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WASHINGTON Russian hackers attacked at least one U.S. voting software supplier days before last year's presidential election, according to a government intelligence report leaked Monday that suggests election-related hacking penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than previously known.

The classified National Security Agency report, which was published online by The Intercept, does not say whether the hacking had any effect on election results. But it says Russian military intelligence attacked a U.S. voting software company and sent spear-phishing emails to more than 100 local election officials at the end of October or beginning of November.

U.S. intelligence agencies declined to comment.

However, the Justice Department announced Monday it had charged a government contractor in Georgia with leaking a classified report containing "Top Secret level" information to an online news organization. The report the contractor allegedly leaked is dated May 5, the same date as the document The Intercept posted online.

The document said Russian military intelligence "executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016 evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions, according to information that became available in April 2017."

The hackers are believed to have then used data from that operation to create a new email account to launch a spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations, the document said. "Lastly, the actors send test emails to two non-existent accounts ostensibly associated with absentee balloting, presumably with the purpose of creating those accounts to mimic legitimate services."

The document did not name any state.

The information in the leaked document seems to go further than the U.S. intelligence agencies' January assessment of the hacking that occurred.

"Russian intelligence obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple U.S. state or local electoral boards," the assessment said. The Department of Homeland Security "assesses that the types of systems Russian actors targeted or compromised were not involved in vote tallying."

The Intercept contacted NSA and the national intelligence director's office about the document and both agencies asked that it not be published. U.S. intelligence officials then asked The Intercept to redact certain sections. The Intercept said some material was withheld at U.S. intelligence agencies' request because it wasn't "clearly in the public interest."

The Associated Press could not confirm the authenticity of the May 5 NSA document, which The Intercept said it obtained anonymously.

Also on Monday, Reality Leigh Winner, 25, of Augusta, Georgia, was charged in U.S. District Court with copying classified documents and mailing them to a reporter with an unnamed news organization. Prosecutors did not say which federal agency Winner worked for, but FBI agent Justin Garrick said in an affidavit filed with the court that she had previously served in the Air Force and held a top-secret security clearance.

Winner's attorney, Titus Thomas Nichols, declined to confirm whether she is accused of leaking the NSA report received by The Intercept. He also declined to name the federal agency for which Winner worked.

"My client has no (criminal) history, so it's not as if she has a pattern of having done anything like this before," Nichols said in a phone interview Monday. "She is a very good person. All this craziness has happened all of a sudden."

In affidavits filed with the court, Garrick of the FBI said the government was notified of the leaked report by the news outlet that received it. He said the agency that housed the report determined only six employees had made physical copies. Winner was one of them. Garrick said investigators found Winner had exchanged email with the news outlet using her work computer.

Garrick's affidavit said he interviewed Winner at her home Saturday and she "admitted intentionally identifying and printing the classified intelligence reporting at issue" and mailing it to the news outlet.

Asked if Winner had confessed, Nichols said, "If there is a confession, the government has not shown it to me."

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Report suggests Russia hackers breached voting software firm - Chattanooga Times Free Press

Software Simplified Linux.com (blog) In 2015, geneticist Guy Reeves was trying to configure a free software system called Galaxy to get his bioinformatics projects off the ground. After a day or two of frustration, he asked members of his IT department for help. They installed Docker, a ...

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Software Simplified - Linux.com (blog)

Usefulness Functionality Price

Audacity is a highly efficient, free and easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux.

Audacity is a free, open source and cross-platform audio editor and recorder. This toolallows you to record, play, import and export MP3, OGG, AIFF and WAV files. It also allows you to cut, copy and paste audio sounds. And even better, it allows you to mix tracks and apply effects (with unlimited undo functionality). The free audio softwarefeatures a frequency-analysis window for audio-analysis applications, a customizable spectrogram mode and a built-in amplitude-envelope editor.

Heres a peek at the features Audacity offers. For a step-by-step guide on how to use Audacity, click here.

This software allows you to easily record live audio through a mixer or microphone. You can also digitize recordings from other media. Even more interesting is that you can capture streaming audio on any recent version of Windows.

This tool allows you to also import, edit and even combine old recordings with new recordings and when you are done you can then export your recordings in different file formats.

Audacity gives you the ability to cut, copy, paste and delete. Even better, it gives you unlimited sequential Redo and Undo options. You can also edit and mix large numbers of tracks.

You can use the platform to alter frequencies using its Bass and Treble, Equalization, High/Low pass and Notch filter effects. And using the compressor, you can amplify, fade in/out or amplify the volume. The platform also offers support for plugins and has a built-in crash recovery.

Audacity has also recently introduced a couple of new and interesting features, including rhythm track, new distortion effect and sample data import.

Audacity is compatible with Mac OS X/macOS, Windows and GNU/Linux operating systems.

As mentioned above, this tool is absolutely free and what makes it even more attractive is the fact that it offers almost the same features and quality output as many premium paid-for applications.

It is quite difficult to take anything away from Audacity. From the look of things, it seemslike its development team works hard to make the tool the best there is with regular updates. Some of its features are, however, inconsistent in their design, but thats probably because of the diversity of its development team. And so, if you are looking to edit or record audio, this would probably be a handy tool to use.

Sound Bars Photo via Shutterstock

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Audacity Audio Software Allows Voice Recording and Editing Free - Small Business Trends

Over the past two years, three New Hampshire companies have won the Microsoft BizSpark Plus Award, which includes $120,000 of free Azure Cloud services for one year.

Last year, Bedford-based ValChoice, an analytics company that lets consumers of insurance know which companies offer the best price, protection and service, received the award. ValChoice also won the New Hampshire Startup Challenge competition.

ValChoice received the award through its participation in Accelerate NH, a program organized by the Alpha Loft incubator. This year, two other Accelerate participants received the award: addapptation, a Newfield company that develops micro-apps for cloud applications; and ViewJoin, a Manchester company that developed a cloud-based application for designing and streaming interactive video broadcasts.

Addapptation also is receiving $100,000 through the local Millworks II venture fund after its showing last month at the Startup Shindig, the Alpha Lofts annual networking event.

The Microsoft award also provides access to hundreds of training courses, free software and tools such as Visual Studio and Office, startup support and networking with enterprise customers.

For founder Daniela Braga, the competing services seemed about even in terms of features. On price, Amazons tools were a bit cheaper than Microsofts. And more developers were comfortable working with Amazon Web Services, or AWS, the cloud-computing pioneer and now the markets largest player.

But Microsoft held the trump card: an offer of $500,000 in credits to spend on Microsofts Azure cloud services over three years, a benefit DefinedCrowd had earned by participating in a Microsoft startup program. That kind of sum can pay for the entire technology-infrastructure cost of getting a software companys first products off the ground.

That was kind of hard to refuse, said Aya Zook, business-development manager with DefinedCrowd, which makes tools to train software how to recognize speech or images.

The startup would build its software on Microsofts Azure.

Microsoft has staked its future on the cloud, the range of on-demand computing power and software services bundled into Azure and other products.

But Microsoft isnt banking on snazzy marketing or technical chops alone to make Azure a winner. The technology giant is also offering bargains and freebies, including discounts to large businesses, free trial offers to all comers, and grants of cash for startups and nonprofits that try the service.

The programs are part of a broader, companywide effort to gain market share. The bet is that discounts and free technical support today will make paying customers down the line, ideally bringing thousands of dollars a year to Azure and boosting awareness of Microsofts offering in a highly competitive market.

Its an old tactic for a company that has long had plenty of cash to work with. Exactly where Microsoft has deployed that money to lure software developers offers a window into the companys shifting priorities over the years.

In the midst of its unsuccessful smartphone push a few years ago, Microsoft was shelling out a reported $100,000 (and up) to application makers who built tools for Windows Phone. Before that, Microsoft made similar deals to get developers and corporate partners interested in Bing, the fledgling search engine. And to a generation of technologists years ago, Microsoft offered ample support to get businesses to plug into the new Windows Server.

Those programs have yielded mixed results, said Michael Cherry, who worked at Microsoft in the late 1990s, and today tracks the company with analysis firm Directions on Microsoft.

Grants to use products dont tend to make a big difference on their own, he said. But when you can add feet on the ground to help a developer that had a problem? Theyll be loyal to you forever. For Microsoft, the cloud is the priority today.

It was the focus of the companys recent Build developer show in Seattle, where the company kicked off the proceedings by staking out a virtual claim to the city, and the market.

A promotional video showed the Space Needle topped by a flag with the Microsoft logo on one side, and Cloud City on the other. Never mind that Amazon, with a much bigger cloud-market share than Microsoft, has its headquarters just a few blocks away from the landmark.

When choosing between Amazon and Microsoft, Braga concedes she had a soft spot for Microsoft. A linguist and speech-software expert originally from Portugal, she had spent seven years at the company. Zook, her colleague, is a fellow Microsoft alum.

Were ex-Microsoft people, she said. Its an environment that were comfortable with.

Still, she said, There are a lot of incentives, and pressure, to go on AWS.

Amazon, which pioneered the business of selling software and developer tools delivered over the internet, built its lead in that market, in part, by touting an easy-to-use product that offered room to experiment without paying. Adding to the appeal, technologists say, was the absence of complex, negotiated software-licensing deals of the sort Microsoft relies on.

A free tier of AWS services, introduced in 2010, can add up to thousands of dollars a year, a benefit available to all customers regardless of size. The company has bolstered that in recent years with credits aimed at researchers and educators, as well as standard startup grants ranging from $15,000 to $100,000.

The combination, on top of a technologically impressive set of products, has given AWS an enviable list of customers at the cutting edge of technology, including Netflix, Airbnb and Slack. To counter AWS lead, No. 2 Microsoft has brought to bear what some see as its greatest asset: a giant base of corporate customers, and a sales force of tens of thousands built to sell to them.

In contract talks with corporate customers of Windows, Office and other software, Microsoft recently has been offering discounts on those products in exchange for a commitment to buy thousands of dollars worth of Azure cloud-computing services, according to consultants who advise those companies. The company has also lent customers its own engineers.

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Microsoft faces off against Amazon - The Union Leader

English: Free software, roughly, is software that grants the four essentials freedoms to use, to study and modify, to copy and to redistribute itself for any purpose. The free software movement is a social movement to protect, for software users, the right of people to control their computers and to cooperate with others, when they choose, as part of a community. The movement was launched by the GNU project in 1983. Eesti: Vaba tarkvara on enam-vhem niisugune tarkvara, mis tuleb lhtekoodiga, mida saab muuta ja edasi jagada. Vaba tarkvara kogukond on sotsiaalne liikumine eesmrgiga toestada tarkvara kasutajatele inimeste igus kontrollida oma arvuteid ja teha teistega koostd, kui nad seda kogukonna osana soovivad. Liikumine algatati GNU projekti poolt 1983. aastal. Vaba tarkvara teatakse ka teiste terminite all, nagu "avatud lhtekoodiga tarkvara", "software libre", "FLOSS" ja "FOSS". Lisamrkuseks niipalju, et "vabavara" ei ole peaaegu kunagi "vaba tarkvara". Franais: Un logiciel libre est un logiciel dont l'utilisation, l'tude, la modification et la distributions sont garanties par une licence dite libre. Suomi: Vapaat ohjelmistot ovat tietokoneohjelmistoja, joiden mukana toimitetaan lhdekoodi jota voi muokata ja levitt eteenpin. Vapaiden ohjelmistojen liike pyrkii turvaamaan ohjelmistojen kyttjien oikeudet hallita tietokoneidensa toimintaa ja toimia yhteisn niin halutessaan. Liike sai alkunsa GNU-projektista vuonna 1983. Vapaisiin ohjelmistoihin viitataan mys nimill "avoimen lhdekoodin ohjelmisto", "FLOSS", "FOSS" ja "VALO". Huom! Freeware eli ilmaisohjelmat eivt melkein koskaan ole vapaita ohjelmistoja.

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Category:Free software - Wikimedia Commons