How closely is that followed today? Relatively well, so far as using text stream goes. A majority of Linux programs continue to use plain text configuration files, which means that users can easily edit them, using the text editor of their choice.
However, there are a few exceptions. GRUB 2, for example, discourages manual editing, automating new entries after a new kernel or operating system is added. Similarly, Systemd uses binary files for its logs, while KDE's Akonadi, by making use of a database, ensures that any failure will be catastrophic, and unrepairable manually.
Such changes are usually made in the name of efficiency. All too often, however, the efficiency is gained by interfering with the do-it-yourself ethos that should almost be a fourth pillar of the Unix Philosophy.
The Linux world offers an incredible range of free and open source tools to do everything you can think of and lots of things you probably haven’t ever thought of. In this roundup we highlight seven command line utilities you probably haven’t run into before and we’ve got everything from monitoring file system events to running re-attachable ssh sessions to printing banners.
Sales of Windows PCs fared better than Apple Macs during the third quarter this year.
Third-quarter PC shipments declined by 3.9 percent compared to the same quarter last year, but Mac shipments dropped by 13 percent. PC shipments totaled 68 million units, according to IDC.
The declines weren't as bad as expected, and were roughly 3.2 percent ahead of IDC's initial projections, the research firm said.
In the top five PC companies, fourth-placed Apple registered the largest decline, with the 13 percent drop in Mac shipments. Apple's Mac sales totaled 5 million units during the quarter, declining from 5.76 million units in the same quarter a year ago.
The state of the PC industry is not looking great. According to analyst firm Gartner, worldwide PC shipments fell 5.7 percent in the third quarter of 2016 to 68.9 million units. That marks the "the eighth consecutive quarter of PC shipment decline, the longest duration of decline in the history of the PC industry," Gartner writes in a press release issued today. The firm cites poor back-to-school sales and lowered demand in emerging markets. But the larger issue, as it has been for quite some time, is more existential than that.
GitLab CI is a lot like Travis CI, and a little less like Jenkins. When a commit is pushed to the repository in GitLab, and the branch contains a .gitlab-ci.yml file, a GitLab CI runner will check out the repository, and follow the instructions in that file. Useful for configuration syntax checks, unit tests, and puppet environment deployments.
It's very likely that the Linux 5.0 kernel will debut at some point in 2017. Linux creator Linus Torvalds hasn't yet officially set a date, but that's not quite how he works or how the Linux development process pushes releases.
In a Google Plus post Torvalds noted that after the Linux 4.8 release, we're now half-way between Linux 4.0 and 5.0.
Torvalds isn't just counting the release number here either. Linux 3.20 was renumbered as Linux 4.0 during it's development cycle in early 2015.
A quarter of a century is a long time in IT, but Linux, which has turned 25, is now at the heart of many hugely successful enterprises.
Martin Percival, senior solutions architect at Red Hat, said: “Linux was regarded as an alternative to proprietary Unix. But RHEL switched it to becoming an alternative to Windows Server.”
The AllSeen Alliance is merging with its erstwhile rival the Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF). The two efforts will now operate under the Open Connectivity Foundation as a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project.
Episode one seeks to explain the blockchain, the technology that allows bitcoins to be transferred between entities, as well as the motives behind its creators.
Last year, Fujitsu launched its first open source project, Open Service Catalog Manager (OSCM), for service providers, IT departments and end users to manage and track the cost of provisioning cloud-native applications.
Building off last week's XFS updates for Linux 4.9 is now a specific feature merge for this file-system: shared data extents.
Dave Chinner sent in the pull request today and he does expect that there will be some follow-up bug-fixes and clean-ups as a result of the big code change.
Linus Torvalds has never pulled any punches when it comes to sharing his opinions about everything from Linux kernel changes to computer processors. And in his most recent comments he’s made it abundantly clear that he favors x86 chips over ARM processors.
It's not as important as NVIDIA publishing new signed firmware images, but then again it's not every day we see NVIDIA developers contribute to the open-source Nouveau driver stack. Nevertheless, today a new set of patches were published for the Nouveau DRM driver.
Alexandre Courbot of NVIDIA who previously sent out the Nouveau patches for "Secure Boot" support sent out a big refactoring of the code today that touches nearly two thousand lines of code. This isn't to be confused with UEFI Secure Boot but is rather the code for properly loading NVIDIA's signed firmware blobs that are needed for hardware initialization since Maxwell.
Back in April I did tests showing how Intel's Clear Linux distribution showed much potential for HD/Iris Graphics performance, something that intrigued many Phoronix readers since Clear Linux would generally be seen as a workstation/cloud/container-optimized Linux distribution and something with not much emphasis on the desktop or gaming. Those earlier tests were with Ubuntu 16.04, bur with Ubuntu 16.10 coming out this week, here are some fresh tests of Clear Linux and Ubuntu Yakkety Yak on an Skylake HD Graphics system.
For curiosity sake, I ran some fresh Ubuntu 16.10 vs. Clear Linux (10820) benchmarks on the same Core i5 6600K system with an MSI Z170A GAMING PRO motherboard, 16GB DDR4-2133MHz memory, and 256GB TS256GSSD370S SSD. The mid-range i5-6600K is equipped with HD Graphics 530.
If you deal with a lot of documents every day storing them on different cloud storage services, like Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, and others, you might find ONLYOFFICE a very useful tool as it allows you to connect all your accounts, edit and even collaborate on your documents with others using the web-based document editors.
Paolo Bacchilega announced the other day, October 10, 2016, the release and immediate availability for download of the fourth maintenance update to the stable gThumb 3.4 series.
Today, October 11, 2016, GitHub officially announced the release of Atom 1.11, their popular, open-source, and cross-platform hackable text editor that you can use for programming and whatnot.
Wire is an open-source messaging service that offers fully encrypted calls, video and group chats — and now it’s available for Linux. Wire for Linux beta is available to download from today via the Wire website. It has the same feature set as Wire’s other desktops and mobile apps, including always-on end-to-end encryption.
VR support for Linux has been lacking and the communication around it has been pretty damn poor by Valve and HTC, but it seems this is about to change at SteamDevDays.
The HTC Vive was supposed to ship with Linux support but that hadn't materialized... But it looks like it now has. Valve is expected to show off a VR Linux demo during this week's Steam Dev Days event in Seattle.
Recursed [Steam, Official Site], is a new indie puzzle platformer that might just warp your mind a little bit. I've been playing it and don't let the graphical style fool you, it's quite good.
Dungeons & Robots [Steam, Official Site] is currently in Early Access and it looks like a lot of fun, the developers have recently given the game an official Linux build.
Earthlock: Festival of Magic [Steam, Official Site] is a rather great looking adventure RPG inspired by some older JRPGs, the developers recently opened an invite-only Linux test, but they have decided to open it up to everyone.
The developers at Unigine Corp are making public some screenshots and a brief video from their upcoming Superposition Benchmark that's powered by Unigine Engine 2.
The game got day-1 Linux support and I took a look to see what it was like.
For those who know me, they will know I love strategy and sandbox building games. Not only that but I love things based around space and other planets. So Earth Space Colonies [Steam, Official Site] deserved a try.
I like how for the most part the game tends to keep things simple, like actually creating your colonies. You select buildings from simple lists and place them down as you would in any other game of this type.
For people who wish to keep up with the latest developments in KDE software and the Plasma desktop, one way to get a vanilla, cutting edge preview of what is coming out of the KDE project is to run KDE neon. KDE neon is an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution and live DVD featuring the latest KDE Plasma desktop and other KDE community software. Besides the installable DVD image, the project provides a rapidly-evolving software repository with all the latest KDE software. There are two editions of KDE neon, a User edition with stable releases of KDE packages, and the Developer edition which offers cutting edge development packages fresh from the build server.
At the end of September I decided to experiment with the User edition of KDE neon. The download for the User edition is approximately 970MB in size. Booting from the downloaded ISO brings up the Plasma desktop. The wallpaper is a collection of blue, purple and black regions. The application menu, task switcher and system tray sit at the bottom of the screen. The theme is mostly a combination of light grey and dark grey. On the desktop we find a single icon for launching the distribution's system installer.
KDE neon uses the Ubiquity graphical system installer it inherits from Ubuntu. The installer asks us to select our preferred language from a list and then gives us the option of downloading third-party software such as media codecs and Flash. We can also choose to download software updates during the installation process. We are then walked through disk partitioning, selecting our time zone from a map of the world, confirming our keyboard's layout and creating a user account. The installation process is pleasantly straight forward and we can typically take the defaults offered on each page. When the installer finishes setting up our new operating system we can either return to the live desktop or reboot the computer.
Once installed, KDE neon boots to a graphical login screen. Plasma is the only login session available to us and we can sign into the account we created during the installation process. The Plasma desktop looks the same as it did during the live session, but there are no icons on the desktop. We are not greeted by any welcome screen and there are no notifications or other distractions.
Shortly after signing into the Plasma desktop an icon in the system tray subtly indicates there are software updates available to us. Clicking the icon opens a widget which indicates the number of waiting updates and 42 were available the first day I was using KDE neon. At the bottom of the widget is an Update button and clicking the button launches the Discover software manager.
Today, October 11, 2016, the KDE Project proudly announced the general availability of the first point release of the KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment, versioned 5.8.1.
I am please to inform that Qt 5.6.2 has been released today. This is the second patch release to the long-term supported Qt 5.6, and there will still be more patch releases to come. While a patch release does not bring new features, it contains security fixes, error corrections and general improvements.
The GNOME Project prepares to unleash the first of two point releases for their latest and most advanced GNOME 3 desktop environment, version 3.22.1, so they're currently updating various core components and applications.
GNOME 3.22 was officially unveiled last month, on September 21, 2016, and it brought numerous interesting new features and improvements. The first point release, GNOME 3.22.1, should improve your GNOME 3.22 experience, as well as to fix some of those annoying issues and annoyance that you've reported lately.
With GNOME/GTK+ 3.22 having been released at the end of September, developer focus is beginning to shift to GNOME 3.24 or in the case of GTK+ developers it's about GTK+ 4.0 development per the toolkit's new development process.
GTK+ 4.0 was opened for development in Git a few days ago. While not any exciting changes have yet landed in Git master, this branch is prepping the removal of GTK 3.x deprecated APIs and this branch will remove the deprecated style API.
We bet that, by now, all of you know Solus is a rolling release operating system, right? But even rolling OSes get new, updated ISO images (installation mediums) from time to time for those who want to install the distro for the first time, or reinstall, right?
Today, October 12, 2016, Softpedia was informed by Robert Dohnert, CEO of Black Lab Software about some important changes made to the Black Lab Linux and netOS projects.
Linux giant Red Hat wants to be a cloud power, but it's not giving up on its open-source roots. So, it should come as no surprise that it's open-sourcing its Ansible DevOps program's Galaxy code repository.
Cloud hosting firms, system integrators and managed service providers get extra support for Red Hat products
Arrow has joined the Red Hat Certified Cloud and Service Provider programme as a distributor, opening up Red Hat’s hybrid cloud solutions to its channel customers in the UK.
In my experience, battery life on laptops has been getting better all the time with Linux/Fedora. However, there’s a few things you can do if you need just a bit more battery life than you are getting with default settings.
First let me say that in the ideal world you wouldn’t have to do any of this. Things should just work and give you the best battery savings they can. Sadly, thats not fully the case (yet), so sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands.
We arrived at the our Hotel around 1PM on Friday. After Checking in we headed over to find the new site in the Hyatt Regency Hotel. The first things we noticed was the Columbus Convention Center is doing a major renovation and one of those renovations was they removed the escalators from the food court to the second floor. At first we thought this may be a issue to move the event stuff in but there was an elevator close by. Also no signage for OLF in the Food Court area. After getting off the elevator on the second floor there was a sign pointing around the corner to the Ohio Linuxfest registration table. This year Ohio Linuxfest charged $10 for general attendees (free to students with student ID). We checked in and out our badges (yes insert favorite Blazings Saddles joke here). walked down to the Vendor Expo hall which this year had a grand total of 28 exhibitors. (see https://ohiolinux.org/expo-map/ for vendor lists). While the Expo was setup ready for Vendors to move in but the Vendor Expo was not open to the public on Friday.
Over the past year, I’ve met incredible people from around the world doing great things in their local communities. At my university, the Women in Computing @ RIT program provides networking for students with faculty, staff, and alumni. They also help advance women in computing through community outreach. I’ve also come into contact with two other international tech communities with interesting stories of their own. With the help of the WiC events committee, we are working on organizing a virtual meetup with WiC from New York, Open Labs Albania, and FOSS Wave from India to introduce each other, share experiences, and more.
Today, October 11, 2016, Fedora Project released of the Beta milestone of the upcoming Fedora 25 Linux operating system, due for release in mid-November.
Fedora is the operating system of choice of Linux founder Linus Torvalds -- that says a lot. Despite the fact that he uses a Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop that ships pre-loaded with Ubuntu, it is unlikely that he kept that OS on it. While there is nothing wrong with Canonical's offering, Fedora is a very wise choice for those who want a no-nonsense Linux distro with a focus on free and open source software.
Today, Fedora 25 Beta becomes available for download. There are many things to get excited about, such as the implementation of Wayland and the pre-release 3.22 version of the GNOME desktop environment.
The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 25 Beta, the next big step on our journey to the exciting Fedora 25 release in November.
Fedora 25 Beta was released today for early testers bringing Wayland by default and new server SELinux troubleshooter. Phoronix is already looking ahead to Fedora 26. Elsewhere, HandyLinux has decided to drop its English support and Bruce Byfield asked if Linux has lost the Unix philosophy.
While Fedora 25 isn't even being released until mid-November, with now being past the change completion deadline for F25 and Rawhide continuing to move along, early Fedora 26 features are beginning to be talked about.
Some of the latest self-contained proposals for Fedora 26 include PHP 7.1 and BIND 9.11. Given their routine package updates and non-controversial components, they should be approved easily by FESCo. PHP 7.1 will be released before 2016 is through and is one of the updates I'm looking forward to.
Fedora used to be just for cutting-edge desktop users and programmers. Today, it's still for them, with the long, long delayed release of the Wayland display server, but it's also for cloud builders.
The Fedora QA team is organizing a Fedora 25 Workstation Wayland Test Day for tomorrow, 13 October. This is to find any last-minute bugs with next month's Fedora 25 Workstation release still set to utilize this next-gen successor to X11 by default.
After reflecting on that conversation with my friends, I've realized that anyone can be an open leader. Just remember that these leaders don't necessarily stand out in a crowd. More often than not, they are part of the communities they serve—empowering and inspiring others with their actions. Being an open leader doesn't necessarily require any form of power or status. Nor do you need to be especially charismatic, as generations of built-up knowledge about leadership would seem to suggest.
HandyLinux is a Debian based distribution. It is mainly concentrated on beginners and user who prefer easy way to use Linux. It uses Xfce desktop environment, so it is even compatible with older hardware. But there is a sad news for people who prefer English language, HandyLinux team decided to stop English translations in future updates.
Six months in between releases is just too short of a period for meaningful, well-tested releases. As soon as issues are polished in one edition with a cumulative fix edition, there's a new version of Ubuntu and the headless chicken race starts again. We will soon have 16.10, and it will most likely suck, because there will be a million little problems that could not have been fully checked in time, but schedule be schedule, release we must. Woe any delays!
Ubuntu 16.04.1 Xenial Xerus is a better release than the GA flop, but it is still not good enough to recommend. The networking stack sucks more than what Trusty does, and overall, it is slower, less responsive, less mature, less complete. It is also not as good as Fedora, and there are some big regressions slash sad neglect in the software stack that tells me the whole idea of the Linux desktop is slowly dying. People did not like the Amazon store and the payware options in USC, but it was a first sane step to offering a mature version of Ubuntu to serious people. Alas, zealots shot it down, because they value pride over progress. And now what is left is a semi-functional distro that is a pale shadow of its former self.
So yes, it works better than before. 6/10 or so. Not even remotely close to the glory of the Trusty release, which heaped accolade upon accolade, accomplishment after another. Trusty just did everything. It was and still is awesome. Xerus is just weak. And even the post-fiasco release is still somewhat lame. Not worth upgrading. Xenial is in denial. I shall now patiently wait to see what doom the Yakety Sax is going to bring us. Ought to happen very very soon, and the timing of this article couldn't have been any more perfect. Stay tuned.
Today, October 11, 2016, System76, a US-based computer manufacturer specializing in the distribution of notebooks, desktop and server computers powered by the Ubuntu Linux operating system, launch a new model of their famous Lemur laptop.
If you're currently enjoying your excellent Lemur laptop from System76, you should know that a better version is now available, featuring 7th generation Intel i3-7100U or i7-7500U Kaby Lake processors that provide stunning performance and much faster Intel HD 620 graphics. The new Lemur laptop also features up to 32 GB of dual-channel DDR4 RAM.
Dell recently updated its XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop with Kaby Lake processors. While that company's laptop is beautiful, it is also very expensive. For developers and home users looking for a solid laptop running Ubuntu Linux, System76's 'Lemur' has historically been a great value. Not only is the affordable machine both powerful and well supported, but it is built like a tank too.
Today, System76 updates the aforementioned Lemur with Kaby Lake processors. While Dell's XPS 13 starts at $949, the Lemur begins at a much more reasonable $649.
That starting price gets you a solid machine. It has a Core i3-7100U processor, 4GB of RAM and a 500GB HDD. If you want more power, storage, or memory, you can configure to your heart's content. Not everyone needs the most hardcore specifications and unlike Dell's machine, the Lemur will better meet the needs of those on a budget.
System76 said on Tuesday that it has updated its Lemur-branded laptop with Intel’s new seventh-generation “Kaby Lake” processors. This laptop specifically ships with Ubuntu 16.04.01 LTS (64-bit) installed, thus offering a cheaper price point than an identical solution packing Windows 10. Pricing for the Lemur starts at $700.
According to the product page, this laptop provides five areas that can be configured: processor, memory, operating system drive, additional storage, and the type of Wireless AC connectivity. On the processor front, there are only two choices: the Intel Core i3-7100U (default) and the Intel Core i7-7500U (an added $160).
It’s Ubuntu 16.10 release week, which means you might be feeling a little nostalgic for releases past.
You could take a look back at every Ubuntu default wallpaper, from the very first release to this week’s pending one, or you could set every Ubuntu wallpaper as your desktop background.
Intel began sampling the Altera Stratix 10, a 14nm SoC that combines 4x Cortex-A53 cores with a Stratix V level FPGA, while using 70 percent less power.
Altera first announced the Stratix 10 SX back in 2013, but the SoC has been delayed, and has only begun sampling now. Along with the challenge of building the first 14nm FPGA, fabricated with Intel’s 14nm 3D Tri-Gate process, the rollout was also likely set back due to Intel’s recent acquisition of the chipmaker. Intel now says the SoC demonstrates “the most significant FPGA innovations in over a decade.”
At 4:30 in the afternoon on November 15, 1989, an F4 tornado ripped through Huntsville, Alabama killing 21 people. It could have been much worse save for the quick thinking of the people running the after-school program at Jones Valley Elementary. They took the children under the stairs as soon as the power went out. They survived, though the top floor was torn from the building. A mother out front who had come to pick up her child was among the 21 casualties.
That was my brother's school. My church and several others were destroyed. My route to school changed for months while they rebuilt and cleared the area. These are the sorts of stories you collect living in the #1 place for tornadoes per capita. And it is these stories that instill a healthy respect for tornadoes, and heeding tornado warnings.
Before going for Linaro Connect I had a plan to look at all those 96boards devices and write some complains/opinions about them. But it would be like shooting fish in a barrel so I decided against. But there were some interesting pieces of hardware there.
In December 2015 I saw the kickstarter for the Pine64. The project seemed to have a viable hardware design and after my experience with the hikey I decided it could not be a great deal worse.
The latest Raspberry Pi graphics driver hacking by Eric Anholt of Broadcom has been working to support QPU shaders by this open-source driver stack. QPUs are the shader core of the graphics hardware found in the Raspberry Pi SoC, but come up short of supporting OpenCL or OpenGL compute shaders.
We’ve had quite a few good games coming through to the Tizen Store lately and the latest addition isn’t any different. The new racing game is called Indian Racing League, brought to you by Games2Win, and promises to be one of the best racing games out there!
Are you ready to drive heavy trucks? If you’re not then you can try getting yourself prepared by driving playing the game Truck Racing 3D! Racing Games Saga have now ported over their best truck racing game “Truck Racing 3D” to the Tizen store. Truck Racing 3D has already been available in the Play Store and has achieved over 50,000 downloads there, which is quite a good feat.
Android alternative Cyanogen looks to have given up on trying to sell a full mobile operating system.
The shine has gone off the outfit of late, and in July, it reportedly axed 30 staffers. While there's a core of users who stick with the CyanogenMod code that's the genesis of the company, mobe-makers taking Cyanogen licenses are in short supply (the company claims 20 phones and millions of customers; IDC says nearly 345 million smartphones shipped in 2015).
Developers can get their hands on Android 7.1 by the end of the month, Google has said.
And almost all Nexus owners will have it implanted in their gadgets by the end of the year, albeit with some reservations.
The next chewy chunk of Nougat includes support for better storage management and telephony software, App shortcut APIs to build single click links directly into core directories, and UI changes to build cuddlier and more numerous graphics into the background. There’s also support for Google’s Daydream VR system, for the few phones that can handle it.
Google has begun sharing early details about the forthcoming Android 7.1 Nougat update.
Oculus, the Facebook-owned company that powers the software inside Samsung's virtual reality ambitions (as well as the Oculus Rift headset, sold separately), has disabled its app from working with the Galaxy Note 7 after a number of replacement phones reportedly caught fire over the weekend.
Nokia is all set to launch two new Android smartphones later this year. Nokia’s non-competitive deal with Microsoft ends this year, and the company has already agreed to bring back its brand in collaboration with HMD global. If rumours are anything to go by, Nokia will launch two new smartphones with flagship specifications and a design that we have come to associate with Nokia brand.
The leaked images earlier hinted at Nokia announcing smartphones with Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon 820 processor and colourful polycarbonate shells like Lumia smartphones launched before. HMD Global, Nokia’s contractor licensing the brand, has already promised to deliver that trademark build quality and Nokia-esque design.
Chinese giant Tencent is dipping a toe into the open-source world, with its own hot-patch system for Android apps.
As it notes at its newish GitHub repo, its Tinker hotfix framework “supports dex, library and resources update” without the user having to restart the app.
It's targeted at app developers: they add the plugin to the build environment for a project's root; edit the build.gradle for the project; make some mods to the apps' subclasses, and make the application itself a subclass of TinkerApplication.
Cyanogen — the company that builds custom versions of Android (including Microsoft software) for manufactures — is shaking itself up. It announced today that it has a new CEO, Lior Tal, and a new strategy. It’s a weird one: instead of trying to get OEMs to license its entire OS, it’s breaking its features up into “Mods” that can be applied to any core Android install. So manufacturers will be able to pick and choose what features they want to include.
It was back in September when the first leaks showed that HTC is working on a new device called Bolt. Noted tipster Evan Blass leaked renders of the device (in silver colour). The phone is reportedly codenamed Acadia, and is expected to be launched sometime in October. Now a new report suggests HTC Bolt will run the latest Android Nougat 7.0 out of the box.
The Nubia Z11 may not have the most eye catching or original design, but it’s still a good looking phone that features a solid build quality. The device basically features a rectangular slab design, with a full metal unibody construction that puts its build quality at par with a lot of current generation flagships.
The rounded corners and slight tapers around the back and sides make it more comfortable to hold, but because the metal body doesn’t have any sharp or flat edges to help with the grip, the phone can be a little slippery and difficult to hold onto at times.
What is the number one factor that software developers consider when choosing which open source software packages to use? A recent survey conducted by Rogue Wave Software says support. What is the second most important factor? Who will carry the burden of providing that support.
Between developers, a dedicated internal open source software (OSS) support team, an internal IT department, and contractors (or an OSS support vendor) an unsurprising 67% of developers in the survey said they are expected to be responsible for support. We also analyzed 34,000 internal support requests to glean additional insights.
Some time ago the MOD Duo jumped onto my radar. In a nutshell, it is a guitar stomp box that comes loaded with different effects and sounds. Instead of buying the multitude of guitar pedals that many musicians string together in complex, if somewhat beautiful ways, the MOD Duo negates all that. It is a single box and what's more, it is powered by open source.
I recently wrote an article featuring 25 DevOps vendors worth watching. However, in the world of DevOps, there are an awful lot of good tools that don't really have a vendor attached, and I thought it was time to give the open source tools their due.
While I wrote that there are tools that don't have vendors, there are vendors that are attached to some of these open source tools. Those vendors provide development support, along with, in some cases, customer support and even proprietary versions of some of the tools that exist alongside their open source cousins. As long as there was an open source version that wasn't "crippleware," it was eligible for the cut.
With 25 billion new devices set to hit the Internet by 2025, the need for a better worldwide cryptosystem for securing information is paramount. That’s why the Apache Milagro project is currently incubating at the Apache Software Foundation. It’s a collaboration between MIRACL and Nippon Telegram and Telegraph (NTT), and Brian Spector, MIRACL CEO and Co-Founder, discussed the project in his keynote at ApacheCon in May.
Spector said the project was born in a bar on the back of a napkin after a brainstorm about how one would rebuild Internet security from the ground up. That sounds like a lot of work, but Spector believes it's absolutely necessary: the future of the Web is going to be very different from the past.
The new method, now used by 5 soil erosion specialists, is based on well-known open source Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tools, including the data viewing tool QGis and the Geospatial Data Abstraction Library. "QGis is the perfect platform for building GIS applications", Huybrechts said at the FOSS4G 2016 conference in Bonn last August. "It’s open source, it is supported by a great community and it comes with a collection of tools and toolkits."
Germany's Federal Office for Radiation Protection (Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz, BfS) is taking steps to rid itself of IT vendor lock-in. Within the next few years, it plans to have replaced its legacy proprietary analysis and reporting tools by modern, open source-based tools. Moreover, the new system, which is being tested, will improve the geographic information capabilities, and will lower costs significantly.
The radiation protection agency was in set up in 1989, three years after the catastrophic nuclear accident in Chernobyl. Its main task is to protect population and environment from damages due to radiation.
To help with decision-making and with generating of reports, the BfS’ crisis unit has for years been using a customised, proprietary software solution. This ‘Integrated Measuring and Information System’ (IMIS) lets BfS make sense of the data generated by some 1800 radiation measuring stations across the country. IMIS continuously monitors the environment and is able to detect small changes in radioactivity. Its results are merged, evaluated, refined and presented in well-arranged documents.
After a long and painful illness, a battle with cancer over the last six years, my brother has died in Brussels, aged only 53.
My love for him has always been the adoring, muted kind that looked up to the light he shone, that basked in his enthusiasm and tried, and failed, to keep up with the thousand-and-one ideas he gave voice and form to. Many of his passions were beyond my comprehension but very real, nevertheless. As a computer programmer, writer of internet protocols and founder of on-line communities, his interests went way over my head. As an author, latterly, we connected and I was able to collaborate with him on one of his books – The Psychopath Code – an involvement for which I am profoundly grateful: Not only has this particular book helped me to navigate a few tricky moments in my own life, but the understanding we shared was like coming home.
I can’t begin to do justice to my brother’s legacy as a professional innovator, thinker, and networker. Pieter was one of these rare people totally unafraid to take chances, to think not just outside the box but into the next universe. How he maintained his enthusiasm and energy, where his inspiration came from, I shall not know in this lifetime.
His death last Tuesday has opened up a hole in my life, a tear in the fabric of my normal. Poignantly – and painfully – it is only as his legacy becomes clearer that I notice the loss of his quiet, determined contribution in my life. Always, in the background, he encouraged me, supporting my modest hopes for an ordinary life: my ambitions to study, to write, to marry and have a child. In all these attempts he was unwaveringly supportive, while seeking so little from me in return. Of course, elder brothers are looked up to, and often expected to take the lead. But lately, in these last few years, while he faced pain and uncertainty – about which he has written so candidly on his blog – while he battled fear and the shadows of disappointment with his trademark wry humour, he faced these challenges fearlessly and with a fiery determination that is frankly awe-inspiring.
Software AG (Frankfurt TecDAX: SOW) has significantly expanded the capabilities of its Apama Community Edition with a new Internet of Things (IoT) Analytics Kit, provided free of charge as Open Source Software under the Apache License, v2.0, along with the ability to run on Raspberry Pi. A different version of Apama Community Edition is also now available as a re-distributable runtime.
PhatWare Corporation, a leading professional software and application developer, is pleased to announce that the entire source code of its award-winning, multilingual WritePad handwriting recognition engine is now available under GPL v.3 license.
The Google Open Source Programs Office has announced Google Code-in 2016 and Google Summer of Code 2017. Google Code-in is for students from 13-17 years of age who would like to explore open source. "Students will find opportunities to learn and get hands on experience with tasks from a range of categories. This structure allows students to stretch themselves as they take on increasingly more challenging tasks." Students will begin on November 28.
Each year, Mozilla hosts a global celebration to inspire learning and making online. Individuals from around the world are invited. It’s an opportunity for artists to connect with educators; for activists to trade ideas with coders; and for entrepreneurs to chat with makers.
This year, we’re coming together with that same spirit, and also with a mission: To challenge outdated copyright laws in the European Union. EU copyright laws are at odds with learning and making online. Their restrictive nature undermines creativity, imagination, and free expression across the continent. Mozilla’s Denelle Dixon-Thayer wrote about the details in her recent blog post.
What percentage of players in the telecom industry now consider the OpenStack cloud platform to be essential or important to their success? According to a survey commissioned by the OpenStack Foundation, a whopping 85.8 percent of them do. That is more hard evidence that we are seeing actual deployments take the place of evaluation when it comes to OpenStack in the enterprise.
The survey was executed by Heavy Reading and received 113 responses from representatives of telecom companies around the world: 54 percent from the US, 14.2 percent from Europe, 11.5 percent from the Asia Pacific region, 8.9 percent each from Central/South America and Canada; and 2.7 percent from the Middle East. Here are more of the key findings.
Within the OpenStack community, there are countless people conducting tests, maintaining infrastructure, writing documentation, organizing community events, providing feedback, helping with project promotion, and countless other roles that may or may not show up under the traditional list of contributors. Since a fundamental tenant of OpenStack is that much of the project's governance comes from its active contributors, finding a way to expand the types of contributions that are "officially" recognized is an important step in bringing everyone's voice to the table.
Alexandra Settle, an information developer at Rackspace, will be speaking at OpenStack Summit in Barcelona. Alexandra is a core reviewer for OpenStack manuals, also working on the OpenStack Ansible and Swift project documentation, and serves as a mentor in documentation for the Outreachy project. She's been interested in information technology since high school and is a fan of Fedora Linux. She began her career as an intern at Red Hat and after spending years using Windows machines, and love the ease of use and functionality that came with using Linux.
Well, I've built and led developer communities for 10+ years at Sun, Oracle, and Red Hat, so I have experience in leading crossfunctional teams to develop and execute strategy, planning, and execution of content, and marketing campaigns and programs. I've also led engineering teams at Sun, and I’m a founding member of the Java EE team.
At Couchbase, a developer advocate helps developers become effective users of a technology, product, API, or platform. This can be done by sharing knowledge about the product using the medium where developers typically hangout. Some of the more common channels include blogs, articles, webinars, and presentations at conferences and meetups. Answering questions on forums and Stack Overflow, conversations on social media, and seeking contributors for open source projects are some other typical activities that a developer advocate performs on a regular basis.
Facebook, working with Exponent, Google, and Tilde, has released software to improve the JavaScript development experience, which can use all the help it can get.
Yarn, introduced on Tuesday under a BSD license and without the patent clause that terminates Facebook's React license for those involved in patent litigation against the company, is an alternative npm client. It's not to be confused with Apache Hadoop YARN (Yet Another Resource Negotiator), which is cluster management software.
October 10, 2016, Boulder, CO. – The FreeBSD Project, in conjunction with the FreeBSD Foundation, is pleased to announce the release of the much anticipated FreeBSD 11.0. The latest release continues to pioneer the field of copyfree-licensed, open source operating systems by including new architecture support, performance improvements, toolchain enhancements and support for contemporary wireless chipsets. The new features and improvements bring about an even more robust operating system that both companies and end users alike benefit greatly from using.
After nearly three years of development, FreeBSD 11.0 was officially released on October 10. The FreeBSD 11.0 release follows the FreeBSD 10.0 update that debuted in January 2014.
FreeBSD 11.0 was also released today for those who think Linux is just too dang easy. The announcement said this is the first release in the stable 11.0 branch. Some of the listed highlights include:
* OpenSSH DSA key generation has been disabled by default. * Wireless support for 802.11n has been added * ifconfig(8) utility will set the default regulatory domain to FCC on wireless interfaces * Up to 40% improvement in performance * Support for the AArch64 (arm64) and RISC-V architectures * Native graphics support has been added to the bhyve(8) hypervisor * Support for Raspberry Pi, Raspberry Pi 2 and Beaglebone Black peripherals
Version 11 also features GNOME 3.18.4, LibreOffice 5.0.6, NVIDIA 346.96, Xorg X Server 1.17.4, GCC 4.8.5, GIMP 2.8.1.8, and Firefox 47.0.1. See the release announcement for download information.
FreeBSD,a well known and vastly used operating system,based on the BSD version of UNIX got release announcement of FreeBSD 11.0.With numerous of changes and improvements in the previously released development releases,now finally the finally release is here with first stable release, FreeBSD 11.0.
Amid rising political tensions with the U.S., Russia is planning to further lower its usage of licensed software from IT giants like International Business Machines Corp IBM , Microsoft Corporation MSFT , SAP AG SAP and Oracle Corporation ORCL .
Per Bloomberg, "The State Duma, Russia's lower house of parliament, is drafting a bill to restrict government agencies from buying licensed software, giving preference to open-source software."
The proposed law is an addition to an already existing federal law that came into effect on Jan 1, 2016, which restricts the use of foreign software in the public sector, if there is a domestic version available.
The Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) has posted a Malaria Box, containing over 400 compounds that might be effective against malaria to almost 200 research groups in two years. It’s an open science project, because the only stipulation is that information is deposited in the public domain (and therefore cannot be patented).
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK)’s Open Lab project, the Tres Cantos Medicines Development Campus near Madrid, Spain, enables visiting scientists to use GSK’s high-tech facilities to research neglected diseases such as malaria and TB.
Even Bill Gates has tweeted that open-source collaboration between scientists could become a drug discovery catalyst.
Now, one scientist is embarking upon a virtual pharmaceutical company that will develop a paediatric cancer drug in the open.
If you are designing life-saving tech to help refugees living in refugee camps, you’re probably not going to design a proprietary product, because doing so would be tantamount to signing the death warrant of a percentage of the refugee camp residents. Open source is how the most number of refugees can be helped. In that vein, learn about an initiative to design a low-cost. open source arsenic detector for use in ensuring safe drinking water in refugee camps.
Depending on who you ask, right now JavaScript is either turning into a modern, reliable language, or a bloated, overly complex dependency hell. Or maybe both?
What's more, there's just so many options: Do you use React or Angular 2? Do you really need Webpack? And what's this month's recommended way of dealing with CSS?
Javascript is a weird and wonderful language that lets us write some crazy code that's still valid. It tries to help us out by converting things to particular types based on how we treat them.
If we add a string to something, it'll assume we want it in text form, so it'll convert it to a string for us.
If we add a plus or minus prefix to something, it'll assume we want its numerical representation, and will convert the string to a number for us, if possible.
remctl is a client and server that forms a very simple remote RPC system, normally authenticated with Kerberos, although including a remctl-shell variant that works over ssh.
This will help build process to avoid call valac in order to generate C source code, VAPI and GIR files from your Vala sources.
Because C source is distributed with a release’s tarball, any Vala project could be binary reproducible from sources.
In order to produce development packages, you should distribute VAPI and GIR files, along with .h ones. They should be included in your tarball, to avoid valac produce them.
Fuck your crazy work hours. Nobody gives a fuck that Elon musk is working 100 hours a week, and Marissa Mayer pulling it to 130 hour work week while still breastfeeding her newborns. You’re not Elon Musk , you ain’t Marissa Mayer, you’re not going to get to space, and you won’t build the next Space X. Do me a favor, put your fucking Mac away and go play with your kids.
[...]
Fuck you startups with your extravagant parties and crazy off-site events that cost way too much money, you’re supposed to buy some fucking servers instead! Fuck spending money on ping pong tables that no one ever uses, fucking music rooms, nap rooms, meditation rooms, stress-free rooms, and pilates rooms. Fuck your ridiculous incentives that you give, too. Fuck your unlimited vacation policy, it’s fucking bullshit. We all know that your employees will take less time off.
Software architecture needs to be documented. There are plenty of fancy templates, notations, and tools for this. But I’ve come to prefer PowerPoint with no backing template. I’m talking good old white-background slides. These are way easier to create than actual text documents. There are no messy worries over complete sentences. Freedom from grammatical tyranny! For a technical audience, concision and lack of boilerplate is a good thing. A nice mix of text, tables and diagrams gets the point across just fine. As a plus, this is naturally presentableââ¬Å —ââ¬Å you don’t need a separate deck to describe your architecture when the deck is the reference document to begin with. As the architecture evolves, the slides evolve.
Vincent Wang needed new jeans and a coat just before classes began this semester at the University of California, Davis, where he studies nutrition. Rather than trek several miles off campus to the nearest Target or Walmart, he ordered the clothes from Amazon.com Inc. and retrieved them from new Amazon pickup lockers right next to the university store that sells Aggies T-shirts and hoodies.
Wang, 21, is one of millions of students who have taken advantage of Amazon Prime Student, which offers all the benefits of a regular Prime membership -- quick delivery, music and video streaming and free online photo storage -- for $50 a year, half the regular price. Amazon’s strategy echoes the one used for decades on college campuses by the credit card companies: snag young consumers early and, with artful promotions, try to make them loyal for life.
One of my earliest memories is sitting on my grandfather's shoulders, waving a flag as our astronauts returned to Hawaii. This was years before we'd set foot on the moon. Decades before we'd land a rover on Mars. A generation before photos from the International Space Station would show up in our social media feeds. I still have the same sense of wonder about our space program that I did as a child. It represents an essential part of our character -- curiosity and exploration, innovation and ingenuity, pushing the boundaries of what's possible and doing it before anybody else. The space race we won not only contributed immeasurably important technological and medical advances, but it also inspired a new generation of scientists and engineers with the right stuff to keep America on the cutting edge.
Peres' vision stands in stark contrast to Lord Jonathan Sacks' dystopian commentary calling computers and radical Islamists the "two dangers" of this century, defeated only by "an insistence on the dignity of the human person and the sanctity of human life."
On the contrary, I believe innovation and technology will help defeat terrorists and sustain and enhance human life.
Innovation and technology have extended our lives – most children born in the early 1900s didn't live past the age of 50, but the average U.S. lifespan is now almost 79 years. Artificial intelligence is helping doctors make complex diagnoses. 3D printing is producing low-cost prosthetics for children and those who otherwise couldn't afford care. Drones are delivering blood and emergency medicine in developing countries. The rabbi should explain his point that "Every new technology…benefits the few at the cost of the many" to the paraplegic patients learning how to walk thanks to virtual reality.
While Sacks decries the idea of self-driving cars, this innovation can save tens of thousands of lives a year in the U.S. alone. More than 35,000 people died on our roads last year, and the federal government estimates over 90 percent of crashes are caused by human error. Eliminating the great majority of automobile deaths and serious injuries would certainly meet Sacks' goal of preserving "the sanctity of human life."
One year since a public health emergency was declared in Flint due to lead-contaminated water, the struggle continues for residents of the hard-hit city. The most recent issue they’re facing is an outbreak of shigellosis, a highly contagious bacterial infection that is transmitted through the accidental ingestion of infected fecal material and causes diarrhea, fever, and abdominal pain.
Matt Karwowski, a medical epidemiologist with the CDC, says, “There is definitely some question about whether changes in hand-washing and hygiene practices may be playing a role. People in Flint have been concerned about the safety of their water supply, and that may be playing a role in their hygiene practices.”
Techdirt has written a number of stories about how Big Pharma is never content with the patent bargain -- that, in return for a time-limited, government-enforced intellectual monopoly, products will afterwards enter the public domain. Instead, companies have come up with various schemes to extend the life of that monopoly -- and thus to cheat the public of the low-cost generic versions of the drug in question that should have appeared. The Daily Beast points to an antitrust lawsuit brought by 35 states and the District of Columbia against the makers of Suboxone, a prescription drug used to treat opioid addiction, over the alleged use of one such scheme, known as "product hopping".
When a sleepy Marc Dubois walked into the cockpit of his own aeroplane, he was confronted with a scene of confusion. The plane was shaking so violently that it was hard to read the instruments. An alarm was alternating between a chirruping trill and an automated voice: “STALL STALL STALL.” His junior co-pilots were at the controls. In a calm tone, Captain Dubois asked: “What’s happening?”
Co-pilot David Robert’s answer was less calm. “We completely lost control of the aeroplane, and we don’t understand anything! We tried everything!”
The crew were, in fact, in control of the aeroplane. One simple course of action could have ended the crisis they were facing, and they had not tried it. But David Robert was right on one count: he didn’t understand what was happening.
As William Langewiesche, a writer and professional pilot, described in an article for Vanity Fair in October 2014, Air France Flight 447 had begun straightforwardly enough – an on-time take-off from Rio de Janeiro at 7.29pm on 31 May 2009, bound for Paris. With hindsight, the three pilots had their vulnerabilities. Pierre-Cédric Bonin, 32, was young and inexperienced. David Robert, 37, had more experience but he had recently become an Air France manager and no longer flew full-time. Captain Marc Dubois, 58, had experience aplenty but he had been touring Rio with an off-duty flight attendant. It was later reported that he had only had an hour’s sleep.
Fortunately, given these potential fragilities, the crew were in charge of one of the most advanced planes in the world, an Airbus 330, legendarily smooth and easy to fly. Like any other modern aircraft, the A330 has an autopilot to keep the plane flying on a programmed route, but it also has a much more sophisticated automation system called fly-by-wire. A traditional aeroplane gives the pilot direct control of the flaps on the plane – its rudder, elevators and ailerons. This means the pilot has plenty of latitude to make mistakes. Fly-by-wire is smoother and safer. It inserts itself between the pilot, with all his or her faults, and the plane’s mechanics. A tactful translator between human and machine, it observes the pilot tugging on the controls, figures out how the pilot wanted the plane to move and executes that manoeuvre perfectly. It will turn a clumsy movement into a graceful one.
Today, October 11, 2016, Canonical published several security advisories to inform Ubuntu users about new Linux kernel updates for their supported operating systems.
Four new kernel vulnerabilities are affecting Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trusty Tahr) or later versions, and three the Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) series of operating systems. They are also affecting the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS for Raspberry Pi 2 kernel.
The first security flaw is an unbounded recursion in Linux kernel's VLAN and TEB Generic Receive Offload (GRO) processing implementations, which could have allowed a remote attacker to crash the system through a denial of service or cause a stack corruption. It was discovered by Vladimír Beneš and affects Ubuntu 16.04 and 14.04.
Linux users should beware of a recently discovered systemd vulnerability that could shut down a system using a command short enough to send in a tweet and Ubuntu users should update to new Linux kernel patches affecting supported operating systems.
SSLMate founder and Linux administrator Andrew Ayer spotted the bug which has the potential to kill a number of critical commands while making others unstable, according to Betanews.
Adobe and Microsoft today each issued updates to fix critical security flaws in their products. Adobe’s got fixes for Acrobat and Flash Player ready. Microsoft’s patch bundle for October includes fixes for at least five separate “zero-day” vulnerabilities — dangerous flaws that attackers were already exploiting prior to today’s patch release. Also notable this month is that Microsoft is changing how it deploys security updates, removing the ability for Windows users to pick and choose which individual patches to install.
An interesting example of knowing what is actually important, such as being ‘secure’ does not mean pulling up drawbridges and never talking. It does seem possible that the MoD has lesson it can teach industry in building security defences in depth, using a wide range of tools, that then map onto the future world of mobile and cloud infrastructures.
A new Hillary Clinton email published by WikiLeaks as part of the ongoing release of hacked campaign files confirms that Daesh (Isis/Isil) has state backing. And from powerful Western allies, no less.
Anti-terrorism analysts have long seen Daesh as a non-state-affiliated actor which grew out of an al-Qaeda insurgency in Iraq (and later Syria). But the email sent by Clinton herself (dated 27 September 2014) shows there’s much more to the story.
In a year noted for crude political discourse, eagerly serialized in the mainstream media, the MSM are themselves bellowing anti-Russian rhetoric, conspiracy theory, and fear-mongering. Of the two “evil of two lessers” contenders, Trump is the one who regularly gets hammered, justifiably in the case of his anti-Muslim and other racist and sexist slurs, while Clinton gets a pass, even an A+, for her repeated verbal assaults on Russia and its president, even as she reeks of class hostility toward Trump supporters.
During the McCarthy era, the most perverse propaganda was about Russians hiding under beds; during the new cold war, it’s about Russians inside every telephone, computer, email, and website, while linking Putin to everything, says Guardian contributor Trevor Timm, “from Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, Greece, and Spain.” It’s hard to reconcile mainstream bogeymania with the missing media attention to the massive Big Brother spying on US citizens, the moral transgressions of which are lately presented in Oliver Stone’s humanizing portrait, “Snowden.”
The quite literal femme fatale (without the alluring charm) has quite a deadly track record in the Middle East, but the MSM, which tout Clinton’s compassion for children and concern for human rights don’t bother to note her criminal record in the destruction of Libya and support for repressive Arab dictators, her backing of the coup in Honduras, or her threats to make war on Russia and destabilize and destroy yet another Arab country, Syria. Netanyahu is her favorite foreign statesman, while Trump is attacked for not being sufficiently obsequious toward the butcher of Gaza. MSM “debate” hosts never think to ask the right questions, such as why has she supported assaults on the main enemies of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Bahrain: Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Iran, and Syria? Like her underworld counterpart, Willie Sutton, she’d have to say it’s because that’s where the money is. Despite his many crackpot ideas, Trump is more pragmatic, less neocon, about US intentions in the Middle East. Just take the oil, he says, and forget about regime change.
Clinton’s eponymous Foundation is built on millions of dollars of generous payola from “too big to jail” financiers along with feudalistic Qatar, the UAE, Oman, and the head chopping capital, Saudi Arabia. Bahrain gave a mere $100 thousand to the Foundation but $32 million to another money laundering operation, the Clinton Global Initiative. Syria, Iran, and Russia didn’t pay the bribes and are paying the price. The MSM choose not press her on the issue. Wikileaks has become the newspaper of record.
Officials within the Obama administration raised concerns over a 2015 $1.3billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, citing worries that the Saudi military did not have the ability to intervene in Yemen without harming civilians, an investigation from Reuters has found.
Full scale civil war between the Western and Saudi-backed government and Houthi rebels broke out early last year. More than 10,000 people have been killed in the fighting, the UN estimates, and three million displaced from their homes. Saudi-led air strikes on the rebel-held city of Sanaa since March 2015 have killed thousands of civilians.
According to emails, documents and interviews with several current and former officials familiar with the discussions, the US government’s lawyers ultimately did not reach a conclusion on whether supplying arms for the Saudi campaign could make the US a ‘co-belligerent’ in the conflict under international law.
Kurdish forces fighting the Islamic State in northern Iraq last week shot down a small drone the size of a model airplane. They believed it was like the dozens of drones the terrorist organization had been flying for reconnaissance in the area, and they transported it back to their outpost to examine it.
But as they were taking it apart, it blew up, killing two Kurdish fighters in what is believed to be one of the first times the Islamic State has successfully used a drone with explosives to kill troops on the battlefield.
In the last month, the Islamic State has tried to use small drones to launch attacks at least two other times, prompting American commanders in Iraq to issue a warning to forces fighting the group to treat any type of small flying aircraft as a potential explosive device.
Fragments of what appear to be U.S.-made bombs have been found at the scene of one of the most horrific civilian massacres of Saudi Arabia’s 18-month air campaign in Yemen.
Aircraft from the Saudi-led coalition on Saturday bombed a community hall in Sana’a, Yemen’s capital city, where thousands of people had gathered for a funeral for Sheikh Ali al-Rawishan, the father of the rebel-appointed interior minister. The aircraft struck the hall four times, killing more than 140 people and wounding 525. One local health official described the aftermath as “a lake of blood.”
European Union ministers have agreed to cuts in Baltic cod catch quotas for next year that fall well short of calls by scientists worried about the stock's eventual collapse.
The fisheries ministers agreed overnight Monday to reduce catches of western Baltic cod by 56 percent in 2017, despite calls by scientists for a 90-percent cut they say is needed to sustain stocks in Danish and German waters.
EU fisheries commissioner Karmenu Vellu said the commission, the bloc's executive, had proposed a reduction of 88 percent "to bring back the stock to sustainability as soon as possible," but had to accept a compromise to reach a deal among all member states.
Listening to the potential impacts on the different fishing fleets, Vellu said: "I have accepted a lower reduction that is still well above the lower limit of the scientific advice."
Denmark’s environmental and food minister Esben Lunde Larsen has just completed tough negotiations in Luxembourg on next year’s fishing quotas in the Baltic Sea.
Danish cod fisheries were hit hard, but not as hard as the EU Commission had originally planned.
The EU Commission had originally envisaged a reduction of cod quotas in the western Baltic Sea of 88 percent. Larsen managed to negotiate that down to a reduction of 56 percent. In the eastern Baltic, the EU originally called for a reduction of 39 percent. The parties agreed on a 25 percent decrease.
Wildfires in the American West can make for apocalyptic images, but they’re also routine, as the heat of the dry season can turn large areas of forest into fires-in-waiting. One lightning strike—or one careless human—can set off a blaze that consumes tens of thousands of acres.
Several factors contribute to the extent of these wildfires. We've made efforts to put them out as soon as possible—it's well intentioned and sometimes necessary to protect ever-expanding human communities. But in many places, putting out the fires has disrupted a natural process of forest housekeeping. With small bits of fuel allowed to accumulate on the forest floor for longer, fires become less frequent but much more intense.
Climate also plays a role. Year-to-year variability leaves some summers noticeably drier and hotter than others. And then there's climate change. What can we say about its influence on fires in the West?
The clashes between presidential candidate Donald Trump and the Spanish-language Univision television network began within days of Trump’s announcement last year that he was seeking the Republican nomination.
Now, a series of emails pirated from the Democratic National Committee and published in the past week by the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks show that within days of Trump’s June 16, 2015, announcement of his candidacy, Univision’s chairman, Haim Saban, was urging the Clinton campaign to take a tougher stance on Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda.
Yeah, so I get that it's political silly season, and people like to throw around all kinds of arguments of "bias" -- especially towards the media. I've been on the receiving end of those accusations, but for the most part, I think claims of media bias are silly and over-hyped. What's true, though, is that it's all too easy to be sloppy in reporting and to try to hype up a nothing story into a something story. Here's a story where no one comes out of it looking very good and the end result is a complete mess. It starts with Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald. Last night I saw a marginally interesting story by Eichenwald about how a Russian government connected news website, Sputnik, misread an email leaked via Wikileaks from Hillary Clinton pal Sidney Blumenthal to campaign chief John Podesta. The email contained a link and full text to a much earlier Eichnwald story about Benghazi and Clinton. The Sputnik story incorrectly stated that the text in the email was by Blumenthal, and not by Eichenwald. It took one sentence out of this longer article, and falsely claimed that Blumenthal was admitting that the mess in Benghazi was "preventable."
Personally, I like Gary Johnson. I got to know him in the 1990s when he was governor of New Mexico. I was working to end the drug war, legalize marijuana and treat hard drugs as a public health, not criminal issue. Johnson came out for marijuana legalization, so I spent some time in New Mexico helping that agenda.
But, the more I got to know him the less I liked his political views. He took money from the private prison industry and proudly supported private prisons. Making prisons into profit centers creates ongoing human rights violations. Prisons should be a function of government not a corporate profit center. Johnson opposed needle exchange to prevent HIV/AIDS, drug treatment and programs to help people with drug problems get their lives going in a positive direction.
Donald Trump, for reasons I’ve repeatedly pointed out, is an extremist, despicable, and dangerous candidate, and his almost-certain humiliating defeat is less than a month away. So I realize there is little appetite in certain circles for critiques of any of the tawdry and sometimes fraudulent journalistic claims and tactics being deployed to further that goal. In the face of an abusive, misogynistic, bigoted, scary, lawless authoritarian, what’s a little journalistic fraud or constant fearmongering about subversive Kremlin agents between friends if it helps to stop him?
But come January, Democrats will continue to be the dominant political faction in the U.S. — more so than ever — and the tactics they are now embracing will endure past the election, making them worthy of scrutiny. Those tactics now most prominently include dismissing away any facts or documents that reflect negatively on their leaders as fake, and strongly insinuating that anyone who questions or opposes those leaders is a stooge or agent of the Kremlin, tasked with a subversive and dangerously un-American mission on behalf of hostile actors in Moscow.
WikiLeaks Monday morning posted an additional 2,000 emails that appear to be from the account of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta. This is the second hack in four days from WikiLeaks, which claims it has a trove of more than 50,000 emails from Podesta.
The emails appear to be mostly from 2015, covering a litany of policy and strategy discussions between Clinton staffers on how to handle issues of the day and the press, including the release of the book "Clinton Cash" alleging nefarious activity by the Clinton Foundation. Another email has long-time Clinton aide Doug Band referring to Chelsea Clinton as a "spoiled brat."
Clinton campaign responded to the release by slamming the Trump campaign for "cheering on a release today engineered by Vladimir Putin," after Trump adviser Jason Miller tweeted a link to the document page with the phrase "And here...we...go."
On the eve of the New Hampshire primary in February, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton was worried. Hillary Clinton was about to go down to defeat in the state, and the former president was despondent.
“He’s losing it bad today,” Mr. Clinton’s chief of staff, Tina Flournoy, wrote to John D. Podesta, Mrs. Clinton’s campaign chairman, in an email. She added, “If you’re in NH please see if you can talk to him.”
The email was one of thousands released by WikiLeaks on Monday that provided a revealing glimpse into the inner workings of Mrs. Clinton’s campaign. They show a candidacy that began expecting a coronation and was thrown badly off course by a misreading of the electorate and a struggle to define what she stood for.
Stretching over nine years, but drawn mainly from the past two years, the correspondence captures in detail the campaign’s extreme caution and difficulty in identifying a core rationale for her candidacy, and the noisy world of advisers, friends and family members trying to exert influence.
US presidential hopefuls do not often intervene in British parliamentary byelections. But then, not many presidential candidates are Bernie Sanders. And more than that, he is intervening on behalf of his older brother.
Sanders, who missed out on taking the Democratic nomination from Hillary Clinton, has recorded a brief but heartfelt campaign video aimed at voters in Witney, Oxfordshire, that talks up the attributes of his brother, Larry.
Larry Sanders, who has lived in the UK since 1969, is standing for the Green party in the constituency, which will elect a new MP on 20 October to replace David Cameron, who quit the Commons last month.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign was no fan of a major ballot measure to create a universal health care system -- at least according to newly released documents from her campaign chairman’s email account.
The emails from John Podesta’s account last November coincided with Clinton’s trip to the swing state of Colorado, where health insurers are funding the opposition to a ballot measure that would create a single-payer health care system in the state. Podesta and the Clinton campaign have not confirmed the authenticity of the emails but have not disputed them, and Wikileaks noted that Clinton appeared to confirm their authenticity during her Sunday night debate with Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is asking his supporters to go out and vote him — 20 days after the presidential election is scheduled to take place.
"Make sure you get out and vote,” Trump told supporters on Tuesday at rally in Florida. "November 28th.”
Election Day is Nov. 8, 2016.
To make matters worse, voters in the Sunshine State don't have much time to register for the election.
John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman for the 2016 US presidential elections, closely monitored and may have intervened in the controversy surrounding the Ford Foundation and other foreign charitable foundations last year, according to to a set of leaked emails released by Wikileaks on Tuesday.
In the first half of 2015, Ford Foundation president Darren Walker sent a number of emails to Podesta, most of which were updates on events taking place in India after the Modi government tightened the rules governing foreign charitable foundations and NGOs. During this time, the Ford Foundation was put on a government watch list over funding it gave to activist Teesta Setalvad in 2009.
One e-mail, for instance, appears to be a deep-dive monitoring of how the Indian media reported the government’s probes into foreign funding, and specifically how various newspapers and editorials viewed the Ford Foundation’s troubles.
[...]
One e-mail from Walker to Podesta, sent on June 8th 2015, strikes a note of frustration and notes that the Ford Foundation “ had sent urgent notes to the Reserve Bank of India asking for assistance” in transferring funds in order to ensure that the foundation could sustain its basic operations in India.
“I promised I’d give you an update on any developments in India,” Walker writes. “At this point this point, we’ve heard nothing further from the GOI. I sent urgent notes to the Ministry of Home Affairs and Reserve Bank of India last week asking for assistance in immediately releasing our bank accounts from their current status so we can transfer funds from NY for basic operations (mostly salary support, not grants),” the email reads.
The Ford Foundation president also angrily references the article carried by the Sunday Guardian in early June, which profiled the Ford Foundation’s activities in India while describing it as an “entity outside the law”.
“I’m attaching an article from the Guardian, which purports to be an independent newspaper, but is really the mouthpiece for the government and BJP. It’s rife with misrepresentations and erroneous information…not a very encouraging article. I appreciate your help,” Walker wrote.
On a plane somewhere over the United States on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta spoke to reporters about his email being hacked and the contents ending up at WikiLeaks.
Podesta suggested that Roger Stone, a longtime ally of Donald Trump's who is working with a pro-Trump super PAC, may have known about the email hacking before the release.
"I think it’s a reasonable assumption to — or at least a reasonable conclusion — that Mr. Stone had advance warning and the Trump campaign had advance warning about what Assange was going to do,” Podesta said.
Is that a reasonable assumption, much less a reasonable conclusion?
The University of Chicago lit up social-media feeds last month after its dean of students published a letter informing incoming freshmen that “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” had no place on a campus dedicated to “freedom of inquiry and expression.”
Although some journalists noted that the letter may have been aimed at pleasing high-profile right-wing donors, opposition to such measures doesn’t track neatly along party lines. Neither the Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žià ¾ek nor the paleoconservative pundit Ann Coulter has much use for so-called “political correctness” measures.
A research study by the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) and Strathmore University’s Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Technology Law (CIPIT).
Remember how the billionaire funder of Facebook and Palantir, Peter Thiel, insisted that he was bankrupting Gawker to protect your privacy? Well, the lawyer, Charles Harder, that Thiel set up with a monthly retainer, specifically to focus on lawsuits that could kill Gawker dead, has become something of a "celebrity" in the "let's stomp out free speech" circle of celebrities. Last month, the Hollywood Reporter did a big profile on Harder and his newfound fame (and rapidly growing client list of famous people upset about press coverage). In some "bonus cuts," reporter Eriq Gardner noted on Twitter that Harder told him he no longer "monitors" what's left of Gawker (now called Gizmodo Media, and owned by Univision).
[...]
This is, to put it mildly, a load of complete bullshit. Harder, who in that profile claims "I believe very strongly in a free press" doesn't seem to understand how the First Amendment works. Cook's statement is clearly one of opinion, and it's clearly protected speech. And despite Harder also saying in that profile that he'd like to change the standard for defamation of public figures, the law as it stands requires not just that the statements be false statements of fact, but also that they be said maliciously. And, yes, Harder is a public figure (remember, there was just a whole Hollywood Reporter feature about him).
What Harder appears to be doing here is little more than threatening a SLAPP suit to try to shut up the press from saying negative things about him. Even the references to Cook being sued in the past are ridiculous, since most of those lawsuits are from Harder himself, and most of them are completely bogus.
So far, it does not appear that Univision is complying with any of these demands (which is good to see). So, let's see what Harder does next. Is he now going to go after Univision too? Will Thiel continue to fund that as well? Because most of the threats seem entirely bogus, and would be laughed out of court.
And, of course, this is yet another reminder of why we really need a federal anti-SLAPP law to stop such bogus threats in their tracks.
When Darine Hotait, the Lebanese-American filmmaker, learned that her film I say dust had been banned from screening at the Lebanese Film Festival (LFF), she was confused. She couldn’t think of a reason why the film got censored although some people had told Darine in advance that it was obvious that they would ban the film.
They. The Bureau of Censorship, a division of General Security, one of Lebanon’s many military bodies. The bureau is not known for transparency and rarely discloses what exactly they have censored and why. They don’t want to be held accountable. They don’t want to leave any trace.
More details have also surfaced in a case Levy is still dealing with -- the filing of a bogus defamation lawsuit on behalf of dentist Mitul R. Patel against an unhappy patient. In this peculiar case, both the supposed plaintiff and defendant claim to have had their signatures forged on the court documents used to secure an order to delist content.
Patel's motion to vacate the bogus lawsuit points a finger at a reputation management firm SEO Profile Defense LLC -- led by Richart Ruddie -- which Patel alleges filed the suit (and forged his signature) without his knowledge after he signed a contract with it for reputation management services.
Additional details uncovered by Levy and Volokh suggest this isn't the reputation management firm's first bogus lawsuit rodeo.
So just this past Thursday, we wrote about Trump's habit of threatening to sue the press over any coverage he considers negative. In the past, we've also covered his stated plans to open up libel laws. The comments on that post got pretty ridiculous after people who can't possibly be regular Techdirt readers complained that I was clearly just stirring up shit because I'm a Hillary Clinton supporter. This despite the fact that pretty much everything we've ever written about her has been critical too -- including her own ridiculous comments mocking free speech and praising censorship. It also ignores that just a few days earlier I had also sided with the Trump campaign when it received a bogus, censorious, cease & desist letter from the city of Phoenix. We're staying pretty consistent here: we don't support censorship, no matter whose team you're on. But, sure, I know. It's crunch time and people are really concerned about supporting their team, rather than actually discussing issues.
But this is an important issue. Threatening a free press with bogus defamation lawsuits and SLAPP (strategic lawsuits against public participation) claims are a really big problem. Case in point: on Friday, as I'm sure you're already aware, the Washington Post published a video of Donald Trump happily discussing sexually assaulting women, and how it's okay because he's a celebrity. As you also know, this became the story of Friday and the weekend, as it appeared to push a bunch of people who had previously supported Trump over the edge to pull their support (why this story rather than earlier ones, I don't fully understand, but...).
Either way, the story led to a few different varieties of followup stories about how the Washington Post got the story. And all of them note that Access Hollywood found the tape itself last Monday, and realized it was newsworthy. They then took it to their corporate parent, NBC, and some work was done on getting the story out -- but it kept getting pushed back. This led many to ask why it could possibly take so long for NBC to report on this. They knew the tape was authentic, so they didn't need to confirm that.
YouTube has launched a program called YouTube Heroes that will allow users to report inappropriate content in the form of a game.
Members will earn points, advance in levels and gain access to exclusive rewards and features on the site dependent on the quality of their contributions.
How do these “Heroes” earn points? By flagging inappropriate videos, adding captions to content and sharing their knowledge with other Heroes in message boards and Google Hangout sessions.
Last year, I wrote about how Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) may be acquired by either Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) or Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL). Early this year, I soured on Twitter stock because economic weakness would hurt ad spending. I further soured on it after incidents of it censoring users for their political statements and its mismanagement of Periscope.
In the past few weeks, the rumors of Twitter being bought crept up again. This list consisted of Saleforce.com (NYSE:CRM), Alphabet, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), Verizon (NYSE:VZ), Microsoft, and Disney (NYSE:DIS). I think traders were bidding Twitter stock up because if Alphabet (the most likely buyer) had to compete with another firm, it would drive the price up.
[...]
Twitter isn't like any other acquisition for the companies looking at it. Even for Microsoft, buying Twitter would be nothing like buying LinkedIn. The reason it is different is its public nature. While most companies are trying to avoid political controversy, Twitter would put them front and center of the action. This situation isn't inherently bad, but with the way Twitter is treating free speech with disdain, it has become a potential problem for buyers.
There have been many examples of Twitter suspending accounts which are politically incorrect. One example of this was journalist Glenn Reynolds getting his account suspended for tweeting "run them down" in reference to drivers being in a situation where protesters were blocking the streets and attacking cars which stopped. It's not my place to discuss the veracity of this statement, but it isn't Twitter's place either! Twitter has become known for wielding a heavy hand when dealing with political statements. Deleting accounts is the last thing a firm with user growth problems needs. 17 million tweets were sent out pertaining to the recent presidential debate. This shows that political expression is paramount to the website's existence. It needs to foster debate instead of stifling it.
The accusation is one of censorship.
“I think basically I was posting about issues around the Lerner Theater and the A.D.A. violations and discrimination the city was engaged in and they didn’t care for that too much and they deleted all those posts and eventually banned me from commenting,” said Richard Wolf.
MABHANDITI frontman, Seh Calaz, on Saturday performed the controversial track, Hohwa — No Under 18, at a concert in Gweru at the weekend in defiance of the Censorship Board’s ban imposed of sexually-explicit song.
Experienced television buyers say some television stations occasionally flag advertisements that use footage from rival stations, though most ultimately relent.
The video-on-demand service — used by customers who want to watch a show after it has aired — reach a relatively small number of viewers. The pro-97 ads that mention Comcast have run on other Oregon cable and network providers.
The Title 10 versus Title 50 debate has long surrounded the way intelligence and covert activity is conducted in accordance with the law. A key issue surrounding intelligence and war fighting efforts is the blurring of lines clearly identified in statutes. For example, intelligence organizations are barred from spying domestically on American citizens.
As the discussions of a potential split between the National Security Agency and US Cyber Command continue to swirl, what would an empty-nested NSA, freed from its child organization, CYBERCOM, look like?
The idea of small digital events linked together in a dance of relationships is illustrated elegantly on screen. There are shots of clouds of gnats buzzing in sunbeams, perhaps in reference to Binney’s rural Appalachian birthplace.
The NSA’s response to the 9/11 revelations was to shelve ThinThread in favour of a much more expensive program, TrailBlazer. After NSA director Michael Hayden was appointed in 1999, Binney had been asked how he could use $1.2bn to revamp his operation. He calculated that he could organise surveillance on the entire planet in near real time, for just $300,000.
Money may lie at the heart of the NSA’s questionable decision making. After 9/11, Binney recalls the order that came through from Maureen Baginski, the NSA’s head of Signals Intelligence (Sigint), to not rock the boat or embarrass large technology companies. “We can milk this cow for 15 years. 9/11 is a gift to the NSA. We’re going to get all the money we need and then some,” she is alleged to have said.
Researchers warn that many 1024-bit keys used to secure communications on the internet today might be based on prime numbers that have been intentionally backdoored in an undetectable way.
Many public-key cryptography algorithms that are used to secure web, email, VPN, SSH and other types of connections on the internet derive their strength from the mathematical complexity of discrete logarithms -- computing discrete logarithms for groups of large prime numbers cannot be efficiently done using classical methods. This is what makes cracking strong encryption computationally impractical.
Most key-generation algorithms rely on prime parameters whose generation is supposed to be verifiably random. However, many parameters have been standardized and are being used in popular crypto algorithms like Diffie-Hellman and DSA without the seeds that were used to generate them ever being published. That makes it impossible to tell whether, for example, the primes were intentionally "backdoored" -- selected to simplify the computation that would normally be required to crack the encryption.
It took the research team "a little over two months" to break a weakened 1,024-bit key using "an academic cluster" of 2,000 to 3,000 CPUs.
Two years after Snowden revelations exposed "Bullrun," Heninger and others published research posting that the NSA could break powerful encryption. Getting past 1024-bit primes would require a machine that costs a few hundred million dollars, they wrote, yet that supercomputer would still only be able to crack about one 1024-bit prime a year. A well-funded and determined institution like the NSA could fit the bill.
Since 2010, the National Institute for Standards and Technology has recommended using keys of at least 2,048 bits, though 1,024-bit keys are still common, Ars Technica wrote.
Researchers have devised a way to place undetectable backdoors in the cryptographic keys that protect websites, virtual private networks, and Internet servers. The feat allows hackers to passively decrypt hundreds of millions of encrypted communications as well as cryptographically impersonate key owners.
The technique is notable because it puts a backdoor—or in the parlance of cryptographers, a "trapdoor"—in 1,024-bit keys used in the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Diffie-Hellman significantly raises the burden on eavesdroppers because it regularly changes the encryption key protecting an ongoing communication. Attackers who are aware of the trapdoor have everything they need to decrypt Diffie-Hellman-protected communications over extended periods of time, often measured in years. Knowledgeable attackers can also forge cryptographic signatures that are based on the widely used digital signature algorithm.
As with all public key encryption, the security of the Diffie-Hellman protocol is based on number-theoretic computations involving prime numbers so large that the problems are prohibitively hard for attackers to solve. The parties are able to conceal secrets within the results of these computations. A special prime devised by the researchers, however, contains certain invisible properties that make the secret parameters unusually susceptible to discovery. The researchers were able to break one of these weakened 1,024-bit primes in slightly more than two months using an academic computing cluster of 2,000 to 3,000 CPUs.
Unblinking Eye, EFF's giant, deep research report (available in Spanish, English and Portuguese) on the state of surveillance law in latinamerica, reveals an alarming patchwork of overbroad powers given to police forces and government agencies.
In the 1980s and 1970s, the military dictatorships of Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Uruguay and Brazil pooled their resources in something called "Operation Condor," which was used to effect mass kidnappings, torture, murders and disappearances. Today, less than a generation later, these countries and their neighbors are effecting surveillance dragnets that are one click away from totalitarianism. Following a military coup in one of these countries, the new generalissimos would be able to quickly crush their opposition and undertake mass arrests of all potential dissidents.
The surveillance laws in these countries have severely lagged behind the powers that the countries' spies have bought for themselves through purchasing new high-tech toys from companies in the USA and EU. These old laws assume that wiretapping happens to one phone line at a time, not across a whole country's communications -- communications that yield far more intimate and compromising information than could be gleaned by spying on the old wireline telephone system.
A powerful surveillance program that police used for tracking racially charged protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Mo., relied on special feeds of user data provided by Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, according to an ACLU report Tuesday.
The companies provided the data — often including the locations, photos and other information posted publicly by users — to Geofeedia, a Chicago-based company that says it analyzes social media posts to deliver real-time surveillance information to help 500 law enforcement agencies track and respond to crime. The social media companies cut off Geofeedia’s access to the streams of user data in recent weeks after the ACLU discovered them and alerted the companies about looming public exposure.
The popularity of Geofeedia and similar programs highlights how the rise of social media has given governments worldwide powerful new ways to monitor crime and civil unrest. Authorities often target such surveillance at minority groups or others seeking to publicly air political grievances, potentially chilling free speech, said the ACLU’s California affiliate, which unearthed Geofeedia’s relationship with social media companies through a public records request of dozens of law enforcement agencies.
Two buzzwords define the past decade of computing: mobile and social. Those days are coming to an end. Although smartphones and social media remain as important as ever, the war to control those platforms are over. Winners are being coronated as the losers are, at last, conceding.
Microsoft plans to unload what’s left of its Nokia purchase, and BlackBerry—remember them?—is abandoning the hardware business. That essentially ends the smartphone wars, leaving iOS and Android as the dominant operating systems. Now, Twitter’s ongoing woes suggest the end of the social platform wars are nigh.
Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter were handing over data to a monitoring tool that law enforcement agencies were using to track protesters, according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
The social media analysis tool, called Geofeedia, had been harvesting posts from the social media networks for surveillance purposes, and more than 500 law enforcement and public safety agencies have been using it, the ACLU said in a Tuesday report.
Through a public records request, the ACLU found that Geofeedia had entered into agreements with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram for their users' data.
In uncovered emails, Geofeedia said the tool was useful for monitoring protests in Ferguson, Missouri, involving the 2014 police shooting death of Mike Brown.
The ACLU is concerned that the tool can "disproportionately impact communities of color," through its monitoring of activists and their neighborhoods. Among Geofeedia's features is an interactive map of real-time Instagram posts showing user locations.
Private Internet Access doesn’t have a warrant canary. That’s because warrant canaries alert somebody to damage that has already happened. The right way to go about the problem is to prevent the damage from happening in the first place.
At PIA, privacy is at the soul of what we do. Our business partners have occasionally been surprised when we say upfront that we’re in privacy first, business second – but that’s the passion we have. Making money is a matter of being able to continue pursuing the primary goal, privacy, on a sustainable basis.
Twitter has suspended its commercial relationship with a company called Geofeedia – which provides social media data to law enforcement agencies so that they can identify potential miscreants.
The social media company announced the change through its Policy account on Tuesday morning following the publication of a report by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of California.
The civil liberties advocacy organization obtained records indicating that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter provided bulk user post data to Geofeedia, which markets its social media monitoring software to law enforcement agencies as a way to track activists, among other uses.
Following reports alleging increased use of social media surveillance last month, both Facebook and its Instagram division ceased providing data to Geofeedia on commercial terms. Facebook did not respond to a request to provide further details.
After Apple and the F.B.I. made their battle over encryption public in February, members of Congress quickly jumped into the debate. Some lawmakers promised new rules that would give authorities more access to smartphones, while others promised to fight off those laws.
Yet after several hearings and bills, and the formation of congressional working groups, little has been done to resolve the central tug of war between the tech industry and federal authorities over civil rights versus national security.
Law enforcement officials have argued that hundreds of criminal investigations have been held up by their inability to get access to locked smartphones and encrypted apps. Privacy advocates and tech companies say such access would cost people their personal information and lead to a slippery slope of surveillance.
I had the honor of delivering the inaugural Peter Zenger lecture at Columbia Journalism School last week. The lecture is named for a newspaper publisher who was tried for libel in the 1730s for printing articles mocking and criticizing William Cosby, New York’s royal governor. Many historians consider Zenger’s acquittal to have been a milestone in the development of American press freedom. In my lecture last week, I offered some thoughts about digital-age threats to the freedoms of speech and the press, focusing mainly on government surveillance and secrecy. The text of my remarks is below. If readers have reactions, I’d love to hear them—I’m at Jameel.Jaffer [at] Columbia.edu.
Sitting at work all day scrolling through Facebook is almost definitely frowned upon by your bosses, but Facebook wants to change that with the launch of a new version of Facebook—specifically designed for work—called Workplace.
Facebook is ubiquitous. If it’s not Mark Zuckerberg handing out “Free Basics” to developing countries, it’s internet connectivity beamed down from giant, solar-powered drones. As of July 2016, the social network had 1.71 billion monthly users. Facebook is without doubt one of the most pervasive technological phenomenons of the 21st Century. Thing is, Facebook’s hit a brick wall when it comes to growth. Everybody who would want to use Facebook, generally speaking, is already, or at least will be using Facebook very soon. So, to eke out the last embers of growth in a saturated market, Facebook has now, officially, entered your workplace.
Global automakers Toyota, BMW and insurer Allianz will license technology from Silicon Valley start-up Nauto, which uses cameras and artificial intelligence systems in cars to understand driver behavior, Nauto said on Friday.
Nauto Chief Executive Stefan Heck told Reuters the carmakers and insurer will integrate the technology into their test vehicles and use the aggregate and anonymized data - whether on driving habits, difficult intersections, or traffic congestion - to help develop their autonomous vehicle strategies.
The investment by BMWi Ventures, Allianz Ventures and the Toyota Research Institute underscores the auto industry's demand for smart systems to improve vehicle and driver safety, reduce liability and make fleet operations more efficient, while preparing for self-driving cars of the future.
Across the US, dozens of lawsuits have been filed in order to remove defamatory material from review sites such as Yelp, or Google’s search results. That’s not unusual, but, the thing is, many of the defendants’ addresses are seemingly made-up, some of those named in the cases have never been informed of the suits, and some of the court documents contain forged signatures, according to The Washington Post.
Linked to at least some of the cases is a selection of companies run by a Richart Ruddie, including SEO Profile Defense Network LLC, and Profile Defenders. Profile Defenders specialises in “online reputation management,” according to its website. In short, these companies and others are allegedly carrying out a pretty novel tactic to clean up content that would reflect negatively on its clients: filing fake lawsuits to encourage websites or online services to remove content.
Yahoo Inc disabled automatic email forwarding at the beginning of the month, the Associated Press reported, citing several users.
While those who have set up forwarding in the past are unaffected, users who would want to leave following recent hacking and surveillance revelations are struggling to shift to rival services, the AP reported on Monday. (apne.ws/2dKpUW3)
The company has been under scrutiny from investors after disclosing last month that at least 500 million user accounts were stolen from its network in 2014.
Reuters reported last week, citing sources, that Yahoo last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, a move that raised a lot of human rights concerns.
Edward Snowden’s face seems ever present in Berlin, where stickers on doors and lamp-posts promise there’s always “A bed for Snowden” and posters plug Oliver Stone’s eponymous film.
The whistleblower’s explosive 2013 revelations about international government surveillance generated some good advertising for Berlin, cementing its reputation as hipster technology activist capital of the world. The city’s cheap lifestyle and post-second world war aversion to surveillance, as well as sympathetic Germany residency rules, have created a powerful network of support and infrastructure for its dedicated cyberactivism community. We are “poor, but sexy”, its residents like to say.
Many of Berlin’s technologists work freelance, employed by anti-surveillance projects or secure messaging tools. And some are employed by Tor, a long running web anonymity project with something of a cult following.
That community recently met in Seattle to tackle a new challenge: a long-running saga of allegations of sexual assault, bullying and harassment that has ripped Tor’s community apart.
On Friday, Delta State Police Command discovered another ‘baby factory’ in Asaba, the Delta State capital, following a tip-off. The police, who stormed the factory located at Oduke area within Asaba metropolis, arrested the proprietor’s husband and a female syndicate who is alleged to be the operator – as a Nurse. Sunday Vanguard gathered that the husband’s duty was to impregnate the women, whose age-range is between 18 and 20; the wife then allegedly sells the children upon delivery. The Command rescued seven pregnant girls.
The victim had shared a taxi home with a man after going for dinner in a restaurant in Visby, Sweden, when she said she needed to use the toilet.
Believed to be in her thirties, the woman was then offered to use the one at her fellow passenger's home.
Her lawyer Staffan Fredriksson said: “She followed him in and had no fears that something would happen. Then the man took advantage of the situation. The abuse started in the toilet.”
It's no secret that cab companies and many cab drivers don't much like Uber and Lyft. Competition is tough. And cabs in most cities have survived thanks to artificial limits on competition through medallions and the like. This has always been a stupid, and frequently corrupt, system. For years, before Uber and Lyft came along, people talked about the ridiculousness of artificially limiting competition in this manner, but it was only once those companies came along that the true ridiculousness was made clear. While some forward looking cabbies have embraced these and similar systems, others have been fighting the new reality, often in fairly ridiculous ways. In Milwaukee and Chicago, cab companies sued those cities, arguing that allowing this type of competition amounted to a Fifth Amendment violation, in the form of "taking private property for public use without just compensation." What private property, you might ask? Well, according to the cab companies, the artificially restricted competition is their property. No, really.
On Monday, protests and actions were held across the country to mark Indigenous Peoples’ Day and to oppose further construction of fossil fuel infrastructure. In North Dakota, hundreds of Native Americans and their allies gathered to resist the construction of the $3.8 billion Dakota Access pipeline, which has faced months of resistance from the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and members of hundreds of other tribes from across the U.S., Canada and Latin America. At least 27 people were arrested blockading construction at two separate worksites, including Hollywood actress Shailene Woodley.
The reanimated CISA, redubbed The Cybersecurity Act (a.k.a., OmniCISA) and hurried through the legislative process by stapling its 2000 pages to the back of a "must-pass" budget bill, is still in the processes of implementation. Not much is known about what the law is intended to do on the granular level, other than open up private companies to government surveillance so the USA can beat back "the cyber."
Surveillance aficionados were quick to lean on private companies to start sharing information, but the government needs to be taught new tricks as well. There's plenty of info siloing at the federal level, which keeps the DHS, FBI, and others involved in the cyberwar from effectively communicating, much less sharing anything interesting they might have had forwarded to them by the private sector.
The federal government has been less than successful in securing its own information -- something CISA was also supposed to fix. The DHS's Inspector General has performed a follow-up investigation on the department's implementation of CISA's requirements. For the most part, things seem to be moving forward, albeit in a vague, undefined direction.
The OIG notes that the DHS has put together policies and procedures and, amazingly, actually implemented some of them. Better still, it has moved many critical account holders to multi-factor authorization. Unfortunately, the DHS still has a number of standalone systems that can't handle multi-factor authorization, which will make them more vulnerable to being breached.
Before the United States permitted a terrifying way of interrogating prisoners, government lawyers and intelligence officials assured themselves of one crucial outcome. They knew that the methods inflicted on terrorism suspects would be painful, shocking and far beyond what the country had ever accepted. But none of it, they concluded, would cause long lasting psychological harm.
Fifteen years later, it is clear they were wrong.
Today in Slovakia, Hussein al-Marfadi describes permanent headaches and disturbed sleep, plagued by memories of dogs inside a blackened jail. In Kazakhstan, Lutfi bin Ali is haunted by nightmares of suffocating at the bottom of a well. In Libya, the radio from a passing car spurs rage in Majid Mokhtar Sasy al-Maghrebi, reminding him of the C.I.A. prison where earsplitting music was just one assault to his senses.
And then there is the despair of men who say they are no longer themselves. “I am living this kind of depression,” said Younous Chekkouri, a Moroccan, who fears going outside because he sees faces in crowds as Guantánamo Bay guards. “I’m not normal anymore.”
When you're among the worst ranked companies for customer service in America, you consistently need to find new ways to ramp up your game if you want to take malicious incompetence to the next level. Enter Comcast, which despite constant promises that it's getting better, routinely keeps finding itself in the headlines for immeasurably shady business practices. Earlier this year, for example, the company was sued by Washington's Attorney General for charging users a $5 per month "Service Protection Plan," then routinely and intentionally charging users for repairs that should have been covered under it.
This week, America's least-liked companies is finding itself in the headlines for another misleading practice: errantly and routinely billing customers for hardware or services they never ordered. According to a new FCC announcement, Comcast will be paying the agency $2.3 million to settle an investigation into the behavior.
It's been a time of remarkable progress of late when it comes to professional sports organizations being smart about how to pursue viewers in this here digital era. Major athletic institutions are finally opening up the door to wider streaming options, putting aside the doomsayers. Add to that that other leagues are starting to realize what a boon Major League Baseball's Advanced Media product has been to viewership and attendance and it seemed like we were on the precipice of a golden age in digital sports media.
Leave it to the NFL to ensure that we take at least one step backwards. What once seemed like a never ending funnel of money and upward trending viewership, the NFL has undergone something of a ratings correction as of late. It seems that amidst the controversy over head injury, bad officiating, the contraction of one-day fantasy football, and what some think is a generally declining quality of the on-field product, less people are watching games, both in person and on television. This had to happen at some point, if for no other reason than because NFL ratings over the past 2 decades were completely boffo. But the NFL's choice to combat this inevitable decline takes a page from the days we finally just got over.
After much negotiation, amendments to a World Intellectual Property Organization internal oversight mechanism were adopted today by the annual WIPO General Assembly. Under the amendments, investigating allegations of wrongdoing of high-ranking WIPO officials will be made more transparent and facilitate access to documents by WIPO member states in case of an investigation.
In two decisions published yesterday on its website, the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) overturned two decisions by the Federal Patent Court (Bundespatentgericht) invalidating the patents in suit for lack of novelty. Both decisions are remarkable not because they break new ground in (patent) law (they don't), but rather because the BGH corrects the fact finding of the lower court and finds in favour of the patentees. They fuel the impression that the Federal Court of Justice is more patent-friendly than the Bundespatentgericht, or, to put it another way, that the Federal Patent Court has become overly strict.
The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board has issued final rules that will take effect in January. The biggest focus is on making filing completely electronic
One wonders if there is a gas leak in the legal department at MasterCard HQ. Because there is nothing in those logos that would mislead a drunken chimp, never mind a human being. Yet MasterCard moved forward with challenging the trademark application for World Masters Games, because trademark bullying knows no limits. The Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand, fortunately, essentially laughed this out of the trademark office.
In 2014 the applicant, Universal Protein Supplements Corp, filed an application with the EUIPO to have the EU territory designed in respect of the international registration of a figurative sign representing a body-builder. The application was for goods and services in the classes indicated above.
The EUIPO examiner rejected the application, on grounds that the mark lacked any distinctive character and was descriptive for the purpose of Article 7(1)(c) of Regulation No 207/2009 on the (now) European Union Trade Mark (EUTMR).
In late 2014 Universal Protein appealed the examiner’s decision.
The supposedly impossible happened: The Marrakesh Treaty entered into force on 30 September, three months after reaching the necessary minimum of 20 ratifications. By then, 22 countries had done so – two more did so during the Marrakesh Assembly.
A former torrent site operator has largely avoided the goals of an aggressive movie industry prosecution in Sweden. Against a backdrop of demands for years in prison and millions in damages, the 25-year-old owner of private tracker SwePiracy was handed 100 hours community service and told to pay $194,000.
Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN continues to put pressure on pirates all over the Internet, including those on YouTube. This week they forced a pirating film uploader to cease his activities, warning that repeat infringers may have to pay penalties that could run into the thousands of euros.
The MPAA has reported several piracy-promoting websites and services to the U.S. Government. The list features major torrent sites The Pirate Bay and Extratorrent, file-hosting services such as Openload and Rapidgator, and for the first time it also includes several of their hosting companies.
Under Section 1201 of the DMCA, a law passed in 1998, people who fix things can be sued (and even jailed!) for violating copyright law, if fixing stuff involves bypassing some kind of copyright lock; this has incentivized manufacturers so that fixing your stuff means breaking this law, allowing them to decide who gets to fix your stuff and how much you have to pay to have it fixed.
What's more, DMCA 1201 has been used to punish and threaten security researchers who revealed defects in products with these locks, on the grounds that knowing about defects in these products make it easier to jailbreak them. That's turning an ever-larger slice of the products we entrust with our private data, finances, health and even our lives into no-go zones for security r