Vinux 5.0 is a striking example of the flexibility and usability of the Linux OS.
Vinux is a fully functional Linux distro that caters to blind and partially sighted users. It's based on Ubuntu Trusty Tahr 14.04.3 LTS and gives users support through 2019. The latest version was released earlier this month.
These facilities will be powered by a global community — a community of millions — because they will operate on free and open source software and Gnu/Linux.
I don’t know if many of you realize just what intense power you have, literally under your fingertips. You have the power to change lives. The tool set, already in place and ready to use, takes about twenty minutes to put into play. That twenty minutes can change a life. It could lead to a child being inspired to amazing achievements in his or her life. You just have to decide if you want to do it — not to the extent Reglue does, we have almost 100 people to make Reglue work — but on an individual basis…?
As I review one Linux distribution or another, I find myself uttering phrases like "This is pretty good! Almost makes me want to switch my system to this," over and over again. So many distributions of Linux are truly fantastic – but usually with a caveat. Something that stops me from making them my primary system.
"You open the box and there are 40 tablets inside, there is a BRCK inside and on the BRCK there is a Linux [open-source] server - so we can locally cache educational content, and serve it up to the tablets."
Much like mishandling a sharp stick, any operating system that easily allows you to access root or super user powers is potentially dangerous. In 2015, the single biggest threat to your computer's security is sitting at your desk, typing on your keyboard. This is why more people than ever are gravitating towards tablets, smart phones and yes, Chromebooks as their main computing device.
All of these devices come locked down so that accessing something dangerous to that device is much more difficult to do. Whether you run rm -r / on a Mac or on Linux, or install something terrible on Windows – there are simply too many opportunities for the less tech savvy to destroy their operating system installation.
Many people liked the idea of running a Linux desktop; but in reality, when asked if Linux desktops were running on their physical systems, the answer was also No. Now, however, it seems like the tide has turned and more enterprises are starting to run Linux desktops. That means they're looking for a more secure and manageable way to deal with them.
I am getting annoyed and tired of Microsoft's marginal business ethics and would dearly like to cut them loose. However, the switch to a completely new operating system and programs seems awfully daunting. I am not a computer geek but am willing to learn. I am an architect, my mostly used programs are AutoCAD and Sketchup, for which I would have to find alernatives and embark on a steep learning curve.
AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS) has announced the arrival of a new service called EC2 Dedicated Hosts.
The new feature will allow companies to run the software they pay for on multiple virtual machines using a single server, giving more granular management to finding what applications are working on what virtual machine.
AWS has outlined the advantages of EC2 Dedicated Hosts in a blog post by evangelist Jeff Barr.
The Linux Foundation regularly awards scholarships as part of its Linux Training Scholarship Program. In the five years that the Linux Foundation has hosted this program, it has awarded a total of 34 scholarships totaling more than $100,000 in free training to students and professionals. In conjunction with this program, we are featuring recent scholarship recipients in the hope that their stories will inspire others.
One of the most interesting presentations from this year's Embedded Linux Conference Europe was how-to boot Linux in under one second!
For targeting various embedded use-cases, Jan Altenberg of Linutronix presented how to achieve this feat of booting Linux in under one second.
Slides and videos from this year's European Embedded Linux conference are now available in full.
As of a few days ago, all of the Embedded Linux Conference Europe videos are available via this YouTube playlist.
The demo described here is just the beginning. There are many implementations of unikernels and there’s plenty of work ahead to ensure they can all reap the benefits of integration, as well as improving Docker itself to make the most of these new technologies. Look over the collection of unikernel projects and contribute your experiences to this blog!
Radeon Crimson Driver is the replacement from AMD meant to help retire the old Catalyst, and it will arrive really soon. AMD is saying that the performance in some Linux games will increase by at least 112%.
The new Radeon Software Crimson Driver from AMD has been released for the Linux platform as well, but it looks like the Linux users will have to wait a little bit more for the new UI or other features.
While leaked slides indicate AMD was planning better gaming on Linux for Crimson, in the end they really didn't deliver. Even for their mentioned games, when testing various Linux OpenGL games on three different systems the performance was largely unchanged.
The High Performance Conjugate Gradients (HPCG) Benchmark list was announced this week at SC15. This is the fourth list produced for the emerging benchmark designed to complement the traditional High Performance LINPACK (HPL) benchmark used as the official metric for ranking the TOP500 systems. The first HPCG list was announced at ISC’14 a year and a half ago, containing only 15 entries and the SC’14 list had 25. The current list contains more than 60 entries as HPCG continues to gain traction in the HPC community.
The top story today is the twentieth anniversary of GIMP, Open Source image manipulation application. To celebrate the project released version 2.8.16 with several new features and a revamped Website. The Linux down under suffered another data breach and Jamie Watson posted a series of step-by-step guides to configure popular desktops. Several reviews blipped the radar as well in today's Linux news.
You have a database, a tweet pattern and wants to automatically tweet on a regular basis? No need for RSS, fancy tricks, 3rd party website to translate RSS to Twitter or whatever. Just use db2twitter.
Twitter is a social networking service that is a bit of a conundrum to many. At any given time it can be used to connect with people of a like mind, and at another it’s an exercise in frustration, thanks to the never-ending stream of data. But for those that depend upon the service as a means to either stay connected, promote a product or service, or even (on certain levels) research a given topic, it’s a boon.
A console application is computer software which is able to be used via a text-only computer interface, the command line interface, or a text-based interface included within a graphical user interface operating system, such as a terminal emulator (such as GNOME Terminal or Terminator). Whereas a graphical user interface application generally involves using the mouse and keyboard (or touch control), with a console application the primary (and often only) input method is the keyboard.
The Inverse team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of PacketFence 5.5.0. This is a major release with new features, enhancements and important bug fixes. This release is considered ready for production use and upgrading from previous versions is strongly advised.
The list of changes is not really huge:
Correctly escape XML output. Make error message selectable. Fixed spurious D-Bus error message. Translation updates.
Back in 1995, University of California students, Peter Mattis and Kimball Spencer, were members of the eXperimental Computing Facility, a Berkeley campus organization of undergraduate students enthusiastic about computers and programming. In June of that year, the two hinted at their intentions to write a free graphical image manipulation program as a means of giving back to the free software community.
The developers of the popular NetworkManager software, which is used in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems as the default network connection manager solution, have announced a new stable release, NetworkManager 1.0.8.
Opera Software, through Aneta Reluga, has announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of a new Beta build for the upcoming Opera 34.0 web browser for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
RAR is a powerful archive manager that can be used to reduce the size of files and to decompress RAR, ZIP, and other formats. A new major upgrade has been released, bring the version number up to 5.30.
I've been looking forward to Cardinal Quest 2 ever since I tried the original, and after a very long wait it has been released. The great thing is that this is a full game, and not an Early Access title (hooray!).
This is unusual, the developers of a turned-based strategic survival game named Thea: The Awakening are giving away their Linux version.
So, the Linux release came about at the end of October that I somehow missed, it's probably another case of Steam not updating the Linux new releases section when an existing game on Steam gains a Linux version. Seriously Valve, how is that still a thing?
Valve, the U.S.-based video game company, altered the gaming field with the 2013 release of its operating system (SteamOS) and Steam Machines, which are hardware platforms for playing computer video games. SteamOS, which was created with Linux, the open source platform, allows smaller gaming companies, such as Alienware, CyberPowerPC and Webhallena, to create unique gaming systems (Steam Machines) by utilizing Valve’s open source operating system. This enables them to compete with large competitors such as Microsoft and Sony.
USENIX, in cooperation with LOPSA (League of Professional System Administrators), presented the 2015 LISA (Large Installation System Administration) Conference in Washington, D.C. USA from 8 November to 13 November. Two members of the KDE Community represented KDE at the Conference Expo, connecting with many of the 1,060 attendees to discuss successful large scale deployment and other KDE goodness.
After informing our readers last week about the implementation of a beautiful and secure lockscreen for the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.5 on the Wayland desktop environment, today we have new information about the things that will come for the Wayland session of KDE Plasma 5.5.
The GNOME developers are working around the clock these days to update the core components and applications of the GNOME desktop environment for the 3.19.2 milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.20 release.
After only three days from the announcement of GTK+ 3.19.2, the GTK+ developers have announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the third milestone towards GTK+ 3.20.
If you like to track your time in a fine granular way, consider to use project-hamster with the GNOME Shell extension.
Solus is still getting some pretty cool features, and it looks like developers are preparing to get some sort of disk encryption ready just in time for the launch.
We have been informed by Black Lab Software, the creators of the Ubuntu-based Black Lab Linux operating system about the general availability of their new class of hardware, the Black Lab BriQ version 5.
Xubuntu 15.10 Wily Werewolf is not a bad distro. It's okay. But it's a disastrous result if you compare to the last few editions. I guess the developers didn't have that much freedom having to work with a wonky, beta baseline, but still. If the product isn't ready, do not release it. Very simple. Keeping to arbitrary deadlines makes no sense, especially since Xubuntu is not a commercial offering. It only harms the user experience and loyalty.
Most of the stuff worked, the beauty and elegance and speed are there, but this autumn's release sacrifices lots of things to get there. Stability, for one thing. Battery life isn't the best either. Crashes and bugs are not becoming a top performer. An occasional niggle or two certainly do not help. All in all, if you're after Xubuntu, then Vivid is a much better choice. Werewolf isn't the Xfce's finest hour. 8/10. We know what it can do. We demand it. Let this be a polite warning.
The highlights of NixOS are that the distribution is very light on memory, showcases a very interesting and powerful package manager and the distribution does everything quickly. The package manager performs most tasks instantly and NixOS offers us a minimal platform on which to build.
There were some quirks of this distribution which took some getting used to. In my case, adjusting to the idea that Nix would manage user accounts as well as packages and that the package manager would reset "damage" to the system took an adjustment in my thinking.
I very much like the way NixOS takes the worry out of upgrading packages by placing each change in its own "generation" and I found, from the end user's point of view, NixOS worked just the same as any other Linux distribution. Setting up NixOS is not for beginners, and I do not think NixOS is intended to be used as a general purpose desktop operating system. But what NixOS does do is give us a useful playground in which to examine the Nix package manager and I think this is very interesting technology which deserves further exploration and adoption by additional distributions.
Sabayon 15.11 KDE left quite contradictory impressions on me.
On the positive side, KDE 5, or Plasma 5 in this operating system was very much polished. I tried Plasma 5 in Kubuntu several times, but felt myself very uncomfortable there. Up until now I thought that Plasma 5 is a bit too unpolished. Sabayon 15.11 KDE fixed that my prejudice. I know now that KDE5 is the Desktop Envirnment everyone can use. Maybe that's the reason for Kubuntu team to revisit their approach.
Well the time has come to officially switch off from LXLE. This time around however I find myself in a weird spot. I’ve honestly struggled with LXLE; not in using the distribution itself but rather coming up with things to write about it. That isn’t to say that LXLE is bad by any stretch of the imagination, in fact it is quite good, it’s just that once you get used to the light weight desktop environment (DE) there is a perfectly capable “heavy weight” distribution underneath. What I mean by this is that once you get used to the DE and it fades into the background you’re left with a perfectly functional distribution that could just as easily have been Ubuntu or Linux Mint or Fedora or {insert your favourite one here}.
The Netrunner Team is happy to announce the release of Netrunner 17 (codename Horizon) – 64bit version.
On November 23, the Netrunner Team was happy to announce the final release and immediate availability for download of the Netrunner 17 GNU/Linux operating system, dubbed Horizon.
The developers of the Debian-based Webconverger Linux distribution used for deployment in places like Internet cafes have announced the release of Webconverger 33.1, which is now available for download.
This is very solid & stable release that businesses all around the world should be deploying Web applications with.
As always with this rolling distribution you will find the very latest packages for the Plasma Desktop, this includes Frameworks 5.16.0, Plasma 5.4.3 and KDE Applications 15.08.3.
The developers of the antiX MX Linux distribution have announced the release and immediate availability for download and testing of the second Beta build of the upcoming antiX MX-15 operating system.
About a week ago, the Netrunner team released an update to its rolling release operating system. Based on Arch/Manjaro, I advised Linux beginners to steer clear, and instead opt for the Kubuntu-based variant. There are a couple of reasons for this. For one, the Ubuntu community is arguably friendlier and better for newbies -- there are a ton of instructions and .deb files available too. More importantly, however, the rolling release could be less stable overall.
For this month, I installed Tumbleweed on my laptop. I had installed Leap 42.1 to overwrite my previous Tumbleweed install on that laptop.
This computer uses legacy booting. I gave Tumbleweed a 40G partition, which I formatted as “ext4”. I also allowed it to use the swap and home file systems from my encrypted LVM on that computer.
In the enterprise Linux space, few if any Linux distribution are as widely deployed as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and none make as much revenue. RHEL 7.2 is the latest incremental update of Red Hat's flagship Linux platform and is the second update of RHEL this calendar year.
Frank, a longstanding member of my team, was unhappy and disengaged. He was visibly upset, avoided speaking up in meetings, and had declining productivity. It was obvious to everyone who worked with him that there was a problem—we had to do something to get Frank back on track, or his future on the team was uncertain. (And just to clarify: Frank is not a real person, but an amalgamation of several).
Analysts on Wall Street have placed a short term price target of $85.058 on shares of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT). This is according to 17 analysts polled by Zacks Research. The brokerage firm with the most lofty expectation has a $92 target. One the other end, the analyst with the most conservative objective sees the stock heading to $72.
The Workstation Working Group has announced a bold plan: make GNOME on Wayland our default in Fedora 24 Workstation. It’s already become the default option in Rawhide — the rolling development version of Fedora. But the plan’s not carved in stone. Fedora is leading edge, not bleeding edge, so we’re cautious about default options. To become default in Fedora 24 Workstation, Wayland needs wide testing and user feedback in Fedora 23. And that’s where you can help us.
Before announcing the release of the second Beta build of the Chapeau 23 Linux operating system, Vince Pooley published a lengthy article to inform all users of the Chapeau 22 distro that they could upgrade to Chapeau 23 if they wanted to.
FLOCK 2016 planning is in progress! FLOCK is the annual conference for Fedora contributors to come together, discuss new ideas, work to make those ideas a reality, and continue to promote the foundations of the Fedora Community: Freedom, Friends, Features, and First.
This comics explains the birth of the project Tunir. When I started working in the Fedora Cloud SIG, I volunteered myself to help with the testing of the Cloud images. We have very clear guidelines about what to test, and how to test.
There is a very useful tool for finding and merging shared permanent storage, and its name is fdupes. There was a terrible occurrence in the software after version 1.51, however. They removed the -L argument because too many people were complaining about lost data. It sounds like user error to me, and so I continue to use this one. I have to build from source, since the newer versions do not have the -L option.
Do you remember my example of a bad stub design in DNF ? At that time I didn’t have a good example of why this is a bad design and what are the consequences of it. Today I have!
New release of DNF and DNF-PLUGINS-CORE is out. Aside from bug fixes and documentation improvements, new methods were added into DNF query API – take advantage of them. For further details look at DNF and DNF plugins release notes.
Fedora/DNF developer Jan à  ilhan announced earlier today, November 24, the immediate availability for download of new maintenance releases for the DNF package manager of the Fedora 23 Linux operating system, including DNF-PLUGINS-CORE.
Fedora developers are hoping you'll help them test out the latest Fedora Workstation experience with GNOME atop a native Wayland experience.
For the Fedora 24 release next year they are hoping to ship Wayland by default for supported GPU/hardware systems. Fedora Rawhide recently went ahead and enabled the Wayland-based desktop by default.
For the first time in Albania we organized a release party where we gathered people who were interested in Fedora. Fedora 23 release party successfully took place at Saturday, the 14th of November in the “Open Labs Hackerspace” in Tirana, Albania. I must say that it was a full house! Actually we started building the Albanian Fedora community recently which is why we didn’t know how many people could come and honestly didn’t expect many, the number of attendants surpassed our expectations. There were many Fedora users, contributors and people that were new in Fedora (thank you!).
26th of October 2015, I joined Red Hat as a part of the Fedora Engineering Team.
After this happened, my next step was to get re-involved in Debian Live to help it carry on after the loss of Daniel. Here’s a quick update on some team progress, notes that could help people building Stretch images right now, and what to expect next.
After teasing users with the release of the KNOPPIX 7.6.0 Live Linux operating system on November 14, 2015, Klaus Knopper announced today, November 24, that the distribution is officially available for anyone who wants to download it.
Today, November 24, Canonical's à Âukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report for the day of November 23, informing us all about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers for the mobile operating system used on Ubuntu Phones.
The Ubuntu GNOME developers have been very busy with their work on the 16.04 LTS, and they released some details about the packages that have been updated and about various other changes.
There’s still a lot of work ahead for Canonical’s mobile operating system to properly gain traction as an alternative mobile operating system. With Blackberry and Microsoft fighting over the small slices of market share left, it will be interesting to see what happens next for Canonical. Nonetheless, Ubuntu for Phones has a unique user experience and design philosophy, which could prove useful if used right.
The Ubuntu developers have published a new iteration of the Ubuntu Kernel Team Weekly Newsletter to inform all users of the world's most popular free operating system about the latest work done on the kernel packages of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.
Dojo-Labs announced a Linux-based “Dojo” home security gateway that notifies users of security threats via a mobile app and a glowing orb.
An Israeli startup called Dojo-Labs has launched $99 presales on its Dojo security device, with shipments due March 8. After the first year, yearly subscriptions cost an additional $99 per year. CEO Yossi Atias has confirmed to LinuxGizmos that the device runs on a Linux operating system based on a Broadcom distribution.
Yossi adds that the device features the capacity to know whenever your TV is recording your voice even if it is switched off and when it uploads the information to the cloud.
"We all lock our front doors and yet our devices are wide open", explains Yossi Atias, Dojo-Labs' CEO and cofounder.
Security systems devoted to the Internet of Things are becoming more common and more sophisticated.
The number of connected devices now exceeds 4 billion, according to Gartner, and is expected to surge to 6 billion in 2016. The proliferation of Wi-Fi-enabled things-from baby monitors to smart locks-makes the home vulnerable to cyber threats, of which the Federal Bureau of Investigation recently issued a warning. The device is created to monitor the behavior of each device that is connected to your home network and help ensure your privacy. And it grows more intelligent with each new gadget and intrusion.
For the past month Imagination has been sharing details on their Creator CI40 development board. Today this "IoT-In-A-Box" has officially launched in the form of a Kickstarter campaign.
Normally, you can’t use a camera without a hot shoe with an external flash unit. But a relatively simple Photon-based device can solve this problem. Many external flash units (including older ones) can be triggered by shorting (i.e., closing the circuit) between its two terminals. If you happen to have a flash with a PC Sync terminal, it most likely can be triggered by shorting the connector’s pins.
Less than two weeks ago, on Thursday November 12 I was presenting Jolla at the great start-up conference SLUSH 2015, telling about Jolla’s ups and downs, focusing on death valleys that we start-ups very often go through. I told the audience that so far Jolla has had two serious death valleys, one in the very beginning in 2013 when we lost our whole technology platform, the basis for our first smartphone. The second death valley was later in 2014 when the Jolla smartphone was not selling as anticipated and its technology was aging.
The Web giant at its Android Developer Summit on Monday announced a major update for Android Studio, Google's official integrated development environment (IDE) for building Android apps and games. Google said one of the top requests it receives from developers is to make app builds and deployment faster in Android Studio, and that's what it's going for with this release.
When I unboxed the Q Founder, Fossil’s first Android Wear smartwatch, I saw an unsuspecting smartwatch that looked not all that dissimilar to Motorola’s Moto 360. It’s metal, has a button to the right-side of the screen, and features the same black bar along the bottom of the otherwise circular display that Motorola fans have long complained about.
In total, five different vulnerabilities in media processing in Android were attacked in Q3, 2015. The Stagefright vulnerability affected nearly 95 per cent of all Android devices out there, according to a new Trend Mirco report.
Some Android devices running older versions of the software can be remotely reset by Google if a court demands access to it, according to a document prepared by the New York District Attorney’s Office.
The document, so far unconfirmed by Google but widely reported and apparently prepared by the New York District Attorney's Office, claims that almost all elderly versions of Android are open to remote unlocking.
Google today launched version 2.0 of its Android Studio integrated development environment (IDE) for writing apps for its mobile operating system.
Android Studio, which is based on IntelliJ, launched back in 2013 and came out of beta a year ago. It includes everything a developer needs to build an app, including a code editor, code analysis tools, emulators for all of Google’s Android platforms, and more.
The new version is now available as a preview in the Canary release channel of Android Studio.
Google officially has rolled out the Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow, but for now, it only landed on select Android One smartphones.
The Jide Remix Mini packs an Android-based computer inside a device a bit larger than a deck of cards (or, for Canadians, about the size of 1.5 hockey pucks). It comes with a 64-bit, 4-Core Cortex processor, 2 GB RAM, and 16 GB of SSD storage.
The device sports two USB 2.0 ports, an Ethernet port, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, a headphone port, and a microSD slot for extra storage. Jide sells the Remix mini for $69.99, and includes an HDMI cable (about 20" long) and a power adapter in the box.
The first Android Wear watches made their debuts last June, and since then, a dozen different models have been released. But going into the holiday shopping season, there are six Android Wear devices worth watching. The following slideshow offers a look at those six Android Wear watches and how they stack up against the Apple Watch.
While news about a BlackBerry smartphone using a Samsung Exynos chipset is already out, there is more news confirming that the Priv will not be its first and last Android smartphone.
In an effort to kickstart its mobile payments solution, Android Pay, Google this morning announced a holiday campaign that will see the tech giant donating up to a million dollars toward special education projects in partnership with nonprofit DonorsChoose.org. This is the first time Google has ever worked with an NGO on a mobile payments campaign, the company notes.
The new Xiaomi Mi Pad 2 is not a huge departure from the Mi Pad before it. You still get a 7.9-inch device with more than respectable specifications for the price. MIUI 7 is still behind the glass, based on Android 5.x Lollipop. An additional version with Windows 10 was also announced, with more details to follow and a later release date than the Android version.
The Open Source Initiative€® (OSI), recognized globally for promoting and protecting open source software and development communities, announced today the affiliate membership of Snowdrift.coop. Snowdrift.coop is building a sustainable funding platform for freely-licensed works. Unlike the one-to-one matching used in traditional fundraising, Snowdrift.coop uses a many-to-many matching pledge that creates a network effect (like the internet itself) so that each donation and even projects reinforce one another. A fundamental difference between Snowdrift.coop and one-time fundraising campaigns that help projects get started is that Snowdrift.coop pays out monthly to provide sustainability for ongoing work.
Google Inc. has an open-source software hit on its hands.
Google has capitalized on the growing popularity of so-called containers, which are standardized building blocks of code that easily can be moved around the Internet and across a broad range of devices. In June 2014, as containers were taking off in the world of software development, Google open sourced Kubernetes, its technology for managing clusters of containers. Since then, Google has captured about 80% of the market for cluster managers, according to consulting firm Cloud Technology Partners Inc.
For my day job, I occasionally have to demonstrate concepts in a Windows environment. The most time-consuming part of the process is almost always the installation. Don't get me wrong; Linux takes a long time to install, but in order to set up a multi-system lab of Windows computers, it can take days!
Open source is now companies' "default approach" to software, and open source's presence within the business world and the use of open source has nearly doubled since 2010. That's according to the latest "Annual Future of Open Source" report from Black Duck Software.
Cyber security solutions can be expensive, often for good reason. However, there are also some very powerful open source offerings that can help keep you and company safe.
Spectrum limitations combined with growing demand for bandwidth are pushing Indian telcos to explore technologies like SDN and NFV, which have the potential to help them to maximize resource utilization.
ON.Lab has announced that Alcatel-Lucent has joined the ONOS project, the Open source SDN Network Operating System (ONOS) for service providers and mission critical networks and a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.
ONOS is a carrier-grade SDN network operating system architected to provide high availability, scalability, performance, and rich northbound and southbound abstractions. Alcatel-Lucent will join service providers, vendors, collaborators and individual contributors to accelerate SDN/NFV adoption and drive open innovation.
If you're able to get to the Silicon Valley area in March, there is a big open networking conference taking shape, with some very talented participants. The Linux Foundation is announcing that the Open Networking Summit (ONS) is becoming a Linux Foundation event, and ONS 2016 will take place March 14-17, 2016 in Santa Clara, Calif.
The Blender Conference has become a fantastic showcase not just of attractive art and animation, but also unconventional uses of Blender and open source software.
We extended the deadline for the SDN/NFV DevRoom at FOSDEM to Wednesday, November 25th recently – and we now have the makings of a great line-up!
Mirantis, which is already well-known for its laser focus on the OpenStack cloud computing platform, has delivered a flurry of announcements this week. Earlier, we covered the news that its Fuel toolset has become an official OpenStack component under the project's "big tent" organizational policy. Fuel has been successfully used to deploy OpenStack in environments ranging from personal proof-of-concept micro-clouds to production infrastructures composed of hundreds of nodes running tens of thousands of instances.
The OpenStack cloud computing scene, like the scene surrounding Hadoop, is flooded with talk of shortages in deployment and management expertise. There just are not enough skilled OpenStack workers to go around. The OpenStack Foundation is now taking some steps to address the situation.
The open source MongoDB NoSQL database is powering an increasing number of websites and services. Here are nine examples of organizations transforming their business with MongoDB.
Drupal Hub will hold regular day time drop-in sessions as well as playing host to established Drupal events, thereby bringing people together to collaborate and contribute to the software.
Other plans are in place for Drupal training days, Drupal user group meets, Drupal sprints and the Drupal Academy, which provides intensive training for users of all abilities.
FarmOS is a Drupal-based software project aimed at easing the day-to-day management of a farm. It allows different roles to be assigned to managers, workers, and viewers. Managers can monitor how things are going with access to the whole system, workers can use the record-keeping tools, and viewers have read-only access to, for example, certify the farm's records.
After years of development and a few delays, the open source Drupal 8 content management system (CMS) is now generally and freely available. Among the most popular and widely deployed CMS technologies in use today, Drupal counts whitehouse.gov and the Federal Communications Commission among its notable users.
Klemen Zupancic has launched a new project Kickstarter forum open source scientific notebook aptly named the sciNote which has been designed to help organise your scientific data both safely and securely in one place.
My history with OpenBSD started around 2011 when I was still an undergrad student working part-time on an University-Industry partnership program. In this job I was assigned the task of implementing a full (!) MPLS solution for Linux and that task encompassed having a working implementation of the LDP protocol, among several other things. I started then looking for an open source implementation of LDP and found out that OpenBSD had a daemon called ldpd(8). I decided to check it out and it was love at the first sight when I saw its code: it was beautiful! I started then porting this daemon to Linux and on top of that fixed quite a few bugs. Two years later I decided that it would be fair to contribute my fixes back to the original implementation, it was when claudio@ invited me to join the OpenBSD team. Around that time I didn't know much about OpenBSD and was surprised with the invitation. Theo de Raadt sent me a couple of emails and I had no clue about who he was. Nevertheless, I was excited with the invitation and started to follow the mailing lists and even bought a book about OpenBSD. Within a couple days I was hooked on it and OpenBSD became my OS of choice.
DragonFlyBSD has switched to using the Gold Linker by default rather than GNU ld.
The GNU Gold linker for ELF files is designed to be faster and much more modern than the GNU linker. DragonFlyBSD has traditionally used GNU ld, but now Gold is ready for primetime use by default on this BSD distribution.
Clasp is a Common Lisp compiler based on LLVM that also provies seamless interoperation with C++ libraries.
Bulgaria’s ‘Future is Code’ initiative - where volunteers visit schools to introduce students and teachers to software development - which started in April, is continuing at least until the end of this month. The project has already introduced a handful of schools to open source. The volunteer-led project is supported by Bulgaria’s Ministry of Education.
According to an historical and widely shared distinction, present on Wikipedia and generally supported by too many free software advocates including some lawyers, “Strong copyleft” (sometimes renamed “viral licensing”) refers to licences governing a copyrighted work to the extent that their copyleft provisions can be efficiently imposed on all kinds of derived works, including linked works: the same copyleft licence becomes applicable to the combination. At the contrary, "Weak copyleft" would refer to licenses (that are generally used for the creation of software libraries) where not all derived works inherit the copyleft license, depending on the manner in which it was derived: copies and changes to the covered software itself become subject to the copyleft provisions of such a license, but not the software that links to it. This allows programs covered by any license (even proprietary) to be compiled and linked against copylefted libraries such as glibc (the GNU project's implementation of the C standard library), and then redistributed without any re-licensing required.
Open source hardware is going through some great surges in popularity right now, and outside of microcontrollers like Raspberry Pi, we don't talk about them much. So I wanted to showcase some open source hardware projects that I thought were especially cool.
Git unsurprisingly is the big winner, CVS the equally unsurprising loser. Nor has any of the data collected suggested material gains for non-Git platforms. DVCS in general has gained considerably, and is now close to parity and Git is overwhelmingly the most popular choice in that segment.
Last month I’ve created a tool which adds comments to Bugzilla when a commit message references a bug number. It was done as a proof of concept and didn’t receive much attention at the time. Today I’m happy to announce the existence of GitHub Bugzilla Hook.
Open-source GitLab is being used for collaboration across over 100,000 organisations to help large distributed teams of developers to work together and control features that allow users to build apps with both accountability and enterprise-grade support.
A status update concerning the Dropbox-sponsored Pyston project was presented earlier this month.
A status update on the open-source Python high-performance JIT project was shared at a Pyston meet-up two weeks ago. For those interested, the Pyston blog shared today that this interesting video has now been uploaded.
Every year about 110,000 people die and others suffer from acute respiratory illnesses because of the fires started by the palm oil and timber corporations in Indonesia. In addition, much of its wildlife is affected and CO2 levels increase drastically. Contributing to the problem is the traditional slash/burn cultivation of Indonesian peasant farmers which is supposed to be illegal under Indonesian law..
During its testimony on security weaknesses among federal agencies this week, the Government Accountability Office detailed a number of critical elements that make up effective protection systems.
Among the systems the watchdog agency detailed was the key components in access control which is typically the technology an enterprise uses to regulate who has access to what resources.
As part of a set of defense decisions that British Prime Minister David Cameron described as delighting President Barack Obama, the British government announced plans to purchase nine P-8 Poseidon long-range patrol planes from Boeing through a foreign military sale approved by the US government. The Poseidon, the aircraft built by Boeing to replace the US Navy's aging Lockheed P-3 Orion antisubmarine warfare patrol aircraft, will fill the gap left by the retirement of the Royal Air Force's Hawker Sidley Nimrod fleet over four years ago, and the cancellation of the UK's own follow-on aircraft. It means about $1.5 billion more in business for Boeing and its partners; the Poseidon currently has a "flyaway" cost of $171.5 million per aircraft.
Was a Russian Su-24 strike bomber over Turkish airspace earlier today when it was shot down by a Turkish F-16 fighter, as the Turkish government claimed? Or did it, as the Russians have claimed, fly in Syrian airspace and never cross the Turkish border? The Turkish and Russian governments have published conflicting evidence on the plane's location as accusations fly between the two sides. But it's entirely possible both sides are right—based on different data sources.
With precision satellite navigation and radar systems available to both sides, one might think that it would be relatively simple to both know where the border was and avoid it or know for certain which side of the border the plane was on when it was shot down. But the Russians have published their own version of navigational tracking data that shows the Su-24 flying south of a part of the Turkish border that juts southward into Syria. The Turks claim that the jet, while clearly not mounting an attack against Turkey, was over a mile into Turkish airspace and had been repeatedly warned that it was on a course that would cross the border.
The Russian Su-24 jet downed over Syria was located in Syrian airspace, the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.
NATO member Turkey on Tuesday shot down a Russian fighter jet on the Syrian border, threatening a major spike in tensions between two key protagonists in the four-year Syria civil war.
The Turkish presidency said in a statement that the plane was a Russian Su-24 fighter jet, while Turkish media said one pilot had been captured by rebel forces in Syria.
"The Turkish government is playing really foul games," he wrote in his account in the web. "What was the Russian plane doing? It was delivering air strikes against the Islamic State. Did it pose any threat to Turkey? No. It means that it was another Turkey’s provocation seeking to set the international coalition which is currently being formed at odds. It is a well-staged shot in the back."
This is the official Turkish radar track of the Russian aircraft they shot down, in red. It briefly transited a tiny neck of Turkish land – less than two miles across where the Russian jet passed – twice. I calculate that each “incursion” over Turkish territory would have lasted about 10 seconds, assuming the plane was flying slowly at 600mph. That Turkey shot down the plane for this is madness, and absolutely indefensible. It is fairly obvious from the track that the plane was operating against Turkish sponsored Turkmen rebels inside Syria, and that is why the Turks shot it down.
Even John Simpson on the BBC yesterday admitted that many innocent civilians had been killed in recent bombings of the ISIS occupied city of Raqqa. Though being the BBC, while reporting correctly that the United States, France and Russia are all bombing Raqqa, they contrived only to mention civilian deaths in a sentence about Russian bombing. That bombing creates terrorist blowback has been proven beyond any rational dispute. So if ending terrorism is truly the aim, it is a curiously counter-productive means of going about it.
Another devastating terror spectacle and another media panic playing right into the script: spreading fear and sowing Islamophobia. Better writers than I have documented the latter, but not as much attention has been paid to the former—how in the wake of the Paris attacks 10 days ago, much of the media have needlessly stoked fears and acted, entirely predictably, as the PR wing for terrorists.
It’s been 10 days since the appalling terrorist attacks in Paris and Beirut, and the focus is rightly on how to hit back. The Prime Minister has promised a “comprehensive plan”, including military action in Syria and increased funding for our security services.
But if the Government’s response is to be truly “comprehensive”, it must also look at how we tackle the fundamentalist ideology behind the murder of innocent people worldwide, as well as the sexual slavery and rape of women in Islamic State-occupied territories.
Except there's a major problem with the latest Anonymous campaign. A large number of the accounts they're suspending have absolutely nothing to do with ISIS. A review of the banned accounts by Ars Technica found that large number of the accounts were banned simply for using Arabic, with many ordinary Palestinian, Chechan and Kurdish users caught in the crossfire.
On Sunday evening, after the Evening Standard Theatre Awards, that excellent actress Frances Barber summoned an Uber car. When the taxi arrived, Barber observed pleasantly that it was a cold night and the driver replied that she shouldn’t be out alone at that time and that she was “disgustingly dressed”. Barber tweeted that she was so angry, she got out, slammed the door and yelled.
Frustrated by a sense of global mispriorities, I blurted out some snarky and mildly regrettable tweets on the lack of attention to climate change in the tech industry (Twitter being a sublime medium for the snarky and regrettable). Climate change is the problem of our time, it’s everyone’s problem, and most of our problem-solvers are assuming that someone else will solve it.
Marc Andreesen calls it an invention as profound as "computers in 1975" and "the Internet in 1993." Fred Wilson thinks it's the future of social media. Kim Dotcom wants to build a new global network on it.
And the team behind Qora wants to bring it directly to you—the open source way, of course.
Qora is one of many so-called "second generation" cryptocurrencies emerging in the wake of Bitcoin's unignorable popularity. But Qora is more than a currency. Simply put, it's a peer-to-peer transaction technology; it allows people to exchange digital assets without an intermediary (and in relative privacy).
To do this, it leverages the blockchain. Sure, the blockchain is the beating heart of Bitcoin, the world's most popular cryptocurrency. But Qora developers believe it can power so much more.
Fox host Bill O'Reilly defended Donald Trump, claiming he's never seen the GOP presidential hopeful show any racism, while correcting Trump's insensitive and wildly inaccurate tweet that falsely claimed that African-Americans are responsible for more than 80 percent of murders against whites. FBI crime data shows that the majority of murders are committed by members of the same race.
A new study found that organizations funded by ExxonMobil and the oil billionaire Koch brothers may have played a key role in sowing doubt in the U.S. about climate change. These findings reveal how important it is for media to disclose the industry ties behind front groups that consistently misinform the public.
Ah, so the media homeless hysteria in fact preceded the public’s opinion swing, helping to shape it. That makes a lot of sense. A few straight days of front pages might convince people that there’s a problem. If “menace” can be measured through New York Post covers, then Siegel was right. And if the question of there being a breakdown of the city’s quality of life, the theme of the panel, was primarily media-made, then the Manhattan Institute was smart to stay ahead of that narrative by hosting writers and journalists at events that take MI’s own claims as self-evident.
Citing possible links between terror-related websites and online communications and Friday’s attacks on Paris, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler suggested Tuesday Congress give the agency more authority to use ‘big data’ to monitor and act on potential threats.
Appearing at a hearing held by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Federal Communications Commission chairman told lawmakers that updating a 1994 law could give the agency more power to assist law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the surveillance of terror suspects online.
An Australian calling himself Phuc Dat Bich who made global headlines after saying he was fighting to use his real name on Facebook admits it was hoax.
"Mr Bich" said on Facebook his real name was "Joe Carr" (or perhaps joker).
He said what had started as a joke between friends "became a prank that made a fool out of the media".
But he said it also brought out the best in people and gave encouragement to people with "truly interesting and idiosyncratic names".
Facebook have not responded to BBC requests for comment.
A day in Stockholm where we discuss how to protect privacy and push back against draconian surveillance and security laws.
This is not particularly difficult to do. In 2009, Microsoft built a tool called PhotoDNA that automates the scanning and matching process, converting incoming images to grayscale and chopping them up into tiny squares. Each piece of image data then passes through a one-way hashing function which generates a unique number based on the square's shading pattern. Taken together, these hashes make up the "PhotoDNA signature" of an image; any future picture that generates the same signature is almost certain to be a copy of the original image. Microsoft claims that its multi-hashing system is powerful enough to detect illegal images even after basic tweaks such as re-cropping or watermarking.
The killings committed in Paris and Saint-Denis on the evening of 13 November have been absolutely shocking. After the sorrow and mourning, we all try to make sense of the terrible violence of these attacks, a reminder of the current state of the world.
An attempt to bring a class action suit against Facebook for alleged privacy violations has reached the Austrian Supreme Court. This follows a decision by the Vienna Court of Appeals that the plaintiff, the Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, could file his own claim in the local court, even though Facebook's international headquarters are in Ireland. However, the same court also ruled that similar claims by other Facebook users cannot be combined into a class action.
The Austrian Supreme Court is being asked by Facebook to dismiss the entire lawsuit, while Schrems hopes to be given permission to start a class action by combining his "model case" with those of others.
Online ad networks and search engines love it when you surf around. Everything you do—every page you load, every query you type—helps them build a profile of you, the better to sell ads targeting your interests. Spy agencies are probably also happy to track your online moves.
JavaScript has been a mixed blessing for the Web. It has helped provide some useful features, but it has also contributed to bloated, insecure and downright messy Web pages. One writer at Wired turned off JavaScript and shared his experience of a cleaner and lighter Web.
There’s another web out there, a better web hiding just below the surface of the one we surf from our phones and tablets and laptops every day. A web with no ads, no endlessly scrolling pages, and no annoying modal windows begging you to share the site on social media or sign up for a newsletter. The best part is that you don’t need a special browser extension or an invite-only app to access this alternate reality. All you need to do is change one little setting in your browser of choice. Just un-tick the checkbox that enables “JavaScript” and away you go, to a simpler, cleaner web.
Earlier this month, Brad Heath and Brett Kelman of USA Today reported that the DEA was running a massive amount of wiretap applications through a single judge in Riverside County, California. Judge Helios Hernandez has signed off on five times as many wiretap warrants as any other judge in the United States.
In 2001, the Bush administration authorized -- almost certainly illegally -- the NSA to conduct bulk electronic surveillance on Americans: phone calls, e-mails, financial information, and so on. We learned a lot about the bulk phone metadata collection program from the documents provided by Edward Snowden, and it was the focus of debate surrounding the USA FREEDOM Act. E-mail metadata surveillance, however, wasn't part of that law. We learned the name of the program -- STELLAR WIND -- when it was leaked in 2004. But supposedly the NSA stopped collecting that data in 2011, because it wasn't cost-effective.
These employees are making discrimination claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, citing in part "hostile treatment in forcing the Americans to train their replacements."
At least 23 former Disney IT workers have filed complaints with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) over the loss of their jobs to foreign replacements. This federal filing is a first step to filing a lawsuit alleging discrimination.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a government, in the wake of a national security crisis—or hostage to the perceived threat of one—will pursue and in many cases enact legislation that is claimed to protect its citizens from danger, actual or otherwise. These security laws often include wide-ranging provisions that do anything but protect their citizens' rights or their safety. We have seen this happen time and time again, from the America's PATRIOT Act to Canada's C-51. The latest wave of statements by politicians after the Paris bombing implies we will see more of the same very soon.
Chicago police officers deleted footage from a security camera at a Burger King restaurant located fewer than 100 yards from where 17-year old Laquan McDonald was shot and killed, according to a Chicago-area district manager for the food chain.
By now, Comcast's strategy for fighting internet video competition is very clear. For one, the company is slowly but surely expanding usage caps into dozens of new markets. In these ever-expanding areas, Comcast imposes a 300 GB usage cap, then charges users $10 for every 50 GB of extra data they consume. Comcast's also now testing a new wrinkle wherein users have the option of paying another $30 to $35 if they want unlimited data. In short, the option to have the same unlimited connection they had yesterday will cost these users significantly more.
But recently, Comcast's other spoke in this strategy started to reveal itself. The company is slowly but surely expanding a creatively named streaming video service named Stream. Stream provides Comcast broadband-only users a $15 service that includes live TV, video on demand, and HBO, and it's Comcast's way of trying to keep would-be cord cutters in house.
The Economist has recently popularised the notion that patents are bad for innovation. Is this right? In my view, this assessment results from too high an expectation of what should be achieved by patents or other intellectual property.
Critics of intellectual property rights seem to think that they should be tested by whether they actually increase creativity. Similarly, in the field of competition law, commentators suppose that it is necessary to balance the innovation promoted by intellectual property against the competition safeguarded by competition law.
We were out on the streets this week to march against the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement in the U.S. Capitol. We were there to demonstrate the beginning of a unified movement of diverse organizations calling on officials to review and reject the deal based on its substance, which we can finally read and dissect now that the final text is officially released.
In November 2015, the European Commission released a proposed text on foreign investor protection in the EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). In this paper, I outline key flaws in this proposal, including language buried in the text that significantly undermines the EC's proposed provisions on the "investment court system" (ICS) and on the right to regulate.
What Is Intellectual Property?
A thing you own that isn’t a physical thing.
After being scheduled for no more than a month, Kim Dotcom's extradition hearing has dragged on for almost 10 weeks. Expected to wrap up during the next two days, there's yet more uncertainty after the prosecution attempted to introduce new evidence at the 11th hour.
Kim Dotcom says he retains hope as his all-important extradition hearing wrapped up in New Zealand today. The fate of the Megaupload founder, who just slammed the U.S. as "bullies", now lies in the hands of the judge who gave him bail almost four years ago.
Internet provider Cox Communications may be held liable for the copyright infringements of its subscribers, a Virginia District Court has ruled. According to the court, Cox failed to properly implement a repeat infringer policy and is not entitled to DMCA safe-harbor protection.
There's a Vinyl resurgence going on, with vinyl record sales growing year-on-year. Many of the people buying records don't have record players. Many records are sold including a download code, granting the owner an (often one-time) opportunity to download a digital copy of the album they just bought.
Some may be tempted to look down upon those buying vinyl records, especially those who don't have a means to play them. The record itself is, now more than ever, a physical totem rather than a media for the music. But is this really that different to how we've treated audio CDs this century?