Netbooks are often ridiculed as a solution looking for a problem but they are also regarded as the ancestors of present day Chromebooks and “cloudbooks”. With the resurgence of these more modern but still low-performance devices, it might seem that the netbook is due for a revival as well. Or so that seems to be the proposition GPD makes with its almost literal Pocket computer. But does that make more sense now than it did before, especially in an age of powerful smartphones? We take the Ubuntu Edition of the GPD Pocket for a good and thorough testing to find out.
Often the best path to working with two vanguard technologies is unclear. That’s why OpenDev, a recent two-day event sponsored by the Ericsson, Intel and the OpenStack Foundation, dedicated a session to folks navigating Kubernetes and edge computing. Both technologies appear to be here to stay. “Containers are what the developers are using,” said Jeremy Huylebroeck of Orange Silicon Valley. “It’s way more convenient for them to actually publish their code and try things faster.”
OpenDev was devised as more of a workshop than a traditional conference, you can also check the event schedule for Etherpads from the individual sessions.
Enterprise Linux vendor SUSE is updating a number of different platforms this week, including its Kubernetes based CaaS Platform.
If you want to manage containers in the cloud, Kubernetes is the program for you. Its latest release, Kubernetes 1.8, is better than ever.
Version 1.8 of the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration and management platform is now available, providing features that improve both scalability and security.
Kubernetes 1.8, released on Sept. 28, is the third major milestone release for Kubernetes in 2017 and follows the 1.7 update that debuted in June. The Kubernetes project was originally started by Google and has been managed as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) effort since July 2015.
Blockchain technology is on the rise. Some might presume Bitcoin is the reason behind it. While it was developed for the digital currency, developers are finding other uses of blockchain technology. Most prominently is the open source project Ethereum. The use of Ethereum has brought about smart contracts, which have proven to be quite functional within the financial industry. With its decentralized structure, blockchain technology could be a paradigm shift with vast boundaries.
As part of our ongoing AMD EPYC Linux benchmarking, I've been working this week on a cross-distribution GNU/Linux comparison followed by some BSD testing... Of course, I couldn't help but to see if Intel's performance-oriented Clear Linux distribution would run on the AMD EPYC server.
Android runs on top of the Linux kernel. All of Android's memory management, input/output, processes, locks, networking, etc happens through and via the Linux kernel. Each new release of Android uses a newer version of the Linux kernel.
Linux right now offers a "Long Term Support" release where support for the kernel branch is maintained for two years, which is nice compared to kernel releases usually dropping maintenance around N+1.1 after the release. But moving forward, Linux LTS releases will now be maintained for six years.
The two-year Linux LTS cycle is suitable for many users, but one case where it's not long enough is the lifecycle of a smartphone and the status quo is many Android phones out there are still running on Linux kernels no longer receiving bug/security fixes. Via Google's Project Treble and cooperation with the upstream Linux community, that two year process is now being extended to six years.
While NVIDIA's Vulkan Linux driver performance has already been very good, it's potentially even better now with the newest NVIDIA Vulkan beta driver.
The annual X.Org Developers' Conference devoted to all things X.Org / Mesa / Wayland / DRM will for the first time be hosted in Spain next year.
Ending out September is the very exciting news that AMDGPU DC display code will likely land in Linux 4.15. Out of this excitement of finally seeing a mainline Linux kernel with modern Radeon GPUs supporting HDMI/DP audio, atomic mode-setting, and more. I decided to see how well this "drm-next-4.15-dc" code is working out for Radeon RX Vega graphics cards, where attached monitors can finally be driven by this DC code rather than having to rely upon AMDGPU-PRO or other kernel branches. So for ending out this exciting month, here are some fresh benchmarks of the RX Vega 56 / RX Vega 64 and other Radeon GPUs using this kernel paired with Mesa 17.3-dev Git built against LLVM 6.0 SVN compared to various NVIDIA Pascal graphics cards.
For those not comfortable riding Mesa Git, Mesa 17.2.2 is set to be released early next week as the newest stable update for the open-source 3D graphics driver stack.
Point release manager Juan Suarez Romero of Igalia is planning on releasing Mesa 17.2.2 next Monday, 2 October, if all goes well. So far there are 43 patches queued and a handful of more patches still possibly landing. Friday marked the release candidate for this newest point release.
DAEMON Sync lets you synchronize or backup your mobile data to computer over local WiFi without any hassle. Unlike any other cloud service DAEMON Sync lets you sync/backup files between devices without having internet connection over local WiFi that means you data never goes through someone else's servers, you can run DAEMON server on computer and let device speak to it directly. It is cross-platform available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Android and iOS. You can backup, browse and share videos and photos and evaluate all advantages of truly secure cloud service. The basic functionality of DAEMON Sync is free for non-commercial use, but other products and advanced features require activation license.
Syncthing is an open-source, free file synchronization application, written in GO programming language, available for almost every operating system Linux, Unix, Windows, Mac, BSD, Android and iOS. It can sync between device that are present on the local network (no Internet required), or between remote devices over the Internet. It is secure and safe since both things are built-in into the application. Syncthing replaces proprietary sync and cloud services with something open, trustworthy and decentralized. Your data is your data alone and you deserve to choose where it is stored, if it is shared with some third party and how it's transmitted over the Internet. It should be safe from data loss, protecting the user's data is priority. Developers took reasonable precaution to avoid corrupting the user's files.
Coffee is a new Linux app that helps you to stay up-to-date with current news and weather without needing to touch the new tab button in your browser.
Inspired by Google Now on Android, Coffee displays a selection of current news headlines from major news publications, as well as weather information for your current location (or any location you choose manually).
Close to three months after the initial hotspot release, I'm happy to announce the release of version 1.1.0. Quick recap: Hotspot is a graphical frontend to the Linux perf profiler suite.
The Wine development release 2.18 is now available.
The Wine [Official Site] project continues to mature with the release of Wine 2.18 which includes improvements to various areas.
Wine 2.18 is now available for those wishing to run Windows games/applications on Linux this weekend.
12 East Games new atmospheric first-person exploration and puzzle game has launched on itch.io, it looks incredible.
The developer, 12 East Games, was founded by Aubrey Serr, who worked on Wolfire games like Overgrowth and Receiver. They're now doing their own stuff and this is their first title.
The game was funded on Fig in 2016, where it gained over $21K in funding from 465 backers, although $12K of that came from Fig directly.
The Pirate: Plague of the Dead [Steam], from developer Home Net Games, looks like it will have a Linux version at launch.
The developers of Sudden Strike 4 [Steam] have released a rather interesting patch, which includes a classic multiplayer game mode like found in Sudden Strike 2.
There was one major problem with Voxel Turf at release: performance. It was quite low and I did note it in my initial thoughts, thankfully now it's not a problem.
Epic Games this week announced the second preview release of Unreal Engine 4.18. Among the fixes this time around affect Linux and Vulkan.
Unreal Engine 4.18 originally went into a public preview state last week while has already been succeeded by Preview 2. Among the improvements this cycle have been a unified XR engine layer for VR/AR, volumetric lightmap support by default, improvements to precomputed skylights, better HTML5 outputs, audio updates, and more.
So, here’s a quick reminder: Games can be obtained by two ways. The old-school way, with the version provided by your distro; and soon, hopefully, your distro will upgrade to the brand-new 3.26 stable version that we’ve just released. And the Flatpak way, the one we actually recommend if your system is ready for it: it’ll give you the choice between the 3.26 version — packed with our hand-picked selection of emulation cores! — and the Unstable Nightly version, where you can test (at your own risk as usual) all of the good stuff Adrien and folks have been working on during all this time.
Heads up, interactive fiction devs: the folks at the Interactive Fiction Technology Foundation have helped put together the Twine Cookbook, an open-source repository of "recipes" devs can use to do advanced tricks with Twine.
It's a really neat effort to support Twine game dev that, according to an IFTF blog post from board member (and Cookbook contributor) Dan Cox, was heavily inspired by the established Inform Recipe Book.
As sometimes happens, I cover a Beta version of a game that later gets released that same day. The Leaderboards update of Ballistic Overkill [Steam] is now live and it fixes the fullscreen issues on Linux.
Sometimes data visualization might call for more than a graph - you need to visualize complex data, such as that generated by city lighting, in three dimensions to get the full effect.
KDAB decided to put together a showcase for the Qt World Summit that allowed us to demonstrate Qt 3D's capabilities as a performant next-generation graphics engine, which can draw thousands of lights and objects simultaneously. This also enabled us to show what modern technologies like Qt 3D can achieve when paired with OpenGL, C++ and custom tooling.
We have released version 2.8.1 of our Qt application introspection tool GammaRay. This release contains a number of important bugfixes as well as support for Qt 5.9.2. Especially if you are experiencing corrupt views or crashes when searching in the object tree, or having trouble attaching to a process on Windows, you want to upgrade to the new version. The same applies to users of bleeding edge Qt versions experiencing build failures.
This release is only made available for interested testers and should not be used for production. Please report problems in the categories placed on the phabricator page regarding the AppImage / timeline refactoring branch, we will switch back to the normal bugtracker when the beta release will be ready.
Krita, the cross-platform, open-source and free digital painting tool used by hundreds of thousands of artists worldwide, has been updated today to version 3.3, a point release that adds better HiDPI support and many other improvements.
Prominent changes of Krita 3.3 include support for the Windows 8 event API to bring native support for the n-trig pen in the Surface line of laptops, as well as other similar notebooks from Acer, Dell or HP, refactored hardware-accelerated display functionality to make Krita use Direct3D indirectly instead of native OpenGL.
Qt desktops are many and varied. So one may ask, all right, if you have to choose one, which one? Well, the answer is both complicated and philosophical. First, because taste is subjective, and my immediate answer would be Plasma, hands down. The way it is realized in Kubuntu 17.04 is just awesome. The best Linux has to offer on the market right now.
But let’s say you want to choose from one of the other available Qt-based desktops. What do you do then? Well, that’s why we’re here, and I’d like to give you a multi-dimensional overview and comparison of these different Qt desktop environments. After all, we talked about them a fair bit recently, so let’s narrow it down, shall we?
As has become tradition in recent years, the KDE e.V. board will have an open dinner alongside its in-person meeting in Berlin, Germany on October 14th, at 7 PM.
When KDE's KWin is acting as a Wayland compositor, there's now a real-time scheduling policy to ensure the graphical system is always responsive.
Today I landed a change in KWin master branch to enable real time scheduling policy for KWin/Wayland. The idea behind this change is to keep the graphical system responsive at all times, no matter what other processes are doing.
So far KWin was in the same scheduling group as most other processes. While Linux’s scheduler is completely fair and should provide a fair amount of time to KWin, it could render the system hard to use. All processes are equal, but some processes are more equal than others. KWin – as the windowing system – is to a certain degree more equal. All input and all rendering events need to go through KWin.
We can now imagine situations where a system can become unusable due to KWin not getting sufficient time slots. E.g. if the user moves the mouse we expect a timely cursor motion. But if KWin is not scheduled the system is quickly starting to lagging. Basically what we expect is that when the mouse moves with the next page flip the cursor must be at the updated position. A page flip happens normally every 16 msec (60 Hz), so if we miss one or two we are in the area where a user visually notices this. For a gamer with a high precision mouse this could be quite problematic already.
As a means to give our work direction and a clearer purpose, KDE is currently in the process of soul-searching. Here’s my proposal of what we should concentrate and focus on in the coming years. I’d welcome any feedback from the community to make this proposal better, and rally up more support from the community, and others interested.
There are quite a few applications in KDE that are severely outdated and deserve a new life.
SELinux, or Security-Enhanced Linux, is a part of the Linux security kernel that acts as a protective agent on servers. In the Linux kernel, SELinux relies on mandatory access controls (MAC) that restrict users to rules and policies set by the system administrator. MAC is a higher level of access control than the standard discretionary access control (DAC), and prevents security breaches in the system by only processing necessary files that the administrator pre-approves.
Alpine Linux is a small, security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on the musl libc library and BusyBox utilities platform instead of GNU. It operates on bare-metal hardware, in a VM or even on a Raspberry Pi. The distribution is noncommercial and evolved for embedded and server-based workloads, although desktop OS use is possible.
No matter your desktop of choice, chances are you will feel right at home on the Zorin Desktop. With the latest release, ZorinOS has done a remarkable job of taking something that was already impressive and made it more stable, more usable, and more accessible than ever. If you’re a Windows 7 user, dreading having to migrate to Windows 10, you no longer have to sweat that change. Adopt ZorinOS 12 and keep working as you’ve done for years.
In this new world of mix-and-match everything inside data centers and across supply chains, the concept of coexistence within different layers of data management is a welcome one for IT managers.
ed Hat Inc., an open source solutions provider on Thursday announced DHFL Pramerica Life Insurance Company Ltd. (DPLI), a life insurance company as the winner of 2017 Red Hat Innovation Awards APAC in the Digital Transformation category for its mobile app, "AceApp".
Red Hat on Tuesday announced the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Solutions, a new platform that combines two existing systems for analytics and data management into a single offering.
The new platform combines the existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Applications and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP HANA into a single, consolidated platform.
The next update to RHEL, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, is expected to include a Wayland technical preview within its GNOME Shell session.
RHEL 7.5 will not be defaulting to Wayland, but it will be available as an option for those interested with it being billed as a "tech preview" feature. If all goes well, likely for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 is when the default migration would take place on supported systems.
Red Hat's oVirt virtualization management platform is out with a new development release.
The oVirt 4.2 release is under development and on Thursday debuted its alpha version. The oVirt 4.2 release features a new administrative portal that has been redesigned from scratch. This new web portal is cleaner, more consistent, and looks fairly nice. There's also a new VM portal for non-administrator users, a new high performance VM type, OVN support for Open vSwitch virtual networking, support for NVIDIA vGPUs, restored Gluster ISO domains, and much more.
Fedora Women Day (FWD) is a worldwide series of events initiated by the Fedora Diversity Team. The events are dedicated to female contributors of the Fedora Project. During this day of celebration, local communities gather to present the accomplishments of women in the Fedora Project and thank them. FWD is also a great chance to promote the participation of more women and raise awareness about the gender gap in tech communities. Furthermore, FWD and events like it show the importance of diversity in open source projects such as Fedora.
The SparkyLinux development team announced the release of SparkyLinux 5.1 rolling operating system for 32-bit and 64-bit computers, an incremental update bringing the latest components and technologies.
Dubbed "Nibiru," the SparkyLinux 5.1 images are here only two weeks after the release of SparkyLinux 5.0, and they've been synced with the Debian Testing repos as of September 25, 2017, which means that the entire distribution is currently based on the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" operating system.
Whenever Mozilla pushes out a new version of its Firefox web browser, you can always guarantee that an update to the Tor Browser and the Tails operating system will be close behind, alas, with Firefox 56 being released on Thursday, Tails 3.2 followed close behind. The release ships with Linux Kernel 4.12.12 which should improve hardware support if you've been having any issues, the NVIDIA Maxwell graphics card is a notable bit of kit supported by the new kernel.
As we learned from the great patriot Edward Snowden, the US government can and will spy on you. Not caring about that invasion of privacy, and dismissing it with the flawed statement of "I have nothing to hide," is flat out idiotic. Regardless of what you do on your computer, or on the internet, your privacy is sacred, and quite frankly, it was earned by our forefathers that fought for our freedoms.
If you do care about your privacy, and you want to keep the heavy-handed Trump administration or other government agency out of your private business, please know you aren't powerless. There is a specific Linux-based operating system that aims to protect your privacy from corrupt governments and other evildoers, such as hackers and spies. Called "Tails," it always runs in a live environment from a DVD or flash drive. In other words, especially with an optical disk, it will help to hide your footprints. Today, version 3.2 sees release.
Canonical today released the Final Beta release of its forthcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, allowing anyone to see what they prepared for this new Ubuntu version that will be hitting the streets on October 19, 2017.
First and foremost, Ubuntu 17.10 is shipping with a refreshed desktop environment, powered by the latest GNOME 3.26 release, highly customized by Canonical to resemble the look and feel of its deprecated Unity user interface. This is also the first release of Ubuntu to ship without Unity in more than six years.
Pitching up alongside the main Ubuntu 17.10 beta release are new beta builds of the various official Ubuntu flavors. Among the many spins choosing to take part in this round of testing is the marvellous Ubuntu MATE, brilliant Ubuntu Budgie, and, er, Xubuntu.
Right you, it’s time to fumble around for the nearest USB thumb drive, stick the kettle on, and lean back in that chintzy IKEA chair of yours — Ubuntu 17.10 Beta 2 is now available to download.
This is the first official testing milestone that the regular version of Ubuntu desktop has taken part in during the ‘Artful Aardvark’ development cycle (it sits out the alpha round of testing).
That makes this beta download your first formal chance to go hands on and help test everything that’s included.
Ubuntu, arguably the most popular (or, at least, widely used) desktop distribution of Linux, is to drop support for 32-bit installations in favour of 64-bit - some 14 years after the introduction of the AMD64 instruction set.
Beginning with Ubuntu 17.10, due next month, Canonical will stop building 32-bit versions of its operating system for desktop machines. The move has been pushed by Dimitri Ledkov, a familiar name which cropped up in a Neowin article last year discussing the same topic. If you have a 32-bit machine running Ubuntu you should probably stick with Ubuntu 16.04 and start looking for a replacement device.
But it seems like not all that many people are using recent builds of Ubuntu to do that… because the developers have decided to make it a bit tougher to install the popular Linux distro on computers with 32-bit processors.
Next month, Ubuntu 17.10 will be released. Even after that release, version 16.04 will remain the most recent LTS version. If you aren't familiar, LTS stands for "Long Term Support," which quite literally means it is supported by Canonical for a longer period of time. For instance, Ubuntu 16.04 will be supported until 2021, while the newer 17.04 is only supported until 2018.
Today, Canonical announces that Samsung has selected version 16.04 LTS of the operating system as the primary Linux distro for some of the ARTIK internet of things modules. This is a smart choice by Samsung, because long support is preferable to bleeding edge for an IoT device.
Canonical recently partnered with Samsung to bring its Ubuntu Linux operating system to the Samsung ARTIK 5 and 7 family of smart IoT (Internet of Things) modules used in a wide-range of appliances.
Samsung decided to enable the long-term supported Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) operating system as primary GNU/Linux distribution for its Samsung ARTIK platform instead of the existing OS, which wasn't mentioned in the press announcement. Choosing Ubuntu as primary Linux distro is a great move as it lets ARTIK’s developers access various of the supported connectivity options, such as Zigbee, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.
When Mark Shuttleworth founded Canonical in 2004, the idea behind the company was simple – promote the use of Ubuntu Linux as a desktop operating system. Fourteen years later, things have gotten a lot more complicated, as the prominent open source software vendor eyes the IoT market.
Canonical’s still flying the flag for desktop Linux, but the company’s real business is in the cloud – it claims that Ubuntu accounts for about 60% of all Linux instances in the major public clouds – and it’s hoping to make its mark in the next-buzziest part of the technology sector, the Internet of Things.
According to Mike Bell, Canonical’s executive vice president for devices and IoT, the way businesses have begun to develop software for IoT devices has been advantageous for them – companies have started to take server or desktop distros and cut them down into software that works on embedded devices. Since Ubuntu is a familiar and well-known framework, it was a natural choice as a starting place.
Yesterday was the very exciting news of the AMDGPU DC code finally being called for pulling to DRM-Next for integration in the Linux 4.15 kernel. So far it's looking like that will indeed happen for Linux 4.15 assuming Linus Torvalds has no objections. If you want to test out this kernel for HDMI/DP audio, Radeon RX Vega display support, atomic mode-setting, or other modern features, here is an Ubuntu kernel spin.
Canonical has released the final beta of Ubuntu 17.10 Artful Aardvark for Desktop, Server, and Cloud products. It represents the last major development before the release candidate which ships a week before the final release, which itself is scheduled for the October 19. Ubuntu 17.10 is not an LTS so it’ll be supported for just nine months.
Fall is officially here, and while some people get excited for pumpkin spice lattes and falling leaves, other folks get excited about something far nerdier -- Ubuntu. Yes, every October a new version of the Linux-based operating system is released. This year in particular is very significant, as with Ubuntu 17.10, GNOME is replacing Unity as the default desktop environment.
This year’s second Ubuntu release is just around the corner. Codenamed Artful Aardvark, Ubuntu 17.10’s Final Beta has landed and its download links are available for testing. Ubuntu 17.10 final will be released on October 19, 2017.
You might be knowing that the flagship version of Ubuntu, which now ships with GNOME desktop environment, doesn’t take part in Alpha 1, Alpha 2, and Beta 1 milestone releases. So, in a way, it’s the first, polished chance to try out all the new Ubuntu 17.10 features.
Canonical engineer Dimitri John Ledkov announced on Wednesday that Ubuntu does not plan to offer 32-bit ISO installation images for its new OS version starting with the next release — Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) scheduled for release on October 19.
The decision comes after month-long discussions on the dwindling market share of 32-bit architectures.
Overnight the final beta of Ubuntu 17.10 "Artful Aardvark" was released for Ubuntu proper and its derivative friends.
Unsurprisingly, Ubuntu has planned to follow the same path that other major distributions have, and drop 32bit ISO images for upcoming releases.
Dimitri John Ledkov from Canonical, sent out a message through their mailing list to the release team, instructing them to not release a 32bit ISO for the upcoming Ubuntu release.
System76, the well-known maker of Linux/Ubuntu laptops and desktops, announced today the release of the Beta version of its first GNU/Linux distribution, Pop!_OS Linux, which is, of course, based on Ubuntu.
That's right, System76 also created their own distro, following on the footsteps of other Linux PC manufactures, such as TUXEDO Computers, which created TUXEDO Xubuntu for their machines. Pop!_OS Linux is designed with the System76 user in mind, but you can also install it on any other laptop or workstation, though it's a modified version of with pre-installed drivers for various of System76's computers.
System76 is today announcing the beta release of their Ubuntu-derived Pop!_OS Linux operating system.
But it recently announced it’s changing gears and creating its own Linux distro, which will replace Ubuntu on its systems, called POP!_OS.
Artful Aardvark (17.10) final Beta images are now available for testing. Help us make 17.10 the best release yet!
The Kubuntu team will be releasing 17.10 on October 19, 2017.
Amber Wireless unveiled a 868MHz “Amber Pi” wireless RF add-on board for the Raspberry Pi with multiple sensors and a breadboard for prototyping your own.
Germany-based Amber Wireless has jumped into the Raspberry Pi add-on market with an “Amber Pi” sub-1GHz RF radio. Designed for the Raspberry Pi 3, the board provides an RF dongle and the company’s sub-1GHz AMB8826 module, as well as temperature, humidity, air pressure, and motion sensors. The combination provides a remote, low-power, battery powered, wireless IoT station for applications including remote surveillance and control, weather stations, industrial automation with serial cable connections or sensor networks, and even remote control of a model airplane.
Just when it seemed that the dream for an open source Linux phone had run its course, several new hardware and software projects have emerged, and some older projects have sought new life as aftermarket replacements. The biggest news in recent weeks was the endorsement by the KDE project and GNOME Foundation for Purism’s new open source Librem 5 phone. Also, Raspberry Pi lovers are anticipating the upcoming Crowd Supply campaign for RPi Zero based ZeroPhone project.
Projects focusing primarily on open source Linux firmware replacements for older Android phones include the Halium OS project, which is setting itself up as sort of a Yocto-style project for standardizing mobile Linux components. There’s also an early-stage PostmarketOS project focused on long lifecycle updates (see farther below).
AvatarMind is prepping a mobile, humanoid “iPal” companion robot with an Android/ROS SDK, natural language capability, and face and emotion recognition.
AvatarMind recently began shipping an early version of its mobile, humanoid iPal robot in China, and is now preparing for a U.S. release. Applications include conversational companionship for elders, special needs children, and hospital patients, as well as educational and retail/hospitality applications.
In a newsletter sent out today, Atari gave some more information about the upcoming Ataribox. The console will be running a version of Linux, and users will have full access to the underlying operating system. No word on games yet, but apparently, the console won't be powerful enough to play AAA titles.
The Tizen platform is slowly expanding and as of now, it runs four smartphones (Z1, Z2, Z3, and Z4) as well as numerous wearables and Samsung TV’s. Tizen 3.0 is the latest version of the operating system and it brings a number of impressive features such as voice-based control, dual accounts for Facebook and Whatsapp. This version can only be found in Samsung Z4 amongst the smartphones and now, Samsung Gear Sport which was recently unveiled at IFA 2017 held in Berlin, Germany has become the world’s first wearable to come with Tizen 3.0.
The Open Community Conference was one of five tracks at the Linux Foundation’s recent Open Source Summit North America. Chaired by Jono Bacon, the tracks covered community management, open source office establishment and open source culture in organizations.
Applications built based on ML are proliferating quickly. The list of well-known uses is long and growing every day. Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s recommendation engine, and IBM’s Watson are just a few prominent examples. All of these applications sift through incredible amounts of data and provide insights mapped to users’ needs.
Why is ML exploding in popularity? It is because the foundational technology in ML is openly available and accessible to organizations without specialized skill sets. Open source provides key technologies that make ML easy to learn, integrate and deploy into existing applications. This has lowered the barrier to entry and quickly opened ML to a much larger audience.
Kansas City-based artificial intelligence startup Mycroft AI revealed Wednesday its newest product during Techcrunch Disrupt’s Product Showcase in San Francisco.
The firm opened a Silicon Valley office in 2016, yet its headquarters remains in Kansas City.
Mycroft is an open-source device, similar to Amazon Echo, using natural language processing technology to enable its everyday use in a consumer’s home. With an open-source, open-hardware approach, Mycroft allows users across the globe to develop software and hardware add-ons.
Government Digital Service (GDS) has outlined that open source coding can be just as safe as closed code – as long as there is the correct guidance.
Two new documents updated GDS’ guidance on opening up source code, outlining the two big concerns over the process and how businesses can overcome these. Their guidance areas cover when code should be open or closed and security considerations when coding in the open.
What do Harvard University, the United States Department of Defense and a group of monks in Myanmar have in common? A local company and an Ottawa-born software are behind all of their online classrooms.
Blindside Networks develops an open-source software called BigBlueButton that allows students and teachers to gather in one electronic space. The software plugs into learning management systems such as Moodle, as well as nearly every other major online learning provider.
Walmart is placing a big bet on React Native. With Electrode, the company’s Walmart Labs division open sourced the React-based framework that powers Walmart.com’s frontend and today the same group is also launching Electrode Native, its tool for bringing React Native to existing native apps on iOS and Android.
There's another reason for taking a second look at Nextcloud as a replacement for DropBox -- or even for Google's office apps or Microsoft's Office 356. Full encryption is on the way to the open source host-it-yourself client/server software.
A year-and-a-half ago when Nextcloud was first forked from ownCloud, it was basically for syncing, storing and sharing files.
"The elevator pitch," Nextcloud's founder and managing director told me a few months back, "was that we were a Dropbox replacement."
"Replacement" might not be exactly the right choice of words. It might be more precise to say that it supplied Dropbox functionality, but on the user's own server. Dropbox is SaaS, and it's use is on the service's servers. That can be problematic for regulated industries such as finance and health care that might be required to store sensitive data on premises. It's also a deal breaker for companies who prefer to keep their secrets on their own metal.
Previously in our discussion of the Understanding OPNFV book, we provided an introduction to network functions virtualization (NFV) and explored the role of OPNFV in network transformation. We continue our series with a look at chapters 4 and 5, which provide a comprehensive description of the various open source NFV projects integrated by OPNFV and the carrier grade features contributed back to these upstream projects by the community. In this article, we cover these two topics briefly and provide some related excerpts from the Understanding OPNFV book.
The good news, then, is that this particular work only works on faces.
The bad news? The code's on GitHub under an MIT licence.
The code for crowdsourcing transport app Beeline will be made open source from October onwards, in a move that could benefit app developers looking to develop new mobility solutions.
[...]
Announcing GovTech's plans to make the code open source on Saturday (Sep 30), the director of the agency's data science division, Liu Feng-Yuan, likened the move to sharing the "recipe" as to how the Government built the Beeline technology.
Google's Chrome has offered virtual reality support for a while and most recently will even let you browse the web in VR while the Linux support has lagged behind.
With the hype this week around Firefox Quantum Beta with its user-interface refinements and more noticeably the performance improvements, I decided to run some benchmarks on my end with a variety of tests comparing Firefox 52 ESR, Firefox 56 stable, Firefox 57 Quantum beta, and Chrome 60. Here are those web browser benchmark results from the Linux x86-64 desktop.
Back in 2014, we reorganized our privacy policies to make them simple, clear, and usable. That effort was based on simplifying the then 14-page privacy policy around a framework that retained some detail but helped users find information more quickly. We did this because of our Data Privacy Principles that offer us guardrails as we develop our products and services.
Today I’m happy to announce another revision of our Firefox Privacy Notice, which follows our initial announcement on the topic. We continue to build our products focusing on user control and fulfilling our “no surprises” rule when it comes to privacy. We believe that in context notices with the user experience in mind make notices more understandable and actionable for users.
All of a sudden, the planet Earth has become one of the world’s most important sources of real-time data. So the business of gathering that data — climate information, travel and commuting data, crime statistics, sporting event attendance, freeway traffic — is growing on behalf of the growing number of academic institutions, research facilities, emergency response teams, humanitarian and relief organizations, and intelligence agencies (yes, they’re growing too).
MySQL, the popular open-source database that’s a standard element in many web application stacks, has unveiled the first release candidate for version 8.0.
Alibaba has spent 2017 pushing its cloud computing business and now it is preparing to make its first major investment in a Western startup in the space.
The Chinese e-commerce giant has agreed to lead a €22.9 million ($27 million) investment in MariaDB, the European company behind one of the web’s most popular open source database servers, according to a source with knowledge of negotiations. The deal has not closed yet, but it is imminent after MariaDB’s shareholders gave their approval this week.
Neither Alibaba nor MariaDB responded to requests for comment.
TechCrunch understands that Alibaba is contributing around €20 million with the remaining capital coming from existing backers. The deal values MariaDB at around the €300 million ($354 million) mark and it will see Alibaba’s Feng Yu, a principal engineer within its cloud business, join the startup’s board.
Libre Office came to be when the community developing Open Office jumped ship several years back and created their own suite on the same code. Without going in to the details of the divorce, suffice it to say Libre Office has fared better than its ancestor, both in terms of development and popularity.
Like Open Office, Libre Office includes includes six programs: Write (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentation), Base (database management), Draw (vector graphics) and Math (mathematical formulae). It’s free to use on Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops.
Blockchain, business, and finance experts have teamed up to create an open-source platform to integrate SAP and blockchain called SophiaTX.
In case you don't know, the Open Source Initiative, more commonly known as OSI, is an organization that's been around since 1998 with the prime goal of promoting and protecting open source software. For the later, it has the roll of keeper-of-the-licenses -- my term, not theirs -- and is the place to turn to have a wannabe new open source license receive the official seal of approval. It's also the place to turn to make sure that a new license is compatible with the General Public License, or GPL, which is pretty much a must if software released under the license is to get much developer interest.
“The corporate/mainstream media keeps telling us that Microsoft has changed and can now be trusted within its competition, but this media merely plays along with an expensive PR campaign which is intended to shift attention and systematically launder Microsoft’s reputation,” writes Dr. Roy Schestowitz, an open source advocate.
Even before Microsoft joined the OSI, open source advocates were skeptical. Richard Stallman, for instance, is the leader of the free software movement, which holds that any software that isn’t entirely open source is inherently unethical. Famously, Stallman won’t watch Netflix on someone else’s computer because it violates these principles.
“The aim of the free software movement is to free users from freedom-denying proprietary programs and systems, such as Windows,” Stallman told TechRepublic earlier in September.
Much of the development work done this quarter was not particularly visible, especially the effort needed to ensure the upcoming 11.1 release has as few regressions as possible. Planning is also well under way for the 10.4 maintenance release which will quickly follow it.
Further work focused on moving the arm architectures' support closer to tier-1 status and improving documentation. In addition, large changes were made to the src and ports trees.
Oracle, the California-based software company, appears to be behind the lobbying campaign using Warren as its foil. The campaign targeted Warren as the supposed source of a provision added to the National Defense Authorization Act that would encourage the Department of Defense to use open-source software for non-battlefield purposes.
“Open-source software” refers to computer programs for which the source code is both transparent and available for use and reuse by anyone, for any purpose, under the conditions defined by a given license. This is different from the proprietary software often purchased by government agencies, where the agency does not have access to the source code.
For proprietary software, the agency must go back to the company that sold the software and pay for any upgrade, update, patch or fix needed to maintain continued operations. The proprietary model often means that one company has a monopoly on knowledge of military and government systems.
Recently, Facebook drew the ire of the open source community by licensing React.js (a widely-used JavaScript library) under a so-called BSD + Patents license. That license drew fears of patent litigation and React.js was rejected by the Apache Foundation and WordPress decided to ditch it. As a result of the backlash, the social media giant has backtracked and re-licensed the library.
This is the second publication from the imprint, which offers open-access to the text through a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License, which means that the book is available for anyone to download and read for free. At last count the book has been downloaded 1,250 times in 18 countries.
Hour of Code is a global movement that aims to demystify code by introducing students and teachers to the basics of programming through direct participation in open source software projects. It currently reaches tens of millions of students in almost 200 countries. Similarly, Kids Can Code teaches children to code, based on the belief that a basic understanding of software engineering provides a set of fundamental skills that is vital to both to the child's future and that of the global economy. Kids That Code offers unique programs in which children learn computer programming, game development, website creation, electronics, and more. Google’s Code-In is an annual programming competition for high school and secondary school students aged 13-17. The program encourages young people to complete tasks specified by various partnering open source organizations. These are just a few examples of the growing numbers of communities working to introduce and foster interest in software development and open source software. Tools such as Alice, Hackety Hack, Scratch, and others provide a platform along with activities and resources for teaching and learning.
But there's a catch: Students can't participate in any of these valuable programs—nor can they use Alice, Hackety Hack, Scratch, or any other software—if they don't have a computer.
Airlines worldwide were forced to delay flights Thursday as a global flight-bookings system operated by Amadeus IT Group SA suffered what the company called a “network issue.”
As research publications increasingly become digital, it's essential to create a findable and unchanging electronic scholarly record. Researchers are probably familiar with the digital object identifier (DOI), which in URL form provides a persistent link to articles (and more). In addition, many libraries and publishers provide redundant archiving to ensure scholarship is preserved over the long term; however, making sure other types of links in articles work and that a linked webpage represents what the author saw when it was cited is also important. Thinking about my own recent publications, there are probably some links that won't work five (let alone 20) years from now, or links resolving to webpages that will be changed and won't accurately represent what I was referencing at the time.
These problems are usually referred to as link rot and reference rot. Link rot means a URL can no longer be found (e.g., your browser returns a 404 error); reference rot means the information cited at a URL either disappeared or changed.
In the US, most education standards are set by the states, and local communities are free to develop lesson plans that ensure that their students meet the state's expectations. Unfortunately, that has often led to education standards becoming ideological battlegrounds, as different groups try to put their stamp on things like history education. Even more unfortunately, battles often break out over basic reality, as scientific topics that people reject for cultural or ideological reasons—think evolution and climate change—can get diluted or eliminated entirely from the state standards.
In an attempt to make it easier for states to handle science education a bit better, a group of prestigious scientific societies banded together to make their own science education standards. The resulting Next Generation Science Standards were offered to the states free of charge, allowing them to be adopted in their entirety or modified to fit a state's needs.
Elsevier is at it again. It has launched a new (free) service that is likely to undermine open access alternatives by providing Wikipedia-like definitions generated automatically from texts it publishes.
Grassroots activists thwarted a costly and destructive renovation scheme—but the NYPL still lacks effective governance.
Speaking at the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) China 2017, in Beijing, Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang said that the advancements being made in GPU field have killed fuelled the death of Moore’s Law, according to Fudzilla.
Establishing a universal program for prescription medications would amount to about $4.2 billion in savings annually in Canada, the parliamentary budget officer says in a new report.
The report, requested by the House of Commons standing committee on health, was released Thursday.
It provides estimates of the cost to the federal government for a national pharmacare program based on the list of drugs publicly covered in Quebec.
Since its inception the CII has considered network time, and implementations of the Network Time Protocol, to be “core infrastructure.” Correctly synchronising clocks is critical both to the smooth functioning of many services and to the effectiveness of numerous security protocols; as a result most computers run some sort of clock synchronization software and most of those computers implement either the Network Time Protocol (NTP, RFC 5905) or the closely related but slimmed down Simple Network Time Protocol (SNTP, RFC 4330).
An alarming number of Macs remain vulnerable to known exploits that completely undermine their security and are almost impossible to detect or fix even after receiving all security updates available from Apple, a comprehensive study released Friday has concluded.
Clarence Birdseye is generally considered to be the founder of the modern frozen food industry. In 1925, after a couple of false starts, he moved his General Seafood Corporation to Gloucester, Massachusetts. There, he used his newest invention, the double belt freezer, to freeze fish quickly using a pair of brine-cooled stainless steel belts. This and other Birdseye innovations centered on the idea that flash-freezing meant that only small ice crystals could form, and therefore cell membranes were not damaged. Over time, these techniques were applied to a wide range of food — including the ubiquitous frozen peas.
If journalism resigns itself to being a “first draft of history,” Ken Burns’ popular PBS documentaries, written by Lynn Novick, have increasingly aspired to—and achieved—a coveted status as popular historical canon. This has, in part, been accomplished by Burns’ choice of cozily American subject matter—jazz, baseball, the Brooklyn Bridge—as well as the calming effect that time and distance provide when it comes to more difficult, inflammatory topics like the Civil War. His success is a rare, fraught feat.
But how would Burns’ earnest, middlebrow glosses on American history, forever panning slowly across sepia-tinted photos, treat a more contemporaneous, contentious event like the Vietnam War? The answer can be found in a 10-part, 18-hour opus that for the first time ventures outside Burns’ previous editorial and narrative comfort zones. The Cold War lead-up, decade-plus of intense air and ground combat, and subsequent years of national shame/guilt over the war affected the second half of our 20th century like nothing else.
Teasing out a coherent, honest through-line of such a momentous, highly charged topic is ambitious, to say the least, and Burns rises to the challenge in many ways. Most notable among them: a dedicated effort to include the voices and experiences of the Vietnamese who suffered and/or fought Americans, to create a much more complete, insightful portrait of the war. But in the striving to present all sides and simply lay out the facts for the viewer, Burns nonetheless pulls his punches when it comes to assigning blame and culpability for the disastrous war. As a result, he has produced a sometimes daring, sometimes schmaltzy, richly detailed yet ultimately flawed film about the tragedy and horrors that the United States brought upon itself and inflicted upon Southeast Asia.
On behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union and its more than 1.6 million members, I write to express deep concern about the detention by the Department of Defense of an American citizen as an “enemy combatant,” and to urge immediate action to ensure that the United States’ conduct with respect to this citizen complies with the Constitution, and domestic and international law. The Defense Department has reportedly been detaining the U.S. citizen, who is suspected of fighting with ISIS, since on or around September 14, after Syrian forces transferred him to U.S. custody, and the U.S. has transferred him to a facility in Iraq. The U.S. government has not publicly disclosed the citizen’s identity, nor has it apparently yet determined whether it will continue to detain the citizen in U.S. military custody, transfer him to another country’s jurisdiction, or transfer him to the federal criminal justice system for prosecution.
The detention of an unnamed U.S. citizen held by the military as an enemy combatant is increasingly a legal and human-rights emergency, national security lawyers and civil libertarian activists say—and a bellwether case for the unsettled question of what terrorism captures in Donald Trump’s administration will look like.
The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Romero, wrote on Friday to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to urge the U.S. citizen’s transfer to civilian custody, calling his military detention “unlawful as a matter of domestic law.”
Donald Trump threatened to "totally destroy North Korea" in his address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 19. That threat violates the UN Charter, and indicates an intent to commit genocide, crimes against humanity, the war crime of collective punishment and international humanitarian law. Moreover, a first-strike use of nuclear weapons would violate international law.
The United Nations has agreed to establish a group of eminent experts to examine all allegations of war crimes and potential human rights violations committed in the conflict in Yemen, and to identify those responsible.
In a last-minute compromise hammered out between Western powers and Arab countries, the UN Human Rights Council adopted by consensus without a vote, a resolution which the Yemen delegation said it accepted.
“We believe that this urgent request could no longer be ignored,” Dutch ambassador Monique TG Van Daalen told the Geneva forum.
While the United States may be slowing its drive to reduce emissions as a nation, California could press for more stringent standards that could end up being as strict those recently planned by some countries.
The nation’s most populous state may propose a plan to ban internal combustion engines, following France and the United Kingdom, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. California Air Resources board chair Mary Nichols told the publication Gov. Jerry Brown, “has expressed an interest in barring the sale of vehicles powered by internal-combustion engines,” in that state.
It would follow a trend California has set since the 1960s when CARB was set up and the state started to create its own air quality and emissions standards to curb some of the worst pollution problems in the Los Angeles area. However, blocking the sale of gasoline- and diesel-powered new cars could radically transform not just a market of 2 million new vehicles per year, but also the market of 13 other states and the District of Columbia that follow California’s emissions standards.
This week on CounterSpin: As Puerto Rico suffers extraordinary devastation in the wake of Hurricane Maria (and Hurricane Irma), some in the media are asking, “Is Puerto Rico Trump’s Katrina?” Besides viewing the staggering disaster through the lens of Trump’s political fortunes, the question usually turns out to be about Trump’s—like George W. Bush’s—tone-deafness or callousness when it comes to talking about a catastrophe overwhelmingly affecting people of color. A more substantive angle would be to talk about what happened to New Orleans in Katrina’s wake—the displacement, the rush to privatization and gentrification, the phenomenon Naomi Klein has labeled “disaster capitalism.” Pointing out that Trump is behaving boorishly is not the same as digging into those questions, or offering an alternative vision for Puerto Rico’s recovery. We’ll talk about the natural and unnatural crises Puerto Rico is facing with journalist Ed Morales.
A majority of Americans say that global climate change contributed to the severity of recent hurricanes in Florida and Texas, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. That marks a significant shift of opinion from a dozen years ago, when a majority of the public dismissed the role of global warming and said such severe weather events just happen from time to time. In a 2005 Post-ABC poll, taken a month after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf coast and devastated New Orleans, 39 per cent of Americans said they believed climate change helped to fuel the intensity of hurricanes. Today, 55 per cent believe that. The shift may in part reflect scientists’ increasing confidence – and their increasing amount of data – in linking certain extreme weather events such as hurricanes to climate change. Many researchers have been unequivocal that while hotter oceans, rising seas and other factors are not the sole cause of any event, the warming climate is contributing to more intense storms and more frequent, more crippling storm surges and flooding.
People who abuse animals in England will now face up to five years in prison under a tough new crackdown.
The environment secretary, Michael Gove, said the tenfold increase from the present six-month sentence was needed to combat cruelty.
On Thursday, Wolfgang Hatz, former engine chief for Volkswagen and Audi and later the head of research and development at Porsche, was arrested in Munich. With Hatz's arrest, the slow-moving investigations of Volkswagen Group in the aftermath of the 2015 emissions scandal seem to be gathering momentum, according to reports from German paper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the New York Times.
This is why most highly educated people supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), even though they had no clue what was in it. The rationale given for the TPP has constantly shifted in response to the political climate. It was originally pushed for its economic benefits, in terms of more growth and jobs.
However, no serious analysis could show anything other than trivial benefits for the economy. While removing trade barriers might generally be good for growth, there are relatively few barriers remaining between the United States and the other eleven countries in the TPP. It already has trade agreements with six of these countries.
In fact, the TPP actually increases protectionist barriers, in the form of longer and stronger patent, copyright and related protections. For some reason, the economic analyses don’t include the negative effects of increasing these protections, even though their impact on the prices of the affected products, most importantly prescription drugs, dwarfs the impact of lowering a tariff of one or two percentage points to zero.
Adjunct professors in America face low pay and long hours without the security of full-time faculty. Some, on the brink of homelessness, take desperate measures
Puerto Rico has rejected a bondholder group’s offer to issue the territory additional debt as a response to the devastation of Hurricane Maria. Officials with Puerto Rico’s Fiscal Agency and Financial Advisory Authority said the offer was “not viable” and would harm the island’s ability to recover from the storm.
The PREPA (Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority) Bondholder Group made the offer on Wednesday, which included $1 billion in new loans, and a swap of $1 billion in existing bonds for another $850 million bond. These new bonds would have jumped to the front of the line for repayment, and between that increased value and interest payments after the first two years, the bondholders would have likely come out ahead on the deal, despite a nominal $150 million in debt relief.
Indeed, the offer was worse in terms of debt relief than one the bondholder group made in April, well before hurricanes destroyed much of the island’s critical infrastructure.
The US’s planned 209 per cent tariff on Bombardier could serve as a lesson for the UK government over its trade vulnerabilities after Brexit, the Irish taoiseach has warned.
Speaking ahead of a summit of the EU’s leaders in Tallinn, Leo Varadker said the White House’s move against Bombardier raised the possibility of a US and UK trade war rather than a free trade deal between the two countries.
Boris Johnson is facing calls to be sacked over allegations he abused his position by using government resources to host a hard Brexit event at the Foreign Office.
The Foreign Secretary is accused of breaching the Ministerial Code by arranging a launch event on government property for the Institute for Free Trade – a new eurosceptic think tank being led by Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan.
Mr Hannan was a prominent figure in the Vote Leave campaign. He has previously called the NHS a “mistake” and said the minimum wage should be scrapped.
While the profile of electronic commerce is rising in diverse international fora, some developing countries are saying they do not want to discuss a new negotiating mandate for e-commerce rules at the World Trade Organization. The current work programme on e-commerce is still adequate, they find, and the WTO Ministerial Conference in December should address more pressing issues, such as agriculture, or completing the Doha Development Round negotiations.
South Korea announced a broad ban on initial coin offerings on Friday, following the lead of China, which banned the practice earlier this month.
"The Financial Services Commission said all kinds of initial coin offerings (ICO) will be banned as trading of virtual currencies needs to be tightly controlled and monitored," Reuters reports. Anyone who issues ICOs in South Korea will face "stern penalties," Korean authorities announced.
"There is a situation where money has been flooded into an unproductive and speculative direction," said Kim Yong-beom, vice chairman of the commission.
Baidu Inc. is building a system to allow China’s cybercops to spot and fix “online rumors” deemed a threat to stability, allowing police agencies to insert themselves directly into everything from its search results to discussion forums.
The fake news that ran rampant on Facebook was a symptom of a larger issue. The real problem lies at the very heart of Facebook’s most successful product: Perhaps virality and engagement cannot be the basis for a ubiquitous information service that acts as a “force for good in democracy.”
Make no mistake about it: the United States has entered an era of a New McCarthyism that blames nearly every political problem on Russia and has begun targeting American citizens who don’t go along with this New Cold War propaganda.
[...]
The real winners in this New McCarthyism appear to be the neoconservatives who have leveraged the Democratic/liberal hatred of Trump to draw much of the Left into the political hysteria that sees the controversy over alleged Russian political “meddling” as an opportunity to “get Trump.”
Already, the neocons and their allies have exploited the anti-Russian frenzy to extract tens of millions of dollars more from the taxpayers for programs to “combat Russian propaganda,” i.e., funding of non-governmental organizations and “scholars” who target dissident Americans for challenging the justifications for this New Cold War.
The Washington Post, which for years has served as the flagship for neocon propaganda, is again charting the new course for America, much as it did in rallying U.S. public backing for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and in building sympathy for abortive “regime change” projects aimed at Syria and Iran. The Post has begun blaming almost every unpleasant development in the world on Russia! Russia! Russia!
This is how the New York Times avoids having to say anything positive about life in the Soviet Union or about socialism. They would have readers believe that it was the loss of the likes of Czechoslovakia or Hungary et al. that upset the Russian people, not the loss, under Gorbachev’s perestroika, of a decent standard of living for all, a loss affecting people’s rent, employment, vacations, medical care, education, and many other aspects of the Soviet welfare state.
Accompanying this review is a quote from a 1996 Times review of Gorbachev’s own memoir, which said: “It mystifies Westerners that Mikhail Gorbachev is loathed and ridiculed in his own country. This is the man who pulled the world several steps back from the nuclear brink and lifted a crushing fear from his countrymen, who ended bloody foreign adventures [and] liberated Eastern Europe. … Yet his repudiation at home could hardly be more complete. His political comeback attempt in June attracted less than 1 percent of the vote.”
Federal agencies generally followed the rules and refrained from exerting political pressure when converting appointees into career positions, according to a new report, which audited the very few cases of “burrowing in” since 2010.
The Office of Personnel Management approved 78 conversions of political appointees between Jan. 1, 2010, and March 17, 2016, according to the Government Accountability Office, as is required by federal law. Agencies converted seven employees without approval, but OPM conducted post-appointment reviews for the cases in which those workers were still on the rolls. In all of those cases, OPM retroactively denied the conversions.
The Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, referring to the “illegal” Catalan referendum on independence slated to take place on October 1, opined, “This illegal plan of rupture has no place in a democratic state under the rule of law such as ours.” Not famous for intellectual agility, Mr Rajoy has cack-handedly drawn attention to what his government calls “rule of law”, a key issue in the present situation and one that affects not just Catalonia but the whole of Spain.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price stepped down Friday, in the midst of a snowballing scandal over his repeated use of taxpayer funds for extravagant air travel while in office, including for trips that combined government and personal business.
"Secretary of Health and Human Services Thomas Price offered his resignation earlier today and the President accepted," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement late Friday afternoon. She added that Trump plans to make deputy assistant secretary for health and director of the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion Don J. Wright acting secretary effective Friday night.
The UN’s decolonisation committee will not accept a petition signed by 1.8 million West Papuans calling for independence, saying West Papua’s cause is outside the committee’s mandate.
In New York on Tuesday, the exiled West Papuan leader Benny Wenda presented the petition – banned by the Indonesian government, but smuggled across Papua and reportedly endorsed by 70% of the contested province’s population – to the UN’s decolonisation committee, known as the C24 and responsible for monitoring the progress of former colonies towards independence.
Preparations for the Censorship Board’s first stakeholders meeting scheduled for next Wednesday in Harare are at an advanced stage. The main purpose of the meeting is to establish rapport between the board and its stakeholders and the proposal of a new name for the board. The board’s chairman, former Cabinet minister, educationist and historian Cde Aeneas Chigwedere said the meeting would be held at the ZRP Golf Club.
NCR's Tom Roberts and David Gibson of Fordham University discuss an unsettling pattern of Catholic writers and scholars being disinvited from speaking engagements and adjunct positions due to intimidation from far-right Catholic groups.
Countless Rohingya refugees have tried to record the ethnic cleansing of their communities by turning to Facebook, the social network that promised to give a voice to the voiceless. Rather than finding solidarity, they face censorship, with Facebook deleting their stories and blocking their accounts. The Rohingya are a majority-Muslim ethnic group primarily living in Buddhist-majority Myanmar. A recent wave of government-sponsored violence has driven an estimated 500,000 Rohingya from Myanmar since August.
Facebook’s mistake shows the danger of censorship and raises the question of which group might be targeted next. When vendors and websites claim to have the tools to target unwanted speech, we need to ask what biases they are bringing to the task.
Over the past five or so years, trigger warnings, whether found on course syllabuses or announced during classes to warn of a film’s or a reading’s content, have initiated a discussion regarding their use on today’s college campuses. Trigger warnings are claimed to be beneficial in alerting students to course content that might precipitate an unwelcomed, intense emotional response and, therefore, they are said to protect students from discomfort.
Vera Jourova says she's asking internet companies to do more to stop online hate speech, and that request is not just in her capacity as the European Union's commissioner for justice. Last year, she chose to close down her own Facebook account following a nonstop stream of online abuse. "It was the highway for hatred and I am not willing to support it," Jourova told a news conference on Thursday. "I have still not [re-]opened it."
You may have heard the story earlier this week that the video game company Atlus had issued a DMCA takedown over a Patreon page for the creators of RPCS3 -- an open source PlayStation 3 emulator, because people could use that emulator to play the Atlus game Persona 5. An awful lot of people immediately said that this was a crazy DMCA takedown, and it's clear that a Patreon page is not violating the copyright of Persona 5 itself. And it is messed up, but perhaps not for the reasons most people are thinking. A DMCA takedown here may actually be legitimate under the law. Rather than a bogus takedown, this may be yet another example of just how fucked up the DMCA is.
The ACLU of Missouri is suing police for its aggressive police response to people protesting Jason Stockley’s acquittal.
“I think everyone deserves the same rights as I do. I just want peace and justice,” says Maleeha Ahmad, one of the protesters who was pepper-sprayed by police officers in St. Louis last week.
Ms. Ahmad has joined a lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Missouri against the city of St. Louis, arguing that the militarized and overtly aggressive police response to people protesting Jason Stockley’s acquittal violated the protesters’ First Amendment, Fourth Amendment, and due process rights. The ACLU of Missouri also sent a letter to officials in St. Louis reminding them that law enforcement is obligated to refrain from unnecessary and disproportionate use of force against nonviolent protests.
For the past nine days, protesters in St. Louis have decried a Missouri judge’s decision to acquit Stockley, a former St. Louis police officer, of first-degree murder for the shooting death of Anthony Lamar Smith, a 24-year-old Black man. The demonstrations called for justice and an end to the cycle of police brutality that is enabled by court decisions amounting to little more than a slap on the wrist.
Little wonder, then, that so many on the liberal-left are hostile to the principle of free speech. When words are so readily conflated with violence, and when to debate contentious issues is seen as a form of ‘normalisation’, we should hardly be surprised to find a professor at Princeton University delivering a lecture entitled ‘Fuck Free Speech’ to commemorate Constitution Day.
BuzzFeed filed a motion to compel the three agencies, Comey and Clapper to respond to subpoenas the media firm issued after it was sued for libel by Russian internet entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev. He was mentioned in the dossier, which was compiled by former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele and contained information the Russians were said to be collecting to try to blackmail Trump.
Several news outlets, including POLITICO, are suing under the Freedom of Information Act to get records about how the federal government tried to vet the claims in the dossier. However, BuzzFeed’s move could have more legal heft because the web publisher is claiming it needs the information to defend itself in the libel suit, pending in federal court in Miami.
The Ars piece quotes a bunch of lawyers discussing whether it is fair use -- with many leaning towards it being fair use, but some arguing it's not that clear cut. I would argue that the newsworthy nature of it and the purpose of the archive push it pretty strongly towards being transformative (the use is quite different than the initial use). And, similarly, the fact that this clearly wouldn't "harm" the market for the Howard Stern show, would weight heavily towards fair use -- though, with so many fair use cases, you never know how a judge will see things (and you could make arguments against fair use if you tried hard enough).
Factba.se also says that it's trying to resolve this amicably with Sirius XM and to properly "preserve the record." And that raises some other questions. Copyright law has Section 108, for libraries and archives to preserve important works in a manner for research purposes that are open to the public. Among the rules under 108 is that the archive must determine "after reasonable investigation" that a copy of the work cannot be obtained at a fair price -- which appears to be the case here. However, there are also some other hoops to jump through, including posting a specific notice with the archive to qualify (which seems unlikely to have happened). Furthermore, it's unlikely that a for-profit entity can avail itself of Section 108's protections. There is one part of 108 -- put in place specifically for Vanderbilt's TV news archive, that make it easier to archive "audiovisual news programs" but again, is Howard Stern's show a "news program?" That would be a fun question to test in court.
While the decision is understandable from an emotional point of view, it’s quite a statement to make as the CEO of one of the largest Internet infrastructure companies. Not least because it goes directly against what many saw as Cloudflare’s core values.
For years on end, Cloudflare has been asked to remove terrorist propaganda, pirate sites, and other controversial content. Each time, Cloudflare replied that it doesn’t take action without a court order. No exceptions.
In addition, Cloudflare repeatedly stressed that it was impossible for them to remove a website from the Internet, at least not permanently. It would only require a simple DNS reconfiguration to get it back up and running.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement provides its agents with information about how to use material that the National Security Agency obtains through its spy programs, according to documents obtained by The Daily Beast through a Freedom of Information Act request.
With assistance from the James Madison Project, The Daily Beast obtained a heavily redacted chapter from a handbook for agents in ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations component. The chapter gives those agents an overview of how the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act works.
The U.S. National Security Agency would need to begin winding down what it considers its most valuable intelligence program before its expiration at year-end if the U.S. Congress leaves its reauthorization in limbo, the agency’s deputy director said on Friday.
The possibility the U.S. government may begin losing access to the surveillance authority even before it would officially lapse on Dec. 31 is likely to increase pressure on lawmakers to quickly renew the law.
Showtime's websites recently began covertly hijacking user browsers to mine cryptocurrency, and neither Showtime nor its parent company CBS appear interested in explaining how or why it happened. The code in question -- a bit of JavaScript dubbed Coinhive, was embedded in two different Showtime domains: Showtime.com and Showtimeanytime.com. When a visitor visited these domains, their browser was hijacked and their computer was forced to help mine Monero, a new privacy-centric alternative to bitcoin currently valued at around $92 each.
Yesterday, the IMCO (‘consumers protection’) Committee of the European Parliament has adopted its Opinion on the ePrivacy Regulation. The majority of its Members, led by the pro-business rapporteur Eva Maydell, are calling for a general bypassing of users' consent. Act now so that Members of the LIBE (‘civil liberties’) Committee do not answer this dangerous call in their decisive Report voted on 11 October.
Pai made his appeal in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, which have wreaked havoc on communities across the US and beyond in recent weeks. The FCC chief framed the activation of the FM radio chip as a boon to public safety, since FM radio signals are generally easier to receive in times of emergency when compared to Internet-based services provided over a cellular network. Though it may not be obvious at first blush, most smartphones have the ability to stream local FM radio stations directly. Chipmakers like Qualcomm and Intel have long baked FM radio tuners into the chips that enable Wi-Fi connectivity in various handsets.
In an arresting presentation framed in a first-hand account of the creation of the early internet and focused on the hyper-sophisticated sensors we carry everywhere in the form of our smartphone, marking our every behaviour and element of our life for commercial and state use, Free Software legend and privacy advocate Prof. Eben Moglen gave a speech this week at Yale Law School on privacy, the "machine," and the jarring threat humanity is facing. There is at least one sign of hope, he said: the FreedomBox.
The Guardian reported that if she charged under the Espionage Act, Winner could get, at most, a 10-year sentence. However, Kathleen McClellan, a national security and human rights deputy director for the Whistleblower and Source Protection Program, told The Guardian that it was "wildly inappropriate" to use the Espionage Act for cases like this.
Allowing foreign ships to bring goods to hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico would be a grave threat to national security, warned a handful of American shipping companies who have the trade routes locked down thanks to a century-old law.
They wanted to see that law left in place, thank you very much. Much to their discontent, President Donald Trump’s administration announced Thursday morning that it would temporarily waive the law, known as the Jones Act.
Puerto Rico, suffering from the combined forces of economic collapse, debt-driven austerity, and Hurricane Maria’s devastation, faces restrictions on imports from foreign registered ships under the Jones Act, a law supported by a small but powerful group of American companies that dominate U.S.-Puerto Rico shipping routes.
The Jones Act, created over 100 years ago to shore up the domestic shipbuilding industry, imposes stiff fines on foreign-built and registered ships that move cargo between U.S. ports. (Foreign ships are allowed into port if they originated from a foreign country, but not if they docked in another U.S. port first.)
Why has the international community ignored the plight of the Anglophone Cameroonians? Well the UK, as the former colonial power, finds the whole subject embarrassing and has no interest at all in interfering. African governments are notoriously unwilling to call each other out on human rights abuse. Plus the entire colonial legacy of the divide between Anglophone and Francophone West Africa is a neuralgic point in the region, affecting many relationships between rulers and states. Persecution of an Anglophone minority by a Francophone government is an issue that, if raised within the remit of the regional organisation, ECOWAS, would cause a very large can of worms to be opened. Without any powerful voices speaking up for the Anglophone Cameroonians, the United Nations is under no pressure to be involved.
11 men were arrested across the UK yesterday as part of a probe into the banned far-right group National Action.
Six of the men were in north-west England, two in Wales, two in West Yorkshire and one man in Wiltshire. It was clearly a big police operation.
It's important to note these men were arrested under the UK's anti-terrorism laws and some were suspected of preparing terrorist acts.
We marked a sad milestone this week — 250 days since the start of Donald Trump’s presidency. Across the spectrum of political life, the disaster that is Donald Trump continues to damage the US at home and to tarnish America’s reputation abroad, and, while there are too many problems to list, certain recent issues stand our for us —the persistence with which Trump continues to try to implement his outrageous Muslim ban, his racist targeting of black sportsmen for what he perceives as their lack of patriotism, and his warmongering against North Korea at the United Nations.
Islamophobia, racism and warmongering are always to be despised when they raise their ugly heads at the highest levels of government, and when it comes to our particular topic of concern — the prison at Guantánamo Bay — these signs from Trump do not bode well for our aim of seeing Guantánamo closed once and for all.
It is true that Trump has not yet managed to do anything stupendously negative regarding Guantánamo, despite threatening to do so. And so, for example, he has not officially rescinded President Obama’s executive order calling for the prison’s closure, and has not sent any new prisoners there, despite very evidently wanting to do so.
The government has lost its claim to money lifted from two men by the DEA at the Cleveland airport. Despite agents being super-sure the money was either drug profits or intended for drug purchases, no charges were brought. But the DEA decided to keep the money -- $31,000 from one and $10,000 from the other -- for itself.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals says not so fast. The decision [PDF] lets the government know it's jumping the gun on claiming sole ownership of this lifted cash. The opinion starts out with a brief description of how the cash-focused Drug Enforcement Agency starts each airport workday.
And then there is the increasingly visible racism of the U.S. I watched when black or Arab workers carried bags or moved carts. I saw so many of those put upon white faces tighten ever so slightly. The animosity is in the air. On the TVs, and there are TVs everywhere in the U.S., large screens EVERYWHERE. It is the only thing more common than cops. And on TV were endless photos of North Korea and the ‘Rocket Man’, or there were football games. One or the other. Jesus but football is popular. And there is no other sport in the U.S. as saturated in jingoistic pro war rhetoric and symbolism. And I am reminded that this is a game proven to cause irreparable brain damage. That said, the, perhaps, hidden dialectic in this most militaristic of sports is the Kaepernick protests, which have spread. Sports always contains within it a kind of potential for such synthesis of contradiction (see Dave Zirin’s recent writing). So mostly the comments one overheard were about football. Or about how fed up people were with that Kim Jung whatshisname…hell, get rid of that fucker. Trump speaking of “Nambia.” An imaginary country that exists in that private colonial map in his mind. And then a group of young Christians sat down near me at the gate. They seemed to be focused on ‘the holy spirit’. ‘Oh man’, one girl said, loudly, ‘I felt the holy spirit today’. I could feel it all day, she said, rather too loudly. I looked at her. She was blonde, refried, maybe in her late twenties, and wore spandex pants and Rebok trainers and a blue t-shirt with some other athletic brand name scrawled across the front of it. She was loud. Oh and she kept eating M&Ms.
There's an apocryphal story from WWII that when the Nazis started requiring the Jews under their control to wear gold stars, the Danish King donned one himself and suggested his subjects do the same. It’s an inspiring story, and it ought to be true, but it is mere folklore in the service of the more mundane historical truth: the Danes saved most of their Jewish population from the Holocaust, but by more conventional methods.
Early warning of Germany’s intentions and a negotiated safe passage through Sweden were why nearly 90 percent of the Danish Jews survived the occupation of Denmark. But it is also true that siding with their Jews in 1943 carried substantial risk for the Danes, who had refused since the German invasion of Denmark in 1940—a “war” that took all of two hours—to enact anti-Jewish measures suggested by the occupying forces and gotten away with it because Danes were “Nordic Aryans,” considered capable of governing themselves and offering no threat.
As we broadcast from Paris, we examine political turmoil in France, where it has been less than five months since the centrist political figure Emmanuel Macron defeated Marine Le Pen to become France’s youngest president ever. While Macron won in a landslide, opinion polls show most French voters now oppose how he has governed. On Saturday, leftist opposition leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon led up to 150,000 people in a protest against Macron and his attempt to rewrite France’s labor law. Meanwhile, human rights groups are criticizing Macron for pushing a new anti-terror law that would make permanent key parts of France’s state of emergency, which went into effect after the 2015 Paris attacks. "The situation in France is highly volatile, both socially, economically and politically," says our guest Yasser Louati, a French human rights and civil rights activist.
After racial slurs were scrawled outside black students' doors at the U.S. Air Force Academy's preparatory school, Superintendent Lt. Gen. Jay Silveria gathered all 4,000 cadets in a hall Thursday so they could hear one message: Treat people with dignity and respect — or get out.
"That kind of behavior has no place at the prep school, it has no place at USAFA, and it has no place in the United States Air Force," Silveria said, in a speech that has found an enthusiastic reception after it was recorded and published online. "You should be outraged not only as an airman, but as a human being."
Speaking to a crowd of some 5,500 people that included faculty, coaches, airstrip personnel and senior officers and staff of the 10th Air Base Wing that includes the academy, Silveria urged them not to let their institution be taken away from them.
Sometimes there’s a nugget of truth to the adage that Washington policymakers are disconnected from the people they purport to represent. This summer’s sustained grassroots defense of network neutrality, including a National Day of Action, is a good example. Millions of Americans have now contacted the Federal Communications Commission and Congress in opposition to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai’s plan to wipe away the open internet.
It is a stirring example of democracy in action. With the Internet’s future as a platform for innovation and democratic discourse on the line, a coalition of grassroots and diverse groups joined with technology firms to insist that the FCC maintain its 2015 open internet (or “net neutrality”) rules.
Cox has started charging overage fees to customers who exceed their data limits in California, bringing the nation's third largest cable company a bit closer to nationwide deployment of data caps.
Previously, Cox's California customers technically had monthly caps, but there was no enforcement of overage fees. Moving forward, Cox subscribers in the state will pay $10 for each additional block of 50GB after they pass the monthly cap.
AT&T has brought wireless home Internet to nine more states, offering rural and underserved customers a slightly faster replacement for old DSL lines.
"Our Fixed Wireless Internet service delivers a home Internet connection with download speeds of at least 10Mbps and upload speeds of at least 1Mbps," AT&T said in an announcement yesterday. "The connection comes from a wireless tower to a fixed antenna on customers’ homes or businesses. This is an efficient way to deliver high-quality, high-speed Internet to customers living in underserved rural areas."
In his ongoing push to get rid of net neutrality rules, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai claimed this month that the rules caused capital investment in wireless networks to drop in 2016. But in doing so, Pai hasn't addressed data from earlier years that doesn't fit his anti-net neutrality narrative.
"The most concerning emerging issue we are seeing is that investment in wireless networks was down significantly in 2016," Pai said in a speech at Mobile World Congress on September 12. "According to the UBS Wireless 411 report, in fact, investment was down 9 percent, a huge drop outside of a recession."
Eliminating net neutrality rules and the related classification of broadband providers as common carriers will reverse the trend, Pai predicted. "In our Restoring Internet Freedom proceeding, the FCC is currently examining whether we should change our Internet regulations in order to encourage greater deployment and investment and bring digital opportunity to more Americans," he said.
Techdirt has been pointing out for a while that the cliché about Chinese companies being little more than clever copycats, unable to come up with their own ideas, ceased to be true years ago. Anyone clinging to that belief is simply deluding themselves, and is likely to have a rude awakening as Chinese high-tech companies continue to advance in global influence. China's advances in basic research are pretty clear, but what about business innovation? That's an area that the US has traditionally prided itself on being the world leader. However, an interesting article in the South China Morning Post -- a Hong Kong-based newspaper owned by the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, which has a market capitalization of $400 billion -- explores how it's Chinese ideas that are now being copied...
The United States now owes Antigua some $200 million in damages, and has offered only about $2 million. Now Antigua will formally request negotiations with the US trade office. At stake is Antigua’s authorisation by the WTO panel to recover its damages by failing to protect US intellectual property rights there, which it again reluctantly threatened to do if there is no resolution.
Under the Japan Funds-in-Trust for Africa for IP systems (FIT/IP), the Japanese are spending up to 1.6 million Swiss Francs annually to conduct the trainings among ARIPO member countries, the main aim being to raise intellectual property literacy and build capacity in Africa.
Of all the things that most people get wrong about copyright law, the idea/expression dichotomy has to rank near the top. The confusion over this is easily explained by the pervasive ownership culture that has emerged organically from an intellectual property ecosystem that only moves in the direction of more protectionism. Because of that culture, most people simply assume that the creation of the idea is itself a copyrightable thing, rather than the reality which is that copyright only applies to specific expression. The useful example at hand is that one cannot copyright a superhero named after an animal that wears a mask and a cape, but one can copyright Batman, particularly any books, comics, or movies in which Batman is depicted.
As already stated, this reality evades many people. But it probably shouldn't evade those in industries dominated by copyright, such as the video game industry. Despite that, Bluehole, developers of the wildly popular PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds developer, appears to have its fur up over another studio, Epic Games, releasing a "battle royale" game mode for its Fortnite title.
In a recent decision, the Opposition Board of the Japan Patent Office dismissed an opposition filed by CFUB Sisley, a French producer of cosmetics and fragrances founded in 1976, against the word mark “SISLOY” written in a standard character.
The case shows that the status of European luxury brand will not automatically enjoy broader scope of protection in Japan unless the brand obtains a high degree of popularity and reputation among Japanese consumers.
A small company called Rasta Imposta has sued Kmart after the retailer stopped carrying the company's banana costume for the 2017 Halloween season. Kmart switched to another company's banana suit, and Rasta Imposta charges that the rival design infringes its copyright.
Earlier this year we wrote about a truly awful Supreme Court ruling concerning whether or not the design of cheerleader costumes could be covered by copyright. As we had explained earlier, this ruling could have a major impact on a variety of industries. The key issue is that "useful articles" are not supposed to be subject to copyright. Historically, that's always meant that the actual design of clothing or costumes is not protected by copyright law. And that's been a really good thing. It's inspired much more competition and innovation over the years in the clothing world.
As we noted when the ruling came out, allowing the copyright on cheerleader uniforms to stand, with a weird "new test" (basically whether you can "separate" the design from the useful article, and if the separated design is copyright-eligible), would lead to a lot of lawsuits pushing the boundaries of that test. And that's exactly what's happening. And it may ruin Halloween this year. Because suddenly, Halloween costume designers are starting to sue. Specifically, a costume maker named (no joke) "Rasta Imposta" is suing K-mart for having the audacity to sell someone else's banana costume. Really.
For most of the lifetime of Kodi since its release as XMBC in 2002, it was an obscure piece of free software that geeks used to manage their home media collections. But in the past few years, the sale of pre-configured Kodi boxes, and the availability of a range of plugins providing access to streaming media, has seen the software's popularity balloon—and made it the latest target of Hollywood's copyright enforcement juggernaut.
We've seen this in the appearance of streaming media boxes as an enforcement priority in the U.S. Trade Representative's Special 301 Report, in proposals for new legislation targeting the sale of "illicit" media boxes, and in lawsuits that have been brought on both sides of the Atlantic to address the "problem" that media boxes running Kodi, like any Web browser, can be used to access media streams that were not authorized by the copyright holder. We've also seen it in the big TV networks' vehement, sometimes disingenuous opposition to the U.S. law and regulations that mandate effective competition in the cable set-top box market.
Which is, of course, entirely besides the point. And, it should be noted, taking Crowell at his word after he has spent the better part of the decade being a factory for settlement threat letters built on flimsy evidence and fear doesn't seem like a reasonable course of action, either. Whatever you think of Crowell and his copyright trolling ways, there are proper and improper tactics to use in a copyright infringement case. Demanding the receipt of private property that almost certainly contains highly private information about what is merely an accused copyright infringer is plainly bonkers. It's worth repeating at this point that it isn't only Crowell's victims crying foul, but also those on the other side who have worked with him on his copyright efforts.
The European Commission published a set of guidelines today outlining how online service providers should tackle illegal content, including piracy. The recommendation follows the notice-and-stay-down principle, proposing proactive automated filters and measures against repeat infringers.
Pennsylvania-based King’s College and head football coach Jeffery Knarr are being sued for copyright infringement. Sports psychologist and author Dr. Keith Bell alleges that both committed offenses when Knarr retweeted a page from his book, that was initially tweeted by someone else, almost two years ago.