VMware has followed through on its promise to make vSphere capable of managing both virtual machines and Kubernetes (K8s) clusters by announcing version 7 of vSphere and a plethora of other container-related tech it hopes will give developers a consistent layer of services to let them go crazy with containers.
VMware today announced it has advanced its Kubernetes strategy by making available its previously announced Tanzu platform to manage any Kubernetes distribution as well as making a Java application development environment based on the Spring framework, formerly known as the Pivotal Application Service (PAS), available on Tanzu. In addition, PAS has been renamed Tanzu Application Service (TAS).
Juniper wants to help enterprises adopt container and Kubernetes technologies. There’s just one problem: containers still aren’t part of the conversation for most network companies.
Scott Sneddon, senior director and evangelist for cloud at Juniper, told SDxCentral that the vendor has a twofold strategy to address multiple orchestration and enterprise challenges in Kubernetes as telecommunication architectures migrate into the cloud-native space. He explained that multi-cloud doesn’t necessarily mean multiple public clouds, but a mix of VMware infrastructure, bare metal assets, or OpenStack components.
“Supporting Kubernetes is really important for that vision in that we expect that a lot of our customers, especially our enterprise customers, are going to be trying to tackle that multiple orchestrator challenge,” Sneddon said. “If we can bring some level of consistency and simplicity in that environment, we think we can add some value and have a benefit.”
The HPE Container Platform is the industry’s first enterprise-grade container platform designed to support both cloud-native and non-cloud-native applications using 100 percent open source Kubernetes – running on bare-metal or virtual machines (VMs), in the data center, on any public cloud, or at the edge.
Solid releases from GNOME and Firefox, bad news for custom Android ROM users, and a new container distro from Amazon.
Plus Mozilla and KaiOS team up to bring the modern web to feature phones, and the surprising way Microsoft is shipping a Linux kernel.
Linux Kernel 5.5.9 Stable Version Released: Linux Kernel 5.5.9 Stable Version is officially released now! You can download from their official website.
Content of the video
we no longer have the ArcoLinux version in neofetch we learn why bupskel can be interesting do a bupskel before and after the update and then do a meld with these two new folders first do a skel to get the new config in your home directory or only copy/paste over the content of new : memory expressed in percentage new : show de version new : used disk in percentage we show you how to display the logo of another distro with neofetch –ascii_distro … we show you the difference between the three neofetch files in ~/.config/neofetch sysinfo still shows your ArcoLinux version cat /etc/lsb-release will also show your version we will show you how to use a logo
Wine 5.4 was released a few days ago as the latest development release. The official apt repository has made the packages for all current Ubuntu releases.
A huge update for the Linux overlay layer, MangoHud, as it can now work with OpenGL games in addition to Vulkan making it many times more useful and awesome.
Quick reminder: MangoHud can show useful information on top of games like: FPS, RAM/VRAM use, disk reads, frame timings, temperatures, it can benchmark and a whole lot more.
Today, they released MangoHud 0.3.0 and the headline feature is it now supporting OpenGL so it's not locked to Vulkan now. Additionally you can now just use the "mangohud" command to load either the OpenGL or Vulkan HUD and "mangohud.x86" for 32bit OpenGL. So try it you can just do "mangohud vkcube" or "mangohud glxgears" and "MANGOHUD=1" also still works for Vulkan.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Valve's free to play competitive shooter which also features the newer Danger Zone mode which is like a Battle Royale has today hit over a million players online.
We've seen it hit a few peak player milestones recently, like February where it did it two days in a row. Valve's CS:GO team sent out a Twitter post, which amusingly just said "Thanks a million." which is how we found out.
This is actually the first time it's done it, and it really is a huge milestone considering it's been out since 2012 although it only went free back in 2018. Also, it's only the third game on Steam to ever hit over a million players online with the others being Dota 2 and PUBG.
this is where Ikona's meat lies—the application icon view. it displays application icons at a pixel-perfect size in an environment similar to a Plasma desktop.
by default, it just shows Ikona's icon. the real meat is when you press “Create Icon.” this exports a special type of SVG with the suffix .ikona.app.svg. Ikona can process these SVGs to produce multiple sizes of the same icon from one SVG file, making wrangling with multiple sizes of icon simple.
saving the icon will cause Ikona to instantly update its preview of the icon.
once you're done designing your icon, you use the export screen to export your icon.
In the past couple of days I tried to finally address an issue in KDE Itinerary where UIC 918.3 train tickets could be rendered in a way that they weren’t accepted by the scanner. That turned into a journey into the depths of high DPI rendering inside KDE Frameworks’ barcode rendering library Prison.
Lots of work has being done this weke to polish up the Plasma System Tray, both visually and functionally. See the overarching visual task at https://phabricator.kde.org/T10470. Lots more interesting work is in progress but not yet done, such as an effort to use the same UI component in System Tray items rather than having each one re-invent the wheel. That’s not done yet but should hopefully make it for Plasma 5.19.
Today, after nearly two years of development I’m very proud to say: The first stable version of Shortwave is now available! I have put a lot of time and effort into this project, now it is finally time to make it available for everyone :-).
After being in development for two years, GNOME Shortwave has seen its first stable release shortly after this week's GNOME 3.36 desktop debut.
Shortwave is a GTK-based Internet radio player that supports tuning into more than twenty-five thousand stations. Shortwave supports the automatic recording of songs, streaming via the Google Cast protocol, an adaptive interface to work across a variety of devices, and integrates nicely with the modern GNOME Shell desktop.
First off, before using Sysprof to improve the performance of a particular piece of software, make sure you’re compiling with flags that allow us to have enough information to unwind stack frames. Sysprof will use libunwind in some cases, but a majority of our stack unwinding is done by the Linux kernel which can currently only follow eh_frame (exception handling) information.
Fedora 32 Release Schedule: Here in this article, we will check out the latest update on the official Fedora 32 release schedule from Fedora Project. Fedora 32 Beta is scheduled to be released on March 17, 2020
Fedora 32 Beta 1.2[Test Version]: While the stable Fedora 32 is scheduled to release on the 3rd week of April 2020, Fedora 32 Beta is currently scheduled to be released on March 17th, 2020. On the other hand, the Test versions of Fedora 32 is already available for developers and testers to test this distro. In this article, we will take you through the steps of installing the latest available test version, the Fedora 32 Beta 1.2.
Developers like pizza and soda (it’s a necessary fuel base combo), but they also need a purpose. This reality is being reflected in the nature of the software coding challenges that we’re currently seeing staged around the globe. Code challenges, hackfests, hackathons and app creator contests used to (before the turn of the last millennium) run with fairly open remits i.e. developers were typically challenged to ‘build something amazing’, in whatever stream they felt the need to follow.
OpenUK, the open technology advocate organisation for open data, open source hardware and open source software in Britain, today announced a new competition for children at what is known as age group Key Stage 3 (11-14 years old) focused on expanding awareness open technology for society.
The competition will be based on assembling and using MiniMU gloves, which come in a child friendly kit and are powered by BBC micro:bit devices.
The MiniMU kit is a make-it-yourself musical glove for children aged 8 and above.
It is based on the MiMU Gloves designed by musician Imogen Heap.
Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora this week. The Beta Freeze is underway. Fedora 32 Beta is go! It will release on Tuesday, 17 March. Update your team’s release readiness status in the wiki.
North America changed summer time this week. Did you notice? Check your meeting times and see my email to the devel list for more information.
I recently hosted a fascinating interview with Alan Pope, Developer Advocate at Ubuntu Linux creator Canonical. To say it was a revealing conversation would be an understatement. Pope bravely fielded a variety of difficult questions, but in this article I want to highlight a couple things that truly surprised me. They are important details that matter to the entire Linux ecosystem, but Pope and I both agreed they exist well outside most people’s radars.
20.04 is the upcoming Long Term Support release for Ubuntu. It is coming out in April. However, if you don’t feel like waiting till then to experience the new version, there’s a way to test it out early! Follow along to find out how!
The first thing you’ll notice about Mint is how traditional their desktop layout is; A taskbar at the bottom of the screen, and a normal desktop where you can place icons, just like Windows XP, 7 and 10. This makes Linux Mint a very good option for those who are used to Windows and want to continue having that layout in the Linux world.
What’s noticeable about Mint is that it uses the same layout regardless of the desktop environment; Linux Mint comes in 3 possible desktops: Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce. But regardless of which one you choose to download, you’ll always notice that Mint is using the same layout.
The taskbar at the bottom of the screen is also similar to the structure of the one in Windows: A start menu icon at the beginning, followed by various launchers, and then the currently opened windows, and lastly the system tray plate.
“The combination of the Raspberry Pi with 3D printers and IoT technology can lead to some pretty insane results, limited only by your imagination and programming skills. One of the devices you can create with a Raspberry Pi is an IoT-friendly ‘smart microwave’ that takes nuking your food to the next level. With a revamped touchpad and voice-activated commands, now I don’t have to get up to make popcorn and interrupt my binge coding sprees.
“The microwave also includes a barcode scanner that can search online for cooking times, so that your food is perfectly optimized for consumption. If that wasn’t geeky enough, it can also send tweets, alerts, or instant messages to your social media accounts alerting you that the timer is done.
“If I need to check which employees left food or ‘blew up’ their coffee, no problem. The microwave allows you to access detailed statistics and can be controlled remotely. All of which can lead to some fun pranks around the office, as you can imagine.”
Milenkovic credits tech enthusiast Nathan Broadbent as the original creator of this invention. More details can be found on his site, Made by Nathan, here.
Well, it's been a rough but fun ride getting to this stage, and I can say that I've learned substantially more about Linux compared to when I started out.
Right now, I can say that my computing environment has stabilized, and I can do practically everything I used to do on the old Mac Mini plus quite a bit more. The system remains lean and mean, and I don't intend to install anything major in the near future. My major annoyance is not being able to print, and I'm unlikely to be able to fix this in the near future, but I'll revisit it when I have time.
Likewise with my video playback situation. To give you some idea, I tried to view Pharrell Williams' "Happy" video the other day, and while the sound played fine, I was still watching the video in slo-mo 30 seconds after the song finished. But hey, you can't have everything…
Incidentally, the Raspberry Pi Model 2 has been hailed as a machine that can run Windows 10: I'm sure there's an element of truth in this, but given the hardware limitations, I don't see how this is possible or even desirable. Maybe I'm wrong. We'll see (but I won't be trying it!).
Ireland based Crust Technologies is building a full open source alternative to Salesforce CRM. Crust CEO, Niall McCarthy explains why he created his company around open source solitons to take on Salesforce.
This year's winner is Clarissa Lima Borges, a talented young Brazilian software engineering student whose Outreachy internship work focused on usability testing for various GNOME applications. Presenting the award was Alexandre Oliva, acting co-president of the FSF and a longtime contributor to crucial parts of the GNU operating system. Clarissa said that she is "deeply excited about winning this award -- this is something I would never have imagined," and emphasized her pride in helping to make free software more usable for a broader base of people who need "more than ever to be in control of the software [they] use, and [their] data." She also emphasized that her accomplishments were dependent on the mentoring she received as part of Outreachy and GNOME: "Every time I thought I had something good to offer the community, I was rewarded with much more than I expected from people being so kind to me in return."
The Award for Projects of Social Benefit is presented to a project or team responsible for applying free software, or the ideas of the free software movement, to intentionally and significantly benefit society. This award stresses the use of free software in service to humanity. Past recipients of the award include OpenStreetMap and Public Lab, whose executive director, Shannon Dosemagen, will be delivering a keynote for the 2020 LibrePlanet conference on Sunday.
Sometimes, all of your best-laid plans can go awry, and when COVID-19 collided with LibrePlanet 2020, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) staff and management had to make an incredibly tough decision: how were we to weigh the risk of a spreading pandemic against our most important yearly event? Within the space of a week, we had to change course from months of scrupulous planning and figure out how to ensure that our carefully-composed program could move forward, giving the worldwide free software community access to the experts, creators, and enthusiasts we had planned to bring together in Boston. We were incredibly excited to present this slate of free software luminaries and newcomers, all eager to discuss what it will take to "Free the Future," and we weren't about to let all of that effort go to waste.
Thankfully, free software activists aren't afraid of a little adversity, and are accustomed to taking on challenges. In only a few days, we fully shifted gears to deliver the LibrePlanet 2020 program remotely, with online talks streaming in from all over the world. We're so grateful to our speakers, who have been so flexible, and to the last-minute benefactors that volunteered to help fill any gaps that might ensue. All this allowed us to present you with a nearly full program for the event!
In the end, I did not get a speaking slot for 0G, the slot before the awards was not given to me because "it used to be Richard's not because he was president of the FSF, but because he's Richard", Richard got neither an award nor a speaking slot, and the article was not taken up by the FSF.
I guess this means I can publish it on my own, and mention it on IRC to virtual attendants at the first fully-online LibrePlanet.
As for the awards, Richard did get to present the award for the Advancement of Free Software to Jim Meyering, and I introduced the Outstanding New Free Software Contributor Clarissa Lima Borges. Thanks to Jim and Clarissa for choosing us. Congratulations to both, and to Let's Encrypt, the awarded Project of Social Benefit.
January, 2020, marked the sunset of two very popular software platforms. Users of both have long been warned in advance and extended support is available, but nevertheless many users felt compelled to upgrade. Such helplessness is common in non-free software, but free software users have autonomy. How could it feel the same?
Windows 7 is non-free, so the vendor knows they can corral users away from it, unless they heed our call to liberate it, which would enable communities to keep on maintaining it independently, just as Python 2 ones can, and indeed some have.
Whether twelve years are long enough to leave a programming language behind, and whether there are good enough reasons to do so are debatable (GCC maintains support for popular languages from the 1970's) but also besides the point: free software users always have an alternative to taking commands from a vendor.
Over the years, volunteers have done a lot to promote and contribute to free and open source software and the organizations/communities in this space. The leaders are not the only ones doing this work. Many people are quietly doing far more work than the leaders of some free software organizations.
In 2017, the now defunct FSFE Fellowship, which consisted of approximately 1,500 Fellows, voted for me to be their community representative. Not only did I have to represent those who voted for me, but also those who voted for other candidates. I also discovered that I was representing a Fellow who died leaving a EUR 150,000 bequest. Although I was only a volunteer, I took all those responsibilities seriously.
I didn't realize this at the beginning but representing the interests of donors and volunteers put me in opposition to some people who had not previously had to deal with the same level of committment from a community representative. The type of people who paid themselves salaries and took long periods of paternity leave after receiving that bequest.
Around that time, I was also dealing with some incredibly tragic circumstances in my family life. I resigned from some of my roles, for example, being a Google Summer of Code admin in Debian. Thanks to the never-ending creativity of open source politics, people immediately started rather offensive lies trying to connect me to trolling or even suggesting that I was expelled. It isn't coincidence when people say things like that about somebody elected by the volunteers. My only mistake was joining the FSFE in the first place.
In September 2018, Debian's leader (DPL) Chris Lamb had the Debian Account Managers move my key from the DD keyring to the inferior DM keyring.
They wanted me to feel humiliated.
They wanted me to continue contributing to Debian, but under their coercive control. You can see the entry on 20 September 2018 when I was moved from the DD to the DM keyring, not expelled.
The thing is, my responsibility is to my employer and clients. By exercising this control over me, those co-conspirators aspired to have the power of an employer without actually paying me.
In other words, they wanted me to be their slave and their puppet.
You need to sign up for an account first – in order to be able to edit or add information to the OpenStreetMap. To view the map, you wouldn’t need an account.
Even though it’s a free-to-use map under an open data license, you cannot use the map API to build another service on top of it for commercial purpose.
So, you can download the map data to use it and host it yourself while mentioning the credits to OSM. You can learn more about its API usage policy and copyright information on its official website to learn more.
In this article, we shall take a brief look at how it works and what kind of projects use OpenStreetMaps as the source of their map data.
A new version of RcppAPT – our interface from R to the C++ library behind the awesome apt, apt-get, apt-cache, … commands and their cache powering Debian, Ubuntu and the like – is now on CRAN.
RcppAPT allows you to query the (Debian or Ubuntu) package dependency graph at will, with build-dependencies (if you have deb-src entries), reverse dependencies, and all other goodies. See the vignette and examples for illustrations.
This new version corrects builds failures under the new and shiny Apt 2.0 release (and the pre-releases like the 1.9.* series in Ubuntu) as some header files moved around. My thanks to Kurt Hornik for the heads-up. I accomodated the change in the (very simple and shell-based) configure script by a) asking pkg-config about the version of pkg-apt and then using that to b) compare to a ‘threshold value’ of ‘1.9.0’ and c) setting another compiler #define if needed so that d) these headers could get included if defined. The neat part is that a) and b) are done in an R one-liner, and the whole script is still in shell. Now, CRAN being CRAN, I now split the script into two: one almost empty one not using bash that passes the ‘omg but bash is not portable’ test, and which calls a second bash script doing the work.
Modern cars have become mobile computer systems with many small computers running millions of lines of code. On this episode, we plug a little Python into those data streams.
It's been a while since having news on Redox OS as the Rustlang-written open-source operating system. But it turns out that's been due to Jeremy Soller being busy working on Pkgar as a new package management format for the operating system.
Science gets a lot of respect these days. Unfortunately, it’s also getting a lot of competition from misinformation. Seven in 10 Americans think the benefits from science outweigh the harms, and nine in 10 think science and technology will create more opportunities for future generations. Scientists have made dramatic progress in understanding the universe and the mechanisms of biology, and advances in computation benefit all fields of€ science.
Crystal Munoz gave birth as a federal prisoner. She had just one night to hold her newborn before she was taken back to the holding facility. Crystal screamed and cried. An officer demanded she calm down. After that, she kept crying, but quietly.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Russia has reached 47, after two more people tested positive for COVID-19 in Kemerovo, according to local health officials. Both patients are now under observation at an infectious diseases hospital. Additionally, another person in Novokuznetsk has been hospitalized with symptoms resembling coronavirus. If this individual tests positive for the disease, it would be Russia’s 48th case of COVID-19.
This time around, let’s use the power of the public purse to reduce inequality.
On March 14, following a meeting of Russia’s federal coronavirus task force, the Education Ministry advised school officials across the country to transfer students to remote learning “as appropriate.” Later that day, officials in the capital and the Moscow region introduced flexible attendance at public schools in the area.
Health Department hospitals in Moscow have temporarily closed to all visitors, in an effort to stop the spread of coronavirus, members of the capital’s emergency task force told the news agency Interfax.
Bernie needs to continue his campaign to the Party’s convention. Just like Jesse Jackson did in 1984 and Ronald Reagan did in 1976.
The COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic is far from the first proof of how intertwined we are as a global community. The climate crisis and the refugee crisis have long been glaring examples that the wars or CO2 emissions on one continent risk the lives and well-being of people on another continent. What coronavirus is providing, however, is a unique opportunity to look specifically at how the intentional damage caused to one country’s healthcare system can make it harder for the entire world to address a pandemic.
For Kim West, dressing for work doesn’t end at home. After arriving at her office at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, West will often layer a second outfit over her shirt and slacks: a full-body gown, topped with booties, sleeve protectors, two pairs of gloves, a hairnet, and an N95 respirator. Donning this extravagant getup — designed to guard against the dangerous and often airborne pathogens she studies — has become second nature for West, who long ago lost track of the sheer amount of protective gear she cycles through each year.
The Russian Orthodox Church says it will not close churches or cancel religious services to help fight the spread of coronavirus, though a spokesman for the organization told the television network Rossiya-24 that the church will consider additional protective measures, including limiting attendance on a case-by-case basis in coordination with health officials.
Three weeks ago – which, in coronavirus time seems an eternity – when many still thought the virus was mainly a problem in China, a group of Ukrainian villagers stoned a bus carrying Ukrainian evacuees from China to their place of quarantine. They were terrified that the evacuees would bring the new plague into their villages, and they responded with violence.
Russia recorded 14 new coronavirus infections in the past 24 hours, bringing the country’s total number of COVID-19 cases to 59. The new positive test results include nine patients in Moscow, two in the Kemerovo region, one outside Moscow, one in St. Petersburg, and one in the Kaliningrad region. All of these individuals returned from trips to Europe in the past two weeks. These people are now hospitalized and in isolation.
A Medicare for All health care system would create millions of new jobs despite critics’ concerns that it would cause widespread job losses by eliminating the private insurance industry, according to a new analysis by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).
"In fact, the bill guarantees sick leave only to about 20 percent of workers."
One of the most tired cliches in conservative politics is that we should run government like a business. Donald Trump’s disastrous response to the coronavirus pandemic is a perfect demonstration of how pernicious that philosophy can be when applied to governance.
New York — The minute colleges began shutting down amidst coronavirus concerns this week, researcher and author Anthony Abraham Jack worried about the many low-income students he mentors.
Connections will be strained in the coming weeks—some of them interpersonal and local, some economic and global. It’s up to us to nourish the connections that are most essential, while finding backups for those that can no longer be relied on.
As a longtime health care reporter, I see the unfolding coronavirus pandemic as representing everything I’ve read about — from the early days of epidemiology to the staggering toll of the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic — but had not covered in my lifetime.
And still, I have been caught off guard by the pushback from top elected officials and even some friends and acquaintances who keep comparing it to the flu.
The study published this week by population mapping group WorldPop measured the effectiveness of nonpharmaceutical interventions. The researchers examined how China isolated ill persons, quarantined exposed individuals, conducted contract tracing, restricted travel, closed schools and workplaces, and cancelled mass gatherings.
The analysis – which has yet to be peer-reviewed – found that early case detection and contact reduction were effective in controlling the virus and combined measures can reduce transmission. They can also delay the timing and reduce the size of the epidemic’s peak, and thus buy time for healthcare preparations and drugs research.
With the coronavirus spreading, along with the commensurate fear, you can expect subtle but key changes in the questions you get asked when you call 9-1-1 in L.A. County these days.
Let’s hope you don’t call often enough to recognize a change, but in addition to seeking critical information about an emergency — location, name, what is happening — dispatchers in the county and in the city of L.A. will be asking added questions.
This is so true. The examples are everywhere. Here in the United States, our federal government has been weak responding to COVID-19 — but others have stepped up. Institutions big and small across the country are following the science and closing or taking other steps to slow the spread of coronavirus, even in areas it hasn’t yet been detected, because this is the right thing to do. People are helping their neighbors, or giving up their favorite activities to do their part to slow the spread of COVID-19. I work for a company that’s publicly-traded on the NYSE, and it shut down all its offices globally. And kept paying the janitors and other office staff.
Some people are in a vulnerable place today. To them: remember the helpers. There are doctors and nurses, officials, neighbors the care, everywhere.
To those that are able: be a helper. It doesn’t take much to brighten someone’s day. Maybe a phone call or video call. Maybe delivering groceries to a neighbor that’s quarantined. Maybe acts of grace and understanding to the stressed people around you, trying their best to get by in the face of a lack of information and certainty. Maybe giving up some activities you enjoy, in order to help slow the spread of COVID-19, even if you personally aren’t especially vulnerable.
EMERGENCY meetings and ‘thinking the unthinkable’ — the council’s leader has lifted the lid on how the coronavirus pandemic has been approached by the authority.
Three Wokingham borough residents have been with the virus as of March 11 and several schools around the borough have taken action to deal with the potential spread of the illness.
[...]
This group includes the leader and deputy leader of the council, the chief executive and the deputy chief executive, directors from each department, as well as representatives from Royal Berkshire Hospital, NHS England and the local Clinical Commissioning Group.
Leader Cllr John Halsall told the News the team has convened around ten times in response to the outbreak, sessions which are often held online through conference calls and which last for more than an hour each time.
These include "shielding" elderly and vulnerable people - where they are kept apart from the wider population - and asking entire families to self-isolate. The government has faced pressure to do more to tackle the epidemic after the UK death toll rose to 21 on Saturday. Downing Street said it would continue to be guided by its medical experts. Its Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) listed "shielding the vulnerable" and "household isolation" as the next steps to tackle the spread of the virus. The latter could see entire households told to self-isolate even if just one person falls ill.
The start time of Friday's "virtual town hall" was pushed back by two hours -- and then it still started 15 minutes late. As those on Zoom waited to watch, the video alternated between confused-looking Democratic Sens. Tammy Duckworth and Dick Durbin of Illinois, as well as Vivek Murthy, the former surgeon general and a member of a committee advising Biden on how to handle campaigning amid a pandemic.
The event started with brief remarks from Durbin, who wasn't visible to those watching on Zoom.
Then Biden came on and he was visible, but no one could hear him: His audio was so choppy that it could not be understood. At one point, he stopped and restarted, but the audio problem hadn't been solved.
The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has been accused of deliberately keeping widespread gaps in its cybersecurity a secret from regulators in a large-scale coverup involving the city's mayor.
The allegations were made by Ardent Cyber Solutions LLC, a company hired by the Department of Water and Power (DWP) in April 2019 to perform cybersecurity work.
In a 10-page claim filed against the city earlier this year, Ardent states that it uncovered an "extremely high number of unpatched vulnerabilities" in the company's "corporate IT network."
Apple said it would close most of its retail stores outside mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, becoming one of the first companies to take such a drastic measure to fight the coronavirus outbreak.
The move signaled that retailers might be the next part of society to shut their doors.
The European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) said a data breach had been confined to its office network, and that no critical power systems were affected. It didn’t mention how or why the intrusion began.
But a public analysis of a cybersecurity incident, which multiple people familiar with the matter said matches the details of the ENTSO-E breach, indicates that the attackers were communicating with the victim organization’s email server for more than a month.
Voatz, a mobile voting app that's already been used in several elections in the United States, has more than a dozen critical security flaws, according to a newly released audit. The audit also shows Voatz publicly refuted an MIT report that found flaws in its app even after it received confirmation that it was accurate.
The audit, which was prepared by cybersecurity firm Trail of Bits for Voatz and Tusk Philanthropies, which has partnered with Voatz on some of its pilot voting projects, found 48 technical vulnerabilities, 16 of which were "high-severity issues."
EY announced the launch of the Baseline protocol, a new package of public domain blockchain tools that will allow enterprises to build and deploy procurement and other business processes securely and privately on the public Ethereum blockchain. EY developed the Baseline protocol in cooperation with ConsenSys and Microsoft.
Aiven, a startup that combines the best open source technologies with cloud infrastructure, announced today that its products will be available in the AWS Marketplace, starting with Aiven for Apache Kafka. This enables customers who use AWS to simplify their procurement process when purchasing Aiven products.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the open source of Project OWL’s IoT device firmware inviting developers worldwide to build mesh network nodes for global emergency communications networks. Project OWL, the winner of Call for Code2018, is a cloud-based analytics tool that helps facilitate organization, whereabouts, and logistics for disaster response. The Linux Foundation’s open governance model will enable a global network of developers to accelerate the development of the mesh networks, which could help save lives following a natural disaster.
Project OWL (Organization, Whereabouts, and Logistics)has developed mesh network of Internet of Things (IoT) devices called “DuckLinks” that can be deployed or activated in disaster areas to quickly reestablish connectivity and improve communication between first responders and civilians in need. A central portal connects to solar- and battery-powered water resistant ‘DuckLinks’ that are placed in the field to generate a Local Area Network (LAN) using a Wi-Fi captive portal powered by low frequency Long-range Radio (LoRa) connectivity. These DuckLinks provide an emergency network to all mobile devices in their perimeter, instructing people how to connect to an emergency response portal. First responders can also use analytics and data sources to build a dashboard and formulate an action plan, such as coordinating resources, learning about weather patterns, and communicating with civilians who would otherwise be cut off.
The chilling message flashed across Anya's field of view, blurring everything else in sight. The twenty-six-year-old account executive stared and listened in horror as a malicious intruder activated her auditory cortex, simulating speech deep inside her brain. The voice was gravelly and heavily digitized.
"Your cloud-connected neuroprosthetic has been compromised, and there's nothing you can do about it! We now control your personal data stream. Oh, and what a stream it is! So many secrets. So many unclean thoughts. You're lucky you were hacked by us and not someone less…tactful.
"With the access we now have to your thoughts, we could make you do anything. Anything! You have twenty-four hours to pay $7,000 into the untraceable Cryptex account we will provide you or we will publish all of your deepest, darkest secrets for everyone to see! Ha ha ha ha! Don't forget, we now know who your family is, and your employer, and your church, and . . ."
The dreadful voice fizzled out, the flashing message disappeared, but Anya's vision was still heavily blurred. A different, more tranquil voice began activating her auditory cortex.
"Your Neurotector Anti-Intrusion Suite has been activated. Please remain calm and do not move while we complete our scan and remove any unauthorized software from your neuroprosthetic."
Anya breathed deeply, trying to calm her nerves. Thank heaven she had opted for neuro-protection software a year ago! The rampant increase of new cognitive hacking exploits, from false-memory droppers to this sort of snareware, made it essential.
Anya's vision suddenly cleared and the security software voice returned. "The intruder has been eradicated, and there are no indications of any privacy compromise through outbound transmission. All altered files and memories have been restored. Have a nice day."
Back in January "iGPU Leak" was disclosed as CVE-2019-14615 as an information leakage vulnerability affecting Intel's graphics architecture leading to both register and local memory leaks. While Intel "Gen9" graphics were patched right away on the disclosure date and Gen8 Broadwell graphics were already mitigated, Gen7/Gen7.5 graphics took longer... In fact, not until the Linux 5.7 release this spring is there the mitigation for iGPU Leak.
On the January disclosure date the Intel open-source developers did post Gen7/Gen7.5 patches for Ivybridge/Haswell that killed the graphics performance. Given the hefty performance hits, the patches weren't merged to mainline.
The maintainers of the Jenkins project have issued a security advisory that highlights vulnerabilities in more than 20 plugins for the open source automation server.
DevOps teams are urged to check the advisory to ensure their continuous integration pipelines are not impacted by any of the flaws, and update their builds where necessary.
Among the list of now-patched bugs is a sandbox bypass vulnerability impacting the Script Security Plugin, which has nearly 250,000 active installations.
Technological transformation is increasingly becoming a competitive differentiator, with businesses across all sectors investing heavily in new platforms, tools, and frameworks. In response, open source has emerged as the most viable, cost-effective and leading-edge solution in enabling organisations to gain the edge in innovation.
No longer do individual businesses need to purchase or build all the software they need in-house. Instead, developers can now benefit from and build on the work of entire development communities, harnessing their collective power instead of starting from scratch. This is enabling countless new strands of innovation and increasing the speed to market for new products.
According to research, 69% of IT leaders deem open source as very important to an organisation’s overall enterprise infrastructure software plans. But software development wasn’t always done this way.
Sobyanin said last month that the city had begun using facial recognition as part of its city security surveillance programme.
Moscow is using facial recognition technology to ensure people ordered to remain at home or at their hotels under coronavirus quarantine do so, the mayor of the Russian capital said on Friday.
At a demonstration against political repressions on March 14, Moscow police arrested nearly 50 protesters. Trying to navigate Russia’s strict rules on public assemblies, the activists staged a series of “one-person pickets” outside the Federal Security Service headquarters in the capital. According to the website OVD-Info, the authorities arrested 49 people, including three teenagers. The news website MBK Media reported 43 arrests, including the arrests of well-known opposition activists Sergey Udaltsov and Leonid Razvozzhaev, as well as 78-year-old human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov.
Joe Biden’s support for the Iraq War and the key role he played as head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in getting the war authorization through the Democratic-controlled Senate not only has made him unpopular within the party’s progressive wing, but has also raised serious questions regarding his electability. Biden’s decision to limit hearings prior to the Authorization for the Use of Military Force to just a day and half, stack the witness list with war supporters and block testimony by prominent war opponents; his false statements about Iraq’s military capabilities; and his defense of the invasion long after inspectors returned after finding none of the proscribed weapons — as well as his recent denials — raise disturbing questions across the ideological spectrum as to how he would conduct foreign policy as president.
The previous rules forbade him from running for a third consecutive mandate, but that changes with the provisions of the amendments, meaning he can seek a fifth overall presidential term in 2024, and conceivably a sixth in 2030.
The Kremlin notes that Putin has not said whether or not he will run again in 2024.
Other constitutional changes further strengthen the presidency and emphasize the priority of Russian law over international norms -- a provision reflecting the Kremlin's irritation with the European Court of Human Rights and other international bodies that have often issued verdicts against Russia.
Forty-nine years ago, on April 22, 1970, University of Southern California students affixed a gas mask to a statue of their mascot, Tommy Trojan, and buried an engine to symbolize the fight against pollution. In Colorado, a throng of bikers swarmed the state capitol. Volunteers picked up five tons of trash in West Virginia. All across the United States, teach-ins and demonstrations for the inaugural Earth Day would go down in history as a galvanizing moment for the environmental movement. But Earth Day’s roots lie in an earlier tragedy: a gargantuan oil spill that sullied the Santa Barbara coastline and put a national spotlight on pollution.
As the world marks the 50th anniversary of Earth Day this year, Arizona State University is taking 50 days to celebrate the beginning of the modern environmental movement. A new website lists events by and for the entire ASU community from March 12 through April 30, plus news stories, a historical timeline of Earth Day and a place to make a pledge for ASU’s Carbon Free Day on April 15, happening in conjunction with the Earth Day Festival on the Tempe campus. Visit earthmonth.asu.edu/events and scroll down for a day-by-day listing of events.
Could the climate crisis precipitate a financial crash akin to or even greater than the one in 2008? With markets currently in turmoil due to the coronavirus pandemic, experts testified Thursday that there is high risk for an even larger economic crisis absent urgent climate policy.
Every crisis is also an opportunity, as the saying goes, and this is especially true of historic crises like the current coronavirus pandemic. Unfortunately, as Kate Aranoff writes in a new piece at the New Republic, the U.S. government looks determined to squander one of the greatest opportunities presented by the economic crisis shadowing the health crisis: The chance to pass a stimulus package that moves toward the emissions goals demanded by the science of climate change.
Right now, around a third of the world’s coastline is made up of sandy beaches and dunes which slope gently and softly to the sea. By the end of the century, these could make up only one-sixth of the frontier between land and ocean. Sea level rise driven by global heating could sweep half of them away.
The GOP’s slavish groveling overrides – for once – its basic instinct for fear and panic.
The vast majority of Venezuela’s voting machines were incinerated on March 7 in a fire that engulfed the main warehouse of the National Electoral Council, or CNE, outside Caracas.€
Top Democratic Party officials are scrambling to figure out how to handle voting by crowds at their next big event of the 2020 presidential season: the county conventions where Democratic National Convention delegates start to be named.
On March 5, the New York Times published a report and two accompanying behind-the-scenes pieces detailing efforts by Bernie Sanders, then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, to establish a sister cities relationship with the city of Yaroslavl, then part of the Soviet Union. The report placed a distinct emphasis on the way Soviet officials aimed to use the relationship to promote perestroika-era government policy: In Russian, the word they used was “propaganda.” However, as current Burlington/Yaroslavl Sister Cities Program President Oliver Carling argues, “the Russian term ‘propaganda’ refers to any centrally generated message propagated to an audience. Thus, in Russian, one can refer to a public health campaign against smoking as ‘anti-smoking propaganda’ without pejorative connotation.” He did acknowledge, however, that “to be sure, Soviet and U.S. officials, including President Ronald Reagan, hoped that sister city relationships would serve as positive PR – propaganda in the Russian sense – and contribute to understanding and more peaceful relations.” To learn how the red scare of citizen diplomacy continues to scourge present-day Vermont, Meduza asked Carling to describe the most recent collaboration between Burlington and Yaroslavl: A traditional pond hockey tournament attended by the Bears, an amateur Yaroslavl hockey team.
This isn’t a pipe dream. We already beat the liar-in-chief by 2.8 million votes in 2016. And the 2018 elections had the highest turnout of any midterm election since 1914 – handing House Republicans their most resounding defeat in decades. People are outraged – and we must keep fighting.If we come together, we will prevail.
“Inside, you can find articles and information about the journalists that are being censored in their own countries,” said Robert-Jan Blonk, senior interactive producer at production company MediaMonks, which helped build the library, in an interview with Fast Company. “We share these stories through the books that live in that library, and people can just openly read them, because even in the countries… where these journalists are from, you’re able to play Minecraft.”
The massive digital library — which contains more than 12.5 million Minecraft blocks, and took 24 builders from 16 different countries over 250 hours to design and build — houses real articles written by five journalists from censored countries including Russia, Mexico, Egypt, Vietnam, and Saudi Arabia, providing unblocked news to readers through a savvy internet loophole.
Over the next several weeks, China would go on to arrest or detain hundreds of people under the auspices of fighting misinformation. Other countries soon joined in, using existing laws that ban the sharing of “fake news” to impose tight control over the flow of information. In some cases, these laws have been used to go after people selling dangerous falsehoods like the promise of miracle cures. But in many instances, doctors and journalists are the ones being targeted as governments fight to maintain control of the narrative about an outbreak that they couldn’t control.
At a time when access to accurate information can be a matter of life or death, draconian restrictions on speech — even those that target falsehoods and conspiracy theories — threaten to scare people into silence and disrupt the flow of crucial health information, said David Kaye, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression and a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine.
On March 12, prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia ended the grand jury of Julian Assange and Wikileaks in which Chelsea Manning refused to testify. As a result, US District Court Judge€ Anthony Trenga ordered the€ immediate release of Chelsea Manning.
The two journalists were reportedly questioned over a report they published on Coronavirus in the city and accused of “causing people to panic and publishing reports on coronavirus outside the knowledge of authorities”.
Both Ãâzyol and Küçükaydñn were released after giving their statements and the news article in question, titled ‘Coronavirus case in Demre’ was removed from the online platform.
A wall is being erected around the nation, too – an outer perimeter, separating the United States from the Third World. So far, our national wall extends along only sixty-four miles of the nearly two-thousand-mile border with Mexico, but Congress has appropriated funds for lengthening it and also fortifying it.
Netflix also hopes more people will begin experimenting with SVT-AV1 for research or other purposes, "Our hope is that the SVT-AV1 codebase helps further adoption of AV1 and encourages more research and development on top of the current AV1 tools. We believe that the demonstrated advantages of SVT-AV1 make it a good platform for experimentation and research. We invite colleagues from industry and academia to check out the project on Github, reach out to the codebase maintainers for questions and comments or join one of the SVT-AV1 Open Dev meetings. We welcome more contributors to the project."
SVT-AV1 is an open-source AV1 codec implementation hosted on GitHub https://github.com/OpenVisualCloud/SVT-AV1/ under a BSD + patent license. As mentioned in our earlier blog post, Intel and Netflix have been collaborating on the SVT-AV1 encoder and decoder framework since August 2018. The teams have been working closely on SVT-AV1 development, discussing architectural decisions, implementing new tools, and improving compression efficiency. Since open-sourcing the project, other partner companies and the open-source community have contributed to SVT-AV1. In this tech blog, we will report the current status of the SVT-AV1 project, as well as the characteristics and performance of the encoder and decoder.
Organised every two years by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), the DesignEuropa Awards has two categories that are now open for applications and nominations: the Small and Emerging Companies Award and Industry Award.
“Patent practitioners and others in the world of intellectual property have expended significant time and money seeking to protect innovation in the field of artificial intelligence (AI). But what happens when an AI tries to patent something itself?” Michael Rosen asks in a recent AEIdeas blog post. “Will such an event be possible? If so, who would be named as the inventor? And who would own the rights to the invention?”
AI has already changed business practices, online searching, and innovation and invention. AI computer programming and other technological systems can simulate human intelligence, are programmed to think like humans, and do things generally associated with humans, such as learning and problem-solving.
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In December 2019, WIPO issued a nine-page document on AI and intellectual property policy. It asked for comments on such topics as deepfakes, who is the “inventor” and the “owner” of AI products, and what protection might exist for anything autonomously developed by AI. WIPO sees this as the first step in a dialogue on AI and legal protections across the globe.
In January 2020, the European Patent Office (EPO) rejected two patent applications that named AI as the inventor. In a press release, the EPO says it “considered that the interpretation of the legal framework of the European patent system leads to the conclusion that the inventor designated in a European patent must be a natural person. The Office further noted that the understanding of the term inventor as referring to a natural person appears to be an internationally applicable standard, and that various national courts have issued decisions to this effect.”
The Australian Government recently reported that local piracy rates had been slashed in half over a period of 12 months. While this impressive drop was music to the ears of copyright holders, a closer inspection of the data shows that something is not quite right, or potentially, very wrong.
A draft law in Sweden envisions much tougher penalties for serious copyright infringement. Under current rules, sentences carry fines and/or prison terms up to a maximum of two years. Under the new proposals, serious copyright-related crimes would be treated more harshly, with prison sentences starting at six months and going all the way to a maximum of six years.
