The hunky-chunky plastic case of the computer company’s earlier laptops gives way with the Galago. Instead, the Pro’s case is made from an aluminum alloy, a material that is sure to see the model met by many a MacBook comparison.
I love my Chromebook Pixel. This 2015 high-end Chromebook is my go-to laptop. And, with its spectacular 2560x1700 IPS, 239-pixels-per-inch display, it still draws admiring glances. Alas, I won't be able to replace it with a next-generation Chromebook Pixel.
The best Linux Ultrabook in the world just got a tiny bit better. A new processor, an updated operating system, better battery life and that same sumptuous screen make this one hard to resist.
Late last year Pine64 unveiled plans to release a cheap Linux laptop with a starting price of $89.
While the Pinebook isn’t available for purchase yet, it looks like some developers have gotten their hands on pre-release versions of the laptop.
There’s a new cheap Linux laptop in town. The Litebook is a 14 inch notebook with an Intel Celeron N3150 quad-core Braswell processor, a 1920 x 1080 pixel display, 4GB of RAM, and a Elementary OS Linux software.
You can order the 2.9 laptop from the Litebook website. A model with a 512GB hard drive is priced at $249. Or you can pay $20 more for a version with a 32GB mSATA solid state disk and a 512GB hard drive.
But before pulling out your wallet, there are a few things you might want to know.
Docker rebrands its commercially supported version and launches a new release approach for its container engine technology.
Docker Inc. is now taking a new approach to how it packages, releases and supports its popular open-source container engine technologies. The Docker Commercially Supported (CS) edition is being rebranded and expanded under the Docker Enterprise Edition (EE) name, along with new certified plug-ins and the official launch of the Docker Store for certified container applications.
Countless stories, comics, and television shows have driven home two very unpleasant stereotypes: the angry, unhelpful system administrator who can’t wait to say “no!” to a user request, and the clueless, clumsy user always a keystroke away from taking down the entire infrastructure. There is a kernel of truth to them. While both resource providers and resource users may want the same end result — the successful completion of computational tasks — they have conflicting priorities when it comes to achieving it.
Devised by psychologist Albert Maslow, the Hierarchy of Needs is a psychological theory to explain human motivation, comprising of multitier model of human needs, often depicted as hierarchical levels within a pyramid. Maslow uses terms such as physiological, safety, belongingness and love, esteem, self-actualization, and self-transcendence to describe the stages that human motivation generally moves through. As human beings, first we need our basic needs satisfied, then the psychological ones, and only then we can think of self esteem and achieving our full potential:
Razer co-founder and CEO Min-Liang Tan has shared plans to improve their Linux support, at least when it comes to their Blade laptops.
Razer hasn't provided official support for their products under Linux, although some community members have created third-party tools for customizing their keyboards, mice, and other gaming peripherals under Linux. Recently, Razer has been getting into the high-end laptop game and while it's x86 hardware, they are looking to ensure it's a good Linux experience.
One week after sending in the main power management and ACPI updates for the Linux 4.11 kernel, Rafael Wysocki has served up a second batch of feature updates for this next kernel version.
This secondary PM update for Linux 4.11 includes fixes for a cpuidle menu governor problem, a fix for the Intel P-State operation mode, updates to the generic power domains, hibernation core cleanups, and other basic changes within the power management realm. Before anyone asks, no, there aren't any targeted Ryzen changes with this code.
Al Viro has called for the new statx system call to be added to the Linux 4.11 kernel.
The statx system call is for providing enhanced file information. As explained in that earlier Phoronix article from a few months back, this new statx() system call would be able to return the file's creation time, data version number, and other new attributes not currently provided. These new attributes wouldn't work for all file-systems, but would work for a subset of them such as CIFS, NFS, and others that track such information.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) which itself is a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project, is expanding its roster of supported projects today with the addition of the gRPC project.
The gRPC project is an open source, high performance remote procedure call (RPC) framework originally developed by Google. The gRPC project has already been used outside of Google, with CoreOS and Netflix among the technology's adopters.
Assuming you have already checked out this morning's Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks, here are some more data points while putting the finishing touches on the Ryzen 7 Linux gaming benchmarks being published later today.
For these interim benchmarks are some more data from the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X that I've done in my benchmarks since receiving this processor yesterday.
For those craving some Linux gaming benchmarks from the newly-released AMD Ryzen 7 1800X processor, here are some test results. In this initial comparison are benchmarks of the Ryzen 7 1800K to Core i7 7700K when running these processors at stock speeds while using a Radeon R9 Fury graphics card paired with AMDGPU+RadeonSI for the Linux graphics driver stack.
Yesterday on top of the main Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks and the follow-up Linux gaming benchmarks, I also posted some extra Ryzen benchmark results and encouraged Phoronix readers to compare their own system's performance to our data using our open-source, automated benchmarking framework.
The latest in our AMD Ryzen Linux benchmarking is looking at the impact of compiled binaries when making use of Zen "znver1" compiler optimizations with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) compared to other optimization levels like Bulldozer and K8-SSE3.
With the AMD Ryzen 7 1800X running on Ubuntu 17.04 development with Linux 4.10 and GCC 6.3, I carried out some compiler benchmarks when trying different tuning levels for the Ryzen processor. It was way back in March of 2015 when AMD began on Zen support in GCC with the introduction of the "znver1" CPU type for signifying the first version of Zen.
Yesterday we posted launch-day Ryzen 7 1800X Linux benchmarks that were particularly appealing for multi-core / heavily-threaded workloads like code compilation. Given all the code compilation done by Linux users in particular, if you were intrigued by the Ryzen 7 1800X performance but find the $499 USD price-tag to be too higher, today I have my initial benchmark figures on the Ryzen 7 1700. The Ryzen 7 1700 is still eight cores and sixteen threads but will only set you back $329 USD as the current low-end Ryzen processor for what's currently available.
Rainbow Stream allows you to manage just about every aspect of your Twitter account from the command line. Yes, you did read that right. It's a full featured command line Twitter client written in Python. Chances are, you're falling into one of two camps right about now. If you're in the slightly insane one that thinks this is a good idea, stay tuned. Rainbow Stream actually does provide an simple and intuitive Twitter experience from the Linux command line.
With so many To-Do list apps filling the market these days it is only fair that a non-GUI app is also created for CLI enthusiasts.
Today we bring you a lightweight application you can use right from your Terminal – it’s Taskwarrior.
This open-source and cross-platform app will enable you to create and manage to-do lists from your Terminal with a list of custom commands.
It requires no PPAs that aren’t already available on your system and so you need not worry about it breaking or update issues.
Weblate 2.12 has been released today, few days behind schedule. It brings improved screenshots management, better search and replace features or improved import. Many of the new features were already announced in previous post, where you can find more details about them.
Blackmagic Design today announced that DaVinci Resolve, its professional editing and color correction software, is now available on Red Hat and CentOS Linux. This allows customers with Red Hat or CentoOS 6.8 or 7.2 systems to download and use the free version of DaVinci Resolve or the full DaVinci Resolve Studio. Adding Linux support gives customers more choice in hardware, allowing them to build extremely high performance, low cost workstations for editing and color correction.
Vivaldi's Ruarí ÃËdegaard is informing Softpedia today about the availability of the second development snapshot of the upcoming Vivaldi 1.8 web browser release, versioned 1.8.770.9.
According to Ruarí ÃËdegaard, Vivaldi Snapshot 1.8.770.9 appears to be a "historic" because it rewrites the history feature of the Chromium-based web browser, but also addresses approximately 40 bugs that have been reported by users since the previous snapshot or even from the current Vivaldi 1.7 stable release. It also upgrades the Chromium backend to version 57.0.2987.
It seems that the experimental Linux version of Arma 3 [Steam] is going to get the 64bit version in a coming update.
The Windows version gained 64bit support only recently in December in the development branch, so it's pleasing to see this being worked on for the Linux port. Originally, Bohemia stated the Linux version might not get 64bit.
I was pointed to SteamDB (thanks Ysblokje) where there's now a content depot for "Linux/Mac 1.68 64-bit".
The developers Spooky's Jump Scare Mansion: HD Renovation [Steam] have stated that Linux support is still coming and it looks like it could be soon.
I might be just a bit late with these numbers but I figured I’d share them nonetheless. Let’s check out how well DiRT Rally runs on my Radeon hardware!
To start out let’s go over the system requirements for DiRT Rally and compare them to the systems I will be using to benchmark the game.
Munch VR [Official Site, Steam], a casual VR gamed aimed at a wide audience now has an experimental version which supports Linux.
One for developers here, as Substance Designer 6 [Official Site] the '3D Material Authoring and Scan Processing Tool' has seen a day-1 Linux release.
Towards The Pantheon [Official Site] was emailed in by the developers and it looks like a fantastic 2D RPG. The good news is that it has been greenlit so it will be coming to Steam.
The developers of Codex of Victory [Steam] emailed in to let me know that their turn-based strategy with real-time base building elements will release this month with day-1 Linux support.
To set the stage, we need to briefly recap some of the problems with the KDE 3.x desktop that (among others) Plasma initially set out to solve.
See the screenshot on the right? That's how your KDE Plasma 5 desktop environment will look like when you upgrade this summer to the KDE Plasma 5.10 release, which will enter development in early May.
KDE developer Eike Hein is announcing that the KDE Plasma 5.10 desktop environment will come with a brand-new look (sort of). According to the developer, the Folder View will be used by default for the upcoming release instead of that Desktop widget you're probably removing every time you reinstall your KDE-based distribution.
It’s finally done! Kube 0.1.0 is out the door.
First off, this is a tech preview really and not meant for production use.
Kube is further developed in coordination with Roundcube Next, to achieve a consistent user experience across the two interfaces and to ensure that we can collaborate while building the UX.
A roadmap has been available for some time for the first release here, but in the long run we of course want to go beyond a simple email application. The central aspects of the the problem space that we want to address is communication and collaboration as well as organization. I know this is till a bit fuzzy, but there is a lot of work to be done before we can specify this clearly.
Today marks the release of KDE's new Kube 0.1 project, the first tech preview (pre-production) release of this experimental Kontact based on Qt Quick and Akonadi-Next.
Kube is self-described by its GitHub repository as "a personal information and collaboration application currently in its early stages of development. It uses Sink for data access and synchronization, and leverages the KDE PIM codebase where possible."
With a one-day delay, the GNOME Project, through Matthias Clasen, was proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download of the second and last Beta of the forthcoming GNOME 3.24 desktop environment.
GNOME 3.24 Beta 2 arrives only two weeks after the first Beta release, and brings with it numerous updated core components and applications that are usually shipped under the GNOME Stack umbrella. The technical version number is GNOME 3.23.91, and can be downloaded from the usual places by early adopters and public beta testers.
Paolo Bacchilega, the developer of the gThumb open-source and free image viewer and browser application designed specifically for the GNOME desktop environment kicked off the development of the next major version, gThumb 3.6.
A first snapshot is now available for download, gThumb 3.5.1, and ships with numerous new features and improvements. For example, there's now double-click activation support, a brand-new zoom popover that includes a bunch of zoom commands, as well as a zoom slider, and a color picker.
The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.5.2 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
This is a bugfix release of the v3.5 musl based branch, based on linux-4.4.52 kernels and it contains bugfixes.
Alpine Linux, the open-source security-oriented GNU/Linux distribution based on BusyBox and musl libc, has been updated earlier to version 3.5.2, the second point release to the stable 3.5 series.
Alpine Linux 3.5.2 comes one month after the release of Alpine Linux 3.5.1 and brings with it the recently released long-term supported Linux 4.4.52 kernel, as well as numerous up-to-date components, including PHP 7.0.16, lighttpd 1.4.45, Chromium 56.0.2924.76, PostgreSQL 9.6.2, nginx 1.10.3, ZoneMinder 1.30.2, and RackTables 0.20.12.
The developers of the PCLinuxOS distribution announced the release of PCLinuxOS 2017.03 KDE Edition, an updated install medium that ships with all the latest KDE technologies and applications.
Powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.9.13 kernel, PCLinuxOS 2017.03 KDE Edition includes the KDE Plasma 5.8.6 LTS (Long Term Support) desktop environment, as well as the KDE Applications 16.12.2 software suite, and KDE Frameworks 5.31.0.
GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton shares with us the availability of a new build of his Gentoo-based exGENT Linux-based operating system, which now includes all the recently released technologies and open source applications.
The openSUSE.Asia organization committee is accepting proposals to host the openSUSE.Asia Summit during the second half of 2017. The openSUSE.Asia Summit is the largest annual openSUSE conference in Asia and is attended by contributors and enthusiasts from all over Asia.
Good news for users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system, as openSUSE Project's Douglas DeMaio informed the community about the latest updates that landed in the repositories in the last week of February 2017.
It would appear that only four snapshots were released for openSUSE Tumbleweed users last week, but they brought a bunch of goodies that many will adore, starting with the recently released Linux 4.10.1 kernel. openSUSE Tumbleweed is also proudly powered by the newest Mesa 17.0 3D Graphics Library, for a better gaming experience.
Just a few days ago, Ansible Tower 3.1 was released. Besides the usual bug fixes, refinements of the UI and similar things this Tower version comes with major new feature: a workflow editor, scale out clustering, integration with logging providers and a new job details page.
The basic idea of a workflow is to link multiple job templates coming one after the other. They may or may not share inventory, playbooks or even permissions. The links can be conditional: if job template A succeeds, job template B is automatically executed afterwards, but in case of failure, job template C will be run. And the workflows are not even limited to job templates, but can also include project or inventory updates.
Application threat modeling can be used as an approach to secure software development, as it is a nice preventative measure for dealing with security issues, and mitigates the time and effort required to deal with vulnerabilities that may arise later throughout the application's production life cycle. Unfortunately, it seems security has no place in the development life cycle, however, while CVE bug tracking databases and hacking incident reports proves that it ought to be. Some of the factors that seem to have contributed as to why there's a trend of insecure software development are:
The Raspberry Pi line of mini computers -- including the all-new Pi Zero W -- are wonderful devices for what they are. Quite frankly, they have inspired many young people to learn about programming, while helping makers to create some really cool projects. With that said, the Pi computers are not the only System on a Chip solutions on the market. Actually, there are more powerful ARM-based offerings available. The problem? They are often radically more expensive than Raspberry Pi.
Black Lab Software is proud to share with us today the release of a brand-new GNU/Linux distribution, netOS Studio, which appears to be the newest member of the netOS family.
Two PDA clamshells with keyboards have funded on Indiegogo: a 5.7-inch, 4G “Gemini PDA” with Android and Linux, and a 7-inch, Ubuntu/Windows “GPD Pocket.”
Aries’ “M6UL” COM expands on an i.MX6 UltraLite SoC with 4GB eMMC, dual Ethernet ports, and dual CAN ports, as well as DRM ID, encryption, and secure boot.
Germany-based Aries Embedded has announced a “M6UL” computer-on-module as a drop-in replacement for its earlier i.MX28-based M28 COM. The new device keeps the SODIMM-style form factor, but advances to NXP’s i.MX6 UltraLite (UL) SoC.
Escape the fogginess and uncertainty of a cloud solution and host your own site at home. A recent convergence of technologies has made this obvious solution both simple and desirable.
On February 28, 2017, the Raspberry Pi Foundation celebrated the fifth anniversary of the extremely popular single-board computer (SBC) with the release of Raspberry Pi Zero W.
For the past year, I've been teaching students how to build and program robots using the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 platform. From the outset, I wanted to find a way to use Scratch and other open source programming languages to extend the capabilities of the platform. That search led me to BrickPi, a Raspberry Pi add-on board from Dexter Industries that easily interfaces with Mindstorms sensors and motors. I requested a teacher trial to see what it could do.
Anyone familiar with Linux likely has some knowledge of the Raspberry Pi. That may not necessarily equate to having experienced one of the greatest embedded platforms on the planet.
If you’re unfamiliar with the Pi, let me introduce you. The tagline for the Raspberry Pi is Teach, learn, and make with Raspberry Pi. The Pi is a series of single board computers (developed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation) to promote the teaching of basic computer science. Thing is, the small-form factor device became incredibly popular beyond the educational environment. People around the globe embraced these boards and, with the help of embedded Linux, began to invent. To that end, as of September, 2016, more than 10 million Raspberry Pi boards have been sold.
On Windows, just right click on the card and choose the formatting option. If you're on desktop Linux, different DEs use different tools, and covering all the DEs is beyond the scope of this story. I have written a tutorial using the command line interface on Linux to format an SD card with Fat32 file system.
Portwell announced a COM Express Basic Type 6 with Intel’s 7th Gen S-series CPUs, 4x SATA 3, triple displays, and 8x PCIe x1 and PCIe x16 expansion.
Portwel’s 125 x 95mm “PCOM-B642VG” COM Express Basic Type 6 entry taps Intel’s higher-end quad- and dual-core S-series desktop-class models. No model details were offered, so presumably the module supports all 16 Kaby Lake-S parts, from a dual-core, 3.4GHz Core i3-7100T with 35W to a quad-core 4.2GHz/4.5GHz Core i7-7700K with 91W TDP. The CPUs are available with HD Graphics 630, and one of three Intel chipsets: Q170, H110, and C236.
Embest has released an eval kit for its AM335x based “SOM-PH8700” COM with WiFi, 2x GbE, 3x USB, and a variety of display, camera, and serial interfaces.
The Embest EVK-PH8700 Evaluation Kit is available for €£79 ($97) from Farnell Element14, which like Shenzhen-based Embest, is owned by Premier Farnell. The eval kit includes both a “BB-EPH1800” baseboard and Embest’s TI Sitara AM335X-based SOM-PH8700 module, which first shipped a year ago along with a similar SOM-PH8800 module. The latter is built around TI’s Sitara AM4378, which offers a Cortex-A9 core instead of the Cortex-A8 on the AM335x.
Another new Multi-language support translator app is now available on Tizen store named ‘G Translator Pro’, added by Mobiteka group, and it uses the translator services provided by the Google Translate API. Read on to see which features we can use in this app.
Android Studio 2.3 is available to download today. The focus for this release is quality improvements across the IDE. We are grateful for all your feedback so far. We are committed to continuing to invest in making Android Studio fast & seamless for the millions of Android app developers across the world.
Following its press conference at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress, Huawei was kind enough to hand out some units of the just-announced P10 smartphone, one of which I got ahold of. I have been using it ever since, and coming from a Pixel (and a tradition of vanilla or near-stock Android devices before that) I thought I couldn’t help but feel strongly about the EMUI. That, however, didn’t’ turn out to be the case.
Apple’s iOS platform and Google’s Android operating system have never been more capable and feature rich than they are today. Both ecosystems enjoy tremendous support from a wide range of third-party developers. Both platforms are available on both affordable devices and on gorgeous, premium devices. In 2017, you really can’t go wrong with either platform. Each one has advantages over the other, and each one is beloved by a huge portion of its user base. And yet in countless studies over the past few years, Apple almost always seems to top the charts in brand loyalty and customer experience across every category.
Last year, at CES, I fell hard for a chubby, round Windows Phone called the NuAns Neo. Who could blame me? The two most notable Windows Phones at the time -- the Lumia 950 and 950 XL -- were drab, unimaginative-looking slabs. The Neo, with its friendly design and swappable back plates, was quirky enough to give me the kind of frisson that comes with seeing something totally out of the ordinary. Alas, Trinity, the company behind the phone, tried and failed to launch the Neo around the world by way of a Kickstarter campaign.
As everyone who watches TV and movie thrillers knows, the best way to ensure smartphone security is to tear your phone apart after making an important call and then break it into pieces and toss them into various trashcans and sewer grates. This can get expensive, however, especially if you want a nice model with 4K video and high-end cameras. Hence, the growing market for Android-based ultra-secure phones such as Silent Circle’s Blackphone 2, TRI’s Turing Phone, Sonim’s XP7 Public Safety, and Motorola Solutions LEX L10.
Back in 2011 was the glorious announcement that AMD would support Coreboot with its future CPUs. Sadly, a lot has changed at AMD over the past half-decade, and there isn't any Coreboot support to find today for Zen/Ryzen.
I sat down at the Open Source Leadership Summit to record a podcast with Mikeal Rogers, who heads the Node.js Foundation, a collaborative project under the Linux Foundation. He observed that one of the characteristics of Node.js and its community is that it's a "post-GitHub platform," meaning "the first release of Node.js and the first code written on Node.js were in a GitHub repository. That's the environment we live in, so we had to come up with some newer ways of managing the project that are unique to this newer and more modern open source."
Safia Abdalla is an open source developer and a maintainer on a project called nteract, but her pet topic is compilers. And, in her talk at Node.js Interactive, Abdalla explained the inner workings of the V8 compiler and how it can optimize the code it gets fed. Although Abdalla specifically focused on what goes on in the V8 compiler, she noted that there are many similarities to other compilers.
Thus, system failures and poor performance usually have a significant negative impact on a company's reputation and economic success. The discipline of APM (Application Performance Management) comes to the rescue by providing methodologies and tools to ensure a high quality of service. APM tools provide the means to monitor the health of software systems, detect and react on emerging performance anomalies, and allow for the diagnosis of the root causes of performance problems. A set of commercial APM tools (AppDynamics, DynaTrace, NewRelic, etc.) are available that are rich in their scope of functionality and maturity; however, in some cases commercial tools may not be suitable due to license costs, vendor lock-in, or other reasons that can negatively affect companies following an open source strategy.
Women in Open Source will kick off a webinar series that will discuss cultivating more diverse viewpoints and voices in open source, including both inspirational ideas and practical tips the community can immediately put into action. The first webinar, “From Abstract to Presentation: How To Develop a Winning Speaking Submission” will be held Thursday, March 9, 2017, at 8 a.m. Pacific Time.
Firefox is easily the most popular Linux web browser. In the recent LinuxQuestions survey, Firefox took first place with 51.7 percent of the vote. Chrome came in second with a mere 15.67 percent. The other browsers all had, at most, scores in single percentages. But is Firefox really the fastest browser? I put them them to the test, and here's what I found.
I remember at a team dinner once Mitchell Baker, Mozilla’s Chairwoman and “Chief Lizard Wrangler”, talked about the importance of storytelling. She talked about how telling stories in the open source software community helps us to reflect on shared experiences and learn from them.
Well, I’m Ben and I’m a Mozillian. I’m a Software Engineer who worked on the “Boot to Gecko” project full time for five years and I have a story to tell.
As an engineer on the project I don’t quite have the full picture when it comes to the high level decision making, financials and business partnerships. But I was involved in the project for a long period of time, longer in fact than any of its co-founders, and gained quite a lot of insight at the engineering, design and product levels.
At Mozilla a fundamental part of our beliefs is that all websites should work equally well across all browsers and all devices. The Internet should just work everywhere, flawlessly, with no questions asked. We’re therefore really happy that, as of this week, the BrowserStack team is launching a mobile test capability for Firefox browser products and a unique offering – one year of free testing on Firefox mobile browsers on BrowserStack’s Real Device Cloud. In addition, developers can test Firefox browsers on different desktop operating systems for free for 30 days.
We know that today the majority of web content consumption and activity is on mobile. That’s what makes BrowserStack’s new Firefox test capability so important for web developers trying to build web compatible mobile sites. And helping developers be more successful with their sites is great for users too, and for Mozilla.
Italy’s Ministry of Defence is sharing the eLearning course that it developed together with LibreItalia, the Italian promoters of LibreOffice. The course is made available via the LibreItalia website, and the source material is available on GitHub. The Ministry hopes that making it available will inspire others to modify and reuse the LibreOffice course.
LLVM 4.0 remains running behind schedule but the third release candidate is now available for testing with hopes of shipping this updated compiler stack in the next week or so.
Gordon Hall will be joining us at LibrePlanet 2017, sharing his analysis of mass surveillance and how it connects to other issues. He spoke with us recently about himself, his interests, and why free software.
RMS was in Germany this month, to give his speech “Free Software, Your Freedom, Your Privacy,” in three different cities, all on the invitation of the Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI), the German Informatics Society, a “network of professionals” whose shared goal is to “motivate for informatics, develop the scientific discipline and promote the impact informatics has on the economy, business and, society.” GI arranged for RMS to make appearances…
What lead to this public hearing on 15 February? In 2014, Dieter Reiter was elected new mayor of Munich. He had referred to himself as "Microsoft fan" even before he took office. He prides himself with having played a major part in the decision to move the Microsoft Germany headquarters to downtown Munich. He started to question the LiMux strategy as soon as his term started, and asked Accenture, a Microsoft partner in the same building as Microsoft, to analyse Munich's IT infrastructure. The report can be found here (German). It's noteworthy that in their report, the analysts identify primarily organisational issues at the root of the problems troubling LiMux uptake, rather than technical challenges.
On 15 February 2017, the city council of Munich, Germany convened to discuss the future of their LiMux project. In its public session, the plenary voted to have the city administration develop a strategy to unify client-side IT architecture, building atop a yet-to-be-developed "Windows-Basis-Client". A translation of the complete decision is included further down.
The opposing parties were overruled, but the decision was amended such that the strategy document must specify which LiMux-applications will no longer be needed, the extent in which prior investments must be written off, and a rough calculation of the overall costs of the desired unification.
Since this decision was reached, the majority of media have reported that a final call was made to halt LiMux and switch back to Microsoft software. This is, however, not an accurate representation of the outcome of the city council meeting. We studied the available documentation and our impression is that the last word has not been spoken.
I woke this morning to Thorsten claiming the new GitHub Terms of Service could require the removal of Free software projects from it. This was followed by joeyh removing everything from github. I hadn’t actually been paying attention, so I went looking for some sort of summary of whether I should be worried and ended up reading the actual ToS instead. TL;DR version: No, I’m not worried and I don’t think you should be either.
First, a disclaimer. I’m not a lawyer. I have some legal training, but none of what I’m about to say is legal advice. If you’re really worried about the changes then you should engage the services of a professional.
The Internet saw Github's new TOS yesterday and collectively shrugged.
That's weird..
I don't have any lawyers, but the way Github's new TOS is written, I feel I'd need to consult with lawyers to understand how it might affect the license of my software if I hosted it on Github.
And the license of my software is important to me, because it is the legal framework within which my software lives or dies. If I didn't care about my software, I'd be able to shrug this off, but since I do it seems very important indeed, and not worth taking risks with.
If I were looking over the TOS with my lawyers, I'd ask these questions...
The new Terms of Service of GitHub became effective today, which is quite problematicââ¬Å —ââ¬Å there was a review phase, but my reviews pointing out the problems were not answered, and, while the language is somewhat changed from the draft, they became effective immediately.
Now, the new ToS are not so bad that one immediately must stop using their service for disagreement, but it’s important that certain content may no longer legally be pushed to GitHub. I’ll try to explain which is affected, and why.
I’m mostly working my way backwards through section D, as that’s where the problems I identified lie, and because this is from easier to harder.
Some words for thought from this week’s video on nteract: “Open science isn’t truly open and open source isn’t truly open.”
[...]
I work as a technologist at a public library and my undergraduate degree is in philosophy. I like it when I hear technologists talking in these kinds of terms. It’s evidence of someone thinking at a very high level.
An editor on the board of a journal published by the prestigious American Psychological Association (APA) has been asked to resign in a controversy over data sharing in peer review.
Gert Storms — who says he won’t step down — is one of a few hundred scientists who have vowed that, from the start of this year, they will begin rejecting papers if authors won’t publicly share the underlying data, or explain why they can’t.
The idea, called the Peer Reviewers’ Openness Initiative, was launched by psychologists hoping to increase transparency in a field beset by reports of fraud and dubious research practices. And the APA, which does not ask that data be made available to peer reviewers or shared openly online, seems set to become an early testing ground for the initiative’s influence. With Storms’ situation still unresolved, the society’s council of editors will discuss whether it should change its policies at a meeting in late March.
Netherlands-based 3D printer manufacturer Ultimaker has filed its first ever patents. The company says the patents are “defensive,” to protect against patent infringement lawsuits, and that it remains “100% committed to [its] open source ethos.”
This is the fifth in OSSBlog’s series of open source programming books. This compilation focuses on the JavaScript language with 18 solid recommendations. There are books here for beginner, intermediate, and advanced programmers alike. All of the texts are released under an open source license.
Java, the famous programming language that is useful to us at almost every time in our daily work. Directly or indirectly we work on Java software almost everyday. My fellow developers, coders, programmers also use to develop Java software that is why I decided that it would be worth to write an article on it. Many of you who are reading this may be new at Java IDE( Integrated Development Environment) who want to develop some kind of software, want to code or modify some kind of string and may be wondering that which IDE to use or which is the best. So here I list the 10 best Java IDE for Linux. This list is based on several opinions, research, comments, update, and support, stability as I wanted to list the best. Let’s start now!
Forget about commercial feedlots and GMOs. Forget high cholesterol, expanding waistlines, and the merits of plant-based diets. Forget The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation. Forget the trends of locavorism and clean eating.
100 years and three generations later, American Coney Island claims to be the oldest family-owned business in Michigan. By any measure, it is one of the nation’s most iconic restaurants, a fixture in downtown Detroit since the city was riding high on the auto business, through its decline, and now during its upswing.
American Coney sits next door to its arch rival, Lafayette Coney Island, making this downtown stretch of Lafayette Boulevard the Motor City’s epicenter of all things hot dog. While each has its devoted fans, I’ve been to both, and for visitors seeking to experience Michigan’s “Coney culture,” I heartily recommend American for food, service and ambiance (though grittier Lafayette has better fries).
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) on Thursday went off in search of a draft of the House Republicans' plan to repeal and replace ObamaCare, creating a storm of controversy gleefully embraced by Democrats.
Paul complained that the ObamaCare bill was being kept in a "secret location." He then walked over to the House side with a copy machine in tow to seek access to a room where he said the bill was being held.
His move quickly created a spectacle, with reporters gathering around Paul for an impromptu press conference.
The World Trade Organization committee on intellectual property rights met this week with some discussion items that departed from past agendas but are becoming more familiar. A discussion on electronic commerce revealed interest from members, despite a slow start on details. And discussions on the United Nations High-Level Panel on Access to Medicines prompted nourished interactions and a wish by some countries to pursue the subject in future sessions.
[...]
India gave a statement along the same lines, and underlined the panel recommendation that governments “should require manufacturers and distributors of health technologies to disclose to drug regulatory and procurement authorities information pertaining to: (1) the costs of R&D, production, marketing and distribution of health technology being procured or given marketing approval with each expense category separated; and (2) any public funding received in the development of the health technology, including tax credits, subsidies and grants,” according to its statement.
India suggested that at future sessions of the Council, India cosponsor, with like-minded members, sub-agenda items under the main agenda item “the United Nations Secretary-General’s High Level Panel Report on Access to Medicines.” Under those sub-agenda items, members could share their experiences including on specific recommendations of the panel, the Indian delegate said.
HackerOne, a platform that is offering hosting for bug bounty programs, announced today that open-source projects can now sign up for a free bug bounty program if they meet a few simple conditions.
The new offering, named HackerOne Community Edition, is identical with HackerOne Professional Edition, the commercial service the company is offering to some of the world's largest organizations, such as Twitter, Dropbox, Adobe, Yahoo, Uber, GitHub, Snapchat, and many others.
Popular with programmers the world over for its stability, flexibilityand security, Linux now appears to be vulnerable to hackers.
Amazon has provided the postmortem for Tuesday's AWS S3 meltdown, shedding light on what caused one of its largest cloud facilities to bring a chunk of the web down.
In a note today to customers, the tech giant said the storage system was knocked offline by a staffer trying to address a problem with its billing system. Essentially, someone mistyped a command within a production environment while debugging a performance gremlin.
"The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) team was debugging an issue causing the S3 billing system to progress more slowly than expected. At 9:37AM PST, an authorized S3 team member using an established playbook executed a command which was intended to remove a small number of servers for one of the S3 subsystems that is used by the S3 billing process," the team wrote in its message.
A wrong command entered by a member of its technical staff was responsible for the outage experienced by Amazon Web Services simple storage service this week.
In a detailed explanation, the company said the S3 team was attempting to debug an issue that caused a slowdown in its billing system when, at 9.37am PST on Tuesday (4.30am Wednesday AEST), one of its technical staff ran a command that was intended to remove a few servers from one of the subsystems used by the S3 billing process.
The worker entered one wrong input for the command and ended up removing a much larger number of servers than intended, some of which supported two other S3 subsystems.
OH JEEZ, THE SANCTITY OF THE Apple operating system continues to be whittled away at, and now two reasonably fresh backdoors have been revealed by a concerned security company.
Apple backdoors are much prized, just ask the FBI, so to have two in a day should be a thing to celebrate. But only if you like that kind of stuff.
The Malwarebytes blog dishes the dirt on the pair and the threat that they pose to people who use Macs.
One of them is XAgent, which Palo Alto Networks clocked onto in February. It is a nasty business indeed.
When Google revealed last week that it had destroyed the SHA-1 algorithm, it hammered another nail into the venerable algo's coffin.
But as we noted in our report on the feat, many applications still use SHA-1. And if you're one of the many Windows shops running Microsoft's System Center Operations Manager Management Server, you've got an exposure.
Today's IAM solutions, warns enterprise cybersecurity expert SSH Communications Security, fail to address fully the requirements of trusted access. Organizations lack an efficient way to manage and govern trusted access credentials and have no visibility into the activities that occur within the secure channels that are created for trusted access operations.
Three years ago, the Heartbleed vulnerability in the OpenSSL cryptographic library sent the software industry and companies around the world into a panic. Software developers didn't know enough about the open source components used in their own products to understand whether their software was vulnerable — and customers using that software didn't know either.
The number of people on controversial zero hours contracts has reached a record high of 910,000.
New figures based on an analysis of Office for National Statistics data reveal that 105,000 more people were on contracts that do not guarantee work in 2016 compared with the same period in 2015.
That's an increase of nearly 14%, and 30% higher than 2014.
In 2005, there were just 100,000 people on zero hours contracts (ZHCs).
But although the new figures are a record, they also reveal a sharp slowing in the rate of increase in the last six months of 2016.
Reports that two intelligence agencies 'suspected' the President's cell phone had been the source of recently leaked information originated as satire.
Two weeks ago, NRKbeta, the tech vertical of the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, published an explainer about a proposed new digital surveillance law in the country.
Digital security is a controversial topic, and the conversation around security issues can become heated. But the conversation in the comments of the article was respectful and productive: Commenters shared links to books and other research, asked clarifying questions, and offered constructive feedback.
The team at NRKbeta attributes the civil tenor of its comments to a feature it introduced last month. On some stories, potential commenters are now required to answer three basic multiple-choice questions about the article before they’re allowed to post a comment. (For instance, in the digital surveillance story: “What does DGF stand for?”)
The phone calls are coming from inside the house, it seems. The newly minted Trump government has suffered under one of the most porous climates in recent Presidential memory, with leaks leaking to the press from seemingly everywhere. This is happening for several reasons, which include enabling technology for such leaks to occur, the controversial nature of our current President and some of his actions, and the fact that, whatever else one might want to say about President Trump, his administration is certainly active, meaning there is much more about which to leak. This has led to Trump, along with members of his team, making strange noises about a crackdown of these leaks. The threats incorporated in this crackdown have included FBI investigations (where many of the leaks have come from), random phone checks by the communications staff with Sean Spicer playing Angry Dad, and the promise of the purging of any longstanding government staffers suspected of leaking information to the press.
And, yet, the leaks persist. And they often persist in laughable ways. We already had Spicer's phone-check and leak-plugging emergency meeting with his staff leak to the press. Now the Washington Post has an article all about the State Department's memo that warned State staff against leaking anything to the press.
The saga of game developer Digital Homicide whipped through our pages like an idiotic windstorm. This gust of blustery nonsense started with the company's lawsuit against a game critic, Jim Sterling, then moved on to it suing Steam users over reviews they wrote, before twirling into the stage where Valve banned Digital Homicide games from Steam entirely and the company stated it planned to shut down operations. All of that happened in the span of six months, which would be impressive if it weren't so sad.
Still, the resolution of the threats against Steam users wasn't the end of the story. The lawsuit against Sterling was still out there, a $10 million dollar anvil hanging over the game critic's head. Until this week, that is, when the court in which the suit had been filed dismissed it with prejudice as part of a settlement agreement between the two parties.
The Swiss Parliament this week adopted new legislation to regulate offline and online gambling by limiting it to a fixed number of Swiss-based operators only. While heavily criticised by opponents inside and outside the Parliament in Bern, the main goal was to harvest revenue streams for the general public and enforce a number of obligation. A number of opponents in the Parliament sided with activists in their call for caution against the ‘slippery slope’ of net filtering. A look at other countries illustrates that filtering on an IP or domain name basis is on the rise.
A ruling party lawmaker accused National Tsinghua University of signing "one China" related agreements with Chinese universities a day after the Education Ministry said it would probe the actions of similar agreements signed between Shih Hsin University.
"If a national university were to succumb (to signing the agreement), then this is not an individual case any longer. The black hand behind this 'one China' letter of commitment is probably Chinese authorities," said Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Chen Ting-fei wrote on her Facebook page.
The musician popularly known as Sadiq Zazzabi was arraigned before a Magistrate Court 3 sitting at Audu Bako Secretariat on Wednesday by the board for two-count charge of releasing an uncensored song and indecent dress respectively.
It is time to revamp the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC). The problem is not just with its current illustrious chief — rather, the problem is with the entire body.
While the name of this statutory body suggests that its job is to certify films, its guidelines mandate it to act a censor. It does not take more than a glance to appreciate the total inanity of the guidelines, drawn up, clearly, by someone who lacks any understanding of cinema or the arts in general.
A former leader of the National Security Agency (NSA) told lawmakers Thursday that government agencies working on cybersecurity are too “stovepiped” to safeguard the nation from digital threats.
Retired Gen. Keith Alexander said that the four groups handling cyber issues — the Homeland Security and Defense departments, the FBI, and the intelligence community — are too “stovepiped,” meaning they bottle up information instead of sharing it with one another and across the government.
Alexander, who resigned from his post as head of both the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command in 2014, was responding to questioning from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday.
For years, electric utilities have increasingly embraced smart meters. Roughly 65 million of the devices have been installed in the United States over the last few years, with 57 million of them in consumer homes. The meters provide innumerable benefits to utility companies, often delivering an ocean of new remote access and monitoring tools to better manage the network and reduce meter reading truck rolls. The benefits to consumers (outside of accuracy) have been less notable, including interference with some home routers, as well as the fact that a number of models have been shown to be relatively easily hacked.
Techdirt has been following India's construction of the world's largest biometric database, called Aadhaar, since July 2015. Concerns include the fact that what was billed as a voluntary system has been morphing into a compulsory one, and evidence that Aadhaar simply can't cope with real-life biometrics.
Snap Inc.’s Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy each added $1.6 billion to his fortune Thursday after shares in the photo-sharing mobile app closed at $24.48, 44 percent above their listing price.
Liberty this week announced that it has applied to the High Court for permission to proceed with its legal challenge, which will see it argue that the "bulk" surveillance powers enabled by the IP Bill.
Specifically, Liberty will challenge the IP Bill's power to equip security services with the legal power to bulk collect personal communications data, and give police and security services the explicit power to hack into, and bug, computers and smartphones.
If there is one piece of information that would fatally undermine the NSA's argument that it doesn't abuse Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), it would be the number of American citizens whose personal information it has "incidentally" hoovered up.
And that is why it refuses to provide the figure.
There were two House Judiciary Committee meetings in Congress yesterday over the reauthorization of Section 702 in December. The first was held in secret with members of the security services; the second in public with panelists.
During an interview with Neil Cavuto on the FOX Business Network, former NSA Director Gen. Keith Alexander addressed the recent controversy involving Attorney General Jeff Sessions and allegations he communicated with Russian diplomats during the presidential election, despite stating that he didn’t during his confirmation hearing before Congress.
Though U.S. President Donald Trump probably stumbled upon it accidentally — and though he invoked a terror attack that never happened — he was right about there being “problems they never thought possible” in Sweden since it “took in” large numbers of refugees from Muslim-majority countries.
There is little sign yet of such frictions in Canada. But as Trump’s utterances and the support he got from almost half the American electorate demonstrate, the debate now taking place across the Old World about refugees from the Middle East has already crossed the Atlantic. It will inevitably shape the discussion in Canada about immigration and Muslim refugees.
Last week’s events at Delhi University, where the ABVP, the BJP’s student affiliate, disrupted a seminar on “protest cultures” and initiated a campaign of violence and intimidation that is yet to die down, signals that we are passing through a disturbing phase when anyone can cite nationalism or patriotism to inflict violence, with the police standing by. The pity is that top government figures have virtually given cover to trouble-makers by arguing — falsely — that free expression is sacrosanct but criticising India is intolerable.
You ever get so bored that you feel like you could kill 27 people and then mail their body parts to the police station?
Serial killers do. Get that bored, I mean. The whole deal with psychopaths is that their brains don't handle dopamine correctly. That's the chemical that makes you feel pleasure. They get so starved for stimulation that they keep trying crazier and crazier shit just to fight the boredom.
You can take the Swede out of Sweden, but you can never take their fika. Hanna MÃÂ¥nsson writes about what happened when she brought the concept to her London office.
When I left Sweden for London almost 12 years ago I also left behind a lot of things that I really love. Friends and family aside, I left 'mosbricka' at one o'clock in the morning, grillchips with dip at fredagsmys, Eurovision hysteria and a lot of fairly fabulous employment rights. And perhaps the hardest one of all – I left behind fika.
The former Uber engineer who published a viral account of sexual harassment and discrimination said her former employer had hired a law firm to investigate her.
Susan Fowler, whose blogpost about sexism and misconduct sparked widespread debate about the mistreatment of women in Silicon Valley, said on Thursday that Uber was investigating her and that she had hired the law firm Baker Curtis & Schwartz to represent her.
An Uber spokesperson told the Guardian that the law form Perkins Coie was “investigating Susan’s claims, not Susan personally”.
Fowler’s claim on Twitter comes a week after she said she had learned of some kind of “smear campaign” and that investigators had reached out to contacts of hers for “personal and intimate” details of her life.
Shortly after Fowler posted her account last month – which claimed that a manager immediately propositioned her for sex when she joined the company and that HR refused to hold him accountable despite clear evidence – Uber said it was launching an “urgent investigation” into her claims. The company subsequently hired the former US attorney general Eric Holder to assist with the process.
You may have heard, recently, about a series of reports about sexual harassment (and general sexism and other similarly awful behavior) in Silicon Valley. It's not a new thing, but it's getting a lot of necessary attention right now and it's seriously messed up. It's unacceptable. It needs to stop -- and people need to speak up about it, and to come down hard on anyone who's engaging in it or letting it slide. If you're doing the kind of crap being discussed, stop it now (and go apologize). If someone tells you you're acting inappropriately, listen to them. And if you see someone else doing something awful, tell them to knock it off and then follow through.
FCC boss Ajit Pai made it clear that overturning net neutrality would be the new FCC's top priority (apparently right behind paying lip service to the poor), and his behavior is making it very clear that wasn't an empty promise. Pai recently killed the FCC's inquiry into Verizon and AT&T's zero rating, which lets both companies use arbitrary usage caps to give their own content an unfair market advantage. The previous FCC argued both ISPs were violating net neutrality and engaged in anti-competitive behavior. The new FCC, in contrast, now says zero rating "enhances competition in the wireless marketplace."
The internet is amazingly robust, but like any complex network is still prone to the occasional failure. A new analysis using network theory explains why the dark net – the hidden underbelly of the regular internet, invisible to search engines – is less vulnerable to attacks. The lessons learned could help inform the design of more robust communications networks in the future.
The regular internet’s design is deliberately decentralised, which makes it very stable under normal circumstances. Think of each site or server as a node, connected to numerous nodes around it, which in turn connect to even more nodes, and so on. Take out a node or two here or there and the network continues to function just fine. But this structure also makes it more vulnerable to a coordinated attack: take out many nodes at once, as happens during a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, and the result can be catastrophic failure that cascades through the entire network.
Broadband industry lobby groups are celebrating a Federal Communications Commission decision to prevent enforcement of a rule intended to protect customers' private data from security breaches.
The data security rule that was scheduled to take effect today would have required ISPs and phone companies to take "reasonable" steps to protect customers' information—such as Social Security numbers, financial and health information, and Web browsing data—from theft and data breaches. The FCC issued a stay of the rule yesterday, and Chairman Ajit Pai said he wants to shift authority over data security and privacy entirely to the Federal Trade Commission.
The creativity-oriented UN World Intellectual Property Organization is often at its best when displaying the colorfully multicultural nature of its membership.
[...]
The event was followed by a lavish array of foods from Australia, mainly dishes featuring Australian lamb and beef, along with wines.
The event was a prime networking opportunity. Not only a platform to spotlight Australia’s candidacy, but among others there were two of the candidates to be next director general of the neighbouring World Health Organization.
Now, I was raised Catholic, and this all feels a little off. To start, there are some pretty clear passages from the Old Testament about making a big thing out of symbols and idols. I'm not saying that claiming dominion over the images of the Pope and Vatican symbols violates those passages, but it does seem to me that this is something of an effort to plunge His Holiness into the murky depths of celebrity culture. After all, while the language bandied about deals with copyright, much of this seems to actually be more in line with trademark and publicity rights.
When copyright is deployed as a censor, it usually means the removal of content. In the case of Freddy Martinez of Lucy Parsons Lab (instrumental in peeling back the opacity covering the Chicago PD's "black budget"), copyright is the excuse being given to prevent the release of information.
Martinez was hoping to obtain a copy of an instructional film the Chicago PD shows to incoming officers. This video -- made more than 30 years ago -- was highlighted in the DOJ's damning civil rights report. The DOJ noted that the video was outdated and the instructors presenting the film did absolutely nothing to ensure engagement or, you know, provide actual instruction.
ExtraTorrent, one of the world's largest torrent indexes, has lost control of its main domain Extratorrent.cc. The domain name has been disconnected by the registrar, which has rendered the site hard to reach. However, it's still accessible through several backups.
Last year the MPAA signed its first anti-piracy deals with a domain name registries, hoping to limit widespread copyright infringement. A dangerous development, according to University of Idaho Law Professor Annemarie Bridy, who warns that DNS filtering could gradually become a common tool to supress disfavored speech.
Copyright trolls still labor under the (deliberate) misconception that an IP address is a person. Sometimes judges allow it. Sometimes judges remind them not to conflate the two. And sometimes -- well, maybe just this once -- the IP address being sued is actually a Tor exit node, evidence of nothing. (h/t Raul)
In an opinion handed down by Judge Michael Simon, the person Dallas Buyers Club is suing for infringement will be subject to adverse jury instructions thanks to the Tor exit node DBC sued. The order refers to alleged evidence spoliation by the defendant, who shut down his exit node after being sued. The defendant has (correctly) pointed out "Evidence of what?" because it's highly unlikely his node would cough up any usable identifying information about infringers utilizing the node.