I've debated for quite some time setting up my own more generalised Linux and technology site, so screw it, I did it. Announcing LifeOnLinux.com as a new experiment!
To be clear: GamingOnLinux will stay exactly the same and keep improving as it always does. LifeOnLinux costs nothing extra to run and it's mainly an experiment right now.
It will have the same basic principles as GOL itself: No bullshit, no adverts, no clickbait, SSL for everyone for free and it will keep things simple and to the point as much as possible. It will accept user contributed articles too, just like GOL does.
When I had turned 16 years old, my granddad had purchased my first ever computer for me and it didn’t have Windows. While I was initially shocked, I was also very curious, as I grew up playing with various models of Amiga so I was already a little used to something different.
I did a little interview with Ryan Sipes from System76 about the future of Ubuntu and what they plan to do now Ubuntu is dropping the Unity desktop environment.
This interview references this blog post by Mark Shuttleworth about Ubuntu moving back to GNOME Shell. I throw in some other questions for good measure.
North Korea has long been a mystery to most westerners. Life inside of the hermit kingdom is not easy for those of us in the west to fully understand, particularly when it comes to technology.
And yet North Korea has been active in developing its own computer operating system. The country has its own version of Linux called Red Star OS, which is often referred to as North Korea Linux.
Dell's Barton George is pleased to announce today the general availability of the last Ubuntu-based system for the company's all-new Precision line-up of computers, the Dell Precision 5720 All-in-One.
Back in January, Dell launched the first of three mobile workstations of its new Precision line-up, the Dell Precision 3520, an affordable and fully customizable 15-inch laptop, along with Dell Precision 5520, which the company dubbed as world’s thinnest and lightest 15-inch notebook powered by Ubuntu Linux.
At Dockercon in Austin, Texas, Docker CEO Solomon Hydes said, Docker "is a bunch of projects not a monolith." One of the newest of these projects is LinuxKit. This is a toolkit for building secure, portable, and lean operating systems for containers.
While much of the recent rise in enthusiasm for containers in applications has users closely associating that functionality with Docker Inc., members of the Linux community have been eager to point out how long their systems have been using containers in applications and to encourage users to look into further Linux utility for their needs.
“Containers aren’t a Docker thing; containers are a Linux thing. … It’s been a core Linux feature for over a decade now,” said Brian Gracely (pictured), director of product strategy at Red Hat Inc.
Since Docker democratized software containers four years ago, a whole ecosystem grew around containerization and in this compressed time period it has gone through two distinct phases of growth. In each of these two phases, the model for producing container systems evolved to adapt to the size and needs of the user community as well as the project and the growing contributor ecosystem.
Docker Inc. is launching a new open-source initiative, dubbed the Moby Project, which the San Francisco-based company describes as a new effort to move software container technology further into mainstream use by developers and businesses.
Moby was announced this morning at the annual DockerCon convention in Austin, Texas. The project includes a library of backend components, a framework for assembling those components into a container platform, and a reference assembly called Moby Origin, explains Docker founder and CTO Solomon Hykes in a post announcing the new project.
Since its beginning, Docker has been created by synthesizing elements in Linux and repackaging them in useful ways. Docker’s next trick is the reverse: using container elements to synthesize distributions of Linux.
Today Docker unveiled LinuxKit and the Moby Project, a pair of projects that are intended to allow operating system vendors, do-it-yourselfers, and cutting-edge software creators to create container-native OSes and container-based systems.
Docker wants containers to be the building blocks of interchangeable platforms. The company announced two new open-source projects, the LinuxKit and the Moby Project, at day two of its DockerCon conference in Austin, Texas.
I'm announcing the release of the 4.10.11 kernel.
All users of the 4.10 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 4.10.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.10.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st...
Today, April 18, 2017, renowned Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the availability of another set of updated kernels for the Linux 4.10, 4.9, and 4.4 branches.
After announcing the release of the Linux 4.10.11, 4.9.23 LTS and 4.4.62 LTS kernels, Greg Kroah-Hartman also informed the community today, April 18, 2017, about the availability of the long-term supported Linux 3.18.49 kernel.
With Linux 4.11.0 being released as soon as this weekend, here's a look back at the changes I found most exciting about this next kernel feature release.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the appointment of Hisao Munakata of Renesas and Dirk Hohndel of VMware to its Board of Directors. Linux Foundation Gold members elected Messrs. Hohndel and Munakata to represent them for a two-year term. They take the places of outgoing Board member Alan Clark of SUSE and Hisashi Hashimoto of Hitachi, who has moved to a Platinum Director seat.
A few days back Intel's Clear Linux updated their LLVM Clang compiler from 3.9.1 to the recent 4.0.0 release, following Beignet getting LLVM 4.0 support. Here are some before/after benchmarks as well as fresh GCC benchmarks.
Clear Linux ships both LLVM Clang and GCC and switches between the default compiler when building its packages/bundles depending upon which compiler is known to do the best for the particular workload. As far as the default compiler exposed, GCC is the default. I ran some tests of Clear Linux 14620 that shipped with GCC 6.3 and and LLVM Clang 3.9.1 followed by upgrading to Clear Linux 14640 to get the distribution's LLVM Clang 4.0 build. (Note there was also a small update to its Linux 4.10 kernel with that build too.)
For those wondering how the bleeding-edge open-source Radeon driver stack is comparing to the latest NVIDIA closed-source binary blob, here are some fresh benchmarks on many different cards. Tested is the new NVIDIA 381.09 binary driver with different Maxwell/Pascal GPUs alongside various AMD GCN card tests using the Linux 4.11 Git kernel and Mesa 17.1-dev Git.
Encrypted messaging service Wire is now available to install on Ubuntu (and related distros) from a secure repository that offers verified packages.
Oracle's Simon Coter announced today, April 18, 2017, the availability of the VirtualBox 5.1.20 and 5.0.38 stable updates for the open-source and cross-platform virtualization software.
Including all the security fixes revealed as part of "April 2017 Oracle CPU", the VirtualBox 5.1.20 and VirtualBox 5.0.38 releases are small bugfix updates that add multiple GUI (Graphical User Interface) improvements, such as a fix for a crash that occurred when attempting to restore the defaults in the Appliance Import dialog.
Back in January, the folks at Nylas announced that Nylas N1, their flagship email client was being rebranded as Nylas Mail and also introduced a free version of the app, called Nylas Mail Basic. Nylas Mail Basic included most of the features of the Pro version, but was only available for Mac when the announcement was made. The company has today launched Nylas Mail 2.0 — a big release that brings some Pro featured promised in January and also makes the app available to Windows and Linux users.
Geneshift [Steam, Official Site], previously known as Subvein: Mutant Factions, a top-down shooter with vehicles will officially launch on April 27th (Early Access) and they also have a demo now too.
I've tested out Downward [Steam, Official Site] and I've found it to be a rather incredible open-world Parkour game and I love it.
Disclosure: Key provided by the developer.
It does look pretty good, so I will likely look to cover it in more detail when we can get hold of the developer for a review key. We have a lot of games like it, so hopefully it does something really unique to set itself apart.
Epic Games has announced their April update to their cross-platform, free-to-play Unreal Tournament game, v0.1.10.
It's been three months since the major Calligra 3.0 release hit the streets in mid-January, and it now received its first point release to fix the various issues reported by users lately.
Calligra 3.0.1 has been released on April 17, 2017, and while it may not yet be available in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distributions, we can tell you about the changes implemented by the hard working development team behind this open-source office suite targeted at KDE users.
So, this Saturday 15th, we got together in São Paulo, Brazil, to celebrate another GNOME release. And what a fun time!
We went to a very nice place called “Taverna Medieval” (Medieval Tavern), an almost-real tavern with nice drinks, huge burgers (including the vegan one called “Elven of the Woods”! what a nice burger) and of course a super awsome tavern keeper.
If you like the Adwaita theme Ubuntu GNOME ships with but don’t like the size of its title bars, here’s a theme that may be of interest.
Those who follow my work are used to read my “Looking forward ” posts, and they appear to be quite popular. This cycle, however, I’m not looking forward the next GNOME release.
NodeSource is releasing a distribution of its enterprise-level, commercially supported NSolid Node.js runtime that works with Docker-friendly Alpine Linux. NSolid for Alpine Linux is intended to work with Alpine’s small footprint and security capabilities, said Joe McCann, NodeSource CEO.
With the NSolid Node.js runtime, the company accommodates three critical enterprise technologies: the Linux kernel, Docker containers, and Node.js server-side JavaScript applications.
Tiny Core comes in a few architectures. It is available for ARM, x86 and x86_64 processors.
Tiny Core Linux may not have all the bells and whistles you get from a more functional Linux distro. However, if you prefer telling your OS what to do rather than the other way around, Tiny Core Linux could be an interesting alternative for you.
I was impressed with Tiny Core's speed and simplicity. It is a Linux variant that can let you work without desktop distractions. It is also a handy and tiny OS very suitable for tinkering. It is an ideal OS option to familiarize users with a hefty collection of lightweight classic desktop environments.
Solus 2017.04.18.0 was released today as the latest ISO snapshot for this growing Linux distribution well known for its original Budgie desktop.
I have made a new version of ExTiX – The Ultimate Linux System. I call it ExTiX 17.4 LXQt Live DVD. (The previous version was 17.2 from 170320).
GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton announced today, April 18, 2017, the release and immediate availability for download of the ExTiX 17.4 LXQt Live DVD GNU/Linux distribution.
ExTiX 17.4 appears to be the second distro based on Canonical's latest Ubuntu 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) operating system, after Ultimate Edition 5.4. However, ExTiX 17.4, which is dubbed "The Ultimate Linux System," is also based on the repositories of Debian GNU/Linux 8.7 "Jessie" and Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch."
Creating cool projects is what makes openSUSE so much fun and a recent project by an openSUSE member highlights just how creative and fun one can be using openSUSE.
Adrian Schröter took a Raspberry Pi 3 using openSUSE to create a 3D-printed foldable tripod and took the idea even further by using the Raspberry Pi 3 used to build the tripod to take interval photographs of a Storch and it’s nest with a Sony A5100 camera.
On April 17, 2017, Fermilab's Pat Riehecky was proud to announce the release and immediate availability for download the Scientific Linux 6.9 operating system.
Open source software company Red Hat has chosen one of its own as the company’s new chief financial officer.
The Raleigh-based company announced Tuesday that Eric Shander, who was named acting CFO in January, has been promoted to executive vice president and chief financial officer. Shander, whose appointment takes effect immediately, previously was vice president and chief accounting officer.
Four months after Frank Calderoni resigned as Red Hat's chief financial officer, the Raleigh-based open-source software firm has named Eric Shander to the role.
Shander had been serving as interim CFO while continuing his role as chief accounting officer. He joined Red Hat in 2015 after long stints at IBM and Lenovo. Red Hat says he “has helped strengthen and grow the company’s finance operation.”
Over the last year, Red Hat has been on a mission to increase the relevance of non-Linux business, with the goal to find a 50/50 balance between its Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its non-Linux properties.
To do that, it needs to aggressively grow its storage business.
And to do that, it needs to grow the channel around its storage business.
On 16th March’17, Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering (SJCE), Mysore invited Red Hat to be the part of there ongoing CSI fest, Technologix. Red Hat was the premium sponsor of the fest. The event was a success with fresh energy. Most of the students were sophomores and were aware about Fedora, Linux and open source.
The last couple of days there was a Fedora Translation Sprint that I took as an opportunity to find out how translations in Fedora work nowadays. The actual translation happens at Fedora’s Zanata instance, a web based application for translation collaborations. Even though it accepts Fedora’s FAS single sign-on system, it is not possible to directly propose translations. Unfortunately, several manual steps are required. Luckily I noticed this early enough in the sprint and Roman, the German translation team coordinator, pressed the necessary buttons in time for me to join during the sprint.
Ryan Lerch put together an initial cut at a Flock 2017 logo and website design (flock2017-WIP branch of fedora-websites). It was an initial cut he offered for me to play with; in trying to work on some logistics for Flock to make sure things happen on time I felt locking in on a final logo design would be helpful at this point.
This week's opensource.com community blogging prompt by Stormy Peters includes the question, “should community managers sit in marketing or engineering?” This is a very individualized decision and not an easy one at that.
The DebConf team would like to call for proposals for the DebConf17 Open Day, a whole day dedicated to sessions about Debian and Free Software, and aimed at the general public. Open Day will preceed DebConf17 and will be held in Montreal, Canada, on August 5th 2017.
Ok, I have been silent about systemd and its being forced onto us in Debian like force-feeding Foie gras gooses. I have complained about systemd a few times (here and here), but what I read today really made me loose my last drips of trust I had in this monster-piece of software.
March was a busy month, so this monthly report is a little late. I worked two weekends, and I was planning my Easter holiday, so there wasn’t a lot of spare time.
Debian has removed keys assigned to developer Dmitry Bogatov after he was arrested by Russian authorities for using the internet to organise protests. Or, as Russian outlet TASS puts it, “for terrorism and attempts to stage unrest in Moscow.”
Bogatov was remanded in custody for two months, but claims he was not at his keyboard at the time posts calling for protests were made. He's also said he will co-operate with authorities.
Continuing our coverage on the UBports' Unity 8 and Ubuntu Touch plans, we've got word from Marius Quabeck, who's now the new community manager for UBports, about some of the aspects that remained unclear since the last Q&A.
Developers are considering dropping the Thunderbird email client from Ubuntu's default apps list in Ubuntu 17.10 due later this year.
As expected, some users and developers aren't happy that the Unity desktop environment is going to be stopped and removed in favour of GNOME Shell. Here come the forks!
Details are light on both, since of course everything is so very new, but hopefully they will see rapid development.
Black Lab Software's Roberto J. Dohnert is informing Softpedia today about the immediate availability for download of the Black Lab Linux Weekly 258 ISO snapshot of the Ubuntu-based distribution.
CNC Design’s “Pulse Train Hat” is a Raspberry Pi add-on that generates variable frequency pulses for automation systems such as stepper/servo motors.
CNC Design Limited has launched a Pulse Train Hat (PTHAT) add-on board for the Raspberry PI designed to “make motor control easy, fast and accurate.” The Raspberry Pi HAT compliant board lets customers use simple serial ASCII commands to generate clean, fast and accurate variable frequency pulses. The chief application is to drive stepper/servo motors that use pulse and direction lines, such as motors found in 3D printers, CNC machines, and robot arms.
D3 Engineering’s “DesignCore RVP-TDA2x Development Kit for ADAS” taps TI’s TDA2x, Jacinto 6, or AM562x, and offers a 3GHz FPD-Link III video input.
D3 Engineering’s DesignCore RVP-TDA2x Development Kit for ADAS is a Rugged Vision Platform (RVP) development kit designed for evaluating ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) technology under realistic on-vehicle conditions. Applications include front or rear cameras with analytics, 3D Surround View with Car Black Box (CarBB), driver monitoring, and mirror replacement and camera monitoring systems (CMS), says the Texas Instruments platinum design partner.
Google has announced a partnership with PayPal that allows you to use your account to buy things anywhere Android Pay is accepted.
If you're looking for ways to help make your Android Nougat experience a bit more productive, Jack Wallen reveals six hidden tricks to help you gain more on-the-go efficiency.
When you talk about Samsung's Galaxy smartphones, it's hard not to talk about 'the average consumer.' Because the Galaxy S series is the second-most popular line of smartphones on earth, its audience is unashamedly mainstream, and the vast majority of sales of these devices will be to consumers who aren't what you'd call tech-savvy. The issue for Samsung, increasingly, is learning how to split the difference between a smartphone that provides a good experience for everybody and maintaining that all important credibility with its fans and enthusiasts.
As if getting venture funding themselves isn't exciting enough for open source-oriented startups, seeing an open source-focused company like Deis get snapped up by Microsoft must be a thrill as well.
While it would be more thrilling, perhaps, if Microsoft disclosed how much it paid, I'm sure those in the startup world and their backers have ways of finding out that information. Not that the acquisition path is necessarily the exit route that all of these startups envision for themselves, but such money can obviously talk.
Large-scale telco cloud deployments will reach global critical mass after 2020, in parallel with the deployment for 5G, according to a new study from ABI Research. Such massive deployments will likely require the new core network currently being architected by 3GPP to allow for advanced concepts, including network slicing and services geared toward different business verticals. The research firm adds that early 5G deployments will likely focus on enhanced mobile broadband, during which time there will not be an immediate need for a new telco core.
There are a lot of parallels between the world of politics and open source development. Open source community members can learn a lot about how political parties cultivate grass-roots support and local organizations, and empower those local organizations to keep people engaged. Between 2005 and 2009, Howard Dean was the chairman of the Democratic National Congress in the United States, and instituted what was known as the “50 state strategy” to grow the Democratic grass roots. That strategy, and what happened after it was changed, can teach community managers some valuable lessons about keeping community contributors. Here are three lessons community managers can learn from it.
Next month, the world’s leading automotive experts and engineers will gather at Automotive Linux Summit in Japan to discuss the future of connected cars and collaborate on the open source technologies driving innovation in the automotive arena.
The strength of open source software is the community that helps to develop it and the vendors that adopt it, and that's just as true in the world of high-end enterprise solutions for real-time big data management as it is for traditional data warehousing and business intelligence. That's why Obsidian Systems, South Africa's leading open source software provider, has partnered with global leaders in the field to bring the benefits of live data capture and analytics to local companies with some of the most powerful and cost-effective platforms available.
Obsidian has built a strong reputation for real-time analytics in finance, retail, mining and telecommunications. It's done this by leveraging the capabilities of its key partners in the field, Hortonworks and Talend.
The Document Foundation, through Italo Vignoli, announced today, April 18, 2017, that the upcoming major update to the popular LibreOffice open-source office suite, versioned 5.4, has entered development.
While the LibreOffice 5.4 release should hit the streets sometime at the end of July, the folks over at The Document Foundations already planned the first bug hunting session for the first Alpha build, which should happen next Friday, on April 28, 2017. During this session, the team plans to squash numerous bugs.
LibreOffice 5.4 is due out this summer as the next feature update to this open-source cross-platform office suite.
Some of the changes queued so far for LibreOffice 5.4 include various Writer and Calc refinements, improved importing of EMF+ vector images, integration of pdfium for rendering inserted PDF images, Notebookbar improvements, a responsive design for the document iframe, some performance improvements, localization enhancements, and more.
On 10th April an international journalist team around Harald Schumann of the German tagesspiegel published the results of researches they did over several months about “Europe’s dire dependency on Microsoft“. The article mainly focuses on LibreOffice as an alternative to Microsoft Office. I can only underline all of the explanations, experiences and facts described in this article from my eleven years of experience in the OpenSource groupware scene.
If your email experience is via Exchange and Outlook, the net effect is both time consuming and disruptive.
Previously, users with old hardware had to pay for each app. Individual programs cost between $5 and $20 each
The Chinese media report on a man called Zhao from Xi'an who took revenge on his noisy upstairs neighbors whose boy wouldn't stop jumping on his ceiling by buying a "building shaker" -- a gadget that thumps your shared walls until your neighbors capitulate -- and leaving it on while he went away for the weekend.
In the past 10 years, the best-performing artificial-intelligence systems — such as the speech recognizers on smartphones or Google’s latest automatic translator — have resulted from a technique called “deep learning.”
Deep learning is in fact a new name for an approach to artificial intelligence called neural networks, which have been going in and out of fashion for more than 70 years. Neural networks were first proposed in 1944 by Warren McCullough and Walter Pitts, two University of Chicago researchers who moved to MIT in 1952 as founding members of what’s sometimes called the first cognitive science department.
We can’t afford to defund the vital efforts that could help solve some of our greatest challenges, from cancer to climate change.
The last issue is by far the worst, but it only affects 3G-SDI resolutions. 720p60, 1080p30 and 1080i60 all work fine. And to be fair, not even Blackmagic's own converters actually send 352M correctly most of the time…
I wish there were a way I could publish this somewhere people would actually read it before buying these things, but without a name, it's hard for people to find it. They're great value for money, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them for almost all use… but then, there's that almost. :-)
On my quest to generate reproducible standalone binaries for GNU FreeDink, I met new friends but currently lie defeated by an unexpected enemy...
A new variant of the IoT/Linux botnet “Tsunami” has been identified by Unit 42 researchers, according to a blog post by Palo Alto Networks.
Co-authored by Claud Xiao, Cong Zheng and Yanhui Jia, the post names the new variant as Amnesia, a botnet that targets an unpatched remote code execution vulnerability.
This vulnerability was publicly disclosed over a year ago in March 2016 in DVR (digital video recorder) devices made by TVT Digital and branded by over 70 vendors across the globe.
This unpatched remote code execution vulnerability affects about 227,000 devices around the world especially Taiwan, the United States, Israel, Turkey, and India.
Microsoft is enabling a new phone sign in option as part of the company’s iOS and Android Microsoft Authenticator app.
A declassified U.S. Government documentary history of the momentous 1953 coup in Iran, in which Central Intelligence Agency personnel participated, had been the object of widespread demand from historians and others for decades. In recent years, it finally seemed to be on the verge of publication.
But now its release has been postponed indefinitely.
Last year, “the Department of State did not permit publication of the long-delayed Iran Retrospective volume because it judged the political environment too sensitive,” according to a new annual report from the State Department Historical Advisory Committee (HAC). “The HAC was severely disappointed.”
“The HAC was unsuccessful in its efforts to meet with [then-]Secretary Kerry to discuss the volume, and now there is no timetable for its release,” the new report stated.
The Brits are having an election on June 8th, as Prime Minister Theresa May looks to shore up support before things really get messy with Brexit. But an unlikely person has just floated the idea of running for British Parliament. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange just asked his followers on Twitter if he should run for election.
The current administration is back to threatening free speech. On his way to being elected, Trump's passion for bogus defamation suits led him to declare he would "open up" libel laws to make it easier for him to sue people for saying things he didn't like.
This continued after the election. Trump tweeted his opposition to "fake news," calling out pretty much any major network that wasn't Fox News and calling them "enemies of the people." His new CIA director, Mike Pompeo, is similarly threatening the First Amendment. In his remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Pompeo went on a rant about Wikileaks -- one no doubt motivated by the site's recent data dumps on CIA computer exploits.
[...]
This is an interesting change of heart for Pompeo. Last year, when he was running for re-election in Kansas, he seemed pleased with Wikileaks and its ability to obtain damning documents.
Last July, while stumping for then-candidate, now-president Donald Trump, US Representative Mike Pompeo (R-KS) gleefully referenced nearly 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails released by the transparency/disclosure journalists at Wikileaks. “Need further proof that the fix was in from Pres. Obama on down?” Pompeo tweeted. The emails showed that DNC officials had worked overtime to rig their party’s primaries for eventual nominee Hillary Clinton and against challenger Bernie Sanders.
The British government’s plan to “take back control” of its waters after leaving the EU is about to be challenged by a claim from Denmark that its fishermen have a historical right to access to the seas around Britain dating back to the 1400s.
Officials in Copenhagen have mined the archives to build a legal case that could potentially be fought in the international court of justice in The Hague, although officials hasten to say that this is not their intention.
Denmark is seeking a Brexit deal that recognises the right of its fleet to continue to exploit a hundred shared stocks of species such as cod, herring, mackerel, plaice and sand eel.
Over a century ago, labour laws began to be instituted in diverse countries throughout the world. These laws were intended to provide protection to workers in what was recognised as an unequal relationship of exchange, but it also gave authority to managers to organise and direct their employees’ work. While the world of work has changed since these initial labour regulations were instituted, the fundamental reasons for the existence of labour protections – to ensure safe and healthy workplaces, to give workers a voice, and to provide minimum protections with respect to working time and earnings – remain valid.
The world has reached a key moment in the history of the way we work. We have entered a new business environment, dictated by rapid changing technological variables that create an entirely new economic landscape. Exponential growth of our interconnected world forces us to see the world anew. The 21st century asks for a different mindset now the rules of the game have fundamentally changed.
In this game it is not anymore relevant to optimize an organization’s efficiency based on a stable set of known variables. Instead, there’s a strong need to adapt as fast as possible to increasingly complex working conditions. Efficiency has to make place for engagement and adaptability. The organizations that know how to fully engage their employees and those who are natives in this information-rich, densely interconnected world of the 21st century are the ones that thrive.
Sanders is viewed favorably by 57 percent of registered voters, according to data from a Harvard-Harris survey provided exclusively to The Hill. Sanders is the only person in a field of 16 Trump administration officials or congressional leaders included in the survey who is viewed favorably by a majority of those polled.
His election victories have sparked a backlash. Since he ran for deputy-governor in 2012, hard-line Muslim organizations have argued that the Quran forbids Muslims from selecting non-Muslims as leaders, in an effort to attack the ambitious, highly popular pluralist politician.
The real Alex Jones is not his bombastic, conspiratorial InfoWars persona, his lawyer is hoping to convince a Texas jury in the radio host's child-custody battle.
That's more or less what attorney Randall Wilhite told Texas District Judge Orlinda Naranjo, the Austin American-Statesman reported on Sunday.
Wilhite told Naranjo that Jones' public personality should not be considered as material in evaluating the InfoWars founder's ability to be a father. Wilhite said doing so would be comparable to judging actor Jack Nicholson in such a custody battle based on his performance as the Joker in "Batman."
"He’s playing a character," Wilhite said of Jones. "He is a performance artist."
But Kelly Jones, the InfoWars host's ex-wife who is seeking sole or joint custody of the couple's three children in the case, testified that Jones' InfoWars personality was indeed the real Jones.
[...]
Jones, with millions of followers, rose to new prominence during the 2016 election cycle after Donald Trump, then the Republican frontrunner, appeared on his broadcast in late 2015. Trump's Democratic challenger in the election, Hillary Clinton, called Jones out in a speech she delivered in August that targeted Trump's support from the so-called alt-right.
The most tumultuous period in post-war British history just got more tumultuous.
Over the next seven weeks and two days, Theresa May will take on Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the most consequential election of the last 30 years.
On the ballot paper is Britain’s future outside the European Union.
Standing outside Number 10, the prime minister framed the election as a choice between an orderly, clean Brexit under her leadership, or a half-hearted, chaotic version under the most radical Labour leader since the 1930s.
Despite the opposition alleging fraud in the presidential elections, they didn't bother to send any delegates to observe the recount process.
Ecuador's National Electoral Council President Juan Pablo Pozo reported that Tuesday's recount of the ballots that had inconsistencies during the April 2 presidential run-off election was completed, with Alianza Pais candidate Lenin Moreno again winning the vote.
Finland has lost its spot at the top of the World Press Freedom Index after a five-year run. The NGO Reporters without Borders cited Prime Minister Juha Sipilä’s alleged attempts to influence Yle coverage of his potential conflict of interest in a state-funded nickel mine as one reason for Finland's tarnished image.
The most recent news shows that Russia plans to ban and block the domains of VPNs and proxies that don’t work with Russian authorities to enforce their internet censorship filter.
Facebook just announced Caffe2, a new deep learning framework developed in cooperation with NVIDIA and other vendors.
We've noted repeatedly how modern toys aren't immune to the security and privacy dysfunction the internet-of-broken-things has become famous for. A new WiFi-enabled Barbie, for example, has come under fire for trivial security that lets the toy be modified for use as a surveillance tool. We've also increasingly noted how the data these toys collect isn't secured particularly well either, as made evident by the Vtech incident, where hackers obtained the names, email addresses, passwords, and home addresses of 4,833,678 parents, and the first names, genders and birthdays of more than 200,000 kids.
Microsoft is the latest to publish a National Security Letter, following Google, Yahoo, Twitter, Calyx, Cloudflare, and… the Internet Archive. Microsoft's NSL [PDF] was issued by the FBI (of course) and demanded the usual subscriber info.
In the post accompanying the disclosure, Microsoft points out the USA Freedom Act is the only reason it's been able to release the NSL. This is one of the benefits of the recent law: a better, faster way to compel review of NSL gag orders, which used to take place almost never.
In addition, Microsoft notes FISA orders are on the rise. Of course, its reporting is limited to useless "bands," so the only thing that can definitely be determined is Microsoft's FISA interactions have at least doubled.
A 1987 CIA memo shows that the Agency was not only deeply concerned about anti-CIA protests on college campuses in the United States, but held the protestors themselves in derision.
While some of the protest tactics were described by the CIA as “so sophomoric that it’s depressing,” it should be noted that several years before these very tactics had been extremely effective - as a result of Yale and Harvard Law Schools’ questioning of the Agency’s (flagrantly homophobic) policies towards homosexuals, the Agency’s General Counsel had recommended cancelling the recruitment trips.
In a historic female genital mutilation case that has planted a bull's-eye on what prosecutors are calling an "incredibly secretive" religious ritual, a federal magistrate on Monday denied bond to an Indian-Muslim doctor accused of mutilating the genitals of two Minnesota girls at a Livonia medical clinic.
With Steam's policy for providing refunds on digital game purchases being roughly two years old, many people forget the context of the time when Valve began offering those refunds. It's worth being reminded that at that time nobody in the neighborhood of the Steam client's popularity was offering any real avenue for getting refunds on digital game purchases. Those that did mostly did so under the most restrictive conditions, with insane single-digit day windows in which a refund could be had, and only for certain reasons, of which the game being shitty was not included. Steam's criteria was that you could request a refund during a two-week period for any reason, be it the game not living up to expectations, the gamer's machine not being able to run it properly, or anything else. The other contextual aspect to keep in mind was that Steam had endured several weeks of absolutely brutal PR, with awful customer service ratings and the whole fiasco over its attempt at creating a paid-mod system.
Instead of complaining, he actively encouraged fans to download a free copy from The Pirate Bay, Soulseek, or even long defunct pirate classics such as Napster, Limewire, and Kazaa.
Last week, we wrote twice about sculptor Arturo Di Modica and his claim that the "Fearless Girl" statue, that was placed last month in front of his "Charging Bull" statue, violates his rights. As we explained, in detail, he has almost no legal case here. His letter to New York City argues three possible claims of action -- all of which would almost certainly be losers in court (as we detailed in that last post).
However, I still have seen a bunch of people arguing in support of Di Modica, claiming that he "has a point." Many have pointed to a blog post by Greg Fallis that is literally titled "Seriously, the guy has a point." Others have raised other issues in discussions I've seen (and taken part in...) on Twitter and Facebook. I still don't think he has any point at all, but I wanted to do a post addressing each of the key issues I've seen raised, and explaining why I think they fail as legitimate arguments.