Some Linux users have found that Apple's Mac computers work well for them. The combination of refurbished Macs from Amazon and Linux can result in a high quality operating system on a relatively low cost computer. But is it worth it to install Linux on a Mac? A writer at Softpedia considered that very question in a recent article.
It was then I explored ways to present Linux to the new user, and to do so in a way that did not cause system shock. I decided to make each new Linux installation look as much like Windows as possible. My partner Diane did fairly well when I told her we would become a one operating system household. She wasn’t weaned…she was herded into the world of Linux. I had cleaned the last virus from her computer.
There are plenty of criticisms of docker, the system for building a container-based virtual machine running just a single application. I've read many of them have have consistently been either in agreement or at least amused.
The most relevant criticism is about the basic approach of building single-application virtual machines.
Today, August 3, Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release and immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance release of the stable, long-term supported Linux 4.1 kernel.
Greg Kroah-Hartman has released stable kernels 4.1.4, 3.14.49, and 3.10.85. All of them contain important fixes.
Thanks to the generous sponsorship of Intel, the Linux Plumbers Conference is pleased to announce that there will be an additional social event this year. On Thursday August 20th, we will be gathering at the Seattle Rock Bottom Brewery—just a short walk from the conference venue and hotel—for drinks and dinner in a relaxed setting. The evening’s event will be showcasing local beers, wines, and spirits, but some of the more standard items (like single-malt scotches and cocktails) will also be available.
There’s no doubt about it: AMD’s Linux graphics drivers are behind Nvidia’s, something that will start mattering a lot more when Valve’s first Linux-based Steam Machines start hitting the market this November.
AMD hasn’t turned the ship around yet, and big-name games are still only supporting Nvidia hardware when they launch on Linux. But AMD hasn’t been sitting on its hands. AMD’s developers are working on a new Linux driver architecture that will result in better open-source drivers, too—eventually.
Not much being said in public about the Arma 3 Linux port, but it seems it is progressing and could become a reality.
It's that time of the month again Linux gamers! The new GOL survey for August is now available, so please make sure to fill it in if you have the time.
I managed to get an early look at what will be one of Linux's only semi-realistic racers, and the results of DiRT Showdown on Linux are rather interesting.
After three months of development work we are proud to announce the release of version 1.15 of the EFL, Elementary, Evas Generic Loaders and Emotion Generic Players. In these 12 weeks we got over 1000 commits from 64 authors in EFL alone. We slowed down a bit from last release (by around 200 commits). Elementary has another 472 commits by 56 authors. Great job everyone! Some highlights are listed below.
Xfce has a long history of being the third most popular Linux desktop. For over a decade, it trailed behind GNOME and KDE. Then, a few years ago, during the revolts against GNOME and Unity, it became a major contender, and ever since has consistently polled a strong second to KDE. Nothing had changed in Xfce, but users' search for alternatives made them appreciate Xfce in a way they never had before.
About a year ago, we talked with several people who were going to work together in Randa, Switzerland. These people were united by a love of KDE and had common motives—to make KDE technology better and have tons of fun while doing it!
The 5th edition of the Randa Meetings high in the Swiss Alps in August 2014 was a huge success, with many new features and major new additions to KDE technology, through the dedicated efforts of about 50 KDE developers taking a week out of their busy lives to bring great software to users.
The Ubuntu and KDE developers are working together at making Unity 8 and KDE coexist, permitting the users to have both the two desktop environments on the same system.
KDE Frameworks, Plasma desktop, and our community have a rich history of nearly twenty years in creating great open-source software, making us a truly historic organisation of passionate developers; and along with that history some of our online infrastructure has begun to show its age. The KDE.org website and its various sections are the front door to the KDE ecosystem, it is how people new to KDE will judge us and it’s where our developers, translators, artists, and community members know their hard work will be presented to the world.
Akademy always starts off with two days of ever so exciting talks on a number of engaging subjects. But this year particularly interesting things happened courtesy of Blue Systems.
The GNOME Project released earlier today, August 3, the fifth maintenance release of the stable GNOME Software package manager application for the GNOME 3.16 desktop environment, a version that fixes seven issues.
The developers of the famous GParted open-source partition editor software used by default on numerous Live CDs announced the release and immediate availability for download of GParted 0.23.0.
At the moment Polari will not tell you much more except logging a debug message in the terminal, should you fail to connect to the IRC server.
Slightly later than usual, but still, I'm giving a short update on how my works on Getting Things GNOME! have been progressing recently.
After my first attempts with unit tests two weeks ago, I started the week off with an ambitious plan to unit test also another feature which I had to implement consequently: the start of the day setting in the preferences window. The test was a simple task. I really enjoy testing, even though I had to change it several times because of changes in the parse_time() function's output type. Nevertheless, my test was done and ready in a short period of time. However, afterwards I spent almost the entire week working on the functionality of setting the time itself.
We are proud to announce the release of Tanglu 3 (Chromodoris willani) today!
Tanglu 3 comes with fresh new packages, a Linux 4.0 kernel, systemd 224, KDE Plasma 5.3 and the latest GNOME release, GNOME 3.16.
Point Linux 3.0 (Agni) is the latest release of the distribution based on the stable branch of Debian - the current version of which was released in April of this year and is code named Jessie. Point Linux aims to provide a very stable system - thus the Debian base, but with modifications to improve the user experience over a stock Debian system. One of the things the Point Linux developers do to achieve this goal is to provide their own repository, where current builds of Firefox and Thunderbird are available for installation (unless the full installation medium is used, in which case these programs are installed by default). This is in contrast to the Debian experience where only unbranded versions of these programs are available. Point Linux also chooses default desktop environments for the distribution based on the ease of use of the desktop. This choice has traditionally been the MATE desktop environment, but with this release Xfce has been added as an official desktop environment.
Today, August 4, Bernhard Landauer, the maintainer of the i3 community edition of the Manjaro Linux distribution had the pleasure of announcing the immediate availability for download of Manjaro Linux i3 0.8.13.1.
Also, these days Red Hat is much more than just Linux: other huge chunks of Red Hat are Middleware, there are several virtualization products, they are serious towards software defined storage, and they indeed have a very specific idea of what Cloud means and how to do that – and it’s all backed up by products which are again backed by pretty vivid community projects (with colorful names as Drools, Byteman and CapeDwarf).
Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7, the latest version of the stable, proven and predictable Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform. As the basis for large, complex IT deployments, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7 offers enterprise IT teams new capabilities to bolster system security, proactively identify and resolve business-critical IT issues, and confidently embrace some of the latest open source technologies, such as Linux containers, without sacrificing operational stability.
Nucleus Software, the leading provider of lending and transaction banking solutions to the global financial services industry, today announced that it is organising a round table discussion on “Shaping The Future of Lending For Non-Banking Finance Companies (NBFCs)" in Chennai on August 5, 2015 in association with Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open-source software solutions.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst doesn’t look like your stereotypical gambler. Instead of slot machines, he’s surrounded by the Raleigh skyline. Instead of card sharks, he’s mingling with coders. In his typical uniform – a white button-up shirt and blue jeans – he sits at a desk in an office atop Red Hat Tower, the 19-story downtown nucleus of what some call the future of information technology infrastructure, making a high-stakes bet, one that doesn’t just impact the coders in the cubicles, but all of Raleigh, N.C. Because if Red Hat sneezes, the ripples could give the city’s tech culture the economic equivalent of a summer cold.
Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst opens up on "The Open Organization," his new book, at an NCTA "Thought Leaders" event on Aug. 27.
The site itself is 'supported by' by Red Hat, but (as they say) the opinions expressed on the website are those of each author, not of the author's employer or of Red Hat.
As we announced when Korora 22 was released, Adobe Flash is no longer included by default.
I had a bit of free time over the last few days, and looked at the current state of the art for Doom on Linux. The awesome Rahul Sundaram has been looking after several Doom-related packages for a while – including the Chocolate Doom package – but there are some things that seem to be commonly used these days that we didn’t have packaged. So I packaged them up, and put them in a new repository!
I’ve udpated the CUDA version in the Fedora 22 Nvidia repository, it now contains CUDA 7.0.28 along with the cuFFT 7.0.35 patch. Note that from this version, CUDA is x86_64 bit compatible only, so there are no more i386 packages. There is still the cudart library available for 32 bit, but I don’t think it’s worth packaging.
Note that there are parts of this chain I’m not a part of, and obviously linux distributions I’m not involved in that support Secure Boot. I encourage other maintainers to offer similar statements for their respective involvement.
The "remi" repository exists for > 10 years, it have changed a lot, and some recent changes worth to be explained.
Ubuntu and Debian developers have been working for some time to make GCC 5.x the default compiler for the project, and they have finally made it. Ubuntu was the first one to achieve this, and now it looks like Debian has joined the party as well.
However, what one must remember is that the Ubuntu Phone is still a work in progress. The company is issuing updates every month and is relying on its current user base regarding the feedback and ideas. Right now, only three Ubuntu phones are present in the market ranging from $186 to $328 roughly. Ubuntu has been in hibernation mode for the development of this OS for a long time and it looked like they might be consumer ready now, however, after seeing the Ubuntu Phone it looks like they might be far from that scenario right now.
Canonical is working on multiple projects at the same time, and it's often difficult to understand their plans, but Director of Product Strategy Engineering Olli Ries has shed some light on how their inner workings are structured and how things are evolving, from the inside out.
Ubuntu Touch is now available by default in three phones, the Bq Aquaris e4.5, Bq Aquaris e5 HD, and Meizu MX4 Ubuntu Edition, and it looks like Canonical plans to support them for as long as possible.
Ubuntu is planning on converging its operating systems, and this approach will become a lot more obvious in the next couple of years. In the meantime, we found out some interesting things about the future of Ubuntu desktop and Canonical's plans for it.
Bodhi, a Linux operating system based on Ubuntu that features a minimalist approach and really low system requirements, has just received a testing version for the upcoming 3.1.0 release.
The maintainers of Ubuntu MATE have donated money to various open source projects this month. The beneficiaries of the donations all have something to do with Ubuntu MATE and have helped it exist in its current state by one means or another.
Avnet’s revamped, Linux-based “ZIDK-II” kit for motor control combines its ZedBoard SBC, featuring an ARM/FPGA Zynq SoC, with improved Analog Devices gear.
Avnet Electronic Marketing’s “Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC/Analog Devices Intelligent Drives Kit II,” or “ZIDK-II,” is a major upgrade to a previously released kit of the same name, featuring an enhanced Analog Devices ” brushless DC motor control reference design. As before, the system is built around Avnet’s community-backed, Ubuntu Linux-based ZedBoard single board computer, which showcases the Xilinx Zynq-7020, a SoC that combines see farther below.
When the first Raspberry Pi came out in 2012, it was no surprise when people in the tech community started to organize events focused around using the device. Software developers, hardware engineers, makers, teachers, children, and parents alike started to come together to learn about the Pi and what they could do with it. These events became known as Raspberry Jams, and they've inspired makers and educators around the world.
F&S has launched a Linux-ready, “ArmStone A9-v2ââ¬Â³ Pico-ITX SBC with an i.MX6 SoC, SATA, mini-PCIe, extended temperatures, and an optional 7-inch touchscreen.
The Tizen Developer Summit 2015 in Bengaluru, India, was a great time for Samsung to show of its Tizen talents, and that includes Information about its Next Gear Tizen Smartwatch. The new watch will feature a round face, as seen in the SDK and other leaks, but this is the first time that Samsung has also confirmed the existence of the Bezel that is used to Interact with the device.
For all the wonderful advantages Android offers over iOS and Windows Phone, there are a few issues that just frustrate enthusiasts and mainstream users alike. If lack of a timely update schedule comes right up at number one on the list of things people find most infuriating about Android devices, the presence of an inordinate amount of bloatware has to come in at number two on the list. What’s more, the two are mostly interrelated to a certain extent. What’s worse is that most of the unnecessary software on our phones (unlike the ones on our PCs) cannot even be uninstalled without rooting. The redundant software mostly comes from manufacturers and carriers, who deem it fit to give their users multiple apps performing the exact same job, irrespective of whether one even intends to use the feature. So Samsung will insist on installing S-Voice even if Google Now is the only digital assistant you’ll ever use. Examples of such unneeded software abound in Android land, with many such apps taking up valuable resources in smartphones and tablets as they keep running in the background eating away at the devices’ already anemic battery life, taking up storage space, adversely affecting performance and delaying updates. The last one assumes a great deal of importance when you realize that every single app has to be updated separately and checked for bugs and compatibility, before being pushed out to the end-users.
Sony has announced two new Android smartphones – the selfie-obesessed Xperia M5 and Xperia C5 Ultra – that will go on sale around the world in mid-August.
The better-equipped of the two devices, the Xperia M5, continues Sony’s recent tradition of offering waterproof and dust-proof devices – and pairs that ingress resistance with a 21.5-megapixel rear camera and 13-megapixel front-facing camera for selfies or video calling.
It's a new month, and you know what that means. The latest distribution numbers for Android's different builds are now in. With 15.5% of Android devices running on Android 5.0, and 2.6% equipped with Android 5.1, the Lollipop build of Google's open source OS can be found on 18.1% of Android flavored devices. That is a gain of 5.7 percentage points from last month. The percentage of Android devices powered by Android 4.4 KitKat actually rose by the smallest of margins, .1 percentage point from the last report, to 39.3%.
The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 is getting an OTA update today, and it takes the device from 5.0 up to 5.1.1. That means a few small tweaks to the system, but there are also some important bug fixes, including one for the Stagefright vulnerability.
Need a smartphone that can go from zero to hero as fast as possible? These are the top 5 flagships with quick-charging batteries.
Google reveals that the newest Android operating system initially codenamed as "Android M" will be delaying the release of Android M Developer Preview 3 for selected Nexus devices.
The information was shared by the company's employee and moderator Wojtek Kalicià âski on the Developer community page in Google+.
With Lava pixel V1, Google has attempted to revolutionize the budget smartphone market again but has not been able to do so.
The phone does offer good design, excellent touch response, smooth performance and decent camera, however at the same time lacks full-HD screen, 4G connectivity and the latest processor - features that are already available in various phones in this budget segment. However, users who value stock Android and priority updates may find this one to be a good option.
At Rs 11,350 the smartphone fails to compete with Lenovo K3 Note, which is available at Rs 10,000 and offers better features including display, processor and camera. YU Yureka Plus also comes with better specifications at a lower price.
New features, functionality, rewrites and releases of open source software are being driven by customers, and it's important to understand how the benefits of open source software can change. There have been many cases of organizations originally seeking open source primarily for cost savings, but then later realizing other benefits, including performance and reliability.
It is with mixed feelings that we announce that the Ada Initiative will be shutting down in approximately mid-October. We are proud of what we accomplished with the support of many thousands of volunteers, sponsors, and donors, and we expect all of our programs to continue on in some form without the Ada Initiative. Thank you for your incredible work and support!
The cybersecurity team at Lockheed Martin will share some defensive firepower with the security community at Black Hat this week with the open source release of an internal advance threat tool it has been using in house for three years now. Dubbed Laika BOSS, this malware detection platform is meant to help security analysts better hunt down malicious files and activity in an enterprise environment.
Nearly a year ago, Matchstick hit Kickstarter with the goal of bringing a more open HDMI dongle to challenge the likes of the Chromecast and Fire TV Stick. Today, however, its creators made a painful revelation.
They’re not going to be able to deliver a satisfactory product, and that means around 17,000 backers won’t be getting their hands on the Firefox OS-based Matchsticks they were hoping for when they pledged their support to the project last fall.
Nope, just non-Windows users being played so far [1]. I should have guessed with it being Adobe’s DRM that is being used that maybe Linux wouldn’t see the best support. It’s also depressing to me that Mozilla has given up on calling it what it is in some cases [2].
As you may know, Pale Moon is an open-source, cross-platform browser based on Mozilla Firefox, being up to 25% faster then the original.
It's been a while since I talked about Ceilometer and its companions, so I thought I'd go ahead and write a bit about what's going on this side of OpenStack. I'm not going to cover new features and fancy stuff today, but rather a shallow overview of the new project processes we initiated.
AppFormix, a leading provider of analytics and control services to cloud-based datacentres, has formed a partnership with Mirantis to become a Mirantis Unlocked partner. This will see AppFormix integrate with Mirantis OpenStack to bring analytics and control of resource utilisation to OpenStack based private cloud infrastructure.
I've used LibreOffice as my main office suite since it forked from OpenOffice five years ago. Now its latest edition, LibreOffice 5.0, is better than ever. And, in my book, that means it's the best standalone office suite available in 2015.
Pivot tables is a very powerful tools in spreadsheets that allow you to analyse big massive of data in flexible dimensions.
LibreOffice Calc gives you an option to build your own Pivot tables using the built-in tools.
When Engard educates people on what open source is, what it means to use open source software, what types of software are available, which companies use it, and who trusts it, they see that their fears are unfounded, she says. To back up her discussions with facts, she maintains bibliographies on open source and open source security. She also has a set of bookmarks on Delicious, and she wrote a book, Practical Open Source Software for Libraries. “[W]hen people come to me and say open source is too risky … I have facts and figures, just what librarians want, to say no, all software has potential risk associated with it. You have to evaluate software side by side, and look at it, and really take the time to compare it. … I know you’re going to pick the open source solution over the proprietary because it is so quickly developed, so quickly fixed, so ahead of the curve as far as technology is concerned.”
Just in time for PC-BSD & FreeBSD 10.2 (coming soon), the Lumina desktop has been updated to version 0.8.6! This version contains a number of updates for non-English users (following up all the new translations which are now available), as well as a number of important bug-fixes, and support for an additional FreeDesktop specification. The PC-BSD “Edge” packages have already been updated to this version and the FreeBSD ports tree will be getting this update very soon as well.
Today's new feeds were just chock full 'o interesting articles. The first up came from Ole Tange who set up a little experiment to see how long it took for someone to read his source code. Bryan Quigley commented on "The Mozilla We've Got" and OpenSource.com interviewed Linus Torvalds' daughter, who is building a career in computer science and engineering. Elsewhere, Brook Kidane reviewed Point Linux 3.0 and Laurent Montel ran down KDEPIM 5.0.
It’s been a long time since there has been any news on the state of federation, so here’s an update on where Mediagoblin’s at and some technical aspects of federation. We’ve been working with the W3C Social Working Group to define the future of federation, and part of my work there has been to work on the ActivityPump standard. There’s more to say on that and why we’re investing time there, but this blogpost will mostly be about MediaGoblin and federation from a technical perspective.
I am the maintainer of a piece of free software called GNU Parallel. Free software guarantees you access to the source code, but I have been wondering how many actually read the source code.
To test this I put in a comment telling people to email me when they read this. The comment was put in a section of the code that no one would look to fix or improve the software -- so, the source code equivalent to a dusty corner. To make sure the comment would not show up if some one just grepped through the source code I rot13'ed the source code.
The autonomous region of Extremadura (Spain) is committed to the use of open source in schools, the new Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) government says in a statement published on Monday. However, the administration will not cancel the EUR 38 million request for PC hardware and proprietary software licences, published by its predecessor.
"Our aim is to anticipate the information needs of the local public sector, information professionals and all citizens by providing a web space that makes it possible for them to view, compare and comment on town halls' principal fiscal and accounting ratios, by allowing free access to multiple types of reports, segmenting the reports by autonomous regions or provinces. We intend to work with other exeprts and the principal National and Europan Transparency foundation.
In terms of transparency, countries in the European Union (EU) still have a long way to go, a report entitled Future-proofing eGovernment for a Digital Single Market, and conducted by several IT service providers, revealed.
When the TRS-80 — a personal computer from Tandy that would be sold via their RadioShack stores, hence TRS — went on sale on Aug. 3 in 1977, computers weren’t exactly new. The Apple I had been introduced the previous year and personal computers were clearly a growing market, but Tandy is often credited with pioneering the idea of mass-market personal computer.
Twitter is reportedly experimenting a new ‘News’ tab in its mobile apps for Android and iOS which will surface trending news items. This move by Twitter is an attempt to keep users engaged with the social network.
Shares have plunged since company leaders said Twitter is in 'turnaround' mode
Richard Dawkins is the latest victim of users who disappear seemingly at random and without warning. What is this mystery?
Twitter is in crisis. Although the company is popular among power users, those who don’t use Twitter don’t see the point. As its stock price plunges, Twitter execs are working frantically to give the service more mass appeal.
As first reported by BuzzFeed, Twitter is testing a news tab within its app in the US that showcases the top news headlines of the moment. The effort is meant to broaden Twitter’s appeal by making it easier to find the stuff worth seeing.
Canadian hacktivists Telecomix Canada have defaced Donald Trump's website. The message, entitled "Your Moment of Zen, Mr Stewart" is a shoutout to Jon Stewart of the Daily Show for his steady criticism of Donald Trump.
The announcement was made by Telecomix Canada on pastebin and says that the reveal of the server penetration is in honour of the last week of Stewart's tenure helming the Daily Show on Comedy Central.
When companies claim their products are unhackable or invulnerable, it must be like waving a red flag in front of bulls as it practically dares security researchers to prove otherwise. Apple previously claimed that Macs were not vulnerable to the same firmware flaws that could backdoor PCs, so researchers proved they could remotely infect Macs with a firmware worm that is so tough to detect and to get rid of that they suggested it presents a toss your Mac in the trash situation.
As we head into the middle of the week more news will be coming out surrounding the Black Hat hacker conference which takes places on the 5th and 6th this week. A talk that will be given by Trammell Hudson, Xeno Kovah and Cory Kallenberg is set to show a flaw in the firmware of Mac computers which can be remotely targeted.
Hackers are exploiting a serious zero-day vulnerability in the latest version of Apple's OS X so they can perform drive-by attacks that install malware without requiring victims to enter system passwords, researchers said.
Apple (AAPL) shares are down significantly for the second day Tuesday — bringing investors' paper losses to staggering levels and putting the stock further into correction territory.
The morning after Laura Capehorn parked her Saab 9-3 estate, all she could find of it was a car-shaped hole in the snow.
The interior designer had left the vehicle outside her mother-in-law's house in Shepherd's Bush, London, one evening in January 2014. By the morning it was gone, presumed stolen.
Police immediately asked to see the car's key, and weren't surprised to find out it was an electronic fob. They had seen an increase in tech-savvy criminals using a key-cloning system to gain entry to high-value vehicles. Once in, the thieves drive away within seconds.
WordPress 4.2.4 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.
The developers of the WordPress content management system (CMS) today announced the release of version 4.2.4. This security release addresses six vulnerabilities and four bugs.
According to the release notes, WordPress 4.2.4 patches three cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws and a SQL injection vulnerability that can be exploited to compromise websites. The latest version also protects users against a potential timing side-channel attack, and prevents attackers from locking posts from being edited.
Marc-Alexandre Montpas of Sucuri, Helen Hou-Sandí of the WordPress security team, Netanel Rubin of Check Point, Ivan Grigorov, Johannes Schmitt of Scrutinizer, and Mohamed A. Baset have been credited for reporting these vulnerabilities.
WordPress has noted that these fixes are also included in WordPress 4.3 RC2.
Check Point has published a brief advisory for the SQL injection vulnerability (CVE-2015-2213) patched in the latest version of WordPress. According to the security firm, this is a critical flaw affecting WordPress 4.2.3 and prior.
Key allies in the US and UK led war on Islamic State (ISIS) are covertly financing the terrorist movement according to senior political sources in the region. US and British oil companies are heavily invested in the murky geopolitical triangle sustaining ISIS’ black market oil sales.
The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq and Turkish military intelligence have both supported secret ISIS oil smuggling operations and even supplied arms to the terror group, according to Kurdish, Iraqi and Turkish officials.
One British oil company in particular, Genel Energy, is contracted by the KRG to supply oil for a major Kurdish firm accused of facilitating ISIS oil sales to Turkey. The Kurdish firm has close ties to the Iraqi Kurdish government.
What is clear is that the first default by a US commonwealth is now in the history books.
JJ: In part because coverage of Puerto Rico is so spotty, so inconsistent, some media seem to be shorthanding the debt story, making comparisons to Greece or to Detroit. There are some similarities, but neither of those examples really gets at the particular story of what’s happening in Puerto Rico, do they?
Imagine a US senator publicly calling the Chinese “evil people.” Imagine a governor saying African leaders are “animals.” Imagine a presidential candidate claiming Latinos are “liars.” In each of these cases, the media would rightfully explode, condemning the politicians for their overt racism.
A group of researchers have demonstrated how to track users with nothing more than their remaining battery power, which could compromise privacy
A team of European security researchers has published a paper analyzing how the battery life of mobile devices could be used to track web browsing habits of Firefox users on Linux, using the HTML5 Battery Status API (via The Guardian).
Ever since legendary British investigative journalist Duncan Campbell told the world in a 1988 magazine article about ECHELON — a massive, automated surveillance dragnet that indiscriminately intercepted phone and Internet data from communications satellites — Western intelligence officials have refused to acknowledge that it existed.
Despite sporadic continuing press reports, people who complained about the program — which, as Campbell disclosed, automatically searched text-based communications using a dictionary of keywords to flag suspicious content — were routinely dismissed as conspiracy theorists.
The only real conspiracy, it turns out, was a conspiracy of silence among the governments that benefited from the program.
It's not so much the American public losing a few opportunities to buy a luxury vehicle as it is the other thing: tight control of sales. The American public can't get many laws written in its favor, but large industries certainly can. This initial thrust led to lots and lots of partnerships with local law enforcement agencies conveniently located near shipping docks. And this led to lots and lots of luxury vehicles ending up in the hands of law enforcement.
Then, the government stopped the crackdown. It claimed to be making an effort to more tightly focus its forfeiture efforts as a result of Eric Holder's reform initiative. The appearance of being an errand boy for corporate interests certainly didn't help. Cases were dropped and charges dismissed. But the vehicles remained in the government's hands.
One person in Saeki Co.'s position spent two years fighting for the return of a seized vehicle and $125,000 in cash. This followed about a dozen similar settlements, most occuring after a legal battle with the agency(ies) holding the vehicles. In other cases, the prevailing parties still have yet to be fully recompensed. And others are still being prosecuted for violating a law the federal government isn't entirely clear on and has lost an interest in enforcing.
Richard Stallman is famous for creating the GNU operating system, and founding the free software movement, which changed how we develop software. Now he’s published an essay in Technology Review about how police body cams should switch on automatically any time an officer pulls out a weapon.
Stallman’s proposals are somewhat similar to what we’ve seen previously from groups like the ACLU, which crafted a model bill for regulating policy body cams. In that model bill, the ACLU suggests that police should turn body cams on whenever they respond to a call or interact with a member of the public — except when it would be dangerous for the officer to turn the camera on
The anti-piracy catastrophe that is Rightscorp continues its slide into disrespectability, albeit inadvertently. Currently facing lawsuits for robocall phone harassment and the realities of a business model that largely relies on the kindness of accused strangers, Rightscorp is barely upright.