Common sense says that Microsoft and the FOSS movement should be perpetual enemies. In the eyes of many, Microsoft embodies most of the greedy excesses that the Free Software movement rejects. In addition, Microsoft previously has labeled Linux as a cancer and the FOSS community as a "pack of thieves".
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We shouldn't be slow to forget Microsoft's mantra of Embrace, Extend and Exterminate. Right now, Microsoft is very much in the early stages of embracing Linux. Will Microsoft seek to splinter the community through custom extensions and proprietary "standards"?
In the end, what the horizontal economy aims to pursue is a system of distributed governance, reinvigorating citizens’ inputs into both political and economic processes. In a sense, it is the Linux approach to human and ecosystem well being.
At the core of Cisco's big routers has long been the IOS-XR network operating system. IOS-XR is now evolving, thanks to a rebasing on Linux and the inputs of Cisco's hyperscale web partners.
Would the world really be tremendously different if Linux, the open source operating system kernel, did not exist? Would there be no Internet or movies? Those are the questions some viewers of the Linux Foundation's ongoing "World without Linux" video series are asking. Here are some answers.
In case you've missed it, the "World without Linux" series is a collection of quirky short films that depict, well, a world without Linux (and open source software more generally). They have emphasized themes like Linux's role in movie-making and in serving the Internet.
If you've been curious about what the atomic mode-setting craze has been about within DRM/KMS drivers, here's a recent presentation on the matter.
Laurent Pinchart presented at last month's Embedded Linux Conference Europe in Dublin about the "anatomy of an atomic KMS driver."
Good news, gamers! AMD just launched Radeon Software Crimson for both Windows and Linux.
The Windows drivers saw some serious improvements and contain a slick new control panel. But despite promises of performance improvements for games on Linux, little has changed on open-source operating systems. These are the same old Linux drivers with some new branding.
The new proprietary AMD GPU Driver named Crimson just shipped and I decided to take it for a spin in a set of benchmarks. So, let's see if we see any improvement in the performance of these drivers.
Last week I wrote about the Wayland protocols being split from Wayland and Weston itself. Today marks the version 1.0 release of these protocols.
Wayland-Protocols is an independent repository of the protocols that are now marching to their own release schedule. This also reflects a change in development tactics in that protocol additions/modifications aren't necessarily implemented yet in the Weston reference compositor. However, this is the path they're looking at moving forward.
First of all, let me introduce Kafka, a high-throughput distributed messaging system. It was originally developed by LinkedIn as a backbone of a website activity tracking infrastructure. Once open source, it was developed further under the umbrella of the Apache Foundation. In 2014 Confluent was founded to provide enterprise level support to Kafka users. Kafka is now used by major companies, including Netflix, Twitter and PayPal. There are now many more uses for Kafka: message queuing, log aggregation, stream processing or as a commit log.
As you may know, Nmap is a command-line network exploration tool that supports ping scanning to determine the online hosts, port scanning techniques and TCP/IP fingerprinting for remote device identification.
As you may know, Aptik is an open-source application that enables the users to easily perform and restore backups of PPAs, aplications and packages in Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Elementary OS and other Ubuntu derivates.
As you may know, Linphone is an open-source VoIP service that allows the users to perform voice calls, video calls and text conversations with friends and other Linphone users.
Up to date packages are available via some third party PPA, so installing the software on Ubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf, Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr, Linux Mint 17.x, Elementary OS 0.3 Freya and other Ubuntu derivative systems is easy.
As you already know, Wireshark is an open-source protocol analyzer software, very used for monitoring the network traffic.
Whether you want to learn PHP, Ruby, or Linux, we got a bundle that can teach it all—and then some. Pay what you want for this nine-course Learn to Code bundle at the BGR Store.
Switch Galaxy Ultra looks pretty decent, it has some positive reviews, and it has parts designed by WipeOut co-creator Jim Bowers.
Albion Online is something I have kept on eye on for sometime now, and since I’ve been playing it during the closed beta period here are my initial thoughts on it. This is not a full review, as I will do that once it’s completely out.
We have a real empty spot when it comes to MMORPG games on Linux, and I used to love chilling out in WoW when I was a Windows minion, so finally having one comparable on Linux is great, but is it any good?
Empire TV Tycoon has just today put up their Linux version after sorting out some issues, and I can't wait to give it a go.
I used to love Tycoon games as a younger lad, so this sort of thing appeals to me greatly. I never had a chance to actually play many, I had a lot of demo versions, but never a lot of actual games.
Last week marked the release of Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry that was greeted by a Linux release on the same day as the OS X and Windows game release. Given that there were reports of a command-line driven benchmarking mode, I decided to try out the game. However, in total I spent just ten minutes inside the game.
Well now, Syber discounted their Steam Machine line (all three models), and now all but the highest price machine are sold out. This was a one-day sale, and sadly we missed covering it here, but it's worth noting that it did well.
If you missed out on the massive Steam Machine game sale earlier this month, Valve is running some more sales this week in time for some holiday shopping.
Storm United is easily one of my favourite up and coming FPS games, it needs more players so get going people.
In this latest patch they have fixed the annoying issue for Linux gamers not being able to connect to larger maps, as well as optimizing the Linux version to reduce a bunch of stutter it had. Full patch notes available here.
Unmechanical has been extended with a new chapter, adding more than an hour's worth of puzzles and exploration, and the Unreal Engine 3 powered game is now officially available for Linux. You can buy the Linux version from GOG or Steam, but it does not yet have a SteamOS icon on Valve's distribution platform.
The Steam machine is now publicly on sale as of last week, but it’s not off to the best start. A couple of weeks ago, Ars Technica compared the performance of games when running on Valve’s Linux based SteamOS and Windows 10. Six Valve games were tested on a single machine and results showed a 21 to 58 percent frame rate drop when running on Linux. While only six games were tested out of an entire collection of around 1,800 available titles, the games used Valve’s own Source engine, which is designed for Linux and SteamOS. Valve had previously stated that Steam games run faster on Linux, so it was expected that any of Valve’s own Source engine games would run smoothly.
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 3.6 RC1.
Since the beta, we have fixed many bugs, including an ugly, evasive crash that could happen on code completion, depending on how you used the mouse while typing function arguments (QTCREATORBUG-15275).
On November 25, the Krita developers were happy to announce the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta build of the upcoming Krita 2.9 Animation Edition open-source digital painting software.
Following a successful Kickstarter campaign where the KDE-aligned Krita program raised €30,520, the first beta of Krita 2.9 Animation Edition is now available.
The Yorba Foundation, a group of developers working on applications like Geary or Shotwell, is no more, and the projects are now available through the GNOME stack.
The GNOME developers are still working hard these days on the second milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, which means that we should see more and more updates to various core components and GNOME applications.
In preparation for the GNOME 3.19.2 release, the second development milestone towards the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, the GNOME developers are updating these days many of the project's core components and applications.
Booting operating systems on UEFI powered machines is just another problem that needs to be taken care of by Linux developers. The Solus OS people are now working on a gummiboot fork, which is acting as a UEFI boot loader.
1. MX Linux, the sucessor of MEPIS, is currently at version 15 beta 2. The OS will come in both 32 bits and 64 bits.
The developers of the Arch Linux-based BlackArch GNU/Linux operating system have announced today, November 25, 2015, the immediate availability for download of a new installation media for the distribution.
Earlier today, November 25, we've been informed by Arne Exton, the developer of several GNU/Linux and Android-x86 distributions that are available for download right here on Softpedia, about the release and immediate availability for download of his CruxEX 3.2 operating system.
Today, November 24, the developers of the beautiful KaOS GNU/Linux distribution have had the great pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability of new installation media for the operating system, dubbed KaOS 2015.11.
GeckoLinux is based on openSUSE Leap 42.1, and it exists to make the openSUSE distribution more refined and approachable. It has recently released live installable DVD editions featuring the Cinnamon, XFCE, and Budgie desktop environments. These include many refinements and features not available in the standard openSUSE Leap installation images.
Swapnil Bhartiya today posted an interesting article describing his experiences using Tumbleweed the last weeks from an Arch user's point of view. I feel inspired. Elsewhere, James Darvell asks if the latest Microsoft Linux ceasefire is true love or just toxic and the Linux Migrant noticed MX-15 is in beta. A Slashdot reader today asked if folks will be able to run a modern desktop system into 2016 without systemd. So far, no one has really given him a straight answer.
As a journalist, I have to stay updated with the latest software and rolling releases suit my needs the best. I have been an Arch user for couple of years now and I love it to the core because it's one of the best rolling release available. Prior to Arch, I was an openSUSE user and before that I used Ubuntu.
The reason I moved from openSUSE to Arch was that openSUSE aims at stability and reliability, which means packages take some time to land in official repositories or in the Open Build Service (OBS). On the contrary, thanks to AUR (Arch User Repository) and testing repositories, you can easily install packages even before they are officially released. And since it was a rolling release, I was always running the updated packages without having to reinstall everything every year.
I'm happy to announce the release of virt-manager 1.3.0!
Red Hat's Cole Robinson has announced the release of virt-manager 1.3.0 for open-source virtual machine management.
In the past year, the open source community has helped publish more than 1,000 articles on Opensource.com. Thank you.
Thank you to our readers and open source community members who visit the site, share personal and professional experiences, and participate in online and in-person discussions.
Early this year, David Edmundson from KDE, concluded that "In many cases [systemd] allows us to throw away large amounts of code whilst at the same time providing a better user experience. Adding it [systemd] as an optional extra defeats the main benefit". A perfectly sensible explanation. But, then, one might wonder to which point KDE would remain usable without systemd?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 continues Red Hat's goal of redefining the enterprise operating system by providing a trusted path towards the future of information technology without compromising the needs of the modern enterprise.
Welcome back to our continuing series on systemd features. As you’ve guessed from our previous articles, systemd brings more power and flexibility to service startup and management. One of the most important changes in systemd from legacy SysVinit is how it starts up units.
You may have heard from casual users that systemd starts everything together. Some people believe this is true, and that’s why the system starts faster. But the reality is not quite that simple. Let’s look a little more deeply at how systemd understands unit relationships.
Fedora 23 features the brand new Cinnamon Desktop Spin for users craving a more traditional user interface. The Fedora 23 Cinnamon Desktop Spin features version 2.8.3 of the Cinnamon Desktop which by default features a taskbar and applications menu at the bottom of the screen, and includes many applications that are also present in Fedora Workstation such as Firefox and Terminal. In addition to the applications it shares with Fedora Workstation, the Cinnamon Desktop Spin also ships with its own versions of some applications, including the Nemo file browser. The Cinnamon Desktop Spin also prides itself on being highly configurable by default with Cinnamon Spices, allowing you to easily customize your desktop with new themes, applets, desklets, and extensions.
After informing users about the proposal of various changes in the systemd implementation of the upcoming Fedora 24 Linux operating system, such as systemd file triggers and systemd package split, the Fedora Project developers have published details about more upcoming feature proposals for Fedora 24.
What’s HyperKitty, you may ask? It’s a cute name for something that’s not actually particularly feline (and while we hope you’ll think it’s hyper-good, it’s not hyperactive). It’s a new, modern web interface for all the Fedora mailing lists. At Flock this August, I spoke about how much of Fedora’s vital activity is buried behind increasingly archaic Internet technologies — mailing lists and IRC (Internet Relay Chat). We’ll leave IRC for another day, but HyperKitty is part of the scheme to bring that to the visible web-based world — without taking away the things that are working.
The developers of the well-known Fedora Linux operating system have announced their plans to make the GNOME on Wayland session the default for the upcoming Fedora 24 Workstation Edition.
LinuxDays in Prague – over 1000 registered visitors make it the largest Czech Linux event (if we don’t consider DevConf.cz which is international). As every year, we had a Fedora booth there and we had the first opportunity to give away new Fedora handbooks. A couple of Fedora contributors also delivered talks, I myself spoke on Fedora Workstation and problems of Linux desktop in general.
Today in Linux news, Bruce Byfield hits the cloud nail on the head with his thoughts on the cloud. Are folks sacrificing the independence gained by switching to Linux by trusting cloud vendors? Elsewhere, Bryan Lunduke ponders the perfect Linux distribution and an update on the new Debian Live emerged. Pavlo Rudyi posted a look back at GIMP's 20 years and Samuel Mehrbrodt discussed improving LibreOffice's toolbars.
Earlier today, November 25, Canonical's à Âukasz Zemczak sent his daily report for the day of November 24, 2015, informing all Ubuntu Phone users about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers on the Ubuntu for phones operating system.
Ubuntu's kernel team continues to be focused on having Linux 4.4 for Ubuntu 16.04.
Linux 4.4 is their target for the "Xenial Xerus" since Ubuntu 16.04 is to be a Long-Term Support release and the upstream 4.4 kernel is also being maintained as a long-term release too. Additionally, Linux 4.5 would come too close to the April debut of Ubuntu 16.04 that the developers wouldn't feel comfortable, particularly for an LTS release.
Canonical's Sergio Schvezov informs all users of the Snappy Ubuntu Core operating system for embedded and IoT (Internet of Things) devices about the release of the Snapcraft 0.5 snaps creation utility.
A recent discussion on the Ubuntu Snappy Core mailing list has revealed the fact the operating system for embedded and IoT (Internet of Things) devices will feature a new, much cleaner all-snap architecture.
An Ubuntu user is building the first Unity 8 theme and it looks like that’s not as difficult as people may believe, but the fact that it can be made is more important than the quality of the theme.
Inforce has launched an 85 x 54mm “Inforce 6309 Micro SBC” that runs Linux or Android on a Snapdragon 410 and offers -30 to 85€°C operation and optional PoE.
Qualcomm’s ARMv8, 64-bit Snapdragon 410 has proven to be popular among embedded developers. In addition to Inforce Computing’s new Inforce 6309 Micro SBC, we have seen the quad-core, 1.2GHz Cortex-A53 SoC used in the eInfochips Eragon 410 COM, the Intrinsyc Open-Q 410 COM, and Qualcomm’s own DragonBoard 410c SBC.
Snickerdoodle is a new maker board designed for people who like building stuff ranging from robots to advanced networking, and it can fit in the palm for the hand.
Calao unveiled a modular “Delta P100” IoT gateway with a Linux/Java OSGI programming stack, plus WiFi, 3G/4G, LoRa, SigFox, and other wireless options.
French embedded firm Calao Systems, which we last heard from in September with its Tegra K1-based SMC-NTKE1 SMARC module, has now spun its first Internet of Things gateway. This low-powered Delta P100 runs Debian Linux on the lowly, 700MHz ARM11 SoC that launched a million Raspberry Pi’s: the Broadcom BCM2835. The device is manufactured by Calao partner Eolane.
Remember the world's tiniest computer that goes by the name of C.H.I.P.? Of course you do, it is the world's cheapest single-board computer (SBC) ever made, available for purchase for only $9 (€8.4).
Starting today, shops and newsagents are stocking a computer magazine called The MagPi, and as a world's first, this magazine comes with a free computer—literally stuck to the front cover. It's the newest Raspberry Pi release, called Pi Zero. This computer also goes on sale around the world for just $5.
Earlier this month, popular watchmaker Fossil announced a range of connected fashion items. Among them were a Bluetooth connected analog watch and a fitness band built in to a stylish leather bracelet. But what we were really excited about was the company’s announcement that it was going to build its own Android Wear-powered smartwatch. Today, the Fossil Q Founder is finally available to order…
As of right now, the only model available is the stainless steel Fossil Q Founder which you can pick up directly from Fossil’s online store for $295. If — like me — you were more keen on the brown leather strap model, you’ll have to wait a little while longer. That version of Fossil’s first smartwatch isn’t available just yet. The placeholder page simply says ‘Coming Soon’.
...Google no longer recommends use of the Eclipse IDE.
If you’re looking to get a new Android device this year you’ll want to keep reading for everything you need to know. And while we already detailed the best Android tablet Black Friday deals this year, below is about more than just tablets. How about a 128GB micro-SD card for your LG G4 or Samsung tablet? We have those for the lowest price we’ve ever seen, $39.99.
Now, Nokia is rumored to return to the mobile game by licensing its brand in partnerships with Chinese handset makers. However, due to contractual obligations following the Microsoft deal, Nokia has to wait until 2016 to actually launch a new smartphone.
An Indigogo campaign was recently launched for the Turis Omnia, promising backers a high-security, high-performance, open-source router.
“With powerful hardware, Turris Omnia can handle gigabit traffic and still be able to do much more,” the company said.
“You can use it as a home server, NAS, printserver, and it even has a virtual server built-in.”
Everybody loves Puppet! Or at the very least, an awful lot of people USE Puppet and in the IT world, “love” is often best expressed by the opening of one’s wallet. I know, in the FOSS world wallets are unnecessary, and Puppet does indeed have an Open Source version. However, once one gets to enterprise-level computing, a tool designed for enterprise scale is preferable and usually there is a cost associated.
Puppet was originally started as an open source project by Luke Kanies in 2005, essentially out of frustration with the other configuration management products available at the time. Their first commercial product was released in 2011, and today it is the most widely used configuration management tool in the world with about 30,000 companies running it. According to our own surveys, better than 60% of Linux Journal readers use some form of Puppet already and you must like it too as it regularly finishes at or near the top in Readers’ Choice awards.
Running 3.1 miles through my hometown. Consuming unreasonable quantities of simple carbohydrates, fat and sodium. Pretending that the former activity justifies the latter. These are some of my favorite Thanksgiving traditions.
Here I am, almost 20 years into my own crazy open source story, and it shows no sign of abating.
IBM is aiming to popularise its proprietary machine learning programme SystemML through open-source communities.
My open source story started in high school as a student. I always considered myself to be a hacker—not the malicious type, but the curious type who liked to tinker with code and hardware. My first encounter with open source was in 2001 when I installed my first Linux distro, Lindows. Of course, I was also an early user of Mozilla Firefox.
For many years, Firefox developer Mozilla generated substantial income from a sponsorship deal with Google; the search and advertising firm paid Mozilla in return for Firefox making Google its default search engine. That deal was ended last year, with Firefox defaulting to Yahoo in the US, Yandex in Russia, and Baidu in China.
From blocked videos to annoying ads, there are many things about YouTube we don't like. These restrictions and distractions only dampen the amazing experience that the video-sharing website is meant to provide. If you are a Firefox user, however, you won't have to worry about such things. Firefox offers a variety of add-ons that let you fix pretty much any annoyance that YouTube has. Furthermore, they also let you download videos right to your desktop so that you can watch them whenever you want, even without a connection.
Mozilla has announced the release of a new maintenance version of the popular, open-source, and cross-platform Mozilla Thunderbird 38 email and news client for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.
As you may know, Pale Moon is an open-source, cross-platform browser based on Mozilla Firefox, being up to 25% faster then the original.
Palemoon is based on Firefox, has support for the official Firefox extensions, but does not contain all of the Firefox features, including: social API, accessibility features, WebRTC and has some specific customizations and configuration options which are not available on Firefox.
To build your own cloud and take advantage of the power of the open source powered OpenStack project takes dedicated resources and a good bit of learning. Due to the size of the project and the pace of development, keeping up can be difficult. The good news is that there are many resources to help, including the official documentation, a variety of OpenStack training and certification programs, as well as community-authored guides.
LibreOffice might be a great office suite, but the community doesn’t like the fact that the UI still looks kind of dated. The good news is that anyone with some coding skills can try to fix that by working on the project.
With the Design team, we are working on improving toolbars in LibreOffice. This is part of our long-term goal, making LibreOffice “simple for beginners and powerful for experts“.
Toolbars in LibreOffice are currently quite limited: A toolbar can have icons, or custom widgets, in a row. You can switch between icon-only, icon+text or text-only display.
The new API-based service will aim to "provide a way for beneficiaries to connect their data to the applications, services and research programs they trust," Mark Scrimshire, a member of the Entrepreneur-in-Residence program at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, writes at the HHS Idea Lab blog.
Apple has told us it intends making Swift 2.0 open source “later this year”, a move some developers are calling “monumental”, a “huge milestone in the evolution of the programming industry.”
The area51 repository continues to update, even as the official ports tree for FreeBSD sticks with KDE4. Since the KDE-FreeBSD team is also responsible for the official ports, that basically means that not everything has been shaken out yet, and that the team doesn’t feel that it can provide a really good Frameworks5 / Plasma5 / Applications installation .. yet. I’ve been playing with ideas for a default desktop wallpaper (the upstream default gives me a headache; I’d really like to combine Flying Konqui by Timothée Giet with bubbles made from the BSD logo.
GNU.org has a category on its website named “Philosophy of the GNU Project,” where the Microsoft software is described as malware, along with Apple and Amazon.
There are a number of important organizations in the Open Source and Free Software world that do tremendously valuable work. This includes groups such as the Linux Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, and others.
Today Software Freedom Conservancy announces a major fundraising effort. Pointing to the difficulty of relying on corporate funding while pursuing important but controversial issues, like GPL compliance, Conservancy has structured its fundraiser to increase individual support. The organization needs at least 750 annual Supporters to continue its basic community services and 2500 to avoid hibernating its enforcement efforts. If Conservancy does not meet its goals, it will be forced to radically restructure and wind down a substantial portion of its operations.
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) – superb open source and free graphics editor. Development began in 1995 as students project of the University of California, Berkeley by Peter Mattis and Spencer Kimball. In 1997 the project was renamed in “GIMP” and became an official part of GNU Project. During these years the GIMP is one of the best graphics editor and platinum holy wars “GIMP vs Photoshop” – one of the most popular.
I’m winding down for a month away from Infinity. The current status is that the language and note format changes for 0.0.2 are all done. Y
FCC will not seek to ban free software from wireless routers, according to a clarification it made earlier this month on a rulemaking related to radio devices. An earlier draft of the official proposal included a specific reference to device manufacturers restricting installation of the open-source project DD-WRT.
Open-source voting systems bring a greater level of transparency and accountability by allowing the public to have access to the source codes of the system, which is used to tabulate the votes. A system owned by The City could also save taxpayers money.
Building a business in an open and collaborative way can be a wonderfully rewarding experience, engaging both the members of the organization as well as the customers in a unique relationship based on common, transparent goals, while growing a sense of community around the venture.
Last year, Shaun McCance wrote an article for Opensource.com, 4 tips from growing a community grocery store, where he shared his experiences from the initial steps of building a co-operative (co-op) grocery store in his hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio, applying similar practices that many open source software projects use in software development.
Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city, is requiring the use of open IT standards for all of its future IT projects. This way, the city aims to rid itself of IT vendor lock-in. Aarhus is currently ”fenced in by contracts, proprietary software and proprietary standards”, says Camilla Tække, leading the change management project for the city. “This is a change in culture, not just as a technical one.”
Coe may be a Tory Lord, but he is a disgrace not fit to lead international athletics. When will the British learn that corruption is not something that just happens abroad? If the standards of British public life were ever higher, we have the living breathing examples of Sebastian Coe and Tony Blair to show us what a sleazy entity Britain has now become.
What do a few geeks do when they find themselves on the way to Dublin for LinuxCon Europe? They make a side trip to Bletchley Park, of course. Seeing the place where Alan Turing, father of computer science, broke the German Nazi Enigma codes in the second World War was quite an experience. In this article, Jeffrey Osier-Mixon (community manager at the Yocto Project at Intel) and I describe a few of the highlights of our geeky and wonderful side trip.
Bletchley Park was one of Britain’s best-kept secrets, and for decades after the war, the people who worked there were still sworn to secrecy. The work at Bletchley Park is believed to have saved thousands of lives and shortened the war by about two years, but it wasn’t until 2009 that the people working at Bletchley were publicly recognized for their service. For more about the history, read an in-depth story on the Bletchley Park website.
Cybercrime has cost Australians $1.5 billion and the rise in ransomware attacks has contributed to that figure. While ransomware is known to target personal computers, holding data on those machines hostage and demanding ransom, this kind of attack is being used by criminals to go after websites as well. Linux web servers are now being targeted by a new variant of ransomware.
Already a scourge on personal computers, as well as personal websites, ransomware is now going after Linux web servers, according to a new blogpost from Malwarebytes.
Scheuer’s proudly sociopathic views should come as no surprise. In December 2013, he called for the assassination of President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron...
Leading international cultural figures have joined human rights campaigners in calling for the release of Ashraf Fayadh, the Palestinian poet and artist facing execution in Saudi Arabia.
Chris Dercon, the director of Tate Modern, British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, historian Simon Schama, playwright David Hare, and Egyptian novelist and commentator Ahdaf Soueif are among the those calling for the death sentence imposed on Fayadh by a Saudi court last week to be overturned.
More than a dozen organisations for artists, writers, musicians and freedom of expression from the UK, North America and Africa – including Index on Censorship, literary association PEN International and the International Association of Art Critics – have also signed a joint statement condemning Fayadh’s conviction for renouncing Islam, a charge which he denies.
In the midst of its worst fire crisis in living memory, the Indonesian government is taking a leap backward on forest protection. The recently signed Council of Palm Oil Producing Nations between Indonesia and Malaysia, signed at the weekend in Kuala Lumpur, will attempt to wind back palm oil companies' pledges to end deforestation.
This is despite Indonesia’s efforts to end fires and palm oil cultivation on peatlands.
If successful the move will undo recent attempts to end deforestation from palm oil production, and exacerbate the risk of future forest fires.
That throws a rather lurid light on what could be done with the €£175 billion admitted cost of Trident, if we lived in a society with less crazed values.
Despite its impact, few book-length assessments of the foundation’s work have appeared. Now Linsey McGoey, a sociologist at the University of Essex, is seeking to fill the gap. “Just how efficient is Gates’s philanthropic spending?” she asks in No Such Thing as a Free Gift. “Are the billions he has spent on U.S. primary and secondary schools improving education outcomes? Are global health grants directed at the largest health killers? Is the Gates Foundation improving access to affordable medicines, or are patent rights taking priority over human rights?”
As the title of her book suggests, McGoey answers all of these questions in the negative. The good the foundation has done, she believes, is far outweighed by the harm. In education, she maintains, most of its initiatives have either gone bust or failed to deliver on their promises. The foundation’s first great education initiative focused on creating small schools in place of big ones, on the assumption that doing so would allow students to receive more individualized attention. From 2000 to 2008, it spent $2 billion to establish 2,602 schools across the United States, affecting a total of nearly 800,000 students. Unfortunately, the experiment failed to improve college acceptance rates to the degree that the Gateses had hoped, and so they abruptly terminated it.
Instead, the foundation channeled its resources into a host of other initiatives — increased data collection on teacher effectiveness, the introduction of performance-based teacher pay, more standardized testing for students. The foundation has invested heavily in charter schools and vigorously backed the Common Core, which sets national reading and math standards. These are all key elements of the so-called school reform movement. Arne Duncan, as head of Chicago’s public schools, worked closely with both the Gates and Broad foundations, and as President Obama’s secretary of education he sought to implement many of their ideas.
McGoey (along with many others) is sharply critical of this movement. She cites studies that show that charter schools have performed no better or worse than traditional public schools, and she notes that the Gates Foundation itself has backed away from its once vocal support for assessing teacher performance on the basis of student test scores. While the willingness of the Gateses to change their minds in the face of evidence is admirable, McGoey writes, the reforms they championed “are now entrenched. For many teachers and students, their recent handwringing over the perils of high-stakes testing has come a little too late.”
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On one point, however, McGoey is convincing — the need for more analysis of this powerful foundation and the man and woman at its head. Bill and Melinda Gates answer to no electorate, board, or shareholders; they are accountable mainly to themselves. What’s more, the many millions of dollars the foundation has bestowed on nonprofits and news organizations has led to a natural reluctance on their part to criticize it. There’s even a name for it: the “Bill Chill” effect.
That’s not to say that there has been no critical coverage of the foundation’s work. Diane Ravitch has excoriated Gates along with the rest of the school reform movement in her book The Death and Life of the Great American School System, as well as on her blog. The New York Times and other papers have offered occasional close examinations of Gates’ work. And Joanne Barkan, in a 2011 article in Dissent titled, “Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools,” offered a thoroughgoing critique of the education work of Gates and its fellow foundations. In another Dissent article on “how big philanthropy undermines democracy,” Barkan complained that “the mainstream media are, for the most part, failing miserably in their watchdog duties. They give big philanthropy excessive deference and little scrutiny.”
That may be changing. Alessandra Stanley, writing in the Times in late October, offered a skeptical assessment of the outsized claims made by Sean Parker and other Silicon Valley philanthropists. “Tech entrepreneurs believe their charitable giving is bolder, bigger and more data-driven than anywhere else — and in many ways it is,” she observed. “But despite their flair for disruption, these philanthropists are no more interested in radical change than their more conservative predecessors. They don’t lobby for the redistribution of wealth; instead, they see poverty and inequality as an engineering problem, and the solution is their own brain power, not a tithe.”
[...]
We need more probing accounts of this sort. The power of the new barons of philanthropy is only going to grow. The risks they take and the bets they make will no doubt become bolder. If journalists don’t hold them accountable, who will?
As reported by Politico, The New York Times has responded to Donald Trump's recent mockery of one of its reporters who helped debunk the presidential candidate's false claim that he saw "thousands and thousands" of Arab-Americans cheering as the World Trade Center collapsed under the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Many members of the public believe the internet is subject to a completely different set of laws when it comes to defamation. Fortunately, sanity (mostly) continues to reign when courts apply REAL laws to newfangled message delivery systems. There are exceptions, of course. An Australian court recently declared Google to be the "publisher" of defamatory content posted by other people at other websites, but returned in search results. A Canadian court found a blogger personally liable for republishing defamatory statements made by others.
Dell ships Windows computers with software that lets websites slurp up the machine's exact specifications, warranty status, and other details without the user knowing.
This information can be used to build a fingerprint that potentially identifies a person while she browses across the web. It can be abused by phishers and scammers, who can quote the information to trick victims into thinking they're talking to a legit Dell employee. And, well, it's just plain rude.
A website created by a bloke called Slipstream – previously in these pages for exposing security holes in UK school IT software – shows exactly how it can work.
I don't go so far as Richard Stallman, who condemns clouds as a proprietary trap to be avoided at all costs. However, if you are going to use commercial clouds, encrypt your data with a key that only you or your company members possess. Better yet, set up a private cloud, and secure it to your satisfaction.
Reddit has decided to honor ‘Do Not Track,’ a feature that will ensure that it does not download third-party analytics on to browsers that enable the option.
The DNT option allows users to ask their browser to send websites they access a request or signal to opt-out, for example, from third-party tracking for purposes such as behavioral advertising. But as Reddit points out, websites can interpret the signal however they want and most ignore it.
Let's Encrypt is a non-profit Certificate Authority (CA), run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG), which aims to make the process of getting X.509 certificates for Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption a trivial process, as well as cost-free.
What if, in response to the terrorist attacks in Paris, or cybersecurity attacks on companies and government agencies, the FBI had come to the American people and said: In order to keep you safe, we need you to remove all the locks on your doors and windows and replace them with weaker ones. It's because, if you were a terrorist and we needed to get to your house, your locks might slow us down or block us entirely. So Americans, remove your locks! And American companies: stop making good locks!
I must say that I’m extremely skeptical that it is really technically “impossible,” or even highly impractical, to maintain the anonymity of past comments. If the newspaper really valued its readers’ privacy, and the promise that seems to me to be made in the Privacy Policy (and that is in any event implicitly expected by commenters), I would think that some technical solution would have been eminently possible, even if it would involve some modest expense and hassle. (For instance, I assume the tech people could just replace the real names in all the existing user entries with the screen names, and then block any future posts from those now-fully-anonymous accounts. That would require users to create new real-name-based accounts, but that seems a modest price to pay for maintaining the privacy of the old accounts.)
A MEMO ABOUT HOW the George W. Bush administration interpreted a ban on assassination can be kept secret, along with other legal documents about the drone war, a federal appeals court said in a ruling made public Monday.
For several years, the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times have been suing to wrench documents from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Council that outline the rationale for killing suspected terrorists. Specifically, they sought the release of the justification for drone strikes that killed three U.S. citizens in Yemen in the fall of 2011: Anwar al Awlaki, his 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman al Awlaki, and Samir Khan.
If you want to keep believing that, you should on no account read the latest State Integrity Investigation from the Center for Public Integrity and Global Integrity. It grades state governments on criteria including electoral oversight, legislation accountability, lobbying disclosure and public access to information, and the results are not good.
Female genital mutilation is still practised at a rate of one girl every 11 seconds around the world in 29 countries. At least 130 million women and girls live with the consequences of having their sexual organs forcibly mutilated, with many suffering from fistula, maternal mortality, child mortality, infection from Aids and typhus, and post-traumatic stress.
Just 10 minutes before Yahya Jammeh, president of the Gambia, announced on Monday night that the controversial surgical intervention would be outlawed in his country, Jaha Dukureh, an anti-FGM campaigner, received a call from the president’s office to let her know that her work had been successful. They told her the president would announce that the Gambia was moving into the 21st century and there was no place for FGM in the modern state.
My name is Damien Echols, and in 1993 I was arrested for three counts of capital murder in the town of West Memphis, Arkansas. Nine months later I was sentenced to death, and spent almost 19 years on death row before being released in 2011 when new evidence came to light.
Prison is a dark and stagnant place. It's filled with the most cold, horrendous energy you can imagine. It feels like a kind of psychic filth that penetrates into your very soul.
Much of magick is about is learning to change states of consciousness at will. I learned to use meditation and ritual as shields. They prevented the hellish energy of prison from changing me and making me more like the people all around me—people who had given up on even trying to be human.
I host my blog on small machine somewhere in OVH. As part of package I got IPv6 address for it. Five minutes ago I decided to no longer use it.
Bernd Lange, chair of the European Parliament international trade committee, has sent a letter to EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmström regarding the EU commission’s investor-to-state dispute settlement (ISDS) reform proposal.
His letter shows that he overlooks many deficiencies in the commission’s proposal, among them perverse incentives. The proposed system lacks integrity and would undermine our values. I will go through his letter line by line.
YouTube to litigate copyright infringement/fair use actions on behalf of users harassed by subject to inappropriate DMCA takedown requests?
This is apparently what is going to happen soon, as IP enthusiast Nedim Malovic (Stockholm University) explains.
Trouble continues for one of the largest Internet providers in the United States, with a Lloyds underwriter now suing Cox Communications over an insurance dispute. The insurer is refusing to cover legal fees and potential piracy damages in Cox's case against BMG Rights Management and Round Hill Music.
C4C and several of its signatories co-signed two open letters, one addressed to the European Commission and the other to the European Parliament, in order to share our concerns regarding the European Commission’s current approach on copyright matters in its public consultations.
The English Court of Appeal has ruled that record label Cayman Music does not own the copyright to 13 songs composed by musician Bob Marley, including the hit “No Woman, No Cry”.
Lord Justice Kitchin was joined by Lady Justice Arden and Lord Justice Lloyd Jones in ruling that the 13 songs were part of a 1992 agreement in which Cayman Music transferred the rights to Island Records.
As you hopefully already know, we take a bit of a different view of ad blockers around here on Techdirt, recognizing that many people have very good reasons for using them, and we have no problem if you make use of them. In fact, we give you the option of turning off the ads on Techdirt separately, whether or not you use an ad blocker. And we try to make sure that the ads on Techdirt are not horrible, annoying or dangerous (and sometimes, hopefully, they're even useful). Most publications, however, continue to take a very antagonistic view towards their very own communities and readers, and have attacked ad blockers, sometimes blocking users from reading content if they have an ad blocker. Perhaps no publication has fought harder against ad blockers than German publishing giant Axel Springer, the same company that frequently blames Google for its own failure to adapt.
German media giant Axel Springer, which operates top European newspapers like Bild and Die Welt, and who recently bought a controlling stake in Business Insider for $343 million, has a history of fighting back against ad-blocking software that threatens its publications’ business models. Now, it’s taking that fight to mobile ad blockers, too. According to the makers of the iOS content blocker dubbed “Blockr,” which is one of several new iOS 9 applications that allow users to block ads and other content that slows down web browsing, Axel Springer’s WELTN24 subsidiary took them to court in an attempt to stop the development and distribution of the Blockr software.
A group of major Hollywood studios have won a default judgment against the operators of MovieTube and several associated websites. The movie studios have been awarded a total of $10.5 million in statutory damages and control over a few dozen MovieTube domains, which were taken offline earlier this year.