Like most fancy tech terms, "Cloud Computing" has lost its newness, and it's now just a commodity we purchase. It's often so much easier to provision virtual machines than it is to buy and host your own servers. Yes, there are concerns over privacy and security when your data is in the cloud. When you host in your own data center, however, there's still the possibility of a rogue cleaning crew getting to your servers. (We've all seen the movies; it just takes a mop and a blue jumper to get you into the most secure data center.) Regardless of your stance on cloud computing, it's here to stay. This month, we talk a bit about how to live in this bold new world.
Linux is known for offering tremendous overall hardware compatibility, but Linux is most famous for its compatibility with older laptop hardware. This article will share some of the best Linux distros for old laptop hardware and also touch on what the minimum requirements are for each distro.
In January I wrote several times about my new low-priced ASUS X540S laptop, and how I loaded a variety of Linux distributions on it. I've been using the system for over a month now, and during that time I have come to like it even more than I did initially.
The Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) will see new features introduced with the Linux 4.11 kernel.
F2FS for Linux 4.11 is making use of a separate thread for discards to avoid latency problems during checkpoints and fstrim, some prep work for open-channel SSD support, on-disk bitmaps are being introduced, and various other changes.
The guy behind the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds, has built version 4.10 of the mainline kernel—nicknamed “Fearless Coyote.” Like any new kernel, version 4.10 has a slew of improvements for compatibility with a wide range of hardware. As I was digging through the commit log to see what’s new (a lot, actually), an entry on Kaby Lake caught my eye.
Many of the technologies we now take for granted were quiet revolutions in their time. Just think about how much smartphones have changed the way we live and work. It used to be that when people were out of the office, they were gone, because a telephone was tied to a place, not to a person. Now we have global nomads building new businesses straight from their phones. And to think: Smartphones have been around for merely a decade.
The patches are now out there for having initial accelerated support in the Nouveau DRM driver for the GeForce GTX 1050/1060/1070/1080 series "Pascal" graphics cards. The signed firmware is being released and will allow these consumer graphics cards to now have hardware-accelerated support via the open-source driver.
The patches were merged last night into the Nouveau DRM development tree for enabling Pascal hardware acceleration for the GP102 to GP107 Pascal GPUs. We should be seeing the binary firmware release to pair with the driver today. While this is a huge milestone and great to see it finally happen, do note this initial support doesn't yet have any re-clocking (similar to the Maxwell Nouveau support) and is basically in the same boat as Maxwell in terms of supported features, etc.
Collabora developer and longtime X.Org/Wayland contributor Daniel Stone has written a blog post detailing some of the recent and ongoing projects being led by the consulting firm when it comes to open-source graphics.
Collabora is involved in many of the open-source upstream Linux graphics development from the work on the Intel Mesa shader cache to employing the current Mesa release manager to advancing Wayland and Weston.
Emil Velikov has announced the availability today of the Mesa 17.0.1 release candidate.
Mesa 17.0.1 RC has five dozen patches prepped for this first point release to Mesa 17. Mesa 17.0.1 has a GLVND fix, a number of crash fixes for Gallium3D drivers, improved compute shader support in Nouveau, Intel OpenGL and Vulkan fixes, and a wide range of other work. Mesa 17.0.1 as usual is mainly comprised of bug/regression fixes while Mesa 17.1 due out in about two months will be the next feature release.
NVIDIA released their new Vulkan beta driver on Monday to support the new Vulkan 1.0.42 extensions but that ended up breaking the SteamVR Linux support, which relies upon Vulkan. NVIDIA has now corrected this support.
NVIDIA have released another beta of their Vulkan driver, which includes a fix for a major problem with SteamVR.
The past few months have been busy ones on the open-source graphics front, bringing with them Wayland 1.13, Weston 2.0, Mesa 17.0, and Linux 4.10. These releases have been quite interesting in and of themselves, but the biggest news must be that with Mesa 17.0, recent Intel platforms are fully conformant with the most recent Khronos rendering APIs: OpenGL 4.5, OpenGL ES 3.2, and Vulkan 1.0. This is an enormous step forward for open-source graphics: huge congratulations to everyone involved!
Mesa 17.0 also includes the Etnaviv driver, supporting the Vivante GPUs found in NXP/Freescale i.MX SoCs, amongst others. The Etnaviv driver brings with it a 'renderonly' framework for Mesa, explicitly providing support for systems with a separate display controller and 3D GPU. Etnaviv joins Mesa as the sixth hardware vendor to have a supported, fully open-source, driver.
In preparation for Ryzen tests coming up in the near future, I've been running some fresh benchmarks across a range of Intel and AMD x86_64 Linux systems. For those curious about the current performance of Ubuntu 17.04 daily with the Linux 4.10 kernel, here are benchmarks from 14 of the systems.
For this round of testing was an Intel Xeon E3-1245 v5 Skylake system with MSI C236A WORKSTATION motherboard, 32GB DDR4-2133 memory, 120GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD, and integrated HD Graphics P530.
We all run our favourite apps on your PC. This year you all will be wondering that which apps are updated? Which are the best app to use this year, so let’s take a look at the 10 new best apps for 2017.
Have you ever been engrossed in work so much so that you forget to check your system battery and it just sleeps on you? Well, all that is a thing of the past now since you know about the lightweight utility app to fix that.
We introduce to you the Battery Monitor; is a tiny tool that will notify you about your system’s battery status which could be Charging, Discharging, Not Charging, Critically Low Battery on Linux.
It offers a convenient, KF5 and Qt5-based GUI coupled with a QML image view to browse, view, and download images hosted in two of the most famous Danbooru boards (konachan.com and yande.re).
molly-guard is a handy utility which protects machines from accidental shutdowns/reboots by asking your hostname. Many of the Linux professional, working more then one system when they have issues. molly-guard was primarily designed to shield SSH connections.
For some reason they want to reboot the system to resolve the issue in production, in such a case they might reboot wrong system instead of actual system. Even i also did the same accidentally many times.
The latest and last planned development release of Phoronix Test Suite 7.0-Ringsaker is now available for your cross-platform, open-source benchmarking needs.
Do you wish to make a multiboot USB? Do you want to have multiple OSes on a USB drive for installation or for recovering other systems? Do you want to boot and use multiple operating systems from your USB drive, I got you covered. Let us look at two ways of achieving this.
When setting up a new Linux install with an SSD, many don’t know what file system to go with. This is understandable, as file systems are not talked about enough. When people install Linux, often times they select the default options without thinking about it. That’s not the right way to go about these things.
In this article we’ll go over the best file systems for your SSD on Linux. We’ll rank them and go over the positives and negatives of each.
Wave the checkered flag because SuperTuxKart has been greenlit on Steam thanks to thousands of votes from enthusiastic fans of the FOSS racing game.
Thimbleweed Park [Official Site], the new point & click adventure game from Ron Gilbert and Garry Winnick is to release on March 30th and it will have day-1 Linux support.
Recently, some images 'leaked' in a Steam update that showed off a shiny new look for the Steam client and Valve have confirmed it is being worked on. Thanks to SteamDB for noticing and putting the images up.
Paradox & Eugen Systems have today announced their new RTS 'Steel Division: Normandy 44' [Official Site, Paradox Store] and it will have Linux support.
During GDC at the AMD event, a LiquidSky employee stated that their gaming client that streams games to you will have a Linux client.
You can see the video here, at around 44 minutes the LiquidSky presenter talks about how it works and what platforms it will support and Linux is directly mentioned as being supported.
Valve developer Andres Rodriguez has posted a set of 22 patches for supporting high priority scheduling within the AMDGPU kernel driver.
This high priority AMDGPU scheduling work is done as part of their open-source AMD Linux GPU driver improvements for benefiting VR / SteamVR.
It’s no secret that the Arc GTK theme is our go-to recommendation for Linux users bored of their distro’s default design.
This hasn’t gone unnoticed by our readers. William emailed us to say recommend a GTK theme that isn’t Arc — and it’s pretty nice!
Linux is steadily building up steam as a viable platform on all sorts of fronts, including gaming as we’ve seen recently, but which is the most popular of all the many distros out there?
The results of our survey from earlier this month (which had almost 900 participants) have now been totted up, in which we asked you to name the three distros you used the most. And the clear winner – king-of-the-hill, top-of-the-list, a-number-one – was Ubuntu which was cited by 24% of respondents.
The popular OS had a clear lead over second-place Mint, which was used by 14.5% of those surveyed. And the bronze medal was just secured by Fedora which snared 10.1%, only a fraction ahead of Debian which finished on 10% bang-on.
New update of stable Q4OS 'Orion' desktop is available. Bunch of important packages updates and security patches has been delivered, as well as improvements of the native Q4OS update manager application. All the changes are available for existing Q4OS users via the automatic update process.
Work on the next major version, Q4OS 2.3 'Scorpion' continues as the Debian Project also nears end of development cycle for the Debian GNU/Linux 9 'Strech' operating system, upon which Q4OS 2.3 will be based. The release date is preliminarily scheduled at about the turn of April and May 2017. Q4OS 'Scorpion' will be supported at least five years from the official release date.
During the last two months, we’ve been busy rebasing Lakka on LibreELEC. It was quite difficult because we didn’t want to drop support for any ARM boards, but we finally managed to get it working on time. This new version of Lakka is based on the LibreELEC 8.0 stable branch and ships RetroArch 1.4.1. It is a Release Candidate intended for testers and developers. If you are a beginner Lakka user, it’s better to keep using the current stable release until Lakka 2.0 is ready for the masses.
Openbox, Tint2 and Conky are back.
Manjaro-Arm provided a simple out-of-the-box solution for Linux on embedded boards since 2015, but due to its lack of contributor involvement, the project’s sole maintainer announced that it is shutting down.
I decided to spend the last SUSE Hackweek with YaST and find a way which would allow us to write and run YaST integration tests easily. See the details in the project Hackweek page.
Some time ago I found the cucumber-cpp project. It is a cucumber support for the C++ programming language.
The reason is that the YaST UI uses the libyui library which is written in C++. If we want to control and check the YaST UI we need to implement it on the libyui level.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced today that eww ITandTEL, one of Austria’s leading network operators, has deployed Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and Red Hat CloudForms to develop and implement a customer-facing, scalable and automated Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environment. This allows the service provider to more quickly build high-performance cloud solutions for customers and manage these offerings in a more efficient manner with relevant E.U. data protection directives.
Ansible Tower 3.1 update adds new multi-workflow playbook DevOps capabilities to Red Hat's IT automation platform, as well as enhanced search and scale-out clustering features. Red Hat announced the latest iteration of its Ansible Tower DevOps platform on Feb. 28, providing new workflow and scalability options for enterprises. The Ansible Tower 3.1 release adds multi-playbook workflows as well as additional search and scale-out clustering features.
Ubuntu Core is available on Technologic’s i.MX6-based TS-4900 COM, will run on Dell’s Edge Gateway 3000, and will soon appear on a LimeNET base station.
At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Canonical announced several more takers for its IoT-oriented Ubuntu Core distribution. When Dell unveiled its compact, $399-and-up Edge Gateway 3000 series of Intel Atom-driven IoT gateways, Canonical revealed that the devices will be available with Ubuntu Core when they ship in early summer.
FriendlyElec has launched a $30, open spec “NanoPi M1 Plus” SBC with a quad-A7 SoC, onboard wireless, 8GB eMMC, a 40-pin RPi interface, and a GbE port.
FriendlyELEC (AKA FriendlyARM) has released a more feature-rich version of its community-backed, $15 NanoPi M1 SBC. The $30 NanoPi M1 Plus retains the 1.2GHz quad-core, Cortex-A7 Allwinner H3 SoC and 600MHz Mali-400 MP2 GPU, but adds features that meet or exceed those of the quad -A9 Samsung Exynos based NanoPi M2 ($25) and octa-core -A53 Exynos NanoPi M3 ($35). The NanoPi M1 Plus joins nine other NanoPi boards listed in our most recent Linux hacker board roundup — the most of any other vendor.
Embedian’s Linux-driven SMARC-FiMX7 is a SMARC 2.0 COM with a single- or dual-core i.MX7, up to 1GB RAM, 4GB eMMC, LVDS, GbE, and an optional starter kit.
The SMARC-FiMX7 is Embedian’s first SMARC 2.0 computer-on-module, and the first SMARC COM we’ve seen that taps NXP’s i.MX7 SoC. The company is no stranger to the 82 x 50mm SMARC (Smart Mobility ARChitecture) form factor, having released several SMARC 1.x COMs including the i.MX6 based SMARC-FiMX6 and TI AM437x driven SMARC-T4378.
Raspberry Pi Trading launched the Raspberry Pi Zero W, a WiFi and Bluetooth version of the Pi Zero selling for $10. There’s also a new case for both Zeros.
In honor of the 5th anniversary of the original Raspberry Pi, the Raspberry Pi Foundation and its Raspberry Pi Trading hardware unit has launched a wireless version of the stripped-down, $5 and up Raspberry Pi Zero. The Raspberry Pi Zero W is identical to the original except for the addition of the same Cypress CYW43438 wireless chip found on the $35 Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, featuring 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0.
Just in case you missed the announcement yesterday, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the immediate release of the Raspberry Pi Zero W for $10. Here's the intro video:
You'll find that the quickest way to build components of an IoT ecosystem is to use embedded Linux, whether you're augmenting existing devices or designing a new device or system from the beginning. Embedded Linux shares the same source code base as desktop Linux, but it is coupled with different user interface tools and other high-level components. The base of the system is essentially the same.
NComputing’s RPi 3-based “RX300” thin client can be used as client for its vSpace Pro 10 virtualization platform, as well as in standalone Raspbian mode.
Axiomtek’s “tBOX324-894-FL” is an EN 501x-certified transport PC with 7th Gen CPUs, 2x swappable SATA 3 drives, 4x M12 GbE ports, and -40 to 70€ºC support.
The tBOX324-894-FL computer is designed for train management, truck fleet management, transportation controller, data transfer, and security surveillance, as well as infotainment controllers in vehicle, railway, and marine markets, says Axiomtek. The rugged device is said to be certified with EN 50155, EN 50121, E-Mark, ISO 7637, and DNV 2.4, and compliant with EN 45545-2 and IEC 60945.
Jolla, a Helsinki-based smartphone and operating system developer, showcased its tablet computer in Helsinki in August, 2015.
Jolla announced at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona on Monday that it has signed a licensing agreement for launching its mobile operating system, Sailfish OS, in China.
The Finnish boutique smartphone and operating system developer said it has granted a newly-founded consortium, Sailfish China, the exclusive right to develop an independent operating system based on Sailfish OS for release in China.
Toon Sniper is a game where you have to shoot, nothing else to it (almost.) You have to shoot the terrorists from the rooftop that you are standing on. The controls are simple. On the left bottom corner, you swipe left or right to look around and on the right bottom corner, you tap to shoot. There is also a magnifier icon above where you swipe to look around; this helps you to zoom in on the enemy and it helps your aim. You have a certain amount of people and the time you need to kill them in- on the first level you kill ten people in one minute fifteen seconds.
Web servers have come a long way since the CERN httpd was developed by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 as part of the same project that resulted in the first ever web browser.
Some of the leading suppliers of web servers today provide closed source enterprise-level options for enterprises, but many others retain the open values embodied by Tim Berners-Lee and the decision to release the source code for CERN httpd into the public domain in 1993.
Computerworld UK looks at the best open source web servers currently available for enterprises.
ETSI Open Source MANO initiative swells to 60 organizations with arrival of Verizon, Atos and CableLabs as new members.
The rise of open source Internet of Things (IoT) is inevitable, according to a recent survey by open source software firm Red Hat. The survey found that while enterprises are exploring the potential of IoT, they are not rushing into development and project initiation without caution. In fact, “steady deliberation” seems to be the industry approach to IoT, with a focus on containing development and project costs, overriding the initial excitement around IoT. This indicates a preference for open source development environments going ahead.
Today’s software supply chain is fundamentally different than it was only a few years ago, and open source programs at large enterprises are helping to drive that trend. According to Sonatype’s 2016 State of the Software Supply Chain enterprises are both turning to existing open source projects to decrease the amount of code they have to write, and increasingly creating their own open source tools.
For the past five years, I've been unreasonably excited about a metadata standard known as Open Badges. In October 2016, as part of Mozilla Foundation's plans to transition the maintenance of the standard to the non-profit IMS Global Consortium, the Open Badges website was relaunched with perhaps the most concise definition I've seen: "Connected, verifiable credentials represented in portable image files." We're now at the stage where additional standards are being built upon Open Badges, whether blockchain-related or, as I will outline in this article, relating to ways badges tell stories through learning pathways.
The open-source Haiku OS inspired by BeOS has made much progress this month on several fronts.
Haiku OS has been working on real sub-pixel rendering support now that Microsoft patents pertaining to sub-pixel rendering are expiring. There have also been improvements to Haiku's JSON API, work underway to make Haiku build under GCC 6, and prep support for upcoming AMD Ryzen CPU coverage.
Not many presentations can start with a video co-promoting a new computer and the latest Star Trek movie, but Mark Atwood, Director of Open Source Engagement at HP Enterprise, started his LinuxCon Europe keynote with a video about The Machine and Star Trek Beyond.
The Machine uses a new kind of physics for computation and data storage allowing it to be very fast, energy efficient, and agile. The Machine runs Linux, and Atwood says that “the best way to promote the use of any sort of new technology is to make it open source.”
Mozilla makes its first acquisition, adding online bookmarking and sharing service Pocket to its roster.
On Feb. 27, Mozilla announced its first ever acquisition, announcing that it has acquired Read It Later Inc, which is best known for its Pocket technology that enables users to save, share and discover online links.
The storage team of ProfitBricks has been looking for a way to speed transfers between VMs on compute nodes and physical devices on storage servers, connected via InfiniBand, in their data centers. As a solution, they developed the IBNBD driver, which presents itself as a block device on the client side and transmits the block requests to the server side, according to Danil Kipnis, Software Developer at ProfitBricks GmbH.
Last week's release of Ocata, the 15th edition of OpenStack, arrived earlier than might be expected, coming only four months after it's last release. This made it two months premature of its normal six month release cycle. Even with the already early release, it appears that someone at the OpenStack foundation was in a hurry to push this one out the door, as the Foundation sent out an email announcing the release, with a link to a download page returning a 404 error. Thirty minutes later came an "oops" email: "In our excitement, we hit 'SEND' too soon."
Mere months since it was open-sourced by Facebook, Yarn has NPM on the run. The upstart JavaScript package manager has gained a quick foothold in the Node.js community, particularly among users of the React JavaScript UI library.
Known for faster installation, Yarn gives developers an improved ability to manage code dependencies in their Node.js projects, proponents say. It features a deterministic install algorithm and a lockfile capability that lists exact version numbers of all project dependencies. In this way, Yarn enables installation of thousands of third-party packages from the internet while ensuring code is executed the same on every system.
The WebAssembly project that's the cross-browser effort for low-level programming for in-browser client-side execution has reached a major milestone today. WASM can allow compiling C/C++ among other languages down into code supported by Firefox, Chrome, WebKit, and Edge.
The WebAssembly stakeholders agreed that it's the end of the browser preview phase with the initial WebAssembly API and binary format being complete for their initial implementation. Web browsers can now begin shipping WebAssembly support enabled by default.
Amazon’s web hosting services are among the most widely used out there, which means that when Amazon’s servers goes down, a lot of things go down with them. That appears to be happening today, with Amazon reporting “high error rates” in one region of its S3 web services, and a number of services going offline because of it.
Trello, Quora, IFTTT, and Splitwise all appear to be offline, as are websites built with the site-creation service Wix; GroupMe seems to be unable to load assets (The Verge’s own image system, which relies on Amazon, is also down); and Alexa is struggling to stay online, too. Nest’s app was unable to connect to thermostats and other devices for a period of time as well.
Several high-profile websites and services were knocked offline by a failure at one of Amazon's major US data centres.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows firms to rent cloud servers in order to host data on the internet without needing to invest in their own infrastructure.
On Tuesday, sites such as Quora, a Q&A forum, and Trello, which helps people monitor productivity, went down.
After several hours, Amazon said it had rectified the problem.
Following a protest "tractor march" by farmers in Helsinki last spring, the government provided 50 million euros in emergency aid to the agricultural sector. This is far from enough, say those working with a Farmers' Social Insurance Institution (Mela) project aimed at helping farmers cope with financial pressures. On many farms, economic difficulties that have piled up for a long time are also taking a psychological toll.
[...]
Fewer working farms also mean a shrinking safety net for farmers, who have fewer neighbours to turn to in need, a smaller local social network. Of the approximately 100,000 farms in the country 20 years ago, only around 50,000 remain. At the same time, the size of farms and the accompanying investment and economic risks have increased. [iophk: "the population did not halve during the same interval"]
Big Pharma wants to develop treatments for rare diseases, with government support. The International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Associations (IFPMA) this week launched a new report describing policy priorities to increase research and development into rare diseases.
Rare diseases are conditions which affect very small numbers of people. Currently between 5,000 and 8,000 rare diseases have been identified. The day 28 February was called Rare Diseases Day.
Financing for research and development into so-called neglected diseases – those predominantly affecting lower-income populations – rose recently mainly due to the Ebola outbreak, and private sector contributions represent a bigger share, according to the latest available data from a Gates Foundation-supported database.
Public health stakeholders – and just about everyone else – may take notice of a meeting planned for May in the Netherlands, as it could offer the beginning of a new approach to pharmaceutical costs. High drug prices have become a ‘kitchen table’ issue in countries of all economic sizes recently, and the World Health Organization is teaming up with the Dutch government to address it in a new and practical way.
Christos also reported that that NetBSD's base system is now 100.0% reproducible in our current test framework.
Know your enemy, the saying goes. But when it comes to cyberattacks, a game theory model suggests that just knowing the perpetrator and pointing the finger at them might not be the best tactic, and could even play into the hands of the attacker.
[...]
But naming who’s behind an attack may not be helpful if you’re not in a position to retaliate, says Benjamin Edwards at IBM Research, who led the modelling work.
By now you probably know that X.Org's security is in bad shape and routinely new security issues are uncovered and that's the case today.
Google has released details of a bug in Microsoft's browsing programs that would allow attackers to build websites that make the software crash.
Google researcher Ivan Fratric said the bug could, in some cases, allow attackers to hijack a victim's browser.
The bug was found in November, but details are only now being released after the expiry of the 90-day deadline Google gave Microsoft to find a fix.
Microsoft has yet to say when it will produce a patch that removes the bug.
Systems administrators who use a Linux workstation to access and manage IT infrastructure -- whether from home or at work -- are at risk of becoming attack vectors against the rest of the infrastructure.
Dr Ramamurthy Kosanam, the Andhra Pradesh doctor freed from Islamic State (IS) captivity in Libya, said on Sunday that the terrorist organisation forced the hostages to watch videos of what it did in Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and other places.
“ISIS people forced us to watch videos of what they did to Iraq, Syria, Nigeria & other places. It was bit difficult to watch them,” he said speaking to ANI.
He also said that ISIS recruits did not assault the hostages physically, but abused them verbally.
Ramamurthy said most of the ISIS terrorists were educated youth who knew about India.
Two people were wounded when a weapon was accidentally fired Tuesday as French President François Hollande was giving a speech in the western city of Villognon, the mayor told CNN. Hollande was not injured, but two other people were, Mayor Claude Guitton said. Their injuries were not life-threatening.
In an interesting turn of events last week in a German court, evidence has materialized that engineers were ordered to cheat emissions testing when developing automotive parts.
Last Tuesday, Ulrich Weiß brought forward a document that alleges Audi Board of Director members were involved in ordering a cheat for diesel emissions. Weiß was the head of engine development for Audi, suspended in November of 2015 but continued to draw more than half a million dollars in salary before being fired after prior to last week’s court testimony.
Inspectors have called for the owner of a zoo to face prosecution after the revelation that nearly 500 animals in its care had died in less than four years.
A damning report into conditions at South Lakes Safari zoo in Cumbria, which is home to more than 1,500 animals, found that 486 inhabitants had died of causes including emaciation and hypothermia between December 2013 and September 2016.
One African spurred tortoise named Goliath died after being electrocuted by electric fencing, while the decomposing body of a squirrel monkey was discovered behind a radiator. The zoo had a death rate of about 12% of its animals a year.
When Susan Fowler, a Bay Area-based writer and engineer who until recently worked for Uber, published a blog post on her personal Web site last week, the piece, which detailed a pattern of gender discrimination at the car-hailing company, quickly went viral. Among the experiences Fowler described in “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber” were communications with a sexually inappropriate and vindictive manager, and the company’s failure to respond properly to Fowler’s reports of his misconduct. As the problems persisted, Fowler wrote, and she was prevented from moving teams and from being promoted, she reported every infraction to H.R. This later led an H.R. representative to ask whether Fowler had considered that she herself might be the issue—a comment that Fowler also diligently noted.
In this post I argue that there is one way in which Brexit will *not* be as complicated as initially feared.
WTO renegotiation will be undoubtedly fiddly and tiresome – about as complex a technical readjustment as one can imagine – but it is ultimately not a predicament but a chore.
On November 9th, millions of Americans woke up to a nightmare: The election of a hyper-right-wing, single-party government led by people whose values they didn't share, and who didn't reflect the cultural, racial and gender diversity of their hometowns and neighborhoods.
In the week leading up to the presidential election, like hockey players who refuse to shave during the playoffs, the women of the Weiss family lived in their “Pussy Grabs Back” T-shirts. For months, our family texts had buzzed day and night with emoji-laden reactions to the latest Trump outrage, while my mother waged a very personal campaign against the Republican candidate. When the first Tuesday in November was upon us, my dad, who has a giant poster of William F. Buckley in his office, bowed to shalom bayit and wrote in Steph Curry.
All of this camaraderie put me in a strange position. Since the crucible of my college years—in which being an outspoken Zionist made you fascist, supporting the war in Iraq made you an imperialist, and believing that some cultures are indeed more enlightened than others a hegemon—I’ve gotten used to feeling politically homeless. I’m typically the hardass among the squishes. All of a sudden, I found myself making common cause with those whom I disagree with vehemently on, say, the Iran deal (bad), the necessity of teaching Western Civ. (good), and most certainly Israel. It is the difference on the Jewish state that has been the starkest and the most painful, as anyone who has paid any attention to the increasingly leftward tilt of the Democratic Party will not be surprised to learn.
Following the Women’s March on Washington and its sister marches around the world, Chinese women were noticeably absent from the international media spotlights. This is because street protests and demonstrations that “promote falsehoods” are illegal in China, and the Chinese government has a history of cracking down and retaliating against public events and figures that bring light to gender inequality.
While the Chinese government’s restriction of public protests and demonstrations is nothing new, over the past few years, China has been slowly increasing its censorship of feminist media and publications. For example, in 2015, the imprisonment by the government of the Feminist Five, a group of vocal Chinese women’s rights activists, made headlines and led to an international outcry, leading to their subsequent release. The members of the group had been detained for distributing pamphlets about sexual harassment on March 8, International Women’s Day.
Is it algorithms? Or maybe censorship? Or do people just not care anymore? These are the questions going through many people’s minds as it becomes increasingly more difficult to stay informed in our world.
Facebook became the top source for driving news and information to people in 2015. According to Parse.ly’s chief technical officer, Andrew Montalenti, latest estimates show that social media sources (of which Facebook is by far the largest) accounted for about 43% of the traffic to the Parse.ly network of media sites, while Google accounted for just 38%.
Now you might also have been hearing how Facebook’s algorithm has changed and many publishers are now seeing a decline in traffic from Facebook. There are likely a number of reasons for this and we will get to them shortly.
Fake news is affecting the way we think. Social media platforms have recently been hit with fake news posts that affect politics, cause concern with hoax celebrity deaths, and promote propaganda. Unlike news satire, fake news websites seek to mislead, rather than entertain readers for financial, political, or other gain.
Fake news websites successfully attract attention from large audiences by website spoofing – making the reader believe it is a trusted and legitimate source. Fake news is an unethical journalistic practice that has existed in print media before the internet existed and transformed even today.
Facebook, a major asset of sharing news articles through friends and family, is trying to combat fake news by using a new IOS feature in selective territories.
Fake news sites and articles permeated the 2016 Presidential election as partisan articles were generated by various websites and then shared via social media sites such as Facebook. Once read and re-shared online, the number of people viewing the fake or false news increases exponentially. Attempting to fact check these fake stories appears to make matters worse, as search engine inquiries only cause the results to move further up the results list, giving them a false legitimacy. Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerburg stated in a Nov. 12 post that “99% of what people see on Facebook is authentic.” Adam Mosseri, Facebook's News Feed Vice President says that one of the tactics the social media giant plans to deploy is undermining the financial incentives present that drive individuals to release fake news.
We recently submitted our comments to the Copyright Office's ongoing study on DMCA safe harbors, but perhaps we should have been a bit more creative. At least that seems to be the plan of the Content Creators Coalition, which has made its submission in the form of a video starring producer T Bone Burnett doing his best Werner-Herzog-without-the-accent impression. It's... quite something. (Amusingly it's also hosted on Vimeo, a site which — like all sites hosting user content — relies heavily on DMCA safe harbors for its existence, and indeed prevailed in a major legal battle over that very thing last year.)
The Department of Health's permanent secretary should stick to his day job rather than trawl through social media accounts of health workers, the UUP has said.
Richard Pengelly wrote to health trust chief executives saying he was increasingly concerned at "overtly political" tweets from health staff.
Mr Pengelly is the most senior health official in Northern Ireland after the minister, and the husband of Emma Pengelly Little, a DUP Assembly candidate.
In an email obtained by the News Letter, he highlighted two tweets critical of the DUP and Sinn Fein by two doctors on their personal accounts as being "not appropriate".
As Turkey moves closer to a crucial referendum on the sweeping executive powers its president wants, the authorities have made it clear that nothing about executive presidents — even imaginary ones — can be a laughing matter. The creators of a short comedy film learned this the hard way as their fictional schnitzel-craving president was barred from debuting on the big screen.
For espousing the same beliefs about the First Amendment I did on November 8 (everyone speaks always, unfettered), I am no longer a patriot.
Many of the groups and people who supported me then, and once supported the First Amendment absolutely, now call me a nazi, fascist, enabler, racist and normalizer.
Because we live in odd times, and because too many people only read a sentence or two before losing their sh*t, I feel the need for a disclaimer. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a nazi, fascist, enabler, racist or a normalizer. I do not like people who are those things. I didn’t vote for Trump and I think he’s a lousy human. ‘Kay?
The tools are there to be abused. Anyone who doubts this aspect of intrusive surveillance programs is either a supporter or a beneficiary. Oversight might be in place and various checks and balances instituted, but the scope and breadth of these programs ensures -- at minimum -- collection of communications and data government surveillance agencies have no business looking at.
If someone's given a tool that allows them to snoop on almost anyone with impunity, it will eventually be abused. Case in point: everywhere and everything related to state-sponsored surveillance.
Spiegel, which has published several surveillance agency leaks (from Snowden and others), has obtained some more documents. The documents haven't been published, but the contents indicate that -- from 1999 on -- Germany's foreign intelligence agency (BND) has used its powers to snoop on journalists and their sources.
An open database containing links to more than 2 million voice messages recorded on cuddly toys has been discovered, cybersecurity researcher Troy Hunt has revealed.
The messages were created by owners of CloudPets soft toys.
At one point, the data was even held to ransom, Mr Hunt says.
The animals are advertised as being toys that enable people to record and send greetings via a phone app and the toy itself.
The creatures are marketed as cuddly devices to connect children to working parents or grandparents.
The personal information of more than half a million people who bought internet-connected fluffy animals has been compromised.
The details, which include email addresses and passwords, were leaked along with access to profile pictures and more than 2m voice recordings of children and adults who had used the CloudPets stuffed toys.
The US company’s toys can connect over Bluetooth to an app to allow a parent to upload or download audio messages for their child.
CloudPets’s chief executive, Mark Myers, denied that voice recordings were stolen in a statement to NetworkWorld magazine. “Were voice recordings stolen? Absolutely not.” He added: “The headlines that say 2m messages were leaked on the internet are completely false.” Myers also told NetworkWorld that when Motherboard raised the issue with CloudPets, “we looked at it and thought it was a very minimal issue”. Myers added that a hacker would only be able to access the sound recordings if they managed to guess the password. When the Guardian tried to contact Myers on Tuesday, emails to CloudPets’s official contact address were returned as undeliverable.
Already Alexa is an ecosystem of over 11 million (and growing!) Echo devices sold, plus numerous third-parties adding in AVS support into their gadgets and frobs. Apple, Google, and Microsoft better figure out a way to compete, and fast.
A woman has given a harrowing description of the daily sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of an imam for nearly five years as a young girl.
Nabila – not her real name – was sexually abused almost every day from the age of seven in a small mosque operating within an imam's home in the West Midlands.
An Indonesian man collapsed while being publicly caned Monday for spending time with a woman who is not his wife in contravention of strict Islamic laws in a staunchly Muslim part of the country.
Herizal bin Yunus, 27, fainted after being caned eight times in front of a crowd in Aceh, the only province of the world's most populous Muslim-majority country that imposes sharia law.
Officials carried him off stage after he collapsed during the punishment outside a mosque in the provincial capital Banda Aceh, which was carried out by a religious official dressed in an all-encompassing, hooded cloak.
But once he came to, a doctor examined him and said he was in good health, and he was taken back up on stage to be flogged another 14 times. A local religious court had sentenced him to be caned a total of 22 times.
The way I started living life changed a lot post-divorce. Ironically, I gained freedom in more ways than one. Other than the most obvious — freedom from a bad marriage — I also started living life in a way I should have a long time ago.
The pivotal moment came for me when I decided I wanted to travel more and secondly undertake some aid work. Like most people, I fancied a partner in crime so waited around to see who would be free to join me.
I waited.
And waited.
The Yankton Sioux and their Chairman, Robert Flying Hawk, have broken new ground in litigation against the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to protect the waters of the Missouri River from invasion and desecration by the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL): Their complaint challenges the federal Indian law concept of “plenary power,” by which the U.S. claims total authority over Indians and Indian lands.
To my knowledge, a litigation challenge to federal Indian law basic concepts has only been done once before, by the Western Shoshone National Council in 1995. The Western Shoshone challenged the whole structure based on the so-called “right of Christian Discovery”—including the “trust doctrine” that the U.S. uses in conjunction with “plenary power.”
Italy’s president commuted part of the sentence of a former U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officer, allowing her to avoid prison for her role in a controversial U.S. program that involved kidnapping suspected terrorists and flying them to other countries for interrogation.
Obstructing government operations seems like a serious offense, but it tends to be one of those catch-all charges used by law enforcement to generate arrests for non-criminal activities like showing less respect than officers feel they deserve or someone getting all constitutional in response to searches and/or seizures. In Nebraska, law enforcement uses it to handle "being made."
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The police certainly seemed secure in the rightness of their actions, despite everything about the arrest looking like nothing more than petty revenge for having their operation blown. And the local prosecutors office was the most compliant entity in this failed compliance sting, as it followed through with a jury trial, rather than drop the ridiculous charge.
The jury found in favor of the restaurant owner, which means the next time an ID sting is uncovered, restaurant owners are more than welcome to let each other know which teens are acting as narc-of-the-day for the local PD.
Honestly, the problem here lies entirely with state law enforcement and its response to Horavatinovich's actions. As Fault Lines' Josh Kendrick points out, the public shouldn't be forced to stay silent when law enforcement screws up.
FCC chairman Ajit Pai said today that net neutrality was “a mistake” and that the commission is now “on track” to return to a much lighter style of regulation.
“Our new approach injected tremendous uncertainty into the broadband market,” Pai said during a speech at Mobile World Congress this afternoon. “And uncertainty is the enemy of growth.”
Pai has long been opposed to net neutrality and voted against the proposal when it came up in 2015. While he hasn’t specifically stated that he plans to reverse the order now that he’s chairman, today’s speech suggests pretty clearly that he’s aiming to.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s net neutrality rules, passed two years, ago were a “mistake” that caused uncertainty for the broadband industry, the agency’s new chairman said.
The net neutrality rules, along with the FCC’s decision to reclassify broadband as a regulated common carrier, “deviated” from the U.S. government’s longstanding light-touch regulatory approach toward the internet, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai said Tuesday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
Proponents of an open internet are holding a rally on Monday to mark the two-year anniversary of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) vote that enshrined net neutrality protections that the new Trump administration has already begun eroding.
The 3pm event in Washington, D.C is backed by the Color of Change, National Hispanic Media Coalition, Center for Media Justice, and Free Press, and will feature the FCC's only Democratic commissioner, Mignon Clyburn.
Michael Flynn, Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Miller aren’t the only Donald Trump surrogates who’ve had a very bad couple of weeks.
Ajit Pai, the president’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, was pilloried by The New York Times and Washington Post editorial boards last week after his agency released a rapid-fire series of rulings in a move that resembled Trump’s rush of executive orders. Chairman Pai’s directives, which he issued with zero public input, undermine the open internet and undercut the agency’s Lifeline program, which is designed to make the internet more affordable for families with low incomes.
Pai’s attack on Lifeline drew a swift response. A series of letters from dozens of Democrats on Capitol Hill asserted that Pai’s move to prevent nine internet service providers (ISPs) from serving Lifeline participants was “unfairly punishing” families in need.
Last week we watched as Verizon, a company that spent years telling users they didn't want or need unlimited data, was forced to bring back unlimited data. AT&T quickly followed suit with similar plans of its own, despite having spent years waging a not so subtle war on grandfathered unlimited connection customers. The reason for this sudden collective about-face? The continued rise of T-Mobile, which has increasingly brought something vaguely resembling competition to the wireless sector (even if non-price, often superficial competition remains the predominant law of the land).
While this was happening, we've been noting how new FCC boss Ajit Pai has been taking an axe to consumer protections, moving to gut broadband privacy rules, making it easier for prison telco monopolies to rip off inmate families, and killing efforts to bring competition to the cable box. Pai also recently killed off the FCC's inquiry into zero rating, after the former FCC stated Verizon and AT&T were using usage caps to give their own content an unfair market advantage.
YouTube has launched a $35-a-month TV subscription service that will rival US cable networks.
The live TV service will carry more than 40 channels, including some of the country's biggest networks including ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN.
The service will also include a "cloud DVR" that will let users record and store programming.
One analyst told the BBC that YouTube posed a real threat to traditional cable companies.
At an event in Los Angeles this afternoon, YouTube announced its own streaming TV service. The offering will mix live-streams of broadcast and cable television programming with the wealth of online video found on YouTube. It’s the latest in a surge of over-the-top (OTT) services trying to woo consumers who never bought into traditional cable television.
The service will exist as a standalone app. For $35 a month, subscribers get all four major networks — ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC — and roughly 35 cable channels. That price covers six accounts, so each member of the household can have a personalized account that offers recommendations tuned to their taste. The kids will have to draw short straws, however, as you can watch up to three concurrent streams at a time.
The hot topic at Mobile World Congress this year is not a new phone - apart from the Nokia 3310, they all look the same.
Nor is it a new technology like virtual reality - compared with last year, there seem to be fewer VR headsets around.
In the context of the revision of the European Telecom Package, La Quadrature du Net relays the open letter drafted by the research project netCommons on the importance of community networks for freedoms and fundamental rights. The letter, which will be sent to EU policy-makers, make a number of recommendations for sustaining the growth of community networks.
La Quadrature du Net stresses that, for law-makers, the review the Telecom Package should be seen as an opportunity to reinforce the transparency, civil rights and liberties and the possibility for all actors, especially small ones, to be able to play a significant role in the future so-called Digital Single Market. Also, La Quadrature du Net points out the importance of a fair and equal regulation for all the actors in the telecom ecosystem, especially local communities and non-profit entities. This revision should not lead to a closed market with few monopolistic actors.
It's also totally different from the Web that Berners-Lee invented in 1989, and then generously gave away for the world to enjoy and develop. It's truly sad to see him acquiescing in a move that could destroy the very thing that made the Web such a wonderfully rich and universal medium -- its openness.
I've known Bas Grasmayer for many years, and he's a super insightful digital/music strategist and has written a bunch of posts for us over the years. He tends to be on the cutting edge of any digital music startup -- so it's little surprise that he first got a Soundcloud account way back in 2008 or 2009, soon after Soundcloud started. His account is at soundcloud.com/bas/ because, well, that's his name.
Following complaints from rightsholders and broadcasters, the UK's Intellectual Property Office (IPO) is considering how the law can be tightened to tackle the so-called Kodi epidemic. Interested parties are invited to participate in a consultation to assess how copyright, fraud, and other legislation can target both device sellers and end users.