Veteran systemd and BUS1 developers are David Herrmann and Tom Gundersen have been working on "nettools" as a new network configuration libraries project for Linux.
Announced yesterday from the All Systems Go! 2018 conference (what used to be the systemd conference and then broadened to more user-space topics) was nettools as this collection of new network configuration libraries.
Nettools is intended to provide the functionality for DHCP, NDP, IPv4 ACD, IPv4LL while initially the focus has been on the IPv4 Address Conflict Detection (ACD) capability.
After getting the Linux support squared away for Creative's Sound BlasterX AE-5 and Sound Blaster Recon3D, Connor McAdams latest challenge was getting the Sound Blaster ZxR support working on Linux. Overnight a set of 11 patches were sent out to get this ZxR sound card working on the mainline Linux kernel.
With these patches, the Sound Blaster ZxR should be finally working on Linux and also marks the last Creative card not working with the CA0132 Linux kernel driver. Adding in the Sound Blaster ZxR support took just about 400 lines of new code for this driver.
The Kyber I/O scheduler added back in Linux 4.12 and backed by Facebook engineers is seeing some improvements come the Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle.
The current Kyber I/O scheduler heuristics rely upon the mean latency rather than 99th percentile latency, the statistics calculations are based on a short window of time that can cause issues for outliers with bursty workloads, and considers latency only after I/O has been submitted to the device.
Last week’s events, with Linus Torvalds pledging to stop behaving like an asshole, instituting a code of conduct in Linux kernel development, and all but running off to join a monastery, have made a lot of waves. The last bastion of meritocracy has fallen! Linus, the man with five middle fingers on each hand, was going to save free software from ruin by tellin’ it like it is to all those writers of bad patches. Now he has gone over to the Dark Side, etc., etc.
There is one thing that struck me when reading the arguments last week, that I never realized before (as I guess I tend to avoid reading this type of material): the folks who argue against, are convinced that the inevitable end result of respectful behaviour is a weakening of technical skill in free software. I’ve read from many sources last week the “meritocracy or bust” argument that meritocracy means three things: the acceptance of patches on no other grounds than technical excellence, the promotion of no other than technically excellent people to maintainer positions within projects, and finally the freedom to disrespect people who are not technically excellent. As I understand these people’s arguments, the meritocracy system works, so removing any of these three pillars is therefore bound to produce worse results than meritocracy.
It's been another week, so as normal, another -rc release is here. For a -rc6 release, it's pretty normal. There are more individual merges from different trees than -rc5, but the number of changes is much lower than last week. Lots of different driver tree updates, along with some some x86 and a risc-v fix.
Full details are in the shortlog below, and as always, please go test and report any problems. It all "just works" on my systems, and I have not heard of any major outstanding issues as of this point in time.
The PS3OFMINIPAD is a low-cost wired gamepad controller manufactured by UK-based BigBen Interactive and marketed for use with the PlayStation 3 and being a "kid friendly" controller.
With the next Linux kernel cycle whether it ends up being 4.20 or 5.0, the BigBen PS3OFMINIPAD will now be supported. Queued this past week into the HID-next Git branch is a new driver for supporting this particular controller.
Apple announced the Magic Trackpad 2 almost three years ago to the day while the mainline Linux kernel will finally be supporting this multi-touch device soon.
Google engineers are working to add Apple Magic Trackpad 2 Linux support to the mainline Linux Kernel.
Although it’s been 3 years since Apple announced the Magic Trackpad 2 Linux users have needed to rely on out-of-tree patches and drivers to use the multi-touch device with desktop Linux distributions like Ubuntu, in both wired and wireless mode.
—But not for much longer!
With BUS1 still appearing out in the distant for the mainline Linux kernel as an in-kernel IPC mechanism, dbus-broker is the year-and-a-half long effort so far at making a faster D-Bus compliant implementation in user-space.
D-Bus Broker has continued advancing with a focus on speed while retaining compatibility with the long-standing D-Bus interfaces. With the upcoming Fedora 29 release, the D-Bus Message Broker may become the default implementation -- it met the code completion deadline with the necessary changes made, but some of the work is currently only in Fedora Rawhide and not the branched F29 packages. So hopefully Fedora 29 will be the first major Linux distribution defaulting to dbus-broker or it might end up becoming Fedora 30.
A set of five patches were sent out on Sunday by AMD's Rex Zhu that enable RPM fan settings to be viewed and manually toggled via the sysfs interface.
For those wishing to manually override your Radeon graphics card fan control settings, the AMDGPU DRM driver will be offering this ability via sysfs. The new patches allow for the fan speed target to be viewed/set, the ability to read the min/max fan speed, and to enable/disable the fan sensor all via sysfs, making it easy to read or tune these values from the command-line or easy-to-create scripts.
The Khronos Working Group maintaining Vulkan have released their 1.1.86 specification update to end out September. This is one of the more interesting Vulkan updates in recent times.
We’ve accumulated enough features and fixes that it is time for yet another release. The beefier changelogs can be found here: (Arcan) and here: (Durden). Starting with the following video which consolidates the visible changes to (indirectly) Arcan and its reference desktop environment, Durden.
Arcan is that display server built originally off a game engine code base and has been building up a feature-set close to that of X11/Wayland. Durden is its accompanying desktop while the project has also been pursuing a virtual reality desktop and trying to work on other innovations in this space.
This weekend Arcan 0.5.5 and Durden 0.5 have been released as the newest versions of this display stack and its reference desktop environment. Recent focuses for the project have been better BSD/OpenBSD support, packaging within Void Linux, and more. The graphics-related subsystem code in Arcan is getting squared away and soon will be focusing on the last area to go beyond feature parity with X.Org: advanced network support and not just "RDP/VNC nonsense."
Intel developers this week sent out their final set of feature updates for the "i915" Direct Rendering Manager driver for the upcoming Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle.
Complementing the earlier Intel DRM feature updates queued a few weeks back, this week Intel developers sent in their second and final batch of feature updates for this next kernel cycle.
One of the XDC2018 talks I was most looking forward to was the presentation by Red Hat's Karol Herbst and Rob Clark on their work with SPIR-V/NIR support inside Mesa for the context of OpenCL/compute support, which includes getting GPGPU computing on the Nouveau and Freedreno drivers.
While there are no signs of an imminent "Turing" signed firmware release as a prerequisite for open-source driver support on the new GeForce RTX 2070/2080 series, NVIDIA has finally let loose the signed firmware images for Volta "GV100" hardware.
Merged today to linux-firmware.git are the signed firmware images needed for enabling Volta GV100 hardware acceleration. Since the GeForce 900 "Maxwell" series, the GPUs require signed firmware images in order to enable hardware acceleration, which has made the newer GPUs much more open-source-unfriendly than Kepler and older generations. Without these signed binary blobs, the GPUs basically only work out with Nouveau for kernel mode-setting.
The AMD developers uploaded their public Git trees making up the "AMDVLK" open-source AMD Vulkan driver stack prior to ending out September.
The highlights for this latest code drop, which continues happening roughly on a weekly release cadence, includes various fixes as well as new extensions for the newly-minted Vulkan 1.1.86. It also seems AMD developers are looking more at AMDVLK now with DXVK for Steam Play / Proton gaming.
As perhaps a sign of where Intel is heading for their GPU computing strategy with their in-development discrete GPUs, they are developing a Vulkan compute back-end for the widely-used OpenCV library. This Vulkan back-end is for handling GPU-based compute for neural networks with this Open Computer Vision library as an alternative to the CUDA and OpenCL GPU compute support.
Last week at XDC2018 in Spain, Elie Tournier of Collabora presented on the current state of the Virgl effort for allowing OpenGL acceleration provided by a host's system within a QEMU/VirtIO-GPU virtual machine environment.
For the most part the information is what most Phoronix readers should be already familiar with if you stay up to date with our news coverage... In recent months Virgl has gone from only supporting OpenGL 3.0 to now supporting OpenGL 4.3 and OpenGL ES 3.2, assuming the host driver supports the necessary bits too. The OpenGL ES support has required some workarounds to get it working.
Audiobooks are a great way to consume literature. Many people who don’t have time to read, choose to listen. Most people, myself included, just use a regular media player like VLC or MPV for listening to audiobooks on Linux.
Today, we will look at a Linux application built solely for listening to audiobooks.
Once upon a time, visual HTML editors were all the rage. You would open a browser-like program and just type your pages, without thinking too much about the source code, the scripts, or even the looks. The magic happened somewhere behind the scenes. Then, slowly but surely, online CMS started showing up, and eventually became the modern norm. But what if you still want to write Web stuff offline?
It does sound a bit like a paradox - after all, you WILL be uploading your material one day. Still, being able to write in an offline manner has its perks and convenience. Moreover, if you do not use any CMS, writing pure HTML can be tedious. Having a nice frontend helps you focus on what you want people to read, not necessarily what machines ought to be interpretting and displaying. The question is, how difficult is this to achieve in the year 2018?
Renaming files in batches is a rare task. Probably, that is why, with the exception of Xfce’s Thunar, desktop file managers can only rename files one at a time. However, when I digitize music, I am dealing with ten or more files per albums, and I need a bulk renamer. Of course, I could use the rename command, and, using it four or fives a week, I would soon get to know the options I wanted. However, for such a repetitive task, a desktop tool is more convenient. It was with this need that I rediscovered pyRenamer for the second or third time. As I quickly remembered, it is by far the most versatile of all the alternatives.
As the name suggests, pyRenamer is written in Python, and offers most of the options of the rename command. It comes with only brief online help embeeded in the interface, but, aside from a few obscure features, is easy enough to figure out by trial and error. By default, the interface consists of a directory manager on the top left, and a pane on the top right for the files in the currently selected directory. On the bottom left are the options for renaming, and on the bottom right the controls. Users can also choose to select View | Show Options to add an option pane on the top right. The options include such useful functions, as automatically preserving file name extensions and showing a preview of the selected renaming options. The Options pane can also be used to enter regular expressions to limit the file names that are bout to be renamed.
If you want to set-up touchpad gestures on Linux, but don’t know how, you should check out the following app.
The app is called ‘Gestures’ and is described by its developer as being a “minimal Gtk+ GUI app for libinput-gestures”.
Windows and macOS both come with a variety of useful touchpad gestures pre-configured out of the box, and offer easy-to-access settings for adjusting or changing gesture behaviour to your liking.
Whether you are a professional software developer looking for a platform to create elegant documentation for one of you projects, or someone working in a company in need to create an internal documentation for staff, or even just a power user who wants to save some notes in a good fashioned way, MkDocs is the best tool for you.
MkDocs is a static site generator which is oriented at creating documentation platforms. It’s quite simple, beautiful and easy to configure and deploy. Written in Python, it simply requires you to create your files in Markdown format, and then, just using a single YAML configuration file, it can generate a working static website out of it for you.
We are still compiling Audacity as 32-bit. Whilst MacOSX works with 32-bit, it would prefer a 64-bit version of Audacity. We are working on a 64-bit version for Mac for 2.3.1. On Windows you may find that recording is disabled until you change Windows permissions for the microphone! This affects all versions of Audacity, and many other audio programs.
Audacity 2.3.0 features a stack of improvements, and benefits from over 90 bugs fixes.
This is the first major update to the open-source audio tool since the release of Audacity 2.2.2 back in February.
Sockets are used for two different processes to share data or for shuttling information from one machine to another and the network. They are extremely useful and the basis of things like FTP, real-time network chat systems, secure shells, and so on.
For the fly-by programmer, sockets can be somewhat hard to get right, but by using systemd's socket units, you can make systemd do the heavy lifting.
Besides making sockets simpler to set up, systemd dumps whatever comes in through the socket to STDIN. This means you don't have to bother with complicated socket management in you script; just pick up the data from STDIN and use it from there.
The other advantage is that systemd will make sure your socket is active only as long as necessary, waking it up when data is incoming, and closing it down again when it is done. This saves resources, as the server associated on the receiving side will be closed most of the time and will only be activated if a systemd socket unit detects activity on its port.
Stellaris, the space grand strategy game from Paradox has officially launched on GOG today so more of you can enjoy it.
Of course, all the DLC is also available on GOG so you're not being left out. On top of that, the multiplayer is expanding with a beta now available to support online multiplayer regardless of where you purchased it from which is exactly how it should be done. Great stuff from Paradox for doing that.
Egosoft have officially announced their latest space sim X4: Foundations is going to launch on November 30th, although the status of the Linux build isn't fully confirmed.
When asked about it, they simply told us "The plan is to launch the Linux Beta at release, but we have to see if that will work out.".
Buddy System recently released their crowdfunded adventure platformer and it's a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Funded on Fig back in February last year, Little Bug is a very strange yet captivating platformer that requires you to use a grappling-hook mechanic to swing you around. It's really quite something!
Fancy trying out another free Doom game? If you have quick reaction times and love slaying demons DaggerHell Overkill is for you.
Based on the gameplay found in the rather great simplistic FPS Devil Daggers, DaggerHell Overkill is a slight revamp of a previous release simply called DaggerHell. Fully playable with GZDoom paired with Freedoom, it features the same basic gameplay found in Devil Daggers with your magical hand shooting enemies like a machine-gun (hold fire) or like a shotgun (click fire).
Just days after announcing Total War: Three Kingdoms for Linux and releasing Life is Strange: Before The Storm, Feral Interactive has announced they will be bringing Life is Strange 2 to Linux (and macOS) in 2019.
UK-based video games publisher Feral Interactive just teased today the upcoming port of the recently released Life Is Strange 2 episodic graphic adventure video game for the Linux and macOS platforms.
Developed by Dontnod Entertainment and published by Square Enix, Life Is Strange 2 was released on September 27, 2018, for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One gaming platforms as the third installment in the award-winning Life Is Strange franchise after Life Is Strange and Life Is Strange: Before the Storm.
This is fantastic news, Life is Strange 2 is confirmed to be coming to Linux with the porting from Feral Interactive once again. This has replaced the "AURORA" teaser on their Port Radar.
This is bad news for my free time. Reassembly is a highly addictive spaceship building and exploration game, one that just had a big performance update.
Seriously, I was absolutely addicted to this game some time ago. It has some seriously good combat, some fun exploration and a ship builder that's incredibly easy to use that enables you to create some truly ridiculous spaceships.
After being in Early Access for around a year, Timeslip Softworks have announced that their turn-based tactical RPG Vigilantes will release in full this week. Thursday, October 4th is the date and they recently released an update to add in some of the final elements of the game with update 30.
For those of you who like your more casual action-arcade type games StarCrossed does look pretty sweet.
Currently on Kickstarter, Contigo Games need $10K and they already have over $8K with 25 days to go so it looks like they will easily hit their goal. It's not a lot to ask for but they do mention how they've been working on it for two years already. The Kickstarter is to help with "outreach and marketing".
Feral's GameMode open-source project for dynamically optimizing a Linux system for gaming with automatically adjusting tunables like the CPU frequency scaling governor and real-time kernel optimizations may soon see another feature added.
As sad as it is, I appreciate it when we see a developer being really honest. Limit Theory was a promising open-world space sim that was Kickstarted back in 2012 and the developer has reached their limit.
Writing in a post titled "The End", the developer talks about how they've essentially exhausted not only their finances but their energy emotionally and physically has been drained trying to complete it.
It's Sunday, I have still a ridiculous cold so I feel quite poorly. Here's a run over some Linux games on sale, some other random things along with a question to you.
It has been a long time since last having anything new to report on the Unvanquished open-source game project that is powered by the "Daemon Engine" as a long ago fork from ioquake3 and has seen countless improvements since. At least when the project started out several years back, the visual quality was great and they had been doing great alpha releases. However, in the past two years they haven't succeeded in putting out new alphas or their long-awaited beta, but fortunately the project is still alive.
While DXVK captures much of the limelight these days when it comes to accelerating Windows gaming on Linux by mapping Direct3D 11 (and D3D10) over Vulkan, the VK9 project and its main developer continue advancing D3D9-over-Vulkan for those preferring to relive over Direct3D Windows games.
Fancy getting in on the action? Black Riddles Studio has finally released an update to Crazy Justice [Steam] and we have some keys available. For a little history on it, see my previous article.
If you like strategy games and you like the idea of MOBAs like Dota 2, Asteroid Fight might be an interesting choice. I went into Early Access recently with full Linux support.
The amusing strategy game Dungeons 3 has another DLC out with Clash of Gods giving you even more content to play with. I have to admit, Realmforge Studios and Kalypso Media Digital have supported this one really nicely since release. Easily the best in the series!
I've had a good amount of fun with this one, with a healthy dose of laughs. The narrator is amazing and the gameplay is a surprisingly good mix of RTS mechanics with the dungeon building elements.
While we've talked a lot about DXVK recently, let's not forget other interesting projects like VK9 (formerly SchaeferGL) which aims to give Direct3D 9 over Vulkan.
Seven Kingdoms Ancient Adversaries holds a special place in my heart, as one of the earliest strategy games I played. Back in the days when you used to actually go to a shop to buy a PC game, something about it caught my eye and many hours were lost.
The KDE developers remain very busy improving their desktop environment.
KDE contributor Nate Graham continues doing a splendid job summarizing the weekly improvements heading into the KDE desktop stack.
Get ready for your weekly load of Usability & Productivity! We’re all working to push Plasma 5.14 out the door, and have already starting work on 5.15. One thing I am personally looking into is improving the visuals of the login screen. As you may recall, for 5.13 we re-did the lock and login screens. The lock screen changes have been very well received, but feedback for got login screen has been more mixed, with many complaining about the (almost) permanently blurred background being a visual regression, since the background image is no longer as clear as it was before.
We’ve heard the feedback and I’m working on the issue. I hope to have a tweaked version ready for Plasma 5.15 that addresses this complaint. You can follow the progress here.
Since KDE Itinerary was first presented to a wider audience at Akademy 2018 a lot has happened. Here are the most important changes from the past two month, in KDE Itinerary and the underlying frameworks.Since KDE Itinerary was first presented to a wider audience at Akademy 2018 a lot has happened. Here are the most important changes from the past two month, in KDE Itinerary and the underlying frameworks.
My name is João Garcia and I’m an illustrator hailing from Brazil, more specifically, from the city of Florianópolis in the southern part of the country. I graduated in Design in the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina with a focus on illustration and animation.
This week, we also plan to bring out a preview release of Krita 4.2. We don’t have everything in that we want to yet — like the updated resource handling, but there’s already plenty to play with!
This post will be related not only to the last month (September), but I have decided to include my experiences from August as well. In the last month, I was very occupied with some assignments from the university after the two week travel that I had in August for Akademy and ERBASE (which is a congress that I had presented a paper). I am in the end of this semester in the university, so I am anxious for my vacations to code more in the projects that I contribute to.
Well, following this brief comment about Akademy, I will start talking about what I have done in KDE in the weeks of August/September. I am still working in that RAID patch on KDE Partition Manager, where I still got some problems with device mapping and udev. The RAID arrays are not been mapped as I expected. Also there are some bugs related to partition creation inside of RAID and another one related to udev, that is keeping the device busy, which will raise some errors when you try to do any disk operation.
It has been a busy week!
My significant accomplishment this week is the packaging of squashfuse for Debian.
This is required for libappimage, which is next on my to-do list.
I have uploaded it to mentors here: https://mentors.debian.net/package/squashfuse
I do have a mentor/sponsor, but under the KDE umbrella ( Thank you lisandro! ),
he is very busy and I would like to give him a break on this one.
If anyone has some spare time to give this a look, thank you!
GNOME Internships are getting closer, if you are a GNOME contributor with some experience this internship is a good fit for you. Official application deadline is 1st of October, but we are open to receive more aplications if the aplicant is a good fit.
Quirky is an offshoot of Puppy Linux. The live distro is maintained by Barry Kauler, who until 2013 was the lead developer of Puppy. The main difference between Quirky and Puppy is that Quirky is experimental - its aim is "to explore new ideas in Puppy's underlying infrastructure".
The official introduction to Quirky consists of a few short paragraphs on the developer's blog. The last paragraph acknowledges that the page "needs to be filled out a bit more" and refers people who want to find out more about the distro to the blog's Quirky tag. There is also a link to the Quirky docs which consists of a single page that reads: "coming soon".
As I was not that familiar with Puppy I read most of the blog posts with the Quirky tag. The blog posts are rather technical and aimed at people interested in the underlying technologies. If, like me, you would like an overview of how to use the distro on a day-to-day basis then you are out of luck.
Ubuntu Studio is the OS I listed when I published an article on the Ubuntu distro you should use and I cited it as an excellent OS for artists and media creators. Today, I introduce to you yet another distro that was created for media projects and perhaps. It goes by the name of AV Linux.
AV Linux is an adaptable Debian-based distro that houses a large collection of software for audio and video creation. It is built with support for i386 and x86-64 architectures and thanks to its customized kernel, it offers users low-latency audio production for maximum performance.
As you would expect, AV Linux can run LIVE from a storage device or from a hard drive after being installed. So without further ado, let’s get to its feature highlights.
It will also feature a 13.3” FHD IPS display at 1920 x 1080 resolution, 6GB of DDR3L RAM, and an 8000mAh battery with up to 8 hours of battery life.
Manjaro is definitely not the first Linux distribution to also get into the hardware scene, but given Manjaro’s surge of popularity this year, they could do quite nicely with the Bladebook, which is purported to be part of a series – so assuming the Bladebook does well, it won’t be the last hardware we’ll see from Manjaro. That’s a big “if” statement, however.
If you’re interested in trying the latest Manjaro-Xfce beta builds to see what all the hype is about, you can grab it here – alternatively, you can try the Manjaro KDE beta (running KDE v5.13), or the Manjaro GNOME BETA (GNOME v3.30). Finally, you can just download the latest stable version (Manjaro 17.1.12 in XFCE, KDE, GNOME, or the customizable Architect installer).
Many popular Linux distributions have Culmus packages in their repositories. Whether they update those packages during a release cycle and how quickly they adopt new version varies widely from distribution to distribution.
You may have your favorite icon theme installed on Linux desktop right now but here is the new icon pack "Mugricons". It is released just few days ago under license GNU General Public License V3, this icon pack borrowed some icons from three icon sets that are: Archdroid, Zafiro and Adwaita.
Some people prefer to use flat design themes, if you are then we present you this theme pack "Qogir". It is based on Arc theme and targets GTK3 and GTK2 based desktop environments. You can install and apply this theme pack, if you are running any of these desktop environments: Gnome, Gnome Shell, Cinnamon, Xfce, Mate, Budgie etc.
4MLinux 27.0 BETA is ready for testing. Basically, at this stage of development, 4MLinux BETA has the same features as 4MLinux STABLE, but it provides a huge number of updated packages.
The openSUSE Project will have a summit at the 17th annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) at the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, Calif., March 8, 2019.
The openSUSE Summit at SCaLE 17x will take place on a Friday during the beginning of SCaLE 17x, which takes place March. 7-10, 2019. The community hosted summit will have its own full-day schedule and talks for the openSUSE Summit at SCaLE 17x need to be submitted through events.opensuse.org rather than SCaLE’s CfP tool. SCaLE attendees and community members are encouraged to submit a talk for the summit. The call for papers for the openSUSE Summit at SCaLE 17x is open until January 10, 2019.
Singapore-based iZeno has been named a Red Hat advanced business partner for the Malaysia market joining the vendor’s solution provider partner program.
"iZeno is extremely proud to achieve the advanced business partner (ABP) status in Malaysia,” said Jason Lin, managing director of iZeno.
Fedora 29 release is due on Oct-2018 and it is the right time of the beta release of this amazing piece of OS. With this beta release, you can taste the upcoming features of Fedora 29 operating systems which is used by millions of users across the world.
After optimizing the Linux laptop battery life last cycle, Hans de Goede of Red Hat has been working on Fedora 29 to provide a "flicker-free" boot experience. A Linux desktop flicker-free boot has been talked about for a decade or longer but with Fedora 29 and using Intel graphics that is finally becoming a reality.
The premise of the long desired flicker-free boot is to maintain the same resolution/mode-set from the system boot through the desktop loading without any unnecessary mode-set operations or sudden graphics changes in order to provide a smooth boot experience.
A big project I've been working on recently for Fedora Workstation is what we call flickerfree boot. The idea here is that the firmware lights up the display in its native mode and no further modesets are done after that. Likewise there are also no unnecessary jarring graphical transitions.
Basically the machine boots up in UEFI mode, shows its vendor logo and then the screen keeps showing the vendor logo all the way to a smooth fade into the gdm screen. Here is a video of my main workstation booting this way.
Release Candidate versions are available in remi-test repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests (for x86_64 only), and also as base packages.
Rar support is necessary in the case that the eBook uses rar as compression, which happens quite often in comic books (cbr extension). Calibre 3 has split out rar support into a dynamically loaded module, so what needs to be done is packaging it. I have prepared a package for the Python library unrardll which allows Calibre to read rar-compressed ebooks, but it depends on the unrar shared library, which unfortunately is not built in Debian. I have sent a patch to fix this to the maintainer, see bug 720051, but without reaction from the maintainer.
This has passed now the time-frame of a year, so I have decided to “salvage” unrar-nonfree. Package salvaging has been recently introduced into the Debian ecosystem to step in between leaving the package in dire state and the full MIA process...
I was assigned 15 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 18 hours from July and August. I worked 29 hours and therefore carry over 4 hours to October.
This is my monthly summary of what I have been doing related to Free Software in September 2018.
Debian developers have been discussing what to many seems like a rather unorthodox idea of not allowing questions/answers following presentations at their annual DebConf conference. This idea of banning questions and answers follows a policy by a Python conference that forbids questions/answers following presentations and is meant to help ease newcomers.
Debian developers have largely rejected this idea of not allowing Q&A periods following presentations at DebConf considering this annual gathering of developers/contributors is about collaboration and fostering new ideas for this leading Linux distribution. The idea though was brought up by Debian Project Leader Chris Lamb who initiated the discussion over this idea after seeing the PyCascades Python conference has explicitly banned question and answer sessions following presentations at their conference.
This is a short review of Ubuntu 18.10 "Cosmic Cuttlefish" Beta for both your wishes to enjoy it and to contribute to its development. In summary, 18.10 features new Yaru Theme and GNOME 3.30, it will be released at October this year with 9 months official support until July next year. Also, this Beta release means our chance to contribute by reporting bug we find so we can help Ubuntu development process. I hope you will like it and enjoy contributing!
Earlier this week I published some initial Windows vs. Ubuntu graphics tests with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti and other NVIDIA graphics cards. While having that Windows 10 install around, I also did some comparison tests with a Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 on this same system and using the latest AMD drivers.
For your viewing pleasure this weekend are some reference results when testing Ubuntu 18.04 and Windows 10 Pro on this same Core i7 8086K system that was maintained exactly the same through the duration of the tests. The graphics cards on the NVIDIA side were the GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1080 Ti, and RTX 2080 Ti with the NVIDIA Windows 411.63 driver as the latest driver there while on the Linux side their latest driver (and the RTX launch driver) is the 410.57 driver. On the AMD side were the Radeon RX 580 and RX Vega 64 graphics cards. The latest Radeon Software Windows driver at the time of testing was the 18.9.2 release while on the Linux side was the Linux 4.19-rc5 kernel with Mesa 18.3-dev built against LLVM 8.0 SVN via the Padoka PPA.
The Khronos working group responsible for Vulkan is working to drop Mir support, a.k.a. VK_KHR_mir_surface.
The Vulkan Mir surface support (VK_KHR_mir_surface) is for native Mir compatibility back when Canonical wasn't interested in supporting the Wayland protocol with the Mir display server. The usage of VK_KHR_mir_surface is quite limited and on the driver side was only ever carried by Ubuntu's patched Mesa builds.
But there have been various projects to at least write preliminary VK_KHR_mir_surface support including SDL, Vulkano, Vulkan Haskell bindings, GLFW, MoonVulkan, and other bindings/wrappers/WSI projects.
I still remember how quickly after joining the Ubuntu community about 13-14 years ago (yes, it’s really been that long) and after having been encouraged to get some of my work uploaded into Ubuntu, I realised that we could do a lot better at helping new contributors get started. I wanted others to benefit from my experience and what I had learned from the (quite busy) maintainers in the day. I started collecting links to helpful docs, code snippets and tasks to work on on the Wiki. It was a simple thing to do, and over time our whole developer team took the experience of new contributors on as a cornerstone of the project.
Jack Wallen shows you how to install the OrangeHRM server on Ubuntu 16.04, so you can empower your human resources department with a better workflow.
Providing detailed hands-on training, it was targeted at embedded engineers looking for an introduction to key embedded Linux and Security topics.
For example, there was a look at the anatomy of an Embedded Linux system, and it covered a wide range of tracing and profiling tools which can help to understand performance issues and also investigate bugs and unexpected behaviours. There was also consideration of coding standards and defensive programming techniques.
Read how Open Source techniques are driving innovation in Nanotechnology by looking into several aspects through Open Science and AI.
Open source operating system HAIKU is a lightweight, fast, and relatively simple operating system that picks up where the discontinued BeOS left off when its development ceased in 2001.
This weekend the HAIKI team released HAIKU R1 Beta 1, which is kind of a big deal when you consider that the last major release of the operating system came in November, 2012.
I took a look at HAIKU a few months ago when it became clear that the new beta was on the way. Now it’s here, and HAIKU R1 brings a bunch of significant updates.
This week the software developers behind the mining operation Slush Pool have announced a new organization alongside releasing an open source operating system (OS) for cryptocurrency devices. The new offshoot company called Braiins has produced a Linux based system for bitcoin mining rigs and they plan to extend the OS to other digital currency software embedded devices.
Conducted by Heavy Reading, the multi-client survey spanning six segments across networking technologies – DevOps, automation, cloud native, big data and analytics, open networking performance, software-defined networking (SDN), and management and orchestration (MANO) – indicates continued and increasing importance of open source software for network transformation.
Key findings indicate CSPs show an unexpected level of sophistication around new technologies and approaches, including adoption of open networking solutions in numerous domains and active automation of processes across operations.
“From the number of CSPs expecting open source to be a critical component of next-gen networks, to the growing importance of emerging technologies like DevOps and cloud native, it’s encouraging to see open source continue to mature and watch real progress unfold,” said Heather Kirksey, Vice President, Ecosystem and Community, LFN.
The survey includes responses from 150 CSP representatives across 98 discrete companies worldwide. Bringing an unprecedented look at operator perceptions and experience of open source networking technologies, the survey delivers a comprehensive look at the state of open source in networking today.
In my previous article, I walked through scenarios to help you determine whether to open source your SaaS solution, and discussed the cost-benefit analysis that goes along with this decision. From an open source point of view, there's no point in just chucking code over the wall, slapping on an open source license, and calling it a day. You want to create an inviting community where people want to collaborate and spend time-even socialize!-with you.
John Mark Walker Chucking code over the wall accomplishes nothing, besides giving others insight into how you do things. Although that may be interesting and beneficial for them, you don't get much benefit unless you create the pathways of collaboration and communication that unlock a thriving community. Thus, you have an inherent interest in doing this The Right Wayââ¢.
That's one of the findings of a recent survey aimed at evaluating the current state of the growing DevOps industry undertaken by DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) in collaboration with Google Cloud.
Some 30 000 respondents participated in the survey, the results of which have been published in the 2018 Accelerated State of DevOps Report.
According to DORA, DevOps is not a software development methodology or technique but rather a software engineering culture and practice that is aimed at unifying software development (Dev) and software operations (Ops).
Those interested in open source operating systems will be pleased to know that a new release of the lightweight and fast open source operating system HAIKU has been released this week in the form of HAIKU R1 Beta 1.
The latest release of HAIKU brings with it plenty of major updates including a package management system allowing you to easily search and install third-party apps. Together with added support for EFI bootloaders, user interface and enhancements, a new improved version of the WebPositive web browser, an updated network utility and support for streaming media to name just a few. The HAIKU development team explain a little more.
Community managers care about growth in their community, but growing development communities is hard work. It's rare for developers to start contributing code to projects they've never worked with before—it's far more likely that your developers were (or still are) users of the project, too.
So, this is easy, right? Scale the user community, and the developer community should grow too. But, how? Attracting users isn't easy either—there's a reason we have marketing. Unless you have a big budget for events, materials, adverts, etc., scaling the user community isn't much easier than scaling the developer one.
So we have limited options for attracting users, and virtually none for the developers. What are we left with? Well, for ideas we could look to the ways users become developers.
This week the Vivaldi browser received its biggest update, adding secure sync across devices and making many operations speedier.
Vivaldi supremo Jon von Tetzchner, who co-founded Opera, the browser which invented many features taken for granted today, told us encrypted sync was the most requested feature. But it's one of around 1,500 tweaks and improvements to Vivaldi 2.0. Version 1.0 was launched three years ago.
Socorro is the crash ingestion pipeline for Mozilla's products like Firefox. When Firefox crashes, the Breakpad crash reporter asks the user if the user would like to send a crash report. If the user answers "yes!", then the Breakpad crash reporter collects data related to the crash, generates a crash report, and submits that crash report as an HTTP POST to Socorro. Socorro saves the crash report, processes it, and provides an interface for aggregating, searching, and looking at crash reports.
I gave a talk about Rust and WebAssembly for SFHTML5’s “All About WebAssembly” meetup. You can find the slide deck here. Use your arrow keys to cycle through the slides. Video recording embedded below.
The MS-DOS 2 source dates from the 3 August 1983 release and is an altogether different beast, clocking in at around 100 source files and is considerably larger, reflecting the bigger team and feature set. In the original release notes, then MS-DOS product marketing manager Chris Larson observes that "COMMAND.ASM is currently too large to assemble on a micro".
Facebook open sourced their internal distributed log storage project called LogDevice. It offers high write availability using replication, durable log storage and recovery from failure.
Most of Facebook's applications that perform logging require high write availability, durable storage of logs, and workloads that vary in terms of performance and latency requirements. Another important requirement was to be able to survive hardware failures. An older Facebook project called Scribe was more focused on aggregating logs to central storage, and there were cases where data loss could occur. Scribe now uses LogDevice as a log storage backend.
Important changes in this version:
1. Support for virtual databases 2. The dictorg module improved 3. Support for building with WordNet on Debian-based systems 4. Default m4 quoting characters changed to [ ] 5. Dicoweb: graceful handling of unsupported content types.
StepSync allows synchronization of folders, optionally recursively descending in sub-folders. It allows thus various options of performing backups: pure insertion, updates and including full synchronization by importing changes from target to source.
StepSync 1.0 is yet another option for those looking towards open-source options for file/folder synchronization and backups.
GNU's GNUstep as a reminder is the open-source implementation of Apple's Cocoa API as well as Objective-C frameworks and other interfaces found on macOS. GNUstep is still around though in recent years we haven't been hearing much out of the project... But this weekend StepSync 1.0 was announced.
autogen-5.18.16 bison-3.1 dico-2.7 gdb-8.2 gnupg-2.2.10 gnu-pw-mgr-2.4.2 gnutls-3.6.4 guile-cv-0.2.0 help2man-1.47.7 indent-2.2.12 librejs-7.17.0 mes-0.17.1 nano-3.1 parallel-20180922 xorriso-1.5.0
Dragora is one of the lesser known Linux distributions that is focused on shipping "entirely free software" to the standards of the FSF/GNU.
Dragora is focused on simplicity and elegance while being a "quality GNU/Linux distribution." With the Dragora 3.0 Alpha 2 release they continue working on transitioning to the Musl C library, restructuring of the file-system directories, transitioning over to the SysVinit init system, enhancements to the boot script, improving the initial LiveCD experience, upgrading to the GCC 8 compiler stack, adding Meson+Ninja support, improving the security, making use of LibreSSL 2.8, and a variety of other alterations.
At SeaGL 2018, Chris Marusich will present a talk introducing GNU Guix to people of all skill levels and backgrounds. SeaGL is an annual GNU/Linux conference in Seattle. Attendance is gratis.
If you're in the Seattle area, please consider coming! Even if you can't make it in person, the talk will be recorded and later made available on the SeaGL website, so you can watch it at your convenience after it's been uploaded.
The National Cybersecurity Agency of France takes digital protection very seriously — so seriously, in fact, that the organization has its own secure operating system, which it's open sourced.
Called CLIP OS, the operating system is built on Linux and "uses a 'partitioning mechanism' that allows the OS to separate public and sensitive data into two 'totally isolated' software environments." The agency says that CLIP OS is designed to be deployed "on both security gateways and workstations."
You can learn more about CLIP OS at the project's website or on GitHub. If you want ot use it, you'll need to compile the code yourself.
"In virtually every security-related topic in GitHub, the majority of the repositories are written in Python, including tools such as w3af, Sqlmap, and even the infamous AutoSploit tool," the company explained on Wednesday in a blog post, adding that hackers enjoy Python's advantages – easy to learn, easy to read, comprehensive libraries – just like everyone else.
A new version of RcppAPT – our interface from R to the C++ library behind the awesome apt, apt-get, apt-cache, … commands and their cache powering Debian, Ubuntu and the like – is now on CRAN.
This version is a bit of experiment. I had asked on the r-package-devel and r-devel list how I could suppress builds on macOS. As it does not have the required libapt-pkg-dev library to support the apt, builds always failed. CRAN managed to not try on Solaris or Fedora, but somewhat macOS would fail. Each. And. Every. Time. Sadly, nobody proposed a working solution.
nanotime uses the RcppCCTZ package for (efficient) high(er) resolution time parsing and formatting up to nanosecond resolution, and the bit64 package for the actual integer64 arithmetic. Initially implemented using the S3 system, it now uses a more rigorous S4-based approach thanks to a rewrite by Leonardo Silvestri.
This release disables some tests on the Slowlaris platform we are asked to conform to (which is a good thing as wider variety of test platforms widens test converage) yet have no real access to (which is bad thing, obviously) beyind what the helpful rhub service offers. We also updated the Travis setup. No code changes.
After last month's beta, The Qt Company is marking the start of October by officially releasing Qt 3D Studio 2.1.
We are happy to announce that Qt 3D Studio 2.1 has been released. Qt 3D Studio is a design tool for creating 3D user interfaces and adding 3D content into Qt based applications. With Qt 3D Studio you can easily define the 3D content look & feel, animations and user interface states. Please refer to earlier blog posts and documentation for more details on Qt 3D Studio.
Nuitka version 0.6 was quietly released last week as the Python 2/3 compiler that converts the Python code into optimized C code.
Nuitka continues nailing the Py2/Py3 compatibility, can effectively serve as a replacement to CPython, and still ends up linking the code against libpython while often generating faster code out of this Apache-licensed project. The Nuitka 0.6 release adds a wide array of new optimizations for the generated C code, fixes a variety of bugs, support for using clang-cl as the compiler on Windows as well as ccache support, various code clean-ups, and a variety of other improvements.
After starting your first Python project, you might realize that it is actually not that obvious to be consistent with the way you write Python code. If you collaborate with other developers, your code style might differ, and the code can become somehow unreadable.
I hate coding style discussions as much as every engineer I guess. Who has not seen hours of nitpicking on code reviews, a heated debate around the coffee machine or nerf guns battles to decide where the semicolon should be?
Another area that is closely related to professionalism is that of priorities. In almost every case where I’ve observed, or been asked, to accept overtime has come when someone messed up what the most important thing was. Somewhere, somehow, prioritization had failed. The most important and urgent work was not done at the most appropriate time. Sometimes mistakes happen or circumstances change. But, more often than not, someone got the priorities wrong.
As instructed, I filed an appeal, explaining that I had been tweeting about research and was confused why I was suspended. The confirmation message said that they would likely get back to me in a few days. A short while later, I received an email that said my account was suspended for violating the Twitter rules: [...]
MIT Comparative Media Studies researcher/instructor Chris Peterson is an adrent supporter of the Math Prize for Girls, and as part of his work with the organization, he's learned about the way that STEM fields were once considered inherently feminine, while the higher-status humanities were dominated by men -- it's the subject of some outstanding feminist scholarship by Professor Maria Charles.
Peterson tweeted a quote from Maria Charles's work on the subject in a discussion of the upcoming Math Prize for Girls, and then found that his Twitter account had been suspended, without any explanation (he was given a chance to appeal the suspension, but has been told he might have to wait for days to find out what Twitter thought he did wrong).
A vice president of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has to turn over to the hospital nearly $1.4 million of a windfall stake in a biotech company, in light of a series of for-profit deals and industry conflicts at the cancer center that has forced it to re-examine its corporate relationships.
The vice president, Dr. Gregory Raskin, oversees hospital ventures with for-profit companies. As compensation for representing the hospital on the biotech company’s board, Raskin received stock options whose value soared when the startup went public a little over a week ago.
The move to hand over his stake is one of several steps now underway as the cancer center tries to contain a crisis that has already led to the resignation of its chief medical officer and a review of its conflict-of-interest policies. Several board members and some executives of the nonprofit institution have maintained close ties to the health and drug industries at a time when stunning cancer breakthroughs are generating excitement among investors and spawning a flurry of biotech startups.
World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (Dr Tedros) today hailed a dispute settlement decision at the neighbouring World Trade Organization upholding laws requiring tobacco products to be packaged without logos or designs as a way to reduce interest in smoking. Meanwhile, lobbyists for popular alternative “electronic” tobacco products such as vaping are out in force in Geneva this week.
Dr Tedros was speaking at the opening of this week’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control conference in Geneva, and highlighted a range of efforts that are continuing to build against tobacco.
The United Nations Human Rights Council last week passed a resolution on the rights of peasants, to be confirmed by the UN General Assembly in November. The resolution includes an article on the right to seeds, and in particular the right to save, use, exchange and sell farm-saved seeds, which has been a longstanding demand of peasants’ organisations. The resolution also asks that seed policies and intellectual property laws take into account the rights, needs and realities of peasants.
[...]
After the adoption of the resolution, it is up to the UN General Assembly to adopt this UN Declaration as a last formal step, he told Intellectual Property Watch.
The Human Rights Council is composed of 47 member states. Iceland was elected after the United States resigned its membership in June.
The declaration was supported by Algeria, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Egypt, Haiti, Kenya, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Philippines, South Africa, Togo, Venezuela, and the State of Palestine.
According to the voting sheet [pdf], the resolution was approved through a vote, with 33 countries in favour, 3 against, and 11 abstentions. The three countries who voted against were Australia, Hungary, and the United Kingdom.
Among those who abstained are Brazil, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Spain, and South Korea. Switzerland, China, Kenya, South Africa, and Tunisia voted for the resolution.
A group of academic researchers from Northeastern University and Princeton University, along with Gizmodo reporters, have used real-world tests to demonstrate how Facebook’s latest deceptive practice works. They found that Facebook harvests user phone numbers for targeted advertising in two disturbing ways: two-factor authentication (2FA) phone numbers, and “shadow” contact information.
Two vulnerabilities in Facebook's "view as" feature — a feature that lets people see what their own profile looks like to someone else — were exploited by attackers who gained access to the personal information of about 50 million users, among them those of chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, the company said on Friday.
Beyond the impact on Facebook accounts themselves, the company confirmed that breach impacted Facebook's implementation of Single Sign-On, the practice that lets you use one account to log into others. The idea is to use a trusted service—like Facebook Google, Twitter, and so on—to log into sites and services across the web, rather than create a unique profile for each one. That saves time, and ensures you're logging in through an entity you trust. In this case, it also appears to have potentially made Facebook's breach an internet-wide calamity, at least for those impacted.
It’s unclear exactly when the accounts were breached, but Facebook discovered the issue on Tuesday, September 25. The issue stems from a change Facebook made to its video uploading feature in July 2017, so it’s possible the vulnerability went unnoticed for a long time.
Just in case you’re not aware, Facebook isn’t a social networking website. In other words, as Edward Snowden says, it’s a surveillance company that sells your data as well. The recent Cambridge Analytica debacle has reinforced the notion that Facebook could be misused to profile users and sell their data. Just recently, Facebook also confirmed the account compromise of 50 million users due to some bug.
While the maintained Linux 4.x kernel branches have all seen a lot of work on L1TF/Foreshadow and other x86/x86_64 speculation execution mitigation work, the Linux 3.16.59 kernel is bringing a load of work for those still riding this old kernel base.
Linux 3.16 long-term stable maintainer Ben Hutchings issued the set of 131 patches set to make up this 3.16.59 point release. A majority of these Linux 3.16.59 patches are pertaining to L1TF/Foreshadow and the other Spectre vulnerabilities not already addressed by earlier 3.16 patches.
The Irish Data Protection Commissioner (DPC), the regulator responsible for overseeing the company’s European data compliance, today said it was “still awaiting” further information and clarification about the attack.
A European Union privacy watchdog could fine Facebook Inc. as much as $1.63 billion for a data breach announced Friday in which hackers compromised the accounts of more than 50 million users, if regulators find the company violated the bloc’s strict new privacy law.
On Friday, Facebook announced that they faced yet another data breach which led to the exposure of as many as 50 million accounts. The attackers managed to grab hold of the tokens of accounts through ‘View As’ feature of the social media platform.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, the leading entity that looks over Facebook for the European Union, has asked for more information pertaining to the hack. The Commission has demanded information about the nature and scale of the breach to verify whether the data breach has violated GDPR laws.
You can’t prevent yourself from having security incidents, but you can change how the incidents play out when they do happen.
On a pretty regular basis I see claims that the public CVE dataset is missing some large number of security issues. I’ve seen ranges from tens of thousands all the way up to millions. The purpose behind such statements is to show that the CVE data is woefully incomplete. Of course almost everyone making that claim has a van filled with security issues and candy they’re trying very hard to lure us into. It’s a pretty typical sales tactic as old as time itself. Whatever you have today isn’t good enough, but what I have, holy cow it’s better. It’s so much better you better come right over and see for yourself. After you pay me of course.
If you take away any single thing from this post, make it this: There are not millions of unfixed security flaws missing from the CVE data.
Telegram Messenger is a communication app that allows you to create encrypted chats and phone calls with other users over the Internet. This program describes itself as being a secure and private communication app, but a researcher has shown that in its default configuration it would allow a user's IP address to be leaked when making call.
Telegram, which is a posing a stiff challenge for WhatsApp in the terms of features and security was facing a flaw that exposed IP address of users when a call is initiated.
Today WikiLeaks publishes a secret document from the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) International Court of Arbitration, pertaining to a dispute over commission payment in relation to a $3,6 billion arms deal between French state-owned company GIAT Industries SA (now Nexter Systems) and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The agreement was for the sale of 388 Leclerc combat tanks, 46 armoured vehicles, 2 training tanks, spare parts and ammunition. It was signed in 1993 and scheduled to be completed in 2008.
Russia has its GRU in addition to its KGB (now FSB and SVR). The UK has its Defence Intelligence in addition to its MI6 and GCHQ. Much less high profile, Defence Intelligence is more analytical than operative – as indeed is GRU, Skripal was an analyst.
Defence Intelligence had its proudest modern moment when it refused to endorse MI6’s pack of lies on Iraqi WMD, and earned the hatred of MI6 and of Blair and Straw as a result. This was confirmed by the Chilcot report which stated that MI6 even actually hid some of the intelligence material from the Defence Intelligence Service to prevent their rubbishing it.
I hope you will forgive me for pointing out that the opposition of the Defence Intelligence to the Blair Dirty Dossier was first revealed in my memoir Murder in Samarkand, a decade before the Chilcot report confirmed it. It was one of the many reasons Straw attempted to block publication, and one of the many things revealed in my memoir – including of course the UK’s complicity in torture and extraordinary rendition – which the government claimed to be untrue, but in due course has been proved to be 100% accurate. As it should be, as Murder in Samarkand only recounts things I personally witnessed first hand.
Prime Minister Imran Khan has decided in principle to abolish the office of the National Security Adviser and has announced that powers conferred upon the office will be gradually transferred back to the Foreign Ministry.
WikiLeaks, a controversial non-profit organization that publishes news leaks, secret information, and classified documents provided by anonymous sources dropped new information relating to “arms industry corruption, France, UAE, Germany and the war in Yemen” today.
This was announced via the organization’s official Twitter account.
Along with the announcement, WikiLeaks tweeted a link to the “Yemen Files” section of its official website.
The transparency organization WikiLeaks just released a new document that sheds light on the corruption behind a lucrative French/German arms deal with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), weapons that are currently being used to wage a disastrous and genocidal war against the people of Yemen.
The document details a court case from the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) International Court of Arbitration regarding a dispute over a “commission payment” made to Abbas Ibrahim Yousef Al-Yousef, an Emirati businessman, as part of a $3.6 billion arms deal between France’s state-owned weapons company Nexter Systems (then GIAT Industries SA) and the UAE. Per the deal, which was signed in 1993 and set to conclude in 2008, the UAE purchased 388 Leclerc combat tanks, 46 armored vehicles, 2 training tanks, and spare parts, as well as ammunition.
There's that famous saying; "I can protect myself from my foes, but who will protect me from my friends?" Therefore, the countries of the world will protect themselves from the U.S. more easily now. For the U.S. is alone in the world, no longer having friends or foes.
For instance, Turkey will not be astonished at the U.S. arming and deploying the PKK/Democratic Union Party (PYD) along its southern border, saying "How can a country treat its ally so?" Nor would we tell the Trump administration, which used the trial of its agent pastor Andrew Brunson to sever ties with Turkey, "Then take Brunson and give us the Gülenist Terror Group's (FETÃâ) leader Fetullah Gülen in the U.S. in return." Because relations are not bilateral anymore.
The United States long has meddled in Latin America's affairs
[...]
Chavez died of cancer in 2013, and now five years later it seems that his socialist dream, like Allende’s, has failed. Under his successor Pres. Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela has descended into economic and political chaos. Hyperinflation has beset the country, with prices rising at an annualized rate of 1,000,000 percent.
Shortages of basic necessities such as toilet paper and bread have caused mass unrest, culminating in violent protests. Now there is open talk about the need to overthrow Maduro or remove him from power, perhaps through U.S. military intervention.
The parallels with Venezuela and Chile, however, should prompt far more skepticism from honest observers. The CIA long ago confessed to years of maneuvering to destabilize the Allende government and to coordinate the forces that would bring it to an illegal and violent end. There is ample evidence now that just such a plot is underway in Venezuela today, and that it is very likely to succeed. The best way to tell, in fact, is to study what happened in Chile.
Philip Agee was a former CIA case officer who wrote a book in 1975, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, that shed light on the CIA’s machinations in Latin American countries. In 2005, John Perkins wrote of a time in his life when he, like general Smedley Butler, was a gangster for capitalism. The book was titled Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and exposed international banking and US corporate corruption in mobster-type dealings with foreign administrations. The plan was to cajole foreign governments into accepting loans that they wouldn’t be able to pay back so überwealthy elitists could swoop in and cash in. Perkins come across, not unlike a CIA operative, as a pitiable character in his tell-all.
Conversely, Douglas Valentine comes across as a writer with integrity intact. Valentine is the author of several books, including The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam, which revealed the lethally and morally bankrupt, covert role of the CIA in Viet Nam. More recently Valentine has written The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World (Clarity Press, 2017).
Killing comes in degrees of intimacy. At one extreme there is the example of Freddie Oversteegen, a hero of the Dutch resistance, who as a 14-year-old-girl used to pick up German soldiers and collaborators in bars, lure them into the woods, and once in a secluded spot shoot them dead. Long after the war, she told an interviewer that when seeing a man she had just shot fall, “you want to help them to get up”. At the far extreme, perhaps, were the crew of Enola Gay, who killed 80,000 civilians with one bomb, dropped on Hiroshima from miles above.
Drone pilots are even safer and further from their victims than high-altitude bombers. They go to work at an airbase and never physically leave it. In the evenings, they go home to their families, like any other commuter, after deciding which strangers halfway round the world to kill.
But what is the psychological effect of such a job? Neither the crew of Enola Gay nor Oversteegen thought they had acted wrongly. Both were buoyed by patriotism and widely admired for their courage. Drone pilots, however, have been less studied. The wars they fight are much less obviously just – if they are just at all.
The Church of England has just announced a programme to help RAF chaplains offer pastoral care and support to drone pilots. The unusual thing is that they are to study ethics and philosophy in this training. Traditionally, chaplaincy work has been much more practical: about the business of surviving and maintaining morale. Frontline soldiers don’t really have time to worry about the ethics of their trade while they’re at work.
On March 28, 1938, Konrad Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten German Party in Czechoslovakia, met German Chancellor Adolf Hitler during which the former was instructed to put pressure on the Czech government regarding the rights of the three million ethnic Germans who lived mostly in the Sudetenland area of the country. Czechoslovak President Edvard Beneš resisted, and on May 19 he initiated a partial mobilisation in response to a possible German invasion. On May 20, Hitler presented his generals with a draft plan of attack on Czechoslovakia.
The governments of France and Britain were intent on avoiding war with Germany. The British government demanded that Beneš request a mediator. On July 20, French Foreign Minister Georges Bonnet told the Czech ambassador in Paris that while France would publicly declare its support to help the Czechoslovak negotiations, it was not prepared to go to war over the Sudetenland question.
In Malta, a threat was being felt, be€cause if Germany was to invade Czechoslovakia, Italy might join them and attack the island. At this time, Malta was being governed by Governor Charles Bonham-Carter. During his stay in Malta he kept diaries in which he shared his thoughts about the situation in Malta and the fear of an outbreak of war at that time. In 2004, John Manduca edited and published the Governor’s diaries in a book entitled The Bonham-Carter Diaries 1936-1940. The following are excerpts from Bonham-Carter’s diary of 1938:
“Hitler’s speech of Monday [September 12, 1938]… appeared unpleasantly threatening, and when this was followed in the evening by the news of the ultimatum by the leaders of the Sudeten Germans to the Czech government, we felt the position was really as bad as it could be.
This week marks the eightieth anniversary of the Munich Agreement. Concluded by Nazi Germany, the UK, France and Italy in 1938, it was designed to avoid war between the powers of Europe by allowing Nazi Germany to annex parts of the western regions of Czechoslovakia.
However, many experts believe it opened the doors to Hitler's aggression and paved the way for the beginning of World War II.
Radio Sputnik discussed the role of the Munich agreement with Geoffrey Roberts, professor of history at University College Cork, Ireland and a leading British scholar on Soviet diplomatic and military history.
This weekend is the 80th anniversary of one of the most controversial events in British history – Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s notorious Munich Agreement with Adolf Hitler – and yet vast numbers of documents exclusively from that period have still not seen the light of day.
The Independent understands that around 1,750 British intelligence reports, from a four-month period immediately before the Munich Agreement and from the three months immediately after it, are missing from the record.
Eighty years ago at Munich Britain and France sacrificed Czechoslovakia to buy off Hitler. They rejected Russian offers of building a system of collective security, and brought Europe one step closer to the Second World War. Today Britain is again leading Western efforts to isolate Russia. Have they learnt anything?
Unlike modern-day Western revisionists of history, who try to absolve Britain of her betrayal of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher believed the Munich deal was an awful blot in UK's history. She admitted as much to the Czechoslovak President Vaclav Havel in 1990. The transcripts of their meetings have been released to the National Archives in London.
In the summer of 1992, Jack Platt, an American, and his Russian best friend, Gennady “Genya” Vasilenko, saw each other for the first time in four years. It was a tense reunion.
Vasilenko had spent that time in a Russian prison and believed that Platt helped put him there.
“Why did you sell me out? Was that the plan from the beginning?” Vasilenko asked, his voice breaking with emotion.
The list of failed lessons from the US war on Afghanistan after seventeen years of incessant violence is a long one. Here are a few.
We expect 17-year-olds to have learned a great deal starting from infancy, and yet full-grown adults have proven incapable of knowing anything about Afghanistan during the course of 17 years of U.S.-NATO war. Despite war famously being the means of Americans learning geography, few can even identify Afghanistan on a map. What else have we failed to learn?
For an organization that only produces output through online and digital means the lack of Internet access makes heading the libertarian organization somewhat difficult. For this reason, the founder, Julian Assange, has declared he will step aside, leading to former WikiLeaks spokesperson Kristinn Hrafnsson taking charge. WikiLeaks says, via Twitter, this is happening due to “extraordinary circumstances” due to Assange being “held incommunicado.”
Julian Assange has stepped down as editor of WikiLeaks as he continues to be denied access to the internet and other forms of communications.
Assange, who has been living inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London for over six years, will continue as publisher.
Icelander Kristinn Hrafnsson has been named as Assange's replacement. He is an "investigative journalist selected in 2010 as Icelandic journalist of the year (his third award) for his role in the Collateral Murder publishing collaboration with Wikileaks," the statement said.
The WikiLeaks statement also highlights the challenging circumstances under which its founder, Assange, has been held "arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorean embassy," in which he has no access to communications with anybody "except for visits by his lawyers."
The pulse of negotiations, a flurry of communications, and the person central to this is one who threatens to go nowhere – for the moment. But go somewhere these parties would wish Julian Assange to do. For six years, cramped within a space in London a stone’s throw away from Harrods, one he has made his tenuous home, a citadel of sporadic publishing and exposes; for six years, an unruly, disobedient tenant whose celebrity shine has lost its gloss for certain followers and those who did, at one point, tolerate him.
The landlords have lost patience, and Lenín Moreno is willing to call in the arrears. He has made it clear that, whilst Assange has been subjected to an unacceptable state of affairs (“Being five or six years in an embassy already violates his human rights”), he should also be moved on in some form with the British authorities. How that moving takes place is producing a host of large, ballooning questions.
A Julian Assange supporter wants to coordinate classical music performances outside the Ecuadorian embassy in London to “afford some beauty” to the WikiLeaks founder inside.
Australian-born Mr Assange has been within the building, in Knightsbridge, since 2012.
Gordon Parnell, a 62-year-old Canadian who has lived in Mexico since 1991, said he wishes to show his support for Mr Assange, which is why he is attempting to find talented individuals or ensembles to entertain him.
A public forum was held in Oakland, California on the attack on Julian Assange and Wikileaks on September 16, 2018. The effort by the US government to continue to attempt to arrest whistleblower and journalist Julian Assange is a threat to all labor, journalists and free speech rights speaker pointed out. Assange and Wikileaks exposed the criminal activities of governments and corporate crooks as well as the corrupt Democratic party who manipulated the results of the primary in last election. Speakers also discussed how governments, politicians and the billionaires who run these governments are desperate to shut Assange and to silence all whistleblowers and journalists.
This forum also looked at the attack on Julian Assange not only as an attack on democratic rights but also part of the growing crisis in capitalism and US imperialism. It will also looked at the role of independent media and Pacifica radio on how the Julian Assange case is being covered.
A US intelligence worker who was jailed for leaking thousands of documents to Wikileaks has defended her actions in her first UK public appearance.
Chelsea Manning, who has since been released from prison, has spoken of the 'struggle for survival' living as transgender through her seven years behind bars.
Manning leaked official government documents known as the Afghan Logs, which included hundreds of thousands of classified military reports about the Afghanistan conflict from 2004 to 2009.
The family of Seth Rich, the Democratic National Committee staffer whose 2016 murder was twisted into a right-wing conspiracy theory, has finally received its first public apology.
On Sunday evening, the Washington Times published a lengthy retraction and apology for a March 1st opinion column that promoted the theory that Rich and his older brother, Aaron, stole thousands of DNC documents and gave them to Wikileaks, which published a trove of hacked Democratic Party emails in the summer and fall of 2016. The retraction and apology are part of a settlement between the Times and Aaron Rich, who had sued the paper for defamation.
"We are very concerned about his health: he has been locked up in the embassy for more than six years, without proper access to medical care," said Robinson during an interview with the Catalan publication, Nacio Digital.
The lawyer stressed her client’s wavering health, which, she said, the embassy is unable to properly moderate due to lack of proper medical equipment and facilities.
"The Embassy is not equipped for prolonged detention to provide a reasonable environment...the prolonged uncertainty of indefinite detention deeply affects the psychological and physical trauma above and beyond the expected stressors of incarceration," the Australian lawyer said.
Robinson also showed concern over the “very serious” threat of Assange’s extradition to the United States for trial, “If Assange faces a trial in the US, he can not benefit from the first amendment of the Constitution, which refers to freedom of the press.
“We can not forget that he is only an editor who published material of public interest,” Robinson said.
The worst red tide algae bloom in a decade has rocked Florida’s beaches in recent months, including those in Pinellas County, keeping tourists from hotels and waterfront restaurants. The organism that affects the central nervous system has killed thousands of fish, plus dolphins, turtles, seabirds and at least 100 manatees. Humans, too, can experience coughing, sneezing, tearing and itchy throats. Also, there’s that unbearable odor.
Now, as many on Pinellas County beaches cross their fingers as the smell and rust-colored water starts to wane, we talked to the photojournalists who brought us the images of Red Tide. The demands of the job sent them toward the beaches and harbors most people were fleeing, crouching down, right in the face of a river of death to capture the right image.
Four tiger sharks have now been captured and killed following two separate attacks off the coast of North Queensland last week. Despite being relatively rare, shark attacks – or the threat of attacks – not only disrupt recreational beach activities but can affect associated tourist industries.
Shark nets are a common solution to preventing shark attacks on Australian beaches, but they pose dangers to marine ecosystems. Seeking a cost-effective way to monitor beach safety over large areas, we have developed a system called SharkSpotter. It combines artificial intelligence (AI), computing power, and drone technology to identify and alert lifesavers to sharks near swimmers.
Nine environmental activists were injured and 34 detained in an operation to evict protesters holed up in forest treehouses in a bid to block the expansion of an open-pit coal mine, police said yesterday.
Police officers have mobilised against fierce resistance since the middle of last week to clear the demonstrators from Hambach Forest near the border with Belgium and the Netherlands.
Up to 4,000 police have been on the scene to remove 60 treehouses, some as high as 25 metres off the ground, housing dozens of protesters.
The occupation began in 2012 and had until now been quietly tolerated.
The reality is that our largely impotent outrage is the fuel that makes the publicity machine run, so they'll keep finding ways to keep us in that state of mind. That's healthy, right?
The government is running on empty and the North is an easy thing to reach for. The Tories have long seen it as a backwards space to be tamed and profited from.
Theresa May explained to business people in New York a couple of days ago that this country will have the lowest corporation tax of all the developed countries after it leaves the EU: The lowest business rate in the G20. So now we know.
Ironically, early industrialism was fought by many Conservative parliamentarians as it developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century: The upstart industrialism often ran counter to their own interests in agriculture and business – though a few (like the Lords of Bute) were shrewd enough to see the game changing.
After escaping from this summer’s febrile parliament to the North, Theresa May’s next stop was Africa, to coax trade deals. In the nineteenth century, the East End of London was seen as 'darkest London', a local exotic counterpart to 'darkest Africa', and the north was described using similar terms of imperialist eugenics.
Tax evasion is at the center of the criminal cases against two associates of the president, Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen. The sheer scale of their efforts to avoid paying the government has given rise to a head-scratching question: How were they able to cheat the Internal Revenue Service for so many years?
The answer, researchers and former government auditors say, is simple. The IRS pursues fewer cases of tax evasion than it did less than 10 years ago. Provided you’re not a close associate of President Donald Trump, there may never be a better time to be a tax cheat.
Last year, the IRS’s criminal division brought 795 cases in which tax fraud was the primary crime, a decline of almost a quarter since 2010. “That is a startling number,” Don Fort, the chief of criminal investigations for the IRS, acknowledged at an NYU tax conference in June.
Bringing cases against people who evade taxes on legal income is central to the revenue service’s mission. In addition to recouping lost revenue, such cases are supposed “to influence taxpayer behavior for the hundreds of millions of American citizens filing tax returns,” Fort said. With fewer cases, experts fear, Americans will get the message that it’s all right to break the law.
Starting in 2011, Republicans in Congress repeatedly cut the IRS’s budget, forcing the agency to reduce its enforcement staff by a third. But that drop doesn’t entirely explain the reduction in tax fraud cases.
Over time, crimes only tangentially related to taxes, such as drug trafficking and money laundering, have come to account for most of the agency’s cases.
So it comes as a shock that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the main regulator of America’s stockmarkets, now wants to ban Mr Musk from serving as a director or senior officer at any publicly listed company, including Tesla. After the close of trading on September 27th, the SEC filed a civil lawsuit against Tesla’s boss (but not against Tesla) alleging that he misled shareholders about his plan to take the company private. The mercurial Mr Musk had tweeted on August 7th, “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.”
According to the settlement, Musk will remain the CEO of the company and will participate in the board meeting but not as a chairman. He has also agreed to not contest for the position of chairman for the next three years. Tesla will appoint an independent chairman and Musk does not have to admit any allegations as per the settlement.According to the settlement, Musk will remain the CEO of the company and will participate in the board meeting but not as a chairman. He has also agreed to not contest for the position of chairman for the next three years. Tesla will appoint an independent chairman and Musk does not have to admit any allegations as per the settlement.
President Donald Trump's "random tariffs" are the wrong way to go about pressuring Chinese leaders to reform their allegedly unfair trade practices, Republican U.S. Rep. Will Hurd of Texas told CNBC on Wednesday.
Hurd, an undercover CIA officer for nearly a decade before going into politics, prefers a more direct route.
The White House squandered an opportunity in the spring to let Beijing know that "we're not playing around," he said. That's when the U.S. was banning American firms from selling parts to China's No. 2 telecommunications company.
New textbooks arrived belatedly to East Jerusalem schools for the new school year due to Israeli censorship.
Umno has denied imposing a censorship on media coverage at its two-day general assembly which began yesterday.
Party’s information chief Shamsul Anuar Nasarah said the party had even allowed online media to cover the assembly for the first time.
This, he said, was to ensure that the party no longer blocked media coverage or controlled the content of the debates.
“This is the first time we allowed news portals. Whatever it is, we hope that we will continue to receive cooperation from all the media until the end,” he said.
There is no censorship of the media coverage for the Umno General Assembly 2018, says party information chief Datuk Dr Shamsul Anuar Nasarah.
He said that the party did not block the dissemination of any information, control the content of the debates or block any coverage by the media throughout the assembly.
"This is the first time we allowed (news portal) Malaysiakini. Whatever it is, we hope that we will continue to receive cooperation from all the media until the end," he said during his visit to the media centre here at the Putra World Trade Centre (PWTC) on Sunday (Sept 30).
Unlike previous years, Umno has decided that the debate session on the final day of the assembly will be a closed-door event, with a delayed telecast of the debates shown on the screens at the media centre in Bilik Mawar here.
The years-long lawsuit is over an ad based on an image created by the State Department that previously was run on county buses in the Seattle area.
The ad was submitted to King County Metro Transit by Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer and their organization, the American Freedom Defense Initiative.
Kuwaitis gather on the lawn outside the National Assembly building in Kuwait City in protest against the government's new censorship regulations on publications, which resulted in banning many books from entering the country.
This past week the Library celebrated Banned Books. Libraries from all over the United States celebrate this week as a reminder that freedom to read is a democratic fundamental right.
Representative of civil unrest that gripped Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, the the painting by former St. Louis teen David Pulphus depicts a horned police officer pointing a gun at a black man portrayed as a wolf holding a sign that says “Stop Kill.”
It was hung in the heavily trafficked Cannon Tunnel of the U.S. Capitol Building as part of a high school contest that dates back to 1981. The painting by Pulphus was more than 400 paintings selected as part of a nationwide student-art competition in 2016 by a jury of constituents from the district of Democratic Rep. William Lacy Clay.
There is finally a public debate about the big internet platforms policing content and suspending accounts. But it’s a serious mistake to frame the debate without mentioning the thousands of moderation decisions that have been made by such online giants as Apple, Facebook, Google-owned YouTube and Spotify.
Internet companies have removed millions of posts and images over the past decade and suspended hundreds, perhaps thousands, of user accounts. These silenced voices span the political spectrum and the globe: Women discussing online harassment, ads featuring crucifixes, black and Muslim activists reposting messages they received, trans models and indigenous women. Platforms have taken down documentation of war crimes in Syria, Myanmar and Kashmir, arrests in North Dakota and police brutality across the United States.
“When anyone is silenced, the result is censorship and it’s plain and simple, but it takes a more sinister form, particularly in settings that claim to champion open discourse and when it’s performed quietly behind closed doors,” King said. “And also, in many cases, only the person who is censored knows what’s happened, and, even then, the person often doesn’t know how or why it’s happened.”
“Any broadcaster which obeys this absurd decision of the commission will restrict free political speech and become a supporter of Zurabishvili’s election campaign,” he added.
Member of the GD majority, David Matikashvili, says he agrees with the decision of the Regulatory Commission. Matikashvili believes that the opposition parties are trying to discredit Zurabishvili, which, according to him, is wrong.
“Salome Zurabishvili is the target of a black PR campaign... They [the opposition] want to take the presidential election in a destructive direction,” he stated.
Kakha Bekauri, the chairman of the Georgian National Communications Commission, said that the GNCC had demanded the withdrawal of several political advertisements from TV companies due to “unethicality.”
Liberals and conservatives are once again screaming at each other over matters of artistic censorship. This time, they are both wrong.
Artistic censorship in the United States has been going on since the country was founded, despite the First Amendment guaranteeing freedom of expression. The publication of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” was blocked in 1921 due to a masturbation scene. In 1999, Mayor Rudy Giuliani attempted to withhold 7 million dollars of funding from the Brooklyn Art Museum due to Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” being showcased in their exhibit. The list goes on.
My goal now is to ensure that NDAs cannot be weaponised and used to hide criminal behaviour. Law firms have been enabling questionable behaviour and making money out of these agreements. And this is not just limited to sexual harassment; it is far more insidious within our work culture. My NDA would have been unenforceable, but this was never made clear to me and I lived in fear of it for 20 years – until last year. I felt I had been criminalised and that, if I spoke, I would be the one going to jail.
It's an oft-cited maxim that the news media is the "fourth estate" upon which a healthy democracy stands.
It ensures the three traditional powers of state — the legislature, executive and judiciary — can be critiqued, challenged and curbed from quietly drifting into the arms of corruption and authoritarianism.
A free, fair, open and uncensored media is an antidote to state power and, for all its failings (and there are many), should be treasured as such. There are many countries around the world whose people would give anything for such a freedom.
China has long made it clear that reporting on politics, civil society and sensitive historical events is forbidden. Increasingly, it wants to keep negative news about the economy under control, too.
A government directive sent to journalists in China on Friday named six economic topics to be “managed,” according to a copy of the order that was reviewed by The New York Times.
[...]
Officials are trying to clean up huge debts accumulated by local governments. Curbing debt could mean slower economic growth, as it deprives borrowers of the funds they would otherwise spend.
China has long maintained a tight grip on the media, though the economy traditionally has been one of the freer domains of reporting. Even after China began more closely managing its economic message following market turmoil in 2015, aggressive journalists have covered the fallout of peer-to-peer online lending schemes and the problems posed by local government debt, among other issues.
Science fiction author, librettist, singer and historian Ada Palmer (previously), science and piracy historian Adrian Johns, and I have teamed up to create a seminar series at the University of Chicago called Censorship and Information Control During Information Revolutions, which compares and contrasts the censorship regimes and moral panics that flourished after the invention of the printing press with modern, computerized efforts to control and suppress information.
While it could be argued we’re still reeling from the effects of September 11, 2001 – not least because of the endless wars waged by the USA against an unseen enemy and increased levels of racism and Islamophobia around the globe – in the weeks after the attack, the world was very much still in a state of shock and anxiety at what had happened.
It’s something that directly affected the music world, too. Not only did bands cancel tours, but Jimmy Eat World – who had released fourth album Bleed American less than two months before – decided to reissue it as a self-titled album in the wake of the attacks. But political rockers Rage Against The Machine found themselves in an even more extreme situation after 9/11.
Not only was every single one of their songs featured on a list circulated by Clear Channel, of over 150 songs it deemed to be “lyrically questionable” to its network of 1,172 radio stations across the U.S., but the CIA closed down the message board on the band’s website citing ‘violent threats’ and ‘inflammatory messages’ that had apparently been posted on the forum, which was hosted by Infopop.
Even for Chinese authorities, who have long tried to limit the influence of foreign media and ideas, last week marked an escalation. In the span of a few days, authorities blocked access to Twitch, the video-game live-streaming platform owned by Amazon.com Inc.; ordered a purge of foreign content from school textbooks; and proposed restricting foreign programming — especially current-events shows — from television and online streaming sites.
One might take the clampdown as yet more evidence of the government’s hold over what Chinese can see and read. In fact, such restrictions are only further dividing China into a society of information haves and have-nots — of cosmopolitans and everyone else. Chinese with money, especially in cities, can circumvent official controls via technology and travel. Meanwhile, rural and less-affluent Chinese are left to consume what censors deem appropriate. It’s a chronic condition that underlines existing economic and social divisions, and it’s sure to get worse.
According to the latest report by the Committee to Protect Journalists in Pakistan, fatal violence against journalists has declined, but fear and self-censorship have grown. In this era, five Pakistani American students at Harvard University have created a startup that challenges censorship using the latest block-chain technology. Their mission is "making journalism truly free." Saqib Ul Islam visited Harvard's innovation lab to bring us the story of a new company called "Inkrypt."
Facebook has lately announced a series of major steps it would take to combat fake news and the global spread of misinformation that it says could influence elections, but the more we learn about just who it is Facebook is partnering with in this endeavor, the clearer it becomes that these initiatives are not at all designed to foster independent thought and discourse, but to ultimately ensure that public online discourse doesn’t stray too far from official state narratives.
Mark Weisbrot, a co-director at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, recently slammed Facebook’s decision to work with US government-funded organizations as “Orwellian” — especially given the fact these organizations themselves “specialize in overseas propaganda.”
Thus while claiming to fight Russian, Iranian, and other propaganda these very groups will strictly enforce an official establishment Washington and NATO view of world events.
Meet Mai Khoi, a Vietnamese musician who's battling state censorship and standing up for human rights and democracy. She's had her concerts raided, been evicted from her home and only performs in secret in Vietnam #SheRoars (Source: Bloomberg)
Guests on a five-star honeymoon resort in the Maldives caught a rare glimpse of the decades-long political and religious tensions rocking this island nation when policemen - armed with axes, concrete saws and ropes - stormed the Fairmont Maldives to destroy model human figures that had been deemed un-Islamic.
The unprecedented raid on Friday came as President Abdulla Yameen railed against what he said was a plot by the "Western-backed opposition" to undermine Islam in the Maldives in advance of a highly charged election on Sunday.
Police remove sculptures in the Maldives | A series of sculptures by the British-Guyanese artist James deCaires Taylor was removed by police from the Fairmont Maldives Sirru Fen Fushi resort last Friday (21 September), according to Al Jazeera. The police said that the civil court had issued an order for the resort to take down the works, which had been deemed un-Islamic because of their depiction of the human figure. In July, the country’s then president, Abdulla Yameen (who suffered an unexpected election loss on 23 September), had previously ordered the removal of the sculptures.
Institutions of a country that considers animal torture not only legal but appropriate for children have ultimately no moral whatsoever to forbid access to certain parts of an art exhibit due to its sexual nature.
Armed with a new Vermont law that protects student journalists, four high school editors have stood up to censorship and won, prompting their school to revamp its media policy.
The Burlington High School students had posted a story on the school newspaper website that they collectively wrote on a school employee facing unprofessional conduct charges from the state. They had gotten a tip about the investigation and filed a public records request, posting the story the night of Sept. 10.
Batman is easily one of the world’s most prominent pop culture icons. Following his 1939 debut in the 27th issue of Detective Comics, he has been featured in numerous animated, live action and print appearances. For over 79 years, the public enjoyed the exploits of Bruce Wayne’s crime fighting efforts. Readers were recently given a bit more to enjoy, though, when on the pages of Batman: Damned, Issue 1, the caped crusader decided to strip naked in an uncensored panel.
To dissuade concern early on, it is important to note that Batman: Damned is what is referred to as a “black label” comic. Black label comics are written for mature audiences and have “R” ratings, hence DC comics is not intentionally displaying nudity to children.
Additionally, the comics publisher has promised to censor the panel in subsequent publication of the graphic novel. While many are apathetic to the issue, merely viewing it as a comedic publication error and little more than a joke, this raises the question about censorship in modern media. When does an image or piece of work reach the point where it should be censored?
Science journals are not printed on litmus paper, but here’s a case in which politics appears to have triumphed over academic freedom. When mathematicians Theodore Hill and Sergei Tabachnikov collaborated on a paper offering theoretical support for something called the “greater male variability hypothesis,” they expected controversy but not censorship. They got both.
The hypothesis holds that in a variety of areas — from birth weight to standardized test scores — males are overrepresented at the highest and lowest ends of the spectrum. The article by Hill and Tabachnikov initially appealed to the journal Mathematical Intelligence, whose editor said she welcomed the controversial topic. That embrace proved short-lived. The journal bowed to intense pressure from critics of the article, which had been available online as a pre-print, and rescinded the acceptance. Then another publication, the New York Journal of Mathematics, contacted Hill and agreed to publish the work. Which it did, for a few days.
Jordan Peterson is a Canadian academic whose mysticism-soaked misogyny revolves around the social hierarchy of some lobster species and the literal existence of witches and dragons; somehow, when this rubbish is blended with anodyne life advice for angry manbabies, it creates a potent elixir that transforms internet dudes into an army of argumentative internet assholes.
Peterson's principal grievance against progressive movements is that it interferes with his free speech rights (for example, he was very upset that he might have to refer to a hypothetical nonbinary student using a gender-neutral pronoun).
But as much as Peterson loves free speech, he's not very good at sharing. He has sued and threatened to sue numerous critics, on flimsy and absurd grounds, in ways that, in my opinion, were designed to intimidate them into silence and forced apology rather than face his deep-pocketed legal weapons.
Farah Shaer’s undergraduate thesis film was banned in her home country of Lebanon.
The MFA student recently acted in and produced “Heaven Without People,” which also faced censorship.
The feature film, shot in Lebanon, was screened Sept. 22 at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Shaer said it follows a Lebanese family who reunites at an Easter lunch for the first time in three years. Throughout the course of the film, political differences arise between relatives, and tension takes over the meal. “Heaven Without People” reveals how national politics can impact family relationships, Shaer said. Having grown up in Lebanon, Shaer said filming there helped her authentically reflect the nation’s society, especially the importance of family.
“The main problems in the film are about how corruption is ruining the country and how some of the younger generation is following the path of the older generation,” Shaer said. “The other side of the conflict is the younger generation who are revolting against this corrupted regime.”
EFF has presented its full evidentiary case that the five ordinary Americans who are plaintiffs in Jewel v. NSA were among the hundreds of millions of nonsuspect Americans whose communications and communications records have been touched by the government’s mass surveillance regimes. This presentation includes a new whistleblower and three additional expert witnesses—Professor Matthew Blaze, Dr. Brian Reid, and former Chief Technologist at the Federal Trade Commission Ashkan Soltani—along with AT&T documents and witnesses we first revealed in 2006. We also marshalled key portions of the now massive amount of public admissions by the U.S. government and the most recent example of public judicial review in the Big Brother Watch case in Europe.
The goal is to convince a federal judge that the NSA’s current claims of secrecy should not prevent American courts from publicly evaluating the legality of how these surveillance schemes impact millions of innocent Americans.
When histories of the 21st century are written, it's certain Google will loom large. In but two decades, the company - which began life as the research project of Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin in a Menlo Park, California garage - has shaped the internet and the modern world like no other.
Company executives and staff alike have much to celebrate on Google's 20th birthday, September 27. Its search engine has long-enjoyed a nigh-on total monopoly in the market, while key sister products — including Chrome, Drive, Gmail, Maps, Play, and YouTube — boast over a billion users each worldwide. Smartphone operating system Android, developed by Google, also has well over two billion active users, making it the world's largest.
Such unprecedented multi-channel growth has produced a vast cash pile for the firm's holding company Alphabet, which is rapidly nearing a US$1 trillion market cap, an echelon previously only ever inhabited by Amazon and Apple — if it were a country, its GDP would rank among the world's 15 largest.
In commemoration of Google's 20th birthday, many mainstream media organizations - and the company itself - have published condensed histories of the search engine giant, chronicling key moments in the firm's two-decade saga. Missing from each is the story of how the CIA and other US spying agencies helped fund its creation.
In the early 1990s, the US intelligence community launched a daring initiative — in conjunction with leading universities and firms in California's burgenoning ‘Silicon Valley', spying agencies sought to perfect a means of tracking the activities of groups and individuals on the then-embryonic world wide web.
Then, a supercomputing revolution was rapidly pullulating, and the US surveillance state wasn't prepared to sit idly by — the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA), among others, wished to direct and influence the upheaval for their own ends, creating an online milieu facilitating their desire to collect and understand vast quantities of data on private citizens.
[...]
To achieve these goals, the agencies would — under the auspices the National Science Foundation (NSF) — provide over a dozen grants worth several million each to teams at different universities, in order to identify sort the ‘digital fingerprints' of individuals and groups online, linking and ranking their queries in order of importance, deciphering any meaningful patterns that emerged from the data morass, and tracking their future digital trails.
If successful, any architecture grant recipients created in their universities would be passed to the private sector for scaling up. A vast number of tech companies of modern prominence got their ‘break' in this manner — Google would soon become one of them.
A federal judge Thursday tossed a lawsuit filed by Utahns who allege the government used “blanket” warrantless surveillance of Salt Lake City-area residents and visitors during the 2002 Winter Olympics.
The request for dismissal came from Rocky Anderson — the lawyer for the six plaintiffs and the mayor in Salt Lake City during the Games — who wrote in court papers that it won’t be possible for them to get to the truth of whether the National Security Agency spied on Americans and others. He says government attorneys have repeatedly refused to disclose information, citing a court rule that allows them to keep private documents and evidence if it might detail sensitive information that threatens national security.
A group of 2002 Winter Olympics attendees have dropped their suit alleging the National Security Agency illegally spied on them at the event, saying further litigation would be fruitless...
A former Salt Lake City mayor is dropping a lawsuit claiming the National Security Agency conducted "blanket" surveillance in Salt Lake City during the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah.
Rocky Anderson said in court documents Thursday that he's been so stymied in his efforts to get information about the NSA's operations that it no longer makes sense to pursue the case.
He says federal officials have refused to answer questions, citing attorney advice and the state secrets doctrine.
The NSA Codebreaker Challenge will take participants into the world of blockchain, with focus being on Ethereum. Details of this year’s contest should excite blockchain enthusiasts as it affirms the technology’s growing recognition and prominence.
The NSA Codebreaker Challenge promises to introduce participants into the blockchain technology world. The challenge will focus on how the technology works with Ethereum. This year’s contest will excite blockchain fanatics as it confirms this technology’s prominence and growth.
Over the past few years, the National Security Agency(NSA) of the United States has been staggered by a series of leak, resulting in the spread of digital spy tools across the internet, which caused real damage inside as well as outside the agency.
A similar case was reported in December last year, where a US intelligence worker pleaded guilty of deliberately retaining classified national defense information at home, and exposing it in the process.
On September 25, the 68-year old Nghia Hoang Pho has been sentenced to prison for 66 months, for transferring the confidential data to a personal computer, which allegedly has been accessed by the Russian intelligence by the means of Kaspersky software.
Moreover, the knock-on effects of a decision against RTB are likely to spread beyond the EU’s borders, just as has happened with the GDPR itself. Many companies might decide to switch back to earlier forms of online advertising that were based on general information about the visitors to a particular Web site, rather than on an obsessive surveillance of everything people do online. That would be a welcome development for online privacy, which makes this call for a formal investigation of RTB worth watching closely.
Smart speaker love is in full effect for US consumers, with 24 percent of US households owning a smart speaker, and 40 percent of those households owning multiple speakers, according to Nielsen’s latest study.
The incident has prompted numerous inquiries: Conservative Party chairman Brandon Lewis said in a tweet that the party was investigating the incident, while the Information Commissioner’s Office, the body responsible for upholding information rights, says that it’s aware of the incident, and that it’s “making enquiries with the Conservative Party.” The Telegraph notes that if it’s found to have violated European laws regarding data protection, the party “could face a fine of up to 4 [percent] of its income”, or €£2 million. It’s an embarrassing start to the Party’s conference, which had touted the app as a way to overhaul the party’s image as an out-of-touch political party.
It appears like all comes down to the privacy paradox. In a world, where people are concerned about their data misused by companies and tech giants. However, they don’t want to lose the perks right away.
Ferris will turn away customers if they're not college students or faculty members. The cafe allows professors to pay, but students have something else the shop wants: their personal information.
To get the free coffee, university students must give away their names, phone numbers, email addresses and majors, or in Brown's lingo, concentrations. Students also provide dates of birth and professional interests, entering all of the information in an online form. By doing so, the students also open themselves up to receiving information from corporate sponsors who pay the cafe to reach its clientele through logos, apps, digital advertisements on screens in stores and on mobile devices, signs, surveys and even baristas.
WhatsApp was originally designed to be an ad-free platform by its co-founders Brian Acton and Jan Koum. Now that the messenger is in the hands of Facebook, things are about to get really annoying with the introduction of ads.
Brian Acton – one of the co-founders of the popular messaging app WhatsApp – resigned from Facebook in 2017. And with that, he left $850 million on the table in the form of non-vested stock options. He stood against the changes Facebook’s management was trying to bring to WhatsApp, and paid the price, literally.
Since its inception in 2009, WhatsApp never wanted to show its users any ads. Both Acton and Jan Koum – the other co-founder of WhatsApp – hated the idea of earning money that way. Their motto at the company was “No ads, no games, no gimmicks”.
Travellers who refuse to hand over their phone or laptop passwords to Customs officials can now be slapped with a $5000 fine. The Customs and Excise Act 2018 - which comes into effect today - sets guidelines around how Customs can carry out "digital strip-searches".
Fatwas against offensive speech are now issued daily, by the Western Twitterati as much as by Eastern religious tyrants. Intolerance of so-called blasphemy against Islam and Muhammad is now as pronounced in trendy Western circles as it is in Islamic imam circles. The stunningly arrogant belief that anyone who offends one’s faith or ideology or identity deserves to be severely reprimanded – the belief that motored the Ayatollah’s death sentence on Rushdie – is now the central belief of virtually every new political movement in Western academic and public life.
This is the true horror of the Rushdie affair: the Rushdie side won the battle – as demonstrated in the fact that Rushdie survives and his book is still widely available – but the Khomeini side won the war. The sentiment of the fatwa defeated the principled liberalism of the fatwa’s opponents. We are all Ayatollahs now.
It is hard to discern truth in Egypt these days. President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi’s government is opaque, and there are few independent journalists to question it. Under a new law, even popular social-media accounts can be regulated as if they were newspapers, which are themselves horribly over-regulated. A pro-government television host has been off the air for weeks with no explanation. A rumour on WhatsApp claims that 22 military officers were quietly arrested this month. The facts of these stories are almost irrelevant. What matters is that the rumours circulate.
The nominee’s full record should be examined, including his many misleading and false statements to the Senate.
The Democratic Party has decided to wage its opposition to the reactionary Supreme Court nominee on the most degraded and right-wing basis possible.
Mudhoney is currently celebrating their thirtieth anniversary and have recently released their tenth full-length album, “Digital Garbage.”
As my colleague Adi Robertson noted last year, courts have ruled that there’s a difference between something like a facial or fingerprint recognition system, and a passcode that you type into your phone. As Apple and other companies have pushed for facial recognition systems, it was only a matter of time before a case like this would pop up.
According to a report by Forbes, the FBI recently forced an iPhone X owner to unlock the phone using his face. This is the first known case in which feds used the FaceID feature to get access to some suspect’s smartphone.
Last year when Apple launched iPhone X with FaceID feature, legal questions were raised: Will law enforcement agencies force the suspects to unlock their phone by looking at it? Well, it looks like we finally have an answer.
National Security Agency whistleblower Reality Winner was kept in isolation for a week in a Florida county jail, a move that left her “hysterical,” according to an advocate who visited her in the facility. On Monday, Winner was moved from her isolated cell into the jail’s general population, according to advocates.
Charged under the Espionage Act and facing up to 10 years in prison, Winner, a 26-year-old former defense contractor and Air Force veteran, pleaded guilty in June to retaining and transmitting a document to a news organization. On her way to serve out the remainder of the five-year term spelled out in the plea deal, she was transferred in the middle of the night a week ago from the small rural county jail in Georgia where she has spent more than a year in custody. But, rather than being sent to a federal facility for processing, she was taken to yet another county jail in Florida for reasons that remain unclear.
You shouldn’t be convicted by secret evidence in a functional democracy. So when the government uses forensic software to investigate and build its case in a criminal prosecution, it should not hide that technological evidence from the defense. In an amicus brief filed today EFF urged the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to allow criminal defendants to review and evaluate the source code and developmental materials of forensic software programs used by the prosecution, to help prevent the wrong people ending up behind bars, or worse, on death row.
The Constitution requires that defendants be given the opportunity to review, analyze, and confront the prosecution’s evidence. But in the information age, prosecutors are increasingly relying on evidence produced by proprietary forensic software programs–marketed and distributed by private companies to law enforcement–to establish key elements of their case, while still seeking to keep the source code that determines the outputs of that forensic technology a secret. This gamesmanship undermines the public’s trust in the integrity and fairness of the criminal justice system. We are told simply to take the government’s word for it that the software does what it is supposed to do.
Ostensibly, the secrecy around proprietary forensic software is meant to prevent competitors from learning the trade secrets of the original program vendor, but it also prevents defendants and the public from discovering flaws that could send innocent people to prison or execution. Time and again, when forensic software is subjected to independent review, errors and inconsistencies are discovered that call into question its viability and suitability for use in the criminal justice system. Forensic software has no special immunity from the bugs and mistakes that plague software in other fields, something that has been amply demonstrated with errors discovered in, for instance, the software used for DNA analysis and breathalyzer tests.
The CBP has drones. How many, it's not really sure. It depends on when you ask. Or how you ask. The EFF's FOIA lawsuit against the agency caused it to suddenly "remember" it had deployed drones 200 more times than it had previously disclosed.
The CBP's drones are a lending library for US law enforcement agencies. An audit of the program found the CBP's drones were more often used by others than by the agency owning them, despite this agency being charged with patrolling thousands of miles of US border -- something that might be aided by some additional eyes in the skies.
But the eyes were worthless. The Inspector General concluded it was an airborne boondoggle. The CBP wasn't malicious, just inept. As the IG saw it, the half-billion slated for drone use would be better spent on more personnel and ground-based surveillance.
Nevertheless, the drones continue to fly. When not straying far from the border to aid inland law enforcement agencies, the agency's unmanned aircraft are still aloft, engaging in surveillance no one can really say for certain is 100% legal. The Inspector General's latest report [PDF] shows the CBP has done very little to ensure its drone deployments are secure or legally-compliant.
When an order was issued on September 25, 1943, to round up Jews, the Danish people responded with a successful effort to save them
California Gov. Jerry Brown has a signed a bill into law that opens up the Internet for youth in state care. With A.B. 2448, California now requires that all youth in juvenile hall be granted access to the Internet for educational purposes. Meanwhile youth in foster care are also ensured access to the Internet for social and recreational activities.
The success of this bill should be credited to its author, Assemblymember Mike Gipson, and its organizational sponsor, the Youth Law Center. Together they first introduced the measure in 2017 as A.B. 811, which was passed by strong majorities in the legislature, only to die by the governor’s veto pen. This time around, Gov. Brown signed the new bill, which was narrowed at his request.
EFF joined the effort early: we ran email actions and testified in favor of A.B. 2448 before a Senate committee. We also helped rally tech companies such as Facebook to support the bill. Ultimately, this is an enormous victory on behalf of at-risk youth who don’t have the ability to vote or travel to Sacramento to argue their case.
The attorney general is abusing his power to force immigration judges to issue more deportation orders.
When the government believes that someone should be deported, it usually has to prove its case in an immigration court. And although the immigration courts have long been plagued by due process problems—including the lack of any right to an appointed lawyer, even for kids—those courts have at least held out the promise of neutrality: a neutral immigration judge hears the case, and the losing party may appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals.
But Jeff Sessions is aggressively working to make these courts instruments of the Trump administration’s immigration agenda. Sessions is exploiting the fact that, unlike other judges, Immigration Judges and the members of the Board of Immigration Appeals are actually the Attorney General’s employees. They are part of a sub-agency within the Department of Justice, rather than the judicial branch. And the Attorney General may—until now, in rare cases—overrule immigration court and Board of Immigration Appeals decisions on his own initiative.
In the past, Attorneys General have used this “self-certification” authority sparingly: under the Obama Administration, for example, this power was only used four times throughout both terms. By contrast, Sessions has self-certified cases six times in less than two years, and has issued five decisions so far.
All of them follow the same pattern: using the Attorney General’s direct control over the immigration courts to deport immigrants in greater numbers and stop them from obtaining relief to which they are entitled by law, by enacting sweeping substantive and procedural changes to the immigration system.
The people of California will now have more insight into how their local law enforcement agencies operate. California Gov. Jerry Brown signed S.B. 978, which requires local police departments to publish their “training, policies, practices, and operating procedures” on their websites starting in January 2020. That opens up access to this information to anyone, not only journalists or activists with the time, money, or knowledge to request them.
S.B. 978, introduced by Sen. Steven Bradford, has long had EFF’s support because it helps inform everyone about how police officers are trained. Law enforcement agencies are adopting new policies about new policing technologies all the time, and the community benefits from understanding them. Newer surveillance technologies such as body-worn cameras, biometric scanners, drones, and automatic license plate readers have drawn significant public interest and concern.
Posting policies and procedures online ensures that law enforcement agencies are more transparent about what they’re doing. Doing so also helps educate the public about what to expect and how to behave during police encounters.
This sentence does nothing of the sort. To those not closely watching these things (i.e., people who'd never read this press release in the first place), it may seem like the DOJ is serving up justice. But for those of us who've seen certain people -- like General Petraeus -- mishandle classified info in a much more egregious fashion (giving his mistress, and biographer, access to top secret info) and walk away from it pretty much unscathed, this statement from the DOJ is not just hollow. It's hypocritical.
Even the judge handling the case saw through the DOJ's double standard. Josh Gerstein of Politico reports the judge had plenty to say about the DOJ's prosecutorial efforts, especially in light of the fact Pho never directly gave anyone else access to the NSA's classified hacking stash.
California enacts net neutrality law, and the Justice Department immediately files a lawsuit against California. Attorney General Jeff Sessions stated "Once again the California legislature has enacted an extreme and illegal state law attempting to frustrate federal policy. The Justice Department should not have to spend valuable time and resources to file this suit today, but we have a duty to defend the prerogatives of the federal government and protect our Constitutional order."
Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the internet, announces his new project Solid, "an open-source project to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web". He writes "Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we've all discovered, this hasn't been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance—by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way."
The California net neutrality bill, previously approved by the state Assembly and Senate despite protests from AT&T and cable lobbyists, imposes rules similar to those previously enforced by the FCC.
[...]
(UPDATE: The Justice Department filed its lawsuit against California Sunday night, the department announced. “Under the Constitution, states do not regulate interstate commerce—the federal government does," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement. "Once again the California legislature has enacted an extreme and illegal state law attempting to frustrate federal policy. The Justice Department should not have to spend valuable time and resources to file this suit today, but we have a duty to defend the prerogatives of the federal government and protect our Constitutional order. We will do so with vigor. We are confident that we will prevail in this case—because the facts are on our side.” Pai issued a statement praising the Justice Department's lawsuit against California.)
The lawsuit claims the California bill is "unlawful and anti-consumer" because it goes against the federal government's "deregulatory approach to the Internet."
The measure signed Sunday by Brown, a Democrat, prohibits internet service providers in California from stratifying users and websites by who can pay for faster surfing speeds and service. If the law stands, broadband providers including Comcast Corp. and AT&T Inc. will be blocked in the state from slowing traffic on their airwaves while charging consumers for faster access.
When the rules go into effect, likely next year, internet providers won’t be allowed to block or throttle content; they’ll have to allow all “nonharmful” devices to connect; offer paid fast lanes; charge interconnection fees; and to wiggle around these rules by, say, claiming a streaming TV service delivered over internet cables should be counted as TV delivery and not subject to regulations.
Creator of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee has unveiled his plans to create a new decentralized web where the data will be controlled by the users.
Last week, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, asked me to come and see a project he has been working on almost as long as the web itself. It’s a crisp autumn day in Boston, where Berners-Lee works out of an office above a boxing gym. After politely offering me a cup of coffee, he leads us into a sparse conference room. At one end of a long table is a battered laptop covered with stickers. Here, on this computer, he is working on a plan to radically alter how all of us live and work on the web.
Due to the continuous torrent of data breaches and scandals like Cambridge Analytica, Tim Berners-Lee is devastated. To fight the powerful forces of the Internet, world wide web inventor has worked on a project called “Solid.”
In collaboration with MIT, the open-source project is build to make web decentralized, snatch power from big players like Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc. Solid offers tools to create social applications which follow the existing W3C standards. In simple words, you will have a tremendous amount of control over your data.
In 2009, I said, “The web as I envisaged it we have not seen yet.” That was because people were using the web just for documents, not for the data of a big web-wide computer. Since then, we have seen a wave of open data, but not of read-write data.
[...]
So I have taken a sabbatical from MIT, reduced my day-to-day involvement with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and founded a company called inrupt where I will be guiding the next stage of the web in a very direct way. Inrupt will be the infrastructure allowing Solid to flourish. Its mission is to provide commercial energy and an ecosystem to help protect the integrity and quality of the new web built on Solid.
I’ve always believed the web is for everyone. That's why I and others fight fiercely to protect it. The changes we’ve managed to bring have created a better and more connected world. But for all the good we’ve achieved, the web has evolved into an engine of inequity and division; swayed by powerful forces who use it for their own agendas.
Today, I believe we’ve reached a critical tipping point, and that powerful change for the better is possible - and necessary.
This is why I have, over recent years, been working with a few people at MIT and elsewhere to develop Solid, an open-source project to restore the power and agency of individuals on the web.
Solid changes the current model where users have to hand over personal data to digital giants in exchange for perceived value. As we’ve all discovered, this hasn’t been in our best interests. Solid is how we evolve the web in order to restore balance - by giving every one of us complete control over data, personal or not, in a revolutionary way.
Solid is a platform, built using the existing web. It gives every user a choice about where data is stored, which specific people and groups can access select elements, and which apps you use. It allows you, your family and colleagues, to link and share data with anyone. It allows people to look at the same data with different apps at the same time.
Solid unleashes incredible opportunities for creativity, problem-solving and commerce. It will empower individuals, developers and businesses with entirely new ways to conceive, build and find innovative, trusted and beneficial applications and services. I see multiple market possibilities, including Solid apps and Solid data storage.
While Cloudflare had already been handling domain registration through the company's Enterprise Registrar service, that service was intended for some of Cloudflare's high-end customers who wanted extra levels of security for their domain names. The new domain registrar business—called Cloudflare Registrar—will eventually be open to anyone, and it will charge exactly what it costs for Cloudflare to register a domain. As Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince wrote in a blog post yesterday, "We promise to never charge you anything more than the wholesale price each TLD charges." That includes the small fee assessed by ICANN for each registration.
The FCC is once again being accused of blindly letting the telecom sector's biggest companies dictate federal policy. The FCC this week voted to move forward (pdf) with a plan that the agency claims will speed up deployment of fifth-generation (5G) wireless. Under this carrier-backed proposal, cities will be limited in terms of how much money they can charge carriers to place cell technology like small cells on government property in public rights of way (traffic lights, utility poles). It also imposes strict new timelines and operational restrictions making it harder for localities to stand up to giant nationwide cellular carriers.
On its surface, the FCC is framing these changes as a necessary shift to speed up broadband deployment and eliminate cumbersome bureaucracy as the U.S. engages in a "race to 5G" with other countries. But the upgrading of wireless networks isn't a race, 5G itself has been aggressively over-hyped as a panacea for a broken market, and cities say the FCC's new plan is largely about saving money for wireless carriers, while tying the hands of cities, counties and towns trying to improve connectivity to rural markets.
So let's be clear about something: the Ajit Pai FCC's repeal of net neutrality was already a mammoth fuck you to the American public, open competition, and a healthy internet. The effort to neuter the rules was based on bogus telecom lobbyist data, lots and lots of shady behavior, and oceans of complete nonsense. And while folks like Ajit Pai like to speak loftily about his noble effort to "strip away burdensome regulations," the reality is that killing net neutrality served one real purpose: giving natural telecom monopolies the green light to (ab)use a broken, uncompetitive broadband market to screw consumers and competitors alike.
When the FCC killed these overwhelmingly popular consumer protections it wasn't just killing net neutrality, it was killing the federal government's ability to adequately hold lumbering telecom monopolies accountable on the federal level. In addition to neutering the FCC and shoveling any remaining, fleeting oversight to an FTC ill-equipped for the job, ISPs convinced the Trump administration to also try to prevent states from filling the void. As such, both Comcast and Verizon successfully lobbied the FCC to include language in the net neutrality repeal "preempting" (read: banning) states from holding giant ISPs accountable as well.
Again the goal here is obvious: to eliminate any meaningful state or federal oversight of natural telecom monopolies, which will now be left unchecked by neither regulatory oversight nor meaningful competition.
Xbox and Playstation are the two big rivals in the console industry. Their parent companies Sony and Microsoft have been fighting it out for a long time, outselling each other from time to time. But this generation has a clear winner and it’s. definitely the Playstation.
In 2013 when both the current generation consoles launched, nobody had the edge over one another, Xbox and Playstation had their own loyal fans. But Microsoft in their launch presentation put themselves in a bad spot, with predatory DRM announcements, which required users to connect to the internet using their consoles once every 24 hours to avoid getting locked out. This obviously caused massive outrage at that time, and Microsoft eventually had to remove these anti-consumer features.
On the German Qualcomm v. Apple patent litigation front, next week (the first week of October) will have the same schedule as last week: a Mannheim trial on Tuesday followed by a Munich trial on Thursday.
Last week's Mannheim patent--a switch patent--may not even be infringed, but at any rate it's rather unlikely to be valid. The opinion by the Swedish patent office--perfectly independent because Apple's lawyers couldn't communicate with the examiner and only got to submit two prior art references without any further explanation or documentation--that I mentioned last week is a clear thumbs-down for that patent. At last week's trial its key finding was summarized by counsel for Apple, and a German patent litigator who is not involved with those cases (last time I saw him, he was suing Apple over a SEP) told me that those opinions are private and don't appear in any patent register. However, someone in Sweden appears to have an inside track. My web traffic stats showed an inbound link from a Swedish-language website previously unknown to me, Feber. They obtained and published the opinion by the Swedish patent office (PRV = "Patent- och registreringsverket"), which was apparently written in English.
Apple might've infringed a Qualcomm patent, but that doesn't mean iPhones should be banned from sale, a new US International Trade Commission filing said Friday.
Qualcomm in late 2017 had asked the ITC to prevent iPhones that had Intel 4G chips from being sold because of allegations of patent infringement. Administrative Law Judge Thomas Pender on Friday agreed that Apple infringed one Qualcomm patent related to power management, but it didn't infringe two other patents, he said in a final initial determination published to the ITC's website.
Telecommunications company Qualcomm has filed an opposition to the US Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) motion for a partial summary judgment on whether it should license its wireless standard-essential patents to competitors.
The FTC accused Qualcomm of engaging in bad faith conduct during SEP licensing to “maintain its monopoly in markets for modem chips”.
When the complaint was filed in July 2017, I already expressed skepticism regarding Qualcomm's strategy of targeting only Intel-powered--not Qualcomm-powered--iPhones. While a potential shortage of supply is a major factor in the ITC's analysis, Qualcomm basically traded one issue in for another. By targeting its only major baseband chipset competitor, Qualcomm exposed itself to allegations of anticompetitive behavior, especially since antitrust regulators around the globe had at the time of the complaint already held Qualcomm in violation of competition law because of, among other things, its refusal to grant standard-essential patent (SEP) licenses to Intel.
On September 6 2018, Tokyo District Court dismissed the GREE's claim against Supercell in a patent infringement case, which was previously reported here. GREE demanded JPY 100 million (approx. USD 909,000) in damages from Supercell for the patent infringement by the layout editor of “Clash of Clans”.
In this case, the interpretation of "the whole game space ... chosen by player" in Claim 6 and 8 of the subject patent (JP 5952947) became an issue, especially from the viewpoint of how a player chooses the whole game space. The judge examined the description of the specification and the response to an office action, and concluded that the player chooses a certain range of the game space, considering no other options described or suggested in the specification or the response. The judge ruled that the layout editor does not infringe the GREE's patent, because there is no facility or action taken by a player to choose a certain range of the game space.
Today the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that generally relates to user interactions with a new desktop system that is ergonomically friendly and designed for multi-user environments.
A lawsuit filed in federal court on Thursday alleges certain aspects of Apple products, including iMessage and FaceTime, infringe on multiple patents owned by Finnish holdings firm MPH Technologies, which attempted to license its IP to Apple in 2016.
A former Apple engineer is suing his old employer to force it to acknowledge his role as the inventor of "Find My iPhone" and to compensate him for unfair dismissal.
Darren Eastman, the inventor credited on an Apple patent for detecting battery errors (US 7877631B2), is seeking to have his name added to five Apple patent applications (US 20130326643, 20130326642, 20140364099, 20140199966 and 20140364148) related to locating lost phones and electronic ticketing, the return of 735 Apple shares he claims were unfairly taken from him, and $326,400 in damages, plus $32,640 in interest and $5,000 in attorney's fees.
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has upheld a summary judgement of noninfringement in favour of AT&T in its lawsuit with Advanced Media Networks (AMN).
AT&T was sued by AMN in 2015 for allegedly infringing a US patent relating to wireless networking.
Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court held that the Patent Act’s damages provision, 35 U.S.C. 284, allowed a patent holder to recover foreign lost profits when patent infringement liability is based on 35 U.S.C. 271(f)(2). WesternGeco LLC v. ION Geophysical Corp., 138 S. Ct. 2129 (2018).
Section 271(f)(2) provides that a company “shall be liable as an infringer” if it supplies certain components of a patented invention “in or from the United States” with the intent that they “will be combined outside of the United States in a manner that would infringe the patent if such combination occurred within the United States.” In contrast, the Federal Circuit has held that a company that makes or sells an entire infringing device within the United States is not liable for lose sales in foreign markets under section 271(a). Power Integrations, Inc. v. Fairchild Semiconductor Int’l, Inc., 711 F.3d 1348, 1370 (Fed. Cir. 2013). Thus, by allowing the recovery of foreign lost profits, WesterGeco creates a new incentive for patent plaintiffs to find liability based on sales of infringing components.
In the wake of the Court’s opinion, however, uncertainty remains with respect to whether the sale of software will constitute sale of an infringing component. Software is inoperative alone, but rather must be combined with appropriate hardware. Therefore, it would seem to qualify as a component. In light of WesternGeco, is software developed in the U.S. also “supplied in or from the U.S.?” If that software is then installed on foreign devices abroad, does that expose the software developer to world-wide lost profit damages for infringement of a competitor’s U.S. patent?
[...]
In the case of software, the scenario posed by the dissent is even more prescient, as software is often developed in the U.S. and then replicated across devices worldwide. The issue of whether software may constitute an infringing component under ۤ 271(f) was addressed by the Court over 10 years ago in Microsoft Corp. v. AT & T Corp., 550 U.S. 437 (2007), but its tension with WesternGeco LLC v. ION Geophysical Corp and its outmoded reasoning casts significant doubt as to whether the Court rule the same way today.
We talked about a variety of matters, from the nature of property rights, Rothbard's view that all human rights are property rights, Locke's labor theory of property and the Marxian labor theory of value, the history and general nature of IP rights and why IP rights are incompatible with other property rights. This was a very fast-talking, dense episode with a lot of lecturing and talking from my end, but I think we covered a lot of ground, from the foundations of law and property rights to IP law. Their shownotes: Since its beginning, the music industry has been under heavy government regulation: copyright laws control much of the economy of the music business. Today, there are many voices on the frontline arguing for the abolishment of all intellectual property, including copyright laws... Stephan Kinsella is a Patent Attorney and advocate for IP Abolishment. On this episode of Creative Juice, Circa sits down with Stephan to discuss the little-known argument against intellectual property and how it may actually be harming independent artists and creatives. "This is one of my favorite episodes of Creative Juice to date - I highly advise that you learn about this topic and take part in the discussion surrounding these laws.
Miguel ÃÂngel Margáin, Director General of the Mexican Institute of Industrial Property, took office in early 2013, and was in Geneva for the annual World Intellectual Property Organization General Assemblies. William New of Intellectual Property Watch sat down with him for an interview. He spoke about achievements of the office during this administration, major amendments to adhere to global treaties and changes in the NAFTA, the introduction of geographical indications, and the ascendance of IP rights in Latin America.
Aman Gebru, visiting assistant professor at Cardozo Law, has a new article forthcoming in Denver Law Review about patenting traditional knowledge. Aman is on the teaching market this year in the patents and intellectual property field, but his research and teaching deal with other areas as well like contracts and international law. His proposal, if adopted, could be good for the public and some communities, but might make big pharma a bit angry.
So-called traditional knowledge is a term of art. Gebru defines it as the "know-how, skills, innovations, and practices of indigenous peoples and local communities." This is often referred to colloquially as “traditional knowledge” or “TK." (5). One of the big issues in the international human rights community and the TK literature is whether it is fair for big U.S. companies to extract information from local communities that they then go on to patent and commercialize in products like pharmaceutical drugs, generally without compensation or attribution.
Gebru taps into the literature on “information-forcing” in contract law to argue, I think quite effectively, that the patent office should compel disclosure of any "substantial" reliance by the patent applicant on traditional knowledge.
Going all the way back to 2012, we were highlighting why a copyright "small claims court" might be problematic. It's been in discussion for a long, long time. There are some legitimate complaints from copyright holders that bringing a federal case is kind of expensive. But that's because it should be expensive. When Congress got serious about this issue back in 2016, we wrote about how it would be a huge tool for copyright trolls. Earlier this year lawyer Cathy Gellis explained how the law was a total disaster, in that it was built with the assumption that all copyright claims are legitimate ones. But that's a laughable claim -- as copyright lawsuits (and threats of lawsuits) are quite frequently used either to just shake people down for money or as a way of suppressing free speech.
Make it even easier to sue over copyright, and you can bet that it will be used much more often -- meaning with significantly more abuse.
We also had a guest post from lawyer Robert S. Schwartz, highlighting a very important point. One of the reasons why, historically, copyright law hasn't been as big of a concern for suppressing free speech was because of copyright toleration. That is, even though basically everyone infringes on many people's copyrights every single day, we've mostly "tolerated" many infringements, because common sense tells us that the law couldn't have been meant for such things.
Canada currently observes the minimum term of copyright as required by the Berne Convention, which is life of the author plus 50 years. USMCA requires all signatories to agree to a term of at least life of the author plus 70 years.
The extension of already-lengthy copyright terms will discourage new creativity in Canada. It will further prevent Canadians from accessing and using the rich pool of resources in the public domain, which means they can be used free of any copyright protections. Creativity always builds upon the past, and the public domain is our shared cultural commons used to create new works of art and science. Like a sedimentary rock, the “Commons” in Creative Commons starts with the public domain. Fulfilling our mission of protecting and expanding the public domain is why we’ve developed tools to better mark and dedicate content to CC0. We continue to advocate for changes to copyright policy that promote a robust and accessible public domain.
During the opaque renegotiation of NAFTA, we urged negotiators to ensure that the copyright provisions in the agreement should not be expanded to create new (and likely more onerous) copyright rules. We worked with international groups to release the Washington Principles on Copyright Balance in Trade Agreements to restate the obvious fact that further copyright term extensions make no sense: “there is no evidence to suggest that the private benefits of copyright term extensions ever outweigh the costs to the public.”
The end of copyright protection in a work allows for the production of new works. That is why term length is a balance to be struck — and one which Canada has handled well. Ian Fleming’s literary character James Bond, for example, entered the public domain in Canada on January 1, 2015. This allowed Canadian authors David Nickle and Madeline Ashby to produce License Expired, an anthology of unauthorized 007 stories for ChiZine Publications.
Well, this is depressing. Back in 2016, we wrote about yet another copyright infringement case where we feared the impact on creativity in music. At issue was whether or not the band Led Zeppelin had infringed on the copyright of Randy Wolfe (aka Randy California) who had written the song Taurus for his band Spirit. Taurus has some similarities to Led Zeppelin's classic "Stairway to Heaven":
The world's oldest active torrent file turned fifteen-years-old this week, a remarkable achievement. TorrentFreak catches up with the creator of "The Fanimatrix" torrent file, who saw BitTorrent as the only affordable option to share the Matrix fan film with the world.
BitTorrent and Tron hope to successfully integrate blockchain technology with the popular file-sharing protocol. The idea of adding rewards and 'payments' to BitTorrent is controversial, but the team stresses that all blockchain enhancements will be open source and backward compatible. They also call on third-party torrent clients to embrace their plan.
An ambitious free-to-play fan project to build an interactive, VR-style interface of the Next Generation-era Enterprise-D has come to an untimely end after being hit with photon torpedoes—or their 21st-century legal equivalent, a cease-and-desist letter.
A 'carpet-bomb' of DMCA takedown requests has all but wiped Torrent9 from Google's search results. French anti-piracy outfit SACEM targeted hundreds of thousands of URLs in a few days. An effective strategy, but one that relies on several dubious reports, including takedowns targeting open source software.