The year is almost over and what a year it has been. Once again I must bemoan the fact that the year of the Linux desktop has still eluded us. That's okay...for now. Why? Because Linux managed to dominate in a world that is far more important than the desktop.
Oh, and there's the fact that the desktop is slowly becoming irrelevant to a large portion of the world. More on that later.
Tech giant IBM has launched an open-source blockchain along with the support of financial incumbents including JP Morgan, the London Stock Exchange and Wells Fargo as well as tech specialists such as Cisco and Intel.
When there are different efforts attempting to solve a big problem, what’s the best way of figuring out which one (or ones) are succeeding? Press releases? New members joining? Hires? Integrations promised? Conference attendees?
There’s information to be gleaned from each of these, but the most reliable sign of a successful open source project is to look at the code. Healthy projects have frequent code contributions from diverse organizations and individuals. Issues are triaged and assigned. Pull requests are debated and revised, and at the end are either accepted or they are rejected with meaningful feedback.
As 2015 comes to a close, the time has arrived to make predictions for what will happen in the Linux (and broader Free and Open Source Software) world in the year ahead. Will all of my predictions actually come true in 2016? Who knows? But I’m making them anyway!
Chromebooks have been big sellers on Amazon for quite some time now, and their popularity among some users is simply undeniable. But will Chromebooks eventually surpass Macs and Windows computers? A writer at the San Francisco Chronicle recently examined that possibility. I’ll share my thoughts below, but here’s a snippet from the SFC article.
Another Linux security vulnerability has been discovered and making the news for a couple of days. Researchers discovered that hitting backspace 28 times allows bypassing of security measures. In other news, Microsoft is increasing pressure on loyal users to upgrade to Windows 10 and Adriaan de Groot said Plasma 5 on FreeBSD when it's stable. Dedoimedo was disappointed in another distro and Bruce Byfield listed nine reasons to use Open Source.
The Linux Foundation has announced the first big steps of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which aims to deliver container-based, micro services-ready applications for open source cloud computing.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation , a Linux Foundation project, supports development of cloud native applications using containers, dynamic scheduling and micro services. The CNCF is developing open source technologies, reference architectures and common application and service formats, to allow Internet companies and enterprises to scale their business, according to a statement from the Linux Foundation. The Linux Foundation announced the CNCF in July.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a Linux Foundation group to aid the creation of applications and services built with containers, has ratified its governance structure. Now that it's more than a pretty name, it's ready to tackle the task of creating an open source hybrid cloud.
For those with an AMD Tonga or Fiji graphics card that want to try out the latest open-source AMDGPU kernel driver code with PowerPlay support enabled, here's an easy-to-use Ubuntu/Debian kernel spin.
As I had to spin a fresh kernel anyways to conduct the AMDGPU year-end benchmarks for various articles, I've uploaded the kernel in case any other R9 285 or R9 Fury owners out there want to try out the latest open-source support.
Eric Anholt at Broadcom is now serving as the Raspberry Pi kernel maintainer beyond his role in developing the open-source VC4 graphics driver. Today he published a major re-write of the Raspberry Pi 2 hardware enablement for the kernel, which now includes SMP support for the BCM2836 SoC and improved DeviceTree.
As for our Microsoft meets the Linux Foundation poll? For one thing, it was only up for about twelve hours before it was lost to deep space, but it took somewhere north of 100 votes before it went away, with most of you indicating that you still don’t trust Microsoft much, if at all. More than a few of you, however, were willing to take a “wait and see” approach. FOSS folks are nothing if not willing to forgive.
Etnaviv has been in the works for years as both an open-source DRM kernel driver and a user-space Mesa driver for providing OpenGL support. The driver has been making much progress over this year especially and now Lucas feels that it's ready to go mainline. David Airlie hasn't yet pulled the new driver into DRM-Next, but we'll continue monitoring over the next few days.
The developers of the powerful Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier have announced the immediate availability for download and testing of the Orca 3.19.3 release.
Mumble is a popular, free and open source VoIP (Voice over IP) client used by various communities across the world. Mumble is particularly well-known among gaming communities, especially games that take advantage of its positional audio feature.
QEMU 2.5 has been officially released today as the newest feature release to this critical component to the open-source Linux virtualization stack.
A major highlight of this release is the new provider: Marathon.
And yet another updated of Armadillo by Conrad bringing us to 6.400.2. I folded that yesterday into RcppArmadillo 0.6.400.2.2; and this is now on CRAN and Debian. There was even an interim-CRAN-only release 0.6.300.2.2 with a refinement for tests of imcompleye LAPACK libraries---which we encounter whenver R is build with its own (partial) copy of LAPACK as on Windows, and on bigger computers whenver this was chosen over the default of system LAPACK.
Opera Software, through Kornelia Mielczarczyk, has announced today, December 17, the immediate availability for download and testing of the last release of the Opera web browser in 2015.
Vivaldi, a web browser developed by one of the Opera founders and a large independent team, has finally reached the Beta 2 milestone, almost a year after the initial launch.
In six previous posts I have looked at a variety of Linux Desktop Environments: Xfce, KDE, Gnome 3, Cinnamon, MATE, and LXDE. Now I am going to move one step lower in the GUI hierarchy, and look at using only a simple Window Manager for your Linux GUI. But in order to do that, I am going to have to spend a minute explaining the difference between the two.
It’s been a few years that I maintain some python-django-* packages, as part of the maintenance of the OpenStack dashboard, Horizon. Currently, this consist of: python-django-appconf, python-django-babel, python-django-bootstrap-form, python-django-compressor, python-django-discover-runner, python-django-formtools, python-django-openstack-auth, python-django-overextends, python-django-pyscss.
Granted, I am not much of a gamer, but my gaming experience on Linux improved drastically thanks to Steam. So, I visited the closest Dell store and ask about the Alienware Steam machine.
They offered me the Alienware Alpha instead.
I made it very clear that I wanted a Steam machine, not a Windows computer with a Steam client. I want to run Linux games.
So, they got my email and promised to notify me about the availability of Steam machines.
I thought I was never going to hear from them, but they wrote to me in a matter of two days... to offer me the Alienware Alpha AGAIN!
Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) is a beautiful looking atmospheric puzzle platformer about finding the source of a never-ending blizzard. Looks like it will come to Linux now too!
SteamOS has scored a significant win, as Capcom has revealed they will be providing native support to SteamOS for Street Fighter V.
For now, Capcom has confirmed that they are working with Steam closely to make this happen. They also explained that the game will have Steam controller support, and that this functionality will be immediately available for the beta. Hopefully they have a six button virtualization available, as is found in MadCatz's popular Street Fighter Game Pads.
Capcom in cooperation with Valve will be bringing Street Fighter V to SteamOS (Linux).
Street Fighter V is a fighting video game powered by Unreal Engine 4. The PlayStation 4 and Windows is set to be released in February 2016 while it's not clear yet whether the Linux/SteamOS release will happen at the same time.
Capcom has just announced that the upcoming Street Fighter V game will also be adapted for SteamOS, with the help of Valve.
Street Fighter V is one of the most anticipated games for 2016, and it looks like Valve has managed to convince Capcom to release the game for the SteamOS platform as well. To dispel any kind of confusion, SteamOS support means that the game will be playable on most of the Linux distros out there.
This news comes as a complete surprise since Capcom has never expressed any interest in the Linux platform and none of the games from their catalog has Linux support. Most of the publishers and developers usually start with something that they have already released for Windows and Mac OS, but Street Fighter V is still in the Beta stages, and it will be a while until it’s going to be released.
I'm not entirely sure if this is an accidental slip, or if Feral Interactive are preparing to release Medieval II: Total War on Linux, but their radar updated today to say Medieval II: Total War is out on Mac and Linux, but it's currently not.
Good news you maniacs, Hatred the weirdly controversial game is now in Beta for Linux. You need a password, but we have the scoop for you.
Honestly, I don't think we will see this for a few months. They have announced Rocket League is coming to Xbox One in February, so I honestly think they are putting most of their time into that port right now. I can't blame them, it will probably give them more income right now, but I do wish developers would stop promising one platform, then side-lining it for another. I will still pick it up when it's out though, as it looks like good fun.
As part of the preparations for the year-end Linux benchmarking articles, I've published new versions of the Team Fortress 2, DiRT Showdown, BioShock Infinite, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Linux benchmark test profiles.
Yesterday Valve released a big update to Team Fortress 2 that brought renderer improvements for OS X and Linux gamers. However, how does it affect the performance of this popular free-to-play game?
Of significance for Linux gamers with this update are that texture streaming is now enabled, there is reduced memory consumption by about 500MB, and faster map loading. These changes also affect the Mac OS X build of the game while Windows players of TF2 have already had these improvements with Direct3D 9.
SMACH Z, the handheld Steam Linux gaming system powered by an AMD SoC, is going back to the drawing board and they've decided to cancel their current crowdfunding campaign.
Although the wait has been very long between Zanshin 0.2.1 and 0.2.2, we are now happy to announce the immediate availability of Zanshin 0.3 beta1! (aka 0.2.80)
Finally! We're getting a new feature release in sight. It brings a lot of changes coming from our own dog-fooding of 0.2.x, discussions with designers and users feedback.
We are happy to announce that the brand new 5.5 series of Plasma releases, more specifically Plasma 5.5.1, is now available in our stable repositories. This quick update that followed the first 5.5 release provides some bug fixes to Plasma users, in addition to the many changes that were introduced in 5.5.0 which aimed at enhancing users' experience.
Neofytos Kolokotronis from the Chakra GNU/Linux, a rolling-release computer operating system inspired by Arch Linux, was more than proud to announce a few moments ago, December 17, the availability of the latest KDE packages in the stable software repositories of the distribution.
So I’ve written about KDE-on-FreeBSD quite regularly, and in fact my most-common commit to KDE’s repositories recently is “adding news to the K-F site about updates”. But there’s an increasingly large gap between what’s in the official FreeBSD ports tree and package repositories, and what’s in area51. The testing repo gets regular updates, and I’ve got a local package server for testing. I’m sure the folks doing the real work in the testing repo have, too. But all that’s not official. And sometimes there are questions about when KDE Frameworks / Plasma5 / Qt5 are going to be updated in the official repo’s. Those questions also come from users of PC-BSD — PC-BSD is developed by iXsystems, who also graciously support the area51 repository.
The GNOME developers are working around the clock these days to release the third milestone towards the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, so we've spotted a few more updated apps on the FTP channel.
The developers behind the open-source and cross-platform GTK+ GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit have announced today, December 16, the release and immediate availability for download and testing of GTK+ 3.19.5.
There are more and more updated GNOME apps and core components released on the project's FTP servers as part of the forthcoming GNOME 3.19.3 desktop environment, which should be available later today.
Hi all,
only a day late, here is the third development snapshot in the GNOME 3.19 development cycle: 3.19.3.
To compile this snapshot, you can use the jhbuild [1] modulesets [2] (which use the exact tarball versions from the official release).
You can also test the latest code using the vm images [3] that are produced by our continuous integration infrastructure, build.gnome.org.
Just a few minutes ago, December 17, 2015, Matthias Clasen sent us an email to inform everyone about the general availability of the third development milestone towards the GNOME 3.20 desktop environment.
We reported the other day that the GNOME developers have finally released the third milestone towards the upcoming GNOME 3.20 desktop environment, bringing it more closer to reality.
Clutter 1.25.2 was released this morning by Emmanuele Bassi as the first development release of this tool-kit since Clutter 1.24.
A week before Christmas, GNOME 3.19.3 is now available for those wanting to enjoy the very latest GNOME desktop developments.
With GNOME 3.19.3 due for release this week, Florian Müllner has announced new versions of GNOME Shell and Mutter.
Mutter 3.19.3 brings fixes for refresh rate unit reporting on KMS/Wayland, crash fixes, corrected touch pointer emulation on Wayland, a crash fix during XWayland initialization, and other fixes. There wasn't much with Mutter 3.19.3 about new feature work but mostly fixes.
In order to participate in such a program you just need to find a mentor and make a little contribution in a open source project that is participating in Outreachy, such as GNOME, Mozilla and Linux Kernel. During the applications process I got a lot of help and support from the community and especially from Felipe Borges, who will be my mentor during all the internship.
XDG-App has made much progress and is found in a "tech preview" state for GNOME 3.18 but it's not until GNOME 3.20 and later where things will get more interesting. Alexander Larsson has provided a "Christmas 2015" update concerning the project for GNOME sandboxing.
Yesterday I released xdg-app 0.4.6 and I wanted to take some time to talk about what is new in this version what is happening around xdg-app.
For the past year Intel's Open-Source Technology Center has been working on the Clear Linux Project as a way to accelerate VMs to the point they are as fast as software containers and provide the best Linux support for Intel hardware in various cloud use-cases. As part of doing this, they've had to make their distribution lightning fast. Clear Linux though can be stretched outside of traditional cloud use-cases if you just want a lean and mean distribution.
seems it is time to rebase our Menda theme once more. Gtk 3.18 introduced some defects into the current one. So what would be a nice theme fitting Manjaro Linux? The new Arc theme came in mind. However it is Cyan based, which doesn’t fit our more green based style we have now.
Philip Müller, leader of the Manjaro project, announced a couple of days ago that the team was preparing to rebase or replace the standard Menda theme used in the current stable release of the Manjaro Linux distribution.
American Megatrends Inc. (AMI), a hardware and software company that specializes in BIOS and UEFI firmware, PC hardware, data storage products, remote and server management tools, as well as unique solutions powered by Linux and Android, was proud to announce that it has joined SUSE's 64-bit ARM Partner Program.
On paper, openSUSE Leap 42.1, with SLE stability and three years of support, kernel 4.1 and Plasma 5.4, tons of good software, and community repos sounds like a blazing good deal, a dream come true, the Linux Nirvana. In reality, it is nothing of the sort.
Package management works, but you don't get all the software you need plus conflicts, codecs are broken, network connectivity is half-broken, smartphone support is average, resource utilization is high. The distro works, but it gives you no love. It is far from being the beautiful, exciting, amazing product that I expected, the kind that reigned supreme in the SUSE 10 and 11 days. Ah, how I miss them.
Overall, despite being stable, i.e. non-crashy, openSUSE 42.1 is hardly usable as a day-to-day distro. If you value your software, media and gadgets, then this operating system will frustrate you. Xubuntu Vivid or Mint Rafaela are much better choices. Faster, leaner, just as beautiful, and they actually give you everything you need, without any bugs or problems. This autumn season turns out to be one of the worst I've ever had, and it makes me wanna blowtorch a few keyboards. Almost anything and everything I tested so far sucks to a high or very high degree. Present company included. OpenSUSE 42.1, one small step for SUSE, one giant leap for failure. 4/10.
OpenSUSE has been my go-to distribution for my dated Toshiba NB520. My sturdy 3 year old Toshiba netbook doesn't support Gnome 3 or Ubuntu Unity due to hardware limitations, but the last three releases of openSUSE KDE handled every piece of hardware on the NB520 without issues. OpenSUSE Leap 42.1's DVD has only an x86-64 release as of this writing, though 32-bit users can always install Tumbleweed, openSUSE's well-reviewed rolling release. Tumbleweed has installation media for 32-bit machines and if you're still running a previous 32-bit release of openSUSE, you can always run the upgrade procedure to Tumbleweed.
If you selected the options to Add Online Repositories Before Installation and Include Add-on Products from Separate Media during the installation process using the openSUSE Leap 42.1 DVD, the setup process might stall midway.
Tumbleweed had two snapshot this week and Mesa updated two new minor versions since Saturday’s 20151209 snapshot.
The biggest package update for the week was to autofs in the 20151214 snapshot. Autofs, which is a program for automatically mounting directories, had several fixes and upstream patches.
Today, December 18, SUSE has announced the immediate availability of the first Service Pack (SP1) for its long-term supported SUSE Linux Enterprise Linux (SLES) 12 operating system.
The Software Freedom Conservancy is something of an oddity among the myriad technology outfits that exist in the US of A. It fights to keep software free and to prevent people or companies taking advantage of what are perceived to be liberal licensing terms.
Douglas DeMaio from the openSUSE Project has informed us earlier today, December 17, about the latest updates that make their way into the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system.
RED HAT has announced the launch of OpenShift Dedicated, a cloud-based service targeting enterprise IT and development teams.
OpenShift Dedicated includes the recently released OpenShift Enterprise 3.1 and builds on the success of OpenShift Online, the service that allows developers to build, launch and host applications in the public cloud. Support includes Kubernetes and Docker containerisation.
Let’s Encrypt have lauched their public beta, and they’re now offering SSL certificates to everyone. The process is very easy and quite easy to automate. However, there’s a catch: these certificates expire in a few days (90 days as of now), so they have to be renewed often. That’s where having the process be simple and automatable helps.
If a new class of cloud-native, mobile-ready business applications is ever to take hold of enterprises as their creators promised years ago, the platforms on which they run need to be fully operational.
The company is predicting an earnings per share growth of 17.54% in the coming year. The earnings per share growth over the next five years will be . Red Hat, Inc. had an earnings per share growth of 16.10% in the last 5 years.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), of the Technology sector was at a price of 78.77 today, marking a change of 0.91%. Red Hat, Inc. forecasts a earnings per share growth of 2.20% over the next year. Its return on investment is currently 8.70% and its debt to equity is currently 0.53. Red Hat, Inc. has a market cap of 14269.37 and its gross margin is 84.80%.
The company is predicting an earnings per share growth of 17.54% in the coming year. The earnings per share growth over the next five years will be . Red Hat, Inc. had an earnings per share growth of 16.10% in the last 5 years.
Red Hat Inc. ( RHT ), the world's largest seller of Linux software, continues "to drive and benefit from the adoption of open, hybrid cloud technology as companies look to modernize the data center and on-ramp to the cloud." Also, the company believes it is well positioned for the second half of the fiscal year as it continues to benefit from delivering innovation to customers.
Red Hat Inc. said its revenue rose 15% in the latest quarter, though the open-source software provider’s results were dented by negative currency effects.
Shares of Red Hat Inc. gained in Thursday’s extended session after the open-source software provider posted results that beat analysts’ expectations. Red Hat reported fiscal third-quarter earnings edged down to $46.9 million, or 25 cents a share, from $47.9 million, or 26 cents a share, a year earlier. On an adjusted basis, the company known for its Linux OpenStack platform would have earned 48 cents a share.
Revenues in this quarter increased by 15% from last year, and by 21% in constant currency. Deferred revenue totaled $1.49 billion, which was an increase of 14% year over year. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $457 million, up 16%, or 22% measured in constant currency.
Of course, the main area for concern was whether the Skylake "WKS GT2" graphics were working on this newest CentOS 7 update. CentOS 7 as with upstream RHEL7 is on a Linux 3.10 kernel well before the Skylake Linux enablement, but Red Hat back-ports a lot of hardware support code to their Enterprise Kernel.
Compared to the historical data, we were quite successful in the number of people who voted for their FESCo candidates. With 280 voters, we are well above the average of 213 voters.
2015 has been an active and busy year for Fedora. All year, the contributors across all of the different sub-groups, working groups, special interest groups, and teams help make the magic behind Fedora happen. With a project as large as Fedora, sometimes it can be hard to keep others on different sides of the Project up to date. To help share what everyone has worked on make happen this year, all sub-groups, teams, or other groups are invited to share your “Year in Review” on the Fedora Community Blog!
We had decided Singapore as the location for FAD APAC 2015 in a discussion during FUDCon Pune. Following up the first FAD for APAC budget planning in Phnom Penh last year, we would like to make a plan for the events, activities in APAC and budget for them during next fiscal year (March 2016 – February 2017). This year, as suggestions from FPL, Council and other community members, we also added another main purpose to develop a strategy/plan for user and contributor growth in APAC which had been discussed a little last year.
In March 2013, we introduced an entirely new and rewritten OpenID provider: FAS-OpenID. This has since become the basis for logging in to almost every web service the Fedora Infrastructure runs as well as some external services. Since then, the authentication server has come a long way, been rewritten twice, and added a whole lot of new features. But during all these years, the design has always stayed the same, and has been ported at least two times: first from FAS-OpenID to FedOAuth, and after that to Ipsilon.
RPM of PHP version 7.0.1 are available in remi-php70 repository for Fedora ââ°Â¥ 21 and Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS), and as Software Collection in the remi-safe repository.
Inevitably, after finding an interesting patch file it's time to actually add it to the Fedora kernel. The kernel team has tried our best to keep the wiki instructions up to date. The build dependencies have changed of late so double check those, especially if you get pesign errors. The instructions for building from Fedora kernel source are still accurate. To summarize from the wiki
I strongly recommend that the people who cannot live with libsystemd0 installed on their systems leave Debian, because their life is going to suck more and more as we will integrate it in every important daemon after jessie will have been released.
Back in 2011, when the AppStream meeting in Nürnberg had just happened, I published the DEP-11 (Debian Extension Project 11) draft together with Michael Vogt and Julian Andres Klode, as an approach to implement AppStream in Debian.
Just a few moments ago, December 17, the developers behind the Debian-based antiX GNU/Linux computer operating system announced the release and immediate availability for testing of the first RC (Release Candidate) build of antiX MX-15.
A few minutes ago, December 16, Canonical's à Âukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report to inform us about what's going on in the Ubuntu Touch world, regarding the OTA software updated.
While using Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex Beta i was able to use the new features in the Nautilus file manager. The first change to Nautilus that i noticed while using Ubuntu 8.10 Beta was the large Eject icon that appears next to mounted devices in the Places window to the left side of Nautilus. Clicking on the Eject icon unmounts the device while clicking on the device will mount it again. I found this to be quite useful and a quickway to mount and unmount devices in Ubuntu 8.10. The Natutilus file manager also includes easy to add, tabbed browsing. Now you can have multiple folders open in separate tabs. Create a new tab in Nautilus file manager y selecting File — New Tab or pressing (Ctrl + T). By right clicking on the tabs you can move them left and right or close the tab.
George Hotz made a name for himself by being the first to hack the iPhone and PlayStation 3. He's now trying to build his own autonomous car system, and he seems to be using Ubuntu to do it.
Canonical has revealed that a number of vulnerabilities have been found and fixed in the Linux kernel packages, affecting the Linux kernel of the Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system.
Today, December 17, Canonical published several security announcements about the availability of new kernel versions for all of its supported Ubuntu Linux operating systems.
It's almost weekend, so we're continuing our "Watch" series of articles with a DIY (Do It Yourself) HVAC automation system called Pi-Cubes, which is powered by the Raspberry Pi single-board computer as well as the Ubuntu Snappy Core operating system.
Cube-Controls has launched a “Pi Cubes” home automation and HVAC kit that runs Ubuntu Snappy on a Raspberry Pi.
Having furnished its Kickstarter backers with its Pi Cubes home automation system, Kitchener, Canada startup Cube-Controls has opened sales to the general public. The Raspberry Pi-driven system is designed like a commercial building HVAC automation system, says Cube-Controls. However, it is designed for the home, supporting control over furnaces, boilers, humidifiers, air handler units, dampers, valves, and any other HVAC equipment.
Today, December 18, Canonical's à Âukasz Zemczak sent in his daily report for the day of December 17 to inform all Ubuntu Phone users and Ubuntu Touch developers about the latest updates for the upcoming OTA-9 software update.
Canonical is one of the big three of the Linux world (the other two being Red Hat and SUSE), but the company no longer organizes events that bring people together in person. The company used to have Ubuntu Developer Summit (UDS), but they changed it from an in-person event to an online event called Ubuntu Online Summit (UOS), which is organized over Google Hangouts.
UDS was not, of course, the only Ubuntu event; the Ubuntu community organizes many events on its own. UbuCon, which used to be a small, regional event is one of them.
With the end of UDS, UbuCon's popularity grew immensely. It grew so big that the community started co-hosting it with other major Linux events like Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). And Canonical's involvement in UbuCon increased as well.
I run a file and media server at home to host all my files. It’s a very important machine for my work and personal life. And while I do use public and private cloud to collaborate or share files with others, I don’t use the public cloud to save personal photos or work documents. Everything lives on my local machine away from the prying eyes of spy agencies and companies.
The development team of the Deepin Linux computer operating system had the great pleasure of announcing earlier today, December 17, the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta build of Deepin 15.
The Linux Mint upgrade to version 17.3 Rosa is one upgrade regular users do not want to skip.
This latest release in downloadable ISO format, available in the MATE and Cinnamon desktop editions, hit servers earlier this month. Several days later, the upgrade was available from within the package management repository for existing Linux Mint users. That eliminates the need for a clean installation and having to set up all the apps and configurations to use the new release.
Today, December 18, we've been informed by GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton about the immediate availability for download of a new build for its MeX Linux computer operating system.
Code has launched a compact “PixiePro” SBC that runs Linux on a 1GHz i.MX6Quad SoC, and offers extensive I/O including WiFi, BLE, NFC, GPS, and 3G.
At first glance, $130 may seem a lot these days, for yet another SBC based on the well-worn NXP (formerly Freescale) quad-core i.MX6. Yet, the PixiePro SBC stands out with its extensive wired, and especially wireless interfaces squeezed onto a compact 91 x 52mm board. It’s a bit cheaper than the i.MX6Quad based, $135 Udoo Quad, which has a larger (110 x 86.5mm) footprint, half the RAM at 1GB, and WiFi as the only standard wireless interface. It’s also lower cost than the larger (102 x 69mm) i.MX6Quad based version of SolidRun’s sandwich style HummingBoard-Gate SBC.
After publishing details about the availability of new kernel packages for the Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS computer operating systems, Canonical now reports that the Linux kernel for Raspberry Pi 2 was updated for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf).
Wind River Pulsar Linux simplifies the edge-to-cloud development of Avnet platforms based on the Xilinx Zynq€®-7000 All Programmable SoC. With included support for connectivity, firmware updates and communications between the device and cloud, the software infrastructure delivered on the Avnet-designed platforms improves software development efficiency and dramatically decreases time-to-market. Developers can build applications directly in the cloud by accessing Wind River Pulsar Linux within Wind River Helix App Cloud, a cloud-based development environment for building IoT applications.
QNAP€® Systems, Inc. announced the release of the TS-x53A series - the world's first QTS-Linux dual system NAS.
Kodi is the best multimedia solution when you want an open source and powerful media hub for your home. A really good Android remote is being worked on so that users can control it much easier.
We’ve seen a relentless wave of new smartphones over the last 12 months, staggered throughout the year, but real innovation has been in short supply. In a “tick” year we expect something different, but this was a “tock” year, where most manufacturers focused on refinement. If you bought a flagship in 2014, there weren’t any irresistible reasons to upgrade, but that doesn’t mean there were no highlights in the class of 2015.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai underlined India's importance for Android, saying the number of users of the operating system in the world's fastest growing smartphone market will surpass those in the US in 2016.
Speaking at the 'Google for India' event in Delhi on Wednesday, Pichai also backed the Internet giant's much hyped Android One programme and claimed it was a success in all the 20 countries across the globe.
The world of community-backed SBCs continued to expand in 2015, marked by lower prices and more modular, kit-like Internet of Things boards. Here we take a look at the top 10 most important -- and probably the best -- under $100 Linux- or Android-based, open-spec hacker SBCs that began shipping in 2015. (Click on the Gallery link below for a slide show.)
Google has never had a problem coming up with sweet-related nicknames for each new version of Android, but after Marshmallow it might start taking suggestions. During a Q&A at Delhi University (jump to 47:11 in the video to hear for yourself) Sundar Pichai was asked why no Indian sweets were on the name list, Pichai said he would ask his mother for suggestions, before opening the possibility of an online poll. Of course we think that's a good idea, but the real question is what should the options be? Let us know what you've got for Android N in the comments.
He runs global internet giant, but the question that stumped Sundar Pichai on his first India visit as Google CEO was whether the popular mobile operating system Android can be named after an Indian dessert!
A smiling Pichai replied he will ask his mother for suggestions and Google can even go for an online poll to decide the name.
The core of TouchJet Pond is essentially three parts. The projector itself isn't all that special by projector standards, being only an 80 lumen projection at only 1920x1080 resolution. The projector is small, lightweight, and easy to mount. Instead of being just a pass-through projector for whatever you put in the HDMI port, the Pond is running Android 4.4.2 with access to the Google Play Store over WiFi. The image projected basically looks like an Android tablet, which is something we've seen before but not nearly as interactive as the Pond. To interact with it you have two different tools at your disposal. There's a stylus, which lets you walk up to the screen and touch the surface you're projecting on, and there's a remote for controlling basic settings and a D-Pad for basic navigation. It's a fairly basic setup, but when you look at what you can do by putting Android on a wall or on a floor and let kids go nuts, there's a lot of fun to be had here.
After nearly a billion downloads of its VLC media player across Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, iOS and Android, VideoLan has an new platform: Chrome OS.
For nearly 15 years, VLC has become known around the world as "the" software for media playback, mainly because it supports a wide variety of audio and video codecs.
The vast majority of Android users don’t have Android 6.0 Marshmallow yet, but it’s still not to early to think about what new features Google will unveil next year with its next major Android release. Android Geeks this week has posted some rumors about what we can expect from Android 6.1, which it says will be released in June right around the time that Google shares more details about what will presumably be Android 7.0.
Android security is always a hot topic on these here Nets of Inter -- and almost always for the wrong reason.
Most of the monthly missives you read about this-or-that super-scary malware/virus/brain-eating-boogie-monster are overly sensationalized accounts tied to theoretical threats with practically zero chance of actually affecting you in the real world. In fact, if you look closely, you'll start to notice that most such stories come from studies commissioned by companies that -- gasp! -- make their money selling malware protection programs for Android phones. (Pure coincidence, right?)
Software analysts at Deutsche Bank AG -5.56% recently sent around a list of 2016 predictions, and one caught my eye: “Open source keeps eating the world.” Open source is more-or-less free software that developers share with each other for the good of nerdmanity.
Given the insane variety of superb open source frameworks available, I picked our top 5 open source frameworks of 2015 not from a single ranked order, but from all levels of the stack. (For front-ends, I focused on the web and, still more narrowly, true client-side frameworks—simply because browsers and mobile devices are growing increasingly capable, and because SPAs [single page applications] and the like avoid sending data over the wire unnecessarily.)
Genealogy, the study of family histories, is a popular pastime for millions of people worldwide. Individuals seeking to learn more about their pedigree or simply discover more about their family's past have built vibrant communities of like-minded (and possibly related) individuals to help each other play historical detective and track down the missing links in their chain of ancestry.
Fortunately, to assist in this historical sleuthing and help to organize all of the important names, dates, and documents which paint the picture of their kinship, amateur and professional genealogists alike have access to a slew of software tools. Providing a number of different features, and running on a variety of platforms, family tree researchers can choose between many options to meet their needs, and many of these choices are open source and usable on a Linux operating system.
Yahoo today announced that it has released the source code for its Anthelion web crawler designed for parsing structured data from HTML pages under an open source license.
Web crawling is at the very core of Yahoo, even though it has many other applications, including Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Messenger, Flickr, and Tumblr. For Yahoo to share code in an area as competitive as web search is significant.
Yahoo is announcing today that it has open-sourced algorithms for doing very quick and efficient computations on streams of data. The Java-based Data Sketches algorithms are now available for download on GitHub under an Apache License.
Recently, I learned about FreedomBox, a personal server that allows you to use the Internet privately or in locations that have bad or no Internet connection. I was visiting Swecha, a non-profit in the Indian city of Hyderabad that is working to bring about social change with the use of free and open source software, as part of the Free Software Movement of India. The FreedomBox is a revolution in itself and a big part of their initiative.
According to the open source operating system Debian wiki page, FreedomBox is a free software stack that is able to host applications like file sharing, shared calendaring, instant messaging, secure voice conference calling, blogs, and wikis. And, it can be installed on one of the supported hardware devices, installed on a standard Debian machine, or deployed on a virtual machine. FreedomBox has the ability to store data and provides secure instant messaging and voice conference calling that works on low bandwidth.
When I talk about working openly, I mean that doing things "the open source way" is more than using an open source license (although clearly you must have one of those, too). Working openly means being public about your process, from start to finish, including all the messy bits in between.
Spring offers a single gaming management environment that supports multiple products, with a range of management functions covering player management, accounts, payment systems, back-office users, permissions, currencies, languages, main reports and business performance.
International Centre for Free and Open Source Software will organize 'FOSS Young Professional Meet 2015' (FYPM 2015) at Mascot Hotel here from December 21-22.
Chromium users of both architectures (32 e 64 bit), release 47.0.2526.80 is available for testing now. There are no major updates, you will probably notice the bookmark folders now are black instead of yellow. This can make them unreadable if you are using a dark theme. Developers are aware of that, if you want to follow the discussion just look at this ticket.
Netflix announced today that their HTML5 video player now supports Firefox on Windows Vista and later using Adobe’s new Primetime CDM (Content Decryption Module). This means Netflix fans can watch their favorite shows on Firefox without installing NPAPI plugins.
WebAssembly is a new binary format for compilation to the web. It is in the process of being designed and implemented as we speak, in collaboration among the major browser vendors. Things are moving quickly! In this post we’ll show some of our recent progress with a deep dive into the toolchain side of WebAssembly.
Work continues on the WebAssembly project that's the joint effort by Mozilla, Google, Microsoft, and Apple to allow C/C++ (and potentially other languages) to target a virtual ISA that would be executed within the web-browser.
WebAssembly is a virtual ISA designed around allowing portable code, compatibility across different browsers, a small download footprint, and other traits for effective client-side browser scripting. Much of WebAssembly's development continues to happen on its LLVM back-end.
OpenStack release names are tied by context to the location of the design summit preceding the release. The next design summit is set to be held in Austin, Texas.
Securing the cloud is not easy. Now, Mirantis, the pure-play OpenStack business, and Palo Alto Networks, an important network security company, have joined forces to add firewalls via virtual network function (VNF) to Mirantis OpenStack. The partners claim this combination will protect "applications from cyber threats while taking advantage of the agility, cost savings, and innovation of the OpenStack cloud ecosystem."
The UK Met Office approved PostgreSQL as its preferred RDBMS, following an evaluation of alternatives. The decision was influenced by 2ndQuadrant training. Data Services Portfolio Technical Lead James Tomkins commented: “With the training we had from 2ndQuadrant we could feel the weight of expertise that came with Gianni [Dr Gianni Ciolli, tutor] and it was obvious he really knew his subject inside-out. It was an enormous confidence-building exercise and has been consistent with all of our interactions with 2ndQuadrant.”
Web edition of the open source productivity suite still has a minimal feature set, but documents are editable in the desktop version LibreOffice
The Document Foundation has revealed today that LibreOffice 5.0.4 has been released and is now available for download and upgrade.
The Document Foundation's Italio Vignoli announced the released of the latest update to LibreOffice 5.0 this morning. Version 5.0.4 is a bug fix release and users of that branch are encouraged to upgrade. This release brings over 120 fixes and is said to be "ready for the enterprise."
Berlin, December 17, 2015 – The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 5.0.4, the fourth release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family, with a large number of fixes over the previous releases. So far, the LibreOffice 5.0 family is the most popular LibreOffice ever, based on feedback from journalists and end users.
The Document Foundation is looking for developers or a company that will be able to implement usability metrics collection for LibreOffice.
Students would often come to school with an assortment of file formats from software that was bundled with computers they or their parents had purchased in local stores. Supporting differing file formats was difficult, and by distributing OpenOffice (and later, LibreOffice) to students and teaching them how to save files in a format that they could share with their teachers was a boon.
In this Ask A Dev, iOS architect Thaddeus Ternes explains how Apple's decision to open up Swift differs from its other public offerings — and why you should be excited about it.
Finally, you can enlist Elastic Search, Logstash, and Kibana—otherwise known as the ELK Stack—to collect and visualize log data produced by Bro logs. This provides real-time cyber-attack detection.
What’s good to know is that BSD will be well-represented at both of these events. At SCALE 14x — which is the first-of-the-year FOSS event worldwide from Jan. 21-24, 2016, in Pasadena, Calif. — the FreeBSD Foundation (along with FreeBSD in its own booth, of course) will be there, as well as pfSense. What’s more, there’s a BSD certification exam being offered, as it has been for the last several years at SCALE. More on this in a later post.
This week mainline LLVM received support for the PKU feature flag as prep work towards supporting the new RDPKRU and WRPKRU instructions for Intel's forthcoming memory protection keys capabilities.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today announced that we would begin accepting donations as part of our support for GNU Guix, a dependable and customizable package manager, along with GuixSD, GNU's advanced free GNU/Linux distribution. Donations will primarily go to increasing the project's build farm capacity so it can manage the growing number of packages and users.
If you do enough work in any sort of free software environment, you get used to doing lots of writing of documentation or all sorts of other things in some plaintext system which exports to some non-plaintext system. One way or another you have to decide: are you going to wrap your lines with newlines? And of course the answer should be "yes" because lines that trail all the way off the edge of your terminal is a sin against the plaintext gods, who are deceptively mighty, and whose wrath is to be feared (and blessings to be embraced). So okay, of course one line per paragraph is off the table. So what do you do?
Of course, my setup has changed since 2012. Although the vast majority is still the same, there is a growing list of modifications and additions. To address this, I’ve been keeping a changelog on my wiki where I detail every major change and addition I’ve made to the setup that I described in the original interview.
Sweden’s public administrations should use open IT standards and software “that frees the state administration from dependence on single technical solutions”, the government writes in its note on ICT, part of its 2016 budget plan. “For eGovernment solutions, IT standards will play an increasing role in the creation of reusable solutions.”
Statisticians working for the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) recommend a switch to ReGenesees for the calibration of survey estimates. ReGenesees is developed as open source by Italy’s National Institute of Statistics. The survey analysis tool is built on top of R, the open source statistical computing programming environment.
Government spy agency GCHQ has released one of its tools, Gaffer, on Github.
But last Friday, Elon Musk tweeted the launch of OpenAI, an open-source, nonprofit artificial intelligence platform.
Rory’s mission statement is that “Great documentation is a fun, thorough, and concise dialogue that distributes knowledge”. He’s right of course. Anyone can pick out terrible documentation. It’s either too long, too short, out of date, or just plain wrong. [Rory] strives to keep documentation short and to the point with the Farmbot project. He’s not the only one working on it – that’s the ‘dialogue’ part. Farmbot has a forum and a community driven documentation site which makes the documentation easy to keep up to date.
Danone and B Lab have announced an open source cooperation agreement that aims to accelerate the process for large, publicly listed multinationals to become certified as B Corps. B Lab is a global non-profit organization that sets and raises business standards to inspire and guide corporations to act as a force for good in the world, which could involve minimizing negative externalities, maximizing the positive, and utilizing their entrepreneurial acumen for societal benefits.
On the consultation website, Deputy Minister of the Interior and Administrative Reconstruction Christopher Vernardakis thanked all the participants for their contributions. "The constructive suggestions, comments and ideas submitted will be processed and will be taken into account in order to improve the provisions of the draft law."
Polish "efforts in open data have largely been sequential and benefitted little from involvement of non-government actors. This has left a vacuum in advancing an OGD agenda whose objectives and potential impacts would be shared and understood by all actors." This is the main conclusion from the 'Open Government Data Review of Poland' recently published by the OECD. "As a result, Poland currently trails the OECD's OURdata Index on open, useful, and re-usable government data."
The FarmBot robot kit ships with an Arduino Mega 2560, Raspberry Pi 2 Model B, disassembled hardware packages and access to the open-source software community. FarmBot Genesis runs on custom built tracks and supporting infrastructure, all of which you need to assemble yourself. The online FarmBot community makes it easy to find step-by-step instructions for every single assembly process. There are even forums to troubleshoot installing a FarmBot in your own backyard. The robot relies on a software platform that users access through FarmBot’s web app, all of which looks a whole lot like Farmville, the infamous mobile game.
I'm just starting out in the world of development, and many of the projects I'm interested in exploring are written in Node.js. If you're an old hand at such things, you already know that which version of Node you use on a particular application is vitally important. (This is actually one of the reasons Docker is so amazingly amazing when it comes to deploying Node apps, but I digress.)
The National Interoperability Framework Observatory (NIFO) community is making available on the Joinup platform an updated series of European countries factsheets and analytical models. The updates track interoperability initiatives in 2015, and refine scoring. They also describe more precisely the implementation and monitoring of the National Interoperability Frameworks (NIFs).
If I asked you to name the most-popular websites in the world, you might mention Google, Facebook and Amazon. In another part of the world, candidates might include Tencent, China's social networking phenomenon; and Baidu, its incumbent search engine.
An activist shareholder is calling for Yahoo to radically change its strategy, fire CEO Marissa Mayer and even revert to its old logo.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) kicked off its 10th ministerial conference in Kenya on Tuesday to develop a new free trade agreement, as grassroots activists rallied worldwide against measures they say would undermine the rights of small-scale farmers in developing countries.
Children in Flint, Michigan, have such high levels of lead in their blood that Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency on Monday, calling the situation a "manmade disaster." The origins of the escalating situation in Flint go back to 2011, when Republican Gov. Rick Snyder appointed an emergency financial manager to balance Flint's budget—largely by cutting costs on basic public services. Here's what you need to know:
Readers of USA Today, the LA Times and Atlantic Monthly might expect that prominent university professors quoted as independent experts on obesity would relay objective information based on the best science. They would be wrong.
Over the past few months, through excellent investigative work, journalists Anahad O’Connor and Candice Choi unmasked a scheme that should look familiar to anyone following health and environmental news: corporations paying front groups and scientists to spin the media and public in order to protect their products.
As many others, I have been following the launch of Let’s Encrypt. Let’s Encrypt is a new zero-cost X.509 Certificate Authority that supports the Automated Certificate Management Environment (ACME) protocol. ACME allow you to automate creation and retrieval of HTTPS server certificates. As anyone who has maintained a number of HTTPS servers can attest, this process has unfortunately been manual, error-prone and differ between CAs.
A major cyberattack next year will target a U.S. election, security expert Bruce Schneier predicts.
The attack won't hit the voting system and may not involve the presidential election, but the temptation for hackers is too great, even in state and local races, said Schneier, a computer security pioneer and longtime commentator.
That we stand today on the brink of some form of war does not seem to be debatable. America has enemies – people that would do us harm and even destroy our way of life. Who these enemies are is more fertile ground for debate. The world is simply too complicated, and the American public too uninformed by our government, to say with certainty who our real enemies are and who they are ultimately working for.
What we can do in an effort to be prepared is to look at all of the possible sources of attack – all of the other nations and groups that have interests in conflict with our own. When we do this a startling pattern emerges. Every significant threat against the Unites States has demonstrated some measure of tech savvy.
A week after saying the US should disrupt the Islamic terrorist group ISIS' online recruiting by "closing that Internet up in some way," Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump was given a chance to clarify what he meant at last night's GOP debate.
During Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, frontrunner Donald Trump doubled down on his call for “closing off parts of the Internet” in order to stymie terrorist groups’ online recruitment efforts. “I would certainly be open to closing areas where we are at war with somebody,” Trump said, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria, or ISIS. “I sure as hell don’t want to let people that want to kill us and kill our nation use our Internet.”
The Paris climate agreement could see big changes in Indonesia, where a developing economy depends on practices like open-cut coal mining and using fires to clear forests for farming.
Changing those industries could drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions but many Indonesians have more pressing concerns.
Indonesia is currently undergoing one of the worst environmental disasters of the 21st century. Fires rage across the length of Indonesia as a result of companies looking to profit from the land. The smoke has reduced visibility to 30 meters in some cities while there are reports of children who have choked to death. There have been over 10,000 cases of respiratory infection and counting.
MPs have voted to allow fracking for shale gas 1,200m below national parks and other protected sites.
The new regulations - which permit drilling from outside the protected areas - were approved by 298 to 261.
Opposition parties and campaigners criticised the lack of a Commons debate - and accused ministers of a U-turn as they previously pledged an outright ban on fracking in national parks.
Through Koch Industries, Charles and David Koch, are funding a dozen college football games during the 2015-2016 season. This funding will allow them to have an increased presence at twelve major games this year. Koch-branded video equipment as well as Koch-themed giveaways will be regular occurrences at these college football games. However, as Nick Surgey writes, the Koch brothers’ history of buying influence and manipulating course content on college campuses provides an important context for understanding their newfound interest in college football.
The Malaysian botanist had then just been made the director at the newly established Centre for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia.
At the time, the entire south of Kalimantan was blanketed in smoke and the airports had to be closed.
The fires were low, producing more smoke than heat, so the roads were still usable.
He found squatter homes all along the road, each about 100m apart. Every house was occupied.
Earlier this week, we wrote about the truly bizarre situation in which the Las Vegas Review Journal -- the largest newspaper in Nevada -- had been purchased for $140 million... and no one knew who the owner was. For fairly obvious reasons, this started to make a lot of people uncomfortable -- including the reporters for the NVRJ. Suspicion quickly focused on big time political funders, with some noting that Nevada is an early primary state, and may play a key role in the presidential election. The Koch brothers, who are big time funders of candidates flat out denied it, leading to more intense scrutiny on the other key guess: Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, a key funder of Mitt Romney in the last election.
Charles and David Koch have received positive press for backing a bipartisan effort to reform American criminal justice laws, which have helped make the U.S. the world's biggest jailer and whose burdens have fallen disproportionately on people of color.
But, as the Kochs ride the wave of momentum toward criminal justice reform, it is becoming increasingly clear that part of their agenda would actually make it harder to prosecute corporate violations of environmental and financial laws that protect the public from corporate wrongdoing. The changes would make it harder to hold executives and their employees responsible for violating U.S. laws and would protect their financial interests, at the public's expense.
Over at least the past five years, the Kochs and Koch-backed groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) have been pushing to increase the "intent" standard for criminal violations, particularly for so-called "white collar" crime and executive suite criminals.
He didn't even know what are the missile silos and the strategic air command with missiles on the planes and our nuclear submarines. He didn't even know what that meant. He couldn't answer that question. It was bizarre. He is also a giant progressive. So I can't vote for progressive. I can't vote for Hillary, and I can't vote for him.
Carly Fiorina is unique among all the candidates in the Republican presidential field for her visceral, aggressive hatred for anything resembling truth. Other candidates lie, of course, but they at least go to the trouble of dressing up their lies with weasel words and other forms of qualifying language that allow them to squirm their way out of fact checks. Fiorina doesn’t care about any of that. She makes firm, declarative statements that are unquestionably inaccurate, and when confronted with inarguable facts that prove her wrong, she insists against all evidence that she is correct and bristles at the very notion that anyone might challenger her. She does not care. She does not pretend to care. As far as Fiorina’s concerned, the fact that she said it is what makes it true.
Now more than ever, say activists, media access to West Papua is crucial in order to bring global attention to a planned smelter, and to give the world a true understanding of the human rights situation in the region – and Freeport’s role in it. Nithin Coca reports.
It is over half a century since the West Papuan Morning Star flag was raised with pomp and ceremony on 1 December 1961 in the capital Hollandia (now Jayapura). The flag and accompanying national anthem had been chosen by Papuans in a democratic process and accepted by the colonial Dutch as part of their programme for granting independence. The flag was then flown alongside the Dutch flag on official buildings. A halcyon time? No, Indonesia ramped up its claim to the territory with military incursions and an attempted torpedo boat assault.
Germany said on Tuesday that Facebook, Google and Twitter have agreed to delete hate speech from their websites within 24 hours, a new step in the fight against rising online racism following the refugee crisis.
The government has been trying to get social platforms to crack down on the rise in anti-foreigner comments in German on the web as the country struggles to cope with an influx of more than 1 million refugees this year.
The new agreement makes it easier for users and anti-racism groups to report hate speech to specialist teams at the three companies, German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said.
The German government has struck a deal with Facebook, Google, and Twitter will supposedly make it easier to report and remove hate speech from the Internet. The big Web companies will now have 24 hours to remove instances of hate speech after they have been first reported.
"When the limits of free speech are trespassed, when it is about criminal expressions, sedition, incitement to carry out criminal offences that threaten people, such content has to be deleted from the net," said German Justice Minister Heiko Maas. "And we agree that as a rule this should be possible within 24 hours."
The agreement also changes how the complaints are processed. By the new workflow, they will be assessed by "specialist teams" at the companies, which will look at them from the standpoint of German law "and no longer just the terms of use of each network," Maas said.
It's a struggle that Disney ought to know quite well, having taken over the Star Wars franchise. The struggle between good and evil; the light side of the force... and the dark side. And it looks like we're all getting a front row seat to the internal strife of Disney via the ongoing silliness surrounding the image of a Star Wars toy accidentally released to the public by a retailer.
I have to admit that I find Donald Trump's presidential campaign fascinating. Or, rather, I find its survival to this point fascinating. What amazes me about it is that the Trump campaign exhibited a strong commitment to not actually putting forward any detailed policy prescriptions, except for a few general policy ideas that mostly conflict with the party whose nomination he's seeking. And those policy ideas he does express have generally been either despicable, impossible to implement, or both. Deporting six million Latin Americans? Yeah, that just isn't going to happen. Putting a hold, however temporary, on legal immigration by using a religious test to keep Muslims out of the country? That violates the very founding document an American President would be tasked with upholding. Also, it's disgusting.
Yesterday we warned that Congress was quietly looking to do two horrible things: (1) strip all pretense from the "cybersecurity" information sharing bills and turn them into full-on surveillance bills and (2) then shove it into the "must pass" omnibus bill which is supposed to be about funding the government and nothing more. And... it looks like our warning was almost entirely accurate, as the bill has been released and within its over 2000 pages, it includes CISA and has been stripped of many of the key privacy protections (if you want to find it, it's buried on page 1728), while expanding how the information can be shared and used. In part, due to concerns raised yesterday, a few of the absolutely worst ideas didn't make it into the final bill, but it's still bad (and clearly worse than what had previously been voted on, which was already bad!).
This week, the European Union put forward proposals recommending a legal ban on under 16s joining social networking sites without parental permission. Naturally, this was reported in some quarters as another excuse to whip up anti-European sentiment. However, as the government's mental health tsar for schools, my initial reaction to the news was positive.
Of course, I paused to ponder how on earth such a law would be enforced. After all, we live in a world where the average 10 year old has far more technological expertise than their parents (as a recent experiment in which a teenager was handed the "Fort Knox of laptops", with every conceivable parental block in place and proceeded to access online pornography within 30 seconds proved). Putting aside the practical considerations, however, I believe the general sentiment of the proposal to be sound.
A few weeks ago, we wrote about a plan by the Montana Standard newspaper to change its commenting policy, publishing the "real names" of any commenters. While we generally think that's a silly policy for a variety of reasons, the real problem was that it was retroactively applying it to all old comments, despite clearly telling earlier commenters that their names would not be revealed (and potentially violate the newspaper's own privacy policy). In its defense, the newspaper insisted that (1) anyone who wanted otherwise could contact the paper and have their comments deleted and (2) that while it might have liked to have only applied the policy to new comments after January 1, its content management system wouldn't allow that. Of course, while that seems like something that, perhaps, should be fixed by the newspaper, I can understand that it might not have the resources to do so.
PRESTON, which collects about four million intercepted phone calls a year, has also recently been used to plant malware on iPhones, according to disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The phones were then targetted for MI5 "implants" (malware), authorised by a ministerial warrant.
MICROSOFT'S JAMMY SOD DEPARTMENT has managed to pull off something of a coup with the announcement that it is to form a joint venture to bring Windows 10 to the Chinese public sector.
Nearly everything Schiff says here is complete hogwash. This bill is far from "the most protective of privacy of any cyber bill" that has advanced. Other versions clearly had more privacy protections (mainly the one advanced by the House Judiciary Committee). And, this latest one clearly strips out privacy provisions and makes it that much more difficult to protect our privacy.
And the fearmongering about "these innumerable hacks" and how "our privacy is being violated every day" is totally meaningless, because CISA does nothing to stop these hacks. We've asked many times before how would CISA have stopped a single hack and no one ever answers. We've looked hard and cannot find a single online security expert who thinks that CISA would be useful in preventing online hacks and attacks. Because it wouldn't. There is nothing in there geared towards stopping attacks.
You know what would help in protecting our privacy and limiting the damage from hacks? Stronger encryption. I wonder what Rep. Adam Schiff thinks about that?
We warned earlier this week that Congress was going to make the cybersecurity bill CISA much worse on privacy, and then shove it into the "must pass" omnibus spending bill, and that's exactly what happened. The 2000+ page bill was only released early yesterday morning and the vote on it is tomorrow, meaning people have been scrambling to figure out what exactly is actually in there. The intelligence community has been using that confusion to push the bill, highlighting a couple of the predictions that didn't make it into the bill to argue that people against CISA are overstating the problems of the bill. That's pretty low, even for the intelligence community.
Worried about privacy, about the websites you visit tracking you, whether you accept their cookies or not?
Panopticlick to the rescue!
Panopticlick is a tool released by the Electronic Frontier Foundation that makes it easy to tell if your browser settings are putting up enough resistance against online tracking.
THE INTERCEPT HAS OBTAINED a secret, internal U.S. government catalogue of dozens of cellphone surveillance devices used by the military and by intelligence agencies. The document, thick with previously undisclosed information, also offers rare insight into the spying capabilities of federal law enforcement and local police inside the United States.
One of the basic tenets of a civilized society is that the punishment should be proportionate with the crime. What essentially amounts to vandalism should not result in even the remote possibility of a 25-year jail sentence. But that very possibility is on the table in the government’s case against journalist Matthew Keys, whose sentencing hearing is about one month off. The case is an illustration of prosecutorial discretion run amok—and once again shows why reform of the federal anti-hacking statute, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), is long overdue.
Taking another page from its counterparts in Asia, Facebook will add a feature for booking a ride through its messaging application. Users of Facebook Messenger in the U.S. will be able to summon an Uber car with a few taps starting on Wednesday.
Wheaton College has suspended a political science professor who said her fellow Christians and Muslims worship the same God.
The prominent Christian college's decision, which sparked protest on campus on Wednesday, came days after Larycia Hawkins, a tenured professor, received attention in Christian media outlets after announcing she would wear a traditional headscarf known as a hijab through the Christian Advent season. Wearing the hijab is part of her personal effort to show solidarity with Muslims, who have faced backlash in the aftermath of recent mass shootings in San Bernardino, Calif. and Paris.
The family of a teenage protester who faces beheading in Saudi Arabia have come forward in public for the first time to plead for his life.
The father of Abdullah al-Zaher, 19, called on the world to help before it is too late and his son is executed in the kingdom along with a reported 51 other people.
“Please help me save my son from the imminent threat of death. He doesn’t deserve to die just because he participated in a protest rally,” Hassan al-Zaher told the Guardian.
Last month, the attorney representing the Chicago police officer who shot and killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald offered an explanation for his client's actions: "There is this 21-foot rule," the attorney, Dan Herbert, told CBS News. "It talks about how an individual is a significant threat to a police officer when they're in that 21-foot boundary."
Chicago police officials said the black teen held a four-inch folding knife on the night of the shooting last October, and that he waved it aggressively at Jason Van Dyke and other officers, ignoring orders to drop the weapon. But the video, released in late November on court orders, showed McDonald was wielding a knife but was shot with 16 bullets as he was facing away from the officers and then fell to the ground.
I don't know how this has changed over time, but these figures sure seem strange. I played on my own in front of my house when I was five,1 but today's parents think you need to be 10—and a substantial fraction think you need to be over 12 to play in front of the house unsupervised.
Yesterday’s revelation that Prince Charles sees Cabinet Office memoranda denied to most ministers did not spark as much public outrage as might be expected. Part of that is because of the view that, by and large, Charles is a fairly decent old stick with some surprisingly progressive opinions.
The problem is, of course, that with a monarchy you have no choice what you get. The defence deployed yesterday across all media was that this is a longstanding practice, in place for many decades. What they did not tell you is that it was instituted at the insistence of the Prince of Wales who was the future Edward VIII, and at the very least sympathetic to fascism. Strange how the media omitted that bit, don’t you think?
Let me put it this way. It is definitely a possibility that the coming real domination of both MPs and MSPs will never happen again. If the SNP do not even try to use that dominance to deliver Independence, then what is the point of the SNP?
Oh sorry, I forgot. They manage the institutions better, and are an effective opposition at Westminster. That apparently is the point. But not what I joined for.
The Washington Post editorial board criticized the Republican Party for pushing "fear-mongering and raw xenophobia" into the mainstream during the GOP presidential debates.
Janine Jackson: It’s a crime story, a culture war story, a debate about what gets called terrorism and about presidential candidates’ ability to rise or sink to an occasion. But for all the worthy stories being aired, the killing of three people at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood clinic by a man angry about “baby parts” hasn’t quite become a story about women and our right to decide whether to have a child.
With Colorado only the latest in a long, long history of attacks, how do we move the conversation off the dime of whether reproductive justice advocates have a right to be upset toward what must be done to secure an atmosphere in which women can actually exercise their full human and legal rights? Jodi Jacobson is editor-in-chief at RH Reality Check. She joins us now by phone from Maryland. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jodi Jacobson.
Since the FCC passed net neutrality rules last February, ISP allies in Congress have been working tirelessly to either gut the rules, or shame and defund the FCC so it can't enforce them. This has included an endless number of House "fact-finding" hearings that usually involve using discredited ISP data to claim the rules are demolishing the Internet. Of course the opposite appears to be true; network investment (at least in competitive areas) continues undaunted, and the rules have actually helped stop a lot of the anti-competitive shenanigans that were occurring on the streaming video front.
Last week, we wrote about an important survey put online by the EU Commission, asking for feedback on its plans to regulate certain key aspects of the internet. We noted that the survey itself was cumbersome and confusing, and because of that, via the Copia Institute, we set up our own guide to filling out the survey called Don't Wreck The Net. We were a little mocking of the survey, as it does seem a bit silly that the people in charge of potentially putting all sorts of regulations on the internet... have a poorly designed and confusing survey (including the fact that depending on how you answer certain questions, the survey will appear quite different for you than it might for others). However, to some extent, we get it: government bureaucracies have some limitations on what technologies they can make use of.
Twice within 2015, INPI, the French TM Office, was forced to tackle controversial trade mark registration cases. Both cases were linked to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris. In January, INPI rejected some 50 trade mark applications for “Je suis Charlie” that were filed within a few days after the attack at the Charlie Hebdo offices. The attempt to capitalize on the tragic events was shocking for many. Moreover, leaving aside moral aspects [can they be left aside?!], how would one enforce such a trade mark registration? This could have been a one-off attempt (despite those 50 applications…), but, only last month, just after Paris suffered from another terrorist attack, “Je suis Paris” and “Pray for Paris” marks were also filed with INPI.
The verdict comes at the close of a two-week trial, which took place after US District Judge Liam O'Grady issued an opinion (PDF) slamming Cox's behavior, saying that the ISP isn't protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act "safe harbor" because the company did not "reasonably implement" a policy to terminate repeat infringers.
Today's verdict is a huge victory for BMG and its copyright enforcer, Rightscorp. The Rightscorp business model is based on sending massive numbers of copyright notices via email and asking for $20 or $30 per song "settlements" from users believed to have pirated songs. While Rightscorp wasn't a named plaintiff in the suit, BMG's case was based on evidence produced by Rightscorp, which says it found the IP addresses of the worst Cox infringers.
The MPAA has not yet given up its fight against Popcorn Time. The movie industry group is reportedly going after a group of developers who launched a "Community Edition" of the popular application. While the new fork has yet to throw in the towel, they've taken down their website and GitHub repository for the time being.
The City of London Police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit (PIPCU) claims to have "dismantled a gang suspected of uploading and distributing tens of thousands of karaoke tracks online." However, it turns out that this "gang" is actually three blokes, aged 60, 53, and 50: one man from Barnstaple, Devon and two men living in Bury, Lancashire.
PIPCU's press release says: "hundreds of albums have had their copyright uploaded by the men, leading to thousands and thousands of tracks being accessed illegally and depriving legitimate music companies of a significant amount of money." That sounds dramatic, but once again the reality is rather different.
Three men from the UK have been raided by City of London Police after uploading thousands of karaoke tracks online. Although described by police as a criminal "gang", the men in their 50s and 60s claim they only created their own karaoke tracks when alternatives weren't commercially available.
Internet provider Cox Communications is facing more than $200 million in potential damages, if a jury holds it responsible for the copyright infringements of its subscribers. According to music publisher BMG there is no doubt that Cox is responsible. After a week of trial hearings the company has asked the court to confirm this, arguing that the ISP failed to rebut its allegations.