"You know, with windows versus Linux, Windows got there first by a long shot. It was the entrenched party. So Linux is the scrappy upstart. In the case of robotics, open source got there first. The community grew up doing things the open source way. There was actually a period in the mid-2000s where Microsoft put a lot of effort into its Windows-based Robotics Developer Studio. It had really good features, but it's never taken off. So yeah, I think robotics are proving to be a different situation than what happened with personal computing."
Long live Linux. Long live ROS. Long live open source.
Today at InterWorx, I write software for Linux for web hosting companies. I got my RHCSA last year, and I'm currently studying for the RHCE. I'd love to say that I got into open source and Linux for philosophical reasons, but to be honest it was just because it let me get stuff done. If it wasn't for Linux and other open source software, I never would have been able to fix that problem all those years ago. With that one opportunity (and a lot of work!), I was able to start a path to a whole new career.
The parties who work for the project deserves credit though the task is important thing than who did it. But people fear naming it just Linux won’t give a community spirit to the distributions rather it would make it just a business perspective. The project to develop complete free version of OS was started by GNU project years before the the work of Linux initiated. The core component of the system is GNU and Free Software Foundation(FSF)’s founder Richard Stallman called it as GNU/Linux whereas the name came into rise after Yggdrasil Linux distribution adopted the complete name.
Last Saturday, we had another event with the PPLUG. Back on Software Freedom Day 2015, we agreed that we should have some InstallParties here in Phnom Penh to growth the amount of Linux users. It took us a while until most of us had time for doing such an event. But on 30th January we all had time, a venue was found very fast the National Institute of Posts, Telecommunications and Information Communication Technology (NIPTICT) offered their rooms and supplied us also with drinking water and the necessary equipment.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is doubling down on its Linux server efforts today with the announcement of the new HPE Integrity MC990 X server.
The MC990 X is a rack-mounted 8-socket platform that can scale up to 144 cores of compute. The compute isHPE Integrity powered by Intel Xeon E7-8800 v3 processors, with options including the E7-8890 v3, which is an 18-core 2.5 GHz chip. Memory on the MC990 X scales up to 6 TB, which can be spread across 192 DDR4 DIMM slots.
Docker's recent acquisition of Unikernel Systems has sent pulses racing in the microservice world. At the same time, many people have no clue what to make of it, so here's a quick explanation of why this move is a good thing.
Although you may not be involved in building or maintaining microservice-based software, you certainly use it. Many popular Web sites and services are powered by microservices, such as Netflix, eBay and PayPal. Microservice architectures lend themselves to cloud computing and "scale on demand", so you're sure to see more of it in the future.
Rumor has it that Docker Inc., the company behind Docker containers, is planning to switch from Ubuntu to the lightweight Alpine Linux OS as the host environment for Docker images.
Rumor has it that Docker Inc., the company behind Docker containers, is planning to switch from Ubuntu to the lightweight Alpine Linux OS as the host environment for Docker images.
It has been a while since hearing much anything about HP's "The Machine" computing architecture and its associated Linux++ project, but that changed this past week.
While we're still waiting to see if HP's The Machine prototype will be delivered this year, Keith Packard who has been working at the project spoke about it at this year's Linux.Conf.Au 2016 event. In fact, it was sadly just one of a few sessions from this year's LCA2016 that I found really interesting.
With the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA still not enabling the experimental AMDGPU PowerPlay or CIK (Sea Islands / GCN 1.1) support in their kernel builds (although they basically are both off by default at runtime), here is my spin of the newly-released Linux 4.5-rc3 kernel with these features turned on.
The Linux Foundation's Hyperledger Project, an open source blockchain working group, announced that it has received code contributions from across its 30 founding members, which will be reviewed by its newly-formed technical steering committee.
The Hyperledger brand was donated to the Linux Foundation's blockchain initiative by Blythe Masters' Digital Asset Holdings. Technical contributions have also come from the likes of IBM, Blockstream and Ripple. The founder members include technology providers such as ConsenSys, Credits, Guardtime, Symbiont and R3CEV, the consortium shared ledger standards group with 42 banks backing it.
Dell is moving forward with offering natively UEFI firmware flashing from the Linux desktop.
The ability to upgrade the firmware on a system from a Linux OS is something that Dell and Red Hat are going to implement, and the first steps have been taken already.
The White House today announced its Cybersecurity National Action Plan (CNAP), which includes a series of steps and programs to enhance cybersecurity capabilities within the Federal Government and across the country. In the proposal, the White House announced collaboration with The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative(CII) to better secure Internet "utilities" such as open-source software, protocols and standards.
A discussion of the new Vulkan graphics API and its impact on Open-source software
For the longest time, when bringing up Wayland a recurring question was "what about network transparency?!" Well, Samsung's Derek Foreman has today published the set of Wayland patches for providing Wayland network traparency by pushing the Wayland protocol over TCP/IP.
A common complaint about Wayland is that it isn’t network transparent. X allows you to run an application on one computer and display its output on a different computer as long as the application doesn’t depend on certain “modern” features (such as the shared memory extension). Applications are forwarded individually and are indistinguishable from apps on the local desktop (network performance considerations aside). This is different than remote desktop protocols like VNC or RDP which provide control of an entire operating system.
Today, Adam Jackson of X.Org Foundation has announced the release and immediate availability for download of the first maintenance build in the X.Org Server 1.18 stable series.
X.Org Server 1.18.1 represents the work done by the X.Org project's developers in the last three months, and it is here to addresses many of the issues reported by users since the release of X.Org Server 1.18.0 on November 9, 2016 (exactly three months ago). Among the highlights, we can mention several XWayland improvements, lots of Glamor patches, as well as some changes in the Present extension and the modesetting driver.
The NVIDIA 361.28 release adds a legacy, non-GLVND libGL.so library to the NVIDIA package. This allows distribution packagers to choose between the GLVND and non-GLVND GLX client libraries at install time. The NVIDIA installer itself is defaulting to the legacy library unless --glvnd-glx-client is passed at install time. This is being done due to behavior differences with the NVIDIA GLX client driver that isn't defined by the Linux OpenGL 1.0 ABI.
Well, I have to say I'm pleased with today's task. It went as expected, which is always a good thing. No regressions, no weird stuff. Almost. The FAIL error for one of the easyLife packages is somewhat alarming. If I had not looked at the console output, I might not even have noticed. But I have, and it is ever so slightly worrying me.
However, the end result is, our old laptop is working fine, with the Nvidia drivers in place and all that, and the CPU utilization is a bit lower than with Nouveau, so there's a small bonus to this escapade, too. More importantly, Fedora 23 did not disappoint, and it is a rare beacon of hope in what is otherwise a dreadful distro season for me. To wit, if any one of you is looking for a fresh experience, a little less Ubuntu a little more something else, Fedora 23 could be the right ingredient. We're done. Oh, we shall discuss Fedora and Nvidia again, if you're wondering, so stay tuned.
The Gnumeric development team had the pleasure of announcing the release and immediate availability for download of a new maintenance release in the Gnumeric 1.12 stable series.
This article discusses some of the interactive command line interface (CLI) tools that are provided with or which can be easily installed on Red Hat related distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS, and other derivative distributions. Although there are GUI tools available and they offer good information, the CLI tools provide all of the same information and they are always usable because many servers do not have a GUI interface but all Linux systems have a command line interface.
This article concentrates on the tools that I typically use. If I did not cover your favorite tool, please forgive me and let us all know what tools you use and why in the comments section.
I have started Tunir on Jan 12 2015, means it got more than one year of development history. At the beginning it was just a project to help me out with Fedora Cloud image testing. But it grew to a point where it is being used as the Autocloud backend to test Fedora Cloud, and Vagrant images. We will soon start testing the Fedora AMI(s) too using the same. Within this one year, there were total 7 contributors to the project. In total we are around 1k lines of Python code. I am personally using Tunir for various other projects too. One funny thing from the code commits timings, no commit on Sundays Smile
Avidemux is an open-source, cross-platform tool for video editing, written in C++ and using Qt for its GUI. It allows the user to cut, filter and encode videos easily, having support for the most popular file types, including: AVI, DVD, MPEG, MP4 and others.
Atom is an open-source, multi-platform text editor developed by GitHub, having a simple and intuitive graphical user interface and a bunch of interesting features for writing: CSS, HTML, JavaScript and other web programming languages. Among others, it has support for macros, auto-completion a split screen feature and it integrates with the file manager.
Fotoxx is powerful, open-source, complex image manipulation tool. It is better editor for those images made with digital camera. It can edit photos and manage a large collection. Includes thumbnail browser/navigator, RAW file import, a comprehensive set of edit functions working in deep color, rapid visual feedback, edit/copy/paste selected image areas, file versioning, batch operations, named collections (views), HDR, stack, panorama, montage, metadata edit and report, image search using any metadata and (partial) file names. It can crop, rotate, flip, resize, red-eye removal, sharpen fuzzy edges, reduce noise in low-light photos, stretch, and distort functionality.
HandBrake is a tool for converting video from nearly any format to a selection of modern, widely supported codecs. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, DVD ripper, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. It is a versatile, easy-to-use tool for converting DVDs and other videos into H.264, MPEG-4, or OGG formatted media. It's particularly useful for making videos that are compatible with portable video devices such as the Apple iPod/iPhone.
Despite the fact that Shotcut is not available via any repository, the installation instructions are pretty straight forward and should not make you any problems.
Also in today's open source roundup: A review of KShutdown, and the differences between AMOLED and LCD displays for Android smartphones explained
Popcorn Time was a media player powered by an underlying BitTorrent client that would allow its users to stream and play the latest TV shows and films. Now this is the perfect example of what the ugly side of open source is.
To celebrate 15 years of VLC, VideoLAN proudly announced the release and immediate availability for download of VLC Media Player 2.2.2 for all supported platforms, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows.
The latest feature added to the popular Vim text editor is asynchronous processing.
Since yesterday with this patch, there is now support for asynchronous processing via jobs using the job_start(), job_status(), and job_stop() functions. Initially this jobs support was limited to Unix-like platforms, but since then has been extended to cover Vim on Windows as well.
Exactly one year after the 3.0 release, here's the next minor release of the Icemon 3.x series.
No major changes this time, merely bug fixes and small code refactorings.
Welcome to the new part of Free Messenger Saga (Signal, Tox, Matrix, Tor Messenger). It’s very good that in the modern world of Facebook, WhatsApp and Skype some peoples create new software for communication.
SoftMaker Office 2016 is a commercial suite of applications that are available for Windows and Linux systems. The company making it, SoftMaker, decided to provide it for free to schools, teachers, colleges and universities worldwide.
Landis+Gyr, a world leader in delivering energy management solutions to the utility industry, is expanding distributed intelligence capabilities on the grid with a major advancement in adaptability and processing power for the network connecting the Gridstream€® suite of AMI, Distribution Intelligence and Customer Intelligence solutions.
Free and open source first-person shooter Unvanquished combines real-time strategy elements with old-fashioned FPS gameplay. A new update has been released for the game as it moves closer to a Beta version.
The game engine uses Cryengine for graphics, which can generate ‘photo-realistic’ worlds — it’s best known for being the engine behind the PC-crippling Crysis games.
Firewatch, a first person mystery adventure game released for Linux & SteamOS Posted by TheBoss, 9 February 2016 at 8:44 pm UTC / 462 views Share
Firewatch looks awesome, for the style, the story and the gameplay. It's available day-1 for Linux and SteamOS.
Sadly, the developer has not responded to my request for a key, so I am personally unable to cover it.
This is pretty exciting for anyone who wants a stable core system with a setup of KDE Plasma software on to as recent as possible, setted-up and configured as good as possible, with hopefully less issues like “distro X has a slightly outdated version of kibrary Y which is know that makes app Z crash”.
Recently the question was asked in the KDE forums how we handle advanced settings. While there is neither a best practice nor a common approach in KDE software, we actually discussed a similar concept in respect to the Plasma control modules (KCM).
The updated organization of KCMs was implemented by the developers, the community decided about the basic layout, and a couple of proposals were done [1, 2]. So why don't generalize this idea and write a guideline?
Last week I received and invitation to be a columnist on a blog about 3DPrinting, 3DPrinterChat, and I already made 3 blog posts. It’s amazing. I’m learning more about 3dprinting and sharing the knowledge that I have. It’s a wonderfull website to people that want know more about 3dprinting and how to start use a 3dprinter.
After having spent a great deal of time improving Plasma, I recently focussed on other ares of our workspace, such as KRunner, and various KDE Applications.
I’ve always had more than a few activities lying around - mainly one for each project I’m working on. Be it KDE, Work, Studies, etc. But I was basing my workflow not only on them, but also on virtual desktops. I had four of them, the first one to keep the web browser and the mail client in, two for actual work (that is related to the current activity), and the last one to keep the music player in.
The biggest task I’ve been trying to accomplish is to move all the UI code to GtkBuilder .ui files and rework the codebase to use them as reusable templates.
First of all I would like to thanks the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring once again my trip to Brussels for the GNOME Developer Experience Hackfest. Besides hacking on Glade and attending FOSDEM I had a great time meeting with old friends and making new ones, not to mention the amount and variety of beers consumed
GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton informs Softpedia today, February 9, about the immediate availability for download of a new build of his Exton|OS Light computer operating system.
I will start this post by thanking the kind folks at the Reddit’s linux subreddit and Voat’s linux subverse who wholeheartedly participated in this survey. Here are the results and they are pretty insightful. For a developer who builds apps targetting the linux platform, it helps to know what are the preferences of users who run those apps on a desktop. Not understanding these requirements beforehand has caused a lot of unneeded backlash in the history of linux desktop development and a lot many forks were created which ended up causing a division of focus.
For the past couple of years I have been producing analysis guides for the top 10 Linux distributions as listed on Distrowatch.
Click here for the guide for 2013 Click here for the guide for 2014
The point of this article is to look at the top 10 Linux distributions as listed on Distrowatch for the year 2015 and analyse their suitability for the average Joe. The criteria for an Everyday Linux distribution is as follows:
Must be relatively easy to install Must have an intuitive desktop environment Must be easy to use Must have a standard set of applications pre-installed (i.e. web browser, audio player, media player) Must have a decent package manager in order to install further software Must be ready to use from the get go
The distributions are listed in the order they are in on Distrowatch.
Today, 4MLinux founder Zbigniew Konojacki has informed Softpedia about the immediate availability for download of his BakAndImgCD 16.0 Live CD, a fork of the 4MLinux operating system used for data backup and disk imaging operations.
After more than a year in the making, the MakuluLinux 10 Xfce Edition is now live and available for download for those who want to try out something different, something fresh.
Zorin OS 11 continues the line of Linux distributions for the users who migrate from other operating systems. It was released at the beginning of February 2016.
Let's have a whistle-stop tour for the main features of this operating system.
The Manjaro Linux development team has had the great pleasure of announcing this past weekend that the Arch Linux-based operating system is coming soon to ARM devices.
We all know that there's already an unofficial Arch Linux for ARM project, which aims to port the well-known and acclaimed GNU/Linux distribution to embedded devices and single-board computers, but now it looks like the Manjaro Linux team plans on conquering the ARM ecosystem too.
I’ve worked at SUSE for just a hair over two years now. Before that time I had never seen the inner workings of an “Open Source Company”. Not in any real, in-depth way.
The Slackware-based Zenwalk 8.0 Linux operating system entered development just two weeks ago, when the development team announced the release of the first Beta build.
Cogs are easily replaceable employees.
For the next earnings release earnings of Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE:RHT), the analysts are expecting firm to post $0.31 EPS for the quarter. The financial results date is expected to be around 2016-03-23. These projected numbers are given by Zacks Research, and therefore, there might be a discrepancy between the projected numbers of FactSet. Both the firms follow recommendations of a different set of analysts. Most recently Red Hat, Inc. recorded earnings of $0.31 for the quarter closed on 2015-11-30.
Red Hat Inc (NYSE:RHT) was upgraded by equities research analysts at Cowen and Company from a “market perform” rating to an “outperform” rating in a report issued on Thursday, AnalystRatings.NET reports.
The Infrastructure Team consists of dedicated volunteers and professionals managing the servers, building the tools and utilities, and creating new applications to make Fedora development a smoother process. We’re located all over the globe and communicate primarily by IRC and email.
When you decide to embrace Linux on the desktop, it can be quite exciting. There is a good chance you started your computing journey with Microsoft Windows, but now you want something different. While choosing the open source route can be a smart move, it can, unfortunately, be confusing too. What operating system should you pick?
Many people choose Ubuntu, which is a solid choice, but some people prefer others. Linus Torvalds, for instance, famously uses Fedora. While that operating system can be quite rewarding, setting it up can be a frustrating experience for those new to Linux. Enter Korora. This operating system takes the best of Fedora and mixes it with user-friendly software and pre-configured RPMFusion repositories. Version 23, code-named 'Coral', is now available for download.
If you want to try out Wayland from a Live DVD/USB device, RebeccaBlackOS has seen a new release and ships the very latest Wayland/Weston components as well as for the high-profile software making use of Wayland.
A new release of the Raspberry Pi's Debian-based "Raspbian" Linux distribution is now available. This release based off Debian Jessie adds in experimental support for the Pi's new open-source, OpenGL Linux graphics driver stack!
This Raspbian update now available has a number of application updates, a number of bugs have been fixed, and other small improvements made.
A new release of Raspbian is now available for download. The update primarily consists of bug fixes, but there are also new updates to some of the standard applications; including Scratch, Sonic Pi and Node-RED.
Raspbian is the official Linux distribution of the Raspberry Pi products, and a new version has been released by its developers.
As the name indicates, Raspbian is based on Debian, but nothing that major happened to the base of the OS, with one exception. The developers did make a number of upgrades to the packages, as it was to be expected. Raspbian is stable, and the current iteration of the OS will be kept a little bit longer, but the devs need to upgrade packages in the OS.
Even if the OTA 9.5 update for Ubuntu Touch is not ready yet, it doesn't mean that the developers are not already looking forward to OTA 10, and they have a comprehensive list of changes and fixes in place.
While Canonical employees are working hard these days on the enablement of the Ubuntu Tablet device, it looks like we're getting the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system on the Fairphone 2 smartphone.
How did that happen? Well, you might have heard of Marius GripsgÃÂ¥rd, the skilled developer who managed to port Ubuntu for Phones on the OnePlus One smartphone, right? Sure you did, and today we're informing you that he is currently working on porting Ubuntu Touch to Fairphone 2.
In our next session Sergio Schvezov is going to talk about what’s new in Snapcraft and the changes in the 2.x series. Be there and you are going to be up-to-date on how to publish your software on Snappy Ubuntu Core. There will be time for questions afterwards.
Canonical's Daniel Holbach writes today on his personal blog about the upcoming Snappy Clinic event that will take place in a few days on the Ubuntu on Air YouTube channel of the project.
Last week, we told you about the release of the groundbreaking Snapcraft 2.1 Ubuntu Snappy creator tool, which brought some very attractive new features to the IoT ecosystem. We also discussed the fact that Canonical updated its Ubuntu Snappy Core images for the all-snap architecture with much-needed modifications and optimizations.
Canonical has just announced that the latest Firefox 44.0.1 is now in the official repositories for the users of Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
We've seen a lot of people lately bragging with their Ubuntu Phone's convergence features and how easily is to transform the smartphone into a full-fledged desktop operating system.
Just a few moments ago, Ã Âukasz Zemczak of Canonical sent in his daily report email to inform us about the latest work done by the Ubuntu Touch developers in preparation for the upcoming OTA releases.
The Release Notes are available, and don't indicate that there are very large changes in this release, just some nice incremental updates, bug fixes, and general cleanup. There may be some interesting internal changes; we'll have to wait for the official announcement to hear about that.
Axiomtek’s “CEM846” is a Linux-ready COM Express Type 10 Mini module with a choice of Atom E3800 SoCs, -40 to 85€°C support, and wide-range power.
Last April, Axiomtek launched a trio of Intel Bay Trail COM Express modules, including a CEM841 Type 2 Basic (125 x 95mm) COM, as well as CEM842 and CEM843 Type 6 Compact (95 x 95mm) modules. Now the company has unveiled a smaller, 84 x 55mm CEM846 COM Express Type 10 Mini module, running the Bay Trail Intel Atom E3800. Like the CEM843, it offers industrial -40 to 85€°C support, in this case as a standard feature.
The future of robotics is open source. Linux helps power these 12 robots.
Canonical has received commitments from Android smartphone and tablet makers to ship devices using the Ubuntu platform “later this year”, according to The Register.
Jane Silber, the company’s CEO, claimed “there’s a lot of interest from these folks in supporting another platform”.
So far, commercial mobile devices powered by Ubuntu have come from two companies – BQ and Meizu – both of which are also offering Android devices using the same hardware.
Mobile display technology is firmly split into two camps, the AMOLED and LCD crowds. Both are based on quite different underlying technologies, leading manufacturers to tout a number of different benefits depending on which display type they’ve opted for.
Qapital, the financial management service integrated with most banks, is launching its Android app today.
Google has moved to a beta release of its Android Studio 2.0 IDE, which updates several capabilities since the preview was offered more than two months ago.
When Google made the preview available around Thanksgiving, it emphasized workflows and emulation. The beta of version 2.0 updates Android Emulator, the App Indexing & Integration Testing feature, and Instant Run, a workflow capability enabling a faster code editing and application deployment cycle. Android Studio is Google's official IDE for building Android mobile apps.
We've said a few times now that Google's virtual reality initiative is too big for the company to just be working on Google Cardboard, and now the Financial Times has published a report detailing what seems to be the next phase of Google's VR push. The report says that Google is working on "a successor to Cardboard," creating a higher-quality headset and building VR software directly into Android.
Glide, an Israeli-developed video messaging app that is one of the most popular of its type in the world, is coming to Android Wear watches – with users now able to see and hear video messages on their watches almost in real time.
Nvidia is doing an impressive job with its Shield platform. The tablet received the Android 6.0 Marshmallow Over the Air (OTA) update just a week ago. In addition to stock Android, Nvidia has installed its core apps on the tablet, including the Shield Hub. Since it’s an Android tablet you can install all supported apps, games and services on the device.
Canonical is courting Google’s Android partners in the hope they'll break ranks with the Chocolate Factory and deliver devices powered by Ubuntu.
The Linux shop has received commitments from Android smartphone and tablet makers to ship devices using its Linux with devices “later this year.”
Android, unlike other operating systems, can power everything from the most humble of devices to the most expensive, powerful tablets on the market. Knowing this – and knowing that the Amazon Fire is a pretty decent tablet, though locked outside of the Google Play Services ecosystem – we decided to look into what other offerings there are on the market for really, really cheap Android tablets.
Now that Rubin had shepherded smartphones from concept to phenomenon, they no longer held much interest. As an engineering problem, they had been solved. Sure, entrepreneurs kept launching new apps, but for someone who considered engineering an art, that was like adding a few brushstrokes atop layers of dried paint. Rubin wanted to touch canvas again—and he could see a fresh one unfurling in front of him.
If there is one word that often percolates conversations hailing the benefits of open source, it is choice. We often celebrate many of the 800+ Linux distributions, the countless desktops, applications, frameworks, and more. Choice, it would seem, is a good thing.
Interestingly, choice is also an emotive thing.
The IT/ITeS sector, one of the largest contributors to exports in the country, has played a vital role in shaping the overall growth story of India. In view of the challenging business environment, the sector has significant expectations from the ensuing Union Budget 2016 on the tax and policy initiatives front.
San Francisco could launch a major makeover of its voting systems this year, an effort that supporters say will lead to cheaper, more transparent elections in the city.
On Tuesday, Supervisor Scott Wiener will call for a Board of Supervisors hearing into the city’s efforts to adopt a voting system that would use off-the-shelf hardware and open-source software. Elections officials, politicians and voter-participation activists have all touted such publicly owned balloting systems as cheaper and more trustworthy than using products supplied by private vendors.
“We want to set a trend here and around the country toward more open and transparent voting systems,” Wiener said in an interview.
I’ve been flirting with the idea of asking students in my Educational Game Design module to make their projects “open source”.
I am wary of the way non-computer scientists use the term “open source”. I often hear people mistakenly refer to free software as “open source”, when its code is not at all open source. I have also heard people in open education talk about how we can learn from open source, but I always felt cautious about this because the contexts are usually different.
Start an open source project if you want to learn all you can about software design, development, planning, testing, documenting, and delivery; enjoy technical challenges, administrative challenges, compromise, and will be satisfied hoping that someone out there is benefitting from your work. Do not start an open source project if you need praise, warmth and love from your fellow human beings.
After a couple of months of work and thanks to the kind code reviews of the folks at Google, we got the feature landed in Chromium's repository. For a while, though, it remained hidden behind a runtime flag, as the Chromium team needed to make sure that things would work well enough in all fronts before making it available to all users. Fast-forward to last week, when I found out by chance that the runtime flag has been flipped and the Simplify page printing option has been available in Chromium and Chrome for a while now, and it has even reached the stable releases. The reader mode feature in Chromium seems to remain hidden behind a runtime flag, I think, which is interesting considering that this was the original motivation behind the dom distiller.
Mozilla released just a few hours ago the first hotfix for the latest stable and most advanced branch of the popular Firefox web browser for all supported operating systems.
Mozilla Firefox 44.0.1 is now available for download (see download links in the last paragraph), and according to the release notes that popped up minutes ago, it adds quite a few improvements, a couple of new features, and fixes for several issues reported by users since the release of Firefox 44.0.
As you may know, Mozilla Firefox is among the most popular internet browsers available, being very appreciated by FOSS users.
I committed myself to the idea that the Internet is a global public resource that we all share and rely on, like water. I committed myself to stewarding and protecting this important resource. I committed myself to making the importance of the open Internet widely known.
When we say, “Protect the Internet,” we are not talking about boosting Wi-fi so people can play “Candy Crush” on the subway. That’s just bottled water, and it will very likely exist with or without us. At Mozilla, we are talking about “the Internet” as a vast and healthy ocean.
Martin’s appointment recognizes a long history of major contributions to the Internet standards process: including serving as editor for HTTP/2, the newest and much improved version of HTTP, helping to design, implement, and document WebPush, which we just launched in Firefox, and playing major roles in WebRTC, TLS and Geolocation. In addition to his standards work, Martin has committed code all over Gecko, in areas ranging from the WebRTC stack to NSS. Serving on the IAB will give Martin a platform to do even greater things for the Internet and the Open Web as a whole.
Impetus Technologies, a big data solutions company, has announced StreamAnalytix 2.0, featuring support for Apache Spark Streaming, in addition to the current support for Apache Storm. Streaming data analytics has become a big deal, especially with the Internet of Things and other emerging technologies helping to produce torrents of streaming data that enterprises need to make sense of.
Impetus' platform is open source-based, and here are more details on how enterprises can leverage it along with tools like Spark.
Can you make the most of MySQL and the cloud at the same time? Not if you do things the traditional way, according to Deep Information Sciences. But the company says the newest version of its database solution, deepSQL, delivers a MySQL-compatible database that is also able to scale efficiently with the cloud.
It’s no secret that open-source technology — once the province of radicals, hippies and granola eaters — has gone mainstream. According to industry estimates, more than 180 young companies that give away their software raised roughly $3.2 billion in financing from 2011 to 2014.
Even major enterprise-IT vendors are relying on open-source for critical business functions today. It’s a big turnaround from the days when former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously called the open-source Linux operating system “a cancer” (and obviously a threat to Windows).
What a weekend! Buzzfeed sent rumours soaring that Twitter was going to stop displaying tweets in order and instead have an “algorithm” optimise it. Scary, right? I have no idea if it’s true but the possibility hit a nerve. #RIPTwitter was trending globally and it encouraged a small fraction of Twitter users to wonder “what could I use instead?” That is, one heck of a lot of people.
Next minute, thousands of new users are pouring into GNU social—a social network whose existing users only numbered in the thousands to begin with. It’s free software’s decentralised answer to Twitter and to date it has a fairly niche following. Not any more. The admin of the largest server, quitter.se, reported 1200 new signups in two days.
Only the GNU licenses give authors a choice about whether to permit upgrades to future license versions. When I wrote the first version of the GNU GPL, in 1989, I considered including a license upgrade option as is found now in CC licenses, but I thought it more correct to give that choice to each author. Thus, the author could release a program either under “GPL 1 only” or “GPL 1 or later.”
A student advocacy group, along with one of the University of Washington’s top librarians, is urging faculty members to take a good look at using more free online textbooks.
And two bills in the state Legislature would promote and facilitate the use of such open-source textbooks and course materials.
Earlier today, U.S. PIRG released a new report investigating the real impact of high textbook prices on today’s students. The report, titled “Covering the Cost,” is based on a survey of nearly 5,000 students from 132 institutions.
Over the last decade, the price of college textbooks has soared. Since 2006, the cost of a college textbook increased by 73% - over four times the rate of inflation. Today, individual textbooks often cost over $200, sometimes as high as $400.
Johannes Bechberger, while working on his Bachelor’s thesis supervised by my colleague Andreas Zwinkau, has developed a performance benchmark runner and results visualizer called “temci”, and used GHC as a guinea pig. You can read his elaborate analysis on his blog.
UK publishing house Usborne is giving out its iconic 1980s programming books as free downloads.
The books, which are available for free as PDF files, include Usborne's introductions to programming series, adventure games, computer games listings and first computer series. The series was particularly popular in the UK, where they helped school a generation of developers and IT professionals.
Patches published by Google developers today for LLVM/Clang confirm that the company has at least one in-house processor of its own.
Jacques Pienaar, a software engineer at Google since 2014, posted patches today seeking to mainline a "Lanai" back-end inside LLVM. He explained they want to contribute their Lanai processor to the LLVM code-base as they continue developing this back-end with a focus on compiling C99 code. He mentions Lanai is a simple in-order 32-bit processor with 32 x 32-bit registers, two registers with fixed values, four used for program state tracking, and two reserved for explicit usage by user, and no floating point support.
In other words, whatever your opinion on abortion might be, these people suck. Editing videos to make it seem like something that isn't happening is happening isn't virtuous. It's called lying, and it's a no-no.
I was clumsy, and I spilled some beer on the keyboard of my Mac Air laptop, bought July 9, 2014. I immediately started drying my precious computer, overturning it, and my greedy Mac didn't gulp all that much beer, but....
I knew that liquid spills can easily kill a laptop. However, this beer fatality was a first time for me. I realized that only luck has saved me in dozens of my plane trips and train trips, where a few seconds of air bumps or rail vibration might tip a plastic cup and immediately drown a precious machine, the ally and partner in my everyday life.
The Mac Air immediately went dark. In bitter days to follow I struggled to get it back on its feet from its alcoholic overdose. But the battery had shorted out and the motherboard was fouled beyond repair. The screen misbehaved like delirium tremens. Beer is not so fatal to laptops as sugary Coca-Cola, but even pure water can drown delicate microelectronics.
I managed to retrieve my precious files from the faltering hard disk and I migrated promptly to a new Mac Air, the same model, but running the latest version of the OSX operating system. The machinery was the same, but in the meantime Apple had "upgraded," or rather transformed, its software.
APPLE SUPREMO Tim Cook has brought shame on his company, its hardware and its status as a camera option by tweeting one of his own photos.
The problem is with the photo and the photographer, but there is no schadenfreude in that. Cook took his photo during a leisurely night out. He didn't take it for one of those 'taken on the iPhone' promotional efforts or to show off.
Over the past several years, there’s been a significant increase in the number of people using ad-blocking software in their web browser. We have certainly seen a growth in those numbers here at WIRED, where we do all we can to write vital stories for an audience that’s passionate about the ongoing adventure of our rapidly changing world.
On an average day, more than 20 percent of the traffic to WIRED.com comes from a reader who is blocking our ads. We know that you come to our site primarily to read our content, but it’s important to be clear that advertising is how we keep WIRED going: paying the writers, editors, designers, engineers, and all the other staff that works so hard to create the stories you read and watch here.
More than 1 in 5 people who visit Wired Magazine’s website use ad-blocking software. Starting in the next few weeks, the magazine will give those readers a choice: stop blocking ads, pay to look at a version of the site that is unsullied by advertisements, or go away. It’s the kind of move that was widely predicted last fall after Apple allowed ad-blocking in the new version of its mobile software, but most publishers have shied away from it so far.
After Texas law firm Scott & Scott issued its analysis of the changes to Windows Server licensing, Microsoft responded by addressing each of Scott & Scott's points in an email. The issues described by Scott & Scott, Microsoft contends, would be limited to a very small customer segment, and even then wouldn't be as significant an issue as claimed.
Microsoft's hardware—Surface, HoloLens, and Xbox—is "absolutely essential" to its future, according to former CEO Steve Ballmer in a new interview with Business Insider. That's because of the interrelationship between devices and the cloud: so many devices are supported by and dependent on cloud software, Ballmer feels that the company needs to participate both on the cloud side and on the device side.
A fleet of emergency helicopters has been scrambled to take injured passengers to hospitals after the crash at Bad Aibling, an hour from Munich.
Police say at least four people have died and around 150 have been injured - 15 critical and 40 seriously - in the smash in southern Germany.
It is feared that of the four dead, one is a train driver. The other train driver is missing, with local fire services hunting for him.
Twidiots around the world are very angry right now. Twitter has decided to follow in the footsteps of Fakebook and introduce an algorithmic timeline. When the news of this hit Twitter, there was a twidiot storm the likes of which has seldom been seen on the service. They went on a rage-filled tweet rampage, vowing that Twitter was dead to them, they would never tweet again (the world should be so lucky), and other hysterical dramatics.
In 1991, if you were running a personal computer network in your business or enterprise, there was a good chance it was running on Novell's NetWare, which was the predominant server-based network operating system at the time.
If ever one wondered about the efficacy of a state government agency imposing officials on local governments, Flint has answered that question forever.
In April, 2014, the state-appointed emergency manager, in order to save money, ordered that the city’s water source be changed from Lake Huron to the notoriously polluted Flint River.
Senator Bernie Sanders blasted the state of Michigan after reports circulated that undocumented immigrants living in Flint, Michigan have been denied clean drinking water. "This is a humanitarian crisis," the presidential candidate declared.
The comments came after the Detroit Free Press reported earlier this week that Flint's roughly 1,000 undocumented immigrants have faced significant barriers accessing the bottled water now being distributed throughout the city. According to both immigrants and advocates, some people have been turned away because they lacked proper identification, while many others do not even bother because they don't speak English and fear being deported.
An alarming new study has shown that the world’s forests are not only disappearing rapidly, but that areas of “core forest” — remote interior areas critical for disturbance-sensitive wildlife and ecological processes — are vanishing even faster.
The Geneva-based International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) provides intellectual property rights protection for plant breeders. In 2016, the organisation is planning to work on systems to facilitate breeders’ applications for new varieties. Meanwhile, civil society is calling for ways to protect plant varieties other than through UPOV, which they see as hindering farmers’ rights.
Civil society has been concerned with the interrelations between the ITPGRFA, UPOV and WIPO, in particular on the implementation of farmers’ rights, which they say are undermined by the last version of the UPOV Convention (1991) (IPW, WIPO, 2 April 2015).
The average successful hack gains attackers less than $US15,000 ($A20,600), a recent Ponemon Institute study has found. Yet that may still be enough to lure attackers who are proving adept at navigating “confusing” industry messages on endpoint security, believes one security specialist who argues that the result is hampering companies' ability to shore up privileged-account security.
An attack by a hacker has just revealed the sensitive information of about 20,000 FBI employees. Besides this personal contact information of the FBI employees, the hacker also claims to have more sensitive data like credit card number and some military emails.
A class of Android trojans have found a way to inject themselves into system processes and are leveraging their newfound access to carry out a series of malicious operations.
The Internet of Things is amazingly powerful and useful — but not always safe to use, and most organizations with IoT implementations need to do a better job of keeping them secure. That's a message that Jerry Irvine, CIO of the Chicago IT services company, Prescient Solutions, would like his fellow CIOs to take to heart. In an interview with The Enterprisers Project, he explains why.
Many of the protections being discussed for the kernel are coming out of the grsecurity patches. These patches have been around for a very long time and provide a set of modern security features. The question always comes up "but why aren't they in the mainline kernel if they are so useful?". The simplest answer is that the authors and the kernel maintainers never came to an agreement about the patches so they were never merged. (The full history is available in various mailing lists for those who are interested. Google will find you plenty of interesting reading.) The patch authors have been doing the hard work of rebasing and reworking the patches to work with newer kernel versions ever since.
In medieval times, cities were walled. At night the gates were locked, the towers guarded, and thieves and brigands were kept outside. At least in theory, because walls could be scaled, or blown up, or tunnels dug, or guards bribed.
And so in what may turn out to be the ultimate 21st century Renaissance Faire, the Iraqi government, no doubt with the support of, if not the checkbook of, the United States, is building a wall around the city of Baghdad in hopes that that will stop ISIS where nothing else has.
Bernie Sanders wants to stay on message. So his presidential campaign has focused on economic issues. The American economy is rigged, Sanders says, in the interests of the wealthy and well connected. Banks and Wall Street brokerage houses get what they want at the expense of everyone else. The government should step in on the side of ordinary people.
It’s hard not to resonate with Sanders’s message that the rules of the game are designed to benefit those best positioned to shape them. When power is concentrated in the hands of a few people, when there’s one ultimate rule-making authority, politicians and their cronies can engage in self-dealing with relative impunity. Eliminating the privileges that prop up the crony class would likely prove more efficient and just than Sanders’s proposals to increase the power of the state – which tends persistently to favor the well-connected. But you can find his prescription unappealing while appreciating his diagnosis.
This underlying reluctance of large swaths of the American electorate of both parties to continue such long-standing US meddling in faraway conflicts – which it intuitively, if vaguely, realizes is the major cause of blowback terrorism – is reflected by the better-than-expected standing of antiestablishment candidates, such as Donald Trump and Ted Cruz on the Republican side and Bernie Sanders on the Democratic side. Although Trump and Cruz have made some over-the-top comments about bombing ISIS into smithereens, in general they are less hawkish than the mainstream candidates, with their traditional Republican jingoistic foreign policy: Marco Rubio, Chris Christie, John Kasich, and Jeb Bush. Moreover, the pall of George W. Bush’s disastrous Iraq War still hangs over the 2016 election to such an extent that so far, the candidacy of Bush #3 – who the at the beginning of the campaign in 2015 the media was trying to anoint as the Republican frontrunner – has done abysmally.
From the fighter jets soaring overhead to the armed troops patrolling Levi Stadium, Super Bowl 50 was a highly militarized event, its 70,000 spectators and millions of television viewers subject to a showcase of war propaganda and heavy security crackdown.
To much fanfare, the Armed Forces Chorus, comprised of 50 men and women from the Army, Navy, Marines, Coast Guard, and Air Force, kicked off the massive sports event by singing "America the Beautiful” from the field. CBS’ broadcast of the song cut away to footage of uniformed troops standing at attention, with text on the screen reading, “United States Forces Afghanistan.” The clip was a nod to a brutal war and occupation, now stretching into its 15th year, as top generals press for an even slower withdrawal.
Following the national anthem, the U.S. Navy flew its signature Blue Angels Delta formation over the cheering stadium, located in Santa Clara, Calif. The Navy is open about the propaganda purposes of such flights, stating in a press release they are intended to demonstrate “pride” in the military. In a country that dropped 23,144 bombs on Muslim-majority countries in 2015 alone, the war planes are not just symbolic.
An Arabic site that aggregates Facebook and other social media postings reports that Israeli officials are filled with anxiety and consternation about the possibility that the regime of Bashar al-Assad will conquer Aleppo with Russian and Iranian help, and will go on to reconstitute itself. It would be, in the view of Israeli hardliners, an Iranian puppet and would give Lebanon’s Hizbullah a free hand in the region. Yuval Steinitz, a cabinet member with a portfolio for strategic affairs, warned that the victories of the Syrian Arab Army in the Aleppo area constitute a long-term threat to Israel.
Reuters reports that Turkish president Tayyip Erdogan allegedly bullied European leaders and threatened to drown Europe in refugees if his terms were not met. He wanted 6 Bn Euros to keep the 2.5 million Syrian refugees in Turkey happy enough in that country to discourage them from moving to Europe.
One would be the first woman to get the Democratic presidential nomination and, if successful, go on to become the first female president of the United States. The other is an old, white man. Yet the question of who's more of a feminist, Hillary Clinton or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, has provoked surprisingly impassioned debate and a volatile divide on the left.
Since the Sanders campaign started, female fans have had to fend off accusations that their support is anti-feminist. Last week, women's rights icon Gloria Steinem even suggested that young women only support Sanders to attract boys, and former secretary of state Madeleine Albright opined to Democratic voters that "there's a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other." Meanwhile, Bill Clinton accused "Bernie Bros"—a term that seems to have become a derogatory catchall for Sanders supporters of any gender—of "vicious" and "profane" sexism. Since then, an array of feminists for Bernie have come out swinging, challenging the idea that XX-chromosomes a feminist candidate makes.
Two powerful backers of Hillary Clinton attracted headlines—and outrage—this weekend when they uttered sweeping statements under the banner of “feminism,” calling on young women to back the former Secretary of State’s presidential bid.
Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary of Sate, introduced Clinton in New Hampshire on Saturday by declaring, "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other!"
At a rally in New Hampshire on Monday night, Donald Trump was criticizing Ted Cruz for having insufficiently endorsed torture – Cruz had said two nights earlier that he would bring back waterboarding, but not “in any sort of widespread use” – when someone in the audience yelled out that Cruz was a “pussy”. Trump, in faux outrage, reprimanded the supporter, repeating the allegation for the assembled crowd: “She said he’s a pussy. That’s terrible. Terrible.”
Maybe Washington should bluntly declare not victory, but defeat, and bring the U.S. military home.
If Hillary Clinton is elected president, could her slow-bleeding email scandal lead to her impeachment?
The question has been percolating in right-wing circles since last October, when Republican Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama broached the subject in an interview with conservative talk-radio host Matt Murphy. If Clinton makes it to the White House, Brooks declared in no uncertain terms, “the day she’s sworn in is the day that she’s subject to impeachment because she has committed high crimes and misdemeanors” arising from her use of a private email server to discuss matters of national security during her tenure as secretary of state.
Every year in January, February, and March, volunteers count whales from the shores of O‘ahu, Kaua‘i, and the Big Island for the annual Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale National Marine Sanctuary Ocean Count.
The thought of a massive pipeline moving crude oil some 60 inches underneath his farmland troubles Richard Lamb. It isn’t just the risk of an accident or the burden of clashing with the powerful oil industry. It’s the helplessness of facing Iowa’s eminent domain.
A well-meaning but ultimately flawed new study tries to argue that climate change is even more unfair than we thought. It has long been understood that climate change is uniquely inequitable and immoral since most of the world’s poorest countries will suffer greatly from its impacts, even though they have contributed little or nothing to the problem because they are historically low emitters of carbon pollution.
A study released Friday by The University of Queensland and the Wildlife Conservation Society goes even further, however, arguing that the world’s big carbon polluters won’t suffer greatly from climate change.
They say mother knows best – and in David Cameron’s case it certainly seems to be true.
The Prime Minister’s mum Mary has signed a petition aimed at stopping Tory cuts.
Jill Huish, who runs the campaign that Mary backed, said: “It shows how deep austerity is cutting our most vulnerable when even David Cameron ’s mum has had enough.”
Geneva, 2 February 2016 – UNCTAD has updated its recently launched Investment Dispute Settlement Navigator. The ISDS Navigator is now up to date as of 1 January 2016.
The update reveals that the number of investor-State dispute settlement (ISDS) cases filed in 2015 reached a record high of 70. Spain was by far the most frequent respondent in 2015, with 15 claims brought against it. The Russian Federation is second on this list with 7 cases.
PayPal has stopped accepting payments for Canadian outfit UnoTelly—a provider of VPN and SmartDNS services—because these might be used to facilitate copyright infringement.
UnoTelly said in an update on its website that Paypal had "severed payment processing agreement unilaterally and without prior warning." It added: "Paypal indicated that UnoTelly is not allowed to provide services that enable open and unrestricted Internet access."
Ars sought comment from PayPal on this story, however, it had not immediately got back to us at time of publication. We'll update this story, if the online payments giant does get in touch.
UnoTelly told its customers that it had no control over PayPal's decision, and apologised for the inconvenience.
Two years ago, Russian officials discussed plans to privatize a group of national enterprises headed by the oil producer Rosneft, the VTB Bank, Aeroflot, and Russian Railways. The stated objective was to streamline management of these companies, and also to induce oligarchs to begin bringing their two decades of capital flight back to invest in the Russia economy. Foreign participation was sought in cases where Western technology transfer and management techniques would be likely to help the economy.
However, the Russian economic outlook deteriorated as the United States pushed Western governments to impose economic sanctions against Russia and oil prices declined. This has made the Russian economy less attractive to foreign investors. So sale of these companies will bring much lower prices today than would have been likely in 2014
As Techdirt has repeatedly pointed out, one of the most problematic aspects of the TAFTA/TTIP deal being negotiated between the US and the EU is the inclusion of a corporate sovereignty chapter -- officially known as "investor-state dispute settlement" (ISDS). Techdirt isn't the only one worried about it: no less a person than the EU's Trade Commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, said last year that she "shares" the concerns here. Her response was to draw up the new "ICS" -- "Investor Court System -- as an alternative. US interest in ICS is conspicuous by its absence, but Malmström keeps plugging away at the idea, evidently hoping to defuse European opposition to TTIP by getting rid of old-style corporate sovereignty.
Mike has just written about the way the US public is being short-changed over the promised "debate" that would follow the completion of the TPP negotiations. That broken promise is just part of the general dishonesty surrounding the whole deal. For example, the public was told that it was not possible for it to make its views known during the negotiations, because they had to be secret -- even though many other trade deals aren't -- but that once everything was agreed there would be ample time for a truly democratic debate. Of course, at that point nothing could be changed, so the debate was little more than a token gesture, but now it seems the US public won't even get that.
Some rights reserved.On a wet and windy winter evening in December 2015, a crowd of 1,000 people gathers around a doorstep in Dublin’s city centre, a stone’s throw from the Irish parliament. A representative of the Irish traveling community, a group of under 65,000 people that has long been fighting unsuccessfully for official recognition as an ethnic minority, enters the stage. The woman reluctantly explains that she is not a good public speaker. The crowd nonetheless breaks into cheer when she emphatically declares: “Europe has to see now what’s going on, they really do have to see what’s going on.”
[...]
Nominal income exceeds that of 2014 by €20billion and public debt is predicted to sink below the 100% GDP mark. The American Chambers of Commerce announced in December 2015 that US multinationals are expected to create an additional 14,000 jobs in Ireland over the next two years. Those relying on government statistics and mainstream media reports might ask “What’s not to like?”
Americans believe in democracy—and they're ready to reclaim it from the wealthy special interests that have grown ever-more dominant since the U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision.
The overwhelming majority of Americans agree that money has too much influence over elections, and that the system for financing political campaigns needs a radical overhaul.
Over 90 percent of Iowa caucus voters—in both parties—recently told pollsters they are unsatisfied or "mad as hell" about the role of money in politics.
Hillary Clinton is campaigning as a guardian of President Barack Obama’s progressive policy accomplishments. In recent weeks, she has called the Affordable Care Act “one of the greatest accomplishments of President Obama, of the Democratic Party, and of our country,” and promised that she is “going to defend Dodd-Frank” and “defend President Obama for taking on Wall Street.”
Meanwhile, however, Clinton’s campaign has been relying on a team of strategists and fundraisers, many of whom spent much of the last seven years as consultants or lobbyists for business interests working to obstruct Obama’s agenda in those two areas.
Lloyd Blankfein, longtime CEO of Goldman Sachs, didn’t like what Bernie Sanders said about him in early January, and he fired back on CNBC’s “Squawkbox” last week, saying Sanders’ critique “has the potential to be a dangerous moment.”
But there’s more to that story than it appears. It’s not simply that Sanders uses Blankfein as a symbol of the “greed of Wall Street” — it’s that Sanders does so while highlighting the evocative contrast between the 2008 bailout of Wall Street and Blankfein’s public advocacy for cuts to entitlements.
“We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt,” Hillary Clinton complained in an interview in 2014, justifying her spree of paid speeches on Wall Street and elsewhere.
Those speeches have now turned into a major political controversy, with the campaign refusing to agree to release the transcripts of what was said.
Despite Clinton’s protestations, however, the reality is that this country does not allow its former presidents to live “dead broke.” Running the country has great retirement benefits. Ex-presidents are given pensions of nearly $200,000 annually as well as funding for office space and custodial staff.
As she campaigns for the presidency, Hillary Clinton is heralding the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, yet she has infused her staff with former lobbyists and consultants who did all they could to block the two reforms.
In the ‘80s and ‘90s, she served on the board of Wal-Mart — a company notorious for its horrendous treatment of workers and union-crushing efforts — and, while the corporation waged a war against its labor force, Clinton said nothing, did nothing, and fought nothing.
In 1990, she made the statement: “I’m always proud of Wal-Mart and what we do, and the way that we do it better than anybody else.”
This is a company that has used foreign labor (including child workers), stolen its worker’s wages by forcing them to work while off-the-clock, and discriminated against elderly and disabled employees.
Clinton, meanwhile, has zigzagged sharply to the Left to try to tap into the energy of Sanders.
I won’t vote against Hillary Clinton because she’s female, but I don’t intend to vote for her because I am. We need more fundamental changes in this country
Campus is rife with controversy over an event hosted by the Young Americans for Liberty set for Jan. 9. The event titled, “How the Progressive Left is Destroying American Education,” will feature the very loud personality Milo Yiannopoulus. For those who are not familiar with Yiannopolous, otherwise known and self-labeled as "The Most Fabulous Supervillain on the Internet," he allegedly stands to reclaim free speech from social justice activists. Yiannopolous has garnered strong opposition as his planned tours across campuses stand to continue. Opposition stems from Yiannopolous's incendiary, often sexist, racist and homophobic comments and tweets. One such example is Yiannopolous’s tweet stating, “Feminists want to do away with gender pronouns in that they’re all so disgustingly fat no one can tell what sex they are anyway.” Posters around campus advertising the event write, “Feminism is cancer” and “Prepare to get triggered.” Despite the frustration and anger over Yiannopolous, I think we must all remember that his comments, and the ideology that it stands for, is simply not worth engaging with.
Censorship is a dirty word in a country where the liberty to say and print what we want is the very lifeblood of not just our government and legal system, but our lives.
On Jan. 14, the Houston Independent School District board voted to rename four schools bearing the names of known Confederate figures. One of those schools bore a name familiar to University of Georgia students: Henry W. Grady — the very man after whom our college of journalism is named.
Debates on abortion are cancelled because having two people without uteruses discuss the issue is apparently harmful to students’ ‘mental safety’. Trashy pop songs like ‘Blurred Lines’ have been banned for similar reasons. And, more recently, there was an attempt to bar Germaine Greer from speaking at Cardiff University. Groupthink and censorship are the order of the day.
Censorship is having a devastating impact upon freedom of speech on university campuses and is a threat to the freedoms and liberty of us all.
Russia can be a murderously difficult place to do independent journalism; the killing of reporter and activist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006 ought to have made that manifestly clear. But journalism isn’t the only kind of speech that’s under threat in Russia. A new report from PEN America makes it clear how a confluence of laws ostensibly aimed at combating terrorism and religious hatred and protecting children have created an environment in which it’s increasingly hard to publish fiction, broadcast independent television or put on theatrical and musical productions that don’t toe an ever-shifting party line.
Today Access Now filed an intervention with the European Court of Human Rights, providing additional information on how surveillance conducted by the British intelligence agency GCHQ violates international human rights law and policy.
The underlying case, Big Brother Watch and others v. the United Kingdom, deals with U.K. mass surveillance programs like Tempora, as well as U.K. government access to the U.S. database compiled under the Prism surveillance program. The plaintiffs, including Big Brother Watch, Open Rights Group, English PEN, and Constanze Kurz, asked the court to investigate whether GCHQ’s practices and the current system of oversight comply with the right to privacy under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The case stalled for nearly two years pending the resolution of complaints in the Investigatory Powers Tribunal. The case is now moving forward.
ote every single bit of offensive action is eliminated here, even for the terrorists that NSA data contributes to drone-killing. Gone, too, is the NSA’s job to develop intelligence to make our “warfighters” more effective in killing our foes, turned into a strictly protective role. Not mentioned at all are some other missions, like learning what foreign officials and key other global players are doing or countering transnational crime.
But I’m most interested in how, in a release explaining the need to merge IAD with NSA’s spying function, NSA describes its cyber function: “enhancing cybersecurity.” It’s not so ambitious to say it will prevent cyber attacks on US networks (which is what it should aspire to, however unrealistic a goal). More importantly, it pretends that everything it does is about enhancing security, when in fact its optimal end state would be exclusive determination of who got to use certain cyber tools.
The point is, the NSA’s job is not enhancing cybersecurity for everyone: it’s about undermining cybersecurity for many many people around the globe.
Talking about confidentiality in medicine used to be easy. There was a patient; there was a doctor; there were other people. What the patient told the doctor in confidence could not be shared with other people, without either the permission of the patient or some clear legal obligation which overrode that patient’s wishes.
With the arrival of automatic data processing a new regime was overlaid on this traditional conception of medical confidentiality, ‘data protection’, but the model reinforced the central role of the consent of the ‘data subject’. Although consent could sometimes be inferred, or obtained in such a minimalist way that data subjects could almost consent unwittingly, in the case of sensitive data – such as medical information – explicit consent was necessary.
As some of you who have read this blog know, I’m not a big fan of Facebook. The company’s disregard for the privacy of its users, outright manipulation and generally reprehensible behavior has irritated me for quite a long time. I dumped my Facebook account ages ago and I’m never going back to that awful service.
Actually, it kind of is "the end of the analysis" because the core element of that analysis is the fact that any attempt to backdoor encryption doesn't just make security weaker, it puts basically everyone at much greater risk. It introduces cataclysmic problems for any system that stores information that needs to be kept secure and private.
The following sentence is equally inane, in which he tries to place the "risks" of backdooring encryption on the same plane as the risk of ISIS using encryption. Let's be clear here: the risk of backdooring encryption isn't just significantly larger than the risk of ISIS using encryption, they're not even in the same universe. Even worse, by backdooring encryption, you are almost certainly increasing the risk of ISIS as well, by giving them a massive vulnerability to attack and exploit. Trying to suggest that this is an "on the one hand, on the other hand" situation is so ridiculously ignorant, one wonders who the hell is advising Senator McCain on this topic.
Through two executive orders signed Tuesday, President Obama put in place a structure to fortify the government's defenses against cyber attacks and protect the personal information the government keeps about its citizens.
The UK’s intelligence agencies may soon get their hacking powers on a stronger legal footing. But a new report questions why certain warrants designed to hack multiple computers at once are even necessary, when their more targeted equivalents are arguably just as broad.
James Clapper did not name specific agency as being involved in surveillance via smart-home devices but said in congressional testimony it is a distinct possibility
Two of the windows are in the master bedroom close to the bed and the other one is in what will be the study, just on top of where a desk will be. Considering the unpredictable weather in England, I was worried that sudden rain would damage my bed and the stuff on the desk (probably a laptop).
Velux makes some automated roof windows, called Integra, that can close by themselves in case of rain, plus you can control them with a remote, you can set the blinds to open at a certain time of the day, etc.
The cost of the automated feature is small compared to the very expensive windows (roof windows are shockingly expensive compared to normal ones) and to the cost of replacing a laptop and mattress in case they get damaged by rain.
Fifteen years ago, 100,000 football fans streamed into the Raymond James Stadium in Tampa for Super Bowl XXXV. They would witness the wild card Ravens handily defeat the Giants, take in a halftime show that featured N’Sync and Aerosmith, and have their faces digitally scanned, analyzed, and cross-referenced with a database of wanted and suspected criminals. They, uh, didn’t know about that last part until after the fact.
A few days after the game, thanks to the news media and the American Civil Liberties Union, word got out that the Super Bowl had been a testing grounds for new facial recognition software that mapped and cataloged the facial features of everyone in attendance. The ACLU, and many members of the public, were disturbed.
“Facial recognition was a very new, untested technology and it was still kind of science-fictiony,” said Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the ACLU. Stanley wasn’t yet at the ACLU at the time, but he subsequently penned a report on law enforcement’s use of facial recognition technology.
A bill proposed in the Utah State House of Representatives on Monday would update and amend passages in the state's criminal code regarding "offenses committed by means of electronic or computer functions." However, in attempting to address the issue of "doxing"—meaning, publishing personally identifying information on the Internet as a way to harass or attack someone—the bill's language may consequently target free online speech.
Utah HB 255, titled "Cybercrime Amendments," counts State Representative David E. Lifferth as its lead sponsor, and it includes amendments that would penalize denial-of-service attacks and false emergency reports at specific locations (i.e. swatting). Utah state criminal code already punishes certain kinds of electronic communications "with intent to annoy, alarm, intimidate, offend, abuse, threaten, harass, frighten, or disrupt the electronic communications of another," and HB 255 would append that specific passage to count the act of "distributing personal identifying information" as actionable, should that be done with any of the aforementioned intent.
Not only has free speech become a four-letter word—profane, obscene, uncouth, not to be uttered in so-called public places—but in more and more cases, the government deems free speech to be downright dangerous and in some instances illegal.
The U.S. government has become particularly intolerant of speech that challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.
Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, bullying speech, intolerant speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, incendiary speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, right-wing speech, extremist speech, etc.
First, prisons are expensive even if “law and order” rhetoric is cheap. Wise politicians realise this and know that the current approach to prisons policy is financially unsustainable, regardless of what lines voters and tabloids clap along with. The current policy also makes no real sense from a crime prevention perspective and is best seen as one devised by a mischievous demon.
This is the power of imagery. It often captures what words can’t. It angers, it frustrates, it provokes. And it is the reason that the American Civil Liberties Union has been fighting in court for more than 10 years for the release of photographs documenting the maltreatment of prisoners in U.S. military custody in the so-called “war on terror.”
When the dashcam footage of the shooting of Laquan McDonald was finally released by the city of Chicago, it was notably missing the audio. In fact, no surviving footage of the shooting contains any audio. It's 2016 and the Chicago PD is still producing silent films.
In California, Moyer went to graduate school to study social movement theory and indulge his love of analytical thinking. He became best known for identifying eight stages of successful social movements, which he named the Movement Action Plan, or MAP. I found activists using MAP as far away as Taiwan, where they had already read it in translation before I got there.
A wide swath of public officials are calling for change in response to a Daily News and ProPublica investigation about the NYPD’s use of an obscure type of lawsuit to boot hundreds of people from homes. The cases are happening almost exclusively in minority neighborhoods.
Several city council members said they were considering amendments and other reforms to safeguard abuses.
Council Member Vanessa L. Gibson said the statistics included in the story are “shocking.”
Either the terror watch list is complete bull, or the Department of Homeland Security has a big problem. Come to think about it, maybe you can read it both ways.
France has carried out abusive and discriminatory raids and house arrests against Muslims under its sweeping new state of emergency law. The measures have created economic hardship, stigmatized those targeted, and have traumatized children.
In January 2016, Human Rights Watch interviewed 18 people who said they had been subjected to abusive searches or placed under house arrest, as well as human rights activists and lawyers working in affected areas. Those targeted said the police burst into homes, restaurants, or mosques; broke people’s belongings; terrified children; and placed restrictions on people’s movements so severe that they lost income or suffered physically.
A shocking new investigation about private prisons has revealed dozens of men have died in disturbing circumstances inside these facilities in recent years. We continue our conversation with journalist Seth Freed Wessler, who spent more than two years fighting in and out of court to obtain more than 9,000 pages of medical records that private prison contractors had submitted to the Bureau of Prisons.
Trump was criticizing the Texas senator’s unwillingness to support widespread uses of torture when a woman in the audience called Cruz, Trump’s chief rival for more conservative voters, a "pussy."
Then, amazingly, Donald Trump repeated it so the entire crowd could hear.
"She said — I never expect to hear that from you again!," he told the crowd, in mock disapproval. "She said: 'He's a pussy.' That's terrible."
In a visit to India in December 2015, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had said the company had ‘tonnes of data’ from its tests in Sri Lanka and Indonesia to demonstrate that Project Loon created no such interference and would be sharing it with the government.
Every day for one month last fall, Jonathan Sallet, the general counsel at the Federal Communications Commission, sneaked into a small, windowless office at the agency, its location undisclosed except to senior staff.
From 6 a.m. until early evening, with Bach streaming in the background, he worked mostly alone, marking up stacks of law books and standing in front of a lectern. His job: Defend in court the F.C.C.’s most contentious policy — rules to classify broadband Internet providers as utilities, widely called net neutrality.
“I did nothing for one month but prepare,” Mr. Sallet said in an interview. “I talked a lot to the wall.”
His arguments, though — like nearly all of his actions for the agency — have had far-reaching reverberations.
Nafkot Nega thinks journalists are terrorists. When I visited him and his mother, Serkalem Fassil, at their tiny apartment in the outskirts of Washington, DC, in early January, 9-year-old Nafkot intermittently murmured and jabbed his hands, pretending to be a superhero fighting criminals.
Perhaps some of those criminals were journalists like his father, Eskinder Nega, who was convicted of violating Ethiopia’s anti-terror law in July 2012. Eskinder is currently serving an 18-year prison sentence.
“Journalism is a crime or a terrorist act in his mind because what has been portrayed about [his dad],” Serkalem explained to me through a translator. “Not only his dad, but if you mention any journalist he will scream and say ‘I don't like journalists!’”
Facebook's attempt to provide free access to a selection of websites in developing countries was dealt a blow today when India's telecom regulator banned arrangements that charge different amounts for access to different parts of the Internet. The move effectively prevents "zero-rating" schemes in which certain Web services count against data caps while others do not.
At the moment, if you travel abroad you often can't access digital media that you've paid for at home. The European Commission is proposing draft legislation that would let people who have paid for digital media in their country of residence watch that media while they're temporarily in another EU country.
Twenty years ago tonight, I was at a staff party for the closing of the World Economic Forum, lured there by a coven of the contemporary geishas that staffed the Forum in those days, composed largely of doctoral students in Foreign Affairs at the University of Geneva. But I had also agreed to write something about that moment for a book called 24 Hours in Cyberspace. This was a slightly silly proposition, given that it was largely a book of photographs, and a photograph has yet to be taken of anything in Cyberspace.
For years one of the greasier lobbying and PR tactics by the telecom industry has been the use of minority groups to parrot awful policy positions. Historically, such groups are happy to take financing from a company like Comcast, in exchange repeating whatever memos are thrust in their general direction, even if the policy being supported may dramatically hurt their constituents. The tactic of co-opting these groups helps build the illusion of broad support for awful policy, and was well documented during AT&T's attempted takeover of T-Mobile, and Comcast's attempted takeover of Time Warner Cable.
A T-Mobile USA executive yesterday urged the Federal Communications Commission not to take any action against the carrier's "Binge On" program, which throttles nearly all video content and exempts certain video services from data caps.
For more than fifteen years now companies like Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner Cable and CenturyLink have quite literally paid state legislatures to write protectionist broadband laws. These laws, passed in around 20 states, protect the incumbent duopoly from the faintest specter of broadband competition -- by preventing towns and cities from either building their own broadband networks, or from striking public/private partnerships to improve lagging broadband networks. They're the worst sort of protectionism, written by ISPs and pushed by ALEC and ISP lobbyists to do one thing: protect industry revenues.
Despite the fact the laws strip away citizen rights to decide local infrastructure matters for themselves (because really, who better to decide your town's needs than AT&T or Comcast executives), ISPs for more than a decade managed to forge division by framing this as a partisan issue. But then something changed: companies like Google Fiber and Tucows began highlighting how public/private partnerships are actually a great way to fill in the broadband gaps left by an apathetic, uncompetitive broadband duopoly.
Behind the Western-supported government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s lies a troubling trend threatening free speech in Egypt. CPJ’s latest figures list Egypt as the second highest jailer of journalists, second only to China. Eighty-two percent of all journalists in prison in Egypt used the Internet as a medium, according to the organization’s 2015 prison census. A recent report [PDF] from the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression found 366 violations of freedom of the press in the latter six months of 2015, 36 of which related to “news networks or websites.”
One of the biggest victories of the copyright maximalists was the successful adoption of the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaty, implemented by the DMCA in the US, and the Copyright Directive in the EU. Its key innovation was to criminalize the circumvention of copyright protection mechanisms. That strengthens copyright enormously by introducing yet another level of legal lockdown, and thus yet another powerful weapon for copyright holders to wield against their customers. But as Techdirt has reported, the anti-circumvention laws are now being used to prevent people from exploring or modifying physical objects that they own.
A cease-and-desist letter was sent on 1 December, to which the respondent replied that the website was for sale, that two offers had already been received (for $7000 and $4000) but that she would prefer to sell it to the Lady Gaga foundation itself.
Music publisher Warner/Chappell has agreed that “Happy Birthday to You” can enter the public domain and will pay out $14 million in damages, in what has been described as a “historical result” by the film makers that brought the case.
Good Morning to You Productions submitted its settlement deal to the US District Court for the Central District of California on Monday, February 8. The deal will need to be signed off by Judge George King in a hearing scheduled for March 14.
The case stemmed from a class action lawsuit filed against Warner/Chappell in 2013 that said it was not the owner of the copyright to the lyrics in the popular song and had unfairly collected royalties.
This is indeed a large payoff, one that indicates Warner/Chappell is not willing to test the merits of its case in front of a jury. The merits of the case, of course, are pretty much some random assertions with little documentation to back them up, but assertions that have, nonetheless, allowed Warner to obtain an estimated $50 million in licensing fees over the years. The $14 million Warner will pay is roughly in line with what it expected to make during the remaining years of the copyright term.