Linux fréttir

Develop on Windows, deploy to Linux: an increasingly common pattern

Microsoft's second preview of Visual Studio 2019 16.5, freshly flung out this week, has better Linux support for C++ developers and also includes a new designer for Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).…

Brian Krebs: If you're running a business online, few things can be as disruptive or destructive to your brand as someone stealing your company's domain name and doing whatever they wish with it. Even so, most major Web site owners aren't taking full advantage of the security tools available to protect their domains from being hijacked. Here's the story of one recent victim who was doing almost everything possible to avoid such a situation and still had a key domain stolen by scammers.

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Change your passwords, ye scurvy-free non-landlubbers

The Royal Yachting Association (RYA) has told members that "an unauthorised party" may have pilfered a database containing personal information from 2015.…

couchslug writes: Potential hardware damage alert. As reported by Notebookcheck and later posted to a Lenovo support page, the USB-C firmware issue affects more than a dozen ThinkPad models including the ThinkPad X1 Carbon (5th Gen to 7th Gen), X1 Yoga (2nd Gen to 4th Gen), and P-series ThinkPads. It turns out that a firmware update issued in August 2019 corrupted the software controlling the port. " couchslug adds: Anyone with more information on this expensive problem please post. It's already taken out many system boards. The problem affects enough models that class action suit may be appropriate because failures due to the defect have occurred outside the warranty window. Users on Reddit suggest the situation is even worse. The "critical firmware update" is only a mitigation for the hardware failure -- keeping the machine going until the warranty expires." CNET adds: If your laptop is one of the models affected, Lenovo recommends to immediately update your system with new driver and firmware packages that are designed to resolve any USB-C problem. If the updates don't work out, Lenovo urges ThinkPad owners to reach out to Technical Support.

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Users can still run old and new kit on same network, for now

Sonos has said it will continue to support legacy products, in an apparent reversal of a statement made earlier this week.…

The Commerce Department's efforts to tighten the noose on Huawei Technologies Co. is facing a formidable obstacle: the Pentagon. From a report:Commerce officials have withdrawn proposed regulations making it harder for U.S. companies to sell to Huawei [the link may be paywalled] from their overseas facilities following objections from the Defense Department as well as the Treasury Department, people familiar with the matter told WSJ. The Pentagon is concerned that if U.S. companies can't continue to ship to Huawei, they will lose a key source of revenue -- depriving them of money for research and development needed to maintain a technological edge, the people said. The Treasury Department wanted to make sure that Secretary Steven Mnuchin had a chance to weigh in, said one of the people. Cabinet officials are expected to meet on Huawei and other China issues in the coming weeks. The splits within the Trump administration on how to deal with Huawei show the difficulty of confronting China on technology without harming U.S. companies.

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Speaking of tax evasions, Kiel, in a separate story at ProPublica this week: In March 2008, as Facebook was speeding toward 100 million users and emerging as the next big tech company, it announced an important hire. Sheryl Sandberg was leaving Google to become Facebook's chief operating officer. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, then 23 years old, told The New York Times that Sandberg would take the young company "to the next level." Based on her time at Google, Sandberg soon decided that one area where Facebook was behind its peers was in its tax dodging. "My experience is that by not having a European center and running everything through the US, it is very costly in terms of taxes," she wrote other executives in an April 2008 email, which hasn't been previously reported. Facebook's head of tax agreed, replying that the company needed to find "a low taxed jurisdiction to park profits." Later that year, Facebook named Dublin as its international headquarters, just as Google had done when Sandberg was there. And just like Google, Facebook concocted an intra-company deal to "park profits" in Ireland, where it would pay a tax rate near zero. Like its Big Tech peers, Facebook wasn't much afraid of the IRS. But, as it happened, the same year that Facebook started moving profits to Ireland, the IRS launched a team to crack down on deals like that. The effort started aggressively. As we recently reported, the IRS threw everything it had at Microsoft in the largest audit in the agency's history. But shortly after the IRS showed this new ambition, Republicans in Congress, after taking the House in 2010, began forcing cuts to the IRS' budget. Over the years, as Facebook grew into one of the world's largest companies, with 2 billion users, the IRS was shrinking. By the time the IRS finally took on Facebook over its Irish deal a few years later, the agency was in over its head. ProPublica pieced together the story of the Facebook audit from court documents filed by the two sides in their yearslong battle. The picture revealed by the documents provides a crucial window into the IRS' struggles to check large corporations' tax schemes.

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Here's what Met top brass told the press this morning

In depth London's Metropolitan Police is to start routinely deploying facial-recognition tech across the English capital despite legal and public opinion challenges, the force declared this morning.…

Wikipedia has surpassed a notable milestone this week: The English version of the world's largest online encyclopedia now has more than six million articles. From a report: The feat, which comes roughly 19 years after the website was founded, is a testament of "what humans can do together," said Ryan Merkley, chief of staff at Wikimedia, the nonprofit organization that operates the omnipresent online encyclopedia. The 6 millionth article is about Maria Elise Turner Lauder, a 19th-century Canadian school teacher, travel writer and fiction writer. The article was written by Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight, a longtime editor of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is available in dozens of languages, but its English-language version has the most number of articles. The English edition is also the most visited project on the website. According to publicly disclosed figures, the English version of the website averages about 255 million pageviews a day. According to web analytics firm SimilarWeb, Wikipedia overall is the eighth most visited website.

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theodp writes: ProPublica's Paul KIel has the remarkable tale of the IRS' 12-years-and-counting audit of Microsoft for a 2005 deal involving a Puerto Rico subsidiary (and related "Legal Entities") that was deemed worth nothing or a nominal amount on June 30th, 2005 but valued at $30.4 billion just one day later. Seen as an epic case of tax dodging by one of the largest companies in the world, the IRS opened the biggest audit by dollar amount in the history of the agency. In response to extensive written questions, Microsoft said it "follows the law and has always fully paid the taxes it owes." Kiel writes:Microsoft had shifted at least $39 billion in U.S. profits to Puerto Rico, where the company's tax consultants, KPMG, had persuaded the territory's government to give Microsoft a tax rate of nearly 0%. Microsoft had justified this transfer with a ludicrous-sounding deal: It had sold its most valuable possession -- its intellectual property -- to an 85-person factory it owned in a small Puerto Rican city. Over years of work, the IRS uncovered evidence that it believed laid the scheme bare. In one document, a Microsoft senior executive celebrated the company's "pure tax play." In another, KPMG plotted how to make the company Microsoft created to own the Puerto Rico factory -- and a portion of Microsoft's profits -- seem "real." Last week, U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez ruled Microsoft had to turn over disputed KPMG documents because the firm had been promoting a tax shelter. Martinez wrote, "the Court finds itself unable to escape the conclusion that a significant purpose, if not the sole purpose, of Microsoft's transactions was to avoid or evade federal income tax." It's an outcome that "serves the public interest," he wrote, given the difficulty of the IRS' task of discovering underreporting of corporate taxes. Barring an appeal, the ruling resolves the summons enforcement case and means the audit can now be completed by the IRS in the coming months.

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'Its life doesn't have to end!'

More than 10 years on from its campaign to persuade users to dump Windows 7 for a non-proprietary alternative, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off a petition to urge Microsoft to open-source the recently snuffed software.…

From Screw you, Brits... to Up yours, Delors...

Perhaps predictably, Apple has hit out against the European Parliament's renewed calls for a common charging standard. Its battle call? "It'll stifle our profits innovation."…

Longtime Slashdot reader vm writes: You don't have to wait until next Halloween to get creeped out. Using 3D printing, medical scanners, and an electronic larynx, researchers have recreated the voice of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy. The tongue has deteriorated over three millennia and all they have so far is a vowel sound but it's a pretty clever way to raise the dead with science. "The researchers then synthesized Nesyamun's voice by 3D printing a model of his airway and connecting it to an electronic larynx, an artificial voice box that provides a noise source," reports Science Magazine. "Based on writings on Nesyamun's coffin and the objects he was buried with, researchers know that he was an Egyptian priest and scribe who likely sang and spoke to the gods as part of his ritual duties. His coffin inscriptions include a wish to 'see and address the gods as he had in his working life.'" The findings have been reported in the journal Scientific Reports.

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Courtesy of Species360 (not a move by Microsoft into the zoology space)

Is your team flinging poo at visitors to your business? There's a cloud for that – as long as those doing the flinging are literal monkeys.…

TUPE or not TUPE? That is the question. Unison calls on lawyers ahead of 30 June D-Day

IBMers who provide tech services to ScottishPower have voted "overwhelmingly" for industrial action in a consultative ballot over deepening uncertainty surrounding their jobs.…

And what about my buttocks, eh?

Something for the Weekend, Sir? It's that hum in the office. It's getting to me.…

pgmrdlm shares a report from ABC News: The results are finally in for the first chocolate chip cookie bake-off in space. While looking more or less normal, the best cookies required two hours of baking time last month up at the International Space Station. It takes far less time on Earth, under 20 minutes. And how do they taste? No one knows. Still sealed in individual baking pouches and packed in their spaceflight container, the cookies remain frozen in a Houston-area lab after splashing down two weeks ago in a SpaceX capsule. They were the first food baked in space from raw ingredients. Italian astronaut Luca Parmitano was the master baker in December, radioing down a description as he baked them one by one in the prototype Zero G Oven. The first cookie -- in the oven for 25 minutes at 300 degrees Fahrenheit (149 degrees Celsius) -- ended up seriously under-baked. He more than doubled the baking time for the next two, and the results were still so-so. The fourth cookie stayed in the oven for two hours, and finally success. Parmitano cranked the oven up to its maximum 325 degrees F (163 degrees C) for the fifth cookie and baked it for 130 minutes. He reported more success. As for aroma, the astronauts could smell the cookies when they removed them from the oven, except for the first.

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Hadoop slinger's big bet joins list of rivals doing the same thing

When Hadoop distributor Cloudera marked a year since it signed off its merger with rival Hortonworks with the appointment of a new CEO, it was hardly a glowing endorsement of the strategy so far.…

Polishing balls for mates is no way to make a living

On Call Welcome to an On Call with a difference. Today The Register retells a story familiar to all too many readers: "You know about computers, right?"…

Iwastheone writes: NASA reports that Curiosity has suffered a system failure that left the robot unaware of its position and attitude on the red planet. Until it recovers, Curiosity is frozen in place. Mars is far enough away that we can't directly control Curiosity in real-time -- the rover gets batches of commands and then carries them out. That means it needs to have precise awareness of the state of all its joints, as well as environmental details like the location of nearby obstacles and the slope of the ground. This vital information ensures the rover doesn't bump anything with its arm or clip large rocks as it rolls along. Curiosity stores all this attitude data in memory, but something went wrong during operations several days ago. As the rover was carrying out its orders, it suddenly lost track of its orientation. The attitude data didn't add up, so Curiosity froze in place to avoid damaging itself. While the rover is physically stuck in place, it's still in communication with the team here on Earth. Since everything else is working on the rover, NASA was able to develop a set of instructions that should get the rover moving again. When transmitted, the data will inform Curiosity of its attitude and confirm its current state. This should allow the rover to recover and keep performing its safety checks. However, NASA also hopes to gather data on what caused the issue in the first place. The hope is they can avoid another freeze-up in the future.

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