Thus, surprisingly, at its core a slot machine is roughly the same as a desktop PC running desktop games with a few extra peripherals. This means is that Linux desktop gaming has been mainstream among the general Finnish population for 15 years, which is roughly the amount of time these slot machines have been deployed.
In addition to the games themselves, the development environment is also 100% Linux. As a demonstration, here is a screen shot of a development version of the software running on a developer workstation.
We focus so often on technical anti-patterns, neglecting similar problems inside our social structures. Spoiler alert: the solutions to many difficulties that seem technical can be found by examining our interactions with others. Let's talk about five things you'll want to know when working with those pesky creatures known as humans.
The Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) updates have finally been submitted for the Linux 4.16 kernel, which were delayed due to an illness by the subsystem's maintainer.
Theââ¬â¹ OPNFV Projectââ¬â¹ recently announced the OPNFV Verified Program (OVP)ââ¬â¹ in an effort to ease the adoption of commercial network functions virtualization (NFV) products. The purpose of the program, according to OPNFV, is to help operators establish entry criteria for their proof of concepts (POCs) and request for proposals (RFPs).
Last week the big DRM feature update for Linux 4.16 was sent in that included many AMDGPU updates, AMDKFD HSA updates, better Intel Cannonlake graphics support, Jetson TX2 display support, MSM DEVFREQ handling, and much more. But missing were any open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver changes. There is now a secondary DRM pull request with Nouveau updates.
The fourth release candidate for Mesa 18.0.0 is now available.
Mesa 18.0, the first new Mesa 3D release of 2018, is coming up quite soon while today brings the fourth release candidate.
Mesa 18.0-RC4 has around two dozen fixes including several RADV fixes, a few R600 Gallium3D fixes, some Meson build system updates, a handful of Intel i965 OpenGL and ANV Vulkan driver updates, and various other improvements.
As part of his ongoing contract work for improving virtual reality head-mounted display (VR HMD) support on the Linux desktop, now that his DRM leasing and other X.Org Server / kernel level work is getting in order, Keith Packard sent out a set of patches implementing direct display extensions for Mesa's Radeon RADV and Intel ANV Vulkan drivers.
With the Gallium3D OpenGL on-disk shader cache most notably used right now by the RadeonSI driver, TGSI is the intermediate representation currently being cached to the disk for speeding up game load times, etc. Given the RadeonSI NIR back-end continuing to mature, Timothy Arceri of Valve has added NIR caching support.
LunarG today has begun shipping an updated version of their SDK based against the upstream and current Vulkan 1.0.68 specification.
With many of you likely upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS upon release and the recommendation to use disk encryption as important as ever on any important system especially laptops/ultrabooks, here are some fresh benchmarks using a development snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 "Bionic Beaver" and looking at the current performance overhead of using the current "home directory encryption" and "full disk encryption" options available to Ubuntu Linux users.
With more than one hundred different benchmarks, here are some fresh tests of the Core i9 7980XE and Ryzen Threadripper 1950X boxes when running on the Linux 4.15.2 stable kernel atop a daily snapshot of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
For those curious about how the CPU performance is on Linux 4.15 following the Spectre and Meltdown mitigation work, in the days ahead will be a larger CPU comparison using the latest kernel release. For those wondering about the Linux 4.15 + Ubuntu 18.04 performance for high-end desktop platforms, I ran a larger comparison of tests just on the Core i9 7980XE and Threadripper 1950X systems.
Becoming a maintainer of a FOSS project is not easy. It requires much more than just code skills. It’s about responsibility, product management, vision, community and hard work in long-term.
Becoming a maintainer of a FOSS project like Nautilus is even harder, it requires a sense of what being used by millions of people and delivering to business entitles. It also requires understanding the complexity of a file manager, and the old code that lies behind.
Now, becoming maintainer of a project that already has a maintainer working full time on it… that’s a different level.
Python is a general-purpose programming language for building anything; from backend web development, data analysis, artificial intelligence to scientific computing. It can also be used for developing productivity software, games, desktop apps and beyond.
It’s easy to learn, has a clean syntax and indentation structure. And an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) can, to some extend, determine ones programming experience when it comes to learning or developing using any language.
Persepolis is a very good replacement to Internet Download Manager (IDM) for GNU/Linux. Persepolis Download manager (PDM) is free software, with high-speed downloading, with nice user interface similar to IDM, and integration to web browser. Persepolis supports scheduling and bulk downloading as well. This guide is a short tutorial covering how to install Persepolis, downloading files and videos with it, and finally bulk downloading, basically things everyone needs the most out of a download manager. So, give it a try and be happy!
Signal is a well encrypted and open-source instant messaging application and it is available for Android, iOS, Windows, GNU/Linux, and macOS.
It features a clean and modern design (which is either mostly minimalist or flat design these days). Its controls are easy to access and it has a familiar working environment across platforms so users will not find it difficult to use.
VLC 3.0.0 is the first version of "Vetinari" branch of our popular media player.
As expected, the VLC 3.0 media player is now available!
VLC Chromecast support arrives in VLC 3.0, as do many other features! In this post we take a look at 5 changes that make this VLC release worth downloading.
fter many months of hard work, VideoLAN announced today the release and general availability of the VLC 3.0 open-source media player for all supported platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.
Dubbed "Vetinari," VLC 3.0 is probably the biggest update ever of the VLC Media Player application used by millions of computer and mobile users worldwide. It comes with numerous modern features and technologies, including support for Apple's iPhone X, 360-degree video playback, 3D audio support, and HDR video support.
VLC 3.0 also supports 4K and 8K playback by enabling hardware decoding by default, supports 10bits videos, allows audio passthrough for HD audio codecs, can play BD-J Blu-Ray Java menus, supports browsing of NAS (Network-attached storage) and local network drives like FTP, SFTP, and SMB, as well as streaming to Google Chromecast devices.
VideoLAN today launched version 3.0 of its media player across all major desktop and mobile platforms: Windows (ARM, x86, x64), macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, Android TV, Apple TV, and Chrome OS. The world’s most used media player that plays everything just got even better. You can download the new version now: Android, iOS, and everything else.
support for Chromecast, 360-degree video, 3D Audio, and a tweaked UI.
It took the VideoLAN developers several years of development to leave the ageing v2 releases of their VLC player behind and release a shiny new version ‘3’. This is also the first version which unifies the releases for all platforms the player can run on. Lots of changes went under the hood and I encourage you to read the release notes. The new release contains working ChromeCast support using a software stack the developers wrote from scratch, where the video’s you cast are transcoded on the fly if necessary. The UPnP support which was broken for many years, has been re-written and finally works again, so that you can watch the movies you make available on your LAN using for instance Plex or Universal Media Server.
A strange trend has surfaced in which everyone suddenly wants to use OpenStack, even if it is only to manage a few virtual machines (VMs). OpenStack projects that are launched without any other motivation typically disappear again very quickly, especially when the company realizes the overhead it is taking on with OpenStack.
Without a doubt, if you only want to manage a few VMs, you are significantly better off with a typical virtualization manager than with a tool designed to support the operation of a public cloud platform. Although classic VM managers are wallflowers compared with the popular cloud solutions, they still exist and are very successful. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) enjoys a popularity similar to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 12, to which you can add extensions for high availability (HA) and which supports alternative storage solutions.
I take screenshots more than I do real photos, and I’m a reporter for my college newspaper, as well as have my portfolio etc. That said, I’ve had my share of ups and downs with different software, and have come to find two programs that adore, when using a GNU/Linux system; Shutter and Gyazo.
Both of these programs take screenshots, and do various things with them, but they are drastically different and therefore serve quite different purpose in why I use them.
Shutter, I tend to use when writing articles, or any work that requires me to need the screenshot on my local drive, perhaps to be emailed off or uploaded somewhere. Gyazo, I use when I need to quickly send a screenshot of a funny thing that happened in a game, or of something I found on a website, or anything where it’s just “Hey take a look at this!”
My company, QvarnLabs Ab, has today released the first alpha version of our new product, Qvisqve. Below is the press release. I wrote pretty much all the code, and it's free software (AGPL+).
Zero-K is a game where teams of robots fight for metal, energy and dominance. They use any strategy, tactic or gimmick known to machine. Zero-K is a game for players by players, and it runs natively on GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows.
Zero-K runs on the Spring Real Time Strategy Game engine, which is the same engine that powers Evolution RTS and Kernel Panic the game. Many consider Zero-K to be a spiritual successor to Supreme Commander and Total Annihilation. Zero-K also has a large and supportive player and developer community.
When you first open the game, you'll see a panel that shows you what is going on in the Zero-K community.
Descenders [Steam, Official Site] is an extreme downhill biking game that sees you pulling off some sick back-flips while trying not to land on your face, it's now in Early Access with Linux support. Here's some initial thoughts.
With every new generation of gaming hardware, hackers set about trying to crack the software, take control of the system, and run their own programs. This typically begins with attempting to get a version of Linux running, and for the Nintendo Switch, it hasn't taken very long to achieve.
Nintendo hit a real home run with the Switch. It’s selling like hotcakes and people love the fact that they can take their gaming console with them wherever they go.
And pretty soon, those same people might be able to boot up a Debian instance on it. Thanks to the persistence and hard work of the fail0verflow crew it may be possible to run a full Linux-based OS on your Switch in the very near future.
Train Station Simulator [Steam, Official Site], the Early Access game where you build and manage your own station has now officially added Linux support.
Attack of the Earthlings [Steam, Official Site], a new strategy game from Monstrum creator Team Junkfish plays like a reverse XCOM and it's pretty good.
Valve has added support for the AMD/GPUOpen TrueAudio Next within the latest beta of SteamAudio 2.0.
Steam Audio as a refresher is Valve's full-featured spatial audio solution designed for VR and gaming audio in general. Steam Audio can be enabled into Unreal Engine 4, Unity, and other game engines with also having a C API. SteamAudio does support Linux.
Hacker group fail0verflow shared a photo of a Nintendo Switch running Debian, a distribution of Linux (via Nintendo Life). The group claims that Nintendo can’t fix the vulnerability with future firmware patches.
For as long as consoles have been around, people have been hacking them. Nintendo in particular has a long and storied history with hackers, especially with its more modern consoles. Healthy homebrew scenes popped up around the Wii, DS, and 3DS, and now that the Switch is on the scene, hackers have turned their attention to it.
Hacking group fail0verflow has discovered a vulnerability in Nintendo Switch that allows the installation of Linux, basically opening the door to something that the parent company hoped it’d never come true: pirated games.
In a post on Twitter earlier this week, fail0verflow revealed that Nintendo Switch comes with a bug that cannot be fixed with firmware updates and which can be abused at any moment to install Linux.
Storytelling is an innate part of human nature. It's an idle pastime, it's an art form, it's a communication tool, it's a form of therapy and bonding. We all love to tell stories—you're reading one now—and the most powerful technologies we have are generally the things that enable us to express our creative ideas. The open source project Twine is a tool for doing just that.
Twine is an interactive story generator. It uses HTML, CSS, and Javascript to create self-contained adventure games, in the spirit of classics like Zork and Colossal Cave. Since Twine is largely an amalgamation of several open technologies, it is flexible enough to do a lot of multimedia tricks, rendering games a lot more like HyperCard than you might normally expect from HTML.
On February 15th, Unearned Bounty [Steam] a free-for-all multiplayer naval combat game will release on Steam with Linux support, it will also be free.
While the game is planned to be free, I've read that the only items you will be able to purchase are entirely cosmetic, so winning will still be down to your skill.
Oxygen Not Included [Steam] is such an addictive game it's quite crazy and the Occupational Upgrade seems to be pretty good.
PocketSprite is a new tiny retro handheld games system, which has this week launched via the Crowd Supply crowdfunding website, and has already nearly raised its required $20,000 pledge goal. Thanks to over 380 backers with still 41 days remaining on its campaign. The tiny keychain PocketSprite games console comes pre-loaded with two emulators in the form of the GNUBoy and SMS Plus. Allowing you to play “every single game” from the Nintendo Game Boy, Nintendo Game Boy Color, Sega Master System and Sega Game Gear consoles.
These days, dipping into the nostalgia pool is a surefire way to grab the attention of retro preservationists and lovers of geeky gadgetry. Team Pocket’s chibi-sized emulator is a case in point. The PocketSprite, a diminutive, open source emulation device, accomodates your old-school cravings with a lineup of Game Boy, Game Boy Color, Game Gear and Sega Master System Games within a colour OLED display. It doesn’t make sacrifices on framerates, either; Sonic runs loop de loops at 60+ FPS in PocketSprite’s 5:4 aspect ratio.
Interestingly, the PocketSprite isn’t the only pocket-sized GameBoy out there. There’s a slew of competitors, including the PocketStar (which is also crowdfunding on Kickstarter), the Arduino-based 8-bit Arduboy, and the NES-copying BittBoy Mini handheld.
Unlike the “pocket games” of old, which were preloaded with generic, unchangeable random games, PocketSprite lets users upload their own preferred content.
This week Discover gained a lot of little UI polish improvements, and Discover developers also fixed a major crash present in 5.12.
We have released version 2.9.0 of our Qt application introspection tool GammaRay. GammaRay allows you to observe behavior and data structures of Qt code inside your program live at runtime. GammaRay 2.9 introduces a number of new features interesting to Qt Quick, QWidgets, Qt 3D and non-graphical Qt users alike.
“Of course it runs FreeBSD, too” is something I said a lot in the past week (regarding the Pine64, mostly, but also about my Slimbook). I also said “Of course it runs on FreeBSD, too” a lot. Naturally area51, the unofficial KDE-FreeBSD ports tree, contains the latest in released KDE software. Plasma 5.12 and KDE Frameworks 5.42, with Qt 5.9.4. We just bumped Qt to pick up a patch from KDE’s Eike Hein to fix some weird hover behavior. So we’re all up-to-date on the KDE front, and I’ve been running it as my main desktop since the build finished in poudriere.
Taking care of a nearly eight year old feature request, GNOME Shell's Alt-Tab switcher has picked up the ability to close applications, similar to the functionality Apple offers with macOS.
The installation image is actually on the Offensive Security Kali Linux ARM Images page, so don't get confused if you go to the normal Kali Linux Downloads page and don't see it. There is a link to the ARM images near the bottom of that page.
As with most Raspberry Pi installation images, the download is a compressed (xz) snapshot, not an ISO image.
Here we go. This is a short review by my standards, but I did carefully and thoroughly check every single aspect of the desktop experience, in line with my normal testing, I just didn't repeat myself. Everything worked. There were no new problems other than the few small issues we've already seen. And on the bright side, you do get the advantage of even better performance and responsiveness on the new hardware.
While MX-17 Horizon will work perfectly well on ancient rigs, it still gains from new platforms, and lets you take full advantage of its speed. Battery life is also very good. Overall, it's a really top-notch distro, and it didn't botch or falter on two different machines. And as you recall, pretty much EVERY distro that I've tested in the last two and a half years since I've purchased the Lenovo laptop has had some issues, and then when I switched to the LG laptop, then they almost all started having problems there. And it shows it's not hardware that's bad - it's software. Good distros are far and few in between, and MX-17 Horizon is truly a magnificent product. Way to go.
Quirky Linux 8.4 x86_64 is codenamed "Xerus" and is built using the woofQ Quirky Linux build system, with the help of Ubuntu 16.04.3 binary packages. Thus, Xerus has compatibility with all of the Ubuntu repositories. Quirky is a fork of Puppy Linux, and is mainly differentiated by being a "full installation" only, with special snapshot and recovery features, and Service Pack upgrades, though recently there is limited support for live-CD session-saving and "frugal" installation. Version 8.4 has many architectural improvements and package upgrades, including new packages Sakura, Refind, EasyApps, PupControl, VTE and EasyShare. EasyShare is a simple "one top shop" for network file sharing and printing, using Samba and SSHFS. Upgraded applications include Pclock (0.8.2) and seaMonkey (2.49.1). The Linux kernel is now version 4.14.17.
syncOSx86 is based on Android and powered by syncUI (our custom KODI build) - it's designed for ease of use on an HDTV with simple inputs, and is a fresh take on Android UI that I think you'll find interesting if you're a layperson, tinkerer, gamer, or developer.
Arch Anywhere was a distribution aimed at bringing Arch Linux to the masses. Due to a trademark infringement, Arch Anywhere has been completely rebranded to Anarchy Linux. And I’m here to say, if you’re looking for a distribution that will enable you to enjoy Arch Linux, a little Anarchy will go a very long way. This distribution is seriously impressive in what it sets out to do and what it achieves. In fact, anyone who previously feared Arch Linux can set those fears aside… because Anarchy Linux makes Arch Linux easy.
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Follett School Solutions, SIX Group, ZTE Corporation, and Elo are transforming their IT infrastructure and embracing DevOps methodologies by adopting Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform as their enterprise Kubernetes solution of choice. These organizations, spanning each region, are representative of how customers around the world are embracing Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive Kubernetes platform.
Unsurprisingly, Fedora Workstation installs GNOME and a complete desktop environment whereas Server Edition installs a base-system and headless management tools such as the Cockpit server administration web interface.
I reached late on the first day and helped setup the Fedora booth. We had loads of stickers, pens, buttons and stickers in the booth and also a demo system which ran a gaming benchmark program which ran on the open-source graphic drivers. It was nice to see a decent FPS on it but there's a long way to go for Gaming on Linux. That said, the Wine Project is doing a pretty good job supporting Windows binaries, DirectX and other Windows software on Linux.
After a couple of hallway tracks, the first talk I attended was on CHAOSS, an organization which tries to evaluate community health using metrics available within the community. As a person who works on metrics, I understand how important it is to present the right kind of metrics to answer crucial questions about community. Brian Proffitt, a community analyst at Red Hat walked us through on what a healthy community looks like and how to measure community health. While talking about it, he also talked about how important it is to be careful not to gather/leak information about contributors while dealing with sensitive topics such as Diversity and Inclusion. It was a really well-structured talk and gave me new insights about the topic.
Fedora Atomic Workstation is beginning to come together for allowing the core operating system to update atomically as a whole while the desktop applications are expected to be Flatpaks.
Staszek was an active member of the Polish TeX community, and an incredibly valuable TeX Live Team member.
You press a button and it broadcasts a simple message on 433Mhz. There exist very cheap and reliable 433Mhz recievers which you can connect to an arduino, or ESP8266-based device.
I’ve just uploaded a new memo A review of Virtual Labs virtualization solutions for MOOCs in the form of a page on my blog, before I eventually publish something more elaborated (and valuated by peer review).
The decision to switch the display server from Wayland back to Xorg by default for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" was taken a few weeks ago when Canonical's Director of Ubuntu Desktop Will Cooke said the main reasons are the inability for Wayland to support screen sharing and remote desktop services, as well as recoverability from GNOME Shell crashes.
As of today, the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS daily builds are using Xorg as default display server, but you can still use the Wayland session if you manually select it from the login screen. "The default session has now been switched back to use Xorg by default. Wayland is still installed and can be selected from the login screen," says Will Cooke in a recent Ubuntu weekly update.
Ubuntu devs propose shipping Snap apps by default in Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, though decisions need to be made around policy and maintainability first.
Ever since Ubuntu 16.04, which launched just under two years ago, Canonical has made it possible to install snap packages. Snaps are self-contained applications that include dependencies for the software to run, they also bolster security by giving developers more control over the update process and the dependencies. Now, Canonical is trying to formulate policies around snaps which it wants to ship by default in future versions of Ubuntu.
Canonical's Mir developers are working on getting Mir 0.30 release out the door. There has been no public communication whether they will attempt a Mir 1.0 release this cycle after deciding against it the last minute for Ubuntu 17.10 due to their shift in focus.
POP! OS Linux Review. In this For The Record, I take a look at POP! OS, why it’s unique despite being so closely related to Ubuntu and who it’s target market is.
Wincomm announced a pair of Intel 6th Gen based “WPC-766” medical box PCs with IEC-60601-1 electromagnetic certification, 6x COM, 2x GbE, 4x USB 3.0, and 2x mini-PCIe, including a WPC-766E model with PCIe x16 expansion.
If Jeff Bezos' Alexa is too creepy for you, here is an alternative. The Mycroft Mark II voice assistant speaker is on open source device and platform that has successfully launched on Kickstarter. The project reaches of $50,000 the initial funding goal in only 6.5 hours. The Kickstarter raised so far almost $250,000.
A company named Mycroft is hoping to change that, by allowing everyone to create or use complex neural nets and AI, without giving over your personal lives to the gorillas named Amazon, Google, and Apple. Relax, this isn't going to end with Skynet bringing Arnold Schwarzenegger from the future to kill off Emilia Clarke or whoever, this is 700 contributors (so far) who want to free you from the kind of company that would create Skynet.
Each year we attend MWC to show the world what we have been working on hard during the past year, and this year is no exception. In fact, this year we have even more exciting things to announce! For that, visit us during the event, follow us on our social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Diaspora* in order to receive the latest and greatest from Jolla and Sailfish OS!
This has been revealed after some code digging done (or APK teardown) by Android Police. Some intriguing findings suggest features like sending messages from PC, scanning QR code, connecting PC app to phone, multiple browser support, etc.
You've seen it done for Allo, and now it's going to happen for Android Messages! Google is developing a web interface to run on a desktop or laptop, and it will pair with your phone for sending messages. Internally, the codename for this feature is "Ditto," but it looks like it will be labeled "Messages for web" when it launches.
In the cross-platform and web development sector, Angular/angular-cli repositories saw the most growth at 2.2x more users in 2017 than in 2016, the post said. Other Angular projects, Facebook's React and Electron, were also popular.
Developers are also heading to the site to look at deep learning projects as artificial intelligence continues to grow. Two TensorFlow repositories grew—TensorFlow/models saw 5.5x more traffic and TensorFlow/TensorFlow saw 2.2x more traffic in 2017 than in 2016.
The company also found an increase interest in deep learning. “Across multiple industries, artificial intelligence is solving a host of complex and interesting problems. You’ve helped drive that interest by upping your contributions to and visits to projects like Keras-team/Keras and Mozilla/DeepSpeech. TensorFlow/TensorFlow had 2.2 times more visits in 2017 than in 2016,” the company wrote in a post.
Last year, GitHub brought 24 million people from almost 200 countries together to code better and build bigger. From frameworks to data visualizations across more than 25 million repositories, you were busy in 2017—and the activity is picking up even more this year. With 2018 well underway, we're using contributor, visitor, and star activity to identify some trends in open source projects for the year ahead.
ut I did not start writing voluntarily. The tl;dr: of it is that my colleagues at Linux New Media eventually talked me into launching our first blog on the Linux Pro Magazine site. And as it turns out, it was one of the best career decisions I've ever made. I would not be working on Opensource.com today had I not started writing about what other people in open source were doing all those years ago.
Imagine releasing a major new infrastructure service based on open source software only to discover that the product you deployed had evolved so quickly that the documentation for the version you released is no longer available. At Bloomberg, we experienced this problem firsthand in our deployment of OpenStack. In late 2016, we spent six months testing and rolling out Liberty on our OpenStack environment. By that time, Liberty was about a year old, or two versions behind the latest build.
[...]
There is a solid model for how this should happen. We recently joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, part of The Linux Foundation.
Hello everyone! I’m writing this following a visit to Brussels this past weekend to the Free and Open Source Software conference called FOSDEM. As far as I know it is one of the largest, if not the largest FOSS conference in Europe. It proved to be a great opportunity to discuss Thunderbird with a wide range of contributors, users, and interested developers – and the feedback I received at the event was fantastic (and helpful)!
First, some background, the Thunderbird team was stationed in the Mozilla booth, on the second floor of building K. We were next to the Apache Software Foundation and the Kopano Collaborative software booths (the Kopano folks gave us candy with “Mozilla” printed on it – very cool). We had hundreds of people stop by the booth and I got to ask a bunch of them about what they thought of Thunderbird. Below are some insights I gained from talking to the FOSDEM attendees.
Linux networking maintainer David Miller has put out a call for proposals for a two-day networking track at this year's Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC). "We are seeking talks of 40 minutes in length, accompanied by papers of 2 to 10 pages in length." The deadline for proposals is July 11. LPC will be held November 13-15 in Vancouver and the networking track will be held the first two days.
Providing conference childcare isn’t difficult or expensive, and it makes a huge difference for parents of young children who might want to come. If your community wants to (visibly!) support work-life balance and family obligations — which, by the way, still disproportionately impact women — I urge you to look into providing event childcare. I don’t have kids myself — but a lot of my friends do, and someday I might. I’ve seen too many talented colleagues silently drop out of the conference scene and fade out of the community because they needed to choose between logistics for the family they loved and logistics for the work they loved — and there are simple things we can do to make it easier for them to stay.
As the talks within WebGPU community group progress, it becomes apparent that the disagreements lie in more domains than simply technical. It’s about what the Web is today, and what we want it to become tomorrow.
For the longest time I've used vertical tabs in Firefox and I still find it odd that people don't use it more. It's a simple fact that a horizontal tab strip doesn't scale too well when you get lots of tabs.
Will posted a great article a couple weeks ago, Giving and Receiving Help at Mozilla. I have been meaning to write a similar article for a while now. His post finally pushed me over the edge.
Be sure to read Will's post first. The rest of this article is an addendum to his post.
PostgreSQL 10.2 was released yesterday, which includes numerous bug and security fixes: "This release fixes two security issues" as well as "issues found with VACUUM, GIN and hash indexes, parallel query, logical replication, and other bugs reported over the past three months. All users using the affected versions of PostgreSQL should update as soon as possible."
A bit earlier than expected, the first point release of the LibreOffice 6.0 open-source and cross-platform office suite popped up today on the official channels for all supported platforms, along with the fifth maintenance update to the LibreOffice 5.4 series.
LibreOffice 6.0.1 and 5.4.5 are now available for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms with various bug and regression fixes. While a total of 75 issues were fixed in the first point of LibreOffice 6.0, the LibreOffice 5.4.5 update addresses about 69 bugs across several components of the open-source office suite. Also, the LibreOffice 6.0.1 includes an important security patch.
This code, named Waltz, lets firms bring together information about its applications and which data it pulls from all across its technology footprint globally. It categorizes the applications by determining the country it serves, products it trades, legal entities it reports to and other queries so banks have a clearer picture of the applications it has and what data it ingests.
Coinbase has launched the Coinbase Open Source Fund from which we’ll be donating $2500 each month to open source projects. According to its blog, Coinbase also began “as a humble Rails project” and has relied on open source software to build its systems and products.
The startup raises $10 million in a bid to bring more control to Docker and Kubernetes cloud-native application data management.
[...]
While dotmesh is intended to help enable data control in a cloud-native environment, the project is not currently part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). The CNCF itself is a Linux Foundation effort and is home to Kubernetes and multiple other cloud-native open-source projects. Marsden said that while dotmesh is not currently part of the CNCF, the work his company is doing is sympathetic to the goals of the CNCF, which are to build cloud-agnostic software.
The Open Source Initiative is celebrating its 20th Anniversary in 2018 as the term was coined in a session held on February 3rd, 1998 in Palo Alto, California.
In the last 20 years, the initiative has come a long way. Acknowledging the importance of'open source initiative' which continues to play in our lives and to enable open discussion on the challenges that exist and to work out strategies to iron them out, Bharat Exhibition organised an 'Open Source Summit 2018' in New Delhi on February 08, 2018.
This event was endorsed and supported by Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), Red Hat and Microsoft.
‘Sundar’ is designed by K.H. Hussain — known for his work on Rachana and Meera fonts which comes pre-installed with most Linux distributions; and Narayana Bhattathiri — known for his beautiful calligraphy and lettering in Malayalam script.
Fee awards under anti-SLAPP are mandatory and they are meant to deter unnecessary suits like this one–to protect everyone’s freedoms to engage in public debate without fear of being sued.
Generally, I would prefer not to talk about a lawsuit in progress. My desire to keep the Open Source community informed is my reason for making this statement. Unfortunately, I will not be able to make any further statements about the case for now.
A new project has been launched by the University of Sydney, ErasmusMC and the Drugs for Neglected Disease Initiative to help find compounds that could lead to the treatment of fungal mycetoma.
Mycetoma Open Source (MycetOS) will look for new ways to treat the neglected tropical infectious disease, which causes devastating deformities by attacking the skin, deep muscle and bone.
The current antifungal treatment is reportedly expensive, toxic and ineffective, with only a 25-35% cure rate.
From where I'm standing, I can see Tom twice. The broad-shouldered sales manager is standing next to me, beaming as he watches himself—because he’s also opposite me, as a hologram on his phone, wearing a Liverpool jersey and bouncing a soccer ball between his knees. "So embarrassing," he protests. "I haven’t played soccer in so long."
Scientists have successfully produced human kidney tissue within a living organism which is able to produce urine, a first for medical science.
The study led by Professors Sue Kimber and Adrian Woolf from The University of Manchester, signifies a significant milestone in the development of treatment for kidney disease.
The Medical Research Council and Kidney Research UK funded project is published in the journal Stem Cell Reports.
What if you could grow vegetables in half the time? What if a surgeon could see cancerous cells throughout an entire operation? What if solar panels could become significantly cheaper and easier to make?
All of these improvements and more could come in the near future, thanks to the same tech that helps your TV create lavish and realistic colors. Quantum dots in TVs increase efficiency, create wider color gamuts and improve light output, and soon they'll improve image quality even more.
If there’s something we learned in the last couple of years about smartphones, it’s that we should always keep an eye on them, especially when charging, as the current battery technologies that are being used could catch fire at any moment, eventually posing as a threat to our lives.
And now it turns out we should do the same thing with headphones given this new wireless trend that Apple is aggressively pushing for, as the company’s new AirPods have recently been involved in a terrifying incident.
The chemists have found a way to simultaneously control the orientation and select the size of single-walled carbon nanotubes deposited on a surface. That means the developers of semiconductors can use carbon as opposed to silicon, which will reduce the size and increase the speed of the devices while improving their battery life.
"We're reaching the limits of what's physically possible with silicon-based devices," said co-author Derek Schipper, Canada Research Chair Organic Material Synthesis at the University of Waterloo. "Not only would single-walled carbon nanotube-based electronics be more powerful, they would also consume less power."
Philosophers and mystics have long contemplated the disconcerting notion that the fixed self is an illusion. Neuroscientists now think they can prove it or, at least, help us glimpse this truth with some help from psilocybin, the psychoactive property in magic mushrooms.
Researchers around the world are exploring the drug’s transformative power to help people quit smoking; lower violent crime; treat depression, anxiety. and post-traumatic stress disorder; and trigger lasting spiritual epiphanies in psychologically healthy people, especially when coupled with meditation or contemplative training.
Livestock raised for food in the US are dosed with five times as much antibiotic medicine as farm animals in the UK, new data has shown, raising questions about rules on meat imports under post-Brexit trade deals.
The difference in rates of dosage rises to at least nine times as much in the case of cattle raised for beef, and may be as high as 16 times the rate of dosage per cow in the UK. There is currently a ban on imports of American beef throughout Europe, owing mainly to the free use of growth hormones in the US.
Zerodium is offering $45,000 to hackers willing to privately report zero-day vulnerabilities in the Linux operating system.
On Thursday, the private exploit acquisition program announced the new addition to its bounties on Twitter. Until 31 March, Zerodium is willing to offer increased payouts of up to $45,000 for local privilege escalation (LPE) exploits.
If you are a KDE user and haven't yet upgraded to Plasma 5.12, you may want to do so soon, or one of the recent point releases -- especially if your system is potentially accessible by others to insert rogue flash/memory devices.
Plasma 5 versions prior to 5.12.0 are vulnerable to CVE-2018-6791 which is a vulnerability for arbitrary command execution by way of the removable device notifier.
As per the police records obtained by TMZ, about 40,000 pictures and videos of Mikaela were stolen from her iCloud account. After that, the hackers uploaded 119 private photos and videos to a website known for sharing Fappening leaks in the past.
Even IBM System/390 "Linux on z" systems are prone to the Spectre security vulnerability. But with Linux 4.16, s390 is getting its initial Spectre Variant One and Two mitigation.
At this point, Radiflow's investigation indicates that the cryptocurrency mining malware was likely downloaded from a malicious advertising site. As such, the theory that Kfir has is that an operator at the water utility was able to open a web browser and clicked on an advertising link that led the mining code being installed on the system. The actual system that first got infected is what is known as a Human Machine Interface (HMI) to the SCADA network and it was running the Microsoft Windows [...]
Windows malware that mines for cryptocurrencies has, for the first time, been found in the network of an industrial control system at an operational treatment plant for a water utility, Radiflow, a security provider for critical infrastructure, says.
The tech website Motherboard has asked London's Metropolitan Police Service and an independent government organisation to institute a probe into why an MPS officer bought malware that can intercept messages on Facebook, steal passwords and operate a smartphone camera remotely.
London police have refused to explain why an officer bought powerful spyware that was marketed for spying on a user's spouse.
When Cisco officials disclosed the bug last week in a range of Adaptive Security Appliance products, they said they had no evidence anyone was actively exploiting it. Earlier this week, the officials updated their advisory to indicate that was no longer the case.
LibreOffice through 6.0.1 allows remote attackers to read arbitrary files via =WEBSERVICE calls in a document, which use the COM.MICROSOFT.WEBSERVICE function.
Chris Vickery and the Upguard team have had a busy week, exposing not one but two cases where companies are storing material online in Amazon S3 buckets without proper safeguards.
On Monday, he outed Octoly, a Paris-based brand marketing company that chucks freebie goodies at social media influencers in exchange for getting positive press coverage. Unfortunately, the agency left the contact details for 12,000 of these hipsters-for-hire online for all to see.
(For the record, it should be pointed out that we at El Reg never provide positive coverage in exchange for freebies. We'll happy let a PR buy us a drink or six, or a slap-up steak meal, or a trip to Hawaii, but that's not reflected in our copy.)
President Moon Jae-in said at a carefully planned dinner to honor Kim Yong Nam, the North Korean president’s sister, and Vice President Mike Pence that he hoped the Winter Olympics would be remembered as the “day peace began.” But Vice President Pence did his best to make sure that did not happen, missing the opportunity to further peace on the peninsula created by Moon. Dismissing the historic opening created by North and South Korea, Pence handled the situation instead like a childish teenager.
At a dinner reception where President Moon sought an opportunity for dialogue between U.S. officals and North Koreans, Pence went through great – and somewhat awkward – lengths to avoid talking to them. According to Reuters, when Pence arrived late to the reception he told Moon he planned to leave directly after a photo session but Moon asked him to “come and say hello to friends.” Moon was trying to create a dialogue to advance peace but Pence went around the table and shook hands with everyone except Kim Yong Nam of North Korea.
No court has ever addressed the government’s justifications for military force in so many places. Now, one will.
The United States’ war with al-Qaida has gone on so long, and has metastasized into so many different uses of U.S. armed forces around the globe, that it may be surprising to learn that the federal courts have only addressed the legality of a very small piece of it.
After the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed a statute authorizing the executive branch to use military force against those groups directly connected to the attacks: al-Qaida and the Taliban. But today, the United States claims the authority to use armed force under that statute not just in Afghanistan, but also in Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and Syria — against not just al-Qaida and the Taliban, but also al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Shabab in Somalia, and now the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
But no court has ever addressed the government’s legal justifications for military action in so many different parts of the world. Now, in a case brought by the ACLU, one court will. The federal district court in Washington, D.C., will address whether the executive branch can use its elastic and open-ended assertion of wartime authority to imprison indefinitely an American citizen with no connection to 9/11.
If one could adjectivize the president, there has never been anything Trumpier than Donald Trump's posture on nuclear weapons. It's an issue where he embraces contradictory thoughts in the same breath with routine. In candidate Trump's debate with Hillary Clinton on September 26, 2016, he said, "I would certainly not do first strike" and "I can't take anything off the table" within the space of seconds. In between, he pulled a Reagan and told a homespun tale on the subject, except his made no sense. "I looked the other night, I was seeing B-52s," he said (where? In his head? On Sixth Avenue?). "They're old enough that your father, your grandfather could be flying them," he added. "We are not keeping up with other countries."
So when I say that Fox News may have received a tip straight from the Kremlin, I mean Wikileaks—which is inextricably linked to Russian intelligence (quick side note: a lot of those on the left have come to admire Wikileaks for exposing government malfeasance, and bristle at the notion that they have become a Russian disinformation outlet. If you think this to be the case—and that everything Wikileaks publishes is real and earnest—then you must also believe that per their dump of his e-mails, John Podesta is aware of “nonviolent extraterrestrial intelligence from the contiguous universe helping us bring zero point energy to Earth.”)
In a groundbreaking ruling, the UK Supreme Court has said diplomatic cables leaked to WikiLeaks by whistleblower Chelsea Manning are admissible.
“The Supreme Court unanimously holds that the [WikiLeaks] cable should have been admitted into evidence," the bench ruled on Thursday, with five of the seven judges going against the lower court’s decision.
The ruling comes as a form of vindication for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who tweeted that it was a “big win… that will affect many court proceedings around the world: leaked diplomatic cables are admissible as evidence.”
Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the left populist La France Insoumise party in France's National Assembly, has urged the French government to provide Wikileaks founder Julian Assange with political asylum.
In a press release published on his official blog, the politician urged Paris to "intervene and offer political asylum to Julian Assange" amid the ongoing injustice surrounding his detention by the British justice system.
The CIA is spectacularly terrible at responding to FOIA requests. It's so bad it's highly possible the perceived ineptness is deliberate. The CIA simply does not want to release documents. If it can't find enough FOIA exemptions to throw at the requester, it gets creative.
A FOIA request for emails pertaining to the repeated and extended downtime suffered by the (irony!) CIA's FOIA request portal was met with demands for more specifics from the requester. The CIA wanted things the requester would only know after receiving the emails he requested, like senders, recipients, and email subject lines.
The CIA sat on another records request for six years before sending a letter to the requester telling him the request would be closed if he did not respond. To be fair, the agency had provided him a response of sorts five years earlier: a copy of his own FOIA request, claiming it was the only document the agency could locate containing the phrase "records system."
In yet another example of CIA deviousness, the agency told a requester the documents requested would take 28 years and over $100,000 to compile. Then it went even further. During the resulting FOIA lawsuit, the DOJ claimed the job was simply too impossible to undertake. Less than 2 months after MuckRock's successful lawsuit, the entire database went live at the CIA's website -- more than 27 years ahead of schedule.
The two largest teachers unions in the U.S. were blocked from delivering “failing” report cards to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Thursday.
The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and the National Education Association (NEA) were among the groups that attempted to deliver more than 80,000 report cards to DeVos grading her performance during her first year in the job.
The bogus invitation could be a ruse by traders seeking to profit from a further decline in cryptocurrencies including bitcoin on the futures market, analysts said.
Amazon.com Inc. is preparing to launch a delivery service for businesses, positioning it to compete directly with United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp.
Nearly five months after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico, more than a hundred thousand US citizens there still lack clean drinking water, and almost one-third of the island has no reliable electric power. As initial life-sustaining recovery efforts still grind toward completion, Puerto Rico’s Gov. Ricardo Rosselló has wasted no time using his territory’s recovery as an opportunity to push a number of policy proposals right out of the “disaster capitalism” playbook: from privatizing the island’s power utility to converting nearly all of its public schools to charters.
And while the mainstream US press has been mainly focused on the Trump administration’s woeful institutional response to the storm, it has barely noticed this much more radical political transformation of Puerto Rico, and the potentially disastrous long-term consequences for the citizens who live there.
Ever since Maria made landfall on September 20, the corporate press has been neglecting the island in its coverage. Despite ranking second behind 2005’s Hurricane Katrina for property damage and lives lost, Maria has drawn markedly less media attention than the two major hurricanes that preceded it last summer. For example, according to a survey by the Tyndall Report, broadcast network evening news reports in 2017 devoted 30 percent less coverage to the aftermath of Maria than to Houston’s recovery from Hurricane Harvey. Likewise, Maria drew 12 percent less evening news coverage than Hurricane Irma’s devastation of Florida and the US Virgin Islands.
Jared Kushner’s family real estate company has backtracked on its effort to have a lawsuit filed against it by tenants of its Baltimore-area apartment complexes moved to federal court, after a judge ruled that this transfer would require it to reveal the identities of its investment partners.
The tenants’ class-action lawsuit was filed in the Circuit Court for Baltimore City in September, four months after a ProPublica article co-published with the New York Times Magazine described the highly aggressive tactics used by Kushner Companies to pursue tenants and former tenants over allegedly unpaid rent or broken leases. The lawsuit alleged that Kushner Companies, which owns 15 large apartment complexes in the Baltimore area, was improperly piling late fees and court fees onto tenants’ bills, often in excess of state limits, and using the threat of immediate eviction to force payment.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post reports dozens of other White House employees lack permanent security clearances as they pursue FBI approval to handle sensitive information. Among them is Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, who failed to report over 100 foreign contacts on his initial application, which he has since revised three times.
When I voted to leave the European Union in June 2016, I did so with the best of intentions. I knew that the vote would be close, even if it was 45%-55% to Leave, I asked myself how could the narrow minority on the other side be completely forgotten? Surely we would remain in the Single Market, enjoy all the of benefits of a Norway style Brexit - the free movement of goods, services, capital and people while getting rid of some of the bad aspects of EU membership, such as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), questionable accountability and the inherent democratic deficit within its institutions, as well as regaining the ability to choose which laws we pass at a national level.
I was optimistic about the future of Britain. Free from the shackles of the vast majority of future EU regulation at a domestic level while safeguarding our place within the EEA, Britain would flourish by signing new trade deals across the world, lowering our tariffs across the board and utilising the strength of our soft power to become a greater player on the world stage.
Russian security officials arrested a number of scientists working at a secret Russian nuclear weapons facility for allegedly using lab equipment to mine for cryptocurrencies, according to Russia's Interfax News Agency .
The engineers arrested in the incident were working at the All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics (RFNC-VNIIEF). No official criminal charges have been announced and law enforcement has not said how many members of the operation were detained.
Artec plans to assemble the main element of its Boxer vehicle at Pearson Engineering’s factory in northeast England ââ¬â¢ that is if the British Ministry of Defence hands the German company a deal to supply several hundred of the eight-wheel drive armored personnel carriers to the British Army.
When Snap reported “earnings” this week – in quotes because it was its biggest loss ever – media headlines were euphoric, from TechCrunch (“Snap shares skyrocket on first earnings beat with revived user growth”) to The Wall Street Journal (“Snap Climbs Back Above IPO Price After ‘Shocker’ Earnings”).
The theory was that Snap had reported “better-than-expected earnings.” Thanks to these headlines, over February 7 and 8, Snap shares skyrocketed 48% to $20.75, though they have fallen off somewhat since then.
In the past, if you wanted to change the world, you had to pass a law or start a war. Now you create a hashtag. Ethan Zuckerman studies how people change the world, or attempt to, by using social media or other technological means. As director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT and an associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, he tries to help his students make sense of these issues. Zuckerman is also writing a book about civic engagement during a time when we have a lot less trust in institutions—government, businesses, banks, and so on. Maybe that lack of trust is reasonable. After all, we’ve spent the last decade-plus slowly turning our data over to large corporations like Facebook and Google without quite realizing we were doing it. Zuckerman knows what it’s like to build technology that pisses a lot of people off. Back in the 1990s he created what became one of the most hated objects on the internet: the pop-up ad. The aim was to show an ad on a web page without making it look as though the advertiser necessarily endorsed the content on the page. “Our intentions,” he later wrote in an apology to the internet at large, “were good.” Zuckerman spoke with MIT Technology Review about how social media started controlling us rather than the other way around.
The goal of our culture now is not the emancipation of the individual from the group, but the permanent definition of the individual by the group. We used to call this bigotry. Now we call it being woke. You see: We are all on campus now.
The regulation would allow the RTUK watchdog to halt audio and video material streamed online, social media posts and films offered by Internet-based providers like Netflix if they are deemed a threat to national security or moral values.
Yesterday Nick Timothy, Theresa May's former aide, was accused of using an antisemitic slur in his article on Brexit. He co-authored a Telegraph report titled, George Soros, the man who 'broke the Bank of England', backing secret plot to thwart Brexit.
Not only did Timothy not criticise Soros as a Jew, he didn’t even refer to him as a Jew. But it seems the fact that Soros is a Jew was enough to censure Timothy as an ‘antisemite.’ It took no more.
Stephen Bush wrote in The New Statesman , “The reason that many find the Telegraph's treatment so disturbing is that Soros, who is Jewish, has been at the centre of a series of anti-Semitic conspiracies by the increasingly authoritarian governments in Poland, Hungary and Turkey.” It is mildly amusing that the banal Stephen Bush can’t see that he himself employs an authoritarian manner of thought. Unless guilt by association has become Britain’s press’ MO, the fact that some regimes not approved of by Bush or The New Statesman decided to cleanse themselves of Soros’ infiltration has little relevance to Timothy or his argument.
Wojcicki also went on to refer to the platform’s development of its automated moderation mechanisms, artificial intelligence and machine learning as key to its plans to combat undesirable content, as it has in other cases when disturbing material was found on the platform in large amounts. Importantly, however, and as indicated by Wojcicki, the work of those thousands of human content moderators would go directly to building the artificial intelligence required to automate the moderation processes in the first place. In recent months, other major social media and UGC-reliant platforms have also offered up plans to hire new content moderators by the thousands in the wake of criticism around undesirable content proliferating within their products.
The use of highly-automated systems, running on server farms in China, represents new challenges beyond those encountered so far with Facebook and similar social media, where context and curation are being used to an increasing degree to mitigate the potential harm of algorithmic newsfeeds. The fact that a service like TopBuzz is provided by systems outside the control of the US or other Western jurisdictions poses additional problems. As deep-pocketed Chinese Internet companies seek to expand outside their home markets, bringing with them their own approaches and legal frameworks, we can expect these kind of issues to become increasingly thorny. We are also likely to see those same services begin to wrestle with some of the same problems currently being tackled in the West.
The fight against sexual harassment in China started on college campuses, when former student Luo Xixi shared her story on Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, in January. The account went viral and Beihang University in Beijing sacked the professor at the center of her assault claim. China’s education ministry also announced it would look into setting up a procedure to prevent sexual harassment.
But authorities have been censoring online posts in support of the #MeToo movement including the primary hashtag of China’s campaign, #MeTooInChina, which was temporarily blocked (The Conversation), leading to code words and emojis being used on social media to continue the campaign. Universities have warned students to tone down their activism.
The painting, which hung in a room entitled “In Pursuit of Beauty,” was removed “to prompt conversations about how we display and interpret artworks in Manchester’s public collection.” The gallery’s curator felt a “sense of embarrassment” that the 19th century art displayed in the room depicted women as passive objects and femme fatale figures without proper modern #TimesUp and #MeToo context.
It’s been a funny old week in the world of art. By funny I, of course, mean strange. A week ago today the Manchester Art Gallery removed from view the much revered painting Hylas and the Nymphs by Pre-Raphaelite painter JW Waterhouse.
The act of removal was part of a staged gallery take over by artist Sonia Boyce, who coincidentally is having an exhibition of her work there from March to September. Not content with sending this beautiful picture back to the store room, she persuaded the gallery to remove all postcards and posters featuring this popular scene of temptation and sexual desire from the gallery shop.
Vibrant. The second day of the Kerala Literature Festival (KLF) under way on Kozhikode Beach can be described with this one word. Voices, counter voices, dissent, debate, flashes of new ideas, calling out society’s hypocrisy and victory celebrations marked various sessions of the festival on Friday.
Union Minister of State for Tourism J. Alphons set the ball rolling in the morning by alleging that the festival propagated only Leftist ideas, followed by a statement by festival director K. Satchidanandan that it was not true and that people who shared different ideologies were part of the festival.
This case has to do with withheld documents and FOIA exemptions. It does not guarantee some right to "practical obscurity" for all Americans. In this case, the DOJ withheld rap sheets from release, arguing their release would be an "unwarranted invasion of privacy." The Supreme Court agreed, stating that the purpose of FOIA law was to permit examination of the government's inner workings, not subject private citizens' lives to greater scrutiny.
A police report, obtained and posted by a private citizen (or even a news agency), is not a violation of this ruling. And it sure as hell isn't defamation. Haas is welcome to litigate the issue, but he'd have to sue the police department for releasing it. If Eugene Volokh acquired it from the other party in the complaint (who has a right to obtain a copy of the police report), then Haas has no one he can bring legal action against. The other party involved in a police report can do whatever they want with their copy, including sharing it with blogs detailing a politician's incredibly stupid actions.
As Jones notes at Shooting the Messenger, Google was no more impressed with this latest attempt to vanish critical posts. The links remain live in Google's search engine results and Haas' reputation remains as mismanaged as ever.
Twilio says it will continue to challenge the gag orders attached by default to FBI NSLs, which should result in more published NSLs in the future. The two posted by Twilio are fairly recent. Both were received in May of last year. Both also contain the FBI's response letter letting Twilio know the gag orders had been lifted.
The first [PDF] of the two published lets Twilio know the FBI has agreed to lift the gag order. It also states the FBI is withdrawing its request for subscriber info. The second [PDF] is a little more interesting. The FBI agreed to lift the gag order, but requested Twilio give it a ring before notifying the affected customer.
Twilio Publishes Two National Security Letters as Part of Second Half 2017 Transparency Report
Today, Twilio is publishing our sixth semi-annual transparency report detailing total volume of government requests for information received by Twilio, how Twilio responded to such requests and how Twilio notified users of such requests.
It may soon be possible for your phone to automatically figure out whether it’s you or your five-year-old who’s swiping the screen—and, if it’s the latter, block apps you want to keep off-limits to kids.
That’s the vision of researchers at the University of South Carolina and China’s Zhejiang University, who’ve created an algorithm that can spot whether your kid is accidentally trying to, say, order from Amazon without your knowing.
With the support of and in solidarity with members of Mozilla’s community in India, I write today to urge you to stand up for the privacy and security of all Indians. Your recent consultation on the form of India’s first comprehensive data protection law comes at an auspicious time. The Supreme Court of India has ruled unequivocally that privacy is a fundamental right guaranteed to all Indians by the Indian Constitution. We ask that you take that decision and ensure that right is made a reality in law.
Mozilla’s work on upholding privacy is guided by the Mozilla Manifesto, which states: “Individual security and privacy is fundamental and must not be treated as optional online” (Principle 4). Our commitment to the principle can be seen both in the open source code of our products as well as in our policies such as Mozilla’s Data Privacy Principles. The Mozilla India Community has run numerous campaigns to educate Indians on how to protect themselves online.
For our analog parents, a diary or a personal letter could rarely be touched by authorities, not even by law enforcement searching for evidence of a crime. Objects such as these had protection over and above the constitutional privacy safeguards. For our digital children, however, the equivalent diaries and letters aren’t even considered worthy of basic constitutional privacy.
[...]
Of course, this is only true in the analog world of our parents. Even though the letter of the law is the same, this protection doesn’t apply at all to the digital world of our children, to their diaries and letters.
A headline like “60 Dead Inmates” has a way of focusing the mind, at least in theory. Alarm bells should have been going off across the county government when San Diego CityBeat exposed the shocking death toll at local jails.
But prisoners kept dying, including a man who killed himself behind bars in yet anther suicide. His widow is suing. On the defensive, the county’s attorneys have found a target to harass: One of the reporters behind the award-winning coverage. They’ve upended her life, forcing her to do one of three things — expose sources by testifying about her work, agree to a deal that would protect her fragile health at the expense of harming the widow’s case or fight back.
Kelly Davis, a highly respected colleague and fellow contributor to VOSD, did the right thing and refused to play ball with the county. A judge is standing with her, but the legal scuffle isn’t over.
Enough. The county needs to stand up and back off.
Cindy Cohn is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the international non-profit digital rights organization. From 2000 to 2015 Cohn served as Legal Director and General Counsel for EFF, but her involvement with the organization goes back to 1993. On February 7th, Cohn announced the death of EFF Founder John Perry Barlow. Barlow was a multi-talented man and a colorful figure. He was a poet, an essayist, a cattle rancher and a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. Ms. Cohn was gracious enough to let me interview her about her unique perspective working with cyberlibertarian Barlow for the past 27 years.
A judge has dismissed a number of charges filed by a South Texas county against a former official accused of fraud in the construction of a $232 million border fence funded by the Department of Homeland Security.
The ruling prompted Hidalgo County on Monday to withdraw all remaining legal actions against Godfrey Garza Jr., the former chief of its drainage district, who oversaw a project to improve the county’s levee system and build a fence to stop illegal immigration and drug smuggling.
Judge Martin Chiuminatto of state district court in Hidalgo County told lawyers for the county and Garza that the evidence presented to support the county’s allegations of fraud was not strong enough to send to a jury, according to a transcript of the hearing late last month. Chiuminatto also dismissed charges against Garza’s wife, children and their companies.
After my mom went to prison, we decided to use what we learned to help others.
In 2012, I founded an organization called Mission: Launch with my mom. Based out of Baltimore, Mission:Launch helps formerly incarcerated individuals become self-sufficient faster. For us, this means helping individuals earn a more livable wage by obtaining an occupational license through our program, LaunchPad.
The biggest thing my mom and I have learned since starting Mission:Launch is the importance of having a strong support system. Of all the people we’ve interacted with at the organization, the people who are most successful are always the ones who have strong family or community support. During reentry, having that safety net of people who are willing to catch you if and when you fall is crucial. And so, at Mission:Launch, we prioritize community, family, and peer-support networks.
In practice, that means getting to know every person we engage with and working to understand all the support they will need on their journey. This is why LaunchPad begins with a robust intake to better understand what type of holistic support a person will need. We then refer them to partner service organizations so that we can help them stay focused on obtaining their occupational license. As a society, we make it extremely hard for people to get back on their feet after incarceration. Without the right support it can be close to impossible.
Prisons in the state restrict female hygiene products, risking prisoners’ health and violating their dignity.
Menstruation is a basic biological fact of everyday life for billions of women and girls across the planet. But for women behind bars, having your period can be a living nightmare. Prisons can make maintaining well-being and dignity a monthly struggle. That’s what’s happening in Arizona, where women receive scant hygiene products at great risk to their health and in violation of their human rights.
Imagine having to plead for each sanitary napkin you need from a corrections officer. Now imagine the officer is male. Now imagine that you have to show your used napkins to him before you can get a fresh one. Women in Arizona prisons don’t have to imagine this. For them it’s a harsh reality.
Women prisoners can even be denied access to tampons because they are an alleged “security risk.” In such cases, female prisoners can work 8-hour days with only a thin pad for protection while wearing their only pair of pants. Prisoners bleed through clothes and are forced to wear them for several days. They are not allowed to shower. For too many incarcerated women, a basic human function has been turned into a monthly violation of basic human rights.
Officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement are actively exploring joining the U.S. Intelligence Community, The Daily Beast has learned.
The effort is helmed by a small cohort of career Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, and has been underway since the Obama administration, according to an ICE official familiar with the matter.
Internal advocates for joining the America’s spy agencies—known as the Intelligence Community or the IC—focus on the potential benefits to the agency’s work on counterproliferation, money laundering, counterterror, and cybercrime. The official added that joining the IC could also be useful for the agency’s immigration enforcement work––in particular, their efforts to find and arrest undocumented immigrants with criminal arrest warrants (known in ICE as fugitive aliens).
At this point, no one other than a few ICE officials really wants this to happen. Privacy and accountability activists say the last thing the White House should do is give the agency access to warrantless surveillance. ICE is a domestic enforcement agency and has no need to root around in foreign-facing data collections. The agency, however, feels foreign intel -- along with the unmentioned backdoor searches of domestic communications -- could aid it in tracking down drug traffickers, money launders, and various cybercriminals.
But it shouldn't have direct access. Nor should it ever really need it. Information sharing has been expanded, thanks to the last president, which means ICE likely already receives second-hand info from other IC members like the DHS, FBI, and DEA. Former government officials are wary of the idea of direct intel access, noting that it would result in more complications, rather than better immigration and customs enforcement.
Detained book publisher Gui Minhai on Friday accused the Swedish government of using him as a “chess piece” to make trouble for Beijing, claiming in an interview arranged by Chinese authorities that he did not want to leave the country. Speaking at a detention facility in Ningbo, Zhejiang province, he said: “The year 2018 is election year in Sweden … some politicians might be using me for political gains. I can’t rule out that some are trying to use me to create trouble for the Chinese government.”
sentence handed to Ahmadreza Djalali for allegedly spying on behalf of Israel have failed and his sentence is now "definitive" and could happen at any point, his lawyer has said.
The Iranian emergency medicine specialist, who is resident in Sweden, was arrested in April 2016 in Iran and later charged with "spreading corruption on earth" by passing information on the Islamic Republic's nuclear scientists to Mossad, Israel's secret intelligence agency.
We've noted repeatedly how ESPN has personified the cable and broadcast industry's tone deafness to cord cutting and TV market evolution. The company not only spent years downplaying the trend as something only poor people do, it sued companies that attempted to offer consumers greater flexibility in how video content was consumed. ESPN execs clearly believed cord cutting was little more than a fad that would simply stop once Millennials started procreating, and ignored surveys showing how 56% of consumers would ditch ESPN in a heartbeat if it meant saving the $8 per month subscribers pay for the channel.
As the data began to indicate the cord cutting trend was very real, insiders say ESPN was busy doubling down on bloated sports licensing deals and SportsCenter set redesigns. By the time ESPN had lost 10 million viewers in just a few years, the company was busy pretending they saw cord cutting coming all the while. ESPN subsequently decided the only solution was to fire hundreds of longstanding sports journalists and support personnel, but not the executives like John Skipper (since resigned) whose myopia made ESPN's problems that much worse.
Next week’s UK Supreme Court hearing on the long-running patent dispute over pregabalin will be watched closely by life sciences innovators.
Australia's cattle industry has scored a win against the US-based owners over a patent application it feared would put the brakes on improvement in Australia's cattle herd.
The Federal Court rejected the patent application, saying it was unclear in its scope, that it failed to adequality describe what the invention was, and whether there was an industrial application for it.
Meat and Livestock Australia spends hundreds of millions of dollars on genetic research in cattle, and feared the patent application threatened Australian farmers' access to important genomic testing.
For the past few years, we have detailed several trademark actions brought by Moosehead Breweries Limited, the iconic Canadian brewery that makes Moosehead beer, against pretty much every other alcohol-related business that dares to use the word "moose" or any moose images. This recent trend has revealed that Moosehead is of the opinion that only it can utilize the notorious animal symbol of both Canada and the northern United States. Without any seeming care for whether actual confusion might exist in the marketplace, these actions by Moosehead have instead smacked of pure protectionism over a common word and any and all images of a common animal.
One of those actions included a suit against Hop 'N Moose Brewing, a small microbrewery out of Vermont. The filing in that case was notable in that it actually alleged detailed examples of trade dress infractions, while the images of the trade dress included in the filing appeared to be fairly distinct. Absent, of course, was any evidence of actual confusion in the marketplace. It appeared for all the world that Moosehead's legal team seemed to take past criticism of its trademark protectionism as a critique of the word and image count in its filings and simply decided to up the volume on both ends. Since late last year, despite having done all of this legal literary work to support the suit, little if anything had been litigated after the initial filing.
In the past few weeks, we at Public Knowledge have been talking with decision-makers on Capitol Hill about NAFTA. We wanted to educate ourselves on the negotiation process for this vital trade agreement, and fairly counsel lawmakers interested in its effects on consumer protection. And we discovered a thing or two in this process.
It is something of an unfortunate Techdirt tradition that every time the Olympics rolls around, we are alerted to some more nonsense by the organizations that put on the event -- mainly the International Olympic Committee (IOC) -- going out of their way to be completely censorial in the most obnoxious ways possible. And, even worse, watching as various governments and organizations bend to the IOC's will on no legal basis at all. In the past, this has included the IOC's ridiculous insistence on extra trademark rights that are not based on any actual laws. But, in the age of social media it's gotten even worse. The Olympics and Twitter have a very questionable relationship as the company Twitter has been all too willing to censor content on behalf of the Olympics, while the Olympic committees, such as the USOC, continue to believe merely mentioning the Olympics is magically trademark infringement.
At Christmas time the making of Nativity scenes in churches and homes is a Catholic tradition that is particularly common in Southern Europe.
Like many other Italian children, I have wonderful memories of when my brother and I used to plan and realize new Nativity scenes every year under the supervision of our parents.
But can the various characters (little statues) that compose the various Nativity scenes be eligible for copyright protection?
This is an issue that has been recently at the centre of litigation in Italy.
Katfriend Angela Saltarelli (Chiomenti) discusses an interesting ruling of the Italian Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione).
Chrome and Firefox are actively blocking direct access to the popular pirate streaming site 123movies, also known as 123movieshub and Gomovies. According to Google's Safe Browsing diagnostics service, the site contains "harmful programs," most likely triggered by suspicious advertisements running on the site.
Last week, Stan McCoy, president of the Motion Picture Association's EMEA division, met with the head of Russia's telecoms watchdog in Moscow. Rozcomnadzor says that a number of issues were discussed, including strengthening international cooperation. For once, Russia had some anti-piracy achievements to boast about that the United States couldn't match.
Ebay and social media are popular places to sell and obtain 'pirate' streaming devices but for two sellers, things haven't gone to plan. According to the Premier League and partners the Federation Against Copyright Theft, the men have agreed to pay €£18,000 and €£8,000 respectively, for supplying piracy-configured Kodi boxes and subscriptions to illicit streams.