System76 has long been a Linux computer seller, but recently, it has transitioned into a Linux computer maker. What's the difference, you ask? Well, currently, the company doesn't really make its own computers. System76's laptops, for instance, are made by other manufacturers, which it re-brands as its own.
No, System76 doesn't just slap its name on other company's laptops and ship them out the door. Actually, it works closely with the manufacturers, tweaks firmware, and verifies that both Ubuntu and its Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS will work well on the hardware. System76 then offers top-notch support too. In other words, the company isn't just selling a computer, but an experience too.
Back in April 2017 was the announcement that System76 would begin designing and manufacturing their own systems beginning with desktops and to be followed at a later date by their own laptops, rather than relying upon whitebox designs that they currently retail with their Ubuntu/Pop!_OS-loaded PCs. The Colorado-based company is inching closer to fully realizing their goal.
For a while now the System76 folks have been posting various pictures of their in-progress manufacturing facility while today they have shared more images on their blog.
A problem that has been spotted in early March has resurfaced on Twitter this week, and Lenovo pointed the troubled customer to the official forum. Sadly, the 18-page discussion about the X1 Carbon's inability to use deep sleep on Linux also reveals that Lenovo's machines are unable to use LTE and the fingerprint reader when running this operating system.
Chromium evangelist at Google François Beaufort announced today that the Files app of the Chrome OS operating system was recently redesigned to accommodate viewing of Android and Linux files.
Apparently, Google's Chrome OS team is working on redesigning the Files app of the Linux-based Chrome OS operating system for Chromebooks with a new "My Files" section that promises to help you better organize your local files, including those from any Android and Linux apps you might have installed.
As you can see in the attached screenshot, the new "My Files" section will include the Recent, Takeout, Shortcuts, My Files (Downloads, Google Play/Android Files, and Linux Files), External or Mounted Volumes, Images, Videos, Audio, Google Drive (My Drive, Shared with me, and Offline), as well as Add new services entries.
The sign of a mature technology is not just how pervasive it is, but in how invisible and easy to use it is. No one thinks about wall sockets any more – unless you happen to need one to charge your phone and can’t find one – and that is but one example of a slew of technologies that are part of every day life.
Since Google first open sourced the Kubernetes container controller, inspired by its Borg and Omega internal cluster and container management systems, more than four years ago, we have been betting that it would become the dominant way of managing containers on clouds both public and private. The irony is that the people in charge of Google’s infrastructure were not initially all that enthusiastic in giving away such intellectual property, but the Kubernetes and open source enthusiasts correctly predicted that Google would get tremendous cred with the open source community and help create a Google-alike containerized private cloud environment and also possibly spread Google’s approach to rival clouds as well as helping its own Cloud Platform expansion by giving Kubernetes to the world.
As people continue to adopt CRI-O as a new container runtime for Kubernetes I am hearing questions from administrators who are confused whether they should use Crictl or Podman to diagnose and understand what is going on in a Kubernetes node. This is not one or the other — these tools are complementary, and this article attempts to explain the tools and examine when it is best to use each of these tools. If you take away one thing from this post, remember that Crictl checks the front entrance, while Podman examines the foundation.
First things first. For those people who aren’t familiar with it, CRI-O is a lightweight, Open Container Initiative (OCI) compliant, container runtime for Kubernetes. It is designed to run any OCI-based container, it is optimized for Kubernetes and committed to being stable and conformant with the Kubernetes container runtime interface with each Kubernetes release. CRI-O is also now fully supported in OpenShift, Red Hat’s enterprise Kubernetes container platform. For more information on CRI-O check out the CRI-O community web site and blog.
Kubernetes (aka K8s) is now the de facto standard for container orchestration. Kubernetes adoption is accelerating for stateless applications and microservices, and the community is beginning to evolve and mature the capabilities required for stateful applications. But large-scale distributed stateful applications – including analytics, data science, machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) applications for AI and Big Data use cases – are still complex and challenging to deploy with Kubernetes.
Data processing provider BlueData Inc. today launched BlueK8s, an open-source initiative aimed at making Kubernetes work better with artificial intelligence and analytics workloads.
Kubernetes is the leading framework for managing applications built with software containers. The project has grown in significance with the rising adoption of containers among enterprises, which use the technology to deploy services because it enables code to run across different kinds of infrastructure.
BlueData, provider container-based software for AI and Big Data workloads, will undertake a new open source Kubernetes initiative: BlueK8s.
The company also introduced the first open source project in the BlueK8s initiative, Kubernetes Director (aka KubeDirector), for deploying and managing distributed stateful applications with Kubernetes.
"We are taking advantage of legacy, while simultaneously eliminating the superfluous functionality and/or capabilities that are no longer relevant in a modern networking construct," Garg said.
On the Northbound interfaces, what ArcOS has it an open standard based programmable API, that enables organization sto harmonize different operating conditions. On the south side with the interfaces that connect with the underlying hardware, Garg said taht Arrcus takes advantage of the Linux kernel. Arrcus adds its own Data Plane Adaptation Layer (DPAL), which is an intelligent hardware abstraction layer, which allows ArcOS to interface into the underlying merchant silicon.
"We are a control plane solution and what that means is our product runs on the microprocessor that is contained in the switch or router hardware," Garg said. "The majority of those processors are Intel based, but our architecture also supports ARM, we're hardware agnostic at the system level we're also hardware agnostic at the component level."
There's already a new framework coming to Linux 4.19 in the form of Google's Gasket while queued this week is now another new framework: the FPGA Device Feature List.
Another one of the new frameworks slated for the Linux 4.19 kernel cycle kicking off in August is for idle injection.
Right now drivers like Intel PowerClamp and the AMD CPU cooling code insert idle CPU cycles when needed on their own, in order to keep below an intended power envelope or thermal threshold. Rather than drivers implementing idle injections on their own, the idle injection code within the Linux kernel has moved into a dedicated framework to make it easier for other kernel users to deploy.
While Linux hardware support for desktop PCs has advanced a great deal over the years, one area that continues to struggle is support for fan/thermal/power sensors on many of today's motherboards. This area has struggled with not enough public documentation / data-sheets from ASIC vendors as well as not enough upstream Linux kernel developers being interested in the hwmon subsystem. The IT87 Linux driver for many common Super I/O chips found on countless motherboards is unfortunately facing a downfall.
While the kernel configuration is just one part of Intel's Clear Linux optimizations for their performance-oriented distribution, a Fedora user has taken the liberty of spinning a Fedora kernel build based upon Clear Linux's kernel configuration.
It’s interesting for Fedora developers, as there is a little bit of debate whether or not Clear Linux kernels actually improve performance in any significant way, or if its entirely negligible. For example, when Phoronix tried a Clear Linux kernel for Ubuntu, all they managed to achieve was decreased boot times, but nearly all other tests showed only minuscule gains compared to the stock Ubuntu kernel.
Thus, its important to remember that finely-tuned kernels are only one small part of the overall puzzle. There are many other tweaks involved, particularly amongst the Intel development team working on Clear Linux, where they apply various packages to the kernel, and some vital components such as Glibc, GCC, and compiler optimizations revolving around LTO, FMV, and PGO.
Launched with support from Europe’s biggest transmission power systems provider and other organizations, LF Energy aims to streamline everything from system operator smart assistants to smart grid control software. It will serve as an umbrella organization that supports collaboration among vendors in the energy sector to advance information and communication technologies (ICT) that impact the energy balance and brings about economic value.
In today’s technology arena, open source is pervasive. The 2018 Open Source Jobs Report found that hiring open source talent is a priority for 83 percent of hiring managers, and half are looking for candidates holding certifications. And yet, 87 percent of hiring managers also cite difficulty in finding the right open source skills and expertise. This article is the second in a weekly series on the growing importance of open source certification.
In the first article, we focused on why certification matters now more than ever. Here, we’ll focus on the kinds of certifications that are making a difference, and what is involved in completing necessary training and passing the performance-based exams that lead to certification, with tips from Clyde Seepersad, General Manager of Training and Certification at The Linux Foundation.
About a year ago, we started a project to lay the foundation for full-scale power management for applications involving the Xen Project Hypervisor on Arm architectures. We intend to make Xen on Arm's power management the open source reference design for other Arm hypervisors in need of power management capabilities.
The latest AMDGPU firmware/microcode binary images for Radeon GPUs have landed in the Linux-Firmware Git tree.
Hitting linux-firmware.git minutes ago was the latest batch of AMDGPU firmware files from Bonaire and Hawaii up through Vega 10, Polaris, and Raven hardware. The updated firmware images are the same as what AMD recently shipped with the Radeon Software 18.20 hybrid driver package. No change-logs of what is different about these updated firmware images are currently available, but most of the time it's mostly routine and mundane fixes/updates.
Nvidia released a new version of its long-lived proprietary display driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris systems to add compatibility with recent Linux kernels and fix various bugs.
While not a major release, the Nvidia 390.77 proprietary graphics driver brings better compatibility with the latest Linux kernels. However, Nvidia didn't mention if it's now possible to compile its proprietary display drivers with the upcoming Linux 4.18 kernel series or just with the recent Linux 4.17 point releases.
In addition to improving compatibility with recent Linux kernels, the Nvidia 390.77 proprietary display driver for Linux-based operating systems addresses a random hang issue that could occur for some users when running Vulkan apps in full-screen mode and flipping was allowed.
Serving as the Mesa 18.2 release manager is Andres Gomez of Igalia. He's now pushed back the release plan by two weeks, although Mesa 18.2.0 still should end up shipping in August.
Rather than branching Mesa 18.2 by week's end, which begins the release candidate phase and marks the feature freeze, that deadline will be pushed back to 1 August. That means there are an extra two weeks of developers to land any desired changes into this next quarterly Mesa feature update.
Recently I have published benchmarks looking at Windows Server and FreeBSD against eight Linux distributions as well as a 9-way Linux desktop OS benchmark comparison while the latest in this string of fresh Linux distribution benchmarks is looking at the Linux laptop performance impact, if any, between these operating systems. Up for this benchmarking dance was Microsoft Windows 10, Windows 10 when running Ubuntu 18.04 via WSL, Ubuntu 18.04 itself, Fedora Workstation 28, openSUSE Tumbleweed, and Clear Linux.
whowatch is a simple, easy-to-use interactive who-like command line program for monitoring processes and users on a Linux system. It shows who is logged on to your system and what they are doing, in a similar fashion as the w command in real-time.
It shows total number of users on the system and number of users per connection type (local, telnet, ssh and others). whowatch also shows system uptime and displays information such as user’s login name, tty, host, processes as well as the type of the connection.
IBM’s effort to make its Notes/Domino platform relevant for the future kicks up a gear this week, as the company prepares a second beta of a new version 10.
Notes combined messaging and an application development environment, which set hearts a-fluttering in the early-to-mid 1990s. IBM laid out a then-record $3bn to acquire Lotus, which invented Notes, and drove the product to great prominence. IBM re-branded Notes’ back end as Domino and kept the Notes name for the client. But once Microsoft launched Outlook, bound it to Exchange and web-based development took off, both faded.
And faded and faded until October 2017 when IBM decided it had had enough and did a deal with HCL that saw the latter company pledge to take on future development work.
The forthcoming Atari VCS got a mixed reception from players, who are wary of a nostalgic cash-grab but hopeful for something more versatile and capable than Nintendo's one-shot classics consoles. A great sign: not only has it received spec bumps to 8GB of RAM and a decent GPU, but owners can install Linux. You probably won't want to, but it's proof of the system's general-purpose performance and open-ness.
The Atari VCS is a work-in-progress game console with a design inspired by the classic Atari 2600. But while the VCS will come with a bunch of 80s-era games pre-loaded, it’s basically designed to be a full-fledged computer with (relatively) modern specs.
It's worth noting, that it might be a bit broken, as users have reported the graphics to be in an unplayable state.
Fancy trying to survive after a plane crash on a desert island? Single-player survival game Stranded Deep will see you do just that.
While it doesn't seem to have been announced officially, the SteamOS/Linux icon is now live on their Steam page and checking on SteamDB it seems Linux support was added in a few hours ago.
After organizing the Atari VCS crowdfunding campaign to collect money and creating the hype for the upcoming Atari VCS console, the console has received a major update in the hardware.
Humble Bundle is offering a "Linux Geek Bundle" of ebooks from No Starch Press for $1 (or more—your choice) right now, in connection with It's FOSS. The Linux Geek bundle's books are worth $571 and are available in PDF, ePUB and MOBI format, and are DRM-free. Part of the purchase price will be donated to the EFF. See the It's FOSS post for the list of titles and more info.
More information on the upcoming Atari VCS console due to launch next year has been released in a Q&A on Medium with Rob Wyatt, System Architect for the Atari VCS project. Rob provides more details on the hardware specs: "The VCS hardware will be powered by an AMD Bristol Ridge family APU with Radeon R7 graphics and is now going to get 8 gigabytes of unified memory. This is a huge upgrade from what was originally specified and unlike other consoles it's all available, we won't reserve 25% of hardware resources for system use." In addition, the Q&A covers the Atari VCS "open platform" and "Sandbox", compatible controllers and more.
Need a game for when you have a coffee break? Sparky is a sweet and simple game that's played in the terminal.
Not enough fighting games on Linux for you? Perhaps Battle High 2 A+ will scratch that burning itch.
King under the Mountain is a new fantasy settlement-building strategy game that's now crowdfunding and it even has a Linux demo available. It sounds pretty good too!
For those interested in exploring the universe, Outer Wilds seemed like an extremely exciting game that was planning Linux support.
The retro FPS from Voidpoint and 3D Realms is officially getting multiplayer along with a note about a delayed final release.
Sent out today via press channels, they said that it was originally due for a full release in Q3 of this year, however they're pushing it back to "early 2019" as they want to ensure it "meets the same level of polish as other FPS classics from 3D Realms". They're planning a multiplayer beta closer to the final launch, although they're not really giving out any details on exactly how the multiplayer will work other than saying it will be "old-school multiplayer".
Cutelyst a C++ web framework based on Qt got a new release. This release has some important bug fixes so it’s really recommended to upgrade to it.
Most of this release fixes came form a side project I started called Cloudlyst, I did some work for the NextCloud client, and due that I became interested into how WebDAV protocol works, so Cloudlyst is a server implementation of WebDAV, it also passes all litmus tests. WebDAV protocol makes heavy use of REST concept, and although it uses XML instead of JSON it’s actually a good choice since XML can be parsed progressively which is important for large directories.
Over the course of the past couple of months, I was able to achieve a promising progress in modernising Five or More, although I would have to say there is a fair share of aspects to tackle yet.
I opted for rewriting the code module by module, without combining C and Vala code. There was was an old attempt to port Five or More to Vala, but I chose not to use it due to the fact that the partial port was 4 years old and it definitely needed an update, which might have taken quite some time, and might have produced some nasty bugs. While doing so, I paid extra attention to keep things nicely separated: all of the currently ported modules separate the game logic from the drawing logic and the UI.
I also managed to port the app menu and the preferences window. However, due to the new design gudelines, which are currently only in the state of a proposal, the app menu might require future alterations.
This is Part 2 of a blog post series summarizing the Developer Center BoF. See also Part 1: The Developer Experience.
Hi Again! As promised I will now cover our discussion of possible audiences at the GUADEC Developer Center BoF.
Shedbuilt is a new Linux distribution created exclusively for cheap ARM boards. It’s lead developer Auston sheds light on this new Linux project.
Pinguy OS 18.04 is an Ubuntu-based distribution that offers a non-standard GNOME desktop environment intended to be friendlier for new Linux users.
This distro is a solid Linux OS with a focus on simple and straightforward usability for the non-geek desktop user. If you do not like tinkering with settings or having numerous power-grabbing fancy screen animations, Pinguy OS could be a good choice.
The GNOME desktop is the only user interface option, but Pinguy OS' developer, Antoni Norman, tweaked the desktop environment with some different software options not usually packaged with GNOME.
On July 16th, 1993, Slackware Linux distribution was officially released. Based entirely on the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) system, it was designed for the machines with a 3.5" boot floppy.
On July 16th, 1993, Slackware Linux distribution was officially released. Based entirely on the Softlanding Linux System (SLS) system, it was designed for the machines with a 3.5” boot floppy. Over the past 25 years, Slackware has turned out to be one of the most influential Linux distros around.
The very first releases of SUSE Linux and other open source pioneers were based on Slackware; its effect is also seen on other operating systems with “do it yourself” motto.
ed Hat has reported increased adoption of its container application platform, OpenShift, across the Asia Pacific (APAC) region, driven by independent software vendors (ISVs).
Unveiled during the vendor's partner conference in Bali, Singapore-based ISV Biqmind now offers the solution across key verticals, such as financial services, IT, and oil and gas.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.6, the latest release of its simple, powerful, and agentless open source IT automation solution. Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.6 adds new content for automating across hybrid and multicloud environments, along with simplified connections to network APIs and updates for Ansible deployments overseeing Windows environments.
By now you’ve probably heard about Yum and RPM, the new processes that IBM will use to deliver open source software to IBM i customers. But you may have questions about how the process works, and what the benefits will be. IT Jungle talked with IBM’s open source guru Jesse Gorzinski to get the low down on why the new tech is so important to the platform.
RPM, which stands for Red Hat Package Manager, is a piece of software created more than 20 years that allows customers in that Linux community to more easily distribute and install the various pieces of software required to create a working Linux environment. Over the years, RPM use has migrated beyond the Red Hat community to other Linux and Unix environments (including AIX), and has essentially become a de facto standard for distributing software in the open source world.
Recently at the Red Hat APAC partner conference, I had the opportunity to sit in on several keynotes.
One of my favourite moments from the talks was when Red Hat discussed the road to digital transformation and why CIOs are often wary of taking the initial leap.
This summer I’m working on the PGP Clean Room Live CD project. The goal of this project is to make it easy to create and maintain an offline GPG key. It creates and backs up your GPG key to USB drives which can be stored in a safe place, and exports subkeys for you to use, either via an export USB or a PGP smartcard. It also allows you to sign other people’s keys, revoke your own keys, and change your keys expiration dates. The live system is built on
The Linux desktop is not just for people who like to mess with computers. With a wide range of enterprise class productivity and collaboration tools Linux users can enjoy computing parity with their peers and colleagues running other popular desktop computing platforms. Here are 7 apps that will boost your productivity and you’ll also find an additional 20 bonus apps mentioned throughout this article for you to discover.
Managing a service with deployments in multi-cloud environments can be a challenge in terms of troubleshooting and scalability due to the complexity of dealing with different public cloud providers. An effective way to manage services deployed cross-cloud is to use tools that allow you to define your service once and deploy anywhere: in the cloud, on bare metal, or locally inside containers. In this blog post I am going to describe how the Canonical SRE team has achieved this, the tools that we use and the way we apply them to manage the Ubuntu Archive Mirror service.
After it was decided earlier this year when the development of the next Lubuntu release, 18.10, kicked off that 32-bit installations will be dropped, Lubuntu developer Simon Quigley informs us that the team behind the lightweight GNU/Linux distribution wants to give 32-bit support one more chance if there's still demand from the community.
Starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 18.10 (Cosmic Cuttlefish) release, which is currently scheduled for an October 18, 2018, release, the official flavors won't be shipping with 32-bit installation images, except Lubuntu if users are interested in helping testing and 32-bit (i386) ISOs. Otherwise, Lubuntu 18.10 will not ship with 32-bit installation images.
Kobol has relaunched its open-spec “Helios4” NAS SBC and fanned system. The Helios4 runs Debian on a Marvell Armada 388 SoC with 2GB ECC RAM and offers 1x GbE, 2x USB 3.0, and 4x SATA 3.0 ports for up to 48TB.
In May 2017, Singapore-based startup Kobol attempted to launch its open-spec Helios4 SBC and fan-equipped system for network attached storage (NAS) on Kickstarter. A total of 337 backers ponied up $74K for the Helios4, which also supports media streaming and file sharing. Kobol fell short of its $110K funding goal, but it fulfilled the last of its KS orders in January. The company is now running its own funding campaign to manufacture a second 500-unit batch.
Just two weeks after releasing the first build of his RaspAnd operating system based on Google's Android 8.1 Oreo mobile OS, Arne Exton today announced a new version with support for the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ computer.
RaspAnd Oreo 8.1 Build 180717 is basically identical with RaspAnd Oreo 8.1 Build 180707 except for the fact that it now also supports the latest Raspberry Pi 3 single-board computer, the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, which features a more powerful 1.4GHz 64-bit quad-core processor, dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE 4.2, faster Ethernet, and Power-over-Ethernet support.
Advantech announced an IoT platform initially targeting mine safety that combines BTI’s “MIOTY” LPWAN sensor solution running on an Ubuntu-powered Advantech ARK-2250L gateway connected to a Hitachi IoT Service Hub running on Microsoft Azure.
Because Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) projects tend to be complex, multi-product endeavors, Advantech has lately been entering into IoT collaborations, such as its Embedded Linux & Android Alliance (ELAA) consortium and recently announced Solution Ready Packages (SRPs) cocreation program. Today at the Microsoft Inspire conference in Las Vegas, the company announced a new collaboration with Behr Technologies, Inc. (BTI), Hitachi Solutions America, and Microsoft on an end-to-end IIoT platform that will initially target the mining industry.
Project Fi is a play on the term "WiFi" and is pronounced "Project Fye", as opposed to "Project Fee", which is what I called it at first. Several features set Project Fi apart from other cell-phone plans.
First, Project Fi uses towers from three carriers: T-Mobile, US Cellular and Sprint. When using supported hardware, Project Fi constantly monitors signal strength and seamlessly transitions between the various towers. Depending on where you live, this can mean constant access to the fastest network or a better chance of having any coverage at all. (I'm in the latter group, as I live in a rural area.)
While the last OxygenOS Open Beta update for the OnePlus 5 and OnePlus 5T was a significant upgrade bringing support for Project Treble, the latest versions for both devices offer smaller changes.
The European Commission, the executive arm of the EU, normally makes such announcements on a Wednesday.
It comes just over a year after the Commission slapped a landmark 2.4-billion-euro ($2.8 billion) penalty on Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc, for favoring its shopping service over those of competitors.
The EU penalty is likely to exceed the 2017 fine because of the broader scope of the Android case, sources familiar with the matter have told Reuters.
Open source software has been around for a long time. But calling it open source only began in 1998. Here's some history:
Christine Peterson came up with the term "open source software" in 1997 and (as she reports at that link) a collection of like-minded geeks decided on February 3, 1998 to get behind it in a big way. Eric S. Raymond became the lead evangelist when he published Goodbye, "free software"; hello, "open source" on February 8th. Bruce Perens led creating the Open Source Initiative later that month. Here at Linux Journal, we were all over it from the start as well. (Here's one example.)
Open source did not emerge from a void. It was consciously a marketing programme for the already-15-year-old idea of free software and arose in the context of both the GNU Project and the BSD community and their history (stretching back to the late 70s). We chose to reflect this in the agenda for our celebration track at OSCON.
But that doesn’t mean its inception is irrelevant. The consensus to define open source at the VA Linux meeting and the subsequent formation of OSI and acceptance of the Open Source Definition changed the phrase from descriptive to a term of art accepted globally. It created a movement and a market and consequently spread software freedom far beyond anyone’s expectations. That has to be worth celebrating.
Medellín is well known for its innovative technology scene, with many active software and information technology user groups. One of those is the user group centered around open source content management software WordPress. A year ago the user group hosted Colombia’s first Wordcamp function, supported by the global WordPress community, and the user group recently gathered to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the first WordPress open source software release that took place May 27, 2003.
WordPress is an free, open source software platform that allows amateur and professional users to create websites without writing programming code. Over the years it has grown into a powerful platform robust enough to run enterprise websites in many cases. For example, Finance Colombia runs on WordPress software.
Providing detailed hands-on training, it is targeted at embedded engineers looking for an introduction to key embedded Linux and Security topics.
A new browser extension lets users support their favorite websites, and YouTube and Twitch creators through donations of BAT cyrpto-tokens via Brave Payments.
91 weeks ago, I argued that Brave Payments would be a better product as a browser extension than a whole web browser. Brave Software has since made no indications that they’re interested in making a browser extension, and have instead scrapped their current Muon based web browser product and begun making yet another web browser built on Chromium.
Browser extension developer Michael Volz, however, have detangled the attention tracking and contribution system from the Brave browser in a new unofficial Brave Payments client called BATify.
Is your phone on a bandwidth diet? This upcoming Chrome feature will tell you when you are on a page that uses a lot of data. This is currently available as a flag in the latest Canary channel of Chrome.
Google is continuously upgrading its Chrome web browser to refine the user experience. This time, Google has added a new feature named “Heavy Page Capping” in the Canary build channel that will notify users when a webpage is using excessive bandwidth.
As we announced last week, SeaMonkey and Thunderbird add-ons will now reside on https://addons.thunderbird.net. Add-ons for Firefox and Firefox for Android will remain on https://addons.mozilla.org (AMO). We wanted to let you know that the split is now done and the new site is live.
One of the most popular uses for VR today is 360€° images and video. 360€° images are easy to discover and share online, and you don’t need to learn any new interactions to explore the 360€° experience.
Building 360€° views is not as easy as exploring them, especially if you want to make an experience where the viewer can navigate from scene to scene. Here is the solution I came up with using A-Frame, a web framework for building virtual reality experiences and Glitch, a creative community platform for building, remixing and hosting web apps and sites.
I often teach students at my local public library. I have found the combination of A-Frame and Glitch to be ideal, especially for the younger learners. A-Frame lets you write markup that feels like HTML to produce 3D content. You don’t have to write any JS code if you don’t want to. And Glitch is wonderful because I can give my students a sample project that they then ‘remix’ to create their own version. Thinking about it, ‘remix’ is probably a better word for non-programmers than ‘fork’.
In a bid to support the fledging open-source ecosystem in India, Mozilla has started its Mozilla Open Source Support (MOSS) programme under which it will promote free software and open-source projects in India. Mozilla has set aside a total of around Rs 1.4 crore to fund India-based projects or programmes supporting open source in the current year. Jochai Ben-Avie, Senior Global Policy Manager of Mozilla Corporation, told ET that Mozilla was born out of the free software and open source movement. As a result, the programme started with the effort to give back to those communities, along with supporting other free software and open-source projects and helping advance those projects around the world. “India has always been a really important country for development, and also for Mozilla. As part of the opensource ecosystem, we have a lot of volunteer contributors around 30,000 of them out of which close to 10,000-20,000 are in India. So India is by far our largest community,” said Ben-Avie. He added that the firm wants to give back to the ecosystem and to the open-source movement in India through this programme.
An edition brings together the features that have landed into a clear package, with fully updated documentation and tooling. By the end of the year we are planning to release the 2018 edition, our first since the Rust 1.0 release. You can currently opt-in to a preview of the 2018 edition to try it out and help test it.
In fact, we really need help testing it out! Once you’ve turned it on and seen its wonderful new features, what then? Here we’ve got some specific things we’d like you to test.
While Solaris 11.4 is still in the oven being baked at Oracle, the thirty-fourth stable release update of Solaris 11.3 is now available.
Full details of this SRU can be found in My Oracle Support Doc 2421850.1. For the list of Service Alerts affecting each Oracle Solaris 11.3 SRU, see Important Oracle Solaris 11.3 SRU Issues (Doc ID 2076753.1).
As we continue to work toward release of Oracle Solaris 11.4, we present to you our third release of Oracle Solaris 11.4 open beta.
In addition to sending down a new SRU for Solaris 11.3, the Oracle developers left maintaining Solaris have issued their second beta of the upcoming Solaris 11.4.
Oracle Solaris 11.4 Open Beta Refresh 2 is an updated version of their public beta of Solaris 11.4 originally introduced in January. They say this is the last planned public beta with the general availability release now nearing availability.
Melissa, a leading provider of global contact data quality and identity verification solutions, today announced Listware Desktop, an open source data cleansing tool. Listware Desktop brings all of the data cleansing and data enrichment capabilities of Listware into a flexible, scalable desktop software. Listware Desktop leverages the inherent benefits of open source, and is freely available to anyone to download and modify. Developers and end-users are empowered to customize data cleansing workflows to best meet their unique business needs and make them their own.
Open banking forces [sic] UK banks to open up their data via a set of secure [sic] application programming interfaces (APIs).
In short, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) mandated that from January 2018, the nine largest current account providers must offer standardised APIs for approved third parties providing Account Information Services (AIS) and Payment Initiation Services (PIS).
Landing yesterday in Glibc for Intel's Control-flow Enforcement Technology (CET) were the instructions for Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) and Shadow Stack (SHSTK).
These Intel CET bits for the GNU C Library amount to a fair amount of code being added. The commit message explains some of the CET steps taken. The Control-flow Enforcement Technology behavior can be changed for SHSTK/IBT at run-time through the "GLIBC_TUNABLES" environment variable.
No meeting will be taking place this week due to travel, but meetings will return to our regular schedule starting on Friday, July 27th.
I have acquired a Thinkpad X41 Tablet and worked quite a bit on it making it usable and then installing Linux and of course GNUstep on it. The original battery was dead and the compatible replacement I got is bigger, it works very well, but makes the device unbalanced.
Anyway, my interest about it how usable GNUstep applications would be and especially Graphos, its (and my) drawing application.
Using the interface in Tablet mode is different: the stylus is very precise and allows clicking by pointing the tip and a second button is also possible. However, contrary to the mouse use, the keyboard is folded so no keyboard modifiers are possible. Furthermore GNUstep has no on-screen keyboard so typing is not possible.
A SUSE developer is seeking feedback and interest on the possibility of allowing a scripting language -- most likely Python -- to be used within the GCC compiler code-base. This would primarily be used for replacing existing AWK scripts.
GCC developer Martin Liška at SUSE is seeking comments on the possibility of adding Python as an accepted language within the GCC code-base. This isn't anything along the likes of replacing existing GCC C compiler code into a scripting language or anything to that effect, but is targeting at replacing current AWK scripts that are hard to maintain.
Fourteen companies have joined a group of 10 others in pledging not to indulge in harsh tactics to enforce open-source licences and adopting a deal known as the GPL Co-operation Commitment.
The 14 firms, listed by Red Hat in a statement on Monday, are Amazon, Arm, Canonical, GitLab, Intel Corporation, Liferay, Linaro, MariaDB, NEC, Pivotal, Royal Philips, SAS, Toyota and VMware.
The Commitment was rolled out initially in November 2017, with Red Hat, IBM, Facebook and Google joining up. In March this year, CA Technologies, Cisco, HPE, Microsoft, SAP, and SUSE joined the group.
An innovative and simple solar panel efficiency device has just gone open source in order to get renewable energy to those who need it most.
When you picture solar power, you might think of the enormous Ivanpah solar power plant in California (the largest in the world) or huge tracts of land in other sun-drenched parts of the globe.
But not everyone has access to such enormous grids and particularly in remote villages in developing nations, there is only a need for a single or small group of solar panels that could maintain maximum efficiency to sustain a family or the village itself.
I went to visit the Interaction Design Institute of Ivrea – a school that was started just six months before I went to visit them – and they asked me if I knew someone who could teach electronics to designers and to ask this question to my colleagues at the Politecnico.
I went back and they said “No! Teaching electronics to designers? For us?” Those were guys working on highly sophisticated FGPAs, so they didn’t care about designers. I thought about Massimo – he had a real passion for electronics and he worked as a CTO for an internet provider at that point in time. I said, “Massimo, you could be the right person for this type of engagement – they’re designers, you love design, and you know electronics.” I introduced Massimo to the school and they hired him. That’s how the story started. When he was teaching at the Design Institute of Ivrea, they started the Arduino project as a way to standardise the electronics projects the students were doing. I introduced Massimo to the school and they invented Arduino, so I’m sort of the great-grandfather to some extent.
Ballerina has been inspired by Java, Go, C, C++, Rust, Haskell, Kotlin, Dart, TypeScript, JavaScript, Swift, and other languages. It is an open source project, distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, and you can find its source code in the project's GitHub repository.
A small feature release of our pinp package for snazzier one or two column vignettes get onto CRAN a little earlier.
It offers two new options. Saghir Bashir addressed a longer-standing help needed! issue and contributed code to select papersize options via the YAML header. And I added support for the collapse option of knitr, also via YAML header selection.
A screenshot of the package vignette can be seen below. Additional screenshots of are at the pinp page.
The public draft of the OpenMP 5.0 SMP programming standard is now available for review ahead of the specification's expected stable release before the end of 2018.
OpenMP 5.0 is expected to succeed the OpenMP 4.5 parallel programming standard in Q4'2018, but for ironing out any last minute issues and allowing more compiler developers to begin implementing the standard, the public draft is now available.
IT Operations has always been difficult. There is always too much work to do, not enough time to do it, and frequent interrupts. Moreover, there is the relentless pressure from executives who hold the view that everything takes too long, breaks too often, and costs too much.
In search of improvement, we have repeatedly bet on new tools to improve our work. We’ve cycled through new platforms (e.g., Virtualization, Cloud, Docker, Kubernetes) and new automation (e.g., Puppet, Chef, Ansible). While each comes with its own merits, has the stress and overload on operations fundamentally changed?
Enterprises have also spent the past two decades liberally applying Management frameworks like ITIL and COBIT. Would an average operations engineer say things have gotten better or worse?
[...]
Tickets on their own are relatively innocuous as they are just records. The issue is where you put those tickets. Tickets go into ticket queues, and then the problems start.
In a previous post on silos, I discussed the cost of queues. Queues add delay, increase risks, add variability, add overhead, lower quality, and decrease motivation.
In a letter Monday, coordinated by Georgetown Law's Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection, the former officials asked Ron Jarmin, acting director of the Census Bureau, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross to publicly explain the technical protocols and systems the bureau will use to ensure the security of data obtained electronically in the 2020 Census.
On Monday, Grubbs signed a plea agreement that admitted that from 2015 to 2017 he designed LuminosityLink and sold it for $40 apiece to more than 6,000 individuals, knowing that some of them were using it maliciously. While previously claiming the software was a legitimate tool for system administrators, Monday’s plea agreement admitted he knew some customers were using it to control computers without owners’ knowledge or permission.
The nation's top voting machine maker has admitted in a letter to a federal lawmaker that the company installed remote-access software on election-management systems it sold over a period of six years, raising questions about the security of those systems and the integrity of elections that were conducted with them.
In a letter sent to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) in April and obtained recently by Motherboard, Election Systems and Software acknowledged that it had "provided pcAnywhere remote connection software … to a small number of customers between 2000 and 2006," which was installed on the election-management system ES&S sold them.
The statement contradicts what the company told me and fact checkers for a story I wrote for the New York Times in February. At that time, a spokesperson said ES&S had never installed pcAnywhere on any election system it sold. "None of the employees, … including long-tenured employees, has any knowledge that our voting systems have ever been sold with remote-access software," the spokesperson said.
You read all these headlines about the latest data breaches, and you worry your organization could be next.
After all, if TalkTalk, Target, and Equifax can’t keep their data safe, what chance do you have?
Well, thankfully, most organizations aren’t quite as high profile as those household names, and probably don’t receive quite so much attention from cybercriminals. At the same time, though, no organization is so small or insignificant that it can afford to neglect to take sensible security measures.
If you’re just starting to take cybersecurity seriously, here are five steps you can take to secure your organization more effectively than 99 percent of your competitors.
A recent discovery of surreptitious execution of cryptomining code by a sandboxed app, riding piggyback on the open source software (OSS) ecosystem, raises pertinent questions about the security of open source code and its dependencies. Programmers often use OSS as a jump-off for creating their software—and that includes malware authors.
The latest black spot in the spate of killings — the lynching of five in Maharashtra’s Dhule on July 1 — prompted the central government to write to WhatsApp, which responded that it has introduced a series of measures, including labels on forwarded messages.
[...]
In some cases, however, none of this worked. In Jharkhand, the victims were dragged out of a police jeep. And in Tripura, they sought refuge inside a police camp, which was stormed.
WhatsApp has said that the government and community groups need to work together to deal with fake news technology companies.
The Facebook-owned application in the advertisement said this week it would roll out a new feature that would let users see which messages have been forwarded. “Double check the facts when you are not sure who wrote the original message,” it said.
The entire “liberal” media and political establishment of the Western world reveals its militarist, authoritarian soul today with the screaming and hysterical attacks on the very prospect of detente with Russia. Peace apparently is a terrible thing; a renewed arms race, with quite literally trillions of dollars pumped into the military industrial complex and hundreds of thousands dying in proxy wars, is apparently the “liberal” stance.
Political memories are short, but just 15 years after Iraq was destroyed and the chain reaction sent most of the Arab world back to the dark ages, it is now “treason” to question the word of the Western intelligence agencies, which deliberately and knowingly produced a fabric of lies on Iraqi WMD to justify that destruction.
It would be more rational for it to be treason for leaders to blindly accept the word of the intelligence services.
The UK’s drone programme is putting civilian lives in danger and exposing personnel to the risk of being prosecuted for murder because the government has not established a "clear policy and sound legal basis" for use of unmanned weapons, a group of parliamentarians warned on Tuesday.
The report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Drones (APPG) said that the UK’s involvement in the US-led campaign against the Islamic State (IS) group in Syria and Iraq since 2014, had “raised some serious questions about the legality, efficacy and strategic coherence” of the UK drone programme.
The UK had previously been regarded internationally as "a model of responsible and ethical use" of drones, but that record was at risk of being compromised, it said.
"Since 2015, the UK appears to have been taking serious risks in its use of drones. Specific concerns have been raised about the government’s shift towards a policy of 'targeted killing' as well as the legality of UK assistance to partner operations - and particularly that with its closest ally, the US," it said.
“The APPG argues that there is a political and ethical imperative for the government to review and clarify its procedures for using drones and all the multi-national systems that back them up, lest ambiguities in the current position leave the UK dangerously exposed to legal challenges arising either from its own direct use of drones, or effective complicity in their use by others.”
A two-year probe by the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on drones claims that British military personnel could be prosecuted for murder and complicit in alleged war crimes, a report launched today reveals.
The inquiry – ‘The UK’s use of Armed Drones: Working with Partners’ – received 17 written evidence submissions and conducted six oral evidence sessions by experts in the field. Some 19 recommendations were put forward to “guarantee a solid foundation for UK drone policy and operations moving forward”.
The inquiry called upon the British government to immediately publish its “targeted killing” policy, just as the United States and Israel have done previously, but more importantly to establish “an independent scrutiny mechanism responsible to Parliament in the event that any UK drone (armed or unarmed) is used in an operation where lethal force is employed,” the report said.
This isn’t the first time the British government has been warned over its role in the US drone program, and there’s no indication the UK is looking to end its involvement.
A damning report released to British media after two years of research by a parliamentary committee warns that the British military, including individual personnel, could be prosecuted for civilian deaths and alleged war crimes as a result of its involvement in the US’ drone program, The Independent reported on Tuesday.
UK military personnel engaging in US-led drone operations in Syria and Iraq are at risk of being “liable to prosecution for murder” due to the government not setting a "clear policy and sound legal basis," a report warns.
There is a growing concern that the UK was complicit in civilian deaths by supporting a US-led drone program that was committing unlawful acts - making British personnel open to prosecution, the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) report said.
"In its current form, assistance to partners is putting the UK and its personnel at risk of criminal liability. UK use of force or assistance to partners in drone strikes outside situations of armed conflict are not protected by combatant immunity, therefore making personnel liable to prosecution for murder."
Throughout the day before the summit in Helsinki, the lead story on the New York Times home page stayed the same: “Just by Meeting With Trump, Putin Comes Out Ahead.” The Sunday headline was in harmony with the tone of U.S. news coverage overall. As for media commentary, the Washington Post was in the dominant groove as it editorialized that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is “an implacably hostile foreign adversary.”
Contempt for diplomacy with Russia is now extreme. Mainline U.S. journalists and top Democrats often bait President Trump in zero-sum terms. No doubt Hillary Clinton thought she was sending out an applause line in her tweet Sunday night: “Question for President Trump as he meets Putin: Do you know which team you play for?”
A bellicose stance toward Russia has become so routine and widespread that we might not give it a second thought — and that makes it all the more hazardous. After President George W. Bush declared “You’re either with us or against us,” many Americans gradually realized what was wrong with a Manichean view of the world. Such an outlook is even more dangerous today.
Since early 2017, the U.S. mass media have laid it on thick with the rough political equivalent of a painting technique known as chiaroscuro — “the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition,” in the words of Wikipedia. The Russiagate frenzy is largely about punching up contrasts between the United States (angelic and victimized) and Russia (sinister and victimizer).
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may soon face eviction from the London embassy that has sheltered him for the last six years “any day now” according to reports there are ongoing discussions about the matter.
Ecuador and Britain are in high-level discussions over Assange’s fate, the Sunday Times of London reported.
Ministers and senior Foreign Office officials are in discussions over the fate of Assange’s asylum.
The new Ecuadorean president Lenín Moreno – who has called Assange a “stone in the shoe” – has dismissed him as a problem he inherited from his predecessor.
Assange has been arbitrarily detained according to the UN for nearly 6 years in the Ecuadorian embassy. Now Ecuador has expanded that arbitrary detainment to solitary confinement by forbidding Assange from any human contact including visitations, phone calls and barring his Internet usage — all without Assange ever being convicted of a crime besides publishing documents exposing corruption and shedding light on the truth.
The Wikileaks founder has been living in the South American country’s embassy building since 2012 after seeking asylum there over fears he would be extradited to the US on espionage charges.
He originally went into hiding after an arrest warrant was issued so he could be sent to Sweden over sexual assault and rape allegations.
But he has reportedly overstayed his welcome since former Ecuadorian president, Rafael Corra, granted him political asylum.
The refusal of the authorities of Ecuador from further granting political asylum to the founder of the Internet portal WikiLeaks Julian Assange in the Embassy of the Latin American country in the British capital will strike a significant blow to the international reputation of London and Quito.
The correspondent of ÃâþûþÃÂUA said European political columnist Marie Pudemo.
“As soon as Assange leaves the Ecuadorian Embassy he will be arrested, noted, in particular, it. – If it will give Sweden or the United States, that person faces a long prison sentence or the death penalty. Thus, officials from Britain and Ecuador may be involved in the actual death of the head of WikiLeaks.”
A federal judge has decided unconstitutional prior restraint is the best way to handle a clerical screwup. An injunction request, filed under seal, has been granted, resulting in the LA Times deleting information it obtained legally from a US federal court's website.
A plea agreement the government reached with Glendale police detective John S. Balian was accidentally made public on PACER, where it was scooped up by the LA Times. Information from that plea agreement appeared in its July 14th article on Balian.
The London-based Times newspaper reported yesterday that the British and Ecuadorian governments have been holding secret discussions on plans to evict WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from Ecuador’s London embassy, where he sought political asylum six years ago.
The article said the talks are “an attempt to remove Assange” from the embassy and are being conducted at the highest levels of government, with British Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan personally involved.
The report is the latest public indication of a conspiracy, involving the British, US and Ecuadorian governments, to terminate Assange’s political asylum, in violation of international law, and force him into UK custody. The major powers are determined to prosecute the WikiLeaks editor for his organisation’s role in exposing US-led war crimes and diplomatic intrigues around the world.
Industry Groups Want to Control Access to Legal Rules and Regulations
San Francisco – A federal appeals court today ruled that industry groups cannot control publication of binding laws and standards. This decision protects the work of Public.Resource.org (PRO), a nonprofit organization that works to improve access to government documents. PRO is represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the law firm of Fenwick & West, and attorney David Halperin.
Six large industry groups that work on building and product safety, energy efficiency, and educational testing filed suit against PRO in 2013. These groups publish thousands of standards that are developed by industry and government employees. Some of those standards are incorporated into federal and state regulations, becoming binding law. As part of helping the public access the law, PRO posts those binding standards on its website. The industry groups, known as standards development organizations, accused PRO of copyright and trademark infringement for posting those standards online. In effect, they claimed the right to decide who can copy, share, and speak the law. The federal district court for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the standards organizations in 2017, and ordered PRO not to post the standards.
The United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has opened a formal investigation into the hiring and employment practices of Uber.
The official campaign that campaigned for people in Britain to vote to leave the European Union broke the law, according to the country’s election watchdog, which has now referred the matter to police.
With Theresa May’s government teetering on the brink of collapse as the pro- and anti-EU factions within her party go to war, the announcement from the Electoral Commission that the campaign group fronted by Boris Johnson cheated is bringing Brexit tensions to boiling point, with some lawmakers urging a re-run of the vote.
The group—known as Vote Leave—was chosen as the official campaign group for the June 2016 referendum. The Electoral Commission says it funneled money into a sister campaign to get around spending limits, meaning that it exceeded the €£7 million ($9.2 million) maximum by €£500,000 ($660,000)
Mexico's president-elect has honoured an election promise, by cutting his own salary and those of other politicians.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador cruised to a landslide victory two weeks ago, vowing to take on corruption and the political elite.
Mexico's president-elect has honoured an election promise, by cutting his own salary and those of other politicians.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador cruised to a landslide victory two weeks ago, vowing to take on corruption and the political elite.
He has taken a pay cut of 60 percent.
Our payment processor (Mangopay) is throwing us out. Liberapay won’t shut down, but the service will be disrupted until we can fully migrate away from Mangopay.
The first two sections of this blog post are about what you should do as a Liberapay user. Mangopay may cut us off as soon as July 26th, so don’t wait too long. The last section is about how Liberapay is going to change and improve in response to this crisis.
ndia has flagged concerns of its large trade deficit with China, visa restrictions for Indian professionals and the challenges faced in exporting IT services, meat, rice and medicines to Beijing at the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Trade is skewed in favour of China at a trade surplus of $63 billion. Bilateral trade was $89.6 billion in 2017-18.
“This large and growing deficit is difficult for India to sustain, and serious efforts need to be made to remedy the situation,” India said in its submission to WTO, commenting on China’s trade policy, which EThas seen.
Others have noted that Mr Trump has never criticised Mr Putin, Xi Jinping or Kim Jong-un, whereas he rarely misses a chance to skewer his allies.
Exposure to the test makes it easier to pass, doctors warn.
Teen Christopher Justice laid out the case for why the Confederate flag is a racist symbol.
ohn Brennan, former CIA director in the Obama administration, said Russian President Vladimir Putin likely recorded Monday’s meeting with President Donald Trump and will be able to use it against him in the future.
“I would find it unbelievable if they didn’t [record it] in some manner,” Brennan said Tuesday morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. “I think whatever Mr. Trump said in that meeting with Mr. Putin is now memorialized on Russian tape and it will be used as necessary by Mr. Putin against Mr. Trump.”
For more than 40 years Brian Llewellyn has prided himself on making generations of north east children laugh with his traditional Punch and Judy show.
So when he was booked for a school summer fete parents and children alike looked forward to an afternoon of riotous fun, with Punch bashing Judy and running amok before being locked up by the police constable, his long standing foe.
That was until the school asked him to drop central elements of his act over fears they “perpetuate prejudicial stereotypes” and encourage “inappropriate behaviour”, including domestic violence.
...Frontier Foundation (EFF) will urge a federal judge to put enforcement of FOSTA on hold during the pendency of its lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the federal law. The hold is needed, in part, to allow plaintiff Woodhull Freedom Foundation, a sex worker advocacy group, to organize and publicize its annual conference, held August 2-5.
FOSTA, or the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, was passed by Congress in March. But despite its name, FOSTA attacks online speakers who speak favorably about sex work by imposing harsh penalties for any website that might be seen as “facilitating” prostitution or “contribute to sex trafficking.” In Woodhull Freedom Foundation v. U.S., filed on behalf of two human rights organizations, a digital library, an activist for sex workers, and a certified massage therapist, EFF maintains the law is unconstitutional because it muzzles constitutionally protected speech that protects and advocates for sex workers and forces speakers and platforms to censor themselves.
Facebook is once again under fire from members of Congress—this time, for censoring political posts in Vietnam.
A bipartisan group of 17 U.S. representatives sent a letter Monday to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, urging them to rebuff the Vietnamese government’s demands to remove posts it deems politically sensitive.
“It is already being reported that your companies have removed video and accounts after requests by the Vietnamese government, including accounts of users in California and Germany,” the letter reads. “The censorship of the accounts of Vietnamese-Americans is particularly concerning.”
Key quote from the Caucus letter: “If the Vietnamese government is coercing your companies to aid and abet censorship, this is an issue of concern that needs to be raised diplomatically and at the highest levels.”
Facebook is too optimistic when it comes to Cambridge Analytica extends.
Sorry for this post on a fairly old topic. I just did not get around to write this up.
Several media outlets (e.g., Bloomberg) ran the story that Facebook privacy policy director Stephen Satterfield claimed that “European’s data” may not have been accessed by Cambridge Analytica in an EU hearing.
This claim is nonsense. It is almost a lie - except that he used the weasel word “may”.
For fairly trivial reasons, you can be sure that the data of at least some European’s data has been accessed. Largely because it’s pretty much impossible to perfectly separate U.S. and EU users. People move. People use Proxies. People use wrong locations. People forget to update their location. Location does not imply residency nor citizenship. People may have multiple nationalities. On Facebook, people may make up all of this, too.
[...]
So yes, I bet that at least one EU citizen was affected.
Just because the data is too big (and too unreliable) to be able to rule this out.
Apparently, neither the U.S. nor Germany (or the EU) even have reliable numbers on how many people have multiple nationalities. So do not trust Facebook (or Kogan’s) data to be better here…
Tragedies often bring political proposals that would do more harm than help—undermining our right to secure communications, for example, or our right to gather online. It is in these moments we face legislative gambits that are too often willing to trade our privacy for assumed security. It is in these moments that we should be careful about what could be taken from us.
The Kelsey Smith Act (H.R. 5983) tries to correct a tragedy that occurred a decade ago by expanding government surveillance authorities. It is a mis-correction.
The bill would force cell phone companies to disclose the location of a person’s device at the request of police who believe that person is in distress. On its face, that’s not unreasonable. But if the police make a mistake—or abuse their power—the bill offers almost no legal recourse for someone whose location privacy was wrongfully invaded.
As the Supreme Court recently recognized in Carpenter, cell phone location information is incredibly sensitive data. It provides “an intimate window into a person’s life, revealing not only his particular movements, but through them his ‘familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations.’ These location records “hold for many Americans the ‘privacies of life.’”
With this in mind, any legislative attempt to intrude on this private data must be done extremely carefully. The Kelsey Smith Act fails to do that.
Glaser approached the administrators at his children’s school in Seattle, University Child Development School, which had just installed a gate and camera system, and asked if they might try using SAFR to monitor parents, teachers, and other visitors who come into the school. The school would ask adults, not kids, to register their faces with the SAFR system. After they registered, they’d be able to enter the school by smiling at a camera at the front gate. (Smiling tells the software that it’s looking at a live person and not, for instance, a photograph). If the system recognizes the person, the gates automatically unlock. If not, they can can enter the old-fashioned way by ringing the receptionist.
The first day problems began as the opt-out window for the e-health record system began on Monday, with many individuals wasting no time attempting to withdraw their consent.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s favourite secure messaging app Wickr is among the 76 organisations and individuals that have signed an open letter today calling on his government to reject its plans to ‘undermine strong encryption’.
Wickr, Twilio, ThoughtWorks, Linux Australia, Startpage.com and a slew of digital rights, civil liberties and privacy organisations signed the open letter to the Attorney-General Christian Porter and Minister for Law Enforcement and Cyber Security Angus Taylor. They are calling on government “not to pursue legislation that would undermine tools, policies, and technologies critical to protecting individual rights, safeguarding the economy, and providing security both in Australia and around the world”.
The government is adding the finishing touches to proposed legislation that it says will boost the ability of law enforcement agencies to access communications sent via encrypted services.
Walmart wants to listen to its workers and shoppers more. A lot more.
America's largest retailer has patented surveillance technology that could essentially spy on cashiers and customers by collecting audio data in stores. The proposal raises questions about how recordings of conversations would be used and whether the practice would even be legal in some Walmart stores.
"This is a very bad idea," Sam Lester, consumer privacy counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C., told CBS News. "If they do decide to implement this technology, the first thing we would want and expect is to know which privacy expectations are in place."
Walmart's patent filing says the "sound sensors" would focus on minute details of the shopping and checkout experience, such as the beeps of item scanners and the rustling of bags, and they could also pick up conversations of workers and customers. It's unclear so far how that chatter could be used.
Horrendously unreliable Microsoft messaging service Skype is getting an upgrade, and though there's a lot to love, there's more to hate.
The previously useful app is letting go of the version known as 'Skype Classic' to almost no one but which worked okay on the whole, in place of a new 'version 8.0'.
In 1983, the KGB contacted Carl Gebhardt, the CIA’s Moscow station chief, with a proposal. In order to avoid needless problems between the two spy services, the KGB wanted to open a secret communications channel with the CIA.
The CIA readily agreed, and the pact led to a series of secret meetings between top CIA and KGB officials in Europe. Eventually nicknamed the “Gavrilov channel,” after a 19th century Russian poet, this carefully choreographed exchange of secret communications continued throughout the remainder of the Cold War.
Some of the Gavrilov meetings took place in Helsinki, where Donald Trump met with Vladimir Putin on Monday. But one of the key differences between the Gavrilov channel and the Trump-Putin meeting was that the CIA always insisted on having at least two American officers present – no one from the CIA could meet the KGB alone. That guaranteed that no American could hand over secrets to the KGB without at least one other American knowing about it; it also insured that no American would come under unfair suspicion of being a KGB spy simply by meeting with the Russians alone.
Trump, on the other hand, insisted on meeting Putin without any of his aides present. At a time when there is a federal investigation underway into whether his campaign colluded with the Russians to win the 2016 election, Trump’s decision to meet Putin alone was at best reckless. His many critics will take it as further evidence that he really is a KGB agent.
The Trump administration in April began enforcing a “zero-tolerance” immigration policy that has resulted in thousands of immigrant children being separated from their families. On June 18, ProPublica released an audio recording from inside a Border Patrol detention facility; children separated from parents and family members could be heard crying in the background, while a six-year-old girl from El Salvador begged for someone to let her call her aunt. The recording reminded the public of the undeniable reality that immigration policy has deep and lasting effects on actual people.
However, as corporate media dove into this story, the voices of those impacted most by immigration policy were drowned out by soundbites from congressmembers and Trump administration officials. Concentrated coverage of the policy from six major broadcast and cable news networks began on June 14; the story reached a climax of sorts on June 20, when Trump signed an executive order ending the policy. FAIR looked at the sources used on these networks during this seven-day period, examining the immigration-related segments on a representative evening news show from each network,* to see who got to speak about this contentious issue.
To an outsider, the fancy booths at last month’s health insurance industry gathering in San Diego aren’t very compelling. A handful of companies pitching “lifestyle” data and salespeople touting jargony phrases like “social determinants of health.”
But dig deeper and the implications of what they’re selling might give many patients pause: A future in which everything you do — the things you buy, the food you eat, the time you spend watching TV — may help determine how much you pay for health insurance.
With little public scrutiny, the health insurance industry has joined forces with data brokers to vacuum up personal details about hundreds of millions of Americans, including, odds are, many readers of this story. The companies are tracking your race, education level, TV habits, marital status, net worth. They’re collecting what you post on social media, whether you’re behind on your bills, what you order online. Then they feed this information into complicated computer algorithms that spit out predictions about how much your health care could cost them.
Are you a woman who recently changed your name? You could be newly married and have a pricey pregnancy pending. Or maybe you’re stressed and anxious from a recent divorce. That, too, the computer models predict, may run up your medical bills.
On a Monday afternoon, on July 9, the D.C. Court of Appeals handed down a 2-1 decision against me and in favor of the CIA in a long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. At 4:20 p.m., Judges Brett Kavanaugh and Gregory Katsas, a Trump appointee, filed a 14-page opinion with the clerk of the court in Washington. They ruled that the CIA had acted “reasonably” in responding to my request for certain ancient files related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. Appended to their decision was a 17-page dissent from their colleague Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson who strongly objected to their decision.
That evening, President Donald Trump announced to the world that Kavanaugh was his choice to fill the Supreme Court seat of retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. In his remarks at the White House event, Kavanaugh touted his “Female Relationship Resume” and declared, “My judicial philosophy is straightforward: A judge must be independent and must interpret the law, not make the law.”
A human rights lawyer, who sent complaints to the UN against Lithuania for allowing the CIA to host secret prisons on its soil, is sure he will see the country’s leadership indicted. He talks exclusively to RT.
In May of this year, Lithuania and Romania were found responsible for knowingly allowing the torture of prisoners at secret CIA facilities on their territories, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) ruled.
The ECHR decision referred to the cases of Saudi-born Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, both of whom are currently held at the US Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba.
[...]
Tomas assumes that the greatest obstacle to the development of human rights in Lithuania is that it denies “the binding nature” of the European Convention on Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
The lawyer claims that there are secret tapes on which Lithuanian judges are heard talking to each other and complaining that the president of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaitė sent her advisor to talk to judges in order to convince them to take one or another decision. “That’s a public tape, it was made secretly. This is clear pressure,” he stressed.
Gun rights advocates need to contend with the unintended consequences of expansive gun rights: a more intrusive government.
In recent months, the nation has been debating gun control issues with renewed intensity. One of the principal arguments that firearms advocates advance against restrictions on guns is freedom: Americans ought to be free to own guns, and free to defend ourselves, and that broad ownership of guns by citizens is a check against the possibility of oppression by our own government.
My colleague Louise Melling has laid out the ACLU’s views on guns here — that while gun regulations must be unbiased and subject to due process protections, the Constitution does permit limits on firearms sale and ownership. Overall, the ACLU does not generally engage in either side of the gun control issue. But we do care about freedom, and I have noticed a growing trend: the wide availability of guns and their misuse leading to restrictions on Americans’ freedom. Advocates for expansive gun rights who are serious in their concern over expanded government powers might consider how this is the case.
As the federal investigation into Garner’s killing drags on, New York City finally says it will take action.
Four years ago today, Eric Garner was killed on Staten Island by police. The 43-year-old father died after he was put in a chokehold by New York Police Department Officer Daniel Pantaleo. His last words, “I can’t breathe” — repeated 11 times while half a dozen officers did nothing to intervene — helped fuel a movement for police accountability that continues today.
Yesterday, the city announced that, after waiting more than three years for a federal investigation into Garner’s killing to conclude, it will move forward with its own inquiry into Garner’s death. In a letter to the Department of Justice, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Lawrence Byrne wrote that if the Justice Department does not publicly announce whether it will bring charges against Pantaleo by August 31, the city will serve Pantaleo with departmental charges and try him in an administrative trial in early 2019.
The announcement on the eve of the anniversary of Garner’s death was almost certainly designed to help Mayor Bill de Blasio avoid criticism from Garner’s family and other advocates, who have been pushing the city to take action. This decision by the city, while welcome, does not excuse the administration for taking so long to do anything and also proves that the excuses for not taking action were flimsy at best.
To fully understand why this delay has been so frustrating, we should look back at how we got here.
A month after Garner’s death on Staten Island, then Richmond County District Attorney Daniel Donovan failed to secure an indictment against Pantaleo. Since then, Garner’s supporters’ hopes for accountability have hinged on an ongoing federal investigation launched in 2014 by the Justice Department. The investigation began under Attorney General Eric Holder, continued under Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and is now proceeding under the current head of the Justice Department, Jeff Sessions.
Cops lie. This is a fact. As a business owner, it is in your best interest to oust known liars from your premises, if only for liability reasons. Sure, this will result in backlash from cop supporters, but so will the alternative.
Cops have placed themselves on a plateau of humanity far above their fellow citizens. Any perceived slight becomes a reason to drape themselves in an appropriated American flag and decry the masses for failing to show them the respect they feel they have no duty to earn.
There have been several reports of low-wage fast food employees saying and/or doing mean things to cops in their restaurants. Sometimes, these things have actually happened. What officers fail to understand is that most employees of restaurants have zero respect for a majority of their customers. Add a blue uniform and an air of sanctimoniousness, and cops can easily fly up the ranks of the disrespected.
But cops don't help their own case by lying about things that happened. And even if they're not outright lies, they're severe miscontruals of the actual events. In April of 2016, an officer claimed he was drugged by a Subway employee who supposedly spiked his soda as he went through the drive-thru. Drug tests of the drink and the cop cleared Subway and its employee of any wrongdoing. It also netted the accused teen -- who was arrested and charged -- a $50,000 payout from the city of Layton, Utah.
If you've been paying attention, you've probably noticed that Sinclair Broadcast Group's $3.9 billion merger with Tribune Media has been widely derided as terrible. The company, already under routine fire for content that's more lobotomized pablum than news, hopes to seal a deal that would give it ownership of more than 230 local broadcast stations reaching more than 72% of the nation. Given Sinclair's inflammatory and facts-optional reporting, that's generally seen as a problem for a country where daily discourse is already a raging dumpster fire, and local reporters are already struggling to survive.
For much of the last year the FCC has been going to comical lengths to pave the way for Sinclair's deal. From attacking the law that prohibits any one broadcaster from dominating more than 39% of local broadcast audiences, to restoring obscure bits of discarded regulation (like the UHF discount) simply to let Sinclair bullshit its way under said limit, the FCC has been making it very clear it hoped to rubber stamp the deal. It was so clear, Ajit Pai found himself the subject of a nonpartisan corruption investigation by his own agency into whether he coordinated the effort with Sinclair.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said he won't approve the Sinclair/Tribune acquisition as it's currently structured, saying Sinclair's plans for divested stations would violate the law. Pai is recommending that the merger be reviewed by an administrative law judge, a move that could ultimately kill the deal.
Today, Representative Mike Coffman (R-CO) took two important steps towards protecting net neutrality. First, he’s signing the discharge petition that could force a vote on the Congressional Review Act (CRA) that negates Chairman Pai’s disastrous rollback of net neutrality protections. But he’s going a step further, too: he announced a bill that would codify net neutrality in law. The bill is straightforward: it bans blocking, throttling, and prioritization with clear authorization for FCC rulemaking and enforcement. Both of these actions are important, all the more so because Rep. Coffman has recognized that protecting net neutrality isn’t a partisan issue. This is an issue that the vast majority of Americans agree on, which makes it all the more confusing that it has become a partisan issue in Washington.
While the best chance of reversing the FCC's attack on net neutrality still likely rests with the courts, an uphill effort to restore the FCC's 2015 rules via Congress appears to have taken a small step forward this week.
The Congressional Review Act lets Congress reverse a regulatory action with a simply majority vote in the Senate and the House (which is how the GOP successfully killed FCC consumer broadband privacy protections last year). And while the Senate voted 52 to 47 back in May to reverse the FCC's attack on net neutrality, companion efforts to set up a similar vote in the House have, as expected, had a hard time gaining traction thanks to ISP lobbying influence.
But things progressed slightly this week on the news that Representative Mike Coffman of Colorado agreed to be the first House Republican to sign off on the effort to restore the rules.
When we’re discussing the [I]nternet, it’s not surprising that legislation and policy can have an impact that extends far beyond one country’s borders. While many of us are aware of domestic threats to fair dealing, privacy, and net neutrality, including regulator proposals and proposed legislation, it’s also important to consider the role that international trade can play in influencing policy on a global scale.
If you are looking for an ebike, while I don’t have any systems to recommend that are good in the freedom department, Shimano’s steps system at least provides you with some level of access.
Now that we know the nominee to replace Justice Kennedy’s seat, it’s time to play the “How Will Kavanaugh Vote On Issues I Care About?” game. Most attention is (rightly) going to the big hot button issues like abortion, immigration, or whether a sitting president can be indicted. But since I write on intellectual property issues, let’s take a look at whether Kavanaugh will shift the Court in patent or copyright cases.
Bloomberg has a summary of cases where Judge Kavanaugh has a record on intellectual property issues, mostly related to royalty rates set by the Copyright Royalty Board. Of course, Kavanaugh does not have a judicial record on patents, since those cases are heard by the Federal Circuit. As a result, there isn’t a lot substantively (though a concurring opinion he wrote on one case regarding the Copyright Royalty Board suggests that he may have some thoughts on Patent Trial and Appeal Board, as well) on pure patent and copyright issues to go on.
While, of course, figuring out Kavanaugh’s record on particular issues is predictive of how he will vote on the same issues in the future, it’s not the only factor in the outcome of a SCOTUS case — there are eight other justices on the Court and on some issues, Kavanaugh’s vote might not make a difference, at least in the near term. Let’s take a look at the outcomes of some of the recent patent and copyright cases before SCOTUS.
A Missouri federal judge on Monday granted a request for summary judgment by Logboat Brewing Co., the maker of Shiphead, dismissing Shipyard’s claims that Shiphead violated the Portland brewer’s trademark with its name, the color scheme on the can and a “schooner logo” on the Shiphead can. A summary judgment is issued before a trial in cases where the judge determines the facts and law are clearly on the side of one of the parties in the suit.
The judge, Nanette K. Laughrey, said there was no evidence to support Shipyard’s claims that consumers could be confused by the names and the image of the schooner. The vessel on the Shipyard logo is depicted in port, while in the Shiphead logo, it is in the hair of a painting of a woman serving beer.
Roughly a year ago, Shipyard Brewing Co. launched its bid for title holder of the single dumbest trademark lawsuit in the beer industry. The lawsuit against Logboat Brewing came as a result of two concerns. First, both breweries have the word "ship" on some packaging and include images of ships on that packaging as well. Lost on Shipyard appeared to be Logboat's use on its Shiphead brand was that of a woman with hair that somehow was a ship, whereas Shipyard merely had ships in water. That made the trade dress and trademarks fairly distinct. That may be the reason Shipyard coupled that concern with a second, namely that both breweries used the word "head" in their respective brands, with Shipyard having trademarks on brews such as "pumpkinhead" and "applehead." The theory, I guess, was that these two factors that on their own were not valid trademark complaints combined to form one that was.
This is where the narrator would jump in and say: "That theory was wrong." The judge presiding over the dispute didn't buy into Shipyard's claims and completely rejected Shipyard's claims in a very thorough ruling. Let's start with the trade dress issue. Do you think these cans look similar?
A new trademark regulation entered into force in Albania on June 7, 2018, clarifying a range of issues raised by the changes to the Albanian Industrial Property Law in force as of March 24, 2017. Some of the most significant changes and clarifications concern the following:
We talked about how silly this was in response (and pointed to dozens of articles we've written in the past about how copyright is used for censorship), but let's add another one to the pile. As you know, the World Cup just ended this past weekend, and FIFA, which certainly has some history being over aggressive on the "intellectual property" side of things, apparently was working overtime getting videos taken down from various platforms.
This resulted in lots of outraged fans especially over insane situations like when Kathryn Conn posted a 5 second video of her 7-year-old son celebrating a goal. She posted it to Twitter, where it was promptly taken down thanks to a highly questionable DMCA notice from FIFA. It is positively bizarre that anyone could possibly think that this video infringed on anyone's copyright, or that it somehow should require "licensing" from FIFA to show your 7-year-old celebrating a goal.
This Article explores the escalating battles between visual art and copyright law in order to upend the most basic assumptions on which copyright protection for visual art is grounded. It is a foundational premise of intellectual property law that copyright is necessary for the “progress” of the arts. This Article demonstrates that this premise is flatly wrong when it comes to visual art. United States courts and scholars have come to understand copyright law almost universally in utilitarian terms; by this account, the reason we grant copyright to authors is to give them economic incentives to create culturally valuable works. But legal scholars have failed to recognize that their paradigm makes no sense when applied to visual art, one of the highest profile and most hotly contested fields in intellectual property law. This is because scholars have failed to take into account the single most important value for participants in the art market: the norm of authenticity, which renders copyright law superfluous. The fundamental assumption of copyright law—that the copy poses a threat to creativity—is simply not true for visual art. By juxtaposing copyright theory with the reality of the art market, this Article shows why copyright law does not—and cannot—incentivize the creation of visual art. In fact, copyright law, rather than being necessary for art’s flourishing, actually impedes it.
As we've pointed out any number of times over the past few years, cord-cutting is a very real thing and represents a threat to the cable television industry as it exists today. One of the last threads from which that industry largely hangs is professional sports broadcasts, with cable network providers having traditionally locked up pro and college sports broadcast rights in long-term exclusive deals. That has slowly begun to change, as the leagues of the world have finally gotten on board with streaming providers big and small, connected to the cable industry or not. If this is adopted en masse, it puts disruptive change for cable on the horizon.
But progress isn't linear and one of the threats to keeping this train on its tracks is the quality of the experience for users that dive into these sports streaming options. Especially early on in this kind of change, providers getting things right is extremely important, as reputations and public perception of the viability of sports streaming are more than somewhat on the line. And YouTube recently botched its broadcast of the World Cup match between England and Croatia.
A Texas District Court has sanctioned TVAddons operator Adam Lackman for failing to disclose evidence requested by Dish. Within five days, he must share how much money was earned through TVAddons.ag and Offshoregit.com. At the same time, the court reprimanded Lackman's lawyer for an "egregious disruption" of the court proceedings.