07.10.19
Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 5:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Microsoft’s bullying tactics aren’t “old news”; the same tactics carry on to this date and they’re the moral or corporate equivalent of doxing
Examples continue to surface which show a distinct pattern (that continues to this date); Microsoft does not appease critics but instead it tries to render them unemployed. We’re starting to see more and more examples (people ‘coming out’, so to speak) of people whose job/livelihood Microsoft attempted to destroy because they had not been friendly to Microsoft’s financial interests. Some of them send us messages. Others write about it publicly in response to our articles. Few were reluctant to tell us their story but only said, in general terms, that it had happened to them too. Microsoft apparently does this a lot. About a decade and a half ago it got caught making ‘dossiers’ on people — a form of intimidation. Wired wrote about it.
Here’s a new example of a user with a karma of 3,771 and almost 7 years in the site Hacker News. This person wrote earlier today: “Years ago, a Microsoft sales associate called my CEO to try to get a member of my team (and probably me) fired because we told Microsoft we were taking a pass on upgrading our company to Vista; too many problems. Similar things have happened to other people in my network. Not saying this is MS policy or anything, but it happens.”
“Microsoft may well bribe people at the Linux Foundation and the media, but it cannot fool the entire world all the time.”An article of ours gained momentum in several places in Reddit and Hacker News (even the front page), e.g. [1, 2, 3], all this despite the relatively old age of the article. Sadly, it’s also a very short article that does not name our 4 recent examples, including my own [1, 2, 3]. It focuses on only one; there are also examples of retributions (see our Wiki page on “Microsoft Retribution against individuals and organisations”) which we’ve been gathering for a dozen years. Some of these examples are very recent, yet Microsoft apologists (e.g. in today’s comments) pretend it’s “old news” or “old Microsoft”. Microsoft is still a very malicious company. oiaohm brought up the report “Microsoft hijacks Android’s share menu w/ ads for its apps” earlier today in IRC (the report is days old), adding that “Microsoft is still finding new underhanded ways.” Yesterday we showed how it was screwing its very own "partners". Nothing has really changed. Months ago Microsoft sued a company for refusing to pay patent royalties (tax, extortion money)... for Android. Microsoft may well bribe people at the Linux Foundation and the media, but it cannot fool the entire world all the time. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:03 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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With its text-based interface, Linux provides IT administrators an easy and quick way to navigate files, grant permissions, run containers and build data processing capabilities on an open source OS.
Linux has traditionally stayed in on-premises architectures, but that’s starting to change. With the development of containers and orchestration, organizations are using it beyond bare metal.
If you decide to use these newer Linux features and capabilities, however, you should still familiarize yourself with the kernel, as well as some useful commands and security protocols.
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Canonical continues to pursue a somewhat bifurcated approach to containers by announcing support for Kubernetes 1.15 while continuing to advance Snaps as an application container that enables software deployment via a single click.
For example, Canonical recently announced in collaboration with DJI that Snaps will be supported on an instance of Ubuntu embedded in Manifold 2 drones manufactured by DJI. While that approach will make it easier to deploy containerized applications on a type of embedded system, Snaps—for the moment, at least—mostly only runs on Ubuntu.
Docker, in contrast, provides what Canonical describes as “process containers,” which typically are immutable and share some libraries across all containers in execution. Docker registries are optional and typically contain a loose collection of Docker images identifiable by hash or tags. That approach makes it possible to run containerized applications across multiple operating systems. However, within organizations that have standardized on Ubuntu, Canonical is making the case for an application container in the form of Snaps.
Canonical is trying to drum up support for Snaps on multiple distributions of Linux with mixed success. Most recently, it made available Snapd, a service that individual developers can employ to run Snaps on other Linux distributions. Support for Snaps running on Linux distributions other than Ubuntu generally is limited to what’s provided by Canonical, which tends to limit enthusiasm. It’s also worth noting that alternative application packaging technologies in the form of AppImage and Flatpak have been around longer than Snaps.
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IBM
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$34B deal is now done and with it comes renewed questions about how IBM will influence and control Red Hat’s enterprise software portfolio.
IBM announced on July 9 that it had formally closed its’ largest acquisition ever, picking up enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat in a deal valued at $34 billion.
With the deal now done, questions about how IBM will handle Red Hat’s enterprise application software portfolio and direction moving forward can now be officially answered. In a press conference, Arvind Krishna, SVP, Cloud and Cognitive Software at IBM and Paul Cormier, President Products and Technologies at Red Hat were peppered with questions about what will happen now.
Krishna said that Red Hat will remain neutral and will continue to work with its partners that might well be competitors to IBM.
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IBM on Tuesday closed the deal that saw it acquire open source software products leader and Linux developer Red Hat Inc. for $34 billion.
IBM first announced its intent to acquire Red Hat in October 2018. On May 3, the U.S. Department of Justice concluded its review of IBM’s Red Hat acquisition, and by posing no objections basically approved IBM’s acquisition of Red Hat.
Red Hat will operate as a distinct unit within IBM and will become part of IBM’s Cloud and Cognitive Software segment. It will maintain its independence and neutrality, insists IBM.
Current CEO Jim Whitehurst will continue to lead Red Hat. He will join IBM’s senior management team and will report to CEO Ginni Rometty.
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IBM on Tuesday closed on its $34 billion cash acquisition of Red Hat.
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Kernel Space
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I’m announcing the release of the 5.1.17 kernel.
All users of the 5.1 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.1.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.1.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s…
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Mike Rapoport from IBM launched a bid to implement address space isolation in the Linux kernel. Address space isolation emanates from the idea of virtual memory—where the system maps all its hardware devices’ memory addresses into a clean virtual space so that they all appear to be one smooth range of available RAM. A system that implements virtual memory also can create isolated address spaces that are available only to part of the system or to certain processes.
The idea, as Mike expressed it, is that if hostile users find themselves in an isolated address space, even if they find bugs in the kernel that might be exploited to gain control of the system, the system they would gain control over would be just that tiny area of RAM to which they had access. So they might be able to mess up their own local user, but not any other users on the system, nor would they be able to gain access to root level infrastructure.
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Many Linux distributions provide their own “longterm maintenance” kernels that may or may not be based on those maintained by kernel developers. These kernel releases are not hosted at kernel.org and kernel developers can provide no support for them.
It is easy to tell if you are running a distribution kernel. Unless you downloaded, compiled and installed your own version of kernel from kernel.org, you are running a distribution kernel. To find out the version of your kernel, run uname -r:
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After going through 9+ rounds of revisions for the Amlogic video decode driver, it’s now been part of the media subsystem updates for the Linux 5.3 kernel.
This Amlogic video decode driver supports the GXBB/GXL/GXM chipsets and allows currently MPEG-1/MPEG-2 decoding with future work to tackle MPEG-4, H.264, HEVC, and VP9.
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Herbert Xu sent out the crypto subsystem updates on Monday for the in-development Linux 5.3 kernel.
Linux 5.3 is bringing an updated Jitter RNG implementation based on the upstream Jitter 2.1.2 spec with various alterations. There is also now support for the SHA204A random number generator, 5-way interleave support for ECB/CBC/CTR for 64-bit ARM, and other fixes.
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The power management changes for Linux 5.3 merge window don’t offer any P-State changes or other prominent Intel changes this cycle but there is some other improvements as well as new CPUFreq drivers for CPU frequency scaling.
Arguably the biggest Linux 5.3 power management change is the mainline addition of a CPUFreq driver for Raspberry Pi. This CPUFreq driver communicates with the firmware running on the dedicated processor responsible for clock adjustments. This firmware ends up making the final call on whether to honor requests for CPU clock changes based upon thermal and power criteria.
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Graphics Stack
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Following the Radeon RX 5700 series launch, AMD has now open-sourced their Contrast Adaptive Sharpening (CAS) technology under FidelityFX on GPUOpen.
Contrast Adaptive Sharpening provides sharpening and optional scaling and is implemented as HLSL and GLSL shaders for Direct3D and Vulkan. CAS is designed to provide better sharpness with fewer artifacts and to increase the quality of temporal anti-aliasing.
The GLSL/Vulkan shaders for CAS are obviously relevant to Linux gamers though this initial FidelityFX release appears catered to a Windows workflow. FidelityFX 1.0 / CAS is licensed under the MIT license.
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t’s just not the RADV Vulkan driver seeing lots of Navi activity but the AMDGPU DRM kernel driver and RadeonSI OpenGL Mesa driver are also off to the races in improving their newly-enabled Navi / Radeon RX 5700 series support.
On the AMDGPU kernel side, AMD longtime Linux developer Alex Deucher sent out a new PR containing some additional fixes for Navi. This pull request is for the now-open Linux 5.3 merge window to polish up this initial GPU enablement for the kernel.
The Navi 10 work that’s new for AMDGPU is GPU reset abilities in case of hangs, PowerPlay power management fixes, and graphics fixes. Outside of Navi specific work there is also XGMI fixes, HMM API changes, and other fixes.
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Applications
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With the release of Red Hat AMQ Streams 1.2, Red Hat Integration now includes a developer preview of Change Data Capture (CDC) capabilities to enable data integration for modern cloud-native microservices-based applications. CDC features are based on the upstream project Debezium and are natively integrated with Apache Kafka and Strimzi to run on top of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the enterprise Kubernetes, as part of the AMQ Streams release.
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Syncthing, an open source continuous file synchronization tool, had a new release yesterday. The new Syncthing 1.2.0 adds QUIC with NAT traversal as a new transport protocol, fixes some bugs, and enables automatic error reporting.
Syncthing is a free, open-source peer-to-peer file synchronization application written in Go, which implements its own open Block Exchange Protocol. The application, which is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Solaris, Darwin and BSD, can sync files between devices on a local network, or between remote devices over the Internet.
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Proprietary
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Like any other downloadable software you could use, there’s going to be a learning curve, which might be the biggest downside to DaVinci 16. You may not have experienced DaVinci’s editing software yet but they work just like Premiere and Final Cut.
The best way to learn the program and work out the technical kinks is by downloading it and giving the editing technology a try. It’s free to download and use, so check it out and see how it works differently than the programs you might pay a lot of money for.
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And while everyone know Linus Torvalds, in general, says Momjian, “If you are a creator of an infrastructure tool, you sit in an office and maybe you’re at a conference once every other month.” He argues that no IT decision maker really plans their IT strategy around a scripting language, a compiler or a text editor, or base it around some of the virtualisation tools out there. “They are interesting, but not a core part of a business process in organisations,” he says.
But compared to the early 1990s when Momjian was a Unix admin, proprietary Unix systems are on life support. Compare the proprietary Unix vendors to the like Microsoft and Oracle, who are still selling relational databases. Since the early 2000s, Momjian has been a database man. “There is a lot of people who find databases really interesting,” he adds.
For Momjian, the database industry is a good industry to be in. And there are some people in the open source community who are jetted around the world to speak to thousands of delegates about their contribution to database technologies.
For Momjian, these are the true rock stars of the software industry.
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Instructionals/Technical
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The df command is used for checking disk space in Linux. Learn some of the most common usage of the df command in Linux.
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Games
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When trying out Flux Caves myself back in March, I was quite impressed with the demo. It recently released in full and as of today, the Linux version is live everywhere.
Unlike some puzzle games, the aim of Flux Caves is not to make you sweat or get frustrated. It’s supposed to be a more peaceful experience with a slightly open-world for you to run around in. There’s no losing, no dying, just you and the puzzles.
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Confirmed to be coming to Linux at the Early Access release on August 20th, UnderMine looks like a fantastic action-adventure roguelike.
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Here’s another new game for you to keep an eye on, it’s called Tactics V: Obsidian Brigade and it’s arriving with Linux support on August 15th.
In development by From Nothing Game Studios (previously made GravBlocks), it’s inspired by the likes of Final Fantasy Tactics and other console tactical RPGs from the 1990s.
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After a successful crowdfunding campaign back in 2015, Elsinore a time-looping adventure game set in the world of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is releasing with Linux support on July 22nd.
This was previously mentioned on GamingOnLinux a few times, in our older crowdfunding roundup articles “The Funding Crowd”. Some of you might actually remember it, I certainly didn’t but I’m putting that right now by making sure everyone knows, as it does sound very interesting.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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The KMyMoney development team today announces the immediate availability of version 5.0.5 of its open source Personal Finance Manager.
After three months it is now ready: KMyMoney 5.0.5 comes with some important bugfixes. As usual, problems have been reported by our users and the development team worked hard to fix them in the meantime. The result of this effort is the brand new KMyMoney 5.0.5 release.
Despite even more testing we understand that some bugs may have slipped past our best efforts. If you find one of them, please forgive us, and be sure to report it, either to the mailing list or on bugs.kde.org.
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New Releases
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A point release does not designate a separate, new version of Qubes OS. Rather, it designates its respective major or minor release (in this case, 4.0) inclusive of all updates up to a certain point. Installing Qubes 4.0 and fully updating it results in the same system as installing Qubes 4.0.2.
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We’ve already discussed how amazing the Raspberry Pi 4 is with upgraded specs. You can easily utilize it as a desktop replacement for minimal tasks like browsing activities, managing media or similar stuff acting as a desktop replacement. In either case, IoT projects and so on.
That’s all good. But, we’re talking about something more exciting – which you might have already figured out from the headline.
Offensive Security announced to officially support Kali Linux on Raspberry Pi 4. Well, it was quite expected because of Raspberry Pi 4’s popularity just after a few weeks of launch.
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Announced last month, the Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer is the latest and most advanced Raspberry Pi SBC ever built. It features a powerful 1.5 GHz quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A72 CPU, up to 4GB of RAM, support for up to 4K resolutions, Bluetooth 5.0, Gigabit Ethernet, 2x USB 2 and 2x USB 3 ports, 2x micro-HDMI ports, and a USB-C power supply.
The Offensive Security team was quick to build an image of their popular Kali Linux operating system for the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer to give security researchers and hacking enthusiasts a more affordable way to run their favorite Linux OS for ethical hacking and penetration testing tasks.
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Debian Family
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New live/install iso/img images of Sparky 4.11 are out.
Sparky 4.11 “Tyche” is the last release of the 4 line which moves the base system from Debian stable “Stretch” to Debian oldstable “Stretch”.
Make sure that Sparky 4 will be supported next 2 years about, so if you keep running your machine with Sparky 4, do regular system upgrade.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Following Canonical’s pivot away from its internally-developed Unity user interface and Mir display server, Ubuntu has enjoyed two relatively low-drama years, as the Linux Desktop market homogenized during its transition back to a customized GNOME desktop. In a review of the most recent release, TechRepublic’s Jack Wallen declared that “Ubuntu 19.04 should seriously impress anyone looking for a fast and reliable Linux desktop platform.”
Largely, it’s been a slow-and-steady pace for Ubuntu since the pivot from Unity to GNOME, though the distribution made headlines for plans to end support for 32-bit support. This prompted Valve, operators of games marketplace Steam, to re-think its approach toward Ubuntu, which it previously characterized as “as the best-supported path for desktop users.”
TechRepublic’s James Sanders interviewed Will Cooke, director of engineering for Ubuntu Desktop at Canonical, about the distribution’s long-term plans for legacy 32-bit support, shipping a desktop in a post-Unity-era Ubuntu, and why Linux should be the first choice for users migrating from Windows 7 prior to the end of support.
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Devices/Embedded
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The Raspberry Pi 4-based Pi-top[4] mini-PC has surpassed its Kickstarter goal, starting at $199. The gizmo has an OLED display, 5-hour battery, fan, and 14 sensor modules plus options including screen/KB and robotics kits.
The Pi-top [4] mini-PC and hacker kit was announced a few weeks back in conjunction with the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B SBC that it’s built around. Now it’s on Kickstarter with early bird packages starting at $199 and shipments due in November.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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In an interview with a French magazine, Huawei’s CEO and founder, Ren Zhengfei, has stated that the homegrown HongmengOS will be faster than Android and will have a broader application as well. It can be used not only on smartphones but on routers, network switches, tablets, computers and even data centers.
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The most prominent user-visible feature of Sculpt OS 19.07 is the ability of copy and paste text between terminals, graphical applications, and virtual machines. Our unique take on this feature is described in a dedicated article.
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Genode continues advancing as an open-source operating system framework and with that their effort to develop Sculpt OS as a general purpose operating system has continued in-step. Out now is Sculpt OS 19.07 as their latest operating system release.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Have you ever needed to scan a recipe while also watching a cooking video? Or perhaps you wanted to watch a recording of a lecture while also looking at the course slides. Or maybe you wanted to watch somebody stream themselves playing video games while you work.
We’ve recently shipped a version of Firefox on our Beta and Developer Edition release channels with an experimental feature that aims to make this easier for you to do!
Picture-in-Picture allows you to pop a video out from where it’s being played into a special kind of window that’s always on top. Then you can move that window around or resize it however you need!
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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LibreOffice 6.3 will offer a new tabbed layout called tabbed compact. Focus are users with widescreen and a simple user interface.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Programming/Development
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AMD has updated its μProf software in line with the release of Zen 2 processors. Announced its Ryzen Twitter channel via Reddit, the software encompasses four tools that AMD claims allow developers to identify ways to optimise their applications for AMD processors.
μProf 3.0 gives detailed runtime performance information from CPU profiling to system-wide power profiling. Windows developers can also analyses which areas of an application are more resource intensive, while Linux and FreeBSD developers can monitor system performance metrics. AMD has introduced several new features with the 3.0 update, the principal of which is support for 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen Desktop processors.
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Few days ago we’ve heard from some of our friends talking about scraping. At that time me like, hey what scrap…? Then knowing somethiing about that took my attention seriously on that amazing technique. Extracting data from websites – sounds really crazy. And yeap, We did something to get started. Now, may be it’s your turn.
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When programming, it’s quite common to want to create a collection of some kind, from another collection, usually with some modification taking place along the way. Python gives an awesome set of tools for dealing with this kind of problem: comprehensions. If you’re not using comprehensions regularly in your code, read on, and I’ll show you what you’re missing out on!
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Python is a storehouse of numerous immensely powerful libraries and frameworks. Among them, is Seaborn, which is a dominant data visualization library. In this Python Seaborn Tutorial, you will be leaning all the knacks of data visualization using Seaborn.
So let’s begin first by reasoning out the importance of Python Seaborn.
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The second post in a little mini-series on new APIs in the GLib 2.62 series, this one’s about Christian Hergert’s g_queue_insert_before_link().
This is a new helper function for inserting elements at arbitrary positions in a queue, without needing to allocate a new container element for them. Previously, using g_queue_insert_before(), a new GList container would have been allocated. The new function means that elements can be moved from one position in a queue to another, without any allocations; and statically allocated GList elements can be used in a GQueue correctly.
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Learning probability and statistics isn’t the first thing most aspiring data analysts and scientists tackle. But make no mistake: understanding the math is just as critical as understanding the programming!
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The landscape of embedded systems and computing is changing. Fast. IoT in particular is driving widespread change in technology when it comes to standards, hardware, systems, and software, with the need for all of these components to work seamlessly as a complete infrastructure. Meanwhile, the demand for increased functionality at the edge has underscored the need for faster and more formidable compute power across entire systems or networks.
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A Node.js process manager is a useful tool to ensure that a Node.js process or script runs continuously (forever) and can enable it to auto-start at system boot.
It allows you to monitor the running services and it facilitates common system administration tasks (such as restarting on failure, stopping, reloading configurations without downtime, modify environment variables/settings, showing performance metrics and so much more). It also supports application logging, clustering, and load balancing, and so many other useful process management features.
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Hardware
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In a statement on Tuesday, IQM said it is getting funding from US-based investor Matadero QED; Finnish state-owned investment firm Tesi; Helsinki-based venture capital firms Maki.vc and OpenOcean as well as German investment firms MIG Fonds and Vito Venutres.
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Health/Nutrition
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Many friends from the CC and open education communities have noticed my absence from meetings and conferences in the past six months. I’m ready to share why.
I was diagnosed with an auto-immune liver disease in 2005, and with liver cancer in September, 2018. The cancer was caused by the underlying liver disease. Once the cancer was diagnosed, my doctor quickly sent me to the Mayo Clinic. I spent the entire month of December in twice-daily radiation and round-the-clock chemotherapy. Bottom line: I needed a liver transplant to live.
You may have heard about the organ shortage in the United States. There are simply not enough organs available to people who need them. Most countries have similar unfortunate statistics. Want to help? Sign up to be a donor (US link) and talk to your family about your decision.
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Security
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It is newly minted conventional wisdom that not a single information security conference goes by without a presentation about the abysmal state of Internet of Things security. While this is a boon for researchers looking to make a name for themselves, this sorry state of affairs is definitely not beneficial for anyone who owns a connected device.
IoT device owners aren’t the only ones fed up, though. Right behind them is Eldridge Alexander, manager of Duo Labs at Duo Security. Even better, he has a plan, and the experience to lend it some credibility.
Before assuming his current role at Duo Security, Alexander held various IT posts at Google and Cloudflare. For him, the through-line that ties together his past and present IT work is the security gains that accrue from aligning all of a network’s security controls with the principle of zero-trust.
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“On the one hand it took over 100 days for them to actually take this seriously and it required public outcry,” Leitschuh says. “On the other hand it’s a really good thing to see that a company can apologize for their mistakes and be willing to work with the community and researchers. It’s now on all of us to hold them accountable.”
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A vulnerability in the Mac Zoom Client allows any malicious website to enable your camera without your permission. The flaw potentially exposes up to 750,000 companies around the world that use Zoom to conduct day-to-day business.
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Environment
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Since 1994, the sea level in South Florida has risen about four inches. In Miami, the rising sea level has meant “sunny day flooding” even when there’s no rain. Some of the most frightening predictions warn that the Monroe and Miami-Dade counties and most of Broward County in the state’s southeast could disappear because of flooding by 2100.
In an effort to bring attention to the future and current effects of climate change, Zero Hour will host its inaugural summit in Miami. Previously, the organization has focused its largest protests, such as its historic youth climate march last July, in big cities such as Washington, DC, and New York, and they say the change in scenery is an intentional move into a different region.
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The latest round of Dutch “poldering” also concerns a sea-level-related threat. On June 28th the government released its national Climate Accord, the product of over a year of bargaining between industry, consumer groups and politicians over how to meet the Netherlands’ targets for reducing carbon emissions. Under the global climate agreement signed in Paris in 2016, the country committed to cut its CO2 emissions by 49% by 2030 and by 95% by 2050. The question was how to do it, and who would pay.
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The Greens will exact a high price for backing German conservative Ursula von der Leyen as European Commission president, judging by their first encounter.
The environmentalist party’s two top MEPs, Ska Keller and Philippe Lamberts, damned the German nominee with faint praise Monday, on her first attempt to secure their votes for her surprise candidacy for the EU’s top job.
The German defense minister came across as “a very able politician,” Keller told reporters afterward. “But from my own point of view, that’s not enough.”
Unlike von der Leyen, who emerged from last week’s emergency EU summit as the compromise candidate to succeed Jean-Claude Juncker as Commission president, Keller was a Spitzenkandidat — one of the “lead candidates” who would supposedly compete for the job in a democratic contest.
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Responding to the release of the Committee on Climate Change report released this morning that concludes (1) that of 33 key sectors, none show good progress in managing climate change risk, Green MP Caroline Lucas said: “This damning verdict from the Committee on Climate Change underlines the Government’s abject failure to deliver the policies needed to meet our climate targets.
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While many of these vessels operate legally, many others do not. As many as 300,000 tons of squid are taken illegally from the region each year — much more than the 50 to 150 tons that are allowed to be harvested legally.
In part this massive illegal fishing operation is the result of the distant and remote nature of the fishery itself. But it’s also inspired by longstanding political angst that impedes cooperation between Argentina and the United Kingdom territory known to some as the Falkland Islands and others as the Islas Malvinas.
The question of sovereignty over these islands has been festering for nearly two centuries. Argentina argues that the British have illegally occupied the Islas Malvinas since 1833, a matter it first raised with the United Nations and other international bodies in the 1940s. This dispute later erupted in the brief but brutal 1982 Falkland/Malvinas’ War, in which Argentina tried (but failed) to retake the islands by force.
Decades later the sovereignty struggle continues. Currently Argentina has the backing of the United Nations’ International Court of Justice to negotiate with the UK over the Malvinas. But the UK refuses to negotiate the sensitive issue of sovereignty, stating the self-determination of the Islands’ residents — who voted in 2013 to remain a British Overseas Territory — should be respected.
Regardless of conflicting interpretations of sovereignty, the fate of the Islands lies in the oceans around them.
Economically 52.4 percent of the Islands’ GDP — approximately $86.3 million — depends on fisheries, with squid being the most valuable resource. In a good year, the Islands can provide nearly 10 percent of the world’s illex squid supply. By comparison Argentina is less dependent on fisheries — which only account for 3.4 percent of its GDP — but their value still amounts to approximately $20.2 billion, more than 230 times the value of the Falklands’ fisheries.
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Finance
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Tenants throughout the United States struggle with the high cost of living and loss of their homes, but from major cities to small towns, they are escalating a grassroots movement in the name of housing justice.
In New York, a place where Wall Street investors feel more at home than the state’s own residents, tenants achieved what the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) called “the biggest housing justice victory for tenants in a generation” with the passage of the 2019 “Housing Stability And Tenants Protections Act.”
The new law will enact sweeping reforms to help protect tenants, such as the preservation of over one million rent-regulated apartments, preventing building owners from raising rents on tenants or during vacancy, allow cities and townships to pass their own tenant protections (among other landmark measures).
Around 2.4 million tenants in New York, as well as manufactured housing residents across the state, are expected to benefit.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Tencent, owner of the all-purpose Chinese app WeChat, is trying to encourage more U.S. social-media stars to do business in the world’s No. 2 economy. The opening panel of the event is titled “How Tencent could help your influencers’ businesses in China.” They have an edge over YouTube in tapping the burgeoning market: The Google-owned video service is blocked in the country.
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Our amnesia about vaccines is part of a broader forgetting. Prior generations of Americans understood the danger of zero-sum economic nationalism, for instance, because its results remained visible in their lifetimes. When Al Gore debated Ross Perot about NAFTA in 1993, he reminded the Texan businessman of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which raised tariffs on 20,000 foreign products—prompting other countries to retaliate, deepening the Great Depression, and helping to elect Adolf Hitler. But fewer and fewer people remember the last global trade war. Similarly, as memories of Nazism fade across Europe and the United States, anti-Semitism is rising. Technology may improve; science may advance. But the fading of lessons that once seemed obvious should give pause to those who believe history naturally bends toward progress.
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The idea, a few years ago that a streaming tv show would garner enough hype to warrant this level of promotional involvement from Microsoft would have seemed like utter madness. Today, it feels fairly normal.
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When Gassée saw Windows 1.0, he dismissed the software as no threat.
But when Sculley saw the software, he was enraged. Microsoft had been provided early prototypes of the Macintosh and some source code to help optimize Word and MultiPlan. Now Windows had a menu bar almost identical to Apple’s. Windows even had a Special menu, containing disk operations. Other elements were strikingly similar. Windows came bundled with Write and Paint, both mimicking Apple’s MacPaint and MacWrite.
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Jonathan Bartley, co-leader of the Green Party, said:
“The Green Party is following with interest today’s announcement from Heidi Allen about the new grouping Unite for Remain.
“As the Green Party is a democratic party, with direction provided by its members, we are today launching a survey of members to seek their views on the proposals in circulation about how the number of Remain MPs can be maximised in the next election, with the aim of stopping Brexit and transforming the UK to tackle our environmental and social crises.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Choosing to destroy a work of art that embodies a point of view is no better than Nazi book burning or any number of historically heinous attempts to whitewash or revise the historical record.
The incredible irony of this decision is first that it involves an institution of learning and teaching, where transparency, tolerance and open discussion of all points of view are the lifeblood of education.
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Twitter while not banning the racist reactionary lies of Trump has blocked the tweets of activists who are fighting for the freedom of Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.
This rally will protest the banning of Free Julian Assange sites and othe sites critical of US and Israeli actions. The collusion and collaboration of the owners of Twitter with the same US intellligence agencies that
have been involved in the very crimes that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks has exposed is not surprising. The real criminals of US war crimes in Iraq and the crimes of Hillary Clinton in overthrowing the Honduran goverment
are unprosecuted but the whisltelbowers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are imprisoned.
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The intent behind “ag-gag” laws is pretty evident. The aim is to prevent the general public learning about unsatisfactory or downright cruel conditions in which animals are kept by some farmers. Techdirt has been reporting on them for a number of years. Fortunately, US courts are increasingly throwing them out as unconstitutional. So far, ag-gag laws seems to be a US specialty, but that may be about to change. A new law under discussion in France would force online companies to remove “hateful content” from their networks within 24 hours. The journalist Marc Rees spotted a proposed amendment to the law that would define the following content as “hateful”
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Privacy/Surveillance
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On Wednesday (10 July), the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights – the court’s highest body – will hear arguments from Amnesty International, Liberty, Privacy International and other human rights organisations from four continents over the unlawfulness of the UK’s bulk surveillance practices.
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A web page at detroitmi.gov dedicated to the Project Green Light hosts a map showing the location of nearly 600 surveillance cameras and says this infrastructure is for “improving neighborhood safety, promoting the revitalization and growth of local businesses, and strengthening DPD’s efforts to deter, identify, and solve crime.”
After the extent of the surveillance was exposed and public anger began to rise, Detroit Police Chief James Craig hastily called a press conference on June 27 in an effort to downplay the invasive nature of the system and justify its implementation.
Forced to admit that the artificial intelligence and biometrics system had been in place for the past two years without review, Craig became irritated. When questioned by the media about its legality, he said, “How come we never talk about the criminals?” Chief Craig also said that the department had the right to detain people based on the technology because it constitutes “reasonable suspicion” that an individual identified by the system had committed a crime.
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The apps circumvent Android permissions designed to keep personal data out of the hands of developers
Researchers have discovered more than 1,000 Android apps have the power to share and receive personal information even when the user explicitly forbids the collection of data.
The findings were presented to attendees at PrivacyCon 2019 in the US, and they don’t just focus on obscure apps. Indeed, big name firms including Disney and Samsung were cited for releasing apps that flout the privacy conventions users have come to expect.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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Speaking alongside Khashoggi’s fiancée at a conference in London on Tuesday, Ms Callamard urged the US to declassify its intelligence on the killing and said Washington was “not at the top of the co-operation chain”.
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Documents, video and audio material that EL PAÍS has had access to show that a Spanish private defense and security firm named Undercover Global S. L., which was tasked with protecting the diplomatic building between 2012 and 2018, instructed its men to collect all possible information about the cyberactivist, particularly regarding his lawyers and collaborators.
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Is such a parallel apt? Not exactly. People misremember the Supreme Court decision in The Pentagon Papers cases that gave The New York Times the right to publish the documents. The court did not find a sacrosanct freedom of the press.
It merely allowed for the continued publication. Indeed, the justices’ split decision pointed in the other direction: that in matters of “mortal danger”, journalists have a legal responsibility not to publish.
The Pentagon Papers were a top-secret account of the Vietnam War commissioned in late 1967 by Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara. The review drew on classified documents from the Defence Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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A 2018 report by Mission: Readiness, a group of 750 retired military professionals that makes policy recommendations to increase the percentage of young Americans eligible to serve in the military, found that 71% of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 fail to meet all of the basic requirements for military service.
The biggest disqualifier is obesity, with roughly 31% of American youths disqualified because they are overweight. Other factors explaining the shortage of eligible recruits are inadequate education, criminal history and drug use. According to Army Major Gen. (Ret.) Allen Youngman, a member of Mission: Readiness, almost 25% of high school graduates are unable to pass the basic military entrance exams, which not only disqualifies them from technical positions within the service but also from military service as a whole.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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It called on her to “refuse the regime’s money” and use her influence to demand the release of the detained women activists.
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The gang’s activities were initially exposed by the charity Hope for Justice, whose co-founder and CEO Ben Cooley said, “This was a vast criminal conspiracy profiting from the misery and manipulation of vulnerable human beings.” The charity believes there could have been up to 400 victims who were exploited by the gang between June 2012 and October 2017, in what Judge Mary Stacey, who presided over the two trials, described as the “most ambitious, extensive and prolific” modern slavery network ever uncovered in Britain.
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When they were unveiled in 1937, these murals were upheld by the left as radical examples of social justice through art. Concerned parties now see Arnautoff’s work as exploitative and traumatic for the school’s minority students who have to encounter these striking scenes on a daily basis.
This speaks to a changing dialogue about representation, one spurred on by the democratization of cultural criticism through social media. Audiences now have more platforms to express and amplify what have been long-standing concerns about portrayals of the minority experience in America that rely almost exclusively on fetishistic displays of violence and physical trauma.
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In February 2018, the French government presented a new plan to combat Islamist threat in a 60-measure document entitled “Prevent to Protect,” which was reviewed by The World. The plan, presently in place, calls for a cross-disciplinary approach, including the reinforcement of secularism in schools and a “greater awareness of radicalization” in the workplace.
The plan relies on the concept of laïcité — the French term for a strict strand of secularism that involves the complete and total separation of church and state.
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When the British government forcibly deported every single Chagossian from their islands between 1967 and 1971 to make way for a US nuclear weapons base, a few of them eventually found their way to the UK, being at the time British subjects. The small British Chagossian community is very active. Steven Leelah’s grandfather was one of the original deportees and his mother is a UK citizen. Steven had his right to remain in the UK refused by the Home Office, and when he turned up to report as required pending his appeal, he was arrested and imprisoned in “immigration detention” pending deportation. Just where they intend to deport him is an interesting question – his father is Chagossian and his mother is British – certainly not to Chagos, where the islanders are still forbidden from their own homes.
This is yet another example of the vicious and callous brutality which was injected, deliberately, into the Home Office by Theresa May and her “hostile environment” policy, which is no more and no less than the institutionalisation of racism as government policy. It goes hand in hand with the deprofessionalisation of the “Border force” and the contracting out of most of its functions to for profit companies.
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Organizers with Mijente, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, the Tech Workers Coalition, and other groups mobilized in New York and Washington D.C. to demand Palantir Technologies, a surveillance company, cancel its contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
In New York, people stood outside the Palantir office and chanted, “Immigrants are welcome here! Time to cancel, Palantir!”
Activists with Mijente, an immigration and Latinx-focused organization, attempted to give workers entering the New York office a flier that urged “all Palantir employees to speak to their executives and help cancel this contract.”
As Sophie Hurwitz reported, the flier declared, “There is no need for Palantir to be in the business of abusing human rights. You have the power to stop this.”
It outlined how hundreds of people were arrested by ICE thanks to the software designed by Palantir and how management lied about Palantir’s role in President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants and asylum seekers.
The flier additionally noted a Privacy Law Scholars Conference at the University of California in Berkeley dropped Palantir as a sponsor in June.
But according to Hurwitz, several individuals refused to take the flier as they entered the building that houses the company’s New York office.
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Most countries have holidays and observances that celebrate aspects of their founding and heritage. For many, it is an opportunity to display patriotic pride, but for others, it is the time to somberly reflect on dark chapters of their nation’s history.
This is the premise of “Forever Half Mast.” Indie singer-songwriter Lucy Dacus wrote the song in connection with American Independence Day. It is part of a series of songs about holidays, and it grapples with how a citizen should view the shameful parts of their history.
“There is a daily dissonance one endures as an American wherein much of our joy is counterweighted by shame, where much of our pride lives in tandem with injustice and suffering,” Dacus said in a press statement. “‘Forever Half Mast’ is about confronting this unavoidable culpability as an American citizen and consumer. Instead of allowing this guilt to paralyze us, we should try to let it influence us in positive ways.”
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Below is a lightly edited excerpt of Sohn explaining three things that have happened since repealing net neutrality that clearly demonstrate what the FCC did is terrible for consumers, competition and public safety.
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Monopolies
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Executives for Facebook, Google, Amazon and Apple will testify before Congress next week as part of the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust investigation into Silicon Valley.
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Monopolies
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Patents and Software Patents
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The High Court justice says it’s irritating when people take numerous points “indiscriminately,” how it’s essential for top QCs to join the judiciary and that he won’t refer cases on the SPC Regulation any more, in an exclusive discussion with Managing IP
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Copyrights
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[...] Yet despite this Xerox-like approach to filmmaking, Disney isn’t compensating or even crediting the original writers. Screenwriters working in animation don’t have the same protections (or residuals) as their live-action counterparts in the Writers Guild of America, all thanks to some random incident back in 1938.
While a lot of fans were understandably upset to learn this, we’d like to point out that there are possibly other creative parties being shafted here too. Namely, the folks behind Kimba The White Lion. We’ve talked before about how The Lion King is suspiciously similar to the ’60s Japanese series. [...]
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The alleged former operator of Mangamura, a site blamed for causing an estimated $2.9 billion in damages to the Japanese manga industry, has been detained in Manilla. According to immigration officials in the Philippines, 28-year-old Romi Hoshino was arrested Sunday when attempting to board a plane to Hong Kong.
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John Steele, one of the attorneys behind the ‘copyright troll’ law firm Prenda, has been sentenced to five years in prison. The attorney was one of the masterminds behind the fraudulent scheme that extracted settlements from alleged pirates. Because of Steele’s cooperative stance, his sentence is significantly lower than that of co-conspirator Paul Hansmeier.
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Video game key reselling is a vast market and a major pain point for games studios. Small video game development studios are now urging users to pirate games instead of purchasing them from key resellers. Developers say that the sale of keys, which are ultimately sold for a high amount in illegal markets, cost them more than they earn.
One such developer named Mike Rose from No More Robots, a Manchester-based gaming studio is running a petition on change.org. In his petition, he called out G2A, a popular online marketplace for key resellers, to stop selling indie titles on their platform.
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In this article, we will look at Chromebooks and why it is becoming so popular in the world today and if it is worth considering as your next computer or a second computer.
The first Chromebooks arrived in June 2011. They were basic computers that were simply a Chrome Browser on a cheap computer. The price was also quite low. Soon the market grew as many people started to experience the joy which, we Linux users, always enjoyed; fast updates, free and no viruses and let’s face it many people are merely using a computer to browse the internet, and they don’t need the rest and Google released that a Chromebook meet that need.
After Chromebooks grew in popularity, especially in schools, but businesses and for home use also, Google realized that people are missing some apps. As people are familiar to Windows and apps galore, so they brought the Google Play Store to Chromebooks, which has been one of their best moves yet, as people are already familiar with it due to Android phones and as Chrome OS and the Play Store is part of Google, it was an obvious move.
However, this move brought in a new stage for Chromebooks as well because no users can run many more apps, but it also means that Chromebooks needs more system resources, so different price ranges for Chromebooks appears. Cheap ones and pricey ones with powerful hardware.
As Chromebooks become more powerful and more popular Google continues to improve it by bringing more software to it, and the next thing is Linux apps so that we can run native Linux apps like LibreOffice, Blender, etc. on a Chromebook. It is still a work in progress, and they are continuing to improve it so that it can run nearly all the Linux apps in the future flawlessly.
Crossover also released a package to run Windows apps on Chromebooks and Wine also have a package for Android, and I will be surprised if it doesn’t work on Chromebooks as well.
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Desktop
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System76, the US-based maker of powerful Linux computers, announced on Twitter that its Thelio desktop line-up can now be configured with 3rd-generation AMD Ryzen processors.
System76′s Thelio line-up offers customers out-of-this-world handcrafted desktop systems powered by the company’s in-house developed Pop!_OS Linux operating system or Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux, and ships with state-of-the-art hardware components that make your Linux computing experience more enjoyable.
Available in three models, only two of the Thelio desktops can now be configured with AMD Ryzen CPUs, including the 2nd Gen AMD Ryzen 5 with 5 core and 8 threads, 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen 5 3600X with 6 cores and 12 threads, 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen 7 3800X with 8 core and 16 threads, 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with 12 Cores and 24 threads, AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPUs.
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Server
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IBM
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IBM has closed its acquisition of Red Hat following the statement of intent back in October. Following the $34 billion deal, Red Hat will operate as a distinct unit within IBM — and will be reported as part of IBM’s Cloud and Cognitive Software segment.
For IBM, the deal means fully embracing open source as it looks to accelerate its business model within the enterprise. For Red Hat, it means expanding its client base and working with a big player in the enterprise cloud business.
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IBM acquired Red Hat for a cool $34 billion. It’s IBM hope that Red Hat will help IBM’s annual revenue growth within the next five years. That growth will come from the continued rise of the hybrid cloud. How will they do that? The same way Red Hat has always grown: By embracing the open-source software approach.
Specifically, as Paul Cormier, Red Hat’s president of products and technologies, said in a conference call, it will continue moving forward with the hybrid cloud: “Today what we start on is that journey on steroids.”
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IBM has tried multiple ways to stay relevant in the technology world. But it has often been outgunned by rivals like Amazon and Microsoft.
On Tuesday, IBM outlined its latest strategy: using its $34 billion purchase of Red Hat, the largest ever acquisition of a business software company, to get a big piece of the lucrative cloud computing market.
The deal is a high-stakes bet for IBM and its leader, Ginni Rometty. Amazon and Microsoft dominate the cloud computing industry, with Google a distant third. (In China, Alibaba is the clear leader.) They have the internet skills and the deep pockets to spend many billions a year building the vast data centers that power the cloud, helping to protect their lead. But their grasp has raised concerns from customers about being dependent on a single provider.
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International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) has completed its acquisition of Red Hat for $34 billion, thus making it the world’s second-biggest technology acquisition ever. IBM has been struggling to adopt cloud-related technologies. With this deal, IBM will try to go after the market leaders like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Open Source has taken over the world, as IBM’s purchase of Red Hat closes. We reflect on this historic moment.
Plus Mozilla’s been labeled an Internet Villian, we deep dive into the tech behind all the controversy and how you can self-host secure DNS.
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Kernel Space
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Linux Foundation
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Microsoft recently applied to join a private Linux kernel mailing list that’s meant for reporting and discussing security issues privately before they are made public. After a week-long discussion, it’s all but certain that Microsoft will be subscribed to the list.
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The ONAP Dublin release adds new stability and features to the platform including enhanced capabilities for 5G deployment. It also marks a major milestone for adoption and deployment of ONAP which is now being used by multiple global operations including Deutsche Telekom, KDDI, Swisscom, Telstra, TIM, AT&T and Orange. ONAP now also benefits from the consolidation of multiple open source networking projects under the LF Networking umbrella, of which it is a part.
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LF Networking (LFN) has announced the availability of ONAP Dublin, the latest release of the open-source platform for real-time, policy-driven orchestration and automation of physical and virtual network functions.
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Graphics Stack
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Today, NVIDIA’s brand new “SUPER” series has been officially released, along with a new Linux driver.
Available now are both the GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER and GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER, with the GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER due to release later on July 23rd.
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ROCm 2.6 was released overnight and when initially seeing this new Radeon Open Compute support come right after the Radeon RX 5700/5700XT launch, I was hopeful it would bring Navi support but sadly there are no signs of it in this release. But at least ROCm 2.6 is bringing other features.
Radeon ROCm 2.6 brings various information reporting improvements, the first official release of rocThrust and hipCUB, MIGraphX 0.3 for reading models frozen from Tensorflow, MIOpen 2.0 with Bfloat16 support and other features, BFloat 16 for rocBLAS/Tensible, AMD Infinity Fabric Link support, RCCL2 support, rocFFT improvements, ROCm SMI fixes, and other enhancements.
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Hardware
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I first blogged about the state of open source drivers for Arm GPUs 7 years ago, in January 2012, and then again in September 2017. I’ve had a few requests since then to provide an update but I’ve not bothered because there’s really been no real change in the last few years, that is until now!
So the big positive change is that there’s two new open drivers om the scene with the panfrost and lima drivers. Panfrost is a reverse engineered driver for the newer Midguard and Bitfrost series of Mali GPUs designed/licensed by Arm, whereas Lima is aimed at the older Utguard series Mali 4xx series of devices. Panfrost, started by Alyssa Rosenzweig, and now has quite a large contributor base, has over the last few months has been coming along leaps and bounds and by the time Mesa 19.2 is out I suspect it should be able to run gnome-shell on an initial set of devices. I’m less certain the state of Lima. The drivers landed in the kernel in the 5.2 development cycle, which Linus just released. On the userspace side they landed in the mesa 19.1 development cycle, but they’ve greatly improving in mesa 19.2 cycle. Of course they’re all enabled in Fedora rawhide, although I don’t expect them to be really testable until later in the 19.2 cycle, but it makes it easy for early adopters who know they’re doing to be able to start to play.
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For those wondering if upgrading your RAM to higher frequency DIMMs is worthwhile when moving to AMD X570 and a new Zen 2 processor like the Ryzen 9 3900X, here are some reference benchmarks at different frequencies while maintaining the same timings.
In case you missed it, the new AMD processors offer native DDR4-3200 memory support while back during AMD’s press briefings they recommended DDR4-3733 as a “sweet spot” for those wanting optimal latency at a reasonable speed. But if you are after pushing high-end DDR4 to their limits, they say DDR4-5100 can be achieved on air cooling with mild overclocking.
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Applications
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I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to music. My favorite pastime is to see my favorite bands, solo artists, and orchestras live. It’s such a life-changing and exhilarating experience. It’s one thing to be sitting at home listening to a CD or watching music videos on TV or on YouTube, but being in the audience, packed out in a stadium or music hall, takes it to another level. But it’s an expensive pastime. And there are only so many opportunities to attend music performances live. For the rest of the time, I’m listening to music from my CD collection or over the cloud.
I dabble with a wide range of music. Linux is blessed with a mouthwatering array of excellent open source music players. But I’m always on the lookout for fresh, eclectic, and innovative music players.
Olivia is an online/offline cloud-based music player like iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube Music. Olivia allows you to search any music online stream it, You can set the player to save your streams while playback. Olivia lets you create and manage your music library.
Olivia has been in development for a mere 5 months. There’s no official release yet, with the software in a beta stage of development. Olivia is written in C++ and uses Qt, a free and open-source widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.
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Canonical is happy to announce the availability of MAAS 2.6. This new release introduces a range of very exciting features and several improvements that enhances MAAS across various areas.
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Cloaker is one of the easiest tools to encrypt and decrypt single files with cross-platform support (runs on Linux, Windows and macOS).
The free and open source tool has a very basic Qt5 user interface on top of which you drag and drop a file you want to encrypt or decrypt, enter the password (with a minimum length of 10 characters), choose the location where to save the file, and you’re done. What’s more, Cloaker is portable / requires no installation.
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Whenever we hear the word “download manager” or “downloader”, we remember the software Internet Download Manager & Free Download Manager. Good news is that various alternative to IDM and FDM are available for Linux based operating systems.
In this post, we have collected the list of few amazing downloader for Ubuntu operating systems. Downloader for Ubuntu can help you to manage your downloads in a proper way.
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Proprietary
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With the release of SUSE Enterprise Storage 6, users can now take advantage of the advances made in Ceph Nautilus and the Ceph Dashboard, a snappy upgrade that makes managing and monitoring your storage cluster easier than ever.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Supraland released for Linux on Steam on July 2nd and it just released on GOG today but it seems the Linux version will not be heading to GOG.
What is Supraland? It’s a very highly rated first-person action and puzzle game, inspired by the likes of Zelda, Metroid and Portal. It’s popular, with an “Overwhelmingly Positive” rating on Steam from over two thousands user reviews and from my time spent in the demo, I can see why as it was pretty sweet.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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QComboBox::currentIndexChanged(QString) used to have (i.e. in Qt 5.13.0) a deprecation warning that said “Use currentTextChanged() instead”.
That has recently been reverted since both are not totally equivalent, sure, you can probably “port” from one to the other, but the “use” wording to me seems like a “this is the same” and they are not.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The calendar is a fresh new take on the previous one; the individual online accounts rows were removed in favor of delegating it all to GNOME Settings’ Online Accounts panel, navigation is easier and simpler, adding new calendars is a more intuitive operation, and it’s possible to toggle calendars right from the first page.
I’m pretty happy with the rework itself, and splitting it in pages and a controller was definitely the right choice. It allowed implementing the same functionality in a much more well organized way.
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New Releases
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Following on from the launch of the new Raspberry Pi 4 mini PC, Offensive Security has released Kali Linux for Raspberry Pi 4 specifically created to take advantage of everything the pie has to offer. At the moment, Kali Linux for Raspberry Pi 4 is only available in a 32-bit variant, but a 64-bit version is currently under development and will be available sometime “in the near future” says Offensive Security.
“We have a fascination with ARM hardware, and often find Kali very useful on small and portable devices. Over time, we have Built Kali Linux for a wide selection of ARM hardware and offered these images for public download. The scripts used to generate these images can be found on GitLab. These images have a default password of “toor” and may have pre-generated SSH host keys. These images are built using the “kali-rolling” repositories, and contain their respective kernel sources in case you need to compile extra drivers, or other kernel dependent code. We generate fresh Kali Linux image files every few months, which we make available for download. This page provides the links to download Kali Linux in its latest official release. For a release history, check our Kali Linux Releases page.”
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Kali ARM image downloads for various devices. We have Built Kali Linux for a wide selection of ARM hardware and offer these images for public download.
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Tor Browser is fully installed (8.5.4)
System upgrade from Debian Buster repos as of July 9, 2019
Update Linux kernel to 4.19.0-5
Update apt to 1.8.2
Update dpkg to 1.19.7
Update Thunderbird to 60.7.2-1
Update Hexchat to 2.13.2-4
Update youtube-dl to 2019.07.02
ISO Image Writer replaces Rosa Image Writer
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This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.
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After a non-security-critical installation-time bug was found due to expired repository signing keys in the old BL Helium installation ISOs, we just published a new set of Helium install ISOs that have been fixed. The ISO image files are available for direct download or via BitTorrent at the usual place.
This issue only affected brand-new installations. If you already worked around the issue as suggested in our previous announcement, you don’t have to do anything. Existing users of BL also do not need to do anything.
Thanks to all users who reported the issue.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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In this video slideshow, we look at all the stunning backgrounds which will be in Linux Mint 19.2. Enjoy!
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family
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Fedora Family
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TL; DR:
EPEL-8 will have a multi-phase roll-out into production.
EPEL-8.0 will build using existing grobisplitter in order to use a ‘flattened’ build system without modules.
EPEL-8.1 will start in staging without grobisplitter and using default modules via mock.
The staging work will allow for continual development changes in koji, ‘ursa-prime’, and MBS functionality to work without breaking Fedora 31 or initial EPEL-8.0 builds.
EPEL-8.1 will look to be ready by November 2019 after Fedora 31 around the time that RHEL-8.1 may release (if it uses a 6 month cadence.)
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Debian Family
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The Debian community has announced the release of Debian 10 “Buster.” Debian is one of the most popular GNU/Linux-based distributions. Buster will be supported for the next five years.
Buster ships with several desktop environments including, Cinnamon 3.8, GNOME 3.30, KDE Plasma 5.14, LXDE 0.99.2, LXQt 0.14, MATE 1.20, and Xfce 4.12. In this release, GNOME will default to using the Wayland display server instead of Xorg. “The Xorg display server is still installed by default and the default display manager allows users to choose Xorg as the display server for their next session,” said Debian community in a blog post.
The Reproducible Builds project enabled Debian developers to build bit-for-bit identical binary packages of the open-source packages available in Debian 10. “This is an important verification feature, which protects users against malicious attempts to tamper with compilers and build networks. Future Debian releases will include tools and metadata so that end-users can validate the provenance of packages within the archive,” said the blog post.
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At a sprint over the weekend, Ian Jackson and I designed and implemented a system to make it possible for Debian Developers to upload new versions of packages by simply pushing a specially formatted git tag to salsa (Debian’s GitLab instance). That’s right: the only thing you will have to do to cause new source and binary packages to flow out to the mirror network is sign and push a git tag.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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This article is the first in a series of machine learning articles focusing on model serving. I assume you’re reading this article because you’re excited about machine learning and quite possibly Kubeflow as well. You might have done some model training and are now trying to understand how to serve those models in production. There are many ways to serve a trained model in both Kubeflow and outside of Kubeflow. This post should help the reader explore some of the alternatives and what to consider.
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Devices/Embedded
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Inforce announced two Micro SoMs with Android (and soon, Debian) BSPs running on octa-core Qualcomm SoCs. The Inforce 6701 showcases the high-end Snapdragon 845 while the Inforce 6502 taps the Snapdragon 660.
Inforce Computing unveiled a pair of Qualcomm Snapdragon based compute modules using the same 50 x 28mm Micro SoM form factor used in earlier products such as its Snapdragon 600-based Inforce 6401 and Snapdragon 820-based Inforce 6601. The new, Snapdragon 845-driven Inforce 6701 and Snapdragon 660-powered Inforce 6502 ship with BSPs for Android 9.0 Pie and Android 8.0 Oreo, respectively. Debian Linux BSPs are said to be “coming soon.”
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Here we are again, to see the best apps and games downloaded for each month, this time in the Tizen Store in June 2019. As we can see from the list below, WhatsApp Messenger has remained in the top spot but Facebook (which was in second place in many previous months) is not there anymore.
Opera Mini web browser has only dropped one place lower that it had been last month. Usually, we can see that WhatsApp, Facebook and Facebook Messenger would be pretty close together but now there is more of a gap between them. Facebook Messenger proving to be the least popular of the three apps.
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If you are looking for an open source tool to help you write your next novel, bibisco, ManusKript, and Plume Creator can help you get started.
Aspiring writers have no shortage of software that is supposed to help them along the road to a finished manuscript. Whether they are writing a short story or a multi-volume series, this software promises to organize them by providing software and revisable outlines, as well as a supposedly distraction-free full-screen mode and databases for characters, settings, objects, and drafts. On Windows and Mac, the leading software is Scrivener. However, since a Linux version of Scrivener has yet to reach general release, open source alternatives have sprung up like bibisco, Manuskript, and Plume Creator, each with its own approach to writing and outlining.
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Events
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We are pleased to announce that the Android Microconference has been accepted into the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference! Android has a long history at Linux Plumbers and has continually made progress as a direct result of these meetings. This year’s focus will be a fairly ambitious goal to create a Generic Kernel Image (GKI) (or one kernel to rule them all!). Having a GKI will allow silicon vendors to be independent of the Linux kernel running on the device. As such, kernels could be easily upgraded without requiring any rework of the initial hardware porting efforts. This microconference will also address areas that have been discussed in the past.
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Dave kicks things off with a report from FOSS Talk Live 2019. Fab couldn’t make it but says he’s planning to go to this year’s OggCamp. We than discuss the news that Larian is doing Baldur’s Gate III.
Naturally, we must also talk about Magic The Gathering, because it is the best game ever made. The new Core Set comes out this week!
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Today, we release two versions of Firefox 68 — a rapid release as well as an Extended Support Release (ESR).
We’d like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to this release of Firefox!
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We recently closed the first half of 2019 and with that it is time to look back and do a quick summary of what the media team has achieved during this 6 months period.
Looking at some stats, we merged 87 Pull Requests, we opened 56 issues, we closed 42 issues and we welcomed 13 new amazing contributors to the media stack.
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Mozilla has released a new update to its Firefox Quantum browser, following an update that was released back in May this year.
The latest update has brought in new features to the browser that include the ability to have the dark mode for all the sections of the website. This will be applicable to texts, sidebars, and even toolbars.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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The LibreOffice Quality Assurance ( QA ) Team is happy to announce LibreOffice 6.3 RC1 is ready for testing!
LibreOffice 6.3 will be released as final in mid August, 2019, being LibreOffice 6.3 RC1 the forth pre-release since the development of version 6.3 started in mid November, 2018 ( See the release plan ). Since LibreOffice 6.3 Beta2 ( the previous pre-release ), 123 commits have been submitted to the code repository and 66 bugs have been fixed. Check the release notes to find the new features included in this version of LibreOffice.
LibreOffice 6.3 RC1 can be downloaded from here, it’s available for Linux, MacOS and Windows. ( Note tha it will replace your actual installation )
In case you find any problem in this pre-release, please report it in Bugzilla ( You just need a legit email address in order to create a new account ) so it can get fixed before LibreOffice 6.3 final is released.
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BSD
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For four and a half years now, OPNsense is driving innovation through
modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple
and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD
security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear
and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing.
We thank all of you for helping test, shape and contribute to the project!
We know it would not be the same without you.
Download links, an installation guide[1] and the checksums for the images
can be found below as well.
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The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/11 branch.
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FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE is now available. Please be sure to check the Release Notes and Release Errata before installation for any late-breaking news and/or issues with 11.3. More information about FreeBSD releases can be found on the Release Information page.
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This document contains the release notes for FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE. It describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of FreeBSD. It also provides some notes on upgrading from previous versions of FreeBSD.
This distribution of FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE is a release distribution. It can be found at https://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/ or any of its mirrors. More information on obtaining this (or other) release distributions of FreeBSD can be found in the “Obtaining FreeBSD” appendix to the FreeBSD Handbook.
All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before installing FreeBSD. The errata document is updated with “late-breaking” information discovered late in the release cycle or after the release. Typically, it contains information on known bugs, security advisories, and corrections to documentation. An up-to-date copy of the errata for FreeBSD 11.3-RELEASE can be found on the FreeBSD Web site.
This document describes the most user-visible new or changed features in FreeBSD since 11.2-RELEASE. In general, changes described here are unique to the 11.3-STABLE branch unless specifically marked as MERGED features.
Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 11.2-RELEASE, new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options, major bug fixes, or contributed software upgrades. They may also list changes to major ports/packages or release engineering practices. Clearly the release notes cannot list every single change made to FreeBSD between releases; this document focuses primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major architectural improvements.
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FreeBSD 11.3 brings a number of updated user-space applications, libxo support has been enabled for various applications, XZ 5.2.4 has been updated, a Lua loader has been merged, LLVM Clang 8.0 is now available along with other LLVM 8.0.0 components, various networking driver updates, a ZFS file-system fix, and other changes. And, yes, there is a random driver update for improving the performance during the expensive task of reseeding the pool.
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FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC
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Hello!
We are pleased to announce the availability of a new GnuPG release:
version 2.2.17. This is maintenance release to mitigate the effects of
the denial-of-service attacks on the keyserver network. See below for a
list changes.
About GnuPG
===========
The GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG, GPG) is a complete and free implementation
of the OpenPGP and S/MIME standards.
GnuPG allows to encrypt and sign data and communication, features a
versatile key management system as well as access modules for public key
directories. GnuPG itself is a command line tool with features for easy
integration with other applications. The separate library GPGME provides
a uniform API to use the GnuPG engine by software written in common
programming languages. A wealth of frontend applications and libraries
making use of GnuPG are available. As an universal crypto engine GnuPG
provides support for S/MIME and Secure Shell in addition to OpenPGP.
GnuPG is Free Software (meaning that it respects your freedom). It can
be freely used, modified and distributed under the terms of the GNU
General Public License.
Noteworthy changes in version 2.2.17
====================================
* gpg: Ignore all key-signatures received from keyservers. This
change is required to mitigate a DoS due to keys flooded with
faked key-signatures. The old behaviour can be achieved by adding
keyserver-options no-self-sigs-only,no-import-clean
to your gpg.conf. [#4607]
* gpg: If an imported keyblocks is too large to be stored in the
keybox (pubring.kbx) do not error out but fallback to an import
using the options "self-sigs-only,import-clean". [#4591]
* gpg: New command --locate-external-key which can be used to
refresh keys from the Web Key Directory or via other methods
configured with --auto-key-locate.
* gpg: New import option "self-sigs-only".
* gpg: In --auto-key-retrieve prefer WKD over keyservers. [#4595]
* dirmngr: Support the "openpgpkey" subdomain feature from
draft-koch-openpgp-webkey-service-07. [#4590].
* dirmngr: Add an exception for the "openpgpkey" subdomain to the
CSRF protection. [#4603]
* dirmngr: Fix endless loop due to http errors 503 and 504. [#4600]
* dirmngr: Fix TLS bug during redirection of HKP requests. [#4566]
* gpgconf: Fix a race condition when killing components. [#4577]
Release-info: https://dev.gnupg.org/T4606
Getting the Software
====================
Please follow the instructions found at https://gnupg.org/download/ or
read on:
GnuPG 2.2.17 may be downloaded from one of the GnuPG mirror sites or
direct from its primary FTP server. The list of mirrors can be found at
https://gnupg.org/download/mirrors.html. Note that GnuPG is not
available at ftp.gnu.org.
The GnuPG source code compressed using BZIP2 and its OpenPGP signature
are available here:
https://gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/gnupg/gnupg-2.2.17.tar.bz2 (6560k)
https://gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/gnupg/gnupg-2.2.17.tar.bz2.sig
An installer for Windows without any graphical frontend except for a
very minimal Pinentry tool is available here:
https://gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/binary/gnupg-w32-2.2.17_2019... (4185k)
https://gnupg.org/ftp/gcrypt/binary/gnupg-w32-2.2.17_2019...
The source used to build the Windows installer can be found in the same
directory with a ".tar.xz" suffix.
A new version of Gpg4win incluing this version of GnuPG will be released
in a few days.
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Thirty-five volunteers joined FSF staff over the course of three days to get all the Bulletins stuffed in envelopes and mailed out. This was a great opportunity to catch up on free software issues with some of our most dedicated free software enthusiasts here in Boston. We are grateful to have such a strong core of supporters that keep the movement growing, and thanks to your generous contribution, we will be even stronger.
Please be vocal about your support for free software. Read and share the Bulletin articles online using the #ISupportFreeSoftware hashtag, use our fundraiser support images, and talk to your community about why you support the FSF. It makes a difference.
Throughout our spring fundraiser, we have been enjoying both the public posts from supporters using the hashtag on social media, as well as answers to the “What inspired you to join today?” question we ask new members. Here are some of our favorites.
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Free Software Foundation president Richard Stallman (RMS) was in Brno, Czech Republic on June 6, 2019, to give two speeches.
In the morning, he took part in the URBIS Smart City Fair, at the Brno Fair Grounds, giving his speech “Computing, freedom, and privacy.”1
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Hardware/Modding
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The SMD Challenge was born from an insight into the human condition, as its creators explain:
“Making LEDs blink is what people think make Makers happy, but they are wrong. Makers want to be miserable. They like to make mistakes and to have to try things over and over again. That which does not kill us, makes us stronger. This project will make you strong!”
The SMD challenge is a badge you make yourself. This project starts with a relatively easy to solder resistor and LED. It then moves into increasingly tiny resistors and LEDs. Coming in both “Regular Edition” and “Misery Edition,” the SMD challenge is designed to challenge—and break—all but the most determined solderers.
If you do manage to make it all the way to the end (and can document your success), you can enter the prestigious 0201 Club. If you prefer to experience the misery (and success) secondhand, the club also features links showing many of the successful attempts.
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Programming/Development
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Programming languages are commands used to create a software program. These programming languages are used to code and create software that will improve work for many systems in all industries, including the engineering-dependent sectors.
There are two types of programming languages. The first one is called the “high-level languages” and the second one is called the “low-level languages.”
[...]
It is a high-level programming language used for general purposes. Python focuses on the readability of codes. That’s why it is fond of whitespaces.
Python was designed to help programmers in writing readable, logical, and straightforward codes for both small and big projects.
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In this course, you’ll learn about reading and writing files in Python. You’ll cover everything from what a file is made up of to which libraries can help you along that way. You’ll also take a look at some basic scenarios of file usage as well as some advanced techniques.
One of the most common tasks that you can do with Python is reading and writing files. Whether it’s writing to a simple text file, reading a complicated server log, or even analyzing raw byte data, all of these situations require reading or writing a file.
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My GSoC mentor, Sebastian Dröge coded the skeleton of the test with a basic unit test case for HTTP source plugin (aka reqwesthttpsrc). Here is the link to the merge request. The test was to check whether we receive the data correctly which is sent by the server. Here we make a hyper HTTP server which respond with “Hello World”. Then we use our plugin to receive the data and we compare both. Also the interesting thing here is the Custom test harness which can be used to initialize a HTTP server with required behavior and our HTTP element with required properties set. We can use this to create the desired Harness for the any test case.
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In this issue of Wing Tips we continue to look at how to extend Wing’s functionality, by taking a closer look at at the scripting API and writing up a more complex script.
If you haven’t read the previous installments of this series, you may want to take a look at Part 1 where we introduced Wing’s scripting framework and set up auto-completion for the scripting API, Part 2 where we used Wing to debug itself for easier extension script development, and Part 3 where we looked at how to collect arguments from the user.
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A very common things I see among my newer Python students is that often try to access values by index within loops. Part of this is down to experience in other programming languages, where this kind of pattern is common, but there are also situations where they just don’t realise there’s a better way. In this post, I want to show off some of those better ways so you can write more Pythonic loops, and ditch indices in favour of descriptive variable names.
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If you’re a developer creating binary packages, like an RPM, DEB, Flatpak, or Snap, you have to compile code for a variety of different target platforms. Typical targets include 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and ARM. You could do your builds on different physical or virtual machines, but that means maintaining several systems. Instead, you can use the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) to cross-compile, producing binaries for several different architectures from a single build machine.
Assume you have a simple dice-rolling game that you want to cross-compile. Something written in C is relatively easy on most systems, so to add complexity for the sake of realism, I wrote this example in C++, so the program depends on something not present in C (iostream, specifically).
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Science
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In this opinion article, you will find a set of suggestions for the inclusion of enterprise technology into software engineering courses. This piece goes through the difficulties that students face and proposes simplifications successfully used in the past. The continual advancement of enterprise technologies leads to a simplifying of the inclusion process in education.
In the coming years, one can expect that industry demand for experts who know the technology used in enterprise development processes and production systems will increase. Academic institutions are here to prepare experts and leaders for industry, and thus they should know the technologies being used.
It has been ten years since I taught my first software engineering course. Since then, I have taught this course every year. Many software engineering courses put emphasis on analysis and design from the abstract perspective, involving UML models and notations, and letting students develop software projects on their own.
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Security
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The macOS client application for the popular audio and video conferencing service Zoom can be made to forcibly join users to calls, activating Mac microphones video cameras without users being asked for permission, a researcher has found.
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The first release candidate of Samba 4.11 is now available while Samba 4.12 begins development on Git master.
With Samba 4.11 there is the notable work around making it scalable to 100,000+ users with hundreds of thousands of objects. This is making Samba of more relevance for use in very large organizations. Samba 4.11 also brings other performance optimizations, lower memory usage, search performance enhancements, and other scalability work.
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Samba says its next release will switch off previously on-by-default support for the aging and easily subverted SMB1 protocol. It can be reenabled for those truly desperate to use the godforsaken deprecated protocol version.
The open-source SMB toolkit’s developers say the Samba 4.11 build, currently in preview, will by default set SMB2_02 as the earliest supported version of the Windows file-sharing protocol.
“This means clients without support for SMB2 or SMB3 are no longer able to connect to smbd (by default),” the 4.11 release notes read.
“It also means client tools like smbclient and others, as well as applications making use of libsmbclient are no longer able to connect to servers without SMB2 or SMB3 support (by default).”
Admins will still have the option to allow SMB1 on their servers if they so choose, but support will be turned off by default.
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“Canonical has removed the compromised account from the Canonical organization in GitHub and is still investigating the extent of the breach, but there is no indication at this point that any source code or PII was affected,” the team said.
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Microsoft will become a member of the sought after Linux-distros mailing list, which privately discusses non-public security issues. To qualify for the membership, a member must have been submitting fixes for at least a year, with the tech giant’s anniversary and join date on August 5.
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As it stands right now, there are representatives from ALT Linux, Amazon Linux AMI, Arch Linux, Chrome OS, CloudLinux, CoreOS, Debian, Gentoo, Openwall, Oracle, Red Hat, Slackware, SUSE, Ubuntu, and Wind River on the list. According to the list’s information page, issues disclosed here are subject to a maximum embargo period of 14 days but seven days are preferable.
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Zoom had a vulnerability that allowed users on MacOS to be connected to a video conference with their webcam active simply by visiting an appropriately crafted page. Zoom’s response has largely been to argue that:
a) There’s a setting you can toggle to disable the webcam being on by default, so this isn’t a big deal,
b) When Safari added a security feature requiring that users explicitly agree to launch Zoom, this created a poor user experience and so they were justified in working around this (and so introducing the vulnerability), and,
c) The submitter asked whether Zoom would pay them for disclosing the bug, and when Zoom said they’d only do so if the submitter signed an NDA, they declined.
(a) and (b) are clearly ludicrous arguments, but (c) is the interesting one. Zoom go on to mention that they disagreed with the severity of the issue, and in the end decided not to change how their software worked. If the submitter had agreed to the terms of the NDA, then Zoom’s decision that this was a low severity issue would have led to them being given a small amount of money and never being allowed to talk about the vulnerability. Since Zoom apparently have no intention of fixing it, we’d presumably never have heard about it. Users would have been less informed, and the world would have been a less secure place.
[...]
If your bug bounty requires people sign an NDA, you should think about why. If it’s so you can control disclosure and delay things beyond 90 days (and potentially never disclose at all), look at whether the amount of money you’re offering for that is anywhere near commensurate with the value the submitter could otherwise gain from the information and compare that to the reputational damage you’ll take from people deciding that it’s not worth it and just disclosing unilaterally. And, seriously, never ask for an NDA before you’re committing to a specific $ amount – it’s never reasonable to ask that someone sign away their rights without knowing exactly what they’re getting in return.
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Since the Microsoft Patch Tuesday is also the day when other vendors also release security patches, it’s also worth mentioning that Adobe and SAP have also published their respective security updates earlier today.
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The FreeIPA project focused on Kerberos and SSSD, with enough other parts glued on to look like a complete IDM project. Now that’s fine, but it means that concerns in other parts of the project are largely ignored. It creates design decisions that are not scalable or robust.
Due to these decisions IPA has stability issues and scaling issues that other products do not.
To be clear: security systems like IDM or LDAP can never go down. That’s not acceptable.
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The canonical Security is once again under questionable notice. The forum has been hacked thrice on different occasions. In July 2013, details of 1.82 Million users were stolen by hackers followed by the second hacking where 2 million users data were stolen in July 2016 and in July 2019, the Github account of Canonical limited has been hacked.
This company works behind the distribution of Ubuntu Linux and was hacked on July 6th, 2019. The Security team accepted that the Canonical owned account on Github was compromised on credentials and was used to create disturbance and issues among other activities. Though the company has removed the account from the organization in Github, it is still working on checking out the breach. The company believes that the source code or PII was affected in any way.
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Environment
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Commuters in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore area faced an extremely difficult and dangerous drive back to work on Monday morning following the long holiday weekend as heavy downpours flooded local roadways.
Videos have surfaced on social media in which the raging floodwaters turned roads into rivers. One social media user captured a video while driving through high floodwaters in the Virginia Avenue Tunnel on Monday morning and said, “You’re going to need a boat to pass underneath the Virginia Ave. underpass on I-66 in NW D.C.”
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A flash flood warning has been issued for the Washington, D.C., metro area until 1:45 p.m. Monday by the National Weather Service.
In one hour, some spots just west of the nation’s capital saw over 3 inches of rain, especially along the Potomac River.
Areas of concern include the Great Falls, Virginia, area and southeastern Montgomery County, Maryland.
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A cohort of progressive Democrats plan to introduce a resolution declaring a climate emergency Tuesday in Congress, a move that could open the door to decisive action on the crisis.
The Guardian’s Emily Holden reported Monday afternoon that Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) are expected to introduce a resolution calling for naming the climate crisis an “emergency” on Tuesday. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, also plans to introduce the resolution in the upper chamber, according to the reporting.
In comment to The Guardian, Blumenauer’s office said that the congressman “decided to draft the resolution after Donald Trump declared an emergency at the U.S. border with Mexico so he could pursue building a wall between the two countries.”
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Veteran broadcaster David Attenborough has expressed his disappointment at the rise of climate science denial in the US and Australia and called on voters to respond.
Referencing the rise of climate science denial in some countries while giving evidence to a committee of MPs in the UK, Attenborough said he was “sorry that there are people in power and internationally, notably the United States, but also in Australia” where “those voices are clearly heard”. He said he hoped the “electorate will actually respond” to public figures that promote climate science denial.
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The opposition to one of President Trump’s most consequential regulatory rollbacks — a plan to weaken pollution standards for automobiles nationwide — widened on Tuesday when 24 governors, including three Republicans, urged the president to abandon his plan.
The governors’ plea adds to a chorus of criticism from an unlikely mix of voices, including not only environmentalists and labor unions but also some of the biggest automakers in the world. The two dozen governors include the leaders of four states — North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Montana — that voted for Trump in 2016, helping propel him into the White House.
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Governors from more than 20 states — including some won by Donald Trump in the 2016 election — joined California officials to urge his administration to implement automobile emissions rules that are consistent nationwide and require efficiency improvements each year.
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Citing climate-damaging tailpipe emissions, 23 governors signed a pledge Tuesday backing California leaders in their showdown with the Trump administration over its plans to relax vehicle mileage standards .
The pledge by leaders of states and Puerto Rico, most of them Democrats, comes as the administration seeks to ease tougher mileage standards laid out by former President Barack Obama as part of his efforts against climate change. Legal challenges to Trump’s policy proposal threaten to disrupt the auto industry for years, and an influential auto industry trade group is renewing its appeal for the compromise.
The administration says American consumers increasingly want bigger, less-efficient SUVs and pickup trucks . It argues that demanding ever-more fuel-efficient vehicles will drive up automobile costs and keep less-safe, older vehicles on the road longer; opponents challenge that claim.
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An enormous glacier the size of Florida may be on the brink of melting so quickly it could cause catastrophic global sea level rises, scientists have warned.
While the climate crisis has seen temperatures soar and rapidly reduce ice levels in the Arctic, down in the Antarctic, far larger ice sheets containing much more water are now believed to be at significant risk of collapse, despite previously being considered stable.
The Thwaites Glacier is one of five recently identified unstable Antarctic glaciers which have doubled their rate of ice loss in just six years.
Covering 70,000 square miles, it is likely to accelerate its flow into the ocean, a new study into Antarctic ice sheet stability has suggested.
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Sea-level rise may accelerate significantly if marine ice sheets become unstable. If such instability occurs, there would be considerable uncertainty in future sea-level rise projections due to imperfectly modeled ice sheet processes and unpredictable climate variability. In this study, we use mathematical and computational approaches to identify the ice sheet processes that drive uncertainty in sea-level projections. Using stochastic perturbation theory from statistical physics as a tool, we show mathematically that the marine ice sheet instability greatly amplifies and skews uncertainty in sea-level projections with worst-case scenarios of rapid sea-level rise being more likely than best-case scenarios of slower sea-level rise. We also perform large ensemble simulations with a state-of-the-art ice sheet model of Thwaites Glacier, a marine-terminating glacier in West Antarctica that is thought to be unstable. These ensemble simulations indicate that the uncertainty solely related to internal climate variability can be a large fraction of the total ice loss expected from Thwaites Glacier. We conclude that internal climate variability alone can be responsible for significant uncertainty in projections of sea-level rise and that large ensembles are a necessary tool for quantifying the upper bounds of this uncertainty.
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The mathematical models the researchers created make the most catastrophic scenarios of rapid melting and fast rises in sea water levels seems much more likely than the best-case scenarios of a slow sea level rise. Just how much ice the glaciers will shed in the next 50 to 800 years is impossible to predict since the climate is constantly changing and more data is needed. And yet, the researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the University of Washington factored the instability into 500 ice flow simulations for Thwaites with refined calculations, according to Phys.org.
While the scenarios showed a wide-range of possibilities, they consistently pointed to an irreversible instability in the glacier that would keep pushing the ice out to sea at an enormously accelerated rate over the coming centuries.
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Energy
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As the Trump administration scrambles to formalize its rollback of clean car standards, 24 governors are telling the President to pump the brakes on the proposed rule. The governors have signed a letter, as reported this morning in The New York Times, Associated Press, and Bloomberg, requesting that the administration reconsider the rollback of fuel efficiency and emissions standards, and to honor California’s authority under the Clean Air Act to write its own standards, which other states are allowed under the law to sign onto.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Early on, as the scope of Russia’s disinformation and hacking efforts were being revealed, there was a tendency on many fronts to downplay the width and breadth of the problem. For example, early whistleblower revelations of Russia’s troll factories–which pump bile and misinformation into the internet bloodstream 24/7–were downplayed as just a few harmless sods posting lame memes in broken English. In time, it became clear that the efforts were larger and far more sophisticated than previously believed.
The hack of the DNC was similarly downplayed for years. Posing as a Romanian hacker, Russian intelligence sowed all manner of chaos with a carefully timed and leaked reveal of DNC data. Yet even many US journalists downplayed that possibility. Others, thanks largely to flimsy, troll-backed conspiracy theories, routinely claimed the DNC had hacked itself. And still others implied the hack was some kind of mass delusion. We now know the hack was part of a documented attack by Russian intelligence, only exposed due to some sloppy opsec by Russian intelligence agents.
Here on planet Earth, one thing keeps being made abundantly clear: the scope of Russia’s disinformation and hacking efforts are continually being revealed as much bigger than both “conventional wisdom” and crackpot wingnut theory dictated. The latest case in point: the Seth Rich conspiracy, which proclaimed that the DNC staffer had been covertly murdered instead of being robbed, has infected brains across the internet for years now. While the theory was never true, it gained traction thanks to a wide variety of voices ranging from Wikileaks to Fox News.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The proliferation of deep fake videos is going to start having an effect on First Amendment protections. Hint: it’s not going to make these protections any stronger.
“Deep fake” may be easier to define than “fake news,” but that doesn’t mean there won’t be collateral damage. The issue isn’t a new one. Faking reality has been around nearly as long as reality itself. Cheap tools that make this anyone’s game is the only thing new. Before we had deep fakes, we had Photoshop and its imitators.
Video used to be the last bulwark of truth. It couldn’t be faked easily. But this too has been abused for years. Editing video to make it show what the editor wants it to show is a tactic that has been used for years. Now, however, tools make it possible to put new words in peoples’ mouths, as was demonstrated to devastating satirical effect when a video of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was tricked out to make it appear as though Zuckerberg was promising to swallow every user’s data and privacy.
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The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has decided it’s OK if a government agency searches a phone that should never have been seized in the first place… so long as it’s not the same government agency that illegally seized it. The illegality of the original seizure — which should have provoked some discussions of poisonous trees and their harmful fruit — is pretty much discarded in favor of the good faith exception.
The backstory is this: Charles Fulton Jr. was targeted by the Galveston (TX) Police Department — working in tandem with the FBI — for sex trafficking and prostitution of teens. He was ultimately found guilty on four sex trafficking charges, prompting this appeal of the district court’s refusal to toss out the evidence pulled from his seized phone.
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GitHub has removed code that is based on DeepNude — an app that uses AI to digitally undress pictures of women and create fake nudes.
While the maker of DeepNude has already shut down the project and made it illegal to use or possess copies of the app, multiple repositories based on the DeepNude algorithm have cropped up on GitHub and also on other platforms.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Over the years, UK ISPs have been forced by the government to censor an increasing array of “controversial” content, including copyrighted material and “terrorist content.” In fits and spurts, the UK has also increasingly tried to censor pornography, despite that being a decidedly impossible affair. Like most global censorship efforts, these information blockades often rely on Domain Name Server (DNS) level blacklists by UK ISPs.
Historically, like much of the internet, DNS hasn’t been all that secure. That’s why Mozilla recently announced it would begin testing something called “DNS over HTTPS,” a significant security upgrade to DNS that encrypts and obscures your domain requests, making it difficult to see which websites a user is visiting. Obviously, this puts a bit of a wrinkle in the government, ISP, or other organizational efforts to use DNS records to block and filter content or track user activity.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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Potential productivity benefits for architecture, engineering, and construction may depend on the outcome of copyright litigation by the International Code Council (ICC) against San Francisco-based startup UpCodes. The firm, which aims to reduce perceived bottlenecks in the implementation of the nation’s 93,000 building codes, faces charges that its public posting of codes undermines the public-private partnership that develops them.
The nonprofit ICC, which prepares the International Building Code and other model codes adopted by multiple jurisdictions, contends that UpCodes has appropriated its property and “does not need to violate ICC’s copyrights to further its claim to innovate,” an anonymous ICC spokesperson commented for this article through its public relations firm. UpCodes regards its practice as fair use, citing precedents establishing that information “incorporated by reference” into law (the applicable legal term) enters the public domain. Other appeals courts, ICC counters, have protected copyrights in cases it considers comparable.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The groups warned that the system could label students as threats based on data such as physical disabilities or those seeking mental health care.
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Monopolies
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Copyrights
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This recommendation was followed up by Rose and other game developers on Twitter, suggesting that anyone thinking about buying a resold game key via G2A just pirate their games instead. This isn’t he first time we’ve seen this sort of thing specifically about G2A, which is one of the more popular Steam key resellers out there. A couple of years ago, another indie game studio went so far as to put its game up on The Pirate Bay itself just to keep money from reaching the hands of G2A.
The big problem here is that game developers regularly give away free or cheap Steam keys to influencers and others in the hopes of promoting the game on the internet. Some of those influencers then turn around and resell those keys on the G2A market. For its part, G2A insists that it will take down fraudulent sellers and even issue refunds to devs that can prove the keys sold were obtained by nefarious means, but that’s generally a lot of window dressing, given that G2A also buys Google ads to place its own links at the top of search results for these same indie games. Meanwhile, these resold keys generate no revenue for the developer, but do increase their costs in customer service, server requirements for online games, etc.
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A decade ago, you may recall, there was a big copyright fight concerning the iconic “Hope” poster that artist Shepard Fairey had created for the Obama campaign. The Associated Press realized that Fairey had used one of its photos as the “model” for making the poster, and started demanding money (there was also a side issue where the actual photographer kept changing his story, first claiming he was thrilled that Fairey had used it, then arguing that the copyright on the photo was his and not the AP’s, and then getting angry at Fairey). Eventually Fairey filed for declaratory judgment of non-infringement, against the AP, arguing that his use was covered by fair use. We argued at the time that he had a very strong case. However, Fairey poisoned his own position in the lawsuit by stupidly first (falsely) claiming he had used a different photograph as the basis for his poster and then destroying evidence about which photo he had used. That’s bad. Really bad. So, it wasn’t a huge surprise to see Fairey eventually agree to just settle the lawsuit, rather than fight for the fair use ruling, since the case was so muddied by his own early actions.
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Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 3:20 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Keeping judges embattled and under the control of Office aristocracy
Summary: The priorities of EPO management reveal the sheer misunderstanding if not malice; either they do not know how to run a patent office or they intentionally try to make it fail (where it matters most)
THE patent system in Europe used to be a lot better than the system in the United States. If one does not get distracted by number of patents and instead focuses on the quality of patents…
Benoît Battistelli‘s attack on the EPO has considerably lowered patent quality — to the point where it grants patents that even the USPTO would reject, e.g. European software patents. Who benefits from this?
“Why would Campinos even want to attend a meeting of a lobby/pressure group? This has sadly become far too routine; never does he attend events of actual scientists.”The EPO is nowadays increasingly pissing off even law firms, which one might expect to love this crazed patent zeal or support for patent trolls. About a week ago Managing IP (a front for law firms) published “Lawyers urge EPO for quality as new plan branded propaganda”. On Tuesday it published “Lawyers doubtful that new EPO appeal rules will improve efficiency” (the site mostly/only speaks for lawyers; their writers admitted this bias to me). This is the latest EPO ‘reform’ and response to it:
European lawyers say that revised rules at the EPO’s Boards of Appeal could lead to cases becoming overloaded with documents due to fears of late-stage claims being impermissible
Revised rules of procedure at the EPO’s Boards of Appeal and their focus on avoiding late amendments and submissions could see parties ‘front-load’ their arguments at an earlier stage, causing a headache for first instance divisions, lawyers say.
We have meanwhile noticed that the front group IBM uses for lobbying [1, 2] (e.g. for software patents in the United States), the IP Owners’ Association, plans to have António Campinos as a speaker alongside Andrei Iancu (both EPO and USPTO are now dominated by ‘moles’ of litigation zealots). IPO says “Campos” (as in, “EPO President António Campos”). They don’t even know who’s invited? In their own words:
Keynote speakers will include USPTO Director Andrei Iancu and EPO President António Campos. As usual, the three-day Meeting will convene IP lawyers, in-house experts, academics and government representatives, as well as IP service providers, from around the world – and all for the discussion of trends, strategies, best practices and thought leadership.
Why would Campinos even want to attend a meeting of a lobby/pressure group? This has sadly become far too routine; never does he attend events of actual scientists. That serves to reveal who today’s EPO really strives to serve and we’ve taken note of similar things dozens of times before. The only time we see EPO officials together with scientists there’s some expensive festival (millions of euros wasted per hour) in which they piggyback these scientists’ accomplishments, having invited (and paid) media companies for puff pieces. █
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