There's so many more fun projects out there to explore, so don't let my modest list be the end of the adventure. Too often in the open source world, we suffer from people looking in, scrutinizing what we make, and seeking practical and clear paths toward monetization. But that's not what open source is about, really; open source is supposed to be fun and inspiring. It empowers everyone to follow their vaguest notion to completion, no matter how "useless" or "frivolous" it may be.
If you're looking to land a profitable job in the tech sector, having a broad range of skills is the best way to get your foot in the door.
Is Android on Chromebook ready for mainstream use? Not quite yet. But, I can see it from where it is now. I've long thought that Chromebooks could replace Windows PCs. Now, with Android apps, I can see people choosing $200 Chromebooks over $400 Windows 10 laptops. Windows' last stronghold, the desktop, finally has some real competition.
For now, there's only one Chromebook that will do it, the ASUS Chromebook Flip, but soon most newer models Chromebooks will be able to run most of the 1.5 million Android apps.
A nice surprise landed on my Chromebook Flip when I checked for updates late last week. The dev channel running on Chromebook was ready with the much awaited 53.0.x update that brings the Google Play Store to Chrome OS devices. I updated it and I have been running Android apps on my Chromebook Flip since Friday.
Fujitsu has signaled it will use 64-bit ARMv8 cores in the whopping exascale supercomputer it's building for Japan's boffins.
Every computer runs a version of Unix, with all but 16 being a Linux variant.
After six years of litigation, Sony is now agreeing to pay the price for its 2010 firmware update that removed support for the Linux operating system in the PlayStation 3.
Sony and lawyers representing as many as 10 million console owners reached the deal on Friday. Under the terms of the accord, (PDF) which has not been approved by a California federal judge yet, gamers are eligible to receive $55 if they used Linux on the console. The proposed settlement, which will be vetted by a judge next month, also provides $9 to each console owner that bought a PS3 based on Sony's claims about "Other OS" functionality.
Ensuring U.S. government agencies have a compliant cloud-based infrastructure is the task of the General Services Administration’s 18F digital services, which created cloud.gov, a Cloud Foundry-based hosted cloud service specifically for federal agencies.
Weaveworks announced the public beta of its Weave Cloud hosted cloud product. It combines versions of Weaveworks’ container networking and management software.
Of particular interest: Weave Cloud offers native Docker container integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), so that Docker containers can run directly on AWS VPC.
A “serverless” approach to API deployment involves containerization, webhooks, virtualization and reciprocity, with no infrastructure (servers, deployments or installed software) required. Microservices can be used as an abstracted resource that allows developers to work more effectively, and focus more on development and less on operations.
"Microservices" is fast becoming one of the newest buzzwords that IT decision makers need to know as DevOps redefines modern software application delivery. Here's a primer on what microservices mean and how the concept is affecting the channel.
Patrick Debois is best known as the founder of DevOpsDays and as a creator of the DevOps movement, which explains why some refer to him as the “Godfather of DevOps”. As CTO of Small Town Heroes, an interactive video company, he puts these DevOps practices to the test on a daily basis to deliver mobile applications, and he recently organized a new event, Mobile Delivery Days.
On Linux, userland processes typically have a stack that is around 8 MB long. If a program overflows the stack, e.g. using infinite recursion, this is normally caught by a guard page below the stack.
Linux kernel stacks, which are e.g. used when handling system calls, are very different. They are relatively short: 4096 bytes on 32-bit x86, 16384 bytes on x86-64. (The kernel stack size is specified by THREAD_SIZE_ORDER and THREAD_SIZE.) They are allocated using the kernel's buddy allocator, which is the kernel's normal allocator for page-sized allocations (and power-of-two numbers of pages) and doesn't create guard pages. This means that if kernel stacks overflow, they overlap with normal data. For this reason, kernel code must be (and usually is) very careful to not make big allocations on the stack and has to prevent excessive recursion.
Kernel developer Jiri Slaby has announced the release of the Linux 3.12.61 LTS kernel, which is the sixty-first maintenance update for the long-term supported Linux 3.12 series.
Timothy Arceri of Collabora has prepped the latest version of his massive patch-set for providing an on-disk shader cache for Mesa, albeit focused for now on the Intel DRI driver.
Emil Velikov announced the release this morning of the fourth and final planned release candidate for Mesa 12.0.
Mesa 12 is a monstrous release with a lot new OpenGL 4 support across the major drivers and tons of other improvements: learn more via The 12 Big New Features Of Mesa 12.0.
With Fedora 24 set to ship today, here are some benchmarks I carried out yesterday comparing Fedora 23 to Fedora 24 on a Core i5 6600K "Skylake" system with HD Graphics.
Besides performance improvements, Skylake users will have much better out-of-the-box experience than they did on Fedora 23. In fact, with F23's stock kernel wasn't even the accelerated graphics support by default -- fortunately, over the past six months, everything has been tightened up and there's now good Skylake support on Fedora 24.
Time tracking software is a type of computer software that records time spent on tasks. This category of software can enable users to run billing reports, and prepare invoices for clients.
The deployment of this software offers a new level of productivity to organisations, as it provides management with information on what time is spent by employees on different activities such as projects and tasks. This can help to measure productivity over time. This software is commonly used by professionals that charge clients by the hour such as accountants, solicitors, and freelancers. The generation of automatic invoices with minimal or no data entry removes the inconvenience of billing and invoicing clients, and improves efficiency.
As mentioned earlier in our news story about the features coming to the Orca 3.22 open-source screen reader and magnifier, the GNOME developers are currently working hard on releasing the third snapshot towards GNOME 3.22.
The GNOME developers announced this past weekend that they were working hard on releasing the third snapshot towards the GNOME 3.22 desktop environment.
The new development team behind Shotwell, the open-source image editor used in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems, has announced the availability of a new maintenance build in the Shotwell 0.23.x series.
Shotwell 0.23.2 is now the latest and most advanced stable version of the project, bringing better support for the Facebook integration by adding a pop-up login and updating the documentation in regards with the Facebook publishing permissions.
Since Evernote client is not available for Linux, Linux users always search for an Evernote alternative. Today we have come up with Wiznote, a note taking app that is available for all major platforms including Linux. Wiznote is developed by Wozhi Tech Beijing Co. Ltd. a team of 20 developers. It allows to take, edit and view notes and collaborate with your team members. Let's see more about Wiznote and how to install it in Linux.
After seeing how smoothly Steam ran on the Cinnamon Linux box, we sat together at my house the next day and put Linux Mint Cinnamon 17.3 LTS on her Dell, installed I might add, without hardly any drama over EUFI. Mint has that handled nicely. I explained to her that while Steam has almost 2,000 games running on Linux, some of the larger game houses haven’t boarded the Linux Steam ship. For her, that was fine. What she plays runs just fine on Linux…at least for now.
Comcept today announced — on the game’s release day — that Mighty No. 9 has been delayed on Xbox 360, Mac and Linux.
A Valve developer on reddit has talked a bit about Valve and VR, and he specifically stated that a third of Valve is now working on VR. A third of Valve, yet still no Linux support.
What does it mean when developers behind one of the world's most popular desktop environments decide to jump into the deep end and fork a distribution? Depending on who you ask you’ll hear madness, excellence, confusion, and excitement as onlookers figure out the exact nature of a new breed of beast and guess what it will do.
KDE neon is a new distribution freshly forked from Ubuntu being driven by prominent KDE contributors and figures. When initially announced some mixed messages marred the event, but since then the project has found its footing and expectations are seemingly being set...
Neon is entirely unique as a product produced by a community which always made generalist software; Plasma and KDE software is offered by Suse, Red Hat, Arch, Slack, any distribution you can name. Neon is in direct competition with those systems, and several people decried this new distribution as opening the potential for favouritism.
The latest updates for KDE's Plasma, Applications and Frameworks series are now available to all Chakra users, together with other package updates,
Plasma 5.6.5 includes a month's worth of bugfixes and new translations, with most changes being related to plasma desktop, plasma workspace and kwin.
Applications 16.04.2 include more than 25 recorded bugfixes and improvements to 'akonadi, ark, artikulate, dolphin. kdenlive, kdepim, among others'.
Frameworks 5.23.0 include bugfixes and improvements to breeze icons, plasma framework, kio and ktexteditor, among others.
Chakra GNU/Linux developer Neofytos Kolokotronis informs the community of the rolling release operating system about the availability of numerous up-to-date GNU/Linux technologies in the main software repositories.
I'm back from the GTK hackfest in Toronto, Canada and mostly recovered from jetlag, so it's time to write up my notes on what we discussed there.
Despite the hackfest's title, I was mainly there to talk about non-GUI parts of the stack, and technologies that fit more closely in what could be seen as the freedesktop.org platform than they do in GNOME. In particular, I'm interested in Flatpak as a way to deploy self-contained "apps" in a freedesktop-based, sandboxed runtime environment layered over the Universal Operating System and its many derivatives, with both binary and source compatibility with other GNU/Linux distributions.s
In the upcoming weeks you will be able to see these tips “in action” since we will create more scenario tasks for GNOME applications.
And scenario tasks need to be written using the language that your testers would normally use. Avoid using very technical words if your users wouldn't be technical. You might use technical words and phrases if you were building a usability test for a programmer's IDE and Debugger, but you wouldn't use technical words and phrases for a general desktop environment like GNOME. It's all about finding the right balance and "voice" in your scenario tasks.
Last week I attended the GTK+ hackfest in Toronto. We had a really good group of people for the event, which lasted 4 days in total, and felt really productive.
There were a number of interesting discussion and planning sessions, from a design point of view, including a session on Flatpak “portals” and another on responsive design patterns.
These release notes for Point Linux MATE 3.2 (agni) provide an overview of the release and document the known issues with Point Linux MATE 3.2.
Solus Project has announced the latest Solus 1.2 Linux distribution release. This modern Linux distro offers an elegant experience with a polished Budgie desktop environment and better gaming experience. Solus 1.2 also brings the out-of-the-box support for 32-bit applications.
The Germany-based GNU/Linux company SUSE has teamed up with Intel with the latter to offer its server distribution, which is optimised for high-performance computing (HPC), as an option on the Intel HPC Orchestrator, an HPC system software stack.
The first week at Redhat was an amazing learning experience in which I spent time getting familiarized with the fedora ecosystem. For starters fedora hubs is like collaboration and communication tool which allows both developers and non-developers to easily share ideas and contribute to the open source community.
Last year Red Hat, which has been mostly known for selling Linux in the enterprise became the first $2 billion open source company. Now it wants to be the first to $5 billion, but it might not be just Linux that gets it there.
A couple of years ago Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst recognized, even in the face of rising revenue, that the company couldn’t continue growing forever featuring Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) alone. As successful as RHEL had been, the world was changing and his company like so many enterprise-focused companies had to change too or risk being left behind.
Mid term evaluations of GSoC starts today. It's been a month since it all started and I'd like to blog (brag) about what I've done so far.
I am in my second week and I am still getting used to using inkscape. I recently found out that inkscape has many functionalities that photoshop does not have. This was especially useful in case of importing and exporting images by directing selecting the required image or drawing. I found out that it is really useful feature that Adobe generally allows it by exporting the entire document. As I am starting to use it more and more, I figured inkscape to better and faster for vector graphics.
The idea was to depict the fedora 24 release cycle for the web and the mobile version.
Today, June 21, 2016, Fedora Project has announced the general availability of the final release of the Fedora 24 Linux operating system for desktops, servers, cloud, and embedded devices.
Delayed four times during its development cycle, the Fedora 24 distribution is finally available to download today. It looks like it ships with the usual Fedora Workstation, Fedora Server, and Fedora Cloud variants, as well as the official Fedora Spins with the Xfce, LXDE, KDE, MATE/Compiz, Cinnamon, and Sugar desktops.
The Fedora Project has embarked on a great journey… redefining what an operating system should be for users and developers. Such innovation does not come overnight, and Fedora 24 is one big step on the road to the next generation of Linux distributions. But that does not mean that Fedora 24 is some “interim” release; there are great new features for Fedora users to deploy in their production environments right now!
There's a lot of good stuff in Fedora 24 across their Server, Workstation, Cloud, and other products.
Long story short, this latest Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution release has shaped up to be another splendid release. Fedora 24 features the GNOME 3.20 desktop and all of its latest innovations on the desktop side, GCC 6 is the default compiler, many other package updates like glibc 2.23 / Mono 4.2 / Golang 1.6 / Python 3.5, and many other improvements. You can see a complete list of Fedora 24 changes via FedoraProject.org.
This year a significant number of students are working on RTC-related projects as part of Google Summer of Code, under the umbrella of the Debian Project. You may have already encountered some of them blogging on Planet or participating in mailing lists and IRC.
I’m looking forward to meeting with many of the hard-working Debian hackers, and collaborating with them to build and promote excellent Free Software. The mgmt project considers both Fedora and Debian to be first class platforms, and parity is a primary design goal.
Softpedia has been informed today, June 21, 2016, by Patrick Emmabuntüs about the first-ever release of the Emmabuntüs Debian Edition computer operating system.
One of the most common issues I see among newer Linux users is the desire to upgrade their distribution needlessly to a new bleeding-edge version. This is especially true with those who use Ubuntu and its derivatives. In this article, I'll explain why most people would be much better off sticking to stable distribution releases that have been "in the wild" for six months or longer.
After many months of silence, and probably hard work, TheeMahn has finally released a new version of his Ubuntu-based Ultimate Edition computer operating system.
Take the case of Canonical's recent pronouncement that it has ended decades of dissonance between competing Linux package management solutions. The lack of thoughtful scrutiny of the claims by the tech press beggars belief. Fortunately, a swelling chorus of critics is rising to put the claims in context, separating the wheat from the chaff in Canonical's attempts to unify Linux distributions.
Solving operational difficulties with a modular, easy-to-use system was the solution Mark Shuttleworth laid out in his keynote entitled “More Fun, Less Friction” at Apache Big Data in Vancouver in May.
Good code is cheap; it’s operational knowledge that’s holding back big data from solving the great problems of our time.
Solving those operational difficulties with a modular, easy-to-use system was the solution Mark Shuttleworth laid out in his keynote entitled “More Fun, Less Friction” at Apache Big Data in Vancouver in May.
I am really excited about this new chapter. While I feel I have a lot I can offer my clients today, I am looking forward to continuing to broaden my knowledge, expertise, and diversity of community strategy and leadership. I am also excited to share these learnings with you all in my writing, presentations, and elsewhere. This has always been a journey, and each new road opens up interesting new questions and potential, and I am thirsty to discover and explore more.
Parrot Security OS developer Frozenbox Network was extremely proud to announce the release of the final Parrot Security OS 3.0 "Lithium" computer operating system.
Several home automation platforms support Python as an extension, but if you’re a real Python fiend, you’ll probably want Home Assistant, which places the programming language front and center. Paulus Schoutsen created Home Assistant in 2013 “as a simple script to turn on the lights when the sun was setting,” as he told attendees of his recent Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIoT Summit presentation, “Automating your Home with Home Assistant: Python’s Answer to the Internet of Things.”
Schoutsen, who works as a senior software engineer for AppFolio in San Diego, has attracted 20 active contributors to the project. Home Assistant is now fairly mature, with updates every two weeks and support for more than 240 different smart devices and services. The open source (MIT license) software runs on anything that can run Python 3 — from desktop PCs to a Raspberry Pi, and counts thousands of users around the world.
Ask many people to name the technology categories that are creating sweeping change right now, and cloud computing and Big Data analytics will probably be top of mind for a lot of them. However, there is an absolute renaissance happening right now in the field of artifical intelligence and the closely related field of machine learning. And, open source tools are making a difference in this space.
eInfochips has ported Android 4.4 to the PowerPC architecture on behalf of an avionics customer that will use it for an HMI that monitors engine health.
eInfochips has developed the first Android port to the PowerPC CPU architecture using a modern Android build and featuring Big Endian support. The port is based on Android Open Source Project (AOSP) code for Android 4.4 (KitKat) and features Kernel 3.12.19.
Android TV is basically Android… for TVs. Google’s operating system for smart TVs and set top boxes is based on the same code as the company’s software for smartphones and tablets, but it features a custom user interface designed to be easy to navigate using a remote control and big screen TV and it supports apps with similar features.
OpenAI, the artificial-intelligence non-profit backed by Elon Musk, Amazon Web Services, and others to the tune of $1bn, is working on a physical robot that does household chores.
The robot OpenAI is targeting would be as reliable, flexible, and intelligent as Rosie the maid from TV cartoon comedy The Jetsons.
OpenAI leaders Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, and Greg Brockton explain in a blogpost that they don't want to manufacture the robot itself, but "enable a physical robot ... to perform basic housework".
Without a doubt, open source is making the software business better. But, if you’re considering going the open source route for software that’s critical to your company, keep in mind that “open” doesn’t mean “free.” It’s understandable that cost would be a major factor in the decision to go open source, as it’s free to license and allows you to spin up unlimited instances. However, there are a number of hidden expenses associated with using open source software that in many cases can drive up the price tag way past commercial software. The real differentiating factors in open source have less to do with cost than they do with your objectives, and the capabilities of your team.
It's time for us B2B marketers to stop being so transactional and impersonal—to stop believing that buyers' purchase decisions are completely rational. Buyers, after all, are people, not cogs in a wheel spinning inside their companies.
Traditional B2B marketing tactics are expensive and increasingly ineffective. You know them well: online banners, emails from random salespeople, sponsored golf outings, airport advertising, billboards, radio ads. Our customers are swimming in messages about why our product is better than the next guy's. They're messages designed to promote, persuade, and convince, and they speak to the part of us hungry for just one more tiny bit of data that might help with an important decision.
I see a strong and promising future for Ceph. Sure, like any other data storage solution it doesn't address all data storage needs, but it's here, and it's yet another contender in the software-defined storage arena.
I'm forty years old. I've been developing free software for twenty years.
A decade ago, I wrote a series of posts about my first ten years of free software, looking back over projects I'd developed. These retrospectives seem even more valuable in retrospect; there are things in the old posts that jog my memory, and other details I've forgotten by now.
Platform9 uses a fork of the OpenStack cloud platform. The startup’s product allows companies to turn private servers into in-house versions of public cloud services like Amazon‘s. Last year the company debuted a virtual appliance that integrates its OpenStack controller service with VMware vSphere services.
Nobody likes being locked out. Locked out of their home, locked out of their car, locked out of their corporate network. It feels helpless.
Nobody likes being locked in either. Locked into a contract, locked into a relationship, locked in by a proprietary network operating system or a particular platform. Can’t take advantage of great new developments from other platform companies. It feels helpless.
Markus Mohrhard cross-posted today on the Document Foundation blog of a new feature coming in LibreOffice 5.2. Mohrhard said, "Starting with LibreOffice 5.2 the LibreOffice project will have an automated crash reporting tool with server side analysis." In other news, GNOME's Sébastien Wilmet today blogged this thoughts on Mint's X-Apps, little applications commonly forked from GNOME apps and Sam Varghese reported on the exit of Jacob Appelbaum from Debian. Gizmodo listed five reasons to install Linux, and by Linux they mean Ubuntu, onto your laptop and Matt Hartley discussed why Ubuntu LTS is better than the latest and greatest.
Starting with LibreOffice 5.2 the LibreOffice project will have an automated crash reporting tool with server side analysis of the reports. This has been active in the builds since 5.0.0.0.beta1 and was really working since beta 2.
Dockercon the primary conference for Docker container has a three year old tradition of appeasing the demo gods prior to any live demo - and Dockercon has lots of live demos.
A trio of new reports show positive trends for Docker container adoption, although there is a concern that Docker is too complex to integrate into organizations' environments. As the DockerCon 16 conference gets underway June 20 in Seattle, users and advocates of the open-source container technology are being bolstered by multiple reports that imply adoption is growing, although there are some challenges to adoption.
During the opening keynote for the Dockercon 16 conference, a primary message that was repeated time and again was that that Docker is all about building tools that help developers and operators do their jobs, faster and easier.
Docker today at DockerCon 2016 here officially announced Docker Engine 1.12, which directly integrates container orchestration technology that previously had required separate technology to implement. Docker first announced the Swarm orchestration technology back in February 2015 as a stand-alone project, requiring separate installation.
At DockerCon 16, Docker CEO Ben Golub discusses the business of containers and how he's growing the company.
In a series of tweets, ubuntuBSD project leader Jon Boden announced a few of the technical features coming to the soon-to-be-released ubuntuBSD 16.04 operating system.
FreeBSD VGL provides a library for accessing graphics modes and carrying out basic drawing operations atop its syscons console driver. Not only is basic graphics output on a virtual console supported by libvgl, but mouse input is too handled. However, not many people seem to be using this library.
I respectfully draw the community's attention to two "Op Eds" that explore missed opportunities for the EU in relation to open source everything.
Selecting an open source license is not actually as easy as you might think. This article provides links to some valuable resources for anyone faced with choosing from the sea of open source licenses currently available.
In a government town like Ottawa, where information has traditionally been jealously guarded, what Alex Benay is proposing could trigger a bout of cognitive dissonance.
According to Benay, president and CEO of the Canada Science and Technology Museums Corporation, almost all documents generated by the corporation’s three national museums – Science and Technology, Aviation and Space, and Agriculture and Food – will soon be available to the public through an online portal.
“Our hope is by the fall, roughly 90 per cent of our information is available to the public in real time,” Benay said in an interview Monday, hours after tweeting that museum documents will be “open by default” by autumn.
Not everything will be made public: cabinet documents and material dealing with such things as personnel matters or corporate planning will remain confidential.
But after that, pretty much anything goes, Benay said, including early drafts of historical assessments, exhibition plans and schedules for travelling exhibitions.
Paulus Schoutsen created Home Assistant in 2013 “as a simple script to turn on the lights when the sun was setting,” as he told attendees of his recent Embedded Linux Conference and OpenIoT Summit presentation, “Automating your Home with Home Assistant: Python’s Answer to the Internet of Things.”
I've spent the past few months writing about the small, incremental behaviors that individuals can employ to be more successful. This month, I'd like to highlight team behaviors that I think are critical to having small successes at work. I spent time with one of the AtomicOpenShift (AOS) teams at Red Hat—the Cockpit project.
Although I spend a significant amount of my time with the AOS teams, I rarely get the chance to work directly with Cockpit. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to sit with them for a while when we were all in Brno earlier this year. From an outsider's perspective, the team has an ease of speaking with each other—both on technical topics and personal ones—that makes you take notice. In fact, you might have assumed they all work together in the same office. However, all five engineers and the designer on the team are spread out across Europe and the United States.
Even though parallel programming is known for its speed and efficiency, it’s not hidden that it brings along complexity in the code. To tackle this problem, some MIT researchers have teamed to create a new chip design named Swarm.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) announced today that it has upheld the ban imposed by the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) on Russia's track and field athletes.
Meeting in the Swiss city of Lausanne, the IOC said that the widespread doping allegations in Russia casts “very serious doubts on the presumption of innocence” on Russian athletes and every athlete from the country who wants to compete in the Olympics will have to undergo an individual doping evaluation from an independent lab before being allowed to compete.
Although some Russian media and officials had pinned hopes on the IOC intervening in the ban, most indications were that the Olympic body would affirm the IAAF decision. On Saturday, the IOC released a statement that it “fully respected” the IAAF decision and said it accepted the IAAF’s right to determine athletes’ eligibility to compete.
As little as one free meal from a drug company can influence which medicines doctors prescribe for Medicare patients.
Evidence is mounting that doctors who receive as little as one meal from a drug company tend to prescribe more expensive, brand-name medications for common ailments than those who don’t.
A study published online Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine found significant evidence that doctors who received meals tied to specific drugs prescribed a higher proportion of those products than their peers. And the more meals they received, the greater share of those drugs they tended to prescribe relative to other medications in the same category.
The researchers did not determine if there was a cause-and-effect relationship between payments and prescribing, a far more difficult proposition, but their study adds to a growing pile of research documenting a link between the two.
A security researcher from Tencent, China's largest internet service portal, has discovered a critical security flaw in Microsoft's Windows operating system that affects every single version of Windows over the last two decades, from Windows 95 all the way to Windows 10.
If you're a fan of the cryptocurrency projects, you've heard of something called Ethereum. It's similar to bitcoin, but is a seperate coin. It's been in the news lately due to an attack on the currency. Nobody is sure how this story will end at this point, there are a few possible options, none are good. This got me thinking about the future of security, there are some parallels when you compare traditional currency to crypto currency as well as where we see security heading (stick with me here).
The current way currency works is there is some central organization that is responsible for minting and controlling the currency, usually a country. There are banks, exchanges, loans, interest, physical money, and countless other ways the currency interacts with society. We will compare this to how IT security has mostly worked in the past. You had one large organization responsible for everything. If something went wrong, you could rely on the owner to take control and make things better. There are some instances where this isn't true, but in general it holds.
Now if we look at cryptocurrency, there isn't really a single group or person in charge. That's the whole point though. The idea is to have nobody in charge so the currency can be used with some level of anonymity. You don't have to rely on some sort of central organization to give the currency legitimacy, the system itself has legitimacy built in.
A new variety of ransomware called RAA has been discovered that has the somewhat unusual attribution of being coded in JavaScript instead of one of the more standard programming languages making it more effective in certain situations.
Well it will take some work, security is not like what they show on TV. You don’t need green on black text, special goggles or an unlimited enhance function. Instead, it requires sitting down and understanding the history of the field, what it means to be “secure” and what limitations or assumptions you can work under. This summer I have decided to start my journey on the vast field of cryptography and am doing an online course at Stanford University that provides an introduction to cryptography. It is appropriately named “Cryptography I” and is the first part of a two part course, the second part being offered later in the Fall. Both are taught by a really awesome professor Dan Boneh who I find explains the material very well. I decided I would like to make some posts about what I have learned in this course as I go through the material so that I can share my knowledge and get a chance to write it down somewhere for later reference.
WordPress 4.5.3 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.
A Briton who tried to grab a police officer's gun at a Donald Trump rally in Las Vegas said he wanted to shoot the US candidate, court papers say.
Michael Steven Sandford, 20, did not enter a plea when he appeared before a judge in Nevada and was remanded in custody until a hearing on 5 July.
He is charged with an act of violence "on restricted grounds".
This week’s Project Censored features a recent speech by long-time peace organizer Medea Benjamin. She examines recent successes and setbacks for the antiwar movement, and discusses her current campaigns.
Medea Benjamin is cofounder of the womens’ peace group Code Pink and the fair trade organization Global Exchange. She spoke at Sonoma State University on March 25, 2016, as part of the student-organized Social Justice Week.
Despite over 400,000 dead and ongoing ground and air campaigns inside the country by the U.S., Russia and several others, 51 U.S. diplomats are publicly demanding the Obama administration launch strikes directly against Bashir Assad in Syria.
Using the broken watchlist system to regulate gun ownership raises issues of fundamental fairness.
In the wake of the attack on LGBTQ Americans in Orlando, gun control is again at the forefront of the national conversation. It is also the subject of proposed legislation in Congress. We at the ACLU, like many other Americans, are appalled by the Orlando tragedy. We have deep concerns, however, about legislative efforts to regulate the use of guns by relying on our nation’s error-prone and unfair watchlisting system.
Do you remember how close we came to Armageddon in the early 1960s when Washington put nuclear missiles in Turkey on the Soviet Union’s border and the Soviets responded by putting nuclear missiles in Cuba? Fortunately, at that time we had an intelligent president instead of a cipher. President John F. Kennedy pulled us back from the brink and was assassinated by his own government for his service to humanity.
In 2013, ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella got a tip on an assassination attempt against Enrique Degenhart Asturias, a 44-year-old Guatemala native who had been working as a consultant to the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala City. Rotella, a veteran Latin America correspondent, knew such violence was common in that part of the world, but this event felt distinctive.
The world’s most famous currency speculator has warned that a vote on Thursday for Britain to leave the EU would trigger a bigger and more damaging fall for sterling than the day he forced Britain out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism almost a quarter of a century ago.
George Soros, writing in the Guardian, said a Brexit vote would spark a ‘black Friday’ for the UK, but the devaluation of sterling would bring none of the benefits to the economy that it enjoyed after it dropped out of the ERM on 16 September 1992 – Black Wednesday.
He said that, as in 1992, there would be big financial gains for speculators who had bet on the UK leaving the EU but that such an outcome would leave “most voters considerably poorer”.
Microsoft's name has generally been missing from the reporting of tax avoidance by America's tech giants: the brunt of the attack has been borne by Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon, all of which have sophisticated tax reduction strategies. Now the Sunday Times has thrown Microsoft's hat into the ring, in a half page (paywalled) story headlined "Taxman backs €£100m Microsoft wheeze".
Boris Johnson has said he will apologise on national television if Britain were to plunge into recession after a vote to leave the EU.
His promise came in response to a caller to radio station LBC, who asked the former mayor of London: “If we Brexit and we go into recession, would you have the political courage, to go on TV … and say sorry, I made it wrong and I apologise?”
Former England and Real Madrid star David Beckham has said that he will be voting for Remain in the EU Referendum.
“I played my best years at my boyhood club, Manchester United. I grew up with a core group of young British players that included Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt and the Neville Brothers. Added to that was an experienced group of older British players such as Gary Pallister, Steve Bruce and Paul Ince. Now that team might have gone on to win trophies but we were a better and more successful team because of a Danish goalkeeper, Peter Schmeichel, the leadership of an Irishman Roy Keane and the skill of a Frenchman in Eric Cantona.”
Beckham continued: “I was also privileged to play and live in Madrid, Milan and Paris with teammates from all around Europe and the world. Those great European cities and their passionate fans welcomed me and my family and gave us the opportunity to enjoy their unique and inspiring cultures and people.
If Brexit happens, the chances of them running the country will increase. Do their books contain any clues about what they might do?
The former footballer tells Sky News his views have been "misinterpreted" after he said Brexit would be good for English players.
On June 16, Oracle Corporation released financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2016, and corporate executives trumpeted the company's cloud services success. According to the latest report, Oracle's cloud infrastructure, platform, and software services collectively brought in $859 million for the quarter ending May 31, compared to $576 million for the same period in 2015. Oracle brought in $2.853 billion in revenues for cloud and had an $8.9 billion (€£6.07 billion) profit for the year.
How does Messing propose that the Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security, given Sanders’ authorization to stop protecting him, turn the resulting savings into cash for the purposes of “donating to Orlando families”? She, of course, won’t be proposing any such process, because this talking point is based on shallow moralizing, not on an honest assessment of the costs of Sanders’ continuing his campaign. Even without the exploitation of the Orlando attack, it’s a talking point that doesn’t make any sense.
[...]
Does anyone think the Secret Service is going to fire the exact number of agents assigned to Sanders the day he drops out? Does anyone think the additional vehicles and equipment needed will quickly be pawned off and the money transferred over to Johnny Taxpayer? Does anyone repeating this talking point think that if the Sanders campaign had ended one week ago the US federal government would somehow be $166,000 richer?
The anti-body shaming movement says advertisers and media companies are sending a bad message to women every time they promote the idea that a fit, thin body is ideal. They argue every body is a “bikini body” and larger women shouldn’t be forced to see images that portray unrealistic standards of beauty.
Now that the Obama Administration has abandoned its effort to censor the transcript of Omar Mateen’s 911 call, let’s take a look back at when the president actually condemned censorship of "news reports."
The parents of Nohemi Gonzalez, an American killed in the Paris terror attacks, have launched a legal case against Google, Facebook and Twitter, who they blame for helping the likes of their daughter's killers radicalise and recruit.
The undersigned civil society organisations are deeply concerned about the Directive on combating terrorism and the European Commission's initiatives that could enable and encourage needless or even counter-productive censorship, both by platforms and by governments, without judicial oversight. The NGOs sign a joint letter to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to urge them to avoid making this mistake.
What was NSFW (or, more specifically, theaters) nearly a century ago? Look no further than what CineGraphic has dug up: a compilation comprised of footage from an old reel of 35mm nitrate from 1926 that was unearthed at an old movie theater in Pennsylvania. The result is Forbidden Images, a collection of clips that were banned and censored to meet local “moral standard,” featuring a brief clip from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and short glimpse of Greta Garbo in The Temptress, among many others.
What instantly becomes glaringly apparent is that all of the scenes feature women (shocker!), but no men. This compilation is a look into the historically sexist lens by which many ratings and censorships are governed, from small towns to the MPAA. To this day, women are still exploited for their sexuality and bodies in cinema. Depictions of sexuality are either celebrated, as in the case of Black Swan (a phallocentric gaze), or shamed, such as Blue Valentine, which received the doomed stamp of NC-17 for its female-centric gaze prior to getting appealed. Considering Hollywood’s ongoing antipathy sex and obsession with violence — and the MPAA rewarding these inclinations — perhaps we haven’t come so far in the last century.
Folks in the Bitcoin/blockchain world can be fairly opinionated -- that's no surprise. But just because you have an interview go sideways, it doesn't mean you get to threaten a lawsuit over it. That's not how it works. Perianne Boring founded and runs a lobbying organization focused on Bitcoin/blockchain issues called the Chamber of Digital Commerce. I have to admit to not being that familiar with the organization (I'm more familiar with another organization called Coin Center). However, late last week, Boring appeared on a podcast called Bitcoin Uncensored. To say the interview did not go well... would be an understatement.
For a long time, critics of the Obama administration have been all over them for supposedly downplaying the key source of the threat, radical Islamic extremists.
The evidence ranges from the State Department’s insistence, under Secretary Hillary Clinton, in blaming the Benghazi attack on an anti-Muslim video, to the president’s refusal to blame “radical Islam” for atrocities like Orlando
Just a few weeks ago, we wrote about the FBI pushing strongly for an update to the law that covers National Security Letters (NSLs) to cover up the fact that the FBI has been using them to get electronic communications records. The current law on NSLs doesn't cover that information, though the FBI insists that it's just a "typo" in the law, and still frequently asks for them in its NSLs, because NSL recipients often don't know the law themselves and will still turn over the info. Of course, it helps that the NSLs often come with gag orders. Reports going back a decade have shown that the FBI has a serious problem with abusing its NSL powers to get lots of information it's not supposed to have. And rather than do something to stop such abuses, the FBI's friends in Congress have, instead, been trying to legalize such abusive practices to allow the FBI to do even more.
And, in the spirit of "leave no crisis unexploited," Senator Mitch McConnell is pushing forward on the amendment put forth by Senators McCain and Cornyn to expand NSLs. And, cynically, they're citing the Orlando shootings as the reason why, despite the fact that this amendment was being pushed for before the shootings even occurred and the fact that this would have done absolutely nothing to stop the shootings.
The security services are to receive a licence for hacking into the phones and laptops of a “major town” under the snooper’s charter legislation, which reaches the House of Lords next week.
The broad nature of the hacking powers to be handed to GCHQ are disclosed in an obscure case study in a background Home Office document setting out the operational case for their use.
This shows that all the phones and laptops in a “major town” could be hacked into, as long as the town were overseas and the action were necessary for national security purposes. The example used in the case study is identifying the phones and laptops being used by a terrorist group planning an attack on Western tourists in a major town
According to the minutes of the most recent EU-US justice and home affairs ministerial meeting, held in Amsterdam on 1 and 2 June, the US: "commended the EU collection of biometric data which had facilitated the fight against terrorism and the work of US law enforcement."
YOUR PRIVACY PAL the Tor Project is going the extra mile to protect users from the spying eyes of the FBI.
Tor, as you might already know, is a solid privacy choice that the anti-privacy people would like to see eviscerated. The Russians want it, and so does the US, which has broken into Tor already, apparently legitimately, in the pursuit of the Silk Road marketplace.
Tor does not rest, and a document entitled On the Effectiveness of Address-Space Randomisation (PDF) shows the firm's efforts to limit the kind of exposure that it was set up to circumvent.
Body-worn cameras as a tool of accountability is an idea whose time has come, but so far, the implementation has been less than ideal. Lawmakers -- pressured by law enforcement agencies and unions -- have frequently pushed legislation that makes it almost impossible for the public to get their hands on recorded footage.
In other cases it's been shown that camera placement results in highly-subjective footage -- where the "first-person" perspective can obscure what's really happening. One notable case resulted in two sets of footage. The body-worn camera footage gave the impression that officers were dealing with a highly-combative arrestee. A nearby surveillance camera showed something completely different: several cops beating a non-resisting suspect.
So, it's somewhat a surprise to hear that body camera footage has resulted in the firing of police officers. For one, officers generally don't get fired. They get suspended. Or, if the misconduct is egregious enough, they're allowed to resign.
Index on Censorship calls for the immediate and unconditional release of journalists à žebnem Korur Fincancñ, Erol Ãânderoßlu and Ahmet Nesin, who were arrested by Turkish authorities on 20 June.
“These individuals have committed no crime. Their transgression was to exercise freedom of speech to show their support for a free and pluralistic media. It shows the depths to which Turkey’s authorities have sunk to silence any and all narratives that differ with the government’s,” Melody Patry, senior advocacy officer for Index, said.
Turkish authorities have arrested three prominent press freedom campaigners, including the local representative of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), on charges of spreading "terrorist propaganda", according to human rights groups.
Turkey arrested the local representative of international rights group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) on "terrorist propaganda" charges Monday, in the latest crackdown on the media in the country.
The excuse that worked so well for so long -- "because terrorism" -- seems to have lost its luster. Despite having a locked iPhone tied to a mass shooting with terrorist overtones, the FBI was unable to budge the needle on encryption backdoors or magical "lawful access" crypto keys.
However, that doesn't mean any number of government entities aren't willing to use the ever present "threat" of terrorism as fuel for their various civil liberties-endangering bonfires. Or that they won't use it as a profoundly cheap excuse to withhold information from the American public -- like the Indiana State Police's refusal to turn over Stingray docs because doing so might allow terrorists to plan attacks on cherished annual state events like the Mule Day Parade.
The Maryland Transit Authority has been ducking a Public Information Act (PIA) request from the Baltimore Sun for nearly a year at this point. The paper asked for surveillance footage from the Mondawin Metro station, captured in April of last year as police shut down mass transit in anticipation of protests following the death of Freddie Gray in the back of Baltimore PD van.
A 23-year-old woman was paraded in her village streets with blackened face and shaved off head by her family members for allegedly eloping with a man, the latest in a series of 'honour' related crimes in Pakistan's Punjab province.
According to eyewitnesses, the family members including parents of the woman, on Saturday paraded her in the streets outside her house after blackening her face and shaving off her head in a village of Uch Sharif, Bahawalpur, some 400km from Lahore.
Strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan is accused of hauling the offenders before a judge for breaking article 299 of the Turkish Penal Code.
The controversial text states anyone who insults the president could be locked up from six months to two years.
Last year, Sweden backed up its self-imposed reputation as a "humanitarian superpower" by taking in an unprecedented 163,000 asylum seekers. However, this feat has left Sweden struggling with integration problems, also spurring a surge of organized crime. Curiously, the refugees themselves have become the victims of this ham-fisted policy.
The attackers, who have not been identified and are said to have totalled several hundreds, were reportedly angry that people were consuming alcohol and listening to music during the holy month. They reportedly forcibly entered the Velvet Indieground music shop in Istanbul where a Radiohead listening party was being held, before beating people with pipes, Al Jazeera reports.
International Christian Concern says there has been a surge in incidents in the last two months with little help from the authorities.
Chilling videos have been published online of teenage girls saying they chose to run away and convert.
But the families left behind and the ICC say victims are being beaten and raped before being blackmailed into taking part in the videos.
The ICC says Upper Egypt is “paralysed” by the number of disappearances of young girls.
Former prime minister Ehud Barak blasted Israel’s current government on Thursday evening, saying it was putting the country on the path to becoming an “apartheid state,” and should be brought down if it fails to get back on track.
“I call on the government to come to its senses, to get back on track immediately,” said Barak. “If it does not do that, it will be incumbent upon all of us — yes, all of us — to get up from our seats, comfortable ones and uncomfortable ones, and bring it down via popular protest and via the ballot box before it’s too late,” he said.
Calling the Netanyahu government “weak, flaccid and noisy,” Barak lobbed criticism after criticism at the Israeli leader and his ministers in a blistering speech at the Herzliya Conference, accusing them of operating based on a “covert agenda” to make a two-state solution untenable.
“Fulfilling [that agenda] will inevitably — and that’s a key word in this discussion: inevitably — bring us to a single state, which will be an apartheid state,” Barak said. “Or it will be a bi-national state with a Jewish minority in a generation or two — which will have a high likelihood of experiencing a drawn-out civil war.”
Has the Israel Lobby assigned former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon to the class of “self-hating Jews?” These two former top officials of the Israeli government are obviously, to the crazed mind of the Israel Lobby, especially ADL, anti-semites for critizing the Israeli government.
Former PM Barak said that “only a blind person or a sheep, or an ignoramus, can’t see the erosion of democracy and the budding fascism” in Israel.
Former DM Ya’alon said that Israel had been taken over by a “fanatical core group with a radical ideology” that freely attacks the Supreme Court, freedom of expression and other principles of democracy.
Donald Trump told CBS News over the weekend that the United States should consider religious and ethnic profiling to prevent terror attacks.
“I think profiling is something that we’re going to have to start thinking about as a country,” Trump said. “Other countries do it, you look at Israel and you look at others, they do it and they do it successfully. And I hate the concept of profiling, but we have to start using common sense and we have to use our heads.”
Israel’s most systematic use of racial profiling occurs at its borders and has been rife with abuses that stand in contrast with American values of equal treatment and safeguarding personal liberties.
The Arab American Institute has collected stories of Arab and Muslim Americans who have been harassed or detained while entering Israel. They offer a window into the human impact of racial profiling.
Due to the very sensitive subjects in the directive (censorship of websites, legalisation of intrusive investigative tools, etc.) it is very important for MEPs to be able to discuss and to adopt an amended version of this text in plenary session before negotiating it in a trialogue.
In the LIBE Committee, Ms Hohlmeier tried to bypass the debate and the negotiations with the shadows by tabling compromise amendments only a few hours before the meetings with the shadow rapporteurs, by choosing bilateral discussions instead of collective meetings and by avoiding a real debate during the shadow meetings. This kind of behaviour is not worthy of the democratic arena that the European Parliament should be. The current version of the text to be voted tomorrow in LIBE committee is more Ms Hohlmeier's work than the work of the entire LIBE Committee. Ms Hohlmeier is pressured by Member States to adopt urgently this Directive and legalise at the European level without proper oversight the dangerous measures that exist in some national legislations on censorship and surveillance.
Before the bodies were removed from the Pulse nightclub in Orlando last week, Democrats began eagerly exploiting that atrocity to demand a new, secret “terrorist watchlist”: something that was once the domestic centerpiece of the Bush/Cheney war-on-terror mentality. Led by their propaganda outlet, Center for American Progress (CAP), Democrats now want to empower the Justice Department — without any judicial adjudication — to unilaterally bar citizens who have not been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime from purchasing guns.
After two years, the DOJ has decided to drop its bogus conspiracy/drug trafficking case against Federal Express. In July 2014, FedEx was hit with an indictment for allegedly knowingly delivering illegal/counterfeit drugs to a handful of sketchy recipients.
The government insisted FedEx perform interdiction efforts for it by opening boxes and determining (without guidance) whether or not the contents were legit. FedEx pointed out that it was in the package delivery business, not the law enforcement business. The DEA shrugged and said, "Do better." FedEx said, "Why don't you give us a list of people/businesses you think are engaged in illegal activities?" The DOJ refused to do so and rewarded FedEx's good faith efforts with an indictment.
An indictment is easy to obtain, as anyone familiar with the machinations of grand juries is aware. The DOJ's case, however, immediately fell apart after it dragged its purple and orange ham sandwich into a process that's actually adversarial. Judge Charles Breyer -- who we know from his hilariously-redacted denial of HP's heavily-redacted request to seal documents and his interest in the FBI's possibly-illegal courthouse step wiretaps -- presided over the opening arguments… and that was pretty much all he had to hear.
A few weeks ago, we wrote about how legislators in various cities (mainly SF, Chicago and LA) were trying to push through anti-Airbnb legislation that would require homeowners doing short term rentals to register with the city -- and which would hold the platform (Airbnb) liable if its users failed to do so. As we noted, that almost certainly violates Section 230 of the CDA, which bars any law that attempts to hold a platform liable for the actions of its users. At least in San Francisco, the Board of Supervisors ignored all of this with a city attorney claiming (incorrectly) that since it regulates "business activities of platforms," it's not regulating the content on those platforms. That's an... interesting dodge on the Section 230 issues. It seems unlikely to hold up in court, but California's been especially wacky on CDA 230 lately. The SF legislation has since passed, and it will be interesting to see if anyone (i.e., Airbnb) decides to challenge it in court.
As you might have heard, New York City recently launched one of the biggest free Wi-Fi initiatives ever conceived. Under the program, some 7,500 Wi-Fi kiosks will provide gigabit Wi-Fi, free phone calls to anywhere in the country (via Vonage), as well as access to a device recharging station, 311, 911, 411 and city services (via an integrated Android tablet). The city is installing ten a day -- most at old payphone locations -- and hopes to have 500 of the kiosks in place by July. It's a pretty impressive effort, and by most measures providing fast, free connectivity to the city's five boroughs has been something to celebrate.
A recent internet outage has affected many services like WhatsApp, Facebook, Slack, Reddit, and CloudFlare. After this massive outage was reported across many countries, TeliaSonera sent a note to other network operators and informed them about the mishap.
The cable industry is aggressively fighting the FCC's attempt to bring competition to the cable box market. So far that's been via a two-pronged approach of buying a torrent of incredibly misleading editorials by people pretending to be objective observers (including Jesse Jackson), and throwing money at politicians who oppose the plan, but pretty clearly have no goddamned idea what they're actually talking about.
Under the FCC's plan (pdf), cable providers would be required to provide their existing programming to third-party hardware vendors, creating competition and hopefully a flood of better, cheaper hardware without the need for expensive, and annoying CableCARDs. But with the average user paying $231 annually in set top box rental fees, the cable industry is pulling out all the stops to protect $21 billion in annual, captive revenues.
In its second ruling in the Wiley v Kirtsaeng dispute, the US Supreme Court has provided guidance to lower courts on the award of attorney’s fees in copyright cases