Monthly Shaarli
June, 2019
With Firefox Preview, we’re combining the best of what our lightweight Focus application and our current mobile browsers have to offer to create a best in class mobile experience. The new application is powered by Firefox's own mobile browser engine -- GeckoView -- the same high-performance, feature enabling motor that fuels our Focus app.
Several employees were caught abusing the tool, which let them read users’ messages and passwords.
Popular novels, technical tomes and self-published books are pirated and sold on Amazon. That may actually be helping the company extend its grip on the book business.
An employee with "ill-intention" at Desjardins Group collected information about nearly three million people and businesses and shared it with people outside the Quebec-based financial institution, officials revealed Thursday.
Two lawsuits are seeking class-action status, alleging that Amazon records children and stores their voiceprints indefinitely.
The Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) started a year ago to mitigate anticipated software license fee increases. MAlt’s objective is to put us back in control using open software. It is now time to present more widely this project and to explain how it will shape our computing environment.
Background
Over the years, CERN’s activities and services have increasingly relied on commercial software and solutions to deliver core functionalities, often leveraged by advantageous financial conditions based on the recognition of CERN’s status as an academic, non-profit or research institute. Once installed, well-spread and heavily used, the leverage used to attract CERN service managers to the commercial solutions tends to disappear and be replaced by licensing schemes and business models tuned for the private sector.
Given the collaborative nature of CERN and its wide community, a high number of licenses are required to deliver services to everyone, and when traditional business models on a per-user basis are applied, the costs per product can be huge and become unaffordable in the long term.
A prime example is that CERN has enjoyed special conditions for the use of Microsoft products for the last 20 years, by virtue of its status as an “academic institution”. However, recently, the company has decided to revoke CERN’s academic status, a measure that took effect at the end of the previous contract in March 2019, replaced by a new contract based on user numbers, increasing the license costs by more than a factor of ten. Although CERN has negotiated a ramp-up profile over ten years to give the necessary time to adapt, such costs are not sustainable.
Anticipating this situation, the IT department created the Microsoft Alternatives project, MAlt, a year ago.
MAlt’s objective
The initial objective was to investigate the migration from commercial software products (Microsoft and others) to open-source solutions, so as to minimise CERN’s exposure to the risks of unsustainable commercial conditions. By doing so, the laboratory is playing a pioneering role among public research institutions, most of whom have recently been faced with the same dilemma.
MAlt is a multi-year effort and it will now enter a new phase with the first migrations.
The project’s principles of engagement are to:
Deliver the same service to every category of CERN personnel
Avoid vendor lock-in to decrease risk and dependency
Keep hands on the data
Address the common use-casesComing in 2019
The first major change coming is a pilot mail Service for the IT department and volunteers this summer, followed by the start of CERN-wide migration. In parallel, some Skype for Business clients and analogue phones will migrate to a softphone telephony pilot.
Many other products and services are being worked on: evaluations of alternative solutions for various software packages used for IT core services, prototypes and pilots will emerge along the course of the next few years.
How will MAlt impact you and how to contribute?
You will find all the details and progress on the project site and more particularly the list of products addressed in the project.
The new computing newsletter blog will communicate on general items, and in addition, a general presentation will be provided in the Main Auditorium on 10 September at 2.30 p.m.
Needless to say, isolated initiatives will waste effort and resources. Instead, if you or your team are willing to participate, if you have ideas, the best way is to join the coordinated Microsoft Alternatives effort by checking the project site and contributing to the discussion channel.
Interesting times ahead! While the Microsoft Alternatives project is ambitious, it’s also a unique opportunity for CERN to demonstrate that building core services can be done without vendor and data lock-in, that the next generation of services can be tailored to the community’s needs and finally that CERN can inspire its partners by collaborating around a new range of products.
Follow the project, get details, join: cern.ch/malt
Web mapping applications are nowadays an ubiquitous and essential component of
our lives. They bring to the user a set of helpful services that we are now all
used to. Unfortunately the quality of these services depends indirectly on the
user personal data that are often vampirized and exploited, without any respect
for user privacy. Qwant Maps is born from this fact and proposes to give users
exclusive control over their geolocated data.
To this end the choice to use OpenStreetMap [https://www
Security researchers say they have uncovered a massive espionage campaign involving the theft of call records from hacked cell network providers to conduct targeted surveillance on individuals of interest. The hackers have systematically broken in to more than 10 cell networks around the world to d…
Libra is the last thing we need. Big tech’s use of our data is already worrying, says Guardian columnist John Harris
It's possible to purchase Lenovo's high-performance ThinkPad systems with Ubuntu shipped from the factory, starting with 2019 models.
Riviera Beach, Fla., authorized its insurer to pay a Bitcoin ransom to hackers who have paralyzed the city’s computer systems for three weeks.
My wife got a box of Enfamil Fedexed to our door as a promotion on what would have been the due date of our baby. Unfortunately, she miscarried at 3 months.
They knew this because marketers get near real-time access to prescriptions, hospital admissions and other things.
You should care because your information will be sold or traded, and behaviors can be correlated against medical and other outcomes.
Are you a divorced dad who has moved within 90 days and play daily fantasy sports? I can buy a list that will find you for $250. You are a risk for opioid addiction and may get denied service in the future for medical issues. Or you may attract advertising tailored to get you to gamble or drink more, when you are at your most vulnerable.
It used a Shazam-like technology to identify soccer games
How one small business owner flipped the online review ecosystem on its head.
Open internet services
From the author of uBlock on this:
What we see are the public statements, for public consumption, they are designed to "sell" the changes to the wider public. What we do not see is what is being said in private meetings by officers who get to decide how to optimize the business. So we have to judge not by what is said for public consumption purpose, but by what in effect is being done, or what they plan to do.
This is how personally I see the deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API in manifest v3:
In order for Google Chrome to reach its current user base, it had to support content blockers -- these are the top most popular extensions for any browser. Google strategy has been to find the optimal point between the two goals of growing the user base of Google Chrome and preventing content blockers from harming its business.
The blocking ability of the webRequest API caused Google to yield control of content blocking to content blockers. Now that Google Chrome is the dominant browser, it is in a better position to shift the optimal point between the two goals which benefits Google's primary business.
The deprecation of the blocking ability of the webRequest API is to gain back this control, and to further now instrument and report how web pages are filtered since now the exact filters which are applied to web page is information which will be collectable by Google Chrome.
The latest version of the bot detector reCaptcha is invisible to users and has spread to more than 650,000 websites. It’s great for security—but not so great for your privacy.
Reminded that the Microsoft ebook store closes next week. The DRM'd books will stop working.
Research released this week finds that many online retailers use so-called dark patterns to influence what shoppers decide to purchase. Cracking down on the practice could be difficult.
Google Maps is filled with false business addresses created by firms pretending to be nearby. Some are fibbing to get your business. Others are posted by predators seeing what they can take.
“The whole premise of Facebook is to render not private” your activity, said company lawyer, fighting off lawsuits over Cambridge Analytica data collection.
As you shop, “beacons” are watching you, using hidden technology in your phone.
Facebook uncovered emails that appear to show CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s connection to potentially problematic privacy practices at the company.
No, Google won’t stop reading your emails. And you may not actually want it to. The search giant introduced a significant change to the way it treats its users’ emails Friday, announcing that…
Slate’s Use of Your Data
Updated: The data leak impacted Tech Data’s client servers, SAP systems, and more.
GrapheneOS is a security and privacy focused mobile OS with Android app compatibility.
Download Buster: Captcha Solver for Humans for Firefox. Save time by asking Buster to solve captchas for you.
In a response to negative feedback, Google shared that Chrome's current ad blocking capabilities for extensions will soon be restricted to enterprise users.
Sometimes it’s worth pausing to ask the simplest questions.
On June 4th, Firefox will be rolling out this feature, Enhanced Tracking Protection, to all new users on by default, to make it harder for over a thousand companies to track their every move.
The social network wants to dismiss a lawsuit stemming from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.