Unix pioneer Rob Pike was there from the start, physically transporting key elements of the "Toronto distribution" of Unix to Berkeley when he started grad school, and then to Bell Labs, working alongside Dennis Ritchie and other key Unix programmers to develop and refine everything from modern editors to compilers to windowing systems.
His hour-long "illustrated memoir" of the deep history of Unix is delightful, touching on the people and institutional forces that shaped the operating environment that has come to dominate modern computing (he even gives a mention to Cardiac, the cardboard computer that shaped my own computing life).
The next step for these servers is to massage them into actual Linux Daemons, which shouldn't be HUGE, but it will take a minor rewrite of some bits of code. Not a huge issue until I have a real server though. So, really the next step is to get the base functionality built out in the next 3 Servers(Mob, Narrative, & Social)
And what do roughly 95.6% of all websites run on? With the exception of Microsoft sites, the answer is Linux. Facebook? Linux. Google? Linux. Yahoo? Linux. Netflix? Linux. I can go on and on. You may use Windows on your desktop, but it’s effectively just a front end to Linux-based services and data. You might as well be using a Chromebook (running on Linux-based Chrome OS, by the way).
But as a matter of fact, Windows is no longer the top end-user operating system. Oh yes, it does still dominate the desktop, but the desktop hasn’t been king of the end-user hill for some time. By StatCounter’s reckoning, the most popular end-user operating system as of September 2018, with 40.85% market share, was — drum roll, please — Android. Which — guess what — is based on Linux.
So, in several senses, Linux has been the top end-user operating system for some time.
But not on the desktop, where Windows still reigns.
Why? There are many reasons.
Back when desktop Linux got its start, Microsoft kept it a niche operating system by using strong-arm tactics with PC vendors. For instance, when Linux-powered netbooks gave Microsoft serious competition on low-end laptops in the late ’00s, Microsoft dug XP Home up from the graveyard to stop it in its tracks.
But Microsoft’s avid competitiveness is only part of the story. In fact, Microsoft has gotten quite chummy with Linux lately. It’s fair to say that it’s no longer trying to stop the Linux desktop from gaining ground.
Last Monday, a Microsoft update gave users a buggy Outlook mobile email client. The update was rapidly withdrawn, but that left owners with no working email client at all.
"They've barely responded at all," one owner told us on Friday. "A couple of tech supports on the web forums have suggested it's a memory problem, while another claims that they're aware and are looking into it. An obvious strategy would have been to update with the old app last night – but they didn't."
Microsoft finally acknowledged the issue in build 16006.11001.20083.0 later on Friday, and rolled out an update at the weekend that finally fixed the problem.
SAMSUNG HAS RELEASED its Linux on DeX solution to the quandary of how to best use phones as desktop machines more convincingly.
For all its wonderful qualities, Android has never been aimed at keyboard and mouse users, and whilst five years ago everyone assumed that was fine because we'd all be using tablets anyway, it's 2018 and most people have stuck to what they know.
But with our devices becoming ever more powerful, sometimes as powerful as our PCs, there needs to be a way to harness them. Huawei has its Desktop Mode, but other solutions like Remix OS and Google's own Pixel C, have fallen by the wayside. For Google - Android apps in the more sympathetic Chrome OS have been the solution.
Samsung debuted DeX last year to make your phone behave a bit more like a computer when plugged into a monitor. This year, DeX functionality has improved so you don't need to expensive custom dock, just a video cable. At Samsung's developer conference last week, it announced DeX would also get full Linux support. It's only officially available to those in the beta program, but we've got the APK.
To use Linux on DeX, you'll need an updated Samsung device that supports DeX. Currently, only the Note 9 and Tab S4 work with the beta. Install the Linux on DeX app to get started. This is just a few megabytes because it's not a full Linux distro (you'll download that later).
Canonical recently made an official announcement on its company blog stating that the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop (that is, Project Sputnik) now ships with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) pre-installed. Upon reading this, I quickly reached out to Dell asking to review the laptop. I'm a Linux developer, and when a developer edition laptop is marketed with Linux pre-installed, I need to experience it for myself. The laptop eventually arrived, and like a child on Christmas morning, I excitedly pulled the device out of the box and powered it up for the first time.
This is a pretty rock-solid notebook. The device is very light and easy to carry—meaning, it's mobile (which is very important in my book), thin and sleek. Not only does the device look good, but it also performs very well.
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Overall, I had a very positive experience with the 7th generation Dell XPS 13. It's a powerful machine and fully capable of handling all sorts of developer workloads. And if used in a professional environment, it's very mobile as well. You can carry it from conference room to conference room and resume your work with little to no disruption. Ubuntu is well integrated with the machine, and it shows. You can't ask for more in a developer's laptop. I definitely consider this device to be well worth the investment.
Jim Hall: I run Fedora Workstation on a Lenovo X1 Carbon laptop, with an ASUS 24" external display. That gives me a dual-display configuration that lets me work in one window on the larger display while having a separate space to run my music player or other apps. I love my Perixx ergonomic keyboard and my Microsoft Classic Intellimouse. When I'm feeling nostalgic, I swap out the ergo keyboard with my replica IBM Model M keyboard by Unicomp; the buckling spring keys are really easy to type with. My printer is an HP color LaserJet, which works seamlessly with Linux.
Some companies treat “systems engineer” and “systems administrator” almost interchangeably, but there are significant differences between the two positions. In broadest terms, systems engineers must design and implement a company’s system (comprising the network, servers, devices, etc.), whereas systems administrators are largely charged with keeping everything running.
To frame it another way, system administration is a very reactive role, with sysadmins constantly monitoring networks for issues. Systems engineers, on the other hand, can build a system that anticipates users’ needs (and potential problems). In certain cases, they must integrate existing technology stacks (e.g., following the merger of two companies), and prototype different aspects of the network before it goes “live.”
Open-source cloud application infrastructure can be a confusing landscape to navigate with multiple projects, including OpenStack, Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes. While there are some points of overlap, each technology has its own merits and use-cases.
Among the vendors that uses and contributes to OpenStack, Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes is SUSE, which also has commercial products for all three technologies as well. In a video interview with eWEEK, Thomas Di Giacomo, CTO at SUSE explains how the three open-source technologies intersect at his company.
"We see that our customers don't use a single open-source project, most of the time they to use different ones, with different lifecycles and sometimes they overlap," Di Giacomo said.
As a Solution Architect I see my job as many things, from supporting customers in adopting Red Hat technology, educating organisations about using open source technologies and the benefits it brings, to thinking of ways to solve business challenges using technology and culture change. However, these are all generally in the space of “green field” app development. But what about all the systems keeping the business going today?
The challenges businesses face in dealing with these “legacy” systems are complex, multi-faceted, involve many teams, and often businesses face knowledge gaps in how everything works together.
In the public sector, where I work, this problem of legacy systems is arguably larger and more challenging, with the need for organisations to share information, outlined by things like Digital Service Standard. But, it’s worked that way for years, so why change it?
All supercomputers on the coveted Top500 list run on Linux, a scalable operating system that has matured over the years to run some of the most critical workloads and in many cases has displaced proprietary operating systems in the process. For the past two decades, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has served as the foundation for building software stacks for many supercomputers. We are looking to continue this trend with the next generation of systems that seek to break the exascale threshold.
SC18, a leading supercomputing conference, begins today. Red Hat hopes to hold conversations and share our insights on new supercomputers, including Summit and Sierra, nascent architectures, like Arm, and building more open computing environments that can further negate the need for proprietary and monolithic implementations. The updated Top500 list is an excellent example of how open technologies continue to proliferate in high performance computing (HPC) and highlights how the ongoing software optimization work performed on these systems can benefit their performance.
The latest TOP500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers is out, a remarkable ranking that shows five Department of Energy supercomputers in the top 10, with the first two captured by Summit at Oak Ridge and Sierra at Livermore. With the number one and number two systems on the planet, the “Rebel Alliance” vendors of IBM, Mellanox, and NVIDIA stand far and tall above the others.
Barring a heavy-handed approach to the recent acquisition, IBM and Red Hat can do some amazing things in the market. IBM is a long way from making physical machines. That part of the business went with Lenovo several years ago. So, what has been their focus ever since? Software and services. And, among those software pieces and services has been the cloud.
Until today, you may have heard little about IBM’s cloud presence. Although I can assure you it’s there, it was really struggling to compete with the likes of AWS, Azure, and even GCP. Now, with predictions like those from Gartner stating that by 2020, 90% of organizations will adopt hybrid infrastructure management capabilities and that the market in general could be worth $240 billion or more – this was as good a time as any to really take a dive into the cloud management and delivery ecosystem.
This is the third post of our blog series on HashiCorp Vault. In the first post, we proposed a custom orchestration to more securely retrieve secrets stored in the Vault from a pod running in Red Hat OpenShift.
In the second post, we improved upon that approach by using the native Kubernetes Auth Method that Vault provides.
Both of the previous approaches assumed that the application knew how to handle the renewals of vault tokens and how to retrieve secrets from Vault. In all of our examples we used Spring Boot, which, we believe, has a sophisticated and out-of-the box Vault integration.
In this post, we are going to add further improvements with the purpose of enabling applications that cannot integrate directly with Vault.it. We will assume that these applications (henceforth referred to as legacy applications) can read a file to retrieve their secrets.
Kaloom, an emerging leader in the fully automated data center networking software market, today announced collaboration with Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, around the launch of the Red Hat virtual central office solution, a Virtual Central Office (VCO) solution for multivendor NFV deployments at the edge. The solution is designed to speed and simplify the deployment of value-added residential, enterprise and mobile services by telcos and enterprises.
Red Hat's new OpenStack is built on top of the OpenStack "Rocky" community release. This version is noted for its significant bare-metal improvements in Ironic, its bare metal provisioning module, as well as in Nova, its compute instances provisioning program. Red Hat makes use of both improvements by automated provisioning of bare metal and virtual infrastructure resources in its OpenShift Container Platform.
To manage those containers, no matter if they're on bare metal or in a Virtual Machine (VM), the new OpenStack Platform 14 is more tightly integrated than ever with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, Together, OpenStack Platform 14 aims to deliver a single infrastructure offering for traditional, virtualized, and cloud-native workloads.
Today, Red Hat has announced Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14, saying it will become available in the coming weeks. The firm says that the latest version, which is built on the OpenStack “Rocky” community release, more tightly integrates with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform which gives admins full control over their Kubernetes environments.
Red Hat this morning released Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14, delivering "enhanced Kubernetes integration, bare metal management and additional automation". According to the press release, it will be available in the coming weeks via the Red Hat Customer Portal and as a component of both Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure and Red Hat Cloud Suite.
Red Hat Inc. is upping its Kubernetes game with release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 14, the latest version of its infrastructure-as-a-service product.
The new version announced early today, which is based upon the OpenStack “Rocky” community version, improves integration with OpenShift, Red Hat’s own version of Kubernetes, and features better support for bare-metal deployments and improved automation.
OpenStack is Red Hat’s platform for organizations and service providers that want to run a hybrid cloud infrastructure consisting of common elements that run both on-premises and in public clouds. Improved OpenShift integration is a nod to the surging popularity of Kubernetes, which enables applications to be encapsulated and moved across platforms.
Built on the backbone of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, Red Hat OpenStack Platform enables enterprises to transform their IT infrastructure into a more agile, efficient and innovative environment. Modular by design, it helps to optimize IT operations for existing traditional applications while serving as the foundation for cloud-native application development and deployment.
Today we are taking an important step toward helping customers build event-driven applications with the introduction of Red Hat AMQ Streams, a high-performance data streaming capability based on the Apache Kafka open source project.
Integration plays a vital role in the development of modern container- and microservices-based applications. These architectures are inherently more modular and require robust, distributed messaging capabilities that can meet the demands for scale and performance. Kafka was born out of the need to enable microservices and other application components to exchange large volumes of data as quickly as possible for real-time event processing. The technology has excelled at this, and is used today by organizations of all sizes to power mission-critical business applications.
Red Hat is adding data streaming capability to its OpenShift container platform with the addition of a distribution based on Apache Kafka.
AMQ Streams is described as a high-end data streaming tool built on Kafka stream processing. Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) said Monday (Nov. 12) it is integrating the streaming capability with its flagship OpenShift platform based on its enterprise version of the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator. The combination is designed to provide messaging services in the cloud to connect legacy and cloud-native applications.
“As more of the software world has converged on Kubernetes as the standard platform for building cloud-native applications, it is increasingly important to be able to run the communication infrastructure on the same platform,” Red Hat noted in a blog post. The result, the company added, is integration of event-driven microservices with Kafka’s ability to quickly exchange large data volumes for real-time event processing.
There are several ways to build large scale Linux server environments, with x86 and public cloud being obvious ones. But there’s another option too, as I reminded myself when I caught up with Adam Jollans, program director for LinuxOne product marketing at IBM. LinuxOne is a solution built by IBM using the mainframe platform as its base, but it’s solely focused on running Linux workloads.
We discussed the way some organisations are using LinuxOne to keep mission-critical open source solutions running without service interruption and, just as importantly, to keep them secure. Typical workloads his customers run include core banking services – where resilience is essential, not just desirable – and similar solutions for Telcos and SPs. These are services that must scale to hundreds or even thousands of virtual machines, doing so both cost-effectively and without risk.
The characteristics of such mission-critical workloads clearly resonate with the traits of the venerable mainframe. After all, the mainframe is regarded by many, even those who have never seen one, as the gold standard for IT resilience and availability. Unfortunately for IBM, and arguably for the wider world, the mainframe is also widely thought of as being out-dated, expensive, and difficult to manage – even though this hasn’t been true for a long time, and is certainly not the case with LinuxOne.
The global comms industry and those who analyse and report upon it have grown more or less inured to hearing yet another announcement about yet another gigantic merger, acquisition or "strategic partnership" (which a year-or-so down the line turns out to be an acquisition that was initially disguised as a marriage of equals). Consolidation exercises and the inflated prices being paid when one comms company buys another are now so commonplace that, more often than not, the news of the latest spending splurge is greeted by the media with "Oh, another one. Big deal. Ho-hum".
General Shelton was chairman of Red Hat’s board of directors for seven years and, before that, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1997ââ¬â2001. During his time at Red Hat, General Shelton helped guide both me and our organization through some truly great times. When he announced his retirement from Red Hat’s board last year, I jumped at the chance to sit down with him one more time and do what he taught me: listen.
In Berlin, at OpenStack Summit, Jonathan Bryce, OpenStack's Executive Director, announced that this would be the last OpenStack Summit and it would be replaced next year by Open Infrastructure Summit. This is more than just a name change. It represents that OpenStack is evolving beyond its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) cloud offerings to offering a full range of cloud services.
This isn't a sudden change. OpenStack has been expanding its offerings for some time. As Thierry Carrez, the OpenStack Foundation's VP of engineering wrote, in 2017 OpenStack started "shifting our focus from being solely about the production of the OpenStack software, to more broadly helping organizations embrace open infrastructure: using and combining open source solutions to fill their needs in terms of IT infrastructure."
Amazon’s consumer business has switched off its Oracle data warehouse and will be almost Big Red-free by Christmas – at least according to AWS boss Andy Jassy.
The claims – made over Twitter, so it must be true – were then doubled down on by Amazon CTO Werner Vogels, who said that the database was one of the largest in the world, adding “RIP”.
It’s the latest in a long-running war of words between the rival tech giants that normally sees Oracle CTO Larry Ellison smack-talking the online marketplace-cum-cloud vendor.
The IBM POWER9 based Summit system has retained its crown that it first achieved in the June 2018 ranking. Summit is installed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory and now has performance of 143.5 petaflops per second, up from the 122.3 petaflops the system had when it first came online.
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Though China doesn't hold the top spot on the list, it now has more supercomputers than any other other nation with 227. In contrast, there are now only 109 systems on the Top500 list that are located in the U.S., which is an all-time low.
That said, thanks to the enormous power of Summit and Sierra at the top, the U.S. is home to 38 percent of the total aggregate supercomputing power on the top500 list, while China's systems account for 31 percent.
Digital transformation and technology modernization aren’t trends that are limited just to the enterprise world. Behind the walls of proprietary stacks, many telecommunications service providers also want to use open innovation to evolve their infrastructure and services in an agile, flexible fashion. But these closed stacks are a problem and one that extends from the core datacenter all the way to the central offices.
Central offices are the local “hubs” of many telecommunications networks, often handling “last-mile” operations like telephone switching, copper, and optical terminations. These operations lean on purpose-built equipment that can be rigid and complex. Coupled with a lack of open standards, these devices can struggle to interact with each other, making the life of operations teams in central offices harder, especially in the face of demand for modern services expected from 5G. These differentiated services increasingly require virtualized environments and computing power at the network edge, leading to substantial demand for resources, flexibility and operational simplicity.
RedHat was one of the first big open source businesses. It’s grown over the years to encompass more than Linux, building out a complete developer stack that stretches from IoT to hyperscale clouds. It’s a reach that goes well beyond IBM’s, but at a very different, much smaller scale. Where IBM has been a one-stop shop for all your data center needs, RedHat has been a company that’s relied on partnerships and on industry collaboration.
FinancialForce, a leading customer-centric ERP and Professional Services Automation (PSA) cloud solution native to the Salesforce Platform, announced that Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, is successfully unifying its global workforce and accelerating back-office processes with FinancialForce PSA.
"We are going to be the company that is providing enterprise-ready hybrid cloud solutions and actually create the foundation of the infrastructure of the future," IBM's ($IBM) chief digital officer Bob Lord told Cheddar on Tuesday.
IBM's Red Hat ($RHT) acquisition will be a game-changer for the information technology giant ãƼ and it better be, at a $34 billion price tag. The deal, which is IBM's largest ever and the third biggest deal in tech, is expected to close at the end of 2019. It's been less than one month since IBM announced the acquisition, but executives like Lord are already suggesting it will be revolutionary.
"With Red Hat, we now become the number one largest provider of hybrid cloud solutions in the world," Lord said, "which is really important for all our enterprise clients." He said the deal also means that IBM is doubling down on open source and "committing to the developer community that these tools are something that they are going to be able to use and have impact on the world."
On this episode of This Week in Linux we cover a big batch of releases from distros, apps, hardware and more. System76 launches the option to order their new Open Source Certified Desktop, Thelio. We got a big update from the Solus team about the future of the project. openSUSE announces the launch of their Legal Review System, Cavil. Fedora 29 has been released along with other releases like KDE Connect, Sailfish, i3 Window Manager, GIMP, VirtualBox and the Game Manager, Lutris. We’ll also take a look at some upcoming projects like Ubuntu 19.04, Cinnamon 4.0 and the Samsung DeX running Ubuntu. All that and much more!
As new system calls get added to the Linux kernel, these syscalls generally get added to Glibc (and other libc libraries) for developers to make easy use of them from their applications. But as Glibc doesn't provide 1:1 coverage of system calls, sometimes is delayed in their support for new calls, and other factors, there is a discussion about providing an official Linux system wrapper library that could potentially live as part of the kernel source tree.
This weekend was the initial proposal for having an official Linux system wrapper library. Though that initial proposal is a bit flawed in saying that "glibc is basically not adding new system call wrappers", as they are, just sometimes it takes a while among other factors. But it is accurate in reflecting a problem with the status quo.
While Microsoft is self-proclaimed to love Linux, their common and very basic Microsoft OEM Mouse has not loved the Linux kernel or vice-versa... The Linux kernel HID code is finally getting a quirk fix to deal with the Microsoft OEM mouse as it would disconnect every minute when running at run-levels one or three.
The basic Microsoft OEM Mouse that's been available for years (appearing as a PixArt vendor and USB ID 0x00cb) would disconnect every 60~62 seconds on Linux systems when connected out-of-the-box. This isn't some high-end gaming mouse but Microsoft's dead basic OEM optical mouse.
The Linux kernel will likely be doing away with EXOFS, a file-system that had been around since the Linux 2.6.30 days.
EXOFS is a file-system originally derived from EXT2 file-system code for basing it on an external object store. This object-based file-system was originally developed by IBM.
Veteran kernel developer Christoph Hellwig is now seeking to remove the EXOFS object-based file-system on the basis of it being "just a simple example without real life users."
The Linux Foundation Monday announced the formation of a new “Ceph Foundation” backed by more than 30 major technology firms hoping to support and manage the popular open-source storage technology.
Ceph is a unified and distributed storage system used by some of the world’s largest cloud service providers, including Rackspace Inc. as well as major organizations such as Bloomberg L.P. and Fidelity Investments Inc. It provides object, block and file system storage and can also be used as a software-defined storage system for commodity hardware.
Ceph, the open source storage software platform, has gotten its very own foundation. Just like Linux.
The Ceph Foundation is organised as a directed fund under the Linux Foundation. It “will organise and distribute financial contributions in a coordinated, vendor-neutral fashion for immediate community benefit. This will help galvanise rapid adoption, training and in-person collaboration across the Ceph ecosystem.”
The foundation is the successor to the Ceph Advisory Board, which was formed in 2015 by Canonical, CERN, Cisco, Fujitsu, Intel, Red Hat, SanDisk, and SUSE.
In Berlin, The Linux Foundation, announced over 30 global technology leaders have formed a new foundation to support the Ceph open-source, unified distributed storage system project community: The Ceph Foundation.
Ceph is a unified distributed storage system. It provides applications with object, block, and file system interfaces. Ceph is also a software-defined storage (SDS) program. It's designed to run on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware.
Behind the scenes, Ceph uses an Object Store to store data. Within it, each piece of data is stored in a flat, non-hierarchical namespace and identified by an arbitrary, unique identifier. Each item's metadata are stored along with the data itself.
Ceph is an open source technology for distributed storage that gets very little public attention but that provides the underlying storage services for many of the world’s largest container and OpenStack deployments. It’s used by financial institutions like Bloomberg and Fidelity, cloud service providers like Rackspace and Linode, telcos like Deutsche Telekom, car manufacturers like BMW and software firms like SAP and Salesforce.
These days, you can’t have a successful open source project without setting up a foundation that manages the many diverging interests of the community and so it’s maybe no surprise that Ceph is now getting its own foundation. Like so many other projects, the Ceph Foundation will be hosted by the Linux Foundation.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announces over 30 global technology leaders are forming a new foundation to support the Ceph open source project community. The Ceph project develops a unified distributed storage system providing applications with object, block, and file system interfaces.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organisation enabling mass innovation through open source, has announced that over 30 global technology leaders are forming a new foundation to support the Ceph open source project community. The Ceph project develops a unified distributed storage system providing applications with object, block and file system interfaces.
Founding Premier members of Ceph Foundation include Amihan, Canonical, China Mobile, DigitalOcean, Intel, OVH, ProphetStor Data Services, Red Hat, SoftIron, SUSE, Western Digital, XSKY Data Technology, and ZTE. The Ceph Foundation will organise and distribute financial contributions in a coordinated, vendor-neutral fashion for immediate community benefit. This will help galvanise rapid adoption, training and in-person collaboration across the Ceph ecosystem.
Driven in part by the increased use of containers, AI and ML, the Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Ceph Foundation for open-source storage.
Ceph is being used by cloud providers and enterprises to lower the cost of storing information in private clouds while helping them better organize and access their information. The Ceph Foundation is developing a unified distributed storage system that will provide applications with high availability to object, block and file system interfaces.
According to the Linux Foundation press release, unstructured data accounts for more than 80% of enterprise data, which is growing at rate of 55% to 65% a year. Block and file storage systems play a key role in keeping data organized and are crucial components of infrastructure platforms such as Kubernetes and OpenStack. According to an OpenStack survey, roughly two-thirds of OpenStack clouds use Ceph block storage.
The majority of companies using open source understand its business value, but they may lack the tools to strategically implement an open source program and reap the full rewards. According to a recent survey from The New Stack, “the top three benefits of open source programs are 1) increased awareness of open source, 2) more speed and agility in the development cycle, and 3) better license compliance.”
Running an open source program office involves creating a strategy to help you define and implement your approach as well as measure your progress. The Open Source Guides to the Enterprise, developed by The Linux Foundation in partnership with the TODO Group, offer open source expertise based on years of experience and practice.
The most recent guide, Setting an Open Source Strategy, details the essential steps in creating a strategy and setting you on the path to success. According to the guide, “your open source strategy connects the plans for managing, participating in, and creating open source software with the business objectives that the plans serve. This can open up many opportunities and catalyze innovation.” The guide covers the following topics:
Vulkan 1.1.92 is out today to mark the newest specification update to this high-performance graphics/compute API.
With it just being one week since Vulkan 1.1.91 that brought some new/improved extensions, there isn't any new extensions to find with Vulkan 1.1.92. But there are a number of documentation/specification corrections and clarifications.
Jonas Ãâ¦dahl of Red Hat today released a new version of Wayland-Protocols, the collection of stable and unstable protocols for extending Wayland functionality.
With the Wayland-Protocols 1.17 release the big new feature is the initial (unstable) version of linux-explicit-synchronization. The Wayland explicit synchronization protocol provides a means of explicit per-surface buffer synchronization. This synchronization protocol is based on Google Chromium's extension (zcr_linux_explicit_synchronization_v1) and lets clients request this explicit synchronization on a per-surface basis. Google, Intel, and Collabora were involved in the formation of this extension.
Back in September Code Sourcery / Mentor Graphics posted their new Radeon GCN port for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). Two months later this port is still being worked on but not yet ready for mainline.
This Radeon GCN back-end for GCC is being done with a focus on GPU computing with eventually a goal of allowing OpenMP / OpenACC offloading to newer AMD GPUs. At this current stage, single-threaded C and Fortran programs can be built for Radeon GPUs with this compiler but the multi-threading API offloading bits are still coming about. This back-end has been focused on Fiji/Tonga support and newer.
In the nearly one year that the AMDVLK official Vulkan driver has been open-source there hasn't been any "releases" but rather new code drops on a weekly basis that is pushed out of their internal development repositories. But surprisingly this morning is now a v2018.4.1 release tag for this open-source AMD Vulkan Linux driver.
The AMDVLK public source repositories have just been perpetual Git while AMD pulls from their internal repositories when building out their official closed-source Windows/Linux Radeon Software driver releases (that also use their closed-source shader compiler currently rather than the open-source AMDGPU LLVM back-end, as used by the public AMDVLK sources). Waking up this morning there is now the first release tag in AMDVLK as v2018.4.1.
It was just a few months back that the Mesa/RadeonSI open-source AMD Linux driver stack received Zen tuning for that CPU microarchitecture's characteristics. But now AMD's Marek Olšák is going back to the drawing board to work on a new approach for Zen tuning.
Just a few days ago I wrote about another developer wanting to toggle the support around L3 thread pinning as it was found to hurt the RadeonSI Gallium3D performance in at least some Linux games. At that point the goal was to allow making it a DriConf tunable that could then be adjusted a per-game/app basis, but it turns out the gains aren't there to keep it around.
It was just yesterday that the AMD Zen L3 thread pinning was dropped from Mesa due to that optimization not panning out as intended for benefiting the new AMD processors with the open-source Linux graphics driver stack. Lead Mesa hacker Marek Olšák is already out with a new Zen tuning implementation that may deliver on the original optimization goal.
The first patch posted by Marek as part of his new tuning effort is to regularly re-pin the driver threads to the core complex (CCX) where the application thread is. Basically, when Mesa is being used without the glthread (OpenGL threading) behavior, keep chasing the application/game thread on the processor so it will be part of the same CCX and share a cache. This chasing is done rather than explicitly pinning the application thread.
Being well into the Mesa 18.3 feature freeze and that quarterly update to these open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers due out in about two weeks, here is a look at all of the new features and changes you can expect to find with this big update.
One I completely forgot to post about here, NVIDIA recently released the 415.13 beta driver for Linux.
Released on the 8th of November, it includes a number of interesting fixes, including an issue fixed with WINE where it might crash on recent distribution releases. Nice to see WINE get some focus, since things like this can affect Valve's Steam Play.
With last week Amazon Web Services rolling out AMD EPYC cloud instances to EC2, I figured it would be an interesting time for a fresh benchmark look at how the AMD Linux cloud performance compares from some of the popular cloud providers. For this article are sixteen different instances benchmarked while looking at the raw performance as well as the value on each instance type relative to the benchmark performance and time consumed for the on-demand spot instancing. EPYC instances were tested from Amazon EC2, Packet.com, and SkySilk.
With GCC 9 embarking upon its third stage of development where the focus ships to working on bug/regression fixes in preparation for releasing the GCC 9.1 stable compiler likely around the end of Q1'2019, here is a fresh look at the GCC 9 performance with its latest development code as of this week compared to GCC 8.2.0 stable while using an Intel Core i9 7980XE test system running Ubuntu Linux. For good measure are also fresh results from LLVM Clang 7.0 stable as well as LLVM Clang 8.0 SVN for the latest development state of that competing C/C++ open-source compiler.
AsciiDoc is a lightweight markup language for writing notes, documentation, articles, books, ebooks, slideshows, web pages, man pages and blogs. It’s a plain text human readable/writable document format that dates back to 2002.
AsciiDoc comes with a “converter program” that converts AsciiDoc documents to XHTML, DocBook or HTML. DocBook, in turn, can be converted to other formats such as PDF, TeX, Unix manpages and many more using the tool A2X which comes with AsciiDoc. Most of the Git documentation is written in AsciiDoc.
AsciiDoc is highly configurable: both the AsciiDoc source file syntax and the backend output markups (which can be almost any type of SGML/XML markup) can be customized and extended by the user.
There are all kinds of Linux system monitoring tools such as top, htop, atop and many more that provide different output of system data such as resource utilization, running processes, CPU temperature and others.
In this article, we are going to review a modular monitoring tool called Hegemon. It’s an open source project written in Rust, which works are still in progress.
It has been a while since we reviewed any games on FossMint. And even though I don’t know how many of our readers play chess, it is never too late for anyone to learn how to – especially since awesome services like the FICS exist. What, you’ve never heard about it? Read on.
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Open Source: You can deploy the app to Heroku from GitHub.
I'm a web guy; I put together my first site in early 1993. And so, when I started to do Python training, I assumed that most of my students also were going to be web developers or aspiring web developers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Although some of my students certainly are interested in web applications, the majority of them are software engineers, testers, data scientists and system administrators.
This last group, the system administrators, usually comes into my course with the same story. The company they work for has been writing Bash scripts for several years, but they want to move to a higher-level language with greater expressiveness and a large number of third-party add-ons. (No offense to Bash users is intended; you can do amazing things with Bash, but I hope you'll agree that the scripts can become unwieldy and hard to maintain.)
It turns out that with a few simple tools and ideas, these system administrators can use Python to do more with less code, as well as create reports and maintain servers. So in this article, I describe one particularly useful tool that's often overlooked: os.walk, a function that lets you walk through a tree of files and directories.
Have you ever wanted to run a Linux shell on your iOS device to transfer files, write shell scripts, or simply to use Vi to develop code or edit files? Now you can, with a project called iSH that is currently available as a TestFlight beta for iOS devices.
iSH is a project that aims to bring a Linux shell to iOS devices using a usermode x86 emulator. iSH is built on the Alpine Linux distro, which is designed to have a small footprint, be secure, and easy to use with little or no distracting bells and whistles.
For those who found Two Point Hospital a little too cute and lacking in depth, Project Hospital might be what the doctor ordered.
Don't get me wrong, I like Two Point Hospital quite a lot. However, Project Hospital is an entirely different beast altogether. There's a lot more to learn and you can even be a Doctor yourself. It makes it really quite interesting, although a little of your own patience is needed.
With a style that resembles the original Age of Empires a little, The Fertile Crescent is an RTS set during the Bronze Age in the Ancient Near East. Currently available for free on itch.
I've been waiting on this day for quite some time! Parkitect is a truly great theme park management sim and it's getting set to leave Early Access.
November 29th is the day and this will also see the game finally get the campaign mode. Sounds like it's going to be pretty interesting too, with 26 scenarios with unique and varied settings that is spread across a world-map with branching paths.
hey're also now asking for testers.
There's one caveat though, you will for now need to download and compile it yourself until it's properly released or someone provides it ready made for us. The developers said their next release isn't actually too far off, as they're busy working on a beta/release candidate so hopefully that won't be too long.
Currently, they have around 20 servers up with various game modes for people to jump in and test and you can also host your own.
It's been a good few months since I last looked at the Early Access strategic zombie survival rogue-lite called Deadly Days. During this time, it's changed a lot. Note: My own copy was personally purchased.
Sometime in the future, the fast food chain MKing put some secret addictive additives to their meat. Tasty, sure, but it had a rather devastating affect on the population. It practically shut down the brains of people who ate it and so the apocalypse began.
Feral Interactive, one of the only companies to be porting AAA games to Linux have put out a request for more port suggestions.
Sony's PlayStation Classic is being made with an existing open-source emulator that the company has licensed. Rather than produce an emulator of its own, Sony has chosen to use a classic of the emulation world in the PCSX ReARMed emuator.
The PlayStation Classic was announced to immensely positive buzz, but every revelation after the first five games were announced has dulled the device's shine considerably. First, the full reveal of the twenty games featured on the PlayStation Classic was met with mild disappointment, mostly over the fact that some key games in the PlayStation One's life cycle - Tomb Raider, for instance - were missing, and some extremely mediocre Sony-developed titles were added instead. Then, a hands-on review of the PlayStation Classic suggested it was a very average affair, with little in the way of extras being added to what is essentially an emulator in a cool shell.
SONY HASN'T ALWAYS had a happy relationship with the emulation community, unless you consider aggressive lawsuits to be part of the rough and tumble of friendship. In one such case, Sony did end up buying an emulator - but only after lawsuits failed, and in any case, the company promptly shut it down.
So it comes as something of an irony that Sony is now fully embracing emulation software on its upcoming Christmas money grab, the PlayStation Classic. Kotaku's hands-on review of the retro cash-in reveals that the console lists PCSX ReArmed in the licenses list. That's an ARM port of CSX Reloaded.
It's an open-source emulator, so Sony is well within its right to use it, it's just amusing that it would. A company that once saw the development of such software as an existential threat to be crushed now embraces it when there's quick cash to be made. It's something of a badge of honour for the developers of the emulator that not only has Sony tacitly accepted the software is legitimate but good enough to be used in official PlayStation products.
Last week the Kotaku release they first hands-on review of the new $100 PlayStation Classic mini console which is now available to preorder and will be available to purchase from online retailers early next month from December 3rd, 2018 onwards.
Unfortunately their experience to find the console as a “barebones experience” but another finding also revealed that the PlayStation Classic uses the open-source PlayStation emulator PCSX ReARMed. “A listing of licenses for open-source software accessible in the PlayStation Classic’s menu said that it uses the open-source PlayStation emulator PCSX ReARMed”.
So instead of creating their very own technology Sony simply downloaded an emulator created by enthusiasts to load onto their new mini console which was created to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the PlayStation One classic game system. Let’s hope they put a slice of the profits from the game system back into the development of the emulator and the enthusiasts that have created it. Somehow I can’t see that happening but the use of the open source PlayStation emulator does allow for a few extras highlighted by Brad Linder over at Liliputing.
From the same developer who made Fran Bow (which supports Linux), Little Misfortune is what they're calling an interactive story. With a focus on exploration and the characters, including sweet and dark elements with choices that have consequences.
With that in mind, when I spoke to the developer in regards to a Linux build they said "We will try to have it, yes! :)". Not solid, but a very positive response especially since they've supported Linux before.
Luna and the Moonling from Greyborn Studios is a colourful puzzle game with an aim to put a new spin on block-pushing puzzle gameplay. Note: Key provided by the developer.
For those who aren't aware, some of the people from Greyborn Studios previously worked on some pretty major titles like System Shock 2, Thief, Skylanders, Red Faction and quite a few more.
"From the moment we released in early access last year we’ve had requests from Linux gamers to support the platform," said Michael Ryan, CTO & Technical Director of Greyborn Studios. "We’re big fans of the platform ourselves and were happy to oblige. We really hope Linux users enjoy the game, and welcome them to the Greyborn community," Ryan said.
Artifact, the multi-lane card game from Valve is closing in on release and so Valve have given out a bunch of new details on what to expect.
Firstly, it's now up for pre-order on Steam for €£15.99/$20 and for that price you will get 10 card packs, 5 event tickets, and two complete starter decks. Considering how much such packs cost for real-life card games, that price is actually quite reasonable I think. Additional packs of cards will be $1.99, each pack has 12 random cards. You will also be able to buy and sell cards on the Steam Market.
The Doom-inspired UI bar along the bottom looked quite amusing, haven't really seen many games do something like that in recent years. Looks like it could be worth a shot, the action looks intense enough to keep me interested for sure.
While it's in Early Access, they're hoping to add a co-op mode along with new maps, new enemies, new levels and so on. The full release is currently scheduled for Q1 2019 although that may change depending on how much feedback they get during development.
Neuroslicers from developer Dream Harvest seems like a very interesting title. A narrative driven, online competitive cyberpunk RTS and it will be coming to Linux.
Ready your swords and your axe as Total War: WARHAMMER II is heading to Linux this month and Feral Interactive have now put up the system requirements.
With Feral Interactive preparing to release Total War: WARHAMMER II for Linux and macOS later this month, today they announced the system requirements for this latest native game port.
On the graphics card front that is always most interesting they list the minimum as a GeForce GTX 680 or Radeon R9 285. Of course, the R9 285 doesn't come as a surprise as it's the first GCN 1.2 GPU using the AMDGPU driver by default and thus RADV support... It might be possible using GCN 1.0/1.1 hardware with this game if opting to use the AMDGPU DRM driver in order to have RADV support, similar to what we have seen with past Feral ports. The GTX 680 is also the highest-end GPU going back to the Kepler generation that is as far back as NVIDIA provides Vulkan support.
UK based video games publisher Feral Interactive revealed today the official system requirements of the Total War: WARHAMMER II video game for Linux and Mac systems.
In mid-June, Feral Interactive teased Linux and Mac gamers with the upcoming release of the Total War: WARHAMMER II port for their beloved platforms, the sequel to the critically acclaimed Total War: WARHAMMER video game released more than two years ago. The company said that the Linux and macOS port is coming in November.
Well, November is here, and now Feral Interactive has revealed the official system requirements for playing the Total War: WARHAMMER II video game on Linux and macOS-powered computers, saying that the port will be available on these two platforms later this month.
Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Fatshark’s first person rat-murdering action game, will be getting another DLC next month. The Back to Ubersreik DLC takes players to the setting of the first Vermintide game, and will feature remasters of three maps seen in the original Vermintide.
After managing to sell a few thousand copies, the dungeon crawler Ebony Spire: Heresy has a great update now available.
For those who missed the story, the developer Bearded Giant Games initially failed to really get anywhere with the game. They wrote a post on Gamasutra about it, where they said it had been a "a soul crushing experience". A pretty sobering reading, as game development has become so much harder in the past few years with stores being flooded with new games. Anyway, many months later they managed to hit over 6,000 sales and so this update is a thank you for keeping the developer going.
The latest feature on deck for the long overdue Xfce 4.14 desktop update is support for the RandR primary display/output functionality.
The X11 Resize and Rotate (RandR) protocol has long had baked into it the concept of a primary output/display, which is intended to be where the desktop panel(s), icons, notifications and other central functionality of the desktop would reside. Basically, of a multi-monitor configuration, the display head that is most important for your workflow.
The first edition was written forfor Krita 2.9.11, almost three years ago. A lot of things have changed since then! So Timothée has completely updated this new edition for Krita version 4.1. There are also a number of notes about the new features in Krita 4.
And more-over, D-Booker worked again on updating and improving the French translation of Krita! Thanks again to D-Booker edition for their contribution.
About 4 years ago I downloaded GIMP as I wanted to get back into art after not drawing for about 15 years. I got a simple drawing tablet soon after and things just progressed from there.
Elisa (product page, release announcements blog) is a music player designer for excellent integration into the KDE Plasma desktop (but of course it runs everywhere, including some non-Free platforms). I had used it a few times, but had not gotten around to packaging it. So today I threw together a FreeBSD port of Elisa, and you’ll be able to install it from official packages whenever the package cluster gets around to it.
A few days ago I cut the 0.1.4 release of libxmlb, which is significant because it includes the last three features I needed in gnome-software to achieve the same search results as appstream-glib.
I've been involved in Free/open source software since 1993, but recently I developed an interest in usability testing in open source software. During a usability testing class in my Master's program in Scientific and Technical Communication (MS) I studied the usability of GNOME and Firefox. Later, I did a deeper examination of the usability of open source software, focusing on GNOME, as part of my Master's capstone. (“Usability Themes in Open Source Software,” 2014.)
Since then, I've joined the GNOME Design Team where I help with usability testing.
Void also comes in musl C flavors, which use the musl C library, a lightweight alternative to the popular glibc library.
Did you know you can run Void in the cloud? We provide ready to upload images for Google Cloud Platform that are compatible with the always free tier! You can also easily build images for other cloud providers from our ready to run x64 tarballs.
Our rootfs tarballs can also be used anywhere you want a Void Linux chroot and are available for all architectures we currently compile for.
You can find all images and rootfs tarballs at https://alpha.de.repo.voidlinux.org/live/current, or in the /live/current directory on any mirror near you.
If you are looking for a new Linux distribution to experiment with, Void Linux is one of the interesting ones that is an original creation and community driven that often doesn't receive the attention it deserves. Void Linux is built off its BSD-licensed XBPS packaging system, is a rolling-release platform, uses runit as the init system instead of systemd, opts for LibreSSL in place of OpenSSL, optional musl libc usage, and has a wealth of other changes.
Void Linux has put out new images for getting started with the Linux distribution and appears to be their first ISO re-spins since October of 2017. Granted, it's a rolling-release, but new install media is always helpful particularly with newer hardware.
The latest version of the NEST simulator is now available in Fedora as part of the NeuroFedora initiative. NEST is a standard tool used by computational neuroscientists to make large scale computer models of the brain that are needed to investigate among other things, how the brain processes information.
The Fedora team announces that the latest version of the Nest simulator is now available in Fedora as part of the NeuroFedora initiative. Nest allows computational neuroscientists to "make large scale computer models of the brain that are needed to investigate among other things, how the brain processes information". Nest provides an easy to use Python interface and it can be run on both laptops and supercomputing clusters.
We’re pleased to announce the stable release of Qubes 3.2.1! As we previously announced, this is the first and only planned point release for version 3.2. Since no major problems were discovered with 3.2.1-rc1, this stable release is not significantly different from the release candidate.
Total Chaos, a Doom II mod that runs on the GZDoom source port, is now available for easy Linux installation from FlatHub.
Flathub is an app store and build service for Linux that distributes applications as Flatpak packages, which allows them to run on almost any Linux distribution.
After nearly a decade of development, the open world survival horror mod was officially released two weeks ago, and it includes 6 chapters set on a remote island known as Fort Oasis. The Total Chaos mod introduces many new graphical features, including 3D models and high resolution textures.
The Debian Project announced the release of Debian 9.6 on November 10, 2018; it is the sixth release of Debian 9 which was released in 2017.
Debian, one of the oldest GNU/Linux distributions that is still in active development, is the basis for other GNU/Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Kali Linux, or Tails.
The new version of Debian 9.6 is available as a standalone ISO image download and the included update manager that administrators may use to upgrade to the new version.
The Debian Project announced the general availability of the sixth point release to the latest stable Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch" operating system series.
Debian GNU/Linux 9.6 "Stretch" is here about four months after the 9.5 point release to offer users up-to-date installation and live mediums if they want to deploy the Linux-based operating system on new computers or want to reinstall without having to download hundreds of updates from the official software repositories. This release includes more than 270 updated packages.
"This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems," Laura Arjona Reina wrote in the mailing list announcement. "Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 9 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old "stretch" media."
I was recently invited to give a seminar at the Cambridge University's Department of Computer Science and Technology on the topic of Reproducible Builds.
Over the last weekend, I have attended the FLOSS meeting "X2Go - The Gathering 2018" [1]. The event took place at the shackspace make spacer in Ulmerstraße near S-Bahn station S-Untertürckheim. Thanks to the people from shackspace for hosting us there, I highly enjoyed your location's environment. Thanks to everyone who joined us at the meeting. Thanks to all event sponsors (food + accomodation for me). Thanks to Stefan Baur for being our glorious and meticulous organizer!!!
Thanks to my family for letting me go for that weekend.
Especially, a big thanks to everyone, that I was allowed to bring our family dog "Capichera" with me to the event. While Capichera adapted quite ok to this special environment on sunny Friday and sunny Saturday, he was not really feeling well on rainy Sunday (aching joints, unwilling to move, walk interact).
On October 12, we started our yearly donation campaign. Today, we summarize what we achieved with your help in 2018 and renew our call for donations.
Canonical’s Ubuntu operating system remains the most popular version of desktop Linux. But once the company stopped developing its own Unity interface, its focus moved elsewhere. Canonical’s eyes are now set more on the cloud than the device you’re reading this on.
If Canonical no longer seems to care all that much about the Ubuntu desktop, why should you? Turns out there are plenty of reasons to stick with this particular version of Linux.
With developers increasingly moving towards microservices – and with the growing prevalence of the cloud as the default platform – software has become more complex than ever.
While installing all of the interconnected applications that make up a modern software stack is becoming easier, the real sting in the tail comes on day two and beyond – when it is time to maintain, upgrade, and scale the deployment.
Among the various Linux on Android implementations, Samsung’s Linux on DeX definitely looks the most polished ready to use solution, even if it’s still in beta form. Although it uses a two-year-old version of Ubuntu, there is already a lot that can be done from that. Plus, just like Android users, Linux users can be pretty creative and only time will tell if they’ll be able to use Linux on DeX to make almost any Linux distro work.
The latest news from the world of cheap electronics is a single board computer running Linux. It costs six dollars, and you can buy it right now. You might even be able to compile code for it, too.
The C-Sky Linux development board is listed on Taobao as an ‘OrangePi NanoPi Raspberry Pi Linux Development Board” and despite some flagrant misappropriation of trademarks, this is indeed a computer running Linux, available for seven American dollars.
This board is based on a NationalChip GX6605S SoC, a unique chip with an ISA that isn’t ARM, x86, RISC-V, MIPS, or anything else that would be considered normal. The chip itself was designed for set-top boxes, but there are a surprising number of build tools that include buildroot, GCC and support for qemu. The company behind this chip is maintaining a kernel, and support for this chip has been added to the mainline kernel. Yes, unlike many other single board computers out there, you might actually be able to compile something for this chip.
Techbase is shipping a Linux-friendly industrial automation controller called the ModBerry M2000 based on the UP Squared SBC, featuring GbE, SATA, and M.2.
Polish development firm Techbase offers a growing family of industrial control computers based on popular SBCs such as the Raspberry Pi 3B+ based ModBerry M500 and UP board based ModBerry M1000. Now, it has added an M2000 model built on Aaeon’s UP Squared SBC. While the M1000’s UP board uses a 1.44GHz Intel Cherry Trail Atom processor, the M2000’s UP Squared advances to an Intel Apollo Lake chip.
Hangzhou C-SKY has launched a “C-SKY Linux Development Board” for $5.60 and up, featuring a RISC-V derived, 574MHz C-SKY GX6605S CK610M SoC, 64MB DDR2, an HDMI port, and 2x USB 2.0 ports.
Last month, Hangzhou C-SKY Microsystems Co. announced Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel support for its new RISC-V based C-SKY CK810 SoC design. Now, Hangzhou C-SKY has launched a development board that runs Linux on a similar CK610M SoC. The C-SKY Linux Development Board sells for 39-40 Yuan ($5.60 to $7.05) on Taobao and $19.50 to $21.50 on AliExpress.
What do you get for the techie who has everything? How about giving them a Raspberry Pi and letting them make pretty much anything. Or better yet, do it for yourself with the Ultimate Raspberry Pi eBook Bundle.
Diarization — the process of partitioning out a speech sample into distinctive, homogeneous segments according to who said what — doesn’t come as easy to machines as it does to humans, and training a machine learning algorithm to perform it is tougher than it sounds. A robust diarization system must be able to associate new individuals with speech segments that it hasn’t previously encountered.
Demonstrated briefly at the Chrome Dev Summit, Squoosh’s top priority is speed, and is primarily just a demo of new capabilities that recent improvements to Chrome already bring to the table. For example, by using WebAssembly, Squoosh is able to use image codecs that are not typically available in the browser.
In this video, Beenish Zia from Intel presents: BigDL Open Source Machine Learning Framework for Apache Spark.
The chief risk officer at one of the world’s largest hedge funds is competing with Google for technologists. And the applicants are asking to keep their open-source allegiance.
The Man Group’s Darrel Yawitch said new hires are looking for assurances from the hedge fund that they will be permitted to contribute to the open-source coding communities that have underpinned some of the biggest advances in technology’s brief history, from the World Wide Web to the Android operating system.
When I worked with the Mozilla Foundation, long before the organization boasted more than a hundred and fifty staff members, we conducted a foundation-wide Myers-Briggs indicator. The Myers-Briggs is a popular personality assessment, one used widely in career planning and the business world. Created in the early twentieth century, it's the product of two women: Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers, who built the tool on Carl Jung's Theory of Psychological Types (which was itself based on clinical observations, as opposed to "controlled" scientific studies). Each of my co-workers (53 at the time) answered the questions. We were curious about what kind of insights we would gain into our individual personalities, and, by extension, about how we'd best work together.
There is a simple truism in much of IT, and that is that organizations can't manage what they're not aware of. As organizations increasingly make use of distributed teams that use cloud-native services, there is a nontrivial risk of application sprawl.
On Nov. 13, container security vendor Twistlock announced its new open-source cloud-native discovery tool, in an effort to help identify and locate applications running on different public cloud services. The Cloud Discovery tool's initial release supports scanning on the three major public cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft Azure.
"Most customers tend to have a multicloud cloud strategy and then you combine that with the fact that everybody has got multiple accounts for different projects or business units, and so forth," John Morello, chief technology officer at Twistlock, told eWEEK. "You get this big equation where organizations try to figure out all the possible things that could be out there deployed and running.
At the 2018 Seattle GNU/Linux Conference after-party, I gave a lightning talk about why the Linux console has only sixteen colors. Lightning talks are short, fun topics. I enjoyed giving the lightning talk, and the audience seemed into it, too. So I thought I'd share my lightning talk here.
Last weekend I participated in the conference Jesieà â Linuksowa 2018 in Krakow, Poland. It was my first time in a country with so much tragic historical experiences.
On the hand, I was impressed by the community members and the organization of the event. We celebrated another edition of Linux Autumn in the hotel Gwarek and my post-event wrap up will take into consideration seven basic points:
Organizers
This time I was accompanied by my friend Ana Garcia, who is a student at the University of Edinburgh and the members of the organization were supportive and kind all the time with us. We felt a warm environment since we arrive at night in the middle of the fog at midnight. They helped us with our talks and workshops we offer related to parallelization.
We meet new friends! Thanks to Dominik, Rafal, Filip, Linter and Matej from Red Hat.
This year, I attended the second edition of the Sustain Open Source Summit (a.k.a. Sustain OSS) on October 25th, 2018 in London. Sustain OSS is a one-day discussion on various topics about sustainability in open source ecosystems. It’s also a collection of diverse roles across the world of open source. From small project maintainers to open source program managers at the largest tech companies in the world, designers to government employees, there is a mix of backgrounds in the room. Yet there is a shared context around the most systemic problems faced by open source projects, communities, and people around the world.
The shared context is the most valuable piece of the conference. As a first-time attendee, I was blown away by the depth and range of topics covered by attendees. This blog post covers a narrow perspective of Sustain OSS through the sessions I participated and co-facilitated in.
Five years ago the community team at DigitalOcean wanted to create a program to inspire open source contributions. That first year, in 2014, the first Hacktoberfest participants were asked for 50 commits, and those who completed the challenge received a reward of swag. 676 people signed up and 505 forged ahead to the finish line, earning stickers and a custom limited-edition T-shirt.
This year that number is an astounding 46,088 completions out of 106,582 sign-ups. We’ve seen it become an entry point to developers contributing to open source projects: much more than a program, it’s clear that Hacktoberfest has become a global community movement with a shared set of values and passion for giving back.
Over the last few years, the Test Pilot team has developed innovative features for Firefox desktop and mobile, collaborating directly with Firefox users to improve the browser – from reminders to return to a tab on your desktop to a simple and secure way to keep track of your passwords.
Today, just in time for the holiday shopping season, the Firefox Test Pilot team is introducing Price Wise and Email Tabs — the latest experimental features designed to give users more choice and transparency when shopping online. These game-changing desktop tools are sure to make shopping a breeze with more options to save, share, track and shop. We’ve also made a few updates to the Test Pilot program itself to make it even easier to become a part of the growing Firefox users testing new features.
The online shopping experience is really geared towards purchases that are made immediately. Countless hours have been spent to get you checked out as soon as possible. If you know what you want, and you’re happy with the price, this is great. On the other hand, sometimes you want to take your time, and wait for a deal. For those times, we have our new Test Pilot experiment, Price Wise.
Firefox Test Pilot is Mozilla’s way to test out interesting new features. Some of these features see the light of the day, and others just vanish into thin air. However, that doesn’t stop the Firefox Pilot team from experimenting with browser.
Today, Firefox announced two new such experiments — namely Price Wise and Email Tabs. Both are ridiculously useful for a user who would like to crack tedious work in mere seconds.
Tell Price Wise to keep an eye on a product, and it’s added to your watch list. Price Wise will automatically monitor the prices of products on your watch list. When they drop, we’ll let you know:
When the price drops, Price Wise alerts you with a colorful heads-up. Price checks are done locally, so your shopping data never leaves Firefox. We’re particularly excited about that; Price Wise is the first Firefox feature designed around Fathom, a toolkit for understanding the content of webpages you browse. Existing software like this works by tracking you across the web, and it’s often run by advertisers and social networks seeking to learn more about you. Your browser can do these checks for you, while making sure the gathered information never leaves your computer. We know it’s possible to deliver great utility while protecting your privacy, and want you to get a great deal without getting a raw deal.
We are very happy to announce that our 2 new Council members Monica Bonilla and Yofie Setiawan are fully on-boarded and already working moving the Mozilla Reps program forward. A warm welcome from all of us. We we are very excited to have you and can’t wait to build the program together.
If your family is anything like ours, the moment the calendar flips to October, you’re getting texts and emails asking for holiday wish lists. Email remains one of the top ways people save and share online, so you likely do what we do: help make everyone’s life easier by diligently copy and pasting the URLs, titles and descriptions into a list. What if Firefox could make that process easier? Thanks to our new Test Pilot experiment Email Tabs, it can.
Please join us in congratulating Tim Maks van den Broek, our Rep of the Month for October 2018!
Tim is one of our most active members in the Dutch community. During his 15+ years as a Mozilla Volunteer he has touched many parts of the Project. More recently his focus is on user support and he is active in our Reps Onboarding team.
A while back, I used to communicate a lot with users of my popular open source project. So it made sense to sign emails and let people verify — it’s really me writing. It also gave people a way to encrypt their communication with me.
The decision in favor of S/MIME rather than PGP wasn’t because of any technical advantage. The support for S/MIME is simply built into many email clients by default, so the chances that the other side would be able to recognize the signature were higher.
As you may already know, last Friday November 09th – we held a new Testday event, for Firefox 64 Beta 8.
Thank you all for helping us make Mozilla a better place: Gabriela, gaby2300.
From Bangladesh team: Maruf Rahman, Tanvir Rahman, Md. Raihan Ali, Sajedul Islam, Rizbanul Hasan, Mehedi Hasan, Md. Rahimul Islam, Shah Yashfique Bhuian.
Michael Howard, Berkley grad and alumnus of Oracle and EMC, took the helm at open-source biz MariaDB almost three years ago. Reflecting on how things have changed, he reckons the biggest shift is in how both investors and enterprise have embrace open-source. Now, he has an IPO on his mind.
In an interview with El Reg, Howard – who, as noted at the time of his appointment, has worked for a number of companies who were slurped up by bigger businesses – said the end of 2018 will see the end of the first year of a three-year plan he devised for the firm.
Broadly, Howard sets out an overall roadmap of three pieces for the firm. Unsurprisingly, cloud native technology is first up. The other two are adaptive scalability, with the aim of supporting “mom and pop shops all the way to planet-scale processing for the largest social platforms”, and boosting the quality of service by professionalising people and technology, for instance through machine learning.
But in addition to these technical goals, there’s the business side of things, and the boss said the plan “is being able to go public; to be able to get the company buttoned up at the right revenue level to go public”.
“We have a voracious appetite for getting to our strategic goals, and part of that is revenue and going public.”
I spent a couple of years evangelizing about Capsicum. I wrote many articles about it. So, it is very natural that I would also like to update you on this blog about the progress of the Capsicum project in FreeBSD, because this is what I’m doing in my free time. That said I feel that this blog wouldn’t be completed without some introduction to what Capsicum is. This post should fill this gap. Over the next weeks and months we will extend this topic and discuss different parts of Capsicum. Without further introduction let’s jump into the topic
The Free Software Foundation has added the Commons Clause to its list of non-free licenses among a number of recent updates to its licensing materials. Other changes clarify the GNU GPL position on translating code into another language and how to handle projects that combine code under multiple licenses.
The 16 new companies in this announcement are a diverse set of technology firms whose participation makes evident the worldwide reach of the GPL Cooperation Commitment. They comprise globally-operating companies based on four continents and mark a significant expansion of the initiative into the Asia-Pacific region. They represent various industries and areas of commercial focus, including IT services, software development tools and platforms, social networking, fintech, semiconductors, e-commerce, multimedia software and more.
The GPL Cooperation Commitment is a means for companies, individual developers and open source projects to provide opportunities for licensees to correct errors in compliance with software licensed under the GPLv2 family of licenses before taking action to terminate the licenses. Version 2 of the GNU General Public License (GPLv2), version 2 of the GNU Library General Public License (LGPLv2), and version 2.1 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPLv2.1) do not contain express “cure” periods to fix noncompliance prior to license termination. Version 3 of the GNU GPL (GPLv3) addressed this by adding an opportunity to correct mistakes in compliance. Those who adopt the GPL Cooperation Commitment extend the cure provisions of GPLv3 to their existing and future GPLv2 and LGPLv2.x-licensed code.
Imagine what the world would look like if growth, innovation, and development were free from fear. Innovation without fear is fostered by consistent, predictable, and fair license enforcement. That is what the GPL Cooperation Commitment aims to accomplish.
Last year, I wrote an article about licensing effects on downstream users of open source software. As I was conducting research for that article, it became apparent that license enforcement is infrequent and often unpredictable. In that article, I offered potential solutions to the need to make open source license enforcement consistent and predictable. However, I only considered "traditional" methods (e.g., through the court system or some form of legislative action) that a law student might consider.
Hello software freedom supporters! I am Jake Glass, and I will be interning for both the campaigns and the licensing teams this fall/winter. I am a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where I earned an engineering degree in computer science, and I am currently in the process of applying to law school.
During my summers as an undergraduate, I worked in software development, where I began to consider the ethical ramifications of computing. I realized that my peers and I were often unintentionally building tools to exert social and political control. As the Snowden leaks were emerging around this time, it became clear to me that the pervasiveness of these tools is an imminent threat to freedom worldwide. This was my original motivation in supporting the free software movement: how can we be sure the programs running on our own machines are not spying on us without having access to the source, as required by the Four Freedoms? My interest in these issues concerning copyrights, patents, and civil rights on the Internet has convinced me to attend law school, where I can engage in formal study of these topics.
Commons Clause is added to their list of non-free licenses. This license is added to an existing free license to prevent using the work commercially, rendering the work nonfree. By making commons clause as non-free, FSF recommends users to fork software using it. So, if a previously existing project that was under a free license adds the Commons Clause, users should work to fork that program and continue using it under the free license. If it isn’t worth forking, users should simply avoid the package.
This move by FSF sparked a controversy that the Commons Clause piggybacks on top of existing free software licenses and thus could mislead users to think that software using it is free software when it’s, in fact, proprietary by their definitions.
However, others found the combination of a free software license + Commons Clause to be very compelling.
A hacker news user pointed out, “I’m willing to grant to the user every right offered by free software licenses with the exception of rights to commercial use. If that means my software has to be labeled as proprietary by the FSF, so be it, but at the same time I’d prefer not to mislead users into thinking my software is being offered under a vanilla free software license.”
Another said, “I don’t know there is any controversy as such. The FSF is doing its job and reminding everyone that freedom includes the freedom to make money.
If your software is licensed under something that includes the Commons Clause then it isn’t free software, because users are not free to do what they want with it.”
A working draft of the standard for the next revision of the C programming language, referred to for now as “C2x,” is now available for review.
Most of the changes thus far approved for C2x don’t involve adding new features, but instead clarify and refine how C should behave in different implementations and with regard to its bigger brother C++. The emphasis on refinement is in line with how previous revisions to C—C11 and most recently C17—have unfolded.
My university's freshman programming class was taught using VAX assembler. In data structures class, we used Pascal—loaded via diskette on tired, old PCs in the library's computer center. In one upper-level course, I had a professor that loved to show all examples in ADA. I learned a bit of C via playing with various Unix utilities' source code on our Sun workstations. At IBM we used C—and some x86 assembler—for the OS/2 source code, and we heavily used C++'s object-oriented features for a joint project with Apple. I learned shell scripting soon after, starting with csh, but moving to Bash after finding Linux in the mid-'90s. I was thrust into learning m4 (arguably more of a macro-processor than a programming language) while working on the just-in-time (JIT) compiler in IBM's custom JVM code when porting it to Linux in the late '90s.
Landing just in time with the GCC 9 branching being imminent is ARMv8.5-A support in the GNU Compiler Collection's ARM64/AArch64 back-end.
This ARMv8.5-A support is an incremental upgrade over the existing ARMv8 support. The ARMv8.5 additions are similar to what we already saw land for LLVM / Clang.
I've had an intuition that clang produces generally worse debuginfo than gcc for optimized C++ code. It seems that clang builds have more variables "optimized out" — i.e. when stopped inside a function where a variable is in scope, the compiler's generated debuginfo does not describe the value of the variable. This makes debuggers less effective, so I've attempted some qualitative analysis of the issue.
I chose to measure, for each parameter and local variable, the range of instruction bytes within its function over which the debuginfo can produce a value for this variable, and also the range of instruction bytes over which the debuginfo says the variable is in scope (i.e. the number of instruction bytes in the enclosing lexical block or function). I add those up over all variables, and compute the ratio of variable-defined-bytes to variable-in-scope-bytes. The higher this "definition coverage" ratio, the better.
By losing the sight of the strategies in play, I feel the discussion degenerated very early in personal accusations that certainly leave scars while not resulting in even a hint of progress. We are not unique in this situation, see the recent example of the toll it took on Guido van Rossum. I can only sympathize with Larry is feeling these days.
Stan Lee is the godfather of modern comics, and his death at age 95, although extremely sad, is a chance to celebrate exactly how much he gave to the world of pop culture. Today, the internet has been flooded with eulogies of his work, life, and his immense impact on comics and film. Many fans fondly recalled the cameos that Lee regularly made in Marvel films over the years, including the pre-Disney Marvel movies, the new Sony Spider-Man Universe, and, of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Imperial College estimates that just a day without satellite access would cost the UK €£1bn, which wouldn't exactly be ideal. Fortunately, the university has ideas for a backup just in case all the satellites go caput. Though, as you can see from the picture above, it's probably not quite ready to be built into a running watch, unless the athlete in question also does some serious lifting.
The main air-to-ground recordings and on-board recordings from the historic mission have been publicly available online for decades. But that was just a fraction of the recorded communications for the mission. Thousands of hours of supplementary conversations ("backroom loops") between flight controllers and other support teams languished in storage at the National Archives and Records Administration building in Maryland—until now.
Thanks to a year-long project to locate, digitize, and process all that extra audio (completed in July), diehard space fans can now access a fresh treasure trove of minutiae from the Apollo 11 mission. And those records are now preserved for future generations.
The Cupertino giant has confirmed to The Verge that its new security-focused T2 chip will require the software check to be performed after components like logic board and Touch ID sensor are repaired. Apple has not mentioned all the components would require the software check to run in order to complete the repair.
The new T2 security chip brings many security-related features for Mac users. One of the most interesting features is “hardware disconnect” that disconnects any audio device connected to a MacBook as soon as its lid is closed. This feature is touted to bring protection against surveillance and from getting eavesdropped by hackers.
Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Mississippi Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes with trends and top stories about education in Mississippi. Subscribe today! Mississippi’s child care desert is especially evident for infants and toddlers: There are currently only enough spots at licensed child care centers for about 23 percent of the state’s youngest children. That’s one of the findings of a new report by the Center for American Progress, which analyzed census data and state child care licensing data to determine the extent to which infant and toddler care is available in nine states, including Mississippi, North Carolina and West Virginia, and in the District of Columbia. The report takes an in-depth look at data revealed last year in another Center for American Progress report that found 42 percent of children under the age of 5 live in a child care desert, defined as areas in which there are either no child care centers or so few centers that at least three children need care for every spot available.
After a decade of intense political fighting and two of the largest wave elections in history, the United States finally has a quasi-stable political equilibrium on the Affordable Care Act.
We have Obamacare, just minus the deeply unpopular stuff—i.e., the individual mandate and the Cadillac tax on employer-provided insurance. This fills me with both personal vindication, since this what I advocated Democrats pass in 2010, and deep concern because it shows neither major political party has any idea how to make laws popular.
When it comes to big pieces of legislation, they are only as popular as the least popular major provision. Most voters don’t evaluate legislation with a complex utilitarian calculation weighing the net value of every provision. Most judge legislation the way they would a pizza. You could have five amazing toppings on that pizza, but if the sixth topping is rotten fish, no one will want to eat your pizza.
If you understand this axiom and realize none of the so-called political gurus leading either major party in our country do, something becomes clear. The last decade of political fighting over the ACA has been less of a titanic struggle between genius ideological leaders and more of a farcical dark comedy performed by fools.
People who use drugs face widespread stigma and criminalisation. This is well-known. But drug policy discussions often centre on men. The experiences of women, trans and gender non-conforming people who use drugs are ignored and silenced – though they face particular challenges accessing care and the gendered stigma of being perceived as unfit parents and ‘fallen’ women.
In May, I participated in a meeting that AWID (Association for Women’s Rights in Development) co-organised in Berlin with feminists and women who use drugs from across eastern Europe and Central Asia. We carried very different experiences and backgrounds, but had a common purpose: to learn from one another and connect the dots between drug policy and feminism in the region.
Women shared their experiences with using drugs including shaming and violence from doctors, sexual violence, criminalisation and stigma within their communities. We looked at how feminism could help push for responses centred on their unique experiences. Three days and many conversations later, I was convinced that drug policy was a feminist issue.
On the federal observance of Veterans Day, we take a closer look at the issue of veterans’ healthcare. On Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence wrote an article for Fox News touting Trump’s record on veterans’ health and the passage of a policy known as “Veterans Choice,” which is seen by veterans’ advocates as an attempt to drain the Veterans Health Administration of needed resources and eventually force privatization of the system. We’re joined by award-winning journalist and author Suzanne Gordon. Her new book is “Wounds of War: How the VA Delivers Health, Healing, and Hope to the Nation’s Veterans.” She recently wrote an article for The New York Times titled “By Protecting Veterans’ Health, You May Protect Your Own.”
The World Trade Organization intellectual property committee met last week with lively discussions on the benefit of IP rights protection for new businesses, and on the role of competition law to prevent abuses of those rights and in particular ensure greater access to medicines. Also, considering the recent WTO Dispute Settlement Body ruling on the tobacco plain packaging, some countries warned against this decision becoming a precedent and spreading to other goods, and undermining trademark protection.
A key drug to treat hepatitis C has been licensed to the Medicines Patent Pool, enabling generic production and expanding affordable access to the drug in low and middle-income countries, excluding the very largest. The agreement between the Pool and AbbVie had been over a year in the making, MPP Executive Director Charles Gore told Intellectual Property Watch.
In this modern Internet era, you will surely have multiple accounts on lot of websites. It could be a personal or official mail account, social or professional network account, GitHub account, and ecommerce account etc. So you should have several different passwords for different accounts. I am sure that you are already aware that setting up same password to multiple accounts is crazy and dangerous practice. If an attacker managed to breach one of your accounts, it’s highly likely he/she will try to access other accounts you have with the same password. So, it is highly recommended to set different passwords to different accounts.
Container policy is defined in the container-selinux package. By default containers run with the SELinux type "container_t" whether this is a container launched by just about any container engine like: podman, cri-o, docker, buildah, moby. And most people who use SELinux with containers from container runtimes like runc, systemd-nspawn use it also.
By default container_t is allowed to read/execute labels under /usr, read generically labeled content in the hosts /etc directory (etc_t).
The default label for content in /var/lib/docker and /var/lib/containers is container_var_lib_t, This is not accessible by containers, container_t, whether they are running under podman, cri-o, docker, buildah ... We specifically do not want containers to be able to read this content, because content that uses block devices like devicemapper and btrfs(I believe) is labeled container_var_lib_t, when the containers are not running.
For overlay content we need to allow containers to read/execute the content, we use the type container_share_t, for this content. So container_t is allowed to read/execute container_share_t files, but not write/modify them.
This blog and two other sites in scope use Serendipity (also called S9Y), a blog software written in PHP. Through the bug bounty program I got reports for an Open Redirect, an XSS in the start page, an XSS in the back end, an SQL injection in the back end and another SQL injection in the freetag plugin. All of those were legitimate vulnerabilities in Serendipity and some of them quite severe. I forwarded the reports to the Serendipity developers.
Fixes are available by now, the first round of fixes were released with Serendipity 2.1.3 and another issue got fixed in 2.1.4. The freetag plugin was updated to version 2.69. If you use Serendipity please make sure you run the latest versions.
Per Buer, CEO and co-founder of Norwegian software company IncludeOS, thinks the growing use of Linux as an embedded operating system is giving it a role for which it is far from perfect.
"Linux has impressive hardware and software support. It supports just about any protocol and any peripheral. It is all dynamic so anything at any time can connect to a Linux system," he wrote recently.
"The result is a massive amount of code and following this a considerable number of potential bugs that could lead to compromise."
He thinks his company's OS offers a better solution. It has created an open-source OS that links into the application at compile time, resulting in one software image where the OS functionality is inside the application and running directly on top of the hardware.
IncludeOS links only the OS functionality that the application needs into the binary software image, thus reducing both its size and possible attack surfaces. This approach is normally termed a 'library OS'.
IncludeOS runs in a single address space, so there are neither interprocess communications nor concepts like user space and kernel space.
D-Link’s Central Wifi-Manager is quite a nifty tool. It’s a web-based wireless Access Point management tool, enabling you to create and manage multi-site, multi-tenancy wireless networks. Whether deployed on local computer or hosted in the cloud. But it seems there might have been a security issue with the software.
Japanese multinational cybersecurity firm Trend Micro has detected a new strain of crypto-mining malware that targets PCs running Linux, according to a report published Nov. 8. The new strain is reportedly able to hide the malicious process of unauthorized cryptocurrency-mining through users’ CPU by implementing a rootkit component. The malware itself, detected by Trend Micro as Coinminer.Linux.KORKERDS.AB, is also reportedly capable of updating itself.
The sulphurous smoke of cannon fusillades drifted over the field in hazy clouds as an Army chaplain declared in a voice booming with hooah how inspiring he found its scent, how much he loved the smell of the battlefield.
An Army general then spoke. Those of us gathered there that day were “true patriots,” he said. We could find more “true patriots” like us in Texas and Oklahoma and throughout the Southern US states. We were in Kansas, but he didn’t explain why we could only find them in those states and here, or what especially made us (and them) “true patriots.”
This was Memorial Day seven years ago at the National Cemetery where just a few months earlier my wife and I had buried our son, Francis. A veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan during some of the worst fighting in the early years of those conflicts, he died at home, like too many other young veterans, a casualty in the aftermath of these wars.
The blustering and factionalism of that spectacle is strongly etched in our memories. It left us feeling empty, even sickened, not just for ourselves, but for our son, too. It was perhaps an extreme example of how both Memorial Day and Veterans Day have been wrung out of shape since their origins, yet it was also emblematic of the contrasting ways we collectively and individually experience them.
It took me a long time to find words to describe the US-orchestrated injustices that I witnessed and participated in while in Iraq. I’ve now been out of the Army for over a decade, and for nearly half of that time I told few people I had even been in the military.
Like many veterans, I didn’t know how to talk about war when I came home. People wanted to thank me for my service but they didn’t want to hear how disillusioned I had become with my country. Returning to college, I found that many students weren’t paying attention to the wars. Perhaps most frustrating, I found the frame of reference provided by Hollywood to be a grave distortion of what I had seen and done. I, like most veterans, hadn’t been a sniper, I didn’t defuse bombs, nor had I been in Special Forces. Major films like American Sniper and Zero Dark Thirty only served to confuse the conversation about why the US was occupying Iraq and Afghanistan and what the day-to-day deployment routine really looked like. Ultimately, I repressed my guilt and stayed quiet.
It wasn’t until I joined Iraq Veterans Against the War (now called About Face: Veterans Against the War) that I learned about the history of the veterans’ anti-war movement, simultaneously gaining a vocabulary that corresponded to what I had experienced. Now I had a frame of reference that made sense. I could see how my own war experience fit into the systemic corruption of the military-industrial complex. Finally, I began speaking out against US militarism.
It’s been another fortnight of mass murder inside Fortress America. Carnage reigns from Coast to Coast, from a progressive synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA, to a line-dancing bar in Thousand Oaks, CA. The high-profile shooters? Both white American men: One a 46-year-old die-hard white supremacist, publicly declaring his hatred for Jews and for immigrant “invaders,” opening fire on a morning Shabbat ceremony. The other, a 28-year-old, US Marine veteran, experienced with machine guns from tours in Afghanistan, targeting “College Night,” at the Border Line Bar and Grill, a country music establishment he reportedly frequented. Both commando-style killers wielded legally purchased Glock handguns (and one of them an AR-15 assault rifle), as they each slaughtered nearly a dozen people, just eleven days apart.
[...]
Looking back across the sixteen years since the film collected the Oscar for Best Documentary, Bowling for Columbine seems prescient, just as the shooting at Columbine High School that prompted Moore’s film looks more and more like part of a trend that is here to stay. From the 2006 shooting at Virginia Tech that left 32 dead, to the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting that killed 27, to the Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre that same year, to the nightmare in Las Vegas last year that killed 58, to the Parkland, Florida shooting in February that triggered the massive “March for Our Lives,” the shameful ‘records’ set by the Columbine killers have been broken, time and again.
According to recent reports, the shooting in Thousand Oaks, CA was the 307thmass shooting in 2018 alone. A subset of an American gun violence epidemic that altogether steals tens of thousands of lives per year,‘mass shootings’ in the United States now occur approximately once per day.[iii]
Compared to other ‘Western powers,’ all these numbers are essentially off the charts. How to explain this ugly American exception?
Recently declassified documents show that the former CIA director and former director of national intelligence approved illegal spying on Congress and then classified their crime. They need to face punishment, writes John Kiriakou.
[...]
Brennan and Clapper, in 2014, ostensibly notified congressional overseers about this, but in a way that either tied senators’ hands or kept them in the dark. They classified the notifications.
As a result, Grassley knew of the hacking but couldn’t say anything while senators on neither the Intelligence or Judiciary Committees didn’t know.
It’s a felony to classify a crime. It’s also a felony to classify something solely for the purpose of preventing embarrassment to the CIA.
For all of this—for the hacking in the first place, and then the classification of that criminal deed—both men belong in prison.
This kind of over-classification is illegal, but few Americans know that because this law is not enforced. The Justice Department has never brought over-classification charges against a U.S. spying authority.
But this would be a good place to start.
When it comes to the ruling elite’s corporate plunder and crimes against humanity, the U.S. national memory’s short and no one, not even its political henchmen, assume blame or suffer real consequences: take Halliburton and former chief executive and U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney for example. Not only did Cheney plan and justify the invasion, occupation and pilferage of Iraq’s oil, gold bars and national museum treasures under treasonous false pretenses, but its subsidiary, Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR Inc.), overcharged the U.S. taxpayer to a tune of more than $2 billion due to collusion engendered by sole source contracting methods and shoddy accounting procedures. It’s even forgotten that Cheney received a $34 million payout from Halliburton when he joined the Vice President ticket in 2000, in advance of his unscrupulous maneuvers, according to news commentator, Chris Matthews; because on November 5th 2018, in celebration of its 100-year anniversary, its chief executives rang the New York Stock Exchange’s (NYSE) opening bell.
Sadly, as a nation, the U.S. doesn’t recall Cheney’s lies, or his role in planning the contemptible “Shock and Awe” saturation bombing campaign that destroyed a sovereign nation, which posed no threat to the United States, and left the world’s cradle of civilization in ruins. Conveniently, it doesn’t recall the over 500,000 deaths from war related causes, as reported by the Huffington Post in its 2017 updated article; nor does it recall that obliterating Iraq’s government created a sociopolitical vacuum that enabled the exponential growth of the CIA’s unique brand of Islamofascism and its resulting terrorism, which has culminated in war-torn Syria and Yemen.
Iraq’s only “crime” against the United States, if you want to call it that, was being hogtied by Washington’s sanctions and embargo against it – in what can only be called a Catch 22 situation. Iraq couldn’t do business with U.S. corporations not because Saddam Hussein was unwilling to, but because the U.S. government effectively barred Iraq from doing so. This Catch 22 situation is presently being repeated in Venezuela and Iran in advance of its planned invasion and occupation.
Since the beginning of 2018, there have been five attacks on temporary Roma settlements in Ukraine. After people arrived in Kyiv, Ternopil and Lviv areas for seasonal work from other areas of the country, mostly Zakarpattya in the southwest, nationalist extremist groups evicted Roma from their camps, setting fire to tents and household goods. These far-right groups were angered by the fact that Roma set up camp in parks and wooded areas, while the police “did nothing about it”.
In most cases, the attackers were charged merely with “hooliganism”, although the additional charge of “infringement of the equal rights of citizens in connection with their racial or ethnic origin or religious identity” was added in relation to attacks in Kyiv and Lviv after pressure from activists. In the most recent attack, in the Lviv area, a 24-year-old man, David Pap, was murdered, and four more were injured.
Civil society remained unsatisfied with Ukrainian law enforcement’s reaction on the attacks against Roma settlements. Attacks on Roma aren’t only offences under the criminal charges of hooliganism, murder and infringement of equality. This kind of persecution contravenes Article 24 of Ukraine’s Constitution, which states that “there can be no privileges or restrictions on grounds of race, colour of skin, political, religious or other principles, gender, ethnic or social background, material position, place of residence, language or any other factor”.
When telling the truth is a revolutionary act, journalists and whistleblowers are targets. When politicians attack freedom of speech, media becomes weaponized.
And here we are.
How ironic that the government of Turkish President Erdoßan is postured as truth-leaker in the apparent gruesome murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Turkey is the leading per-capita jailer of journalists, whose "crime" often consists of speaking out against the repressive regime.
CIA Director Gina Haspel's recent meeting with Erdoßan about the Khashoggi case raises questions. Declassified cables reveal that when Haspel led a "black site" CIA prison in Thailand, prisoners were subjected to "extended sessions of physical violence, wall slamming, box confinement, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, shackling, stress positions, and waterboarding." She later admitted to "being an advocate" of destroying evidence.
The Democratic Party—seeking to blame its election defeat on Russian “interference” rather than the grotesque income inequality, the betrayal of the working class, the loss of civil liberties, the deindustrialization and the corporate coup d’état that the party helped orchestrate—attacks Assange as a traitor, although he is not a U.S. citizen. Nor is he a spy. He is not bound by any law I am aware of to keep U.S. government secrets. He has not committed a crime. Now, stories in newspapers that once published material from WikiLeaks focus on his allegedly slovenly behavior—not evident during my visits with him—and how he is, in the words of The Guardian, “an unwelcome guest” in the embassy. The vital issue of the rights of a publisher and a free press is ignored in favor of snarky character assassination.
JULIAN Assange’s sanctuary in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London has been transformed into a little shop of horrors. He has been largely cut off from communicating with the outside world for the last seven months. His Ecuadorian citizenship, granted to him as an asylum seeker, is in the process of being revoked. His health is failing. He is being denied medical care. His efforts for legal redress have been crippled by the gag rules, including Ecuadorian orders that he cannot make public his conditions inside the embassy in fighting revocation of his Ecuadorian citizenship. Australian prime minister Scott Morrison has refused to intercede on behalf of Assange, an Australian citizen, even though the new government in Ecuador, led by Lenín Moreno — who calls Assange an ‘inherited problem’ and an impediment to better relations with Washington —is making the WikiLeaks founder’s life in the embassy unbearable. Almost daily, the embassy is imposing harsher conditions for Assange, including making him pay his medical bills, imposing arcane rules about how he must care for his cat and demanding that he perform a variety of demeaning housekeeping chores. The Ecuadorians, reluctant to expel Assange after granting him political asylum and granting him citizenship, intend to make his existence so unpleasant he will agree to leave the embassy to be arrested by the British and extradited to the United States. The former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, whose government granted the publisher political asylum, describes Assange’s current living conditions as ‘torture.’
His mother, Christine Assange, said in a recent video appeal, ‘Despite Julian being a multi-award-winning journalist, much loved and respected for courageously exposing serious, high-level crimes and corruption in the public interest, he is right now alone, sick, in pain — silenced in solitary confinement, cut off from all contact and being tortured in the heart of London. The modern-day cage of political prisoners is no longer the Tower of London. It’s the Ecuadorian Embassy.’ ‘Here are the facts,’ she went on. ‘Julian has been detained nearly eight years without charge. That’s right. Without charge. For the past six years, the UK government has refused his request for access to basic health needs, fresh air, exercise, sunshine for vitamin D and access to proper dental and medical care. As a result, his health has seriously deteriorated. His examining doctors warned his detention conditions are life-threatening. A slow and cruel assassination is taking place before our very eyes in the embassy in London.’
Lenin Moreno won Ecuador’s presidency in 2017 by campaigning to continue the economic policies of Rafael Correa (a leftist who was in office from 2007 until 2017) but upon taking office immediately shifted dramatically to the right. Andres Arauz, a former member of Correa’s economic team whom I interviewed for Counterpunch in May, provides an update on Moreno’s remarkably cynical Neoliberal Restoration. In addition to the troubling state of Ecuador’s economy under Moreno despite increased oil prices that help Ecuador, Aruaz discusses major assaults on the rule of law, looming corporate capture of Ecuador’s highest courts (including the role played by some environmentalists in helping it happen) and the fact that candidates in upcoming elections are forced keep alliances with Correa secret to avoid disqualification.
[...]
Additionally, Moreno’s accused Correa’s government of having exceeded a legal public debt limit, but then his brilliant solution to this alleged problem wasn’t to reduce the debt, like Correa famously did in 2008-9, but to remove the legal limit. A law was approved to remove it entirely for the next 4 years. That generates concern, because now this government has no limit.
The government also now requires that any surplus revenue from high oil prices has to go into a fund. The budget was based on a price of $45 per barrel, but prices this year have averaged around $70. In spite of the fact that the law is in force, the fund hasn’t been created. Not one dollar has been deposited in any such fund, so they disregard their own self-imposed “austerity”. Why? The reason is that the government also issued two decrees.
One decree eliminated the Law of Energy Sovereignty that established that windfall oil revenues were to be shared 50/50 with the Ecuadorian government. So that law no longer exists. A second decree did the same in the mining sector. The windfall revenues are no longer available to the government because they have given them away to transnational corporations. It shows the implications of Moreno’s political about face.
Another thing is the so called “Trole” law that was approved a few months ago. It changed a bunch of regulations and was aimed at blocking the state’s ability to finance itself internally, to get loans from within the country. That was clearly done to be in tune with transnational capital markets. The best example of this is that instead of getting $500 million internally – something that would have been very easy for the Central Bank or the Social Security institute to provide – the government had to go to Goldman Sachs and guarantee the loan with $1.2 billion in bonds. So the sustainability of our public finances is now a concern.
On Thursday, November 8, a federal court in Montana ordered a pause in the construction of the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Sounds like cause for celebration, doesn’t it? It’s not. Nothing can stop Keystone XL, and the reason is NAFTA.
The order from Judge Brian Morris of the US District Court for the District of Montana came in a lawsuit brought by the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), North Coast Rivers Alliance, and other environmental and Native American groups. Defendants are the US State Department, which approves trans-border oil pipelines, and TransCanada Corp., the Calgary-based corporation which is constructing KXL, a 1,179-mile long oil pipeline which will run from oil fields in Alberta, Canada to Nebraska, USA and from there via an already-existing pipeline to refineries in Texas.
In his 54-page order, Judge Morris held that the State Department had failed to take a “hard look” at the environmental consequences of approving TransCanada’s permit application, particularly the impact the KXL pipeline would have on global climate change. KXL will transport Canadian tar sands oil, crude with a high carbon content. Judge Morris ordered that work on the pipeline be suspended until the State Department could conduct further environmental studies. Judge Morris’ serious treatment of global climate change places him in sharp contrast with President Donald Trump who dismisses climate change as a Chinese hoax.
You might have also seen that recent drone video of the baby bear fighting its way through the snow to its mother. Cute, sure, but also another reminder of how drone operators are harassing animals to get the perfect shot.
Let me tell you about why I woke up crying today. It has to do with just how close we are to full-blown climate disaster. I was thinking about children who are already experiencing the horrible consequences of global warming, and I was thinking about particular children I love and what’s in store for them. Most of all, I was thinking about the unthinkable: that we are on the verge of ensuring that most, if not all, life on Earth will be snuffed out.
Everyone should be tossing and turning in their beds unable to sleep, experiencing the raw emotions that led me to tears this morning.
This is not a joke, or a drill. This is it. Decision-point for humankind. The UN says we have to turn things around within 12 years to avoid catastrophe. Others give us even less time.
We need to act. And we need to act quickly. But we need to act rationally as well. It won’t help to run out and just “do something, anything” to fight for our future. We need to look honestly at whether the things we’ve been doing so far are effective. They aren’t.
The World Social Forum’s ‘Thematic Forum on Mining and Extractivism’ convenes from November 12-15 here in Johannesburg, just after the Southern Africa People’s Tribunal on Transnational Corporations. In between, at the notorious 2012 massacre site on the platinum belt to the west, there’s a launch of a new book – Business as Usual after Marikana– critical not only of the mining house Lonmin but of its international financiers and buyers.
This is the moment for a profoundly critical standpoint to take root, unhindered by ineffectual reformism associated with Corporate Social Responsibility gimmicks and the mining sector’s civilised-society watchdogging at the mainly uncritical Alternative Mining Indaba. That NGO-dominated event occurs annually in Cape Town every February, at the same time and place where the extractive mega-corporations gather.
The Thematic Forum firmly opposes ‘extractivism.’ Unlike the Indaba, it aims to connect the dots between oppressions, defining its target as extraction of “so-called natural resources” in a way that is “devastating and degrading,” since mining exacerbates “conditions of global warming and climate injustice. It subjects local economies to a logic of accumulation that privately benefits corporations,” and represses “traditional, indigenous and peasant communities by violations of human rights, affecting in particular the lives of women and children.”
The last point is not incidental, as two of the main organisers are the Southern Africa Rural Women’s Assembly and the WoMin network: “African Women Unite Against Destructive Resource Extraction.” Inspired by Amadiba Crisis Committee activists in the Eastern Cape’s Wild Coast, they’ve campaigned hard for the #Right2SayNo.
For decades, Arnold and Mary Richards collected monthly royalty checks — most recently from $1,000 to $1,500 — for the natural gas sucked up from beneath their West Virginia farm by small, old wells.
So in 2016, when EQT Corp. drilled six new gas wells, the Ritchie County couple expected to see their royalty payments skyrocket. The much-larger wells would collect far more natural gas from the Marcellus Shale formation, which is fueling the boom in the state’s gas industry.
The Richards’ checks did grow considerably. But the couple also saw something they didn’t expect: EQT was cutting the size of those new checks.
Titanic II is set to sail in 2022. It’s a $500 million replica of the doomed Titanic that hit a North Atlantic iceberg in 1912. A local news report about the new ship postulated this logical but not valid prevailing attitude regarding climate change today: “The Titanic II will undoubtedly have less trouble with icebergs because of global warming.”
This statement could not be further from reality. If we as a culture could just remember that climate change is almost always not as it seems, it might be possible that we could survive as a species. On a warmer planet, cold extremes can become more common, drought can increase with more rainfall and icebergs can become more numerous.
On Thursday, a federal judge in Montana temporarily halted the construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry oil from Canada’s tar sands region in Alberta to refineries as far away as the Gulf of Mexico. The court’s decision will require the Trump administration to review more thoroughly the potential negative impacts of the pipeline on the surrounding environment and climate change. President Obama halted the construction of the pipeline, which is being built by TransCanada, in 2015 following mass public protests, but Trump reversed the order shortly after he came into office. Environmental and indigenous groups hailed the decision Thursday. Sierra Club attorney Doug Hayes said in a statement, “The Trump administration tried to force this dirty pipeline project on the American people, but they can’t ignore the threats it would pose to our clean water, our climate, and our communities.” We speak with May Boeve, executive director of 350 Action, the political arm of the climate organization 350.org.
The statewide death toll from the wildfires blazing in northern and southern California hit 31 as firefighters on Monday continued to battle the flames that have already destroyed thousands of structures and displaced thousands of humans and animals alike. The increased death toll comes as scientists rip President Donald Trump's recent tweet about the fires avoiding any climate crisis connection to the destruction.
With the Camp Fire raging in nothern California now having claimed the lives of 29 people, it ties the record (pdf) set back in 1933 for the deadliest single wildfire in the state. Having destroyed more than 6,000 structures, it also tops the record for most destructive fire.
It's only 25 percent contained, and is one of several wildfires ravaging the state, as firefighters are also battling the Woolsey Fire in Los Angeles and Ventura counties, the Hill Fire in Ventura County, and the Nurse Fire in Solano County. And, with over 225 people are still unaccounted for, the death toll may rise.
You’ve done enough escape rooms to know the drill by now. You are escorted into what seems like an ordinary room. There’s a table and a chair. On the table is a book. As soon as you step across the threshold, the door closes behind you. You hear the lock click into place.
You are now trapped in a room with four strangers. Three of them look as concerned as you are. The fourth is nonchalant.
The instructions this time are a little different. As with other escape rooms, you have a certain amount of time to figure out how to get out. Also, you know that clues to the puzzle are hidden somewhere in the room. Figure them out and you’ll be able to unlock the door.
But here’s the difference: the temperature in this room will go up a degree with every minute that passes. If you and those four strangers can’t figure out how to stop it from rising, you’ll succumb to heat stroke. In other words, if you don’t escape in the allotted time period, you’ll die.
You immediately set to work looking for the clues. Maybe one or two are in the book on the table or maybe a code is carved on the underside of the table. Maybe you need to use the chair to climb up close enough to scrutinize the crown molding near the ceiling. Three of the strangers are doing what you’re doing: trying to uncover clues.
The fourth is leaning against the wall, looking relaxed. “It’s just a joke,” he says to no one in particular.
“I already feel it getting warmer in here,” you respond.
“It’s just your imagination,” he replies. “Power of suggestion. Fake news.”
The clock is already ticking. It can’t be your imagination. It’s definitely hotter in the room than when you first entered. You’re sweating. Everyone’s sweating, even the leaning man. “Temperatures naturally fluctuate,” he comments. “It might be going up now, but it will go down again. Count on it.”
The Department of Veterans Affairs has acknowledged that the failure of a new IT system for processing claims for Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits has been holding up payments for months and causing financial hardship for thousands of veterans. "Many of our Post-9/11 GI Bill students are experiencing longer than typical wait times to receive monthly housing payments," the VA said in a statement, with processing times averaging "a little over 35 days" for first-time veteran applicants. More than 82,000 veterans were still waiting for housing payments for the fall semester as of November 8, with some having lost housing as the result of non-payment.
The RBI had informed in August this year that as much as 99.3 per cent of the junked Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes returned to the banking system.
Enterprise software giant SAP announced today that it has agreed to acquire Qualtrics for $8 billion in cash, just before the survey and research software company was set to go public. The deal is expected to be completed in the first half of 2019. Qualtrics last round of venture capital funding in 2016 raised $180 million at a $2.5 billion valuation.
This is the second-largest ever acquisition of a SaaS company, after Oracle’s purchase of Netsuite for $9.3 billion in 2016.
In its 10th iteration, the annual Singles’ Day event on Nov. 11 notched 213.5 billion yuan ($30.7 billion) in merchandise sales, an increase of 27 percent, according to a tally posted at the event’s media center in Shanghai. The final number compares with 39 percent growth last year.
Ma will hand the chairman’s role to Chief Executive Officer Daniel Zhang next year, passing along one of China’s highest profile corporate roles at a time when the country is embroiled in a trade spat with the U.S. Concerns about the impact of those tensions on a slowing economy have contributed to a 16 percent slump in Alibaba’s share price this year.
Altynai, 24, doesn’t know what she will do if her parents stop sending money from Russia. She’ll be in a hopeless situation without those 20,000 soms (€£220) a month — this money is her only way of surviving. For the past three years, Altynai (name changed) has been living with her grandmother, whose pension isn’t enough to buy anything.
She says that residents of her village in the Batken region of Kyrgyzstan frequently leave to work abroad. There’s never enough jobs here in Leylek district, which is bordered by Tajikistan on three sides. There are no new enterprises being opened. Most people work for low wages in state institutions.
Indeed, over the past decade, more and more people have been leaving Kyrgyzstan to work abroad. In Russia alone, there are more than 800,000 Kyrgyz citizens on the migration register. Most of them come to work. In 2017, they made money transfers to Kyrgyzstan totalling $2.5 billion — which was more than the total state annual expenditure.
The 2016 corruption scandal at Wells Fargo, in which executives pressured employees to meet “wildly unrealistic sales targets,” created a work environment described as “relentless pressure.” Once revealed, the massive fraud committed against millions of consumers led to congressional hearings, substantial fines by state and federal regulators, and a series of announced changes by Wells in which they committed to “building a better bank.”
You might think that this renewed commitment by Wells Fargo would start with targeted attention to its workforce. Instead, Wells Fargo has announced that it is laying off workers, while lining the pockets of share traders.
[...]
Even worse, Wells Fargo has laid off an additional 26,500 employees since the Trump tax bill. If the company chose to save just one-tenth of the $40.6 billion it has authorized for spending on stock buybacks, all 26,500 of those jobs could have been saved, assuming each employee takes home $100,000 annually.
Wells Fargo chose to enrich its shareholders at the expense of its workers, and, ultimately, the security of its customers. To build better banks, a better financial sector, and a better economy, we need better rules that encourage productive — not extractive — corporate behavior and foster the shared prosperity US companies can clearly afford to provide.
This is a problem, and not just because it allows economists to avoid being held accountable for their errors. It is also a problem because the denial and obfuscation prevent us from learning from the mistakes and therefore make it more likely they will be repeated.
The country saw a great example of this sort of obfuscation around the 10th anniversary of the crash of Wall Street’s Lehman Brothers, which is generally regarded as the peak of the financial crisis. The 10th anniversary stories were all about the financial crisis and how it was caused by complex financial instruments that regulators were not able to monitor. In short, history is being written to show that the crisis was a system failure, not the fault of the people guiding economic policy.
In reality, the main factor causing the Great Recession (and the financial crisis) was the collapse of a massive housing bubble that had been driving the economy. Recognizing the bubble and its impact on the economy didn’t require great insight, it just required paying attention to widely available government data on house prices, construction and consumption that were released monthly. The problem of the housing bubble is basically that the people at the Federal Reserve Board and other economic policy makers were not doing their jobs.
After he was charged in January with burglary, D’Angelo Springer had a decision to make.
Springer, 24, had been pulled over after running a stop sign in Kankakee County. He was giving a ride to an acquaintance, who had an arrest warrant in a neighboring county. When officers searched the car, according to police reports, they found a checkbook behind the passenger seat that had been taken in a car break-in. Springer denied he was involved, but he was charged with felony burglary, which could have sent him to prison.
Before trial, the Kankakee County prosecutors gave Springer another option: He could enroll in a new diversion program the county was offering. If he completed the program and performed community service, his charges would be dropped.
In November 2016, two of Russia’s largest banks MDM and B&N completed a merger. This new entity now ranked (by size of assets) in the top 10 of all Russian banks and the top 5 for private lenders. Following the merger CEO Mikail Shishkhanov declared, ‘We have laid the foundation for the creation of an international-class bank’.[1] Yet a mere 10 months later it required a bailout in what could be one of the mostly costly rescues in Russian banking history. [2] Mr Shiskhanov blamed these difficulties largely on MDM, whose losses ‘turned out to be much more serious than assumed in the conditions of a falling market’. [3]
How had those tasked with assessing MDM’s health prior to the merger failed to recognise such problems? Part of the answer lies 6000 kilometres away in the Irish Financial Services Centre (IFSC), via Ireland’s large shadow banking sector. Irish registered special purpose vehicles (SPVs), or shell companies in common parlance, have become widely used by Russian MNEs for off balance sheet financing and wider tax/regulatory avoidance. Between the years 2005-2016 around €110 billion was raised by Russian connected vehicles in the IFSC, [4] with Russian banks also using it as a location to hide losses. [5]
Concerned with the latter usage, this article examines MDM’s use of several IFSC based vehicles as part of a scheme that helped to create fictitious assets on its balance sheet, whilst simultaneously hiding losses. By providing loans to these off-balance sheet vehicles the bank was able to increase the size of its assets. These shell companies then used the proceeds to purchase some of the bank’s stock of non-performing loans (NPLs), thereby hiding some of its losses. An examination of the data contained in financial statements of MDM and its associated shell companies allows us to explore this insider dealing scheme, the techniques used to conceal what was happening and its effects on the bank’s balance sheet.
"Deadlocked," "Titanic," "Failing," and "Life support." If you believe the British media, the United Kingdom is heading for a Brexit catastrophe.
Rising political tensions around what seems like the impossible task of negotiating Britain's exit from the European Union were displayed in dramatic fashion in the British media over the weekend and on Monday.
Prime Minister Theresa May has been scrambling to clinch a deal by the end of this month. But she's facing fierce political headwinds at home and in the European Union.
When the Argentinian dictatorship of General Galtieri seized the Falkland Islands, known to them as the Malvinas, in 1982, Parliament echoed with the rage of wounded, Anglo-British patriotism. It endorsed the dispatch of a “task force” to ensure Britain’s claim. As the ships sailed across the equator the balance of public opinion opposed the use of force. Then, Thatcher ordered HMS Conqueror to torpedo the antiquated Argentinian battleship Belgrano. The nuclear-powered submarine sunk its target. Over 300 of its crew drowned in the South Atlantic. The ruthless display ensured war would follow. Opinion swung decisively behind the Prime Minister. While some of his soldiers and pilots fought hard, Galtieri's bravado display of puffed up aggrandisement collapsed, humiliated by an utter lack of preparedness for a real battle.
Today, it is the Generalissimo of Brexitannia, Boris Johnson, who has been torpedoed. After two long years of preparation the battle of Brexit has finally been joined by a well-aimed, perfectly executed strike which has holed the Leave campaign that he led below the water line. The torpedo was the stunning resignation statement of his younger brother Jo Johnson MP. Johnson junior was Theresa May’s loyal Minister of Transport. Now, he has pulled out of the government denouncing its negotiations with the EU as a catastrophe of statecraft while clinically skewering his brother’s braggadocio. He has pledged to vote against the prime minister’s deal with the EU should it reach the House of Commons, where its defeat is now likely. He has called for a People’s Vote instead, to endorse remaining in the European Union.
Johnson junior was a Remainer, like all ‘sensible’ ruling class conservatives including the prime minister, and he backed her attempt to deliver a Brexit that ‘works’. But the prime minister could not escape its contradictions. As I have shown the EU is above all a union of regulation. This is its central achievement: a customs union and single market, accomplished with the British, who played a central role in its creation over the course of 40 years. Regulation is not the same as sharing traditional sovereignty and for EU members like the UK who are outside of the Eurozone the classic pillars of sovereignty remain overwhelmingly national. Such is its strength, whatever happens to the common currency, Europe’s regulatory union will continue. Its advantages explain the commitment to continued membership of countries strongly opposed to many of the EU policies. It offers over 500 million people a growing cosmos of opportunity across all their nations with shared human rights and high environmental, safety and employment standards as well as an exceptional open market for capital and business – both manufacturing and services.
“Working-class voters tried to send a message in 2016, and they are still trying to send it,” writes columnist David Brooks (New York Times, 11/8/18). By “working class,” he means “white working class,” since people making less than $100,000 voted decisively for Democrats in 2018.
Since the 2016 elections, corporate media narratives about US politics have fixated on the “white working class” as a pivotal demographic, presented as a hardscrabble assortment of disaffected outsiders. Piece after piece has been published in establishment outlets attempting to decipher the motivations of this racialized socio-economic group, depicted as fighting from the Heartland against “cultural elites” on both coasts.
[...]
This misrepresentation of working-class whiteness extends to discussion of the voting habits of organized labor, as in a Washington Post piece (10/10/18) speculating that Sen. Sherrod Brown’s pro-union rhetoric in Ohio might help Democrats “reverse the flight of the white working class to President Trump.” Though the typical union worker is often depicted as a gruff white man nearing his 50s, union membership is more common among African-American workers than whites, at 13.0 percent vs. 10.5 percent.
Despite the significant number of people of color in the working class, non-white members of this class are rarely talked about as such. While use of the phrase “white working class” has been ubiquitous in political journalism in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, the “black working class” is discussed much less often. While the New York Times will occasionally put out a piece with explicit analysis of working people of color—including one op-ed by Tamara Winfrey-Harris (6/16/18) and another by Alexis Okeowo (6/2/18)—they are few and far between compared to the multitude of pieces published on their white counterparts.
This promotes a homogenous image of the working class as sweaty, middle-aged white men in hard hats, with MAGA bumper stickers on their pick-up trucks and a fear of social change in their hearts. This depiction erases the multitude of working people who do not meet this stereotype, and ignores the fact that the working class has far more people of color and more women than the professional and ownership classes.
Recent extreme volatility and sharp drops in US stock markets underscore the instability of capitalism yet again. As many commentators now note, another economic downturn looms. We know that all the reforms and regulations imposed in the wake of the Great Depression of the 1930s failed to prevent both smaller downturns between 1941 and 2008 and then another big crash in 2008. Capitalism’s instability has, for centuries, resisted all efforts to overcome it with or without government interventions. Yet mainstream economics mostly evades an honest confrontation with the social costs of such economic instability. Worse, it evades a direct debate with the Marxian critique that links those costs to an argument that system change would be the best and most “efficient” solution.
At a small liberal arts college in rural Iowa, students who work in the libraries, mailroom, and other campus workplaces have undertaken an ambitious organizing drive.
Two years ago, 350 dining-hall workers at Grinnell College made history when they formed the first union of undergraduate workers at a private college. Now hundreds of other student workers on campus are campaigning to join then.
Without lawyers or an international union behind them, these young workers represented themselves at the National Labor Relations Board, up against high-powered “union avoidance” lawyers and university administrators—and won. They’re set for a November 27 election.
Grinnell, founded by abolitionists and once a stop on the underground railroad, has a reputation for its commitment to social justice. Yet this October, Grinnell’s lawyers outrageously claimed that a union would “erode the egalitarian nature” of the college, creating a “caste system” and turning student workers into “an underclass of serfs.”
Calling the Electoral College one of the “least understood disasters at the core of our Constitution,” Harvard Professor Lawrence Lessig (above) launched a Rappaport Center for Law and Public Policy discussion convened to explore the pros and cons of the body that gets the last word on presidential elections.
Sinclair is the largest owner of television stations in the United States, with a hundred and ninety-two stations in eighty-nine markets. It reaches thirty-nine per cent of American viewers. The company’s executive chairman, David D. Smith, is a conservative whose views combine a suspicion of government, an aversion to political correctness, and strong libertarian leanings. Smith, who is sixty-eight, has a thick neck, deep under-eye bags, and a head of silvery hair. He is an enthusiast of fine food and has owned farm-to-table restaurants in Harbor East, an upscale neighborhood in Baltimore. An ardent supporter of Donald Trump, he has not been shy about using his stations to advance his political ideology. Sinclair employees say that the company orders them to air biased political segments produced by the corporate news division, including editorials by the conservative commentator Mark Hyman, and that it feeds interviewers questions intended to favor Republicans.
In some cases, anchors have been compelled to read from scripts prepared by Sinclair. [...]
Meanwhile, emerging threats to election security remain largely unaddressed under the Trump administration, leaving the integrity of our democracy in question.
That’s why we need to look ahead now. There are no permanent victories — or losses — in politics. If we want to turn our midterm victories into long-term results, we need to address the problems that got us here in the first place.
Now, communication lines have started to open between Facebook and federal agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to the company. Facebook also established relationships with state election boards, so it could be alerted to problems as they occurred. Those connections are likely to strengthen ahead of the 2020 presidential election, when foreign interest in election manipulation may be higher. Twitter Inc., too, has strengthened its relationship with federal law enforcement agencies, seeking to protect against foreign influence.
Jonathan Albright, a researcher at the Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, said that false and misleading information is still running rampant on platforms like Facebook.
“Many of the dangers that were pointed out years ago have seemed to grow exponentially on Facebook, not unlike the other large social media ‘platforms,’ ” he wrote earlier this month.
Albright analyzed 250,000 Facebook posts, 5,000 political ads and historic engagement metrics for hundreds of pages and groups on the social media platform.
[...]
“People who don’t have the access or ability to verify information, it just gets spread too fast for it to be contained,” Rosenblatt said. “I think it often spreads so fast that by the time fact-checking gets underway, people have already settled into their conclusions.”
Rumours of child abductors spread through WhatsApp in a small town in Mexico. The rumours were fake, but a mob burned two men to death before anyone checked.
Since Donald Trump’s selection as president two years ago, a growing movement of citizens has been fighting back at what it sees as a dangerous march toward fascism US style. And, despite the election of some progressive candidates in the midterm elections, it would be a mistake to count on them alone to interrupt the erosion of an already tattered democracy in a largely corporate controlled society.
Still, the diverse community of activists, old and young—a veritable rainbow coalition—is already a force, both as potential allies to the newly elected progressives and as a check on them to follow through on their campaign promises.
Like many born after World War II and before the moon landing in 1969, my activism began in the 1960s, volunteering for Eugene McCarthy’s presidential campaign and as an anti-Vietnam war protestor. Ever since, I have been a part of a range of campaigns and causes, in recent years focusing on challenging men’s violence against women and working to transform masculinity. Today’s activists, from Black Lives Matter to 350.org, for example, count at their core women—many active well before the Women’s March—who have long been leading the way in a feminist wave revitalizing activism today.
In campaigning in the midterms, activists saw a simultaneous truth: in addition to the energy and enthusiasm many felt in working to help the Democrats take back the House of Representatives, they also recognized that electoral politics alone cannot fix a broken system. Those outraged by the white supremacist misogynist temporarily residing at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue felt that working to flip the house was a struggle worth engaging in.
President Donald J. Trump has a special, strained take on the world. Defeat is simply victory viewed in slanted terms. Victory for the other side is defeat elaborately clothed.
Jeff Sessions hides emotion poorly — his face is reflexively expressive — and last Wednesday night, it betrayed a mixed set of sentiments as he stepped out of the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building in downtown Washington. He had the stunned appearance of a hostage emerging out of an underground prison for the first time in months. But for a moment, in the news-camera glare, another look flashed across his face: the impish grin of a man who knows he’d managed to leave a little surprise behind.
Earlier that day, Sessions had resigned as the head of the Justice Department at the request of President Donald Trump. But before he left the job, the soon-to-be former attorney general had some last-minute business to attend to. With a black-ink pen, he initialed, in an illegible scrawl, a document formalizing the terms of what will be one of his abiding legacies: a Justice Department disengaged from its role in investigating and reforming police departments that repeatedly violate the civil rights of the people they’re sworn to protect. Police reform had been a DOJ priority during the Obama administration, and that work played a significant role in the federal response to the deaths of black men at the hands of police in cities such as Ferguson, Missouri.
In the wake of the deadly anti-Semitic attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, ProPublica and Frontline present a new investigation into white supremacist groups in America — in particular, a neo-Nazi group, Atomwaffen Division, that has actively recruited inside the U.S. military.
Two weeks later came the next blow. The wealthy state of Hesse, with its center in Frankfurt/Main, was a stronghold of the Social Democrats (SPD) for decades. Then they were pushed out by the Christian Democrats, often using racist stereotyping propaganda. The state elections on October 28th shocked them both. The SPD was reduced to a pitiful relic, under 20 %, while the CDU got its worst result in 50 years.
These state-level shocks were no less staggering at the federal level. Merkel, seeing her personal aura dwindle like a fading rainbow, took a step fully unthinkable just a few years ago. She has always been both chancellor and head of the CDU, an indispensable tie she always claimed. But at its congress next month she will step down as party leader. She can remain “queen mother” of the national government until 2021, if it stays in power, but the odds against it and her are grating downward. With its current rating of 27 % the CDU-CSU is still the strongest but not by much.
Three main rivals are pushing to succeed her as party leader – and maybe even more? Jens Spahn, 38, currently Minister of Health, has always been a major right-wing opponent of Merkel. Never popular despite all his efforts, the public has spurned him in the polls.
The Republicans, worried that the party may lose two Senate seats, a Governor’s mansion, and probably a bunch more close races for the House over the counting of disputed mail-in ballots and provisional ballots, are drumming up conspiracy theories now. I just drove through Trump Country last night and listened to Fox Radio as the host (I think it was Laura Ingraham) and her call-ins denounced the recount battles as Democratic corruption.
The biggest laugh was when Ingraham noted that Floridians had passed a law that will (finally!) permit non-violent felons who have served their time to vote. She snarkily said, “We’ll see how that works out!” This, of course, after Republican voters in Southern California elected to the House two convicted felons.
At any rate, it needs to be pointed out to these people, who are either simply incapable of logic or just grabbing at straws to attack a legitimate need for a careful count of all ballots, that there are good reasons why signatures when a person votes, and when they originally registered to vote, can be different looking. My father-in-law is 91, and has palsied hands. When we tried to get him a mail ballot so he could vote at the nursing home he lives in, he enthusiastically signed the ballot application as best as he could. It was rejected by New Jersey authorities (NJ is a heavily Democratic state by the way and he happens to be a Democrat) because they said his signature didn’t match the one he signed five years ago when he and my mother-in-law moved to New Jersey from Florida and registered to vote when they got their state ID cards at the state Motor Vehicle Dept.
Soft power was always a term best suited for eunuchs. It relies on persuasion, counsel and an air of seduction. It does not imply actual force as such (often, that side of the bargain is hidden). At its core are the presumed virtues of the product being sold, the society being advertised to others who are supposedly in the business of being convinced. Joseph Nye came up with it in the groves of academe as the Cold War was coming to an end, and every policy maker supposedly worth his or her brief insists upon it. (Since 1990, Nye has done another shuffle, attempting to market another variant of power: from soft, power has become erroneously sentient – or “smart”.)
Nye himself already leaves room for the critics to point out how the concept is, essentially, part of an advertising executive’s armoury, the sort an Edward Bernays of foreign affairs might embrace. It co-opts; it suggests indirectness; it is “getting others to want what you want” by shaping “the preferences of others”; it employs popular culture and concepts of political stability. In a vulgar sense, it inspires envy and the need to emulate, stressing desire over substance.
[...]
Most recently, Australia’s tetchy Prime Minister Scott Morrison (daggy cap and all), has been busy pushing Australian credentials in the immediate region, throwing $2 billion at a new Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific. Another billion is also sought for Australia’s export financing agency.
What is striking in this endeavour is the language of ownership, part proprietary and part imperial. “This is our patch,” Morrison explained to those at Lavarack Barracks in Townsville on Thursday. “This is where we have special responsibilities. We always have, we always will. We have their back, and they have ours.” These are the vagaries of power. “Australia has an abiding interest in a Southwest Pacific that is secure strategically, stable economically and sovereign politically.” Diplomatic posts will be established in Palau, the Marshall Islands, French Polynesia, Niue and the Cook Islands, all newly modelled sets of eyes.
The president is lying about “election theft” in Florida as part of a calculated strategy to shut down an essential part of the election process.
Adam Schiff, a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, told Axios that Democrats would try to find out whether Trump used "the instruments of state power to punish the press."
Why it matters: Until now, all Trump critics could do is complain about his escalating attacks on the media. With subpoena power and public hearings, the incoming House Democratic majority can demand emails and testimony to see if Trump used “the instruments of state power to punish the press,” Schiff said.
We spoke with Henry Giroux about his capstone work American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism, what the increase in dehumanization and militarization in our society means for democracy, and the importance of historical consciousness under the Trump administration.
When finding peace seems fruitless, or it seems that power will never bend its ear to listen to our voices, we must remember that we are not alone. Collectively, our voices are heard and amplified by one another. We need only to look at a calendar and remind ourselves, with each passing day, that we are in this struggle together.
In a French-language speech before the Internet Governance Forum held in Paris on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron said that the two sides would work together for six months starting in early 2019 to come up with "joint, precise, and concrete" proposals that both Menlo Park and Paris could agree with.
Outside of China, things are good for ByteDance. Its viral short video app Tik Tok landed 30 million new users in three months, thanks to a merger with Musical.ly. But in China, the giant startup is once again running into trouble with its news aggregator, Toutiao.
This time, the target is Toutiao’s story section. That’s where users -- whether professional organizations or individual people -- publish works of fiction. But now regulators have ordered a one-month suspension of the section, accusing it of publishing pornographic content, Beijing Daily reports.
The offending articles are said to contain titles like, “After a night of debauchery, the man turned out to be her new boss” and “To make money to treat my ailing mother, I started working at a club. To my surprise, my first customer was my teacher.”
Campus censorship, a certain type of radical academic rushes to tell us, simply does not happen. Apparently, free speech is alive and well at a university near you and to suggest otherwise is ‘hysteria’ that fuels a moral panic ‘whipped up’ by a politically motivated minority intent on besmirching students and sullying hallowed institutions. Except, of course, when it’s not.
It emerged this week that a book listed as ‘essential’ for third-year politics students at the University of Reading came with a warning telling them ‘to take care’. Norman Geras’s ‘Our Morals: The Ethics of Revolution’ was flagged up as potentially falling foul of the government’s Prevent Duty. Students were told not to access it on personal devices, to read it only in a secure setting, and not to leave it lying around where it might be spotted ‘inadvertently or otherwise, by those who are not prepared to view it’. Rarely has an examination of the ethics of socialist revolution sounded more exciting!
Geras argues that violence can be justified in cases of grave social injustice. This was more than enough for one member of staff to tip off university officials, who in turn agreed it was ‘sensitive’ and issued the stark warning. This lot could clearly have taught the Stasi a thing or two about surveillance and reporting.
To anyone who knew the late and much-missed Norman Geras, the idea that the state could consider his work an incitement to terrorism would have been incomprehensible. Geras was an inspirational politics professor at Manchester University, and a polemicist and moral philosopher of exceptional insight. He devoted much of his energy to opposing the murder of civilians, and lost many friends on the left in the process.
You could level all kinds of charges against him, we would have conceded. But incitement to terrorism? The charge would be insane.
We should have known better. We should have realised that academic bureaucrats could find reasons to label any and every work ‘threatening’ or ‘triggering’ if the mood so took them. All they would require is the necessary levels of ignorance, condescension and paranoia censors have displayed throughout the ages.
As my colleague Eleni Courea reports in the Observer, Reading University has found one such buffoon. He – or maybe it is a she, for priggishness and anti-intellectualism are by no means exclusively male preserves – has warned students to handle Geras’s Our Morals: The Ethics of Revolution as if it were an unexploded bomb.
Before UN Secretary Guterres took off for Paris (coverage by Inner City Press here), his deputy spokesman Farhan Haq on November 9 declined to provide information about who Guterres would meet with but said "one of our colleagues, Vannina [Maestracci] will be travelling with the Secretary-General and we'll try to provide details once we have the schedule firmed up." Well, two days later, absolutely nothing from the UN, even as Turkish state media reports Guterres met for 45 minutes with Erdogan. What did they talk about, how to ban journalists? Later, still with no Erdogan or any other read out, Guterres pedantic Paris Internet Governance Speech said, among other things, "We see the Internet being used as a platform for hate speech, for repression, censorship" - this from a man who has banned and censored Inner City Press for 131 days and counting, and whose spokesman Stephane Dujarric blocks Inner City Press on Twitter. Guterres intoned, "Non-traditional, multilateral and multi-stakeholder cooperation will be crucial, including governments, private sector, research centres and civil society" - while Guterres maintains a non-public "banned from the UN" list which according to his own guards includes political activists he doesn't like. Guterres said, "You have support from UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (DESA)" - a department taking payments from UN bribery imprisonee Patrick Ho. This is Guterres and his UN. The day before in his ParisPeace Forum speech Guterres said, among other things, "We must never accept the plight of the victims of violence and terrorist acts in Syria, Yemen, Mali or Myanmar" - but covering up the slaugher of Anglophones by Cameroon's Paul Biya is fine with him, either for a golden statue or bureaucratic favors from Biya's Ambassador as chair of the UN Budget Committee. Guterres said, "Alongside Jürgen Habermas, we must recognize that the oxygen of a modern democracy is a continuous flow of communication between civil society and the political authorities" - this as Guterres has Inner City Press banned for the 130th day after having it roughed up on June 22 and July 3; his spokesman Stephane Dujarric blocks Inner City Press on Twitter. Some continuous flow of information. Guterres said, "horror must never prevail over hope. The hope with which I receive my guests in the meeting room on the 38th floor of the Secretariat Building at United Nations Headquarters, adorned by the Matisse tapestry Polynésie, le Ciel, with its deep, peaceful shades of blue." It was from even photo ops on the UN's 38th floor that Dujarric unilaterally banned Inner City Press, just before having it assaulted by UN Security Lieutenant Ronald E. Dobbins on June 22 and July 3 and now contacting and dissembling to those who question that online, at least if they are from Europe. As Inner City Press moved forward with its inquiry into UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres' personal use of public funds, silence on slaughter in Cameroon and elsewhere and failure to disclose family members' financial interests in Angola and elsewhere, his spokesman Stephane Dujarric on 20 June 2018 said that “things will soon be getting worse” for Inner City Press' reporter. Inner City Press has now been banned from the UN for 127 days and Dujarric is providing his and his boss' pretext, as purported background, to some of those asking questions, at least if they come from Europe, see below. The pretexts are lies - now that they are becoming public, the ban is more disgusting and should be UNtenable.
French President Emmanuel Macron today opened the 13th Internet Governance Forum (November 12-14) in Paris with a firework of requests to the IGF community and some bold ideas. The IGF after a decade should take on much more responsibility in the development of internet regulation, Macron demanded, and said he together with last year’s and next year’s hosts of the UN forum is collaborating on pushing for more formal results, The IGF according to Macron should become a part of the UN Secretary General‘s Office, Macron proposed, to illustrate the importance. His call for regulation was echoed at the event by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.
The Communications and Multimedia Ministry has no qualms about having the Film Censorship Board of Malaysia (LPF) come under its jurisdiction.
Its minister Gobind Singh Deo said he is prepared to speak to Home Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin about it.
"I have been asked this question before (and) I have no problems with it as it is relevant to my Ministry because we deal with the National Film Development of Malaysia (Finas)," he said at a press conference after officiating at the Digital Transformation Forum here on Tuesday (Nov 13).
He said he knew of reasons why LPF would be parked under the Home Ministry but did not want to elaborate.
Immediately after the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in October, all eyes were on Gab, the Twitter-esque platform celebrated by self-proclaimed alt-right celebrities such as Richard Spencer and Alex Jones for its permissive attitude toward all speech, including speech considered hateful in civil society. In the weeks leading up to the attack, the alleged gunman, Robert Bowers, had reportedly used the platform to espouse anti-Semitic views and conspiracies from what is believed to be his verified account on the site, which bore a bio that plainly stated “jews are the children of Satan.”
From the start, Gab has positioned itself as an echo chamber that would allow people to find a community of like-minded bigots. Even if they weren’t actively engaging in hate speech at any given time, they were offered, by Gab, a platform on which hate was normalized — possibly was even the norm. While more-familiar social media sites may also feature their share of repugnant content, Gab’s free-speech absolutism provides those who engage in such discourse with the tacit, and often explicit, endorsement of their fellow users.
[...]
The central premise of Torba’s disingenuous defense seems to be that although social media — and the Internet as a whole — begets toxicity, his platform is being unfairly singled out. He cited the case of Cesar Sayoc, who had used both Twitter and Facebook to reportedly spout conspiracies before being caught for allegedly mailing pipe bombs to Democratic-aligned pundits and Democratic politicians. (Twitter, for its part, has acknowledged its shortcomings and is taking steps to squash hateful content as it emerges.)
Why should these sites have the privilege of retaining their spot on the Internet, argued Torba, when they also struggle with hate?
It’s a question that blatantly ignores the gaps in the way that we classify hate speech. According to the “massive academic study” that Torba cited, the estimated 6 percent of the site dedicated to hate speech is possibly a gross underestimate. Looking at the research more closely, that was merely the percentage of posts that contained overt slurs — a narrow slice of what hate speech encompasses.
[...]
When Torba founded Gab in August of 2016, "it was in response to these accounts getting banned from Twitter and Facebook during the 2016 election,” said Michael Edison Hayden, an open-source intelligence analyst at Storyful who has monitored the online behavior of extremists at length.
The accounts that ended up being the bedrock of Gab’s user base turned out to be created by people who were banned from the more popular platforms, either for violating the rules surrounding hate speech, being involved in targeted harassment or sending violent threats. Some members, such as early Gab user Milo Yiannopoulos, were guilty of all three.
“When the impetus for your company is to find a place for these people who have already demonstrated themselves to be bad actors on other platforms,” Hayden said, referring to Gab’s initial user base, “it’s almost as if you decided to start a village entirely with people that had been convicted of crimes.”
The social-media site where the alleged Pittsburgh synagogue shooter broadcast his intentions is pledging to curb threats of violence, while it said it plans to remain a platform where hate speech and other forms of extreme content are permitted.
Gab.com, which resumed service this week after a stretch in digital exile, will proactively police the site rather than wait for users to report troubling posts, founder Andrew Torba said in an interview, vowing to bolster efforts to expunge threats of physical harm.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro has asked domain name registrar Epik to send it information about its interactions with Gab, the social network that came under fire after one of its users shot people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
Gab.com was registered at GoDaddy before moving to Uniregistry, and then to Epik. Epik founder Rob Monster got in touch and invited Gab to move the domain to its service, but he said he didn’t take the decision lightly.
A move by the Philippines Justice Department to charge investigative news site Rappler with tax evasion is being seen as a thinly disguised attempt to stifle press freedom in the Southeast Asian country.
On Friday, the Justice Department said it had "found probable cause" to indict Rappler and its CEO and executive editor, former CNN bureau chief Maria Ressa, on charges of tax evasion. "We are not at all surprised by the decision, considering how the Duterte administration has been treating Rappler for its independent and fearless reporting," Rappler said in statement.
At the beginning of this year, we had a fairly long post about a dangerous situation brewing in the Philippines, where President Duterte was clearly trying to retaliate against one of his chief media critics, The Rappler, run by Maria Ressa. As I mentioned, I got to see Ressa speak at a conference last year, and the former CNN bureau chief is a force of nature who seems completely devoted to accurately reporting on President Duterte, no matter how much he dislikes it.
When we wrote about Ressa and Rappler in January, it was over some trumped up charges concerning claims of "foreign ownership." That story is a bit complex, but in order to get a grant from the philanthropic Omidyar Network, Rappler sold what are known as Philippine Depository Receipts (or PDRs). PDRs do have value, which are tied to the value of shares in the company, but which don't grant any of the related ownership rights. And yet, Duterte and the Filipino SEC have been arguing that Rappler committed tax evasion by somehow "not reporting" the PDR's.
[...]
Here is a case where it seems quite clear that the charges are being trumped up based on Rappler's reporting, rather than based on anything even remotely legitimate. And whether or not Ressa and Rappler continue is beyond the point. The message to anyone else who wants to follow in their shoes is "don't bother, we'll make your life a living hell." Obviously that won't (and shouldn't) stop many reporters, but it can have an enormous chilling effect on many, many people.
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and more than 70 human and digital rights groups called on Mark Zuckerberg today to add real transparency and accountability to Facebook’s content removal process. Specifically, the groups demand that Facebook clearly explain how much content it removes, both rightly and wrongly, and provide all users with a fair and timely method to appeal removals and get their content back up.
While Facebook is under enormous—and still mounting—pressure to remove material that is truly threatening, without transparency, fairness, and processes to identify and correct mistakes, Facebook’s content takedown policies too often backfire and silence the very people that should have their voices heard on the platform.
Politicians, museums, celebrities, and other high profile groups and individuals whose improperly removed content can garner media attention seem to have little trouble reaching Facebook to have content restored—they sometimes even receive an apology. But the average user? Not so much. Facebook only allows people to appeal content decisions in a limited set of circumstances, and in many cases, users have absolutely no option to appeal. Onlinecensorship.org, an EFF project for users to report takedown notices, has collected reports of hundreds of unjustified takedown incidents where appeals were unavailable. For most users, content Facebook removes is rarely restored, and some are banned from the platform for no good reason.
Despite igniting controversy over ethical lapses and the threat to civil liberties posed by its tattoo recognition experiments the first time around, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recently completed its second major project evaluating software designed to reveal who we are and potentially what we believe based on our body art.
Unsurprisingly, these experiments continue to be problematic.
The latest experiment was called Tatt-E, which is short for “Tattoo Recognition Technology Evaluation.” Using tattoo images collected by state and local law enforcement from incarcerated people, NIST tested algorithms created by state-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences and MorphoTrak, a subsidiary of the French corporation Idemia.
According to the Tatt-E results, which were published in October, the best-performing tattoo recognition algorithm by MorphoTrak had 67.9% accuracy in matching separate images of tattoo to each other on the first try.
If I’m signing up for a dating website, I usually just smash the “I agree” button on the site’s terms of service and jump right into uploading some of the most sensitive, private information about myself to the company’s servers: my location, appearance, occupation, hobbies, interests, sexual preferences, and photos. Tons more data is collected when I start filling out quizzes and surveys intended to find my match.
Because I agreed to the legal jargon that gets me into the website, all of that data is up for sale—potentially through a sort of gray market for dating profiles.
These sales aren’t happening on the deep web, but right out in the open. Anyone can purchase a batch of profiles from a data broker and immediately have access to the names, contact information, identifying traits, and photos of millions of real individuals.
Berlin-based NGO Tactical Tech collaborated with artist and researcher Joana Moll to uncover these practices in the online dating world. In a recent project titled “The Dating Brokers: An autopsy of online love,” the team set up an online “auction” to visualize how our lives are auctioned away by shady brokers.
Creating a dating profile is pretty easy. You head over to the profile section of an app and start filling every single detail about yourself. That includes usernames, e-mail addresses, sexual orientation, interests, professions, thorough physical characteristics, personality traits and much more. For the sake of looking genuine, you even post up some of your “good” pictures.
While you blindly fill in all the gaps, one thing you fail to notice is the “Terms and Conditions,” which often include companies’ “escape routes” to misuse the information uploaded to their servers.
Shockingly, the personal information that you once entrusted to a certain dating app is already being withheld by data brokers. As it turns out, data profiles get sold to data brokers for millions of dollars, through online auctions.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has declined to appear before the International Grand Committee which comprises at least five governments including the UK, Argentina, Australia, Ireland, and Canada.
The investigation by the committee, which is scheduled for November 27 in London, will take place in regards to the data privacy issues.
Facebook’s head of UK public policy- Rebecca Stimson and head of Canada Public Policy- Kevin Chan responded to the invite by Damian Collins, a member of the British Parliament, and Bob Zimmer, a Canadian lawmaker via a letter.
But, to be clear, any new federal data privacy regulation or statute must not preempt stronger state data privacy rules. For example, on June 28, California enacted the Consumer Privacy Act (S.B. 375) (“CCPA”). Though there are other examples, the CCPA is the most comprehensive state-based data privacy law, and while it could be improved, its swift passage highlights how state legislators are often in the best position to respond to the needs of their constituents. While baseline federal privacy legislation would benefit consumers across the country, any federal privacy regulation or legislation that preempts and supplants state action would actually hurt consumers and prevent states from protecting the needs of their constituents.
It is also important that any new regulations must be judicious and narrowly tailored, avoiding tech mandates and expensive burdens that would undermine competition—already a problem in some tech spaces--or infringe on First Amendment rights. To accomplish that, policymakers must start by consulting with technologists as well as lawyers. Also, one size does not fit all: smaller entities should be exempted from some data privacy rules.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions authorized the Justice Department’s attorneys to apply for a warrant in 2017 to search freelance journalist Aaron Cantú’s phone.
Investigators at the Justice Department believed Cantú “incited” violence and acted in “concert” with protesters accused of “destroying property and menacing bystanders” in Washington, D.C., on January 20, when President Donald Trump was inaugurated.
“Law enforcement authorities intervened and arrested the freelance journalist, among others, and seized his smartphone, which investigators believed contained evidence of the freelance journalist’s coordination with other protesters,” a 2017 annual report from the Justice Department briefly describes. Investigators decided he likely committed crimes while engaged in newsgathering.
Charges against Cantú and others were dismissed, as the #J20 cases collapsed and it became clear that prosecutors withheld evidence.
This is one of several examples of the Trump administration questioning, arresting, or charging journalists in its first year in office. It also is one example of the administration seizing the records of members of the news media.
It seems like Facebook has a long way to go when it comes to gaining back the trust of its users. The social networking site is voted the least trustworthy tech company, according to a recent poll conducted by Fortune.
The poll, in collaboration with Harris Poll organization, was conducted in October on behalf of around 2,000 US adults.
Britain’s biggest employer organisation and main trade union body have sounded the alarm over the prospect of British companies implanting staff with microchips to improve security.
While this logging is compulsory, compliance with privacy protections is optional.
The personal information of American charity donors, political party supporters, and online shoppers, has continued to quietly leak onto the [I]nternet as a result of poor website security practices, new research shows. As many as one in five e-commerce sites in the U.S. are still leaving their customers exposed, Philadelphia-based search marketing company Seer Interactive said Monday.
In May 2011, the secret police took me from my home in Saudi Arabia in the middle of the night, while my 5-year-old son was sleeping. I might have disappeared without a trace — if it wasn’t for one brave witness, Omar Aljohani, who took the risk of live-tweeting the details of the incident.
Twitter, the platform that once saved my life, is now putting it in danger. The events in the weeks following Jamal Khashoggi’s murder inside the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul showed that the lives of other journalists and activists are also at risk. Seven years after Twitter saved me, I recently made the choice to delete my Twitter account live on stage in front of an audience of 1,000 people. I had more than 295,000 followers, and I am disconnecting from them for good.
In 1898 the state of Louisiana held a constitutional convention with the declared aim of disenfranchising black people and perpetuating white rule. “Our mission was, in the first place, to establish the supremacy of the white race in this state to the extent to which it could be legally and constitutionally done,” reads the official journal of the convention. Legal means were found to scrub 130,000 registered black voters from the rolls and allow juries to come to non-unanimous verdicts in felony trials, including those involving the death penalty.
This measure might sound technical, or even be presented as a bid to make the court system more efficient, but its real purpose was thoroughly racist. It effectively side-stepped the constitutional requirement that black people should serve on juries, which gave them some leverage in resisting legal discrimination against the black population.
Since there were usually only one or two black jurors on a jury, they only had influence so long as verdicts were unanimous. Once a split verdict was allowed, then all-white juries could effectively decide the fate of defendants by a 10 to 2 verdict. This entrenched the legal bias against black people for over a century.
It was only last Tuesday that voters in Louisiana approved an amendment that abolished this toxic Jim Crow law that had survived the civil rights movement because it was not demonstrably racist written down, despite its obvious racist intent. Oregon is now the only state that does not require juries to reach unanimous verdicts.
Tuesday, October 23, might have been a routine day in prison for Avis Lee. “I got up at 5 am, took a shower, drank decaf coffee, prayed, ate breakfast and went to work at 8 am,” she recalled. Lee, who has been incarcerated for over 30 years, works as a peer assistant at the inpatient drug and alcohol therapeutic community at SCI Cambridge Springs, the Pennsylvania women’s prison. The routine was normal, but the day was not. In Philadelphia, nearly 350 miles away, the state’s superior court was hearing oral arguments about her prison sentence. “This hearing may very well determine what’s going to happen to me for the rest of my life,” Lee recalled thinking.
In 1979, Lee’s older brother and his friend committed a robbery. Lee, then age 18, was the lookout. During the robbery, her brother fatally shot the man they were robbing. The two men fled; Lee flagged down a bus driver and attempted to get help. All three were later arrested; lacking an attorney, Lee and her brother were convicted of murder, which in Pennsylvania mandates a sentence of life without parole (or LWOP). Lee, now age 57, is among over 2,700 people sentenced to life for crimes committed between the ages of 18 and 25.
In 2012, in Miller v. Alabama, the Supreme Court ruled that mandatory life without parole for juveniles constituted cruel and unusual punishment. Four years later, in Montgomery v. Louisiana, the Court ruled that its earlier decision was retroactive, giving the nation’s 2,300 juvenile lifers a chance at resentencing.
[...]
Neuroscience backs her claim — studies have shown that brain areas involved in reasoning and impulse control are not fully developed until the mid-twenties. That Tuesday in October, a nine–judge panel heard oral arguments. If the majority agree with Lee’s argument, they can remand the case for an evidentiary hearing as to whether her life without parole sentence is unconstitutional. Lee’s attorney, Bret Grote of the Abolitionist Law Center, explained Lee and her legal team would use that hearing to present testimony not only from Lee and those who know her, but also expert testimony about adolescent development to show that, at 18, Lee had the same developmental elements of youth that the Supreme Court noted in Miller v. Alabama.
All’s fair in the bitter, protracted war between 7-Eleven and its franchisees. The tensions have built steadily in the years since DePinto, a West Point-educated veteran, took charge and began demanding more of franchisees—more inventory, more money, more adherence in matters large and small. Some franchisees have responded by organizing and complaining and sometimes suing.
As detailed in a series of lawsuits and court cases, the company has plotted for much of DePinto’s tenure to purge certain underperformers and troublemakers. It’s targeted store owners and spent millions on an investigative force to go after them. The corporate investigators have used tactics including tailing franchisees in unmarked vehicles, planting hidden cameras and listening devices, and deploying a surveillance van disguised as a plumber’s truck. The company has also given the names of franchisees to the government, which in some cases has led immigration authorities to inspect their stores, according to three officials with Homeland Security Investigations, which like ICE is under the jurisdiction of the Department of Homeland Security.
The current CEO of 7-Eleven is Joe DePinto, a West Point grad who got the job in 2005 and has spent his tenure slowly tightening the screw on franchisees, demanding business practices that return more profit to corporate HQ at the expense of the independent operators. As the franchisees have felt the sting, they've fought back, suing the company over DePinto's policies.
Google lost control of several million of its IP addresses for more than an hour on Monday in an event that intermittently made its search and other services unavailable to many users and also caused problems for Spotify and other Google cloud customers. While Google said it had no reason to believe the mishap was a malicious hijacking attempt, the leak appeared suspicious to many, in part because it misdirected traffic to China Telecom, the Chinese government-owned provider that was recently caught improperly routing traffic belonging to a raft of Western carriers though mainland China.
Officials at Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) have said that the HTTP-over QUIC protocol will be renamed to HTTP version 3 and will serve as the official version of the HTTP protocol. QUIC stands for Quick UDP Internet Connections, and the experimental protocol uses UDP (User Datagram Protocol) instead of TCP.
Data centre operator NextDC has sealed a deal for APAC network provider Superloop to connect the new Indigo subsea cable system to its data centres in Perth and Sydney.
Like much of rural America, Garfield County is on the wrong side of the “homework gap”—a stubborn disparity in at-home broadband that hinders millions of students’ access to the array of online learning, collaboration, and research tools enjoyed by their better-connected peers. Many of Garfield’s students trek to [I]nternet oases such as Caine’s classroom or one of the local businesses willing to host a district Wi-Fi router. Going without isn’t an option. “All their work is on that computer,” Caine says, “and they need that access.”
You'll recall that one of the top reasons for killing popular net neutrality rules was that it had somehow killed broadband industry investment. Of course, a wide array of publicly-available data easily disproves this claim, but that didn't stop FCC boss Ajit Pai and ISPs from repeating it (and in some cases lying before Congress about it) anyway. We were told, more times that we could count, that with net neutrality dead, sector investment would spike.
You'll be shocked to learn this purported boon in investment isn't happening.
A few weeks ago, Verizon made it clear its CAPEX would be declining, and the company's deployment would see no impact despite billions in tax cuts and regulatory favors by the Trump FCC. Trump's "tax reform" alone netted Verizon an estimated $3.5 billion to $4 billion. A recent FCC policy order, purporting to speed up 5G wireless deployment (in part by eliminating local authority over negotiations with carriers), netted Verizon another estimated $2 billion. And that's before you even get to the potential revenue boost thanks to the repeal of net neutrality and elimination of broadband privacy rules.
Over the last decade, one of the topics typically discussed in patent proceedings in Spain has been to what extent the validity of the patent may be analysed in preliminary injunction proceedings. In the mid-2000s, the Judges in charge of the Commercial Courts at the time, with jurisdiction to deal with patent cases in Barcelona, used to take the view that in preliminary injunctions life is too short to examine validity in depth. Therefore, they considered that only indicia should be examined. They added that in the case of examined patents, validity should be presumed unless the party alleging the nullity of the patent should file very robust indicia supporting the invalidity grounds. The Court of Appeal of Barcelona confirmed this line of analysis in a saga of decisions handed down from 4 January 2006 onwards.
More recently, some first instance Commercial Courts had become increasingly open to holding profound validity discussions in the context of preliminary injunction proceedings. Experts were examined and cross-examined and, as a result, not much was left for the hearing of the main proceedings, which was basically a reiteration in the form of a déjà vu of the hearing of the preliminary injunction proceedings. However, a recent judgment from the Court of Appeal of Barcelona dated 16 October 2018, which confirmed a preliminary injunction ordered by Commercial Court number 1 of Barcelona on 28 July 2017, has established that the depth of the analysis carried out by the Court of First Instance went beyond what the Court of Appeal considers reasonable.
This decision by the FCJ confirms that when both parties declare the lawsuit resolved, only the allocation of costs has to be decided upon by the court. This must be done according to the court’s equitable discretion, giving consideration to the parties’ previous arguments.
In a Notification published in the Federal Register earlier this month (83 Fed. Reg. 55102), the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced the implementation of an interim procedure for patentees to request recalculation of Patent Term Adjustment (PTA) determinations for alleged errors due to the Office's failure to recognize that an Information Disclosure Statement (IDS) was accompanied by a safe harbor statement. The Office also announced the provision of a new form for applicants to use when making a safe harbor statement.
The interim procedure and new form address an issue with the computer program that the Office uses to make initial PTA determinations, which currently does not recognize when an applicant has filed an IDS concurrently with a safe harbor statement. According to the Notification, the interim procedure will remain in effect until the Office can update the PTA computer program and provide notice to the public that the computer program has been updated.
Pursuant to 37 C.F.R. ۤ 1.704(d), an IDS that is not accompanied by a safe harbor statement will result in a reduction of PTA if the IDS is filed after a Notice of Allowance or after an initial reply by the applicant, is filed as a preliminary paper or paper after a decision by the Board or Federal court that requires the USPTO to issue a supplemental Office action, or constitutes the sole submission for a Request for Continued Examination after a Notice of Allowance has been mailed.
Here's one you don't see everyday. The RIAA is telling a court that it needs to be careful about too much copyright protection. Really. This is in the lawsuit over "Stairway to Heaven" that we've been covering for a while now. As we noted, the 9th Circuit brought the case back to life after what had appeared to be a good result, saying that Led Zeppelin's "Stairway" did not infringe on the copyright in the Spirit song "Taurus." While we were a bit nervous about the case being reopened after a good result, as copyright lawyer Rick Sanders explained in a pair of excellent guest posts, there were good reasons to revisit the case -- in part to fix the 9th Circuit's weird framework for determining if a song has infringed, and in part to fix some bad jury instructions.
As with the Blurred Lines case, I've been curious how the RIAA and various musicians would come down on these cases. After all, I can imagine how they could easily end up on either side of such a case. Lots of musicians take inspiration from other musicians (it's actually kind of an important way for most musicians to develop), and if that's seen as infringing, that seems like it should be a huge problem. But, of course, to make that argument would require the RIAA to actually admit that copyright can go too far.
And... that's actually what it's done. The RIAA and the NMPA (National Music Publisher's Association, which historically is just as bad as the RIAA on many of these issues) actually had famed law professor Eugene Volokh write an interesting amicus curiae brief in support of the 9th Circuit rehearing the case en banc (with a full panel of 11 judges, rather than just the usual 3). Hat tip to Law360's Bill Donahue, who first spotted this.
As announced earlier today, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has finally issued its (short) judgment in Levola Hengelo, C-310/17, holding that copyright cannot vest in the taste of a food product (a spreadable cheese in the background Dutch proceedings).
The case is important for a number of reasons, and especially because it is probably the first time that the CJEU has been given directly the chance to tackle the notion of 'work' under the InfoSoc Directive (but, I would say, the overall EU copyright acquis).
The EU’s highest court ruled today that the taste of a Dutch cheese called Heks’nkaas cannot be considered a copyrightable ‘work’ because it is subjective
The taste of a food product is not eligible for copyright protection, the Court of Justice of the EU ruled today.
As readers know, this was a referral for a preliminary ruling from The Netherlands, asking whether copyright could vest in the taste of a spreadable cheese.
In an authoritative poll conducted on Twitter, 81% voted against sensory copyright (226 votes in total).
In 2007 and as recently as January 2018, the director of the movie The Man From Earth was championing the promotional effects of piracy. Last week, out of nowhere, he appeared to do a complete turnaround, branding the phenomenon as a threat to all creators. Something didn't feel right about this apparent change of heart. Diving into the details, a bigger picture begins to emerge.
In a recent submission to the US Trade Representative, the MPAA again states that Switzerland’s copyright law is wholly inadequate, making it extremely attractive to host illegal sites there. The European country has plans to update its laws, but the proposed changes are no significant improvement, Hollywood's trade group notes.
Earlier this year, Corel obtained a patent which enables the company to offer software pirates an amnesty deal via a messaging system. While this can be a smart approach, it is not without its flaws. This week, the company remotely disabled the software of a fully-licensed user of Paintshop Pro and left his medical-related business unable to meet customer needs.
In a new blog post, Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki continues her series of posts about the impossibility of complying with this rule.
Following GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), the European Union is not going soft with the big tech companies. After Facebook, Google, and Twitter, now EU is looking forward to shackling YouTube. However, its CEO Susan Wojcicki seems to be strictly against it.
In a second blog post voicing against Article 13, Susan said that it is simply impossible for YouTube to comply with the law. The massive financial loss will not be limited to YouTube, but to the creators too.
Creativity has long been a guiding force in my life, which is why I jumped at the opportunity to be YouTube’s chief executive nearly five years ago.
Creators have used YouTube to share their voices, inspire their fans, and build their livelihoods. Kurzgesagt — In a Nutshell recently became the number one channel in Germany by creating videos that help others fall in love with science. Artists like Dua Lipa and Ed Sheeran reached fans on YouTube long before they were discovered by a label. And acclaimed musicians like Elton John have used our site to breathe new life into iconic songs.
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We have already taken steps to address copyright infringement by developing technology, like our Content ID programme, to help rights holders manage their copyrights and earn money automatically. More than 98 per cent of copyright management on YouTube takes place through Content ID. To date, we have used the system to pay rights holders more than €2.5bn for third party use of their content. We believe Content ID provides the best solution for managing rights on a global scale. The consequences of article 13 go beyond financial losses. EU residents are at risk of being cut off from videos that, in just the last month, they viewed more than 90bn times. Those videos come from around the world, including more than 35m EU channels, and they include language classes and science tutorials as well as music videos.