Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/06/friday_squid_bl_582.html
A paddleboarder had a run-in with an injured giant squid. Video. Here’s the real story.
As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.
Read my blog posting guidelines here.
Post Syndicated from Darknet original http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/darknethackers/~3/A3ozOmH4BDE/
TheFatRat is an easy-to-use Exploitation Tool that can help you to generate backdoors and post exploitation attacks like browser attack DLL files. This tool compiles malware with popular payloads and then the compiled malware can be executed on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Android. The malware that is created with this tool also has […]
The…
Read the full post at darknet.org.uk
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/06/the_secret_code.html
As codes go, Potter’s wasn’t inordinately complicated. As Wiltshire explains, it was a “mono-alphabetic substitution cipher code,” in which each letter of the alphabet was replaced by a symbol — the kind of thing they teach you in Cub Scouts. The real trouble was Potter’s own fluency with it. She quickly learned to write the code so fast that each sheet looked, even to Linder’s trained eye, like a maze of scribbles.
Post Syndicated from nellyo original https://nellyo.wordpress.com/2017/06/23/bnr_/
Отговорната редакторка на сайта на СБЖ казала,
че знае от много достоверен източник,
че Бетина Жотева, член на СЕМ, казала,
че министърът на външните работи Захариева в личен разговор казала,
че е за закриване на Радио България.
Бетина Жотева казала,
че нито министър Захариева й е казала,
нито тя е казала, че министър Захариева й е казала,
че е за закриване на Радио България.
*
Днес много се говори, че са си говорили, това е интересен сюжет – но да се върнем към Радио България.
I
Радио България и реформата в БНР
Радио България е име на програма, произвеждана и предоставяна за разпространение от Българското национално радио на различни езици. Технологиите се развиват, потребителските модели се променят, има динамика и във външните отношения на страната. Променят се условията – променят се и програмите и услугите на обществените медии.
За Радио България в последно време се говори поради две обстоятелства:
Радио България първоначално се разпространява наземно – поради което според ЗРТ подлежи на лицензиране – и е лицензирана. През февруари 2012 г. разпространението на програмата продължава онлайн, като съдържанието на турски език се разпространява и наземно, включително интегрирано в програмата на районната станция Радио Кърджали. Този факт стана широко известен при лицензирането на програмата на Радио Кърджали през 2015, когато се вдигна шум около новините на турски език – докато се установи, че това е част от чуждоезиковата продукция на Радио България.
Ръководството на БНР се обръща към регулатора с искане за изменение на лицензията на Радио България – така че съдържанието, което не се разпространява наземно от години, да престане да бъде предмет на лицензията. Както става ясно от протокол от заседанието на СЕМ на 16 май 2017 (стр.6-7):
искането е за изменение на лицензията, в частта да бъдат заличени определени приложения към нея, а това са приложенията на отделни езици.
Мониторинг на СЕМ от 2017 установява, че изискванията на лицензията не се изпълняват. Да се актуализира лицензията изглежда логично искане – пет години след прекратяване на наземното разпространение на съдържанието на някои езици. Както напомня Мария Стоянова според посочения протокол
защото си спомняме, че става въпрос за предаватели, които са премахнати и предадени за скрап.
Сегашното ръководство на БНР взема и второ – вече програмно – решение да прекрати и производството на съдържание на някои от езиците. От медиите става ясно, че БНР се аргументира с данните за потреблението и интереса към това съдържание. Решението е подкрепено изцяло от Обществения съвет на БНР, обсъдено е и по съответния ред в органите на радиото. Зад решението с целия си авторитет е Райна Константинова, в случая председател на Обществения съвет – но също един от най-опитните експерти в областта на обществените медии в Европа.
Редуцирането на езиците ще доведе до намаляване на заетите в БНР. Някои са пренасочени в БНР, някои приемат условията за освобождаване, други протестират и търсят подкрепа в колегията и институциите.
Накратко, ръководството на БНР и Общественият съвет провеждат съдържателни обсъждания и така стигат до изводи за модела на преструктуриране на Радио България.
II
Реакцията към стъпките, предприети от БНР:
СЕМ обсъжда въпроса, но не стига до решение да измени лицензията и да легализира прекратяването на наземното разпространение, а (видно от посочения протокол) решава
да изиска информация от КРС с какви мощности се разполага и къде се разпространява програмата на “Радио България” и
да изиска от БНР програмна схема и програмна концепция за “Радио България”.
На 15 юни парламентарната комисия за култура и медии има в дневния ред точка 2. Изслушване на генералния директор на Българското национално радио относно искане на БНР за изменение на индивидуална лицензия за създаване на радиоуслуга с наименование „Радио България” и свързаните с изменението последици.
Стенограмата отразява заседанието, изслушват се различните мнения, както и становище на министъра на външните работи. Депутатите се обединяват около идеята, че чуждоезиковата продукция на БНР трябва да бъде запазена.
Министър Захариева заявява ясно, че министерството на външните работи по принцип не би могло да се меси в редакционната политика, въпреки че това е обществена медия. Също така министър Захариева обръща внимание, че Радио България „под формата, която го разбираме, класическата“ не съществува – и става дума за чуждоезикова продукция.
За МВнР тази продукция има значение – „Подчертаваме, че чуждоезикови рубрики имат своята роля за разпространението на българската култура и наука, а също така за информираността на тези наши общности в чужбина, както и на чуждестранни граждани, за българската държавна политика.[…] разширяването на Западните Балкани е приоритет на външната политика на правителството и ще бъде един от приоритетите на българското председателство на Съвета на ЕС в началото на следващата година. И затова ще ни бъдат необходими, като инструмент да комуникираме, тези рубрики”, се казва в писмото до парламентарната комисия за култура и медии.
МВнР смята, че е уместно да се проведе обществена дискусия преди преструктурирането.
На сайта на президента е изложено становище, в което между другото се казва:
Неприемливо е в навечерието на Българското председателство на Съвета на ЕС да се обсъжда идеята за закриването на „Радио България“. Тази програма на БНР има опит и традиции в създаването на образа ни навън като европейска държава на духа.
До медиите това съобщението достига накратко така: Президентът забрани да се закрива Радио България.
Позицията на работещите е отразена по-подробно тук. Те са срещу решението на ръководството, подкрепени са от Съюза на българските журналисти.
След срещите и публикациите поне става ясно: парламент, президент и правителство не могат да вземат програмните решения на обществените медии.
III
А сега?
Ръководството на БНР учи по трудния начин, че реформаторските мерки трябва да са отлично обосновани и публично обяснени и защитени, за да се отличават от обикновено съкращаване на живи хора.
УС на БНР приема за сведение изразените мнения и решава поетапната модернизация да продължи след обществена дискусия.
Модернизацията не се поставя под съмнение, аналоговата лицензия ще си отиде. Същевременно колкото и чуждоезиковата продукция да е политически въпрос, никой не поддържа комуникация под определен праг на ефективност, общественото радио също.
Така че предстои да се решава обща задача: публичният ресурс да бъде инвестиран в чуждоезикова продукция по такъв начин, че да се постига ефективна комуникация, включително с използване на съвременните платформи, за изпълнение на обществената мисия на БНР.
Filed under: BG Content, BG Media, BG Regulator, Digital 
Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/banning-vpns-and-proxies-is-dangerous-it-experts-warn-170623/
In April, draft legislation was developed to crack down on systems and software that allow Russian Internet users to bypass website blockades approved by telecoms watchdog Roskomnadzor.
Earlier this month the draft bill was submitted to the State Duma, the lower house of the Russian parliament. If passed, the law will make it illegal for services to circumvent web blockades by “routing traffic of Russian Internet users through foreign servers, anonymous proxy servers, virtual private networks and other means.”
As the plans currently stand, anonymization services that fail to restrict access to sites listed by telecoms watchdog Rozcomnadzor face being blocked themselves. Sites offering circumvention software for download also face potential blacklisting.
This week the State Duma discussed the proposals with experts from the local Internet industry. In addition to the head of Rozcomnadzor, representatives from service providers, search engines and even anonymization services were in attendance. Novaya Gazeta has published comments (Russian) from some of the key people at the meeting and it’s fair to say there’s not a lot of support.
VimpelCom, the sixth largest mobile network operator in the world with more than 240 million subscribers, sent along Director for Relations with Government, Sergey Malyanov. He wondered where all this blocking will end up.
“First we banned certain information. Then this information was blocked with the responsibility placed on both owners of resources and services. Now there are blocks on top of blocks – so we already have a triple effort,” he said.
“It is now possible that there will be a fourth iteration: the block on the block to block those that were not blocked. And with that, we have significantly complicated the law and the activities of all the people affected by it.”
Malyanov said that these kinds of actions have the potential to close down the entire Internet by ruining what was once an open network running standard protocols. But amid all of this, will it even be effective?
“The question is not even about the losses that will be incurred by network operators, the owners of the resources and the search engines. The question is whether this bill addresses the goal its creators have set for themselves. In my opinion, it will not.”
Group-IB, one of the world’s leading cyber-security and threat intelligence providers, was represented CEO Ilya Sachkov. He told parliament that “ordinary respectable people” who use the Internet should always use a VPN for security. Nevertheless, he also believes that such services should be forced to filter sites deemed illegal by the state.
But in a warning about blocks in general, he warned that people who want to circumvent them will always be one step ahead.
“We have to understand that by the time the law is adopted the perpetrators will already find it very easy to circumvent,” he said.
Mobile operator giant MTS, which turns over billions of dollars and employs 50,000+ people, had their Vice-President of Corporate and Legal Affairs in attendance. Ruslan Ibragimov said that in dealing with a problem, the government should be cautious of not causing more problems, including disruption of a growing VPN market.
“We have an understanding that evil must be fought, but it’s not necessary to create a new evil, even more so – for those who are involved in this struggle,” he said.
“Broad wording of this law may pose a threat to our network, which could be affected by the new restrictive measures, as well as the VPN market, which we are currently developing, and whose potential market is estimated at 50 billion rubles a year.”
In its goal to maintain control of the Internet, it’s clear that Russia is determined to press ahead with legislative change. Unfortunately, it’s far from clear that there’s a technical solution to the problem, but if one is pursued regardless, there could be serious fallout.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from corbet original https://lwn.net/Articles/726142/rss
The default apps on a mobile platform like Android are familiar targets for
replacement, especially for developers concerned about security. But while
messaging and voice apps (which can be replaced by Signal and Ostel, for
instance) may be the best known examples, the non-profit Guardian Project has taken up the
cause of improving the security features of the camera app. Its latest
such project is ProofMode, an app
to let users take photos and videos that can be verified as authentic by
third parties.
Post Syndicated from Juan Villa original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/kotlin-and-groovy-jvm-languages-with-aws-lambda/
Juan Villa – Partner Solutions Architect
When most people hear “Java” they think of Java the programming language. Java is a lot more than a programming language, it also implies a larger ecosystem including the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Java, the programming language, is just one of the many languages that can be compiled to run on the JVM. Some of the most popular JVM languages, other than Java, are Clojure, Groovy, Scala, Kotlin, JRuby, and Jython (see this link for a list of more JVM languages).
Did you know that you can compile and subsequently run all these languages on AWS Lambda?
AWS Lambda supports the Java 8 runtime, but this does not mean you are limited to the Java language. The Java 8 runtime is capable of running JVM languages such as Kotlin and Groovy once they have been compiled and packaged as a “fat” JAR (a JAR file containing all necessary dependencies and classes bundled in).
In this blog post we’ll work through building AWS Lambda functions in both Kotlin and Groovy programming languages. To compile and package our projects we will use Gradle build tool.
To follow along, please clone the Git repository available at GitHub here. Also, I recommend using an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) such as JetBrain’s IntelliJ IDEA, this is the IDE I used while working on these projects.
Kotlin is a statically-typed JVM language designed and developed by JetBrains (one of our Amazon Partner Network Technology partners) and the open source community. Compared to Java the programming language, Kotlin has additional powerful language features such as: Data Classes, Default Arguments, Extensions, Elvis Operator, and Destructuring Declarations. This is a just a short list of Kotlin’s powerful language features. For a more thorough list of features, and how to use them, refer to the full documentation of the Kotlin language.
Let’s jump right into the code and see what an AWS Lambda function looks like in Kotlin.
package com.aws.blog.jvmlangs.kotlin
import java.io.*
import com.fasterxml.jackson.module.kotlin.*
data class HandlerInput(val who: String)
data class HandlerOutput(val message: String)
class Main {
val mapper = jacksonObjectMapper()
fun handler(input: InputStream, output: OutputStream): Unit {
val inputObj = mapper.readValue<HandlerInput>(input)
mapper.writeValue(output, HandlerOutput("Hello ${inputObj.who}"))
}
}The above example is a very simple Hello World application that accepts as an input a JSON object containing a key called “who” and returns a JSON object containing a key called “message” with a value of “Hello {who}”.
AWS Lambda does not support serializing JSON objects into Kotlin data classes, but don’t worry! AWS Lambda supports passing an input object as a Stream, and also supports an output Stream for returning a result (see this link for more information). Combined with the Input/Output Stream form of the handler function, we are using the Jackson library with a Kotlin extension function to support serialization and deserialization of Kotlin data class types.
To get started with this example, let’s first compile and package the Kotlin project.
git clone https://github.com/awslabs/lambda-kotlin-groovy-example
cd lambda-kotlin-groovy-example/kotlin
./gradlew shadowJarOnce packaged, a JAR file containing all necessary dependencies will be available at “build/libs/ jvmlangs-kotlin-1.0-SNAPSHOT-all.jar”. Now let’s deploy this package to AWS Lambda.
To deploy the lambda function, we will be using the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI). You can find information on how to set up the AWS CLI here. This tool allows you to set up and manage AWS services via the command line.
aws lambda create-function --region us-east-1 --function-name kotlin-hello \
--zip-file fileb://build/libs/jvmlangs-kotlin-1.0-SNAPSHOT-all.jar \
--role arn:aws:iam::<account_id>:role/lambda_basic_execution \
--handler com.aws.blog.jvmlangs.kotlin.Main::handler --runtime java8 \
--timeout 15 --memory-size 128Once deployed, we can test the function by invoking the lambda function from the CLI.
aws lambda invoke --function-name kotlin-hello --payload '{"who": "AWS Fan"}' output.txt
cat output.txtIf successful, you’ll see an output of “{"message":"Hello AWS Fan"}”.
Groovy is an optionally typed JVM language with both dynamic and static typing capabilities. Groovy is currently being supported by the Apache Software Foundation. Like Kotlin, Groovy also packs a lot of powerful features such as: Closures, Dynamic Typing, Collection Literals, String Interpolation, and Elvis Operator. This is just a short list, see the full documentation for a list of features and how to use them.
Once again, let’s jump right into the code.
package com.aws.blog.jvmlangs.groovy
class HandlerInput {
String who
}
class HandlerOutput {
String message
}
class Main {
def handler(HandlerInput input) {
return new HandlerOutput(message: "Hello ${input.who}")
}
}Just like the Kotlin example, we have defined a function that takes a simple JSON object containing a “who” key value and build a response containing a “message” key. Note that in this case we are not using the Input/Output Stream form of the handler function, but rather we are letting AWS Lambda serialize the input JSON object into the type HandlerInput. To accomplish this, AWS Lambda uses the Jackson library and handles the serialization for us.
Let’s go ahead and compile and package this Groovy example.
git clone https://github.com/awslabs/lambda-kotlin-groovy-example
cd lambda-kotlin-groovy-example/groovy
./gradlew shadowJarOnce packaged, a JAR file containing all necessary dependencies will be available at “build/libs/ jvmlangs-groovy-1.0-SNAPSHOT-all.jar”. Now let’s deploy this package to AWS Lambda.
aws lambda create-function --region us-east-1 --function-name groovy-hello \
--zip-file fileb://build/libs/jvmlangs-groovy-1.0-SNAPSHOT-all.jar \
--role arn:aws:iam::<account_id>:role/lambda_basic_execution \
--handler com.aws.blog.jvmlangs.groovy.Main::handler --runtime java8 \
--timeout 15 --memory-size 128Once deployed, we can test the function by invoking the lambda function from the CLI.
aws lambda invoke --function-name groovy-hello --payload '{"who": "AWS Fan"}' output.txt
cat output.txtIf successful, you’ll see an output of “{"message":"Hello AWS Fan"}”.
Finally, let’s touch up on how we built the JAR package from the Kotlin and Groovy sources above. To build the JARs we used the Gradle build tool. Gradle builds a project by reading instructions from a file called “build.gradle”. This is a file written in Gradle’s Groovy Domain Specific Langauge (DSL). You can find more information on the gradle build file by looking at their documentation. Let’s take a look at the Gradle build files we used for this post.
For the Kotlin example, this is the build file we used.
buildscript {
repositories {
mavenCentral()
jcenter()
}
dependencies {
classpath "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-gradle-plugin:$kotlin_version"
classpath "com.github.jengelman.gradle.plugins:shadow:1.2.3"
}
}
group 'com.aws.blog.jvmlangs.kotlin'
version '1.0-SNAPSHOT'
apply plugin: 'kotlin'
apply plugin: 'com.github.johnrengelman.shadow'
repositories {
mavenCentral()
}
dependencies {
compile "org.jetbrains.kotlin:kotlin-stdlib:$kotlin_version"
compile "com.fasterxml.jackson.module:jackson-module-kotlin:2.8.2"
}For the Groovy example this is the build file we used.
buildscript {
repositories {
jcenter()
}
dependencies {
classpath 'com.github.jengelman.gradle.plugins:shadow:1.2.3'
}
}
group 'com.aws.blog.jvmlangs.groovy'
version '1.0-SNAPSHOT'
apply plugin: 'groovy'
apply plugin: 'com.github.johnrengelman.shadow'
repositories {
mavenCentral()
}
dependencies {
compile 'org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all:2.3.11'
testCompile group: 'junit', name: 'junit', version: '4.11'
}As you can see, the build files for both Kotlin and Groovy files are very similar. For the Kotlin project we define a dependency on the Jackson Kotlin module. Also, for each respective language we include the language supporting libraries (kotlin-stdlib and groovy-all respectively).
In addition, you will notice that we are using a plugin called “shadow”. We use this plugin to package all the project dependencies into one JAR by using the Gradle task “shadowJar”. You can find more information on Shadow in their documentation.
Don’t stop here though! Take a look at other JVM languages and get them running on AWS Lambda with the Java 8 runtime. Maybe start with Clojure? or Scala?
Also take a look AWS Lambda Java libraries provided by AWS. They provide interfaces and models to make handling events from event sources easier to handle.
Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/726331/rss
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (linux-hardened), CentOS (sudo), Debian (apache2, c-ares, flatpak, graphite2, and openvpn), Fedora (glibc and thunderbird), Gentoo (graphite2, jbig2dec, libksba, nettle, urbanterror, and vim), openSUSE (go and unrar), Oracle (sudo), SUSE (tomcat), and Ubuntu (openvpn).
Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/court-suspends-ban-on-roku-sales-in-mexico-170623/
Last week, news broke that the Superior Court of Justice of the City of Mexico had issued a ban on Roku sales.
The order prohibited stores such as Amazon, Liverpool, El Palacio de Hierro, and Sears from importing and selling the devices. In addition, several banks were told stop processing payments from accounts that are linked to pirated services on Roku.
While Roku itself is not offering any pirated content, there is a market for third-party pirate channels outside the Roku Channel Store, which turn the boxes into pirate tools. Cablevision filed a complaint about this unauthorized use which eventually resulted in the ban.
The news generated headlines all over the world and was opposed immediately by several of the parties involved. Yesterday, a federal judge decided to suspend the import and sales ban, at least temporarily.
As a result, local vendors can resume their sales of the popular media player.
“Roku is pleased with today’s court decision, which paves the way for sales of Roku devices to resume in Mexico,” Roku’s General Counsel Steve Kay informed TorrentFreak after he heard the news.
TorrentFreak has not been able to get a copy of the suspension order, but it’s likely that the court wants to review the case in more detail before a final decision is made.
While streaming player piracy is seen as one of the greatest threats the entertainment industry faces today, the Roku ban went quite far. In a way, it would be similar to banning the Chrome browser because certain add-ons and sites allow users to stream pirated movies.
Roku, meanwhile, says it will continue to work with rightholders and other stakeholders to prevent piracy on its platform, to the best of their ability.
“Piracy is a problem the industry at large is facing,” Key tells TorrentFreak.
“We prohibit copyright infringement of any kind on the Roku platform. We actively work to prevent third-parties from using our platform to distribute copyright infringing content. Moreover, we have been actively working with other industry stakeholders on a wide range of anti-piracy initiatives.”
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from Bruce Schneier original https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/06/amazon_patents_.html
Amazon has been issued a patent on security measures that prevents people from comparison shopping while in the store. It’s not a particularly sophisticated patent — it basically detects when you’re using the in-store Wi-Fi to visit a competitor’s site and then blocks access — but it is an indication of how retail has changed in recent years.
What’s interesting is that Amazon is on the other of this arms race. As an on-line retailer, it wants people to walk into stores and then comparison shop on its site. Yes, I know it’s buying Whole Foods, but it’s still predominantly an online retailer. Maybe it patented this to prevent stores from implementing the technology.
It’s probably not nearly that strategic. It’s hard to build a business strategy around a security measure that can be defeated with cellular access.
Post Syndicated from nellyo original https://nellyo.wordpress.com/2017/06/23/cpc-5/
На сайта на КЗК има съобщение, според което
С Определение № 654/15.06.2017 г. Комисията за защита на конкуренцията, на основание чл. 74, ал. 1, т. 3 от ЗЗК, ПРЕДЯВИ на Сдружение на композитори, автори на литературни произведения, свързани с музиката и музикални издатели за колективно управление на авторски права „МУЗИКАУТОР“ твърдение за извършено нарушение по чл. 21, т. 5 от ЗЗК, изразяващо се в злоупотреба с господстващо положение на пазара на предоставяне на права за излъчване на музикални и литературни произведения от репертоара на Музикаутор по безжичен път, предаването или препредаването на произведенията по електронна съобщителна мрежа за доставчици на радиоуслуги на територията на страната, което може да предотврати, ограничи или наруши конкуренцията и да засегне интересите на потребителите посредством необосновано прекратяване на съществуващите договорни отношения с Българското национално радио, с което се препятства осъществяваната от радиото дейност.
В срок от 30 (тридесет) дни адресатът на определението и молителят имат право да представят писмени възражения по предявените твърдения.
*
През април 2017 СГС прекрати делото, заведено от БНР, поради недопустимост на иска.
През юни 2017 БНР и Музикаутор подписаха договор.
Filed under: BG Content, BG Media, Media Law 
Post Syndicated from Simon Long original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/a-raspbian-desktop-update-with-some-new-programming-tools/
Today we’ve released another update to the Raspbian desktop. In addition to the usual small tweaks and bug fixes, the big new changes are the inclusion of an offline version of Scratch 2.0, and of Thonny (a user-friendly IDE for Python which is excellent for beginners). We’ll look at all the changes in this post, but let’s start with the biggest…
Scratch is one of the most popular pieces of software on Raspberry Pi. This is largely due to the way it makes programming accessible – while it is simple to learn, it covers many of the concepts that are used in more advanced languages. Scratch really does provide a great introduction to programming for all ages.
Raspbian ships with the original version of Scratch, which is now at version 1.4. A few years ago, though, the Scratch team at the MIT Media Lab introduced the new and improved Scratch version 2.0, and ever since we’ve had numerous requests to offer it on the Pi.
There was, however, a problem with this. The original version of Scratch was written in a language called Squeak, which could run on the Pi in a Squeak interpreter. Scratch 2.0, however, was written in Flash, and was designed to run from a remote site in a web browser. While this made Scratch 2.0 a cross-platform application, which you could run without installing any Scratch software, it also meant that you had to be able to run Flash on your computer, and that you needed to be connected to the internet to program in Scratch.
We worked with Adobe to include the Pepper Flash plugin in Raspbian, which enables Flash sites to run in the Chromium browser. This addressed the first of these problems, so the Scratch 2.0 website has been available on Pi for a while. However, it still needed an internet connection to run, which wasn’t ideal in many circumstances. We’ve been working with the Scratch team to get an offline version of Scratch 2.0 running on Pi.
The Scratch team had created a website to enable developers to create hardware and software extensions for Scratch 2.0; this provided a version of the Flash code for the Scratch editor which could be modified to run locally rather than over the internet. We combined this with a program called Electron, which effectively wraps up a local web page into a standalone application. We ended up with the Scratch 2.0 application that you can find in the Programming section of the main menu.
We didn’t stop there though. We know that people want to use Scratch for physical computing, and it has always been a bit awkward to access GPIO pins from Scratch. In our Scratch 2.0 application, therefore, there is a custom extension which allows the user to control the Pi’s GPIO pins without difficulty. Simply click on ‘More Blocks’, choose ‘Add an Extension’, and select ‘Pi GPIO’. This loads two new blocks, one to read and one to write the state of a GPIO pin.
The Scratch team kindly allowed us to include all the sprites, backdrops, and sounds from the online version of Scratch 2.0. You can also use the Raspberry Pi Camera Module to create new sprites and backgrounds.
This first release works well, although it can be slow for some operations; this is largely unavoidable for Flash code running under Electron. Bear in mind that you will need to have the Pepper Flash plugin installed (which it is by default on standard Raspbian images). As Pepper Flash is only compatible with the processor in the Pi 2.0 and Pi 3, it is unfortunately not possible to run Scratch 2.0 on the Pi Zero or the original models of the Pi.
We hope that this makes Scratch 2.0 a more practical proposition for many users than it has been to date. Do let us know if you hit any problems, though!
One of the paths from Scratch to ‘real’ programming is through Python. We know that the transition can be awkward, and this isn’t helped by the tools available for learning Python. It’s fair to say that IDLE, the Python IDE, isn’t the most popular piece of software ever written…
Earlier this year, we reviewed every Python IDE that we could find that would run on a Raspberry Pi, in an attempt to see if there was something better out there than IDLE. We wanted to find something that was easier for beginners to use but still useful for experienced Python programmers. We found one program, Thonny, which stood head and shoulders above all the rest. It’s a really user-friendly IDE, which still offers useful professional features like single-stepping of code and inspection of variables.
Thonny was created at the University of Tartu in Estonia; we’ve been working with Aivar Annamaa, the lead developer, on getting it into Raspbian. The original version of Thonny works well on the Pi, but because the GUI is written using Python’s default GUI toolkit, Tkinter, the appearance clashes with the rest of the Raspbian desktop, most of which is written using the GTK toolkit. We made some changes to bring things like fonts and graphics into line with the appearance of our other apps, and Aivar very kindly took that work and converted it into a theme package that could be applied to Thonny.
Due to the limitations of working within Tkinter, the result isn’t exactly like a native GTK application, but it’s pretty close. It’s probably good enough for anyone who isn’t a picky UI obsessive like me, anyway! Have a look at the Thonny webpage to see some more details of all the cool features it offers. We hope that having a more usable environment will help to ease the transition from graphical languages like Scratch into ‘proper’ languages like Python.
Other than these two new packages, this release is mostly bug fixes and small version bumps. One thing you might notice, though, is that we’ve made some tweaks to our custom icon set. We wondered if the icons might look better with slightly thinner outlines. We tried it, and they did: we hope you prefer them too.
You can either download a new image from the Downloads page, or you can use apt to update:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
To install Scratch 2.0:
sudo apt-get install scratch2
To install Thonny:
sudo apt-get install python3-thonny
Before Christmas, we released an experimental version of the desktop running on Debian for x86-based computers. We were slightly taken aback by how popular it turned out to be! This made us realise that this was something we were going to need to support going forward. We’ve decided we’re going to try to make all new desktop releases for both Pi and x86 from now on.
The version of this we released last year was a live image that could run from a USB stick. Many people asked if we could make it permanently installable, so this version includes an installer. This uses the standard Debian install process, so it ought to work on most machines. I should stress, though, that we haven’t been able to test on every type of hardware, so there may be issues on some computers. Please be sure to back up your hard drive before installing it. Unlike the live image, this will erase and reformat your hard drive, and you will lose anything that is already on it!
You can still boot the image as a live image if you don’t want to install it, and it will create a persistence partition on the USB stick so you can save data. Just select ‘Run with persistence’ from the boot menu. To install, choose either ‘Install’ or ‘Graphical install’ from the same menu. The Debian installer will then walk you through the install process.
You can download the latest x86 image (which includes both Scratch 2.0 and Thonny) from here or here for a torrent file.
This version of the desktop is based on Debian Jessie. Some of you will be aware that a new stable version of Debian (called Stretch) was released last week. Rest assured – we have been working on porting everything across to Stretch for some time now, and we will have a Stretch release ready some time over the summer.
The post A Raspbian desktop update with some new programming tools appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/sci-hub-ordered-to-pay-15-million-in-piracy-damages-170623/
Two years ago, academic publisher Elsevier filed a complaint against Sci-Hub and several related “pirate” sites.
It accused the websites of making academic papers widely available to the public, without permission.
While Sci-Hub is nothing like the average pirate site, it is just as illegal according to Elsevier’s legal team, who obtained a preliminary injunction from a New York District Court last fall.
The injunction ordered Sci-Hub’s founder Alexandra Elbakyan to quit offering access to any Elsevier content. However, this didn’t happen.
Instead of taking Sci-Hub down, the lawsuit achieved the opposite. Sci-Hub grew bigger and bigger up to a point where its users were downloading hundreds of thousands of papers per day.
Although Elbakyan sent a letter to the court earlier, she opted not engage in the US lawsuit any further. The same is true for her fellow defendants, associated with Libgen. As a result, Elsevier asked the court for a default judgment and a permanent injunction which were issued this week.
Following a hearing on Wednesday, the Court awarded Elsevier $15,000,000 in damages, the maximum statutory amount for the 100 copyrighted works that were listed in the complaint. In addition, the injunction, through which Sci-Hub and LibGen lost several domain names, was made permanent.
Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan says that even if she wanted to pay the millions of dollars in revenue, she doesn’t have the money to do so.
“The money project received and spent in about six years of its operation do not add up to 15 million,” Elbakyan tells torrentFreak.
“More interesting, Elsevier says: the Sci-Hub activity ’causes irreparable injury to Elsevier, its customers and the public’ and US court agreed. That feels like a perfect crime. If you want to cause an irreparable injury to American public, what do you have to do? Now we know the answer: establish a website where they can read research articles for free,” she adds.
Previously, Elbakyan already confirmed to us that, lawsuit or not, the site is not going anywhere.
“The Sci-Hub will continue as usual. In case of problems with the domain names, users can rely on TOR scihub22266oqcxt.onion,” Elbakyan added.
Sci-Hub is regularly referred to as the “Pirate Bay for science,” and based on the site’s resilience and its response to legal threats, it can certainly live up to this claim.
The Association of American Publishers (AAP) is happy with the outcome of the case.
“As the final judgment shows, the Court has not mistaken illegal activity for a public good,” AAP President and CEO Maria A. Pallante says.
“On the contrary, it has recognized the defendants’ operation for the flagrant and sweeping infringement that it really is and affirmed the critical role of copyright law in furthering scientific research and the public interest.”
Matt McKay, a spokesperson for the International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM) in Oxford went even further, telling Nature that the site doesn’t offer any value to the scientific comunity.
“Sci-Hub does not add any value to the scholarly community. It neither fosters scientific advancement nor does it value researchers’ achievements. It is simply a place for someone to go to download stolen content and then leave.”
Hundreds of thousands of academics, who regularly use the site to download papers, might contest this though.
With no real prospect of recouping the damages and an ever-resilient Elbakyan, Elsevier’s legal battle could just be a win on paper. Sci-Hub and Libgen are not going anywhere, it seems, and the lawsuit has made them more popular than ever before.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from ris original https://lwn.net/Articles/726278/rss
The digiKam Team has released
version 5.6.0 of the digiKam Software Collection for photo management. “With this version the HTML gallery and the video slideshow tools are back, database shrinking (e.g. purging stale thumbnails) is also supported on MySQL, grouping items feature has been improved, the support for custom sidecars type-mime have been added, the geolocation bookmarks introduce fixes to be fully functional with bundles, the support for custom sidecars, and of course a lots of bug has been fixed.”
Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/aws-bill-simplification-consolidated-cloudwatch-charges/
The bill that you receive for your use of AWS in July will include a change in the way that Amazon CloudWatch charges are presented. The CloudWatch team made this change in order to make your bill simpler and easier to understand.
Consolidating Charges
In the past, charges for your usage of CloudWatch were split between two sections of your bill. For historical reasons, the charges for CloudWatch Alarms, CloudWatch Metrics, and calls to the CloudWatch API were reported in the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) detail section, while charges for CloudWatch Logs and CloudWatch Dashboards were reported in the CloudWatch detail section, like this:
We have received feedback that splitting the charges across two sections of the bill made it difficult to locate and understand the entire set of monitoring charges. In order to address this issue, we are moving the charges that were formerly listed in the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) detail section to the CloudWatch detail section. We are making the same change to the detailed billing report, moving the affected charges from the AmazonEC2 product code to the AmazonCloudWatch product code and changing to the AmazonCloudWatch product name. This change does not affect your overall bill; it simply consolidates all of the charges for the use of CloudWatch in one section.
Billing Metric
The CloudWatch billing metric named Estimated Charges can be viewed as a Total Estimated Charge, or broken down By Service:
The total will not change. However, as noted above, the charges that formerly had AmazonEC2 as the ServiceName dimension will now have it set to AmazonCloudWatch:
You may need to adjust thresholds on your billing alarms as a result:
Once again, your total AWS bill will not change. You will begin to see the consolidated charges for CloudWatch in your AWS bill for July 2017.
— Jeff;
Post Syndicated from nellyo original https://nellyo.wordpress.com/2017/06/22/bnt-14/
Мъж влиза в БНТ след Вяра Анкова е заглавие в 24 часа.
24 часа е издание, което не предполага – то информира за решеното: Защо е опасно този СЕМ да избира шефове на БНТ и БНР – и изборът се отложи.
Сега казват: мъж влиза в БНТ. Кой точно мъж? И това е казано.
Да си спомним как се фабрикува новината – като се обявява за обществено мнение: Обединение на БНТ и БНР иска медийната общност. Нищо подобно – но 24 часа свежда волята. Владимира Янева по-късно разкрива механиката.
Да видим какво искала сега медийната общност – ето заглавие: Колеги на Каменаров смятат, че той е с най-големи шансове. И голяма снимка.
Октоподът-оракул Паул почина, но ние си имаме 24 часа.
Filed under: BG Media, BG Regulator 
Post Syndicated from Gleb Budman original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-to-get-your-first-customers/
After deciding to build an unlimited backup service and developing our own storage platform, the next step was to get customers and feedback. Not all customers are created equal. Let’s talk about the types, and when and how to attract them.
First Step – Don’t Launch Publicly
Launch when you’re ready for the judgments of people who don’t know you at all. Until then, don’t launch. Sign up users and customers either that you know, those you can trust to cut you some slack (while providing you feedback), or at minimum those for whom you can set expectations. For months the Backblaze website was a single page with no ability to get the product and minimal info on what it would be. This is not to counter the Lean Startup ‘iterate quickly with customer feedback’ advice. Rather, this is an acknowledgement that there are different types of feedback required based on your development stage.
Sign Up Your Friends
We knew all of our first customers; they were friends, family, and previous co-workers. Many knew what we were up to and were excited to help us. No magic marketing or tech savviness was required to reach them – we just asked that they try the service. We asked them to provide us feedback on their experience and collected it through email and conversations. While the feedback wasn’t unbiased, it was nonetheless wide-ranging, real, and often insightful. These people were willing to spend time carefully thinking about their feedback and delving deeper into the conversations.
Broaden to Beta
Unless you’re famous or your service costs $1 million per customer, you’ll probably need to expand quickly beyond your friends to build a business – and to get broader feedback. Our next step was to broaden the customer base to beta users.
Opening up the service in beta provides three benefits:
Pitching Beta to Press
Not all press cares about, or is even willing to cover, beta products. Much of the mainstream press wants to write about services that are fully live, have scale, and are important in the marketplace. However, there are a number of sites that like to cover the leading edge – and that means covering betas. Techcrunch, Ars Technica, and SimpleHelp covered our initial private beta launch. I’ll go into the details of how to work with the press to cover your announcements in a post next month.
Private vs. Public Beta
Both private and public beta provide all three of the benefits above. The difference between the two is that private betas are much more controlled, whereas public ones bring in more users. But this isn’t an either/or – I recommend doing both.
Private Beta
For our original beta in 2008, we decided that we were comfortable with about 1,000 users subscribing to our service. That would provide us with a healthy amount of feedback and get some early adoption, while not overwhelming us or our server capacity, and equally important not causing cash flow issues from having to buy more equipment. So we decided to limit the sign-up to only the first 1,000 people who signed up; then we would shut off sign-ups for a while.
But how do you even get 1,000 people to sign up for your service? In our case, get some major publications to write about our beta. (Note: In a future post I’ll explain exactly how to find and reach out to writers. Sign up to receive all of the entrepreneurial posts in this series.)
Public Beta
For our original service (computer backup), we did not have a public beta; but when we launched Backblaze B2, we had a private and then a public beta. The private beta allowed us to work out early kinks, while the public beta brought us a more varied set of use cases. In public beta, there is no cap on the number of users that may try the service.
While this is a first-class problem to have, if your service is flooded and stops working, it’s still a problem. Think through what you will do if that happens. In our early days, when our system could get overwhelmed by volume, we had a static web page hosted with a different registrar that wouldn’t let customers sign up but would tell them when our service would be open again. When we reached a critical volume level we would redirect to it in order to at least provide status for when we could accept more customers.
Collect Feedback
Since one of the goals of betas is to get feedback, we made sure that we had our email addresses clearly presented on the site so users could send us thoughts. We were most interested in broad qualitative feedback on users’ experience, so all emails went to an internal mailing list that would be read by everyone at Backblaze.
For our B2 public and private betas, we also added an optional short survey to the sign-up process. In order to be considered for the private beta you had to fill the survey out, though we found that 80% of users continued to fill out the survey even when it was not required. This survey had both closed-end questions (“how much data do you have”) and open-ended ones (“what do you want to use cloud storage for?”).
BTW, despite us getting a lot of feedback now via our support team, Twitter, and marketing surveys, we are always open to more – you can email me directly at gleb.budman {at} backblaze.com.
Don’t Throw Away Users
Initially our backup service was available only on Windows, but we had an email sign-up list for people who wanted it for their Mac. This provided us with a sense of market demand and a ready list of folks who could be beta users and early adopters when we had a Mac version. Have a service targeted at doctors but lawyers are expressing interest? Capture that.
When
The first question is “when” to launch. Presuming your service is in ‘public beta’, what is the advantage of moving out of beta and into a “version 1.0”, “gold”, or “public availability”? That depends on your service and customer base. Some services fly through public beta. Gmail, on the other hand, was (in)famous for being in beta for 5 years, despite having over 100 million users.
The term beta says to users, “give us some leeway, but feel free to use the service”. That’s fine for many consumer apps and will have near zero impact on them. However, services aimed at businesses and government will often not be adopted with a beta label as the enterprise customers want to know the company feels the service is ‘ready’. While Backblaze started out as a purely consumer service, because it was a data backup service, it was important for customers to trust that the service was ready.
No product is bug-free. But from a product readiness perspective, the nomenclature should also be a reflection of the quality of the product. You can launch a product with one feature that works well out of beta. But a product with fifty features on which half the users will bump into problems should likely stay in beta. The customer feedback, surveys, and your own internal testing should guide you in determining this quality during the beta. Be careful about “we’ve only seen that one time” or “I haven’t been able to reproduce that on my machine”; those issues are likely to scale with customers when you launch.
How
Launching out of beta can be as simple as removing the beta label from the website/product. However, this can be a great time to reach out to press, write a blog post, and send an email announcement to your customers.
Consider thanking your beta testers somehow; can they get some feature turned out for free, an extension of their trial, or premium support? If nothing else, remember to thank them for their feedback. Users that signed up during your beta are likely the ones who will propel your service. They had the need and interest to both be early adopters and deal with bugs. They are likely the key to getting 1,000 true fans.
The Beginning
The title of this post was “Getting your first customers”, because getting to launch may feel like the peak of your journey when you’re pre-launch, but it really is just the beginning. It’s a step along the journey of building your business. If your launch is wildly successful, enjoy it, work to build on the momentum, but don’t lose track of building your business. If your launch is a dud, go out for a coffee with your team, say “well that sucks”, and then get back to building your business. You can learn a tremendous amount from your early customers, and they can become your biggest fans, but the success of your business will depend on what you continue to do the months and years after your launch.
The post From Idea to Launch: Getting Your First Customers appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.
Post Syndicated from Ernesto original https://torrentfreak.com/kim-dotcom-opposes-uss-fugitive-claims-supreme-court-170622/
When Megaupload and Kim Dotcom were raided five years ago, the authorities seized millions of dollars in cash and other property.
The US government claimed the assets were obtained through copyright crimes so went after the bank accounts, cars, and other seized possessions of the Megaupload defendants.
Kim Dotcom and his colleagues were branded as “fugitives” and the Government won its case. Dotcom’s legal team quickly appealed this verdict, but lost once more at the Fourth Circuit appeals court.
A few weeks ago Dotcom and his former colleagues petitioned the Supreme Court to take on the case.
They don’t see themselves as “fugitives” and want the assets returned. The US Government opposed the request, but according to a new reply filed by Megaupload’s legal team, the US Government ignores critical questions.
The Government has a “vested financial stake” in maintaining the current situation, they write, which allows the authorities to use their “fugitive” claims as an offensive weapon.
“Far from being directed towards persons who have fled or avoided our country while claiming assets in it, fugitive disentitlement is being used offensively to strip foreigners of their assets abroad,” the reply brief (pdf) reads.
According to Dotcom’s lawyers there are several conflicting opinions from lower courts, which should be clarified by the Supreme Court. That Dotcom and his colleagues have decided to fight their extradition in New Zealand, doesn’t warrant the seizure of their assets.
“Absent review, forfeiture of tens of millions of dollars will be a fait accompli without the merits being reached,” they write, adding that this is all the more concerning because the US Government’s criminal case may not be as strong as claimed.
“This is especially disconcerting because the Government’s criminal case is so dubious. When the Government characterizes Petitioners as ‘designing and profiting from a system that facilitated wide-scale copyright infringement,’ it continues to paint a portrait of secondary copyright infringement, which is not a crime.”
The defense team cites several issues that warrant review and urges the Supreme Court to hear the case. If not, the Government will effectively be able to use assets seizures as a pressure tool to urge foreign defendants to come to the US.
“If this stands, the Government can weaponize fugitive disentitlement in order to claim assets abroad,” the reply brief reads.
“It is time for the Court to speak to the Questions Presented. Over the past two decades it has never had a better vehicle to do so, nor is any such vehicle elsewhere in sight,” Dotcom’s lawyers add.
Whether the Supreme Court accepts or denies the case will likely be decided in the weeks to come.
Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and ANONYMOUS VPN services.
Post Syndicated from jake original https://lwn.net/Articles/726234/rss
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (lxterminal, lxterminal-gtk3, openvpn, and pcmanfm), CentOS (thunderbird), Debian (jython, spip, tomcat7, and tomcat8), openSUSE (openvpn), Oracle (thunderbird), Slackware (openvpn), SUSE (openvpn), and Ubuntu (kernel, linux-lts-trusty, nss, and valgrind).
Post Syndicated from The HiveMQ Team original http://www.hivemq.com/blog/hivemq-3-2-5-released/
The HiveMQ team is pleased to announce the availability of HiveMQ 3.2.5. This is a maintenance release for the 3.2 series and brings the following improvements:
You can download the new HiveMQ version here.
We strongly recommend to upgrade if you are an HiveMQ 3.2.x user.
Have a great day,
The HiveMQ Team
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