In a world bursting with new tools and diverse development environments, it's practically a necessity for any developer or engineer to learn some basic sysadmin commands. Specific commands and packages can help developers organize, troubleshoot, and optimize their applications and—when things go wrong—provide valuable triage information to operators and sysadmins.
Linux is hot right now. Everybody is looking for Linux talent. Recruiters are knocking down the doors of anybody with Linux experience, and there are tens of thousands of jobs waiting to be filled. But what if you want to take advantage of this trend and you’re new to Linux? How do you get started?
For years, the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) has been an oasis for developers looking to build modern apps without getting locked into the desert of some big vendor’s ecosystem. It’s a convenient, widely used open-source framework that makes application architecture easy for developers.
Hyperledger, an open source collaborative effort created to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies, announced today that 10 new organizations have joined the project. The growth comes on the heels of the availability of Hyperledger Fabric 1.0, the consortium’s first production ready blockchain framework announced last month. As a multi-project, multi-stakeholder effort, Hyperledger incubates several business blockchain and distributed ledger technologies including Hyperledger Sawtooth, Hyperledger Iroha and Hyperledger Indy, among others.
The Open API Initiative (OAI), a Linux Foundation project created to advance API technology and its interoperability, has announced the 3.0.0 release of the OpenAPI Specification.
The Open API Initiative (OAI), a Linux Foundation project created to advance API technology, announced the 3.0.0 release of the OpenAPI Specification. The OAI provides a foundation for developing interoperability of APIs and other technologies.
A new release of ZOL is available for running the ZFS file-system natively on Linux. This ZFS On Linux v0.7 update does bring a number of new features.
ZFS On Linux 0.7 introduces resumable send/receive support, compressed send/receive, multiple import protection, scrub pause/resume capabilities, delegations, large dnodes, cryptographic checksums, JBOD management, and a wide array of performance improvements.
The open source EdgeX Foundry group gains new members as it begins to sculpt standardized software building blocks for intelligent edge computing.
In April, The Linux Foundation launched the open source EdgeX Foundry project to develop a standardized interoperability framework for Internet of Things (IoT) edge computing. Recently, EdgeX Foundry announced eight new members, bringing the total membership to 58.
With Fedora not yet officially supporting the EGLStreams code-path for GNOME Mutter on Wayland, NVIDIA has created their own third-party Copr repository with said support.
Bryce Harrington has tagged the beta releases of the upcoming Wayland 1.14 and Weston 3.0.
Wayland 1.14 is the next update to the core Wayland code. Over the earlier alpha release, there are no changes at all. As outlined then, Wayland 1.14 is shaping up to be a fairly small, incremental update with some cleaning up of tests, adding the FreeDesktop Contributor Covenant, and other small changes/fixes.
Besides yesterday evening marking the embargo expiration for the new Crimson ReLive / AMDGPU-PRO 17.30 details, AMD also announced the public availability of the Radeon GPU Profiler.
Radeon GPU Profiler is a new open-source initiative within the GPUOpen space for allowing more analytics and low-level optimization details to be explored by game developers running on Radeon GPUs.
Are you a computer expert stepping into the world of video tutorials? Or someone who's looking to record and share bugs in an application? Whatever the reason or requirement, whenever you want to create a digital recording of your computer screen, what you need is good screen recording (a.k.a. screencasting) software.
QEMU 2.10 is under development as the next step for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack.
As of yesterday, QEMU 2.10-rc0 is now available for testing.
A bunch of handy new features and bug fixes recently landed in Etcher, the open-source, cross-platform image writing tool.
In this post I’m going to run you through a few of the more notable additions, though feel free to peruse the full change-log yourself for more details.
You’ll now see image name, drive name, and a relevant icon (where supported) in Etcher’s desktop notifications — perfect for when you’re writing an image in the background.
Wondering what the best ebook reader for ubuntu is? So were we, so we tried a bunch to write this list of the 5 best ebook reading apps available on Ubuntu.
When it comes to office work, you want to be as productive and efficient as possible. Today, let’s look at 10 must have Linux apps for your office which will get your working like a Boss. Read along.
GNU nano 2.8.6 "Kekulé" offers a new feature: the ability to do softwrapping between words -- at whitespace -- instead of always at the edge of the screen. This can be activated with -a or --atblanks or 'set atblanks' together with the softwrap option. This release further fixes a handful of rare display glitches, fixes a build failure on AIX, harmonizes the quoting rules in the rc files, and renames the option 'cut' to 'cutfromcursor' (please update your nanorc files before 2020).
Following the latest trends of implementing a built-in screenshot utility into a web browser product, Opera Software on Monday announced that it added a new screen capture tool to the latest Opera developer release.
Opera developer 48.0.2664.0 appears to be the first version of the popular and free web browser to add a new camera icon to the sidebar, making easier for users to snap an image of the coolest parts, or even an entire web page. Opera is the third web browser we know to offer a screenshot utility, after Vivaldi and Firefox.
ââ¬â¹D-Link is a USB wireless card or commonly called dongle, used to connect a computer to the Internet through cellular networks. This tutorial will focus on one model DWP-157 and may be applied to other models of D-Link.
The Wine Staging team announced a few moments ago the release and immediate availability for download of Wine Staging release 2.13, a new update to the more advanced compatibility layer for running Windows programs on Linux.
The Wine Staging release 2.13 is now available.
Wine-Staging 2.13 is now available as the newest release of this experimental / "testing grounds" built around Wine with additional patches added.
Having issues trying to create a desktop shortcut for a Steam game on Linux? Well, you can seek some solace in the fact that you're not alone.
Well, mostly the virtual shelves since no Linux gamer actually buys physical games (on Linux) in a box. While I do appreciate the convenience that digital games have brought (and how cheap they have become), I can’t help but miss a little the Golden Age of boxed games. I’m not talking about the shitty packaging of console games and their crappy plastic DVD box, but the time when computer games were packaged in beautiful, big carton boxes with beautiful artwork, featuring goodies and surprises as you opened them up. Hell, Colonization came with a 100 pages manual that went far beyond explaining how to play the game, by giving a good account on how the colonization of the New World really happened. Nowadays it’s not unusual for even complex games to ship without a proper manual (Hearts of Iron IV, with a mostly empty wiki at release, and a tutorial that covered only 10% of the game aspects… like WTF?). But I digress.
For fans of the 0 A.D. open-source ancient warfare game, its 22nd alpha release is now available.
The CRYENGINE 5.4 Preview has been released and it comes with something truly interesting: Vulkan support.
The CRYENGINE 5.4 Preview is a major update which couldn’t have been achieved without all of the feedback from the CRYENGINE community. There are several major advancements and integrations that we think will make things more accessible and let you achieve even more, more rapidly.
After almost one year of development, the master branch (future Godot 3.0) is mostly feature-complete and ready for broader testing by the Godot community. We are therefore releasing a first alpha snapshot for existing users to play with and report bugs.
As of now there is no time table for the stable Godot 3.0 release besides "when it's ready." Godot 3.0 doesn't have a Vulkan renderer but just has its revamped OpenGL ES 3.0 / OpenGL 3.3 support.
We talk a lot about the different features and perks of various operating systems and the programs that work on them. There's often a decent amount of coherence between similar systems (or even similar versions of the same systems). But there’s one area that one Linux system vs. another, or Ubuntu vs. Windows can bring about problems, and that's gaming.
Dying Light [Steam, Gemly], one of the best Zombie games available on Linux (seriously it is!) has a free update and Techland have announced their own store.
Re:Legend [Kickstarter] just caught my eye after it ended up in my inbox, the Kickstarter didn't actually state Linux/SteamOS support so I reached out to the developer. Turns out, they're planning it!
My question was this: "For PC, you only list Steam, which is a bit confusing. Is that Windows only, or will a Linux/SteamOS version be included too?"
The newest game from Supergiant Games, the developers behind the well-received titles Bastion and Transistor, is now out on Steam.
The Mesa OpenGL threading support has been expanded to five more Linux games.
Landing in the public Mesa-git mailing list within the last few minutes, more games have been added to the whitelist to make use of threaded OpenGL for better performance.
OBS Studio (formerly Open Broadcaster Software) is now available in version 19.0.3, with installer downloads available for Mac and Windows, and repositories available for a variety of Linux flavors. The free, open source software for video recording and live streaming lets users record multiple sources simultaneously, including webcams, the desktop, and even individual windows.
An interesting SteamOS update just before and now it's time for the Steam Client Beta! Valve have been putting in the effort lately for sure.
SteamOS 2.121 is now available as the latest release of Valve's Linux distribution for gaming.
Valve's SteamOS engineers are continuing to improve the Debian-based SteamOS gaming operating system that powers the Steam Machines, and they've just released today a new Beta update.
Sunday was busy day and the talks were as varied as the speakers.
Antonio Larrosa kicked off the morning with his talk on The KDE Community and its Ecosystem. He expressed concern about what he perceived as an increase in the isolation of certain communities and laid out the advantages of working on intra-community relationships.
Later on in the day, Kevin Ottens gave his audience a taste of what Qt's 3D API can do in his talk Advances in Qt 3D. There are more and more applications that rely on 3D everyday, especially with the increase in popularity of virtual reality. Ottens introduced the tools Qt developers looking to include 3D into their programs and even treated attendees to a preview of a feature that is still in the works and that helps manage shader code.
The second day of Akademy BoFs, group sessions and hacking has just finished. There is a wrapup session at the end so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present.
Wednesday is the third and for many people last day of BoFs, as people start to head off home. However hacking and some smaller meetings will happen tomorrow between those still here
KDE developer Sebastian Kügler today shared the project's vision on the KDE Plasma desktop environment, and what they are aiming for in the coming months and years.
We all know that KDE Plasma transformed lately into a powerful, modern, and not so resource hungry desktop environment, and it's currently being used by default in many popular GNU/Linux distributions, including openSUSE Leap, Chakra GNU/Linux, and KaOS.
Family_find_relatives is an extension of the Family activity which is aimed at providing a bit more challenge for someone who has already finished the family activity. The goal of this activity is: given a relation, the user will have to select a pair of node that correctly represents the given relation.
Test if you can, on real hardware if possible, in virtual machines if not.
The basic prototype patches let GNOME Disks resize partitions and their filesystems, check filesystems and repair them – at least when built against UDisks master where the actual work is performed. It needs some fixes on how jobs and UI states correspond but here a glimpse on how the resize looks like.
A relatively short update about the project. I have implemented a new GtkSourceCompletionProvider to mimick user- requested word-completion feature in Vim.
In previous post, Indexing multiple languages source code in GNOME Builder, I wrote about how indexing of source code in a project is done in GNOME Builder. Now that we have index of all symbols in the project, this index is used to implement global search of symbols using which we can search fuzzily all symbols in the project.
Apologies for running a bit late. Had been brewing up some serious potions and not to mention my old nimbus 2000 can’t really live up to expectations now. Almost an antique. well without a further due, let’s get into explaining you about the spells I’ve been working on.
For the longest time, the Evolution groupware suite was given a bad rap; being dismissed because of the inclusion of the mono software, bugs, or a lack of stability. However, that ire mellowed considerably over the years and Evolution continued to, well, evolve.
It had been a while since I gave Evolution a go. Since my migration to Elementary OS, I'd been toying with various and sundry clients (Elementary Mail, Geary, Nylas, and Thunderbird to be specific), never to be completely satisfied. In fact, over the last few years, I've felt the email client was one of the weakest links in Linux.
As I mentioned in my last blog post, I spent the last weeks working on tags. Though, just to be clear from the beginning, general tags will probably not make it into the next versions of Nautilus. At the time I found out that this feature should not be included, I already had some of the work done, so I’ll explain below what I accomplished even if it’ll not be part of the next releases.
GNOME's Mathias Clasen has dished up an update on GNOME Recipes, the desktop cookery app for Linux, bringing news of several improvements.
While this is a development release, I think it may be time to declare this version (1.6) stable. Therefore, I encourage you to try it out and let me know if something doesn’t work.
This year I am also giving a presentation about the application story in Endless OS. Our infrastructure, our changes to GNOME Software, our heavy use of Flatpak, etc. Hopefully you’ll find it interesting.
The GUADEC is approaching and I’m happy to say that I will be there, again! Apart some issues with my laptop[1], everything is packed and ready for the trip. I plan to be in Manchester from tomorrow evening and will stay in there until Thursday next week. Just by looking at the schedule and planned social events, I’m sure that it is going to be an awesome week.
I mentioned that we switched from using external tools for decompression to using libarchive. That's not the whole truth, as we switched to using libarchive for CBZ, CB7 and the infamous CBT, but used a copy/paste version of unarr to support RAR files, as libarchive support lacks some needed features.
Evince, the default document viewer on Ubuntu, is adding support for more file formats. The next stable release, Evince 3.26, due in October, will allow you to view Adobe Illustrator files on Linux without needing to install any additional software. “But wait!”, I hear you cry, “Evince can already do that!”
Gedit is the default text editor on Ubuntu and just about a bajillion other Linux distros — but it’s also unmaintained.
Did you know that? I didn’t. Not until a reader mentioned it to me earlier today.
And, sure enough, head over to Gedit page on the GNOME Wiki and you can see for yourself that the project is “no longer maintained” and is “looking for new maintainers”.
My biggest concern over Manjaro 17.0.2 KDE is the 50+ seconds of boot-up times. It’s a concern to me only because I can’t put my laptop computer to sleep due to that Focaltech touchpad issue. So when I take a break (say for about 20-30 minutes), I’m forced to keep the laptop turned ON. If I’m somewhat low on battery, then I’m forced to plug in the charger (yes I’m talking from the two weeks+ experience I’ve had so far with Manjaro). That said, even if you have a troublesome Focaltech touchpad, if you’re going to install it into an SSD then I guess it’s not much of a concern at ll anyway. Other than that, this a gorgeous looking, responsive, power efficient and one of the stablest KDE distributions I’ve had used so far!
The openSUSE Leap distribution is about to make a new release, Leap 42.3.
While Leap is normally a 'point release' distribution, the development of Leap 42.3 has been conducted as if it were a 'rolling release', so since May I have had several of my systems running the 42.3 pre-release and following the development as it progressed.
The openSUSE Project has released openSUSE Leap 42.3.
With this release we can see that the community version is now more closely aligned with the ‘shared core’ of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack 3.
The openSUSE Project released openSUSE Leap 42.3 today bringing the community version more closely aligned with its shared core of SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 Service Pack 3.
The mutual packages of both Leap and SLE distributions give seasoned Linux users, systems administrators, and developers even more reason to use the newest chameleon distribution.
Users are advised to take advantage of the seamless upgrade to Leap 42.3. Leap 42.2 reaches its end of maintenance in six months.
The developers of openSUSE Leap operating system have shipped the latest version in the form of openSUSE Leap 42.3. This fixed release distro is powered by Linux kernel 4.4 and allows you to choose a variety of desktop choices, including KDE 5.8 and GNOME 4.20. This release comes with about 10,000 packages and shares even more source code with SUSE Linux Enterprise.
GNU/Linux developer Arne Exton is known for creating and maintaining a bunch of Linux-based operating systems, as well as for packaging the latest kernels for Slackware Linux.
The blog runs on a server in the Teklinks datacenter, and that will be replaced by new hardware. Since this involves driving to the datacenter and doing physical work (thanks Robby Workman!) the slightly longer-than-usual downtime is needed.
In 2012, when CFO spoke with Red Hat finance chief Charlie Peters, the company essentially had a single significant product offering, the operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Five years later, the company is neck deep in its transformation to a company with a burgeoning position in cloud-platform technologies. And the current CFO, Eric Shander, happens to have the kind of deep technology experience that could help accelerate that evolution.
Red Hat’s ongoing experiments with making its Linux distributions more modular and flexible have yielded a new sub-distribution of Fedora.
Dubbed Fedora Boltron Server, the new prototype server project uses the various modularity technologies that Red Hat has been building into Fedora. Its goal is a Linux distribution in which multiple versions of the same system components can live and work side-by-side, non-destructively.
CollabNet (www.collabnet.com), a global leader in enterprise software development, release automation and DevOps solutions, announces a new webinar, "Monitoring your DevOps Tool Chain for Continuous Delivery & Feedback in Red Hat OpenShift," that will be co-hosted by CollabNet partner Carahsoft. The webinar will take place on August 2, 2017, at 10 a.m. PDT/ 1 p.m. EDT.
SteelCloud LLC announced today that it has enhanced ConfigOS, its patented STIG remediation software, to comprehensively support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. ConfigOS dramatically reduces the time and effort to build, test, and deploy STIG-compliant Linux and Windows application environments. This new RHEL 7 support adds to ConfigOS existing automation for RHEL 5 & 6, CENTOS and SUSE Linux.
The FADs (Fedora Activity Day) were technical in many cases, but this time We can to realize an organizational FAD that allowed the ambassadors to achieve objectives and to contribute to the community in a better way.
couple of days after Fedora 26 was released on July 11, I began installing it on my herd of computers. Many of the improvements that Fedora 26 brings to the table are under the covers, such as improvements to the kernel and glibc. However, I noticed two updates right away.
I know many of you have wanted to test running Wayland on NVidia. The work on this continues between Jonas Ãâ¦dahl, Adam Jackson and various developers at NVidia. It is not ready for primetime yet as we are still working on the server side glvnd piece we need for XWayland. That said with both Adam Jackson looking at this from our side and Kyle Brenneman looking at it from NVidia I am sure we will be able to hash out the remaining open questions and get that done.
With the recent release of Fedora 26, the Fedora 27 release schedule is falling into place. Also worth noting, starting with Fedora 27, there is no longer an Alpha release. As of now, the current Fedora 27 release schedule is as follows.
Yesterday I completed an incredible first year in the fedora project, I noticed it because I was awarded with one badge for it (egg badge).
I arrived a month ago through whatcanidoforfedora, who told me that it was a good idea to go to ambassadors, commops and infrastructure, I tried first in ambassadors and immediately I was kicked :P. being member of any major parts of the fedora project requires a lot of patience and work. that was my first learning about the the project.
The new release rolls up 26 security fixes that have landed since June. This one, which landed last week, is worth plucking out of the noise, with Debian joining others in patching the Heimdal Kerberos man-in-the-middle bug.
Yesterday I uploaded the first update of the TeX Live packages in Debian after TeX Live 2017 has entered Debian/unstable. The packages should by now have reached most mirrors. Nothing spectacular here besides a lot of updates and new packages.
Ubuntu Kernel Upgrade Utility (Ukuu) is a GUI tool to install a new Linux Kernel from Ubuntu Mainline PPA. Very useful tool if the existing Canonical managed kernel is causing you driver issues.
Linux Mint 18.2 MATE Edition has been released and announced by Linux Mint project, include the latest MATE Desktop 1.18 as default desktop environment. MATE 1.18 desktop environment is now based on the latest GTK+ 3 technologies. GTK+ 3.14 or latest is required to install MATE 1.18, which is no longer compatible with the GTK+ 2 series. All the included applications and components were successfully ported to GTK+ 3.
Ubuntu MATE 17.10 is nearing Alpha 2, and we need as many people as possible playing with the new version and running into bugs so we can Squash them early!
Which video player should Ubuntu MATE 17.10 ship by default?
That’s precisely the question posed to users of the distro by its project lead Martin Wimpress, He’s launched a poll over on Google+ (because apparently people still use it) asking users to help him decide which media player should ship out of the box.
Right now Ubuntu MATE ships with VLC by default.
Enterprise NVR solutions provider, Surveon Technology has announced the Linux-based NVR3304 will be added to its Professional Series.
Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine SDK for the Snapdragon 835 supports Caffe, Caffe2, or TensorFlow AI frameworks on Linux or Android targets.
In May 2016, Qualcomm announced its first deep learning software development kit, called the Snapdragon Neural Processing Engine for the Snapdragon 820 system-on-chip. Now, it’s releasing a more advanced SDK for the Snapdragon 835 (APQ8098).
Mentor’s “Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC ZCU102 Evaluation Kit” offers Mentor Embedded Linux, Nucleus, Code Sourcery, a hypervisor, and an Android 6.0 BSP.
Mentor (formerly Mentor Graphics), which is now a Siemens business unit, likes to focus on supporting a few complex multicore SoC families with its embedded development tools, creating a one-stop shop for developers. For example, it offered comprehensive support with its Mentor Embedded Linux for AMD’s embedded G-Series SoCs. This month it has turned its attention to the 64-bit ARM/FPGA hybrid Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC system-on-chip.
In the beginning of this story there was MeeGo, developed by Nokia and Intel, great software contributed to open source community. When Intel switched their focus on Tizen (Samsung) and Nokia's mobile department was acquired by Microsoft, MeeGo was no longer in their interest. MeeGo developers (working at Nokia) were put out of business, but they didn't give up on it. Another company Jolla, boosted into start via Nokia's bridge program and the government of Finland, was founded and strongly supported by Nokia's N900/N9 customer/developer community.
Jolla picked Linux kernel, Mer core ("MeeGo Reconstructed"), rpm-package management, systemd, libhybris, Linux root access, terminal in the phone etc. and developed their proprietary UI and apps on top, additionally adding 3rd party services like Aliendalvik (Myriad) to support Android apps, MS Exchange Active Sync (Microsoft) for business email, and HERE Maps (Nokia) w/o navigation features. Two of Jolla's essential apps, browser and office have later been switched to OSS license, even more is promised but seems to be taking time. Some community members blame the investors willing to hold "owning" of the software, some blame Jolla themself, but the promises are still alive.
Remember the Moto Z? The Lenovo-controlled redesign of Motorola's flagship smartphone bet the farm on a modular phone idea, and the modular system kind of sucked. The modules were expensive, only worked with brand-new Motorola smartphones, and didn't offer anything useful over a non-modular version of the same accessory. To limit the effect the bulky modules would have on the phone, Motorola slimmed the phone down as much as possible, resulting in the removal of the headphone jack. Motorola sacrificed a lot to make the modular phone idea work, but at the end of the day the modular system never delivered a compelling use case.
The next version of Android, still just named "O" for now, is almost here. The Android O release candidate has just been released. And, unlike earlier Android releases, more users than ever should be able to use the new Android, thanks to Google's Project Treble.
Project Treble has redesigned Android to make it easier, faster, and cheaper for manufacturers to update devices to a new version of Android. It does this by separating the device-specific, lower-level software -- written mostly by the silicon manufacturers -- from the Android OS Framework.
GitHub is adding new features and improvements to help build and grow open source communities. According to the organization, open source thrives on teamwork, and members need to be able to easily contribute and give back. The new features are centered around contributing, open source licensing, blocking, and privacy.
New contributor badges are designed to welcome new contributors, and it helps to identify the type of users within a project. For instance, maintainers will now be able to see a “first-time contributor” badge to new members. In addition, maintainers will also be able to distinguish lengthy and heated discussions, according to GitHub.
The deal will leverage StackIQ's expertise in open source software and large cluster provisioning to simplify and automate the deployment of Teradata Everywhere.
This feature pays homage to individuals which, in our opinion, have made the most important contribution to the world of open source.
It’s true that open source is collective power in action. The most important open source projects are frequently coded by a collection of experts, that build, share, and improve the software together, then make it available to everyone. But this does not diminish the importance of an individual’s contribution to the popularity of open source software.
Without open source, many of the systems and applications we take for granted simply would not be around. All the key players in computing come from, or owe a huge creative debt to, the open-source community, and continue to rely on its talent and expertise when developing new products.
The availability of free open source software has huge potential benefits, allowing users to share their collective experience to improve the software as its developed, as well as giving access to essential software to those who couldn’t otherwise afford it.
Obviously limiting the selection to only 10 open source giants made for some really difficult decisions. There are so many others who play key contributions to the development of open source. Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments section below.
Open source software and the open collaboration practices that it engenders are quietly gaining ground among software vendors, securities firms and maybe across Wall Street.
One of the biggest proponents of OSS movement, the Symphony Software Foundation, based in Palo Alto, Calif., has been consistently pulling market participants into its camp.
GigaSpaces Technologies announced today that its business unit for Cloudify, the open source orchestration and cloud management platform, will be spun off into a new company focused on its core markets — cloud and telecoms. GigaSpaces’ core product is its in-memory computing platform XAP. It also sells an in-memory analytics solution called InsightEdge.
Kite, a San Francisco based startup that develops tools for IDEs and text editors used by programmers, has apologized to the open-source community after its code was found to include what many considered to be ads for the company.
Sharp-eyed developers noticed that an update pushed to Kite’s Minimap for Atom Github page seemed to inject links in the code Minimap was looking at to Kite’s own website, and to upload scripts to Kite’s own servers. Uploading a programmer’s work to an untrusted third-party server is a security concern.
Was Kite being unethical? The open-source community certainly thought so.
Kite, founded in 2014 by CEO Adam Smith, makes tools that use machine learning to acquire data from GitHub with the stated intention of making a programmer’s work easier and better.
Anyone can be an entrepreneur, if you have the right guidance. With a body of knowledge that is open sourced and publicly available, you can be your best mentor in learning what it takes to launch your own venture.
That was the message from Boulder Venture Capitalist Brad Feld and Bill Aulet, managing director of Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship on Wednesday. The duo spoke as part of program promoting Catalyze CU, summer startup accelerator designed for CU students and faculty.
Aulet said entrepreneurs must have four characteristics: heart, head, hands and home.
As banks, hospitals and retailers continue to lose ground to hackers, the open source community has stepped into the fray with a cyber security project designed to bring advanced analytics to IT monitoring data. The incubating Apache Spot 1.0 project also seeks to leverage machine learning to scale cyber defenses.
As Spot moves toward “graduation” from the Apache Software Foundation, member companies are attempting to scale the cyber tool to accelerate real-time threat detection. Cloudera (NYSE: CLDR), for one, announced a cyber security framework this week based on the open source project.
In May, a well-known but long-ignored cell network flaw let cybercriminals drain bank accounts across Germany. The process of patching up the holes in Signaling System 7 has proven slow, and mostly reserved for large telecoms who can afford to invest in experimenting with defenses. But now, a team of researchers has created a set of open-source SS7 solutions, making fixes to one of the world's most persistent vulnerabilities available to all.
Rich Bowen is omnipresent at any Open Source conference. He wears many hats. He has been doing Open Source for 20+ years, and has worked on dozens of different projects during that time. He's a board member of the Apache Software Foundation, and is active on the Apache HTTPd project. He works at Red Hat, where he's a community manager on the OpenStack and CentOS projects.
At Open Source Summit North America, Bowen will be delivering a talk titled "Mentoring: Your Path to Immortality." We talked to Bowen to know more about the secret of immortality and successful open source projects.
Open Source Summit North America is less than two months away! Join 2,000+ open source professionals Sept. 11-14 in Los Angeles, CA, for exciting keynotes and technical talks covering all things Linux, cloud, containers, networking, emerging open source technologies, and more.
Google launched today version 60 of the Chrome browser. This version brings mostly developer and API-related changes, with no changes to visible UI functions. In addition, the Chrome team also fixed 40 security issues.
The biggest of the Chrome 60 changes is the addition of the Paint Timing API, a new tool for website developers that allows them to measure the time Chrome takes to "paint" their web page.
Data is critical to building great AI — so much so, that researchers in the field compare it to coal during the Industrial Revolution. Those that have it will steam ahead. Those that don’t will be left in the dust. In the current AI boom, it’s obvious who has it: tech giants like Google, Facebook, and Baidu.
Starting a new eCommerce business? Great! The first thing you need to do is find an eCommerce app that’s going to fit your requirements. There are many eCommerce apps out there, which may be overwhelming. That’s why we decided to do this self-hosted eCommerce software list.
We have years of experience with eCommerce hosting. So we’ve tested and have worked on most eCommerce apps you can find. After our thorough research and testing, we narrowed down the list to the top 5 best self-hosted eCommerce apps.
As you might expect, the Reyedr HUD does not run Linux. However, in an email to LinuxGizmos, Steinigen said his company will soon announce plans to release the device’s firmware under an open-source license.
Things in the normally placid world of open source hardware are heating up as major figures in the Maker movement have begun speaking out against the current managing director of Arduino AG, Frederico Musto. The Italian engineer became a part owner in the company after buying out one of the original five founders and ultimately came to run Arduino AG, a holding company that owns the trademark for the project.
Now Musto is facing scrutiny, initially for exaggerating his educational credentials and, ultimately, for seemingly pulling open source licenses, schematics, and code from the Arduino hardware line-up.
The suspicions arose when Musto met with Limor Fried and Phil Torrone of Adafruit. Fried asked Musto about his MIT credentials and Musto, according to Fried, cut the meeting short. Musto has removed his higher education credentials from his LinkedIn page, leaving only a Montessori Kindergarten in Torino, Italy.
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Fried and Torrone have been working to uncover potential favoritism in the Italian courts thanks to help from Musto’s father, Paolo, as well as fraud associated with signing his documents as a Ph.D. Further, the Arduino Foundation that Musto promised to launch in order to support the open source project has yet to materialize.
The data government agencies deal with today is not what it once was, and the volume of it is exploding. Because of that, the expectation for storing data has become more challenging than ever before.
Today, “data is as unique as you can imagine. You have data coming in different sizes and formats: pictures, videos, medical data, sensor data. Couple with that, the volume is just increasing exponentially,” Shaun Bierweiler, vice president of public sector for Hortonworks, says in an interview with FedScoop TV.
I don’t know if you have heard of Patreon before because we are about to introduce you to a Patreon-type service for open source projects – Gratipay.
Gratipay is an open source startup founded with the purpose of providing project supporters with an avenue to financially help open source projects.
You can find a long list of open source projects to choose to support using a variety of payment options and of course, you are free to donate as much as you want to.
The FreeBSD Project announced today the release and immediate availability of the first incremental update to the FreeBSD 11 operating system series, FreeBSD 11.1.
It's been more than nine months since FreeBSD 11 was released as the latest and most advanced version of the widely-used and most popular BSD operating system on the market, and now, FreeBSD 11.1 is here with a bunch of new features across multiple components, as well as all the latest security and bug fixes.
FreeBSD 11.1 is now available as the first point release to FreeBSD 11.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE. This is the second release of the stable/11 branch.
Free and open source software is the catalyst for Penn Manor School District's award-winning student learning programs. For one, they save the school district more than a million dollars on its technology budget. Besides fiscal savings are the open leadership principles that foster innovation among teachers and students, help to better engage the community, and create a more vibrant and inclusive learning community.
As school leaders prepare to launch a new academic year, here are three open leadership ideas that create a more open, transparent, and collaborative culture in the Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, school district—please take, use, and modify for your own.
Last year and at the beginning of this year, we asked you, Node.js users, to help us understand where, how and why you are using Node.js. We wanted to see what technologies you are using alongside Node.js, how you are learning Node.js, what Node.js versions you are using, and how these answers differ across the globe.
I’m not going to review Perl 6 as a language here because it’s a massive spec with a lot of dark corners and weird edge cases, but I do want to share some things I’ve discovered about the language run-time. MoarVM, the Perl 6 virtual machine, is a fantastic piece of technology.
CPython is the reference implementation of Python, so it is, unsurprisingly, the target for various language-extension modules. But the API and ABI it provides to those extensions ends up limiting what alternative Python implementations—and even CPython itself—can do, since those interfaces must continue to be supported. Beyond that, though, the interfaces are not clearly delineated, so changes can unexpectedly affect extensions that have come to depend on them. A recent thread on the python-ideas mailing list looks at how to clean that situation up.
On July 11, Victor Stinner floated a draft of an as yet unnumbered Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) entitled "Hide implementation details in the C API". The idea is to remove CPython implementation choices from the API so that different experimental choices can be made while still supporting the C-based extensions (NumPy and SciPy in particular). As he noted, other attempts to provide an alternate Python implementation (e.g. PyPy), which are typically created to enhance the language's performance, have largely run aground because they cannot directly support these all-important extensions.
A short sub-thread on the python-ideas mailing list provides some "food for thought" about the purpose and scope of that list, but also some things to perhaps be considered more widely. When discussing new features and ideas, it is common for the conversation to be somewhat hypothetical, but honing in on something that could be implemented takes a fair amount of work for those participating. If the feature is proposed and championed by someone who has no intention of actually implementing it, should the thread come with some kind of warning?
The thread in question started in mid-June with a query from Thomas Güttler about why the socket module returns plain tuples rather than named tuples. The reception to the idea was mostly positive and there were some discussions of how it might be done; Guido van Rossum indicated that he would be favorable to the change as well. But, apparently Güttler was not actually planning to implement the change, as he currently does not have the time to do so.
As the Node Summit got underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, Charles Beeler, general partner at Rally Ventures, said the Node community has come a long way since 2012, when everyone was talking about Node.js and no one was using it.
Initially released in 2009, the JavaScript runtime environment now has enough users and momentum that the nonprofit Node.js Foundation feels comfortable claiming that "Node.js is emerging as a universal development framework for digital transformation with a broad diversity of applications."
5.0.0-rc1 has just been tagged.
Following the LLVM 5 branching earlier this week, release manager Hans Wennborg has now tagged the first release candidate.
Is it possible to do software development, mathematical or not, as mathematician in academics? This is a question I was asking myself recently a lot, seeing my own development from logician at a state university getting rid of foreigners to software developer. And then, a friend pointed me to this very depressing document: The origins of SageMath by William Stein, the main developer of SageMath. And I realized that it seems to be a global phenomenon that mathematicians who are interested in software development have to leave academics. What a sad affair.
[...]
My assumption was that this hits only on non-tenured staff, the academic precariat. It is shocking to see that even William Stein with a tenure position is leaving academics.
TensorFlow is also name-checked in the announcement, and since the SDK's page also mentions convolutional neural network support, Vulture South reckons Cuda ConvaNet (part of last year's announcement) is also in there somewhere.
GitHub has added a chunk of features it says will help new users and projects build better communities.
Singing the “teamwork” song, the organisation says the features announced here are about making it easier to contribute to projects.
For project maintainers, new contributors will show a “first time contributor badge” attached to their pull requests. That will become a “contributor” badge when the PR is merged, and there's an additional flag to help maintainers “separate signal from noise” during flamewars (politely described by GitHub as “lengthy or heated discussions”).
The $15 (€£12) fee has been added to the ride-hailing service in some US cities to reward drivers who return items that have been left behind by passengers.
One of the brightest lights on the internet is in danger of being snuffed out: Snopes, the website that brought fact-checking to the web, is facing the prospect of losing all its advertising revenue due to a painful legal battle that ultimately stems from the co-founders’ divorce two years ago.
As of Tuesday evening, Snopes.com, one of the Internet’s most longstanding fact-checking websites, successfully raised over $600,000 in less than 48 hours—an effort to stay afloat while an ugly legal battle is underway.
Snopes’ founder, David Mikkelson, told Ars in a lengthy phone interview that a Web development company, Proper Media, and two of its founders have essentially held the website "hostage" for months, keeping both data and money that should have gone to Snopes’ parent company, Bardav.
A recent experience I had with one airline’s booking Web site involved an obvious pandering to “mobile” users. But to the designers this seemed to mean oversized widgets on any non-mobile device coupled with a frustratingly sequential mode of interaction, as if Fisher-Price had an enterprise computing division and had been contracted to do the work. A minimal amount of information was displayed at any given time, and even normal widget navigation failed to function correctly. (Maybe this is completely unfair to Fisher-Price as some of their products appear to encourage far more sophisticated interaction.)
Most likely, if anything passes the Senate at all, it will be larded with amendments designed to buy off both factions, all written behind closed doors, without markups, hearings, or input from Democrats. To repeal (and replace) Obamacare, McConnell still has a narrow path to tread, but he has correctly identified that the only road to victory lies through chaos, secrecy, and panic.
Thanks to a pair of defections from more GOP senators late yesterday, the Republican plan to repeal and replace or simply repeal the Affordable Care Act is dead — for now.
But the health care status quo is far from popular, with 57 percent of Americans telling Gallup pollsters in March that they “personally worry” a “great deal” about health care costs.
Many health care activists are now pushing to adopt what is called a “single payer” health care system, where one public health insurance program would cover everyone. The U.S. currently has one federal program like that: Medicare. Expanding it polls very well.
One of the activists pushing for such an expansion is Max Fine, someone who is intimately familiar with the program — because he helped create it. Fine is the last surviving member of President Kennedy’s Medicare Task Force, and he was also President Johnson’s designated debunker against the health insurance industry.
With firm vaccination campaigns, the US eliminated measles in 2000. The highly infectious virus was no longer constantly present in the country—no longer endemic. Since then, measles has only popped up when travelers carried it in, spurring mostly small outbreaks—ranging from a few dozen to a few hundred cases each year—that then fizzle out.
But all that may be about to change. With the rise of non-medical vaccine exemptions and delays, the country is backsliding toward endemic measles, Stanford and Baylor College of Medicine researchers warn this week. With extensive disease modeling, the researchers make clear just how close we are to seeing explosive, perhaps unshakeable, outbreaks.
Sperm counts in Western countries have decreased by half in recent years, suggesting a continuing and significant decline in male reproductive health, a new evidence review reports.
Sperm concentration decreased an average 52 percent between 1973 and 2011, while total sperm count declined by 59 percent during that period, researchers concluded after combining data from 185 studies. The research involved nearly 43,000 men in all.
Signs of a degenerative brain disease were widespread among a sample of donated brains of former football players, researchers reported Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The finding bolsters the connection between playing American football and developing Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which is linked to repeated blows to the head and was first described in boxers. However, the large study provides little new information about the disease, its progression, or prevalence.
Today, July 27th 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the Imperial project of the CIA.
Achilles is a capability that provides an operator the ability to trojan an OS X disk image (.dmg) installer with one or more desired operator specified executables for a one-time execution.
Aeris is an automated implant written in C that supports a number of POSIX-based systems (Debian, RHEL, Solaris, FreeBSD, CentOS). It supports automated file exfiltration, configurable beacon interval and jitter, standalone and Collide-based HTTPS LP support and SMTP protocol support - all with TLS encrypted communications with mutual authentication. It is compatible with the NOD Cryptographic Specification and provides structured command and control that is similar to that used by several Windows implants.
SeaPea is an OS X Rootkit that provides stealth and tool launching capabilities. It hides files/directories, socket connections and/or processes. It runs on Mac OSX 10.6 and 10.7.
The database is still hosted in IBM's cloud, and the earliest it could be locked down is this autumn.
One issue is that the cameras are not protected from local attack. If WiFi is used the attacker only needs to be nearby. If Ethernet is used an attacker can add another device to the network. This is difficult as you would need to gain access to the network switch and find a live port on the proper network. Attacking the Ethernet cable leaves signs, including network glitches. Physically attacking a camera also leaves signs. All of this can be done, but is more challenging than a network based attack over the Internet and can be managed through physical security and good network monitoring. These are some of the reasons why I strongly prefer wired network connections over wireless network connections.
In addition, the identities of people working undercover for the Swedish police and the Swedish security service, known as Sapo, may have been revealed, along with names of people working undercover for the special intelligence unit of the Swedish armed forces.
Aquabox took the bait, and asked the FBI agents to upload a screen shot of the bug they’d found. As noted in this September 2015 story, the FBI agents uploaded the image to file-sharing giant Sendspace.com and then subpoenaed the logs from Sendspace to learn the Internet address of the user that later viewed and downloaded the file.
With the increasing rise in the intensity and volume of online threats, our computers and smartphones are becoming more prone to attacks. In such situations, it becomes necessary to look for a capable antivirus solution to make sure that your online life is safe and sound. Along the similar lines, Russian cybersecurity giant has released a free version of its antivirus named Kaspersky Free.
For some reason, this keeps happening and I will never understand why. For years, we have covered incidents where security researchers benignly report security flaws in the technology used by companies and governments, doing what can be characterized as a service to both the public and those entities providing the flawed tools, only to find themselves threatened, bullied, detained, or otherwise dicked with as a result. It's an incredibly frustrating trend to witness, with law enforcement groups and companies that should want to know about these flaws instead shooting the messenger in what tends to look like a fit of embarrassment.
Quantum random number generators aren't new, but one small enough to provide practical security for Internet of Things applications is interesting.
That's what South Korean telco SK Telecom reckons its boffins have created, embedding a full quantum random number generator (QRNG) in a 5x5mm chip.
The company's pitch is that QRNGs are large and (at least compared to IoT requirements) expensive, and it wants a commercial tie-up to make its research into an off-the-shelf device.
Traditional computers are binary digital electronic devices based on transistors. They store information encoded in the form of binary digits each of which could be either 0 or 1. Quantum computers, in contrast, use quantum bits or qubits to store information either as 0, 1 or even both at the same time. Quantum mechanical phenomenons such as entanglement and tunnelling allow these quantum computers to handle a large number of states at the same time.
Quantum computers are probabilistic rather than deterministic. Large-scale quantum computers would theoretically be able to solve certain problems much quicker than any classical computers that use even the best currently known algorithms. Quantum computers may be able to efficiently solve problems which are not practically feasible to solve on classical computers. Practical quantum computers will have serious implications on existing cryptographic primitives.
Lisa Ling served almost two decades in the Air National Guard, working on communications technology and drones. After an honorable discharge, she discovered her work had led to the deaths of hundreds of people. On our latest episode of Ars Technica Live, she tells Ars editors Annalee Newitz and Cyrus Farivar how that experience turned her into a whistleblower.
Civilians know almost nothing about military drone programs, and Lisa told us that it wasn't much better on the inside. She joined the National Guard to be a nurse, but her technical skills quickly got her moved into a role working with computers and comms equipment. After a few years of that, she was reassigned to work on drones. But she didn't realize, at first, what she was building.
Lisa described how she was given parts of the drones to work on without ever being told how her bits would fit into the larger project. She was deployed to Afghanistan multiple times and noticed what she called "traumatized soldiers," but at the same time she was a good military tech. She didn't question her orders, and she did her work to the best of her ability.
The government warned that the move, which will also take in hybrid vehicles, was needed because of the unnecessary and avoidable impact that poor air quality was having on people’s health. Ministers believe it poses the largest environment risk to public health in the UK, costing up to €£2.7bn in lost productivity in one recent year.
All new petrol and diesel cars and vans will be banned from UK roads from 2040, the government will announce on Wednesday in a revised "controversial bomb" air pollution plan.
The Tory government published a draft air pollution plan in May, but it faced criticism from environment lawyers and clean air campaigners for being too floppy at curbing the nitrogen oxides (NOx) pollution that causes thousands of premature deaths in the UK each year. The High Court demanded that a final version of the plan be published by the end of July—and so here we are.
"In the face of this overwhelming agreement on the basic fact of human-caused climate change by the world's scientists, your efforts seem to be divorced from reality and reason," the Representatives wrote. "This only reinforces our skepticism of your motives in engaging in a clearly unnecessary, and quite possibly unscientific, red-team-blue-team exercise to review climate science."
"By August 2, 2017, we will have used more from Nature than our planet can renew in the whole year," the groups said in a statement.
"This means that in seven months, we emitted more carbon than the oceans and forests can absorb in a year, we caught more fish, felled more trees, harvested more, and consumed more water than the Earth was able to produce in the same period."
Last week, US Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry took a phone call from two men he thought were the Ukrainian Prime Minister and his translator. But the 22-minute-long phone call was actually two Russian pranksters, Vladimir “Vovan” Kuznetsov and Alexei “Lexus” Stolyarov, otherwise known as the “Jerky Boys of Russia,” in the style of an American prank call duo from the 1990s, according to Bloomberg.
Constructed at a cost of $46.9 million ($386.8 million in 2016 dollars) and launched on July 21, 1959, the Savannah was the world's first nuclear cargo ship and the second nuclear-powered civilian ship (coming just two years after the Soviet nuclear icebreaker Lenin). Owned by the US Maritime Administration (MARAD) and operated by commercial cargo companies, for nearly a decade she carried cargo and passengers around the world. She also acted as a floating herald for America's seemingly inevitable, cool Atomic Age future. Savannah boasted all the latest conveniences, including one of the world's first microwave ovens.
Every year since 2011 -- when ACA became law -- the CEOs of US health companies have averaged an 11% raise. Remember, that's 11 percent, every year.
Why it matters: The ACA has not hurt the health care industry. Stock prices have boomed, and CEOs took home nearly 11% more money on average every year since 2010 — far outstripping the wage growth of nearly all Americans. But the analysis also reveals that the pay packages for the country's influential health care executives don't give them incentives to control health care spending — something that economists, policymakers and even Warren Buffett have said is the most pressing problem in health care.
Companies in the United States, Germany, Japan, and other countries are racing to develop self-driving cars. But India's top transportation regulator says that those cars won't be welcome on Indian streets any time soon.
"We won’t allow driverless cars in India," said Nitin Gadkari, India's minister for Road Transport, Highways, and Shipping, according to the Hindustan Times. "I am very clear on this. We won’t allow any technology that takes away jobs."
In recent years, new technology has mostly created jobs for drivers. In India, the leading ride-sharing services, Ola and Uber, completed 500 million rides in 2016, creating work for Indian drivers. But Uber's ultimate goal is to introduce fully self-driving cars that will make these driving jobs obsolete.
Almost 40% of corporate investments channelled away from authorities and into tax havens travel through the UK or the Netherlands, according to a study of the ownership structures of 98m firms.
The DAO, a blockchain-based organization created last year, was supposed to demonstrate the potential of Bitcoin competitor Ethereum. Investors pumped $150 million of virtual currency into the project. But then in June 2016, hackers found a bug in the DAO's code that allowed them to steal $50 million from the organization, creating a crisis for the Ethereum community.
A Tuesday ruling from the Securities and Exchange Commission makes clear that security flaws were not the problem with the DAO. The agency says the DAO's creators broke the law by offering shares to the public without complying with applicable securities laws. Though luckily for the DAO's creators, the SEC isn't going to prosecute them.
As John Nichols, who broke the story for the Nation, wrote: “If successful, they will reverse one of the great strides toward democracy in American history: the 1913 decision to end the corrupt practice of letting state legislators barter off Senate seats in backroom deals with campaign donors and lobbyists.”
A proposed resolution advocates for overturning the 17th Amendment so Republican-controlled state legislatures could pick senators.
Following Trump's speech, the Boy Scouts of America issued a statement clarifying that their organization is nonpartisan. The statement reads, "The Boy Scouts of America is wholly non-partisan and does not promote any one position, product, service, political candidate or philosophy. The invitation for the sitting U.S. President to visit the National Jamboree is a long-standing tradition and is in no way an endorsement of any political party or specific policies. The sitting U.S. President serves as the BSA’s honorary president. It is our long-standing custom to invite the U.S. President to the National Jamboree."
The Supreme Court has ruled that tribunal fees of up to €£1,200, introduced by the Tories under David Cameron , are unlawful.
In a humiliating slapdown the Government will be forced to repay up to €£27 million in fees already paid by workers pursuing employers for unfair dismissal, equal pay or discrimination and other issues.
Trade union Unison took the government to court, arguing the charges are illegal and discriminatory.
Their case was dismissed by the High Court, but they appealed to the Supreme Court, who today ruled in their favour.
Well, just in case you didn’t hear, an information technology officer has been accused of bank fraud. He tried to flee the country, and now Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s (D-FL) office has finally fired the aide, despite this person being under investigation since last winter. His termination was made official on Tuesday.
Imran Awan is also the subject of a Capitol Police probe where he’s accused of “serious, potentially illegal, violations on the House IT network.” He provided technical assistance to other Democratic members of Congress. It was a family affair as well. As Jen noted over the weekend, his two brothers, along with two of their wives, also worked for members of Congress. Imran moved out of his house in Virginia when he found out he was under investigation last February. He rented the home to a Marine Corps veteran and his wife, a naval officer, who found hard drives that they tried to destroy. The FBI now has possession of those hard drives. Jen added that Imran tried to enter the home to retrieve the hard drives, though the Marine refused entry.
The National Archives obviously can't be expected to store every piece of paper generated by the federal government. But it does have an obligation to preserve copies of historically-significant documents. Unfortunately, it's allowing agencies to make these decisions. While it's true some agencies may have a better grasp on a document's significance, other agencies aren't as interested in archiving historically significant documents -- especially ones that might make them look bad.
Canada's highest court recently upheld a controversial order requiring Google to remove certain results from its worldwide search listings. Now, Google is asking a federal judge to rule that that the Canadian order is unenforceable in the U.S.
Yesterday, Google filed a lawsuit (PDF) in California, asking a judge to rule that the Canadian order is unenforceable in the US. Google lawyers argue that the order violates both the First Amendment and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which prevents online platforms from being held responsible for most user behavior.
I am known as a frequent critic of Christianity and have never been de-platformed for that. Why do you give Islam a free pass? Why is it fine to criticise Christianity but not Islam?
Social networking giant Facebook has bought a startup that focuses on intellectual property protection and management services. The acquisition will help to expand Facebook's anti-piracy repertoire, and make sure that copyright issues are properly handled.
Without EFF taking part in the case, the Australian court issued an injunction ordering EFF to remove the article from its website and not to spread it further. Without explaining any of the court's reasoning, the injunction claims EFF is "restrained from publishing any content with respect to the Plaintiff's intellectual property {sic}." If EFF "does not comply with this order its assets may be seized and it [sic] directors and other officers may be liable to be imprisoned for contempt of Court," according to EFF's narrative of the matter.
Gretchen R. Hammond, a transgender reporter, was personally threatened, subject to sexist and anti-Semitic abuse and Neo-Nazi slurs as retribution against an article she wrote, losing her job as a result – and the National Review is the only major American publication reporting on it. How did this happen? Hammond was the first reporter to write about the Chicago Dyke March removing three Jewish women from the march for having Jewish symbolism on their flags. While the Dyke March holds that there is nothing anti-Semitic about forbidding Jewish symbols while allowing other religious imagery, they were evidently unhappy with anyone reporting on their totally not anti-Semitic actions and letting the public draw its own conclusions. Shortly after the article was published, Hammond and her employer, the LGBT newspaper Windy City Times, began receiving insults and threats, which included anti-Jewish and sexist slurs. Shortly after, Hammond was forced off of reporting and placed into sales, which she blames on harassment from the Dyke March.
The decision by publisher Penguin Random House to withdraw Mandela ’s Last Years from sale is a blow for freedom of expression.
The publisher’s decision on Monday night to halt further sales of the book was a dramatic about-turn on their position only hours earlier in which they had stood firm in the face of growing criticism over the work by Vejay Ramlakanââ¬Å¡ the principal physician who cared for Nelson Mandela until his death.
Here in North America, because 2016 just had to become the most infuriatingly stupid and polarizing year in the history of the multiverse, far too much oxygen was spent on debates over both how much racism was okay on one side and exactly what qualified as racist on the other. It's one of those frustrating contests with nobody to root for, as half of the population proclaimed that racism was dead and everyone was too stuck up about it while the other side managed to find racism everywhere, introducing into the popular lexicon terms like "privilege" that mostly make me want to put my head in a vice and get to rotating that lever.
Still, this isn't a debate that should be totally ignored. After all, at its heart is the matter of free speech, not just as a legal framework but also as an ideal that the West tends to claim to hold in high regard. Strangely, one of the beacons of this debate shall now be on the subject of vanity license plates, with a heavy dash of nerd culture thrown in just to make it extra fun. For this story, we go to Winnipeg, where a Star Trek fan received the following vanity plate for his car.
Let's jump back in the wayback machine for a moment and discuss Untied, your primary source for customer and employee complaints about United Airlines. When we last wrote about the site in 2012, we first mentioned that Untied.com has been a thing since 1997 before detailing the lawsuit United Airlines filed in Canada after it found that Untied.com had redesigned its parody site to look more like United.com.
Untied, if you are not aware, is a site that started with a single person's complaint about United Airlines customer service before morphing into an aggregator of such complaints from both customers and internal airline staff and former staff. If you want a bible to be written on what United has done wrong in the realm of customer service, you need not worry because Untied.com is that bible. Had this suit been filed in America, it would face a mountain of caselaw suggesting that so-called "sucks sites" are well within the boundaries of protected nominative fair use. It's worth mentioning that Untied doesn't actively attempt to mislead visitors to the site into thinking it's affiliated with the airline. In fact, visitors are shown a popup upon visiting that alerts them to Untied's status as a parody site. Even a cursory glance at the site's contents would confirm that status, as the entire site is dedicated to taking a metaphorical dump on United Airlines' reputation.
Back in the more innocent era of the early 2010s, you may recall that we discussed a series of delightful trademark disputes between clothier North Face and a couple of guys who started a business first called South Butt (later changed to Butt Face). In those series of posts, we discussed two conflicting facts: trademark lawsuits against parody operators such as this are extremely hard to win in court... except that those same lawsuits are crazy expensive to fight, so the parody operators typically just cave and settle. It's one of those corners of the law in which the very framework of the legal system virtually ensures that the proper legal conclusion is never reached. Yay.
As the UK's porn filter move from "voluntold" to mandatory, questions are being raised (again) about the potential for overblocking. As is the case with any filtering system, things that should be allowed to go through sometimes end up caught in the netting.
In addition to the opt-out porn filtering system in place at UK internet service providers, the government is also demanding any site that meets its vague definition of pornographic verify users' ages before allowing them access. This will apparently be tied to credit cards and/or mobile phones, so the government can strip porn viewers of anonymity it will be slightly more difficult for the under-18 crowd to avail themselves of over-18 web goodies. (But not really.)
In his endeavour to paint an accurate portrayal of the era, Bhandarkar met individuals involved in the infamous mass sterilisation campaigns, people affected by the Turkman Gate demolition, and even those who were held in Tihar jail and prisons in Gujarat under MISA (Maintenance of Internal Security Act). “I interacted with them and learnt of how people joined underground activism,” reveals Bhandarkar. While the director read texts from the Shah Commission Report, to Kuldip Nayar’s Emergency Retold and Coomi Kapoor’s The Emergency: A Personal History , Kulhari admits she was not familiar with the controversial period until Indu Sarkar came her way.
History Professor Steven Levine is a specialist in East Asian affairs at the University of Montana. Fluent In Chinese, Levine was partly responsible for bringing the Confucius Institute to the state, a decision he now says was a “mistake” that has opened the door to Beijing soft power.
An appeal to lift the ban on "Perfect Chemistry," by Simone Elkeles, from the library at Challenger Middle School was denied, setting a dangerous precedent, said James LaRue, director of the Office for Intellectual Freedom, a unit of the Chicago-based American Library Association.
Another batch of FBI National Security Letters has been released, thanks to the expedited review process instituted by the USA Freedom Act. Automattic, the company behind Wordpress, has released five NSLs dating back to 2010, as the result of successful nondisclosure challenges.
Amazon's ambitions to build a fleet of self-flying delivery drones will have an interesting side-effect: They will create unimaginable quantities of data.
Aerial footage, mapping data, flight patterns, number-crunching analysis, and more — autonomous vehicles produce vast reams of data, and drones are no different. And Amazon is already thinking about how it can turn that to its advantage.
So while the internet-connected age has delivered untold innovation, it has also been a total shitshow for privacy and security. The internet-of-broken-things can't seem to go a week without reports of another major privacy screw up, and even your kid's Barbie is now collecting snippets of data that can be sold to the highest bidder. And while throwing a WiFi chipset into something isn't such a bad idea, companies are so eager to boost revenues that actually securing these products -- or respecting customers' privacy -- has repeatedly been shown to be a distant afterthought.
The Investigatory Powers Bill - nicknamed The Snooper's Charter - was agreed upon by both houses of Parliament and passed into law by Royal Assent on 29 November 2016, making it the Investigatory Powers Act.
The National Security Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation violated specific civil liberty protections during the Obama years by improperly searching and disseminating raw intelligence on Americans or failing to promptly delete unauthorized intercepts, according to newly declassified memos that provide some of the richest detail to date on the spy agencies’ ability to obey their own rules.
New Zealand Prime Minister Bill English is the latest high-ranking official to come under pressure as a result of the Kim Dotcom spying fiasco. English, who was acting Prime Minister in 2012 when much of the spying took place, now stands accused of acting unlawfully when he tried to have the surveillance of Dotcom recognized as a state secret.
German police will be able to read encrypted messages using government malware by the end of 2017, according to leaked documents obtained by Netzpolitik. They are legally able to deploy this malware because of a new law. Last month, Germany passed a law that allows police to use “Staatstrojaner” or state trojans to hack into mobile phones to read encrypted messages on apps such as WhatsApp. Police would be allowed to utilize this technology to hack into smart phones for even minor crimes.
We say ‘Russia' as though it is just what we would expect from the country under Putin, but it isn't far off how we see the UK turning out under Theresa May. It is bad news, of course, particularly for Russians, but also for anyone that needs to make private internet searches, make illicit purchases or watch Bruce Springsteen videos.
Your Roomba vacuum cleaner collects data about the size and geometry of your home as it cleans and transmits that data back to Irobot, Roomba's parent company -- and now the company says it wants to sell that data to companies like Apple and Google.
The Government Accountability Office has taken a run at the TSA's Behavioral Detection program in the past. Its findings were far from complimentary. Specially-trained "Behavior Detection Officers" (BDOs) were basically human coin flips. Deciding whether or not someone was a threat came down to a lot of subjective readings of human behavior, rather than proven principles.
In response to this report, the TSA started trimming back the number of BDOs it deployed, converting about 500 of them back into regular TSA officers. But the TSA still believed there was something to its pseudoscience patchwork, so it's still sending out 2,600 BDOs to covertly stare at travelers' throats and eyes (no, really) until terrorism reveals itself.
The development comes amid the heightened scrutiny of electronics coming into the US on international flights, largely on Middle Eastern airlines. In March, US aviation security officials barred electronics larger than cellphones in carry-on bags of direct flights to the US from nine airlines at 10 airports overseas.
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Last year, taxpayers spent about $186 million to deploy 2,393 officers to blend in at 87 airports to help with screening and identify possible terrorists. The GAO report said there was little science behind how it singled out criminals.
The TSA will now require “all electronics larger than a cell phone” to be removed from carry-on bags and placed in their own separate bin for X-ray screening with nothing on top or below, similar to how laptops have been screened for years. So if you’ve ever gone through security and thought, “Gee, just my laptop, shoes, belt, and coat? I wish I had to remove more items for separate screening,” you’re in luck!
Passengers at domestic airports will now be asked to place their large electronics, such as tablets, e-readers and handheld game consoles, into separate bins for X-ray screening. A similar policy has already applied to laptops for years.
The policy will not apply to passengers enrolled in TSA’s PreCheck program, and there have not been any changes to what is allowed in carry-on bags.
I-cut connects girls at risk of FGM with rescue centres and gives legal and medical help to those who have been cut.
Five Kenyan girls have developed an application that helps fight female genital mutilation (FGM), a prevalent but harmful practice in rural parts of Kenya.
The state's new law to discourage distracted driving closes loopholes against making calls by prohibiting even holding a personal electronic device while stopped in traffic. The law also prohibits eating or applying make-up while driving.
The advent of DNA testing has made it uncomfortably clear that our criminal justice system often gets things wrong. Things go wrong for a variety of reasons, but many of them touch on science, or rather the lack of a scientific foundation for a number of forensic techniques. But in 70 percent of the cases where DNA has overturned a conviction, it also contradicted the testimony of one or more eyewitnesses to the events at issue.
here's general prosecutorial dissatisfaction with the founders' decision to implement due process rights for accused criminals. Flowing from the "limits" of the Fourth Amendment into the Fifth and Sixth, it seems the system is set up for prosecutorial failure. At least, that's the impression you get when you hear prosecutors actively arguing against enshrined rights.
Albuquerque, New Mexico is in the middle of a two-year experiment in case management. Far too often, accused were allowed to languish behind bars until the state decided to begin prosecuting their cases. The right to a speedy trial doesn't seem to be so much a right as an easily-ignored guideline. People lose parts of their lives and, often, their employment for having done nothing more than be accused of committing a crime.
As we noted last week, there are really only two options here. One, the FCC was attacked coincidentally at the same time John Oliver's program aired, it just failed to do any meaningful written analysis of the attack, and has zero interest in being transparent about it. Two, the FCC made up the attack completely to try to deflate all the talk about the "John Oliver effect" in the press, a misguided continuation of the agency's clear desire to downplay the massive public opposition to Pai's plan to kill net neutrality.
Based on the FCC's other recent behaviors in regards to ignoring comment fraud to this same purpose, it's fairly obvious the latter is a very real possibility. But with the FCC refusing to comply to FOIA requests, it's going to take some notable outside pressure to get to the truth. That's not going to be easy given that despite broad bipartisan support for the rules, ISPs have successfully convinced the public this is a partisan issue, which helps them stall meaningful discourse by bogging the entire process down in thinking-optional partisan patty cake.
On April 26, a nonprofit called American Oversight filed a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request asking the FCC for all records related to communications on net neutrality between Internet service providers and Chairman Ajit Pai or Pai's staff. The group asked for "correspondence, e-mails, telephone call logs, calendar entries, meeting agendas," and any other records of such communications.
The group also asked for similar records related to FCC communications with members of Congress, congressional staff, and members of the media. But American Oversight's lawsuit against the FCC says the commission hasn't complied with the requests.
"Optimization" is just another word for "slowing down, reshaping or degrading your video traffic, over the connection you buy, using the mobile-data plans you pay for," Free Press also said. (DSLReports has a story on the petition.)
US Rep. Michael Doyle (D-Penn.) yesterday accused Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai of pursuing an agenda that harms both consumers and small businesses.
So we've noted repeatedly how major ISPs aren't just pushing to have the FCC kill its existing, popular net neutrality rules. They've also been spending a lot of time and money pushing loyal politicians to support the crafting of a new net neutrality law as a replacement. Why? They know that if Congress is even capable of shrugging off its dysfunction and corruption to craft one, AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Charter lawyers and lobbyists will be the ones writing it.
So we've noted for years now how incumbent ISPs love to breathlessly insist that net neutrality protections "stifled broadband industry investment," despite the fact that publicly-available SEC filings, earnings reports, and the ISPs' own public statements on this subject have repeatedly proven this claim false. Traditionally, large ISPs like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Charter have employed industry-friendly economists to massage and cherry pick the data until it looks like a slowdown occurred. But every few months or so a journalist will painstakingly document how this slowdown claim is complete and total bullshit.
While Adobe is finally mercy killing Flash, its multimedia software that helped power countless web applications like games and videos faced but widespread criticism for its rapid decline in usefulness and growing number of security vulnerabilities, some fans want to keep it alive as an open-source project for the future.
This morning, Adobe announced their plans to end support for Flash in late 2020. For Flash developers this will mean transitioning to HTML, as Chrome will increasingly require explicit permission from users to run Flash content until support is removed completely at the end of 2020.
After Adobe's big announcement this morning that they plan to end support for Flash in late 2020, Google Chrome's Anthony Laforge published a blog article asking Flash developers to start transitioning to HTML.
For a long time, Google shipped its Chrome web browser built-in with Flash support, but it now looks like Chrome will slowly start blocking Flash content, require explicit permission from users, until upstream support is terminated three years from now, at the end of 2020. Google, like anyone else on this planet, believe HTML is faster, safer, and more power efficient than Flash, without a doubt.
For many, though, Flash was simply seen at least as a nuisance, and at worst a serious security risk.
Flash-based exploits have circulated for years, in a game of cat-and-mouse between hackers and Adobe itself. Apple's Steve Jobs famously banned Flash from the iPhone, claiming that Flash hurt battery life and also was a security risk. [...]
Tech firms have long been hammering nail's into its coffin, too, and back in 2010, Steve Jobs famously penned a letter that called for the demise of Adobe Flash in favour of a shift to open web standards.
Adobe Systems has said that it plans to phase out its Flash Player plug-in by the end of 2020.
The technology was once one of the most widely used ways for people to watch video clips and play games online.
But it also attracted much criticism, particularly as flaws in its code meant it became a popular way for hackers to infect computers.
In a Reuters poll of analysts, Nokia's networks sales are seen falling 3 percent in the second quarter from a year ago, while revenues from its technologies unit, including patent royalties, are seen up 40 percent following the deal with Apple.
Last week, Malone announced that he had received what appeared to be a legal demand e-mail from Darden, Olive Garden’s parent company, claiming alleged trademark infringement, because he used the phrase "Olive Garden" on his website. Malone ridiculed the demand in a response that he posted publicly, in which he accurately described the concept of "nominative fair use"—the trademark equivalent of fair use in copyright law.
In Finland, tens of thousands of people face demands for cash settlements for alleged copyright infringement. The mass influx of piracy threats has triggered alarm bells at Finnish authorities and organizations, with the Government actively finding ways to defuse the situation.