couple of months ago, we introduced you to a Windows program called Sidebar Diagnostics; this time, we are going to take a look at a similar program for Linux.
Conky must be a familiar name if you have been using Linux for a while. It is a fork of a now defunct app called Torsmo.
While it is a fork in the technical sense, it is more advanced than Torsmo. If you're running Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, etc, you can just run the following command in a Terminal
Want your next laptop to be a bit more open? System76 have announced their Galago Pro and Darter Pro now come with Coreboot, the open source boot firmware.
From what they said, this should enable their systems to boot "29%" faster. Both systems are available for pre-order now, with shipping expected to begin in the last week of October. Both sound like pretty great units for work and a little Linux gaming on the go. The Galago Pro starts at $949 while the more powerful Darter Pro starts at $999.
Well, folks... they did it. The people over at System76 finally achieved one of their dreams -- selling laptops with open source firmware! This is quite an impressive feat.
System76 has long been a proponent of both Linux and open source, and over the years, it never deviated from that. And now, two of its laptops will come with open source firmware based on Coreboot. Thrilling stuff, eh? Also exciting, however, is both computers can be be configured with some excellent specifications too, such as 10th gen Intel Core processors, up to 32GB RAM, and Thunderbolt 3.
Intel officially launched Comet Lake processors last August with Y-series (4.5-5.5W TDP) and U-Series (15W TDP) targeting 2-in-1 hybrid laptops and tablets. Since several Windows 10 Comet Lake laptops launched such as OneMix 3Pro 8.4ââ¬Â³ mini laptop with an Intel Core i5-10210Y Comet Lake-Y processor.
If you’d rather get a Comet Lake laptop running Linux, System76 got you covered with two models, namely Galago Pro and Darter Pro laptops running a choice of Pop!_OS 19.10 (64-bit), Pop!_OS 18.04 LTS (64-bit), or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (64-bit) operating systems, as well as System76 open firmware based on Coreboot, EDK2, and System76 firmware apps.
The open source centric Laptop manufacturer introduced two models with open source firmware.
OEMs have already announced a bunch of Intel 10th gen CPU upgrades for the most popular Windows-based laptop series, but what about Linux-based ones? System76 has us covered with two 14 and 15-inch models sporting mid-range to premium Comet Lake configurations, and, as an added bonus, these systems feature the highly tunable Coreboot open source firmware.
The 14-inch model is part of the Galago Pro family, while the 15-incher joins the Darter Pro series. Both models can be configured with mid-range specs comprising an Intel Core I5-10210U CPU coupled with 8 GB of RAM and a 240 GB M.2 SSD, along with a 1080p matte display. If budget is not a problem, users can further max out the specs to include a quad-core i7-10510U, up to 32 GB of RAM and up to 6 TB of SSD+HDD storage. Standard features for both models also include a GbE NIC with jack, dual-band Wi-Fi + Bluetooth 5.0, a Thunderbolt 3 port, USB-A 3.0 ports, MiniDisplayPort and HDMI outs, and an SD card reader.
The Galago Pro can be configured with up to 32GB of memory and up to 6TB of SSD storage. There are plenty of ports, including USB 3.1 Type-C with Thunderbolt 3, two USB 3.1 Type-A ports, and an SD Card Reader.
The Linux operating systems of course come free, but to get 6TB of storage buyers need to purchase a 2TB NVMe SSD and they can add an extra 4TB 2.5-inch drive, which bumps the price up to $1,877.
The Darter Pro can also be configured with up to 32GB memory and M.2 SATA or PCIe NVMe SSD storage of up to 2TB.
Similarly, it has USB 3.1 Type-C with Thunderbolt 3, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, one USB 2.0 port, and a SD Card Reader.
To get the largest memory and storage on the Darter Pro, consumers would be looking at a total price of $2,126. If buyers want a UK keyboard instead of the US keyboard, they'll need to pay an extra $119.
Linux is a far cry from the esoteric bundles of code it once was, and the number of polished distros out there, offering variants on Windows, OS X and Ubuntu, is testament to that.
If you’re new to Linux or are looking for a change, these distributions are easily among the best options in 2019. This list was designed to cover different experience levels and use cases. So whether you’re a system admin, developer, or a desktop user, you’ll find something to interest you.
Rancher 2.3 and Amazon EKS were first to roll out support for Windows nodes in Kubernetes clusters this week, as well as mixed-mode clusters that encompass both Windows and Linux nodes. Most Kubernetes platforms already supported Windows containers but running on Linux host nodes; in all cases, including upstream Kubernetes, the Kubernetes master node still runs on Linux.
Docker is basically a virtualized open-source environment that allows users to distribute and install multiple apps on the server but without interfering each other’s installation and process. Docker benefits most from cluster environments and data centres. It provides an isolated environment for the container. Now, what are Docker containers?
You can compare the Docker Container with multiple containers available on a single shipyard with different articles. In the same way, Docker has implemented a technology called containers, which you can say a term used alternatively instead of virtual machines. However, containers take less space as compared to regular VMs.
The operating system images created by different developers to be used on containers are a package of a single application and all dependencies such as libraries, utilities, and static data into one image file, but without a complete operating system. That’s why containers can be compared to lightweight virtualization. All containers installed on any Docker can run simultaneously using the host OS kernel but with isolated processes. This gives them better performance while using low resource. The images running on it are only of few MBs. However, unlike VirtualBox or Hyper-V, natively the containers and Docker is available to manage using a command-line interface whether you want to download some OS image or managing of different apps, you need to type commands. It could be cumbersome for noobs or professionals those have to manage multiple containers on personal desktop or data centres or server clusters.
Thus, to mitigate all such incommodious the Docker provides an API that can be used to manage it using GUI (graphical user interface) based desktop applications and web-based management tools.
During a recent webinar titled, “Modern continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline for traditional provisioning,” we received a lot of interest and many questions regarding the topic. Some of the questions were coming in at a very rapid rate and we were not able to address them all. As a followup to our webinar, we have decided to put the answers to those questions into this blog post. The questions are listed below. This is part two in a series, check out our first blog post here.
The demo in the webinar showed a combination of CloudForms/Ansible Tower to accomplish lifecycle provisioning. Is CloudForms an alternative or must it be used together with Ansible? Can you elaborate on the integration?
Traditional IT management based on fixed resources stopped making sense with the cloud, an unlimited pool of resources that can be accessed from any point in the world. Companies are moving from a CAPEX intensive environment to a new OPEX based cloud. With the new consumption model that favours the cloud, the weight shifts from asset lifecycle management to resource governance. This generates additional requirements for forecasting and budgeting. But the question is still "are we spending our money well?"
The question is not so simple to answer because comparisons are difficult. The first reaction many organizations have is to believe that lower costs are better costs, but in many cases that is basically wrong.
For instance, it is easy to reduce costs by purchasing a storage service that is cheaper than the one you are using now. However, that change may be associated with a decrease in performance; can your application support it or would you be losing customers - and revenue - in the process? The same thing can happen if you reduce expenses at the cost of limiting the application availability and not investing enough in load balancers, databases or application workers.
In order to align business, resources and costs you need to take several steps; in this post we will outline some best practices we have been gathering about the topic.
Red Hat claims to be a neutral broker that will pave the way for organisations to run the same container application platform across different public cloud services and in a hybrid cloud environment.
This comes at a time when major public cloud suppliers are all trying to differentiate themselves through platform services – for example, with their own implementations of the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration platform.
Speaking to Computer Weekly on the sidelines of Red Hat Forum in Singapore, Damien Wong, vice-president and general manager for Asian growth and emerging markets at Red Hat, said the company’s OpenShift platform will let enterprises run containerised applications on the same platform, regardless of cloud deployment model or underlying cloud infrastructure service.
The old-school "one server/one function" concept has prevailed for veritable decades in the technology realm, whereby a single server stands duty to perform authentication, file, print, web, messaging, and other services.
That's the past. The future is moving towards a serverless model whereby functions (e.g. applications) are more important than actual server implementations.
spend a lot of time on the road and enjoy listening to podcasts about a variety of topics. One of my interests is keeping up with the latest news and information about Linux and open source, and that led me to Jupiter Broadcasting, an open source (both in topics covered and its own license) podcasting network. I met Jupiter's cofounder Chris Fisher when I visited System76's Denver headquarters in late 2018.
Jupiter Broadcasting emerged from The Linux Action Show, a podcast that began in 2006 and ended 10 years later in early 2017. The show was such a success that, in 2008, Chris and co-founder Bryan Lunduke decided to start Jupiter Broadcasting. Back then, the company only had two shows, The Linux Action Show and CastaBlasta. Now it offers 10 Linux-related podcasts with titles like Linux Headlines, Linux Action News, Choose Linux, Coder Radio, Self-Hosted, and more.
I was interested in learning more about Jupiter, so I was grateful when Chris agreed to do this interview (which has been lightly edited for length and clarity).
Facebook takes aim at Google's machine learning dominance, Ubuntu calls for testing of its Chromium snap package, Tails wants feedback on its upcoming 4.0 release, Puppet goes public with a beta of Project Nebula, and Microsoft re-issues yet another product under a permissive license.
I took my kids to the symphony this past Sunday. It was hugely beneficial to have the kids experience a symphonic performance. It made for a pretty decent lesson about the benefits of working together. When the orchestral members were warming up before they begin the performance there is a cacophony of sounds and although individually, the instruments sound nice, together it sounds like a mess. When the performance started and the conductor did his conducting, keeping everyone on pace and on the “same sheet of music” as it were, you could listen and imagine the story of events in the mind’s eye. Everything from serious and intense melodies to whimsical light hearted tones. Although my kids could only manage to sit through an hour of the performance, there were lots of lessons to be extracted about the benefits of working together.
How this can be applied to the Linux community is as such. When we work together, in harmony with one another, we can make for some amazing results. Whether it is the latest Ubuntu MATE, the newest release of Plasma or helping someone through a tech question, by working together in a kind and respectful tone we can achieve great things. I am of the belief that all Linux is good Linux and by making any one aspect better, we make it all better, regardless of the flavor of Linux or desktop you choose.
Our first computers, the future of food, and ethical sources of funds.
Plus the spooky reason that Popey unfollowed Joe.
Out today is the Intel Compute Runtime 19.40.14409 release for Linux users that pulls in their newest GMMLIB, Compiler, and OpenCL code for Linux systems. For the new Tiger Lake support, the OpenCL 2.1 support is listed as "early support" while Broadwell through Icelake graphics are considered production-ready.
With IWD 0.22 comes support now for IPv6 network configuration handling. IPv6 address dumping, RTNL packet paser, and other bits are now supported by rtnlutil. The IWD netconfig also has support for now for handling the IPv6 DNS, default route, and other pieces of the IPv6 puzzle.
The "VIRTME" project was started years ago as a set of simple tools for running a virtualized Linux kernel that uses the host distribution or basic root file-system rather than a complete Linux distribution image. There hasn't been a new release of VIRTME in years but that changed on Thursday.
VIRTME is focused on providing a very basic virtualization setup for quickly and easily testing Linux kernel changes without the overhead of setting up a complete virtualization stack. Developers behind VIRTME also talked previously of spinning this into a sandbox-type environment.
There hasn't been a major release of the X.Org Server now in 17 months... Not because there haven't been any changes (in fact, a lot of GLAMOR and XWayland work among other fixing) but because no one has stepped up as release manager to get the next version out the door. But to workaround that, developers are looking at moving the X.Org Server to purely time-based releases and letting their continuous integration testing be the deciding factor on if a release is ready to ship.
Adam Jackson of Red Hat proposed at last week's XDC2019 the idea of having these new, effectively automated X.Org Server releases. The xorg-server releases would get back on to their six-month release cadence and be largely autonomous with sticking to the release timeframe and just ensuring the testing gets done by way of their CI system to ensure the X.Org Server is in good shape for releasing.
A lot of the Tiger Lake "Gen 12" graphics compiler infrastructure changes to Mesa for Intel's open-source OpenGL and Vulkan Linux drivers were just merged into the Mesa 19.3 code-base.
These compiler changes have been public and under review for several weeks now but have just been merged to Mesa 19.3-devel this Friday afternoon. The changes for Tigerlake/Gen12 represent the biggest changes to Intel's graphics ISA going back to the original i965. As explained last month, nearly every instruction field, opcode, and register type is updated and the hardware register scoreboard logic has been punted into software with now leaving it up to the compiler now for ensuring data coherency between register reads/writes and a new sync hardware instruction.
Back during the summer Eric Anholt who had been the lead developer of Broadcom's VC4/V3D graphics driver stack most notably used by Raspberry Pi boards left the company to join Google. In his place, the Raspberry Pi Foundation is working with consulting firm Igalia to continue work on the DRM/KMS kernel driver and Gallium3D drivers for this open-source graphics driver support.
Igalia has been working recently on V3D shader compiler improvements with implementing more pieces of NIR as well as addressing test case failures / bugs. One of the areas they have been working on a lot is OpenGL transform feedback.
Recently on Phoronix you have likely heard a lot about the LRU "bulk moves" functionality for the AMDGPU driver after it was talked up by a Valve Linux developer for the performance help to Linux games and then the change landing in Linux 5.4 as a "fix".
Huang Rui was the developer involved at AMD leading the charge on this bulk moving mechanism and he presented at last week's X.Org Developer's Conference on the topic. He mentioned how it came about when they were looking at the performance of the F1 2017 game's benchmark and ultimately seeing a need to redesign their kernel driver's buffer migration code.
It's fairly rare these days seeing big patch sets out of AMD focused on improving the open-source Linux driver support for the likes of aging GPUs such as the Sea Islands and Volcanic Islands generations, but this Friday there is some notable development activity.
Sea Islands as a reminder is the original Radeon R7/R9 200 series and wound up in other graphics cards as well. Volcanic Islands made up the Radeon Rx 300 series as well as the R9 Nano/Fury graphics cards. A set of 15 patches posted today provide "BACO" support for these Sea and Volcanic Islands GPUs.
Mir 1.5 was released today and has an updated shared memory implementation to work in confined Snaps without the Mir interface and on older Linux kernels. Mir 1.5 also has MirAL abstraction layer updates to support clipping windows to a specified area, support for Mir-based servers to setup environment variables for launching clients, fixes for Arch Linux support, logging of EGL/GL extensions available, supporting XDG-Output v3, and fixing many different bugs.
As it stands now, new libdrm releases have been 2.4.xx for many years with no real meaning. The proposal is to now use a format like Mesa for YEAR.N.0 or perhaps YEAR.MONTH.0 or even YEAR.MONTH.DAY. At least any of those formats would be more meaningful than the current 2.4 versioning scheme and provide users/developers with some easy guidance over the age of a given libdrm release.
We have covered several torrent client applications on FossMint in topics such as 10 Best Cloud Torrent Service Providers and Best BitTorrent Client Apps for Linux in 2019. But as you already know by now, at least one new open-source application is created every other week.
Today, I bring you an open-source application developed for the torrenting world and it goes by the name of Torrential.
Torrential is a simple open-source torrent client designed for elementary OS users to download torrents in style while enjoying speed and minimalistic design experience.
It doesn’t have any settings unique to it, though, so technically it is another torrent client alternative that hopes to provide users with a speedy torrenting experience. However, as is expected of all Linux client applications, you can customize Torrential’s look using themes.
While Intel's SVT-VP9 video encode has been public since February and receiving frequent Git commits for advancing this very fast open-source VP9 video encoder, finally today it saw its first tagged release, being called the SVT-VP9 0.1 pre-release.
While its version is just 0.1, at least from our extensive testing over the past number of months it is surprising they are not calling it SVT-VP9 1.0 yet. SVT-VP9 is super fast on modern x86_64 CPUs and has been working out very well along with Intel's other open-source Scalable Video Technology (SVT) encoders.
One of the reasons why I became interested in Linux was the allure of the command line. The command line offers advantages day-to-day because of facets like its scalability, scriptability, simple design, and simple interface. At the command line, there’s enormous power at our fingertips. Its continuing flexibility and power remain big draws to this day. It’s perfectly possible to do everything at the command line with the exception of comfortable web browsing, and a few specialized tasks.
It’s true that some people consider the command line to be arcane and obsolete. They prefer graphical interfaces. And for non-technical people and beginners, few dispute good graphical user interfaces make life easier. And I love GUI software. But who doesn’t want the best of both worlds?
The power of the command line can be accessed on the desktop by using a terminal emulator. The terminal window allows the user to access a console and all its applications such as command line interfaces (CLI) and text user interface software. Even with sophisticated modern desktop environments packed with administrative tools, other utilities, and productivity software all sporting attractive graphical user interfaces, it remains the case that some tasks are best undertaken with the command line.
The terminal emulator is a venerable but essential tool for everyone using the command line. There are so many terminal emulators available for Linux that the choice is, frankly, bamboozling.
What distinguishes kitty from the vast majority of terminal emulators? It offers GPU-acceleration combined with a wide feature set. It’s targeted at power keyboard users. It’s billed as a modern, hackable, featureful, OpenGL based terminal emulator.
It is Simplified Federation. It's a skipper, it skips our username input whenever we want to Follow or Favorite a user from different Mastodon server. Indeed, in Mastodon today we still cannot work in only one browser window as every of such external interaction opens a new small window. But thanks to this addon, it's a lot more easier now. I will show you how to install it on Mozilla Firefox as it needs a little setup. Let's go!
BleachBit, a system cleaner (and more) for Linux and Windows, was updated to version 2.3 beta recently, receiving some major changes. The new version was upgraded from GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3, file scanning should be much faster, and there's also a new dark mode, among other changes.
BleachBit is a free and open source tool to clean up your computer to free up disk space, with some privacy features on top. It can remove the web cache, cookies, URL history, temporary files and log files of popular web browsers like Firefox, Google Chrome / Chromium, Opera, Safari, etc., remove the cache, recently used and temporary files for many popular applications, remove unused localization (language) files, and much more. The tool may also be used to shred files to prevent data recovery, and wipe free disk space to hide previously deleted files.
Rspamd 2.0 has been released as the newest version of this leading open-source spam filtering software and it's coming with plenty of changes.
The changes to Rspamd 2.0 are significant to warrant a version bump on their own but this does also mark a shift in the versioning for the project. With not having bumped the major version number in a while and relying a lot on patch level versioning, moving forward Rspamd will be doing just a "major.minor versioning scheme.
We have released Rspamd 2.0 today.
I've released man-pages-5.03. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.
This release resulted from patches, bug reports, reviews, and comments from 45 contributors. The release includes over 200 commits that change around 80 pages.
This weekend, I released Site.js version 12.7.0 with improvements to its WebSocket interface. Today, I want to take you step-by-step through building and running a basic chat app using Site.js.
Knife Sisters, a visual novel about love, power and dependence, is released for Linux today at 10 am Pacific. The game is developed by Transcenders Media from Malmö, Sweden, and was originally released in April 2019, for Mac OSX and Windows on Steam and Itch.io.
In Knife Sisters, you play 19-year old Leo who gets drawn into a world of strange assignments and occult rituals by the artist Dagger. During gameplay, players make decisions related to power, consent and submission, have playdates with characters, and explore their own emotions as well as their moral compasses.
SanAndreasUnity, an open source remake of the game engine for GTA: San Andreas that aims to be cross-platform has a new release out, with better Linux support included.
Goblinz Studio are currently development Legend of Keepers, a tactical dungeon management game where you're the bad guys. It now has a free prologue available to test on Linux.
From what they said, it's a mix between a "Roguelite and a Dungeon Management" game. Blending two different game phases together, where you first setup a defensive force for your dungeon and then wait for the heroes to come along and see if you manage to mount a successful barrier. A bit like "a reversed dungeon crawler", as they say anyway.
For years we have been looking forward to the realistic X-Plane flight simulator rendered by Vulkan as an alternative to their long-standing OpenGL render and with X-Plane 11.50 that is finally being made a reality.
X-Plane has long offered great support for Linux on-par with their Windows and macOS support. X-Plane's OpenGL renderer has been showing its age for a while and now the developers at Laminar Research have confirmed their Vulkan (and Apple Metal) renderer support is coming with X-Plane 11.50.
Get ready for a few more cuts and bruises as RageSquid and No More Robots just gave Descenders the biggest update yet. Modding support is now in using mod.io along with a massive new map.
Thanks to the mod.io integration, you can subscribe to and download mods directly in the game and it works perfectly. They said they went with mod.io instead of the Steam Workshop to ensure that everyone could play together easily, which is part of the point of mod.io to make mods cross-platform with open APIs.
BOC is a game we highlighted last month as it certainly seems like an incredibly interesting 4x strategy game that will be supporting Linux. It's now on Kickstarter to take it through to release.
Impressively, they built their own custom cross-platform game engine for BOC. Allowing them to create a huge world for you to spread your civilization across. The developer, Code::Arts, has some rather grand sounding plans for it too. Check out the new trailer for it below:
Pegasus Frontend is certainly promising, an open source graphical game launcher you can use across Linux, MacOS, Windows, Raspberry Pi, Android and more.
With a focus on customization with full control over the UI, support for EmulationStation's gamelist files and more it certainly sounds like a useful application to manage your game library especially for big-screen usage.
Just released this week is Runefall 2 from Playcademy and GC Games, a pretty great looking casual match-3 game.
Match 3 games are still underserved on Linux, with very few high quality titles of the genre so it really is great to see more. People often underestimate how big the casual market is. As for Runefall 2, this is the first Linux release from Playcademy!
Valve continue to do some pretty big tweaks to the matchmaking system in Dota 2, with another blog post and update talking about all the improvements they're implementing.
This is following on from all the other changes recently like the ban waves and sounds like they're really pushing to make the Dota 2 community and gameplay better for everyone.
Ever played a game of Dota 2 by yourself and get matched against an entire team of people? I have, it sucks. They're all forming a strategy, while half of your team are telling each other they're going to report them. It happened for a lot of others too and Valve have finally put a stop to it. In the latest blog post, Valve said that now a five-player team will only be matched up against other five-player teams. For Solo players, they will now only be matched up with a party maximum of two, so Solo players will either now be against an entire team of other Solo players or possibly three solo players and one party of two.
Linux on Chrome OS, a.ka. Crostini has primarily focused on creating a viable path for developers to adopt Chromebooks as a primary device. The addition of GPU support did a lot to advance that goal but there’s still a large group of Linux users that could benefit from Crostini if this latest update has anything to do about it. That group is gamers.
Now, I know that we’re all excited about Stadia launching next month. If rumors are correct, it could change the face of gaming as we know it. Still, there are a lot of games out there that live in the PC environment that will never see the grand stage that is Stadia. Personally, I am a huge fan of Source games that run on the Steam network and since I don’t own a PC anymore, my only option to jump into a Day of Defeat GunGame match has been to use the old school Crouton method on a Chromebook. All-in-all, most of my Steam games run quite well using the “hacky” Linux method but I would love to be able to install Steam via Crostini and play my games natively.
Kdenlive 19.08.2 is out with many goodies ranging from usability and user interface improvements all the way to fixes to speed effect bugs and even a couple of crashes.
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 4.10.1 !
In this release we fixed debugging with the tools from Xcode 11, and a bad crash in the application output pane, as well as some less serious issues. Find a more detailed overview in our change log.
The KDE Plasma Mobile team has begun publishing weekly reports on their development efforts for making KDE software more suitable for mobile devices as well as convergence and other efforts in common with KDE on the desktop.
At Akademy Bhushan and Marco presented Plasma Nano shell to the community. Earlier this week the changes to use plasma-nano as a base shell package landed in plasma-phone-components. The shell includes an updated look for the app launcher and several of the shell interactions, including adding and removing widgets and changing the wallpaper.
Marco Martin made several changes in the shell to improve the overall user experience.
The application grid was updated to show application names in single line and with a smaller font size.
Cast to TV, a GNOME Shell extension to cast media (with optional transcoding) to Chromecast and other devices over the local network, was updated to version 11 yesterday. This release brings support for the latest GNOME 3.34, a file queue (playlist) for the remote widget, NVENC hardware acceleration support, and more.
Cast to TV is a GNOME Shell extension to cast videos, music and pictures to Chromecast or other devices over a local network. It supports video transcoding on the fly (for videos that can't directly play on the device), customizable subtitles, it can show a music visualizer while casting music, and much more. For controlling the device, the Gnome Shell extensions adds a new button on the top panel with playback controls.
GLib 2.63.1 will be released in the next few weeks, and will contain a fun new API to slightly simplify emitting a warning once, and then shutting up to avoid emitting loads of log spam.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Lubuntu 19.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Just like the previous week, we have again released 4 snapshots since last Friday (1003, 1004, 1007 and 1009). 3 more have been tested but have been discarded by openQA; two of them only due to OBS being ‘too fast’ and random failures marking a snapshot as failed; likely they would have been ok. Snapshot 1010, on the other hand, was declined by openQA as the yast software management was not usable due to an ABI break. This has since been fixed and snapshot 1011 is expected to be releasable again (currently building).
The latest versions of Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware and related products are available with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 15. This provides flexibility to customers who are migrating from SLES 12 to 15, and for Oracle customers who are still running older versions of the database and middleware products.
Here is yet another update for Chromium 77.
The latest release fixes 8 vulnerabilities, several of them high-risk. You can read all about it in the Google announcement.
So, the flatpak application you use just crashed
How do you report it? If you file a bug just saying it crashed, the developers will probably ask for some stack trace. On Fedora 30, for example, abrt (the crash reporting system) doesn't provide any useful information. Let's see if we can extract that information.
We are gonna have to use the terminal to use some command line tools. Flatpak has a tool flatpak-coredumpctl to use the core dump in the flatpak sandbox. The core dump is an image of the program memory when it crashed that will contain a lot about the crash. But by default the tool will not be able to provide much useful info. There is some initial setup need to be able to have a better output.
First you must make sure that you have the right Debug package for the right version of the Flatpak runtime. Well, actually, for the corresponding SDK.
I quickly realised that trying these apps on my Dell XPS 13 was really an adventure, mostly because of HiDPI (the high DPI screen that the PS 13 has). Lot of the applications found on Fedora, by default, don't support high DPI and a thus quasi impossible to use out of the box. Some of it is fixable easily, some of it with a bit more effort and some, we need to try harder.
Almost all the apps I have tried used Qt. With Qt5 the fix is easy, albeit not necessarily user friendly. Just set the QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR environment variable to 1 as specified in Qt HiDPI support documentation. There is also an API to set the attribute on the QCoreApplication object. There must be a good reason why this opt-in and not opt-out.
[...]
In the end, I have Hydrogen available on Flathub, the three others in queue for Flathub, and all have had patches submitted (with Muse3 and Rosegarden already merged upstream).
Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora Program Management this week. The Go/No-Go meeting is next week. We are currently under the Final freeze.
No office hours next week, but normally I have weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else.
Tails 4.0 will be the first version of Tails based on Debian 10 (Buster). It brings new versions of most of the software included in Tails and some important usability and performance improvements.
You can help Tails by testing the release candidate for the upcoming version 4.0!
Powered by the latest Linux 5.3.2 kernel, Tails 4.0 Release Candidate is packed with up-to-date technologies to better protect your privacy when surfing the Internet. It comes with the latest alpha version of the upcoming TOR Browser 9.0 anonymous web browser based on Firefox 68.1.0 ESR, as well as the newest Tor 0.4.1.6 release.
Tails 4.0 Release Candidate also updates Electrum to version 3.3.8, which is fully compatible with the current Bitcoin network, and improves the usability of the Tails Greeter by making it easier to select languages, simplifying the list of keyboard layouts, fixing the Formats setting, and preventing additional settings from being applied when clicking on the Cancel or Back buttons.
Ubuntu is the world’s most prominent Linux distribution. Ubuntu and its developer, Canonical, has caught a lot of flack over the years, but the Linux world is much better off thanks to both.
So let’s stop and take a moment to appreciate some of what Canonical and Ubuntu have given the Linux community.
Intrinsyc introduced the first Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 hardware development platform last year with its Open-Q 845 HDK designed for OEMs and device makers.
The Librem 5 is coming soon, and while we know the details of the Linux phone’s internals, there are still several unknowns surrounding the handset. However, a hands-on video from The Linux Gamer posted earlier today showed an early build of the Librem 5. There’s a lot going for the Linux phone, but there are several mountains still to be climbed before the device should be considered consumer-ready.
First, the positives: the phone looks well-built, and some internal components can be repaired by end-users (e.g., the battery). The phone is rather thick for a modern smartphone, but the added height is needed to house all the boards needed for the hardware kill switches and to allow for replaceable components. The 1440x720 display, which created some controversy when announced, also looks good in the video. Considering its size and resolution, it likely won’t look nearly as crisp as flagship displays in person, but if the hands-on video is anything to go by, it’s a perfectly usable display.
At some point in the setup process, it was necessary to disable wifi. And I of course forgot to re-enable it. A number of apps insisted on downloading new versions. Eventually I realized my mistake, and re-enabled wifi, but am still wondering just how severe a case of sticker shock I am in for at the end of the month.
[...]
My new smartphone's virtual keyboard represents a definite improvement over the multipress nature of text messaging on my old flip phone, but it does not hold a candle to a full-sized keyboard. However, even this old man must confess that it is much faster to respond to the smartphone than to the laptop if both start in their respective sleeping states. There is probably an optimal strategy in there somewhere! :-)
There's always a lot to get excited about in October: sweater weather, pumpkin spice, Halloween costumes, and for the last three years, Hacktoberfest.
Hacktoberfest is a "month-long celebration of open source software." It's organized by DigitalOcean and DEV and open to anyone. In my experience, Hacktoberfest is an easy way for users of open source to become contributors to open source. It's also celebratory and community-oriented and always includes some beautifully done artwork, which is later turned into stickers.
Being censored by an organization that claims to be promoting Free as in Speech is no small feat. It raises an interesting question: where do I go from here?
The answer has been right under my nose all along: the Uncensored Speakers Toastmasters Club in Dublin.
Uncensored Speakers meets on the second and fourth Friday of each month at The Central Hotel (Open Street Map).
Most Toastmasters groups have some community guidelines against overtly political or religious speeches or use of profane language. Uncensored Speakers claims to be different: a speaker may well choose to say what they really think about Brexit, choosing from some of the most colourful words that the English language has brought us.
Tonight's meeting is an exception: there will be a Table Topics and Humorous Speech contest, I've been invited to join the judging panel.
Censorship credentials
Let's look at how the Free Software censorship scandal has evolved.
In 2017 the Fellowship elected me as their representative to the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).
FSFE had just banked that huge €150,000 bequest. In fact, €50k had been withheld by the lawyer pending confirmation that FSFE doesn't lose their charitable status while the other €100k had reached the bank account. FSFE decided to appoint all their staff as voting members of the association, remove the elections from the constitution, put the €100k in reserve to underwrite future obligations to staff and then the two most senior staff, the president, Matthias Kirschner and the executive director, Jonas Oberg, went on extended periods of paternity leave.
Ethics of free software
Anything happens in our life or society can be seen through lens of ethics. So software also has that. But that ethics is comes from the perspective of developer. Stallman says he dont want develop software that chains its users. That is a strong ethical point. But it comes from developer. Some egoistic developers and companies sees this as a charity from software developers or companies.
User’s right is above developer’s ethics
Software developer or company is just a worker. We cannot rely on them for our rights. We have our rights. So I think its user right issue. For example, I want to use some software. but I can say that (1) I should get the right to run the software, (2) I should get the right to see the source code, (3) I should get the right to share the software and source code, (4) I should get the right to modify and share the modified version. If I am not getting these rights I dont want your software. I will ask somebody else to write softwares with those rights for me. Thats all. Simple.
But it can become ethical issue when somebody taking a decision on it. A school management can think like should we impose software that cannot be shared in school. Or somebody asks you can copy of the program. Usually we tell kids to share things. But its a rare case compared to huge individual use of software.
I conducted this very scientific Twitter poll and out of 52 respondants, only 23% agreed with me. Some people who disagreed with me pointed out specifically what they think is lacking: more regional events, more in specific countries, and more “generic” FLOSS events.
Many projects have a conference, and then there are “generic” conferences, like FOSDEM, LibrePlanet, LinuxConfAU, and FOSSAsia. Some are more corporate (OSCON), while others more community focused (e.g. SeaGL).
[...]
So far in 2019, I went to: FOSDEM, CopyLeft Conf, LibrePlanet, FOSS North, Linux Fest Northwest, OSCON, FrOSCon, GUADEC, and GitLab Commit. I’m going to All Things Open next week. In November I have COSCon scheduled. I’m skipping SeaGL this year. I am not planning on attending 36C3 unless my talk is accepted. I canceled my trip to DebConf19. I did not go to Camp this year. I also had a board meeting in NY, an upcoming one in Berlin, and a Debian meeting in the other Cambridge. I’m skipping LAS and likely going to SFSCon for GNOME.
So 9 so far this year, and somewhere between 1-4 more, depending on some details.
There are also conferences that don’t happen every year, like HOPE and CubaConf. There are some that I haven’t been to yet, like PyCon, and more regional events like Ohio Linux Fest, SCALE, and FOSSCon in Philadelphia.
I think I travel too much, and plenty of people travel more than I do. This is one of the reasons why we have too many events: the same people are traveling so much.
At WMES 2019 I will lead a Wikidata workshop about adding historical heritage data, basically repeating the one at esLibre.
At LAS 2019 I plan to attend to the Flatpak workshops and to call for a BoF for people involved in opensource conference organizations to share experiences and reuse tools.
Lots of thanks for the Wikimedia España association and GNOME Foundation for their travel sponsorship. Without their help I could not attend both.
We are happy to let everyone know that the Community DevRoom will be held this year at the FOSDEM Conference. FOSDEM is the premier free and open source software event in Europe, taking place in Brussels from 1-2 February 2020 at the Université libre de Bruxelles.
The Mozilla Developer Roadshow program launched in 2017. Our mission: Bring expert speakers and technology updates to local communities through free events and partnerships. These interactive meetup-style events help developers find resources and activities relevant to their day-to-day productivity and professional skill development.
Digital Restrictions Management is the practice of imposing technological restrictions that control what users can do with digital media. When a program is designed to prevent you from copying or sharing a song, reading an ebook on another device, or playing a single-player game without an Internet connection, you are being restricted by DRM. In other words, DRM creates a damaged good; it prevents you from doing what would be possible without it. This concentrates control over production and distribution of media, giving DRM peddlers the power to carry out massive digital book burnings and conduct large scale surveillance over people’s media viewing habits.
If we want to avoid a future in which our devices serve as an apparatus to monitor and control our interaction with digital media, we must fight to retain control of our media and software.
Here’s the final set of presentations from the “Sala de Grados (Aulario IV)” room at the LibreOffice Conference 2019 in Almeria, Spain. We have many more videos from other rooms to come, of course! (Note: for better audio, use headphones.)
Therefore, if online resellers want to get the most out of this multifunctional development platform Magento, it is very important to establish an effective expansion on the shopping page. This helps to expand various functionalities and offers users a wide experience of shopping online, as well as brings high profits and optimize Magento 2 Speed.
Currently, there are many extensions available on the Internet, and it is necessary to choose the most useful ones. This task can be challenging for business owners. To help you choose the best extensions, we have prepared a list of excellent Magento plug-ins that you can install and improve the performance of your website and help you gain an edge over the competition.
Praveen Vishakantaiah and Imad Sousou stepping down after a career of 25+ years at Intel.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA256
The first RC build of the 12.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available.
Installation images are available for:
o 12.1-RC1 amd64 GENERIC o 12.1-RC1 i386 GENERIC o 12.1-RC1 powerpc GENERIC o 12.1-RC1 powerpc64 GENERIC64 o 12.1-RC1 powerpcspe MPC85XXSPE o 12.1-RC1 sparc64 GENERIC o 12.1-RC1 armv6 RPI-B o 12.1-RC1 armv7 BANANAPI o 12.1-RC1 armv7 BEAGLEBONE o 12.1-RC1 armv7 CUBIEBOARD o 12.1-RC1 armv7 CUBIEBOARD2 o 12.1-RC1 armv7 CUBOX-HUMMINGBOARD o 12.1-RC1 armv7 RPI2 o 12.1-RC1 armv7 PANDABOARD o 12.1-RC1 armv7 WANDBOARD o 12.1-RC1 armv7 GENERICSD o 12.1-RC1 aarch64 GENERIC o 12.1-RC1 aarch64 RPI3 o 12.1-RC1 aarch64 PINE64 o 12.1-RC1 aarch64 PINE64-LTS
Note regarding arm SD card images: For convenience for those without console access to the system, a freebsd user with a password of freebsd is available by default for ssh(1) access. Additionally, the root user password is set to root. It is strongly recommended to change the password for both users after gaining access to the system.
Installer images and memory stick images are available here:
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/ISO-IMAGES/12.1/
The image checksums follow at the end of this e-mail.
If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list.
If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system, use the "releng/12.1" branch.
A summary of changes since 12.1-BETA3 includes:
o A NULL pointer dereference that could lead to a system crash had been fixed.
o A fix to correctly implement pmap_page_is_mapped() on arm64 and riscv.
o A fix to tun(4) and tap(4) when destroying interfaces had been added.
o A fix to krping to notify sleeping threads of device removal had been added.
o Several updates to mlx5core, mlx5en(4), and mlx5ib(4).
o Several fixes in libusb(3) and xhci(4) have been added.
o Several SCTP and TCP fixes have been added.
A list of changes since 12.0-RELEASE is available in the releng/12.1 release notes:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.1R/relnotes.html
Please note, the release notes page is not yet complete, and will be updated on an ongoing basis as the 12.1-RELEASE cycle progresses.
=== Virtual Machine Disk Images ===
VM disk images are available for the amd64, i386, and aarch64 architectures. Disk images may be downloaded from the following URL (or any of the FreeBSD download mirrors):
https://download.freebsd.org/ftp/releases/VM-IMAGES/12.1-RC1/
The partition layout is:
~ 16 kB - freebsd-boot GPT partition type (bootfs GPT label) ~ 1 GB - freebsd-swap GPT partition type (swapfs GPT label) ~ 20 GB - freebsd-ufs GPT partition type (rootfs GPT label)
The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB and 165 MB respectively (amd64/i386), decompressing to a 21 GB sparse image.
Note regarding arm64/aarch64 virtual machine images: a modified QEMU EFI loader file is needed for qemu-system-aarch64 to be able to boot the virtual machine images. See this page for more information:
https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/QEMU
To boot the VM image, run:
% qemu-system-aarch64 -m 4096M -cpu cortex-a57 -M virt \ -bios QEMU_EFI.fd -serial telnet::4444,server -nographic \ -drive if=none,file=VMDISK,id=hd0 \ -device virtio-blk-device,drive=hd0 \ -device virtio-net-device,netdev=net0 \ -netdev user,id=net0
Be sure to replace "VMDISK" with the path to the virtual machine image.
=== Amazon EC2 AMI Images ===
FreeBSD/amd64 EC2 AMIs are available in the following regions:
eu-north-1 region: ami-0c2caa354f54dcc8e ap-south-1 region: ami-011f6d0b22b4179ae eu-west-3 region: ami-0e633b1e66b94dc5e eu-west-2 region: ami-06f77908c8875b5ce eu-west-1 region: ami-07d5b3d4ffa682d66 ap-northeast-2 region: ami-0a0d9969831c99d3f ap-northeast-1 region: ami-092398d1a41a67f27 sa-east-1 region: ami-023dd6db41165f441 ca-central-1 region: ami-0cf9fd10259cf4eb2 ap-east-1 region: ami-0e255d1bb4a1f76f4 ap-southeast-1 region: ami-0404212cff3236606 ap-southeast-2 region: ami-0fea81c67debcba8b eu-central-1 region: ami-08e32f4e90fd250f4 us-east-1 region: ami-0e6e401d0ffebd916 us-east-2 region: ami-0d094195cae5bf901 us-west-1 region: ami-04c1e10d06064e68d us-west-2 region: ami-02d0010139a9a494e
FreeBSD/aarch64 EC2 AMIs are available in the following regions:
eu-north-1 region: ami-022e4644320e82ac1 ap-south-1 region: ami-0e421a1864d53d226 eu-west-3 region: ami-0bffb1c264a4b8d09 eu-west-2 region: ami-0f596a538918dc9c8 eu-west-1 region: ami-063c017d8b9086b55 ap-northeast-2 region: ami-0b34ed283d7dd41ae ap-northeast-1 region: ami-0071602b3e78a8de0 sa-east-1 region: ami-07986820662819e67 ca-central-1 region: ami-0d9ee49739059957b ap-east-1 region: ami-00ae1e2b897eb6230 ap-southeast-1 region: ami-0018127ce245410e0 ap-southeast-2 region: ami-02fa0380052cd268f eu-central-1 region: ami-01836dc7a9f273243 us-east-1 region: ami-0018654c0af06d99d us-east-2 region: ami-06a4203b93836b927 us-west-1 region: ami-09c5010072b44bd96 us-west-2 region: ami-063fae5c2ec327807
=== Vagrant Images ===
FreeBSD/amd64 images are available on the Hashicorp Atlas site, and can be installed by running:
% vagrant init freebsd/FreeBSD-12.1-RC1 % vagrant up
=== Upgrading ===
The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of amd64 and i386 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running earlier FreeBSD releases can upgrade as follows:
# freebsd-update upgrade -r 12.1-RC1
During this process, freebsd-update(8) may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.
# freebsd-update install
The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.
# shutdown -r now
After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components:
# freebsd-update install
It is recommended to rebuild and install all applications if possible, especially if upgrading from an earlier FreeBSD release, for example, FreeBSD 11.x. Alternatively, the user can install misc/compat11x and other compatibility libraries, afterwards the system must be rebooted into the new userland:
# shutdown -r now
Finally, after rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to remove stale files:
# freebsd-update install
Richard Stallman, the founder of Free Software Movement, resigned. Did he do something wrong? No. He had some wrong beliefs that he openly told to a semi private email list. Thats a good thing. He openly said things. So others get opportunity to correct him. Right? No. It created a land slide. Finally he was forced to resign from the same institution he founded in 1984 to protect software user’s rights. Then his own project members rejected them. I could not find any genuine reason for all these.
All these happened because he said something about a news article appeared on a news portal. Actually he was analyzing the words used in news article. Ok let it be a bad thing. So you decided it was wrong and asked for his resignation. You have to make a press release about things. Every is fine. I will accept it.
But this was not happened. In the same email discussion somebody wrote that that person was worried about the mail get leaking to press. That happened. Email reached outside. Online lynch mob began. Facebook events organized for protest against him. There was a smear campaign event in officially started. Lot of media telling all kinds of lies about Stallman. Then Stallman’s comment came that he was forced to resign from FSF president position.
This is wrong. I cannot accept it. But FSF did that. By accepting the resignation what FSF tell the world that they approves all smear campaign and lies spread in the society. In another words you can say that FSF secretly conspired with others for these smear campaign to fire Stallman. That usually happen in power structures.
Richard Stallman has issued a brief statement saying that there will not be any radical changes in the GNU Project's goals, principles and policies.
Two year ago Arduino launched MKR WAN 1300 board powered by Arduino Zero compatible Microchip Atmel SAMD21 32-bit ARM Cortex M0+ MCU and a Murata CMWZ1ZZABZ LoRa module based on Semtech SX1276...
Open source hardware projects have struggled to gain the mass audience that popular open source software projects have. This may not matter.
pytest 5.2 was just released, and with it, a cool fun feature called dynamic scope fixtures. Anthony Sotille so tilly is one of the pytest core developers, so I thought it be fun to have Anthony describe this new feature for us.
We also talk about parametrized testing and really what is fixture scope and then what is dynamic scope.
Special Guest: Anthony Sottile.
Many traditional optimizations in the compiler work from a top-down approach, which starts at the beginning of the program and works toward the bottom. This allows the optimization to see the definition of something before any uses of it, which simplifies most evaluations. It’s also the natural way we process things. In this article, we’ll look at a different approach and a new project called Ranger, which attempts to turn this problem upside down.
[...]
This simple example shows how we are attempting to remove the need for the top-down analysis order, which helps eliminate the need for heuristics and should result in more consistent optimization results.
Much of the research that has gone into this project has been to control the performance of the on-demand analysis, so that it is not more expensive than the much simpler top-down approach. The Ranger only does work that is actually needed, so we also see some significant time savings in optimization passes that don’t need very many ranges. We hope to extend this approach in the future to other optimizations.
This work is live in a current GCC development branch and is now capable of building an entire Fedora distribution. We plan to integrate it with mainstream GCC in the next release, GCC 11.
While polling other contributors (I proposed moving to gitlab.com), someone suggested moving to Sourcehut, a newish git hosting platform written and maintained by Drew DeVault. I've been following Drew's work for a while now and although I had read a few blog posts on Sourcehut's development, I had never really considered giving it a try. So I did!
Sourcehut is still in alpha and I'm expecting a lot of things to change in the future, but here's my quick review.
[...]
All in all, I don't think I'll be moving ISBG to Sourcehut (yet?). At the moment it doesn't quite feel as ready as I'd want it to be, and that's OK. Most of the things I disliked about the service can be fixed by some UI work and I'm sure people are already working on it.
Github was bought by MS for 7.5 billion USD and Gitlab is currently valued at 2.7 billion USD. It's not really fair to ask Sourcehut to fully compete just yet :)
With Sourcehut, Drew DeVault is fighting the good fight and I wish him the most resounding success. Who knows, maybe I'll really migrate to it in a few years!
Grace Hopper is one of those iconic figures that really needs no introduction. During her long career in the United States Navy, she was a key figure in the early days of modern computing. If you have been involved in open source or technology in general, chances are you have already heard several anecdotes about Grace Hopper. The story of finding the first computer bug, perhaps? Or maybe you have heard some of her nicknames: Queen of Code, Amazing Grace, or Grandma COBOL?
While computing has certainly changed from the days of punch cards, Grace Hopper's legacy lives on. She was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Navy named a warship after her, and the Grace Hopper Celebration is an annual conference with an emphasis on topics that are relevant to women in computing. Suffice it to say, Grace Hopper's name is going to live on for a very long time.
Grace Hopper had a career anyone should be proud of, and she accomplished many great things. Like many historical figures who have accomplished great things, sometimes the anecdotes about her contributions start to drift towards the realm of tall tales, which does Grace Hopper a disservice. Her real accomplishments are already legendary, and there is no reason to try to turn her into the computer science version of John Henry or Paul Bunyan.
Datto backs up data, a lot of it. At the time of writing Datto has over 500 PB of data stored on ZFS. This count includes both backup appliances that are sent to customer sites, as well as cloud storage servers that are used for secondary and tertiary backup of those appliances. At this scale drive swaps are a daily occurrence, and data corruption is inevitable. How we handle this corruption when it happens determines whether we truly lose data, or successfully restore from secondary backup. In this post we'll be showing you how at Datto we intentionally cause corruption in our testing environments, to ensure we're building software that can properly handle these scenarios.
Disclaimer: You should absolutely not attempt these instructions on any system containing any data you would like to keep. I provide no guarantees that the commands within this post will not completely destroy your zpool and all its contained data. But we'll try to only destroy it a little bit.
Nowadays, we have huge amounts of data in almost every application we use - listening to music on Spotify, browsing friend's images on Instagram, or maybe watching an new trailer on YouTube. There is always data being transmitted from the servers to you.
This wouldn't be a problem for a single user. But imagine handling thousands, if not millions, of requests with large data at the same time. These streams of data have to be reduced somehow in order for us to be physically able to provide them to users - this is where data compression kicks in.
There're lots of compression techniques, and they vary in their usage and compatibility. For example some compression techniques only work on audio files, like the famous MPEG-2 Audio Layer III (MP3) codec.
I often speak about “visual debugging” and “visual testing”, meaning, how IDEs can help put these intermediate concepts within reach using a visual UI.
For testing, sometimes our code has problems that require investigation with a debugger. For React, that usually means a trip to the browser to set a breakpoint and use the Chrome developer tools. In Debugging During Testing With NodeJS we show how the IDE’s debugger, combined with TDD, can make this investigation far more productive. In the next step we show how to do so using Chrome as the execution environment.
Python‘s had this handy logging module since July 2003.
The Serenity operating system turns 1 year old today. I'm counting from the first commit in the git repository, on October 10, 2018. Parts of the code had been around for a while before that, so this first commit was really about putting everything I was tinkering with into a shared repo.
Nobel Prizes for literature were awarded Thursday to two writers enmeshed in Europe’s social and political fault lines: a liberal Pole who has irked her country’s conservative government and an Austrian accused by many liberals of being an apologist for Serbian war crimes.
Techdirt has written many times about the need to move from traditional academic publishing to open access. There are many benefits, including increasing the reach and impact of research, and allowing members of the public to read work that they have often funded, without needing to pay again. But open access is not a panacea; it does not solve all the problems of today's approach to spreading knowledge. In particular, it suffers from the same serious flaw that afflicts traditional titles: a tendency to focus on success, and to draw a veil of silence over failure. As a new column in Nature puts it:
Michigan’s public schools are continuing to turn classrooms over to long-term substitute teachers who can have as little as two years of college, according to new state data.
Permits issued this year show the use of long-term subs is on pace to match and most likely exceed last year, when districts used more than 2,500 long-term subs. That was a tenfold increase from four years earlier, a trend that has angered education advocates.
It means another year in which thousands of students will get their math, English and science instruction from non-certified teachers.
The device cuts 10-inch vinyl records, which can hold about 10 to 15 minutes of audio on each side. It’s a connected device; a companion app helps with formatting and song arrangement to better fit your music onto the two sides. But at its core, the Phonocut was designed for simplicity. All you have to do is plug in an audio cable, like from a headphone jack, and press Play.
Creators of the show — which has tackled homelessness, incarceration and death — said they decided to take on this issue because of data that shows 5.7 million children under age 11 live in households with a parent with substance abuse issues.
Ken Thompson, who co-created the popular operating system Unix along with Dennis Ritchie, remains a revered figure in the field of computer science. In 2014, famous open-source developer Leah Neukirchen got her hands on a /etc/password file from a BSD 3 source tree. It contained hashed passwords of some big names like Dennis Ritchie, Steve Bourne, Ken Thompson, Brian W. Kernighan in the computer science field.
Neukirchen tried cracking the passwords out of curiosity as the passwords were sealed with a DES-based crypt(3) algorithm, which is now considered easy to crack.
A 39-year-old password of Ken Thompson, the co-creator of the UNIX operating system among, has finally been cracked that belongs to a BSD-based system, one of the original versions of UNIX, which was back then used by various computer science pioneers. In 2014, developer Leah Neukirchen spotted an interesting "/etc/passwd" file in a publicly available source tree of historian BSD version 3, which includes hashed passwords belonging to more than two dozens Unix luminaries who worked on UNIX development, including Dennis Ritchie, Stephen R. Bourne, Ken Thompson, Eric Schmidt, Stuart Feldman, and Brian W. Kernighan. Since all passwords in that list are protected using now-depreciated DES-based crypt(3) algorithm and limited to at most 8 characters, Neukirchen decided to brute-force them for fun and successfully cracked passwords (listed below) for almost everyone using password cracking tools like John the Ripper and hashcat.
A security audit funded by the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) has discovered a critical security bug in iTerm2: a popular open source alternative to Apple’s Terminal — which provides a command line interface to control the UNIX-based operating system sitting below macOS.
Mozilla, iTerm2’s developers and Radically Open Security, the not-for-profit security company contracted to probe iTerm2’s security, have urged users to update the software, which has now been patched. The issue had been sitting in the open (hopefully) unnoticed for approximately seven years, they said.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (lucene-solr and ruby-openid), Fedora (krb5 and SDL2), openSUSE (kernel and libopenmpt), and Ubuntu (python2.7, python3.4).
California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday signed a law that will make the state the first to allow employers, co-workers and teachers to seek gun violence restraining orders against other people.
Given the freshets of love now showering George W. Bush, I thought it might be useful to run here whole for the first time my short life of Bush that was serialized in 2004 and later appeared € in a different form in€ Grand Theft Pentagon, my book on the crimes of the defense industry during the Afghan and Iraq wars. Let it stand as my brief against the rehabilitation of George W. Bush.
In a rather macabre instance of déjà vu, Iraq is again coming apart at the seams. Iraqi security forces have killed more than 100 mostly peaceful protestors over the last few weeks, wounding thousands more. And that’s just what the military acknowledges. In daily demonstrations across Baghdad and southern Iraq, protesters have railed against unemployment, poor social services, and government graft and corruption—specifically the theft of hundreds of millions in tax dollars and national oil wealth. At the moment, it’s unclear whether the prime minister will resign, the security forces will double-down on their brutality, or, as some people have begun to demand, a new military ruler will take charge. Whatever the future brings, things are unlikely to end well.
GOMA, North Kivu Province, Democratic Republic of Congo — The boy was sitting next to his father, as he so often did. He mimicked his dad in every way. He wanted to be just like him, but Muhindo Maronga Godfroid, then a 31-year-old primary school teacher and farmer, had bigger plans for his two-and-a-half-year-old son. He would go to university one day. He would become a “big name” — not just in their village of Kibirizi, but in North Kivu Province, maybe the entire Democratic Republic of Congo. The boy was exceedingly smart. He was, Godfroid said, “amazing.” He could grow up to be a leader in a country in desperate need of them.
The Turkish offensive in Northeast€ Syria€ points to urgent need for the Turkish Armed Forces, Kurdish-led forces, and all other local armed groups to make protecting civilians and respect for human rights a priority in their operations, Human Rights Watch said today.
CCTV footage shows students carrying Fahad’s limp body from Room 2011 in the middle of the night.
Iraqi security forces have used excessive and unnecessary lethal force in confronting at times rock-throwing protesters, killing at least 105 and wounding over 4,050 since October 1, 2019
The attack on a synagogue in Halle, Germany on Yom Kippur, Judaism’s holiest day of the year, is a terrifying reminder that the scourge of anti-Semitism persists in Europe today.€
On the 18th anniversary of the war in Afghanistan, President Donald Trump said on Twitter, “… it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.” He added, “WE WILL FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN.” But rather than referring to the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Trump was actually talking about the role of U.S. troops in northern Syria, about which he had just made a serious decision. One wonders whether Trump would take greater interest in the longest official war in U.S. history if he had real estate interests in Kabul. He made absolutely no mention of Afghanistan on the anniversary of the war. But neither did most members of Congress.
A few days ago, a video widely shared online showed a regional commander in southern Tanzania caning boys who were lying on the ground as punishment for burning down their dormitories after their mobile phones were confiscated.€
Turkey’s plan to create a 32-kilometer “safe zone” in Syria where it could relocate one million Syrian refugees is woefully misguided and dangerous – and bound to fail.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is attacking President Trump for pulling US troops out of Syria, where they’ve been engaging in an illegal and bloody war against the Syrian government and its military for at least five years, not counting the three prior years when the US was providing arms and training to Syrian rebels, including groups associated with Al Qaeda.
Big powers, as with the greatest of gangsters, have always had a certain, indulgent luxury; their prerogative is to make promises they can choose to abide by or ignore.€ A vision is assured, guarantees made.€ Then comes the betrayal.€ The small powers, often pimped in the process, can only deal with the violent consequences.
The government directly attributes the security measure to some of the Greater Copenhagen bomb attacks and Herlev gang [sic] shootings, which the police strongly suspect are connected to Swedes living in the Malmö and Stockholm areas.
The pro-Beijing group Safeguard HK visited Cheng on Tuesday at Princess Margaret Hospital and promised to donate at least HK$520,000 to help him.
Apple Inc has removed an app that helped Hong Kong protesters track police movements, saying it was used to target officers, after a Chinese state newspaper sharply criticized the U.S. tech giant for allowing the software.
In the past few months, there has been a surge in refugees entering the Greek Islands from nearby neighboring Turkey.
Several Greek refugee centers warned of being overwhelmed. The rise in refugees stirred memories of the massive exodus in 2015 from Turkey when nearly a million people entered Greece.
As European governments decry Turkey’s offensive on Kurdish forces in Syria, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told the EU on Thursday that Ankara will let millions of migrants flow into the continent unless Europe halts its criticism. Analysts say the threat exemplifies the lack of influence European powers have over Turkey.
Pentagon officials fear that Turkey’s incursion could lead to the release of tens of thousands of Islamic State fighters and their families who are being held in detention facilities under Kurdish control, and a return, quickly, of the self-proclaimed caliphate that the United States and its partners have spent the last five years destroying.
But even more, they fear that the next time the United States is looking for help from fighters on the ground in the region, the Americans will not be able to find it.
The head of Indonesia’s intelligence agency, Budi Gunawan, told reporters that the two assailants were members of an Islamist terror group, Jamaah Ansharut Daulah, that has pledged loyalty to the Islamic State and has been responsible for several recent attacks in Indonesia.
Economic and strategic competition between China, a Communist-ruled one-party state, and India -- the world's largest democracy -- has also intensified in the past few years as Beijing started to expand its influence in India's traditional backyard, especially through Xi's ambitious BRI global trade plan.
Recent moves arousing suspicion in India include China taking control of a major port in Sri Lanka and signing groundbreaking trade deals with Nepal, and its navy conducting anti-piracy operations in the western Indian Ocean.
To a question from Hindustanââ¬â°Times whether he was referring to the military exercise in Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as south Tibet, Luo said, “As far as we know, the so-called military exercise is not a fact, it is not true”.
The exercise in question is the India Army’s “Him Vijay” drill, said to be taking place some 100 km from the Line of Actual Control (LAC) -- which divides India and China – in Arunachal Pradesh. News reports from India said it is the biggest exercise to test the combat capabilities of the new mountain strike corps.
Though Luo unexpectedly denied knowledge of the exercise, Chinese academics have told Hindustanââ¬â°Times that Beijing isn’t pleased with the drill as it is in an area they consider disputed.
A group of scientific researchers has discovered a record methane emission coming from the eastern Siberian Sea, expedition organizer Tomsk Polytechnic University (TPU) said in a statement.
The Mediterranean basin is one of the hot spots of this global crisis, and in some ways it is being “hit harder than other parts of the world,” according to Wolfgang Cramer, scientific director at the French-based Mediterranean Institute of Biodiversity and Ecology (IMBE).
A new report whose main conclusions are being presented on Thursday in Barcelona shows that the temperature increase in the Mediterranean region has already reached 1.5ۼC above pre-industrial levels, which means that the warming effect in this area is 20% faster than the global average.
Greens have welcomed plans to turn the European Investment Bank (EIB) into Europe’s “climate bank”, which forms part of a pledge by the new Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, to deliver a ‘European Green Deal.’
However, they say such a proposal only makes sense if the EIB agrees to end all financing of fossil fuel projects and rapidly become a bank which exclusively supports the transition to a climate-neutral economy.
Molly Scott Cato, who spoke during a European Parliament debate on the future of the EIB today and is Green party spokesperson on finance [link to video], said...
Green MP and Mayoral candidates Carla Denyer and Sandy Hore-Ruthven have issued a letter to the people of Bristol today, calling on the city to face up to the climate crisis.
The letter is in support of the peaceful climate protests being launched today by Extinction Rebellion, taking place in London and in cities around the world.
Greens in Bristol will be joining the action in solidarity, while advocating bold political action to address the climate crisis on Bristol City Council, in the West of England, and in Westminster.
The letter reads as follows.
Al Gore missed this memo, written at some time between 1809 and 1813, by the poet John Clare in Norhamptonshire, England. However, in his latest op-ed, It’s Not too Late – The climate crisis is the battle of our time and we can win, in the New York Times, September 22, 2019, the former Vice President helpfully notes that the fastest-growing occupation in the United States is solar installer and the second fastest- growing is wind turbine service technician. The loss of Clare’s world is un-remediated. The loss of our world, apparently, is salved by the growth of mostly low-wage ‘green-tech’ jobs. Clare, at least, identifies the cause of his loss – Accursed Wealth, or, as we might call it today, capitalism.
His voice€ trembled with rage as he told me that he was€ speaking for all the animals living in the basin that can’t speak for€ themselves.
For the entire 2.5 million years of the Ice Age epoch called€ the Pleistocene, it was a low-carbon world. Atmospheric carbon dioxide hovered€ around 230 parts per million. Not only did€ Homo sapiens€ evolve on a low-carbon planet, so did€ Homo erectus€ and most other human species now known only from fossil evidence in Europe and Asia.
Even as the winds gusted dangerously as forecast, California’s biggest utility faced hostility and second-guessing Thursday for shutting off electricity to millions of people to prevent its equipment from sparking wildfires.
The globalised industrial food system that transnational agri-food conglomerates promote is€ failing to feed the world.€ It is responsible for some of the planet’s€ most pressing political, social and environmental crises.
By stabilizing carbon emissions and holding warming to 1.5€°C above pre-industrial levels, 76 percent of vulnerable species will be better off, and nearly 150 species would no longer be vulnerable to extinction from climate change.
Click the three different warming scenarios to explore how increased warming makes more species vulnerable.
Two-thirds of North America's birds, or hundreds of species, will be squeezed by shrinking habitats if climate change continues at its current pace — especially Arctic birds like the snowy owl, boreal birds like the gray jay and Western forest birds like the mountain bluebird, a new study from the National Audubon Society predicts.
If average global temperatures warm 3 C above preindustrial times, 389 of 604 North American bird species are predicted to lose a significant chunk of suitable habitat where they can live, as those require certain temperature and precipitation ranges that are expected to shrink as climate change pushes warm temperatures further north, says the study released Thursday by the U.S.-based conservation group.
After 11 years of inundating cineplexes with status-quo defending super cops and soldiers, Hollywood has finally given us a blockbuster movie with a protagonist willing to fight for common people against the economic system oppressing them. He just happens to be a comic book villain.
In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has been talking about plans for, as he put it, a “very substantial tax cut for middle income folks who work so hard.” But before Congress embarks on a new tax measure, people should consider one of the largely unexamined effects of the last tax bill, which Trump promised would help the middle class: Would you believe it has inflicted a trillion dollars of damage on homeowners — many of them middle class — throughout the country?
That massive number is the reduction in home values caused by the 2017 tax law that capped federal deductions for state and local real estate and income taxes at $10,000 a year and also eliminated some mortgage interest deductions. The impact varies widely across different areas. Counties with high home prices and high real estate taxes and where homeowners have big mortgages are suffering the biggest hit, as you’d expect, given the larger value of the lost tax deductions. But as we’ll see, homeowners all over the country are feeling the effects.
One went up and one went down.€ Each enjoyed similar benefits as a result of their travels.€ I refer to Brett Kavanaugh and Maryanne Trump Barry. Brett ascended to the United States Supreme Court and Maryanne descended from the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.€ Their travels enabled them to escape the consequences of their misconduct.
Alas, I have not written about Immanuel Wallerstein right after his death, as I should have. The electoral campaign for Moscow City Duma demanded all my time and attention, so I limited myself to a short post on social media and promised to write an article later.
A caravan of buses, security vehicles, indigenous leaders, and backpackers with Che Guevara T-shirts wove their way down a muddy road through farmers’ fields to the precolonial city of Tiwanaku. Folk music played throughout the cool day of January 22, 2015, as indigenous priests conducted complex rituals to prepare Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, for a third term in office. His ceremonial inauguration in the ancient city’s ruins was marked by many layers of symbolic meaning.
“I will be the hero! These morons—when this is over, I will be the hero…. Anything I did should be praised.”
While the European family seems to be having its internal spats – populist sparks within threatening to light the powder keg – the marshals and deputies, for the most part, are attempting to contain the British contagion. Britain is still scheduled to leave on October 31 without a deal with the European Union. The divorce papers remain unimplemented, and the lawyers and mediators are chafing. Governments across the European Union are planning for the hardest of hard departures, and Yellowhammer, the emergency government document contemplating the worst – queues, depleted supplies of necessaries, possible riots, transport shortages – has become, in a short time, part of the canon of apocalypse.
Ivan Zhdanov, the director of Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), says a donation from Spain was made deliberately to give Russia’s Justice Ministry an excuse to list his organization as a “foreign agent.” In an interview with the independent television network Dozhd, Zhdanov said FBK staff tracked down a 140,000-ruble ($2,160) transfer from a Spanish company, which he says is atypical, insofar as the Anti-Corruption Foundation rarely receives donations from legal entities, let alone from abroad.
Microsoft, which bought the code repository site for $7.5 billion last year, has defended its relationship with government agencies before.
The news comes just days after Friedman sent an email to employees saying that GitHub would allow ICE to renew a contract for a GitHub product, despite the fact that he, GitHub leadership, and many employees are opposed to ICE's child separation policy.
WASHINGTON — Two Florida businessmen tied to President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani have been arrested on campaign finance violations resulting from a $325,000 donation to a political action committee supporting Trump’s reelection.
First it was the NBA. Now it is esports that has found itself in the middle of the standoff between Chinese leaders and the Hong Kong pro-democracy protesters.
In March of 2018, US president Donald Trump promised “we’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon.” That December, he issued an order to begin withdrawing US troops. Apparently the order never got executed. Most of a year later, US forces remain.
There is blood in the water and frenzied sharks are closing in for the kill. Or so they think.
According to conventional wisdom, the Trump administration, as well as its regional allies in the Lima Group and the Venezuelan opposition, were set to intensify the diplomatic war on the Venezuelan government at the UN General Assembly. However, they only managed to demonstrate how far removed their coalition against President Maduro is from convincing the international community that deadly sanctions and a coup are the way forward for Venezuela.
The Herrick v. Grindr case [um] ground to a halt on October 7th, as the Supreme Court refused to grant cert. The lawsuit -- and its attempt to undermine Section 230 immunity -- is dead, relegated to the pile of also-rans which have attempted to get a US court to rewrite this very important section of the Communications Decency Act.
Police in Osinniki, a town outside Kemerovo, have dropped all charges against an Odnoklassniki user who was under investigation for allegedly insulting Vladimir Putin. According to an official document shared on Telegram by human rights lawyer Pavel Chikov, the case against Ilya Putevsky was abandoned because Putevsky never used the words “president” or “Russian Federation,” meaning that officials can’t be sure his October 7 blog post was in fact addressed to President Putin.
In tandem with the Apple controversy, Blizzard Entertainment, creator of World of Warcraft and other popular games, is facing harsh criticism from the gaming community after it banned a Hong Kong player who made comments in support of the protests.
The incident has raised questions about whether U.S. corporations are turning a blind eye to human rights abuses and censorship in an effort to appease the Chinese government and ensure their business is not disrupted in the world’s most populous country.
In a standing-room-only meeting yesterday, executives answered questions from employees on the controversial contract. CEO Nat Friedman fielded questions from employees and attempted to explain why the company would renew a $200,000 contract with the immigration agency. The Verge has obtained a transcript of the conversation.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has sent an email to employees with a lengthier explanation for why the company chose to remove HKmap.live from the App Store yesterday. Similar to Apple’s statement last night, Cook claims that the app — a crowdsourced mapping tool that’s become useful amid the ongoing protests in Hong Kong — was being misused in ways that could threaten public safety.
Facial recognition tech is considered at least mildly controversial in the United States. Certain federal agencies (like the DHS) are pushing for widespread deployment even as Congress members are raising questions about the tech's accuracy and reliability. Meanwhile, facial recognition bans are being introduced and enacted at the city and state level, showing there's no nationwide consensus that the tech is trustworthy, useful, or non-invasive.
Those outside the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are accustomed to thinking of the Internet censorship practices of the Chinese state as primarily domestic, enacted through the so-called "Great Firewall"—a system of surveillance and blocking technology that prevents Chinese citizens from viewing websites outside the country. The Chinese government’s justification for that firewall is based on the concept of “Internet sovereignty.” The PRC has long declared that “within Chinese territory, the internet is under the jurisdiction of Chinese sovereignty.''
Hong Kong, as part of the "one country, two systems" agreement, has largely lived outside that firewall: foreign services like Twitter, Google, and Facebook are available there, and local ISPs have made clear that they will oppose direct state censorship of its open Internet.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently released a proposed rule that will have grave consequences for the enforcement of fair housing laws. Under the Fair Housing Act, individuals can bring claims on the basis of a protected characteristic (like race, sex, or disability status) when there is a facially-neutral policy or practice that results in unjustified discriminatory effect, or disparate impact. The proposed rule makes it much harder to bring a disparate impact claim under the Fair Housing Act. Moreover, HUD’s rule creates three affirmative defenses for housing providers, banks, and insurance companies that use algorithmic models to make housing decisions. As we’ve previously explained, these algorithmic defenses demonstrate that HUD doesn’t understand how machine learning actually works.
This proposed rule could significantly impact housing decisions and make discrimination more prevalent. We encourage you to submit comments to speak out against HUD's proposed rule. Here's how to do it in three easy steps:
When you sign up for security services like two-factor authentication (2FA), the phone number you're providing is supposed to be explicitly used for security. You're providing that phone number as part of an essential exchange intended to protect yourself and your data, and that information is not supposed to be used for marketing. Since we've yet to craft a formal privacy law, there's nothing really stopping companies from doing that anyway, something Facebook exploited last year when it was caught using consumer phone numbers provided explicitly for 2FA for marketing purposes.
Stop us if you’ve heard this before: you give a tech company your personal information in order to use two-factor authentication, and later find out that they were using that security information for targeted advertising.
That’s exactly what Twitter fessed up to yesterday in an understated blog post: the company has been taking email addresses and phone numbers that users provided for “safety and security purposes” like two-factor authentication, and using them for its ad tracking systems, known as Tailored Audiences and Partner Audiences.
He recounted how GDPR provided the company with a "very, very good opportunity" to invest in understanding where all of its data was, across "every single corner" of the organisation.
"Now we have a very good understanding of what we're dealing with," he said, "and it enables us to drive a very effective transformation programme. To simplify the data, reduce the amount of data, so you don't need to duplicate, govern, document, put the metadata in place to really step up the analytics capabilities, the insight, and the automation for customers.
Unfortunately, End-Of-Life relays have some negative impacts on the network. Any relay in the network that runs an obsolete version puts network stability and security at risk. Outdated relays make it harder for us to roll out important fixes. And they can also make it harder to roll out some new features.
The cybersecurity agency within the Department of Homeland Security is seeking subpoena power to protect critical infrastructure.
Speaking at the FireEye Defense Summit Oct. 10, Chris Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, said that his agency wants the ability to compel [Internet] service providers to give his agency the contact information of customers who operate critical infrastructure that CISA identifies as having known vulnerabilities.
“Shops and cafes that offer wifi services must collect internet traffic information for 90 days, so in case there is anything, officials may need to request for the information under Article 26 of the Computer Crimes Act,” Puttipong said at a news conference.
Last fall, we chose NPR Illinois public radio reporter Rachel Otwell to join our Local Reporting Network to investigate sexual harassment at public colleges and universities in the state.
Her first stories focused on how the flagship campus of the University of Illinois had helped several professors retain seemingly unblemished records even though they were found to have violated its policies, including its sexual misconduct policy. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign allowed them to resign, paid them for periods they weren’t working and, in some cases, kept them on the faculty or promised not to discuss the reasons for their departures. The University of Illinois System holds the license to operate NPR Illinois.
In late August Jeremy Hammond was removed from the Federal Correctional Institution in Memphis, Tennessee where he was serving a 10-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to charges he hacked the private intelligence contractor Stratfor Global Intelligence. At the time of his transfer Hammond was enrolled in the Federal Bureau of Prison’s intensive Residential Drug Abuse Program (RDAP) which upon completion qualifies participating inmates for early release. Hammond’s prison release date was projected to come around mid December of 2019 but because of his removal from the RDAP program and the summons to this grand jury his time incarcerated could be extended by over two years. Hammond is currently confined at William G. Truesdale Correctional Center in Alexandria, VA and will likely remain there for the duration of these proceedings.
The Times, like nearly all news organizations, has also been hesitant about calling Trump a liar. Ironically, the Times was among the first to report that the president was repeating “an election lie” way back in January 2017 when Trump insisted, during a meeting with congressional leaders, that he had won the popular vote if one discounted all those who voted illegally. (He lost by about 3 million votes, and voter fraud is extremely rare.) The result of the Times’ hypercaution, however, is that America’s most influential media institution has ended up normalizing Trump, allowing him and his followers to undermine the norms of our democratic republic.
Anti-government protesters paraded captive police officers on a stage Thursday, defying Ecuadorian authorities who are seeking dialogue with opponents, particularly indigenous groups, after more than a week of deadly unrest.
As an autonomous collective, let's try (together!) to do a little NYPD math.
(Jakarta) – Indonesian authorities should immediately and impartially investigate the death of an environmental lawyer.
Pakistan is moving to make torture a criminal offense, an important step in stemming widespread abuses by the police.
Venezuela’s brutal crackdown on dissent, and its failure to tackle a humanitarian emergency that is largely of its own making, give rise to serious concerns about its fitness as a candidate for the United Nations Human Rights Council, a coalition of 54€ international and Venezuelan organizations said today.
Meanwhile, in Mr. Harpon’s desk there investigators this week found a USB drive containing jihadist propaganda and the addresses of some colleagues.
When a fight broke out recently in the parking lot of Salt Lake Park, a few miles south of downtown Los Angeles, Cogo Guebara did what seemed the most practical thing at the time: she ran over to the park’s police robot to push its emergency alert button.
“I was pushing the button but it said, ‘step out of the way,’” Guebara said. “It just kept ringing and ringing, and I kept pushing and pushing.”
Members of the ‘Bring Back Our Girls’ (BBOG) advocacy movement have asked the federal government to unveil its plan to rescue the remaining 112 Chibok school girls who are still under Boko Haram captivity.
They made the call on Saturday in Abuja during a sit-out demonstration to mark day 2000 since the abduction.
The 112 girls are part of the 279 female students abducted at Government Girls’ Secondary School Chibok, Borno State by the insurgents in April 14, 2014.
I generally found all the hype around the movie€ Joker€ to be overblown on all sides. The claim that a movie could end civility reflected the general hyperbole and panic in the Trump era. But the whining about woke culture and the left that came from the director were even more pathetic. All the people whining about cancel culture need to stop. If you’re whining, you haven’t been canceled.
Abuse of power, corruption, violation of the social contract… If you’re an American Democrat, chances are Donald Trump’s disdain for all of those has been evident to you for quite a bit. The spectacle of the President using the power of his office to urge the leader of Ukraine, and now China, to investigate a political rival has pushed even reluctant impeachers over the brink.
Technology is another form of law, and a failure to understand tech can get us into real problems, especially at the policy level, where politicians' failures to come to grips with tech (sometimes deliberately, and sometimes due to a lack of good advice) produces all kinds of terrible outcomes.
Bruce Schneier (previously) wants us to think about becoming "public interest technologists," who work for the public good, by advising lawmakers and policymakers, and by pursuing public interest goals in our technical work.
The lawsuit was dismissed by a California federal judge but later picked up in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In 2018, the court ruled in favor of Robles, writing in an opinion that “the ADA applies to the services of a public accommodation, not services in a place of public accommodation,” and that he may proceed with the lawsuit.
The report - prepared by an EU security group - highlighted the increased security risks posed by well-resourced state-backed entities and called for a new approach to securing telecoms infrastructure in the EU.
The report stressed that non-EU companies bidding for 5G network contracts could be "subject to interference" when they have strong ties to their government, or work in a system that lacks "democratic checks and balances".
The EU will now seek to come up with a so-called toolbox of measures by the end of the year to address cyber security risks at national and bloc-wide level.
The European Agency for Cybersecurity is also finalizing a map of specific threats related to 5G networks.
Rep. Maxine Waters, the California Democrat who heads the House Financial Services Committee, announced Wednesday that Mr. Zuckerberg will testify at a hearing by the panel on Oct. 23. The focus will be on Facebook's plan to create a digital currency and its role in housing. The company agreed in a legal settlement in March to overhaul its ad-targeting systems to prevent discrimination in housing, credit, and employment ads.
Amazon is now America’s second-largest private employer. (Walmart is the largest.) It traffics more than a third of all retail products bought or sold online in the U.S.; it owns Whole Foods and helps arrange the shipment of items purchased across the Web, including on eBay and Etsy. Amazon’s Web-services division powers vast portions of the Internet, from Netflix to the C.I.A. You probably contribute to Amazon’s profits whether you intend to or not. Critics say that Amazon, much like Google and Facebook, has grown too large and powerful to be trusted. Everyone from Senator Elizabeth Warren to President Donald Trump has depicted Amazon as dangerously unconstrained. This past summer, at a debate among the Democratic Presidential candidates, Senator Bernie Sanders said, “Five hundred thousand Americans are sleeping out on the street, and yet companies like Amazon, that made billions in profits, did not pay one nickel in federal income tax.” And Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, declared that Amazon has “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.” The Federal Trade Commission and the European Union, meanwhile, are independently pursuing investigations of Amazon for potential antitrust violations. In recent months, inquiries by news organizations have documented Amazon’s sale of illegal or deadly products, and have exposed how the company’s fast-delivery policies have resulted in drivers speeding down streets and through intersections, killing people. Company insiders were accustomed to complaints from rivals at book publishers or executives at big-box stores. Those attacks rarely felt personal. Now, a recently retired Amazon executive told me, “people are worried—we’re suddenly on the firing line.”
The article clocks in at more than 14,000 words, and it includes a thorough examination of all of the company’s most high-profile controversies that lays out with clinical precision the case against Amazon from the perspective of its fiercest critics. But it’s well worth every sentence to understand the breadth of Amazon’s business and what it could spell not just for the future of American commerce, but the dozens of other industries and product categories Amazon now engages in.
On 13 September, the Full Bench of the Australian Federal Court dismissed the appeal in Encompass Corporation v InfoTrack1, confirming that 'computer-implementation' is insufficient to provide patentability to an otherwise unpatentable scheme. The highly-anticipated decision, while not providing a definitive test, nonetheless offers greater clarity on the criteria for patentability of computer-implemented inventions.
[...]
However, importantly, the Full Court did note that the primary judge may have used language that introduced conceptually distinct elements of patentability in the consideration of whether the claimed method and apparatus were directed to an eligible subject matter. The bench drew attention to the caution expressed in CCOM in respect to importing novelty or inventive step considerations into the assessment of subject matter eligibility, inferring that some flaws may exist in the primary judgement, despite arriving at a similar conclusion.
After attending the hearing of the Encompass appeal proceedings, the decision was not too surprising. However, given the full bench of five judges, we had hoped the decision would provide greater clarity in respect of a test to determine what is required for a computer-implemented invention to be patentable in Australia.
You may have seen the headlines lately, saying that famed pseudonymous street artist Banksy was being "forced" into opening up a pop up store in London in order to secure a trademark and prevent "a greetings card company" from selling "fake Banksy merchandise." Banksy also claimed that the company was "attempting to take custody of my name." Banksy and Banksy's artwork are somewhat famous for protesting against commercial incentives and traditional capitalism -- so many people rushed to Banksy' defense because, from the initial description, it sounded like Hallmark or some sappy corporate giant of that nature was trying to rip off Banksy images for its own benefit.
Another day, another example of copyright being used as censorship. As you may have heard, there was a bit of controversy this weekend when talk show host Ellen DeGeneres attended the Dallas Cowboys game with former President George W. Bush. This made lots of people quite upset as they argued that being friends with Bush was either support for "tolerance of hate and discrimination" or an effort at "whitewashing... his manifest crimes." Others argued, as Ellen did, that there are good reasons to be kind to people you fundamentally disagree with.
