03.23.16
Posted in News Roundup at 7:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It’s okay because Linux, or projects that are Linux-based, came in the back door. Linux now runs everything from the on board computer in my car to the communication and guidance systems that are relaying data between Earth and Mars. If you think that’s impressive, let’s stretch it out about a billion more miles and say between Earth and Pluto. NASA and the New Horizons Project chose open source software and Linux in particular because of it’s modular abilities and its open source heart, not to mention the rock-solid stability. How many times would NASA risk bricking a $500 million solar probe by having to reboot a Windows core system after every update?
“Please do not reboot your half billion dollar space probe until Windows completes the current updates. (currently 12 of 8179).”
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Server
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When they founded CoreOS, Brandon Philips and Alex Polvi set out to essentially redesign the Linux operating system for distributed systems.
They began by looking at the areas where they thought the whole server infrastructure space could be improved. Then zeroed in on one of the hurdles of distributed systems: deployments — including application lifecycle management. They also realized that managing the lifecycle of all the files on disk — the traditional job of a package manager — is really hard.
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That may be changing. According to a recent O’Reilly Media study, 40 percent of respondents already run Docker in production. Docker has 75-plus paying enterprise customers for its data center product, which was made generally available in February, and almost 6,000 paying customers of Docker Cloud, the company’s hosted service.
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Kernel Space
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The Btrfs file-system updates for Linux 4.6 are not particularly exciting this round.
While there are many new features to the Linux 4.6 kernel, the Btrfs changes for this next kernel cycle are on the lighter side.
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Graphics Stack
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Thanks to AMD having released their new GPU-PRO “hybrid” Linux driver a few days ago, there is now Vulkan API support for Radeon GPU owners on Linux. This new AMD Linux driver holds much potential and the closed-source bits are now limited to user-space, among other benefits covered in dozens of Phoronix articles over recent months. With having this new driver in hand plus NVIDIA promoting their Vulkan support to the 364 Linux driver series, it’s a great time for some benchmarking. Here are OpenGL and Vulkan atop Ubuntu 16.04 Linux for both AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards.
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Applications
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Today, March 22, 2016, the Samba development team has had the great pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of the first release in the Samba 4.4 series.
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This is the first stable release of the Samba 4.4 release series.
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Proprietary
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Ruarí Ødegaard from the Vivaldi team announced on March 22, 2016, the release and immediate availability of a new snapshot of the Chromium-based web browser for all supported platforms.
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Wine or Emulation
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Games
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Good news folks, Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem which was previously named Umbra is sitll coming to Linux the developers confirmed to me.
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Just a few moments ago, March 23, 2016, Valve pushed a new Beta of its Steam Client for all supported platforms, including SteamOS, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
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Hyper Light Drifter is one I have kept an eye on since the Kickstarter, as graphically it looks vibrant and beautiful. The good news is the release date now set as the 31st of March should include Linux too.
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Nelly Cootalot: The Fowl Fleet was funded on Kickstarter in 2013. The campaign was featured in The Funding Crowd #4, and though it wasn’t certain at the time, the final product is a fully native and polished Linux build.
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Fear not ARK lovers, as ARK: Survival Of The Fittest is confirmed to be coming to Linux. We don’t know when exactly, but it’s at least in their plans for release.
If you expand the Early Access text it directly mentions both Linux & Mac, which is really pleasing to see.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Tuesday, 22 March 2016. Today KDE releases a feature-packed new version of its desktop user interface, Plasma 5.6.
This release of Plasma brings many improvements to the task manager, KRunner, activities, and Wayland support as well as a much more refined look and feel.
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Today, March 22, 2016, the KDE Project has had the great pleasure of announcing the release and general availability of the major KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.
Early adopters have been able to test the Beta of KDE Plasma 5.6 since the beginning of the month, but now the acclaimed and highly anticipated desktop environment has been promoted to the stable channel and declared ready for deployment in production environments.
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We have been working hard over the last 4 months to prepare Kdenlive 16.04, that will be released with KDE Applications around the 20th of april. This release will brings many stability and usability improvements as well as dozens of new features. We are now entering feature freeze and will concentrate on fixing as many bugs as possible for the release.
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KDE’s Kdenlive non-linear video editor was added to KDE Applications 15.08 and since then it’s continued to advance in step with the four-month updates to the stack…
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To celebrate the release of KDE Plasma 5.6 we’ve made a tech preview of our KDE neon developer edition installable images built directly from developer Plasma/5.6 Git branches
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Kdenlive, the free and open-source video editor software for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD operating systems will be updated this spring to version 16.04, a release that promises a set of cool new features.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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With GNOME 3.20 on final approach for landing tomorrow, 23 March, here’s a recap of some of the exciting changes and new features of this six-month update to the GNOME stack.
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WebKitGTK+ 2.12 is all ready for this week’s GNOME 3.20 release.
Carlos Garcia Campos of Igalia has provided a nice overview of the changes and new features found in this version of WebKitGTK+, the browser layout engine used by some GNOME components.
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How easily can you use your computer? Today, the graphical desktop is our primary way of doing things on our computers; we start there to run web browsers, music programs, video players, and even a command line terminal. If the desktop is too difficult to use, if it takes too many steps to do something, or if the cool functionality of the desktop is hidden so you can’t figure out how to use it, then the computer isn’t very useful to you. So it’s very important for the desktop to get it right. The desktop needs to be very easy for everyone to use.
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The wait is almost over, and later today, March 23, the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating system will be unveiled in its final, production-ready version.
With this occasion, we thought it would be a very good idea to summarize the best new features that have been made available in GNOME 3.20. For users, the soon-to-be-released desktop environment will have a much-improved font that not only supports new languages but also looks better, for a modern look and feel.
During the GNOME 3.20 development cycle, most of the core apps received a keyboard shortcuts overlay, which internally is known as “shortcuts windows.” It can be accessed from any graphical app with Ctrl+F1 and displays info about the available keyboard shortcuts and multitouch gestures for the respective application.
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OpenWrt, the open-source, Linux kernel-based operating system for routers and embedded devices, has been updated today, March 22, 2016, to version 15.05.1, the first point release in the “Chaos Calmer” series.
OpenWrt 15.05.1 is here to update many of the internal components, starting with the Linux kernel, which is now at version 3.18.23 (it fixes a keyring reference leak), and continuing with the OpenSSL 1.0.2f, Samba 3.6, as well as netifd, uhttpd, rpcd, uci, procd, ubox, and hostapd.
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New Releases
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Softpedia has been informed today, March 22, 2016, by Rescatux developer Adrian Raulete about the availability for download of the sixth Beta build of his upcoming Rescatux 0.40 system rescue Live CD.
For those of you not in the know, Rescatux is a free Live CD based on Debian technologies that can be used for fixing issues with GRUB and GRUB2 bootloaders. It is considered by its developer as a more advanced version of the popular Super Grub2 Disk Live CD, which is also created by Adrian Raulete.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced financial results for its fiscal fourth quarter and fiscal year ended February 29, 2016.
“Enterprises increasingly adopting hybrid cloud infrastructures and open source technologies drove our strong results. The fourth quarter marked our 56th consecutive quarter of revenue growth, contributing to Red Hat’s first fiscal year crossing $2 billion in total revenue,” stated Jim Whitehurst, President and Chief Executive Officer of Red Hat. “Customers are demanding technologies that modernize the development, deployment and life-cycle management of applications across hybrid cloud environments. Many are relying on Red Hat to provide both the infrastructure and the application development platforms to run their enterprise applications consistently and reliably across physical, virtual, private cloud and public cloud environments.”
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Red Hat, which promised a few months ago to hit $2 billion in annual revenue, has done so and now claims to be the world’s first open-source company to reach that milestone. It crossed the $1 billion-a-year line four years ago.
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Just think: Some people still don’t believe that you can make money from Linux and open-source software. Fools! Red Hat just became the first open-source company to make a cool 2 billion bucks.
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Red Hat Inc. ( RHT ) is due to issue its quarterly earnings report in the upcoming extended-hours session. Given its history, traders can expect very active trading in the issue immediately following its quarterly earnings announcement. Historical earnings event related premarket and after-hours trading activity in RHT indicates that the price change in the extended hours is likely to be of limited value in forecasting additional price movement by the following regular session close.
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In the past few years, cloud computing has been one of the fastest growing industries, dominated by large name companies in Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
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Today in Linux news “a feature-packed” KDE Plasma 5.6 was announced with “improvements to the task manager, KRunner, activities, and Wayland support.” A new project melds FreeBSD with Ubuntu to “escape from systemd” and Red Hat becomes first $2 billion open-source company. Getting Started with LibreOffice 5.0 is now available and Edubuntu may be on its last legs.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Flavours and Variants
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Remember Pear OS? Of course you do, it is the popular GNU/Linux distribution that looked very much like a Mac OS X operating system but that, unfortunately, was acquired by a big company whose name we don’t know even to this day.
Last year we reported on the fact that Portuguese developer Rodrigo Marques has created a clone of the Pear OS Linux operating system and published it on the well-known SourceForge project hosting website under the name PearOS.
At that point in time, PearOS presented a huge disappointment to existing Pear OS users, who were used to having a near perfect, tweaked desktop environment that resembled the look and feel of the Mac OS X operating system created by Apple.
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Seco’s Linux-friendly COM Express Type 6 Compact module runs Linux on a 3rd Gen AMD R-Series SoC, and offers -40 to 85°C operation and a Mini-ITX carrier.
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Phones
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If you are part of an organization looking to get into the community-support game, you would do well to tread carefully and deliberately. Communities, particularly at the start of your involvement in them, can be delicate and fragile things. Stomping in there with big words and big plans and big brand engagement will cause a lot of damage to the community and its ecosystem, often of the irreparable sort.
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The Mattermost project was named because the developers wanted to emphasize the importance of communication. And the design provokes a conceptual shift in classroom communications. Unlike email, Mattermost is a convenient virtual meeting room and a central dashboard for our district technology operations. When everyone connects in a transparent conversation stream, collaboration naturally happens in the open. I was incredibly fond of our internal IRC system, but I really love the Mattermost platform. It costs nothing more than a little server space and occasional software update attention. But even better, it serves as the communication hub for our Student Technology Help Desk, and helps our students collaborate during times when they are not together in the same physical space during a given class block.
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Much has changed within the storage channel over the past few years. New technologies, especially cloud-computing, have created innovative business models that have transformed not only what channel businesses sell, but the way they sell them too. As a result, many resellers have evolved into service providers in a process that is now fairly well understood.
However, there is another, lesser-known evolution that is equally important: not only is the channel changing, but so too are customers. This new type of customer is comfortable with cloud technologies and with the increasingly related area of open source operating systems, which they are looking to use in new ways. If channel organisations are to capitalise on these customers then they need to understand how they can add value through open source.
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The increased focus and adoption of open source software is bolstering telecom operator plans, forcing vendors to rethink strategy
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Events
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Szilvi Kádár, Daniella Kőrössy, and I are the organizers of Django Girls Budapest, a free workshop that teaches women how to code. We held our first Django Girls workshop in December 2014, and we’re currently planning our fourth event. We’d like to share some bits and pieces of event organizing advice, and we hope you’ll find some useful ideas for your next event.
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We are just forty-eight hours after LibrePlanet 2016 successfully concluded. The second day carried the energy and excitement from Saturday, and attendance remained strong in all sessions.
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The Government of Uganda through National Information Technology Authority (NITA-U) will host the 7th African Conference on Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and Digital Commons (IDLELO 7) in August 2016. The conference aims to support uptake of Open Source in Uganda and the region.
The Ministry of ICT has recently developed a Free Open Source Software (FOSS) Policy to provide guidance on deployment of Open Source Software and the use of Open Standards as a means of accelerating Innovation and local content development.
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Google today announced plans to kill off the Chrome app launcher for Windows, Mac, and Linux in July. The tool, which lets users launch Chrome apps even if the browser is not running, will continue to live on in Chrome OS.
As you might suspect, the Chrome app launcher was originally ported from Chrome OS. Google first started experimenting with bringing the app launcher to its desktop browser in May 2013. The Chrome app launcher debuted on Windows in July 2013, followed by OS X in December 2013, and finally Linux in July 2014.
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SaaS/Big Data
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Small business domain host GoDaddy is famous for its racy commercials and its long history of servicing domains, but now it is entering the cloud business and placing its bets on OpenStack. The company has expanded its hosting services to offer Cloud Servers and Bitnami-powered Cloud Applications. The new offerings are designed to help the individual developers, tech entrepreneurs and IT professionals to quickly build, test and scale cloud solutions.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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The LibreOffice Documentation Team has published Getting Started with LibreOffice 5.0.
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CMS
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The Ghost open-source software project today announced the beta release of a desktop app for Mac, Windows, and Linux. The tool allows people to update their Ghost blogs right from the desktop, so you no longer need to go to a website to do that.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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BSD
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Jordan Hubbard from the FreeNAS project, an open-source initiative to create a powerful, free, secure, and reliable NAS (Network-attached storage) operating system based on BSD technologies, announced the release of FreeNAS 9.10.
FreeNAS 9.10 is the tenth maintenance release in the current stable 9.x series of the project, thus bringing the latest security patches from upstream, support for new devices, as well as several under-the-hood updates. As expected, FreeNAS 9.10 has been rebased on the latest FreeBSD 10.3 RC3 (Release Candidate) release.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Summertime is fast approaching, and this means GSoC is fast approaching too. This year we have some interesting potential projects. Check it out, and if you’re interested, apply! You have until Friday (March 25th) to get your application in.
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GNU Parallel 20160322 (‘Bruxelles’) has been released.
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Public Services/Government
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Poland’s new eGovernment strategy recommends that publicly financed software should use an open architecture, and consider publication under an open source licence. The eGovernment strategy twice emphasises the use of open source, for a new system of public registers and for a eInvoicing system that interoperates with a national document management system.
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The European Commission and the European Parliament generally use open source tools and methods for software development, concludes the EU-FOSSA project, following a review of 15 ongoing projects. The institutions’ project management tools make room for agile, collaborative development cycles.
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Programming
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Almost two years after its launch and four months since it was open sourced, Swift 2.2 has been released by Apple. The update is a major one because it now runs on Linux. Officially, Swift runs on Ubuntu 14.04 and Ubuntu 15.10 but it won’t be long until it unofficially arrives on other distros such as Arch and Manjaro via the Arch User Repository (or AUR).
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Science
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That might sound reasonable, especially the last part about not being able to lobby for more funding. It is aimed mainly at organizations that receive government grants, but many academics believe that it is so loosely worded that it will also apply to them, and will prevent them from pushing for new regulations in any circumstances. Even if that is not the UK government’s intention, the mere existence of the policy is bound to have a chilling effect on the academics, since few will want to run the risk of having their grants taken away by inadvertently breaking the new rules.
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Apple
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In this process, Apple’s marketing VP Phill Schiller went on to call the old Windows PCs “sad”.
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The iPhone unit sales were set to decline this year.
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Security
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The tool allows security researchers to quickly disassemble and inspect code in related binary files, Google officials said.
Google has made available for free a tool for quickly spotting similarities and differences in related binary files or software code.
The BinDiff tool gives security researchers a way to identify and isolate fixes for vulnerabilities in vendor-supplied patches. It also gives them a way to disassemble and compare malicious software files for differences and similarities in code.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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On the final day of his historic trip to Cuba, President Obama addressed the Cuban people. “The United States and Cuba are like two brothers that’ve been estranged for many years,” Obama said. “We both live in a new world, colonized by Europeans. Cuba was in part built by slaves who were brought from Africa … Like the United States, Cuba can trace her heritage to both slaves and slave owners.”
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Transparency Reporting
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Following in the proud tradition of governments everywhere who believe a push for transparency is best performed under the cover of darkness, the Canadian legislators behind an attempt to update the Access to Information Act have decided to keep their transparency discussions secret.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Republican presidential candidates haven’t exactly set a high bar for their understanding of climate science during the 2016 race so far. However, front-runner Donald Trump wins the prize for the most confounding denial of global warming expressed by a major party’s presidential candidate to date.
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Finance
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The CEO of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s visited a fully automated restaurant, and it’s given him some evil ideas on how to deal with rising minimum wages.
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Censorship
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MEPs highlight concerns about self-censorship in the Albanian media and deplore defamation threat to BIRN Albania following its investigation into candidates in the 2015 local elections.
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We’ve written about Donald Trump’s announced plans to “open up libel laws” which was specifically directed at the Washington Post, which he argued was purposely writing bad articles about him. Despite the fact that, even as President, he can’t really change such laws (there’s a little First Amendment issue to deal with), we noted that he can create real problems for free expression. For example, by blocking a federal anti-SLAPP bill from becoming law. And Trump is no stranger to SLAPP suits that are used to threaten or filed solely to silence people. He’s threatened or sued an awful lot of people over perceived slights, such as claiming it was defamation to post a picture of him next to a picture of South Carolina murderer Dylann Roof. And then, of course, there’s the famous case where he sued reporter Tim O’Brien for writing a book about him (that was actually mostly positive), but which pointed out that he was probably “only” worth a few hundred million dollars, rather than $10 billion.
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Facebook and other social media are having a ‘chilling effect’ on our freedom by making us behave as if we are under constant surveillance, according to new research.
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Facebook and other social media are having a ‘chilling effect’ on our freedom by making us behave as if we are under constant surveillance, according to new research.
Users are self censoring their day-to-day activities to avoid disapproval from online friends and family.
Now scientists warn that the fear of constant surveillance has led to a blurring of our online and offline lives and reduced our freedom.
The study of more than a hundred 19 to 22 year olds revealed they would hide cigarettes if pictures were being taken at parties for fear of being frowned upon for smoking.
It included in-depth interviews with 28 of the participants and experiments involving a further 80.
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Since the autumn there has been speculation as to what, exactly, the regents would vote on; how would “tolerance” be defined? Well, now we know, and the document under discussion still shows the two main perspectives of the prior discussions. We see efforts to produce a broad and positive statement for tolerance, and also the fingerprints of those who wish to smuggle in a false and destructive equation of anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism, thereby making the University of California a place where any criticism of a certain state’s illegal policies is intolerable.
The manner in which this is done in the current draft is deceptive and underhanded. In the main body of the text, the rightful condemnation of anti-Semitism is clear and unadorned: “In a community of learners, teachers, and knowledge-seekers, the University is best served when its leaders challenge speech and action reflecting bias, stereotypes, and/or intolerance. Anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination have no place in the University. The Regents call on University leaders actively to challenge anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination when and wherever they emerge within the University community.”
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Privacy
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The second iteration of the Silk Road drug marketplace was shuttered in November 2014, almost exactly a year after it opened. Now, 17 months later, the right hand man of that website has accepted a plea agreement in a district court in the Western District of Washington.
Brian Farrell has formally admitted to being “DoctorClu,” a staff member of Silk Road 2.0 who provided customer and technical support, approved vendors, and promoted other employees, according to a court document filed earlier this month.
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The Tor Project is fortifying its software so that it can quickly detect if its network is tampered with for surveillance purposes, a top developer for the volunteer project wrote on Monday.
There are worries that Tor could either be technically subverted or subject to court orders, which could force the project to turn over critical information that would undermine its security, similar to the standoff between Apple and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Tor developers are now designing the system in such a way that many people can verify if code has been changed and “eliminate single points of failure,” wrote Mike Perry, lead developer of the Tor Browser, on Monday.
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Anyone who values anonymity can benefit.
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There continue to be many people around the globe who want to be able to use the web and messaging systems anonymously, despite the fact that some people want to end Internet anonymity altogether. Typically, the anonymous crowd turns to common tools that can keep their tracks private, and one of the most common tools of all is Tor, an open source tool used all around the world.
Even as Apple continues to make headlines as it squares off with the FBI over privacy issues, Mike Perry, lead developer of the Tor Browser, wrote in a blog post that Tor developers are hardening the Tor system in such a way that people can verify if code has been changed and “eliminate single points of failure.” “Even if a government or a criminal obtains our cryptographic keys, our distributed network and its users would be able to detect this fact and report it to us as a security issue,” Perry wrote.
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The Idaho mother who sued President Barack Obama over alleged unconstitutional telephone metadata collection has lost again in court. Anna Smith had her initial case dismissed in 2014, and this week her appeal met a similar fate.
On Tuesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Smith, finding that her case was now moot in light of the new changes to the now-expired Section 215 of the Patriot Act.
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Anna Smith, a nurse and mother of two, sued President Barack Obama and other high-ranking government officials in June 2013, upon the exposure of a program that collected metadata from every American’s phone records.
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You may remember that, right after the Paris attacks late last year, politicians rushed in to demonize encryption as the culprit, and to demand backdooring encryption before the blood was even dry. Of course, it later turned out that there was no evidence that they used encryption at all, but rather it appears that they communicated by unencrypted means. Just yesterday, we noted that the press was still insisting encryption was used, and using the lack of any evidence as evidence for the fact they must have used encryption (hint: that’s not how encryption works…).
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A three-judge federal appeals panel has partly dismissed an Idaho woman’s lawsuit over the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records as moot.
Nurse Anna J. Smith sued the government in 2013, arguing that the agency’s collection of call records violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures.
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The UK intelligence agency GCHQ has stepped in to prevent a massive hack attack on Britain’s energy networks after discovering so-called “smart meters” – designed to replace 53 million gas and electricity meters can be easily hacked.
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Civil Rights
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As leading presidential candidates spoke at the Washington gathering of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), promising support and a crackdown on boycotts of Israel, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders made a dissenting speech in Salt Lake City, where he spoke up for suffering Palestinians. It received little broadcast media attention.
As Sanders trails Clinton in delegate count, his campaign has effectively been discounted by major media.
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The Transportation Security Administration finally obeyed a 2011 federal court order March 3 and issued a 157 page Federal Register notice justifying its controversial full-body scanners and other checkpoint procedures. TSA’s notice ignored the fact that the “nudie” scanners are utterly unreliable; TSA failed to detect 95% of weapons and mock bombs that Inspector General testers smuggled past them last year while the agency continues to mislead the public about its heavy-handed treatment of travelers.
The Federal Register notice is full of soothing pablum about how travelers have no reason to fear the TSA, declaring that “passengers can obtain information before they leave for the airport on what items are prohibited.” But it neglects to mention that TSA can invoke ludicrous pretexts to treat innocent travelers as suspicious terrorist suspects.
Flying home from Portland, Ore., on Thanksgiving morning, I had a too-close encounter with TSA agents that spurred me to file a Freedom of Information Act request. On March 5, I finally received a bevy of TSA documents and video footage with a grope-by-grope timeline.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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President Barack Obama is in Cuba, and Silicon Valley is tagging along for the ride.
Executives from several technology companies are traveling with the U.S. president on his goodwill tour or introducing new business initiatives focused on the island—or both. Among the companies joining the Cuba parade this week are Google parent Alphabet Inc., Airbnb Inc., PayPal Holdings Inc., Priceline Group Inc., Stripe Inc., and Xerox Corp.
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DRM
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The protest began outside the W3C office and continued with a march past Google’s Cambridge office, to Microsoft’s office nearby. The companies are both supporters of Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), the proposal to enshrine DRM in Web standards. The protest included free software users and developers, including Richard Stallman and Chris Webber, the maintainer of the GNU MediaGoblin decentralized publishing platform. A small number of protesters split from the group to enter the W3C meeting, then were ejected by police.
DRM in Web standards would make it cheaper and more politically acceptable to impose restrictions on users, opening the floodgates to a new wave of DRM throughout the Web, with all the vulnerabilities, surveillance and curtailed freedom that DRM entails.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Part of the fun of covering the sort of silly trademark disputes that we do here at Techdirt is seeing just how far companies, most often large companies, will go in trying to apply protectionist habits where they don’t belong. This typically manifests itself in the key marketplace aspect of trademark law, where the brands in question are to be competing for customers who might become confused for an infringement to have occurred. Too often this aspect of the law appears to go ignored in claims of infringement, or else the concept of competitive marketplaces is stretched to the point of absurdity. As I said, this is often times amusing to us, because we’re strange.
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Copyrights
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A UK’s Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit has charged a man for operating several proxy sites and services that allowed UK Internet users to bypass local pirate site blockades. In a first of its kind prosecution, the Bakersfield resident is charged with several fraud offenses and one count of converting and/or transferring criminal property.
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Everyone behind the failed clown school that was Prenda Law deserves what’s happening to Paul Hansmeier. Unfortunately, it appears Hansmeier is taking the most damage from the fallout of Prenda’s disastrous copyright trolling… or at least he’s the one doing most of his suffering in public.
Of course, it’s his own fault. Rather than get out of the trolling business, Hansmeier doubled down. He swapped porn stars for wheelchairs, pursuing small businesses for Americans with Disabilities Acts violations. Fronting as a public interest, Hansmeier’s “Disabilities Support Alliance” is every bit the serial litigant Prenda was.
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03.22.16
Posted in News Roundup at 10:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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GoDaddy announced a new OpenStack-powered public cloud service. The new service benefits from the Bitnami partnership for applications.
GoDaddy, one of the largest domain registrars and shared hosting providers, is jumping into the cloud market with a new OpenStack-powered public cloud service.
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Not even VMware invaded the data center as quickly as open source container supplier Docker has in its first three years. In an interview with InformationWeek, CEO Ben Golub offers his vision for the future.
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Kernel Space
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Earlier today, March 22, 2016, kernel developer Zefan Li had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of a new maintenance release for the stable, long-term supported Linux 3.4 kernel branch.
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The portability of the util-linux package is not our primary goal, but in many cases port code to the another libc or another operation system (if possible) is a way how to detect code disadvantages, obsolete functions etc. v2.28 is possible to compile on OSX and improved has been also support for kFreeBSD and GNU Hurd (of course you cannot compile Linux specific stuff, but build-system is smart enough to automatically disable utils irrelevant for your OS).
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We are a little more than half-way through the Linux 4.6 kernel merge window so here’s a quick look at the new changes and features that have made it into the code-base for this next major kernel release.
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Graphics Stack
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Benchmarks
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While still working on some AMD vs. NVIDIA Vulkan Linux driver benchmarks using AMD’s new hybrid driver with Vulkan support, for your viewing pleasure this morning are some benchmarks comparing the new AMD GPU-PRO driver with its binary OpenGL driver against the pure open-source driver stack with the Ubuntu 16.04 AMDGPU driver and RadeonSI Gallium3D from Mesa 11.2 + LLVM 3.8.
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Applications
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This Perl (core) module provides a variety of functions and tools for manipulating ANSI color and text style escape sequences.
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This is a minor bug fix release of the Perl POD translators for text and man pages. It fixes a warning about use of uninitialized variables when run on a Perl module in the current directory, cleans up a confusing warning during the Perl core build, and fixes a long-standing bug in turning off italic font in =item tags in a C block.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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Today, March 21, 2016, the Wine Staging team has announced the release and immediate availability for download of Wine Staging 1.9.6, based on the recently released Wine 1.9.6 development snapshot.
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The Wine-Staging 1.9.6 release adds an experimental Vulkan wrapper for running Vulkan Windows binaries on Linux.
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CodeWeavers got their Wine-based CrossOver software running on Android, but before getting too excited, it’s x86 Android.
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Games
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But there is something weird about these figures. For a start it does not include Steam’s own Linux based operating system as being Linux. In 2013, Valve announced there were over 65 million SteamOS users around the world. In February 2015, Valve announced there were over 125 million active SteamOS users worldwide.
[...]
According to Gaming on Linux the figures are pants and Linux use amongst gamers is healthy. In fact there should be between 160 – 190 million accounts as of March 2016.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The highly anticipated GNOME 3.20 desktop environment is about to be released in a couple of days, and we can’t help but notice that many of its core components and apps are being updated these days to version 3.20.0.
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We did it again, the Igalia WebKit team is pleased to announce a new stable release of WebKitGTK+, with a bunch of bugs fixed, some new API bits and many other improvements. I’m going to talk here about some of the most important changes, but as usual you have more information in the NEWS file.
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One of the new nice features of Maps 3.20 is the ability of loading map layers in GeoJSON, KML, and GPX formats.
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GTK+ 3.20 was released on Monday as the toolkit empowering the GNOME 3.20 desktop release this week.
GTK+ 3.20 brings much-improved Wayland support, a lot of CSS canges, support for reading .XCompose files, support for using native file choosers on Windows, a high contrast inverse theme, and a variety of other changes.
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New Releases
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The developers behind the OpenELEC Linux operating system for embedded device designed to act as a media center, have announced the release of the first Beta build of OpenELEC 7.0.
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Arch Family
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Today, March 22, 2016, the Manjaro development team proudly announced the general availability of a new stable update for the Manjaro Linux 15.12 (Capella) computer operating system.
With today’s update, Manjaro Linux 15.12 users will receive the recently released Linux 4.5 kernel, along with the KDE Applications 15.12.3 software suite for the KDE Plasma 5.5.5 desktop environment, and of course, updates to many of the core components and applications.
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Red Hat Family
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Some people call patience a virtue. To me, it’s the single toughest lesson I had to learn when joining an open organization.
It dawned on me recently in the middle of a class discussion with a group of MBA students at North Carolina State University. When I visited their classroom a few weeks ago to chat about their assigned reading, The Open Organization, I was overwhelmed (but also overjoyed!) by the number of insightful questions the students posed during my short time with them. But one in particular stuck with me long after I left.
“What was the hardest thing you had to learn,” one student asked me, “when you started working at Red Hat?”
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Fedora
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Google Summer of Code is a yearly program ran by Google that focuses on bringing more students into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization over a three month period during their break from school. Google has a more comprehensive break-down of how the program works on their website. Fedora is happy to announce that for the tenth year, we are participating in Google Summer of Code 2016.
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Debian Family
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The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: diction, doublecmd, ruby-hiredis, vdr-plugin-epgsearch.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Just a few moments ago, March 22, 2016, Canonical’s Adam Conrad announced that the upcoming Final Beta build of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating is officially in Feature Freeze.
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Today, March 22, 2016, Canonical’s Sergio Schvezov announced the release of Snapcraft 2.5, the Snappy creator tool used to create and manage snaps for the Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system.
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Snapcraft, Ubuntu’s build and packaging tool for Snappy packages, has seen a new major release.
Snapcraft 2.5 comes with a kernel and kbuild plugin as Ubuntu developers work on being able to snap a kernel, the kernel snaps are considered experimental in this version. Snapcraft 2.5 also has support for downloading snaps and other enhancements.
More details on Snapcraft 2.5 can be found via the release announcement. There is also this new blog post about using the new kbuild and kernel plugins of Snapcraft 2.5.
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Another shot has been fired in the war between *nix true believers and systemd advocates, with a group of diehards welding the Ubuntu body onto the FreeBSD chassis.
Their beta, ubuntuBSD, has taken its first breaths at Sourceforge, and the counter tells us more than 2,800 daredevils have already hit the download button. It uses Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) on top of the FreeBSD kernel.
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Phones
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Tizen
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Today, In Tizen developer related news, it has been announced that the Tizen 2.3.1 Software Development Kit (SDK) will no longer be supported after April 1st 2016. When this specific SDK was released it would only support version 2.3 and 2.3.1 of the Tizen Operating System (OS).
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Android
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Android phones aren’t all glitzy flagship devices like the Galaxy S7 edge and the LG G5. In fact, the majority of Android phones out there are dirt-cheap phones made by no-name companies. Gadget YouTuber Austin Evans recently got his hands on a $20 Android phone called the Alcatel Pixi Glitz and he decided to see how it stacked up to other Android phones on the market. While he wouldn’t personally use it as his primary device, he did say that for $20 it’s a “pretty solid” device.
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Jaguar is the latest car manufacturer to jump into the world of wearables with its new Android Wear app, which allows owners to control their air conditioning, check the fuel level and track their cars from their wrists.
Although Jaguar has been pushing what it can do when it comes to smartphone integration recently, the Android Wear app deals with a set of tasks slightly more mundane than remote off roading.
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Casio has announced that its its rugged Android Wear smartwatch, the Smart Outdoor Watch WSD-F10, will go on sale on the company’s website, the Google Store, and Amazon, from March 25th for $500. The device was first unveiled at CES earlier this year, and unlike many of the new smartwatches we saw then, the Smart Outdoor Watch was commendable for its clear sense of purpose. It’s massive, yes, with its 1.3-inch, 320 x 320 watch face surrounded by a chunky plastic frame, but it’s built to actually be useful when you’re romping about in the great outdoors.
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InFocus has announced the launch of the cheapest Android Marshmallow smartphone – Bingo 10 – at Rs 4, 299. The company had recently unveiled Bingo 50, which also came with the latest Android 6.0 Marshmallow for Rs 7,499. The InFocus Bingo 10 is exclusively available on Snapdeal.
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Last week, we wrote about the “freeform window” mode in the Android N Developer Preview. Brief mentions in the developer documents and hints in the code pointed to Android someday displaying apps in resizable floating windows, just like in a desktop OS. Freeform window mode isn’t normally accessible in the current dev preview, but shortly after the post, we were contacted by reader Zhuowei Zhang with instructions on how to make it work.
We’ll get to the instructions, but first let’s talk about what’s actually here. Freeform window mode is just what we imagined. It’s a dead ringer for Remix OS—multiple Android apps floating around inside windows—and it might be the beginnings of a desktop operating system. It works on Android N phones and tablets, and once the mode is enabled, you’ll see an extra button on thumbnails in the Recent Apps screen. To the left of the “X” button that pops up after a second or two, there will be a square shape—the same ugly placeholder art Google used for the split screen mode in the Android M Developer Preview.
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It seems that Microsoft has, once again, broken promises made to Lumia owners. If you’ve got a Lumia 1020 or Lumia 920 — devices released in July 2013 and November 2012 respectively — then you’re not going to be seeing an upgrade to Windows 10 Mobile despite previously being promised the very same upgrade.
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Users of 1Password are in for a treat. AgileBits, the company behind this outstanding password management tool, has released a major update to the mobile app, and it’s one that everyone should get behind immediately.
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Why do we have maintainers in free software projects? There are various different explanations you can use, and they affect how you do the job of maintainer, how you treat maintainers, how and whether you recruit and mentor them, and so on.
So here are three — they aren’t the only ways people think about maintainership, but these are three I have noticed, and I have given them alliterative names to make it easier to think about and remember them.
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In this installment, I’ll cover concatenating multiple image files into a multi-page pdf–a very handy trick the imagemagick utility convert makes possible. But first, a bit of grousing on the subject of academia, budget-constrained researching, and academic publishing.
Pricing for on-line academic resources tends, not surprisingly, to be linked to budgetary allowances of large academic institutions: what institutions can afford to pay for electronic access to some journal or other, for example, will influence the fee that will be charged to anyone wishing to gain such access. If one is affiliated with such an institution–whether in an ongoing way such as by being a student, staff, or faculty member, or in a more ephemeral way, such as by physically paying a visit to one’s local academic library–one typically need pay nothing at all for such access: the institution pays some annual fee that enables these users to utilize the electronic resource.
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Over the past few weeks, I’ve shared some thoughts about several of the most common branding issues we see in our work with open source companies at New Kind. I’ve covered how to vet the name you are considering for an open source project and outlined the pros and cons of some of the most popular company, product, and project brand architecture scenarios we see in the open source world.
Today I want to share one of the most common brand strategy mistakes I see open source project leaders make: the deep (possibly inherently human) need to name everything.
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The free and open source community has been having a lot of conversations about diversity, especially gender diversity, over the last few years. Although there is still plenty to do, we’ve made some real strides. After all, the first step is admitting there is a problem.
Another type of diversity that has gotten much less attention, but that is integral to building sustainable communities is age diversity. If we want free and open source software to truly take over the world, then we want to welcome contributors of all ages. A few months ago, I interviewed some women approaching or over fifty about their experiences in open source, and in this article, I’ll share their perspectives.
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Events
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FOSSASIA is an annual Free and Opensource conference that focuses on showcasing these FOSS technologies and software in Asia. It has talks and workshops that covers a wide range of topics – from hardware hacks, to design, graphics and software.
This year, the conference is held in my home country, Singapore, at the Science Center. The Science Center is a place where people can see Science happen and learn how it works. It’s a pretty nice place to hold this conference and it is quite relevant as well, because technology is related to Computing Sciences and theories.
My talk was approved and I was scheduled to talk on the Day 2 of the event. My talk is about Opening Up Yourself. Basically, it’s about Opensource VS Proprietary software and contributing to Opensource. I am also manning the Fedora booth for this year!
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Did you know that O’Reilly’s annual Open Source Convention, OSCON, is moving from their regular location of Portland, Oregon, to Austin, Texas (May 16-19)? As an Austin local, I’m ecstatic to have my favorite conference in my favorite city. I’ve always said (and read) that Austin and Portland are similar cities. Both are a little weird, both have that small town charm, and both have an amazing foodie scene. (And now they both have Voodoo Doughnuts!)
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Over the last holidays I plunged and started learning Rust in a practical way. Coming from a C++ background, and having a strong dislike of the whole concept of checking the correctness at runtime, like in, say, JavaScript, Rust is really promising.
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CMS
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The Joomla project has released version 3.5.0 of their open-source PHP-based CMS, the last version in the 3.x branch, but one of crucial importance, adding many much-needed features, and of course, the obligatory bug fixes.
First and foremost, Joomla 3.5 is the first Joomla version to fully support PHP 7, the latest major version of the PHP engine.
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Joomla released a new version of its open source web content management system today that company officials claim will improve user experience for both developers and administrators.
Joomla version 3.5 contains nearly three dozen new features, they explained.
Joomla is built on PHP and MySQL. The update will make website’s faster because it offers PHP 7 support, said Joe Sonne, former Open Source Matters, Inc. board member and current member of the capital committee. Open Source Matters is the nonprofit organization that supports the Joomla Project.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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Microsoft open sources Visual Studio Productivity Power Tools [Ed: This is how you reinforce a false perception/illusion that Visual Studio is "open" even when it's proprietary software.]
This news comes only weeks after Microsoft told the world it was integrating Visual Studio with open-source Eclipse Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Microsoft is clearly incorporating its development tools with those of the open-source community.
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MS India inaugurates MS Openness Day [Ed: Government of India says you must be FOSS to get in the queue, so Microsoft sets up event in India to change perception. Openwashing.]
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BSD
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Marius Strobl has announced the availability of the third release candidate for FreeBSD 10.3: “The second release candidate build of the 10.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available. Noteworthy changes since 10.3-RC2: the requirement that for a root-on-ZFS setup, ZFS needs to account for at least 50 percent of the resulting partition table was removed from zfsboot; build configurations of csh(1) and tcsh(1) were changed to activate the SAVESIGVEC option, i. e. saving and restoring of signal handlers before/after executing an external command; FreeBSD SA-16:15 and CVE-2016-1885 have been resolved; the netwait rc(8) script has been changed to require firewall setup to be completed, otherwise a ping(8) to the IP address specified via the netwait_ip option may not succeed; in order to be able to work on upcoming Intel Purley platform system, including Skylake Xeon servers, the x86 kernels now align the XSAVE area to a multiple of 64 bytes
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Programming
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Trends like agile development, devops, and continuous integration speak to the modern enterprise’s need to build software hyper-efficiently — and, if necessary, to turn on a dime.
That latter maneuver is how CloudBees became the company it is today. Once an independent, public cloud PaaS provider for Java coders (rated highly by InfoWorld’s Andrew Oliver in “Which freaking PaaS should I use?”), CloudBees pivoted sharply 18 months ago to relaunch as the leading provider of Jenkins, a highly popular open source tool for managing the software development process.
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After announcing the availability of the iOS 9.3, Mac OS X 10.11.4 El Capitan, watchOS 2.2, and tvOS 9.2 operating systems, as well as the Xcode 7.3 IDE, Apple now released version 2.2 of its Swift programming language for OS X and Linux.
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Stand well back: Microsoft has had a bright idea. Rather than royally screwing over people running Windows 7 and 8.1 on new Intel hardware, it’s just going to give them a rough ride instead.
In January, Microsoft said it would only offer software updates for “security, reliability, and compatibility” fixes for Windows 7 and 8.1 on Intel Skylake processors until July 2017. After that cutoff point, only critical security fixes would be made available – and only if they weren’t a chore for Microsoft to develop and release.
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Today is just the anniversary of the first tweet, which Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sent out on March 21, 2006. But Twitter itself was not released to the public until July 15, 2006. That is its birthday. That is how birthdays work.
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Hardware
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Andrew Stephen “Andy” Grove was a Hungarian-born American businessman, engineer, and author. He was a science pioneer in the semiconductor industry.
Andy was the visionary who changed the face of semiconductor maker Intel. Affectionately called the ‘mastermind’ he left a huge mark on the technology industry. Time Magazine named him man of the year in 1997.
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Andrew Grove, the longtime chairperson and chief executive of Intel Corp., died at the age of 79. He is remembered as a pioneer of the digital age, a savior of Intel and a champion of the semiconductor revolution. But before he became a business luminary, Grove survived some of the 20th century’s darkest horrors.
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Health/Nutrition
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The company will follow the standards set by Vermont’s labeling law until a national standard is set.
Vermont started a revolution, and its effects will soon spread across the country. No, we aren’t talking about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign to be the Democratic presidential nominee but the 2014 law passed by state legislators mandating the voluntary labeling of foods made with genetically engineered ingredients. The new regulations are set to go into effect on July 1, and with a federal political solution proving elusive, one of the biggest food companies in the game now says it will label all its products, nationwide, in accordance with tiny Vermont’s law.
“We can’t label our products for only one state without significantly driving up costs for our consumers, and we simply won’t do that,” Jeff Harmening, head of U.S. retail operations at General Mills, wrote on the company’s website Friday. “The result: Consumers all over the country will soon begin seeing words legislated by the state of Vermont on the labels of many of their favorite General Mills food products.”
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Security
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A while back, we stumbled upon an interesting GitHub repo dubbed randumb, which included an example called Cryptostalker, advertised as a tool to detect crypto-ransomware on Linux.
Cryptostalker and the original project randumb are the work of Sean Williams, a developer from San Francisco. Mr. Williams wanted to create a tool that monitored the filesystem for newly written files, and if the files contained random data, the sign of encrypted content, and they were written at high speed, it would alert the system’s owner.
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Google has shipped an out-of-band patch for Android shuttering a bug that is under active exploitation to root devices.
The vulnerability (CVE-2015-1805) affects all Android devices running Linux kernel versions below 3.18.
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Today everyone who is REALLY, I mean REALLY REALLY good at security got there through blood sweat and tears. Nobody taught them what they know, they learned it on their own. Many of us didn’t have training when we were learning these things. Regardless of this though, if training is fantastic, why does it seem there is a constant march toward things getting worse instead of better? That tells me we’re not teaching the right skills to the right people. The skills of yesterday don’t help you today, and especially don’t help tomorrow. By its very definition, training can only cover the topics of yesterday.
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Cybercrime is costing us millions. Hacks drain the average American firm of $15.4 million per year, and, in the resulting panic, companies often spend more than $1.9 million to resolve a single attack. It’s time to face facts: Our defenses aren’t strong enough to keep the hackers out.
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On Tuesday, registered Republicans in Utah who want to participate in their state’s caucus will have the option to either head to a polling station and cast a vote in person or log onto a new website and choose their candidate online. To make this happen, the Utah GOP paid more than $80,000 to the London-based company Smartmatic, which manages electronic voting systems and internet voting systems in 25 countries and will run the Utah GOP caucus system.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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A crucial problem in news media coverage of the Syrian civil war has been how to characterize the relationship between the so-called “moderate” opposition forces armed by the CIA, on one hand, and the Al Qaeda franchise Al Nusra Front (and its close ally Ahrar al Sham), on the other. But it is a politically sensitive issue for US policy, which seeks to overthrow Syria’s government without seeming to make common cause with the movement responsible for 9/11, and the system of news production has worked effectively to prevent the news media from reporting it fully and accurately.
The Obama administration has long portrayed the opposition groups it has been arming with anti-tank weapons as independent of Nusra Front. In reality, the administration has been relying on the close cooperation of these “moderate” groups with Nusra Front to put pressure on the Syrian government. The United States and its allies–especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey–want the civil war to end with the dissolution of the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is backed by US rivals like Russia and Iran.
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The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is adding more American lobbyists to its payroll by hiring BGR Government Affairs, a company founded by former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour, according to filings disclosed last week.
The contract provides BGR with $500,000 annually to assist with U.S. media outreach for the Center for Studies and Media Affairs at the Saudi Royal Court, a government entity. The retainer includes the services of Jeffrey Birnbaum, a former Washington Post reporter who once covered the lobbying industry and now works as a lobbyist, as well as Ed Rogers, a former Reagan administration official who now lobbies and writes a column for the Post called PostPartisan.
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By jumping into wars wherever some group calls itself “Islamic State,” the U.S. government misunderstands the threat and feeds the danger of endless warfare, explains ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
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As you inch your way through security at the airport, you’ll be relieved of your penknife and terrifying tube of Pepsodent. Your unopened can of Coke will, of course, be thrown in the trash, along with any snow globes, and off go your shoes.
When at last you’re reshod and passing the duty-free shop, you can buy a well-deserved bottle of Scotch . . . which you can then bring on board, crack against the cabin wall and use as you would a machete.
So why all the security kabuki from the TSA?
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“What I’m trying to do is explain the emotional environment in Turkey at the time,” says Suny, professor of history and political science in LSA. “What would lead a government to kill hundreds of thousands of their own subjects, who, in their own view, were perfectly loyal?”
This year, in recognition of his scholarship at Michigan, Suny was named the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History. The Distinguished University Professorship is the highest professorial title granted at U-M.
Suny will present his lecture, “They Can Live in the Desert, but Nowhere Else: Explaining the Armenian Genocide 100 Years Later,” at 4 p.m. Tuesday at Rackham Amphitheatre. The lecture will tell the story of why, when and how the genocide of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire happened.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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Soaring temperatures threaten to make Gulf States uninhabitable.
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Just how bad was laid out by the World Health Organization this week in a bleak new report on environmentally related deaths.
New analysis of data from 2012 found that a staggering 12.6 million people died that year from living and working in toxic environments.
That’s almost equivalent to the combined populations of New York City and Los Angeles, and represents nearly a quarter of the 55.6 million deaths recorded that year.
That’s scary, but it gets worse.
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If you dig deep enough into the Earth’s climate change archives, you hear about the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. And then you get scared.
This is a time period, about 56 million years ago, when something mysterious happened — there are many ideas as to what — that suddenly caused concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to spike, far higher than they are right now. The planet proceeded to warm rapidly, at least in geologic terms, and major die-offs of some marine organisms followed due to strong acidification of the oceans.
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Peatlands are created by eons of decomposing vegetation accumulating in wet areas. They store vast quantities of carbon and can be many feet deep. Under natural conditions, peatlands absorb water in the wet season and slowly discharge water in the dry season. Large areas of tropical rainforest grow on these peatlands. This means that they regulate flooding, provide clean water, store carbon and provide habitat for endangered orangutans and other critical wildlife.
But over the last several decades, millions of acres of peatland have been drained to make them suitable for agricultural use—primarily to grow palm oil, timber, rice and other commodity crops. The draining causes the peat to dry out and decompose, which emits carbon into the atmosphere. More significantly, the drier peat is much more susceptible to fire, and large amounts of greenhouse gases are released when both the peat, and the forests growing on the peat, are burned.
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Finance
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Today, the Commission released two new texts relating to the controversial Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (“Regulatory Cooperation” and “Good Regulatory Practices”), which continue to ignore requests by the European Parliament.
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Reputable newspapers try to avoid the self-serving studies that industry groups put out to try to gain public support for their favored policies. But apparently the New York Times (3/17/16) does not feel bound by such standards. It ran a major news story on a study by Citigroup that was designed to scare people about the state of public pensions and encourage them to trust more of their retirement savings to the financial industry.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Teach for America, the nonprofit known for placing idealistic and inexperienced teachers in some of the nation’s neediest schools, is cutting 15 percent of its national staff in what the organization described as an effort to give more independence to its more than 50 regional offices around the country.
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At first glance, “Democrats for Education Reform” (DFER) may sound like a generic advocacy group, but a closer review of its financial filings and activities shows how it uses local branding to help throw the voice of huge Wall Street players and other corporate interests from out-of-state.
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Censorship
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Theatres and playwrights are censoring their plays for fear of offending Muslims, a leading free speech campaign group has claimed.
Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of Index on Censorship, claimed theatre heads are worried that certain plays would cause “violent protests” and elect not to stage them to avoid the risk.
She pointed to last year’s cancelled National Youth Theatre production, Homegrown, which was set to examine radicalisation in schools but was pulled two weeks before its premiere.
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As incidents of censorship are on the rise in Turkey, museums and art centres must find increasingly nimble ways to negotiate the changing cultural landscape. A new guide for Turkish cultural venues and artists implicated in censorship cases is due to be published later this year by the research platform Siyah Bant.
“I can recite a hundred horrific incidents from last year alone. It would be a pity to think of them as arbitrary or unrelated. This zeitgeist makes the culture wars of the 1980s feel look like toddler’s play,” says Vasif Kortun, the director of Salt, one of Istanbul’s leading contemporary art spaces.
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Kareem Chehayeb and Sarah Shmaitilly, the founders of Beirut Syndrome, a grassroots journalism site based in Beirut, Lebanon, discussed the tendency of the Lebanese media to censor their reporting in an effort to maintain the country’s reputation at a panel discussion in Reiss Hall on Wednesday.
Chehayeb and Shmaitilly said the idea behind their site is to report on Lebanese issues from an alternative perspective, seeking to counteract Lebanese censorship on their website with clear, unbiased content.
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Privacy
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When the New York Times revealed on Saturday that the Paris attackers used and trashed multiple “burner” phones to hide their plotting from authorities, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and The Wire’s creator David Simon started debating the value of communications surveillance over Twitter.
The Paris attacks, the subject of intense speculation since last year, have reignited the debate over whether Snowden’s revelations helped the enemy avoid the NSA’s all seeing eye. The Times article also repeats the assertion — with no credible evidence — that those involved in the attack used encryption, which scrambles communications in transit, to help hide their activities from authorities.
Snowden, the former NSA contractor turned whistleblower, pitted his views on the failures of NSA spying to hunt down terrorists against what Simon, journalist and author, described as the potential advantage of proactive collection to detect burner phones used by less sophisticated criminals.
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CNN has its own version of updated reporting from the Paris attack. It provides a completely predictable detail inexplicably not included in the weekend’s big NYT story: that the one phone with any content on it — as distinct from a pure burner — had Telegram loaded on it.
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Hosted by Greg Knieriemen, Ed Saipetch and Sarah Vela. This week, Greg is out while Sarah and Eddie drive the car talking Uber, Apple and data centre pay. Our special guest is Vaughn Stewart of Pure Storage.
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The fact that an optional national numbering system now seems to be morphing into a way to monitor what people are doing will hardly come as a surprise to Techdirt readers, but this continued slide down the slippery slope is still troubling, as are other aspects of the new legislation. For example, it was introduced as a “Money Bill,” which is normally reserved for matters related to taxation, not privacy. That suggests a desire to push it through without real scrutiny.
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Hundreds of residents have been asked to give their views on and “increase” in cars parked by GCHQ workers in the Fiddler’s Green and Hester’s Way areas of Cheltenham.
Liberal Democrat councillor Wendy Flynn, a former mayor, said she had delivered 400 letters to residents and has set up an online petition and survey.
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More evidence of Stingray obfuscation has been uncovered in Milwaukee. What appeared at first to be a bog standard court order for tracking of a suspect using a cell phone provider’s own “network equipment” actually appears to be something else. The ACLU was already involved in this case, arguing that such tracking by cell phone providers only be available with a warrant. But as it dug into the specifics, it became obvious the tracking had not been performed by the cell provider.
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Students from Harvard and MIT are working towards ‘building an Internet that protects privacy’, starting with email. So, basically, they have built a super secure mail service that can keep even the NSA out. It’s called the ProtonMail.
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Civil Rights
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Remember the recent leak by Anonymous that revealed the personal information of Republican Presidential front-runner Donald Trump? What’s more, this leak has fooled Donald Trump, the FBI, and the Secret Service as everything ‘leaked’ was already available online. In a new video, Anonymous has outlined this point and thanked everybody for being a part of this experiment.
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Contrary to the stereotype of apolitical Millenials, students at Sonoma State University in Northern California have organized a Social Justice Week, addressing issues from US foreign policy to local police-brutality cases. Today’s guests are student organizers or guests taking part in Social Justice Week. Also included is a preview of next week’s program, when the guest will be Medea Benjamin of Code Pink.
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Louisiana, which has the highest incarceration rate in the country in general as well as an extraordinary incarceration rate for African Americans, no longer provides public defenders to all its people accused of crimes; within months over half its public defender offices are expected to become insolvent due to lack of state-provided funding.
This is a conscious decision to not provide Constitutionally-required legal services to the poor.
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The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) published a new opinion poll on America’s Muslims and other religious groups this week, which contains some surprises. One important finding is that mosque attendance is associated with strong identification as an American and strong civic participation as well as with opposition to violence toward civilians, whether committed by the state or by non-state actors. That is, people like Donald Trump who equate mosques with radicalism and just plan wrong.
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“Let’s look at Super Tuesday 3, you had major coverage here at CNN, at MSNBC, at Fox — all the networks across all through the night as the polls are closing,” Goodman said. “You see the concession speeches and the great victory speeches, you see Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, Kasich, you see Donald Trump. You’re waiting here at CNN, at MSNBC. They said he’s going to hold a news conference… and that’s it. Where was Bernie Sanders? Well, in fact, Bernie Sanders was in Phoenix, Arizona before thousands of people and as the networks were waiting for Donald Trump and waiting and all the pundits are weighing in, they don’t even say that Bernie Sanders is about to speak.”
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Markiz explained that the low-key protest was meant to counter Trump’s statements maligning immigrants and his proposal to ban all Muslims form entering the country, saying they intended their actions to model the “opposite to the rhetoric and vitriol that’s happening this year, in particular the language that’s coming out to hate towards Muslims, and Mexicans.” But he insisted that he move wasn’t a rejection of AIPAC itself, but of the rhetoric Trump has introduced into American political discourse.
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If Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are the 2016 presidential candidates, gender will be part of the campaign in an unprecedented way. It goes beyond the fact that Clinton would be the first woman nominated by one of the two major parties as its presidential candidate: Polls consistently show that women really, really don’t like Trump, and men — to a lesser but still significant degree — really don’t like Clinton.
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Why do the Republicans fear Trump so much? Romney evoked the racism and misogyny of the Trump campaign. Romney even said the word “misogyny”, something of historical proportions for a party that has systematically gone after women’s reproductive health and women’s rights. The “gender gap” in the 2012 presidential election was the largest in U.S. history, with the Democrats winning the women vote by 20 points.
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The increase in law enforcement officers in the Rio Grande Valley makes residents feel less safe.
Last year, the Texas Legislature passed an $800 million omnibus bill that, among other things, flooded the Rio Grande Valley with law enforcement officers. And this week, a Texas Senate subcommittee on border security will hold hearings to determine the necessity of increased collaboration between local law enforcement, state troopers, and federal immigration agents.
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Five Questions That Weren’t Asked During the 2012 Presidential Debates and Are Unlikely to Be Asked in 2016
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During the first family’s historic visit to Cuba on Monday, the Cuban president confronted President Barack Obama about the crippling trade embargo and called on him to “return the territory illegally occupied by Guantánamo Base.”
At an afternoon press conference in Havana, the two leaders touted the “concrete” achievements made since the countries resumed diplomatic relations in December 2014.
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What those brief glimpses of the latest outburst of violence at a Trump rally failed to show, however, is the role the candidate himself played in the moments before the attack, when he stoked anger at the two protesters as they were marched through the crowd of his supporters.
Fortunately, that context is available in the form of unedited video of the first 19 minutes of the rally, which was streamed live on Facebook by the local ABC affiliate, KGUN. The video makes it possible to see exactly how Trump reacted to the ejection of three sets of protesters within the first nine minutes of his speech.
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Where to start? Saying that Hillary is good on getting people to “buy in” to the political process shows either a stunning lack of self-awareness or a stunning lack of caring. The Clinton Foundation looks a lot like a slush fund that facilitated dirty deals with foreign governments while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state in the Obama administration.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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You’d be hard pressed to find a company that’s been more involved in trying to kill net neutrality than Verizon. The company successfully sued to overturn the FCC’s original, flimsy 2010 neutrality rules, which most ISPs actually liked because they contained enough loopholes to drive several vehicle convoys through. Responding to Verizon’s legal assault, the FCC responded last year by taking things further, passing new, (supposedly) more legally sound neutrality rules and reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. Verizon sued again, though this time as part of a multi-pronged coalition of ISP lobbying groups claiming the rules violated their free speech rights.
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DRM
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A crowd upset about the possibility of DRM in Web standards gathered to protest outside the World Wide Web Consortium’s Advisory Committee meeting in Cambridge, MA last night. EFF is participating in these W3C meetings as a member, encouraging the group to adopt a non-aggression covenant to protect security researchers, standards implementors and others from the effects of including DRM-related technology in open standards.
Last night’s protests, shown below, were organized by the Free Software Foundation and included comments from EFF’s International Director Danny O’Brien.
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Do you own an old Kindle that’s been gathering dust? Get it updated before March 22 or you won’t be able to get online and download your books any more.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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That the Indian government has been under pressure from the United States to change its patent regime is no secret among those who follow the public discourse on intellectual property rights. Now, a new controversy about India’s alleged private assurance to the US-India Business Council (USIBC) and other lobby groups that it would not invoke compulsory licensing for commercial purposes seeks to add fuel to fiery speculation about a shift in India’s policy on IPR.
The controversy pivots on a 5 February 2016 submission by the USIBC to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) annual Special 301 report. The Special 301 Report is prepared every year by the USTR under Section 301 as amended of the (US) Trade Act of 1974. The report aims to identify trade barriers to US companies due to intellectual property laws in other countries
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Copyrights
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Two Californian judges have thrown up a roadblock for Malibu Media, the adult media publisher that files thousands of copyright lawsuits each year. Both judges have refused to grant a subpoena to expose the personal details of alleged pirates, arguing that the geolocation tools that linked the wrongdoers to their district are not sufficient in these cases.
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03.21.16
Posted in News Roundup at 7:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Redox uses Rust for its kernel-level code to provide more memory safety considerations than C allows by default. But the project doesn’t simply rewrite Linux in a new language. Redox discards as much from Linux’s version of the Unix tradition as it keeps.
As explained in the project’s wiki and design documents, Redox uses a minimal set of syscalls — a deliberately smaller subset than what Linux supports so as to avoid legacy bloat. The OS also uses a microkernel design to stay slender, in contrast to Linux’s monolithic kernel.
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Desktop
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One of the most practical aspects of software is what it empowers us to accomplish. Software can help us with our daily lives, our work, education, and of course entertainment. Ideally, I’d love to suggest that we Linux users proudly avoid proprietary software as a matter of course. In truth, this isn’t entirely possible for everyone out there. Below are some applications that are incredibly difficult to quit.
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At the Free Software Foundation’s LibrePlanet2016 conference on Saturday, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden participated in a discussion regarding free software and security. He joined the talk via video conferencing from Russia.
Edward Snowden told that he was able to disclose the secrets of American government and its projects of mass surveillance using free software. The event was being held in an MIT lecture hall and this statement drew a wide round of applause.
Praising the likes of Debian, Tails, and TOR, he said — “What happened in 2013 couldn’t have happened without free software.”
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OS X and Linux are nowhere near as popular as Windows when we look at the PC market as a whole, but the two platforms are actually extremely popular with a certain crowd.
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Server
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Web development used to seem so simple. You get a domain, set up a server, slap together some software, and you’re in business. And indeed, you often still can do that today. But, if you’re expecting to get lots of visitors at once, you need to understand the different types of “fast” that you’ll need to consider, measure and then optimize.
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Kernel Space
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Linus Torvalds has honored the request to land the “objtool” stack frame validation support for the Linux 4.6 kernel.
This new Objtool effort provides build-time object file validation for kernel stack frame correctness. This new objtool user-space utility is run at the kernel’s build time to analyze the resulting .o machine code, decode the instruction stream, and checks the interpreted instructions. Suspicious Assembly code patterns are then output with currently this objtool just checking frame pointer usage but other features are planned. Another early limitation is that so far, only x86_64 is supported.
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Many XFS file-system changes can be found in the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel release.
Dave Chinner sent in the XFS updates over night for the Linux 4.6 merge window and it’s a heavier pull than normal.
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Tuxera has published a new stable version of their NTFS read-write driver for Linux.
This new NTFS-3G Linux driver is marked as 2016.2.22 while the actual release happened just today (not in February as implied by the version number).
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Graphics Stack
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Today, March 21, 2016, Nvidia has announced the immediate availability for download of an updated display driver for GNU/Linux, BSD, and Solaris operating systems, Nvidia 364.12.
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Well Nvidia dropped a bit of a big one today didn’t they! Nvidia driver version 364.12 is now out and brings in official Vulkan support, Mir support and Wayland support.
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NVIDIA’s 364 Linux driver series is now available and it’s pretty darn exciting!
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Applications
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Games
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How many Linux gamers are there? It’s tough to say. We don’t even know how many Linux users there are in general. Valve’s Steam Hardware Survey supposedly sheds light on the OS breakdown among gamers, and it appears to show Linux use declining. But Valve’s Steam Hardware Survey is misleading, obscuring the fact that Linux gaming is healthier than ever.
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Team17 really are getting more Linux friendly, and the latest game in the Worms series title ‘Worms W.M.D’ will be heading to Linux at release.
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The co-op shooter PAYDAY 2 is now officially available on SteamOS & Linux, yet another popular game!
I’ve been waiting on this one as I am keen to play it to see what the fuss is all about. Being the bad guy is always more interesting than being forced to be the hero of everything most of the time.
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As some more exciting news to Linux gamers besides NVIDIA releasing a Wayland/Mir-supportive driver and mainline Vulkan support is the release of PAYDAY 2 for Linux.
PAYDAY 2 is self-described as “an action-packed, four-player co-op shooter that once again lets gamers don the masks of the original PAYDAY crew – Dallas, Hoxton, Wolf and Chains – as they descend on Washington DC for an epic crime spree.”
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Reviews
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Black Lab Linux is supposed to be a distribution that focuses on being easy to use and having a consistent user interface, with the hope of attracting users new to Linux. Unlike many other distributions, it offers professional support (for a fee), and also offers computers for sale that have Black Lab Linux preinstalled. As is typical, the distribution by itself is offered as a free downloadable ISO file, so that’s what I tested here. I tested the 64-bit version using a live USB system made with UnetBootin; follow the jump to see what it’s like.
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Red Hat Family
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, said developers are now targeting the company’s Ubuntu platform for “game changing” areas such as Network Function Virtualisation and Internet of Things.
Last month, the company significantly boosted its convergence strategy, unveiling the first Ubuntu-powered tablet, from European vendor BQ, following earlier launches in the smartphone space.
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Flavours and Variants
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Edubuntu is a version of Ubuntu Linux designed for schools, students, and folks generally interested in education. Formerly known as Ubuntu Education Edition, the operating system is based on Ubuntu, but includes a suite of apps aimed at teachers and students.
The first version of the operating system was released in 2005, and the last major release came in 2014, when the developers decided to only offer new versions alongside Ubuntu’s LTS (Long Term Support) releases every two years instead of the more frequent releases which come out every six months.
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Jonathan Carter and Stéphane Graber are retiring as Edubuntu’s project leaders. After 14.04 they decided to move to LTS-only releases as they began working on other projects, but with 16.04 LTS due next month, they decided they can’t invest the resources to make a new release.
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I have loaded and briefly tested both Raspbian and NOOBS on all of my various Raspberry Pi systems. The best news of this release is that the NOOBS installer now recognizes the Raspberry Pi 3 built-in wireless network adapter, so it is now possible to install from NOOBS on a Raspberry Pi 3 without having to use a wired network connection or a second wireless adapter.
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Phones
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Android
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Facing multiple Android security challenges in March so far, Google is issuing an unprecedented mid-month emergency patch update. The emergency patch is not, however, related to reports of a new Stagefright flaw but, rather, is a known Linux kernel vulnerability that Google was scheduled to fix.
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As I noted recently, the Apache Software Foundation, which incubates more than 350 open source projects and initiatives, has been steadily advancing a number of important open source projects. Now, the foundation has announced the availability of Apache PDFBox v2.0, an open source Java tool for working with Portable Document Format (PDF) documents.
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Animation
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Not exactly gaming news, but could be useful for developers. Dwango has obtained the rights to the animation software Toonz used by Studio Ghibli and plan to release an open source version named OpenToonz.
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SaaS/Big Data
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According to a LinkedIn report on the 25 Skills That Could Get You Hired in 2016, cloud and distributed computing ranked as the most in-demand skill globally last year. LinkedIn has a 19-page report available on Slideshare that breaks down the most in-demand job market skills by country.
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Databases
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Enterprises could save up to 90 per cent on licensing costs by moving away from incumbent proprietary databases to an open source alternative, according to Frank Fanzilli (pictured), independent board director at PostgreSQL vendor EnterpriseDB and board director of the Linux Foundation.
Fanzilli, former global CIO at Credit Suisse First Boston, explained that banks have been adopting open source software, particularly Linux, since the 2008 crash in a bid to cut costs. Governments are also starting to trust open source to run mission-critical applications.
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But they won’t be able to do it for ever, says Frank Fanzilli of EnterpriseDB
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Networking
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CMS
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International media group Hubert Burda Media makes its Drupal 8 based Thunder Content Management System (CMS) available online as a free open-source platform for use and further development by other publishers. With this move, Burda joins forces with sector and industry partners including Acquia, Facebook, Microsoft, nexx.tv, Riddle.com and Valiton, aiming to develop the best open-source CMS platform for publishers. Burda believes that in today’s world, successful media offerings result from the right combination of quality journalism and technology expertise. For the media company, this meant future-proofing its Content Management System by developing Thunder, an open-source system based on leading-edge technology, now available online free of charge for use and continuous development.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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A decade later and Twitter is used by millions every day. Officially it’s a ‘micro-blogging’ service, but in the past 10 years it has become everything from an instant messenger, a news source and a dating site, to a tool of political subversion, a revolution in the way we watch TV together and so much more.
[...]
Perhaps donating Twitter to the open source community would give the company more time to concentrate on the real money-spinning aspects of the service – the training, the strategy planning, the support – because plenty of people make a living out of Twitter. It just isn’t Twitter itself.
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Public Services/Government
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The US’ Federal Government is asking for public comment on a draft Federal Source Code policy. The policy will require new software developed specifically for or by the Federal Government to be made available for sharing and re-use across Federal agencies. Part of this code is to be made available publicly.
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The city of Dortmund (Germany) is levelling the playing field for open source software solutions. The city in January stated that it accepts electronic documents in the Open Document Format (ODF). Do-FOSS, a free and open source software advocacy group in the city, welcomed the “landmark decision”.
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It may be five or ten years behind the curve, but the U.S. government has now declared its love for open source software — or what it calls open source software, at least.
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Programming
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Apple has released Swift 2.2, the latest version of their mobile and server programming language. This version is the first official release that has been cotributed to by open-source developers, including contributions from 212 non-Apple contributors.
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Science
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For Assane Gueye, a Senegalese cybersecurity expert based at both University of Alioune Diop in Senegal and University of Maryland in the US, sustainable innovation solutions could emerge from going beyond incubators as people share ideas.
“Usually in Africa when we talk about infrastructure we always talk about money, it’s not true,” he said.
If people have enough information about the technology, they can tweak it and make better use of it,” he explained.
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Security
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It has to be patched, says Koen Van Impe, warns a security analyst at the Belgian national computer security incident response team.
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The Google Security Blog published a post in mid-February 2016 on a critical issue found in glibc getaddrinfo (CVE-2015-7547). The mention of a vulnerability in glibc should ring a bell: One year ago, everyone put on their patching gloves when a critical problem was found in gethostbyname, also part of the glibc library. This one was dubbed GHOST (CVE-2015-0235).
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Keeping its national security in view, Denmark’s national intelligence agency PET has launched a campaign for the people to join its ‘Hacker Academy’ where they will be trained in offensive and defensive hacking and online attacks.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The unintended but entirely predictable consequences from the UK’s disastrous Counter-Terrorism and Security Act keep on a-coming. You will recall that this handy piece of legislation tasked teachers with weeding out possible future-terrorists amongst the young folks they are supposed to be teaching. This has devolved instead into teachers reporting children, usually children that would be peripherally identified as Muslim children, to the authorities for what aren’t so much as transgressions as they are kids being kids. It has even turned some teachers into literal grammar police, because the universe is not without a sense of humor.
And now we learn that these part-teacher-part-security-agents may be incorporating art criticism into their repertoire, having reported a young Muslim boy of four years old to the authorities because of his inability to properly illustrate a cucumber.
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Censorship
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The company’s controversial slogans have previously been the subject of numerous complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority.
Chief Censor Andrew Jack said his office recently received its first complaint about the vans – from the police.
“I can confirm that we have received a submission in respect of some of the Wicked campervans from the police, and we’ll be working through the classification process and testing those publications against the criteria in the Films, Videos, and Publications Act to determine whether or not they need to be age restricted or might be objectionable.
“This is the first time a publication, in respect of Wicked Campers, has been submitted to us.”
He would now consider whether the images need to be banned or restricted.
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Matt Lauer, aka Mr. Softee (when interviewing people with whom he sympathizes), tried to act like a tough guy in his Friday interview with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. You’re not fooling us, Matt.
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A protest urging the UK National Union of Students (NUS) to reform its Safe Space and No Platform policies took place last Thursday in London. A grand coalition of humanists, atheists, liberal Muslims and human-rights activists set up shop on the pavement outside NUS headquarters. Talking to the students and campaigners involved made this reporter hopeful about the free-speech fightback, which has recently erupted on campuses up and down the country.
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Facebook may now be one step closer to its dream of accessing China’s 720 million Internet users, though I wouldn’t count on a full reconciliation between the two countries just yet.
Over the weekend, while attending an economic forum in Beijing, Mark Zuckerberg took some time out to meet with Liu Yunshan, China’s propaganda chief, it was reported by Xinhua News Agency, China’s official press agency, over the weekend.
Liu expressed interest in working with Facebook to “enhance exchanges and share experience so as to make outcome of the internet development better benefit the people of all countries,” it said in the report.
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On Sunday, the CBLDF held a panel hosted by Charles Brownstein and Betsy Gomez highlighting the wave of censorship spreading across the world like kudzu, relentless and nearly impossible to stop. And the results are frightening.
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Ever wonder why Hollywood’s married sleuths Nick and Nora Charles retired to separate beds after their comic adventures? We have film censors to thank—or blame—for those twin beds.
For much of filmmaking history, government entities sliced and diced the movies as they saw fit, cutting out profanity, violence and obscenity until the movies were squeaky-clean. But did this silencing of the salacious protect Americans or control them?
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Well, this isn’t necessarily a huge surprise, but Friday afternoon a Florida jury sided with Hulk Hogan in his lawsuit against Gawker, awarding him a fairly astounding $115 million (he had asked for $100 million) for posting a short clip of a Hogan sex tape along with an article about it. We hadn’t written about this case recently, as it was getting tons of press coverage elsewhere — but when we discussed it three years ago, when a Florida court first issued an injunction against Gawker, we noted the serious First Amendment issues here. Hogan (real name: Terry Bollea) had originally sued in federal court where it was more or less laughed out of court, mostly on First Amendment grounds. However, he was able to try again in state court, where it’s astounding that it even went to trial in the first place.
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Hogan brought the case three years ago after Gawker, a 13-year-old digital news site founded by Nick Denton, an entrepreneur with an allergy to celebrity privacy, published a video the wrestler claimed was secretly recorded. The sex tape was sensational, showing Hogan — whose real name is Terry Bollea — engaged in sexual intercourse with Heather Cole, the then-wife of his best friend, Tampa-area radio shock jock Bubba the Love Sponge (real name: Todd Alan Clem). Gawker’s posting of the Hogan sex tape was accompanied by an essay from then–editor-in-chief A.J. Daulerio about celebrity sex and a vivid play-by-play of the encounter between Hogan and Cole.
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Privacy
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A federal watchdog has concluded that the Pentagon inspector general’s office may have improperly destroyed evidence during the high-profile leak prosecution of former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake.
The Office of Special Counsel, which is charged with protecting federal employees who provide information on government wrongdoing, said its review of the handling of the Drake case had determined that there is “substantial likelihood” that there had been “possible violations of laws, rules or regulations” in the destruction of the evidence.
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So, this morning we wrote about a new flaw found in the encryption in Apple’s iMessage system — though it was noted that this wouldn’t really have impacted what the FBI was trying to do to get into Syed Farook’s work iPhone.
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One of the points that seems to be widely misunderstood by people who don’t spend much time in computer security worlds, is that building secure encryption systems is really hard and almost everything has some sort of vulnerability somewhere. This is why it’s a constant struggle by security researchers, cryptographers and security engineers to continually poke holes in encryption, and try to fix up and patch systems. It’s also why the demand for backdoors is idiotic, because they probably already exist in some format. But purposely building in certain kinds of backdoors that can’t be closed by law almost certainly blasts open much larger holes for those with nefarious intent to get in.
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Apple’s growing arsenal of encryption techniques — shielding data on devices as well as real-time video calls and instant messages — has spurred the U.S. government to sound the alarm that such tools are putting the communications of terrorists and criminals out of the reach of law enforcement.
But a group of Johns Hopkins University researchers has found a bug in the company’s vaunted encryption, one that would enable a skilled attacker to decrypt photos and videos sent as secure instant messages.
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When the FBI branded Martin Luther King Jr a “dangerous” threat to national security and began tapping his phones, it was part of a long history of spying on black activists in the United States. But the government surveillance of black bodies has never been limited to activists – in fact, according to the FBI; you only had to be black.
In the current fight between Apple and the FBI, black perspectives are largely invisible, yet black communities stand to lose big if the FBI wins. A federal judge in California is set to rule on Tuesday whether the FBI will be granted a request compelling Apple to unlock the iPhone of a San Bernardino shooter.
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That’s not all that surprising, of course. People have known about burner phones for ages. But the thing that stood out for me was the desperate need of the NY Times reporters to insist that there must be encryption used by the attackers, despite the near total lack of evidence of any such use. Immediately after the attacks, law enforcement and intelligence officials started blaming encryption based on absolutely nothing. Senator John McCain used it as an excuse to plan legislation that would force backdoors into encryption. And Rep. Michael McCaul insisted that the Paris attackers used the encrypted Telegram app, despite no one else saying that. In fact, for months, the only thing we’d heard was that they used unencrypted SMS to alert each other that the attacks were on, and made almost no effort to hide themselves.
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New details of the Paris attacks carried out last November reveal that it was the consistent use of prepaid burner phones, not encryption, that helped keep the terrorists off the radar of the intelligence services.
As an article in The New York Times reports: “the three teams in Paris were comparatively disciplined. They used only new phones that they would then discard, including several activated minutes before the attacks, or phones seized from their victims.”
The article goes on to give more details of how some phones were used only very briefly in the hours leading up to the attacks. For example: “Security camera footage showed Bilal Hadfi, the youngest of the assailants, as he paced outside the stadium, talking on a cellphone. The phone was activated less than an hour before he detonated his vest.” The information come from a 55-page report compiled by the French antiterrorism police for France’s Interior Ministry.
Outside the Bataclan theatre venue, the investigators found a Samsung phone in a dustbin: “It had a Belgian SIM card that had been in use only since the day before the attack. The phone had called just one other number—belonging to an unidentified user in Belgium.”
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Hundreds of residents have been asked to give their views on an ‘increase’ in cars parked by GCHQ workers in the Fiddlers Green and Hester’s Way areas of Cheltenham
Liberal Democrat councillor Wendy Flynn, a former mayor, said she had delivered 400 letters to residents and has set up an online petition and survey.
Wendy told the Echo: “GCHQ do a vitally important job keeping us safe and their presence helps the local economy.
“However they also have a responsibility to the community that are situated in and a moral obligation to be a ‘good neighbour.’
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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CBS CEO Les Moonves hasn’t always been a huge fan of change. The CEO likes to whine a lot about how the television landscape is shifting, whether that’s the fact that Netflix doesn’t have to share viewership numbers in the subscription streaming age, or the way Dish is giving users what they want with DVRs that automatically skip ads. Moonves is also a big fan of pouting and claiming CBS will pull all of its broadcast content off the air if the network doesn’t get what it wants (a man, in a very nice suit, threatening to take his ball and go home).
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Aw, who are we kidding? The monkey has no clue about any of this. It’s a monkey! The case is really about a giant publicity stunt by PETA, which is pretending to represent the monkey and claiming that a monkey taking a selfie can get a copyright. Incredibly, PETA hired a big time, previously well-respected law firm by the name of Irell & Manella, which argued with apparently straight faces that someone must own the copyright, and thus the monkey (and PETA) were the most obvious choice. But, that’s something anyone with even the most marginal knowledge of copyright should know is not true, because we have something called the public domain. No one needs to hold the copyright because there might not be a copyright (and in this case, there is none).
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The American Petroleum Institute (API), a group that represents the oil industry, apparently releases a fee-based report on oil prices, which is released to paying subscribers a week before the US government releases “official” data. For obvious reasons, this information is fairly valuable to traders, who are more than willing to pay the monthly fee to get early access to some crucial information on the price of oil. Apparently, last week, some people then took that data, and tweeted about it… leading API to issue DMCA takedown notices, which Twitter promptly complied with.
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Any time anyone routes around Hollywood’s windowed food chain — theatrical release, delay, video release, delay, VOD, longer delay, pay TV, even longer delay (or never), on-demand streaming — studios and theaters get bent out of shape. This terrible system makes major studios and theaters happiest (and their own worst enemies), even though it’s apparent a large percentage of the public would rather enjoy films on their own terms.
Along with the complaints about the reshuffling of The Schedule come the inevitable cries of “PIRACY!” Sean Parker, formerly the major labels’ worst enemy, is now at the receiving end of motion picture industry hate, even though his plan — the “Screening Room” — involves everyone getting paid.
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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There would certainly be support issues. The crowd currently buying Ubuntu Precision Dells are both computer and Linux savvy, and most likely don’t bother the help desk people with many how-do-I-do-this sort of questions. That would change if Dell were to begin mass marketing lower end machines with an operating system that would be new to most buyers. The solution? Canonical, eager to expand its user base, would probably be more than willing to strike a deal to offer limited tech support to new Ubuntu Dell owners at a reasonable bulk rate.
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Programmer community site Stack Overflow’s new survey sees OS X overshadowing Linux again this year as the more popular operating system among developers. Although Windows still leads the pack (currently at 52.2%, including the different versions), it’s expected to continue trending downward, below 50% by this time next year.
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In a world of PCs dominated by Windows and Macs, Dell’s line of “Project Sputnik” laptops with Ubuntu Linux have secured a cult following.
The latest Project Sputnik laptop is the XPS 13 Developer Edition, which shipped last week. With its sleek design, the XPS 13 brings a new, sexy look to otherwise dull Linux laptop designs.
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Kernel Space
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Here is another big feature coming for the Linux 4.6 kernel.
Following the cgroup pull request for the Linux 4.6 merge window, Tejun Heo sent in a second pull request and it goes ahead to provide cgroup namespaces support for the kernel.
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While F2FS still doesn’t seem to have been utilized yet by any large, wide-scale deployments as the flash file-system of choice, this Linux file-system continues to mature.
Jaegeuk Kim sent out the pull request this week for updating the Flash-Friendly File-System for Linux 4.6. His pull request needs to be re-submitted to a mistake he made that upset Torvalds, but it gives us a look at the features that are coming for this file-system in the next Linux kernel release.
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Graphics Stack
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Intel MPX memory protection aims to safeguard against buffer overflows in programs assuming you have a supported processor and software stack. Over at Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center they published a guide this week on making use of Intel MPX under Linux.
The software requirements for utilizing Intel Memory Protection Extensions (MPX) on Linux include the Linux 3.10 kernel (but Linux 4.1 or newer is recommended), GCC 5.0 or newer, Glibc 2.20 or newer, Binutils 2.24 or newer, and GDB 7.9 or newer. On the hardware side, MPX support is present with latest-generation Skylake processors and newer. This combination of software and hardware allows for checking pointer references to look for buffer overflows.
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New firmware blobs have been updated in linux-firmware Git this morning for Skylake affecting both audio and graphics.
The new audio firmware is to fix various bugs over the earlier binary-only blob. At least according to Intel, there are no changes besides fixes.
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Applications
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The Blender Foundation and online developer community are proud to present Blender 2.77, released March 19th, 2016!
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Blender 2.77 was released this weekend as the newest version of this wildly popular, cross-platform, open-source 3D animation program.
Blender 2.77 delivers Cycles rendering improvements, new GPU capabilities and rendering abilities, faster OpenGL rendering of the UI, better anti-aliasing, new design tools, new features for Blender’s Game Engine, multi-threading improvements, and much more.
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Blender Foundation was proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of version 2.77 of its open-source and cross-platform Blender 3D modeller software.
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This past weekend, we had the great surprise to see Atom 1.6, the next major version of GitHub’s powerful, cross-platform and open-source hackable text editor exit the devel channel and enter the stable one.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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There will likely be a few embarrassed developers about this, but it looks like the private beta for the Linux port of F1 2015 has been left open during the free weekend. Is this an oversight, or a sneaky marketing decision? Who knows. It certainly looks like it is coming now though, rather than being rumours and speculation from SteamDB history.
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Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at Ink scripting language and Atomic Game Engine going open source, GameWorks SDK 3.1 released by NVIDIA, and new games out for Linux.
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RC Mini Racers is a fast paced arcade racing game with weapons, and it has just arrived on SteamOS/Linux.
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Following the tracker we started back in Q2 2015, here’s the latest analysed data of the survey that ran back in November-December 2015 [ Most answers have come from r/linux and r/linux_gaming, so this will certainly not be representative of the Linux community as a whole – previous warnings regarding the data quality are still valid ]. This time we will explore the data a little further and look for some particular profiles of Linux gamers that emerge from this dataset. But before we go there, let’s go through a number of general observations.
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Good news for everyone wanting to play it on Linux (including me), as the developer of Stardew Valley has said Linux is a top priority.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Qt v5.6 is Qt’s first “LTS” release since 2011, offers tighter alignment with Yocto Project, and is said to make “Boot to Qt” stack customization easier.
The Qt Company released version 5.6 of its cross-platform application and UI development framework, bringing Qt’s “Boot to Qt” embedded Linux platform in greater alignment with Yocto Project tools. As a result, “developers can easily pull in the full Qt offering to their own Yocto-based software stacks or customize Qt’s Yocto-compliant software stack to meet their production needs,” says the Qt Company.
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Some interesting things — for KDE users and developers — have landed in the official FreeBSD ports tree recently.
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Are you a student? With experience in C++? And some free time over the summer? Then there is a unique chance for you right now: Apply as a Google Summer of Code student. You’ll get to work on a real Open Source project for three months, gain lots of experience and even get paid for it. Mentors with lots of knowledge in the project will guide you throughout the program.
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4MLinux developer Zbigniew Konojacki today informs Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of a new build of his Antivirus Live CD tool based on the latest 4MLinux and ClamAV projects.
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Solus Project’s Josh Strobl is back with another installation of the “This Week in Solus” newsletter, letting the community know about what landed in the Solus operating system this week and what the team’s plans are for the future of the project.
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Welcome to the 24th installation of This Week in Solus.
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Reviews
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Antergos Antergos is a cutting edge Linux distribution which is based on Arch Linux. The project creates a powerful desktop oriented operating system that supports several desktop environments and install-time add-ons. Around the middle of February the Antergos project released a snapshot carrying the version number 2016.02.19. At the time I downloaded the ISO image, but was unable to get the distribution to boot on my hardware. I then moved on to explore other projects, but then discovered the Antergos developers had released an updated ISO, this one labelled 2016.02.21. I downloaded this new ISO and found it booted on my test system and so proceeded to experiment with the distribution.
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New Releases
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT) stock opened at $73.04 and scored a place in the group of buzzing stocks. While writing, the stock was hovering around $74.09. Coming to technical details, it had made a high of 74.61 and the low of 72.68 so far in this session. Considering the last closing price, the market cap of Red Hat, Inc. Common Stock stands at $13.53B.
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Fedora
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This is a long overdue post on a project called Bugyou, that recently went live to servers. It is a tool for reporting Autocloud image build test reports to different tracking services. Its split into two parts. Bugyou and Bugyou-Plugins. Bugyou is essentially a fedmsg consumer here that listens and filters autocloud messages and pushes them down a retask-queue.
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Debian Family
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One particular encouraging meeting I had was with a Debian Developer employed by Google and working on Git. While my maths background sets me up with the right thinking skills to write programs, I don’t have knowledge typically gained from an education in computer science that enables one to work on the most interesting software. In particular, low-level programming in C is something that I had thought it wouldn’t be possible for me to get started with. So it was encouraging to meet the DD working on Git at Google because his situation was similar: his undergraduate background is in maths and he was able to learn how to code in C by himself and is now working on a exciting project at a company that it is hard to get hired by. I don’t mean that doing exactly what he’s doing is something that I aiming for, just that it is very encouraging to know the field is more open to me than I had thought. I was also reminded of how fortunate I am to have the Internet to learn from and projects like Debian to get involved with.
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About one month has passed and here is the usual updated of TeX Live packages for Debian, this time also with an update to biber to accompany the updated version of biblatex. This will be (probably) the last upload before TeX Live 2015 gets frozen in preparation for 2016. After the freeze there will be some time of piece, and updates will got to experimental with the new binaries.
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Today we have the great pleasure of introducing you to a new project that saw the light of the Internet for the first time this past weekend, on March 12, 2016. Meet ubuntuBSD!
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What was mostly seen by many Ubuntu loyalists as yet another speculation churned out by the rumor mills has become official now. Ubuntu 16.04 allows users to move the Unity Launcher to the bottom of the screen, and the vast majority of Ubuntu users are loving it.
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It’s amazing how some folks think they’re inventing the wheel when they are actually re-inventing it. Take menus/task bars and such. Canonical thought it was revolutionary to put the bar on the left side of the screen to save space on huge or tiny screens. Just now they think it’s progress to allow users to move it to the bottom, again. I was able to move my KDE “panel” around on my first desktop distro, Caldera e-Desktop, in 2000…, so they’re 16 years late.
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According to Marius of Softpedia, ubuntuBSD can be used both as a desktop OS or basic Ubuntu server, with all bells and whistles. Just choose the appropriate option at the time of installation.
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For most people, an AC1900 Wi-Fi router hits the sweet spot. It delivers enough speed to support media streaming, and enough features to handle the needs of most homes without blasting a hole in your pocketbook. They’re not the most powerful, but they’re much less expensive than higher-end routers equipped with all the latest whiz-bang features.
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I’ve spend some time on the Odroid-C2 port, but it is far from being ready yet. I’m still stuck with u-boot and Retroarch compilation.
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Phones
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Android
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ASUS ZenWatch 2 has been updated with the latest Android Wear OS version, which brings a number of exciting new features to the wearable.
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The U.S. FTC is warning Android developers against using software called “Silverpush” when building new apps for the platform. With “Silverpush,” the microphone on an Android device can hear a television playing in the background allowing viewing information to be passed along to third-party advertisers.
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A few weeks ago Julius Knapp of the FCC responded to the furor in the free, libre and open source software communities related to the agency’s proposed rules on banning WiFi device modification. In his response, he sought to reassure the community that their proposals will not restrict open source firmware on devices.
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Their conversation focused on a topic that is near and dear to the open source community: diversity in tech. Google’s workplace is 70% male, so hiring more women and minorities interested in technology is a big issue for them. They know that they will create better products if they have a more diverse team. And, Jacquelline says we’re seeing that companies founded by women are not getting the same results to support their businesses when pitching to venture capitalists. Men are 18% more likely to get funding with the same exact pitch as a woman.
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The current “AI summer” is being driven by gargantuan computational power being applied to larger and larger data sets. Housley said that around 2014 he saw a few different market forces at work, “an increasing commoditisation of machine learning and AI technology; popular big data technologies such as Apache Spark and Hadoop were bundling machine learning libraries as part of their systems.”
He pointed to more of a social trend with consumers expecting smarter apps and increasing automation of work force activities which is driving big data analytics. “Most companies are sitting on massive silos of data. Not just their structured data – their website activities which are very highly ordered – but also all the documents that are flowing through their systems.”
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Redox OS subscribes to a micro-kernel design but part of what makes it so interesting is that it’s written in the Rust programming language. Most features are implemented in Rust for Redox OS and there’s an optional original GUI, Newlib for C programs, drivers are run from user-space, and there’s work underway in supporting the ZFS file-system. Common Unix commands are supported by Redox.
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Events
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I had to leave early to the venue for day two, as I had a welcome talk in the Python track. The morning started with the “Introduction to GSOC, and GCI” talk from Stephanie Taylor. The room was full with many ex-GSOC and GCI students, and mentors. The students of GCI last year completed more than 4k tasks, among them 1k+ was done by the students under FOSSASIA organization.
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SaaS/Big Data
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to a project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, in a project that intentionally and significantly benefits society in other aspects of life. This award stresses the use of free software in the service of humanity.
This year, it was given to the Library Freedom Project, a partnership among librarians, technologists, attorneys, and privacy advocates which aims to make real the promise of intellectual freedom in libraries. By teaching librarians about surveillance threats, privacy rights and responsibilities, and digital tools to stop surveillance, the project hopes to create a privacy-centric paradigm shift in libraries and the local communities they serve. Notably, the project helps libraries launch Tor exit nodes. Project founders Alison Macrina and chief technology wizard Nima Fatemi accepted the award.
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…before Daniel could finish the room broke out into clapping and standing ovation. Edward responded with clear emotion by thanking the community for creating free software. Sitting down in front…
…feeling the energy, emotion and celebration was vibrant in the room. It was a great kick off to the day. Naturally things ran over time and those watching the stream had sound related issues, so Ruben our newest tech team member, made a valiant effort to edit the video to share it amongst all of you.
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Hi there. I’m Sumana Harihareswara and I’m going to speak with you about “inessential weirdnesses in free software”. Just some housekeeping to start: I am not using any slides today, I will be taking questions at the end, and I’ll be posting the text of my remarks online later today. And there are other good talks happening right now, so to help you decide whether to stay in this room: this talk is going to be more interesting to people who already have been participants in free software for a few years, who can use tools we commonly use in our community, like version control, IRC, mailing lists, bug trackers, and wikis, and who are already familiar with general free software trends and arguments. And this talk is going to be most interesting to people who regularly spend time working to help reach out to new people and get them to use free software and participate in our communities. So if that is not particularly interesting to you then I do encourage you to check out the other talks happening right now — I am particularly jealous that I can’t go to Luis Villa’s talk applying a capability approach to issues of software freedom.
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Public Services/Government
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Senator Daniel Squadron (D)’s proposed NY senate bill S161, which is also sponsored by Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson (D), will, if enabled, allow open-source software developers to claim back 20 percent of the expenses they incur for building and distributing free software. However, they’d only be able to claim back $200 a year under the proposed rules.
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The pilot program proposed in the draft policy would require “covered agencies to release at least 20 percent of their newly-developed custom code, in addition to the release of all custom code developed by Federal employees at covered agencies as part of their official duties.”
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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While searching for information on the next Elsevier Inc. et al. v. Sci-Hub et al. court date (just rescheduled from March 17 to April 27), I discovered that I — and apparently everyone else — have so far overlooked a big pile of public documents from the case. I’ve been checking PlainSite periodically, which hosts Elbakyan’s defiantly self-incriminating letter to Judge Robert W. Sweet and Sweet’s subsequent preliminary injunction against Sci-Hub and LibGen, but I should’ve noticed sooner that their collection is out of date and far from complete. So I ran a query on PACER, where the search tool for the Southern District of New York is so poorly designed and/or broken I couldn’t find what I was looking for. Fortunately, a site called PacerMonitor provides an alternate interface. $37.80 and many right-clicks later, I’d assembled all 122 PDFs released so far. You can download the full 42MB set here.
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Science
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Don’t tell Donald Trump, but conspiracy theories are for losers. Seriously. I mean it. This is huge. And nobody wants to talk about it.
OK, it’s actually more complicated than that. Other potential explanations paint an even less flattering picture of the current conservative conspiracy craze. But whatever it is, conservatives—at least in the current political moment—are significantly more prone to embrace conspiracy theories, and the more they know, the more they embrace them… at least if the conspiracies make liberals look bad. The same is not true of liberals—at least not now—according to a new paper published in the American Journal of Political Science that takes some major strides toward making sense of conspiracy theories as less of a puzzling black sheep phenomenon than it’s usually taken to be.
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Health/Nutrition
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While a congressional hearing Thursday focused attention on the drinking water crisis in Flint, Michigan, news reporting from around the country reveals that the problem of lead-contamination afflicts communities nationwide.
A multi-part USA Today investigation published this week identified almost 2,000 additional water systems in all 50 states where testing has shown excessive levels of lead contamination over the past four years. “The water systems, which reported lead levels exceeding Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] standards, collectively supply water to 6 million people,” according to reporters Alison Young and Mark Nichols.
The series installment released Thursday details hundreds of educational facilities across the nation “where children were exposed to water containing excessive amounts of an element doctors agree is unsafe at any level.”
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The new excuse for U.S. imperial wars is “humanitarian” or “liberal” interventionism with Hillary Clinton and other proponents citing noble motives for destroying foreign societies, as ex-CIA official Graham E. Fuller discusses.
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The early March assassination of Honduran social movement leader Berta Cáceres provoked international outcry, and calls for 2016 presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton to discuss her support of the country’s 2009 coup, which ousted democratically elected president Manuel Zelaya and escalated the violent repression of human rights defenders.
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Lockheed Martin is expanding various munition factories to meet rising demand from the U.S. and its partners fighting the Islamic State — and to start equipping American warplanes for great-power wars at sea.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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European researchers have identified a new “fuel” that by 2030 will be more important than oil. It’s called energy efficiency − the drive to get more bang from each buck spent on power.
If the European Union member states adopt a 40% energy efficiency target, the sum of energy savings and power from renewable sources such as wind and photovoltaics together would overtake the sum of all imported coal, oil and gas by 2030, according to a new study from the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre.
With government encouragement, energy efficiency could become a “niche fuel” for investors at a time when fossil fuel prices are low. The drive to wean the community off carbon-based fuels could also lead to the creation of jobs and economic growth if the right investments were made in low-carbon technologies.
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The Atlantic seas could be getting rougher, with winter storms capable of causing dramatic changes to the beaches of Western Europe.
And new research shows that the pounding delivered to the shorelines of the UK and France in the winter of 2013-2014 was the most violent since 1948.
Gerd Masselink, professor of coastal geomorphology at Plymouth University School of Marine Science and Engineering, UK, and colleagues report in Geophysical Research Letters that they decided to switch focus from sea level rise resulting from global warming.
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In a world filled with high-impact weather events, it’s only natural to wonder exactly why your town was beset with a heat wave, a destructive flood, or a deadly tornado. Today, such events occur in a different global atmosphere–one with more greenhouse gases than at any time in human history, thanks to human activity. A growing branch of atmospheric research is working to quantify the influence of human-induced climate change on various types of extreme weather, and there is real progress being made. “It is now possible to estimate the influence of climate change on some types of specific weather events,” said Rear Admiral David Titley (Pennsylvania State University) at a press briefing in Washington, D.C., last Friday. Titley chaired a U.S. National Academies committee that has just produced an important report, released on Friday. Attribution of Extreme Weather Events in the Context of Climate Change serves as a very useful guide to how this work is carried out, what it can and can’t do, and where the science is heading.
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TransCanada Corp put “substandard materials” — made by Quebec manufacturing company, Ezeflow — in an Alberta natural gas pipeline that blew up in 2013, Canada’s pipeline regulator said on Friday as it finally responded to a four-year old warning from a whistleblower with a new industry-wide safety order.
The order gives all Canadian pipeline companies under federal jurisdiction 60 days to identify whether any of their pipelines are using specific types of pipeline fittings, made by Ezeflow in Quebec as well as fittings by Canadoil Asia produced in Thailand, that were flagged for safety reasons. The order also requires the companies to submit mitigation plans to address potential weaknesses.
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Canada’s Lax Kw’alaams show us how we can be saved: by loving the natural world and local living economies more than mere money and profit
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The Commercial Energy Working Group (CEWG) is one of the many lobbying organizations in Washington. They make recommendations to federal agencies and try to sway lawmakers on policies. They engage in the basic political work of making the government friendlier to business.
There’s only one problem: who the Commercial Energy Working Group actually represents is a secret.
This violates federal lobbying and ethics laws, according to Public Citizen’s Tyson Slocum, who has urged the House and Senate to investigate the matter. “The Commercial Energy Working Group is one of the most active – and secret – organizations seeking to undermine energy market regulations,” Slocum told The Intercept. “The purpose of my complaint is to force the group to start identifying its membership.”
Under the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007, all lobbying organizations registered with the federal government must list the names of any business that has contributed more than $5,000 to them in any one quarter. But the CEWG “does not disclose the individual companies or entities that constitute its active membership,” according to Slocum’s letter.
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Hillary Clinton has always been the favored candidate of the party establishment. And unlike 2008, when the powerful Cook County portion of that establishment broke for Obama, a favorite son, this time the establishment remains unified in the face of the Sanders insurgency. Which would be reason enough for Sanders to carry on his fight all the way to Philadelphia, even if it really were mathematically impossible for him to win the nomination—a point we are still unlikely to reach before California votes on June 7. The strength of Sanders’s challenge, and the enthusiasm of his supporters, have already pulled Hillary Clinton off dead center on police violence, trade policy, access to education, and making the wealthy pay their share of taxes.
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According to a North Carolina pastor, Bernie Sanders needs to schedule a meeting with Jesus Christ, some people’s lord and savior. When introducing Trump at a rally, televangelist Mark Burns the crowd, “Bernie Sanders… doesn’t believe in God, how in the world (are) we going to let Bernie — I mean, really?” Burns then warned the Senator, “Bernie’s got to get saved, Bernie’s got to meet Jesus. He’s got to have a coming to Jesus meeting.”
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In her essay “There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions,” black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde wrote: “I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sizes and colors and sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression.”
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This week’s episode of teleSUR’s “Days of Revolt” features Chris Hedges in conversation with political cartoonist Dwayne Booth, also known as “Mr. Fish.” They sit down to discuss the “unpleasant truth” revealed by political cartoons.
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Mike Murphy is a longtime Jeb Bush friend and loyalist, and he’s also the guy who ran Right to Rise, the Super PAC that blew through $100 million in an epically futile effort to sell Bush to the masses. So it’s understandable that he might be a little bitter about the success of Donald Trump, who almost single-handedly destroyed Bush.
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Did you know that if a given political party already has an incumbent in a particular political post, it’s standard practice in the United States for a political party to prohibit its voter-list to be purchased by anyone who’s not an incumbent office-holder in that party — including by someone who wishes to challenge or contest within that party the incumbent, in a primary election?
Only incumbents have access to that crucial list — crucial for any candidate in a primary election (unless there is no incumbent who is of that party).
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Censorship
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In Shakespearean times, cuckolds were referred to as “he who has horns” — an issue everyone else can see, that’s not obvious to them. Everyone else sees his shame immediately, but the cuckold can only tell by looking closely in a mirror. Perhaps the same is true for censors, who insist that they adore free speech while mercilessly trampling it at the slightest opportunity.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, whom I wouldn’t even right-swipe on Grindr (ironically one of the few social platforms left without Orwellian speech suppression), recently made a visit to The Today Show where he firmly proclaimed that his site doesn’t censor its users. Dorsey made his extraordinary statement following Matt Lauer’s claim that his Twitter followers named censorship as one of the most important issues facing the social media platform.
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One act of censorship denies facts established by scientific research. The other denies the documented violation of international law (for instance, the Fourth Geneva Convention) and multiple United Nations resolutions. So the answer to the question just asked is – there is no difference.
[...]
The maps in question are not new or novel. Nor are they historically inaccurate, despite Zionists’ claims to the contrary. They can be seen individually and in different forms on websites of the BBC and Mondoweiss and are published in a number of history books, such as Mark Tessler’s well-received A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Perhaps what the Zionists can’t abide is lining up the maps together in chronological order.
In truth, the objections reported to have been used by those who pressured McGraw-Hill are historically perverse – the sort of grasping at straws that reflects a biased and strained rewriting of history. For instance, an objection was made to the labeling of public land in pre-1948 Palestine as “Palestinian.” Why? Because the Zionist claim is that Palestine before 1948 was a British mandate and so the land was British and not Palestinian.
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So Comrade Rubin is demanding a thorough denunciation of Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief-of-staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell (and academic advisor to the Ron Paul Institute). Rubin took to the website of his luxurious neocon Beltway sinecure, the American Enterprise Institute, to call for Wilkerson’s deportation to the gulag for severe ideological deviationism.
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AKP legal expert says counter-terror laws will be broadened to target those who ‘ideologically support’ terrorist acts, days after Ankara bombing blamed on PKK
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Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s life changed when his dreamlike fantasy Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival six years ago.
As well as establishing him as a distinctive voice in cinema – a visionary who blurs reality and fantasy in semi-experimental films that have a meditative pace influenced by an interest in Buddhism – he became his country’s best-known filmmaker internationally.
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Content regulation on the Internet is at the forefront of discussion in India due to a build up of events over the past 12 months. Last August the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) requested the Department of Telecommunications to prevent telecommunication providers from allowing their customers to access 857 pornographic websites. This mandate was immediately appealed and subsequently overturned by the Supreme Court. Then, just a few weeks ago the Supreme Court has provided further clarification about how existing ‘decency’ law could apply in an online context, and requested CIS to assess this further. Though the CIS said initial mandate to block porn was focused on child pornography the Supreme Court has sought a much wider review.
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Privacy
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Governmental control is nothing compared to what Google is up to. The company is creating a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation we should call surveillance capitalism. Is there nothing we can do?surveillance capitalism
[...]
Google surpassed Apple as the world’s most highly valued company in January for the first time since 2010. (Back then each company was worth less than 200 billion. Now each is valued at well over 500 billion.) While Google’s new lead lasted only a few days, the company’s success has implications for everyone who lives within the reach of the Internet. Why? Because Google is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior. This is a new surveillance capitalism that is unimaginable outside the inscrutable high velocity circuits of Google’s digital universe, whose signature feature is the Internet and its successors. While the world is riveted by the showdown between Apple and the FBI, the real truth is that the surveillance capabilities being developed by surveillance capitalists are the envy of every state security agency. What are the secrets of this new capitalism, how do they produce such staggering wealth, and how can we protect ourselves from its invasive power?
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But domestic politics, especially in Westminster, seem to be in a state of chaos. The Conservative Government, in the days after Duncan Smith resigned, is imploding; Labour provides no effective Opposition; and the post-Coalition Liberal Democrats are a discredited irrelevance.
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As one of the United States’ largest technology companies is battling with the government over access to its cell phones, the federal prosecutor from New Jersey says Apple is seeking to make their products “warrant-proof.”
On Friday, U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman discussed the ongoing fight between the tech giant and the federal government over access to a device owned by one of the shooters in the San Bernadino, Calif. terror attacks.
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Clarke is a former White House official who served as the National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection, and Counterterrorism for a period during his 30 year career. In an interview on “Morning Edition” with NPR host David Greene, he said that he thinks if the FBI had asked, the National Security Agency could have already opened the encrypted iPhone belonging to San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, Newsweek reports.
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Civil Rights
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From an economic point of view, mobility of labour is advantageous in many respects. Allowing workers to move where they are best rewarded is helpful to productive efficiency. It means that, when skill shortages arise, firms can recruit widely and workers can supply labour where their particular abilities are most in demand. British firms benefit, just as do firms in other countries, from being able to recruit from a broader pool for the particular skills needed in their operations. At the same time British workers gain, just as do workers in other countries, from access to a broader pool of possible employers.
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Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and appointed with the advice and consent of the National Rifle Association, according to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
McConnell offered this unusual view of the confirmation process during an interview with Fox News Sunday. In response to a question from host Chris Wallace, who asked if Senate Republicans would consider the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court after the election if Hillary Clinton prevails, McConnell responded that he “can’t imagine that a Republican majority in the United States Senate would want to confirm, in a lame duck session, a nominee opposed by the National Rifle Association [and] the National Federation of Independent Businesses.”
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Police officers in Maryland frequently did not follow safety guidelines when using Tasers, and often discharged the weapon before their safety was actually at risk, according to a six-month investigation by The Baltimore Sun.
In the first-ever analysis of Taser use in Maryland, the Sun studied three years of Taser incidents in the state. The study found that nearly 60 percent of the people that police hit with Tasers were described as “non compliant and non-threatening.”
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Before the European debt crisis, the austerity regimes in Ireland, Spain and Portugal and the meltdown of Greece, large parts of the European Union almost felt like the self-ascribed identity discourse of an enlightened, liberal, tolerant polity cognizant of its own dark pasts and its current diversity. Today, we are facing a very different continent. Right-wing populist, neo-fascist and racist parties have moved from the margins into the centre of politics, and so have their ideas.
Understandable but diffuse anxieties over globalisation, competition over social services and perceived cultural distance to immigrants have solidified into Islamophobic resentment and racialised ideologies of European supremacy.
Racist populist parties shape political discourses from the most advanced Scandinavian democracies to the illiberal polities of Hungary or Slovakia. Recently, a member of the European Parliament of the neo-fascist Golden Dawn spoke of Turks as “dirty and polluted … wild dogs” in a plenary session. The President, Martin Schulz, immediately understood the strategy behind the diatribe, i.e. to push the boundaries of acceptable discourse in the European Parliament. He expelled the MEP. His deliberate action, however, only reinforces the tragic state of affairs. One has to be courageous and resolute to stand up to an ideology which has been invented in Europe, destroyed much of it and is now being legally represented in one of the centres of European power.
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Forget Trump. It’s the people who paved the way for him who seem uncomfortably familiar to an expert on pre-Nazi Germany.
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The lessons to be learned from Weimar Germany are not the ones we hear and read about today. Weimar Germany did not collapse under the weight of its various crises. It was actively destroyed by a conservative elite – noble landowners, high-level state officials, businessmen, army officers – that chose to ally with the Nazi Party. As we watch the Republican establishment’s ineffectual flailings to stop Donald Trump, it’s worth remembering that Weimar Germany’s old-style conservatives never really liked Hitler and the Nazis either. To them, the Nazis were too loud, uncouth, low class. But they admired Hitler’s nationalism, his promise to revive Germany’s great power status, his opposition to democracy, and his anti-communism. And they were either indifferent to or actively supported the Nazis’ anti-Semitism.
The conservative elite got much more than they had bargained for with their willingness to turn political power over to the Nazis. Some would live to regret their choice, many not until American and British bombs rained down on Hamburg, Berlin and other cities and the Red Army approached the gates.
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For nearly 20 years, a for-profit company called Youth Services International Inc. (YSI) has controlled multiple juvenile facilities in Florida. During that time, YSI workers have been accused of a slew of abuses, from slamming kids’ heads into walls to underfeeding them.
On Wednesday, the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) announced the company is finally getting the boot. According to a DJJ press release, the state will terminate all services and transfer to new providers by August 31, 2016.
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North Korea last year sentenced Canadian pastor Hyeon Soo Lim to life imprisonment with hard labour on sedition charges.
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Anti-Donald Trump protesters blocked a major highway outside of Phoenix, Arizona Saturday, delaying Trump supporters who were driving to a rally for the presidential hopeful in the state capital.
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I am prepared to believe that even Iain Duncan Smith has been genuinely sickened by the attack on the disabled in the budget to give yet more tax breaks for higher earners. He is very typical of the officer class of the senior British regiments and while he is instinctively right wing, there is a linit to the amount of suffering he could see unleashed on the poor, because he does have some sense of basic decency. I grant you things had to go very far before it finally took effect, but it has. It should also be remembered that he is not an old Etonian but a real Scot, born in Edinburgh, and state educated.
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Sunday at Indian Wells should have been a day of healing and celebration. Not only were both world’s top-ranked players in action in the men’s and women’s singles finals at the BNP Paribas Open, but for the first time since the racist incident in 2001, both Williams sisters were on hand for the final — Serena on the court, Venus in the stands cheering her on.
Instead, their return was darkened by a reminder of the ugly sexism that still exists in the sport.
In a morning meeting with the media, Raymond Moore, the CEO of Indian Wells Tennis Garden, was asked about whether his plans to make the men’s event more prestigious extended to the women’s tournament as well. He clearly found the question amusing.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Copyrights
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Parties asserting copyright claims can also seek compensation for “moral prejudice” suffered from the infringement, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled.
Writer and director Christian Liffers was seeking damages for copyright infringement and moral prejudice suffered when a Spanish broadcaster aired clips from his 2006 documentary “Dos Patrias Cuba y la Noche” (“Two Homelands: Cuba and the Night”).
The documentary focuses on six stories of homosexual and transsexual inhabitants of Cuba.
Mandarina, an audiovisual company, produced a documentary on child prostitution in Cuba containing unauthorised clips from Liffers’ film. The documentary aired on Spanish television channel Telecinco, which is owned by broadcaster Mediaset.
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03.20.16
Posted in News Roundup at 5:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Issue 16 of Linux Voice is nine months old, so we’re releasing it under the Creative Commons BY-SA license. You can share and modify all content from the magazine (apart from adverts), providing you credit Linux Voice as the original source and retain the same license.
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Server
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CoreOS pushes the open-source container security project to the 1.0 milestone and production stability.
As container use grows, there is an increasing need to understand from a security perspective what is actually running in a container. That’s the goal of CoreOS’ Clair container security project, which officially hits the 1.0 milestone today, in an effort to help organizations validate container application security.
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Kernel Space
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Linux Kernel 4.5 was released earlier this week, and once again Collabora engineers played a role in its development. In addition to their current projects, seven Collabora engineers contributed a total of 33 patches to the new Kernel.
As part of its continued committment to further increase ts participation to the Linux Kernel, Collabora is looking to expand its team of core software engineers. If you’d like to learn more, follow this link.
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New wireless hardware support and other networking improvements will be present in the Linux 4.6 kernel.
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There are a number of input driver improvements en route for the Linux 4.6 kernel.
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Graphics Stack
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Explore all of the new tools, libraries and more that GPUOpen has to offer. AMD’s Lead on the GPUOpen Initiative, Nick Thibieroz, deep-dives into all of the finer points of this Open Source revolution. Welcome to the new era of open source game development!
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A question that pops up with some regularity is whether libinput has a global configuration storage system, and, subsequently, why it doesn’t have one. Comparisons are drawn to the X-specific tool xinput that allows to trigger all configuration options (see below though).
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On Friday night to much surprise, AMD published the beta version of their new hybrid Linux driver stack with Vulkan support alongside OpenCL, OpenGL, and VDPAU support. Here’s some more details from my initial testing of this new driver that AMD is currently calling the Radeon Software AMD GPU-PRO Beta Driver for Linux.
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Applications
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And now for the main news: I’m pleased to announce the release of Nmap 7.10 with many great improvements! It’s got 12 new NSE scripts, hundreds of new OS/version fingerprints, and dozens if smaller improvements and bug fixes. And that’s not even counting the changes in Nmap 7.01, which we released in December but I never got around to announcing because I suck at marketing.
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The OpenShot video-editor project recently released builds from the long-awaited 2.0 series. Although they are still tagged as “betas,” they offer a glimpse at what the development team has been up to since its previous stable update in late 2012. Many fans of OpenShot have learned to be patient, but the 2.0 is worth a look even for those with no prior experience.
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Plank, the simple, lightweight dock written in Vala, which is used by default in elementary OS, reached version 0.11.0.
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Double Commander is a powerful open source & cross platform file manager, inspired from total commander file manager but includes new ideas and features. It brings dual pane side by side experience to enhance the use of GUI for the user. The main window of the application is separated by two panels side by side that allow you to view the content of two different location or same and browse through folders with ease. For each file, image or folder, details such as name, extension, size, date and attributes are displayed in the list.
The most important function of Double Commander is that it can compress/pack files to many popular formats like ZIP, LZMA, TAR, BZ2, TBZ, GZ and TGZ you can select compression method you want to pack. Using this file manager create symbolic or hard links, change the timestamp properties and the attributes, view file properties and calculate the occupied space by a specific file. You can also compare two different files by their content side by side, change the encoding format for each one and view all identified differences. This feature is very useful for users who need to compare two documents with identical content, but still contain few different words or sentences. Use search function of Double Commander you deeply search for specific file, text, even using creation of date and file mask.
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Double Commander is a file manager that uses two side-by-side panels, available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X. The application ships with two interfaces: GTK2 and Qt4.
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Git is an open-source revision control system, developed by Linus Torvalds, providing a big number of features and an intuitive syntax. It is used a lot by the developers that want to share their code with others.
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As you may know, Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Wine or Emulation
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By ending a wait that lasted almost two years, the developers of ScummVM announced the arrival of a new version for the virtual machine preferred by graphic adventure fans: also known as “Lost with Sherlock”, ScummVM 1.8.0 is hailed as one of the most hefty releases ever prepared by the team with the addition of many games and game engines, the substantial update of graphics and sound sub-systems and the availability of new conversions for minor platforms.
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Games
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Here are the latest results from the monthly GOL survey. Wait, you already did February? Previously we were showing the results as the month we presented results, which was wrong (last months posted was amended).
Since the questions you answer are for the month before, going forward I will name the correct month in the article title that the results correlate to. So, I’m announcing these in March (and previously we would say “survey results for March”), but the questions were all about February, hope that makes sense. If it doesn’t let me know.
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Pretty great performance there. It’s really pleasing to see that Virtual Programming’s eON wrapper technology mature to this state for some.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I work in political/editorial cartoon but also in children’s book illustration. They are 2 different genres, but I like changing from time to time what kind of topics I’m working on. According to my mood I will spend more time in one or another genre.I like to denounce with my cartoons, but sometimes it is also good to put some poetry in this complicated world and the children illustrations help me to focus in something more positive.
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Akademy-es 2016 will be taking place during the next 15th to 17th of April. Here you can learn about the conference’s program.
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Last week, the KDE community organized a sprint at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
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Last week I attended the KDE sprint at CERN to discuss the next steps in Wayland development with my fellow Plasma developers and our awesome crew of the visual design group.
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We usually tend to cater to ordinary users, and computer geeks, and tend to get excited every time we see a computer screen with KDE software displayed on some popular TV show or a movie.
But I have to say that all these screenshots that many of us collected during the years fade a bit in comparison to seeing Plasma running on most computers in the control centre of the CMS experiment.
Plasma, KWin, Dolphin, and all the shebang.
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if you have a Windows Phone (e.g. Lumia or similar), then please help us on MTP & Windows Phones so we can find the correct patch to make these devices work in the kio-mtp io slave.
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Bereitschaft is a great contender on that front but at least for my ears does sound like the fearful state of a worker sitting at home on Saturday, carefully nipping his beer, hoping his boss won’t call him in. If more desktops would call it Bereitschaft, I would vote for it in KDE too because I like consistency, but in this “everyone on its own” state of affairs, I prefer Standby. And we use the dashed version of Standby-Modus because we prefer to separate foreign words from native words. It’s a matter of taste and the transition from “foreign” to “native” is blurry but the German KDE team once decided to go the “dashed” way for all but two or three words.
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This year’s conf.kde.in was organised in Jaipur. I was super excited to be part of KDE India and conf.kde.in for the first time. I was taken back by the preparations that volunteers had done. I really want to take some moment to put forward my thanks to the whole LNMIIT team for such a great welcome and hospitality. Special thanks to “Sagar Chand Agarwal” who made his whole effort in making the conference a success.
I took a lot from various speakers, each of them was a pioneer in what they were doing. It was an exceptional experience for me. The best part was the development sprints where we taught students on how they can build their first own Qt applications. Students showed keen interests and asked many questions, we tried our best to help them and solve as many problems as we could in the small time span we were given.
Those two days gave me an experience of a lifetime of many speakers. I want to specially mention to “Pradeepto”, at first seeing his reply on emails made me curious to meet him in person. But my perception towards changed him when I met him personally, I got to know that he was the creator of KDE India, Season of KDE and conf.kde.in, and he shared his own experience of his journey in details. We even sat on the grass to listen to his experience and felt it should never end, that was his charisma which I guess attracted almost every person who attended conf.kde.in.
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We had a really amazing turn out to the Kubuntu Packaging Party, and we had lots of Fun !
We quickly realised that the number of people, had blown past the limits of some of the channels set up for folks to join the party. Despite a valiant effort by Ovidiu-florin BOGDAN and the KDE Sprint team in the Bus at CERN Labs who joined the Google+ Hangout via one device.
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Friday 15th April 20:00 UTC, we will !be dressing up in party frocks and pressing the “Big Blue Button” to teleport into (K)Ubuntu party land. I have deliberately broken out the K, to directly express our intent that the Kubuntu community team welcome and indeed, openly invite the Ubuntu community to come along and join us.
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Over the second week of March I’ve been at the sprint at CERN.
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If you are a student, you have a unique opportunity right now. Join the Summer of Code, submit a project proposal until March 25th, and work with the people from an open source community during the summer. You will get paid for three months, you will become part of a community, and you will have the chance to make an important step in your career as a software developer. Google is organizing and sponsoring the program and hundreds of mentors from all kind of open source projects all over the world are ready to help you to do your next step in open source. I really would have loved to have such a program when I was a student. You are living in good times.
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This is the first article of short series on ways everyone who wants to put some time into helping Krita can make a real difference. There are many ways of helping Krita, ranging from coding to writing tutorials, helping users on forums to helping with fund raisers. But let’s take a look at one task that is really important: bug triaging.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3.18 added the ability to access Google Drive directly from Files (Nautilus). To use this feature, all you have to do is add your Google account to GNOME Online Accounts and enable “Files”:
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Ping Indicator is an AppIndicator created as a replacement for the old Link Monitor GNOME 2 panel applet.
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Extensions are a practical and overall useful extra layer for the Gnome desktop. They can help enrich and expand the baseline behavior, and they can improve the usability. Again, we go back to the question of why you’d need add-ons in the first place? Is it not trying to fix something that’s broken in the first place? But then, you can argue the same thing about Firefox. And the answer is, not necessarily.
There are a few things that are still broken in Gnome 3, no doubt about that. But the framework goes beyond that, and there are some genuinely practical extensions that, yes, you can live without, but they do make the experience ever so slightly more enjoyable. For me, this is an important lesson, because Gnome and I didn’t have too much love lately. All in all, the system works, it’s realized well enough, and the repertoire of add-ons is wide and useful enough to justify existence. What I’m trying to say is, if you have entertained the through of considering Fedora and/or Gnome 3, then the extensions might be a nice ingredient in your overall proverbial culinary delight. Or something. Personally, I’m pleased, because I never thought I would find meaning and fun in this exercise. But it’s happened, and we will expand the Fedora games to new heights soon enough. We’re done.
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Terminix is a new GTK3 tiling terminal emulator. The application, which is currently in beta, allows splitting terminals both horizontally and vertically, with re-arrangeable terminals using drag and drop, and options to save and restore terminal layouts.
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Reviews
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You do remember my Mint Rosa resolution, before it recovered majestically? Any distro that fails the basics shall not survive the ordeal or be committed to the disk, as it does not meet the minimum requirements for sane and healthy usage. In this regard, sadly, KaOS 2016.01 failed big time.
I like the way it looks, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are just too many bugs, too many problems, that even if the system had somehow installed nicely and without errors, I would still be probably highly skeptical of its ways. But then, it’s a hypothetical discussion that won’t be resolved today. I might get around to testing KaOS again, but surely not in the foreseeable future. And this most likely applies to any distro using Calamares or any beta-quality installers. That’s a risk I’m not willing to accept. Grades wise, you know the score. This one is not on my recommendation short list. Peace.
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Slackware Family
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KDE 5_16.03 is available. I used the latest KDE releases: Frameworks 5.20.0, Plasma 5.5.5 and Applications 15.12.3. You’ll find this also as part of the Slackware Live Edition ISO images based on liveslak-0.7.0 (the PLASMA5 variant) which I uploaded a day earlier.
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Libreoffice 5.1.1 was released last week, check out the Document Foundation blog article. I Was busy with Plasma 5 updates and the Live ISOs but here they finally are: packages for Slackware -current (actually we have a release candidate! It’s now officially “Slackware 14.2 RC1″).
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Red Hat Family
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Fedora
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As you may know, if you follow any of my work, I am a proponent of free and open source games. The entire purpose of my OpenBlox game engine is to allow people to easily create free and open source games that they can share with the community. To achieve that, I needed to make sure that the engine itself was as portable as possible, and that every library used would be either packaged or easy to package for the various distributions that we would like to support. To that end, I started working to package RakNet, a cross-platform networking engine written in C++.
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Debian Family
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Derivatives
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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We reported this as a rumor last month, but now it is official, and the packages needed to move the Unity Launcher of Ubuntu Linux to the bottom of the screen have finally landed in the main repositories.
It is probably the most requested feature ever for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, and Ubuntu Unity developer Marco Trevisan announced yesterday on his Google+ page that Canonical finally decided to merge the hard work done by the Ubuntu Kylin team to bring the Unity 7 Launcher on the bottom edge.
Marco Trevisan mentioned in his quick announcement the fact that one needs to run a command to move the Unity Launcher to the bottom of the screen. Curious to see if it works, we have executed the respective command but nothing happened, and it looks like there’s no button or check box in the system settings to allow you to do that.
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The inaugural release of UbuntuBSD is now available, which the developers have codenamed “Escape From SystemD”, and pairs the Ubuntu userspace with the FreeBSD kernel.
Similar to the now-rather-defunct Debian GNU/kFreeBSD that paired the Debian GNU user-space with the FreeBSD kernel rather than the Linux kernel, developers have done the same with Ubuntu and called it UbuntuBSD. This first UbuntuBSD beta release is based off Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf and the FreeBSD 10.1 kernel.
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Plank is meant to be the simplest dock on the planet. The goal is to provide just what a dock needs and absolutely nothing more. It is, however, a library which can be extended to create other dock programs with more advanced features. Thus, Plank is the underlying technology for Docky and aims to provide all the core features while Docky extends it to add fancier things like Docklets, painters, settings dialogs, etc.
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Nemo is a complete forked from Nautilus file manager by Linux Mint team for their distribution and its goal is to extend and enhance the user experience to the Cinnamon desktop and file management. Nemo has features like: compact view, all desktop icons, etc.., open in terminal and open as root, file operation progress while copy/move files shows percentage and details, has nice GTK bookmarks management, up/forward/back and refresh buttons, nice proper status bar, better search, invoke terminal within Nemo using Terminal extension, manage images in Nemo using image extension, extensions extend the usability of Nemo and it offers much more.
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As a reminder, Debian has replaced its good old sysVinit with Red Hat’s systemd, starting with the release of Debian Jessie. Ubuntu has also adopted the change, Mark’s system being a Debian-derivative, but this under the hood change made a lot of community members unhappy.
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ubuntuBSD just went live today with its first release, v15.04 BETA1 (codenamed “Escape from SystemD”).
This project owes a lot to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and I’d like to send you a sincere offer for collaboration.
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Flavours and Variants
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The last weeks have been exciting. The Raspberry Pi 3 was released, bringing 64bit computing to the world of tiny boards. This is great for our project as the 32bit version created a limitation for ownCloud: PHP is unable to handle files larger than 2 to 4GB without some nasty tricks. We might, thus, go for the Raspberry Pi 3 if we ship this as a pre-assembled device in the future. Of course, right now, we keep working on Pi 2’s for compatibility reasons.
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Steampunk usually involves sticking a few old valves on your laptop and riding a penny farthing, but [Alexzpro] understands the real thing: he just created a steam powered Raspberry Pi Zero (translated).
His setup is a little lashed together, but works it’s a throwback to electricity generation of old and deserves the steampunk moniker. A steam boiler drives a steam turbine, which turns a motor, generating electrical power. This feeds into a regulator and a bank of capacitors that smooths the voltage out to a nice even 5 Volts, which powers the Pi.
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On Pi Day (3/14/16), I finally acquired a Raspberry Pi model 3 B from my local Micro Center (I had ordered one from Pimoroni on launch day, but it must be stuck in customs). After arriving home with it, I decided to start running it through its paces. Below is my review and extensive benchmarking of the Pi 3 (especially in comparison to the Pi 2).
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It took a long time to get to this point, but ED and his team has finally achieved it! A fully working Pyra prototype! Looks like you won’t have to wait too long now to get your hands on something tangible (hopefully within 2016) to replace your existing Pandora, or to jump on the ship if you did not have any Pyra-like handheld until now.
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Intel talked a little about its new high-end Core i7 NUC mini PC at CES earlier this year, but today at GDC the company revealed what the final model will look like, along with its specs, release date, and cost.
The new NUC6i7KYK, codenamed “Skull Canyon,” includes a 2.6GHz (3.5GHz Turbo) 45W quad-core Core i7-6770HQ—not the fastest Skylake laptop chip that Intel can sell you, but definitely one of the fastest. The other main draws are the Iris Pro 580 GPU, which includes 78 of Intel’s graphics execution units and a 128MB eDRAM cache (compared to 48EUs and 64MB of eDRAM in the standard Core i5 NUC we just reviewed), and the Thunderbolt 3 port which also supports full USB 3.1 gen 2 transfer speeds of 10Gbps. It takes DDR4 memory, M.2 SATA and PCI Express SSDs, and comes with a built-in Intel 8260 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapter, just like the Core i5 NUC.
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Data Modul’s Linux-ready “eDM-COMB-BW6” COM Express Basic Type 6 module supports Intel Core and Xeon CPUs in Skylake, Broadwell, and Haswell flavors.
The eDM-COMB-BW6 supports an unusually wide range of Intel processors, starting on the high end with Intel’s latest 14nm-fabricated 6th Generation Core “Skylake” processors. Data Modul has yet to post a product page for the eDM-COMB-BW6, but the display-oriented Munich, Germany based firm has supplied most of the key details.
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Phones
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It’s been five years since Marc Andreessen wrote an essay published in the Wall Street Journal that proclaimed “software is eating the world.” By now, we can consider networking just about chewed and swallowed.
We are beginning to realize how much software-defined networking is changing everything. As ON.Lab Executive Director Guru Parulkar puts it, the “softwarization” of networking is not only changing how users manage networks, but everything the network touches.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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WebAssembly is an emerging standard whose goal is to define a safe, portable, size- and load-time efficient binary compiler target which offers near-native performance—a virtual CPU for the Web. WebAssembly is being developed in a W3C Community Group (CG) whose members include Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Apple.
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Presently, Firefox supports two main kinds of add-ons. First were XUL or XPCOM add-ons, which interface directly with the browser’s internals. They are fabulously powerful, as powerful as the browser itself. However, with that power comes security risk and the likelihood that extensions will break as the browser changes.
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SaaS/Big Data
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The first out of the gate is the Glance image project, which released its Mitaka RC1 milestone on March 16. Glance was quickly followed the same day by Heat, Neutron and Nova.
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Databases
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It says that Oracle Corp. sent a special Postgres-related letter to at least several big Russian IT companies. In the letter Oracle is suggesting the ways to protect Oracle DBMS from migration to Postgres in government organizations and big Russian companies where many years Oracle was the default DBMS choice.
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SVN repository is still accessible, but new contributions are expected to be provided as pull requests at GitHub.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Upstream GCC developer Jan Hubička has written about his experience compiling LibreOffice with GCC6 — while also making use of Link-Time Optimizations (LTO) — and comparing various criteria against that of other GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler versions.
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BSD
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There’s a handful of BSD-oriented, desktop-oriented, developers in the Netherlands that I know of. Koos. Raphael. Perhaps some remnants of KDE-NL, or a wandering GNOME developer. Or other desktop systems. Anyway, I’m launching the idea to have some kind of get-together around mid-april (when the weather is nice) somewhere central(-ish) like Zwolle or Amersfoort. The Dutch BSD Desktop Dev Beer Day, or (DBD)2. The plan would be to occupy a cafe somewhere and talk about BSD on the desktop, and in particular porting and keeping the desktop stack up-to-date on all fronts.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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The Google Summer of Code 2016 is on! If you’re a student, consider applying for a GNU Hurd project — details to be found on our GSoC and project ideas pages.
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This year’s program is bursting with something for everyone in the free software movement, from inquisitive newcomers to hardcore developers.
Keynotes talks will include NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in conversation with the ACLU’s Daniel Kahn Gillmor; Open Source Initiative board president Allison Randal; Free Software Foundation founder Richard Stallman; and Software Freedom Conservancy executive director Karen Sandler.
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GNU hackers Christopher Allan Webber (whom you may know from the GNU MediaGoblin project) and David Thompson will be co-presenting “Solving the Deployment Crisis with Guix” at LibrePlanet 2016 this Saturday, March 19th. Chris and David will be focusing on the hardships and obstacles that users face when trying to exercise their software freedom by self-hosting web applications, offering Guix as a solution. The presentation will be held from 10:55 AM to 11:40 AM in room 32-141 of the MIT Stata Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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This April marks the 10 year anniversary of Software Freedom Conservancy’s formation. Formed in New York in 2006, Conservancy’s initial Member Projects included BusyBox, SurveyOS, uClibc and Wine. To celebrate this milestone and thank our Supporters, we will be hosting an exclusive cocktail hour in Cambridge, MA during LibrePlanet on Saturday March 19, 2016. Supporters must rsvp to rsvp-10-years@sfconservancy.org.
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Public Services/Government
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These rules are bad and already hindering user freedom. The FCC has pulled a fast one and we need to fight back. This is a major security and privacy threat which will lead to even buggier and more insecure wireless hardware. A legal campaign to end this nonsense will require significantly more funding and criticism. Unfortunately the major players on fighting this are burning out. Christopher Waid, of ThinkPenguin, Dave Taht, of BufferBloat, Eric Schultz, Josh Gay of the FSF, and others just don’t have the time or resources to keep fighting this. Don’t let this be the end.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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Sci-Hub is a free, online repository of 48 million academic papers. It was launched by Kazakhstani graduate student Alexandra Elbakyan. Unlike most graduate students, Elbakyan is not pondering Foucauldian discourse and beer prices, but hiding out in Russia. According to a recent New York Times article, Elbakyan’s struggles to access research papers inspired her to set up the site so that other students and researchers would have the same access to knowledge as researchers at well-funded universities. The repository is generated by downloading papers from publisher’s paywalled websites using anonymous ‘donated’ subscription credentials.
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Programming
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STACK OVERFLOW, the interactive Dear Deirdre for nerds, has released its 2016 user study. It interviewed 56,033 users in 173 countries, asking 45 questions that give some indication of the state of developers today.
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Health/Nutrition
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Public health advocates, academics, patients, governments and others this week presented further ideas to the United Nations Secretary-General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines on ways to break the longstanding pattern of expensive medical products around the world as a way to pay for research and development.
The second public dialogue of the High-Level Panel took place in Johannesburg, South Africa on 17 March, a day after closed-door meetings with a range of experts who submitted written comments to the panel. A first public dialogue was held in London last week (IPW, Public Health, 11 March 2016).
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At a time when genome-editing technology is still in its infancy, and its uses are yet to be determined, the voices of patients and patients’ carers, and those with disabilities, need to be heard.
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How America’s moms are leading the battle for clean drinking water
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Keri Webber got on a plane to fly from her home city of Flint, Michigan to Washington, DC this week in the hopes of finally being able to meet with her governor. “We’ve tried to meet with him in Lansing, we tried to meet with him in Flint,” she said of Rick Snyder. “We came to DC [to] meet on neutral ground. We never got a response.”
Webber’s family has been through a lot over the last year and a half. One daughter showed lead lines in her bones last July, a sign of lead poisoning, while the other has Legionnaires disease. Her husband has lost half the vision in one eye after an artery exploded, causing permanent damage, and he also has extremely high blood pressure, both of which Webber attributes to the water contamination. He’s had to have a battery of tests and is now taking eight pills a day; his medical costs alone come to $8,000, yet the both of them rely on meager Social Security disability checks to get by. “We are going bankrupt over his medical bills, period,” she said.
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Security
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Several months ago, I decided to explore a somewhat obscure topic of outbound per-application firewall control in Linux. A concept that Windows users are well familiar with, it’s been around for ages, providing Windows folks with a heightened sense of – if not practical factual – protection against rogues residing in their system and trying to phone home.
In Linux, things are a little different, but with the growing flux of Windows converts arriving at the sandy shores of open-source, the notion of need for outbound control of applications has also risen, giving birth to software designed to allay fears if not resolve problems. My first attempt to play with Leopard Flower and Douane was somewhat frustrating. Now, I’m going to revisit the test, focusing only on the former.
[...]
Leopard Flower firewall is an interesting concept. Misplaced, though, for most parts. It caters to a Windows need that does not exist on Linux, and to be frank, has no place in the Microsoft world either. Then, it also tries to resolve a problem of control and knowledge by requiring the user to exercise the necessary control and knowledge. But if they had those to begin with, they wouldn’t need to dabble in per-application firewalls. Furthermore, the software is still fairly immature. There are at least half a dozen little things and changes that can be implemented to make lpfw more elegant, starting with installation and followed by service and GUI model, prompts, robustness, and a few others.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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While Sheldon Adelson has yet to endorse a candidate for president, and refused to let reporters peek at his ballot at last month’s caucus in Nevada, it’s starting to look like the conservative rebellion against Donald Trump will not be bankrolled by the casino operator and Republican donor known for his far-right views.
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In this web exclusive interview, New York Times reporter Scott Shane discusses his new book, “Objective Troy: A Terrorist, a President, and the Rise of the Drone.” It just won the 2016 Lionel Gelber Prize. The book tells the story of the first American deliberately killed in a drone strike, Anwar al-Awlaki, and examines why U.S. counterterrorism efforts since 9/11 seem to have backfired.
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EYE IN THE SKY is a drone war primer in the form of a thriller. I’m not spoiling anything by laying out the premise, which is quickly established at the start of the film: The British have identified known members of al Shabaab, among them British and American citizens, in the act of preparing a suicide attack from a house in a mostly Somali neighborhood in Nairobi. Taking out the house with a Hellfire missile should be simple enough, but it risks the lives of civilians, including a young girl in the house next door. Then there are the political ramifications: In a war room back in London, an official asks, “Has there ever been a British-led drone attack in a city in a friendly country that is not at war?”
What follows are two hours of legal, tactical, and political wrangling around the decision to pull the trigger. The film, which is currently in theaters, shifts rapidly between the Nairobi streets; a bunker commanded by a hawkish British colonel (Helen Mirren); a London situation room where politicians, military officers (among them the late Alan Rickman), and lawyers ask ever-higher authorities to approve the strike; and a U.S. drone base in Nevada, where a young pilot and sensor operator gear up for their first kill operation.
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The CIA’s motto might well be: “Proudly overthrowing the Cuban government since 1959.” Now what? Did you think that the United States had finally grown up and come to the realization that they could in fact share the same hemisphere as the people of Cuba, accepting Cuban society as unquestioningly as they do that of Canada?
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Who murdered Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres?
While the identities of the killers remain unknown, activists, media observers, and members of the Cáceres family are blaming the increasingly reactionary and violent Honduran government.
The authorities had frequently clashed with Cáceres over her high-profile campaign to stop land grabbing and mining while defending the rights of indigenous peoples.
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Little mentioned in the Democratic campaign is Hillary Clinton’s role in supporting a 2009 coup in Honduras that contributed to a human rights crisis, including the recent murder of a renowned environmental activist, writes Marjorie Cohn.
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So is Hezbollah a terrorist organization?
Of course not.
So why has the Arab League decided that they are?
Because most of the league’s member states are Sunni Muslims, while Hezbollah is a Shiite organization supporting Shiite Iran and Alawite (quasi-Shiite) Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
So were Israel’s Arab parties right when they condemned the league’s resolution?
Right, yes. Wise, no.
Let’s start with Hezbollah. Surprisingly enough, it is in a way an Israeli creation.
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Originally, terrorism just meant a strategy of striking fear to achieve a political end. In this sense, every war is terrorism. But the term is more precisely applied to individual acts of violence, the aim of which is to strike terror into the hearts of the enemy population.
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This week, the Lo Porto family’s lawyers filed briefs with the Italian state prosecutor investigating Giovanni’s kidnapping and death, arguing that strikes like the one that killed him are illegal under international law, and requesting that the prosecutor ask the U.S. government to hand over information about the operation.
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The Republican establishment likes to pretend that it is the responsible alternative to Donald Trump, but that self-image doesn’t match reality, as Bill Moyers and Michael Winship describe.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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If you are concerned about global warming, you are part of a growing majority that hadn’t been this large since 2008, a new Gallup poll has found.
In fact, 64 percent of adults say they are worried a “great deal” or “fair amount” about global warming, up from 55 percent at this time last year. According to the poll, concerns about global warming have increased among all party groups since 2015, though concerns remain much higher among Democrats than Republicans and Independents.
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Finance
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THE MULTIPLE, REMARKABLE crises subsuming Brazil are now garnering substantial Western media attention. That’s understandable given that Brazil is the world’s fifth most populous country and eighth-largest economy; its second-largest city, Rio de Janeiro, is the host of this year’s Summer Olympics. But much of this Western media coverage mimics the propaganda coming from Brazil’s homogenized, oligarch-owned, anti-democracy media outlets and, as such, is misleading, inaccurate, and incomplete, particularly when coming from those with little familiarity with the country (there are numerous Brazil-based Western reporters doing outstanding work).
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Campaign finance reform advocates have rallied against super PACs’ ability to influence elections since their creation in 2010, and new reporting by the Washington Post puts a spotlight on how “ghost corporations” are pumping money into these committees, with their big money contributors hiding behind a veil of secrecy.
As the Center for Responsive Politics explains: “super PACs may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates,” though they “are prohibited from donating money directly to political candidates.” They report their donors to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) monthly during an election year.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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According to mainstream Democrats and pundits, Sanders’ demise is imminent. His downfall and Clinton’s triumph is now an inevitability. It is a matter of if not when. Sanders has called these political obituaries “absurd” and has vowed to keep fighting all the way to the convention.
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Jane Sanders is the wife of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, and her influence on his campaign is increasing. This week in Arizona, she visited a number of Native American communities, supporting Apache protests against mining interests and engaging with the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe, the Indian Country Today Media Network reports. She also sat down for a discussion with Simon Moya-Smith, a journalist from Indian County Today Media Network.
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CBS chief Les Moonves famously cheered “Go Donald!” during an investor call in December, and in February said Donald Trump’s campaign “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
Now he’s found a new way to celebrate the Trump run.
Countering concerns in the media industry that Trump may not spend as much campaign money on TV commercials as a traditional major-party nominee, Moonves is pointing with delight to all the money down-ballot Republicans will spend to distance themselves from their party’s standard-bearer.
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Noam Chomsky sees a lot more in the Bernie Sanders campaign than just a presidential run. “Bernie Sanders is doing courageous things and organizing a lot of people,” Chomsky told Abby Martin on Telesur’s “The Empire Files.”
“That campaign ought to be directed to sustaining a popular movement which will use the election as an incentive,” said Chomsky. “And unfortunately, it’s not. When the election’s over, the movements will die. The only thing that’ll ever bring about meaningful change is ongoing, dedicated popular movements which don’t pay attention to the election cycle. It’s an extravaganza every four years but then we go on.”
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Announcement follows campaign that urged Sanders to not attend meeting by group that promotes ‘racist, militaristic, and anti-democratic policies’
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Bernie Sanders confirmed on Friday that he will not attend the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington next week, and his campaign revealed that the candidate’s offer to address the gathering by video link was turned down by the organizers.
In a letter to Robert Cohen, the group’s president, released on Friday afternoon, Sanders wrote that while he “would very much have enjoyed speaking at the AIPAC conference,” like all of the remaining presidential candidates, his campaign schedule made it impossible for him to attend in person.
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Although Sanders promised to send AIPAC a copy of the speech he would have made, it seems possible the group did not really want to hear from him, given that he promised recently to seek a “level playing field” in his approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict if elected president.
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Donald Trump will be giving an address at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Policy Conference in the nation’s capital on Monday, a move that has set off promises of protests and boycotts targeting the real estate mogul. But while AIPAC has rolled out the red carpet for the GOP frontrunner, it has moved to block activists from attending the conference and shut down planned protests.
Immediately following the decision to host Trump, a group of expected AIPAC attendees started a Facebook group called “Come Together Against Hate” to plan protests against his speech. On March 14, a number of the planned attendees involved in organizing the protests received an email from an AIPAC staffer warning them about the ramifications of engaging in a protest against Trump. Among other consequences, the staffer said they’d be barred from the organization’s future events.
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President Obama doesn’t take on Official Washington’s powerful neocons head-on, but he does drag his heels on some of their crazy schemes, which is better than America can expect from Hillary Clinton, writes Robert Parry.
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Or maybe the explanation is just that corporate media’s malign neglect of the Bernie Sanders campaign is paying off for Hillary. FAIR and other organizations that monitor the press have established beyond a reasonable doubt that The Washington Post and The New York Times might as well be Team Hillary’s Ministry of Propaganda. And, as anyone who can bear to watch MSNBC and CNN can attest, “liberal” cable news outlets are no better. National Public Radio may be the worst of all. Remember that at pledge time!
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Lawmakers this week hosted business groups in a briefing that sought to reframe the movement to boycott Israeli-owned companies as a threat to the American economy.
At Tuesday’s briefing, organized by the Congressional Israel Allies Caucus, Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colorado opened the event by saying that since the U.S.-Israel Free Trade Agreement was signed in 1985 trade between the countries has “multiplied tenfold to over $40 billion annually.”
The boycott movement would not only impact the Israeli economy, but also the U.S. economy and “should be confronted by all means,” he said.
The Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement is a global campaign calling on Israel to end its occupation of internationally recognized Palestinian territory and restore full equality to its Arab and Palestinian citizens.
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Censorship
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The rare meeting, reported by China’s state news agency Xinhua, suggests warming relations between Facebook and the Chinese government, even as Beijing steps up censorship of and control over the Internet.
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The Minnesota Department of Transportation is looking for a new historian to write a book about the beloved old bridge after canceling its first contract with the Washington County Historical Society last fall.
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High school students from all over the Granite State were at the University of New Hampshire on Thursday to hear from a panel of leaders in journalism — including a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist — before participating in a day of student-led Socratic discussion on freedom of expression.
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Privacy
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The Federal Communications Commission will vote in less than two weeks on whether to consider proposed new privacy rules for broadband providers like Comcast or Time Warner Cable.
The unveiling of the proposal earlier this month marked the start of an unofficial media tour by Chairman Tom Wheeler to sell the draft rules to the public. Meanwhile, industry groups are doing everything they can to keep harsh regulations at bay.
If the rules come to fruition, they would create a massive change in the way privacy is policed at broadband providers.
Here’s what you need to know about the proposal that could, within a year, be coming to an Internet service provider near you.
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A redaction oversight by the US government has finally confirmed that the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s targeting of secure email service Lavabit was used specifically to spy on Edward Snowden.
Ladar Levison, creator of the email service, which was founded on a basis of private communications secured by encryption and had 410,000 users, was served a sealed order in 2013 forcing him to aid the FBI in its surveillance of Snowden.
Levison was ordered to install a surveillance package on his company’s servers and later to turn over Lavabit’s encryption keys so that it would give the FBI the ability to read the most secure messages that the company offered. He was also ordered not to disclose the fact to third-parties.
After 38 days of legal fighting, a court appearance, subpoena, appeals and being found in contempt of court, Levison abruptly shuttered Lavabit citing government interference and stating that he would not become “complicit in crimes against the American people”.
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IT’S BEEN a mystery akin to the plot of The Prisoner. Who was it that the feds were after when they served Lavabit with notice that it wanted access to its servers? Information. We want information.
We know that whoever it was, Lavabit decided it would sooner fall on its own sword than give up the encryption key, very similarly to Apple’s stance on the matter, and folded.
We all knew it was Edward Snowden. It was fairly obviously Edward Snowden, and now, tickle our snickers, it turns out it was Edward Snowden.
Even though a gagging order has prevented Ladar Levison who owned Lavabit, or any of his team from spilling, it now appears that the Feds have done it themselves.
Some recently released federal papers which had been redacted showed that the marker pen had failed to redact a single email address.
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While Apple and the federal government duke it out over the encrypted phone of a dead terrorist, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is keeping things old school by advocating that educators start paying close attention to any radical leanings among their students.
In January, the FBI’s Office of Partner Engagement – a liaison between the FBI, other feds, and local and school law enforcement – released an unclassified paper detailing a plan to keep an eye on any latent anti-American activity in high school youths.
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SilverPush is called a ‘cross-mapping’ platform that unifies data points from the billions of digital devices around the globe. In the company’s words, “Redefining TV Advertising.”
Why is the US Federal Trade Commission so worried that is it sending letters to some Android developers?
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NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden opened the Free Software Foundation’s LibrePlanet 2016 conference on Saturday with a discussion of free software, privacy and security, speaking via video conference from Russia.
Snowden credited free software for his ability to help disclose the U.S. government’s far-reaching surveillance projects – drawing one of several enthusiastic rounds of applause from the crowd in an MIT lecture hall.
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Even after National Security Agency (NSA) warrantless spying was revealed publicly in 2005, and even after Edward Snowden exposed massive governmental surveillance programs in 2013, the instructive example of Fly’s battles with Hoover never registered in public debate. The consensus history skips almost directly from the Supreme Court’s 1928 Olmstead decision legalizing warrantless wiretapping to the FBI’s abuses in the 1960s and the Supreme Court’s 1967 Katz decision, which reversed Olmstead by establishing that wiretapping violated a “reasonable expectation of privacy” standard. Paul Starr’s widely lauded 2004 book The Creation of the Media: The Political Origins of Modern Communications, published shortly before the NSA wiretapping story broke, reads back American legal guarantees of private communication to the Post Office Act of 1792. “Lack of popular trust in the privacy of communications,” Starr argues, is a hallmark of “closed or restricted regimes” that should be contrasted with America’s more restrained and successful libertarian model.
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No, Mr. President, it works the other way around. You’d better backoff on your encryption demands, or else the tech community will revolt, That’s what’s already happen with Apple’s encryption efforts, as well as app developers like Signal and Wickr. Every time you turn the screws, we techies increase the encryption.
It’s not a battle you can win without going full police-state. Sure, you can force Apple to backdoor its stuff, but then what about the encrypted apps? You’d have to lock them down as well. But what about encrypted apps developed in foreign countries? What about software I write myself? You aren’t going to solve the “going dark” problem until you control all crypto.
If you succeed in achieving your nightmare Orwellian scenario, I promise you this: I’ll emigrate to an extradition-free country, to continue the fight against the American government.
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VPN comparison tables can be a great way to find out information about VPNs in a more efficient manner. We’ve created this to be “that one privacy VPN comparison chart” you rely on–a HUGE list of the most important information that you will need.
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Civil Rights
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Ho, ho, another brainiac goes down as stupidity is mistaken for a real threat, apparently our national pastime.
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A Cleveland city employee has been fired after posting inflammatory comments about the death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice on his Facebook page, lamenting that he didn’t kill the “little criminal” himself.
“Tamir Rice should have been shot and I am glad he is dead,” wrote Jamie Marquardt, a supervisor for Cleveland’s Emergency Medical Service, according to Cleveland’s Fox 8 TV station. “I am upset I did not get the chance to kill the little criminal.”
A spokesperson for the city denounced the post and called Marquadt’s comments “egregious.”
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Contrary to popular belief, the FISA Court does not operate in complete isolation from traditional courts. On several known issues — notably, the access to location data and the collection of Post Cut Through Direct Dial numbers — FISC has taken notice of public magistrate’s opinions and used that to inform, though not necessary dictate, FISC practice. As I have noted, at least until 2014, the FISC used the highest common denominator from criminal case law with respect to location data, meaning it requires the equivalent of a probable cause warrant for prospective (though not historic) data. And FISC first seemed to start tracking such orders during the magistrate’s revolt of 2005-6. That’s an area where FISC seems to have followed criminal case law. By contrast, FISC permits the government to collect, then minimize, PCTDD, though it appears to have revisited whether the government’s current minimization procedures meet the law, the most recent known moment of which was 2009.
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The protester, Ray McGovern, a retired Army officer and CIA analyst, was wearing a black “Veterans for Peace” T-shirt, when he was set upon within sight of Secretary of State Clinton, who ironically was delivering a speech about the importance of foreign leaders respecting dissent. The assault on McGovern left him bruised and bloodied but it didn’t cause Clinton to pause as she coolly continued on, not missing a beat.
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Bassel Khartabil, open source developer, Wikipedian, and free culture advocate, was taken from his friends and family he loves four years ago this week. On March 15, 2012, Bassel was kidnapped from the streets of Damascus by Syrian military intelligence. Since then, we know that he has suffered torture, solitary confinement, arbitrary detention, dangerously overcrowded prison conditions, and even the bombing of his prison’s neighbourhood by Syrian opposition forces.
What we don’t know right now is his current location, the state of his health, or even whether he is still alive. Bassel was taken from his civilian prison cell in Adra jail four months ago and was swallowed up by the country’s military field courts. No news of him has emerged since then, though rumors of a death sentence have caused anguish for his many supporters.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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The House Energy and Commerce Committee recently approved H.R. 2666, the No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act. The legislation attempts to codify Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Wheeler’s pledge not to use the Open Internet Order to regulate broadband rates. This seems like a straightforward task and technically it is a straightforward task. However, some members of Congress want to use this bill to fundamentally undermine the central purpose of the Order itself.
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Send this to a friend
03.19.16
Posted in News Roundup at 7:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop
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The main goal of Project Sputnik is to speed up adoption of new hardware technologies in Linux laptops. The effort was conceived four years ago by Barton George, a Linux enthusiast and senior principal engineer at the office of the CTO at Dell.
Initially, Sputnik was focused on bringing Linux to “ultrabook”-style laptops with touchscreens, which were relatively new in 2012. Dell provided the latest hardware available, and George’s team started tuning Linux to work on those laptops.
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Do you know who programmers really are? What they really do? Or what tools they use? Let’s see how closely your guesses come to the reality of the 50,000 plus developers who responded to Stack Overflow’s 2016 developer survey.
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Server
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CoreOS the makers of Linux for massive server deployments and a container power in its own right, launched an early version of Clair, an open source container image security analyzer late last year. Today, CoreOS released Clair version 1.0 and it’s ready for production workloads.
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Google will open-source its super-duper load balancing Maglev tool to developers – a move that will also bolster its own infrastructure developments.
In a blog post Google said it has a history of building its own networking gear, “and perhaps unsurprisingly, we build our own network load balancers as well, which have been handling most of the traffic to Google services since 2008.”
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The Maglev software-defined load balancer, which runs on commodity Linux servers, has been critical to Google Cloud Platform for eight years, company says.
As it’s already done with other areas of its massive datacenter infrastructure, Google this week gave enterprises a peek at Maglev, the software-defined network load balancer the company has been using since 2008 to handle traffic to Google services.
Maglev, like most of Google’s networking systems, was built internally. But unlike Jupiter, the custom network fabric connecting Google’s data centers, Maglev runs on commodity Linux servers and does not require any specialized rack deployment, Google said in a blog post describing the technology.
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Kernel Space
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Let’s be honest. Do you often feel like you really don’t know the cloud that well? I know I do, and I work with it every day and I write about it every week. That’s where the newest Linux Foundation and edX free massive open online course (MOOC) LFS151, an Introduction to Cloud Infrastructure Technologies comes in.
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On March 18, 2016, kernel developer Jiri Slaby announced the release of the fifty-seventh maintenance build of the long-term supported Linux 3.12 kernel series.
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For the majority of you reading this relying upon Serial ATA (SATA) drives, the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel will support runtime power management of the AHCI host controller for saving more power on your system when idling.
The libata pull request for Linux 4.6 provides the kernel’s AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface) driver with runtime power management support. This code allows the AHCI controller to be turned off if no devices are attached.
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Graphics Stack
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Benchmarks
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This week we showed how the new AMDGPU driver stack is performing on Ubuntu 16.04 and that the recent generations of Radeon graphics cards are commonly seeing 80~90% the performance of Catalyst. However, it’s important to keep in mind that aside from Catalyst being more buggy than the proprietary NVIDIA driver, the NVIDIA binary driver also tends to be more performant. So for putting the Ubuntu 16.04 open-source Radeon numbers into perspective, here are results putting them against the GeForce Kepler and Maxwell graphics cards.
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Applications
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The shell is much more than just a command interpretor, it is also a programming language of its own with complete programming language constructs such as conditional execution, loops, variables, functions and many more.
That is why the Unix/GNU Linux shell is more powerful compared to the Windows shell.
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Email is arguably one of the most popular and useful functions of a Linux system. Fortunately, there is a wide selection of free email software available on the Linux platform which is stable, feature laden, and ideal for personal and business environments. Send and receive emails, run a mail server, filter spam, administer a mailing list are just some of the options explored in this article.
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Lynis is an open source and much powerful auditing tool for Unix/Linux like operating systems. It scans system for security information, general system information, installed and available software information, configuration mistakes, security issues, user accounts without password, wrong file permissions, firewall auditing, etc.
Lynis is one of the most trusted automated auditing tool for software patch management, malware scanning and vulnerability detecting in Unix/Linux based systems. This tool is useful for auditors, network and system administrators, security specialists and penetration testers.
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Today, Steffen Lindner, one of the developers behind the ownCloud Mail app for the self-hosting ownCloud server software, has announced the release of version 0.4 for the cool and promising project.
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The development team behind the HPLIP (short for HP Linux Imaging and Printing) project, an open-source initiative to bring the latest HP printer drivers to GNU/Linux distributions, has released the third maintenance build in the 3.16 series.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Have you ever wondered where fashion and software development overlap? If so, look no further than the flip-flop. It’s a feature available in Sed, Awk, Ruby and Perl which – akin to its namesake – is short, revealing and can raise a few eyebrows.
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Solid State Drives (SSDs) are slowly becoming the norm, with good reason. They are faster, and the latest iterations are more reliable than traditional drives. With no moving parts to wear out, these drives can (effectively) enjoy a longer life than standard platter-based drives.
Even though these drives are not prone to mechanical failure, you will still want to keep tabs on their health. After all, your data depends on the storing drives being sound and running properly. Many SSDs you purchase are shipped with software that can be used to monitor said health. However, most of that software is, as you might expect, Windows-only. Does that mean Linux users must remain in the dark as to their drive health? No. Thanks to a very handy tool called GNOME Disks, you can get a quick glimpse of your drive health and run standard tests on the drive.
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Wine or Emulation
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Wine 1.9.6 was released this morning as the latest bi-weekly development release of Wine.
Most prominent to Wine 1.9.6 is now that it better detects graphics cards using the Mesa drivers. There is also more support for Shader Model 5, C++ exception handling improvements, and a total of 32 known bug fixes. Shader Model 5.0 is what’s needed by DirectX 11 support.
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The Wine development team announced just a few moments ago the immediate availability for download and testing of Wine 1.9.6, the sixth milestone towards the major Wine 1.10 release.
Wine 1.9.6 does not appear to be a significant snapshot, and the release highlights include better detection of graphics cards when using the Mesa 3D Graphics Library, support for Shader Model 5 shaders, as well as improvements to the C++ exception handling.
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Games
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Hello, open gaming fans! In this week’s edition, we take a look at Ink scripting language and Atomic Game Engine going open source, GameWorks SDK 3.1 released by NVIDIA, and new games out for Linux.
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Are you ready to rob some banks? PAYDAY 2 is showing signs that it’s getting closer to a Linux release.
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Void Invaders is a recent discovery of mine on Steam and it looks like the developer is planning to create a Linux version!
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According to the latest round of rumors in the Linux community…
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Nvidia already has its Tegra-powered SHIELD TV and offers a variety of games over their cloud/streaming “GeForce NOW” service. So it’s highly unlikely that this full-blown Linux distribution, codenamed “NLINUX,” would be aimed at the SHIELD TV. Otherwise, the Tegra X1 would run into performance issues, and this would even risk cannibalizing the monthly subscription revenue off GeForce NOW.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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New Releases
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The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.3.2 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
This is a bugfix release of the v3.3 musl based branch.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Ballnux/SUSE
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Slackware Family
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Coming two months past the Slackware 14.2 beta is now the release candidate for this next major Linux distribution update.
This Slackware Linux cycle was big for the project in that it finally began using PulseAudio, BlueZ 5 was pulled in for Bluetooth support, the AMDGPU driver was added, GCC 5.3 made it as the default base compiler, and more.
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Today, Slackware maintainer and lead developer Patrick Volkerding has announced the release and immediate availability for testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of the upcoming Slackware 14.2 operating system.
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Red Hat Family
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The stock is an undervalued pick that faces robust growth this year. The time to buy the stock is now, ahead of earnings that are likely to come in strong.
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Fedora
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Today in Linux news Stack Overflow published the results of their latest developer survey finding Mac OS X is more popular than Windows or Linux. Elsewhere, OpenSource.com ran an introduction to the Korora Linux distribution and Microsoft’s patent bulldog is outta there. Dim* has this week’s Tumbleweed review and Agam Shah looked at Dell’s Linux strategy.
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Starting with the Fedora.next initiative, the Fedora Project embarked on a journey to reinvent itself. A major piece of that effort was the creation of different “editions” of Fedora that could be targeted at specific user personas. Instead of having a One-Size-Fits-Some Fedora distribution, instead we would produce an operating system for “doers” (Fedora Workstation Edition), for traditional infrastructure administrators (Fedora Server Edition) and for new, cloudy/DevOps folks (Fedora Cloud Edition).
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I am happy to announce the release of the F23-20160318 update lives. This set of lives contain all the updates as of the date of creation. Those updates include the 4.4.5-300 kernel.
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Another release of DNF stack is there. In the new version of plugins there is support for debuginfo packages to be automatically upgraded along with the package they belong to and dnf repository-packages command was optimalized drastically. In addition over ten bugs were fixed in this release. Read more in DNF and plugins release notes.
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With the release of Fedora 24 Alpha just around the corner, it will be the first time for many to get a good look of how the final wallpaper for Fedora 24 will look on their desktop. Masha Leonova from the Fedora Design Team recently blogged showing what the wallpaper will look like in Fedora 24 Alpha.
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Debian Family
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Debian’s annual conference, DebConf, is taking place in July this year in Cape Town, South Africa. Valve is among the sponsors for this year’s Debian conference.
DebConf 16 is taking place in Cape Town from 2 July to 9 July and preceded by DebCamp from 23 June to 1 July. The news this weekend is that registration is now open for DebConf 16. The venue of this year’s event is the University of Cape Town.
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Derivatives
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The developer of the Robolinux project has announced the release of his latest Robolinux 8.4 LTS “Raptor” series of Debian-based operating systems, which includes numerous software updates and performance improvements.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Marius Gripsgård from the UBports team teased the Ubuntu community today, March 18, 2016, on his Google+ page with a photo of the OnePlus X Android smartphone running the Ubuntu mobile OS.
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Today, March 18, 2016, AMD has announced the release of a Beta driver for GNU/Linux operating systems that incorporates support for the new, groundbreaking Vulkan 3D API.
The new driver has been named AMD Radeon GPU-PRO by AMD, and it is currently targeted at AMD R9 series of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units), such as AMD Radeon R9 380X, AMD Radeon R9 380, AMD Radeon R9 285, AMD Radeon R9 M395X, AMD Radeon R9 Fury X, AMD Radeon R9 Fury, and AMD Radeon R9 Nano.
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E-con Systems has launched a 70 x 55mm, Tegra K1 based “eSOMTK1” COM with up to 4GB RAM, up to 64GB eMMC, WiFi/BT, and an open-spec “Propus” baseboard.
Nvidia’s Tegra K1 has seen considerable adoption in Linux-ready computer-on-modules, including Calao’s 82 x 50mm SMC-NTKE1 SMARC COM, Toradex’s SODIMM-style, 82 x 45mm Apalis TK1, GE’s 84 x 55mm mCOM10K1 COM Express Type 10 Mini, and Seco’s 95 x 95mm SECOMExp-TK1 COM Express Type 6 Compact.
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The Qt Company released version 5.6 of its cross-platform application and UI development framework, bringing Qt’s Boot to Qt embedded Linux platform in greater alignment with Yocto Project tools. As a result, “developers can easily pull in the full Qt offering to their own Yocto-based software stacks or customize Qt’s Yocto-compliant software stack to meet their production needs,” says the Qt Company.
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We reported last year that ownCloud was in talks with WD (Western Digital) Labs to help them develop a community project that would bring a self-hosted cloud storage device in users’ homes.
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Adlink has launched a “AmITX-SL-G” Mini-ITX SBC based on 6th Gen Intel CPUs, with multiple SATA, GbE, and video ports, plus PCIe and Mini-PCIe expansion.
Adlink is one of the last of the major embedded firms to announce an embedded Mini-ITX board based on the Intel’s 14nm fabricated 6th Generation Core (Skylake) processors, following Congatec’s early March launch of the Conga-IC170. Like the Conga-IC170, however, it’s shipping now.
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Phones
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There are plenty of reasons to be anticipating the arrival of GNU/Linux phones and tablets. Verizon Wireless has given us another.
On March 7, the FCC slapped a $1.35 million fine on Verizon in a privacy case, a move that’s being hailed as a victory by some privacy advocates. If so, it would seem to be a hollow victory. For starters, the fine is too low to be much of a deterrent against a company which last year had income of over $63 billion. But there is much more wrong with the agreement the carrier reached with the FCC than merely the price tag.
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Tizen
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Drone Attack is the latest game on the Tizen store that wants to take over your free time to destroy World War 2 style enemy planes. The game-play is rather very simple however its kind of the developer to add a huge “How to play” button on the start screen of the game (maybe the same amount of attention could’ve been given to rectify the typos made in the instructions).
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Android
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Last week was a big week for the whole of Android due to the early release of the developer preview of Android N. This was a preview version which rolled out to all of the Nexus range including the Nexus Player. As a result, those running a Nexus Player could get a taste of what the next generation of Android looks like for the Android TV platform. Of course, this is a very early version of Android N and it is one which is considerably buggy at the moment. Not to mention that some of the really big changes (like PIP and Recording) are yet to be optimized, as they rely on developers to integrate the features into their own apps. These are not features which will come with Android TV as standard, but do rely on them being actively included. This does mean that not all Android TV apps will come running with these features.
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If you’ve ever been curious about how Android is having an impact in the enterprise, a new entry in Google’s “Coffee with a Googler” interview series is worth a look. In the interview above, Android for Work Product Manager Janice Wong explains what Android for Work is and ways developers can target their apps for the workplace.
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For this article, I’m returning to portable science software on Android. In a previous article, I looked at a program called xcas/giac. This program is an open-source engine that is used to handle symbolic manipulation of mathematical equations. Because it is open source, it has been ported to several different platforms. Because Android’s core is really Linux, a port to the Android platform has been made, and it’s available on the Google Play store. Installation is as easy as a quick search on the store and clicking install.
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Science fiction ranges from complete fabrications to some surprisingly accurate visions for the future. What tool, device, object, or other item from your science fiction library do you hope, or even expect, to one day find an open source version of?
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I was amazed at Free Software in 1993, and quickly realized the potential of a group of developers working together to create great software. So in 1994, when Microsoft announced that MS-DOS was “dead,” I realized we could leverage the Free Software concept to create our own free version of DOS for everyone to use. With that, FreeDOS was born.
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Italian indie developer Digital Video and Japanese publisher Dwango have inked an agreement for the latter to acquire Toonz, a digital animation software solution. The deal goes forward under the condition that Dwango will publish and develop an Open Source platform based on Toonz, OpenToonz. This will be made available for free download on March 26.
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Security professionals are increasingly acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: No network is secure from a sufficiently skilled and determined attacker. So while every effort should be made to prevent intruders getting on to the corporate network, it’s important that you can quickly spot an intrusion and minimize the damage that can result.
Anton Chuvakin, a security expert at Gartner, points out that if hackers are made to work hard to find what they are after, intrusion detection systems (IDS) have a far greater chance of spotting them before they can do too much damage.
“What companies need to be doing is switching away from trying to prevent hackers from getting in to their networks,” Dr Chuvakin said. “Thinking about how they can slow hackers down so they can catch them is much more sensible. If hackers steal your encrypted data but then have to spend three days searching for your encryption keys, then you have a much better chance of detecting them.”
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Events
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Networking is a vital and necessary part of the modern business world, but much as in the real world, the road is not the reason. Networks exist to enable applications, and it’s these programs and systems that companies really want. Given this truth, when building a system, it doesn’t make sense to design apps around a network; rather, it’s much more useful to create a network that fits the programs a company runs. Open-source networking hardware allows a company to do just that.
To gain some insight into open-source networking, Jeff Frick, cohost of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke to Calvin Chai, head of product marketing at Pica8, Inc., at the Open Networking Summit 2016 conference.
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I did a talk earlier today at the wonderful venue of the Science Centre Singapore at FOSSASIA 2016, titled ‘Virtualization and Containers.’ Over the last few years, several “cool new” and “next big thing” technologies have been introduced to the world, and these buzzwords leave people all dazed and confused.
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FOSSASIA, the premier conference on Free and Open Source Software in Asia is having their 2016 edition in Singapore Science Center, Singapore. Even though the today is the first day of the event, the social part of the conference already started from yesterday.
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It’s LibrePlanet time. It seems like only yesterday — actually, it was only yesterday — that they folded the tents and put the elephants on the trains after a successful run for Great Wide Open down in Atlanta. Now, on the opposite end of the U.S. East Coast, way yonder up north as we say around here, they’re getting ready for the FOSS fest to end all FOSS fests — that being the Free Software Foundation’s LibrePlanet 2016, which opens for a two day run right next door to Bean Town in Cambridge.
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CMS
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This isn’t just a WordPress story, it’s really an open source story. WordPress, as you probably know, is a GPL-based open source project. It supports a wide range of plugins and themes that extend and modify its capabilities and customize its look. Each of the plugins and themes is also GPL.
Since plugins are smaller open source projects, most have just one or — at most — a few maintainers. That means if the maintainer gets tired of working on the plugin or has life circumstances that make it impossible to keep supporting it, there are two choices: let it wither, or put it up for adoption.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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BSD
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While DragonFlyBSD’s TCP code getting a per-CPU LPORT cache for listen sockets may not sound like an exciting change, it’s a huge performance win.
The commit by Sepherosa Ziehau explains, “In order to guard against reincarnation of an accepted connection after the listen socket is closed, the accepted socket is linked on to the same global lport hash list as the listen socket. However, on a busy TCP server, this could cause a lot of contention on this global lport hash list. But think about it again: as long as the listen socket is not closed, reincarnation of an accepted connection is _impossible_, since the listen socket itself is on the global lport hash list.”
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Just one week after the initial public release of Gneural Network to provide a GNU project for programmable neural networks, version 0.5 has been made available and it’s a big release.
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Public Services/Government
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A New York state senator says open-source programmers should be able to claim back part of their costs for writing free software.
NY senate bill S161, proposed by Senator Daniel Squadron (D) and co-sponsored by Senator Ruth Hassell-Thompson (D), would allow developers to claim for 20 per cent of the out-of-pocket costs of building and sharing open-source code – although the rebate has a maximum annual benefit of only $200 per person.
“I represent the tech triangle and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, as well as areas in lower Manhattan where the technology sector has a growing presence – supporting that kind of innovation is key,” Squadron told El Reg in a statement.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Hardware
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It wasn’t too long ago that we reported here on a husband and wife team that added to the growing list of 3D printed musical instruments with their own contribution: an open source 3D printed violin. Yes, there have been other 3D printed violins, like the originally outstanding 3dvarius from France or Unique-3D’s acoustic violin from Russia. While both violins lay claim to incredible design work and acoustics, there’s one thing missing: they are not open source. This was the remarkable contribution of Matt and Kaitlyn Hova, who named their violin after their last name– the Hovalin. Now the Hovalin, being open source and accessible to 3D printing violin fans of all stripes, has been 3D printed in Wood PLA. It just keeps getting better for us 3D printed instrument fans, doesn’t it?
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Programming
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According to the latest Stack Overflow developer survey, JavaScript is the most popular programming language and Rust is most loved.
Stack Overflow, the popular question-and-answer community site for developers, today released the results of its annual developer survey, which indicates, among other things, that JavaScript is the most popular programming language among respondents.
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Health/Nutrition
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The World Trade Organization said today that momentum continues to build among member states to accept a public health amendment to the WTO intellectual property rights agreement, as three more countries adopted it in the past week.
At issue is 2005 amendment to the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), which encompassed an August 2003 informal waiver to TRIPS rules aimed at making more affordable medicines available to poor countries. This agreement was also referred to as the Paragraph 6 solution since it was originally mandated to be solved under paragraph 6 of the 2001 WTO Declaration on TRIPS and Public Health.
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Speakers from Asian civil society provided recommendations to the public hearing of the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines held yesterday. They underlined the unaffordability of medicines in their countries, the inefficiency of current mechanisms such as voluntary licensing, and the pressure applied by pharmaceutical companies and the United States and Europe to prevent the use of compulsory licences. One speaker warned against the expert advice given by the World Intellectual Property Organization to least-developed countries, while others pointed to stringent intellectual property measures in free-trade agreements.
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Security
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As previously reported by the media in and after July 2015, security researchers evaluating automotive cybersecurity were able to demonstrate remote exploits of motor vehicles. The analysis demonstrated the researchers could gain significant control over vehicle functions remotely by exploiting wireless communications vulnerabilities. While the identified vulnerabilities have been addressed, it is important that consumers and manufacturers are aware of the possible threats and how an attacker may seek to remotely exploit vulnerabilities in the future. Third party aftermarket devices with Internet or cellular access plugged into diagnostics ports could also introduce wireless vulnerabilities.
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Links to malware inside online advertising bypassed the security systems of the advertising serving companies and distributed ransomware to unsuspecting ‘link clickers’.
Earlier this week major websites including BBC, Newsweek, New York Times and MSN ‘hosted’ malvertising on their sites that has been credited as the largest of attack of its type for two years. Previously Google’s DoubleClick and Zedo ad servers were ‘infected’ and YouTube, Amazon and Yahoo websites used advertisements served from them.
Although ad serving networks try to filter out malicious ones, occasionally altered ones’ slip in. On a high-traffic site, this means a large pool of potential victims. Websites that serve the ads are usually unaware of the problem.
AppNexus, one of the ad servers said it has an anti-malware detection system called Sherlock it uses to screen ads and also uses a filtering product from a third-party vendor. “We devote considerable financial resources to safeguarding our customers. Unfortunately, bad actors also invest considerably in developing new forms of malware,” said Josh Zeitz, vice president of communications.
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Tanvir Hassan Zoha, 34, security researcher, has gone missing just days after accusing Bangladesh’s central bank officials of negligence, which facilitated the theft of over $81 million from the country’s oversea accounts.
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Finance
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Iain Duncan Smith has stepped down as work and pensions secretary in protest at the government’s planned cuts to disability benefits.
The former Conservative party leader announced his resignation from the cabinet post in a letter to David Cameron.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Chicago is hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, say the headlines, and the only question is which social services should communities shortchange? But is Chicago broke because experts say it is, or is there another way to look at it? We’ll hear about the “mirage” of deficits from Chicago civic educator and organizer Tom Tresser.
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Donald Trump released an ad on March 17 in which he did what almost every politician does as a matter of course: said something bad about Russian President Vladimir Putin, in this case by lumping him with ISIS. The pundit class was in shock, reporting that the “bromance” between the New York businessman and Putin was over.
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Censorship
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IN 1966 Bob Dylan was asked by Playboy magazine whether he believed in the “cause of peace”. His answer was typically cryptic and enlightening. “To say ’cause of peace’ is just like saying ‘hunk of butter’,” he replied.
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Twitter has long had a trolling and harassment issue, and its CEO isn’t immune to it. CEO Jack Dorsey said he has been harassed on Twitter, but he has not blocked any users himself, he told NBC “Today” show host Matt Lauer on Friday.
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On a “Today” show appearance meant to mark the 10th anniversary of Twitter (it’s Monday), chief executive and co-founder Jack Dorsey said on Friday that he’s never personally blocked anyone on the social network, despite Twitter’s perpetual problem of abuse and harassment.
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If proverbs are shorthand for real life, then this year’s parliamentary sessions were the proverbial pot of congee that is fouled by a single rat dropping.
The congee, of course, refers to the annual meetings of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) [held from March 3-15].
And the rat dropping is the list of 21 banned topics issued by the [ruling] Chinese Communist Party’s central propaganda department to journalists covering the parliamentary meetings.
They weren’t allowed to write about smog, although it’s clearly the talk of the whole country.
Neither were they allowed to write about the economy, other than to say nice things about it. Doubts and other news was a no-go area.
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Why settle for copyright infringement accusations when you can have it all? That seems to be pro se filer Michael Henry Smith’s rationale. Apparently, his self-published fictional account of the Waco biker/cop shootout hasn’t racked up as many sales as he believes it should. And now, the Internet must pay.
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Just to be clear on a few things before I get into the meat of this post. (1) I tend to be a supporter of Wikileaks and its goals to help whistleblowers reveal important information, (2) I’m flabbergasted that Hillary Clinton would use a private server for her emails, (3) I think YouTube made a big mistake in blocking the ridiculous Innocence of Muslims video in various countries, and (4) I’m very concerned about public officials meddling in the affairs of companies in telling them to block certain content.
Given all that, I was quite intrigued when Wikileaks tweeted out a story this morning claiming that a recently released Clinton email “reveals that Hillary worked with Google’s CEO to keep” the “Innocence of Muslims” video blocked on YouTube. That seemed like a big deal — especially as I remembered, clearly, Google putting out a statement about all of this and rejecting the White House’s request to censor the video. The problem, though, is that Wikileaks’ tweet is vastly overstating the reality.
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Privacy
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The Federal Trade Commission is warning a dozen developers about some code they’ve included in their apps that can surreptitiously listen to unique audio signals from TVs in the background and build detailed profiles of what consumers are watching. The technology, produced by a company called SilverPush, is used to track users across devices and the FTC warned the developers that if they don’t disclose the use of the code to consumers, they could be violating the FTC Act.
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Whenever you’re on Facebook, do you ever get the feeling that you’re being watched? An ad pops up that’s right up your alley, or three new articles show up in your feed that are similar to something you’ve just clicked on.
Sometimes it seems like Facebook knows you personally, and that’s because it does. It has algorithms that track what you like, watch and click on. That information is then passed along to Facebook advertisers.
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Cryptography is the foundation of information security throughout the digital world. It means that when you log into your email, you can read the messages — but other people can’t. We use crypto when we access our bank accounts, social networking sites, and documents stored in the cloud. Crypto safeguards our medical records, our location data, and the photos we send to our loved ones. The modern digital age and the Internet we have now were built atop the math of cryptography.
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That’s hardly heartening. The DOJ would only go so far as to confirm this has happened before, likely because there’s no way to deny it. The documents from the Lavabit case have been made public — with the DOJ using a formerly-sealed document to hint at what could be in store for Apple if it refuses to write FBiOS for it.
Unfortunately, because of the secrecy surrounding the government’s requests for source code — and the court where those requests have been made — it’s extremely difficult to obtain outside confirmation. Whittaker contacted more than a dozen Fortune 500 companies about the unnamed official’s claims and received zero comments.
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We’ve written a few times in the past year about the latest UK efforts to enact its “Snooper’s Charter” law, officially the Investigatory Powers Bill, which would give the government much greater surveillance capabilities. Right after last year’s election, Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Office Secretary Theresa May made it clear that they were going to go full Orwell, and do whatever possible to grant themselves greater powers to spy on everyone. As more concerns were raised, we noted that the government pretended to back down, while still including all the bad stuff people predicted.
As more and more complaints about the bill were raised, we noted May decided to try to rush the bill through, along with a healthy dose of “if you don’t do this we’re all going to die!” FUD. That included releasing a new draft of the bill, which pretended to address the privacy concerns people raised, but which did so basically by just adding the word “privacy” to a heading and making no substantive changes to protect privacy at all (and possibly changes that made things worse).
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Cindy Cohn was always a compelling choice to give the keynote speech at ABA Techshow. The Electronic Frontier Foundation executive director has been involved in numerous high-profile court cases against the National Security Agency over its mass surveillance data-collection programs.
[...]
Cohn’s speech was partly informational, as she guided attendees through the various ways the government can collect data and justify its methods. Noting that many of those in attendance had probably heard of PRISM, the NSA program revealed by Edward Snowden that collects Internet communications from at least nine service providers in the U.S., Cohn talked about other ways the government conduct surveillance. Most notably, Cohn spoke about the subject of the Jewel case: the NSA’s “upstream collection,” where the government intercepts Internet cables to copy everything that gets transmitted on them. “This turns the entire Fourth Amendment upside down,” Cohn argued. “In this case, the government is collecting everything first and then analyzing it to sort out what they need.”
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Robert Hannigan, Director of GCHQ, warns of scale of hacking on business as he launches Britain’s first National Cyber Security Centre
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Building the Internet of Energy [Ed: Ask companies if their ‘new’ meters come with cams and microphones]
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The truth is many of the same people do not give a second thought to their privacy when using public platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter. In fact, the internet has never really been that private. It is a public medium that enables people to reach out to different corners of the world.
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American citizens’ eyes were opened by the awesome power, reach and constitutional violations of the surveillance activities carried out by the National Security Agency and other government agencies, as revealed by the documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013. Lately, we have discovered that the Obama administration is drawing up rules that will allow the NSA to share raw surveillance data with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other intelligence agencies without first applying any privacy protections.
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All through 2014 and into 2015 the FBI was given direct access to all of the data the NSA was vacuuming up from the Internet, according to a report by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB). This means that all the while FBI Director James Comey (shown) was complaining about the “going dark” problem and a shrinking pool of surveillance tools, his agency had nearly limitless amounts of the very data he claimed he was missing out on.
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‘Insider Threat’ program, based largely on Manning’s WikiLeaks disclosures, targets government employees for ‘continuous evaulation’ using a variety of subjective labels
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It was Edward Snowden’s email account the FBI was targeting in its extraordinary legal case against Lavabit, we can now confirm.
Lavabit ran an encrypted email service that Edward Snowden was thought to have used in 2013 to contact journalists about the top-secret NSA files he had in his possession.
In documents published earlier today, hundreds of pages of previously sealed material related to the Feds’ battle with Lavabit were made available. It was immediately noticeable that there were huge swathes of redactions, most of them covering the email address and details of the individual the agents were specifically looking for and why.
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As the NY Times notes, these details certainly add some pretty hefty weight to the First Amendment arguments about “compelled speech” that Apple has made (and that the EFF doubled down on in its amicus brief). As for what then would happen… that’s up to the court, but it’s likely that the court would find Apple in contempt and/or start fining it. But that still leaves open the question of how does it comply if not a single engineer is willing to help out.
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Civil Rights
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The mutual adoration society that is long-running reality show “COPS” has just landed one of its protagonists in the middle of an evidence suppression order. Evidently forgetting his star turn in an episode of the show, Officer Miguel Hernandez of the Fort Myers (FL) Police Department performed an illegal search of a man walking down the street and concocted a story to cover up his actions. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)
Unfortunately, Hernandez’s stop of Hubert Solomon was all captured on tape — and apparently broadcast as well. Hernandez spotted Solomon walking down the middle of a street. Sidewalks are for walking, Hernandez thought (and Florida law agrees: pedestrians “must use sidewalks if one is available”), and he circled the block to cite Solomon. Solomon was on the sidewalk by this point, and shortly thereafter, so was Officer Hernandez’s patrol car.
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But a small victory. After extraordinary outside pressure from Congress and veterans’ groups, the State Department agreed to undo a change to visa procedure that would have condemned even more Afghan translators to their deaths.
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The Times quotes one of the political scientists behind the rankings as saying that assigning a score based on the appointing president is considered to be a “reasonably good predictor of voting on the Supreme Court.” But that depends what you mean by “reasonably good”; David Souter and Clarence Thomas, after all, were both appointed by George Bush Sr., for example, and their Martin/Quinn scores were wildly different. Sandra Day O’Connor and Antonin Scalia, both nominated by Ronald Reagan, are a similarly divergent pair, not quite as extreme—as are Dwight Eisenhower’s John Marshall Harlan and William Brennan.
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Relationships between some of the most successful and trusted advertising agencies in the world and Saudi Arabia have been condemned, after it emerged that the country has been employing PR advisers to promote the nation’s reputation.
Cached documents exclusively revealed by The Independent today detail human rights groups’ fears that the agencies are helping to “whitewash” human rights abuses by Saudi Arabia; a country which has been accused of murder, torture and committing war crimes against its own citizens.
It emerged that Qorvis, a subsidiary of the conglomerate that owns brands such as Saatchi & Saatchi, distributed an article on behalf of the controversial regime which appeared to defend execution of citizens, including juveniles.
The Independent revealed a cached letter from human rights groups to the PR brand expressing concerns about their work for the country which they said had: “effectively served to strengthen the 80-year relationship between the Saudi and American people and governments.”
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Prison phone companies are trying to stop a new Federal Communications Commission effort to impose rate caps on intrastate calls, with one executive claiming that immediate enforcement of new caps will cause “jail unrest.”
The phone companies and the FCC have different interpretations of a stay order issued on March 7. Prison phone companies say the court order should mostly preserve the status quo, while the FCC argues that the order lets it apply its existing caps on interstate call rates to intrastate calls.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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When T-Mobile last November launched BingeOn, its zero-rating service that lets subscribers watch select streaming video services like Netflix without eating into their monthly data allotment, there was one question on everyone’s mind: Where’s YouTube?
Well, there was another question, too, namely whether or not the service was a violation of net neutrality, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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Till Lampel and Martina Pfaff review recent decisions from German courts regarding trade marks, in particular some notable decisions from the Federal Supreme Court
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Copyrights
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Site blocking is viewed by entertainment companies as a key weapon in the piracy wars but since workarounds are easily available, its efficacy remains suspect. However, if entertainment companies have their way, amendments to Russian law will outlaw the promotion and discussion of block circumvention techniques.
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Spotify has agreed to do a better job at allowing music publishers and songwriters to claim and receive royalties from the streaming service. However there’s a caveat: to strike the settlement deal with Spotify, copyright holders cannot make an infringement claim against the company.
In recent months, Spotify has faced a number of lawsuits from musicians who have challenged the Sweden-based firm’s alleged failure to licence artists’ works before making them available for streaming.
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Netflix has jumped on the DMCA takedown bandwagon. In recent weeks the company has reported tens of thousands of pirate links to Google alone, hoping to make pirated copies of their programming harder to find. Netflix’s position on piracy deviates from a few years ago, when CEO Reed Hastings highlighted its positive sides.
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I got very excited yesterday when I saw a court system alert that there was a new decision out in the appeal of Lenz v. Universal. This was the Dancing Baby case where a toddler rocking out to a Prince song was seen as such an affront to Prince’s exclusive rights in his songs that his agent Universal Music felt it necessary to send a DMCA takedown notice to YouTube to have the video removed. Heaven forbid people share videos of their babies dancing to unlicensed music.
Of course, they shouldn’t need licenses, because videos like this one clearly make fair use of the music at issue. So Stephanie Lenz, whose video this was, through her lawyers at the EFF, sued Universal under Section 512(f) of the DMCA for having wrongfully caused her video to be taken down.
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Nearly a year ago I wrote The Maginot Paywall about the rise of research into the peer-to-peer sharing of academic papers via mechanisms including Library Genesis, Sci-Hub and #icanhazpdf. Although these mechanisms had been in place for some time they hadn’t received a lot of attention. Below the fold, a look at how and why this has recently changed.
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Last month, Techdirt wrote about the growing interest in Sci-Hub, which provides free access to research papers — more than 47,000,000 of them at the time of writing. As Mike noted then, Elsevier’s attempt to make the site go away by suing it has inevitably produced a classic Streisand Effect, whereby many more people know about it as a direct result. That was first pointed out by Mike Taylor in a short post, where he listed a few titles that had written about Sci-Hub. This week, David Rosenthal has produced a kind of update, listing many more posts on the subject that have appeared in the last month alone.
Rosenthal’s list includes an article entitled “Should All Research Papers Be Free?” that was published in Sunday’s edition of The New York Times. It’s probably the most significant contribution to spreading the word about Sci-Hub more widely, but it doesn’t really add much to the debate. By contrast, another post mentioned by Rosenthal, found on the Inside Higher Ed’s site, and written by the college librarian Barbara Fister, may lack the impact of The New York Times news analysis, but does make some genuinely novel observations about what is going on here.
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Send this to a friend
03.18.16
Posted in News Roundup at 8:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Kernel Space
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Today, March 17, 2016, Linux kernel developer Sasha Levin announced the release and immediate availability of the twentieth maintenance release of the long-term supported Linux 4.1 kernel.
Just a few days ago we reported news on new Linux kernel maintenance releases, including Linux kernel 4.4.6 LTS, Linux kernel 3.14.65 LTS, and Linux kernel 3.10.101 LTS, and today we would like to inform our dedicated Linux readers about the availability of Linux kernel 4.1.20 LTS.
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Jiri Kosina submitted the HID driver subsystem updates today for the Linux 4.6 merge window and come with some noteworthy changes for mobile/desktop users.
The HID updates in Linux 4.6 include added/improved device support in the Sony, Wacom, Microsoft, and Logitech HID drivers. There are also code clean-ups to the much-used Wacom driver, and a wide assortment of bug fixes.
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There are a number of ARM64/AArch64 architectural improvements heading in for the Linux 4.6 kernel.
The ARM64 pull for Linux 4.6 has some new features part of ARMv8.2 like half-precision floating point support and User Access Override functionality.
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Immediately after dropping news about the availability of the twentieth maintenance release of Linux kernel 4.1 LTS, kernel developer Sasha Levin published details about Linux kernel 3.18.29 LTS.
Linux kernel 3.18.29 LTS is the twenty-ninth maintenance build for the long-term supported Linux 3.18 kernel series, which is used in various Linux kernel-based operating systems by enterprises and small- or medium-sized businesses. Therefore, the Linux 3.18 branch receives security patches and hardware support for a few more years than normal Linux kernel releases.
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Graphics Stack
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In continuation of the results earlier this week looking at How Ubuntu 16.04 Is Performing With AMDGPU/Radeon Graphics Compared To Ubuntu 14.04 With FGLRX, here is an extra run with the Radeon/AMDGPU results while enabling DRI3 rendering support.
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Applications
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Recently the launcher application for TOR browser has been updated to 0.2.3, but upstream immediatley released an important security fix and bumped the release to 0.2.4.
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Gordon Lyon from the Nmap project, one of the most acclaimed network and security scanner open-source software used by millions of hackers and security experts worldwide, today, March 17, 2016, announced the release of Nmap 7.10.
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Everyone today needs security and when it comes to things like data, PC, messaging, cloud etc then one become much paranoid about it. Security is required in all the fields these days. Be it dual verification from Gmail, Cinavia Message Code 3 for BluRay players or any other similar thing, every one getting curious about adding more and more layers of safety so that any mishap can be avoided.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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XCOM 2 Anarchy’s Children DLC released today for Windows, but it has been delayed at the last minute by Feral Interactive.
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Today, March 17, 2016, UNIGINE Corp. has proudly announced the release and general availability of version 2.2 of its beautiful 3D game engine UNIGINE for all supported platforms, including Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
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While Game Developers Conference is happening this week, there’s already been the Unity 5.4 beta, CRYENGINE V, and the open-sourcing of Atomic Game Engine.
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More good news for developers, as the Atomic Game Engine is now open source under the MIT license. It’s available on github right now.
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The developers of Substance Painter 2 have announced they will be releasing a Linux beta of their 3D painting software.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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I’m happy to announce that Qt 5.6.0 has been released today! This release has taken a bit longer to finish than we originally expected, mostly because we put a lot of new infrastructure in place, allowing us to make Qt 5.6 a Long Term Supported (LTS) release. With that, Qt 5.6 (LTS) will be receiving patch releases with security updates and bug fixes for the next three years, in parallel to upcoming Qt versions. Today, with Qt 5.6, we’ve now also made our new offering for start-ups and small businesses available!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Frederic Peters of the GNOME Project has just announced a few minutes ago that the highly anticipated GNOME 3.20 desktop environment is now officially in Release Candidate (RC) stage of development.
The GNOME 3.20 Release Candidate build is here one day late, as the official release schedule noted March 16, 2016, as the release date, but considering the fact that today’s Saint Patrick’s Day, it is more than welcome, and we have all the time on our hands to give it a proper test drive.
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Hello all,
GNOME 3.19.92 is now out; this is our release candidate for 3.20,
scheduled next week. Please go and try it.
To compile GNOME 3.19.92, you can use the jhbuild modulesets published
by the release team (which use the exact tarball versions from the
official release).
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Hello all,
We would like to inform you about the following:
* GNOME 3.20.0 newstable tarballs due
* Hard Code Freeze ends
Tarballs are due on 2016-03-21 before 23:59 UTC for the GNOME 3.20.0
newstable release, which will be delivered on Wednesday. Modules which
were proposed for inclusion should try to follow the unstable schedule
so everyone can test them. Please make sure that your tarballs will
be uploaded before Monday 23:59 UTC: tarballs uploaded later than that
will probably be too late to get in 3.20.0. If you are not able to
make a tarball before this deadline or if you think you’ll be late,
please send a mail to the release team and we’ll find someone to roll
the tarball for you!
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Being well past the various freezes, today’s GNOME 3.20 release candidate doesn’t offer much more than bug fixes and translation updates. If you aren’t familiar with the new work added earlier in the GNOME 3.19 development cycle for GNOME 3.20, see our many GNOME 3.20 articles. There is much-improved support for native Wayland on GNOME, many improvements to GNOME’s many applications, and other enhancements throughout the stack.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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Mageia made it to SCaLE 14x for the first time in sunny California, with one of our dedicated QA deputy leaders to man the booth.
Bill Kenney, or wilcal as he is known here, did an amazing job running the Mageia booth at SCaLE. This is an extract from his report on the event.
The Mageia booth was located right in the centre of the Pasadena Convention Center on January 22nd – 24th. Friday saw the highest traffic, Saturday was quieter, but lots of families came down to see the exhibits, which is always nice to see.
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To be honest, today I was postponing the upgrade because the machine, a rather old Toshiba Satellite which, oh horror, came with Windows VISTA preloaded, put up a fight when I installed Mageia 2 to it.
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Slackware Family
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Softpedia has been informed today, March 17, 2016, by GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton about the immediate availability of a custom compiled Linux 4.5 kernel for Slackware Linux Current (14.2) and all of its derivatives.
According to Mr. Exton, he managed to compile the recently released Linux kernel 4.5, which has been officially unveiled by Linus Torvalds on March 13, 2016, exactly the same way as Slackware’s latest kernel huge.
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Red Hat Family
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Concerns over China’s economic slowdown as well have kept many global companies wary. Not Red Hat.
The open source software major is planning to spend tens of millions of dollars in China in the next five years as part of a broader effort to lift growth in Asia, which currently contributes a fifth to Red Hat’s revenues, president and chief executive Jim Whitehurst told CNBC.
The North Carolina-based company is expected to cross $2 billion in revenues this year with a target to hit $5 billion in around five years. It is aiming to more than double the Asian ex-Japan share of its revenue to 20 to 25 percent in the same period—up from 10 percent now.
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Fedora
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Once again, the upcoming Fedora 24 operating system has suffered a delay in its release schedule, and for now, it looks like only the release date of the Alpha build has been postponed for a few days.
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Korora is Linux distribution that aims to make it easier to install and use for new Linux users, while still providing power-users with the tools and openness that they want. Originally, Korora was built on Gentoo, but in 2010, the team redid the whole thing as a Fedora Remix, with the goal of making the system “just work,” from first boot. As a Remix, it ships Fedora packages, but also a number of things that Fedora cannot directly ship, including media codecs, graphics drivers, and other useful bits that may be in non-free repositories or require a lot of expertise to install and get breathing.
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Fedora 24 Alpha due out next Tuesday has been delayed due to blocker bugs. Elsewhere, Patrick Volkerding announced Slackware 14.2 Release Candidate 1 today saying, “We still have a bit of work to do.” Mitch Wagner today said that “Open Source is killing us” and Charles Schultz reported on Mageia at SCaLE 14x.
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The remi repository will be soon 11 years old, and we just reached the 100 millions of downloads
Of course, this is only an indicator, first years are not included, some people aspire the full repository, and lot of private mirrors are used and are not included in this figure, but it allows me to observe the growing success of my work, and to compare the popularity of the various available packages.
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Debian Family
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Softpedia has been informed today, March 17, 2016, by the developers behind the popular Linux AIO project, about the immediate availability for download of the Linux AIO Debian Live 8.3.0 ISO image.
For those of you not in the know, the Linux AIO project develops unique Live ISO images that contain multiple editions of a well-known GNU/Linux distribution, such as Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Linux Mint, Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), PCLinuxOS, and many others.
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FOSSASIA 2016 is now under way. The Debian, Red Hat and Ring (Savoir-Faire Linux) teams are situated beside each other in the exhibit area.
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Derivatives
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Today, March 17, 2016, the developers of the Debian-based Elive Linux distribution built on top of the Enlightenment desktop environment have announced the availability of a new Beta build.
Elive 2.6.18 Beta has been made available for download, but the fact of the matter is that the 2.6 branch of the GNU/Linux distribution has been in development for quite too long now, and it doesn’t look like it will be promoted to the stable channel anytime soon.
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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Earlier this week was the How Ubuntu 16.04 Is Performing With AMDGPU/Radeon Graphics Compared To Ubuntu 14.04 With FGLRX, which showed off some interesting open-source Radeon Linux driver results but the Radeon R9 285 “Tonga” graphics card at the time couldn’t be tested on Ubuntu 16.04′s kernel due to a regression. That issue is fortunately now resolved in the latest Xenial Xerus kernel so here are those numbers.
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According to Marius of Softpedia, there will be a VPN panel in the System Settings after installing the OTA-10 update on devices. Other than that, the update includes improvement to pay and location services, better support for Web Apps in the Browser app, the EDS Plugin for Qt PIM module’s Organizer and improvements to Indicator-Datetime. The VPN feature though stands out of the rest and was first cited by Softpedia last year.
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The world of electronic music has traditionally been a fairly expensive venture, whether you’re paying for expensive hardware or software. Luckily, there are plenty of free apps and open source software to enable people to get creative on the devices that they mostly have anyway. But I wanted to see how far the famously inexpensive Raspberry Pi could be pushed as a music-making machine.
Turns out, it can be quite an amazing little sequencer, as long as you know what tools to use and aren’t afraid to learn a little something new.
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Aaeon’s EMB-BSW-1 is a Mini-ITX SBC based on Intel’s N3000 “Braswell” SoCs, and featuring triple display support, dual hdmi, dual mini-PCIe, and 12-24V input.
Due to the height of the built-in heatsink, Aaeon can’t use the term “thin” for its latest “EMB-BSW-1” industrial Mini-ITX board, but otherwise the board would likely fit that definition. The low profile, along with wide range 12-24V DC power input plus triple display make the EMB-BSW-1 well suited for embedded applications including digital signage, ATM, and point-of-sale.
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You may have heard about the crowdfunded Jolla tablet, sporting the very cool proper GNU/Linux based SailfishOS, and also that things went a little sour because of an unfortunate set of circumstances, meaning most tablets will never be shipped (I got my e-mail regarding a refund a couple of days ago).
However by an uncharacteristic stroke of good luck one of the few Jolla tablets that has indeed been shipped, has come into my possession via the second hand market – and at a very reasonable price too. Thanks a lot to the altruistic Jolla supporter who was one of the first to pledge for the crowdfunding, and who sold it on to me after only a few days of ownership. It’s the 64 GB version including the quite elegant LastuCase of real leather and wood, which doubles as a stand.
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Phones
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Tizen
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The Game Developers Conference (GDC2016) is being held this year in San Francisco 14 – 18 March. This is the world’s largest annual gaming event, with an estimated 26,000 gamers and gaming professionals expected to gather and explore what are the latest trends for the gaming Industry.
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Android
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If you’re like most people I’ve asked, “the keyboard” probably wasn’t one of the first things that came to mind. When you stop and think about it, though, the interface that lets you input text plays a critical role in your mobile productivity. Whether you’re editing documents or simply sending an email, it has more of an impact on your on-the-go efficiency than almost anything else on your device.
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Android N is set to be the best Android release yet with tons of improvements and new features. Here’s everything we know so far about the next iteration of Google’s mobile operating system.
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Google Keep is a great tool for managing all sorts of notes and lists — especially if simplicity, universal access, and tight integration with Google services are priorities for you. I’ve used it on and off for years myself, and lately, it’s become a core part of my mobile tech setup.
So how do the people who actually make Keep keep their own lives organized? I thought it’d be interesting to find out. I got in touch with Keep’s product manager, Mario Anima, to get the inside scoop on his own personal Android habits and how he molds the platform to fit his day-to-day needs.
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It’s been over a year since parent company Fossil Group teased a smart Michael Kors watch was in development, and now we finally have a peek of what’s coming later this year.
Michael Kors is making a big entrance into the wearables space with two sleek and beautiful Android Wear smartwatches: a beautiful gold-plated design for women and a sporty black one for men. The starting price for both is $395 and they’ll debut in department stores (and Michael Kors stores) in fall 2016.
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Garrison is half-right about the fatal nature of open source. Viewed in isolation, these problems are insurmountable.
But if you put them together, the problems solve each other. Service providers overwhelmed by open source can turn to vendors to solve the problem, and pay the vendors to do it.
Sure, it’s a tough competitive environment for both service providers and vendors. But that’s what disruption looks like.
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Brandt is a founding faculty member of CROSS, which was created to bridge the gap between student research and open-source software projects. Weil developed his Ph.D. thesis project into a highly successful open-source software product, the data storage system Ceph.
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This week on Ctrl-Walt-Delete, Walt and Nilay take on the long-running dispute of the public opinion on open source tech, and whether there actually is a hard definition of “open” and “closed.”
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Secondly, the dispute stands out because it provides an example of how a business operating an open-source model can call upon trademarks as a way of creating product differentiation and competitive advantage. I have previously reported on this with regards to the open source Debian and Python projects, which have both leveraged trademarks rights to protect their interests. The open source community typically eschews patent protection and is often characterised as harbouring anti-IP sentiments; but Eyeo’s complaint over Magic AdBlock shows the importance that trademarks can have in open source models.
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Events
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Web Browsers
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Chrome
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Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome Beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, Mac, and Windows.
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Chrome 50 has improvements to push notifications, support for a preload declaration/attribute to specify resources should be loaded preemptively, audio/video buffer stream improvements, Web Animation enhancements, and a variety of other changes to assist HTML5/JavaScript developers wishing to take advantage of bleeding-edge web features. Chrome 50 is also what’s rolling out version 5.0 of the V8 JavaScript engine.
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Mozilla
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unveiled the first point release of the recently announced Firefox 45.0 web browser for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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The 2015 Open-Source Rookies class reflects three technologies shaping the future of open-source software: Docker containers, open collaboration and AI.
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BSD
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There’s a new look at the FreeBSD Foundation, with a new logo and website. The changes are intended to highlight “the ongoing evolution of the Foundation identity and ability to better serve the FreeBSD Project,” according to the post announcing the changes.
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Public Services/Government
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For many years, the open source software community has made the distinction between “free as in freedom” (the software can be used or modified as the user sees fit) and “free as in beer” (the software is available at no cost). Some have added a third type of free: “free as in puppy”. Like a puppy, adopting open source software has ongoing cost.
What many people don’t consider is that developing open source software has a cost, too. Many developers purchase extra hardware for testing or pay for code hosting, a website, etc. A pending bill in the New York Senate aims to help offset those costs.
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Data
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Open-source data—be it a compilation of informative files, a crucial API that bring together different features or downloadable yearly Census Bureau data—can be an important resources for bootstrapped startups looking for a leg up in the development stages. That’s why we spoke with Esri, a mapping technology data firm with a sizable office in D.C., who recently helped the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unload a ton of open-source, mapping datasets for public use.
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Programming
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The results of Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2016 is out.
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Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, has said he’s ‘worried’ about the direction the Apple Watch is taking the company.
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Steve Wozniak said device has taken firm into ‘jewellery market’ and that it is no longer ‘the company that really changed the world a lot’
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Health/Nutrition
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Today’s House Oversight Committee hearing into the Flint Water Crisis was a joke. It was partisan — more so than the previous two hearings — because Republicans finally clued in that a Republican state governor’s crisis doesn’t make them look good if they don’t kick up a stink and draw fire away from their role in the mess.
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Security
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Trustwave said over the last seven days, malware-laced spam has represented 18 percent of total spam collected in its honeypots. Trustwave said malware-infected spam typically represent less than 2 percent of total spam. The recent increase to 18 percent is almost entirely traced to ransomware JavaScript downloaders. Campaigns aren’t continuous, Trustwave reported, but are delivered in hour-long bursts.
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Containers started making a big splash in IT and dev operations starting in 2014. The benefits of flexibility and go-live times, among many others, are almost undeniable. But large enterprises considering using a container platform for development or IT operations should pause and consider security first.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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Of course I do not in any way condone ISIS, rape, terrorism, violence, victim shaming or slavery. But I do have what I believe are legitimate questions about a New York Times story involving those topics, and hope I can ask them here without being accused of supporting things I find abhorrent.
I ask these questions only because while rape is tragically used all-to-often as a tool of war, claims by people or groups in war can sometimes be untrue, exaggerated, or reported erroneously for political aims. Iraqi defectors lied about WMDs to help draw America into the 2003 invasion. Claims in 1991 that Iraqi invaders bayoneted Kuwaiti children in their incubators were completely fabricated. In 2011 Susan Rice announced Libya’s Qaddafi was handing out Viagra, so that his soldiers could commit more rapes, it was a lie.
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IF THERE WAS anything surprising about Hillary Clinton’s defense of capital punishment when questioned by an Ohio death row exoneree Sunday night, it was only that she was not better prepared to deliver it. This was no gotcha question, no unscripted ambush like the one carried out last month by Black Lives Matter protesters who confronted Clinton at a fundraiser with her ’90s-era rhetoric about “superpredators.” Although the CNN-sponsored Democratic town hall dictated that candidates do not receive questions in advance, the Clinton campaign almost certainly knew that Ricky Jackson, who spent an incomprehensible 39 years in prison as an innocent man, would be in the audience — and that if called upon, he would probably ask Clinton to justify her support for a policy that sent him to die for a crime he did not commit.
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For almost a year, a Saudi-led coalition of Middle Eastern countries, backed and armed by the U.S. and U.K., has been bombing Yemen, the poorest country in the region. Saudi Arabia hopes to destroy Yemeni rebel groups such as the Houthis, and has bombed hospitals, homes, schools and even a refugee camp in the process.
Civilians have paid a heavy toll for the conflict. Thousands have been killed, and human rights groups have for months accused the coalition of committing war crimes.
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One of the world’s largest advertising agencies has been accused of helping Saudi Arabia “whitewash” its record on human rights following the kingdom’s largest mass execution for more than 30 years.
A US subsidiary of Publicis Groupe, the French media conglomerate that owns UK brands such as Saatchi & Saatchi, distributed an article in which the kingdom’s foreign minister Adel bin Ahmed Al-Jubeir implicitly attempted to justify the execution of 47 people.
A number of political protesters and at least four juveniles are believed to have been among those killed in January. Human rights groups are increasingly worried that three more juveniles – including Ali al-Nimr, who was sentenced to death aged 17 for taking part in a pro-democracy protest – are due to be executed imminently.
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Transparency Reporting
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In 2013, there was controversy abounded when The Times of London alleged that Beyoncé’s perfect rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” during Obama’s second inauguration was the work of lip-syncing. Unperturbed, MuckRock’s founder Michael Morisy seized on this as an opportunity to use FOIA to release those tracks, providing public-domain Bey for all. Sadly, his efforts were thwarted by a combination of FOIA not working that way, and of all things, John Williams. Yes, that John Williams.
Adding insult to injury (a phrase that will come up more than once in this article), Michael’s follow-up request for the processing notes on his request included a very notable omission.
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Legislators and government employees aren’t allowed to choose which laws to comply with any more than the rest of us. (Theoretically…) Communications between government employees that are subject to open records requests need to be carried out on platforms where they can be searched and archived. This means no use of Telegram, just like it means no setting up your own private email server.
The irony, of course, is that legislators are currently discussing encrypted communications (including encryption bans) and how law enforcement can no longer obtain communications they used to be able to grab with a warrant. Meanwhile, their own communications are being withheld from the public record… using encryption and automatic destruction. Perhaps the public needs to start issuing statements about how they used to get all these text messages with public records requests but can’t anymore, thanks to the efforts of the government.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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December to February was the hottest meteorological winter ever by far, topping the previous record by a jaw-dropping half a degree Fahrenheit. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reports that this winter was a remarkable 2.03°F above the 20th century average.
This extreme warmth — caused primarily by the accelerating human-caused global warming trend (with a boost from El Niño) — is a key reason a number of countries have already “set records for the all-time most expensive weather-related disaster in their nations’ history” this year, as meteorologist Jeff Masters has explained.
We already knew from NASA surface temperature data and from the satellite data that this was the hottest February on record by far. Indeed, every database confirms that February was the most extreme deviation from “normal” temperatures ever recorded for any month!
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As a new forest fire crisis builds in the country, with fire hotspots numbering in the hundreds on many recent days, Greenpeace Indonesia today launched a mapping tool allowing the public to monitor fires and deforestation in near-real time, and see to an unprecedented extent who controls the land where they are taking place.
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Last year, fires burned 2 million hectares of peatlands in Indonesia, creating an acrid haze that affected several neighbouring Southeast Asian countries.
As nations met in Paris late last year to agree a deal to limit global greenhouse gas emissions, the huge carbon pool stored in the peatlands was going up in smoke at an unprecedented rate.
Big companies have cleared a massive amount of peat forests in Sumatra and Kalimantan and drained the land to establish tree and oil palm plantations. Global Forest Watch estimates that the fires have tripled Indonesia’s entire annual emissions. Peatlands have become an important issue, not only in Indonesia but for the whole world.
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Finance
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Farming minister Michelle O’Neill says the beef industry in Northern Ireland would “suffer significantly” if a major trade deal between the EU and US gets the green light.
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President Aliev has wasted billions on “prestige” projects. Hosting the Eurovision song contest, the European Games and now a Formula 1 Grand Prix. But ordinary people are struggling to get by on incomes which were already at third world standards and whose value has fallen still further with the collapse of the manat. None of which matters to the empty-headed bling merchants of Formula 1.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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“When Fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross,” goes a saying…
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The deep irony in this will not be missed by anyone who’s been following UK higher education. Researchers are increasingly being forced to spend their time and money on ‘impact’ activities – defined as ‘an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia’. Impact activities already count for 20% in the Research Excellence Framework – the assessment exercise that determines central (non-grant) research funding. A recent FOI request suggests that it could rise to 25%. Yet now we’re being told that we must not spend government grant money on anything that will have an effect on public policy. It’s absurd.
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As the aggressive behavior of his supporters becomes as much of a story as the violence implied in his politics, Donald Trump is bringing together folks who agree on little else to denounce him. It’s true Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz have policies in some ways even more regressive than Trump’s, but then neither of them is openly pining for the days when protesters were carried off on stretchers.
Turnout by thousands of appalled citizens led to the cancellation of Trump’s Chicago rally, and a coalition of public interest groups, including MoveOn, Color of Change, Greenpeace and Jobs with Justice, released an open letter calling for a mass Nonviolent Mobilization to Stand Up to what they called a “five alarm fire” for democracy.
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The city-state has been distributing morbid anti-drug propaganda in its schools. So we asked an expert what Singapore’s harsh anti-drug policies actually achieve in reality.
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Censorship
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Last year when Environmental Protection Agency staff members knew there were bigger problems with the Flint, Michigan, water supply than the agency was saying, they were under orders not to communicate with reporters without oversight by the agency.
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Missoula County Public Schools upheld Bennett’s suspension without pay for not censoring the “Free the Nipple” edition of the Willard Alternative High School student newspaper, the Student Press Law Center reports.
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Saturday was World Day Against Cyber Censorship and in a unique partnership Amnesty International and AdBlock combined to deliver 156,789,119 impressions of messages by prominent privacy and free speech advocates Edward Snowden, Ai Wei Wei, and Pussy Riot in a campaign conceptualized and brokered by advertising agency ColensoBBDO.
Amnesty International experienced their highest ever daily web traffic.
For 24 hours AdBlock served banners with messages from these three influential individuals where they would normally remove banners altogether. During this period it’s estimated that over 50 million internet users were reached with these thought provoking messages speaking out against the dangers of cyber censorship.
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Privacy
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Thanks largely to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, most Americans now realize that the intelligence community monitors and archives all sorts of online behaviors of both foreign nationals and US citizens.
But did you know that the very fact that you know this could have subliminally stopped you from speaking out online on issues you care about?
Now research suggests that widespread awareness of such mass surveillance could undermine democracy by making citizens fearful of voicing dissenting opinions in public.
A paper published last week in Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, the flagship peer-reviewed journal of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC), found that “the government’s online surveillance programs may threaten the disclosure of minority views and contribute to the reinforcement of majority opinion.”
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Political dissidents and cyber criminals alike will soon be sending anonymous internet traffic through a library at Western University in Canada, thanks to a new “node” in the encrypted Tor network operated by staff there—the first to open at a library in the country.
In Canada, the legality of running a Tor node is essentially untested, making the high profile, institutionally-backed node at Western a potential target for the feds.
Tor is touted as a tool for people, such as journalists, to keep their browsing habits safe from spies and police. But more nefarious traffic, such as drug dealing or child pornography, also passes through the network. A small public library in New Hampshire began operating a Tor node last year, and faced pressure from the Department of Homeland Security to shut it down. The library resisted, and the node is still running.
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It’s been one of the worst-kept secrets for years: the identity of the person the government was investigating in 2013 when it served the secure email firm Lavabit with a court order demanding help spying on a particular customer.
Ladar Levison, owner of the now defunct email service, has been forbidden since then, under threat of contempt and possibly jail time, from identifying who the government was investigating. In court documents from the case unsealed in late 2013, all information that could identify the customer was redacted.
But federal authorities recently screwed up and revealed the secret themselves when they published a cache of case documents but failed to redact one identifying piece of information about the target: his email address, Ed_Snowden@lavabit.com. With that, the very authorities holding the threat of jail time over Levison’s head if he said anything have confirmed what everyone had long ago presumed: that the target account was Snowden’s.
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Nearly three years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave journalists his trove of documents on the intelligence community’s broad and powerful surveillance regime, the public is still missing some crucial, basic facts about how the operations work.
Surveillance researchers and privacy advocates published a report on Wednesday outlining what we do know, thanks to the period of discovery post-Snowden — and the overwhelming amount of things we don’t.
The NSA’s domestic surveillance was understandably the initial focus of public debate. But that debate never really moved on to examine the NSA’s vastly bigger foreign operations.
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EFF’s suit was filed in the wake of news reports claiming the government knew for two years about the Heartbleed Bug, a widespread security flaw affecting an estimated two-thirds of the world’s websites, without disclosing the threat.
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Here’s the background: The French Parliament is currently debating a series of regulations on the digital economy and as part of its measures, it has defined a new constraint that basically prohibits parents to upload pictures and videos of their (minor) children on social networks. According to the draft, if parents do upload this content on social networks they may get risk being sued by their own children and may be liable for civil damages and compensation. I do not know what will become of the whole draft nor that specific provision itself. What happened to me, following the news reports about the project, is that several of my friends tweeted and discussed online whether French had lost their sanity.
[...]
But to Melissa and I, we do this because we do not want to bring our son at his young age into the nets of marketers, big data, and surveillance. We do not want to put his face out there, despite the fact that we love him so tenderly. We do not want him to be identifiable unless he hasn’t expressed an actual will to do so.
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In a recent Deeplinks post and in some of our other communications about the Apple case, we’ve referred to what the government wants Apple to do as creating a “backdoor.” Some people have questioned the use of the term, but we think it’s appropriate. Here’s why.
The term “backdoor” has a long history. It was originally used—along with “trapdoor”—throughout the 1980s to refer to secret accounts and/or passwords created to allow someone unknown access into a system. People worried, for instance, that a malicious programmer or system administrator might leave behind a trapdoor that they would be able to use to get into a system long after they were officially working on it. Later, in the first round of the crypto wars, throughout the 1990s, privacy advocates often referred to the government’s key escrow proposals—where the government, or private companies, would keep copies of people’s decryption keys—as a “backdoor” into our encryption.
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Today, more than two dozen civil society groups sent a letter to European leaders reviewing the “Privacy Shield” data-transfer agreement with a singular message: this arrangement is not enough. The Privacy Shield is intended to allow companies to share data about customers across the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the Privacy Shield fails to provide sufficient clarity, oversight, remedy, or protections for the human rights of E.U. citizens against U.S. surveillance practices. The letter specifically calls for legislative reform of U.S. surveillance laws, increased protections for personal data, and additional redress and transparency mechanisms.
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The National Security Agency’s internal civil liberties watchdog insisted on Thursday that the agency has no interest in spying on Americans under its controversial spying tools.
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After weeks of relentlessly negging each other in their legal filings and the press, Apple and the FBI are getting in their final punches before heading to court next week.
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SME PED devices were only NSA-approved mobile phones for classified communications.
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Police arrested a 74-year-old peace activist who refused to leave a protest site outside an NSA spy base in Yorkshire on Wednesday. The force also issued an official dispersal order banning protesters from assembling there.
Lindis Percy, a founding member of Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases (CAAB), was arrested by police at the Menwith Hill US listening post.
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Nearly three years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden gave journalists his trove of documents on the intelligence community’s broad and powerful surveillance regime, the public is still missing some crucial, basic facts about how the program works.
Surveillance researchers and privacy advocates published a report on Wednesday outlining what we do know, thanks to the period of discovery post-Snowden — and the overwhelming amount of things we don’t.
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Civil Rights
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What’s the worst thing your boss has ever done? Made you work on the weekend? Sexually harassed the secretary? Gave millions of dollars to an infamous dictator? Jack’s boss did that last one, and all of a sudden having to cancel your Saturday BBQ doesn’t sound so bad, huh?
Jack was an accountant for SNC-Lavalin, a Montreal-based engineering firm that managed to single-handedly disprove every nice stereotype about Canadians. Between 2001 and 2011, SNC bribed Muammar Gaddafi and friends with millions of dollars in exchange for cushy contracts, and Jack discovered it during a routine audit. He told us all about learning that his bosses were secretly funding supervillains.
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Crematoria are profitable private businesses.
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On December 16, 2010, the Salt Lake City Police Department and the Safe Streets Violent Crimes Task Force, in coordination with Salt Lake City School District officials, entered West High School in Salt Lake City to conduct a gang raid. Each one of the young people detained during the raid had brown skin. Not one was accused of committing a crime, but it didn’t matter. They were treated like criminals and labeled as gang members.
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Given the recent and re-manufactured debate over torture’s legality, morality, and “effectiveness,” our nation is presented with a stark choice: Do we learn from one of the darkest chapters in our history, or do we repeat our most grievous and heinous mistakes?
With our core values hanging in the balance, now — perhaps more than ever — it is imperative that the Senate torture report see the light of day.
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A lawsuit recently filed by an allegedly ousted New York City medical examiner lends more credibility to the theory that the justice system is more concerned with successful prosecutions than actual justice. At the center of the allegations lies a DNA testing technique apparently used nowhere else in the country.
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As a candidate in 2008, Obama praised a Supreme Court ruling that affirmed that prisoners had a right to habeas corpus regardless of where they were held, calling it “a rejection of the Bush administration’s attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantánamo” (New York Times, 6/13/08). But that ruling was a reversal of an appeals court ruling that Garland had voted for; if you’re glad that the Supreme Court rejected the legal black hole theory, why put another judge there who embraced it?
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Government lawyers on Thursday continued their fight to bury the Senate Torture Report, arguing before the D.C. District Court of Appeals that the 6,700-page text could not be released on procedural grounds.
When the 500-page executive summary of the report was released more than a year ago, it prompted international outcry and renewed calls for prosecution. The summary describes not only the CIA’s rape and torture of detainees, but also how the agency consistently misrepresented the brutality and effectiveness of the torture program.
But many of the most graphic details are in Volume III of the full report, which former Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein has said contains “excruciating” details on “each of the 119 known individuals who were held in CIA custody.”
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The New York Police Department is facing criticism after arresting an adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio Tuesday night. Five Mualimm-ak was arrested while attempting to mediate a police confrontation with a homeless man in midtown Manhattan. Five Mualimm-ak had just left an event at George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, where he read his essay in the book “Hell is a Very Small Place,” about his five years in solitary confinement. Since being released from prison in 2012, Five Mualimm-ak has become a prominent advocate for previously incarcerated men and women. He serves on Mayor de Blasio’s Task Force on Behavioral Health and the Criminal Justice System. He was arrested Tuesday along with fellow prison activist Joseph “Jazz” Hayden. Five other people who attended the book reading were later arrested at the police precinct, where they went to inquire about the arrest of Five Mualimm-ak and Hayden. They were charged with “refusal to disperse.” We speak to Five Mualimm-ak and two other activists connected with Incarcerated Nation Corp., Joseph “Jazz” Hayden and Terrence Slater. All three were arrested on Tuesday.
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Senate Republican leaders are tamping down talk in their conference of voting on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court in the lame-duck session after the elections.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee, on Wednesday floated the idea of voting on Garland later this year if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency. Hatch describes himself as a good friend of Garland’s, and helped move his nomination to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals through the Senate in 1997.
Behind the scenes, several other Republicans have discussed the lame-duck option and voiced concerns that Clinton might nominate a judge who is even more liberal. They also worry about the selection that Donald Trump, their presidential front-runner, might make, according to one GOP lawmaker.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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Witnesses testifying at the United States House Communications and Technology Subcommittee today unanimously reported success of the multistakeholder preparations for the transition of oversight over the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) from the US government to the multistakeholder internet community.
The Director at the Global Internet Policy and Human Rights Project, Matthew Shears, called the proposals delivered by the two-year process at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) “the most successful expression of multistakeholder approaches to internet governance yet.”
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With Google Fiber now starting to encroach on some major Comcast territories, the company’s suddenly finding itself in the unfamiliar position of actually having to compete on price. In Atlanta, where Google Fiber is expected to appear later this year or early next, Comcast has been circulating flyers urging locals not to fall for the “hype” of ultra-fast, relatively cheap Google Fiber service.
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Last year you’ll recall that T-Mobile launched its “Binge On” zero rating program, which exempts the biggest video services from the company’s usage caps (aka “zero rating”). Net neutrality advocates quickly complained that the practice violated net neutrality, since the very act of giving some companies an advantage automatically disadvantages some others. After T-Mobile spent some time lying about the nature of the program, the EFF came out with a detailed report noting that T-Mobile was just throttling all video files back to 1.5 Mbps, whether the content was being streamed or directly downloaded.
Net neutrality advocates like the EFF argued that the program should be opt in instead of opt out, voicing concerns that T-mobile continues to ignore. YouTube similarly initially complained about the program and that video partners were being throttled by default. But in a matter of months, Alphabet/Google appears to have completely changed its mind, issuing a new blog post that says it’s now partnering with T-Mobile to zero rate Google Play Movies and YouTube content traveling over the T-Mobile network.
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The World Intellectual Property Organization has released data on disputes between trademark owners and third parties who are registering new domain names with the original brand name. Disputes are on the rise and the proportion relating to new generic top-level domain names is growing, it found. Fashion and banking are the prominent areas for disputes.
[...]
Asked to describe the relationship between the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and WIPO, Gurry said WIPO historically has been charged with the development of a dispute resolution procedure, which was adopted by ICANN in 1998/1999.
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For years, AT&T used contract fine print to prohibit its customers from suing it. Instead, users were forced to participate in binding arbitration, a system whereby company-employed arbitrators weigh the evidence — and unsurprisingly rule in favor of the company employing them a dramatic majority of the time. Initially, lower courts repeatedly derided this behavior as an “unconscionable” curtailing of consumer rights and abuse of the law. But in 2011 the Supreme Court’s AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion ruling declared that what AT&T was doing was perfectly ok, resulting in countless companies now following AT&T’s lead.
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T-Mobile USA and YouTube have reached a compromise that will bring YouTube into T-Mobile’s Binge On program, which reduces streaming quality but exempts videos from data caps.
The Google-owned YouTube was the most notable absence from Binge On when T-Mobile launched the program in November. YouTube later said that while reducing data charges can be good for customers, “it doesn’t justify throttling all video services, especially without explicit user consent.”
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There’s a a growing trend to close off publishing platforms by demanding a login in order to view the content. Which is a move away from an open web. In December 2015 Facebook launched its own in-app browser, which is basically a web-view that loads links you tap on using the Facebook app. It may provide convenience for some but the primary goal is to keep users inside the application longer. This opens up more advertising exposure and associated revenue. This poses a challenge to the open web because this overrides the user’s default mobile browser keeps the eyeballs in a closed ecosystem. The feature Instant Articles for publishers is done such that it loads articles available nearly instantly in the app compared to a mobile browser. This opens up for monetizing viewing and privacy invasions by Facebook on users. The in-app browser lack decent privacy controls.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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The European Commission will be obliged to consult with US authorities before adopting new legislative proposals following passage of a controversial series of trade negotiations being carried out mostly in secret.
A leaked document obtained by campaign group the Independent and Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) from the ongoing EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations reveals the unelected Commission will have authority to decide in which areas there should be cooperation with the US – leaving EU member states and the European Parliament further sidelined.
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Trademarks
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About a year ago, we wrote about a somewhat strange trademark dispute between Macy’s and a company called Strategic Marks. The issue in the case was that Strategic Marks was attempting to sell merchandise and create popup stores for brands that had been dissolved through acquisition into larger companies, such as Macy’s. These brands were once staples of the storefront experience, including names like Marshall Field’s, Bullock’s, and Foley’s. All were once well-known regional department stores that Macy’s bought and rebranded as Macy’s stores. Macy’s, despite all of this, claimed it retained trademark ownership over those, despite their being generally unused.
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Copyrights
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The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued an important ruling last Fall in the long-running “dancing baby” case, affirming that copyright holders must consider whether a use of material is fair before sending a takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. We welcomed that ruling, but the majority decision also set the bar for enforcing that requirement higher than Congress intended. So Stephanie Lenz asked the Ninth Circuit to rehear the case en banc to address those elements of its ruling that risk leaving many victims of improper takedowns without a practical vehicle to vindicate their rights (EFF and the San Francisco law firm of Keker & Van Nest, LLP, represent Stephanie Lenz in the case).
In an amended opinion issued today, the Ninth Circuit declined Lenz’s request for rehearing. At the same time, the appeals court made some interesting changes to its first ruling.
What hasn’t changed: The court’s new opinion stands by its earlier determination that rightsholders must consider whether a use is a lawful fair use before issuing a takedown notice. It leaves intact its determination that fair use is not just a carve-out of the copyright system but a right on the same level of those described in the rest of the statute. Finally, the new opinion retains its determination that a victim of takedown abuse can vindicate her rights even if she cannot show actual monetary loss.
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Send this to a friend
03.17.16
Posted in News Roundup at 11:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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First, the ARM backstory: ARM is a type of architecture for computer chips. First developed in the 1980s to power PCs, ARM chips have ended up seeing their widest use so far in mobile devices, where they account for the vast majority of market share. Today, the number of ARM processors produced totals more than 50 billion. If you lined up all the ARM chips in existence, you could circle the globe about twelve times.
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At the Open Networking Summit (ONS) 2016 this week, John Donovan, chief strategy officer and group president of AT&T technology and operations, gave attendees an update on where the carrier stands with its multi-year Domain 2.0 project to embrace such technologies as software-defined networking (SDN) and network-functions virtualization (NFV) within its data centers.
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Docker is transitioning to Alpine Linux–an exceptionally lightweight Linux distribution of less than 5MB. That is a 95 percent drop in the size of the Docker container image, but with a Linux distribution that is still capable of supporting a wide range of applications and services so it won’t impede the capabilities Docker provides with its containers.
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After this, Oracle could offer its product on its own Linux too. It could undercut Linux companies on cost as its operations are much bigger than theirs. And it could offer what Microsoft could not – a database for the enterprise running on Linux.
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Kernel Space
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Support for Memory Protection Keys (PKeys/MPK) that will be found on future Intel CPUs is being proposed for inclusion into Linux 4.6.
Memory Protection Keys were previously described by the Intel developers as “a CPU feature which will be found in future Intel CPUs…Memory Protection Keys provides a mechanism for enforcing page-based protections, but without requiring modification of the page tables when an application changes protection domains. It works by dedicating 4 previously ignored bits in each page table entry to a ‘protection key’, giving 16 possible keys. There is also a new user-accessible register (PKRU) with two separate bits (Access Disable and Write Disable) for each key. Being a CPU register, PKRU is inherently thread-local, potentially giving each thread a different set of protections from every other thread. There are two new instructions (RDPKRU/WRPKRU) for reading and writing to the new register. The feature is only available in 64-bit mode, even though there is theoretically space in the PAE PTEs. These permissions are enforced on data access only and have no effect on instruction fetches.”
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EFI-enabled systems will see some nice improvements with the upcoming Linux 4.6 kernel.
One of the big EFI changes for Linux 4.6 that was already delayed twice before is using separate EFI page tables when executing EFI firmware code, which is done in order to isolate the EFI context from the rest of the kernel. This obviously is a big help from a security perspective.
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The EXT4 file-system updates for the in-development Linux 4.6 kernel are varied, but there are some notable enhancements.
With today’s EXT4 pull request for the Linux 4.6 merge window, the EXT4 maintainer Ted Ts’o describes the changes as “Performance improvements in SEEK_DATA and xattr scalability improvements, plus a lot of clean ups and bug fixes.”
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We reported earlier the release of the sixth maintenance build of the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series, and in this article, we would like to inform you about the availability of Linux kernel 3.14.65 LTS.
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Just a few minutes ago, March 16, 2016, renowned kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman released three Linux kernel maintenance builds, Linux 4.4.6 LTS, Linux 3.14.65 LTS, and Linux 3.10.101 LTS.
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The Linux Foundation and edX are going to be offering another free training course to the open source community. It’s focused on open source cloud computing and container technology, and looks very timely.
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A new massive open online course (MOOC) for Linux developers will cover the implementation of cloud-based projects.
The Linux Foundation is offering the course through edX, the nonprofit online learning platform launched in 2012 by Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The course is free and will begin this June.
According to the Linux Foundation, understanding cloud technologies tops the list of most important skills for any developer, sysadmin or emerging DevOps professional.
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Applications
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Conrad announced a new Armadillo release 6.600.4 yesterday. This followed some work we had done for thorough pre-release checking with reverse dependencies tests for the over 200 CRAN packages using it and resulted in one more squashed bug. This releasehas been folded into RcppArmadillo 0.6.600.4.0 which arrived on CRAN and Debian earlier today.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Greetings developers, just to let you know that Unity have now added Linux builds of the fresh 5.4 beta. They have also updated the stable build with core OpenGL fixes, as it was quite broken. I’ve been testing a few games that showed OpenGL was a bit broken in the latest Unity, so it’s nice to see them patch it up (and now have a Linux build with the fixes).
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Sad news Double Fine fans, as Day of the Tentacle Remastered will not be on Linux at launch with no current date shared.
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We gathered that Life Is Strange is coming to Linux from all the recent SteamDB activity, but it looks like Feral Interactive are the ones behind it.
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Two long and low quality videos from GDC are now up with Vulkan as the subject, all very interesting with Oxide Games and Valve speaking.
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The cross-platform Atomic Game Engine has been open-sourced under the MIT license.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Neofytos Kolokotronis from the Chakra GNU/Linux operating system, an Arch Linux-inspired distribution, has just announced a few minutes ago, March 16, 2016, the availability of some important updates for the Linux OS.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME Project is working hard these days to promote the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment to the Release Candidate (RC) state, so we can’t help but notice that they’re updating many of the core components and apps.
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Red Hat’s Alexander Larsson today announced the release of XDG-App v0.5.
With today’s xdg-app 0.5 release, Alex considers this GNOME sandboxing tech to be feature complete for making it possible for third-parties to create and distribute applications that work across distributions. With this sandboxing, these packaged applications have minimal access to the host as needed for functionality.
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Topping Linux news today is the rumor that NVIDIA is working on their own Linux distribution. Michael Larabel reported today of a new power management governor being developed for upcoming kernels and Mageia said they’d see you at Chemnitz Linux Days. Chris Sherlock offered tips for “LibreOffice newbies” and Microsoft claims 8,000 companies have signed up for SQL on Linux in the first week. “Docker puts containers on a diet” and the Linux Foundation is offering a free course on cloud infrastructure technologies.
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The dark satanic rumour mill has manufactured a hell on earth yarn claiming that Nvidia is working on its own Linux OS for gamers.
A slide has tipped up showing a screen capture of an installer screen for this operating system supposedly going by the “NLINUX” codename at NVIDIA.
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Reviews
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I quite like Netrunner and I have become accustomed to the way you do things in the past week or so.
I am not that keen however on the KDE Plasma desktop. It still feels big and bulky and too in your face.
If you are want to have a look at the Arch world but not get your feet too wet then this is one way to do it but you are basically using Netrunner on top of Manjaro on top of Arch.
I wouldn’t say this version of Netrunner is for the absolute beginner and it won’t be everybody’s cup of tea. I suspect the Debian version is for the masses and this version is for those who like to play.
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Red Hat Family
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Red Hat, has been getting a chance to be the badge sponsors to Nullcon for consecutive 3 years now. Nullcon organizers are creative in making the badges and the effort is well appreciated when the the security enthusiasts are fond to see the first thing they hit
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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 officially enters its beta stage today, providing users of Red Hat’s Linux platform with new features, some of which had already debuted in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 in November 2015.
While the RHEL 7 product branch first became generally available in June 2014, Red Hat’s Linux products have long life cycles. RHEL 6, first released in November 2010, is still in what Red Hat refers to as Product Phase 1, which means this version’s capabilities are still being updated and extended.
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Debian Family
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The Debian community is preparing yet another awesome event for the of spring 2016, where you can meet new people, share knowledge, relax, plan cool features for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system, and have a good time while at it.
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Derivatives
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The Elive Team is proud to announce the release of the beta version 2.6.18
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Canonical/Ubuntu
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On March 15, 2016, we reported on the fact that Canonical published several new Ubuntu Security Notices to inform the community about important kernel updates for the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 15.10 operating systems.
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We reported last year that the Ubuntu developers planned on implementing VPN support on the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system, and they’ve just announced the finalization of the new feature.
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Phones
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Android
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Although Google doesn’t seem to know exactly what to do with Android TV, its never-quite-baked platform for smart TVs and streaming boxes, the company does have some interesting ideas.
With the upcoming Android N release, Google is promising picture-in-picture mode on the big screen, and it has announced a developer tool called “TV Recording” that sounds intriguing on its face. Details are still scarce, but both additions could help Android TV stand out from Google’s far more popular Chromecast.
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Android N, Google’s next version of its mobile operating system, gets its internal codename. It’s New York Cheesecake (yes, it’s sweet).
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For those that want to see what’s new in Google’s recently announced and upcoming Android N software, you can see the changes in our Android N vs Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow walkthrough below. This is a comparison of Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow vs the new Android N Developer preview on a Nexus 6, and a Nexus 6P.
Here we will detail and share some of the new features and changes Google has made in Android N that are different from the latest Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow release. So far the list is over 40, but not all are visual. Most of the changes are behind the scenes and more will be added when it’s released this summer. However, there is still plenty to see in this very early Android N preview.
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Google introduced factory reset protection in Android 5.1 to prevent a stolen device from being used. When FRP is active, you’re supposed to be required to log in with an account that was previously on the device, but RootJunky has made it his mission to find workarounds for FRP. In fact, he found a fantastically complicated one for the Android N developer preview.
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Lava has launched a new budget smartphone, the Flair S1, which is now listed on the company’s site at Rs. 4,349. Available in Black and Champagne Gold, the Lava Flair S1 is available via several third-party online retailers at a market operating price of Rs. 3,799.
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Open-source software is not possible without collaboration and collaboration is not possible without communication. Collaborative communication in open source projects typically means some form of distributed chat.
In the past, and indeed the present for most projects, that has meant IRC. IRC has some disadvantages, though, and developers love a shiny new toy, which is part of the reason more than a few projects have moved to Slack, the startup attracting crazy amounts of venture investment and equally crazy valuations.
[...]
There are ongoing efforts to improve IRC, notably the IRCv3 project, but if you’re looking for a solution right now, IRC comes up short.
And there’s no question that Slack is a very well designed, easy to use chat system. But it’s closed source, which makes it a questionable choice for open-source projects. Still, if good old IRC really isn’t working any more – and I would suggest your project take some time to really evaluate that question before proceeding – there are open-source Slack imitators that can also solve some of the problems with IRC, but are self-hosted and FOSS licensed.
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If you’re a fan of third-party software that adds functionality to a Wi-Fi router, your options just got smaller. The Federal Communications Commission has new rules designed to make sure routers operate only within their licensed frequencies and power levels. TP-Link is complying by blocking open-source firmware like the Linux-based OpenWRT and DD-WRT from its routers. That’s the easiest way for router manufacturers to comply.
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You may have heard the news recently that the MAME project has been licensed under the GPL version 2.
MAME, which originally stood for Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, is probably the largest and most complete game emulation systems ever created, with the ability to emulate many original gaming systems, largely from the 80s and 90s. While primarily developed for Windows, MAME also compiles easily for Linux, and can be ported to other operating systems as well.
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While I was putting together slides for my lightning talk at Great Wide Open (happening March 16-17), Not that Weird: Open Source Tools for Creatives, I remembered that in the last half of 2015 we had a bit of a loss from our open source creative toolbox. I think I was little late to the game in realizing this—after all, the last official stable release of Celtx (the open source, desktop version) was in 2012—but for folks paying attention, it’s been a long time coming.
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Events
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Open Networking Summit (ONS) kicked off in Santa Clara this week, the first event since becoming part of the Linux Foundation.
Guru Parulkar, Nick McKeown and Dan Pitt started the Open Networking summit back in 2011. Yesterday, Parulkar said in his keynote that they started the summit as a small event to highlight the latest developments in software defined networking (SDN), and to accelerate SDN adoption by network operators and service providers.
But as almost everything is become software defined and adoption is increasing, ONS became an important event for the industry and community. The immense adoption of open source led the team to increase focus on open source and open source platforms.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Thunderbird’s method of enabling anti-virus software to scan incoming e-mail messages is explained in the mozillaZine article ‘Download each e-mail to a separate file before adding to Inbox‘ and in Mozilla bug report no. 116443 (the bug report that resulted in the functionality being implemented). It is my contention that the design is deficient and is actually not a solution. In this post I explain why I believe this to be the case. Although here I will discuss Thunderbird in Linux, I believe the deficiency applies to Thunderbird in all OSs.
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Security of users is paramount. Technology companies need to do everything in their power to ensure the security of their users and build products and services with strong security measures in place to do that.
At Mozilla, it’s part of our mission to safeguard the Web and to take a stand on issues that threaten the health of the Internet. People need to understand and engage with encryption as a core technology that keeps our everyday transactions and conversations secure. That’s why, just days before the Apple story broke, we launched an awareness campaign to educate users on the importance of encryption.
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Databases
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Crate Technology has designed a database system for supporting Docker containers and microservices. The technology stresses ease of use, speed and scalability while retaining the ability to use SQL against very large data sets.
Crate was built to run in ephemeral environments, said Christian Lutz, Crate CEO. It was the ninth official Docker image in the Docker Registry and has been downloaded more than 350,000 times in the past six months. It can be managed with Docker tools, or with Kubernetes or Mesos.
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Oracle/Java/LibreOffice
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Li Haoyi has written an excellent blog post entitled “Diving Into Other People’s Code” about diving into an unfamilar codebase (HN discussion here).
I think this is really very helpful for anyone who wants to look at the LibreOffice source for the first time. Many of the things he mentions are directly relatable to LibreOffice – in particular getting your dev environment setup is particularly relatable.
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CMS
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Pseudo-/Semi-Open Source (Openwashing)
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The interesting thing will be to see if the results continue to accelerate at the same rate or even faster. You can see results of last year’s survey here. Follow the 2016 Future of Open Source Survey on Twitter at #FutureOSS and @FutureOfOSS, and stay tuned to Linux.com for future updates and results.
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BSD
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This year’s AsiaBSDCon has come to an end, with a number of OpenBSD-related talks being presented. Two developers were also invited to the smaller “bhyvecon” event to discuss vmm(4) and future plans.
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Public Services/Government
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The Obama administration last week published a draft software source code policy that requires all government agencies to publish their custom-build software as free software for public use, according to the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
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Openness/Sharing
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Open Access/Content
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The U.S. Department of Education’s #GoOpen program is an initiative to use openly licensed educational resources in the classroom. Chesterfield schools have a national reputation as a pioneer in the use of these programs, and is one of six school districts nationwide to be named a #GoOpen Ambassador District, to mentor other school systems in implementing the program.
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Programming
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When I was more active in the frontend community, the changes seemed minor. We’d occasionally make switches in packaging (RequireJS → Browserify), or frameworks (Backbone → Components). And sometimes we’d take advantage of new Node/v8 features. But for the most part, the updates were all incremental.
[...]
On the other hand, Brendan Eich, now the Mozilla CTO, argued for the changes. In an open letter to Chris Wilson, he objected to the fact that Microsoft was just now withdrawing support for a spec which had been in the works for years.
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You may recall that we discussed the New York Yankees’ bumbling attempt to institute a new ticket policy for Yankee Stadium that disallowed print-at-home tickets. Dressed up as a policy designed to combat fake tickets being sold by scalpers, the policy was actually designed to be a warm hug to the team’s partner Ticketmaster and a slap to Ticketmaster rival StubHub, as well as all of the other secondary market resellers out there. Still, some people probably shrugged, assuming that this would only have an effect on Yankees fans, a group that might find the soil of sympathy barren.
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Science
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While traveling in Western Samoa many years ago, I met a young Harvard University graduate student researching ants. He invited me on a hike into the jungles to assist with his search for the tiny insect. He told me his goal was to discover a new species of ant, in hopes it might be named after him one day.
Whenever I look up at the stars at night pondering the cosmos, I think of my ant collector friend, kneeling in the jungle with a magnifying glass, scouring the earth. I think of him, because I believe in aliens—and I’ve often wondered if aliens are doing the same to us.
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Last month it was quietly announced that anyone receiving research grants from the state will be banned from lobbying “government and Parliament” on either policy issues or funding. The rule is said to be aimed principally at charities, but who knows the truth: in any case it covers all government grants “related to research and development”, and that means academics like me.
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The UK government has passed rules banning academics who receive public funding from “lobbying” ministers and MPs about their research, meaning that the people whom the government pays to acquire expertise in matters of public policy aren’t allowed to speak to policy-makers anymore.
The problem, from the UK government’s perspective, is that it wants to do things that scientists understand to be stupid: impose austerity as a means of stimulating the economy, give tax breaks to the rich as a means of stimulating the economy, limit migration as a means of stimulating the economy, and, of course, deny climate change.
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Health/Nutrition
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When U.S. politicians talk about Scandinavian-style social welfare, they fail to explain the most important aspect of such policies: selfishness.
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Today in Johannesburg, South Africa, the second of two public dialogues was held by the United Nations Secretary General’s High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines, drawing another packed room and many ideas, experiences and suggestions for solutions.
The archived livestream of the 17 March Johannesburg dialogue is available on the HLP website here. At press time, it appeared part of the webcast might be missing. The agenda of the event is available here [pdf]. Today’s public segment was preceded by a closed session yesterday.
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Security
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Mainstream websites, including those published by The New York Times, the BBC, MSN, and AOL, are falling victim to a new rash of malicious ads that attempt to surreptitiously install crypto ransomware and other malware on the computers of unsuspecting visitors, security firms warned.
The tainted ads may have exposed tens of thousands of people over the past 24 hours alone, according to a blog post published Monday by Trend Micro. The new campaign started last week when “Angler,” a toolkit that sells exploits for Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and other widely used Internet software, started pushing laced banner ads through a compromised ad network.
According to a separate blog post from Trustwave’s SpiderLabs group, one JSON-based file being served in the ads has more than 12,000 lines of heavily obfuscated code. When researchers deciphered the code, they discovered it enumerated a long list of security products and tools it avoided in an attempt to remain undetected.
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VMware patched two cross-site scripting issues in several editions of its vRealize cloud software. These flaws could be exploited in stored XSS attacks and could result in the user’s workstation being compromised.
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VMware has patched two serious vulnerabilities in the firm’s vRealize software which could lead to remote code execution and the compromise of business workstations.
In a security advisory posted on Tuesday, the Palo Alto, California-based firm said the “important” vulnerabilities are found within the VMware vRealize Automation and VMware vRealize Business Advanced and Enterprise software platforms.
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A chap who found two serious security bugs in Git servers and clients has urged people to patch their software.
The flaws are present in Git including the 2.x, 1.9 and 1.7 branches, meaning the vulnerabilities have been lurking in the open-source version control tool for years.
It is possible these two programming blunders can be potentially exploited to corrupt memory or execute malicious code on remote servers and clients. To do so, an attacker would have to craft a Git repository with a tree of files that have extremely long filenames, and then push the repo to a vulnerable server or let a vulnerable client clone it from the internet.
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Defence/Police/Secrecy/Aggression
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The war on terror’s methods of mass surveillance and remote warfare are not unique. The US is also addicted to covert tools in its ‘war on drugs’, with disastrous consequences.
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One of Russia’s leading human rights activists, Igor Kalyapin, was assaulted in the Chechen capital, Grozny, on Wednesday night by masked men who beat him and doused him in eggs, cakes and green paint.
Kalyapin, whose nongovernmental group, the Committee for the Prevention of Torture, is known for investigating abuses in the region, was in the city to meet a member of the Chechen Human Rights Council, Heda Saratova, and some journalists, according to his colleague Dmitriy Piskunov.
The activist had just checked in to the Hotel Grozny City when “employees of the hotel, accompanied by armed police officers, forced Kalyapin out of his room and onto the street just outside of the hotel,” Piskunov wrote in an email to The Intercept.
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Environment/Energy/Wildlife
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The number of people threatened by rising seas fueled by climate change in the U.S. could be three times greater than previously estimated, with more than six million Floridians at risk under a worst-case scenario, according to a study published Monday.
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Finance
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Whatever the outcome of the United States presidential primaries, let alone the presidential election later this year, there is no doubt that we are watching the strongest challenge to the 30-plus year consensus on the benefits of globalisation.
That pendulum is swinging, embodied in the strength of the campaigns by two ‘outsider’ candidates – Donald Trump on the mercantilist right and Bernie Sanders on the protectionist left – in the US.
From New Zealand’s perspective, their most significant impact may be their capacity to push the US back to the isolationist roots that characterised its engagement with the rest of the international community in the first half of the 20th century.
That isolationism could take many forms, but its greatest appeal to a generation of American workers who feel left behind by globalisation is in its impact on trade policy.
Both Sanders and Trump are, in their own way, wanting to pull up the drawbridge on the last 30 years of global trade liberalisation.
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PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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On the same day that five key states voted in the presidential primaries, startup lobbying shop Engine took a close look at where the candidates stand on important tech issues like privacy, net neutrality, and patent reform. If your views on those issues align with Engine’s, you won’t find their 2016 Candidate Report Card an encouraging read.
After taking a look at the candidates’ records in four policy areas, Democrat Hillary Clinton got the highest overall grade: a B+. Her challenger Bernie Sanders got a B, while Republican candidates ranked lower: C+ grades for Marco Rubio and John Kasich, a D for Ted Cruz, and straight F’s for Donald Trump.
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Bernie Sanders is still in the Democratic presidential primary race, but Hillary Clinton did her best on Tuesday night to pretend that he isn’t.
Clinton used her election night rally to bask in her blowout victories over Sanders in Florida, Ohio and North Carolina, and ignore much closer races in Illinois and Missouri. She paid tribute to Sanders’s “vigorous campaign,” the kind of condescending line that translates into “I won and he lost.” She noted that she has won more votes than anybody from either party so far—a valiant, if not particularly successful, attempt to cast her campaign as the kind of mass movement currently mesmerizing both the Democratic and Republican grassroots. And she spent a lot of time going after Donald Trump, the night’s other big victor and the man who will be the Republican nominee if he can avoid being deposed at the GOP convention.
“Our commander in chief has to be able to defend our country, not embarrass it,” she said. “When we have a candidate for president call for rounding up 12 million immigrants, banning all Muslims from entering the United States, when he embraces torture, that doesn’t make him strong, it makes him wrong.”
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Sanders has plenty of money and plenty of support. He has a real base within the Democratic Party. He will keep winning states. He has had a seismic impact on the 2016 race. But his biggest battle now will be to overcome the twin forces of establishment pressure on him to drop out and a loss of media interest in his candidacy. Both forces were in evidence on Tuesday. Sanders and his supporters will be told repeatedly that the time has come to unite behind Clinton, that the primary race is done. Trump is an exceedingly dangerous candidate on just about every level; the clamor to craft an opposing message to him as early as possible will get louder and louder. The lack of media attention will only grow. It will be a very high tide for Sanders to swim against.
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Journalist John Nichols pays tribute to the investigative journalist, media critic, editor and educator Ben Bagdikian, who has died at the age of 96. Bagdikian wrote the 1983 book “The Media Monopoly,” about how the consolidation of media outlets by a small number of corporate owners threatened free expression and independent journalism. In 1971, as an editor at The Washington Post, Bagdikian received the Pentagon Papers from whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg and transferred them to Alaska Senator Mike Gravel, who entered them into the Congressional Record.
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FAIR contributing analyst Adam Johnson was invited to write a piece for the New York Times‘ “Room for Debate” feature–on the topic “Has Sanders Not Been Taken Seriously Enough?”
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Who is and isn’t a “serious” candidate in our modern public relations-driven democracy is largely tautological. Whoever the news media say is important early on typically becomes the most important. This leads to a feedback loop that anoints the “frontrunner” in the “invisible primary,” where success is measured by name recognition, money raised, party insider support and a host of “serious” accomplishments, all before the most essential of feedback has been provided: actual voting.
This dynamic helped create the artificial consensus around Hillary Clinton early on. According to one tally of nightly broadcast network news during the 2015 primary season, Sanders received a total of 20 minutes of coverage, compared to Clinton’s 121 minutes and Trump’s 327. This gap would narrow once Sanders began to gain parity in early primary states, a feat Sanders achieved not because of media coverage but despite it.
That “frontrunner” status prejudices both viewer and pundit alike when news media presents delegate totals, often including the unearned “super delegates,” despite the fact that their declared preferences are not binding, and could only reverse the will of the voters at the risk of throwing the election. This makes it appear as if Clinton’s lead is more insuperable than it actually is — a vestige of the invisible primary that occurred months before anyone voted.
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Censorship
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First it was Facebook, with the filtered News Feed that shows you as few as one in three of the posts that your friends make.
Then it was Pinterest, which — a year ago — began displaying pins by “relevance” instead of chronology.
Just last month, Twitter provoked an outcry of its own when Buzzfeed reported that it too would introduce, though not compel, an algorithmically ordered feed.
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Zhao Liang’s Behemoth blurs the lines between video art and documentary, visually exploring multiple open-pit coal mines in the sparse hinterlands of China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The film, loosely inspired by Dante’s Inferno, forgoes the spoken word completely. It stylistically melds poetry and performance art to portray the lives of various coal miners and iron smelters as they struggle to produce raw material fast enough for China’s ever-growing economy. The largely plotless film draws one in through the sheer juxtaposition of its monstrous, inhuman-sized landscapes and the intimate close-ups of miners’ soot-covered faces. Though banned from being screened inside China, the film was shown to a packed house in an underground screening room on the outskirts of Beijing this past February. The next day, we sat down in Zhao’s Beijing art studio, where the filmmaker was as wry in his humor as he was cynical, discussing everything from his views on censorship to the relationship between art and activism.
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I still remember one of the first times I went to watch a movie after I moved back to the country. I went to see an independent film on a whim with friends. After barely an hour and a half in the theatre, we emerged with absolutely no idea what had happened. The actual runtime was supposed to be two hours. The evening left me feeling like I had wasted my time and money.
My issue is not necessarily with the censorship itself, but rather with the inconsistency of it. For example, I have watched some movies where scenes have been cut for explicit language but heard that same language in other films. I understand that there are cultural sensibilities to be mindful of and I honestly have no problem when, for example, gratuitous nudity that doesn’t add to the plot is cut. But if part of the storyline or dialogue (even minor bits) is gone, it creates a break that is quiet jarring for the viewer.
When I watched movies at the Abu Dhabi film festival, I noticed the movies were uncut. If it is acceptable for films to be screened in full during festivals, what changes when they go on to be released nationwide?
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Censorship of as many as 10 films, including the trailer of Goutam Ghose’s ‘Sankhachil’ starring Prosenjit Chatterjee, has got stalled in absence of a regional officer at the Central Board of Film Certification’s (CBFC) Kolkata office.
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In the final years before the 1979 Iranian revolution, political freedom in Iran was so restricted that professors caught criticizing the Shah’s regime risked imprisonment.
The repressive environment forced one professor to come up with a very creative way to speak his mind.
“You couldn’t criticize the regime directly – you had to be discreet about it,” Dr. Abbas Milani, a former assistant political science professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977, told Business Insider. Milani is now the director of Stanford University’s Iranian Studies program.
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urkish author Mustafa Akyol, whose book on Islamic liberalism was translated into Malay in Malaysia, has criticised censorship here and in other Muslim countries that he said are now languishing intellectually.
Akyol, who was recently in Malaysia to promote the publication of the Malay edition of his book Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, pointed out that Putrajaya has outlawed more than a thousand books translated into Malay, including Charles Darwin’s On The Origin of Species and Karen Armstrong’s Islam: A Short History.
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Privacy
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As Apple continues to battle the US Government’s desire to work around the security of its mobile operating system, European encrypted email startup, ProtonMail, is choosing the latest skirmish in the crypto wars to launch its end-to-end encrypted email service out of beta — switching from invite-only to public sign ups today.
It’s also launching its first native iOS and Android apps. Previously the free encrypted email client has been accessible via a web interface.
“The best way to ensure that encryption and privacy rights are not encroached upon is to get the tools into the hands of the public as soon as possible and widely distributing them,” says founder Andy Yen, in a blog post announcing the public launch. “This way, we put the choice in the hands of the consumer, and not government regulators.”
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American citizens’ eyes were opened by the awesome power, reach and constitutional violations of the surveillance activities carried out by the National Security Agency and other government agencies, as revealed by the documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013.
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The fallout from Edward Snowden’s 2013 spying revelations is not over yet, according to Richard Ledgett, who ran the National Security Agency’s investigation into Snowden’s leaks.
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In a new court brief filed this week, Apple once again makes its case that the FBI’s request to force it to unlock the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone 5c isn’t constitutional. While this isn’t surprising, it’s notable that the iPhone maker also implies that the NSA might have what it takes to decrypt iPhones for the FBI. It’s just that the Bureau seems not to have sought such assistance.
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As of Feb. 27, encryption protected 77 percent of requests sent from computers around the world to Google’s servers, up from 52 percent at the end of 2013, according to new figures.
Released Tuesday as part of Google’s Transparency Report, the data covers most Google traffic, with the exception of YouTube. The Web giant said it’s aiming to achieve 100 percent encryption across all its products and services.
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The Indian government is proposing legislation which would allow federal agencies access to its enormous biometric database – which last week reached a rough total of one billion citizen records.
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Civil Rights
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It’s amazing how much stuff government agencies “take seriously” and claim they’re handling in accordance to all sorts of secret, but presumably strict, guidelines… once their actions have been exposed.
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The Pentagon has deployed drones to spy over U.S. territory for non-military missions over the past decade, but the flights have been rare and lawful, according to a new report.
The report by a Pentagon inspector general, made public under a Freedom of Information Act request, said spy drones on non-military missions have occurred fewer than 20 times between 2006 and 2015 and always in compliance with existing law.
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America will have a President who supports apartheid, land grab and the continual murder of children.
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Internet/Net Neutrality
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After all, Wheeler had been the top lobbyist for both the cable and cell phone industries, having worked for the National Cable Television Association (NCTA) from 1976 to 1984 and the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) from 1992 to 2004. Though he had left those jobs years before, people wondered if a former lobbyist would properly regulate the industries he once represented.
“Obama’s Bad Pick: A Former Lobbyist at the FCC,” said the headline in The New Yorker on the day after Wheeler’s nomination. Consumer advocacy groups such as Free Press and the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute publicly doubted whether Wheeler would be tough on his previous employers.
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So far, the Canadian government’s attempt to force innovation and lower prices on the Canadian TV industry doesn’t appear to be going so well. As previously noted, the government has demanded that all Canadian cable TV operators begin offering a so-called “skinny” bundles of smaller, cheaper channels starting this month, and the option to buy channels “a la carte” starting in December. But this being the cable industry, companies are finding all manner of ways to tap dance over, under and around the requirements.
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And while this is generally an idea that would benefit all broadband providers, it would benefit new providers like Google Fiber the most. That’s why companies like AT&T, Comcast and Time Warner Cable have been blocking this pole-attachment reform, in some cases trying to claim such policies violate their Constitutional rights. The ISPs figure that if they can’t block Google Fiber from coming to town, their lawyers can at least slow Google Fiber’s progress while they try to lock customers down in long-term contracts.
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DRM
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Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks uncovered a new iOS malware family that takes advantage of vulnerabilities in Apple’s DRM software and can infect non-jailbroken devices. The researchers called the malware “AceDeceiver.”
AceDeceiver uses a novel way of attacking iOS devices by managing to install itself without any enterprise certificates. Instead, it exploits design flaws in Apple’s “FairPlay” DRM mechanism that allow the malware to be installed on non-jailbroken devices.
Apparently, this “FairPlay Man-In-The-Middle” attack was identified for the first time in 2013, but so far Apple still hasn’t fixed it. It’s been used to spread pirated iOS apps so far, but now malware makers seem to be taking advantage of it as well.
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Intellectual Monopolies
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Trademarks
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For whatever reason, we’ve seen all kinds of trademark actions over logos that are claimed to be very similar, but which aren’t. Most often these disputes center on the use of a single identifying thing within the logo, such as the umbrella in the Travelers Insurance logo, or the apple in the logo of, well, Apple. These disputes take trademark law, chiefly designed to aid the public in discerning between brands, and reduce it to slap-fights over the attempted ownership of images of everyday items.
But in the trademark spat between two Brazillian restaurants, Fogo De Chao and Espirito Do Sul, we see this sort of thing sink to a new low as the former is threatening to sue the latter over the use of fire in its logo. Yes, fire. You know, one of the first things early mankind was able to manipulate in order to start down the road of societal progress.
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Bacardi has filed an amended complaint with the US District Court for the District of Columbia in the dispute over the Havana Club run brand and trade mark in the US.
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Copyrights
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I imagine, as a musician, it must be common to come across other music that sounds somewhat similar to one’s own. I would think that not all genres of music are created equal in this respect. Jazz, for instance, while sharing common elements across the genre, seems to have enough instruments and space within the music for unique expression that perhaps similarities occur less often or are less severe than, say, industrial rock, which seems to have some more rigid common core elements. How much similarity is there in songs from Ramstein and Nine Inch Nails, for instance, or in songs from Nine Inch Nails and Powerman5000? Or in songs from Powerman5000 and Final Fantasy XIV…wait, what?
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Restaurants, bars and shops that offer their customers free and open Wi-Fi are not liable for pirating users. This is the advice Advocate General Szpunar has sent to the EU Court of Justice in what may turn out to be a landmark case. While there’s no direct liability, the AG notes that local courts may issue injunctions against Wi-Fi operators and long as they are fair and balanced.
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IN A PRELIMINARY OPINION, a bunch of sage European legal bigwigs have decided that public WiFi hotspots are not responsible for the actions of the general public.
Let’s face it, who would want to be responsible for the actions of the general public?After all, they can get up to all sorts of very silly things, like ride hoverboards or agree with Katie Hopkins.
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If Napster co-founder Sean Parker’s plans come to fruition, the latest movies will be available for viewing from day one in the home via a set-top box. But despite support from big name directors, not everyone is happy. According to a 600 theater chain, Screening Room will only provide quick, quality content for torrent sites.
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The Pirate Party would dominate Iceland’s parliament if elections were held today. That’s the conclusion of a new survey which found that the Pirates appear to be maintaining an impressive lead over their rivals, with around 38% of voters saying they will be voting for the party and kicking the ruling coalition out of power.
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