Month: January 2017

Enlarge / Rep. Ted Lieu, as seen in July 2016. (credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

On Tuesday, while much of Washington, DC’s political class was consumed by President-elect Donald Trump’s first press conference, the only Democrat with a computer science degree was named to the House Judiciary Committee. The House of Representatives has three other members who hold computer science degrees (all Republicans), but none of them sit on the Judiciary Committee.

Despite being a new face to Congress, over the last year, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Los Angeles County) has been very outspoken on issues pertaining to law enforcement and encryption. The Judiciary Committee, which helps guide law enforcement and judicial policy federally, has been one of the primary vehicles to attempt a revision of the balance between privacy and law enforcement needs. 

Rep. Lieu is also a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Air Force Reserves, and he served for four years as a member of the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. The Congressman spoke out against efforts to weaken encryption during a subcommittee hearing in April 2015: "It is clear to me that creating a pathway for decryption only for good guys is technologically stupid—you just can't do that.”

Aaron Swartz at the Creative Commons Salon, San Francisco, in 2006. (credit: Buzz Andersen)

January 11 is a somber day for many in the Ars community. On January 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz tragically took his own life as he continued to face hacking charges stemming from an attempt to liberate the JSTOR archives in 2011. Today, others continue to pursue his goals of open access for academic research and literature. So in remembrance of the man, we're resurfacing Cyrus Farivar's memories of Swartz that originally ran on January 12, 2013.

I don’t remember the first time I heard about Aaron Swartz. It probably was from reading Dave Winer’s blog more than 10 years ago when I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley. The guy effused glowingly about Swartz as a young teenager.

“Aaron is the brightest 13 year old I've ever met on the Internet,” Winer wrote in February 2001. “It's not just bit smarts, he marshals power very well and is persistent. Eventually you come around to his way of thinking, or he comes around to yours. These are the essential ingredients in good technology. We're looking for the right answer, not to be proven right, or to prove the other guy wrong.”

Enlarge / President-elect Donald Trump at his news conference on January 11, 2017. (credit: PBS)

President-elect Donald Trump took to Twitter early Wednesday to blast the leak of unsubstantiated anti-Trump documents that touch on everything from Russia allegedly having leverage to extort him, to sexual escapades, and even to a potentially treasonous act.

The soon-to-be 45th president tweeted: "Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to "leak" into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany." Later at a news conference Wednesday, he called the report "a disgrace," "fake news," "phony stuff," and "crap."

"It certainly never should have been released," he said.

I knew it as soon as I crowned Fedora 25 the best distro of 2016—I was going to hear about it from Linux Mint fans.

How could I proclaim the best distro of the year before the latest version of Mint arrived? There's nothing like some guy on the Internet overlooking your favorite distro to make the hairs in your neckbeard start twitching angrily [/sarcasm]. I understand, it happens to me every time someone fails to recognize that Arch is the best distro of every year.

But I digress. There is a very simple reason I didn't pick Mint as the best distro of 2016, and I didn't even have to wait to test it: the reason is Wayland.