The next largest Linux companies are even smaller. Canonical Software and SUSE are both private companies, so their income is unreported, but both have around 700 employees apiece.
In other words, what is easy to miss if you are working with Linux and open source regularly is how small their corporate presence actually is. Probably, the average computer user has never heard of Red Hat, Canonical, or SUSE.
However, when a small company welcomes a megacorporation into its professional association or signs an agreement with one, its name is reported in places where it is rarely heard. By association, it becomes a player.
For example, take the case of Canonical. Founded in 2004, it has never reported a profit, although its OpenStack division did well enough in 2015 that going public was briefly an option.
Why oh why is the Linux world so quick to welcome our once mortal enemy into the fold? Matt Hartley today said it basically boils down to "the lines between proprietary and free software are blurring" - at least for those wanting them to blur. I imagine they're still pretty bold to Richard Stallman types. Nevertheless, Hartley said for corporate Linux that line is fairly blurry and, for said corporations, Microsoft's new leaf seems sincere. He also said that Microsoft's desire to use Linux proves we've won world domination as we always said we wanted. In addition, Microsoft lends credibility to companies such as Red Hat, SUSE, or Canonical and cooperation might be the best hedge against future patent litigation.
Over a nine year period starting in 2004, the council moved about 15,000 staff from using Windows and Office to LiMux—a custom version of the Ubuntu desktop OS—and other open-source software. At the time, Munich was one of the largest organizations to reject Windows, and Microsoft took the city's leaving so seriously that then CEO Steve Ballmer flew to Munich to meet the mayor.
Now a report commissioned by current mayor Dieter Reiter to help determine the future of IT at the council has outlined a project to make Windows 10 and Microsoft Office available to all departments, and give staff the choice about whether to use Windows or LiMux.
If Windows subsequently became a popular choice, the report says "it could be investigated whether it makes economic sense to continue using Linux as a client operating system".
[...]
Kirschner also questioned why Accenture was chosen to co-author a report assessing the use of Microsoft software, when the consultancy runs a joint venture with Microsoft called Avanade, which helps businesses implement Microsoft technologies.
"Such relationships are problematic and people should interpret the results considering that," he said.
Lenovo's Yoga 900 and IdeaPad 710S shipped without the ability to run Linux or other operating systems, and open-source enthusiasts were less than pleased.
Still not an ideal solution, but at least they're listening.
Almost all of Collabora's customers use the Linux kernel on their products. Often they will use the exact code as delivered by the SBC vendors and we'll work with them in other parts of their software stack. But it's becoming increasingly common for our customers to adapt the kernel sources to the specific needs of their particular products.
The lead developer of the Flash-Friendly File-System, Jaegeuk Kim, has published a patch implementing multiple device support for F2FS.
I’ve written about a lot of desktop Linux software in the nearly 8 years this site has been running. Apps, utilities, tools and clients for almost everything, from bling-laden music players to java monstrosities via photo editors and command line Twitter clients. And yet even I have not heard of every app that’s out there.
But when the weather is unpredictable, or to keep an eye on its plans for the coming days, we turn to weather forecast apps, websites and services.
A slate of desktop weather apps are available for Linux. These range from basic terminal-based reports to indicator applets that unfurl all kinds of meteorological mumbo jumbo.
New APIs available in Chrome 52 allowed us to take on this long-requested feature. The new APIs turned out to be less important than we originally thought but we’re nonetheless happy to report Atom users in all locales now get typical keyboard behavior in Atom’s default installation.
On November 9, 2016, GitHub's Ian Olsen was proud to announce the release and immediate availability of the Atom 1.12 open-source and hackable text editor for all supported platforms.
Atom 1.12 has been in Beta stages of development since the release of Atom 1.11 on October 11, 2016, and it now hits the stable channel with a bunch of exciting new features, among which we can mention international keyboard support Electron 1.3.6 update, which also brings Chrome 52 along for this update.
Wildfire Games was proud to announce the release of the twenty-first Alpha update to its 0 A.D. open-source game of ancient warfare for supported Linux-based operating systems, as well as Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X platforms.
Dubbed Ulysses, the 0 A.D. Alpha 21 release features a large number of content and improvements, starting with a bunch of new maps that you'll most certainly want to conquer, as well as several new game modes, and continuing with the official introduction of the final civilization, namely The Seleucid Empire.
Prominent gameplay features include the Herocide and Regicide, Wonder Victory, and Last Man Standing modes, new champions and buildings, the ability for Briton Crannog to act as both a dock and civic center, and support for Hellenic Royal Stoa and Persian Hall to train new Infantry Champions in the city and town phases.
For those still preferring KDE3 to what's offered by KDE4 or KDE5, the Trinity Desktop Environment continues living on as a fork of the KDE3 code-base but with support for making use of modern components.
This week's Trinity Desktop R14.0.4 was made available as another maintenance update, but does come with some notable changes. This new Trinity release now has support for the CUPS 2.2 printing system, FFmpeg 3.x support, GCC 6.x compiler support, GStreamer 1.x support, and Rar 5.x support. Being able to build under the GCC6 compiler is important and support for the modern GStreamer 1.x is overdue and nice to see the other updated software support.
Back after a hiatus due to my changing employment status: KDE 5_16.11 is my November release of the combined KDE Frameworks 5.27.0, Plasma 5.8.3 and Applications 16.08.2 for Slackware, built on top of Qt 5.7.0. You can use the latest KDE 5 on Slackware 14.2 and -current.
My intention is to keep releasing versions of the stable Plasma 5 software through the “14.2/latest” and “current/latest” URLs. I still carry a “testing” repository but that does not get updated nearly as often and is currently outdated. So please disregard that “testing” area until further notice and be sure to check your automated package management programs for the correct repository URL.
From September 26th to 28th we celebrated at the Igalia HQ the 2016 edition of the Web Engines Hackfest. This year we broke all records and got participants from the three main companies behind the three biggest open source web engines, say Mozilla, Google and Apple. Or course, it was not only them, we had some other companies and ourselves. I was active part of the organization and I think we not only did not get any complain but people were comfortable and happy around.
The GNOME desktop environment comes installed with Fedora Workstation. GNOME hackers have continued to refine it over several years. However, not all third party software providers update their apps accordingly. Some software providers still make use of outdated status bar icons for their apps, for instance. It’s nice to be able to move status icons for these apps to the GNOME top bar. Often these apps are proprietary but popular, including:
Google Chrome addons like Hangouts Google Music Manager DropBox Skype
However, there are also free and open source apps with the same issues. These apps haven’t been updated to use newer features when installed in a GNOME environment like Fedora Workstation.
On November 9, 2016, GoboLinux developer Lucas C. Villa Real happily announced the release of the Beta milestone of the upcoming GoboLinux 016 Linux-based computer operating system.
GoboLinux 016 Beta comes exactly one month after the release of the Alpha snapshot from the new development series, and it looks like it adds a large number of improvements in many areas, including the kernel, which got updated with support for generic 64-bit (x86_64) processors.
It's been almost five months since Rockstor 3.8 open-source and free Linux-based NAS (Network-Attached Storage) operating system received an update, and project developer Suman Chakravartula informed us about the release of Rockstor 3.8-15.
Rockstor 3.8-15 appears to be a substantial update that closes a total of 43 issues reported by users since Rockstor version 3.8-14 announced on the 20th of June 2016, and it also looks like it's the 30th release of the GNU/Linux distribution that uses Btrfs as default file system.
On November 8, 2016, Michael Tremer from the IPFire project, an open source initiative trying to produce a hardened, professional, secure, and easy-to-use Linux-based firewall operating system, announced the release of IPFire 2.19 Core Update 107.
IPFire 2.19 Core Update 107 is the latest, most stable and advanced version of the IPFire 2.19 series, and it looks like it finally patches that nasty "Dirty COW" Linux kernel vulnerability that was fixed by Linus Torvalds himself awhile ago in all supported Linux kernel branches.
"This update patches the IPFire Linux kernel against a recently disclosed vulnerability called Dirty COW. This is a local privilege escalation bug which could be used by a local attacker to gain root privileges," said Michael Tremer in the release announcement for the IPFire 2.19 Core Update 107 update.
A new stable release of the open-source, server-oriented Alpine Linux operating system has been announced on the 8th of November 2016, bringing a brand new kernel and many up-to-date components.
Alpine Linux 3.4.6 is the sixth maintenance update in the stable 3.4 series of the GNU/Linux distribution used in numerous smaller or big server environments worldwide, and it comes only two weeks after the 3.4.5 release to bump the kernel version to the latest upstream release, namely Linux kernel 4.4.30 LTS, which was a minor update patching a bug in Linux kernel 4.4.29 LTS and older builds.
SUSE is extending its "SUSE Ready" application-certification program to include SUSE OpenStack Cloud and SUSE Enterprise Storage, the company has announced.
Open source has risen to become a truly viable option for enterprises due to the cost savings that can be achieved, the often faster production cycles, and the ability to tap into a growing community of highly skilled workers.
The head of kernel development at SUSE Linux, VojtÃâºch Pavlík, says it is remarkable that the company has managed to grow its numbers as much as it has and still retain the same spirit that many start-ups have, where anyone can influence the direction it takes.
Pavlík said that the change of ownership from Novell to Attachmate in 2011 had meant that SUSE went back to its roots and operated under its own brand. This philosophy had been pursued even more vigorously by Micro Focus which bought the Attachmate group in 2014.
Six years ago, Nils Brauckmann became CEO of SUSE after the company was split out from Novell in 2011. Speaking at his company's annual SUSEcon event on November 8, Brauckmann reflected that SUSE has been on a growth path ever since the Novell exit.
Red Hat is changing its OpenStack support plan to tap Agile with those craving long-term commitment following a shakeup in its engineering.
The Linux flinger's OpenStack Platform 10, due shortly and based on Newton, will see Red Hat introduce one and three-year lifecycle support for two new planned editions.
One-year support will be applied to Red Hat OpenStack Platform every six months. This will feature the latest features in the OpenStack open-source cloud code and target those craving new capabilities and working in Agile shops.
Like any FOSS community project, Fedora relies heavily on volunteers. It is, therefore, no surprise that we’re always looking to increase our contributor base. There is always so much to be done. Of course, many teams work in harmony to keep Fedora ticking. Each team tends to have its own “on-boarding process” for newcomers, which if you’ve been around recently, you’ll have noticed CommOps has been working on improving one by one.
Say hello to the latest member of the official Ubuntu family: Ubuntu Budgie. The community spin, hitherto known as Ubuntu Budgie Remix, uses the nimble GNOME-based Budgie desktop environment as its default user experience. The Budgie desktop makes use of modern GNOME technologies but is not a GNOME fork.
Advantech announced five Linux-ready SBCs running Intel’s Apollo Lake SoCs in Mini-ITX, Pico-ITX, 3.5-inch, and EBX form factors.
Advantech unveiled a variety of new boards and systems supporting Intel’s 14nm Atom E3900, Pentium N4200, and Celeron N3350 SoCs. The announcement, which also includes three COMs and three embedded computers that we hope to cover in the coming days, includes five single board computers, one of which is the first Apollo Lake Pico-ITX SBC we’ve seen.
Some nice additions have been made to Marius Quabeck's amazing Magic-Device-Tool utility that lets smartphone and tablet users install various Linux-based mobile operating systems.
It's been a little over two weeks since our last report about Magic-Device-Tool, and even if Marius Quabeck is extremely busy with the preparations for the upcoming UbuCon Europe 2016 international European Ubuntu conference, which will take place between the 18th and 20th of November 2016, in Essen, Germany, he's still updating the utility.
And it looks like the newest Magic-Device-Tool update adds support for the recently released Maru OS 0.3 open-source operating system that lets you run Android software on your phone while providing a Debian desktop. Best of all, it looks like you'll be able to install Maru OS 0.3 with or without Open GApps, a project that helps you install Google Apps on custom Android ROMs.
Some good news for the cricket fans as Nextwave Multimedia Pvt. Ltd. has added another new cricket game to the Tizen store. This seems like a popular, fun and casual mobile cricket game that we think you are going to enjoy.
It’s been an eventful year for Android smartphones, with a few huge surprises along the way—whether it’s Google’s first smartphone or the Galaxy Note 7’s exploding batteries.
After three years of casting videos to our TV with Chromecast, we've made the move back to a set-top box -- for one very specific reason.
There was a time some years ago that CyanogenMod was the surest way to get the latest build of Android on your phone. It's a little slower these days, but development continues to chug along. The CM team hopes to roll out the first nightly builds of CM14.1 later tonight, but not all devices will be supported right away.
According to Steve Kondik, there are about a dozen devices slated for release in the first push. Here they are.
I've always been fascinated by finding new and interesting ways to bring meaning to data with interactive visualization tools. While I'm definitely a geek for numbers, the human mind is simply much better at interpreting trends visually than it is just picking them out a spreadsheet. And even when your main interest in a dataset is the raw numbers themselves, a dashboard can help to bring meaning by highlighting which values matter most, and what the context of those numbers is.
Figuring out how to best visualize your data can be challenging. Maybe you started out by creating a few graphs in a spreadsheet and are trying to find a way to tie them all together. Or maybe you're working with an existing analytics tool and want to find a way to make your data more accessible to a wider audience. Or perhaps you've go several real-time sources and are trying to find a way to tie them all together.
Fortunately, there are a number of great open source dashboard tools out there that make the job much easier. On one end of the spectrum are open source business intelligence tools, like BIRT or Pentaho. But for a smaller project, tools like these could be overkill, and in some cases, you might be able to find a dashboard tool that is already designed to work with the kind of data you are dealing with.
It was a privilege to be a speaker at FUDCon, Cambodia 2016. This being my first international FOSS event was ever more exciting. Right from the day I received the invitation from Sirko, I felt extremely privileged. On reaching the place I found that the event was much bigger than what I had expected it to be. There was a bar camp being organised by the university with over 5000 participants. Simply speaking it was a grand and huge occasion.
Endace, a world leader in high-speed network monitoring and recording technology, is a sponsor of Suricon, which kicks off on Wednesday November 9th at the Hamilton Crowne Plaza in Washington D.C. Suricon, which draws attendees from around the world (including Suricata project contributors, developers and users), is the annual conference for the community behind the popular open-source intrusion detection (IDS) application, Suricata.
Last week I visited All Things Open, one of the largest open source conferences of the US East Coast. The venue was the monumental building of the Raleigh Convention Center, just two blocks from Red Hat’s headquarters. I was presenting syslog-ng in the Operations track of the conference, but luckily I had a chance to stay for the full two days of the event.
There were over 2400 visitors at the conference, so registration and check-in already started the day before. Those who leveraged this opportunity could not just avoid the crowd next morning, but also receive a nice t-shirt together with the conference badge:
LibreOffice is the best office software available, or at least on Linux. LibreOffice is a powerful office suite that comes with a clean interface and feature-rich tools that seeks to make your productive and creative. LibreOffice includes several applications including Writer for word processing, Calc for spreadsheets, Impress for presentations, Draw for vector graphics and flowcharts, Base for databases, and Math for formula editing.
The FreeBSD Unix operating system is one of the earliest open-source operating system projects, and it continues to be actively developed. The most recent update is the FreeBSD 11 release, which debuted Oct. 10. While FreeBSD is a robust operating system, it is not a desktop focused platform, which is where the PC-BSD operating system, based on FreeBSD used to fit in. On Sept. 1, PC-BSD was re-branded as TrueOS, providing FreeBSD users with an easy-to-use desktop as well as a new release cadence. In the past, PC-BSD releases followed FreeBSD milestones, providing users with code that had already been included in a generally available release. With TrueOS, the release model is now moving to what is known as a rolling release, with packages constantly being updated as they become available. As such, TrueOS is not based on the recently released FreeBSD 11; instead, it is based on the FreeBSD "current" branch that is the leading edge of the operating system development. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at the new TrueOS operating system and what it offers desktop users.
Since I've studied civics and governments, I've never thought a two-party system of elected officials in our executive and legislative branches was the best form of democracy. It worked for a time, but now it's time for change. In the United States, our representative democracy has become polarized and plagued with raising money for re-elections instead of focusing on the issues—issues that are largely influenced by lobbyist and corporate interests.
Capgemini Consulting’s Wendy Carrara, project manager for the European Data Portal, discusses the UK’s open data readiness, including ways it could learn from its neighbours and even improve on its open data policy
Open data – that is, publicly available data that’s free for all to use – is set to have a monumental impact on societies in the next five years. Whether it’s information regarding public transportation, citypolicy or city infrastructures, open data enables public sector bodies, business and citizens alike to make more informed decisions about the things that really matter. While it may sound like a popular buzzword from years gone by, governments across the globe are now developing policies that encourage the release of open government data. However, having policy in place is a far cry from actually getting it done.
Nestlé is at it again. Recently publicly condemned for pumping 36 million gallons of water from Strawberry Creek in the San Bernardino National Forest, paying a meager $524 annually for a permit that expired long ago, the multi-national company is now planning to milk the citizens of Flint, Michigan, to keep their water privatization plan afloat.
Nestlé was just given a permit to almost double the groundwater they extract from the Michigan area amidst the recent Flint water crisis. This means the company will be taking more than 210 million gallons annually while many Flint residents are still suffering from the long-term effects of lead exposure.
Nestlé is not even based in the U.S., but the Swiss transnational is taking water from hundreds of local water supplies. The U.S. represents its largest bottled water market. Nestlé also controls more than 70 of the world’s bottled water brands, among them Perrier, San Pellegrino, Ice Mountain, Pure Life, and Vittel.
Microsoft has patched 68 vulnerabilities in Windows, Office, Edge, Internet Explorer and SQL Server, two of which have already been exploited by attackers and three that have been publicly disclosed.
The patches are covered in 14 security bulletins, one dedicated to Adobe Flash Player which is upgraded through Windows Update in Windows 10 and 8.1. Six of the bulletins are rated critical and eight are rated important.
So said Intel general manager of IoT security Lorie Wigle at Intel Security's Focus 16 conference last week.
IoT security is really just security, she said, but the window is closing on the ability to implement IoT with maximum security and minimum risk.
The recent attack on Dyn showed how IoT devices can be co-opted by evildoers.
Previous reports from Centcom were a dramatic under-count, and that trend continued with this new report, which carefully omitted some of the biggest and most well-documented incidents, which apparently fell into the category of strikes that the Pentagon decided not to investigate at all.
The most conspicuously absent figures are from mid-July, when a flurry of US airstrikes against the city of Manbij and the surrounding area killed an estimated 200 civilians. At least 56 civilians were killed in one single incident, which at the time the US claimed they “mistook for ISIS.”
Despite the Pentagon feeling the need to come up with excuses for the Manbij strikes at the time, they not only didn’t include them in the final death toll, but didn’t even hazard an attempt to mention the well-documented incidents in the document.
TransCanada said it hopes to persuade a new Trump administration to revive the controversial Keystone XL crude oil pipeline that President Obama rejected on Nov. 6, 2015.
Taking advantage of President-elect Trump’s vow to launch a series of major infrastructure programs, Calgary-based TransCanada said it was “evaluating ways to convince the new administration on the benefits, the jobs and the tax revenues this project brings to the table.”
“TransCanada remains fully committed to building Keystone XL,” the company said.
The company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline is preparing to tunnel under Lake Oahe, the body of water at the heart of the protests against the crude oil pipeline. This last phase of construction would join the two already-completed sections of the pipeline, Reuters reports.
The company, Energy Transfer Partners, announced today that drilling underneath the lake will start in two weeks despite government agencies’ requests to wait, according to The Guardian. The pipeline is expected to be completed by the end of 2016, the company says.
Protesters, including the local Standing Rock Sioux tribe, have been fighting the the $3.7 billion pipeline since April. They argue that the pipeline, which is intended to carry crude oil from North Dakota to a refinery in Illinois, could pollute water supplies and destroy culturally important land. In September, the US Justice and Interior Departments and the Army Corps of Engineer requested that Energy Transfer Partners voluntarily stop construction underneath the lake.
While America was watching Donald Trump sweep the polls, climate representatives from over 200 countries saw America’s commitments to international climate goals blow away. This week, climate negotiators—along with NGOs, journalists, and other observers—are gathered in Marrakesh, Morroco to flesh out the details of the Paris agreement, newly ratified and enacted by the United Nations to address climate change. And though Trump hasn’t described his climate and energy policies in detail, he has made it clear that he will not honor promises the Obama administration made to combat the intensifying global warming catastrophe.
The Clean Power Plan. Tax breaks for renewable energy. Cabinet appointees and a Supreme Court seat. Trump has the power to drastically change US environmental policy—and as the soon-to-be-leader of the world’s largest economy and second-largest greenhouse gas emitter, his decisions will change the math for other nations previously committed to climate regulations. Some will follow the US, and dial back (or abandon) their goals. Others will stay the course. And still others might double down on climate goals, potentially gaining global clout as a result. However the 45th president of the US proceeds, his decisions on climate will affect everyone on Earth.
Indian Finance Minister Arun Jaitley says "honest people" have no need to worry about a decision to scrap 1,000 and 500 rupee notes.
Mr Jaitley said the move would flush out tax evaders, adding that all old notes deposited in banks would be subjected to tax laws.
The surprise move, announced on Tuesday evening, is part of a crackdown on corruption and illegal cash holdings.
It’s a common belief that low-wage workers will be hit the hardest by advanced robots in the workplace. When we take a global perspective on this, the people that will be most affected by widespread automation won’t be workers in North America, according to a new United Nations report—it’ll be people in developing countries.
Automation stands to reduce opportunities for low-wage workers in North America, the report from the UN Conference on Trade and Development states. But the types of jobs most likely to be eliminated entirely are more prevalent in developing nations. That’s because those same jobs, in sectors like farming and manufacturing, have already mostly dried up in wealthier nations as corporations have moved their operations abroad, in search of higher profits through lower wage costs.
Saudi Arabia’s governing economic body called the Council of Economic and Development Affairs (CEDA) has cancelled $266.7 billion in projects, the Saudi Press Agency said, and announced it would be settling much-delayed private-sector payments by year end.
The projects that have been canceled are the ones that are not expected to accelerate the kingdom’s growth or improve the living standards for its people.
The cancellations were first considered in September, but at the time, it was noted that only $20 billion in projects would be considered to put on the chopping block.
The size of the delayed payments—mainly due to severe hits to the kingdom’s oil revenue—remains undisclosed, but it includes delayed payments to construction firms, medical establishments, and foreign consultants. One analyst, according to Reuters, estimated that the amount still owing just to construction firms was US$21 billion.
An automobile engineer, who went to Saudi Arabia for better job opportunities, has allegedly been “sold” to a Saudi national as a slave to work in his camel farm. The family members of Jayanta Biswas have approached the Ministry of External Affairs for help in bringing him back from Saudi Arabia.
However, they are yet to receive a word from the ministry. “We appeal to the Indian government to initiate action in order to bring my brother back. We are at our wit’s end,” Gouri Biswas, elder sister of Jayanta, said.
The Huffington Post’s editor's note calling Donald Trump as a “racist” and “xenophobe” is no more, a source in the newsroom tells POLITICO.
For months, every story on the Huffington Post about Trump came with the following note at the bottom of the article.
Vigils and protests continued into the early hours Thursday as opponents of President-elect Donald Trump expressed dismay with the election results, underscoring the difficult task he faces in uniting a fractured country.
Despite Hillary Clinton and President Obama urging their backers to accept Trump’s victory and support his transition into power, thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets decrying his crude comments about women and attacks on immigrants.
Protests were reported in cities across the nation, from major metropolitan centers like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, to smaller cities, such as Richmond and Portland, Ore. Dozens of demonstrators were arrested.
Even cities in red states, such as Atlanta, Dallas and Kansas City, Mo., saw demonstrations.
At least two police officers in Oakland, Calif., were injured as protesters took to the streets and chanted slogans against Trump, a police spokeswoman said. A few protesters threw objects at police dressed in riot gear, set off fireworks and started small trash fires.
If you have a quick look at President-Elect Donald Trump’s approach – as a businessperson – to legal obligations, you may see something interesting about his approach to politics.
Trump sees himself as a master of the “art of the deal”.
And he certainly has an interesting and artful approach to contract law.
By way of background, classical contract law is about the sanctity of the agreement: the bargain.
All parties to a contract agree in advance what to do throughout the period of the contract regarding foreseeable risks. This means that there is a lot of “front-end” thought put into a contract: more time working things out in advance, the fewer problems later.
But my main point is the European establishment’s response to the Trump presidential victory. And let us not deceive ourselves here – this was an emphatic victory. The American people wanted a candidate for change, for a push-back against the perceived Washington political elite.
Perhaps the election could have swung in another direction towards another candidate for change – if Bernie Sanders had been the Democrat nominee. Alas, as we know from the DNC files leaked to and published by Wikileaks, his campaign was undermined by his own party in favour of Hillary Clinton, while promoting Trump as the Republican candidate that Clinton could beat.
As the US presidential elections move along, Canada’s informational website for immigration has unexpectedly crashed as Donald Trump currently leads in votes.
The RNC’s sophisticated predictive modeling had Trump losing in the campaign’s last stretch, all the way until the Friday afternoon before the election, according to an embargoed briefing the RNC delivered to reporters at the party’s Capitol Hill headquarters on Friday afternoon.
At the time of the briefing, the RNC’s model showed Trump finishing 30 electoral votes short of the tally needed to clinch the White House, while losing by various margins to Hillary Clinton in the battleground states of Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump won all those states, and the Associated Press declared him the winner at 2:31 a.m. on Wednesday — a shocking upset victory that most pollsters struggled to explain.
[...]
The briefing was called ostensibly to highlight the RNC’s advances in voter modeling and its heavy investment in the party’s ground game. But it also seemed at least partly intended to prove that the Republican Party gave Trump — and all of its 2016 candidates — the tools to succeed in 2016.
The suggestion was unmistakable: if Trump loses, the blame should fall on the rookie candidate and his overmatched campaign — and not the party or its chairman Reince Priebus.
The briefing was conducted by the RNC’s top staff, who asked reporters to agree not to divulge details — or even the existence of the briefing — before the election was called.
The RNC’s model included 9.8 billion rows of data collected from 26 million phone calls that allowed the RNC to assign scores between 0 and 100 on all manner of issues.
I was born and raised in Trump country. My family are Trump people. If I hadn't moved away and gotten this ridiculous job, I'd be voting for him. I know I would.
The Electoral College is a group of people that elects the president and the vice president of the United States. (The word “college” in this case simply refers to an organized body of people engaged in a common task.)
As voters head to the polls on Tuesday, they will not vote for the presidential candidates directly, in a popular vote. Instead, they will vote to elect specific people, known as “electors” to the college. Each state gets a certain number of electoral votes based on its population.
In some sort of a reaction against the political elite, a corrupt system, and political correctness – the US has elected Donald Trump as president.
On the one hand, it is more or less impossible to foresee the president elects politics on IT, mass surveillance, and civil rights. (OK, he has opened up for torture of suspected terrorists – but I’m not sure that he himself will remember or stand by that.)
Donald Trump’s relationship with the news media during his successful run for the presidency was, put politely, complex. A better word might be codependent. Trump lashed out regularly at those whose coverage of his campaign he found unfavorable — tweeting insults, banning and unbanning news organizations, promising to strengthen libel and defamation laws. But free media coverage, particularly from TV news outlets, was also the fuel that powered the Trump machine.
What television news outlets received in return were outsize ratings. For the four weeks of Oct. 10-Nov. 6, CNN, Fox News and MSNBC averaged 84% more primetime viewers than they did over the same period a year ago. The increased numbers — and accompanying ad dollars — rolled in as the networks handed large swathes of airtime over to live feeds of Trump campaign events. Those same networks were caught by surprise Tuesday night by Trump’s victory. Now they must decide whether the trade-off was worth it.
“I think they have to examine the amount of unfiltered airtime they gave to the President-elect,” said Katz Television Group’s Bill Carroll. “If you were going to look at any of the cable networks for the last year, often the key phrase would be, ‘And now we go to a rally for Donald Trump.’”
So: we wake up the morning after the US election to discover ... what?
Here's my short term prediction, followed by my long term prediction. (And if you are American, I'm very, very, sorry.)
Next couple of months: Obama exits. People will feel a strange sad fondness for the utopian era of good governance. (In time, the past 8 years will seem surrounded by a rosy glow, as of Camelot during the days of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; they will even come to think kindly of George W. Bush.)
The US government's science efforts are split across a variety of agencies. Some are obvious, like the EPA, the Department of Energy, and the Department of the Interior, which oversees the national parks and Endangered Species Act. But others are less so. For example, the Commerce Department includes the NOAA, or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, while the National Institutes of Health falls within the Department of Health and Human Services.
The people who run these agencies will have major say over the US' research priorities for the next four years, and they'll determine what role science plays in making policy decisions. So, as the Trump transition team begins the work of vetting potential candidates, the rumored names may say a lot about what we can expect.
A lot of these rumors are preliminary enough that they essentially tell us nothing. For example, possible candidates floated for Commerce Secretary include everyone from the Republican National Committee finance chair (Lew Eisenberg), to two different business executives, to several of Trump's former primary opponents like Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, and Rick Perry. The NOAA keeps one of the US' two temperature records used for climate monitoring (NASA keeps the other), and it tracks the ocean's health. (It may also get all of NASA's earth sciences research.) But it's hard to guess whether any of these figures would pay much attention to these activities, much less make major revisions in them.
WikiLeaks on Wednesday published a 36th batch of emails from Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, just hours after the presidential election concluded with Donald Trump's victory over Clinton.
The release, which includes 225 emails obtained from Podesta's personal Gmail account, brings the total released by WikiLeaks to 58,660. The organization began releasing the messages in early October, and claimed at the time to have around 50,000 on hand. It isn't clear how many more the website holds, or how long the releases will continue, but they seemed timed to hurt Clinton's chances of becoming the next president.
CHINA’S INTERNET is a universe of contradictions. It has brought hundreds of millions of people online and has become a vast marketplace for digital commerce, yet it is also heavily policed by censors to snuff out any challenge to the ruling Communist Party. Under President Xi Jinping, the censors are working overtime to keep 721 million Internet users under control.
The Chinese government is to further restrict Internet use by adopting a new law that may have serious consequences for Tibetans who try to communicate with the outside world.
The regressive measure named the Cybersecurity Law was passed by China's Parliament on 7 November in order to combat what Beijing said is a growing threat of hacking and terrorism, but it has drawn criticism from the international community, business groups and human rights groups.
The law aims to strengthen the country's already restrictive internet controls by forcing companies to censor information the government declares "prohibited" and to support state surveillance requests. This includes requiring them to monitor network activity and provide investigative assistance to security agencies.
Several far-right Polish groups have protested outside Facebook's office in Warsaw after the social networking site temporarily blocked their profiles.
About 120 people demonstrated in the Polish capital Saturday afternoon, denouncing what they said was "censorship."
Facebook recently blocked the profiles of far-right nationalist groups ahead of nationalist demonstrations on Independence Day next Friday, Nov. 11. In recent years, extremist groups have clashed violently with police on the annual holiday. Facebook has since unblocked the profiles.
The Information and Broadcasting Ministry’s 24-hour ban on the television channel NDTV India over its Pathankot coverage is being seen as an attempt to muzzle inconvenient live reportage. And worse, a case of selective vendetta. The Ministry has invoked the Cable Television Networks (Amendment) Rules, 2015, on the ground that the channel broadcast “crucial information” which compromised national security. These rules prohibit “live coverage of any anti-terrorist operation by security forces” and restrict media coverage to “periodic briefing” by a designated officer “till such operation concludes”. It is not clear if the channel's impugned broadcast was 'live coverage' or just 'reportage'.
AT&T, the communications conglomerate which owns Direct TV, was hauled into the court of public opinion Friday, charged with censorship for pulling the plug on Fox News.
Irate customers of the satellite television subscriber service took to the internet to voice their suspicions, tar and feathers at the ready.
When the USA PATRIOT Act was signed into law on October 26, 2001, it erased many of the vital checks and balances that stood between the American people and their government. As Bush supporters cheered the unprecedented power that their people in Washington now held, the civil liberties world warned them: "Your president has just fashioned a weapon that will be wielded by all who come after him."
We’ve seen this play out before. Twice, in fact. In both instances — first with Poke, then with Slingshot — Facebook’s attempt to create a legitimate Snapchat competitor flopped.
The editors at Businessweek like that approach. In a Halloween post on Bloomberg View, the editors argued privacy would be better served if internet service providers gave consumers the option to pay for it rather than for the FCC to require—as it recently has—that consumers must opt in to corporate surveillance. The editors wrote, “So-called pay-for-privacy policies, in which companies charge users more in exchange for not tracking them, is one promising approach.”
It turns out that privacy already has a price, and one can roughly find it in a straightforward way, according to Christopher Soghoian, a technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union. It runs about $400. That’s the price of the cheapest new iPhone available on the market today.
In a recently released TED talk, Soghoian said there’s a “digital security divide” between wealthier iPhone users and generally low-income buyers of devices running on Google’s Android operating system. This threatens democracy, he argues, because today’s new civil rights movements run on mobile technology, but most of these new leaders’ followers will receive marching orders on phones that don’t protect them.
THE OPEN RIGHTS GROUP (ORG) has been quick to express concerns that the new American president, a known reactionary blowhard, now runs the US National Security Agency (NSA) and will therefore work closely with GCHQ.
In a little over two months, Donald Trump – after his shocking victory last night – will control a vast, unaccountable national security and military apparatus unparalleled in world history. The nightmare that civil libertarians have warned of for years has now tragically come true: instead of dismantling the surveillance state and war machine, the Obama administration and Democrats institutionalised it – and it will soon be in the hands of a maniac.
It will go down in history as perhaps President Obama’s most catastrophic mistake.
The Obama administration could have prosecuted torturers and war criminals in the Bush administration and sent an unmistakable message to the world: torture is illegal and unconscionable. Instead the president said they would “look forward, not backward”, basically turning a clear felony into a policy dispute. Trump has bragged that he will bring back torture – waterboarding and “much worse”. He has talked about killing the innocent family members of terrorists, openly telling the world he will commit war crimes.
Modern surveillance programs would be a disaster under President Trump
President Obama has just 71 days until Donald Trump is inaugurated as our next commander-in-chief. That means he has a matter of weeks to do one thing that could help prevent the United States from veering into fascism: declassifying and dismantling as much of the federal government’s unaccountable, secretive, mass surveillance state as he can — before Trump is the one running it.
Last month, Wired published a story with the headline "Imagine if Donald Trump controlled the NSA." Now there's no need to imagine.
Trump overcame all odds on Wednesday when he became the 45th president-elect of the United States. As a result, he's about to gain control of the US intelligence agencies, including the NSA (National Security Agency).
It's the nightmare scenario that many worried about: the US elects a president who uses the country's nearly omnipotent surveillance powers for his or her own gain. Edward Snowden has described the NSA's spying capabilities as the “architecture of oppression,” with the fear being that it could be deployed by a malicious commander in chief.
But what could President Trump, a man who has incited hate speech against minorities and threatened to jail his political rivals, actually do with the NSA? Could he turn the NSA into his own personal spying army?
A Sydney woman, who attended Islamic colleges in Sydney’s west, says girls as young as 12 would be married off overseas and some were dropped off at school by husbands aged in their 30s.
Iraqi-born Bee al-Darraj, now 24, said she tried to report multiple counts of child marriage among her friends and relatives to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) without success.
Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday called on his supporters not to heed what “Europe says and care about what Allah says,” on the latest developments in his country which the European Union described as “extremely worrying.”
Addressing a public gathering in the capital Ankara, Erdogan slammed the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) leaders and lawmakers, 10 of whom Turkish authorities imprisoned since Friday.
“Those who lean on terrorists will continue paying the price,” said Erdogan referring to a speech by the now jailed HDP co-chair Figen Yuksekdag.
The HDP co-chair had earlier praised the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) fight against the Islamic State (IS) in Syria.
“We lean on the YPG, YPJ, and Rojava,” Yuksekdag had declared in a July 2015 speech to a crowd in the Suruc district of Urfa Province right across the border with the town of Kobani in Syrian Kurdistan.
Kobani was notably saved from a complete IS takeover earlier in the year by the US-backed Kurdish forces.
The release of the FCC’s net neutrality rules in 2015 heralded one of the most important progressive changes to the internet in memory. The rules, which barred data throttling and paid fast lanes, were celebrated as a central tenet of Obama-era government regulation. At the time, Obama said the "decision will protect innovation and create a level playing field for the next generation of entrepreneurs."
Now it seems possible that next generation won’t see net neutrality in action. Although telecom policy was hardly a central pillar of Trump’s candidacy, he has gone on record against it. "Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab," Trump tweeted in 2014. "Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media." (It’s unclear what Trump means with comparisons to the FCC’s long-eliminated Fairness Doctrine, which required broadcasters to provide airtime for opposing views. Conservative media was also not "targeted" by net neutrality in any tangible way.)
Companies that make money from threatening alleged file-sharers are known for their bullying tactics but those who are prepared to fight back can enjoy success. A letter sent by a defense lawyer to the copyright trolls behind the movie London Has Fallen provides an excellent and highly entertaining example.