You'd be forgiven for not recognizing the name Alpha. The company first made a splash back in March when it launched the 14-inch Litebook laptop running Elementary OS on a quad-core Intel Celeron and 4GB of RAM for $249. Now Alpha is back with two more products, one of which is a Coe i7 laptop.
As well as announcing their new Litebox mini PC, Alpha have also unveiled a high powered laptop equipped with a 15.6-inch display, powered by an Intel Core i7 processor supported by 8GB of RAM.
Hardware manufacturer Alpha has this week unveiled a new addition to their range of computer systems with the launch of a new mini PC in the form of the aptly named Litebox which is available to purchase price from $249.
The Alpha Litebook is a cheap laptop with a full HD 14 inch display, at least 4GB of RAM and a Linux-based operating system called Elementary OS. The team behind the laptop launched the Litebook in March.
Now they’re back with two new computers. The Alpha Centurion is a higher-power laptop with a 15.6 inch display, an Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, and a starting price of $429.
Alpha’s new Litebox is a tiny desktop computer with a starting price of $249. Both ship with Elementary OS.
'WannaHelp' is the response from free software enthusiasts in the city to cyber scares such as WannaCry which hit thousands of computers worldwide. Volunteers of Free Software Users Group,
The reports on WannaCry ransomware attack might have given enough reasons for the city folks to switch to other available free software options. Around 60 people attended the GNU/Linux Install Festival organized by State Central Library in association with Free Software Users Group, Thiruvananthapuram (FSUG TVM) and ICFOSS at library hall on Saturday.
According to Praveen Arimbrathodiyil, free software activist, it was following the panic that resulted from WannaCry attack that such a festival was organized to inform the public about availability of safe alternatives. "Our aim is to create awareness on the free software and its benefits among the general public. It is mostly the youngsters who have responded to the invitation for the festival," said Praveen.
Free installation of Linux software was the highlight of the festival, in which nearly 40 systems were installed with the operating system.
"I had installed both Windows and Linux in the laptop many year ago. It may be the lack of institutional support for these free software that people tend to go for other options. The government should take initiative to convert the systems in college and government institutions to free software," said Sriram V, chief librarian at CDS, who attended the festival.
The ICFOSS personnel demonstrated the basics of installing free software, alternatives to Windows applications, and about user groups, forums and community support. A free software fest organised at the State Central Library on Saturday witnessed scores of people installing Linux operating system in their laptops even as many others sat in rapt attention listening to experts speak about free software and its benefits. Proponents of free software also should take part of the blame for this as they often clouded the minds of computer users with their technical jargon. Organised by the International Centre for Free and Open Source Software (ICFOSS), in association with the Thiruvananthapuram chapter of the Free Software Users Group (FSUG), and Society for Promotion of Alternative Computing Employment (SPACE), the GNU Linux installation festival was inaugurated by Achuthsankar S. Nair, Director, Centre of Bioinformatics, University of Kerala. The fest saw a healthy attendance by both software aficionados and the merely curious ones.
Some people are, rather falsely, under the impression that just because they use Linux they don’t need to worry about security. Sure, Linux doesn’t suffer from the same types of security issues and prevalent malware that Windows does, but that doesn’t mean that Linux users can neglect their systems and expect to be secure.
These five tools are absolutely essential for Linux desktop users. If you’re running a server, there are more. This guide doesn’t present them in any particular order because they all serve different and arguably equally important functions. Plus, they are all free and open-source software. So if you aren’t using any of these on your Linux desktop, start now.
Open-source pioneer Munich has been warned the city could face increased risk from hackers if it goes ahead with a planned return to Windows.
Munich spent nine years and millions of euros shifting some 15,000 staff to a Linux-based OS and other open-source software, but is now expected to swap Linux for Windows 10 by 2021.
However, Munich's Green Party says the recent WannaCry ransomware attacks on Windows machines worldwide highlight how much more of a target Microsoft's OS is for hackers than Linux-based operating systems.
In May 2017, I gave a talk at Craft Conf in Budapest focusing on the economics of Microservices. You can watch the video recording here or read through the slides here. In this talk, I have briefly discussed a set of proposed prerequisites for microservices, which are the things I believe you should have in place before considering a widespread adoption of the architecture style. Since the presentation, the list has been referenced by other works in the distributed systems space, so I want to use this post to expand on these prerequisites.
Much has been written on the pros and cons of microservices, but unfortunately I’m still seeing them as something being pursued in a cargo cult fashion in the growth-stage startup world. At the risk of rewriting Martin Fowler’s Microservice Premium article, I thought it would be good to write up some thoughts so that I can send them to clients when the topic arises, and hopefully help people avoid some of the mistakes I’ve seen. The mistake of choosing a path towards a given architecture or technology on the basis of so-called best practices articles found online is a costly one, and if I can help a single company avoid it then writing this will have been worth it.
Containers are lightweight OS-level virtualizations that allow us to run an application and its dependencies in a resource-isolated process. All the necessary components that are required to run an application are packaged as a single image and can be re-used. While an image is executed, it runs in an isolated environment and does not share memory, CPU, or the disk of the host OS. This guarantees that processes inside the container cannot watch any processes outside the container.
Marek Olšák at AMD has published his latest patch series: 24 patches providing further clean-ups and micro-optimizations to Gallium3D's Mesa state tracker.
Freedreno Gallium3D as the open-source, reverse-engineered driver for Qualcomm Adreno graphics hardware has switched to using NIR by default.
Last week I posted some fresh macOS vs. Linux Intel OpenGL benchmarks while for those curious about the CPU performance, here are some additional benchmarks from that Mac Mini system.
Like the OpenGL graphics tests, these CPU-focused Mac benchmarks were done from the Mac Mini with Core i5 4278U Haswell CPU, 8GB RAM, 1TB Apple HDD, and Intel integrated graphics. MacOS 10.12.5 was tested with its Xcode 8.3.3 Clang-based compiler stack and other stock packages.
Following last week's news about PCI Express 4.0 and 5.0, a Phoronix Premium member had requested some graphics card benchmarks when comparing PCI Express 1.0 vs. 2.0 vs. 3.0 performance under Linux.
I have written about apps that will help you concentrate by playing ambient noises e.g. Focusli and ANoise.
This time around I’m introducing to you a timer app. It is based on the Pomodoro technique developed by Francesco Cirillo in the late 1980s and you might have come across it before (perhaps as a Chrome extension).
The Pomodoro technique works by breaking down work into assigned time intervals (typically 25 minutes in length) separated by short breaks and that is exactly how Gnome Pomodoro works.
A new version Stacer, an open-source system cleaning n’ tune-up tool for Linux desktops, is available to download. Stacer 1.0.7 ships with improved language support, adds in a choice of light or dark theme, and introduces a new processes monitor. Processes can be sorted based on PID, CPU and memory usage, etc.
The UDisks project that provides a D-Bus interface for querying and manipulating storage devices issued a big release earlier this month.
Whether you're an aspiring or accomplished musician, a volunteer roadie, or an experienced audio engineer, you'll be glad to hear that there are many options for making music with open source. This month, I want to introduce you to the sequencer that I use for my audio work, whether it's mixing soundtracks for short films or making music with my band or for myself: Qtractor.
Qtractor is a digital audio workstation, a term that's a little fuzzy, but generally implies a model based around music tracks in the tradition of a multitrack recorder with an allowance for plugins and effects. In other words, Qtractor isn't a waveform editor like Audacity, and it isn't a DJ mixer like Mixxx. It's a big, all-in-one, one-stop-shop audio studio.
CopyQ is an advanced clipboard manager with editing and scripting features, that lets you intelligently manipulate your system’s clipboard content and use it within a wide range of applications. It monitors your system’s clipboard and saves its content in a way you can later paste it directly into another application.
A new package! Or at least new on CRAN as the very initial version 0.1.0 had been available via the ghrr drat for over a year. But now we have version 0.1.1 to announce as a CRAN package.
RcppMspPack provides R with MessagePack header files for use via C++ (or C, if you must) packages such as RcppRedis.
I have the honour to announce the latest release of Smack! Version 4.2 brings among bug fixes and additional features like Explicit Message Encryption (XEP-0380) and Message Processing Hints (XEP-0334) support for OMEMO Multi-End-Message-and-Object encryption (XEP-0384). OMEMO was developed by Andreas Straub for the Conversations messenger (also as a Google Summer of Code project) in 2015. Since then it got quite popular and drew a lot of attention for XMPP in the media. My hope is that my efforts to develop an easy to use Smack module will result in an even broader adoption.
The Wine Staging release 2.10 is now available.
Building off last week's Wine 2.10 release is now the adjoining Wine-Staging 2.10 release with various experimental/testing features tacked on.
New functionality added to Wine-Staging 2.10 includes a macOS preloader, ntoskrnl and winedevice improvements, and various other bug fixes and improvements.
Wine 2.10 has release recently and this release is one of the less exciting releases for Linux gamers. I imagine the Wine-Staging release isn't far behind now too.
Following the retirement of Valve's Steam Greenlight program, Steam Direct is now available as the streamlined, transparent, and accessible method for game developers to bring their games to Steam.
“Joey, you’re going to love this” the e-mail began, emphasis very much theirs, and very much over-hyping what was to follow! “A really great mobile game called Pin Town is now available on Ubuntu on Snappy. You have to write about it.
XCOM 2: War of the Chosen is the huge new expansion coming to XCOM 2 and Feral Interactive have confirmed they will be porting it. The press emails to me specifically mentioned Windows, but Linux wasn't mentioned. Glad to see it cleared up.
Tropico 6 [Steam, Official Site] has been announced and the really good news is that Linux is going to be supported just like the previous title.
Announced recently at the Microsoft E3 conference, "The Last Night" is a "post-cyberpunk", pixel art adventure game inspired by Flashback and Blade Runner that blends traditional pixel art with 3D composition giving the game a very cinematic look. While the game's website doesn't directly mention Linux, the trailer and the game's Steam page clearly mentions SteamOS as one of the target platforms.
PAYDAY 2 - Ultimate Edition [Steam] is now live on Steam bringing all the DLC under one roof for a better experience.
The Oculus Rift CV1 head mounted display should play nicer with the Linux 4.12 kernel.
When initially connecting an Oculus Rift CV1 VR headset to a Linux system on current stable kernel releases, it can take a while until the raw HID device appears (~20+ seconds). A user affected by this issue had mailed the kernel list about the problem and also included a patch to add a quirk for the CV1 so that the device HID initialization goes by much quicker.
Solaroids: Prologue [Steam, Official Site] has the same basic gameplay as the classic Asteroids with a focus on surviving as long as you can, while you face new threats as the game gets longer.
Xfdesktop 4.13.1 was released this weekend as another baby step towards the long-awaited Xfce 4.14.
We have today started soft branching from '5.9' to '5.9.1'. That way we should be able to release Qt 5.9.1 still during June. So please use '5.9.1' for new changes targeted to Qt 5.9.1 release. We will do final downmerge from '5.9' to '5.9.1' this Friday (16.6) and after that '5.9' will be for Qt 5.9.2.
While there didn't end up being any point/patch releases to Qt 5.8, The Qt Company is making good on their word for improving the release flow with Qt 5.9 and maintaining it as an LTS release.
Regular readers of this site will know that we lurrve KDE Connect (and for some very good reasons)! But one thing we’ve heard a number of you ask each time we write about is whether KDE Connect works over Bluetooth. Right now, it doesn’t — but that’s about to change.
Yes! We cleared the first hurdle in adding recurrence support to GNOME Calendar.
Now GNOME Calendar is smart enough to detect if an event has recurrences or not.
We added a new property – ‘has-recurrence‘ – to GcalEvent. Evolution API took most of the load off our shoulders as it already had a function ‘e_cal_component_has_recurrences()‘ which served our purpose.
I think that, at this point, at least a good part of the community is aware of the many new features that are planned to arrive with GNOME 3.26.
I’m particularly looking forward a better tiling story in GNOME Shell and Mutter.
Bug 701402 calls on GNOME developers to 'implement progress bars in GNOME Shell'. This is absolutely the sort of bug I can get behind — and in this post I tell you why.
I started to work in GNOME Notes (Bijiben) on Feb 27th, 2017 to be exact, when I started to talk with Pierre-Yves Luyten, the former maintainer, about taking over his work in that module.
The last GNOME Notes release was about one year ago, on May 30th, 2016, and it was not even a stable one (3.21.2), so we were overdue for a new one.
Ikey To Become Full-Time Solus Developer!
The Solus Linux distribution and its Budgie desktop continue moving on strong and they've added another developer to their team while the project leader Ikey Doherty will be working on the project full-time.
Tanglu Linux developer Matthias Klumpp is proud to announce today the general availability of the final release of the Tanglu 4 GNU/Linux operating system with both GNOME and KDE flavors.
Zorin Group is announcing today the release of a Beta version of the upcoming Zorin OS 12 Lite edition of the Ubuntu-based operating system, designed for old computers with low hardware specifications.
Parted Magic creator Patrick Verner announced today the release and immediate availability of the Parted Magic 2017_06_12 updated ISO image of the commercial GNU/Linux distribution designed for disk partitioning and maintenance tasks.
Powered by the latest Linux 4.11.4 kernel, Parted Magic 2017_06_12 includes all sorts of up-to-date components, including the Clonezilla 3.25.11 partition and disk imaging/cloning program, Wxfixboot 2.0.1 tool for modifying and fixing bootloaders, as well as DDRescue-GUI 1.7.1 graphical user interface for GNU ddrescue.
It's been a month now, since we started to deploy the rails frontend more frequently. On some days we now deploy multiple times a day. Since this is quite different from what we did before (1 - 2 deployment every two weeks), we have a lot to learn and keep updating our deployment process.
Though this doesn't mean that OBS will be unavailable whenever we deploy. Most of the times we can keep OBS running while deploying the newest codebase. In the rare cases we have to set OBS into maintenance mode, we will drop you a note in IRC.
This morning Red Hat has announced the release of RHEL 7.4 Beta providing a "rich and stable foundation for both existing applications and a new generation of workloads and solutions".
Prince Sultan University has announced a collaboration with Red Hat, global provider of open source solutions, to create the King Salman Education for Employment Program Red Hat Academy.
Five budding system administrators and open source enthusiasts have successfully acquired sought-after Red Hat Certified System Administrator certification having passed their Red Hat exams. Last year leading provider of open source software and services Obsidian Systems joined forces with global open source software leader Red Hat, ICT training service provider CTU Training Solutions and the MICT Seta to help source potential Red Hat Linux System Administrators and open source professionals. Piet Gaohose, Nonhlanhla Khutane, Lethabo Mashile, Bellinda Chabalala and Vukosi Hlungwani have all successfully completed the programme and are now the latest qualified Red Hat Linux System Administrators.
The Fedora Project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Fedora 26 Beta, the next big step on our journey to the exciting Fedora 26 release in July.
The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the fifth release candidate of the installer for Debian 9 "Stretch".
This will be the last release candidate, and the next upload of the debian-installer package will be used for the final Debian 9.0 build, without a separate announcement for the installer.
In prepping for the Debian 9.0 release in a few days, developers have uploaded Debian Installer Stretch RC5 that also serves as the installer's final release candidate.
The developers of the Tails amnesic incognito live system, also known as the anonymous operating system, were proud to announce today the release and immediate availability of Tails 3.0.
Tails 3.0 is a major update that's based entirely on the repositories of the soon-to-be-released Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system. It's also the first version of the operating system to be launched approximately at the same time as a new major release of Debian GNU/Linux.
Recently, with the help from our friends at OMG! Ubuntu, we ran a poll to collect data on usefulness of some GNOME Shell extensions. We limited the poll to a select group of extensions based on popularity on https://extensions.gnome.org as well as how they changed the user experience. The poll was done with Google forms, requiring the user to be logged in, which helped to prevent the poll from being abused. However it was anonymous and we did not collect any identifying information.
There are several findings here. One, UKUI does not look or behave like Windows in any way, nor is it a suitable replacement as such, only wishful thinking. Moreover, it is also in no way superior to Unity, be it experience, consistency or performance. It's buggy, and it comes with a rainbow of clashing styles and problems.
Two, the removal process is a mess. Painful, and to be frank, impossible. It should not take so much time trying to restore your desktop to defaults. You get rid of the packages, and the stuff is still there. Seriously? What! Am I using Windows ME?
Three, stick with Unity, or if you don't like it, go for KDE or Xfce. But not this. I am really surprised by my test today. I was expecting such good things, instead I had to battle frustration and anger, and I wasted precious time trying to get rid of something that should be a simple one-liner. I don't know why or how, but I find UKUI to be unsuitable for day to day use, and I must caution you against using it, because it renders irreversible changes in the desktop, and alters the look of other Gnome-based desktops. Until the next time, regretfully yours, Dedoimedo.
Now that they choose to ditch their powerful Unity desktop environment for GNOME, the Ubuntu Desktop development team has a lot of work on their hands testing various components and technologies that aren't quite familiar.
In his report last week, Canonical's Will Cooke revealed the fact that the Ubuntu Desktop team is working hard on implementing a testing infrastructure based on the company's MAAS (Metal as a Service) and TestFlinger technologies to test various scenarios on a wide range of physical hardware.
Eons ago I wrote a guide on how you can install Intel graphics drivers on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. That guide is still good and it should still work but with a few caveats which we will examine below. I have subsequently discovered that further tweaks and tuning are required in order to get that perfect graphics set up.
Ubuntu is finally doing something to tackle the size of Snap apps, albeit only for GNOME apps at present. A new GNOME platform snap is available in for testing in the testing channel of the Snap store. This snap will allow devs to build and distribute smaller GNOME Snap apps.
Last week, Amazon launched Greengrass, their new IoT platform allowing developers to create intelligent edge software. Amazon is collaborating with a variety of manufacturers to make Greengrass available on as many devices as possible from home gateways, industrial gateways to smart microphones. This is a reflection of the increased appetite from hardware vendors and developers to bring software definable devices to market, where third party developers can add new functionalities to existing devices and get rewarded for it. By deploying more intelligence at the edge, developers can build devices with more offline functions, faster responses that are cheaper for them to operate and give users an improved experience. By offering software definable devices they also give themselves the opportunity to offer a continuously improving experience but also new paid services that help them monetise their device even after they’ve been purchased.
ââ¬â¹Every month we select the top themes for Ubuntu. Many themes stay same and many change. Themes are one of the best ways to make our desktop beautiful and who doesn’t want to make his desktop beautiful? The themes mentioned below are paid and free too. Select as per your liking and install it right now.
This is the second post in the series about building u-boot based gadget snaps, following Building u-boot gadget snap packages from source.
If you have read the last post in this series, you have likely noticed that there is a uboot.patch file being applied to the board config before building the u-boot binaries. This post will take a closer look at this patch.
GNOME 3.26 is shaping up to be one heck of a release, as a recent update from GNOME developer Georges Stavracas shows.
The Ubuntu desktop team has finally revealed the results of the recent GNOME desktop user survey. But if you were hoping to find some definitive decisions taken as a result of the results you’re in for disappointment.
This summary is intended to be a regular communication of activities and plans happening in and around Ubuntu OpenStack, covering but not limited to the distribution and deployment of OpenStack on Ubuntu.
Linux Mint 18.2 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.
This has been an interesting week for Linux Mint. The team released the official beta for the Cinnamon and Mate versions of "Sonya," signaling a final release should be here soon. While that is good news, there was some bad news too. While technically not a Linux Mint issue, it was discovered that the MintBox 2 had a bios vulnerability. Luckily, there is already a patch for the diminutive computer.
After informing us of the release of a new build of his Android-based RaspAnd operating system for Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 2 single-board computers, Arne Exton announced the availability of Exton|OS Build 170609.
Coming about half a year after the previous update, Exton|OS Build 170609 seems to be a massive release that moves to the latest Linux 4.11 kernel series and updates the MATE desktop environment to version 1.18. All the core components in Exton|OS Build 170609 have been updated to their latest version as of June 7, 2017.
Linux Mint 18.2 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.
It is a Linux world, and the rest of computing is just living in it—often literally, thanks to containerisation. The Internet of Things (IoT), in all of its manifold forms, is no exception, and the Linux Foundation lists these seven projects as the key players in the march of connected open-source systems. Here’s a quick rundown.
An Arduino-Due based “ERASynth” RF signal generator starts at $499, and offers WiFi and a multiloop integer-N PLL for better performance and reduced noise.
Istanbul, Turkey based startup ERA Instruments has successfully funded its open spec ERASynth RF signal generator on Crowd Supply, having raised over $30,000. The ERASynth offers some features found on much more expensive commercial RF signal generators, including WiFi and a multiloop integer-N PLL, says ERA Instruments. The device is available through June 16 selling for $499 (10MHz to 6GHz) or $749 (250kHz to 15GHz) for the ERASynth+ model, with shipments due Sep. 21. he product also stands out with its open schematics and open source firmware and GUI software.
The Toyota Camry will be the first Toyota vehicle on the market with the AGL-based system on sale in the US next year.
AGL is an open source project hosted by The Linux Foundation, supported by more than 100 members working together to develop a common automotive software platform.
After months of delays, it looks like Tesla is finally about to release some much-awaited software updates – and not only for cars equipped with second generation Autopilot hardware.
CEO Elon Musk updated the timelines for both the Linux kernel update, which has now an ETA for next weekend, while the new and improved web browser has been pushed to next month.
It was nice to hear and see that this unique open source/open hardware motion picture camera system venture is really moving forward to the point where developers and early adopters alike can now already get their kit. Mind you, if you are an “end user” like me, then the camera is NOT YET ready for us as the enclosure and actual operating system of the camera are still under development. Without those, operating the camera can be a tedious work.
Samsung is known for the production and subsequent development of amazing top-of-the-line devices. Some amazing devices amazing Samsung devices are available on Flipkart at a subsidized rate. These devices are the Samsung Gear S2 and S3, Samsung Z2 and Z4 as well as the Gear IconX Black Smart Headphones. All these devices run on Tizen OS and they are tested and proven to give the users their desired expectations.
Nothing Apple has done in the last three years has reversed the iPad’s sales decline, or stopped it, or even really slowed it down all that much. But 2017 has made clear that if the iPad keeps falling, it won’t be for lack of trying.
On the software side, you’ve got iOS 11, an update that makes iOS 9’s multitasking additions look rudimentary and quaint. It adds a distinctly Mac-like application dock and dramatically changes how the device runs and interacts with multiple apps at the same time. The changes allow for much-improved "window" and file management, and you can easily drag-and-drop content between apps.
As bandwidth demands grow so too are demands on both virtual and physical networking infrastructure. The FD.io (Fast Data) project is an open-source effort that aims to help advance the state and speed of networking transport.
Three new projects surfaced in the last month to make Kubernetes easier to run on various infrastructures and to integrate with apps.
These Kubernetes open source projects -- ksonnet, Istio and Kubermesh -- focus on different layers of the orchestration tool's architecture. Ksonnet, rolled out last week by a consortium of companies led by Heptio, aims to help developers more easily run applications on a Kubernetes infrastructure. Istio, whose marquee contributors include Google, IBM and Lyft, will address common problems with how microservices communicate in Kubernetes clusters. And Kubermesh is a reference architecture created by an e-commerce firm in the U.K. to automate Kubernetes networking on a bare-metal infrastructure.
Open source attracts some of the most wonderfully creative people. I learned this when video interviewing a longtime open source buddy of mine, Caleb Hawkins, a singer/songwriter in Indianapolis, Indiana. I met Caleb online via our shared interest in the Inkscape vector drawing program. Only after I met him did I learn of the neat ways he uses other open source programs, such as Audacity and Ardour. Meet Caleb in this video interview.
Today, we release the new major version 1.6.0 of Rspamd. The most significant change in this version is the addition of Milter protocol support in Rspamd. Therefore, Rmilter project is finally turned to the abandoned state and should not be used in new installations. All Rmilter users should consider migration to Rspamd milter support. This release has some incompatible changes so please check the migration guide.
Rspamd 1.6 is now available as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source spam filtering software.
Speaking at the 5G North America event here this week, Alex Jinsung Choi, EVP and head of corporate R&D at SK Telecom, noted that the company is involved in numerous open source projects as it attempts to move from a centralized network to a more distributed network that promotes lower latency. However, he also said that there are too many different open source communities, each with a different mission which is causing fragmentation. “There are too many fragmented communities,” Choi said. “Harmonization is needed.”
Why is open source software so popular today? You might think it's about money, open standards or interoperability. Ultimately, however, the most important factor behind the success of open source is its ability to offer control -- or the allusion of it, at least -- to people who use it.
The central theme of OpenForge is e-governance, so it requires that the hosted project be related to e-governance. This is not a place for private companies, communities, or individuals to host their private source code repository. Only government departments can have private repositories here. Private companies and individuals must have public repositories. These are the only two aspects that are verified while approving a project on OpenForge. On OpenForge, projects, their members, and activities are not regulated or controlled in any other way.
The decision whether or not to use OpenForge (and to what degree) rests with the respective project owner or department. They can decide what project source code they want to share and how they want to leverage the community to improve the code base.
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The Singapore government is using GitHub to collaborate on its Government Digital Services. There’s a considerable difference between the way Singapore and India provide access to and visualisation of the data.The USA has also listed some of the projects on GitHub. Country’s(US) open data portal doesn’t rank high in terms of its user-friendliness but their data visualisation platform seems to be making up for it. In addition, many governments in Europe and America have come up with a policy to adopt open-source software and to open up the source code of government applications. These activities are mainly on platforms like GitHub and SourceForge (e.g. the US government has a code repository called code.gov which aggregates federal projects, but the code is hosted on GitHub).
Chrome 60 Beta adds a Paint Timing API to provide more insight to developers about their "first paint" performance, CSS font-display support, improvements to the Credential Management API, the Payment Request API has been added to desktop Chrome, there's a new Web Budget API to allow sites using push notifications to send a limited number of push messages that will trigger background work, support for Web Push Encryption was added, and a range of other CSS/JavaScript features and APIs.
Additional web browser news this week is Mozilla's launch today of Firefox 54.
Firefox 54 is significant in that the work of the Electrolysis project is now enabled for everyone: this is the multi-process support in Firefox designed for a more efficient web browser particularly around utilizing multiple tabs and/or content heavy sites. Firefox 54 will make use of up to four processes for dealing with web content.
On the Firefox team, one thing we always hear from our users is that they rely on the web for complex tasks like trip planning and shopping comparisons. That often means having many tabs open. And the sites and web apps running in those tabs often have lots of things going on– animations, videos, big pictures and more. Complex sites are more and more common. The average website today is nearly 2.5 megabytes – the same size as the original version of the game Doom, according to Wired. Up until now, a complex site in one Firefox tab could slow down all the others. That often meant a less than perfect browsing experience.
An update to the Arc Thunderbird theme add-on is now available for download, and brings support for the 3 Arc GTK theme variants.
Chinese venture firm China Growth Capital has led a US$15 million series B financing round in PingCAP, a Beijing-based start-up focused on building databases for enterprise customers.
Other venture firms including Matrix Partners China, Yunqi Partners, Frees Fund and K2VC also participated in the round, according to a company announcement.
Founded in 2015 by engineers and architects who formerly worked at Twitter.com, JD.com, Baidu.com, Qihoo 360, Sogou.com and Wandou Labs, PingCap is the developer of TiDB, a popular open-source distributed NewSQL database.
LibreOffice 6.0 will be the version that succeeds this summer's release of LibreOffice 5.4.
Automattic, the technology company that owns WordPress.com, has a beautiful office in a converted San Francisco warehouse, with soaring ceilings, a library, and a custom-made barn door. If you like the space, you’re free to move in.
The world’s largest software maker Microsoft has raised concerns over the government putting its weight behind open source software in its recent request for proposal to appoint a managed service provider for its e-marketplace, nicknamed GeM.
“The RFP has allocated 50 out of 150 marks to solutions that are built using open source software only; this means that if a bidder does not use open source product only then it would be impossible for such a bidder to achieve the 65 percent qualification marks in solution evaluation and would then automatically become technically disqualified,” Microsoft has said in a letter to the government, reviewed by Moneycontrol.
Moneycontrol has accessed a copy of the letter. In an official response, Microsoft confirmed sending a letter in this regard.
A new MIT-designed open-source website might well be the Pinterest of microfluidics. The site, Metafluidics.org, is a free repository of designs for lab-on-a-chip devices, submitted by all sorts of inventors, including trained scientists and engineers, hobbyists, students, and amateur makers. Users can browse the site for devices ranging from simple cell sorters and fluid mixers, to more complex chips that analyze ocular fluid and synthesize gene sequences.
Seen at Metafluidics.org, the site is built as a free repository of designs for lab-on-a-chip devices, submitted by all sorts of inventors, including trained scientists and engineers, hobbyists, students, and amateur makers. Users can browse the site for devices ranging from simple cell sorters and fluid mixers, to more complex chips with niche dedicated functionalities.
There's open-source software, open-source pharma research, and open-source beer. Now, there are open-source seeds, too. Breeders from Göttingen University in Germany and Dottenfelderhof agricultural school in Bad Vilbel, Germany, have released tomato and wheat varieties under an open-source license. Their move follows similar schemes for sharing plant material in India and the United States, but is the first that provides legal protection for the open-source status of future descendants of plant varieties.
There is an extremely talented landscape photographer called Thomas Heaton whose YouTube videos I find very instructive and entertaining. Recently he featured a new product he was sent to try out: the Loupedeck, a physical console that lets you control Lightroom (the main software I use to sort, catalog and edit my photographs).
[...]
So, I cancelled my Loupedeck order and found a very reasonable MIDI controller for $65 from Adorama and ordered it instead (my lovely daughter is going to pay for it for Father’s Day — it’s so nice she’s earning her own money), and downloaded the open source midi2lr software (midi to Lightroom, get it?).
That history starts with C. In many ways, C is the Latin of programming languages. It inspired JavaScript, Ruby, Python, C++, C#, and Java. A few of those languages are even written in C. It's easy to spot C's influence by looking at if/else and control flow statements in any of the aforementioned languages. C was originally Dennis Ritchie and was used to build Unix. From there, C found its way to the heart of Linux, where C has continued to be the language of choice.
Go was created by legends from this Unix and C era. While working at Google, Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson found themselves frustrated by the common pitfalls of C-family languages. As Bjarne Stroustroup, creator of C++ puts it: "C makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot; C++ makes it harder, but when you do it blows your whole leg off."
I am not fond of change for change’s sake, but new opportunities often bring new priorities and challenges with them. What then if Python as people insist on it today, with all the extra features added over the years to satisfy various petitioners and trends, is actually the weakness itself? What if the Python-like languages can adapt to these changes, and by having to confront their incompatibilities with hastily-written code from the 1990s and code employing “because it’s there” programming techniques, they can adapt to the changing environment while delivering much of what people like about Python in the first place? What if Python itself cannot?
“Why don’t you go and use something else if you don’t like what Python is?” some might ask. Certainly, Free Software itself is far more important to me than any adherence to Python. But I can also choose to make that other language something that carries forward the things I like about Python, not something that looks and behaves completely differently. And in doing so, at least I might gain a deeper understanding of what matters to me in Python, even if others refuse the lessons and the opportunities such Python-like languages can provide.
And, of course, some are worried that students could use this law to shield themselves from having to recognize scientific facts that are publicly controversial. When one Democrat at a hearing asked Republican Representative and bill sponsor Jesse Kremer whether a geology professor would be allowed to tell a student who believed the Earth to be 6,000 years old that they are wrong, Kremer bristled. “The Earth is 6,000 years old. That’s a fact,” he said. (The Earth is, as a matter of empirical fact, a little over 4.5 billion years old.)
World Health Organization Director-Elect Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus in touring the United States this week, visiting key funders of the WHO, partner international organisations, US government agencies and nongovernmental organisations, and a Canadian ministry.
[...]
The US government and US-based Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation are among the largest funders of the WHO.
It was another habitually late night in the office when I heard my private phone line ring. Although I rarely answer my own calls, even after hours, for some reason I reached for the receiver.
“What’s going on, Hercules?“ It was my longtime friend Mark Eichberg.. “Look, before you say anything, I have a favor to ask. I work with this guy, Juan Castillo. He and his wife are desperate to hire a lawyer. You’ve got to see them, man, and hear them out.”
Almost half (46 percent) of U.S. firms that use an Internet of Things (IoT) network have been hit by at least one security breach.
This, according to a survey by consulting firm Altman Vilandrie & Company, which said the cost of the breaches represented 13.4 percent of the total revenues for companies with revenues under $5 million annually and tens of millions of dollars for the largest firms. Nearly half of firms with annual revenues above $2 billon estimated the potential cost of one IoT breach at more than $20 million.
Dragos researchers said it was used successfully in what may have been a dress rehearsal on a December 17 hack on an electric transmission substation in Kiev.
It's worth reading the executive summary, and then skimming the recommendations. Recommendations are in six areas.
The healthcare sector in the U.S. is in critical condition and in dire need of an overhaul to address widespread and systemic information security weakness that puts patient privacy and even safety at risk, Congressional Task Force has concluded.
As per data of Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), over 50,300 cyber security incidents like phishing, website intrusions and defacements, virus and denial of service attacks were observed in the country during 2016.
Last month, over 100 countries were hit by 'WannaCry' ransomware in one of the most widespread cyber attacks in history.
Security is of your Linux systems vital. It’s not a binary thing though. Depending on your requirements you end up choosing a level of security that still allows you and your systems to accomplish what they need to do.
[...]
Cockpit is a Linux session in your browser
As daunting as securing your Linux system might seem, one thing to remember is that every extra step makes a difference. It's almost always better to make a modest stride than let uncertainty keep you from starting.
Fortunately, there are a few basic techniques that greatly benefit users at all levels, and knowing how to securely wipe your hard drive in Linux is one of them. Because I adopted Linux primarily with security in mind, this is one of the first things I learned. Once you have absorbed this lesson, you will be able to part with your hard drives safely.
As you might have deduced, the usual way of deleting doesn't always cut it. The most often-used processes for deleting files -- clicking "delete" in the operating system or using the "rm" command -- are not secure.
Elsewhere, in its rundown of the biggest cybersecurity incidents of 2016, Trend Micro named ransomware attackers the 'most persistent cybercriminals' and the Mirai malware, which recruits vulnerable IoT devices into 'botnets' that deliver DDoS attacks, as the 'worst all-round troublemaker'.
Children are at risk of dangerous levels of air pollution in cars because exposure to toxic air is often far higher inside than outside vehicles, a former government chief scientific adviser has warned.
Prof Sir David King, writing for the Guardian, says walking or cycling to school would be much better for children’s health. The warning comes as the UK government faces a third legal defeat for failing to tackle the country’s illegal levels of air pollution. Air pollution is known to damage children’s developing lungs but recent research also indicates it harms children’s ability to learn at school and may damage their DNA.
On Tuesday, California Governor Jerry Brown and China’s Ministry of Science and Technology agreed to work together on climate issues. The governor pledged to work with China to push forward clean energy technology like carbon capture and storage, emissions trading, and other “climate positive” efforts, according to Reuters. The news comes just a week after US President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the US from the Paris Agreement.
Former President Barack Obama on Tuesday further criticized President Trump's decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord, while saying he believes the agreement still has a chance.
"Obviously I'm disappointed with the current American administration decision to put out of Paris," Obama said during a speech at the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, according to The Associated Press.
"We're going to have to act with more urgency. I'm looking forward to the United States being a leader and not just on the sidelines going forward," he added.
The company which is valued at over €£50bn but has, thus far, failed to make a profit, would struggle to oust Mr Kalanick altogether as he holds a huge amount of stock in his business, but the board are getting increasingly frustrated with his antics and clear lack of public relations savvy.
“This starts at the very top,” said Micah Alpern, a principal at A. T. Kearney, a top management and consulting firm. “They need to start from scratch to create a new culture entirely.”
He places the blame on the directors, particularly investor Bill Gurley, for his removal, accusing them of not having the backbone to stand by him amid what he sees as largely mischaracterized and inconsequential controversies, the people said.>
Uber's embattled CEO, Travis Kalanick, told employees today that he will take an indefinite leave of absence.
The network equipment manufacturer confirmed on Friday that three-quarters of the cuts will be made across its business divisions and support functions in Espoo and the remaining one-quarter in Oulu and Tampere – the majority by the end of 2017.
Residents of European Union countries will be able to make wireless calls, use data, and send texts without any additional roaming charges when they travel anywhere in the EU as new rules take effect on June 15.
The roaming surcharges for using a mobile phone outside of one’s home country in Europe were already a small fraction of what they used to be, the result of a campaign stretching for at least a decade and strict caps put in place in April 2016. Eliminating extra charges when an EU resident moves about the bloc was, after all, one of the high-level promises of regional integration.
Theresa May is losing half her Brexit ministers, it emerged tonight just days before talks with the EU were meant to start.
Sources confirmed Lord Bridges, the Exiting the EU Department’s representative in the House of Lords, had resigned to pursue business interests.
Meanwhile David Jones was ditched from a junior ministerial role in a reshuffle as Mrs May reworked her top team.
The association for British waste-management companies has some concerns about Brexit. Its members send some 3 million metric tons of refuse every year to European facilities for treatment, and with the pound’s slide since last year’s referendum, their euro-denominated contracts are getting more expensive.
That’s not the only concern that Jacob Hayler, executive director of the Environmental Services Association, laid out to a group of Harvard researchers looking into the effects of Brexit on small- and medium-sized UK firms. There’s also a concern about whether future UK policy will align with current EU targets for recycling and municipal waste.
British Prime Minister Theresa May needs to start cooperating with businesses and other parties on Brexit if her government is to survive, former Conservative Party leader William Hague said.
Hague, Britain's foreign secretary between 2010 and 2014, said this change of strategy would have to take place in the next few weeks before divorce talks with the European Union begin in earnest.
Despite her party's expectations of a landslide victory, May lost her majority in parliament in last week's election, pushing her into rushed talks on a support agreement with a small eurosceptic Northern Irish Protestant party.
Last week, Brits went to the polls for the third time in two years and, once again, defied expectations.
Prime minister Theresa May took a gamble with the governing Conservative Party’s parliamentary majority by calling a snap election and lost the bet. Instead of May’s promise of “strong and stable leadership,” the UK now has a hung parliament. May is sticking around and trying to form a minority government, which is looking weaker, more beholden to compromise, and significantly more unstable than it was just a week ago. And she has to lead the UK out of the European Union as smoothly as possible.
Although the UK voted to leave the EU on Jun. 23 last year, it wasn’t until Mar. 29 that it formally began the exit process. Brexit was officially initiated when prime minister at the time Theresa May sent a notification to the EU that triggered Article 50, a clause in the Lisbon Treaty that binds together the bloc’s members.
The clause gives the UK two years to negotiate the terms of its exit. What is not clear, however, is whether the triggering of Article 50 can be revoked and thus whether Brexit can be reversed. It’s a crucial question, because if the answer is yes, that means the UK would have an insurance policy against disaster: that if things were to go horribly wrong in the exit negotiation process, the UK could walk back the decision to leave the EU.
It was just last week when press secretary Sean Spicer said President Donald Trump's tweets should be viewed as the president's official position.
"The president is president of the United States, so they are considered official statements by the president of the United States," he said.
Three-time Academy Award winner Oliver Stone—the Vietnam veteran and Purple Heart recipient who made some of Hollywood’s greatest antiwar movies—was interviewed on the anniversary of D-Day at his Santa Monica office. The hallmark of Stone’s cinematic oeuvre has been artistically creating counternarratives, which has pitted him against not only government forces but also the mainstream media. In 1986, when President Ronald Reagan pursued the Iran-Contra covert operation Stone showed the other side of the story in Central America in the riveting Salvador. Later that year and in 1989, with the Vietnam-set Best Picture Oscar winner Platoon and Best Picture nominee Born on the Fourth of July, Stone took on militarism with his war-is-hell classics. While Reagan ballyhooed unbridled capitalism, in 1987’s Wall Street Stone questioned the “greed is good” ethos. Perhaps most memorable is Stone’s demolishing of the Warren Commission Report in 1991’s JFK, implicating US intelligence agents in the Kennedy assassination. And in his colossal 796-minute 2012 documentary series, Untold History of the United States, Stone compellingly presented an alternative view of the Cold War and more.
Theresa May was secretly discussing the election up to two weeks before she supposedly decided to call it during a walking holiday in Wales, senior Tories have told the Evening Standard.
Like most things in politics, if you look around you tend to find that something thought of as extraordinary and unprecedented has happened before. Or something very like it.
It may be no accident that John McDonnell – one of the principal architects of Labour’s remarkable resurgence – and Jeremy Corbyn sound like they’ve been following the 1974 example, the last time Britain had a hung parliament and the formation of a minority government. They’re of an age to remember it well. McDonnell often speaks of it. They’ve been doing their history homework.
Theresa May’s difficulties look set to continue as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn prepares to use the Queen’s Speech to challenge the prime minister’s wavering authority.
The Queen’s Speech is the formal occasion when a new government spells out its plans for the coming parliament.
It is one of the few times the monarch is permitted to enter Parliament. The speech is set to occur on June 19 but may now be postponed due to the pressure of Brexit talks and Tory coalition negotiations.
Should it be Yvette, or should it be Chuka? Or maybe Keir Starmer? Lisa Nandy? If none of them dislodge Jeremy, there’s the nascent new centre-left party, preparations well under way. This was the talk at some Labour gatherings to watch the election right up until 10pm last Thursday when the exit poll landed. Now all leadership bids have been quietly shelved, and the only real questions for Labour moderates are whether they want to, and whether they will be asked to, rejoin the shadow cabinet.
Labour MP Clive Lewis issued a stark warning to those within the party who seek to undermine Jeremy Corbyn. And while he directed his message at one dissenting MP, it serves as a reminder that there are still those who want to see Corbyn fail.
[...]
...while some people in Labour still don’t believe in Corbyn, the figures speak for themselves...
Jeremy Corbyn is being urged to bring Labour’s biggest hitters back into his shadow cabinet in a reshuffle due to start later this week.
Shadow health secretary Jon Ashworth said it is time for Labour to stop celebrating their election result and focus on strengthening the front bench team to hold the wounded Tories to account.
“We have had our celebrations now, it’s time to take on the Tories,” he told ITV’s Good Morning Britain.
“The time is probably right to strengthen the shadow cabinet. Of course it would be a good opportunity to strengthen the squad.”
To stop Jeremy Corbyn, the British elite is prepared to abandon Brexit – first in its hard form and, if necessary, in its entirety. That is the logic behind all the manoeuvres, all the cant and all the mea culpas you will see mainstream politicians and journalists perform this week.
And the logic is sound. The Brexit referendum result was supposed to unleash Thatcherism 2.0 – corporate tax rates on a par with Ireland, human rights law weakened, and perpetual verbal equivalent of the Falklands war, only this time with Brussels as the enemy; all opponents of hard Brexit would be labelled the enemy within.
But you can’t have any kind of Thatcherism if Corbyn is prime minister. Hence the frantic search for a fallback line. Those revolted by the stench of May’s rancid nationalism will now find it liberally splashed with the cologne of compromise.
The Labour deputy leader, Tom Watson, has written to Theresa May asking if Rupert Murdoch asked her to reappoint Michael Gove to the cabinet or face bad press in his newspaper titles.
Gove’s shock return as environment secretary comes a little over a year after May fired him as justice secretary following his ill-fated attempt to lead the Conservative party.
Senior Labour MPs have publicly shifted their stance on Jeremy Corbyn after the Labour leader defied expectations to increase the party’s vote share and number of parliamentary seats.
Moderate MPs who had previously been critical of their leader today praised the campaign he had run and said he should be applauded for the election result.
Chuka Umunna, who has previously hinted that Mr Corbyn’s “flaws” could “destroy the Labour Party”, said: “[Theresa May] is not up to campaigning, being with people and talking to people about the issues – that was exposed in technicolour. Whereas Jeremy is absolutely at home campaigning, talking to people, getting involved in the debate.
Imagine there was a turkey farm where they were not just being asked to vote for Christmas, but where the turkeys had organised themselves into various groups and each group had different ideas about who’d do better out of Christmas than the other lot; and where they could actually try to move the date of Christmas; and where the rules about voting for or against Christmas were almost impossible to understand in any case.
That’s more or less where the UK is now: a dysfunctional version of the Bernard Matthews estate – stuffed.
The question “When will the next election be?” ought to be easy to answer. It is not. The answer should be “not before 5 May 2022”. Beyond that – in terms of the formal legal position – it is extremely difficult to be, in the buzzword of the moment, “certain”. It is likely to be before 5 May 2022.
Unlike 2015, Labour and Conservatives dominated the news coverage in 2017.
84 per cent of the featured politicians in the news were from the Labour or Conservative parties.
Theresa May was more dominant than Jeremy Corbyn at the start of the campaign, but gradually grew in press coverage.
Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet meets today for the first time since the election and the Labour leader is being urged to reappoint its members because of their loyalty during the campaign. There have been indications that Corbyn might reach out to past critics including Yvette Cooper, Angela Eagle and Chuka Umunna, who have said they would be willing to serve. But Clive Efford, chair of the party’s Tribune Group, said: “Jeremy has got a shadow cabinet that remained loyal and allowed him to perform extremely well during the general election. He can’t sack those people. They deserve to be rewarded for what they have done.”
Since David Cameron announced the coalition government in 2010, hope and reality have, for me and many of my peers, existed in inverse proportions. When politics has impacted upon our lives in the last seven years, it has made us miserable – the trebling of tuition fees, the scrapping of the Education Maintenance Allowance, a housing crisis that disproportionately affected us, along with a 10 per cent fall in wages.
There’s a hypothesis floating around in the dissection of last week's surprise events that Labour could have won an outright majority if someone other than Jeremy Corbyn had been leading the party into the election. Rather than the the most inept Conservative campaign in my living memory, the theory goes, it is down to Corbyn’s incompetence that his party is not in government today.
Despite confounding his critics, some of them now believe a different Labour leader could have won the election outright. “Any other Labour candidate but Corbyn would have beat May,” wrote one. Another Labour MP, a prominent critic of the Labour leader, told me they share this view. “There is no doubt that with a different leader we would have won,” they said. “Jeremy energises parts of the electorate, but alienates others.
John Major has urged Theresa May to pull out of a deal for the Democratic Unionist Party to prop her up in power, warning it risks a return of violence in Northern Ireland.
In a dramatic intervention, the former Conservative prime minister warned the peace process is “fragile” and could fall part if the British government is no longer seen as “impartial”.
“People shouldn’t regard it as a given. It’s not certain, it’s under stress, it’s fragile,” Sir John said.
He urged the Prime Minister to pursue a minority government without “the baggage” of an agreement with the DUP.
One year ago, an act of terrible violence robbed the nation of a passionate and principled woman. MP Jo Cox represented some of the best aspects of our political tradition, and her proclamation in her maiden speech to Parliament – that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us – has profoundly touched many since her death.
One year ago, an act of terrible violence robbed the nation of a passionate and principled woman. MP Jo Cox represented some of the best aspects of our political tradition, and her proclamation in her maiden speech to parliament – that we are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us – has profoundly touched many since her death.
Jeremy Corbyn is to tour 60 Tory marginal seats as he puts Labour on “permanent campaign mode” in case Theresa May’s government falls.
The Labour leader won huge cheers and applause as he hailed the party’s progress in winning 30 seats and depriving May of her Parliamentary majority in the June 8 poll.
Addressing the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) on Tuesday night in the House of Commons, Corbyn declared that his top team was now “a Government in waiting”.
I first saw Jeremy Corbyn’s face in a picture frame that sat in my living room. My parents were in the photo with him. I’m from Maiden Lane Estate in Camden. It’s not in Corbyn’s Islington North constituency, but around here a lot of people can tell you stories of how Jeremy helped them – as he helped with my various problems with police harassment and malicious prosecution.
The reason why so many of us organised and mobilised others – through social media, knocking on doors or organising events – was because we knew the strength of his character; that he wouldn’t renege on promises, unlike Nick Clegg, whose party went from losing four-fifths of their MPs to him losing his own seat. Corbyn answers questions with thoughtfulness and without contempt for those who are suffering and want answers.
A former advisor to a Tory minister has revealed why she voted for Jeremy Corbyn 's Labour.
Emily Poole spent more than three years working for the party - including as a special advisor to former Work and Pensions Secretary Stephen Crabb.
But just 15 months after she left, the 29-year-old has revealed she cast her vote for Labour in the general election.
When dissenters continue to be threatened, silenced, no-platformed, intimidated and even killed for rejecting and criticising Islam, a celebration of apostasy, blasphemy and the free word are historical tasks.
They’re called web content moderators, and they’re the guys who scrub websites of illicit, explicit and undesirable content, using a set of rules or guidelines to determine what user-generated content ought to be purged.
In what has become standard operating procedure following a terrorist attack in any part of the (western) world, a top government official is calling for encryption backdoors. This call is being made despite the lack of evidence supporting the theory terrorists are encrypting their communications. And this particular call, being made by Australian Attorney General George Brandis, is being made despite Brandis claiming he's not calling for encryption backdoors.
The IMG has called Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices, Aircel and Sistema Shyam Teleservices for a meeting on June 12. The other major players -- Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone and Idea -- have been asked for a meeting on June 15 by the panel, while state run carriers will be called on June 17, ET had reported previously.
In a speech after the election, May promised to ‘give the police and the authorities the powers they need to keep our country safe’ – which some have interpreted as doubling down on her promises to ‘regulate’ the internet.
Policies which have been discussed include the idea of forcing internet companies to weaken encryption on messaging products – and automated censorship of certain content, such as Islamic extremist content.
Executive Director of Open Rights Group, Jim Killock, says, ‘To push on with these extreme proposals for Internet clampdowns would appear to be a distraction from the current political situation and from effective measures against terror.
Theresa May has won the backing of French president Emmanuel Macron in her bid to pressure tech companies to do more to tackle terrorism, including a proposal to create new legal powers to force them to remove extremist content.
On Tuesday May will meet Macron in Paris, where the pair will discuss what Downing Street referred to as "a joint campaign to ensure that the internet cannot be used as a safe space for terrorists and criminals".
Baris Dede, a game design student, had a question: How easily did Viking longboats glide through the water? Dilara Diner, a psychologist, wanted to double-check a symptom of hysteria.
But these Turks were not able to quickly find out what they wanted. Since late April the Turkish government has blocked one of the world’s go-to sources of online information, Wikipedia.
After Wikipedia refused to remove unflattering references to Turkey’s relationship with Syrian militants and state-sponsored terrorists, officials simply banned the whole site.
Of course, as you've certainly heard by now, last Thursday's general election in the UK (understatement alert!) didn't quite go according to Theresa May's plan, and she's now left in a much weaker position with many people expecting she will not survive long as Prime Minister. And yet, showing her uncanny ability to double down on the absolute wrong thing, May is insisting she's moving ahead with her plans to regulate the internet, which will require vast censorship and a breaking of encryption. On the encryption angle, she's already got some Parliamentary support given that (as we and others warned at the time!) the Snooper's Charter ("Investigatory Powers Act") included a bit that would require anyone offering encrypted communications to unencrypt those communications (which is impossible if the encryption is strong end-to-end, and only possible with broken, insecure, fake "encryption").
In what has become standard operating procedure following a terrorist attack in any part of the (western) world, a top government official is calling for encryption backdoors. This call is being made despite the lack of evidence supporting the theory terrorists are encrypting their communications. And this particular call, being made by Australian Attorney General George Brandis, is being made despite Brandis claiming he's not calling for encryption backdoors.
Automatic facial recognition (AFR) technology has been used to arrest a man, the South Wales Police told Ars.
While AFR tech has been trialled by a number of UK police forces, this appears to be the first time it has led to an arrest.
South Wales Police didn't provide details about the nature of the arrest, presumably because it's an ongoing case.
Back in April, it emerged that South Wales Police planned to scan the faces "of people at strategic locations in and around the city centre" ahead of the UEFA Champions League final, which was played at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff on June 3.
Report: How thousands of companies monitor, analyze, and influence the lives of billions. Who are the main players in today’s digital tracking? What can they infer from our purchases, phone calls, web searches, and Facebook likes? How do online platforms, tech companies, and data brokers collect, trade, and make use of personal data?
Visitors to this site are well aware of how our every move is tracked as we move around the Internet. We know that companies are building minutely-detailed profiles of us, stored on huge databases, and that the information held there not only changes the ads we see, and the prices that companies offer us when we visit e-commerce sites, but even the mix of news stories that we view. The scale of this “surveillance capitalism”, as it has been called, is vast. One recent study looked at a million Web sites, and found that over 80,000 third-party services receive details about the visitors to them.
Open Rights Group has responded to Theresa May’s post-election hints that she will continue with Conservative plans for Internet clampdowns.
The issue of lawful access to encrypted communications featured in Australia's news over the long weekend, but we're none the wiser to what our government has in mind beyond it being based on the UK Investigatory Powers Act.
Both prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and attorney-general George Brandis took to the media to reiterate their argument that pervasive encryption is problematic for law enforcement.
Brandis has said again that the government doesn't want a backdoor (as in, a weakness planted in cryptosystems to make them government-crackable).
Fairfax Media reported he wants new warrant arrangements between Australia and the USA, so that if he signs a warrant the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation can present it to US authorities to get access to communications conducted through US platforms.
We've been waiting a long time for the Supreme Court to tackle the Fourth Amendment implications of cell site location info. After putting it off for as long as possible (or so it seems...), the nation's top court is finally ready to handle yesterday's hotly-disputed tech/privacy issue.
June will be a decisive month for the future of our privacy and the confidentiality of our electronic communications. The future "ePrivacy" Regulation now being debated in the European Parliament is divisive, brings back unpleasant memories from when the General Data Protection Regulation was negotiated. Since the publication for opinion of two utterly opposing reports, all eyes are now turned toward the main rapporteur, Marju Lauristin, who is supposed to present her text on June 21. Will we see courage or weakness in the face of the lobbies? Civil liberty and innovative models, or exploitation and surveillance capitalism? La Quadrature du Net has made its choice, and will certainly continue to defend it over the long months of negotiation ahead.
The EFF has been instrumental in assisting ISPs in their fights against National Security Letters and their accompanying gag orders. To date, thanks to the a change in the law (in response to an NSL lawsuit by the EFF and the implementation of the USA Freedom Act) and entities like the EFF applying pressure, the public is finally getting a chance to see what's contained in these warrantless demands for subscriber info.
Hopefully, the new avenues available to ISPs to challenge gag orders will result in a steady stream of released NSLs. More importantly, maybe the forced transparency will result in the FBI dialing back its use of NSLs -- something it does thousands of times a year and, worse, a way to route around FISA Court rejections.
At which point will this become dangerous, for real? Should we say stop? Can we say stop? Is it too late to say stop? Discuss.
"We didn't advertise it much to the people that had [the printers]. We didn't not tell them if they asked. The salespeople were told, ‘Don't lead with it in any sales, but if they ask you about it, you can tell them we have the security feature in there.'"
Just months after railing against the possibility of inappropriate spying during the election, the Trump Administration last week came out in support of permanently reauthorizing Section 702, a surveillance authority used to spy on Americans without a warrant. The position is likely to draw ire from members of both parties, because if there is one issue in hyper-partisan Washington that Republicans and Democrats agree on, it’s that Congress should reform – not make permanent – Section 702.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick kicked off a sexual harassment investigation in February after a female engineer said that institutional sexism at the ride-hailing company had forced her to quit her job.
An involuntary manslaughter trial began Tuesday for a Massachusetts woman who as a teen texted her boyfriend and urged him to commit suicide.
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has been detained at home ahead of a planned unauthorised protest in Moscow, his wife says.
"Alexei has been arrested in the entrance to our block of flats," Yuliya Navalnaya wrote on Twitter, adding "our plans haven't changed".
Mr Navalny earlier called on supporters to attend anti-corruption rallies across Russia.
There have been several arrests at protests in the east of the country.
The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, said Trump's banning of nationals from six largely Muslim nations from entering the US "makes no finding that nationality alone renders entry of this broad class of individuals a heightened security risk to the United States." The court said that the president, based on his own tweet, has signed an overly broad executive order that illegally targets people solely because of their country of origin.
As any law enforcement official can tell you, privacy expectations in shared conversations only stretch as far as the other participants are willing to take them. Even in an executive branch setting, an informal conversation does not instantly become classified or top secret or whatever it is the president wishes it was the moment it ends.
There also is no leak. Comey's personal memorializations of conversations with someone unrelated to an ongoing investigation are not the sort of thing that can be leaked -- at least not in the context being used by Trump's lawyer. Comey can hand out copies of these memos to whoever he wants, because they're his recollections, not FBI investigative documents.
If Trump is seeking someone to blame for Comey's actions, he has no one to blame but himself. It's become apparent Comey was fired for not pledging his allegiance to Trump, rather than for any genuine misdeeds related to his job as FBI director. Once Trump unceremoniously shitcanned Comey, any hope Comey might keep his conversational memos secret was lost forever. These statements by Trump's lawyer are legal grandstanding. There's nothing in them of substance. But there doesn't have to be. The assertions appeal to Trump's base, and to President Trump, that's all that really matters.
Pennsylvania has some of the worst civil asset forfeiture laws in the country. At the top of list of perverse incentives? 100% of proceeds go to the agency that seized the property. As a result, all sorts of abusive forfeitures occur. In one case, law enforcement seized a couple's house because of a single $40 drug sale by their son.
Legislators in Pennsylvania haven't made much of dent with their reform efforts. Attempts have been made but every bill presented has been gutted by law enforcement lobbyists before passage. Nothing has made its way to the governor's desk yet, which is just as well because the disemboweled bills are reform-in-name-only.
According to Represent.Us, over the years, these House Representatives have received millions of dollars from telecom companies including Comcast and Verizon. Below are the names and the amount of telecom money that these members of Congress have received. [...]
Verizon and a union representing its workers have reached a settlement requiring the company to fix thousands of problems in areas of Pennsylvania where it hasn't upgraded its copper network to fiber.
Right now, new FCC Chairman and former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai has a plan to destroy net neutrality and give big cable companies immense control over what we see and do online. If they get their way, the FCC will give companies like Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T control over what we can see and do on the Internet, with the power to slow down or block websites and charge apps and sites extra fees to reach an audience.
The cable industry's top lobbying group has consistently claimed that the US' current net neutrality rules harm network investment and raise costs for consumers.
Yet that same group is now bragging about dramatic increases in broadband speeds and claiming that broadband prices are going down.
The NCTA—The Internet & Television Association—touted Akamai's latest State of the Internet Report this month in a post titled, "America's Internet speeds continue to soar."
Apparently hoping to generate some support for his unpopular plan to gut oversight of one of the least competitive business sectors in America, FCC boss Ajit Pai left DC last week to do a tour of some midwestern states. During that tour he stopped in Milwaukee to talk about net neutrality with Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson on WTMJ Radio (you can listen to the full interview here).
The fate of the World Intellectual Property Organization committee addressing misappropriation of the cultural heritage of indigenous peoples will be decided by the annual WIPO General Assembly in October. But the committee this week is expected to provide recommendations on its future work, on the renewal of its mandate, and whether work accomplished over the last two years can lead to a high-level negotiation on one or several treaties giving indigenous peoples increased rights over their culture.
The World Intellectual Property Organization committee in charge of seeking solutions to protect traditional cultural expressions (folklore) from misuse meets this week. On the eve of the meeting, a preambular seminar looked at key policy issues of such protection and if current international instruments could provide for such solutions.
The saga of the Music Copyright Society of Kenya (MCSK) over the past couple of years has certainly been interesting to watch. In the summer of 2015, the Kenyan government responded to some fairly damning reports about just how little money MCSK was paying artists as part of its copyright collection scheme with a tongue-lashing. It also demanded that MCSK open up detailed books on its business and itemize how much it was collecting, paying artists, and paying itself in administrative fees. When the group responded with reports that might as well have been written in crayon for all the professionalism they showed, the government elected to strip MCSK of its collection license as a Collective Management Organization (CMO), instead setting up new collection groups that it for some reason thought would be less corrupt. I'm sure the Kenyan government thought that would be the end of MCSK.
We recently warned that there were efforts underway to make the EU's copyright reform proposal even more draconian and ridiculous. Thankfully, the "compromise," which wasn't a compromise at all and would have made things much worse, was rejected by the Internal Market and Consumer Protection (IMCO) committee, but there was still plenty of bad stuff to be concerned about.
Something big happened last week in the world of music and copyright: a case about a music sample was won on fair use grounds. This basically never happens for a variety of problematic historical reasons. And yet, it did. The hip hop artist Drake was found not to be infringing on a Jimmy Smith composition due to fair use. And that's a big deal -- though the case also highlights the ongoing madness of today's copyright licensing laws (even beyond sampling). But we'll get there eventually. Let's start with the issue of copyright and sampling.