A Linux laptop makes all kinds of sense for a small business. Not only is Linux the most secure computing platform, it’s highly efficient, which means that computing power goes toward doing actual work instead of powering a bloated operating system.
It's also very customizable without requiring a computer science degree. You can install and remove software with the click of a button, and Linux vendors don't lard down their systems with junkware which, as we learned last month in Lenovo's SuperFish Security Gaffe, delivers little value and big troubles. You just get good software that lets you go about your business.
GNU/Linux share of page-views on the desktop are trending upwards thanks to the schools. There’s nothing like reaching the market when it is young.
The nearly bezel-less Dell XPS 13 is one of our highest rated laptops, thanks namely to its compact size, attractive design and fast performance. But if Windows just isn't your preferred operating system, now there's another option to choose from: Linux. As part of its commitment to the platform, which took off with the introduction of Project Sputnik, Dell's announced a Ubuntu-based developer edition of its sleek 13-inch laptop. Naturally, you'll have a myriad of configurations to choose from, with prices ranging from $949 all the way to $1,849, depending on how specced out you want your Linux machine to be.
While usually not presenting any major features each release cycle, the libata feature pull request for Linux 4.1 is a bit more interesting this time around.
Catching my interest from the libata 4.1-rc1 pull request by Tejun Heo is the addition of NCQ Autosense support. Hannes Reinecke has implemented NCQ Autosense support from the new ATA command specification (ACS-4).
NVIDIA released a new Linux driver in the Beta branch, and the developers have implemented support for a number of new GPUS and quite a few fixes and improvements.
The AMD Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver was made available a few weeks ago, but only for the Ubuntu distribution, which was rather odd. In any case, the drivers have been backported to Ubuntu 14.04 LTS as well.
Plank is a simple, lightweight dock written in Vala. The application, which is available by default in elementary OS, features multiple hide modes, customizable screen position, theme and icon size, supports pinning apps to the dock, quicklists and more.
Oracle announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the second Beta version of its upcoming VirtualBox 5.0 virtualization software, a major release that introduces powerful new features.
Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.
At the same time we also started using features of C++11, which is now a requirement to build Tomahawk’s master branch.
The second maintenance release of the GTK+ 3.16 GUI toolkit has been announced recently. While the changelog is quite small when compared with the previous point release, this version introduces more Wayland and HighContrast improvements.
VideoLAN released the VLC Media Player 2.2.1 multimedia playback software with dozens of bugfixes for various core components, as well as stability and performance improvements.
Google developers have promoted to stable the latest Chrome 42 branch of the famous Internet browser, and they have declared it to be the answer to life, the universe and everything.
With the release of Nginx Plus Release 6, the latest version of its Web server, Nginx looks to replace everything from hardware load balancing to legacy servers.
It makes sense for Nginx to broaden its game and its functionality. The company's explosive growth among the most heavily trafficked sites is leveling out; to stay competitive, it must become more than a faster, more efficient alternative to Apache.
Today we announced the availability of NGINX Plus Release 6 (R6). With this milestone event in our commercial business, I thought it would be a good time to reflect back on what we have accomplished as a community and to address where we are taking NGINX from here.
A long time ago, we were investigating a way to expose text-to-speech functionality on the web. This was long before the Web Speech API was drafted, and it wasn’t yet clear what this kind of feature would look like. Alon Zakai stepped up, and proposed porting eSpeak to Javascript with Emscripten. This was a provocative idea: was our platform powerful enough to support speech synthesis purely in JS? Alon got back a few days later with a working demo, the answer was “yes”.
elementary Tweaks is a tool especially created for elementary OS, which allows adjusting various "hidden" settings, such as changing the themes and fonts, accessing various Plank or Files settings and much more.
Thanks to the machine that is Ethan Lee (a game porter), Gratuitous Space Battles 2 could see a same-day release for Linux.
With the latest release of EFL version 1.14.0 beta 1 you get a fresh new tarballs with the latest work. This is a beta release and if for general testing, bug finding and feedback.
Plasma 5.3 Beta was released today, just two weeks ahead of the scheduled official Release. Today's Beta brings better power management, improved Bluetooth support, improved widgets, Wayland support, and a new media center. In addition, nearly 350 bugs were fixed this time.
Tuesday, 14 April 2015. Today KDE releases a beta release of Plasma 5, versioned 5.2.95.
I really like the command line interface (CLI) in Linux. It bestows great power upon its users, and I spend a good deal of time availing myself of those powers. And yet without the GUI desktop I would still be limited. It is through the combination of the GUI and the command line that I find the power of Linux to be more fully realized.
As with many things in Linux, there are several choices available for desktops. A short list includes Xfce, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, GNOME, KDE, and for the kids, Sugar. I have tried all of these at various times over the years, and I always install all of them on my main workstation so that I can try out the latest versions of each. But despite the fact that all of these desktops have many good features, I always return to KDE.
My hackweek project is improving GNOME password management, by investigating password manager integration in GNOME.
The GNOME Project, though Florian Müllner, has announced on April 14 the immediate availability for download of GNOME Shell 3.16.1, the first maintenance release of the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment.
Jean-Marie Josselin informed Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of the final version of his Toutou SlaXen 6.0 RCX computer operationg, a lightweight distribution of Linux based on the upstream Puppy Linux Slacko 5.9.3 distro.
Q4OS is a Linux a distribution that's been developed to provides a close experience as that of a Windows operating systems, which is something that's not usually done in the open source world. Now a new update has been made available and it looks like developers are finally closing in the final version.
Steven Shiau announced on April 14 the immediate availability for download and testing of a new development version of his Clonezilla Live operating system, version 2.4.1-6.
This new release Hanthana Linux 21, is ship with several Desktop Enviroments such as Gnome, KDE, XFCE, Sugar and LXDE. There are several editions in Hanthana 21, for general usage (Hanthana 21 LiveDVD) , educational purpose you can use Hanthana 21 Edu and Hanthana 21 Dev can be use for Software Development purposes. For those who just use Office packages can download either Hanthana 21 Light) or Hanthana 21 Light2. Each of these editions comes with both i686 (32bit) and x86_64 (64bit) architectures and 10 ISO images available for download.
It's my pleasure to announce the immediate release of the first bugfix release of Semplice 7.
Scientific Linux 7.1 is a recompiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux put together by various labs and universities around the world, including Fermilab, is finally stable after a couple of RCs.
It's difficult to hire good data scientists as the right candidates are "very scarce" because universities and colleges have failed to adapt to meet the needs of the enterprise.
That's according to Lee Congdon, CIO of open source software provider Red Hat, who is attempting to shift the Raleigh, North Carolina-based firm towards a more "data driven" business model.
In an OpenStack arena where big players like HP and Red Hat itself are seeking to offer distinguished enterprise support for OpenStack, a support-less strategy may not seem promising, but RDO continues to have its fans. Any business with servers running RHEL or a similar platform can take advantage of it.
This week in Fedora QA we have two Test Days! Today (yes, right now!) is ABRT Test Day. There are lots of tests to be run, but don’t let it overwhelm you – no-one has to do all of them! If you can help us run just one or two it’ll be great. A virtual machine running Fedora 22 is the ideal test environment – you can help us with Fedora 22 Beta RC2 validation testing too. All the information is on the Test Day page, and the abrt crew is available in #fedora-test-day on Freenode IRC (no, you darn kids, that’s not a hashtag) right now to help with any questions or feedback you have. If you don’t know how to use IRC, you can read these instructions, or just use WebIRC.
We had our regular weekly FUDCon planning meeting today and most of the volunteers were present. We went through all the discussion topics and agendas. As the conference is approaching fast, we spent pretty decent time on travel section and it is high time for people who need sponsorship for travel and/or accommodation, please open a Fedora trac ticket for funding request here.
I’m Kevin Fenzi, and I have been using Linux since about 1996 or so (Red Hat Linux 3.0.3 was my first Linux distro). Currently I am employed by Red Hat as Fedora Infrastructure Leader. Basically I maintain (with my team and the community) all the Fedora servers, including the build system, downloads, compose machines, end-user applications and so on. It’s a great place to work and a great community to be involved in. I’m also involved in lots of other places in Fedora.
In Jessie we no longer have update-notifier-common which had the /etc/kernel/postinst.d/update-notifier script that allowed us to automatically reboot on a kernel update, I have apt-file searched for something similar but I haven't found it, so... who is now responsible of echoing to /var/run/reboot-required.pkgs on a kernel upgrade so that the system reboots itself if we have configured unattended-upgrades to do so?
While the new Ubuntu isn't due out until April 23rd, the second beta is more than mature enough to see what we'll be getting in the Vivid Vervet. A vervet, for those of you who are wondering, is an East African monkey.
Based on my work with the beta over the last few days, here are the most important changes in Ubuntu 15.04. I've been using Ubuntu since the first version, 2004's Ubuntu 4.10. These days, I use it on desktops, servers, and cloud. In other words, I know Ubuntu.
CANONICAL BOSS Mark Shuttleworth has confirmed that Linux Kernel 4.0 should be making its debut in Ubuntu products before the end of the year.
A Kickstarter project is pitching a HAT add-on for the Raspberry Pi that provides a 2.7-inch E-paper display, as well as a battery backed real time clock.
For educators, one of the coolest things about the Raspberry Pi is the HDMI port, which let you easily plug in to a monitor. But for embedded gizmos, a more modest display is often more suitable. It doesn’t get much more modest than Percheron Electronics’s E-Paper HAT Display, a Raspberry Pi add-on board that drives a 2.7-inch, 264 x 176-pixel E-paper display from Pervasive Displays.
Most of time we need to refer to the weather, what to wear, where to go, umbrella or no umbrella? This is where a reliable weather app comes in handy.
Nuance Communications have announced their newest innovations that brings clinical documentation to smart devices, smart watches and the Internet of Things.
Here is a new game with a new twist. What you have to do is “Look at the image and guess the game”. A simple game that lets you learn and explore a trivia app that promises to cover every classic game!
ShareNote is an app that lets you easily store all the information that you might need as go by your day-to-day business. anything that comes to mind can be easily stored for future retrival
Redbend, is a company that catalyzes change in the connected world and boasts the ability of keeping more than 2 billion automotive, IoT and mobile devices updated, has announced that it will be providing its Over the Air (OTA) solution to the Tizen based Samsung Z1. Redbend’s OTA updating solutions will enhance the reliability and performance of the platform and software on Samsung Tizen handsets.
If you're an Opera fan on Android, you no longer have to choose between Opera Mini's super-efficient web browsing and the native interface of its full-size sibling. The company has overhauled Mini to finally give it the Android-friendly look and core features of the regular browser, including redesigned Speed Dial shortcuts, a private browsing mode and a customizable design that scales nicely to tablet sizes. There's also a much-needed, Mini-specific data gauge so that you know how many megabytes you're saving. Give it a spin if you're trying to squeeze the most you can out of a capped cellular plan.
The Nexus Android 5.1 Lollipop update is finally starting to make some moves and today, the Nexus 7 Android 5.1 Lollipop update that’s begun to roll out for another one of Google’s variants. Just not the one that most people were expecting.
Amazon has had a hard time keeping up with the sheer breadth of Google Play's app selection, but it's done a pretty great job when it comes to putting a spotlight on kid and family content. There's FreeTime Unlimited, a (cheap) monthly subscription service that gives younger users access to a wide selection of age-appropriate ebooks, movies, TV shows, educational apps, and games. And the company puts a worry-free guarantee behind its Fire HD Kids Edition; break the thing at any point over the course of two years, and Amazon will replace it for free.
The Android 5.0 Lollipop already lets you skip the traditional lock screen via Trusted Face, which uses facial recognition to make sure you're you, or if you’re connected to a Trusted Device, like a specific Bluetooth. Now, Google is adding a new smart lock: Trusted Voice, which uses voice recognition to check your identity.
It's been, what, five weeks since Google announced Android 5.1? In all that time the update has still not arrived on many of Mountain View's Nexus devices. At least one more is joining the 5.1 club today, and it's a little unexpected—the LTE Nexus 7 2013. No, the WiFi version still hasn't popped up.
Over the past few months LG and its partnering carriers have been busy pushing the LG G2 Android 5.0 Lollipop update out to owners around the globe. And while most of the feedback has been positive, the Android 5.0 Lollipop update is also causing problems for many. The LG G2 in the US received Android 5.0 in February on AT&T, it hit Verizon in late March, and starting today is rolling out to T-Mobile owners.
We could spend all day counting all of the things that make Android a great platform, but for real smartphone enthusiasts, the operating system’s tweakability is surely somewhere near the top of the list. If there’s functionality you’re looking for that your Android smartphone doesn’t have out of the box, the odds are pretty good that an app or a tweak is waiting to solve your problem.
AT&T continues to push its software focus, announcing this week that it has released software into an Apache Incubator designed to allow network and IT system managers to install policies that automate access to certain systems and information.
With less than three days to go, innovative new conference Open Source // Open Society (OS//OS) in Wellington now has 50 extra tickets available.
RethinkDB is now offering open source NoSQL designed for easily building and scaling an emerging breed of real-time applications and uses a new database access model to push data to the developer. The popular open source project has officially released its first commercially supported, production-ready version, RethinkDB 2.0.
Although companies like Twitter make it look easy from the user’s point of view, streaming information to a Web service is a tremendously complicated undertaking that is impractical with a traditional relational database, the majority of which require applications to specifically ask for information. That approach works well with the request-reply access model of the Web but is inefficient when thousands of data points cross the stream every second. The delay involved in individually pulling each item can make real-time execution nearly impossible.
I believe OpenStack has a chance to do for the cloud what Linux has done for server operating systems—basically becoming the defacto standard for designing modern applications. But it is not only the opportunity that is exciting: it is also about timing. OpenStack has great momentum with HP, Red Hat, IBM, Intel, Dell, and Cisco getting behind the OpenStack Foundation. The current state of OpenStack very much reminds me of the year 2001 for Linux when IBM announced it was investing a billion dollars in this technology.
Minimalist machines and the cut-down software stacks that run on them have been the norm at hyperscalers for more than a decade, and now the idea is going mainstream. The operating system is going on a diet, and that is not only to improve performance, but also to make securing the software stack easier and to cut down on maintenance and debugging activities. Presumably the prices for such streamlined operating systems will also come down, reflecting the amount of code that goes into them and, more importantly, making them affordable for large-scale deployments.
Just two years after it was treading water as a fading startup called dotCloud, open-source darling Docker is soaring. The company announced Tues. it had raised a $95 million Series D funding that should value the company at about $1 billion, making it the latest in a wave of private tech companies to join the billion-dollar ranks.
The funding comes just half a year after Docker had raised its last funding and was led by a previously minor investor in the startup, Insight Venture Partners, alongside new investors Coatue, Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust . A who’s-who of venture firms already backing Docker re-upped in the round: Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures. While Docker didn’t disclose its valuation from the round, sources with knowledge peg the company’s pre-money valuation at just under $1 billion. PitchBook pegs the post-money valuation at $1.07 billion.
Engine Yard, a startup that offers a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud developers can use to build and run apps, has acquired OpDemand, a startup that created open-source PaaS tool Deis, the companies announced today.
Engine Yard, the largely forgotten, but not yet gone, platform as a service (PaaS) vendor is today announcing that is has acquired Docker-player OpDemand.
Resin.io, a disruptor in making IoT development as easy as web development, today announced a $3M Series A funding round led by DFJ, with participation from The OpenFund and angels Gil Dibner and Panos Papadopoulos. The investment will be used to expand its team, broaden its hardware platform support, and accelerate product development to deliver on its vision of making software development for embedded systems as easy as it is for cloud applications today.
The internet of things (IoT) is getting a lot of attention right now. It is, after all, an alluring story – 50 billion or so devices and sensors connected to the internet and all delivering immense amounts of valuable data that is just waiting to be harnessed for the betterment of corporations, individuals and the world. Or at least that is the general tone of the multitudinous press releases about new IoT offering that cross my desk every day.
The FreeBSD pkg tool for binary package management has been upgraded to pkg v1.5.0. The pkg 1.5 release brings with it a number of exciting imporvements.
The pkg 1.5.0 release finally introduces the concepts of "provides" and "requires" for package management, many new regression tests were added, message reporting improvements, global memory usage reduction and speed-ups are present, improvements to the pkg solver, the pkg.h header file is now C++ friendly, and many of bugs were fixed in the process.
ResearchKit will allow medical researchers the world over to create their own crowd-sourced studies.
Apple announced today that its new ResearchKit platform is now available to medical researchers as an open source framework. Apple first unveiled ResearchKit on stage last month during the March event, promising that it would be available as an open source framework for developers and medical researchers this month. The framework enables the medical community to use the iPhone to distribute actual medical and health research through ResearchKit-enabled apps.
Incumbent networking gear makers have often designed their own chips. It's what has created differentiation between products.
That custom networking chip design, in some cases, was also behind growth in the technology bubble of the '90s. Some companies were considered better than others because of their silicon design.
However, a new breed of manufacturers aren't doing this custom work. Those suppliers, like up-and-coming player Arista, are simply using off-the-shelf silicon.
An open-source hardware project aimed at making the internet "a little bit safer" needs an influx of cash to continue its work.
The Cryptech effort was created following revelations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the US government and its pals are exploiting standards and weak crypto algorithms to gain access to citizens' private correspondence and documents.
If you're looking to reduce the pool of possible zero-day vulnerabilities that could potentially be used for criminal or state-sponsored breaches of computer and network security, throwing people and money at the problem isn't necessarily going to solve it. At least, that's the conclusion from a team of researchers at MIT, Harvard, and the security firm HackerOne (the organization that runs the Internet Bug Bounty program). At next week's RSA Conference, HackerOne Chief Policy Officer Katie Moussouris and Dr Michael Siegel of MIT's Sloan School will present a study on the economics of the marketplace for "zero-day" vulnerabilities in software and networks, showcasing a model for how that market behaves. Spoiler: their model isn't simply driven by supply and demand.
[...]
At last year's Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Dan Geer—a computer security analyst and chief information security officer of the CIA-backed venture capital firm In-Q-Tel—suggested that the US government should simply corner the market on vulnerabilities, offering "six-figure prices" to compete with the black market for zero-days. Geer also said this approach would only work if vulnerabilities were scarce; if they are plentiful, there would be no amount of money that could possibly buy up all the potential attack vectors.
In an effort to keep their computer files from being destroyed, a group of cooperative police departments in Maine paid a $300 ransom demand—in bitcoin.
According to local news station WCSH-TV, the shared computer system of the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office and four town police departments was infected with the "megacode" virus.
If someone hasn't already sold the movie rights to the story of Eddie Raymond Tipton, expect it to happen soon. Tipton, an Iowa-based former "security director" for the Multi-State Lottery Association (MUSL), is accused of trying to pull off the perfect plot to allow himself to win the lottery. It didn't work, but not for the lack of effort. MUSL runs a bunch of the big name lotteries in the US, including Mega Millions and Powerball. It also runs the somewhat smaller Hot Lotto offering, which was what Tipton apparently targeted. When he was arrested back in January, the claims were that it had to do with him just playing and winning the lottery and then trying to hide the winnings. Lottery employees are (for obvious reasons) not allowed to play. However, late last week, prosecutors in Iowa revealed that it was now accusing Tipton of not just that, but also tampering with the lottery equipment right before supposedly winning $14.3 million. Because of these new revelations, Tipton's trial has been pushed back until July. However, the details of the plot and how it unraveled feel like they come straight out of a Hollywood plot.
Prosecutors believe there is evidence indicating a former information-security director for a lottery vendor in Iowa tampered with lottery equipment before buying a Hot Lotto ticket that would go on to win $14.3 million, according to court documents filed Thursday.
Poor countries are feeling “the boot of climate change on their neck”, the president of the World Bank has said, as he called for a carbon tax and the immediate scrapping of subsidies for fossil fuels to hold back global warming.
Jim Yong Kim said awareness of the impact of extreme weather events that have been linked to rising temperatures was more marked in developing nations than in rich western countries, and backed for the adoption of a five-point plan to deliver low-carbon growth.
Speaking to the Guardian ahead of this week’s half-yearly meeting of the World Bank in Washington DC, Kim said he had been impressed by the energy of the divestment campaigns on university campuses in the US, aimed at persuading investors to remove their funds from fossil fuel companies.
Native Americans are pressuring the Obama administration to reject the Keystone XL pipeline, warning the project could infringe on their water rights, harm sacred land and violate America’s treaty obligations.
Tribes sent more than 100 pages of letters to the Interior Department earlier this year raising concerns about the project, which would carry oil sands from Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast.
If this appears to be a coordinated messaging effort on behalf of a US military psychological operation, that’s because it almost certainly is. On cue, despite the anonymous sourcing, and the utter staleness of the “revelation” in question, the media uncritically ran with the US government-backed report. In all these stories, however, the rather glaring fact that the US has a long-documented history of manipulating social media is not mentioned once. In fact, the Pentagon’s efforts alone–to say nothing of other US intelligence agencies or other NATO nation states–spent at least 200 times more than Russia, according to the last available figures (Guardian, 3/17/11)...
[...]
Israel has students” “defending” it online. The UK has “warriors” countering “enemy propaganda.” The Kremlin has “trolls” spreading “propaganda.” The general public’s ignorance of how these complicated mechanisms of online infiltration work is heavily shaped by how they’re framed. Notice, for example, the images that go with these reports on Israel vs. Russia paying people en masse to spam comment sections and social media. On one side, you have a daytime shot of patriotic young people waving flags outside Auschwitz...
[...]
Reading Western press, however, one would get the distinct impression the US–with a military budget greater than the next 15 countries combined–is really a scrappy underdog looking to catch up to the mass of Kremlin troll hordes. This impression, while making for a neat story, does little to provide proper context or truly explain the informational challenge posed by social media manipulation.
Walker and the Republican controlled legislature set about systematically destroying this clean election structure. They dismantled Wisconsin’s 34-year-old partial public financing system for other statewide and legislative elections. They repealed the Impartial Justice law which provided public financing for state Supreme Court elections. That same year they enacted one of the most extreme and restrictive voter photo ID laws in the nation, which threatens to disenfranchise some 300,000 Wisconsinites, and passed 19 other "model" bills lifted from the American Legislative Exchange Council playbook.
Fortunately, the law contains affirmative defenses, including one for journalistic entities or other disclosures in the public interest. It also appears to keep the burden of proof (mostly) where it should be: on the entity bringing the charges.
However, this amendment seems to be more borne of social pressure than actual need. Trafficking in revenge porn has been punished successfully under the UK's harassment laws. This law just feels extraneous -- a way to "do something" that increases penalties for violating existing harassment laws. There's a two-year maximum sentence attached to this amendment, which is far lower than the surprising 18 years handed to revenge porn site operator Kevin Bollaert, but far more than a previous "revenge porn" prosecution under the UK's already existing laws, which only netted a 12-week sentence.
The enacted amendments also give UK Justice Secretary Chris Grayling what he wanted: increased penalties for the crime of being a jerk online. The UK has jailed trolls before, but now the government has a new upper limit on sentencing - quadrupling the former 6-month maximum.
Music industry group IFPI released its latest Digital Music Report today. Documenting the latest developments in the ongoing piracy battle, the report suggests that pirate site blockades are hugely effective. According to the music group it's now time for blocking orders to have a cross border effect.
By Memorial Day weekend, Congress will likely have decided whether the federal government's mass surveillance programs — exposed first by The New York Times in December 2005 and more broadly by National Security Agency contractor-turned-whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 — will be partially reined in or will instead become a dominant, permanent feature of American life.
The creation of what many refer to as the "American Surveillance State" began in secret, just days after the Sept. 11 attacks. As the wreckage of the Twin Towers smoldered, President Bush and his top national security and intelligence advisers were making decisions that would trigger a constitutional crisis over surveillance programs that the public was told was essential to combating terrorism. The first act in this post-Sept.11 drama began on Capitol Hill.
The government will no longer refuse to confirm or deny that persons who are prevented from boarding commercial aircraft have been placed on the “No Fly List,” and such persons will have new opportunities to challenge the denial of boarding, the Department of Justice announced yesterday in a court filing.
After turning up as a sculpture in Brooklyn Park and making an appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Edward Snowden has finally returned home. In fact, if you look at Google Maps right now, it appears he's marched all the way to the president's office, presumably to find out exactly who has copies of his dick pics.
In its mobile app and on desktop, Google is showing a business listing for a fake shop named "Edwards Snow Den" slap bang in the middle of The White House. Could this be the search giant's way of suggesting a rapprochement between the US administration and the famed whistle blower? Unfortunately not: the out-of-place Snow Den is simply the result of someone changing the location of a verified business listing after it's gone live on Google Maps.
A CBS4 investigation has learned that two Transportation Security Administration screeners at Denver International Airport have been fired after they were discovered manipulating passenger screening systems to allow a male TSA employee to fondle the genital areas of attractive male passengers.
It happened roughly a dozen times, according to information gathered by CBS4.
According to law enforcement reports obtained during the CBS4 investigation, a male TSA screener told a female colleague in 2014 that he “gropes” male passengers who come through the screening area at DIA.
“He related that when a male he finds attractive comes to be screened by the scanning machine he will alert another TSA screener to indicate to the scanning computer that the party being screened is a female. When the screener does this, the scanning machine will indicate an anomaly in the genital area and this allows (the male TSA screener) to conduct a pat-down search of that area.”
Although the TSA learned of the accusation on Nov. 18, 2014 via an anonymous tip from one of the agency’s own employees, reports show that it would be nearly three months before anything was done.
We've been talking for a while about the ridiculousness of the civil asset forfeiture system in the US, whereby law enforcement can basically steal what they want (and some cops will even admit that, to them, it's shopping for stuff they want). If you don't remember, it basically just involves police taking stuff and then insisting that it was ill-gotten goods from some sort of law breaking activity -- which would be kept by filing a civil lawsuit against the stuff itself rather than the person. There didn't need to be any criminal conviction at all. Earlier this year, Eric Holder tried to limit the DOJ's assistance of such shopping sprees by law enforcement, but police were still open to using the process to take stuff.
On 3 April, the European Parliamant voted a text in favour of Net Neutrality, protecting a free and open Internet, but Member States gathered at the Council of Ministers have come back on the progress made. The legislation process continues in the form of negotiations to lead in an agreement between the European Parliament, European Commission and the Council of the European Union. In order to protect and guarantee all the advances from last year's vote, a coalition of civil society organisations have launched the campaing website savetheinternet.eu and urge citizens to call their eurodeputy to defend their rights and freedoms
It's getting rather ridiculous to have to keep repeating it at this point, but it's fairly ridiculous that net neutrality/open internet is a partisan issue at all. The public overwhelmingly supports net neutrality, no matter which party they're associated with. It's only the politicians who think this is a red team vs. blue team issue. But, for whatever reason (and much of it appears to do with campaign fundraising), net neutrality has become partisan, with Republicans "against" it and Democrats "for" it. So, with the rules now officially in the Federal Register, not only have the lawsuits begun, but so has the Republican wrangling in Congress to try to kill the laws.
Now that the FCC's net neutrality rules have been published in the Federal Register, the broadband industry has fired its litigation cannons and filed the expected lawsuits via all of the major trade organizations (see suits for the NCTA, ACA and CTIA, pdfs). All of the suits proclaim that the FCC's new net neutrality rules, and its reclassification of broadband providers as common carriers under Title II are an "arbitrary and capricious" implementation of "outdated utility style regulations" that will harm the greater Internet, sector innovation and industry investment (claims even the industry itself has admitted are bunk, yet never seem to go away).
More than three years have passed since Canadian police seized 32 Megaupload servers on behalf of U.S. authorities seeking to prosecute company founder Kim Dotcom in one of the world's largest copyright infringement cases.
Still, no one — except perhaps officials with the file-sharing company itself — knows what's on the servers.
At issue now is how much of this seized Canadian data can be shared with the U.S. Department of Justice, which is very eager to press its case against Dotcom, who is currently fighting extradition from New Zealand, where he's a permanent resident.