Gnome contributor Tobias Bernard is on a crusade against title bars — “the largely empty bars at the top of some application windows [that] contain only the window title and a close button.” Instead he wants to see header bars — “a newer, more flexible pattern that allows putting window controls and other UI elements in the same bar.” Tobias Bernard writes:
Header bars are client-side decorations (CSD), which means they are drawn by the app rather than the display server. This allows for better integration between application and window chrome. All GNOME apps (except for Terminal) have moved to header bars over the past few years, and so have many third-party apps. However, there are still a few holdouts.

He’s announcing the CSD Initiative, “an effort to get apps (both GNOME and third-party) to drop title bars and adopt GNOME-style client-side decorations… The only way to solve this problem long-term is to patch applications upstream to not use title bars. So this is what we’ll have to do.”

Talk to the maintainers and convince them that this is a good idea
Do the design work of adapting the layout and make mockups
Figure out what is required at a technical level
Actually implement the new layout and get it merged

Implementation is already in progress for Firefox, though it has not yet been started for other high-priority apps like LibreOffice, GNOME Terminal, and Skype. “If you want to help with any of the above tasks,” writes Tobias, “come talk to us on #gnome-design on IRC/Matrix.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Should Apps Replace Title Bars with Header Bars?

Long-time Slashdot reader kbahey writes:
Can a single pixel cost you your livelihood and/or freedom? Apparently, this has already happened in Turkey to thousands of people and their relatives. It all stems from the purge by president Edrogan following a failed coupe. The result is that many innocent people lost their jobs (and source of income), their freedom, their reputation, and more.
The details are frightening. The underlying technology is the use of 1×1 transparent pixels, as most web sites do, to track their visitors. This particular pixel was used by Bylock, a messaging app that the Turkish government deemed seditious, in their purge against Fethullah Gulen loyalists. Pre-dawn raids by police were conducted on those who have this pixel. The long legal proceedings caused a digital forensic expert to challenge those cases, because [the pixel using] the servers for Bylock was also being used by other applications for music streaming, and prayer times/direction of Mecca.
30,000 innocent people may have been swept up among the 150,000 Turks detained, arrested or forced from their jobs under state of emergency decrees since the summer of 2016. One 29-year-old high school teacher “wished the worst” for the revolutionaries accused of using Bylock, “until authorities said he was one of them.”

The government eventually exonerated 11,480 of the wrongly accused, but some had already spent months in prison, and reportedly some even committed suicide.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – A Single Line of Computer Code Put Thousands of Innocent Turks in Jail

Long-time Slashdot readers Agilulf, Sara Chan, and wiredmikey — plus an anonymous reader — all submitted the same story. Agilulf writes:
Dutch hackers from AIVD (their intelligence agency) infiltrated Russian hackers, had access to their CCTV system, and followed them for more than a year, watched their attack on the DNC, provided the proof to the U.S. intelligence community that Russia was behind those hacks and the stolen emails, and were disappointed with the response from the U.S.
The Dutch agents also watched Russian agents breach a non-classified network at the U.S. State Department in 2014, where the Russians then sent a phishing email to the White House, successfully stole login credentials, and then accessed email from embassies and diplomats.

“Three American intelligence services state with ‘high confidence’ that the Kremlin was behind the attack on the Democratic Party,” according to the article, which adds that that certainty “is derived from the AIVD hackers having had access to the office-like space in the center of Moscow for years.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Dutch Intelligence Agents Watched Russia Hack the DNC

An anonymous reader writes:
“I will be short. I’ve got an order to kill you,” the note said, demanding $2,800 in U.S. dollars or Bitcoin. “I switched from being upset about it to, ‘I need to get the word out’,” one of its targets told a local newscaster. They filed a report through the FBI’s web site.

“If only 1% of people send money — there’s no overhead for them; that’s money in the bank,” one FBI agent tells the news team. A quick Google search finds recent reports of two nearly identical threats using the same text.

“I have been thinking for a long time whether it is worth sending this notice, and decided that you still have the right to know… I’ve got an order to kill you, because some of your activity causes trouble to several people… I decided to break some rules, as this will be my final order… As soon as I receive the funds, I will forward you the name of the man [this] order came from, and all other information I have.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – FBI Warns of Email Death Threats Demanding Bitcoin

Newsweek reports:
A private satellite company launched a three-foot-wide, carbon-fiber orb called the Humanity Star into the sky last week. Rocket Lab has promised the Humanity Star will be “the brightest thing in the sky,” presumably other than the sun. The orb will reflect light from the sun back to Earth to achieve this effect. It’s expected to orbit the Earth once every 90 minutes for the next nine months before it falls out of the sky and burns up in the atmosphere. The reaction on social media has been largely swift and scornful…
The stated goal of the project, at least, seems admirable: “No matter where you are in the world, rich or in poverty, in conflict or at peace, everyone will be able to see the bright, blinking Humanity Star orbiting Earth in the night sky,” Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said in a statement on the project’s website. “Wait for when the Humanity Star is overhead, and take your loved ones outside to look up and reflect. You may just feel a connection to the more than 7 billion other people on this planet we share this ride with.”
Slashdot reader dmoberhaus writes that “astronomers are annoyed by what they perceive as just another piece of space junk getting in the way.”
“Wow. Intentionally bright long-term space graffiti. Thanks a lot Rocket Lab,” complained an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology. And one New Zealand journalist accused Rocket Lab of “vandalising the night sky with shiny space rubbish.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Rocket Lab Criticized For Launching Their Own Private ‘Star’ Into Orbit