As I mentioned when The Queue launched, although typically I will answer questions from readers, sometimes I'll switch that around and ask readers a question. I haven't done so since that initial column, so it's overdue. I recently asked two related questions at LinuxQuestions.org and the response was overwhelming. Let's see how the Opensource.com community answers both questions, and how those responses compare and contrast to those on LQ.
That is the claim of Karl-Heinz Schneider, the head of IT at the City of Munich's IT services provider [email protected], the company behind the City's desktop Linux implementation. In an interview, he claimed that there were no "compelling technical reasons" for the authority to order a migration back to Windows, suggesting that political interference was behind the move.
With the controversy now escalating into a very public debate, it's currently unknown which operating system Munich will be using for the next decade. Linux is currently deployed on 20,000 computers across the city. Converting them all back to Windows will take months of further work.
While it's attracted the most attention, Munich isn't the only city to have shunned Windows in favour of open-source software. Last September, Moscow abandoned Microsoft's Outlook email program in favour of its own system. Concerns about the use of proprietary software in government departments have also been raised across the world, including in the UK where a long-running but slowly progressing campaign is encouraging Linux usage
Accenture has expanded its relationship with Docker to enhance its existing multicloud Container as a Service solutions. The company will leverage Docker Datacenter to provide enterprises with the capabilities needed to secure the software supply chain, expand workload portability, and improve application resilience.
If you’re a systems administrator choosing a Linux distribution for your workstation, chances are you’ll stick with a fairly widely used distro such as Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, Debian, or one of their close spin-offs. Still, there are several security considerations you should weigh when picking which distribution is best for your needs.
The Linux Sucks presentations really are about how Linux sucks, but Lunduke usually contrasts all the ways the Linux can be difficult or frustrating with the merits and benefits of a free and open source operating system. For example, a newcomer might find the amount of choice daunting, even a developer would be frustrated with trying to pick a solution when there are so many choices for everything (like desktops, sound daemons, package managers, window decorators…), but this is also one of the strengths of Linux, and Lunduke makes sure to emphasize that.
Monitoring software company BigPanda recently published its second annual State of Monitoring report, which provides data and a few answers. It is based on responses from over 1,500 IT pros. When comparing the 2017 and 2016 reports we found that many things have not changed. The top IT concerns are about security and downtime. The top IT monitoring challenges are quick remediation of service disruptions, getting money to buy monitoring tools and reducing the number of unimportant alerts being generated. Interestingly, even the top performance key performance indicators (KPIs) are the same, with customer satisfaction cited by 73 percent, followed service level agreements (SLAs) compliance, incident volume and mean time to repair (MTTR).
Software-defined networking (SDN) for L2 and L3 (layer two and three) networking and network function virtualization (NFV) for L4-L7 network services have remained elusive for many IT departments due to the lack of maturation of the technology or specialized skills needed to implement them. But, network automation doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition. Software-defined approaches for application and networking services combined with scripting and orchestration tools such as Ansible are enabling practical approaches to network automation that doesn’t require boiling the ocean. In this article, I’ll examine some best practices for network automation in L4-L7 services that can drive immediate improvements in your network.
There is a dramatic shift underway in how many in house, and commercial, DevOps tools are being created and used
The growth in interest in serverless computing continues at pace, and for many organisations serverless technologies such as AWS Lambda, Azure Functions or Google Cloud Functions are becoming an essential part of their development and operations toolkit.
An overwhelming 86 percent of respondents to a Chef survey of IT practitioners have completed or are in the progress of migrating from a physical infrastructure to a virtual one.
Chef interviewed more than 1,500 global IT workers that use Chef servers and found that many emerging and legacy technologies are being rebuilt around the needs of developers. In addition, companies are piloting and adapting new technologies like cloud, containers, and microservices in search of speed.
The HPC community is trying to solve the critical compute challenges of next generation high performance computing and ARM considers itself well-positioned to act as a catalyst in this regard. Applications like machine learning and scientific computing are driving demands for orders of magnitude improvements in capacity, capability and efficiency to achieve exascale computing for next generation deployments.
ARM has been taking a co-design approach with the ecosystem from silicon to system design to application development to provide innovative solutions that address this challenge. The recent Allinea acquisition is one example of ARM’s commitment to HPC, but ARM has worked with the HPC community to develop compilers, libraries, and other key tools that are now available for ARM HPC deployments in 2017.
In general, Hsu says, IT organizations are making it clear that they need platforms that go well beyond merely orchestrating containers and images. Applications running in production environments require access to a full range of services that IT operations teams need to be able to manage at scale, he says. Container orchestration engines such as Kubernetes may meet the requirements of an individual developer, but most IT operations teams are looking manage multiple applications accessing hundreds of services that all need to be centrally managed, says Hsu.
Shippable CEO, Avi Cavale and Joyent CTO, Bryan Cantrill join for a fireside chat to learn what both organizations are currently up to, and what contributions are ahead for the microservices ecosystem.
In December 2016, Solomon Hykes, the founder of Docker, announced a re-focused containerd (Con-tay-ner-D) initiative, spinning out the core container runtime from the Docker Engine community project. At the time, it wasn't entirely clear where containerd would land, but now the picture has come into focus, as Docker is sending containerd to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Canonical published a few moments ago a new security notice to inform users of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users about the availability of a kernel update for their systems.
Two kernel vulnerabilities are affecting Ubuntu 16.04, 16.04.1, and 16.04.2 users that are still using a kernel from the long-term supported Linux 4.4 series, including the Linux kernel for Raspberry Pi 2 devices, Snapdragon processors, as well as Google Container Engine (GKE) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) systems.
After releasing the Linux 4.10.3 and Linux 4.9.15 LTS kernels, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the availability of the fifty-fourth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series.
Immediately after announcing the availability of Linux kernel 4.10.3, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman released the fifteenth maintenance update to the long-term supported Linux 4.9 kernel series.
That's right, we're talking about Linux kernel 4.9.15 LTS, which comes only three days after the release of the Linux 4.9.14 patch, which shipped with numerous improvements. Linux kernel 4.9.15 LTS is half of the previous update, and according to the appended shortlog, it changes a total of 82 files, with 690 insertions and 342 deletions.
The statx system call was added to Linux 4.11 for providing enhanced file stats. While the statx() system call is in place for Linux 4.11, not all of the file-systems yet support it.
Linaro developers are hoping to merge the generic TEE subsystem into the Linux 4.12 kernel this spring.
TEE is short for the Trusted Execution Environment and is a trusted OS running in a secure environment, such as TrustZone on ARM CPUs or a separate secure co-processor. We've previously covered the work on TEE for Linux and obviously not everyone is happy about "trusted" computing efforts on Linux and implementations like TEE.
It's been far too long since the last announcement - lots of stuff has been happening. The biggest milestone has been all the breaking on disk format changes finally landing, but there's been lots of other stuff going on, too.
On the subject of the breaking on disk format changes - there's an excellent chance this'll be the last breaking change, so if you're thinking about trying out bcachefs this is an excellent time. Also, if you have a filesystem in the old format, code to read your filesystem is available in the bcachefs-v0 braches of both linux-bcache and bcache-tools.
The long-standing patches for implementing threaded OpenGL dispatch have landed in Mesa 17.1-devel Git.
Marek Olsak and then Timothy Arceri took to getting OpenGL threaded dispatch across the finish line and they've managed to do so over night in Mesa Git.
The code for OpenGL threaded GL dispatch is now finally in Mesa-git, after multiple developers attempts to fix it up. This should improve performance in multiple games for users of the open source Mesa drivers.
Pipeline statistics queries is the latest Vulkan capability being added to the Intel "ANV" Mesa Vulkan driver.
Pipeline statistics queries allow applications to query a set of Vulkan pipeline counters. Developers interested in learning more about the feature can see the Vulkan documentation.
While the AMDGPU "GCN" compiler support in LLVM is quite mature now, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) hasn't yet received a full-fledged GCN compiler back-end for AMD GPUs. SUSE developers have been working on that for AMD and today they have published their code branch. This GCN back-end for GCC is primarily focused on compute capabilities rather than compiling graphics shaders.
At the beginning of today, OpenGL threaded dispatch landed in Mesa as work that's existed in patch form for years but was recently revived for Mesa Git due to the potential for significant performance gains in select scenarios.
Michel Dänzer announced today the general availability of new maintenance updates for the open source AMDGPU (xf86-video-amdgpu) and Radeon (xf86-video-ati) graphics drivers.
xf86-video-ati 7.9.0 and xf86-video-amdgpu 1.3.0 are now available for download and they are coming soon to a GNU/Linux distro near you to improve your gaming experience if you're using an AMD Radeon graphics card.
Both releases come with the ability to use DRM render nodes for DRI3 clients if they are available, and allow the TearFree option to be toggled at runtime by using a RandR output property called "TearFree."
Here’s an interesting one, a developer from NVIDIA noted on the Linux Kernel Mailing List that NVIDIA has been designing some new open source drivers. So I did some digging and got an interesting response.
Given AMD's Ryzen is a very new platform, some Phoronix readers have inquired whether a given distribution is a faster and better-supported than others. Here are tests of Ubuntu, Clear Linux, Debian, Antergos, Fedora, and openSUSE tested with an AMD Ryzen 7 1800X system.
With this week's LLVM 4.0 release making the LLD linker ready for production use on some platforms, namely ELF on x86_64 / AArch64, I decided to finally try it out on one of my test systems. I set LLD as the default linker on an Ubuntu 17.04 system and set off to run some benchmarks.
Today I got around to running a very heavy/demanding, very real-world workload on the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X that I've been meaning to test with this Zen CPU.
The workload I've been running on the Ryzen 7 1800X the past few hours is that of Open Porous Media, the open-source OPM project is a growing initiative around research and simulators for modeling and simulation of porous media processes, including a reservoir simulator and permeability upscaling. This sort of workload has relevance in areas like oil and natural gas industries.
QEMU 2.9-rc0 was tagged yesterday as this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack prepares for its next major release
Less than a week since the launch of the fourth maintenance update to the Flatpak 0.8 series of the open-source Linux application sandboxing and distribution framework (formerly XGD-App), Alex Larsson announced today Flatpak 0.9.1.
Flatpak 0.9.1 appears to the be the first point release to the major Flatpak 0.9 series, and we say major because this milestone adds numerous improvements compared to the 0.8 branch, especially to the build system. The biggest change appearing to be a new Ninja-based build system called "cmake-ninja".
Richard Biener has issued a new status report concerning the state of GCC 7 and that it should be released the middle of next month.
GCC 7 remains in regression and documentation fixing mode with trying to nail down the rest of the P1 (highest priority) regressions. As of yesterday there are 17 P1 regressions remaining. For the other regressions there are 108 P2 regressions, 19 regressions of P3 level, 138 regressions of P4, and 30 of P5.
Oh, good evening my hackfriends! I am just chuffed to share a thing with yall: tomorrow we release Guile 2.2.0. Yaaaay!
I know in these days of version number inflation that this seems like a very incremental, point-release kind of a thing, but it's a big deal to me. This is a project I have been working on since soon after the release of Guile 2.0 some 6 years ago. It wasn't always clear that this project would work, but now it's here, going into production.
Turtl is primarily a note-taking app like Evernote and Google Keep with a high focus on privacy and security. According to their site, “It's a private place to keep your notes, research, passwords, bookmarks, dream logs, photos, documents and anything else you want to keep safe”.
Gnome Encfs Manager (short name is GEncfsM) is a tool to manage EncFS filesystems in Linux whihc is best alternative for Cryptkeeper and has lots of unique features. It’s very useful when you use EncFS with cloud sync / storage services such as Dropbox, etc.,
GEncfsM is an easy to use manager and mounter for encfs stashes featuring per-stash configuration, Gnome Keyring support (standard authentication mechanism). Tray menu is inspired by Cryptkeeper. You have a option to mount the directory automatically on login.
KDE Connect (with KDE Connect Indicator for Unity and other desktops that support AppIndicators) is great for integrating Android devices with your desktop. However, KDE Connect depends on quite a few KDE packages, which some users don't want to install on their GTK-based desktops.
An alternative to KDE Connect is Pushbullet. While the free version has some limitations and it doesn't offer all the features available with KDE Connect, it does provide options to send files up to 25MB, send messages from your desktop (limited to 100/month in the free version, and a storage cap of 2GB) and most importantly, it can mirror your phone's notifications on the desktop.
Oracle announced the availability of two new maintenance updates for the 5.1 and 5.0 stable branches of the open-source and cross-platform Virtualbox virtualization software for all supported platforms.
VirtualBox 5.1.18 is now the newest and most advanced version of the 5.1 series, bringing improvements for Shared Folders by addressing two regressions discovered in the previous point release. Specifically, it fixes an issue with access to long paths and case-insensitive filename access, but only for Windows guests.
PC Building Simulator is a game for Windows and Linux devices in which you simulate the building of desktop computer systems.
This week a new Sim game has been released in alpha testing stage and free to donwload for those interested in the topic. The PC Building Simulator v0.01 is available to download now for Windows and Linux users.
Do you have a Nvidia graphics card on your desktop? That's great until you are in need of the latest drivers especially when you are a gamer. Unlike Windows, Nvidia drivers for Linux desktops are quite hard to come by, and installing the latest drivers on your Linux desktop can be quite an arduous process. Fortunately for Linux users, there are the third party graphics drivers PPA which keeps an updated Nvidia driver for installation. The PPA is currently in testing but you can nonetheless get working Nvidia drivers from here.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - A Criminal Past [Steam] is a new story DLC that Feral Interactive have ported to the Linux version.
Windows gamers had it last month, so we've had a short wait to get it. Out of 165 counted reviews on Steam, the overall rating given is "Very Positive" so it looks like it could well be worth picking up.
It looks like a public beta may be available soon of Serious Fusion 2017 for Serious Sam HD.
I didn't write this up initially, but now the Humble Jumbo Bundle 8 has some new games it's well worth taking a look.
The developers of Vikings - Wolves of Midgard [Steam] have confirmed that Linux is planned, but it won't be until after the initial Windows release.
I've spent a little while checking out the new update for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [Steam] today and I'm pretty impressed with the new map. The new map is called 'Canals' and it's based on a real-world Italian city.
Fresh off the production line from 101’s factory in València is the first KDE Slimbook which I opened today at FLOSS UK conference here in Manchester.
If you’ve been itching to see more of the KDE Slimbook, the ultra-thin laptop announced by Spanish company Slimbook back in January, then you’re in luck.
KDE developer (and all-round awesome chap) Jonathan Riddell snagged some one-on-one time with the bespoke KDE-branded laptop at the FLOSS Spring 2017 conference taking place in Manchester.
“Fresh off the production line from 101’s factory in València is the first KDE Slimbook which I opened today at FLOSS UK conference here in Manchester,” he writes in a short blog post.
For the longest time, the plan was to equip KDE neon’s Developer Editions with translations. As the Developer Editions are built directly from our Git repositories and we do not maintain translations alongside the source code, there is a bit of a problem as the build somehow needs to bridge the gap between code and translations.
It’s fortunate that I also happen to work on ReleaseMe, a KDE tarball release application, and rebuilt it from scratch years ago already, so it supports third party usage of some of its functionality.
With a one-day delay, the GNOME Project, through Javier Jardón, announced the availability of the last milestone in the development cycle of the upcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment, the Release Candidate (RC).
Versioned 3.23.92, the RC build of the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment is here only to polish the new features and improvements implemented in various of the core components and applications that will be distributed as part of the GNOME 3.24 Stack across numerous GNU/Linux distributions starting next week.
The developers behind the GNOME Builder open-source IDE (Integrated Development Environment) application designed specifically for the GNOME desktop environment are about to wrap things up for the final release of GNOME Builder 3.24.
We are happy to announce that GNOME has been accepted to participate in Google Summer of Code 2017. GNOME has participated in the program every year since its inception in 2005 and it’s a pleasure to be participating once again!
The development of the major GTK+ 4 GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit continues with the release of a new milestone, versioned 3.89.5, which adds more improvements and bug fixes.
GTK+ 3.89.5 is the fifth development build of the GTK+ 4 stable series, which should hit the stable channel sometime after the release of the GNOME 3.24 desktop environment next week on March 22, 2017.
The final GNOME 3.23 development release is out ahead of next week's planned GNOME 3.24 debut.
Slackel's Openbox edition is a lightweight operating system that offers reliable performance once you get the box open. It is not an ideal OS for every user, though.
Slackel 6.0.8 Openbox, the latest version of the Greece-based project's lightweight distribution, was released by developer Dimitris Tzemos last fall.
Slackel is a Linux distro that offers several benefits for users who step away from the typical mainstream Debian-based Linux distros. Based on both Slackware and Salix, it offers a few advantages not usually found with the Slackware Linux lineup.
For example, Slackel is fully compatible with both Slackware and Salix software packages. The main difference is it includes the current version of Slackware and the latest version of KDE in the repository.
antiX is a fast and lightweight Linux distribution. It is based on Debian stable. antiX is a very different distro, it isn’t like Debian or Ubuntu. It doesn’t use systemd. Actually, most Linux distros are using systemd to manage the system processes, but antiX doesn’t like systemd. I don’t have any problem with systemd, but time after analyze systemd, I realized that it is not the best way to replace SysVinit, because it doesn’t follow the UNIX philosophy. I think that systemd is very complex, maybe this is the reason for why antiX doesn’t use it.
For the most part this is a maintenance release with a few nice feature additions. We created a GUI to extract embedded Windows product keys. It’s located in the Rescue menu. The output is also saved to a text file so you can just copy it to a USB drive. Some of the newer machines like the DELL XPS 13 are now freezing the NVMe drives at boot. The machine needs to be put to sleep and woken up just like standard SSD drives. We added a sleep button to the NVMe Secure Erase program to overcome this.
As always, Parted Magic was released with the latest Xorg drivers and Linux Kernel 4.10.1.
Parted Magic creator Patrick Verner is announcing the release of Parted Magic 2017_03_14, a brand-new ISO snapshot of the commercial GNU/Linux distribution designed for disk partitioning, cloning, and rescue operations.
Parted Magic 2017_03_14 comes more than two months after the Parted Magic 2017_01_08 release, which was also the first to kick off the new year, and implements a bunch of interesting new features, such as a graphical tool that promises to let users extract embedded Windows product keys.
The Germany originated, Independent but a fork of Arch, Chakra GNU/LINUX is no new name in the Linux distro world.With an user-friendly environment and features, beautiful looks, graphical installer and Half-Rolling release model, Chakra GNU/Linux are a successful and popular Linux Distribution.
Companies sometimes need a quickly-built mobile app to fit a "right now" need, such as a last-minute customer service order-entry form app or something that will let customers easily sign up for newsletters.
But instead of having to assign the creation of these kinds of basic apps to already overloaded developers, which can delay them from working on more business-centric development projects, an increasing number of IT vendors are providing tools that let non-developers assemble basic apps with a few clicks. Using these "low code" tools, non-developers can relatively easily assemble a collection of ready-made components into working apps using what are essentially the Lego building blocks of software.
For the last 10 years, the Fedora Project has been building packages for the same release of another operating system. However on March 31st, 2017, that will come to an end when Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 5 moves out of production.
Red Hat will beat and raise and F2018 guidance will show visibility into the return of expansion of profitability. Pacific Crest remains Overweight
I’ve been working on making a portfolio of what I did for the Fedora Regional Hubs project. Did you know I did a _lot_ of stuff?
Fedora 26 Alpha isn't going to make it out on time and has been delayed, pushing back the final F26 already by a second time.
Red Hat's Jan Kurik has announced today, March 16, 2017, that the upcoming Alpha release of the Fedora 26 Linux operating system has been delayed by one week due to late blockers.
This is the second delay the Fedora 26 Alpha release received. It was initially scheduled for launch on March 14, and then delayed until March 21, but it seems that the realese on that date won't happen either because during today's Go/No-Go meeting, the Fedora Linux developers have decided that some critical bugs need to be resolved before it hits the streets.
Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.
There are three active LTS releases of Ubuntu: 12.04, 14.04 and 16.04. The support for 12.04 is ending this year on April 28, 2017. While Canonical is encouraging users to upgrade to 14.04 or 16.04 LTS, there are still a lot of companies using 12.04.
Customers running critical services on their servers and cloud really don’t like frequent upgrades. They tweak, tune and customize different components of their infrastructure and when you bring in too many changes at the same time with a major release upgrade, something is going to break.
The developer of the LXLE GNU/Linux distribution announced the immediate availability for download of the Beta build of his upcoming LXLE 16.04.2 release.
LXLE 16.04.2 Beta is here to address various of the issues that have been discovered since the previous version of the distro, namely LXLE 16.04.1, but also to improve some of the functionalities and sync the software repositories with the upstream ones of the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system.
NXP’s i.MX8 X SoCs offer 2-4 Cortex-A35 cores plus Cortex-M4F, Vivante, and Tensilica chips, and safety features like ECC and SER.
At this week’s Embedded World show, NXP Semiconductors N.V. unveiled three dual- and quad-core Cortex-A35 based i.MX8 X SoCs. The new SoCs — the i.MX8 QuadXPlus, i.MX8 DualXPlus, and the i.MX8 DualX — also include Cortex-M4F MCUs, Vivante GPUs, and Tensilica DSPs, and feature ECC memory support, reduced soft-error-rate (SER) technology, and other industrial and automotive safety related features. We saw no mention of OS support, but the original i.MX8 SoCs support Linux, Android, FreeRTOS, QNX, Green Hills, and Dornerworks XEN.
There’s no shortage of small, low-power PC-on-a-module devices designed to piggyback on the success of the Raspberry Pi. But one problem with some of these cheap single board computers is that they don’t have the same kind of user and developer community as the Raspberry Pi, which can make it harder to get official support.
So it’s interesting to see that the makers of the Orange Pi line of products have partnered with Ubuntu Linux maker Canonical to offer an official app store for Orange Pi products running Ubuntu software.
Shenzhen Xunlong is launching an Ubuntu snap app store for its Orange Pi SBCs. Canonical also ported its snap-based Ubuntu Core distro to NXP’s LS1043A SoC.
Shenzhen Xunlong Software Co. Ltd has achieved considerable success with its Raspberry Pi compatible, open-spec Orange Pi SBCs. However, many buyers have avoided these amazingly low-cost boards due to spotty software support. Now, the company is partnering with Canonical to develop an Orange Pi App Store that packages Linux apps as Ubuntu “snaps,” the package technology used in Ubuntu Core. Canonical also announced that Ubuntu Core was now available on devices using NXP’s Cortex-A53 based QorIQ LS1043A SoC (see farther below).
NXP announced a Linux-ready, dual ARMv8 QorIQ LS1028A SoC with TSN Ethernet, and unveiled several new MCUs including a tiny, 4x4mm MC9S08SUx.
Kids today are being loud with their ‘drum machines’ and ‘EDM’. Throw some Raspberry Pis at them, and there’s a need for a low-latency sound card with MIDI and all the other accouterments of the modern, Skrillex-haired rocker. That’s where PiSound comes in.
Raspberry Pi Zero users have another operating system to choose from, with the release of NetBSD 7.1.
The Pi Zero isn't the only development board added in the release: the ARM-based ODROID-C1 quad-core single board computer also gets its moment in the spotlight.
The Matrix Voice is a Raspberry Pi-based or stand-alone dev board that allows makers and advanced industrial hardware developers alike to create voice-control apps within minutes, at attractive unit economics.
Kantar said in the top five European markets, Android enjoyed 74.3% of sales. iOS held 22.7%, with the iPhone 7 being the top-selling device in the UK, France and Germany.
Meanwhile in the familiar tech space of smartphones we may have had our 'Concorde Moment'. And that would have been in the area of camera phones. Not that the overall performance of a smartphone had somehow peaked - they keep getting more powerful in most ways - but no, I mean in the specific area of camera performance. We have seen the megapixel race for fitting more pixels to a cameraphone sensor reach a monster level at 41 megapixels with the Nokia 808 Pureview in 2012. This level was maintained in the Nokia Lumia 1020 released in 2013. However, in the four years since, no later versions of Nokia/Lumia/Microsoft flagship class smartphones have matched that camera pixel count or even come close. And cameras in rival phones have not come anywhere near close, with the 24 megapixel class being about the highest count we've seen elsewhere (so far). At least early signs of HMD's ownership of the Nokia brand now does not suggest a return to this 'super' class of megapixel count in the image sensor race. It does kind of suggest we may have had a 'Concorde moment' on that side of the matter.
Samsung’s next Tizen Smartphone, the Samsung Z4 SM-Z400F, has made its appearance at the FCC. Looking through the details of the filing we can see that there will be dual-SIM variant of the device with model number SM-Z400DS. The Samsung Z4 will now be the fourth smartphone powered by Tizen that the Korean tech giant will release. Previous models were the Samsung Z1, Z2 and Z3.
Today at Embedded World 2017 in Nuremberg, Germany, Advantech (2395.TW), along with AIMobile, ArcherMind, Canonical, Lineo, Retronix, RTSoft, Timesys, ThunderSoft and Witekio announced they are forming the Embedded Linux and Android Alliance (ELAA). This industry alliance is committed to driving standardized board adoption of an open and unified architecture for embedded Linux and Android OS for both industrial embedded and IoT applications. By joining the ELAA, participants help advance industrial standards and the open-source community, which will empower Linux and Android adoption in embedded and industrial IoT applications.
Kodi has been popping up in the news more and more often these days with the popularity of cord cutting on the rise. It's a very capable media center that's available for a multitude of different platforms but arguably works best and is easiest to set up on an Android TV box — especially if you're looking to integrate it into your home theatre setup.
Coinciding with the coming of Java 8 in 2014, Google adopted the Jack compiler toolchain to simplify all the moving parts required to build an Android mobile app while using the new language features -- an experiment that ended yesterday.
"We've decided to add support for Java 8 language features directly into the current javac and dx set of tools, and deprecate the Jack toolchain," product manager James Lau said in a blog post yesterday.
In fact, whilst Windows remained the most popular OS last month, with a 38.6% share of the market, Android was just over one per cent behind with 37.4%.
At Google, we care about giving users the best possible online experience, both through our own services and products and by contributing new tools and industry standards for use by the online community. That’s why we’re excited to announce Guetzli, a new open source algorithm that creates high quality JPEG images with file sizes 35% smaller than currently available methods, enabling webmasters to create webpages that can load faster and use even less data.
Google has announced Guetzli, not a German cookie, but rather a new open-source algorithm for creating high-quality JPEGs that are 35% smaller than currently available methods.
Google is one of the biggest champions of open source. Not only does the search giant use open source software in its products, but it contributes to the community too. There are many projects made open source by the company, which helps the greater good.
Today, Google releases yet another open source project. Called "Guetzli," it is a JPEG encoder that aims to produce even smaller image file sizes. In fact, the search giant claims a whopping 35 percent improvement over existing JPEG compression. If you are wondering why smaller file sizes are important, it is quite simple -- the web. If websites can embed smaller images, users can experience faster load times while using less data.
It sure sounds like a match made in dev heaven.
Yesterday, GitLab -- maker of an open source competitor to GitHub -- announced it had acquired Gitter, a Slack-like chat service aimed mainly at software developers.
One of the most commonly cited challenges with open source in the enterprise is a lack of support, but Wright said that's really more of a myth.
We are pleased to announce the Call for Refereed Presentation Proposals for the 2017 edition of the Linux Plumbers Conference, which will be held in Los Angeles, CA, USA on 13-15 September in conjunction with The Linux Foundation Open Source Summit.
Refereed Presentations are 45 minutes in length and should focus on a specific aspect of the “plumbing” in the Linux system. Examples of Linux plumbing include core kernel subsystems, core libraries, windowing systems, management tools, device support, media creation/playback, and so on. The best presentations are not about finished work, but rather problems, proposals, or proof-of-concept solutions that require face-to-face discussions and debate.
Since this is a hackathon, there is a competition on projects make in this event. To make the Hono-to-MsgFlo connectivity, and Flowhub visual programming capabilities more demoable, I ended up hacking together a quick example project — a Bosch XDK controlled air theremin.
These days, most large FLOSS communities have a "Code of Conduct"; a document that outlines the acceptable (and possibly not acceptable) behaviour that contributors to the community should or should not exhibit. By writing such a document, a community can arm itself more strongly in the fight against trolls, harassment, and other forms of antisocial behaviour that is rampant on the anonymous medium that the Internet still is.
Writing a good code of conduct is no easy matter, however. I should know -- I've been involved in such a process twice; once for Debian, and once for FOSDEM. While I was the primary author for the Debian code of conduct, the same is not true for the FOSDEM one; I was involved, and I did comment on a few early drafts, but the core of FOSDEM's current code was written by another author. I had wanted to write a draft myself, but then this one arrived and I didn't feel like I could improve it, so it remained.
Maintaining respect is key to building a successful team, according to Camille Fournier, at the Open Source Leadership Summit in February.
Trevor Livingston, principal architect at HomeAway, offers insight on how to introduce Node into companies at Node.js Interactive.
Google Chrome could soon use native notifications on Linux desktops. A bug report asking for the browser to use a Linux desktop environment’s notification system was filed late last year but recently become active again. Google Chrome (and Chromium) currently use the Chrome Notification API to show alerts from websites, extensions and Chrome Apps on Windows, macOS and Linux.
If you’re a Linux user who upgraded to Firefox 52 only to find that the browser no longer plays sound, you’re not alone.
Firefox 52 saw release last week and it makes PulseAudio a hard dependency — meaning ALSA only desktops are no longer supported.
Ubuntu uses PulseAudio by default (as most modern Linux distributions do) so the switch won’t affect most — but some Linux users and distros do prefer, for various reasons, to use ALSA, which is part of the Linux kernel.
Softpedia was informed today by The Document Foundation about the general availability of the first point release to the LibreOffice 5.3 open-source office suite for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows.
LibreOffice 5.3.1 comes one and a half months after the release of LibreOffice 5.3, a major branch that introduced exciting new features for users of the popular office suite. These include the experimental MUFFIN user interface with a Microsoft Office-like Ribbon UI, as well as the first source release of LibreOffice Online.
During these past six weeks, LibreOffice 5.3.1 received two Release Candidate (RC) development versions, which fix about 100 bugs and regressions that have been either discovered by the LibreOffice developers/contributors or reported by users from the previous version.
With digital technology advancements - websites and web applications have evolved from static to rich and interactive customer experiences. User perception is most critical - so the poor, rushed design does not cut it anymore. User experience goes beyond on-screen design. It requires well defined web content management, product information management, digital asset management, omni-channel e-commerce and enterprise customer relationship management.
The Boundless platform is built upon open source technology and open APIs that generate actionable location intelligence across third-party apps, content services and plugins for enterprise applications. The company recently extended its proven GIS platform with Boundless Connect, a subscription service to the most comprehensive repository of GIS data, and Boundless Desktop, a full-featured, professional desktop GIS, bringing a powerful ecosystem of geospatial knowledge, tools and resources to the enterprise.
The development team behind the BSD-based NetBSD free operating system were proud to announce the official and general availability of the NetBSD 7.1 release.
NetBSD 7.1 entered development only two months ago, when we reported the availability of the first Release Candidate (RC) build, which brought various improvements and bug fixes. It's the first point release to the stable NetBSD 7 series and comes with a bunch of exciting new features.
Matthew Dillon has discovered an important bug in the DragonFlyBSD kernel's VFS cluster code affecting the HAMMER file-system write performance.
Dillon explained in the commit that landed in DragonFly last week, "A bug in the cluster code was causing HAMMER to write out 64KB buffers in 32KB overlapping segments, resulting in data being written to the media twice."
DragonFlyBSD lead developer Matthew Dillon has been testing out various NVMe M.2 SSDs under his BSD operating system to see how these latest-generation storage devices perform.
LLVM developer Rui Ueyama is encouraging the "dogfeeding" of their linker, LLD, that should now be ready for production use on some platforms/architectures with this week's LLVM 4.0 release.
Rui Ueyama believes that the LLD linker is ready for production with ELF platforms -- namely as Linux and BSDs -- on at least x86_64 but the AArch64 and MIPS architecture support should be in good shape too.
Verisign is hosting its 3rd vBSDcon, scheduled for September 8 - 9, 2017, in Reston, VA. A Call For Presentations is currently open and submissions are being accepted at vBSDcon.com. CFP administration is being conducted through EasyChair, which require accounts to upload submissions for consideration. Our call is open through April 30, 2017. So get your submissions in soon!
We are pleased to announce GNU Guile 2.2.0, the first of a new stable release series. More than 6 years in the making, Guile 2.2 includes a new optimizing compiler and high-performance register virtual machine. Compared to the old 2.0 series, real-world programs often show a speedup of 30% or more with Guile 2.2.
Besides bringing the compiler and virtual machine, Guile 2.2 removes limitations on you and your programs by lowering memory usage, speeding up the "eval" interpreter, providing better support for multi-core programming, and last but not least, removing any fixed stack size limit. With Guile 2.2, you can recurse to your heart's content!
GitHub's updated terms caused a great deal of concern, but while they are confusing, they do not appear to be incompatible with copyleft. The Free Software Foundation (FSF), though, still recommends using other code hosting sites.
GitHub recently updated their terms of service (ToS). Users of the site are raising many concerns over the new terms, fearing that the ToS could be incompatible with the copyleft licenses on works uploaded to GitHub. In particular, section D of the new terms, which handles rights granted to GitHub and GitHub users, makes many hackers very uncomfortable.
Section D.4 states, "You grant us and our legal successors the right to store and display your Content and make incidental copies as necessary to render the Website and provide the Service. " At first glance that might appear to grant permissions on your work without the concomitant protective guarantees found in copyleft licenses like the GNU General Public License (GPL). Users who care about ensuring that their software never becomes proprietary would not want to give such unconditional permission. And those uploading works that incorporate third-party copylefted code may not even be able to grant such permissions.
But licenses like the GNU GPL already give the necessary permissions to make, use, and modify local copies of a work. Are the new GitHub ToS asking for more than that? It's not fully clear. While the grant language could fit within the scope of the GPL, other words used in the section like "share" or "distribute" could be understood to mean something that wouldn't line up with the GPL's terms.
The previous article in this series covered how to establish a baseline for open source software compliance by finding exactly which open source software is already in use and under which licenses it is available. But how do you make sure that future revisions of the same product (or other products built using the initial baseline) stay compliant once the baseline is established?
Bloq, a leader in the development of enterprise-grade blockchain solutions, has launched BloqLabs to expand its ongoing sponsorship and support of critical open source projects in the bitcoin and blockchain ecosystems.
As the cost of college has skyrocketed, students and parents could soon get relief on expensive textbooks under the Textbook Cost Savings Act of 2017 that would provide funding to develop free open source learning materials.
“The state is moving rapidly towards free textbooks online,” said the bill’s sponsor Sen. Jim Rosapepe, D-Prince George’s, in an interview. “If the bill passes it will be state policy that we want to move in that direction as much as possible.”
A new 6 axis robotic arm has been created by the development team at Niryo based in Lille, France, which is both open source and can be powered by Arduino, Raspberry Pi and ROS.
If you're looking for free and open source designs to replicate on your desktop 3D printer, you have about two million choices.
Because the open source ethic is rooted so deeply in the 3D printing community, many of the consumer products you would normally buy are already among those millions of predesigned products. You can download the designs and save a lot of money. My group has shown in studies in both 2013 (on a self-built 3D printer) and 2017 (on an out-of-the box 3D printer) that peer-to-peer sharing prosumers (producing consumers) gain an incredible return on investment: > 100% at minimum and more likely ~1000% by 3D printing products to offset purchases only once a week.
Take a look at the TIOBE Programming Community Index — an indicator of the popularity of programming languages — and you'll see that Google's Go and, to a lesser extent, Dart and Perl are trending up. The venerable C, however, is a language whose popularity is plummeting, according to the index.
In a world where there is huge demand for mobile and web applications coded in higher-level languages that are easy to learn and debug and difficult to make mistakes in — at least compared to C — one might assume there’s no reason to bother with a low-level language that's going out of fashion.
Tracking the effectiveness of an asthma health app created using Apple’s ResearchKit, researchers reported problems with participant selection bias, extremely low participant retention, missing data, and data security.
Congressional Budget Office report this week says the bill would leave an additional 24 million people uninsured by 2026.
Cancer research isn’t just about finding a cure. The disease is vast, and the potential implications to each patient or across groups of patients are unique. For progress to be made, researchers need to gather and analyse large volumes of data, taken from patients, clinical trials, public and private studies. As the research is compiled and analysed by numerous private firms as well as public agencies, the information generated can become siloed, preventing potentially beneficial information from reaching other researchers who could use it.
Patch Tuesday After taking a month off, Microsoft's Patch Tuesday is back – and it's a blockbuster edition. There are 18 bundles of patches covering 140 separate security vulnerabilities.
Is open source software inherently less secure than closed-source code?
Which special security precautions should you take with open source?
Keep reading for a primer on open source software security.
When it comes to open source, one of the longest-standing debates is whether code that is open is inherently less secure.
A recently resolved vulnerability in the Linux kernel that had the potential to allow an attacker to gain privilege escalation or cause denial of service went undiscovered for seven years.
Positive Technologies expert, Alexander Popov, found a race condition in the n_hdlc driver that leads to double-freeing of kernel memory. This Linux kernel flaw might be exploited for privilege escalation in the operating system. The (CVE-2017-2636) bug was evaluated as dangerous with a CVSS v3 score of 7.8, towards the higher end of the scale which runs from 1-10.
The Linux team has patched a "dangerous" vulnerability in the Linux kernel that allowed attackers to elevate their access rights and crash affected systems.
The security issue, tracked as CVE-2017-2636, existed in the Linux kernel for the past seven years, after being introduced in the code in 2009.
Hackers took down Adobe Reader, Apple Safari, Microsoft Edge, and Ubuntu Linux over the course of 11 hours on Wednesday, the first day of Pwn2Own, the annual hacking competition held in tandem with the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver.
The global cybersecurity workforce remains stagnant at just 11 percent, according to the 2017 Women in Cybersecurity Report, co-authored by The Executive Women’s Forum on Information Security, Risk Management and Privacy (EWF) and the Center for Cyber Safety and Education, which partnered with (ISC)2. The report is based on survey responses from over 19,000 information security professionals in 170 countries.
“The result of each bill will be the same—worse science at EPA and less public health protections for American citizens,” says Eddie Bernice Johnson, ranking Democrat member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. “If these bills become law, the ultimate result will be more sick Americans and more dead Americans.”
Attorney General Schneiderman has subpoenaed Exxon for internal documents and communications that might show the thought process behind these decisions, and he is currently tussling with the company over the documents they’ve handed over—and the ones they may not have. In a letter to the judge on the case Monday, the Attorney General’s Office said it discovered that former Exxon chairman and CEO (and current Secretary of State) Rex Tillerson used an e-mail alias of “Wayne Tracker” to communicate with other Exxon executives. Now the office wants those e-mails, too.
Uber spokesperson Nathan Hambley pushed back on a story from The Wall Street Journal over the weekend that suggested Uber drivers in Seattle were forced to choose whether or not to listen to the company-produced podcasts every day before they can begin picking up riders.
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The notification remains at the bottom of the driver screen regardless of whether it is ignored, or if the podcast is listened to or not.
Today the Bill giving the Prime Minister the legal power to make the Article 50 notification will be given royal assent. The Bill will become an Act.
(Contrary to popular belief, including some news outlets, the Queen does not give the royal assent in person. No monarch has done this since 1854. The elaborate process employed instead is under this 1967 Act.)
The actions above, and the quote above, were written by an author for Slate, in justification for the students of Middlebury College, and “activists” elsewhere, using acts like violence and shouting down speakers to stop speech they personally judged as hate and/or offensive or dangerous.
The latest specific case involved some guy named Charles Murray. I have no idea who he is, but a lot of people say he is a racist so let’s go with that. But I don’t care.
I simply cannot believe that it is the left, or progressives, or whatever name is best, that are attacking people’s speech. I’ve written extensively about what I call “Post-Constitution America,” an era that started on 9/11 where the rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights no longer applied. I never imagined it would play out this way.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF for its acronym in French) recently published the report "Censorship and surveillance of journalists: an unscrupulous business,” in which it denounces several cases of digital surveillance of journalists by both democratic and authoritarian governments around the world.
Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Tuesday said that blasphemy is an unpardonable offence and directed the state machinery to find those responsible for putting blasphemous content on social media and bring them to justice without any delay.
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The National Assembly on Tuesday passed a resolution condemning the blasphemous content appearing on social media and unanimously agreed to the formation of a committee of parliamentary leaders to monitor such content.
Google is using a 10,000-strong army of independent contractors to flag “offensive or upsetting” content, in order to ensure that queries like “did the Holocaust happen” don’t push users to misinformation, propaganda and hate speech.
The review of search terms is being done by the company’s “quality raters”, a little-known corps of worldwide contractors that Google uses to assess the quality of its systems. The raters are given searches based on real queries to conduct, and are asked to score the results on whether they meet the needs of users.
The Mormon Church has been somewhat flip-floppy when it comes to criticism against it. On the one hand, the notoriously tight-knit Church has been admirably tolerant of many attempts to parody it, including public commentary and a certain Broadway show of world renown. On the other hand, it seems the Church tends to draw a line in the sand when it comes to disseminating official church documents, even when this is done by journalists and organizations dedicated to commentary and news. In the past, the Mormon Church has attempted to utilize copyright law to have those documents removed from such sites as Wikimedia and Wikileaks, which of course resulted in the wider viewership of those same documents as news of the threats wove through the media. The Streisand Effect, it seems, offers no quarter of religious institutions.
Remember James Woods? The Hollywood actor sued a Twitter troll for $10 million, claiming defamation, because that troll had sarcastically referred to Woods as a "cocaine addict."
Many people seem to forget that before Ed Snowden came along, Senator Ron Wyden was beating the drum in Congress about how the NSA was abusing Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to spy on Americans. Here's a story we did back in 2011 concerning Wyden raising concerns about the failure of the Director of National Intelligence to say how Section 702 was being used on Americans. Even earlier in 2011, we wrote about then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, refusing to answer this question, saying that "it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed."
We've talked about the astounding hypocrisy of Rep. Devin Nunes a few times in the past. He heads the House Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to be conducting "oversight" of the intelligence community, but has generally been a cheerleader for mass surveillance in recent years. Nunes, in fact, has regularly slammed any attempt to cut back on surveillance, to the point of actively misleading the public in making false claims about how NSA surveillance programs work. The hypocrisy became clear when Nunes flipped out following the firing/resignation of Mike Flynn as National Security Advisor, arguing that it was somehow unprecedented that an American's phone calls with Russian officials were recorded by the intelligence community. Of course, that suggests either near total ignorance of the programs he's supposedly in charge of overseeing, or just blatant political pandering.
And now it's getting worse. Reporter Katie Bo Williams got her hands on an interesting letter that Nunes, along with ranking member Rep. Adam Schiff, just sent to the heads of the CIA, NSA and FBI, continuing to dig in on the whole "recorded Mike Flynn" thing. The target now is Executive Order 12333, which we've spoken about quite a lot. That's the executive order signed by President Reagan, that more or less gives the intelligence community total free rein in conducting surveillance overseas. As an ex-State Department official revealed back in 2014, the vast majority of NSA surveillance actually is done under 12333, and it just uses other programs -- like Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act and Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act -- to fill in the gaps of what they can't get via 12333. Executive Order 12333, for example, was used to hack into Yahoo and Google's servers overseas, allowing the NSA to scoop up lots of info without any oversight by US courts.
I know a lot of people who worry about the CIA, NSA, DIA, and other agencies illegally spying on them. In fact, somebody I thought knew better just told me that he’s worried about Gang Stalking. Umm… okay. We’re talking about somebody who is a pretty good tile layer and all-around construction guy, but there is no conceivable reason an intelligence agency would be interested in him.
My gang-stalked friend has been lonely lately, and he was short of work for a while so he doesn’t have much money right now. He’s almost a poster boy for low self-esteem. What if he really is being gang-stalked, whether by a government or a (dare I say it) gang? That would mean someone was taking an interest in him. And that would make him feel a lot better about himself. He might even believe he’s important.
According to new figures released by Customs and Border Patrol, the number of electronic devices searched at the border has jumped by five times between 2015 and 2016.
A couple of years ago, the Freedom of the Press Foundation sued the DOJ over its refusal to release its secret rules governing spying on the nation's journalists. This was prompted by revelations the FBI had used National Security Letters to obtain information on AP and Fox News journalists. The DOJ then issued new rules on the do's and don'ts of surveilling journalists, but once again (a) redacted them into uselessness and (b) granted the FBI an NSL exception, undercutting the entire point of the recrafted rules.
The OIG report -- in which the Inspector General disputed the DOJ's extensive redactions -- still has yet to be released in a less-redacted form. Sadly, it now appears it will never be any less redacted than the unintelligible mess the DOJ handed over a few years ago. A federal judge has sided with the government, finding its investigative techniques and methods are too sensitive to be handed over to the public, much less journalists it may or may not have surveilled using NSLs.
In the fall of 2015, privacy activist Phil Mocek and the Center for Open Policing sued the city of Tacoma for its response to a request for Stingray documents. The documents Mocek obtained were heavily-redacted, despite there being several mostly-unredacted versions of the FBI's Stingray non-disclosure agreement already in public circulation.
(This would be the standard NDA the FBI appends to every Stingray purchase by local law enforcement agencies -- one that says all public records requests should be forwarded to the feds and encourages locals to toss cases rather than expose Stingray use. It's also the same contract the FBI was shocked to hear agencies were complying with after signing on the dotted line to take ownership of their new cell tower spoofers.)
The lawsuit was filed under the state's open records law, with Mocek challenging the Tacoma PD's use of the "investigative records" exemption to withhold significant amounts of a mostly bog-standard nondisclosure agreement. As was noted back then, the continued withholding of this information could become costly (for taxpayers): the state's public records law allows for fines of $500/day for violations.
In November the BGH ruled that Snowden should be invited to Berlin and that the government make preparations to ensure his safety, raising the intriguing possibility that Berlin would have to provide protection to one of the most wanted men in the US. But then the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats appealed the decision.
But in the new ruling the court stated that the two parties would have needed the support of a quarter of MPs in the Bundestag (German parliament) to challenge the decision by the committee not to invite Snowden.
The makers of an Internet-connected sex toy have settled to pay a small amount to some 300,000 owners of a vibrator which was used to spy on their sex habits, which the manufacturer collected as individually identifiable data. Additionally, the bluetooth-controlled sex toy device was utterly insecure, allowing remote anonymous administration. In the mess of IoT devices spying on us, we now need to add the bedroom.
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Maybe the most egregious thing about this story is that the vibrator maker continues to collect the private data, just with an obscure-and-opt-out privacy policy saying so.
This gives, if exploited, hackers could potentially gain access to a user' messages, shared files, contacts list and more.
This amicus brief is at the district court level, so it's still quite early in the process -- and there are other legal challenges in other courts. This will still take a while to sort itself out, but we're proud to stand alongside others in the industry in speaking up for why these immigration executive orders are illegal and unconstitutional, not to mention bad for innovation and the economy.
Update: Oh, and just an hour or so after I posted this, the judge has granted a temporary restraining order, blocking the executive order from going into effect...
The 16-year-old girl, who was the first runner-up of a musical reality TV show in 2015, recently had been performing songs against terrorism and ISIS, and police is investigation whether the fatwa was issued as a reaction to it.
I feel really sad that especially little girls are targeted these days, which is unfortunate. Music or any kind of art has nothing to do with religious misbeliefs.
Darussalam Mosque secretary Firmansyah said that Rasyidin's choice to support Ahok was against the agreements reached among mosque officials. He said that Rasyidin had been given warnings on several occasions about voting for Muslim leaders.
Dr. Maymunah Kadiri, a prominent psychologist, speaks about psychological challenges that could make a woman gives up her child for sale and other related issues
Last fall, Alphabet/Google announced that the company would be notably scaling back its Google Fiber ambitions. The company axed its CEO, laid off a small number of employees, and froze a number of anticipated fiber builds (in Portland and a few other locations). Numerous reports indicated that there were growing concerns among many executives about the high costs and slow pace of deploying fiber, so the company was considering an overall pivot to next-generation gigabit wireless while it continued building out most already-announced markets.
While it's hard to call this pivot a failure until we see a real wireless product, ISPs like AT&T were of course quick to suggest Google Fiber was little more than folly (ignoring that AT&T's anti-competitive behavior played a starring role in Google Fiber's struggles in many cities). This has contributed to an overall air of "we told you so" smugness emanating from numerous quadrants of the telecom status quo.
That take, however, is short-sighted. One, the launch of Google Fiber put an unrelenting spotlight on the lack of broadband competition in countless markets, driving many large ISPs (like AT&T) to deploy gigabit broadband service that had previously been unheard of. Google Fiber also managed to shine a bright spotlight on the way many large ISPs use our broken legislative and regulatory systems to keep things broken, whether that's by using utility pole beaurocracy to slow competitors' installs, or writing awful state protectionist law hamstringing what your local town and city can do about it.
Minister Celso Amorim of Brazil has had a significant impact on the state of global negotiations in his professional lifetime, including on global intellectual property rights.
As his new book, Acting Globally: Memoirs of Brazil’s Assertive Foreign Policy, sets out, in the first decade of the 2000s Brazil played an assertive role in foreign policy in areas such as the Iran nuclear issue, relations in the Middle East, and the Doha Round of multilateral trade negotiations at the World Trade Organization.
Amorim (see bio here) was at the centre of that, and reaching back to the early 1990s, took the lead role in negotiating the 1994 WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).
In our recent conversation about Ed Sheeran's rise to fame, we chiefly focused on his claim that music piracy helped him be discovered by the public and his generally lax views on filesharing of his music. While that modern view on how music is consumed is refreshing, we focused less on another chief part of the equation: Ed Sheeran is really good to his fans. Between engaging with them directly via social media, having a generally congenial attitude towards them, and producing music his fans love, he's built up quite a connection with his listeners.
As that notes, authors are typically only allowed to post certain versions of their papers -- usually early ones. But most researchers don't bother with that detail, and simply upload the final version to ResearchGate, which is probably why the recent analysis mentioned by the Tea and Velociraptors blog found so many unauthorized copies. Along with laziness, or ignorance of the niceties here, another factor driving this phenomenon may be that academics are aware that much of their work has been paid for by the public, and therefore feel the definitive results should be disseminated as widely as possible.
Still, the contrast between ResearchGate, which has received major investments from some rather big names, and Sci-Hub, which is currently being pursued in the courts by Elsevier, is stark, given that their respective holdings turn out to be so similar. It's another indication that the academic publishing system is broken, and that copyright is an irrelevance as far as millions of researchers are concerned.
[...] as time has dragged on, the condition of the hard drives has significantly deteriorated. Last year, Cogent first warned that sixteen of them have actually become unreadable.
And so, after eight years, the case is still not over yet. Whatever the outcome at the Supreme Court will be NSE will remain out of business. The company previously stated that it’s not relaunching its Usenet service.
An initiative, fronted by Danish law firm Njord and backed by known international copyright trolls Guardaley, made headlines when it began targeting the customers of several ISPs, including Telia, Tele2 and Bredbandsbolaget, the provider that was previously ordered to block The Pirate Bay.