In this article, I am outlining an idea for an improved process of deploying software to Linux systems. It combined advantages of traditional, package mangement based systems with containerized software through systems such as Flatpak, Snap, or AppImage. An improved process allows us to make software deployment more efficient across the whole Free software community, have better supported software on users systems and allow for better quality at the same time.
A week ago, we reported on the progress System76 has made for their upcoming Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS GNU/Linux distribution, as well as some of the things that they're planning to implement soon.
Pop!_OS is developed on top of Canonical's Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, due for release on October 19, 2017, which means that it's of Alpha quality, so some things might not work as expected or are missing, including the installer, which System76 now wants to develop in collaboration with the elementary OS devs.
July marks the second half of the year, making it an ideal time to reflect upon what the journey through 2017 has been like and where it is going. With respect to virtualization, developers have played an increasingly important role in how companies deal with network agility, flexibility and security. While the direction data centers will head over the next six months remains open, a handful of virtualization trends are shaping the path forward.
Hosting vendor GoDaddy first debuted its own OpenStack-powered cloud service in March 2016, with high hopes of success. Those hopes have been dashed, as GoDaddy sent out notices to its customers this week advising them that the service will be shut down.
The Hyperledger open source group, which works on blockchain code, issued its first release.
The Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 release is the culmination of work by 159 engineers from 28 organizations that have contributed to the Hyperledger group hosted by the Linux Foundation.
The final version of Kernel 4.13 RC1 has been finally released, bringing various changes and tweaks.
Khronos' SIGGRAPH announcements are coming up in just over one week but today we have the Vulkan 1.0.56 release.
Nouveau re-clocking/power expert Karol Herbst has published a set of patches today implementing thermal throttling support for this open-source NVIDIA DRM driver.
The merging fun for Mesa 17.2 will continue through the weekend.
Mesa release manager Emil Velikov has shared rather than going into feature freeze today, he's planning to extend it by a few days. In particular, he's planning to branch now by Sunday evening to allow for some remaining patches to be merged.
I planned on writing about the Present extension this week, but I’ll postpone this since I’m currently strongly absorbed into finding the last rough edges of a first patch I can show off. I then hope to get some feedback on this from other developers in the xorg-devel mailing list.
Another reason is that I stalled my work on the Present extension for now and try to get first my Xwayland code working. My mentor Daniel recommended that to me since the approach I pursued in my work on Present might be more difficult than I first assessed. At least it is something similar to what other way more experienced developers than myself tried in the past and weren’t able to do according to Daniel. My idea was to make Present flip per CRTC only, but this would clash with Pixmaps being linked to the whole screen only. There are no Pixmaps only for CRTCs in X.
Daniel Stone of Collabora has published a new set of 14 patches implementing DRI3 v1.1's modifiers support inside Mesa with support for EGL X11 and Vulkan X11/Wayland.
Community developer and Phoronix reader Aaron Watry has continued providing some much needed attention to Clover, the Gallium3D state tracker implementing OpenCL, notably for R600g/RadeonSI hardware not receiving ROCm OpenCL support.
Watry has been working on improving the OpenCL compliance of Clover via Khronos' recently-opened OpenCL Conformance Test Suite (CTS). Five patches sent out today fix at least one CTS test while the other patches work on version handling changes. He's also begun experimenting with exposing OpenCL 1.2, but with the patches OpenCL 1.1 remains set.
With my recent tests of Intel Kabylake graphics on Linux 4.13 showing no change in performance, it was asked whether the Intel Linux graphics driver has plateaued for reaching maximum performance. It hasn't.
Similar to our past disk encryption benchmarks, a clean install of Fedora Linux (26, with Linux 4.11) was done without any encryption and then again when opting for the full-disk encryption setup via the Anaconda installer. EXT4 was the file-system in use with its default mount options and no other changes were made between the installations or during the benchmarking process.
Given that I have been writing the odd article here and there about server work, hosting, VPS and the like, I thought that perhaps an article about editing configuration files / text documents in a command line scenario might be a good idea.
There are a few major text editors out there, some more user-friendly while some are more complex but bring extra power and configuration (I'm looking at you Vim.)
The editor that most users who are new to the world of working with text only will likely start with, is called Nano.
Qupzilla, the Qt-based cross-platform web browser, now has a session manager. A bug requesting this feature was first opened in 2013.
When I was running Windows one of the first pieces of software I'd install after I'd grabbed all my necessities, was CPU-Z.
It was useful for looking at temperatures, specs, generating reports, and just overall gathering of information. In GNU/Linux we can do all of this via the terminal, but not everyone likes to use consoles, and some may not even know how to. Thankfully, I-Nex exists, and it serves many of the same purposes.
Do you like Electron apps? Chances are you don't. In this post I list reasons why I don't think Electron apps are bad, and why haters should chill.
We have seen how we can calculate different values of different mathematical operations with the help of bc and in bc how we can apply the same formula to different values ââ¬â¹Ã¢â¬â¹with the help of function. But we saw that we can not run our functions second time after bc stops running, so we will now see how we can save them in a file and run them across different bc sessions. bc can take multiple files as input at the same time. Now we will take a look at how to create a file, write some function in it and use it in bc.
The Wine development release 2.13 is now available.
If Wine 2.0.2 with 60+ bug fixes doesn't interest you, perhaps the Wine 2.13 development update will get you more excited.
Wine 2.13 is now available as the latest bi-weekly development release leading up to the eventual release of Wine 3.0 around year's end. Changes with Wine 2.13 include updating Unicode data to Unicode 10.0, nicer looking default mouse cursors are now used, support for persistent connections in WinHTTP, WebServices message framing protocol support, improved metafile support in GDI Plus, debug register support in x86-64 exception handling, and DirectWrite anti-aliasing improvements.
Another Wine development release is now available! Just today Wine 2.13 has released and features a few noteworthy changes.
The Wine development team announced the release and immediate availability for download of the Wine 2.13 development release, which brings some new features and improves support for various Windows apps and games.
Coming only one day after the Wine 2.0.2 stable release, which only brought a bunch of bug fixes, the Wine 2.13 development release is here to introduce support for Unicode 10.0.0, revamp the default mouse cursors, improve anti-aliasing in DirectWrite, and add Message Framing protocol support in WebServices.
ââ¬â¹Gravitation is a game that truly keeps the spirit of being a game. There is no fancy heavy graphical artwork, only bitmaps though not entirely! Jason Rohrer authored the whole game including the audio effects! This game particularly suits those melancholy ones and likely revolves around the life of the author.
Open-source driver contributor Samuel Pitoiset for Valve has published a set of 101 new patches for implementing more KHR_no_error support.
We’re releasing the second beta for Krita 3.2.0 today! These beta builds contain the following fixes, compared to the first 3.2.0 beta release. Keep in mind that this is a beta: you’re supposed to help the development team out by testing it, and reporting issues on bugs.kde.org.
We have travelled from across the globe to meet for our annual gathering where we plan and discuss the next year's activities creating free software to share with the world. Almería is in the south east of Spain, a country which has long been a supporter of free software and collaboration with its creators. The sun here is hot but the water is also warm for those who make it to the beach to discuss their work with a pina colada and a swim. Over the last year KDE has run conferences in Brazil, India, Spain, Germany and sprints in Randa in Switzerland, Krita in the Netherlands, Marble in Germany, GSoC in the US, WikiToLearn in India, Plasma in Germany, Kontact in France, and sent representatives to OSCAL in Albania, FOSSASIA in Singapore, FUDCON in Cambodia, HKOSCon in Hong Kong and more.
Long time no see, huh? Yes, I neglected my blog and as such didn't post anything since Akademy 2014... Interestingly this is the last one where my dear Paul Adams held a famous talk.
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During my PhD I was studying Free Software community productivity metrics. I was also working on research into software quality funded by the European Commission. KDE eV (the governance body1 for KDE) was also taking part in that project. At this time KDE was almost ready to release KDE 4. It was an exciting time to get involved.
Today KDE released the beta of the new versions of KDE Applications. With dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.
MOBO theme is designed to make your desktop grayish, it is designed to work well with Gnome desktop. This theme has modern colors and animations, left pane is a little bit transparent to make theme look unique. It is currently compatible with Gtk 3.20/3.22/3.24 versions and only works fine in Gnome Desktop, it is pretty simple and elegant. If you find any issues with this theme then report it to developer and hopefully it will get fixed in the next update. If you are using other distribution you can directly download theme from its page and install it manually in ~/.themes folder or /usr/share/themes/. You can use Gnome-tweak-tool to change themes.
If you are using Gnome Shell environment then Maxim theme is for you. It looks bright, fresh, spacious and easy on the eye. This theme is forked from Axiom theme which was created by the same creator. This theme is fairly new and its initial release was in the beginning of this July and is in active development, we added this theme to our PPA, so you can get updates easily and keep your theme up-to-date. If you encounter any issues with this theme then report it to developer and hopefully it will get fixed in the next update. If you are using other distribution you can directly download theme from its page and install it manually in ~/.themes folder or /usr/share/themes/. You can use Gnome-tweak-tool to change Gnome Shell themes and you also need to enable user theme extension.
GNOME Tweak Tool, the handy advanced settings utility for the GNOME desktop, has changed its name to the shortened title of 'GNOME Tweaks'.
The fourth snapshot of GNOME 3.25 is now available!
In this release several modules have continue the migration to meson [1], which is great as its saving compilation time (thank you!)
BUT, at the same time some modules are still not including the meson files in the tarball, so we are unable to build them; please be sure you include them!
The GNOME Shell user interface component of the popular GNOME desktop environment was updated recently with both a stable and a development release for the GNOME 3.24 and upcoming GNOME 3.26 series.
GNOME Shell 3.24.3 and 3.25.4 releases are now available, and while the first should soon make its way into the stable repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution, that if you're using the GNOME desktop environment, the latter is a development version published as part of the upcoming GNOME 3.26 release.
The road to the major GTK+ 4 open-source and multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces or GUIs continues with the GTK+ 3.91.1 development release, which adds a significant number of improvements.
GTK+ 3.91.1 has been released nearly two months after the 3.90.0 version, which introduced initial support for Apple's OS X operating system, along with initial support for the Meson build system. GTK+ 3.91.1 is here now to add native file chooser support for OS X.
GNOME developer Javier Jardón announced the release and immediate availability of the fourth development milestone of the upcoming GNOME 3.26 desktop environment.
After a two-day delay, the GNOME 3.25.4 development snapshot is here, and it's the last before GNOME 3.26 enters Beta, which will happen right after the GUADEC (GNOME Users And Developers European Conference) 2017 event, which will take place in Manchester, United Kingdom, from Friday, July 28 until Wednesday, August 2.
Madanapalle Institute of Technology and Science (MITS) signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Redhat Academy to bring awareness among students on Red Hat operating system.
The academy offers training to the students of MITS. The students can take up a project by registering their names with Red Hat licence operating system. After registration, students will get an ID and they will be trained at the college itself. They can also collaborate with the one who has involved in project development, across the world.
Distro-agnostic app distribution and management tools like Snappy, Flatpak and AppImage are trend du jour right now.
But I often wonder how many people out there are actually using these next-gen formats compared to existing ones, like PPAs and regular repositories.
Snaps seem super popular, and there are AppImages for just about everything we mention on this site. But what of Flatpak?
A package file is an archive which contains the binaries and other resources that make software and the pre and post installation scripts. They also provide the information regarding dependencies and other packages required for the installation and running of the software. In the Linux world, there are two main types of packaging formats, .deb for those in the Debian and Ubuntu world and the .rpm for the Fedora, RHEL and CentOS. These formats also have their own tools for package management. The .debs use apt or aptitude and dpkg while the .rpms have been using YUM, at least until recently. Fedora recently replaced YUM with their new package manager, DNF. Yup, they built from the ground up a new package manager, the Dandified YUM (DNF), to replace it. ââ¬â¹
At Friday's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) there were yet more features approved for the current Fedora Linux development cycle.
Since Fedora 21 we had not really a Fedora Release Party here in Phnom Penh, Fedora 21 we did at Development Innovations which was wonderful supported by Greta Greathouse the head of this US AID driven institution. But well in Asia an not to mention non-foss oriented company showed a behavior like in Europe 25 years ago. So DI has a new boss, which is lesser FOSS oriented. So we had to find a new place. For Fedora 24 the time frame was to short for me to organize something and Fedora 25 was an epic fail on the Royal University Phnom Penh, which cancelled the party, an hour before it.
So this time I going with Passerelles Numerique as partner, which will not just provide the room and helps eqipement and this is what makes this Release Party a bit different from the “normal” ones.
The last week we had a Fedora Activity Day for LATAM Ambassadors, it was in Cusco РPer̼, so, why was celebrated this event?
I can tell you why in some words, new Fedora people (people, not fedorapeople.org) don’t know how to do things inside the community, how to collaborate, how to request sponsorship, how to be aware when spending Fedora resources… etc, and… the old people are busy now and can’t spend much time in Fedora.
It was an Alex Oviedo’s (alexove) initiative and we had six representatives for LATAM countries x3mboy from Chile, asoliard from Argentina, josereyesjdi from Panama, itamarjp from Brazil, searchsam from Nicaragua, me (tonet666p) from Perú and bexelbie from Czech Republic (yes, is not LATAM but he was helping us).
The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian 9 (codename "stretch"). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.
Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 9 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old "stretch" media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.
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Since debhelper/10.3, there has been a number of performance related changes. The vast majority primarily improves bulk performance or only have visible effects at larger “input” sizes.
Following on a discussion with the HackerNews community on the things that users want to see in the upcoming Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, Canonical's Dustin Kirkland is now asking the Ubuntu community to vote for the default apps of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
On July 20, 2017, Canonical released new kernel updates for all supported Ubuntu Linux releases, including Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, Ubuntu 16.10, and Ubuntu 17.04, fixing up to fifteen security vulnerabilities.
Which apps should Ubuntu ship by default? Nows your chance to let the Ubuntu desktop team know, as they launch a user survey scouting for feedback.
Back in March, we asked the HackerNews community, “What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?”: https://ubu.one/AskHN
The purpose of this communication is to provide a status update and highlights for any interesting subjects from the Ubuntu Server Team. If you would like to reach the server team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-server channel on Freenode. Alternatively, you can sign up and use the Ubuntu Server Team mailing list.
The developers behind the deepin GNU/Linux distribution announced today the general availability of the first point release to the deepin 15.4 stable series, versioned 15.4.1.
The development team behind the Ubuntu-based BackBox Linux ethical hacking distribution designed for security evaluations and penetration testing tasks announced the release of BackBox Linux 5.
BackBox Linux 5 has been in development for too long, since even the release of BackBox Linux 4.7 in early December last year, but it's finally here, and it brings with it a significant number of improvements, up-to-date components, as well as several under-the-hood optimizations and tweaks.
"The BackBox Team proudly announces the major release of BackBox v5. It took long due to several development processes, but we worked hard and got through it," said the devs in the release announcement. "In this major release we made some structural changes, we removed outdated tools and added new ones."
The BackBox Team proudly announces the major release of BackBox v5. It took long due to several development processes, but we worked hard and got through it.
In this major release we made some structural changes, we removed outdated tools and added new ones.
Seeed Studio’s $7 “Seeeduino V4.2” board is a full-sized Arduino Uno clone with a micro-USB host port, Uno-style expansion headers, and 3x Grove interfaces.
Gigabyte’s “GA-SBCAP3350” SBC is equipped with a dual-core Celeron N3350, plus 2x GbE, SATA, and USB 3.1 ports, and HDMI, mSATA, and mini-PCIe.
The internet of things is growing at a staggeringly fast pace, and is quickly coming to revolutionize virtually every aspect of modern life. Aspiring developers hoping to hop on board and profit off the growing phenomenon are constantly looking for the right tools to use. So what are the open source tools best suited for working with the IoT, and where can developers find them?
A plethora of open source tools lay at the disposal of any would-be developer eager and wise enough to use them. By utilizing these five, you’ll find yourself tackling challenges and developing successful applications in no time.
FossHub, a download site that hosts free and open-source software, has pulled Google advertising from the whole of its file-sharing software section. The difficult decision was taken after Google persistently flagged the download page of the popular qBitTorrent client as "unauthorized file sharing" and went on to ban the entire FossHub site.
A recent exchange on a user forum caught my eye, one that’s typical of many user interactions with open source communities. Someone with a technical question had apparently had the answer they needed and to help others in the same situation had posted a summary of the resolution, complete with sample code. When they came back later, the summary was gone.
I’ve no idea why this happened. It may have been a system issue, or an administrative error, or the user himself may have accidentally deleted it without realising. It’s even remotely possible an intentionally malicious act took place. Without more information there is no way to know. For the self-aware mind, responding to this situation is a matter of choice.
So how did the user in question respond? Well, he decided the only possible explanation was malicious deletion. He posted an angry demand that his account be deleted and assumed more malice when this was “ignored” (after 3 days, including a weekend, having posted the demand at the end of a comment in a user forum…)
It looks as though the secure email provider, ProtonMail, will open source its Android app in the future at least according to their Twitter account. Reaching out to ProtonMail, we asked whether they would open source their Android app and even work with the maintainers of F-Droid to get the client on the FOSS app store.
Scality, a leader in object and cloud storage, announced the open source launch of its Scality Zenko, a Multi-Cloud Data Controller. The new solution is free to use and embed into developer applications, opening a new world of multi-cloud storage for developers.
It looks like Chrome on the Linux desktop could finally be seeing Intel GPU video acceleration support with the web browser having patches pending for VA-API.
Cursor browsing and search while you type, are still available under the Browsing section, as these options offer convenience for everybody, regardless of disability. Users should now be able to find an option under an appropriate feature section, or search for it in the far upper corner. This is a positive trend, that I hope will continue as we imagine our users more broadly with a diverse set of use-cases, that include, but are not exclusive to disability.
The campus library launched a new website July 13 which compiles resources for campus researchers.
The website includes resources on affordable course content, copyright laws and open access publishing, among others.
HealthyPi is the first fully open-source, full-featured vital sign monitor. Using the Raspberry Pi as its computing and display platform, the HealthyPi add-on HAT turns the Raspberry Pi into a vital sign monitoring system.
Vital sign monitors are usually found in developed countries; they just cost too much for less affluent communities to afford. The HealthyPi project aims to change that by developing an inexpensive but accurate monitor using a Raspberry Pi, a custom hat studded with sensors, and a touch screen. The resulting monitor could be used by medical professionals as well as students and private researchers.
Nathan Seidle, the founder of Colorado-based open source hardware supplier SparkFun, has demonstrated how a 3D printed robot he built and programmed was able to crack a safe in just 15 minutes. The DIY safe-cracking robot only cost about $200 to make.
Among developers, Python is the most popular programming language, followed by C, Java, C++, and JavaScript; among employers, Java is the most sought after, followed by C, Python, C++, and JavaScript.
Or so says the 2017 IEEE Spectrum ranking, published this week.
IEEE Spectrum, a publication of the The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, a technical advocacy organization, says it evaluated 12 metrics from 10 sources to arrive at this conclusion.
PHP 7.2 Beta 1 was released yesterday as the next step towards this next refinement to PHP7 that is expected to be officially released in November. I couldn't help but to run some initial benchmarks.
PHP 7.2 Beta 1 presents the Sodium extension for modern and easy-to-use cryptography, opcache improvements, better JSON decoding of invalid UTF-8 data, and many bug fixes among other improvements since PHP 7.1. The latest release and more details can be found via PHP.net.
The Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) has raised new funding, in an effort to help reward and encourage security researchers to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in open-source software. The IBB is backed by Facebook, the Ford Foundation and GitHub, who are now donating a total of $300,000 to help secure the internet with an open-source bug bounty program.
The IBB was started back in 2013 with the help of bug bounty platform provider HackerOne, which still helps to operate the platform.
A bypass of PatchGuard kernel protection in Windows 10 has been developed that brings rootkits for the latest version of the OS within reach of attackers.
Since the introduction of PatchGuard and DeviceGuard, very few 64-bit Windows rootkits have been observed; Windows 10’s security, in particular its mitigations against memory-based attacks, are well regarded. Researchers at CyberArk, however, found a way around PatchGuard through a relatively new feature in Intel processors called Processor Trace (Intel PT).
Sooner than I anticipated, there is an update for OpenJDK 8. Andrew Hughes (aka GNU/Andrew) announced the release of IcedTea 3.5.0. The new icedtea framework compiles OpenJDK 8 Update 141 Build 15 (8u141_b15). This release includes the official July 2017 security fixes.
According to Defining IoT Business Models, a new report from Canonical, the software company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution, device security and privacy (45 percent) falls behind quantifying the return of investment (ROI) of their IoT projects (53 percent) as an immediate challenge. Canonical drew its conclusions from a survey of 361 IoT professionals conducted by IoTNow on behalf of the company.
Tons of improvements made their way into the ansible-hardening role in preparation for the OpenStack Pike release next month. The role has a new name, new documentation and extra tests.
The role uses the Security Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) produced by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and applies the guidelines to Linux hosts using Ansible. Every control is configurable via simple Ansible variables and each control is thoroughly documented.
Millions of IoT devices are vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks due to a vulnerability initially discovered in remote security cameras, Senrio reported this week.
Last year, probably as a distraction from doing anything else, or maybe because I was asked, I started reviewing bugs filed as a result of automated flaw discovery tools (from Coverity to UBSan via fuzzers) being run on gdk-pixbuf.
Apart from the security implications of a good number of those problems, there was also the annoyance of having a busted image file bring down your file manager, your desktop, or even an app that opened a file chooser either because it was broken, or because the image loader for that format didn't check for the sanity of memory allocations.
The idea of the lawsuit, which was filed in August 2016, is to use various federal laws—including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), and American trademark law—as a way to seize command-and-control domain names used by the group, which goes by various monikers, including APT28 and Strontium. Many of the domain names used by Fancy Bear contain Microsoft trademarks, like microsoftinfo365.com and hundreds of others.
Since August, Microsoft has used the lawsuit to wrest control of 70 different command-and-control points from Fancy Bear. The company’s approach is indirect, but effective. Rather than getting physical custody of the servers, which Fancy Bear rents from data centers around the world, Microsoft has been taking over the Internet domain names that route to them. These are addresses like “livemicrosoft[.]net” or “rsshotmail[.]com” that Fancy Bear registers under aliases for about $10 each. Once under Microsoft’s control, the domains get redirected from Russia’s servers to the company’s, cutting off the hackers {sic} from their victims, and giving Microsoft a omniscient view of that servers’ network of automated spies.
NHS TRUSTS are splashing €£158,000 per day on new PCs and laptops at an average cost of €£678 per device, a Freedom of Information (FoI) request has revealed.
Twistlock announced the general availability of version 2.1 of their container security product. Highlights of the release include an integrated firewall that understands application traffic, vulnerability detection, secrets management via integration with third party tools, and compliance alerting and enforcement.
It got me thinking about security and privacy. There's not really a difference between the two. They are two faces of the same coin but why isn't always obvious in today's information universe. If a site like Facebook or Google knows everything about you it doesn't mean you don't care about privacy, it means you're putting your trust in those sites. The same sort of trust that makes passwords private.
The first thing we need to grasp is what I'm going to call a trust boundary. I trust you understand trust already (har har har). But a trust boundary is less obvious sometimes. A security (or privacy) incident happens when there is a breach of the trust boundary. Let's just dive into some examples to better understand this.
In this case, editors decided to publish the name because Mr. D’Andrea is a senior official who runs operations from the agency’s headquarters outside Washington, not in the field. He is also the architect of the C.I.A.’s program to use drones to kill high-ranking militants, one of the government’s most significant paramilitary programs. We believe that the American public has a right to know who is making life-or-death decisions in its name.
It was also not the first time that Mr. D’Andrea’s name has been mentioned in our newspaper. After his identity was disclosed in a 2015 article, The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, discussed the rationale in an interview with Lawfare, a website that covers national security law, and gave more insight into editors’ decision-making.
We’re trashing the world not because it’s fun, but because it pays to do so. People respond to financial incentives. So, how do you provide an incentive to stop trashing the world? One idea is to use cold, hard cash. If people earn more by not trashing, the thinking goes, the incentive flips: it suddenly pays to conserve. Based on this idea, a trial program in Uganda paid landowners to preserve the forest on their land and tracked the results.
It turned out not to be so simple—people don’t always neatly do what they’re supposed to. What if these landowners were already concerned about deforestation and were already preserving their land? You’ve just forked out quite a bit to pay for something that was already going to happen. Or what if they just cut down trees elsewhere instead? Figuring out whether the benefits of the program are worth the cost requires collecting a lot of data.
A paper in Science this week reports on the results, which are encouraging: deforestation slowed to about half the previous rate, and it looks as though people didn’t just shift their forest clearing elsewhere. The program benefits seem to have outweighed the costs, whichever way you slice it. In other words, money provides a great incentive to preserve habitats, which is great news for climate change efforts.
The technology that the project is based on should be familiar to Ars readers. Two years ago, Ars wrote about an academic paper published in Nature that described “a recipe for an affordable, safe, and scalable flow battery.” German researchers had developed better components for a large, stationary battery that used negatively and positively charged liquid electrolyte pools to exchange electrons through a reasonably priced membrane. These so-called “flow batteries” are particularly interesting for grid use—they have low energy-density, so they don’t work for portable energy storage. But as receptacles for utility-scale electricity storage, their capacity is limited only by the amount of space you have.
Software programmers are usually collegial and collaborative, but parts of the bitcoin developer community are currently displaying the kind of acrimony familiar to political capitols like Washington, D.C.
Understanding the nature of the scaling debate then might help the bitcoin community better iterate on the protocol and software in the future. But, what's behind the strife when amendments to bitcoin's rules – or stasis – become so controversial? What unrecognized dimensions of the debate allowed it to become so divisive and debased?
A key ally of Jeremy Corbyn has warned the Labour leadership not to take the party’s new wave of voters for granted over Brexit.
Clive Lewis, the former shadow business secretary who was one of the first MPs to back Corbyn to be leader of the Labour Party in 2015, told POLITICO his party could lose support if it is seen to be “too closely aligned to a policy which will see us coming crashing out of Europe.”
The Norwich South MP, who resigned his position on the Labour front bench in February over Corbyn’s three-line whip on backing the triggering of Article 50, said it would become “more urgent” for Labour to develop “clear positions” and “red lines” on the detail of Brexit negotiations.
Veteran US Republican Senator John McCain has been diagnosed with brain cancer and is reviewing treatment options, according to his office.
The options may include chemotherapy and radiation, his doctors said. The 80-year-old politician is in "good spirits" recovering at home.
The people of the respectable east coast press loathe the president with an amazing unanimity. They are obsessed with documenting his bad taste, with finding faults in his stupid tweets, with nailing him and his associates for this Russian scandal and that one. They outwit the simple-minded billionaire. They find the devastating scoops. The op-ed pages come to resemble Democratic fundraising pitches. The news sections are all Trump all the time. They have gone ballistic so many times the public now yawns when it sees their rockets lifting off.
A recent Alternet article I read was composed of nothing but mean quotes about Trump, some of them literary and high-flown, some of them low-down and cruel, most of them drawn from the mainstream media and all of them hilarious. As I write this, four of the five most-read stories on the Washington Post website are about Trump; indeed (if memory serves), he has dominated this particular metric for at least a year.
And why not? Trump certainly has it coming. He is obviously incompetent, innocent of the most basic knowledge about how government functions. His views are repugnant. His advisers are fools. He appears to be dallying with obviously dangerous forces. And thanks to the wipeout of the Democratic party, there is no really powerful institutional check on the president’s power, which means that the press must step up.
I mean, it is easy to make fun of Trump, he is just too stupid and incapable and uneducated. But what the French president Emmanuel Macron did on Bastille Day, in presence of the usual Trumpies, was just above the usual level of making fun of Trump. The French made Trump watch a French band playing a medley of Daft Punk. And as we know – Trump seemed to be very unimpressed, most probably because he doesn’t have a clue.
Lots of anti-harassment laws have been written over the years. The creation of these laws has sped up as legislators look to find some way of handling cyberbullying and online harassment. These laws have been uniformly bad. Those that make it to governors' desks are often struck down shortly thereafter by courts.
The problem is legislators try to target certain behavior with these laws, but seldom consider the amount of protected speech that will be caught in the laws' webbing. Or maybe these thoughts never enter the minds of legislators, who tend to write these bills badly and broadly.
It only took a month for a court to dump a bogus defamation suit brought by someone who sued one person for things someone else said. Jim Myers wrote an article for The Tennessean discussing changes made to a culinary arts program. The former director of the program -- Thomas Loftis -- didn't like characterizations made in the article. For reasons known only to him and his lawyers, Loftis sued the new director of the culinary arts program, rather than the columnist or the paper that published his article.
As you may know, San Diego Comic Con is going on right now. And, like many techie/geeky people, while I've never attended the show, I always look forward to what comes out of the event. However, SDCC is increasingly looking like a massive censorial bully. A few years ago, we covered what we believed to be a fairly silly trademark dispute that SDCC had filed against the organizers of the Salt Lake Comic Con. We pointed out that trademarking "Comic Con" seemed silly and there was no problem with multiple Comic Con's happily co-existing. And, really, SDCC is the 800-lb gorilla here. It's the dominant comic con and has been for many, many years, as it seems to grow larger and larger. Other cities having their own comic conventions doesn't take away from SDCC (if anything they tend to reinforce the dominance of SDCC).
From the New York Times to the British government, the paternalism of the speech police shines through.
Earlier this month, Trump was relentlessly mocked by pretty much everyone for tweeting he and Russian president Vladimir Putin had discussed forming an “impenetrable Cyber Security unit” to prevent “election hacking, & many other negative things.” The blowback to his ridiculous proposal was so intense it achieved that rarest of Trump self-owns: A tweet walking back his prior tweet.
In unusually passionate and stark terms, the head of the nation’s top spy agency made clear on Saturday in Colorado that he will stand up to anyone -- even the president of the United States -- who asks him to use the U.S. intelligence community as a political prop.
National Security Agency Director Mike Rogers on Saturday rebuffed the prospect for a U.S.-Russia cyber unit, a proposal which has been greeted with incredulity by several senior U.S. lawmakers and which President Donald Trump himself appeared to back down from after initially indicating interest.
The Maryland Court of Special Appeals has handed down a ruling [PDF] on quasi-cell site location info. The evidence offered by the state isn't being so much suppressed as it is being rejected. The information wasn't obtained illegally and no rights were violated. Rather, the court finds the evidence to be questionable, as in "evidence of what, exactly?" [via EvidenceProf Blog]
The defendant in the case is charged with murder. Bashunn Phillips filed a motion to exclude the evidence, which was granted by the lower court. The state appealed. But there's nothing in it for the state.
"We always thought his wealth was because of his investments in cryptocurrency and not with a dark market," she said. "And we don’t understand how he could be how the FBI describes him; it’s totally not the personality of Alexandre Cazes!"
A divided federal appeals court is upholding a President Barack Obama-era regulation that barred e-cigarette smoking—also known as vaping—on both inbound and outbound US flights.
The US Department of Transportation officially banned electronic cigarettes on flights in March of 2016 to clear up any confusion as to whether they were also outlawed like traditional tobacco cigarettes.
US Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) criticized the Federal Communications Commission for failing to turn over its internal analysis of the DDoS attacks that hit the FCC's public comment system.
The FCC declined to provide its analysis of the attacks to Gizmodo, which had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request for a copy of all records related to the FCC analysis "that concluded a DDoS attack had taken place." The FCC declined the request, saying that its initial analysis on the day of the attack "did not result in written documentation."
Verizon Wireless customers this week noticed that Netflix's speed test tool appears to be capped at 10Mbps, raising fears that the carrier is throttling video streaming on its mobile network.
When contacted by Ars this morning, Verizon acknowledged using a new video optimization system but said it is part of a temporary test and that it did not affect the actual quality of video. The video optimization appears to apply both to unlimited and limited mobile plans.
But some YouTube users are reporting degraded video, saying that using a VPN service can bypass the Verizon throttling. The Federal Communications Commission generally allows mobile carriers to limit video quality as long as the limitations are imposed equally across different video services despite net neutrality rules that outlaw throttling. The net neutrality rules have exceptions for network management.
It's no secret that Major League Baseball has proven themselves to be happy bullies regarding its trademarks. Between thinking it owns the letter 'W', forgetting that fair use exists, and its decision to bully amateur baseball leagues, the legal staff for MLB has shown that they can produce some really head-scratching moments.
At some point, even the dimmest of lawyers will understand that parody and fair use are not infringement. There may be all sorts of reasons why big companies send dubious cease-and-desist letters over protected speech. Sometimes it's because lawyers are misinformed. Sometimes it's to silence criticism.
The CJEU judgment builds upon the earlier Opinion of Advocate General (AG) Szpunar in the same case [reported here], yet goes beyond it. This is notably so with regard to the consideration of the subjective element (knowledge) of the operators of an online platform making available copyright content. Unlike AG Szpunar, the Court did not refer liability only to situations in which the operators of an online platform have acquired actual knowledge of third-party infringements, but also included situations of constructive knowledge (‘could not be unaware’) and, possibly, even more.