Do you love Microsoft? Dr. Roy Schestowitz doesn’t. He also led a “Boycott Novell” movement back when there was a Novell to boycott, and he has crusaded against other tech companies, especially regarding software patents. It is, as they say, “Clean indoor work, but somebody has to do it.” And Roy is that somebody.
More supercomputer news this week: The US is responding to China’s new Sunway TiahuLight system that was announced Monday, and fast. First, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Oak Ridge National Laboratory is expected to take delivery of a new IBM system, named Summit, in early 2018 that will now be capable of 200 peak petaflops, Computerworld reports. That would make it almost twice as fast as TaihuLight if the claim proves true. (We had originally reported in 2014 that both Summit and Sierra would achieve roughly 150 petaflops.)
A few days ago, I read a mailing list discussion about the advantages of running a computer in the 1980s. A few, like the lack of Digital Rights Management (DRM), were points well-taken. Others may have been tongue-in-cheek, but might also express personal preferences. However, most of the rest were advantages that I still enjoy (or could enjoy) as a Linux user thirty years later, partly because that is how Linux is designed, and partly because of my personal choices.
A long-running lawsuit stemming from Sony's claim that its PlayStation 3 consoles would allow for third-party operating systems has finally come to a close. As Ars Technica reports, the class-action lawsuit could end up costing Sony millions of dollars for getting on the bad side of some Linux fans, and if you're one of those Linux fans, you could be in for a $55 check.
As part of our "community" program at Collabora, I've had the chance to attend to a workshop on kernel hacking at UrLab (the ULB hackerspace). I never touched any part of the kernel and always saw it as a scary thing for hardcore hackers wearing huge beards, so this was a great opportunity to demystify the beast.
The San Francisco-based financial technology company Ripple has signed up seven more banks to potentially use its blockchain for cross-border payments.
Not that I can share any early benchmark figures or anything of the Radeon RX 480 "Polaris" graphics card, but the testing commenced today... But I can at least share a couple images.
Yep, AMD sent over a Radeon RX 480 graphics card for being able to provide launch-day Linux benchmarks next week. That day is 29 June when the embargo expires and the RX 480 cards will begin to hit stores for the $199+ price-tag (or slightly more for the 8GB version).
Gus Robertson, CEO of NGINX, discusses his firm's latest technology and what's coming next.
Elixir v1.3 brings many improvements to the language, the compiler and its tooling, specially Mix (Elixir’s build tool) and ExUnit (Elixir’s test framework). The most notable additions are the new Calendar types, the new cross-reference checker in Mix, and the assertion diffing in ExUnit. We will explore all of them and a couple more enhancements below.
qBittorrent 3.3.5 was released today and it includes new features, such as a torrent management mode, a new cookie management dialog, as well as other improvements and bug fixes.
So I've been playing through XCOM 2 again, but now with the Alien Hunters DLC enabled and my god it's frustrating.
To get this out of the way: I freaking love XCOM 2, I think it's an incredibly challenging game, that keeps me coming back for more. I like that it's challenging, I enjoy thinking up different strategies when I've failed numerous times.
Do fancy graphics really make a game better? Can a text-based game for Linux still keep you entertained?
Don't get me wrong, I do occasionally enjoy playing a AAA game release from a major studio. But as I've gotten older, I've found that I really value gameplay (and nostalgia too, admittedly) far more than how photorealistic my gaming experience is.
For me, this has meant replaying some of my classic favorites from the 90s and early 2000s, or newer independent games which pay homage to the styles and gameplay of my older picks. As a Linux gamer, it's had the added bonus of providing a high quality gaming experience with very little effort on a computer that is far from top-of-the-line.
Many of my favorites have had dedicated Linux ports created through the years, and still others run flawlessly on Wine or inside of DOSBox. While the games themselves may not be open source, at least much of the rest of my computing stack is open, and for that matter, also free-as-in-beer.
We reported last week on the release of the Beta build of the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.7 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems, and we're now looking forward to the final release, due on July 5, 2016.
In the meantime, KDE developer Martin Gräßlin talks in his latest blog post about the improvements that have been added so far in order to bring better support to the next-generation Wayland display server on the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment.
Last Sunday the full week of Randa Meetings 2016 had passed, and it was time to find a route home, e.g. using KDE’s currently developed Marble Maps (here in the SailfishOS variant)...
Last week in Randa we did not only work on a new Windows version of Marble, but made a lot of progress on vector tile rendering as well. Here is a quick visual impression of the first lower level vector tiles that are now part of the Vector OSM map theme. Much of the work was done by Akshat, one of our GSoC students.
Currently you can see all named and static unnamed stars (also there will be support for Tycho-2 catalog available as an add-on). Having a node for each of the star results in increased memory consumption but I have an idea which I will implement during optimization phase (maintain all nodes in LRU cache and delete nodes that don't get a lot of user attention).
It is strange to talk about improvements when the product does not yet exist, but there are a few important ideas that deviate from original KRunner that I’ve been working on.
My project this summer started with implementing keyframing for masks and layer opacity. Currently I am doing the same for transformation masks, but in between I worked on the problem of interpolation.
In other news, last Monday was my final bachelor thesis presentation which was the last thing I had to do for school this year. I managed to graduate with a 9/10 for the whole thesis process and my supervisors were allegedly very happy with me. Now I cross over the threshold of the academic life to the working life of which the first three months will be reserved for Krita.
We launched up Krita expecting a complete disaster, but what it blessed us with was a small green square sitting tranquilly on top of the canvas. What does it mean?
First, I want to thank Tomaz Canabrava, that brings me to KDE Community and gives me the opportunity to make this changes in my life, to get me rid out my comfort zone and show me the world.
Oomox supports GTK3 and GTK2, and it includes Openbox and Xfwm4 themes. Unity is also supported, though changing the window buttons color is not yet supported.
We reported the other day that the GNOME developers released the third snapshot towards the upcoming GNOME 3.22 desktop environment, meaning that many of the core components and apps were improved.
Tracker, the open-source semantic data store software, which is responsible for indexing different sources needed for the search engine integration of the GNOME desktop environment, implemented via GNOME Shell and other apps from the GNOME Stack, has been updated to version 1.9.0.
I had the privilege of sitting in on the GTK+ hackfest in Toronto last week, getting re-energized for my day job by hanging out with developers from Canonical, Collabora, Endless and Red Hat. Toronto is a fabulous city for a hackfest, and Red Hat provided a great workspace.
A dozen GNOME hackers invaded the Red Hat office in Toronto last week, to spend four days planning the next year of work on our favourite toolkit, GTK+; and to think about how Flatpak applications can best integrate with the rest of the desktop.
The week-view already had good amount of code written for it. So the basic files were already existing.
Excel being Excel there are, of course, special cases. “=” does not mean to look for empty strings. Instead it means to look for blank cells. And strings that can be parsed as numbers, dates, booleans, or whatever are equivalent to searching for such values. These are all just examples of run-of-the-mill Excel weirdness.
The thing that really makes me suspect that Excel designers were under the influence of potent psycho-active substances is that, for no good reason, pattern matching criteria like “foo*bar” mean something different for the two flavours of functions. For the “D” functions it means /^foo.*bar/ in grep terms, whereas for the “if” functions it means /^foo.*bar$/. Was that really necessary?
My recommendation was a choice of three different distributions: Linux Mint MATE, Manjaro Xfce, or PCLinuxOS MATE. As I am a firm believer in "write about what you do, and do what you write about" (as opposed to "regurgitate press releases and try to sound important"), I went home and got out my own Samsung N150 Plus and loaded all three of those distributions on it.
One thing a new Linux user will get to know as he/she progresses in using it is the existence of several Linux distributions and the different ways they manage packages.
Package management is very important in Linux, and knowing how to use multiple package managers can proof life saving for a power user, since downloading or installing software from repositories, plus updating, handling dependencies and uninstalling software is very vital and a critical section in Linux system Administration.
A new major update has been released for the OSMC open-source media center GNU/Linux distribution, bringing all the updates from the upstream Debian Stable software repositories.
Today, June 23, 2016, Barry Kauler, the creator of the Puppy Linux distribution, has proudly announced the release and immediate availability for download of Puppy Linux 6.3.2 "Slacko."
Puppy Linux 6.3.2 "Slacko" appears to be a point release to the Puppy Slacko 6.3 series, and as usual, it has been built from the binary TXZ packages of the Slackware 64-bit 14.1 GNU/Linux operating system. However, it looks like the distro is now powered by a kernel from the Linux 3.14 LTS series, version 3.14.55.
Last week, we reported on the fact that the GCC 6 migration for the openSUSE Tumbleweed operating system was almost over and that the next snapshot would be a massive one moving everything to the GCC 6 compiler.
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2016. Long awaited openSUSE Conference (oSC) finally started. I arrived half an hour before the keynote to join an impressive crowd at the reception desk. Upon registration, like all attendees, I received the beautiful oSC 2016 T-shirt.f
Today in Linux news several security flaws were found in libarchive, a library used to decompress several package types present on a great number of Linux systems. In other news Slackware-current has seen a lot of activity the last few days and Red Hat stock took a bit of dip in after hours trading this evening following an earnings report. Jamie Watson shared his recommendations of Linux distributions for novice users and Bruce Byfield today wrote that a lot of the things Windows users nostalgically miss are still a part of Linux.
Red Hat's Ceph is a popular software-defined object and file cloud storage stack. Now Red Hat is moving forward with its latest release: Red Hat Ceph Storage 2,
Michele Casey, Oracle Linux Senior director of Product Management, reached out to provide insight into Oracle Linux and the platform’s place in the evolution of containers for next-generation application development.
If, like myself, you are a frequent reader of technology-related articles on the internet, you may have seen this article come across your radar last Friday afternoon. Especially if the panda was as eyecatching for you as it was for myself.
Time and again, The Open Organization (and all of the community-driven materials surrounding it) highlights the importance of driving organizational change through collaboration and inclusive decision-making.
Are you looking for projects that could use your help? Fedora Developer Portal is a great project to start with, even if you’ve never contributed before. One of the easiest ways to contribute, but still valuable, is tell the authors what’s missing. More about contributing is under the “Call for your help” header below.
The main purpose of the portal is to serve developers (surprise!). The Fedora Developer Portal team recently released a new version, and their goal is clear: to create the Fedora equivalent of a site like developer.ubuntu.com or developer.apple.com. In just a year, the portal has come a very long way. In this article we talk to Petr Hracek and Adam Samalik, Red Hat engineers who work on this site among other things.
The Fedora community is growing on Telegram. The group chat which I originally created for Flock 2015 and which was later changed to become a general group chat for Fedora users has grown into the size of >300 people.
We also started a Fedora News Channel as a sort of experiment because it’s increasingly difficult to use social networks such as Facebook for spreading the word for free and IM networks may be the new way to get information to users. The channel is currently followed by 294 users, but some messages get three times as many hits because they’re delivered to every subscribed user and they may be share them further. Compare it to Facebook where our messages reach 10% of subscribed users at average.
Fedora Project, proudly announced the release of Fedora 24 version, Now it is available to Download and Install it on your machines. we can Download fedora 24 from their official site.
So I’ve had a couple of issues with my personal FreeIPA deployment in the last couple of months that I never managed to dig into properly because of work on Fedora 24. But now F24 is done, I had time to figure them out, finally.
Fedora is one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions, and now version 24 has been released.
So for the first time ever we’ve released Fedora 24 across both primary and alternate architectures pretty much simultaneously! That’s the three primary architectures, x86_64, ARMv7 and i686, plus the alternate architectures of aarch64, ppc64, ppc64le and s390x. This is the first time we’ve ever released SEVEN architectures on the same day!
Dennis Gilmore from the Fedora Project has published a reminder informing the community that the Fedora 22 Linux operating system will reach end of life in approximately one month from today, on July 19, 2016.
I just updated to Fedora 24 today, just a day after it’s release. Two dnf commands and 30 minutes later, my system is now upgraded to Fedora 24.
This is as bollocky as bollocks go. Korora 23 Gnome actually booted FINE on my G50 machine just the other day. No problem, no sweat. Well, it wouldn't boot from USB, but DVD was fine. Not so with the KDE version. Consistency is such a troubled word. I tried a couple of coasters, even tried a different DVD tray, and then booted the Gnome edition to make sure there's nothing wrong with the hardware. And there isn't.
I can't describe how frustrated I am. It's the same bloody distro with just a few small changes in the visual layout. But then, Fedora boots fine, after a firmware update. Korora Gnome boots fine, but only from DVD. Korora KDE boots not. I am embarrassed to tell people I'm a Linux user. How can this be? We're in 2016. This isn't 1999 anymore. We're not fighting code demons anymore. Seriously, I'm considering starting a petition that says there should be prison time for badly executed and poorly QA-ed distros. The problem is no one cares about petitions.
Among issues with Ion is its incorrect use of the DMA APIs. I've briefly mentioned this before. My educated opinion is that it's a complete mess and that time travel would be a great solution to fix this this problem.
The APT 1.3 development continues at a fast pace, and it looks like it has just received yet another snapshot, apt 1.3~exp3, the third one in the series, which brings more goodies to the upcoming major release of the Debian GNU/Linux package manager.
Readers selected the Raspberry Pi 3 as their favorite among 81 Linux/Android hacker boards in our 2016 SBC Survey, followed by the Odroid-C2 and BeagleBone.
I am excited that I will give a poster presentation about my experiences with HPC at #ISC16 I was selected to do it as part of the Women HPC:)
Today we're going to be talking about the KanKun SP3, a plug that's been around for a while. The idea here is pretty simple - there's lots of devices that you'd like to be able to turn on and off in a programmatic way, and rather than rewiring them the simplest thing to do is just to insert a control device in between the wall and the device andn ow you can turn your foot bath on and off from your phone. Most vendors go further and also allow you to program timers and even provide some sort of remote tunneling protocol so you can turn off your lights from the comfort of somebody else's home.
Just when you thought the platform wars had settled down into a cosy duopoly, Huawei is reported to be working on “an alternative mobile operating system”, according to reports.
“The team working on the project is based in Scandinavia and includes ex-Nokia employees,” The Information scooped.
The secret project is said to be in its infancy, and is intended as a hedge against Google further tightening its grip on Android.
Google is reportedly working on a proprietary binary Android, analyst Richard Windsor told The Register, allowing it to take tighter control of the platform.
Last year was all about cheap or budget Android smartphones, and in 2016 buyers have more choices than ever before. Devices like the Moto G, the cheap Moto X Pure Edition, OnePlus 3 and much more. However, those who want really cheap Android devices, will want to read on for our collection of the best cheap Android smartphones.
Everyone doesn’t need a high-end Android phone, want to sign a 2-year contract, or pay over $600 for a smartphone. And if you’re one of the millions looking for a cheaper route we have a list of some pretty great phones for under $249, and a few that cost a little more but still won’t break the bank.
In the first part of this two-part series, Building a business on a solid open source model, I described how an open source business needs to provide a solid ground for all stakeholders, users, contributors, employees, customers, and of course investors. Foundations, licenses, and trademarks can be helpful in building an open ecosystem. Open source communities need supporting organizations to work transparently, otherwise there are barriers to contribution. Code might be public, but code dumps (like Google tends to do with Android) don't always facilitate collaboration. To encourage collaboration, you must go one step further and be proactive. Development in a place like GitHub or GitLab, and having open feature planning meetings and conferences help toward that goal. But still, open source project leaders can do more.
I consider that the Golden Rule requires that if I like a program I must share it with other people who like it. Software sellers want to divide the users and conquer them, making each user agree not to share with others. I refuse to break solidarity with other users in this way. I cannot in good conscience sign a nondisclosure agreement or a software license agreement. ... "
Your employer may be willing to negotiate / grant you an opt-out clause to protect your FLOSS expertise / accept an additional non-exclusive licence to your FLOSS code / be prepared to sign an assignment...
Always remember in all of this: just because you understand your code and your working practices doesn't mean that anyone else will.
myrepos is kind of just an elaborated foreach (@myrepos) loop, but its configuration and extension in a sort of hybrid between an .ini file and shell script is quite nice and plenty of other people have found it useful.
I had to write myrepos when I switched from subversion to git, because git's submodules are too limited to meet my needs, and I needed a tool to check out and update many repositories, not necessarily all using the same version control system.
Network operators have a jealous eye on the likes of Facebook and Google and want to ditch their clunky networks to compete for "cooler" consumer services, the head of the open-source network function virtualisation (NFV) project has said.
Heather Kirksey is director of the collaborative Linux foundation's OPNFV project – the open source software platform intended to promote the uptake of new products and services using Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV).
Just a week after Nokia (NYSE:NOK) announced an agreement to help China Mobile move to a more flexible cloud network infrastructure, Nokia said it is teaming up with Intel to make its carrier-grade AirFrame Data Center Solution hardware available for an Open Platform Network Functions Virtualization (OPNFV) Lab.
The open source multi-VIM MANO, Cloudify, is giving a sneak preview of its Telecom Edition today at the OPNFV Summit in Berlin. Cloudify is an open source orchestrator used by a growing group of large telecoms and Tier 1 network operators that are pursuing network functions virtualization (NFV).
One of the great problems with cloud has always been interoperability. The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) addresses this problem with the release of Apache Libcloud v1.0, the cloud service interoperability library.
In the age of developer-defined infrastructure, where developers have decision making power in application and cloud infrastructure technologies, open source has proven to be a powerful go-to-market and distribution method for both startups and enterprises. Developers are always looking for new technologies to improve their productivity.
A team of ex-Apple employees, led by former global data center network manager Jason Forrester, are aiming to overturn the ancient regime of proprietary standards for basic switches and routers and replace it with truly open-source standards that any user can customize.
IT WAS ONE HELL of a Monday morning. The rain was hammering down with no end in sight, and the usual 'wrong type of rain' and 'leaves on the line' meant that trains from outlying areas into central London were all pretty much stationary.
When I finally got to the office, I dashed to my desk, powered up my system and launched Microsoft Edge - the window to my Office 365-using world.
I was met with a big, blank white window that wouldn't shift, no matter how often I pressed Ctrl+Alt+Delete.
It was the final straw after a year of repeated crashes, hangs, random tab locks followed by forced refreshes, and general slow motion performance that's made anguished cries and keyboard thumps a normal occurrence for those around me.
So after using Edge religiously since Windows 10's launch as an attempt to ‘embed' with the tech I write about, I decided this morning to stop using it entirely.
The browser-maker Opera has negated Microsoft’s much-publicised claim that its Windows 10-exclusive Edge browser provides significantly less battery drain than competitors Chrome and Opera – and its own tests put Edge firmly in second place for battery efficiency.
In a post at the Opera blog today, Bà âaà ¼ej Kaà ºmierczak reveals the result of the company’s own tests, which put Google Chrome in third place at two hours and fifty-four minutes, Edge in second at three hours twelve minutes, and Opera ahead of that by obtaining three hours and fifty-five minutes of battery life under identical tests.
For Dell, combining software and hardware within a single company was supposed to be like chocolate and peanut butter. Instead, it’s turning out more like oil and water.
“The national media [attention] has waned, but we are trying to keep the story alive,” Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha said, with a voice of sheer determination.
After becoming the face of a national movement, Hanna-Attisha, the pediatrician who helped unmask the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, knows all too well — for herself and the residents of Flint — the disaster which almost destroyed the city is far from over. The series of unfortunate of events leading up to the calamity, the world knows all too well — the city stopped using Detroit’s water supply to use water from the Flint river as an economic measure in April 2014.
High levels of lead permeated the pipes and infiltrated the water supply, while Flint locals complained incessantly about the water’s color, taste and odor, and reported several incidences of strange rashes and skin outbreaks. Yet, government officials assured residents of a majority black city, the water was not a “threat to public health” and “safe to drink.”
libarchive is an open-source library that provides access to a variety of different file archive formats, and it’s used just about everywhere. Cisco Talos has recently worked with the maintainers of libarchive to patch three rather severe bugs in the library. Because of the number of products that include libarchive in their handling of compressed files, Talos urges all users to patch/upgrade related, vulnerable software.
One of the concepts that emerged from the Vietnam War was that of destroying a village to save it. The idea was that by leveling a place where people once lived, the area would be denied to the Viet Cong. The people? Well, they’d just have to find somewhere else.
We spoke to the hacker who claimed to have broken into the servers of the Democratic National Committee, who goes by the name of “Guccifer 2.0,” in reference to the notorious hacker who leaked the George W. Bush paintings and recently claimed to have hacked Hillary Clinton’s email server.
In the interest of transparency, and to let readers judge for themselves, we decided to publish the full chat log. We kept the parts in Romanian, adding the English translation, according to Google Translate.
As Australia's Julian Assange begins a fifth year of life in the Ecuador embassy in London, it looks like Sweden, the country that has accused him of rape, is finally beginning to come around.
A report in the Guardian says Ecuador has received a formal request from Swedish authorities to interview Assange, a move that could bring the long-running saga to an end.
Strangely, this is exactly what Ecuador has been asking for all along!
Proposals for Assange to be extradited to Sweden for questioning were rejected because it was feared that he would be sent to the US from there.
After two years of pain, the market has finally worked off the global glut of crude that slammed oil prices, Saudi Arabia’s energy minister said in a newspaper interview published Wednesday.
“We are out of it. The oversupply has disappeared,” said Khalid Al-Falih, according to the Houston Chronicle. “We just have to carry the overhang of inventory for a while until the system works it out.”
This story is from the Jakarta Post. I reproduce it with this brief comment.
I find the reluctance of the Indonesian Foreign Ministry to make meaningful comment about the problem of transboundary haze very puzzling indeed. It leads me to wonder whether there is the will and capacity, at a national level, to tackle this problem.
Another day has brought another dismal poll for the Remain campaign. And yet, if Britain does vote to leave the EU on the 23rd, it will still most likely not be because a majority of British people wish to leave, but because those who wish to remain are too lukewarm about the issue to get out and vote.
This, if it happens, will be tragic. For all its faults – which, though very real, are inherent to the grandeur of its virtues – the European Union is arguably the greatest thing human beings have ever achieved in the political sphere.
To put the matter in perspective, imagine for a moment how the world would look if the international system worked like the EU.
People are taking to Twitter to complain about flooded polling stations.
The rain doesn't seem to be putting people off, but many are being forced to return to their polling stations this evening.
There are reports of flooded streets as storms swept through the South East this morning.
There will be no (public) exit poll following the EU referendum: our Chief Political Commentator explains why, and tells you what to look out for instead
When Britain votes at general elections, minutes after voting ends at 10pm, the broadcasters reveal the results of their exit poll – a massive survey of around 150 seats in the country, paid for the BBC, Sky and ITV – which, mostly, gives us a fairly clear idea of how the country has voted.
The Chinese internet giant Tencent has finalised a deal to purchase a majority share in Finland’s biggest earning game company, Supercell. Tencent replaces the Japanese telecoms group SoftBank as the Finnish gamemaker's largest owner.
Monday’s bombshell that Trump had finally fired his incompetent campaign manager Corey Lewandowski hit the news networks like a lightning bolt. It had been clear for months the man was in over his head but Trump was loyal to him apparently under the assumption that he’d ushered him through the primaries and therefore knew what he was doing. According to news reports it took the Trump heirs gathering Lewandowski and The Donald in a room together to confront the campaign manager with the campaign’s lack of organization.
It's hard to overemphasize how completely and utterly Sen. Bernie Sanders dominated the youth vote to this point in the 2016 presidential campaign. While Hillary Clinton dominated him among older voters, he dominated her right back among younger voters -- even winning more than 80 percent of their votes in some states against no less than the eventual Democratic nominee.
But this fact might say it better than any: In the 2016 campaign, Sanders won more votes among those under age 30 than the two presumptive major-party presidential nominees combined. And it wasn't close.
So something fascinating happened in Congerss today. No matter what your opinion is on gun control or the various legislative proposals around it that have been up for debate in the past week or so, it's hard to fathom what Congressional Republicans thought they were doing today in shutting off the live video feed from the House floor. A bunch of Democrats decided to hold a sit in on the House floor to push for a vote on some gun legislation. That's a bit of a stunt no matter how you look at it, but the Republicans shot back by helping that stunt get much more attention by not just gavelling the House out of session, but also turning off the live feed of the House floor that flows to C-SPAN and out to the rest of us. C-SPAN doesn't control the cameras and is at the whim of Congress to access that feed, so when the GOP shut off the feed, C-SPAN was left without. This isn't a stupid move that's limited to the Republican side of Congerss, apparently. Eight years ago the Democrats did the same thing when they controlled the House and were upset about Republicans trying to focus on a particular issue.
The National Committee to Combat Climate Change, (CNLCC) on Wednesday complained to various national entities that it’s a victim of alleged censorship in the country’s media and called on those institutions to “help prevent the illegal practice from continuing and spreading.”
CNLCC executives said letters were delivered on Monday to the Dominican Journalists Guild (CDP), the Dominican Newspapers Association (ADD) and the National Human Rights Commission (CNDH), to report the alleged censorship of a report on the cable service EFE of June 15.
Last month in Vietnam, rapper Hàng Lâm Trang Anh asked President Obama about the state of the arts in America, to which he replied that we don't censor artists, adding: "I truly believe if you try to suppress the arts, then I think you're suppressing the deepest dreams and aspirations of a people."
Pahlaj Nihalani, the chief of the Central Board of Film Certification, wanted 89 cuts to the film Udta Punjab. The Bombay high court cut him down to just one and today he stands suitably chastised, but unembarrassed about his attempts to curtail freedom of expression.
Birth photographer Jessica Jackson, the woman behind Itty Bitty Photography, has been making headlines for her work in recent weeks: She has a keen eye and the ability to capture some of the most beautiful, raw moments of childbirth.
Brisbane City Council's sole Greens councillor has blasted the city's highest-ranking bureaucrat over a decision to "censor" a gazebo to be used at community events.
The Gabba ward councillor Jonathan Sri said the council's chief executive, Colin Jensen, refused to allow him to use his discretionary ward funding to purchase the gazebo because it contained "political messaging".
The ACLU of Ohio sued Cleveland on Tuesday, alleging the city's rules for protesters during July's Republican National Convention violate the free speech rights of demonstrators and others attending the event.
In a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday, the ACLU seeks to reduce the size of and the restrictions within the city's convention "event zone" — an area that covers much of Downtown, spanning from West 25th Street to Innerbelt, and from the lake south to the corridor between Orange Avenue and 22nd Street.
Legal action may be taken against communications professor who allegedly made 'vulgar' and 'rude' remarks about Turkish president
Despite 3m Britons buying a wearable device in 2015, we are not willing to use them at work, according to new research from PwC.
In a survey of 2,000 workers across the UK, only 46pc of people said they would accept a free piece of wearable technology if their employers had access to the data recorded.
This was despite the fact that two-thirds of respondents wanted their employer to take an active role in their health and well-being. The biggest barrier to adoption was trust, with 40pc saying they don’t trust their employer to use it for their benefit, and in fact believe it will actively be used against them.
Facebook Inc. has inked contracts with nearly 140 media companies and celebrities to create videos for its nascent live-streaming service, as the social network positions itself to cash in on a lucrative advertising market it has yet to tap—and keep its 1.65 billion monthly users engaged.
If you haven't looked at your own Facebook profile recently, you might want to go check it out.
The social network recently tweaked a setting that changes how your employment and education history is displayed, a spokeswoman for Facebook told The Huffington Post on Monday. While the change won't make any private information public, it could make some previously tucked-away information very obvious to your friends -- which might be a bit uncomfortable.
NBC reports that Justice Sonia Sotomayor let loose a scorching dissent in a case involving the Fourth Amendment and police conduct. The case concerns Edward Strieff, who was stopped while leaving a house a police officer was watching on suspicion of drug activity. When the officer discovered Strieff had an outstanding warrant for a minor traffic violation, he searched Strieff and found methamphetamine. The court had to decide whether the drugs found on Strieff could be used as evidence or whether such evidence was disqualified by the Fourth Amendment's prohibition on "unreasonable searches and seizures." Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority, saying the evidence was "admissible because the officer's discovery of the arrest warrant attenuated the connection between the unlawful stop and the evidence seized incident to arrest."
The Senate on Wednesday rejected a Republican-led effort to allow the FBI to access a person’s Internet browsing history, email account data and other electronic communications without a court order in terrorism and spy cases.
The measure from Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) would have also extended the government’s authority to conduct surveillance over potential “lone wolf” attackers.
McCain and Burr argued that the changes were necessary in the wake of recent terrorist attacks such as in Orlando, where a gunman claiming inspiration and loyalty to the Islamic State killed 49 people at a gay nightclub.
In 2009, Russell Knaggs, from Yorkshire, England, orchestrated a plan to import five tonnes of cocaine from South America hidden in boxes of fruit. Somehow, he did this all from the cell of a UK prison, while serving a 16-year sentence for another drug crime.
As part of the plan, a collaborator in Colombia would log into a Yahoo email account and write a message as a draft. Another accomplice in Europe would read the message, delete it, and then write his own. The point of this was to avoid creating any emails that could be found by law enforcement.
Knaggs didn't use the email account himself, but when Yahoo provided copies of the inbox contents to the authorities, he was convicted and sentenced to another 20 years in prison. The emails certainly aren't the only pieces of evidence used to bust Knaggs (the plot was foiled after officers found a piece of paper with transfer routes and other details during a cell search), but it's one that the defense is scrutinizing.
U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell set up a vote late on Monday to expand the Federal Bureau of Investigation's authority to use a secretive surveillance order without a warrant to include email metadata and some browsing history information.
Crypto backdoors, the overuse of opaque algorithms, turning companies into law enforcement agencies, and online attacks on critical infrastructure have all been attacked by the Global Commission on Internet Governance in a new report published on Wednesday.
The body, which was set up in 2014 by UK-based Chatham House and the Canadian Centre for International Governance Innovation, has presented its 140-page-long One Internet report to provide "high-level, strategic advice and recommendations to policy makers, private industry, the technical community, and other stakeholders interested in maintaining a healthy Internet."
It comes out in favour of strict legal controls on the aggregation of personal metadata, net neutrality, open standards, and the mandatory public reporting of high-threshold data breaches. Along the way, it offers opinions on areas such as the sharing economy, blockchains, the Internet of Things, IPv6, and DNSSEC.
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the Tor Project, and dozens of other organizations are calling today on citizens and website operators to take action to block a new rule pushed by the U.S. Justice Department that would greatly expand the government’s ability to hack users’ computers and interfere with anonymity on the web.
EFF and over 40 partner organizations are holding a day of action for a new campaign—noglobalwarrants.org—to engage citizens about the dangers of Rule 41 and push U.S. lawmakers to oppose it. The process for updating these rules—which govern federal criminal court processes—was intended to deal exclusively with procedural issues. But this year a U.S. judicial committee approved changes in the rule that will expand judicial authority to grant warrants for government hacking.
How would you feel if the Federal Bureau of Investigation could get information about websites you visited or emails you sent – without ever getting permission from a judge? Would you begin to self-censor the websites you visited — maybe avoiding revealing sites? Or, avoid emailing your pastor, therapist, or lawyer? These scenarios may soon no longer be hypothetical.
This spring, text messages got a lot more private. In April, the world’s most popular messaging service, WhatsApp, announced it would use end-to-end encryption by default for all users, making it virtually impossible for anyone to intercept private WhatsApp conversations, even if they work at Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, or at the world’s most powerful electronic spying agency, the NSA. Then in May, tech giant Google announced a brand new messaging app called Allo that also supports end-to-end encryption.
Just yesterday we wrote about how the Senate was, somewhat ridiculously, rapidly pushing forward plans on a vote for an amendment to the laws concerning what information the FBI can gather using National Security Letters (NSLs). Despite the fact that the big push for this bill began a few weeks ago, and the fact that it had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Orlando shooting, cynical Senators including John McCain and Mitch McConnell pointed to the shootings in Orlando as a reason that this expansion of FBI surveillance powers was needed. Of course, the reality is that it wasn't needed, and the law is really there to paper over the fact that the FBI has already been widely abusing its NSL powers to get information it's not allowed to request.
After a vocal debate this morning, the measure (somewhat surprisingly) failed to pass, but by just two votes. It need 60 votes to move forward (it was a vote for "cloture" on debate, which requires 60 votes), and it only received 58. But McConnell already made it clear that the amendment will be reconsidered soon, which means he's likely going to be pushing strongly to get those two remaining votes.
Two psychologists who helped the CIA develop and execute its now-defunct “enhanced interrogation” program partially admitted for the first time to roles in what is broadly acknowledged to have been torture.
In a 30-page court filing posted Tuesday evening, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen responded to nearly 200 allegations and legal justifications put forth by the American Civil Liberties Union in a complaint filed in October. The psychologists broadly denied allegations that “they committed torture, cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, non-consensual human experimentation and/or war crimes” — but admitted to a series of actions that can only be described as such.
“Defendants admit that over a period of time, they administered to [Abu] Zubaydah walling, facial and abdominal slaps, facial holds, sleep deprivation, and waterboarding, and placed Zubaydah in cramped confinement,” the filing says.
The American Psychological Association issued a lengthy report last year acknowledging members of the profession collaborated with the CIA and Pentagon on the torture program, and apologized. But until now, no psychologist has ever been called to account in court.
Politicians with the conservative Swiss People’s Party believe school authorities in Basel have caved to religious minorities in their decision to take pork off the school lunch menu in the coming school year.
Beware “digital protectionism.” That was one of the key messages of United States Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, speaking at the official opening of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Ministerial on the digital economy in Cancun, Mexico.
One week after a federal court upheld the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark net neutrality policy, emboldened FCC officials are moving to advance an ambitious set of reforms that are already generating static from the broadband industry and its political allies.
The decade-long battle over net neutrality, the principle that all content on the internet should be equally accessible to consumers, is not over. Industry giant AT&T has said it plans to join an appeal of the DC Circuit’s decision to the Supreme Court, and net neutrality foes in Congress continue to pursue their relentless campaign aimed at knee-capping the FCC’s consumer protections.
In 2009, the FCC funded a Harvard study that concluded (pdf) that open access policies (letting multiple ISPs come in and compete over a central, core network) resulted in lower broadband prices and better service. Of course when the FCC released its flimsy, politically timid "National Broadband Plan" back in 2010, this realization (not to mention an honest accounting of the sector's limited competition) was nowhere to be found. Since then, "open access" has become somewhat of a dirty word in telecom, and even companies like Google Fiber -- which originally promised to adhere to the concept on its own network before quietly backpedaling -- are eager to pretend the idea doesn't exist.
Another day, another rumor that Apple is going to ditch the headphone jack on the next iPhone in favor of sending out audio over Lightning. Or another phone beats Apple to the punch by ditching the headphone jack in favor of passing out audio over USB-C. What exciting times for phones! We’re so out of ideas that actively making them shittier and more user-hostile is the only innovation left.
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1. Digital audio means DRM audio
Oh look, I won this argument in one shot. For years the entertainment industry has decried what they call the "analog loophole" of headphone jacks, and now we’re making their dreams come true by closing it.
In its early days as a streaming service, Netflix wasn’t just the biggest and best company on the block – it was the only one. In those heady days, Netflix was able to charge low subscription rates and still provide a catalog that included just about everything.
As we’ve seen, that’s been changing. With new competition from companies like Hulu and Amazon, Netflix has seen streaming deals get pricier and customers get antsier. For a few years now, Netflix’s catalog has been shrinking while its prices have been rising.
So where’s a streaming company to find new profits in a tight market? According to some people, the answer is for Netflix to start showing ads, like competitor Hulu does. That would give the company new revenue streams without forcing them to raise prices.
Of course, there’s a group of stakeholders that’s still left unaccounted for here: Netflix’s customers. We decided to ask them about the issue. And, in a survey of more than 1,200 people on Reddit, we got some pretty clear answers.
As the rumors that the next iPhone will drop the 3.5mm headphone jack have intensified, I’ve been keeping tabs on the specific argument that Daring Fireball’s John Gruber made yesterday: that removing the headphone jack from the iPhone is the modern-day equivalent of removing the floppy drive from the iMac in the late '90s. It caused some pain at the time, but it was the way things were moving anyway and in the grand scheme of things it was a smart thing to do.
The people on the “get rid of the headphone jack” side of the debate normally choose some version of this position as the justification that the jack is “old” and so getting rid of it represents “progress.” And the fact of the matter is that Apple has been pretty good at this kind of progress over the years, picking up new technologies like USB and SSDs and dropping aging ones like the DVD drive well before those technologies had gone (or ceased to be) mainstream.
But the headphone jack is not the floppy drive. It’s not the 30-pin connector. It’s not the DVD drive. It’s not even USB Type-C. It’s not, in other words, directly comparable to all those other times when Apple has been “right” to remove or change something, both because of the ubiquity of the headphone jack and the quality of the supposed replacements.
We've seen plenty of strange, even laughable, trademark spats around here. What can get lost in the kind of ownership culture we've collectively created is that trademark is chiefly built around the concept of avoiding customer confusion. With that noble goal in mind, businesses are allowed to reserve the right to use specific marks that act as identifiers for their brands. One of the tests that's commonly referenced to determine whether there is the potential for customer confusion is: would a moron in a hurry be confused by a given use between two competing companies?
Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde is firing back at several major record labels, demanding compensation for damaging his name. Sunde is preparing a lawsuit against the music labels, who were recently awarded damages for his involvement with the notorious pirate site.