I've looked at specialty distributions that were created for engineers and biologists in previous articles, but these aren't the only scientific disciplines that have their own distributions. So in this article, I introduce a distribution created specifically for astronomers, called Distro Astro. This distribution bundles together astronomy software to help users with tasks like running observatories or planetariums, doing professional research or outreach.
From the very first moment of booting up Distro Astro, you will notice that this distribution is aimed at astronomers. The look and feel of items, from the boot splash screen to wallpapers and screensavers, have all been given an astronomical theme. Even the default
Dell's education-focused Chromebook 11 was surprisingly one of the best Chromebooks we've ever used, even though it was notoriously difficult to actually purchase for much of last year. Now, Dell is taking what it learned from last year's launch and releasing a new, upgraded Chromebook 11 that feels just as solid as last year's model at first glance. The first Chromebook Dell produced was a well-built, well-rounded machine with no glaring defects — and it appears the new model offers the same solid combo.
The open-source Docker application virtualization container project has become a defacto standard for applications containers over the course of the last year. But it's a defacto standard that isn't a real specification and is one that is being challenged by Linux distribution vendor CoreOS.
The first major milestone release from the open-source Docker project in 2015 debuts with new features that will pave the way for the year ahead.
The open-source Docker project rolled out its 1.5 release on Feb. 10, providing users of the application virtualization container technology with new networking and visibility capabilities.
Linux Kernel 3.18 is still used in numerous distributions of GNU/Linux, despite that fact that Linus Torvalds announced the final release of Linux 3.19 kernel on February 8, 2015, so it is time to update it to version 3.18.7, which was announced by Greg Kroah-Hartman a few hours ago, on February 11.
The PowerPC architecture updates for the Linux 3.20 kernel, including some improvements for the Sony PlayStation 3 game console.
While Sony long ago removed the "Other OS" functionality from the PlayStation 3, it seems some open-source developers are still working on the PS3 support for Linux.
Geoff Levand landed a few PS3 kernel patches for mainline Linux kernel integration via the 3.20 POWER pull request.
Over the last year SUSE and Red Hat have released live kernel patching solutions named kGraft and Kpatch respectively. Although the two companies didn’t realise it, they were actually developing the software at the same time, after they were both released they decided to work together to bring a combined system to the upstream Linux Kernel, now it’s foundations will be released in the Linux 3.20 kernel.
Linux 3.19 was just released and my usual overview of what the next merge window will bring is more than overdue. The big thing overall is certainly all the work around atomic display updates, but read on for what else all has been done.
Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative open source project developing a common, Linux-based software stack for the connected car, today announced that Eureka Inc., Mcloudware, Microchip, Moscow Design Bureau and Wind River are joining The Linux Foundation and AGL to advance the creation of an open source reference platform to help the industry rapidly innovate and build the cars of the future.
Following yesterday's release of the Linux 3.19 kernel is the newest version of the GNU Linux-libre kernel that strips out kernel functionality dependent on binary-only microcode/firmware images.
Originally, there was kSplice as a standalone project that implemented stop_machine()-based patching for the linux kernel. This project got later acquired, and the current owner is providing live patching as a proprietary service, without any intentions to have their implementation merged.
The XFS changes targeting the Linux 3.20 kernel have been published, but this time around the file-system work isn't particularly exciting.
The changes queued by Dave Chinner for the XFS file-system in Linux 3.20 include...
Last month IBM announced the z13 micro-processor for their z13 mainframe computers. IBM claims the z13 is the "world's fastest microprocessor" and now with Linux 3.20 there's full support.
There's new input drivers for Linux 3.20 and improvements to the existing input drivers with this next kernel version.
As usual, the next version of the Linux kernel will bring a number of prominent changes to Intel's open-source DRM graphics driver.
Trusted Platform Module 2.0 (TPM 2.0) is to be supported by the Linux 3.20 kernel.
While many Linux users and free software advocates are opposed to TPM, TPM 2.0 is going to be supported by the next version of the mainline Linux kernel. Trusted Platform Module technology has already been supported by the mainline Linux kernel but TPM 2.0 breaks backward compatibility with TPM 1.2. TPM 2.0 supports many more alogirhtms, crypto primitives, root keys, and authorization differences. For those learning about TPM for the first time or are just unfamiliar with the differences to TPM 2.0, see the Wikipedia page for a basic overview and the Trusted Computing Group's TPM 2.0 FAQs.
Mesa Git master was branched into Mesa 10.5 this weekend and the latest Git code then bumped to Mesa 10.6-devel. While Mesa 10.5 is a step closer to being released, officially it still only supports OpenGL 3.3.
X.Org and Mesa developers have begun thinking about interesting projects for student developers to get involved in for this year's Google Summer of Code while prospective students should also begin to think about getting involved with X.Org/Mesa development.
Days after branching Mesa 10.5, Emil Velikov went ahead today and put out the first release candidate for the upcoming Mesa 10.5.
NVIDIA today finally mainlined their Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix (VDPAU) support for handling video decode of H.265 / HEVC.
X.Org members will soon be voting on whether the X.Org Foundation should dissolve its 501(c)3 state and become a project of SPI.
A couple of days ago, we found some detailed information regarding the new features and improvements that will be implemented into the forthcoming VLC Media Player 3.0.0 release while we were digging through the Internet, and decided to share it with you on this space, so that you have an idea on what to expect from the upcoming release of VLC.
For those not closely following the development of the VLC open-source, cross-platform media player, the VLC 2.2.0 release is coming soon while further out is VLC 3.0 and it will be even more magical.
Containers are the hottest topic in the data center. Here are the essentials that every well-informed IT pro should know and be able to explain.
I’m not too fond of terminals. This guide is for new GNOME contributors like me whose brain capacity for terminal commands is only so-so big. I will introduce you to 8 git commands worth remembering. I assume only vague familiarity with git: pulling, pushing and committing.
Albino Lullaby is a really freaky looking horror adventure that should be coming to Linux, and it's using Unreal Engine 4.
Nightside is a recent discovery on Steam Greenlight that immediately attracted my attention, and the developers replies to me have been very encouraging.
Apotheon is a heroic action game set within the vibrant world of Ancient Greek Mythology. Ascend Mount Olympus, wrestle the divine powers from the Pantheon of Gods, and save mankind.
Feral Interactive have been great for Linux with their ports, and it's time we took a proper look at XCOM: Enemy Unknown. This has been played through with the expansion Enemy Within which I feel is an essential extra.
KDAB has been working very hard on Qt3D after it fell apart for Qt 5.0 back in the day during Nokia's Qt shafting. The new version of the Qt3D module is nearly ready but not fully-baked, which is why Sean Harmer of KDAB proposed today that this be a "tech preview" feature of the next Qt tool-kit update.
Last night was a sleepless night in all the good ways; I’m excited for the upcoming Plasma Sprint, and knowing I’ll be packing myself into a cigar tube and flinging myself across the North Atlantic Ocean is too much for me to sleep over. I had promised a commenter (too long ago) I would make green cursors, so I decided to make good on my word. After it took 5 minutes I needed more; and the wafting smell of my bread maker inspired me to make a Bread cursor theme. Once that was done, sufficiently delirious, I sent my weird bready message to the VDG. They appear to have ignored it – a wise decision. They’re busy people doing actual work.
The Akonadi-Qt5 release isn't quite ready now. So we're directly creating our own IMAP connection. This is not ideal, as writing an IMAP client is not trivial, but as a starting point, this seems to work well.
We can bet that many of you are eagerly awaiting for the forthcoming GNOME 3.16 open-source graphical desktop environment, which is used with great success on numerous Linux kernel-based operating systems, including Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu GNOME.
After finding plenty of top 5 to top 50 distro lists, one name really stuck out. Just the name. Zorin OS. Its was a freaky cool name. I installed it quick and... Updates. I was dealing done with Windows updates so I won't lie that I was erked. Then I found out what the 500MB of downloads were for. All of the preloaded software and I flipped.
After releasing the first GNU/Linux distribution with Linux 3.18 kernel a couple of days after its launch back in December 2014, Arne Exton did it again, as he just announced today on Twitter that the his Exton|OS with MATE has been updated to version 150211 and includes a custom 3.19.0-5-exton kernel package based on the upstream Linux kernel 3.19.
The Robolinux developers had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download and testing of a brand-new edition of their open-source computer operating system, this time built around the modern and beautiful KDE Software Compilation graphical desktop environment. It is a distro where the main emphasis is on running Windows applications natively.
Dejan Petrovic, the developer of the recently introduced ChaletOS computer operating system informed us today, February 12, that he just pushed a February 2015 release on his servers, urging users to update to it as soon as possible. The new ISO images are available for download right now (see link at the end of the article) for 32 and 64-bit PCs, bringing assorted bugfixes and improvements.
Rather than writing blog articles and helping people, I decided to wind down during the evenings by baking bread. The kneading process relaxes the mind while it exercises the muscles (and relieves back pains). My son does not mind… he eats all I bake anyway. Sourdough in the weekend and regular yeasted breads during the working week. The aromas coming from the oven right now are making me feel hungry again at 10:30 PM.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers the ideal platform for both traditional and cloud-enabled workloads
Red Hat Inc. continues to form partnerships to position its OpenStack cloud platform as a leading contender in the new era of software-defined networking and network functions virtualization.
One of the planned Changes in Fedora 22 is to make DNF the default console package manager, instead of yum. As part of this, we have been converting Anaconda, the Fedora installer, to use DNF rather than yum. At present, in Fedora 22 images, anaconda will use DNF by default but the yum code is still present and switchable with a kernel parameter (inst.nodnf).
I met Matthew at LinuxCon 2013 and have been hounding him for an interview ever since then. He’s worth the wait, though. He really gets under the hood of his GNOME setup and he has some great things to say about the power of open source software. Also, I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating: Fedora has been great for me lately. I know there have always been Fedora fans, but my experience with it was always that there were one or two annoyingly broken things in each release. But 21 is solid. Like Ubuntu solid. And that’s thanks to the work of people like Matthew.
Fedora 22 will ship with GCC 5, which brings a whole host of enhancements, among which is a new default C++ ABI. In this article, we’ll cover how that ABI transition will work in Fedora.
While Fedora 21 has been officially released on December 9, 2014, and users worldwide still enjoy the powerful operating system on their desktop or server computers, the time has come to look at the future and see what the forthcoming Fedora 22 release has prepared for its dedicated users.
While Fedora 22 isn't being released for several more months, so far it's running quite well.
For something about 15 years I was using Debian distribution and ones which derived from it (like Ubuntu). Basically whole time I used development versions of them and amount of issues was nearly not existing. Now I run Rawhide…
I recently acquired a vServer hosted by Server4You and decided to install a Debian Wheezy image. Usually I boot any device in backup mode and first install a fresh Debian copy using debootstrap over the provided image, to have a clean system. In this case I did not and I came across a few glitches I want to talk about. So hopefully, if you are running the same system image, it saves you some time to figure out, why the h*ll some things don't work as expected :)
The best software, whether it’s operating systems or anything else, is predictable. You read the documentation, or explore the interface, and you can make a logical prediction that “when I do action X, the result will be Y.” grep and cat are perfect examples of this.
We've been hearing rumors about a Meizu MX4 handset with Ubuntu Phone for quite a while now, yet there's been no official word on the matter yet – not for the MX4, nor for the MX4 Pro.
Carbonado Intermedia and are two digital media companies owned by Nestle Snipes (typically referred to as Nes Snipes). Carbonado produces animated sitcoms such as Budz, while Auteuristic is a traditional digital video production company focused on live series, including the Times Square Chronicles’ video version of their newspaper, Times Square Beat. Budz and the Time Square Beat are being leveraged by properties such as Verizon and Dish Network.
Linux 3.20 To Fully Support The IBM z13 http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-3.20-s390-IBM-z13
96Boards, the open hardware specification for ARM boards out of the Linaro Community Board Group, has out their first ARM board certified against their consumer edition standard.
Aaeon’s “EPIC-BDU7ââ¬Â³ SBC uses Intel’s 5th Gen Core processors, and offers multiple graphics, GbE, USB, and SATA ports, plus mini-PCIe and PCI-104 expansion.
Aaeon’s EPIC-BDU7 single board computer uses the same old-school EPIC form factor adopted by its Atom-based EPC-CV1 board, but instead loads up with Intel’s brand new 5th Generation Core processors using the 14nm “Broadwell” architecture. Aaeon typically supports Linux on its SBCs, and although no OS support was listed, Linux should run on this board with no problem.
Google's team in Japan connected 300 smartphones and tablets with different animated characters "singing" through the devices' speakers for your listening pleasure.
Android 5.0 Lollipop may not feel like the most stable operating system Google has ever put out, though a new report seems to claim otherwise. According to data from mobile application performance management solution Crittercism, application crash rates are .2% lower on devices running Lollipop than devices running iOS 8.
While Apple may have beaten Android when it comes to sales, when it comes to stability the new Android 5.0 Lollipop beats Apple's iOS 8.
According to data from mobile application performance management specialists Crittercism, app crash rates for the Lollipop are 0.2 percentage points lower than for iOS 8.
Android Lollipop: 2.0% crash rate iOS 8: 2.2% crash rate
AOpen’s rugged “MEP320ââ¬Â³ media player and signage device runs Android 4.2.2 on a 1GHz Freescale i.MX Quad, and offers a thin profile and dual HDMI ports.
This week the LG G3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update finally arrived for users in the United States. A few weeks ago LG started teasing that it was “coming soon” for all users, and as of February 10th the LG G3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update is officially rolling out in the U.S. starting with AT&T.
The LG G3 Android 5.0 Lollipop update is finally here and delivering tons of new features and changes to LG’s flagship smartphone, but the Android 5.0 Lollipop update is also causing problems for many. The update initially started outside of the US, and then this week the AT&T LG G3 finally received Android 5.0 Lollipop, and we’re hearing Sprint is up next.
Quantified-self enthusiasts – those who are somewhat obsessed with using technology to better understand themselves, their daily habits and personal trends – have been fortunate to have a wide variety of niche apps to choose from for measuring everything from athletic activity, to travel time, and even time you’ve spent using your smartphone on a given day. But for the most part, you would have to download a handful of apps in order to log this data. Newly launched Instant 2.0, now available on Android, instead is offering a single destination for tracking nearly everything you want to record, including phone usage, app usage, fitness activity and traveling.
OnePlus kind of let us believe it would show us at least a preview of its new OxygenOS today, but instead we’ve got news on who is going to develop the new OS – some of the leading figures behind Paranoid Android.
You might have heard OnePlus has formed a dev team to build its OxygenOS ROM. They even did an AMA on the /r/Android subreddit today. Among the bits of info revealed by the team is the fact that OxygenOS won't be open source. Instead it will be a "real OS." Steve "Cyanogen" Kondik couldn't resist poking fun at that.
One Plus has been teasing their OxygenOS (replacing CyanogenMod) and fans have been waiting for an announcement as to when they would see this custom Android ROM on their One devices. Today One Plus made an OxygenOS announcement – but not about the ROM itself. Instead they introduced the team that is developing the ROM, and that very team includes developers from the popular ROM Paranoid Android.
Most Moto G devices around the world have already received Android 5.0 Lollipop, but while Android One devices are already running on Android 5.1 Lollipop, we are expecting the new software update to roll out to other devices, too. A Moto G was spotted running Android 5.1 Lollipop, which leads us to believe that a soak test might have begun for the new OTA update.
According to Tech Droider, one of their readers sent in a photo of a Moto G 2014 running on Android 5.1 Lollipop, build number LXY22E, supposedly received on February 2. It’s a bit odd that the image hasn’t surfaced online if the update had rolled out to this particular user more than a week ago, so take this rumor with a grain of salt. Even though a soak test for the Moto G Android 5.1 Lollipop update is the most likely scenario, we can’t be sure that the photo wasn’t faked or manipulated.
Traditionally thought of as intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (ISR), or kinetic action platforms, unmanned systems are now filling roles such as command and control communications, meteorological survey, and resupply, and explosive ordnance disposal platforms. Historically, these platforms have been developed and fielded as standalone systems built by different vendors with unique and often proprietary payloads, control mechanisms and data formats. But this process has created limitations on interoperability and increased costs, leading the DoD to look at other, more viable options, including commercially supported open source middleware.
The shockwaves generated by Edward Snowden's revelations of the close collaboration between US tech giants such as Microsoft and Apple and the NSA are still reverberating through the industry. Those disclosures, together with related ones such as the involvement of the NSA in industrial espionage, as well as the asymmetric nature of US law when it comes to gathering data from foreign individuals, present something of an open goal for non-US technology companies - or so one might have thought.
On the face of it, then, it is surprising that non-US technology firms and others that can distance themselves from the US law are not proclaiming this fact more loudly. After all, there must be a considerable number of organisations that would dearly love to locate their data as far away from the attentions of the NSA as possible.
When you choose not to work in the open, what are your reasons? Are they Good, Bad or Ugly? What are your suggestions for how those of us who want to work more in the open can all do better?
The popular, open source Node.js JavaScript runtime engine is getting a new foundation to manage its development, in a move that could help mend the recent schism in the project's community.
Google’s latest foray into the open-source realm is a framework it’s calling “PerfKit,” which is designed to measure application performance in the cloud, the company announced Wednesday.
The Apache Software Foundation has, since those early days, been at the forefront of challenging problems. Within the context of this article, the ASF has both fostered, and continues to host keynote scientific projects such as Apache OODT (a Top Level Project at the ASF which originally came from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory), to recently incubating projects such as Singa (an efficient, scalable and easy-to-use distributed platform for training deep learning models used currently within Deep Convolutional Neural Network and Deep Belief Network as examples).
Corporations that seek to control the Web, massive government and corporate surveillance, chilling effects on free expression — all of these issues will be harder to address if the next billions coming online think that the Internet exists solely within the walled gardens of platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp. The greatest danger is people relinquishing their control to gatekeepers that get to decide the rules about what we see and what we create.
When I first heard of Mozilla Open Badges, my heart skipped a beat. Wisely implemented, digital badges can help individuals and communities focus their energies on worthy goals.
"Warehouse-grade" automation is the key to the future of big data and distributed computing. So says infrastructure provider StackIQ, which today has rebranded its products and unveiled new automation features for Docker and other technologies that it believes will be crucial to next-generation enterprise data centers.
The open-source OpenStack Foundation grew its' revenue based by 52 percent in 2014 over 2013. OpenStack Foundation 2014 revenue came in at $17.5 million.
As 2015 began, Blue Box, which offers private cloud services based on OpenStack to big companies including Viacom, announced a new round of $4 million in funding on top of the $10 million the company raised late last year. The fruits of that funding appear to thriving, as the company has now, with Alliance Technology Group, announced a joint development program that will deliver an on-premise version of Blue Box Cloud in the second quarter of 2015.
MapR and Mesosphere are announcing a new open source big data framework (called Myriad) that allows Apache YARN jobs to run alongside other applications and services in enterprise and cloud datacentres.
The open source cross-platform document-oriented database company MongoDB has reached version 3.0 this month.
The new iteration sees significant changes in its storage layer performance and scalability.
Creating an artificial pancreas is now open source, reported Boing Boing.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the tech world is a loathsome hotbed of rapacious venture capitalists, airheaded trend-riders, and publicity hounds. That’s the image presented by much of the tech press, which prizes stories about the Montgomery Burnses of the tech world over ones about its more idealistic denizens.
With the new website, we’ve decided to revise how we promote and handle payments. We understand that this has rubbed some people the wrong way, and in the spirit of addressing concerns, we’ve decided to write this post. Keep in mind that this was a really difficult post to right. It covers sensitive territory, and it becomes difficult to choose the right words without offending anyone. That said, here’s our best explanation:
Elementary OS has attracted a lot of attention lately. But a controversy is brewing over how the distro developers are setting up their new site for payments by users. The Elementary OS site is being redesigned to encourage users to pay for the distro. But should the Elementary OS developers expect a payment in the first place?
Jahia is getting a $22.5 million cash infusion from Invus, a New York City-based investment firm, the Geneva, Switzerland-based open source content management system (CMS) vendor announced today.
EdgeBSD remains one of the newer BSD distributions that is a fork of NetBSD but switches from CVS to Git for source code management.
Everybody's favourite audio hacker Alexandre Ratchov (ratchov@) is inviting you to a concert in Grenoble (France).
Valentine's day is this Saturday and, if you're like us, you're either trying to pick the right gift or wishing you had someone to exchange gifts with. We wish you luck with that. But there's something important that you can do regardless of your relationship status:
Now that Cutelyst is allowing me to write web applications with the tools I like, I can use it to build the kind of web applications I need but am not fine with using the existing ones…
Cutelyst, the Qt/C++ web framework just got another step into API stabilization.
Since 0.3.0 I’ve been trying to take the most request per second out of it, and because of that I decided to replace most QStrings with QByteArrays, the allocation call is indeed simpler in QByteArray but since most of Qt use QString for strings it started to create a problem rather than solving one. Grantlee didn’t play nice with QByteArray breaking ifequal and in the end some implicit conversions from UTF-8 were triggered.
The Defense Information Systems Agency is launching a web-based, open source collaboration tool for the Defense Department that provides webconferencing, chat and instant messaging functions for employees based in the U.S. and abroad.
This is the latest installment of our Licensing and Compliance Lab's series on free software developers who choose GNU licenses for their works.
In this edition, we conducted an email-based interview with Rainey Reitman, Activism Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, about their new EFF Alerts mobile app.
Running communities around projects is all about getting the job done, and getting it done well. If you don't nurture a community, it won't grow and produce. Then, if you get that right but fail to maintain and organize things so that the people involved, your community, can continue to succeed and feel happy doing it, your project's growth and success won't last long.
Facebook is taking its crusade for open networking to a broader battlefield, using its 16-port “Wedge” switch design as the basis of a new modular platform that can link together racks of servers across a data center.
Part of it has to do with most farmers being, at a fundamental level, DIY enthusiasts. The prospect of a tractor that can automatically collect data to track crop growth and offer suggestions on how to make growth more efficient sounds useful to most farmers—and it is. Of course, as most farmers are DIY and handymen types to begin with, they tend to tinker with any device, whether it’s making a knife sharper, or trying to expand the capabilities of a complex high-tech machine.
It's good to see more government agencies moving in this direction. It would be even nicer to see shorter time frames for the embargo, and even further commitment to releasing the data beyond just "exploring," but this is good for science, data, learning and innovation.
That sentence was taken directly from Open Source Hardware Statement of Principles 1.0, a preamble of sorts located in the definition section of the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA) website. Part blog, part doctrine, the site serves as a hub for this ever-growing community of creators.
One thing that's been endlessly fascinating about the fledgling virtual reality industry is the amount of collaboration and cooperation going on between disparate companies. First you had Valve providing its research to Oculus, then Oculus and Samsung partnered up for GearVR.
Razer today announced that support for the Open Source Virtual Reality (OSVR) ecosystem has grown to 38 members with the recent addition of 13 new partner companies. OSVR claims to be building from the ground up "the best Virtual Reality gaming experience," and offers a unified - but innovative - approach to input devices, games, and output.
Joining in on the heated discussion that originated over Richard Stallman voicing concerns over adding LLVM's LLDB debugger support to Emacs, Eric S Raymond has come out to once again voice his support in favor of LLVM/Clang and express his feelings that GCC's leading days are over.
Despite criticisms such as it having a "cryptic syntax," the Perl language has remained prominent in language popularity assessments, even if popularity has declined and a planned upgrade has been slow to appear. Designed by Larry Wall, the scripting language is suited for tasks ranging from quick prototyping to Web programming and system management tasks, and it's part of the prominent LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL Perl/PHP/Python) open source stack. At the recent FOSDEM conference in Brussels, Wall revealed intentions to have the long-awaited Perl 6 release out in a beta version in September and generally available by December. Wall answered some questions from InfoWorld Editor at Large Paul Krill via email about what's planned for the language and responded to criticisms.
Get started using the open source R programming language to do statistical computing and graphics on large data sets
Your daughter comes home from school with a report card studded with A's. You (1) give her a hug and raise her allowance or (2) ground her and tell her you know she'll never do this well again.
Perversely enough, too many pundits and academics have chosen option No. 2 since Apple CEO Tim Cook presented investors the company's most recent financial report card -- a fourth-quarter earnings story that featured record sales at Apple, rapid growth, and (most important) a quarterly profit that is the largest ever recorded by a publicly traded company.
A young Russian woman has died after her charging iPhone fell into the bathtub in her Moscow flat.
Yevgenia Sviridenko, 24, who was originally from Omsk, more than 2,000 miles from the Russian capital, was discovered by her flatmate in the bath on Monday evening, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper reported according to The Moscow Times.
The Apache Software Foundation is out this week with patches for its Tomcat Java middleware server. What interested me most about the update was that it was for flaws first reported in 2014.
The US destruction of Fallujah in 2004 was a prime motivation for the growth of ISIS.
The Senate on Thursday confirmed Ashton Carter as President Obama’s new secretary of Defense in a 93-5 vote.
Carter, 60, will be the 25th secretary of Defense and Obama's fourth. He is expected to be sworn into office next week
As the U.S. continues to bomb the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, President Obama asked Congress today to approve a new legal framework for the ongoing military campaign.
The administration’s draft law “would not authorize long-term, large-scale ground combat operations” like Iraq and Afghanistan, Obama wrote in a letter accompanying the proposal. The draft’s actual language is vague, allowing for ground troops in what Obama described as “limited circumstances,” like special operations and rescue missions.
The authorization would have no geographic limitations and allow action against “associated persons or forces” of the Islamic State. It would expire in three years.
Ukraine’s security service arrested a journalist on treason charges Sunday after he posted a video online urging people to dodge the country’s new military draft, his wife and officials said.
Ruslan Kotsaba — a television journalist from the western region of Ivano-Frankivsk — was ordered held in custody for 60 days pending investigations, his wife, Uliana, wrote on Facebook.
Just weeks after a coup that ousted Yemen’s Western-backed government, the capital of Yemen is a city painted in green, mostly with spray paint.
Green tree trunks, green sidewalks, green walls and even a green Ford F-350 bearing the Houthi slogan, which includes the words “Death to America,” on each side of the iconic American truck, about 340 of which the Pentagon shipped to Yemen over the past few years.
President Obama has sent Congress a formal request to authorize military force against the Islamic State six months after the U.S. began bombing Iraq and Syria. The resolution imposes a three-year limit on U.S. operations, but does not put any geographic constraints. It also opens the door for ground combat operations in limited circumstances. The resolution’s broad language covers military action against the Islamic State as well as "individuals and organizations fighting for, on behalf of, or alongside [ISIS] or any closely-related successor entity in hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners." The resolution also leaves in place the open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force Congress enacted one week after the Sept. 11, 2001, which has been used to justify U.S. action in Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Yemen and beyond, and which Obama had previously called for repealing. We speak with Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and author of many books, including "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death."
PRESIDENT OBAMA is going before Congress to request authorization for the limited use of military force in a battle of up to three years against the Islamic State. On the surface, this looks like a welcome recognition of Congress’s ultimate authority in matters of war and peace. But unless the resolution put forward by the White House is amended, it will have the opposite effect. Congressional support will amount to the ringing endorsement of unlimited presidential war making.
Whatever else they decide, the House and Senate should revise the White House initiative to guarantee that it won’t have this tragic result. First do no harm; before proceeding with a debate over the limits of our continuing military engagement, Congress should make it impossible for future presidents to evade its final decision.
He is a liar of course, someone who did not tell the truth no matter the reason or excuse, a bad trait for a journalist. Williams lied about being RPG’ed in a helicopter over Iraq; he did not see any variant of what you can see in the photo above. And that’s not a hard thing to “misremember.”
But if there is any reason to forgive Williams, it was that he was seduced by both his own conflation of his sad little life as a talking head and the “brave troops,” and, more clearly, by the process of embedding with the military. I know. I saw it.
As Washington is not a partner to the Minsk peace deal, how can there be peace when Washington has made policy decisions to escalate the conflict and to use the conflict as a proxy war between the US and Russia?
A New York City police officer was indicted Tuesday in the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man in a Brooklyn public housing complex stairwell in November, several people familiar with the grand jury’s decision said.
The Obama administration has informed lawmakers that the president will seek a formal authorization to fight the Islamic State that would prohibit the use of “enduring offensive ground forces” and limit engagement to three years. The approach offers what the White House hopes is a middle way on Capitol Hill for those on the right and left who remain deeply skeptical of its plans to thwart extremist groups.
Public docketing and confirmations to the clerks in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia by the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, who was responsible for filing all three search warrants for WikiLeaks staffer’s email content in March 2012, reveal that Google waited six months to disclose the existence of the search warrants by the U.S. Department of Justice, despite a May 15, 2014 ruling by Magistrate Judge John F. Anderson to unseal the search warrants for the limited purpose of informing the three WikiLeaks staffers.
Google is facing renewed questions about its handling of subscribers’ private information following the revelation that it waited six months after the lifting of a gagging order to alert WikiLeaks that emails and other data belonging to its employees had been passed to the FBI.
U.K. taxpayers have now forked out US$15 million on a two-year-old siege of the Ecuadorean embassy.
It turns out that oil companies in California didn’t inject wastewater into of usable aquifers, with the state’s permission, hundreds of times — it was more like thousands.
Samsung has been doing a great job this week illustrating why consumers should want their televisions to be as dumb as technologically possible. The company took heat for much of the week after its privacy policy revealed Samsung smart TVs have been collecting and analyzing user living room conversations in order to improve voice recognition technology. While that's fairly common for voice recognition tech, the idea of living room gear that spies on you has been something cable operators have been patenting for years. And while Samsung has changed its privacy policy language to more clearly illustrate what it's doing, the fact that smart TV security is relatively awful has many people quite justly concerned about smart TVs becoming another poorly-guarded repository for consumer data.
About 20 minutes into this electrifying, often terrifying documentary, the film-maker shows for the first time the man we have come to know as Edward Snowden. The ex-NSA employee who blew the whistle on the US Government's spying on its citizens is a familiar face only because of 24 hours of interviews this film's maker compiled over eight days in a Hong Kong hotel room. But when he first appears, he's talking to Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald about how they will deal with what Greenwald calls "the 'you' story".
A federal court in San Francisco sided with the U.S. Department of Justice, ruling that the plaintiffs could not win a significant portion of the case—a Fourth Amendment challenge to the NSA’s tapping of the Internet backbone—without disclosure of classified information that would harm national security. In other words, Judge Jeffrey White found that “state secrets” can trump the judicial process and held that EFF’s clients could not prove they have standing.
Advocates for less government snooping suffered a blow Tuesday when a federal judge in California ruled that a group of citizens can not sue the National Security Agency to stop the "upstream" collection of their data.
The most half-baked "weapon" in any policeman's arsenal should never be raised to the level of a felony. "Resisting arrest" is the charge brought when bad cops run out of better ideas. This truism runs through nearly every law enforcement agency in the country. When you take a look at videographers and photographers who have been arrested for exercising their First Amendment rights (and backed by a DOJ statement), you'll see plenty of "resisting arrest" charges.
A 37-year-old woman has died after deputies in northern Virginia used a Taser stun gun on her while she was in custody.
Natasha McKenna of Alexandria was taken off life support Sunday, five days after she was stunned at the Fairfax County jail, the Fairfax County Sheriff's Office said in a news release.
McKenna was in the process of being transported from the Fairfax County jail to the Alexandria city jail Tuesday when deputies say she failed to comply with their commands and resisted them. A deputy then used a Taser to restrain her, sheriff's Lt. Steve Elbert said Monday.
In the South Carolina prison system, accessing Facebook is an offense on par with murder, rape, rioting, escape and hostage-taking.
Back in 2012, the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC) made “Creating and/or Assisting With A Social Networking Site” a Level 1 offense [PDF], a category reserved for the most violent violations of prison conduct policies. It’s one of the most common Level 1 offense charges brought against inmates, many of whom, like most social network users, want to remain in contact with friends and family in the outside world and keep up on current events. Some inmates ask their families to access their online accounts for them, while many access the Internet themselves through a contraband cell phone (possession of which is yet another Level 1 offense).
With just 59,000 residents, the Pasco police department in Washington state have shot and killed four people in the past six months—more than police in the entire United Kingdom, which has over 80,000,000 citizens, in the past three years combined. In fact, Pasco police are on pace to have more police shootings than Germany, also with 80,000,000 citizens, over the current 12 month period.
Each year, Reporters Without Borders issues a worldwide ranking of nations based on the extent to which they protect or abridge press freedom. The group’s 2015 ranking was released this morning, and the United States is ranked 49th.
That is the lowest ranking ever during the Obama presidency, and the second-lowest ranking for the U.S. since the rankings began in 2002 (in 2006, under Bush, the U.S. was ranked 53rd). The countries immediately ahead of the U.S. are Malta, Niger, Burkino Faso, El Salvador, Tonga, Chile and Botswana.
Media freedom has suffered a 'drastic decline' worldwide last year in part because of extremist groups such as Islamic State and Boko Haram, the watchdog group Reporters Without Borders says. - See more at: http://www.skynews.com.au/news/world/europe/2015/02/12/-drastic-decline--in-world-media-freedom.html#sthash.dLBZAYMJ.dpuf
I didn’t know Yusor Mohammad, Deah Shaddy Barakat or Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha — the victims of Craig Stephen Hicks’ shooting spree in Chapel Hill, North Carolina – but I recognize them. Anyone who has spent time in American Muslim communities would, and that’s partly why this horrible crime is so painful. I realize I’m making assumptions and maybe getting sentimental in the process, but I can’t help it. The personalities that come through from the testimonies of friends and family, the record of the efforts and achievements of these young people, and the photographs that radiate such joy and life are all too familiar to miss.
Not all conservatives used the death of American hostage Kayla Mueller to highlight the brutality of the Islamic State — some decided to focus their disgust on the 26-year-old's humanitarian work for Palestinians.
"No tears for the newly-departed Kayla Mueller, the ISIS hostage whose parents confirmed today that she is dead," conservative blogger Debbie Schlussel wrote on Tuesday, under the headline, "Kayla Mueller: Dead ISIS Hostage Was Jew-Hating, Anti-Israel Bitch."
"Mueller was a Jew-hating, anti-Israel piece of crap who worked with HAMAS and helped Palestinians harass Israeli soldiers and block them from doing their job of keeping Islamic terrorists out of Israel," she wrote.
Schlussel condemned Mueller's humanitarian work in the "so-called 'West Bank'" to prevent the demolition of "terrorists' 'houses.'"
A press freedom advocate -- and husband of an American servicewoman -- went to the U.S. embassy in Azerbaijan, fearing for his life. But he was turned away.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hikmet Hajiyev said in this regard that the investigation carried out under the court verdict discovered that chairman of the Institute for Reporters' Freedom and Safety Emin Huseynov has engaged in illegal business over unregistered grant contracts, making a great deal of money – AZN 1,575,956 – but evading from taxes AZN 247,551 tax to be paid to the state budget.
Caracas, February 11th, 2015. (Venezuelanalysis)- The German Embassy in Caracas has alarmed political observers in Venezuela by publishing what the press has described as an "alarming” official declaration to its citizens in the South American country.
Published on February 5th, the declaration is written and signed by the Chargé d’Affaires at the German Embassy, Dr. Jörg Polster. It began to make the rounds on social media networks over the last two days.
In the statement, German diplomat Polster informs readers that the embassy is extremely “worried” about the current situation in the country and advises German residents to take a number of “precautions in the face of the crisis”.
Bipartisan lawmakers aim to make renunciation of Israel boycott efforts in Europe a key negotiating point in largest free trade deal in history
President George W. Bush was fond of saying that “9/11 changed everything.” He used that one-liner often as a purported moral basis to justify the radical restructuring of federal law and the federal assault on personal liberties over which he presided. He cast aside his oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution; he rejected his oath to enforce all federal laws faithfully; and he moved the government decidedly in the direction of secret laws, secret procedures and secret courts.
During his presidency, Congress enacted the Patriot Act. This legislation permits federal agents to write their own search warrants when those warrants are served on custodians of records — like doctors, lawyers, telecoms, computer servers, banks and even the Post Office.
Such purported statutory authority directly violates the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees the right to privacy in our “persons, houses, papers and effects.” That includes just about everything held by the custodians of our records. Privacy is not only a constitutional right protected by the document; it is also a natural right. We possess the right to privacy by virtue of our humanity. Our rights come from within us — whether you believe we are the highest progression of biological forces or the intended creations of an Almighty God — they do not come from the government.
Nationalists and anti-imperialists marched to commemorate the 116th year of the Philippine-American War on Feb. 4, with a call to make President Aquino, suspended Police chief Alan Purisima, and the US government accountable for the recent Mamasapano deaths.
An Egyptian court on Thursday ordered the release of two journalists jailed for more than a year on charges of broadcasting false news in a conspiracy with the Muslim Brotherhood.
The release followed the publication this week of a previously undisclosed opinion by Egypt’s highest appeals court condemning the journalists’ conviction as baseless when it ordered a retrial at the beginning of this year. The release also comes at a time when the Egyptian government appears to be trying to allay some of the international criticism it has received after a series of harsh and hasty criminal convictions issued during a crackdown on dissent after the military takeover in July 2013.
On Monday, February 9th, Matt DeHart’s parents, Paul and Leann, received notice by mail from the Refugee Protection Division of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board that the family’s claim for Refugee Protection had been denied. The family fled the United States after Matt was interrogated and tortured during an FBI espionage investigation in which child pornography charges were hastily filed after Matt was detained at the Canadian border, an action which was triggered by an espionage alert.
Matt DeHart claims that all his troubles stem from a file uploaded, twice, to a Tor server he ran out of a closet in his parent’s home. An FBI investigation into something the CIA might have done.
Mr. DeHart testified the pornography charges are a ruse to investigate an espionage and national security probe tied to his involvement in Anonymous and his operation of a “hidden” Internet server used to leak a classified U.S. government document, likely destined to WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing organization.
Jails across the country have become vast warehouses made up primarily of people too poor to post bail or too ill with mental health or drug problems to adequately care for themselves, according to a report issued Wednesday.
The study, “Incarceration’s Front Door: The Misuse of Jails in America,” found that the majority of those incarcerated in local and county jails are there for minor violations, including driving with suspended licenses, shoplifting or evading subway fares, and have been jailed for longer periods of time over the past 30 years because they are unable to pay court-imposed costs.
Google has long been behind the SPDY networking protocol as a faster alternative to HTTP 1.1. With the HTTP/2 draft standard being based on SPDY, Google is preparing to sunset the SPDY protocol support within the Chrome/Chromium web-browser.
The MPAA, RIAA and other entertainment industry groups keep hammering on Canada for its lacking anti-piracy enforcement. The groups label Canada a "safe haven" for both file-sharers and online pirate sites, and ask the U.S. Government to intervene.
In a fuming blog article, David Newhoff claims that non-infringing, legal uses of copyrighted works – that is, of people’s own property – are like “aggravated rape” when made without unneeded consent of the monopoly holder. Newhoff tries to scold the crucial concept of “fair use” in copyright monopoly doctrine, the concept which explicitly says that some usages are not covered by the monopoly and therefore not up to the monopoly holder, and ends saying that if you don’t grant permission and can’t set limits, it’s “aggravated rape”. Just when you think copyright monopoly zealots can’t sink any lower, they surprise you with one of the few creativities they’ve ever shown.
YouTube's automated takedown tool is known for its flaws, but this week it crossed a line by attacking a purring cat. According to YouTube's Content-ID system both EMI Publishing and PRS own the rights to a 12 second purring loop. The cat in question, Phantom, has filed a dispute and hopes to reclaim his rights.
Mocking the ridiculous "Special 301 report" from the US Trade Representative has become something of an annual sport around these parts. As we've explained, the whole concept of the report is something of a joke: copyright, patent and trademark maximalists send in reports to the USTR, claiming which countries don't do enough to respect US intellectual property, and the USTR -- via no systematic or objective process -- rewrites those complaints into a report that declares certain countries "naughty" for their practices. The whole thing is such a joke that even those in the government will openly mock it. As I've said in the past, I once saw the head of the US Copyright Office openly joke about the purely arbitrary nature of the 301 report at a conference. Countries like Canada -- which are regularly named to the report, despite having copyright laws that are, in many areas, more stringent than the US's -- have openly declared that they do not find the Special 301 process to be legitimate, and thus do not pay any attention to it. A couple of years ago, Chile also made it clear that it felt the 301 process was illegitimate.
Empornium, one of the leading private torrent trackers for adult content, says it believes a copyright troll gained access to a staff moderation account and is now using obtained data to threaten its users. The revelations may shine light on why some Empornium users have received settlement threats with no lawsuit filed and no notice from their ISPs.
The move might be an effort to appear more legitimate to advertisers and others within entertainment content distribution circles. The BitTorrent file-sharing protocol is often linked with users of the downloading software exchanging content in violation of intellectual property laws. The first project under this original video distribution agreement is the movie Children of the Machine.