In this clip, Linode founder Christopher Aker recalls the story of how he came to create Linode. He had left his previous job to focus on a new venture and was impressed with the work that was being done to turn Linux into a user-space program. That gave him an idea about virtualization. Rest is history now, Linode is one of the earlier pioneers of – cloud – which enables users to run any workload on remote machines without having to buy expensive hardware and deal with its management and maintenance.
Packt's recent story about Rust had the headline "Rust is the future of systems programming, C is the new Assembly."
But there was an interesting discussion about the story on LWN.net. One reader suggested letting people write drivers for the Linux kernel in Rust. ("There's a good chance that encouraging people to submit their wacky drivers in Rust would improve the quality of the driver, partly because you can focus attention on the unsafe parts.")
The Intel Icelake Linux support has largely been squared away for months but one lingering important feature for many is the Thunderbolt support and that's now set to be introduced with the upcoming Linux 5.4 version.
With Icelake, the Thunderbolt controller is now implemented on the processor itself (sans the Thunderbolt power circuitry) and this required some rework of the Linux kernel Thunderbolt driver code. It took a while through a few rounds of code revisions and review but that Icelake Thunderbolt support is now ready for Linux 5.4.
Great news this weekend for APU fans out there – while the AMD Navi GPUs and Ryzen 3rd generation chips are currently taking over the computing world, it doesn’t mean that the company has forgotten about its integrated graphics users.
In a recent report by Tom’s Hardware, it looks like AMD’s next generation APU (Accelerated Processing Unit) might come with LPDDR4X-4266 memory support. If true, this means that AMD Renoir will have a higher maximum data rate than AMD Picasso.
FL Studio is a robust digital audio workstation and musical creation tool for the Windows and Mac platforms. It’s commercial software and considered one of the best musical production programs available today. However, FL Studio does not work on Linux, and no support is planned in the future. So, if you’ve just switched to the Linux platform and want to create music, you’ll need a good alternative. Here are 5 great alternatives to FL Studio to use on Linux!
Once upon a time, the world of Windows music players was ruled by Winamp. It was resurrected a few months ago and works quite well even though it has not received much love in years.
If you want the look-and-feel of good ol' Winamp, with better features, Audacious may be the music player you're looking for.
I tested the program on Windows and Linux. And since they are quite similar, we'll be discussing the Windows version here. The Winamp interface uses a context-menu for most features, so we will focus on the default GTK interface to explore the options.
A hex editor is a computer program used for editing a binary file that contains machine-readable data. It paves the way of manipulating raw binary data for a particular application. “Hex” is the short form of hexadecimal, a numerical standard format that represents the binary program. A regular hex editor has three specific areas such as ‘character area’ on the right, ‘hexadecimal area’ in the middle and the ‘address area’ on the left. Additionally, some hex editors are designed to edit and parse sector data from the hard disk and floppy disk which are frequently called disk editor or sector editor. There are far ranges of Linux hex editor available in the market; that to a greater extent make a user squarely beneficial, and allow them to edit binary program.
In 2017, I started working on a new book to teach Linux command line in our online summer training. The goal was to have the basics covered in the book, and the same time not to try to explain things which can be learned better via man pages (yes, we encourage people to read man pages).
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We are starting with only a few problems, but I (and a group of volunteers) will slowly add many more problems. We will also increase the complexity by increasing the number of machines and having setup more difficult systems. This will include the basic system administration related tasks.
In addition to NetBSD seeing better DRM ioctl support for its Linux compatibility layer (as part of an effort towards possible Steam support) thanks to Google Summer of Code 2019, there were also Wine improvements as a result of this Google programming initiative.
Student developer Naveen Narayanan worked the summer on improving NetBSD's Wine support, particularly when it comes to AMD64 (x86_64) support.
Hellblade Senua's Sacrifice running through Steam play.
Valve seem to be using Early Access to really mix things up for Dota Underlords, with a new update out adding in Contraptions you can put on the board.
While I like Underlords a lot, I was pretty keen to see them do a little more with it. So the idea of Contraptions is pretty fun and it does mix the gameplay up quite a bit. You can place them on the board, move them around and they will affect the combat making placement even more crucial than ever. They also don't count against the normal unit cap.
People often ask me (joking, no one asks me anything, I ain't got no friends) what my favorite Linux desktop is. And my answer is, well, long and complicated. But I guess, in the past fifteen years, I've mostly used and loved Plasma and Unity, with some brief moments of joy with Gnome 2. Then, inevitably, the question of Xfce comes up, and my answer is even longer and more complicated.
The release of Xfce 4.14 might provide a part of the answer you're looking for. And you should definitely look at my reviews of various distros running Xfce, like say Xubuntu or MX Linux, to get a sense of what this desktop environment does, and how it does it. But then, it's never been really my default go-to setup, although I did use it quite successfully and effectively - and still do - on my feisty, 10-year-old Asus eeePC netbook. On the desktop proper, I like it, and I liked what it did approximately three years or so. Since, it's kind of kept a quiet profile, not quite here nor there. Well, I want to see if the new version has the kick to make my proverbial colt buck and gallop. Testing time it is then!
Here’s week 86 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! There are lots and lots of cool changes, which is especially impressive as the KDE community prepares for Akademy, which kicks off next weekend. Sadly I cannot attend this year–there was an unavoidable scheduling conflict with my best friend’s wedding–but I will be there in spirit!
Akademy is the yearly get-together of the KDE community and of KDE e.V. (the association that supports the community’s activities). As always, the conference and attendance is free (gratis).
This will be the first Krita release since the big sprint. We’re aiming to do monthly bugfix releases again from now on! But we also want to cut down on the regressions that come with rapid development so we’re making beta releases again. Please help the team out and check these beta releases for bugs and regressions. R
This past week was GNOME's annual developer conference, GUADEC. Video recordings from all the presentations at this event in Thessaloniki, Greece are now online.
Linux Lite 4.6 Final is now available for download and install.
This release has a number of changes.
After several months of work, the final version of the Linux Lite 4.6 operating system is here, coming five months after the previous version, Linux Lite 4.4. The entire system is based on Canonical's recently released Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, but it doesn't ship with its newer HWE (Hardware Enablement) Linux 5.0 kernel by default.
Instead, Linux Lite 4.6 is still powered by the stock Linux 4.15 kernel of the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system series, though users will be able to install a wide range of kernels from Linux 3.13 to Linux 5.2 from the official Linux Lite software repositories.
I’m not sure how many have noticed, but DNF hasn’t been downloading zchunk metadata in Fedora since the beginning of this month due to a bug in… well, it’s complicated.
Let’s start with the good news. The fact that almost nobody has noticed means that the fallback to non-zchunk metadata is working perfectly. Fedora is still generating zchunk metadata. When we get the fix built for Fedora, DNF will automatically go back to downloading zchunk metadata. And, when that happens, almost nobody will notice (but their metadata downloads will be greatly reduced in size again)
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There are a couple of ways to fix this. The method we’ve gone with is to define WITH_ZCHUNK in libdnf so LRO_SUPPORTS_CACHEDIR is defined once more. This fix is currently in review, and once it’s pushed upstream, we’ll try to get libdnf builds done in Fedora with it included.
Peter Paris requested that C TAP Harness support being built as C++ code. I've not been a big fan of doing this with pure C code since I find some of the requirements of C++ mildly irritating, but Peter's initial patch also fixed one type error in a malloc uncovered because of one of C++'s rules requiring the return of malloc be cast. It turned out to be a mostly harmless error since the code was allocating a larger struct than it needed to, but it's still evidence that there's some potential here for catching bugs.
That said, adding an explicit cast to every malloc isn't likely to catch bugs. That's just having to repeat oneself in every allocation, and you're nearly as likely to repeat yourself incorrectly.
Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and Debian Extended Long Term Support (ELTS), which extend the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor.
The 8th monthly report of 2019 of the Sparky project:
● Sparky 2019.08 (semi-)rolling based on Debian testing “Bullseye” released ● Chours translate Wiki pages to Russian, so I do that to Polish as well; let me know if you would like to translate Sparky Wiki to your language ● Sparky 2019.08 Special Editions released ● Linux kernel updated up to version 5.2.11 & 5.3-rc6 ● Nemomen started translating Sparky tools to Hungarian ● added to repos: FreeOffice office suite
The release of Ubuntu Linux 19.10 edges ever closer, with an expected Beta release landing on September 26 ahead of the planned October 17 launch. Here's a brief rundown of what to expect, and a few features that might make it worth the upgrade from versions 18.10 or 19.04.
As always Ubuntu 19.10 will introduce the usual minor interface and software tweaks, but there are some highlights I'm seriously looking forward to, such as flicker-free boot for Intel users, similar to what you see today in Fedora 30.
The RK3399 SoC has been used in a huge variety of devices. From Chromebooks to SBCs, routers, TV boxes, and even the upcoming Pinebook Pro. With its six cores, gigabit ethernet, USB 3.0, and PCIe support, it’s clearly an SBC powerhouse in the ARM world. I’ve often wondered what kind of benefit was actually gained from using an SSD with an ARM CPU, though. So, I put the Rock Pi 4 to the test.
We’ve covered the Rock Pi 4 before, which you can check out here. It’s a very solid SBC with the RK3399 CPU, which has been modeled in the image of the Raspberry Pi. It bears an almost identical footprint by using the known and beloved Raspberry Pi form factor. This becomes all the more impressive when considering that it comes with six cores, up to 4GB of RAM, PCIe x4 in the form of an M.2 connector, 2x USB 3.0, USB C, 2x USB 2.0, gigabit ethernet, 5GHz wireless, Bluetooth, and a Raspberry Pi compatible GPIO array. There’s more connectivity on this board than any project can sensibly make use of.
Probably the most interesting aspect of the product is its self-driving feature, which has resulted in a whole range of sensors and cameras (Intel RealSense D430 stereo vision depth sensors) being installed. To handle the processing of this sensor data, the system is equipped with an NVidia Jetson TX2 ARM board, running Ubuntu Linux, which also renders the mixed-reality UI for the user with way points and other information.
The EOMA68 computer card design was novel when first talked about for interchangeable Arm-based computer cards that could also be installed within laptops and other devices. But even after being worked on for years and raising more than $234k USD, it's still not ready yet to see the light of day.
We hadn't heard much at all about EOMA68 this year since their ultimately failed plans of shipping the EOMA68 back in 2018. More recently the lead engineer Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton has been investing time in his plans for a libre RISC-V SoC design unrelated to EOMA68 but for potentially yielding a libre Vulkan accelerator for open-source graphics.
All of the applications below are confirmed to run on the Librem 5 Smartphone running PureOS.
Each application is grouped into one of three categories based on how optimized it is for the mobile screen.
Today marks the last day that the Ecuadorean prosecution has to investigate its case against Ola Bini, the Swedish free software programmer€ who was arrested there in April and detained for over two months without trial and without clear charges. On Thursday, the judge accepted a plea by the prosecutors to change the nature of the charges, switching from one part of Ecuador’s broad cybercrime statute to another. It seems likely that the prosecution will rely on evidence uncovered a few weeks ago that depicted Bini accessing an open, publicly available telnet service: an act that is, in itself, entirely legal under any reasonable interpretation of the law
The sudden swapping out of charges at the last moment is just the latest twist in a politically charged and technically confused prosecution. It should be no surprise, then, that Amnesty International this week released a statement denouncing Ecuador’s treatment of Bini. The organization, which works to protect human rights globally, has determined that the Ecuadorian state failed to comply with its obligations under international law during Bini’s arrest and subsequent detention. In addition to this pronouncement, Amnesty has also expressed serious concern that political interference jeopardizes the chance for a fair trial, concerns that EFF has raised as well.
TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 16 final is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). This final version has a correctness fix to the VMX text fragment scanner found while upstreaming it to mainline Firefox for the Talos II, as well as minor outstanding security updates. Assuming no issues, it will become live on Monday afternoon-evening Pacific time (because I'm working on Labor Day).
Few users expected more changes in this release, a user commented on HackerNews, “So … only two relevant changes this time?” While others think that there are editors comparatively better than Emacs.
Another user commented, “I don’t want to start a flamewar, but I moved most things I was doing in Emacs to Textadept a while back because I found Textadept more convenient. That’s not to say TA does everything you can do in Emacs, but it replaced all of the scripting I was doing with Emacs. You have the full power of Lua inside TA. Emacs always has a lag when I start it up, whereas TA is instant. I slowly built up functionality inside TA to the point that I realized I could replace everything I was doing in Emacs.”
In this example, a root number and the number which indicates how many numbers of times that root number should get multiplied have been passed into a function which will then return a list of multiplied numbers of that original number. For example, if we pass in 3 and 5 to this method multiples(3, 5), we will receive a list of multiplied numbers: [5, 10, 15].
For this coming back month, Tryton has still improved for the users by simplifying some usage but also for the developers by providing more tools.
Our bold design includes the Roberto Clemente Bridge, also known as the Sixth Street Bridge, which spans the Allegheny River in downtown Pittsburgh. The Pittsburgh Steelmark, was originally created for United States Steel Corporation to promote the attributes of steel: yellow lightens your work; orange brightens your leisure; and blue widens your world. The PPG Building, is a complex in downtown Pittsburgh, consisting of six buildings within three city blocks and five and a half acres. Named for its anchor tenant, PPG Industries, who initiated the project for its headquarters, the buildings are all of matching glass design consisting of 19,750 pieces of glass. Also included in the design are a fun snake, terminal window, and hardware related items.
This is the second (and final) installment of Jeffrey St. Clair’s essay, Deep Time and the Green River, Floating. Click here to read Part One.
Karl Marx is widely regarded as one of the most sophisticated theorists of human history. Marx was above all a scientist. He used the term historical materialism to explain that it was the material state of society that produced human relations. Today, perhaps especially in the United States, the mainstream tends to tell us it is the other way around. The American Dream argues that material gains comes from hard work, discipline and innovation.
Valerie Harper, who scored guffaws, stole hearts and busted TV taboos as the brash, self-deprecating Rhoda Morgenstern on back-to-back hit sitcoms in the 1970s, has died.
On a recent night on duty at my hospital, I was called to the room of a 60-year-old patient from Puerto Rico. He had a treatable cancer that had now turned end-stage and metastatic. But he refused medical interventions such as intubation or resuscitation.
In this tutorial, we are going to show you the multiple ways to install security updates on RHEL and CentOS operating system.
Basically, we will use four different methods to intstall security updates on RedHat and CentOS operating system.
The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the New York Times reports, fears “ransomware” attacks against America’s voter registration systems in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. In response, it’s launching a program that “narrowly focuses” on protecting those systems.
In the almost 12 hours of Democratic Party presidential primary debates on June 26-27 and July 30-31, the words “Pentagon budget” or “defense spending” were not uttered, except for a fleeting, unanswered comment from Senator Bernie Sanders. Nor did any of the cable news moderators ask a single question about the more than $1.25 trillion dollars spent in 2019 for national security.
Though I encounter students and other young people who have never heard the term I hope most Americans are aware of the “Military Industrial Complex.” In his final speech to the nation President Eisenhower, surprisingly since he oversaw much of its formation, warned citizens of the growing danger of the “permanent armaments industry” controlled by those who owned and profited greatly from this new scientific and technological establishment. Many of the giant arms industries, both industrial and high tech, that dominate the corporate landscape today came into existence as the result of war and would long ago have gone out of business in the absence of the guaranteed government profits flowing from the manufactured wars that sustain them today.
U.S. defense spending is out of control, severely undermining our ability to tackle climate change, infrastructure needs, health care, and other national challenges.€ The mainstream media, particularly the€ New York Times€ and€ Washington Post, contribute to the problem of defense spending by understating the cost of defense.
When shots rang out last year at a high school in Parkland, Florida, leaving 17 people dead, President Donald Trump quickly turned his thoughts to creating more mental institutions.
So now Oracle is appealing the Pentagon's award to Amazon of its US$10 billion JEDI contract to provide cloud computing solutions.
"The Court of Federal Claims opinion in the JEDI bid protest describes the JEDI procurement as unlawful, notwithstanding dismissal of the protest solely on the legal technicality of Oracle's purported lack of standing," said Dorian Daley, general counsel, Oracle Corporation. "Federal procurement laws specifically bar single award procurements such as JEDI absent satisfying specific, mandatory requirements, and the Court in its opinion clearly found DoD did not satisfy these requirements."
At the same time the DoD announced an official review of the award.
"We are reviewing the DoD's handing of the JEDI cloud acquisition, including the development of requirements and the request for proposal process," said Dwrena Allen, spokeswoman at the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General. "In addition, we are investigating whether current or former DoD officials committed misconduct relating to the JEDI acquisition, such as whether any had any conflicts of interest related to their involvement in the acquisition process."
Frankly, a lot of people probably -- likely, definitely -- don't care about JEDI and what it means, but if we were all small-d democrats in this republic, we might (ought to) care. Here are some reasons.
Australian journalist and BAFTA award-winning documentary filmmaker John Pilger says the “psychological torture” of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continues “unabated” while he remains in British custody. Pilger tweeted that he recently spoke with Assange and said the journalist had lost even more weight than previously reported; he has also been denied a chance to speak to his parents on the phone.
Swedish programmer Ola Bini was arrested in Ecuador's capital Quito in mid-April on the the same day as his friend and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and is suspected of having hacked government accounts. During a court hearing on Thursday, the prosecutor announced that he had changed the crime classification in the case of Ola Bini, a Swedish national with ties to Julian Assange, as well as an activist and developer of software that complicates online monitoring.
The charges were changed from “attack on the integrity of computer systems”, which the prosecutor previously insisted Bini was guilty of, to “unauthorised intrusion into computer systems”, the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter reported. Bini is now suspected of having breached the Ecuadorian state telecommunications company CNT's website.
Attorneys for a former CIA programmer accused of spilling secrets to WikiLeaks have asked a New York federal court to divide the case, saying two of his public defenders are potential witnesses in the programmer’s favor for a new count that has been added to the indictment.
Attorneys for Joshua Schulte explained in a letter motion filed Monday that they are able to testify as to Schulte’s state of mind while he was held in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, during which time prosecutors allege Schulte attempted to disclose more classified information. However, attorneys cannot act as both counsel and...
Our pop culture landscape is overflowing with celebrities “speaking out.” For all their work, however, our planet’s environment has yet to escape its perilous future. These activist heroes also face an avalanche of criticism for the impact privately chartered aircrafts have on our atmosphere. (According to the New York Post’s calculations, Google Camp’s fleet of famouses dumped 784,000 kilograms of CO2 into the air.) To shoulder some of the burden, Jezebel has compiled the following list of prominent eco-warriors and the immense benefits private jets have afforded them in their fight against environmental catastrophe. It’s quite literally the least we could do!
In Central Africa, as in other parts of the world, many of the fires are typical for this time of year. While some ignite naturally in the dry season, others are deliberately set by farmers to clear land and improve crop yields.
In South America the burns spilled into sensitive areas and grew out of control. In Africa, some experts fear the same outcome, and say that Central African governments may be inadequately prepared to fight the blazes.
Irène Wabiwa Betoko, a forest manager with Greenpeace who is based in Kinshasa, said that regional governments are less equipped to fight these burns than their South American counterparts, both technically and financially.
“If it catches the rainforest in the Congo Basin, it will be worse than in South America,” she said in a telephone interview. “We are calling on governments to not be silent. Start acting now to make sure these fires are not getting out of control.”
Is our planet approaching a climate change cliff edge? Across the world, from the forests to the oceans, the consequences of humanity’s activities are being felt – and the effects could be catastrophic.Here are four key climate emergencies happening right now: [...]
An increasingly dangerous Hurricane Dorian menaced a corridor of some 10 million people — and put Walt Disney World and President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in the crosshairs — as it steamed toward Florida on Friday with the potential to become the most powerful storm to hit the state’s east coast in nearly 30 years.
One of the lasting highlights of my teaching at the University of New Orleans in 1991-1992 was my travel to Brazil in January 1992 for a conference on climate change. This was a rehearsal for the June 1992 Earth Summit on Climate Change in Rio.
Most of the reporting on the fires raging in the Amazon try to identify the guilty parties. Some of those that have been identified include ranchers and loggers, as well as the rightwing government of Jair Bolsonaro for its lack of enforcing environmental regulations. Yet, what we need to consider is that no single actor is responsible for destroying the rainforest, but instead corporate supply chains that crisscross our planet. To truly effect change, we need to target companies within these networks, which can occur if we restore Country of Origin Labeling (COOL) in agriculture and boycott firms that have been linked to deforestation.
Aramco Trading is aggressively expanding its business, rising from 300,000 bpd in sales when it was set up in 2012, to 4.5 million bpd now. The Saudi giant aims to further boost the trading volume to 6 million bpd by the end of 2020, Aramco’s senior vice president of Downstream, Abdulaziz Al-Judaimi, told Reuters in May.
This small article has as central premise that ‘blurring of distinction’ as in the above quotes referenced much as ‘disguise as recourse’ under criminality has geopolitical ramification much as hegemonic utility concerning extrapolation upon ‘morphing’ and illusion.
If you want to know why the single payer movement is having trouble breaking through in the United States, look no further than Leo Gerard.
As Labor Day approaches, a critical question arises: Will America finally grant its workers First Amendment rights?
Critics condemned Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Friday for replacing Obama-era federal loan forgiveness regulations for student borrowers who claim that they were defrauded by their schools with new policies that could make it more difficult to access relief.
"On the Friday of Labor Day weekend, Betsy DeVos is gleefully forcing hundreds of thousands of students defrauded by for-profit colleges to suffer yet another indignity," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement. "Shame on her."
In Kashmir, dissenting voices, even those of legislators and parliamentarians of opposition parties, have been muzzled. And with the lack of accountability suspension of phone and internet services in the Valley, the populace of Kashmir continues to remain incommunicado. In doing so, the federal government has ignored constitutional checks and balances that ought to prevent the over centralization of powers in India.
On August 26th, an article titled “The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939: Myth and Reality” appeared on CounterPunch. It made many useful points about the right of the USSR to conclude a non-aggression pact with any capitalist nation in light of the invasion that nearly destroyed it in the early 1920s. While Cold War scholarship, including its most recent incarnation in a book like Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, tries to draw parallels between Stalin and Hitler as totalitarian monsters, it was in the interest of humanity to preserve what was progressive about Soviet society despite the clique that ruled from the top.
The next Democratic presidential-candidates debate is scheduled for mid-September and it would be interesting if a network moderator asks the candidates whether they were in favor of decriminalizing consensual, adult sex work?
We Americans tend not to pay much attention to our northern neighbors. Often, entire election cycles can come and go without anyone running for national office saying anything about Canada.
Long ago, when I was a congressional press secretary, Jennings Randolph was a wise senator from West Virginia. On his Washington desk, he kept a motto I never forgot...
“Reality is not always probable, or likely” Borges tells us, but we are yet, presumptuously and foolishly, driven to find a logic and its calculus, especially regarding U.S. presidential elections.
For plutocrats, this summer has gotten a bit scary.€ Two feared candidates are rising. Trusted candidates are underperforming. The 2020 presidential election could turn out to be a real-life horror movie: A Nightmare on Wall Street.
Cybersecurity concerns have prompted the Democratic National Committee to reverse course on offering a telephone voting option in 2020’s presidential caucuses in Iowa and Nevada. But those key early states may find another way for voters not present at February caucuses to take part—possibly by voting early at voting centers.
A recent New York Times piece by pop critics—the two Jons, Pareles & Caramanica—on the playlists of Democratic Presidential candidates was an ode to posturing and opportunism. The computer-curated tastes of musical consumer/voters have long been turned into political capital. The algorithm is now democratic king-maker.
This August, a phony controversy erupted over wealthy donors to President Trump’s campaign and political action committee being publicly named.
Do we really need three-ring circus “debates” to figure out that the only two candidates in the running for president who should be taken seriously are Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren?
It is also one of the most poorly understood, in part because the story of Katharine Gun, played by Knightley, is so little known. I should say from the outset that having followed this story from the start, I find this film to be, by Hollywood standards, a remarkably accurate account of what has happened to date—”to date” because the wider story still isn’t really over.
Gun’s immediate action after reading critiques of U.S. policy and media coverage makes a strong case for trying to reach government workers by handing out fliers and books and putting up billboards€ outside government offices to encourage them to be more critically minded.
You can’t make shit like this up. Well, sometimes you can make shit like this up.
In the U.S., Donald Trump remains among the least popular presidents in modern history. Given the buoyant state of the U.S. economy, at least relative to the widespread misery of the prior decade, this unpopularity reinforces the political disillusion reflected in the 2016 election results. Only Jimmy Carter, who engineered a vicious recession in the midst of a colonial rebellion in Iran, was less popular than Mr. Trump at this point in his tenure.
China’s largest state-run news agency, Xinhua News, is buying ads on Facebook and Twitter to smear protesters in Hong Kong, a new tactic being used to influence how the rest of the world perceives the pro-democracy demonstrators.
An estimated 1.7 million people in Hong Kong, roughly a quarter of its population, took to the streets on Sunday to denounce Beijing’s attempts to interfere in the semi-autonomous territory. But China has amassed soldiers across the border in Shenzhen and appears to be stepping up its propaganda efforts online through paid ads on Facebook and Twitter, as well as unpaid content on platforms like YouTube.
“The District of Columbia fought to make this document public because we believe the American people have a right to know what and when Facebook knew about its data security weaknesses,” said a spokesperson for the office of the attorney general for the District of Columbia. “According to the conversations this document contains, Facebook employees were raising alarms about political partners and doubts about their compliance with Facebook’s data policies as far back as September 2015.”
China's no stranger to censorship online, given it runs one of the most sophisticated internet censorship operations on the planet. Like many governments upset with the idea of free expression online, China has also long waged a war against VPNs and proxies that let the public bypass this ham-fisted techno-blockade.
But the case of Sy’s firing shows that Beijing is turning up the heat further still. The CCP is intervening directly in the staffing decisions of firms, pitting managers against their own employees, and enforcing Beijing’s wishes in an area beyond the direct control of China’s surveillance state.
With 26,000 employees in Hong Kong, Cathay initially took a neutral stance as protests engulfed the city. The airline would not dream of telling its employees what to think, its chairman proclaimed. His defiance withered, though, as criticism from China mounted. When the Chinese aviation authority, absurdly, accused the airline of imperilling safety because its employees had joined the protests, Cathay dumped its chief executive. A climate of fear now pervades it. Chinese inspectors have started screening the phones of Cathay crew for anti-Beijing material.
The Hong Kong government has drawn up plans to use executive orders to force internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict certain applications in Hong Kong as a way to disrupt the successful mass organization of those in the HK protests. Targeted apps could include anything used by protesters to help their organization. Telegram, WhatsApp, Messenger – you name it – they could all be affected. It doesn’t take much to imagine where the inspiration for the orders actually came from – The Chinese government has a well known penchant for this exact type of internet restriction enforced at the ISP level. In response, the Hong Kong Internet Service Providers Association (HKISPA) issued a statement pleading the government to reconsider any sort of limitation on open internet access in Hong Kong. The association passionately cautions anyone that will listen that to block the apps that HK protesters are using is not going to end well: [...]
"We encountered an 'oversight system'—read: a censorship regime—that required us to send every story to Falwell's assistant for review," a former student at Liberty wrote for the Post this summer.
We can't blame the students, who are attending the school hoping to learn and do journalism. We can't fully blame the faculty, who are trying to do their job and provide for their families. One has to blame the leadership of that university, who created such a dishonest climate for journalism education.
The modern movement for reform of the law of defamation is associated with the campaign which supported Simon Singh in defending the misconceived and illiberal libel claim brought by the (now discredited) British Chiropractic Association from 2008 to 2010. The campaign was transformed by the charity Sense About Science (and English Pen and Index on Censorship) into a broader demand for libel reform via “the Libel Reform Campaign“. All three main political parties committed to defamation reform in their 2010 general election manifestos.
Last week, Google announced a plan to “build a more private web.” The announcement post was, frankly, a mess. The company that tracks user behavior on over ââ¦â of the web said that “Privacy is paramount to us, in everything we do.”€
Google not only doubled down on its commitment to targeted advertising, but also made the laughable claim that blocking third-party cookies -- by far the most common tracking technology on the Web, and Google’s tracking method of choice -- will hurt user privacy. By taking away the tools that make tracking easy, it contended, developers like Apple and Mozilla will force trackers to resort to “opaque techniques” like fingerprinting. Of course, lost in that argument is the fact that the makers of Safari and Firefox have shown serious commitments to shutting down fingerprinting, and both browsers have made real progress in that direction. Furthermore, a key part of the Privacy Sandbox proposals is Chrome’s own (belated) plan to stop fingerprinting.
Media outlets reported this week that an international student at Harvard University was deported back to Lebanon after border agents in Boston searched his electronic devices and confronted him about his friends’ social media posts. These allegations raise serious concerns about whether the government is following its own policies regarding border searches of electronic devices, and the constitutionality of these searches and of social media surveillance by the government.
As the Harvard Crimson reported, Ismail Ajjawi alleges that after he arrived at Logan International Airport, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers subjected him to hours of questioning, including about his religious practices. Officers also had him unlock his cell phone and laptop, and took the devices out of his sight for approximately five hours. A CBP officer ultimately confronted Ajjawi about political posts that his friends had made on social media, cancelled his visa, and denied his admission to the United States.
More than 400 police departments across the country have partnered with Ring, tech giant Amazon’s “smart” doorbell program, to create a troubling new video surveillance system. Ring films and records any interaction or movement happening at the user’s front door, and alerts users’ phones. These partnerships expand the web of government surveillance of public places, degrade the public’s trust in civic institutions, purposely breed paranoia, and deny citizens the transparency necessary to ensure accountability and create regulations.
You can read more about EFF’s thoughts on how this technology threatens privacy, encourages racial profiling, and stifles freedom here.
The company has bought the domain pornwikileaks.com: a site that previously housed a forum with over 300,000 posts on it, sharing private information of 15,000 porn stars. In its place is a simple message explaining the act, and a link to a video where the company shows what it did with all the data it purchased:
"We have purchased this site with the intention of shutting it down and removing all information associated with it," the text reads. "There's no catch. No hidden thing to getting your personal stuff off of it. We simply didn't want it out there for the world to see anymore.
The exact terms of the settlement are unclear, but Google will reportedly pay fines between $150 and $200 million. The charges stem from data collection and targeting practices in YouTube, which consumer groups alleged violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Some details of the settlement had been reported in July by The Washington Post, but they were not finalized until today’s vote.
Twitter tweeted later Friday afternoon that Dorsey's account "is now secure," and that there is no indication its internal systems were breached. The company later added that "the phone number associated with the account was compromised due to a security oversight."
The profile, which has more than four million followers, tweeted out a flurry of highly offensive and racist remarks for about 15 minutes.
Twitter said its own systems were not compromised, instead blaming an unnamed mobile operator.
"The phone number associated with the account was compromised due to a security oversight by the mobile provider," Twitter said in a statement.
"This allowed an unauthorised person to compose and send tweets via text message from the phone number. That issue is now resolved."
Twitter hasn’t yet offered any more details about what exactly happened yet. While Chuckling Squad’s modus operandi remains unknown at this time, some of the influencers who got hit in the last two weeks have blamed so-called SIM swap attacks, with a particular focus on AT&T. In a SIM swap, a hacker either convinces or bribes a carrier employee to switch the number associated with a SIM card to another device, at which point they can intercept any two-factor authentication codes sent by text message. (It’s hard to stop a determined SIM swapper, but at the very least you should switch from SMS two-factor to an authenticator app). AT&T did not immediately respond to an inquiry from WIRED about the spate of hacks this month, or whether the @jack incident was related.
Today’s hack appears to be from the same group that attacked a number of YouTube celebrities last week on Twitter, including beauty vlogger James Charles, Shane Dawson, and comedian King Bach. The hackers also allegedly gained access to the late Desmond “Etika” Amofah’s Gmail account, as seen by screenshots collected in their Discord server. At the time, many of the people who’d been affected suggested their accounts were breached following a SIM card swap conducted by AT&T employees.
“We are working with law enforcement, have restored the customers’ service, and discussed ways to secure the account,” an AT&T spokesperson told The Verge after the previous Chuckle Squad attacks. AT&T has not responded to a request for comment today.
The problem, as Baroness Kidron sees it, is that apps like YouTube and Instagram use data-fueled enticements — such as tallying “likes” and automatically personalizing videos that play one after another — to get youngsters hooked on their services. Children, she says, are no match for the turbocharged influence tactics, and often stay glued to the services even if doing so makes them unhappy.
“The idea that it’s O.K. to nudge kids into endless behaviors, just because you are pushing their evolutionary buttons — it’s not a fair fight,” Lady Kidron told me, as she sat a few tables away from a Facebook policy executive. “It’s little Timmy in his bedroom versus Mark Zuckerberg in his Valley.”
Her goal is to counter that power dynamic, so that children’s rights and protections in the digital world more closely resemble those in real life. And she’s not just talking about it — she is changing the law.
In his keynote address at the International Conference on Cybersecurity, Attorney General William Barr argued that companies should weaken encryption systems to gain access to consumer devices for criminal investigations. Barr repeated a common fallacy about a difference between military-grade encryption and consumer encryption: "After all, we are not talking about protecting the nation's nuclear launch codes. Nor are we necessarily talking about the customized encryption used by large business enterprises to protect their operations. We are talking about consumer products and services such as messaging, smart phones, e-mail, and voice and data applications."
The thing is, that distinction between military and consumer products largely doesn't exist. All of those "consumer products" Barr wants access to are used by government officials -- heads of state, legislators, judges, military commanders and everyone else -- worldwide. They're used by election officials, police at all levels, nuclear power plant operators, CEOs and human rights activists. They're critical to national security as well as personal security.
As many have pointed out, our mobile phones are the perfect surveillance device. Most people carry them around -- voluntarily -- while they are awake. Put this together with the fact that mobile phones have to connect to a nearby transmitter in order to work, and you end up with a pretty good idea of where the person using the device is throughout the day. No surprise, then, that police and prosecutors around the world turn routinely to phone tracking data when they are investigating cases. But as the New York Times reports, there can be serious problems with simply assuming the results are reliable. The Danish authorities have to review over 10,000 court verdicts because of errors in mobile phone tracking data that was offered as evidence in those cases. In addition, Denmark's director of public prosecutions has ordered a two-month halt in the use of this location data in criminal cases while experts try to sort out the problems...
China has effectively expelled a reporter working for The Wall Street Journal after he wrote an article about the cousin of the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, in the latest sign of a government clampdown on media freedom.
The Chinese authorities declined to renew the press credentials of Chun Han Wong, a reporter in Beijing for The Journal, a spokesman from Dow Jones, the parent company of the newspaper, said in an emailed statement on Friday.
On the Feminist Glitter Revolt in Mexico City
In 2016, together with former colleague Assistant Federal Public Defender Donnie W. Bethel, I€ wrote, “[p]eople of all persuasions, political parties, and philosophies have awakened to the terrible toll the crises of€ overcriminalization€ and€ mass incarceration€ have wrought on America.”
Israel’s decision to bar two United States Democratic Representatives, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, from entering Israel and visiting Palestine has further exposed the belligerent, racist nature of the Israeli government.
The TSA accidentally admitted years ago that its (annoying) presence at airports was extraneous. Summoned into existence by the 9/11 attacks, the TSA was nothing more than an obsolete government fixture a few years later. With terrorism being pretty much ground-based at this point in time, we're left to wonder why we still need to jump through all the TSA's hoops just to board a plane agents haven't made any safer with their elaborate security pantomime.
Anti-American, that’s the popular slur for any critic of American foreign policy, especially in an election year. If you happen to have enough of a conscience to give a shit about who this country happens to be bombing or starving this week, you’re an anti-American, you hate the troops and you should go back to where you came from. The knee-jerk reaction to this knee-jerk reaction from most peaceniks, left and right, is to designate their opposition to empire as a form of patriotism. And I can respect that, but it’s not really my style. I’ve always been the kind of fat insane faggot who owns her slurs and wears them proudly like gang colors. I call it the Eazy E school of political incorrectness. You can be a patriotic pacifist, or you can be an Anti-American with attitude. My homegirls in the Squad have sheepishly chosen the prior, but I for one am proud to be a flag burning, middle finger waging, Anti-American bitch, and if Trump wants to send me back to the County Cork, I’ll pack my bags if he agrees to kiss my ass on the way out.
What do you do when someone says something offensive?
President Donald Trump’s recent proposition to buy Greenland generated curious headlines and reactions around the world. Many have focused their attention on the comical reaction to his offer: not for sale, absurd. Trump’s disregard for Greenland’s self-governing-autonomy and his unsophisticated approach to negotiation and problem-solving are on full display.
Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton has published an op-ed in the New York Times entitled “We Should Buy Greenland,” confirming the fact that Trump’s spurned bid was indeed dead-serious. In it Cotton reflects the imperialist mentality of his “crazy like a fox” president.
It is a truism that whatever starts off hurting immigrants eventually harms us all. On the other hand, if something benefits immigrants that too ends up helping all of us. When xenophobia hits a nation, this basic principle is forgotten, as a false us-versus-them dichotomy takes hold. A disturbing aspect of American exceptionalism is that this dichotomy keeps being presented as something virtuous; the veneer of exceptionalism blinds us to our common interest and is now breeding the intense storm of resentment that is ostensibly targeted toward immigrants but is actually a reflection of deep self-hatred.
The end of the long and dominant history of modernism in Haitian painting which, like with that of most 20th century societies, began with a midcentury batch of artists combining Europe and home, in this case Haiti, is coinciding with the collapse of bourgeois social order in Haiti, the beginning of a collapse that came with the end of the Duvalier regime, the birth of Haitian democracy, and the human rights wins of the 20th century (out of which emerged Jean Bertrand Aristide). A “collapse of social order” is a heavy accusation but it is true in Haiti’s case: Haitian society is today semi-sovereign and primarily relies on money transfers from the diaspora to survive. In other words, modernism continues to die in Haiti, especially in the form of “tropical figuration” of coconut, bananas, nudes, art but continues to sell the most primarily because modernism is the most sellable. An artist putting an end to modernism’s domination and has been doing so is Franketienne.
One story is that of a young man in the midst of bizarre, even outrageous interactions with a group of boys. He is inexperienced, but perseveres, learns, and overcomes what looks like a dead-end situation. The other story is about these imprisoned teenagers conveying a notion of their own racial oppression through dialogue with the same man, who is their teacher. The combination of the two is extraordinary.
When he was a congressman, the walls of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s office were decorated with photos of Brazilian dictators. Bolsonaro has repeatedly defended the Brazilian military dictatorship that ruled from 1964 to1985. He even paid homage to the Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet. In an interview in 2015, Bolsonaro said that Pinochet “had to act violently to recover the country” and, on several occasions, stated that the dictator “did what had to be done” and that he “should have killed more people”.
Another layer of opacity shielding bad cops from accountability has been lifted in California. Accountability and transparency hasn't exactly been welcomed by the state's law enforcement agencies, but recent developments have forced it upon these unwelcoming recipients.
An article in the New Republic about this month’s historic Native American Presidential Forum ends by citing OJ Semans from the organizing group Four Directions, who says the event was ultimately less about the candidates than about the 5 million Natives across the country, and the possibility of their seeing government as representing rather than oppressing them. We’ll talk about electoral issues in indigenous communities with Mark Trahant, moderator of that presidential forum and editor of Indian Country Today.
Every right we have fought for and won since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his monumental “I Have a Dream” speech 56 years ago this Wednesday is under unrelenting attack and in grave peril — from the right to€ drink fresh water€ and breathe clear air, to the right of workers to organize for€ better wages€ and safer conditions to the right to vote without interference from “enemies foreign and domestic” to the rights of women, children, the LGBTQ community and€ immigrants.
Late in 2017, ProPublica began writing about a California white supremacist group called the Rise Above Movement. Its members had been involved in violent clashes at rallies in Charlottesville, Virginia, and several cities in California. They were proud of their violent handiwork, sharing videos on the internet and recruiting more members. Our first article was titled “Racist, Violent, Unpunished: A White Hate Group’s Campaign of Menace.”
More articles followed, and another neo-Nazi group, Atomwaffen Division, was exposed.
That the comparison can be made is odious–so are the conditions.€ So is the one imposing them.€ He is the most odious of all and his stench pervades the country. He wasn’t the first one to implement it when confronted€ by those he has made helpless.€ It happened in Hitler’s Germany.
The global rise of white nationalist violence proves that the threat of fascism is not just about one community — it threatens all communities: white people, black people, Muslims, Jews, and beyond.
According to WebMD, Epstein-Barr Syndrome is the virus that causes monomaniacus. Nicknamed “mono” or “megalo,” it’s a “kissing disease,” and you must be careful because, as with Herpes, that wonderful messenger god, you’ve probably got it and don’t even know. Lots of people carry the virus but don’t get sick and tired of it, onaccounta they like kissing so much. Well, that’s my reader-response parsing of what the good e-doctor said.
The Russian clothing company Gloria Jeans has released an advertisement that momentarily features a model wearing a hijab, making it the first retailer in Russia to do so. RBC first drew media attention to the advertisement.
The election protests that have rocked Moscow since July are set to continue, and government officials are looking for new ways to contain them. Five sources told Meduza that Cossack groups and members of the Union of Donbas Volunteers are currently negotiating with government representatives about the possibility of helping police and National Guard forces disperse protesters at forthcoming demonstrations. Three sources said that Russia’s presidential administration is responsible for the initiative, but they also added that no funds have yet been allocated for it.
HBO has a series based on a real-life crime in Israel—a 2014 case involving (in the New York Times‘ words) “a Palestinian teenager snatched off a Jerusalem street by Orthodox Jews, choked, bludgeoned and burned to death in a forest at dawn.”
I attended my first protest when I was fourteen years old. It was a mild-mannered affair in the suburban Maryland town I lived in. The date was October 15, 1969—the first Vietnam Moratorium—and it involved about twenty-five of us standing on a street corner with signs calling for an end to the US war in Vietnam. We read the names of the US war dead. I was one of perhaps a half dozen high school students at the protest. The rest of the attendees were college students from nearby College Park, nuns from the local Catholic high school and a couple World War veterans. Most people driving by had no idea what was going on and ignored us. A few people flashed us peace signs in support and many more yelled what they considered to be epithets at us. As the years went by, I attended many, many more protests. Some were peaceful, some involved pushing and shoving with the police and right-wing protesters and some involved fairly pitched battles that included rock throwing, barricades, tear gas, truncheons and rubber bullets.
In 1995 in a€ little remembered€ event Li€ Ruthuan, a member of the Chinese€ Politburo(containing the top seven in the government), made a speech likening the Chinese take-over of Hong Kong to the case of a lady who had agreed to sell a 100-year-old Yi-Xiang teapot that was famous for the taste of the tea€ it€ poured.
The Chinese government rejected Lam's proposal, and blocked her outright from giving in to any of the protesters demand, Reuters said, noting that the request was submitted at some point between June 16 and August 7.
In addition to the withdrawal of the extradition bill, the other demands analyzed in the report were: an independent inquiry into the protests; fully democratic elections; dropping of the term “riot” in describing protests; and dropping charges against those arrested so far.
The withdrawal of the bill and an independent inquiry were seen to be the most feasible politically, according to a senior government official in the Hong Kong administration, who spoke on condition of anonymity. He said the move was envisioned as helping pacify some of the more moderate protesters who have been angered by Lam’s silence.
As demonstrators were arranging how to sidestep the ban, some called for mass "shopping trips", while a YouTuber with 800,000 followers called a fan meeting.
However, in a blow to those efforts, LIHKG, the Reddit-like forum used by protesters to communicate, reported via Twitter that its app had suffered the "largest attack it has ever seen".
The demonstrators, who have earned a reputation for their creativity, have also said they will hold small religious gatherings, which do not require permission for groups of up to 30 people, for the "sinners of Hong Kong".
But now, the Cherokee Nation is turning to treaties signed in the 18th and 19th centuries to push for a delegate to Congress for the first time in history. The treaties, the Nation claims, promised them a seat at the table.
This month, Khairo and other Yazidis marked five years since ISIS overran northwestern Iraq, murdering an estimated 5,000 Yazidi men and boys who refused to convert to Islam, and enslaving some 7,000 women and girls, including some as young as 9.
CAIR emerged in 1994 from a Muslim Brotherhood-created Hamas-support network called the Palestine Committee. CAIR operates under the guise of being a benign civil rights group, but has a long history of serving as a front for Hamas, undermining counter-terrorism actions, and fabricating conspiratorial narratives against the government to rationalize the group’s support of terrorism.
The Islamists’ strident advocacy for the rights of the Kashmiri population allegedly “besieged” by the Indian Army stands in marked contrast to their silence on the forced expulsion by terrorists of hundreds of thousands of Kashmiri Pandits (Hindus) from the Kashmir Valley in the early 1990s. Today, the Kashmiri Pandits live in refugee camps in Jammu, a Hindu-majority region south of the Kashmir Valley that is part of Jammu and Kashmir. Islamists also failed to protest the systematic, state-supported repression and displacement of local populations in Pakistan-administered Gilgit-Baltistan that is claimed by India.
Additionally, the Islamists conveniently overlook the Pakistani state’s tyrannical subjugation of its Baloch, Mohajir, and Pashtun populations.
For the second year running, the G-7 made gender equality one of the five central themes of the summit. G-7 leaders held a session entirely focused on women’s empowerment. The keynote address came from members of the G-7’s second Gender Equality Advisory Council, which was composed this year of champions of the cause such as the Nobel Peace Prize laureates Denis Mukwege and Nadia Murad.
The United States reportedly pushed back on French President Emmanuel Macron’s emphasis on gender equality, with senior administration officials expressing frustration about inclusion of a so-called “niche” issue on the summit agenda. The real question, however, is whether G-7 leaders can afford to ignore the status of women if they hope to meet their development goals. Investment in women, after all, yields high returns on poverty reduction and income growth initiatives. Experts estimate that closing the gender gap in the workforce could add a staggering $28 trillion to global GDP by 2025. There’s benefit to food security, too: If female farmers have equal access to productive resources, it could raise agricultural output and reduce the number of hungry people in the world by 150 million. Increasing girls’ education grows household income and improves health outcomes, while access to family planning brings economic dividends. And when it comes to security, women’s contributions to conflict prevention and resolution reduce conflict and improve stability.
The alleged use of sexual blackmail by spy agencies is hardly unique to the case of Jeffrey Epstein. Although the agencies involved as well as their alleged motivations and methods differ with each case, the crime of child trafficking with ties to intelligence agencies or those protected by them has been around for decades.
Some cases include the 1950s -1970s Kincora scandal and the 1981 Peter Hayman affair, both in the U.K.; and the Finders’ cult and the Franklin scandal in the U.S. in the late 1980s. Just as these cases did not end in convictions, the pedophile and accused child-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein remained at arms’ length for years.
“For almost two decades, for some nebulous reason, whether to do with ties to foreign intelligence, his billions of dollars, or his social connections, Epstein, whose alleged sexual sickness and horrific assaults on women without means or ability to protect themselves… remained untouchable,” journalist Vicky Ward wrote in The Daily Beast in July.
The protection of sex traffickers by intelligence agencies is especially interesting in the wake of Epstein’s death. Like others, Epstein had long been purported to have links with spy agencies. Such allegations documented by Whitney Webb in her multi-part series were recently published in Mintpress News.
Webb states that Epstein was the current face of an extensive system of abuse with ties to both organized crime and intelligence interests. She told CNLive! that: “According to Nigel Rosser, a British journalist who wrote in the Evening Standard in 2001, Epstein apparently for much of the 1990s claimed that he used to work for the CIA.”
All working people, no matter their race, ethnicity, gender, faith, or sexual orientation, or gender identity, need a stake and a say in our society—and they all need to hear that they're part of "We the People."
Electric shocks, bricks hung from private parts, threatened with rape, sexually assaulted, hung naked, hung upside down — these are some of the methods that Haryana Police has been undertaking in dealing with prisoners, both men and women, a study has revealed.
The report, Inside Haryana Prisons, by Sabika Abbas and Madhurima Dhanuka of Commonwealth Human Rights Initiatives, was prepared following a study commissioned by the Haryana State Legal Services Authority.
It is based on interviews of 475 inmates in 19 prisons across the state. Intended to shed light on the conditions of jails in the state, it has revealed that a large number of inmates suffered shocking and inhuman cruelty in the hands of the police soon after they were arrested.
In The Report, Adam Driver headlines the film as a real-life figure Daniel J Jones. Jones was responsible for a document that detailed, among other things, how many innocent people were brutally tortured by the CIA only so could they would utter what the interrogators wanted after 9/11.
Video footage has emerged of Green London Assembly member Caroline Russell being arrested in Trafalgar Square while taking part in a Defend Our Democracy protest (1)
Her fellow Green London Assembly member Sian Berry, Green Party co-leader, said:
“Earlier today, I was speaking at the main rally of the Defend Our Democracy protest. I said then that we were calmly determined not to have our rights chipped away. Protest, and direct action were needed, I said then.
“I’m proud that Caroline has been at the forefront, with others, of showing that determination.
“History tells us that all the rights we have we had to win. No one has ever handed them to us.
Josh Hawley pretends to be against big government. He pretends to be against the "nanny state." But since the second he got into power, nearly everything he's proposed has been about increasing government control over industry. But just one industry. The internet/tech industry that he has personally decided doesn't work the way he thinks it should. Beyond trying to get rid of Section 230, Hawley has proposed a bill that literally makes design choices for internet companies. Earlier this year, he introduced another bill that tries to design features for online video sites. He's made it clear that he doesn't like internet site because his constituents like them too much, which seems odd.
California Labor Federation head Art Pulaski said the state’s labor movement was “unified in opposing” the companies’ “cynical measure,” and would “meet the gig companies’ absurd political spending with a vigorous worker-led campaign” to defeat it.
Pulaski said in a statement that the companies’ ballot measure campaign shows that they “never cared about their drivers or workers. The only thing they care about is their bottom line and making their executives even richer than they already are.”
In very general terms, I already commented on some of Avanci's previously announced theories two weeks ago. Also, the fact that Judge Lucy H. Koh denied Avanci's motion to stay discovery suggests to me that Avanci's preview of the motion to dismiss didn't immediately make her feel that this case was a waste of time.
The question here that is most relevant to the information and communications technology industry at large, apart from the overarching objective of Continental's complaint (to obtain a component-level license on FRAND terms), is whether patent pool firms like Avanci, which don't hold patents in a formalistic sense but are key in bringing companies together and getting them to combine their leverage and to coordinate their behavior, can be held liable. Avanci is a SEP pool with a focus on IoT, but there's plenty of similar organizations such as MPEG LA.
I would encourage the decision-makers at major ICT companies and industry bodies (many of whom are known to read this blog) to strongly consider supporting Continental on that "pool-firm liablity" question, be it through amicus curiae briefs or background advice. Such involvement may be particularly important because, quite frankly, Nokia's litigation skills (and let's not forget that Qualcomm is also an Avanci member) are world-class, while there's light and shadow with respect to Continental. The U.S. antisuit motion and the related reply brief left a lot to be desired (while no one can blame Continental's outside counsel in Germany for the anti-antisuit situation, which was a total surprise to everybody and where they face a court that aspires to make the Eastern District of Texas pale by comparison; plus, I think they may very well prevail on appeal). By contrast, Continental's opposition to Avanci's U.S. venue transfer motion was perfect; it could serve as a textbook example for how to deal with this frequent type of situation, and one can see that a lot of thought as well as hard work went into it.
Earler this summer, we discussed Tom Brady, famed Patriots quarterback and winner of many games, deciding to apply for a trademark on a nickname some fans had given him: Tom Terrific. In news you'll never believe, it appeared that Brady didn't really have any idea how trademark law works. As evidence for that, Brady claimed to want the trademark because he hates the nickname and wanted to stop others from using it. That's not how trademark law works. Instead, to have a valid trademark, Brady would have to use the term himself in commerce, meaning that more people would hear his unwanted nickname in doing so.
As an EU trade mark (EUTM) proprietor, one must keep in mind that there is a five year grace period to use the registered mark. Following the expiry of this period, third parties may seek the revocation of the EUTM in relation to goods and services for which it has not been used. It is therefore common practice for some trade mark proprietors to re-file their respective marks and secure another five year period in relation to the new mark.
In this context, the Second Board of the EUIPO has, in an interesting decision, partially invalidated the EUTM ‘Monopoly’. In particular, the Board considered that a re-filing of the EUTM in question, was made in bad faith as it included goods and services already covered by the earlier registrations.
The court recognised that Amazon used the red sole sign in advertising related not only to the Louboutin's shoes but also to Amazon’s services and goods, for example on the online newspaper “The Guardian” where the trade marks Amazon and its arrow and “Prime” were combined with the offer for sale of counterfeit red sole shoes.
