Based on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 release, Oracle Linux 8 Update 1 is here six months after the release of the Oracle Linux 8 operating system series, which adds a new distribution method combining BaseOS and Applications Streams. It adds updated components and enhanced security to better control and protect your installations on desktop and cloud.
"With Oracle Linux 8, the core operating environment and associated packages for a typical Oracle Linux 8 server are distributed through a combination of BaseOS and Applications Streams. BaseOS gives you a running user space for the operating environment. Application Streams provides a range of applications that were previously distributed in Software Collections, as well as other products and programs, that can run within the user space," said Oracle.
After responding to the latest security vulnerabilities affecting Intel CPU microarchitectures, Red Hat has released new Linux kernel security updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 operating systems to address the well-known ZombieLoad v2 flaw and other issues. The CentOS community also ported the updates for their CentOS Linux 6 and CentOS Linux 7 systems.
The security vulnerabilities patched in this new Linux kernel security update are Machine Check Error on Page Size Change (IFU) (CVE-2018-12207), TSX Transaction Asynchronous Abort (TAA) (CVE-2019-11135), Intel GPU Denial Of Service while accessing MMIO in lower power state (CVE-2019-0154), and Intel GPU blitter manipulation that allows for arbitrary kernel memory write (CVE-2019-0155).
Using Firefox 70 (including WebRender) and Google Chrome 78, here are our latest round of Linux web browser benchmarks tested on the Dell XPS Ice Lake laptop. Making this round of Linux browser benchmarking more interesting is also including power consumption and RAM usage metrics for the different browser benchmarks.
For those wondering about whether Firefox or Chrome makes the most sense for Linux laptops, these benchmarks from the Dell XPS with Intel Core i7-1065G7 will hopefully be useful.
Ubuntu 19.10 with the Linux 5.3 kernel was running on this Intel Ice Lake laptop while using the official builds of Mozilla Firefox 70.0 (both out of the box and with WebRender) and Google Chrome 78. The AC system power consumption was monitored on battery and the total RAM usage was being monitored throughout testing as well. All of the benchmarking was carried out using the Phoronix Test Suite.
Don’t we all wish our networks had infinite bandwidth? The reality is, however, that it is often a severely limited resource. Add to that the fact that bandwidth over-utilization can have huge impacts on network performance and we have a recipe for disaster.
The solution: set up some bandwidth monitoring system. A lot of them are available. Most of them run on Windows, though, and if your OS of choice it Linux, your options are slightly more limited. You still have plenty of options, however, and we’re about to introduce the best tools for bandwidth monitoring on Linux.
We’ll begin by introducing bandwidth monitoring and explain what it is. Next, we’ll cover the ins and outs of the Simple Network Management Protocol, or SNMP, one of the most-used monitoring technology. Our next order of business will be to have a look a Linux as an operating system but, more specifically, as a platform for monitoring tools. And finally, we’ll briefly review some of the best tools for bandwidth monitoring on Linux and describe their best features.
Baba Is You, the truly excellent puzzle game where you have to break the rules of each level to beat them is getting a big update soon. See Also: previous thoughts on it here.
How do you break these rules? Well, on each level there's logic blocks you can push around to change everything. Turn yourself into a rock, a jellyfish, make it so touching a wall wins instead of a flag you can't access and all kinds of really crazy things it becomes quite hilarious.
Terry Cavanagh, the indie developer behind VVVVVV, Super Hexagon and the latest Dicey Dungeons has a new blog post out talking about how well Dicey Dungeons has done and what's to come next.
Leading up to the release, Cavanagh was doing a blog post each day for seven days. This latest post from yesterday then, is long overdue considering Dicey Dungeons launched in August.
As a result of the team behind Factorio feeling like it's going on for too long, they've now set a proper release date.
In their latest Friday Facts update, they mentioned how their "when it's done" approach has served them well to create a high-quality game "but if we continued this way, we would be doing it basically forever". Part of the issue is that they want to work on new features and add content, instead of constant polishing. So they're setting a date publicly now "so we have to stick with it". With that in mind, it's going to leave Early Access on September 25, 2020.
Development is not ending once they hit the big 1.0, they also don't want to say it's 100% finished either. Like a lot of games, as long as the money keeps coming in they will likely keep adding to it.
There are some neat things to report and I think you will enjoy them! In particular, I think folks are really going to like the improvements to GNOME/GTK app integration and two sets of touch- and scrolling-related improvements to Okular and the Kickoff Application Launcher, detailed below:
Aside from tightening the GNOME/GTK integration with KDE, this week there has also been some Okular improvements, better touch support for the Kickoff Application Launcher, deleting files within the Dolphin file manager now uses a separate worker thread for the I/O, Spectacle can now integrate with OBS Studio as a new screen recording option, and other enhancements.
I’m now writing this post in the last hours of the Lakademy 2019 (and my first one). It was really good to be “formally” introduced to the community and it’s people, and to be in this environment of people wanting to collaborate to something as incredible as KDE. Althought I wanted to contribute more to other projects, I did some changes and fixes in the rocs, wrote my Season of KDE project and got some tasks that can help with the future of rocs.
Changes include disabling apparmor, which was preventing some programs from starting properly (eg. man), and fixing chromium by installing chromium-sandbox package. Also added was dummy 'sudo' command (so you can copy&paste sudo commands from internet and it will work as long as you are signed in as root).
I will be happy if you let me know problems you encounter, either by email, or using slax-users google group, or by commenting to this blog post.
The PCLinuxOS community released their monthly ISO snapshots for November 2019, a release that contains all the latest bug and security updates, as well as various improvements.
PCLinuxOS 2019.11 is out now as the latest and most up to date installation medium for this independently developed and user-friendly GNU/Linux distribution, including a fully updated system with all the updates released as of November 12th, 2019, with refreshed themes for GRUB, bootsplash, and the desktop.
PCLinuxOS 2019.11 is available in there different edition, with the KDE Plasma 5, Xfce, and MATE desktop environments. The PCLinuxOS 2019.11 KDE edition ships with the latest KDE Plasma 5.17.3 desktop environment, as well as the KDE Applications 19.08.3 and KDE Frameworks 5.64.0 open-source software suites.
During the 5th and 6th of October, 21 team members attended the very first internal Arch Conf. We spent 2 days at Native Instruments in Berlin having workshops, discussions and hack sessions together. We even managed to get into, and escape, an escape room!
It was a great and productive weekend which we hope will continue in the next years. Hopefully we will be able to expand on this in the future and include more community members and users.
There is a report available for the workshops and discussions from the conference!
Updating CD images again for Buster release 2. I've spent a happy day chasing down various CD images and discovering my ignorance once again :)
Thanks to Sledge for having me around and also to Schweer - who wasn't feeling so well. No RattusRattus or Isy this time round - that meant I got to do a little more but I do miss their company.
Just one day after announcing the availability of the Debian GNU/Linux 10.2 "Buster" maintenance update, the Debian Project now published live and installable ISO images for all supported architectures and flavors.
Debian GNU/Linux 10.2 "Buster" consists of over two months of updates release through the official software repositories. It includes a total of 115 security updates and bug fixes, offering the community the most up-to-date install mediums for the latest Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" operating system series.
Debian GNU/Linux 10.2 "Buster" ISO images are now available to download (see download links below) for all supported architectures, including 32-bit (i386), 64-bit (amd64), ARM64 (AArch64), Armel, ARMhf, MIPS, MIPSel (MIPS Little Endian), MIPS64el (MIPS 64-bit Little Endian), PPC64el (PowerPC 64-bit Little Endian), and s390x (IBM System z).
Live images are available as well with the KDE Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, LXDE, MATE, and Cinnamon desktop environments, but only for 32-bit (i386) and 64-bit (amd64) systems. As usual, a multi-arch image supporting both amd64 (64-bit) and i386 (32-bit) architectures is available as well, along with netboot images.
Following the decision by Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman to seek a general resolution over init system diversity and just how much Debian developers care about supporting systemd alternatives, the general resolution vote is moving closer.
The text is now laid out over three proposals drafted by Sam Hartman in weighing the importance of systemd / init system diversity by Debian developers.
The three choices include affirming init diversity, focusing on systemd but supporting the exploration of alternatives, and focusing on systemd for the init system and other facilities.
The official Debian project named this extended version as the “Buster”. This version launched with 100+ bug fixes and security updates. You can directly update from the Debian 10 or 10.2 using the upgrading commands.
The world of smartwatches is ruled mostly by the likes of Apple Watch and WearOS-based devices. But we have seen a few attempts from the open-source community, including PineTime and AsteroidOS. Now, the tech world has got something new to play with — an open-source hackable smartwatch called Bangle.js.
It’s co-developed by NearForm Research and Espruino, which showcased its latest offering to the attendees of the NodeConf 2019. Until now, the two companies provided digital badges at the conference.
The development team at Popcorn Computer have this week announced they will be launching a new Linux mini PC next year sometime during 2020 with prices starting from just $199. If your budget will stretch and you would like LoRa connectivity than the price increases to $249. Hopefully the new mini PC will be launched early next year and shipping is expected to take place sometime around May 2020.
It’s not sure whether the Linux mini PC will be made available via a crowdfunding site or directly from the Popcorn Computer website. The mini PC is expected to be equipped with a 4.95 inch, 1920 x 1080 pixel IPS LCD touchscreen display and powered by a 1.2 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 64-bit processor supported by 2GB of RAM and equipped with 32GB of eMMC storage.
"Radio Rob" Hopkins lives in Tagish, Yukon, 120km south of the capital city, Whitehorse. It is here that he created Open Broadcaster, an open source system that enables small rural market radio stations to manage their operations and volunteers.
Having lived in the Yukon for 35 years, back when there was no phone or internet, Rob got into communications to set up a low-power FM (LPFM) station for the community. He wanted to make it easier to manage stations, so he made a pitch to the Yukon government for seed money to develop an application to use the internet to run a radio station and deliver the last mile through FM radio.
Google has pushed Skaffold – a command line tool that automates Kubernetes development workflow – out to the developer community, saying the tool is now generally available after 5,000 commits from nearly 150 contributors to the project.
Kubernetes – the de facto container orchestration standard – has become the linchpin of much cloud-native computing, sitting underneath swathes of cloud-based tools to manage how applications run across a wide range computing environments.
We spend a lot of time focusing on the epic side of free software and user freedom: joys come from providing encrypted communication options to journalists and political dissidents; losses are when IoT devices are used to victimize and abuse.
I think a lot about the little ways technology interacts with our lives, the threats to or successes for user freedom we encounter in regular situations that anyone can find themselves able to understand: sexting with a secure app, sharing DRM-free piece of media, or having your communications listened to by a “home assistant.”
When I was writing a talk about ethics and IoT, I was looking for these small examples of the threats posed by smart doorbells. False arrests and racial profiling, deals with law enforcement to monitor neighborhoods, the digital panopticon — these are big deals. I remembered something I read about kids giving their neighbor a pair of slippers for Christmas. This sort of anonymous gift giving becomes impossible when your front door is constantly being monitored. People laughed when I shared this idea with them — that we’re really losing something by giving up the opportunity to anonymously leave presents.
We are also giving up what my roommate calls “benign acts of rebellion.” From one perspective, making it harder for teenagers to sneak out at night is a good thing. Keeping better tabs on your kids and where they are is a safety issue. Being able to monitor what they do on their computer can prevent descent into objectively bad communities and behavior patterns, but it can also prevent someone from participating in the cultural coming of age narratives that help define who we are as a society and give us points of connection across generations.
FOSSA, the open source management company, today announced that it has been selected for the prestigious Upstart 100 List, CNBC's annual list of 100 top startups to watch. The Upstart 100 is an exclusive collection of companies that are building brands, raising money and creating jobs on their path to becoming tomorrow's household names. CNBC's selection committee chose FOSSA from more than 600 nominees, scored across eight equally weighted quantitative metrics, including scalability, sales growth and workforce diversity.
Silicon root of trust (RoT) technology is important for embedding security mechanisms at silicon level for a wide range of products from mobile devices to network cards to webscale servers. It is increasingly important as fears about 5G and cloud security rise, but it is also highly proprietary to each equipment vendor. To address that issues, an open source project called OpenTitan says it will produce a reference design and integration guidelines for silicon RoT. Although Google is a leading figure in the group, and its own RoT design is called Titan, OpenTitan will not be an open source version of that technology. All participants will co-develop a design from scratch that will be agnostic to platform and vendor, said…
Google wants Android phones to have a Secure Enclave chip like iPhones. Its OpenTitan project aims to help design an open source one.
A few days ago I wrote about the OpenMP / OpenACC offloading patches for Radeon "GCN" GPUs being posted and seeking inclusion in the GCC 10 compiler that will be released in a few months. Those patches were successfully merged meaning this next annual update to the GNU Compiler Collection will feature initial OpenMP/OpenACC code offloading support to supported AMD GPU targets.
After GCC 9 only had the initial AMD Radeon GCN target in place, GCC 10 in early 2020 will feature the initial offloading support using the modern OpenMP and OpenACC APIs, thanks to the merges this week. The libgomp port and associated bits for the AMD GCN back-end have landed thanks to the work done by Code Sourcery under contract with AMD.
This patch kit introduces a static analysis pass for GCC that can diagnose various kinds of problems in C code at compile-time (e.g. double-free, use-after-free, etc).
The analyzer runs as an IPA pass on the gimple SSA representation. It associates state machines with data, with transitions at certain statements and edges. It finds "interesting" interprocedural paths through the user's code, in which bogus state transitions happen.
For example, given:
free (ptr); free (ptr);
at the first call, "ptr" transitions to the "freed" state, and at the second call the analyzer complains, since "ptr" is already in the "freed" state (unless "ptr" is NULL, in which case it stays in the NULL state for both calls).
Specific state machines include: - a checker for malloc/free, for detecting double-free, resource leaks, use-after-free, etc (sm-malloc.cc), and - a checker for stdio's FILE stream API (sm-file.cc)
There are also two state-machine-based checkers that are just proof-of-concept at this stage: - a checker for tracking exposure of sensitive data (e.g. writing passwords to log files aka CWE-532), and - a checker for tracking "taint", where data potentially under an attacker's control is used without sanitization for things like array indices (CWE-129).
There's a separation between the state machines and the analysis engine, so it ought to be relatively easy to add new warnings.
For any given diagnostic emitted by a state machine, the analysis engine generates the simplest feasible interprocedural path of control flow for triggering the diagnostic.
Clang's static analyzer has become quite popular with developers for C/C++ static analysis of code while now the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) might finally see a mainline option thanks to Red Hat.
Red Hat's David Malcolm has proposed a set of 49 patches that appear to be fairly robust and the most we have seen out of GCC static analysis capabilities to date.
I would like to propose the following patches which introduce a compile option --record-gcc-command-line. When passed to gcc, it saves the command line option into the produced object file. The option makes it trivial to trace back how a file was compiled and by which version of the gcc. It helps with debugging, reproducing bugs and repeating the build process.
This option is similar to -frecord-gcc-switches. However, they have three fundamental differences: Firstly, -frecord-gcc-switches saves the internal state after the argv is processed and passed by the driver. As opposed to that, --record-gcc-command-line saves the command-line as received by the driver. Secondly, -frecord-gcc-switches saves the switches as separate entries into a mergeable string section. Therefore, the entries belonging to different object files get mixed up after being linked. The new --record-gcc-command-line, on the other hand, creates one entry per invocation. By doing so, it makes it clear which options were used together in a single gcc invocation. Lastly, --record-gcc-command-line also adds the version of the gcc into this single entry to make it clear which version of gcc was called with any given command line. This is useful in cases where .comment section reports multiple versions.
While there are also similarities between the implementations of these two options, they are completely independent. These commands can be used separately or together without issues. I used the same section that -frecord-gcc-switches uses on purpose. I could not use the name -frecord-gcc-command-line for this option; because of a {f*} in the specs, which forwards all options starting with -f to cc1/cc1plus as is. This is not we want for this option. We would like to append it a filename as well to pass the argv of the driver to child processes.
This functionality operates as the following: It saves gcc's argv into a temporary file, and passes --record-gcc-command-line <tempfilename> to cc1 or cc1plus. The functionality of the backend is implemented via a hook. This patch includes an example implementation of the hook for elf targets: elf_record_gcc_command_line function. This function reads the given file and writes gcc's version and the command line into a mergeable string section, .GCC.command.line.
GCC developers recently have been discussing a new proposal over an option for preserving the command-line flags/options used when building a binary as well as the associated compiler version.
The proposal sent out last week was over a --record-gcc-command-line option to save the compiler options into the produced object file. The proposal is in the name of helping debugging, reproducing bugs, and repeating build process. There is already a -frecord-gcc-switches option that is somewhat similar in behavior but with key differences as explained in the proposal.
A new minor release 0.3.3.7.0 of RcppEigen arrived on CRAN today (and just went to Debian too) bringing support for Eigen 3.3.7 to R.
This release comes almost a year after the previous minor release 0.3.3.5.0. Besides the upgrade to the new upstream version, it brings a few accumulated polishes to the some helper and setup functions, and switches to the very nice tinytest package for unit tests; see below for the full list. As before, we carry a few required changes to Eigen in a diff.
I’ve had the pleasure of speaking at the first PyDataCambridge conference (2019), this is the second PyData conference in the UK after PyDataLondon (which colleagues and I co-founded 6 years back). I’m super proud to see PyData spread to 6 regional meetups and now 2 UK conferences.
Systems performance is an effective discipline for performance analysis and tuning, and can help you find performance wins for your applications and the kernel. However, most of us are not performance or kernel engineers, and have limited time to study this topic. This talk summarizes the topic for everyone, touring six important areas of Linux systems performance: observability tools, methodologies, benchmarking, profiling, tracing, and tuning. Included are recipes for Linux performance analysis and tuning (using vmstat, mpstat, iostat, etc), overviews of complex areas including profiling (perf_events) and tracing (Ftrace, bcc/BPF, and bpftrace/BPF), and much advice about what is and isn't important to learn. This talk is aimed at everyone: developers, operations, sysadmins, etc, and in any environment running Linux, bare metal or the cloud.
Since I attend OpenBSD hackathons, I hear stories about how crazy are the ports hackathons. So I try my best to look like a porter in order to experience this craziness. I must admit p2k19 was awesome but the craziness of port hackathons is still an enigma to me.
While Freddie may have sadly bitten the dust, his fame lives on, so much so that Google's Creative Lab has cooked up the FreddieMeter.
The show must go on! It's an AI-powered thingy which uses its smarts to figure out if one's singing voice has a pitch, melody and timbre to match that of Mercury's champion vocals.
Why the Python programming language shines for data science, machine learning, systems automation, web and API development, and more.
Before starting about decorators, first, understand that functions in python have below three properties.
Welcome back to our ongoing series of blog posts on basic data types in Python 3! Last time, we explored the functionality of strings. Today, we dive in to another key data type - booleans. Booleans (and "boolean logic") are an important concept in programming, representing the concept of "true" and "false".
If you're learning Python, you might also want to check out TwilioQuest 3. You'll learn about basic data types like the boolean, and much more about Python programming.
Ready to learn how to use booleans in Python 3? Let's get started!
Standards and open source development are both processes widely adopted in the ICT industry to develop innovative technologies and drive their adoption in the market. Innovators and policy makers assume that a closer collaboration between standards and open source software development would be mutually beneficial. The interaction between the two is however not yet fully understood, especially with regard to how the intellectual property regimes applied by these organisations influence their ability and motivation to cooperate. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the interaction between standard development organisations (SDOs) and open source software (OSS) communities. The analysis is based on 20 case studies, a survey of stakeholders involved in SDOs and OSS communities, an expert workshop, and a comprehensive review of the literature. In the analysis, we differentiate according to the governance of SDOs and OSS communities, but also considering the involved stakeholders and subject matter. We discuss the preconditions, forms and impacts of collaboration, before we eventually focus on the complementarity of the different Intellectual Property Right (IPR) regimes. Finally, we derive policy recommendations addressing SDOs, OSS communities and policy makers.
"The thing about pastry is you have to get your exact measurements," Alana explained one particularly cold afternoon as I walked into the kitchen with my friend Jason.
In order to form the pastry, you need three ingredients: ice-cold water, six ounces of all-purpose wheat flour, and eight ounces of cold butter. But not just any butter could be used, and it would not be unsalted butter. That was not worth the drive to Tesco's.
It wasn’t ever easy to be Bob Kaufman, not even in San Francisco, a city hospitable to poetry and poets, and where Kaufman was a larger than life figure who attracted attention wherever he went, not unlike that San Francisco native, Jack London, who also attracted attention and stood out from his contemporaries. Like London, Kaufman was the real thing and no imitation writer.
For all of the opprobrium Facebook deserves, it is still essential for building ties on the left when there are so few opportunities for networking in real space as opposed to cyberspace. Just checking now, it seems that I became a FB friend with Noel Ignatiev sometime in 2015. It was worth it to me to make such a connection, even if it meant putting up with all the ads and heavy-handed automated interference into saying what was on my mind. (I lost FB posting privileges twice for no good reason.)
On Friday, November 8, 2019, I delivered the following eulogy to honor the memory of a dear and trusted friend.
Sometime in the late fall of 1968 I had my first encounter with Jane Quick in front of Ed Flaig’s Mobil station – at the intersection of 10th and Pine – only a couple of blocks west of here.
That encounter cost me 27 dollars.
Allow me to explain: I was heading to the newly opened Snack Shack, a tiny, alpine-style structure across the street from where the Sonic would eventually move in and put the Shack out of business. The Snack Shack was best known for its poor students’ budget-conscious menu of unhealthy, greasy meals. Where else could one get a 19 Cent hamburger, a miniscule 19 Cent packet of fries, and 10 Cent cokes?
From 3:30 p.m. until closing, usually around 11:30 p.m., I cooked, served meals at the seven seater eating bar and the takeout window to the side, cleaned, hauled trash, and stocked all the artery clogging lard for the next day’s opening.
How did I get into this? As a kid that was the inevitable question of concert day. I still ask it now and again. One of my colleagues, to be heard on violin with your Musical Patriot at the organ on All Your Cares Beguile: Songs and Sonatas from Baroque London will often acknowledge his own anxiety before a gig by reminding himself that being nervous is better than being bored. But I’m not always so sure.
It's all very simple. Biological survival. Bullshit reduces it, good stuff enhances it. So your resistance to change is your evolutionary right. And if you actually stop to think about what changes mean to you and how they impact your life, congratulations, you're doing something 99% of people can't - you're using your brain!
I also mentioned ignorance. Most people don't have the ability to care. Now, you could also have apathy. You do understand all the big words and whatnot, but you equally don't care. That puts you neither here nor there, which is perfectly fine. Just remember that people will almost always try to bundle you into a box they are comfortable with, so it's going to be a binary choice, black or white, for or against. Whatever suits their convictions the best.
And that brings us to the end of this article, and you got the answer you're seeking. Paradoxically, if you actually bothered reading, you already know the answer. Because this article is sort of designed to provoke and challenge your views, and if you can't stomach that, then you're not reading this sentence. Very simple. Thus endeth the rant.
The general assembly of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) has voted unanimously to recommend that the country’s Science and Education Ministry cancel an August order that places harsh restrictions on communication between Russian scholars and their international counterparts.
229 individuals have been selected to join the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) following the body’s elections on November 15, Interfax reported.
Researchers at Griffith University in Australia suggest that national parks and protected areas save an approximate $6 trillion globally in mental health care costs. Lead study author Ralf Buckley said while that is a “conservative” estimate, it’s still “10 times greater than the global value of park tourism and 100 times greater than the global value of park agency budgets.”
"The pro-industry zealots now running the EPA's pesticide office are making a mockery of science and eliminating key safety measures, all for company profits."
As popular support grows for replacing private insurance plans with Medicare for All, critics of the single-payer approach have been playing up the fact that some top union officials, and their political allies, don’t want to do away with job-based medical coverage.
"Instead of you forking out for your monthly bill, we'll tax the giant corporations fairly—the Facebooks and the Googles—to cover the running costs."
Every weekday for six weeks this fall, I had radiation treatment for early-stage breast cancer. This journey has been a lesson in our broken social and economic systems.
We live in the shadow of the past; it haunts the present like the memory of a dead relative who can’t be forgotten or forgiven.€ € Prohibition is a dead historically moment that can’t be forgotten.
EU member states decided in 2017 that the agency, formerly based in London, would be transferred to another location because of the Brexit. Nineteen cities were interested in housing the EMA. After three rounds of voting following a meeting of the European Council in November 2017, a tie was declared between Amsterdam and Milan and the final decision was made by the presidency drawing lots between the two cities.
In March of this year the EMA moved to Amsterdam, operating from temporary premises in Amsterdam Sloterdijk. Now that the newly built and tailor-made Zuidas building has been handed over to EMA, technical equipment will be installed followed by IT configuration and testing.
[...]
According to the Dutch public news service NOS, the new EMA building cost 225 million euro, including 20 years of maintenance. This must be earned back through EMA’s rental payments. The Dutch ministry of economics expects The Netherlands to earn an estimated 128 million euros per year from the arrival of EMA.
Rego is part of the Open Policy Agent (OPA) policy engine, which Fugue adopted this year as its policy as code implementation for cloud security and compliance.
Developed as an alternative to Open Policy Agent’s (OPA) built-in interpreter, Fregot provides error handling that is easy to understand and manage with step-by-step debugging.
President Donald Trump has pardoned a former U.S. Army commando set to stand trial next year in the killing of a suspected Afghan bomb-maker and a former Army lieutenant convicted of murder for ordering his men to fire upon three Afghans, killing two, the White House announced late Friday.
Is this fashion for flat-tops well advised? Carriers have long been threatened by submarines. During the Falklands war Argentina’s navy kept its only carrier skulking in port for fear of British submarines. Now they are increasingly threatened above the waterline, too, by ever more sophisticated land- and air-launched anti-ship missiles. To remain safe, carriers must stay ever-farther out to sea, their usefulness dropping with every nautical mile. Missile improvements also threaten the ability of the carriers’ air wings to do what is required of them, nibbling away at their very reason for being.
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. pulled off the biggest-ever initial public offering on Wall Street five years ago and today sports a market capitalization north of $450 billion. So why is it looking to raise billions more now in Hong Kong, where months of violent pro-democracy protests have unsettled investors and helped tip the city into recession? Fresh capital is not the only reason.
Half an hour later, I gave a young and resigned-seeming police officer my account of the incident. When I asked him how best to protect my family in the future, he told me the best solution was “not living in Malmö: Things have escalated to a point where we can’t manage the situation.”
"A shameful use of presidential powers," said the ACLU. "It sends a clear message of disrespect for the law, morality, the military justice system, and those in the military who abide by the laws of war."
The US-supported€ right-wing coup€ against Bolivian President Evo Morales on November 10th was a serious strike against that nation’s autonomy and its people (especially its indigenous, of whom Morales was one). Such meddling has defined US foreign policy in Latin America for nearly two centuries, since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.
Bolivia’s political crisis turned deadly again when security forces opened fire on supporters of Evo Morales. Officials said Saturday that at least eight people died and dozens were injured in an incident that threatens the interim government’s efforts to restore stability following the resignation of the former president in an election dispute.
And, the magazine added, be sure to spell Veterans Day without an apostrophe!
"[A]fter the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny, they hope to see established a peace. . . which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want." —Atlantic Charter issued August 14, 1941
Trump announced to the world the gruesome death and terrorizing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. “… He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.. They were led to certain death. He reached the end of the tunnel as our dogs chased him down. He ignited his vest, killing himself and the three children. His body was mutilated by the blast…. The thug who tried so hard to intimidate others spent his last moments in utter fear, in total panic and dread, terrified of the American forces bearing down on him.”
As Turkey continues its devastating military assault on Rojava, the Kurdish-led region of northeastern Syria, officials in Washington are facing a critical decision: allow Turkey to prevail in its campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Kurds or take action to protect them.
"Killing a person creates a murderer out of the executioner, is not justice for Stacey Stites, and deprives Rodney Reed of dignity and humanity."
What makes for a heartrending antiwar song? Is it a doleful poetic and folkloric lament, or is it a driving martial beat with piercing raging lyrics of protest? Does it need a woman’s plaintive voice to make your heart ache with pain, or a man’s fierce growl to give you that gut-wrenching sinking feeling? I suppose it all depends on your kind of musical ear, and on your own situation with regard to the hazards of war.
War drives the American police state.
The annual vote on the Cuban resolution at the UN General Assembly on “the need to end the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed by the United States of America against Cuba” is a time of celebration in Cuba, for it is a time in which the governments of the world nearly unanimously support the Cuban demand for the United States to cease its long-standing blockade. The first vote on the resolution was held in 1992, and it was approved with 59 votes in favor, 3 opposed, and 71 abstentions. For the next seventeen years, the annual vote saw a steady increase of votes in favor and a corresponding decrease in abstentions, arriving in 2000 to 167 votes in favor, 3 opposed, and 4 abstentions. Since 2005, there have been only five countries or less that have opposed or abstained. In the vote 2019 this past week, there were 187 votes in favor of the Cuban resolution, three opposed (the United States, Israel, and Brazil), and two abstentions (Colombia and Ukraine).
I don’t know if somebody dumped a bottle of sanity solution into Rhode Island Sound or what the reason is, but Brown University, which has military€ contracts€ just like everywhere else, is the headquarters of a group of€ dozens€ of scholars and experts€ working€ to educate the public about the various costs of wars (funders worth thanking are€ here). If every educational institution in the United States did even a teeny bit of what this group does, I think there’s a chance that “peace on earth” might become a phrase with actual meaning, understood as something that might actually be created.
A couple Saturdays ago I attended the monthly protest near the drone base located on what used to be the Willow Grove Naval Air Station in Horsham, PA, outside Philadelphia. The vigil has been going on monthly for a number of years, peopled by some of the most spiritual, peace-loving people I know. I’d say many of them also qualify as Cassandras, people who have consistently spoken out in an ethical and reasonable manner against the morally confusing reality of our imperial wars. Cassandra was a mythic Greek figure who spurned Apollo and was, thus, doomed to prophesize correctly; the catch was no one would listen to her. Marginalization with a mythic spin.
Our world is bent out of shape. It is all twisted and tangled like a bombed out bridge after an air raid. As we gaze out upon this mangled world, on a very bad day one can see apocalypse around every corner. This was the case in July 2011, when Anders Breivik systematically massacred 76 children at a Labour party youth camp, situated on an idyllic island, in Norway of all places. He imagined that these youth were being trained to respect all peoples in a multicultural world, including Muslims. When some of us in the West first heard this grizzly news, we immediately thought that this must be linked in some ghoulish way with Islamist terrorists. And that is just the problem, isn’t it? Since 9/11, we in the West can easily slip and slide into this quick judgment. Mention terrorism, think Muslim.
When the dust settles in a month or two, the House of Representatives will have impeached President Donald Trump with a one-sided partisan vote and then the Senate will have exonerated Donald Trump with a similarly one-sided partisan vote.€ But at the end of the day, the United States will have acquired a new strategic ally in Central Europe: Ukraine. The very first day of the impeachment hearings in November has been responsible for an important national security decision that had no input from Trump’s national security team or from the congressional foreign policy committees. The implications of this decision are onerous.
Claims that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces have used chemical weapons are almost as old as the Syrian civil war itself. They have produced strong reactions, and none more so than in the case of the alleged attack in April last year on the opposition-controlled area of Douma near Damascus in which 43 people are said to have been killed by chlorine gas. The United States, Britain and France responded by launching airstrikes on targets in the Syrian capital.
"We have seen ISIS level of horror and brutality in Kashmir, 30 years before the West was even introduced to the brutalities of radical Islamic terror. I am glad these hearings are happening here today because when my family and everyone like me lost our homes our livelihood and our way of life the world remained silent," Vashisht told a Congressional hearing on Human Rights organised by Tom Lantos HR Commission in Washington on Thursday (local time).
The bone of contention has always been the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. At the time of partition, the predominantly Muslim state was politically divided over which nation to join. When Pakistani-allied tribesmen attempted to force the issue, the Hindu maharaja of the region chose to accede to India, leading to the first war between India and Pakistan. Ever since, the line of control between the Indian and Pakistan side has remained bitterly contested, with artillery and sniper fire routinely exchanged. Pakistan intelligence services have infiltrated insurgents and plotted attacks across the border for decades, and Indian security troops have been implicated in human-rights violations and killings of the locals as a result of their counterinsurgency operations.
Israel said early Friday it has completed a series of airstrikes on targets linked to the Islamic Jihad militant group in Gaza after overnight rocket fire that rattled a day-old truce.
Public.Resource.Org has one simple mission: to improve public access to government documents, including our laws. Public Resource believes—and EFF agrees—that everyone should be able to read, analyze, and share the laws that govern us, without having to pay a gatekeeper or sign a contract. Sounds uncontroversial, right? Not for the standards organizations that sued Public Resource, claiming that they have the right to control access to a huge chunk of the law because they convened the people who drafted it.
As a practical matter, the core issue is how these particular laws became legal mandates. In these cases, the works started out as voluntary standards on topics like fire safety, energy efficiency, and test design. Those once-voluntary standards were then adopted as binding law by various city, state, and federal agencies through “incorporation by reference.”
Calling all transparency advocates, investigative journalists, and assorted FOIA punks!
It’s once again time to submit your nominations for The Foilies—EFF’s annual, tongue-in-cheek awards for outrageous, ridiculous, and infuriating responses to public records requests.€
The Supreme Court had on Wednesday asked the central government to explore Hydrogen based fuel technology to find solutions to combat air pollution in Northern India including Delhi-NCR.
The BBC documentary,€ Climategate: Science of a Scandal, begins with Michael Mann, a climatologist at Pennsylvania State University recounting how he opened a letter and unleashed wafts of white powder. “My first thought was: I may have been subject to a deadly substance, anthrax,” he says. “All because I decided to study applied math and physics, and move into climate€ science.”
Multiple climate health risks threaten today’s babies. They may grow up hungrier, more diseased and facing more pollution and danger. But there’s hope.
It is not an unreasonable extension of reasoning to argue that the political and social tension wracking Canada today can be traced to orchestrated environmental disarray and a deliberate agenda, now decades in the making, to make sure citizens and scientific evidence and reasoning are kept separate from decision makers and decision making.
One of the key research facilities leading the discussion on the climate crisis is the National Centre for Climate Restoration in Melbourne, Australia, whose work is arguably a major plank underpinning the Extinction Rebellion mindset. Over the last few years, the team there has been analyzing a lot of the leading climate research and issuing reports based on their meta-analyses of these studies.
An omniscient individual on my electronic social media splattergram expressed skepticism that the 0.04% of the atmosphere made up of CO2 could possibly have any responsibility for causing global warming, now also known as climate change. It seems clear to me now that with each passing day more people will stumble upon this startling insight, and the whole carefully constructed edifice of climate change ideological mass conditioning for social control might suddenly crack apart, and our civilization fall into ruins. So, I have decided here to break with my scientifical colleagues and to finally reveal the heretofore hidden truth of the matter, the truth behind the truth, in essence: the truthiest reality of global warming.
It wasn’t long ago that seemingly every green group in America was up in arms over the Democratic Party’s self-defeating refusal to sponsor a nationally televised presidential debate on the climate crisis.
"Article misses a key 'expert' perspective: The climate scientists who are saying we need to radically transform every aspect of our economy in the next decade if we want even a 50 percent chance of averting catostrophic climate crisis."
Lawmakers were told they must "work on our behalf to ensure that we—and you—have a future."
"Corporate polluters have been using recycling to justify ever-increasing production of single-use packaging, while taxpayers and cities are left to foot the bill."
Gov. Jerry Brown took the podium at a July 2017 press conference to lingering applause after a steady stream of politicians praised him for helping to extend California’s signature climate policy for another decade. Brown, flanked by the U.S. and California flags, with a backdrop of the gleaming San Francisco Bay, credited the hard work of the VIPs seated in the crowd. “It’s people in industry, and they’re here!” he said. “Shall we mention them? People representing oil, agriculture, business, Chamber of Commerce, food processing. … Plus, we have environmentalists. ...”
Diverse, bipartisan interests working together to pass climate legislation — it was the polar opposite of Washington, where the Trump administration was rolling back environmental protections established under President Barack Obama.
This move may have particular implications for the struggling U.S. coal industry and its promoters, which have begun rallying behind efforts to extract some of these so-called “critical minerals” from coal and its€ by-products.€ €
"It's absolutely shocking the lengths Donald Trump will go to to shield himself from accountability."
I really discovered homelessness for the first time when I left my job at an upscale Hollywood radio station in 1987 to work at a downscale downtown newspaper.
The term ‘income inequality’ suggests the inevitability of a natural process, a division of winners from losers along the lines of hair loss or disproportionate body mass that corporate researchers are working to solve for the sake of the self-esteem of the losers. Some people are tall, others short, some people have pleasant dispositions, others not so much. Otherwise, it almost certainly isn’t the ‘winners’ for whom inequality is a problem, is it?
There is an inherent bestiality in the politics of the Americas that signals coup, assassination and disruption. No state is ever allowed to go through what is weakly called a transition, except over corpses, tortures and morgues. When a social experiment is conducted, rulers must ensure their wills are well inked ahead of time. Opponents, often funded and sponsored by external powers with an umbilical chord to Washington, lie in wait, hoping for an unequal status quo.
"Do you think we are ignorant?"
Bolivia has a new US-backed puppet leader, and the Western media can hardly conceal their adulation.
This week on counterspin: The Washington Post doesn’t want you to be confused, so they headlined their editorial, “Bolivia Is in Danger of Slipping Into Anarchy. It’s Evo Morales’s Fault.” Elite US media, you understand, are deeply invested in the well-being of Bolivia’s people, who are in uproar after a coup ousting Morales, over charges of irregularities in the recent election that appear to have no evidential grounding—nor, in media’s view, to require any. Back in 2006, US media were counseling Morales that policies like nationalizing the country’s gas industry were popular but “not the answer to Bolivia’s problems.” Their preferred answer, judging by today’s coverage, is celebrating the extra-legal pushout of the country’s first indigenous president, and welcoming the self-declared leadership of a legislator who has tweeted that she “dream[s] of a Bolivia free of satanic indigenous rites.” That’s the topsy-turvy world of elite US media’s “concerned” foreign policy. Which is why we’ll look for a different view from Alex Main, director of international policy at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
The lack of criticism about the destruction of democracy in Bolivia from the presidential candidates in the so-called democratic party of the faking United States of America is possibly the single most revealing non-event in the charade of the 2020 electoral scheming. It is more telling than all of their words. The only one of this group who has so far made a statement about the military pushed resurgence of fascist impunity in Bolivia is Bernie Sanders. His tepid expression of concern included an avoidance of saying this was a coup (he said it “appears to be” a coup) and he made an appeal to peaceful and democratic processes in Bolivia (as if the reality of the violent destruction of democratic processes had not just happened!). So, a mealy-mouthed concern is the best the would-be presidents who call themselves democrats could muster to supposedly counterbalance the enthusiastic and deceitful endorsements of fascism by the republicans and Trump administration. The fact that Morales still had a couple of months left in his term as president of Bolivia as he was removed under the threat of greater violence definitely makes this a coup. It “appears to be a coup” because it is a coup. Saying it only “appears to be” something is a way of possibly later backtracking and is suspiciously unnecessary.
As the military coup continues to entrench itself in Bolivia, the first goal of the perpetrators is to appear to be following the constitutional process. But the façade is not enough to hide the real disaster of yet another self-proclaimed president in Latin America. When you thought that the Juan Guaido experiment in Venezuela was a total failure in every respect, Bolivia repeats the same pathetic tragedy.
When it comes to politics in Latin America, what initially seems clear is usually anything but.
This sounds like a modern day comment from the US far left, but the source is hardly that. It’s from a man who was the most decorated Marine ever at the time of his death. He was an expert on the topic. He served in WW I as well as the Mexican Revolution. Smedley Butler was doomed to be a largely forgotten voice in the rush to gloss over the true causes of war and regime change. He pointed out the techniques used to win public approval and the subsequent serving of the corporate needs by entering these ever-repeating violent conflicts. He described his military career as that of “a high class muscleman for Big Business, Wall Street, and the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
In this past decade, we witnessed a degeneration of politics across the spectrum, with social media, notwithstanding its use, becoming the worst platform for corrosive politics.
We also witnessed moral degeneration and character assassination as influenced by capitalism.
The moral degeneration in SA is very high and that directly reflects the politics of our country.
This open letter is an invitation for us, more especially ANC and Alliance partners, to think critically about who we are as a society and perhaps champion ways in which we can restore some of the values that we have lost.
President Donald Trump spent more than two hours at Walter Reed National Medical Center on Saturday for what the White House said were medical tests as part of his annual physical.
Ford’s testimony on repeat was just one part of the protest. There was a giant banner reading “KAVANAUGH LIED” at the VIP entrance, several people dressed as handmaids from The Handmaid’s Tale (a common tactic), and chants of “shame” yelled at gala attendees who were waiting in line outside the event for over an hour.
Disinformation attacks and scams targeting veterans online have ramped up in recent years, leaving lawmakers and social media platforms scrambling to address the issue.
According to experts, veterans often seem an easy target due to their high level of trustworthiness, the older age of veterans, and the emotional attachment many Americans feel for the group.
A study published by the Vietnam Veterans of America (VVA) in September highlighted the threat to veterans. The report found that the Russian Internet Research Agency had bought over 100 advertisements targeting followers of veteran accounts on social media sites during and after the 2016 election.
Marketing firm Izea has just released a report that's likely to make you choke on your cool, refreshing Pepsi Max*. It seems the average rate a brand will pay for a sponsored Instagram photo has risen from $134 in 2014 to $1,642 this year.
But don't go reaching for an inferior caffeinated Cola brand* just yet, because that's just the tip of the iceberg. The report highlights that influencer rates have been going up across the board. A Facebook status update would once have set you back a bargain $8 is now worth $395, while a $29 Twitter post would now cost $422 a pop. In the same time period, a branded YouTube video encouraging you to smash that Like button was once a steal at $420 - now it comes to $6,700.
Here’s a political riddle: Why would a GOP operative like former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie want to give a Democrat like Deval Patrick a boost in the 2020 presidential race? And why would Christie pointedly name-check Patrick, the onetime Massachusetts governor who confirmed Wednesday that he was indeed making a run at the White House, a full year before Patrick announced?
Twitter says its new ban on political ads will cover appeals for votes, solicitations for campaign contributions and any political content.
President Donald Trump released the rough transcript Friday of a congratulatory phone call€ he had with the incoming president of Ukraine, holding it out as evidence that he did nothing wrong. Instead, the memorandum shows how White House descriptions of Trump’s communications with foreign leaders at times better reflect wishful thinking than the reality of the interactions.
Amid the worst Republican President and Republican Party in modern times, the Democrats are playing the politics of low expectations. This is not the time for Democrats to be in disarray. On Capitol Hill, the prevailing view of most Democrats is that they will cling to their House majority and they shouldn’t expect to regain the Senate in the 2020 elections.
"We are here thanks to many Chileans that have risked their lives to make Chile a fairer country."
Following 9-11 many editorial cartoonists, myself included, tried to make sense of the tragic events. My work criticized US foreign policy and the ensuing, heavy-handed military interventionism that followed. As a result, I was denied boarding a domestic Air Canada flight in 2004. I also began to receive extra screening on a routine basis by airlines in many countries. One of
I was thinking about impeachment when a bird fell out of the sky. I was thinking about quid pro quos and the using of the presidency for personal gain when I rounded a corner and saw a hawk, gray and crumpled. It was a bright blue day, and she seemed to have slammed herself into a window, mistaking it for the sky.
"It's very intimidating," former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch said of the president's tweets.
The counter-narratives about the recent takeover, and restoration, of New York City’s Pacifica radio station, WBAI, have apparently begun. Thus far we have no new offerings but rather restatements of previously given excuses, ones that wilt in the face of reasoned critique.
It is imperative that we remember what happened in Seattle 20 years ago. We are living in a moment of mass uprisings around the world. Today’s political moment traces back to many turning points in political, economic, and social movement history.
Just as Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) heads of state prepared to meet in Brasilia on November 13-14, hosted by Jair Bolsonaro, a double political earthquake hit: Lula’s freedom from prison on November 8, followed by a coup against Bolivian president Evo Morales on November 11.
In its content-moderation report released this week, Facebook revealed that it had removed a whopping 3.2-billion fake accounts from March through September 2019.
"Critically, like UTLA, Sen. Sanders believes in building a national movement for real, lasting change."
"Immigrants haven't been cutting public services," wrote one Tory critic in response. "Conservatives have." €
What follows is a conversation between author Jeff Halper and Marc Steiner of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.
"I'm going to fight to get money out of politics, and I'm going to call it like it is. You know what campaign donations are from big corporations and lobbyists? Bribes."
I find election campaigns in which the Prime Minister addresses scrubbed, smug Tory audiences, filmed by the BBC in close shot to conceal the sparsity of their numbers, deeply disturbing. I find the speeches in factories to employees even more chilling. The sullen compliance of employees, too cowed to show discontent before their bosses, should disturb any right thinking person. This may bore millennials, but back in the 1970s it was inconceivable that a politician of any stripe could address a factory floor without some robust reaction from the workforce. In those days, workers had rights, their employment was protected, and they could not be dismissed on a whim. I have no doubt that the rise of the North Korean factory style meeting in British politics relates directly to the destruction of workers’ rights. Johnson did one in a electric taxi factory a couple of days ago and it was a staple of May’s appalling campaign.
Spontaneous protests have erupted in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi following the parliament’s failure to adopt a critical electoral reform. Opposition parties and civic activists have called for continuous protests in front of the parliament, with a major demonstration announced for Sunday.€
Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch "is expected to describe the personal trauma she endured as the administration's traditional diplomatic establishment in Ukraine collided with a rogue foreign policy operation" run by the president's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
Plenty has been made of the President's unwillingness to adhere to anything close to reasonable security when using his mobile phones. Whereas the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) and the National Security Agency usually work in concert providing state leaders with "hardened" devices that are heavily encrypted, routinely updated, and frequently swapped out, Trump has refused to use these more secure DMCC-S devices (effectively a Samsung Galaxy S4 device utilizing Samsung's Knox security architecture) because they apparently infringe on his ability to Tweet.
Boris Vishnevsky, a deputy in St. Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly and perhaps the city’s most prominent oppositionist, is suing Evgeny Prigozhin’s “Patriot” media group over a series of publications accusing him of sexually harassing his students.
Were Donald Trump and the Republicans who support him slightly less relentless in giving reasons to despair for the human race, it would be a lot harder than it now is to maintain a proper perspective.
US president Donald Trump “elevated his political interest above the national interest and demanded foreign interference in an American election,” Peter Beinart asserts at The Atlantic. “What’s received less attention is what the scandal reveals about Joe Biden: He showed poor judgment because his staff shielded him from hard truths. If that sounds faintly familiar, it’s because that same tendency underlay Hillary Clinton’s email woes in 2016.”
You may not even remember the journey across the border. Maybe you tracked through a desert. Maybe you hid in a trunk. Maybe you arrived in an airport, your passport stamped with a visa. Maybe you came here all by yourself to reunite with your mom or dad. Maybe you were excited, maybe scared. And, in the end, you stayed.
You enrolled in an American school. You grew up eating Cheerios and grilled cheese, playing softball, listening to hip hop. Then one day you were told that you don’t belong. That you are illegal. You need to go.
But go where? This is the country you know. This is your home.
Culturally integrated but legally excluded, you are assimilated and alienated at once.
How daunting it must be to realize that once you graduate from high school, you will find yourself barred from government financial aid, student loans, and legal employment. How frightening, to contemplate the possibility of being forced into an underground economy of temporary jobs, unfair wages, unsafe working conditions. How hard, to watch your American-born classmates move on with their lives, while you watch over your shoulder for cop cars driving by. How exhausting to live in fear. Fear of arbitrary detention, deportation. Fear of being separated from your family. Fear of what the future may or may not hold.
A gun is usually acknowledged to be a weapon from which a bullet is fired, and a ‘smoking gun’ is literally one from which a bullet has emerged, causing a puff of smoke to appear at the end of the barrel. On the other hand, a smoking gun is frequently€ defined€ as “a piece of incontrovertible incriminating evidence”, and there are countless smoking guns in the United States right now : some in politics, but many in literal circumstances in which people have been killed. We are€ told that€ “as of September€ 24, 2019, 334 mass shootings have occurred in 2019 . . .€ € In these shootings, 1,347 people were injured and 377 died.” In almost every other country in the world, this would be regarded as a massive domestic problem that required decisive action, such as€ that taken€ so swiftly by New Zealand after a horrific gun attack by a terrorist in March 2019.
Living In A World That Can’t Be Fixed is not a guidebook to terminal melancholy. Curtis White, the author of this book, also wrote The Spirit of Disobedience along with other social criticism, hardly advocates that course of inaction. On the contrary, White’s provocative title poses a challenge. He’s saying political reformism offers modest remedies, at best, to mitigate the catastrophe upon us. And he says it with a range of insights—from Wordsworth to Adorno by way of Agnes Varda. Curtis writes with assurance of his sources, but far removed from a pedantic style.
As old certainties crumble and systems crystallize, social divisions grow and extremes harden, a friend asks: “Why is there so much wrong in our society?” It’s a good question. He was referring specifically to Britain where we both live, but, although the specific problems may vary, the question could be applied to any country, and by extension, to world society.
India has successfully defeated insurgencies in Punjab and the Northeast and it is now time to strengthen New Delhi's fight against insurgencies in Kashmir, columnist Sunanda Vashisht told a US Congressional hearing on Human Rights in Washington on Thursday. Terrorists trained by Pakistan had caused "ISIS level of horror and brutality" in the Kashmir Valley long before the West was even introduced to the brutalities of radical Islamic terror, Ms Vashisht said, adding that international cooperation in India's fight against terror would also solve the human rights problem in the state.
This leaked off-air recording of ABC News anchor Amy Robach is much more revealing than anything the BBC is going to air about Andrew Saxe Coburg Gotha.
When is it defamatory to call people "racist douchebags?" Well, let's start with the "douchebag" part. This is always a statement of opinion and never actionable. Calling someone (in this case, several someones) a "douchebag" is like calling them an "asshole." It's not something that is possible of defaming anyone since it's always, without exception, a statement of opinion.
Russian authorities should drop a criminal case over a YouTube video of children talking to a gay man and ensure the man’s safety amid threats and attempted physical attacks, Human Rights Watch said today.
The Justice Ministry of the Russian Federation has named Sever.Realii, a regional news project for Russia’s north created by Radio Liberty, as a “foreign agent” media source. The designation follows the formation of a State Duma commission to investigate foreign interference in Russia’s elections. Commission members have publicly accused Radio Liberty and Meduza, among others, of taking part in such interference.
Lebanese€ authorities have been increasing their reliance on insult and defamation laws to silence journalists, activists, and others critical of government policies and corruption, Human Rights Watch said in a report released today.
An Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based system, called Geneva (short for Genetic Evasion), that automatically learns to evade censorship in India, China and Kazakhstan has been developed by researchers at the University of Maryland in the US.
The researchers are scheduled to introduce Geneva during a peer-reviewed talk at the Association for Computing Machinery's 26th Conference on Computer and Communications Security in London on Thursday, November 14.
In 2006, the applicant worked as a human resources management expert at a financial institution (Bank O.) in Hungary. In this capacity, he undertook the analysis and calculation of salaries and staffing management. Among other things, he contributed to his employer’s remuneration policy reform.
According to the code of ethics of the bank, he was under an obligation not to publish formally or informally any information relating to the functioning and activities of his employer.
In January 2011, whilst he was still employed by Bank O., the applicant launched a knowledge-sharing website for human resources management-related publications (including articles) and events. The website also contained a presentation of the applicant with his photograph, describing him as an expert in human resources management and indicating that he worked in the human resources department of a large domestic bank, without mentioning his employer.
In February that year, after two articles appeared on the website, the applicant's employment was terminated due to a breach of Bank O.'s confidentiality standards. The bank argued that the applicant’s conduct in providing educational services in the field of human resources management had infringed its economic interests. Moreover, given the nature of his position, the applicant was in possession of information the publication of which would have interfered with the bank’s business interests.
[...]
The Court recalled that freedom of expression also applies in the context of private employment relations (Heinisch v Germany, No 28274/08) and that the State has a positive obligation to ensure that a fair balance is struck between the competing interest of the individual and of the community as a whole. All this is, in any event, subject to the margin of appreciation enjoyed by the State, which – in the case of commercial speech – is quite broad.
In the context of employment relations, there must be a mutual trust between employer and employee. This means that certain manifestations of freedom of expression that may be legitimate in other situations, would not be so in the context of such relations (Palomo Sánchez and Others, Nos 28955/06).
In the present case, the issue for the ECtHR to consider was whether domestic authorities, in dismissing the applicant’s claims, had adequately secured his right to freedom of expression in the context of labour relations and balanced it against the employer’s right to protection of its commercial interests. To this end, the court considered the following:
The US tech firms need only look to Asia for a lesson in how a push into banking can accelerate their growth. There, tech firms plowed into finance years ago and largely won out. In Beijing, it’s embarrassing to pull out a credit card rather than a QR code that links to your WeChat account. Ant Financial, the banking arm of Alibaba, is far bigger than Goldman Sachs, the bank that helps Apple issue its credit cards. On the same apps you use for news and games and texting, you can also get loans, credit, and manage your investments.
Research firm Gartner pegs Amazon Web Service's cloud-computing market share at 48 percent, with Microsoft Azure lagging behind at 15.5 percent. AWS also remains the only company to hold the Pentagon’s highest security clearance classification, known as Impact Level 6. Microsoft's victory could have the potential to not only hasten its acquisition of Impact Level 6, but add momentum to its ascension as a serious alternative to Amazon and as the preferred choice for government contracts.
[…]€ “An experiment without any goals is a joke,” said Arthur Messaud, a legal expert at French internet freedom advocacy group La Quadrature du Net. “We’re putting the cat among the pigeons by allowing the generalized monitoring of the Internet for everything and anything.”€ […)
In a historic opinion on privacy at the border, a federal judge this week recognized that international travelers have significant privacy interests in their digital data and ruled that suspicionless electronic device searches at U.S. ports of entry violate the Fourth Amendment. U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston held that border agents must have reasonable suspicion that a device contains digital contraband before searching or seizing the device.
The summary judgment opinion was issued in EFF and ACLU’s case Alasaad v. McAleenan, in which we represent 11 plaintiffs against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The case is a constitutional challenge to the agencies’ polices on border searches and seizures of electronic devices.
At the beginning of this year Privacy News Online wrote about how people were waking up to the dangers of micro-targeted advertising. Despite that, nothing much happened – until now. One reason for the shift is the heightened awareness of the role of social media in politics and elections. Twitter has said it will drop all political ads. Facebook has refused to do the same, and has even gone so far as to exempt political ads from a ban on making false claims. A recent open letter from Mozilla and others called for Facebook and Google to stop hosting political ads in the UK until after the General Election currently underway there. The signatories said this was because “the online advertising model, which depends on vast collection of data and opaque ad targeting systems is not fit for purpose”. British political parties are already actively trying out multiple versions of ads on Facebook to see which will be most effective in the General Election campaign that is now underway in the UK.
Amazon, the company founded by Jeff Bezos, plans to dispute the contract process, claiming “unmistakable bias.”
In a statement Thursday, Amazon said that “numerous aspects” of the bidding process involved “clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable bias.” It did not elaborate.
The Indian government’s requests for user data from Facebook increased nearly 37% in the first half of 2019, and at 22,684 queries, was the second highest globally, according to the Transparency Report of the U.S.-based social networking site.
In comparison, Facebook received 16,580 requests in the January-June 2018 period and 20,805 requests during July-December that year. Of the 22,684 data requests, Facebook said it had produced some data in 54% of cases. “Facebook responds to government requests for data in accordance with applicable law and our terms of service. Each and every request we receive is carefully reviewed for legal sufficiency and we may reject or require greater specificity on requests that appear overly broad or vague,” the company said.
However, some staff members have expressed skepticism over the move, saying it infringes on their freedom of association, privacy and expression. “That WhatsApp group was established about two years ago but we are wondering why the directive is coming up now? They only want to reprimand those people posting issues they consider negative,” a staff, who preferred anonymity, said.
Dmitry Muratov, whose storied career saw him launch one of Russia’s major independent news sources with support from figures as famous as Mikhail Gorbachev, has returned to his former post as editor-in-chief of that publication, Novaya Gazeta. 51.7 percent of the newspaper’s staff (or 74 individuals, according to the Moskva news agency) voted for Muratov to take the post.
Good government flourishes in the sunshine, and our nation’s founders knew that. “A press that is free to investigate and criticize the government,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “is absolutely essential in a nation that practices self-government and is therefore dependent on an educated and enlightened citizenry.” But the provision for a free press to enlighten the citizenry is a hollow promise if there’s no publication to practice it.
By signing up, you agree to our Privacy Policy. So who needs local news? Jefferson would say “everyone.” But in case you’re not convinced, look at it this way: When five burglars broke into an office at the Watergate Hotel in Washington on June 17, 1972, it was a local story. Mr. Woodward and Mr. Bernstein were unknowns; The Washington Post had virtually no national profile.
How are you? I, for one, have a cat sitting in my lap. I’ve been busy the last few days reading and replying to many of your thoughtful, interesting responses to the story we published last week, “The Legend of A-N-N-A: Revisiting An American Town Where Black People Weren’t Welcome After Dark.”
If I haven’t gotten back to you yet, I will!
While jobs for middle class Americans continue to shrink, work positions are growing at the top and the bottom of the payscale. Laborers in the emerging underclass who cater to the whims of the better-off are sometimes referred to as “wealth workers."
"Reed's execution should not just be delayed, but canceled," said Bernie Sanders. "Real criminal justice reform must include joining every other major democracy in eliminating the death penalty."
Last month a fire roared through the refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos, a few miles from the coast of Turkey. The immediate cause of the fire is unclear, but there were clashes between Afghan and Syrian refugees in the nearby town of Vathy earlier in the evening, which some witnesses said continued in the camp. There were chaotic scenes during the fire, and almost the entire camp was evacuated, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF) Field Coordinator Eirini Papanastasiou.
At the end of his court martial for treason, the fictional character, Lieutenant Philip Nolan, was asked if he had anything to say to the court before sentencing. Rashly, he blurted out, “Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” A stunned judge granted his wish and Nolan became the legendary ex-pat described in the short story, “The Man Without A Country,” by Edward Everett Hale. He was condemned to live at sea his remaining days (56 years) without ever again being vouchsafed a single word of his beloved country. The teary tale of patriotism was required reading back in the elementary days when it was also mandatory to stand-up (no knees) for a recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, right hand across the heart.
"The Federalist Society is trying to rehabilitate a credibly accused sexual predator, and we will not allow them to forget Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh's other accusers."
"State violence in Bolivia."
"I hate to be the story because we are here to report on what is happening to the people in the amazing country," said Al-Jazeera English senior correspondent Teresa Bo. "I hope it helps denounce that such practices cannot be tolerated. Not here not anywhere."
The list of convicted cops the California Attorney General tried to keep secret has just been made searchable by the Sacramento Bee. It contains hundreds of current and former police officers who've been convicted of criminal acts over the last ten years.
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals has denied immunity to a cop involved in a no-knock raid that left the raided house's resident, Julian Betton, paralyzed. This case was touched on briefly in a previous post discussing legal arguments made by law enforcement officers that attempt to portray people in their own homes as dangerous aggressors when police crash through their doors unannounced.
The Lao government should immediately release political activists arrested for planning a peaceful pro-democracy rally in Vientiane.
“The Age of Disruption: Technology and Madness in Computational Capitalism”
In recent years a plethora of books have been published about the rise of Silicon Valley’s tech giants. Some are filled with breathless cheerleading for the titans of cyber-capitalism, some are more critical investigations by a new generation of muckrakers.
With its ubiquitous and astronomical digital infrastructure, Google has put the world at our fingertips. But in some ways, it’s also making the world dirtier and less democratic.€
The Nigerian authorities are holding Omoleye Sowore, a former presidential candidate and democracy activist, in detention despite a November 6, 2019 bail order by an Abuja Federal High Court.€
The promotional video categorised feminism, homosexuality and atheism as dangerous ideas and warned Saudis to be vigilant against them.
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The Saudi Human Rights Commission also released a statement saying that feminism was not a crime. However, it did not make reference to homosexuality or atheism.
Atheism is illegal and is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia. While punishments for same sex relations are not codified under the law in Saudi Arabia, they are strictly prohibited under Shari’a (Islamic law) which Saudi Arabia draws from for it’s legal framework.
Recent reforms of the male guardianship system and other laws which discriminated against women – such as the lifting of a ban on female drivers - are a testament to the tireless work of feminists and long-standing activist voices who are now locked up or who continue to be prosecuted in the country.
Ramos-Gomez isn't the only US citizen who's ended up in ICE custody.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan and Michigan Immigrant Rights Center filed the complaint on Ramos-Gomez's behalf in April, saying VanderKooi discriminated against him based on his race, violating the state's Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act. The ACLU also said Ramos-Gomez has post-traumatic stress disorder.
A timeline provided by the ACLU and MIRC shows that Captain VanderKooi, while watching a TV news story about Mr. Ramos-Gomez’s arrest on November 21, 2018, emailed ICE officer Derek Klifman, asking: “Could you please check his status?” Another ICE officer, Matthew Lopez, responded two days later, on November 23, 2018, saying he had determined Mr. Ramos-Gomez was a foreign national and thanked Captain VanderKooi for “the lead.” On November 26, 2018, Captain VanderKooi sent ICE the police report. The email, which had the subject line “Spectrum Helicopter Pad Loco,” said: “It is not clear what mad intent was involved in this breach of hospital security but here is the report.”
If you travel to Guantánamo, interview attorneys for its prisoners, read its military court transcripts, and review unclassified government documents, this becomes clear: Torture is a major reason there has still been no trial — and may never be one — for alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other Guantánamo prisoners.
It's an impediment to trial partly because evidence obtained through torture is rarely admissible in court, potentially weakening prosecution efforts. In addition, information that remains secret, such as the identities of the torturers, could become public at trial, and "the CIA absolutely does not want that to happen," said Rick Kammen, the former lead defense attorney for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who is charged with orchestrating the October 2000 USS Cole naval warship bombing and has been held at Guantánamo for 13 years.`
Internet service providers like Comcast and Verizon are free to slow down, block or prioritize internet traffic as they wish, without interference by the federal government. That’s the effect of an October ruling by the D.C.
The merchant accused Amazon of rewarding those who pay for the company’s warehousing, packing and delivery services with better visibility on Amazon’s e-commerce website.
The European Commission, which is already investigating Amazon’s double role as store and host to other retailers, asked a U.S. Congressional committee looking into big tech companies’ abuse of power to hand over a 62-page document from the long-time Amazon merchant made public by Bloomberg News last week. The paper is based on an analysis of thousands of Amazon transactions and accuses Amazon of “tying” its marketplace and logistics service together.
Uber Technologies Inc. owes New Jersey about $650 million in unemployment and disability insurance taxes because the rideshare company has been misclassifying drivers as independent contractors, the state’s labor department said.
Uber and subsidiary Rasier LLC were assessed $523 million in past-due taxes over the last four years, the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development said in a pair of letters to the companies. The rideshare businesses also are on the hook for as much as $119 million in interest and penalties on the unpaid amounts, according to other internal department documents.
The New Jersey labor department has been after Uber for unpaid employment taxes for at least four years, according to the documents, which Bloomberg Law obtained through an open public records request.
The basic approach here is to create a checksum before transmitting the data and then recreate the checksum at the other end — if the two match then we know the data was (probably) not corrupted.
The invention here is directed improving chance that the data was “probably not corrupted” by somewhat randomly mixing-up the original data before calculating the checksum. That approach helps catch systematic errors undetected by a less nuanced checksum algorithm. The claims use a “varying device” to do the mixing-up that changes bit-positions relative one another and requires that the mixing be varied “in time.” Although the claims do not spell-out the meaning of “in time” – I assume that we’re talking about something like a pseudo-random number generator function that uses the current time as its repeatable initiating point.
Note here, all that the claims require are two devices working in tandem to (1) mix-up (vary) the incoming data in a way that changes over time; and (2) generate check data.
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Note that in this case, the specification identifies the prior art approach and its deficiencies and then explains how the invention is an improvement over the prior art. That approach had fallen out of favor in U.S. patent practice appears to be what saved-the-day for the patentee in this case.
I was thinking some today about the pending Federal Circuit inequitable conduct case in Conversant Wireless Licensing v. Apple Inc., Docket No. 19-02039 (Fed. Cir. 2019). That case involves acts by the prior owner of Coversant’s patent — Nokia. During standard setting discussions for an old GPRS communication standard, Nokia apparently delayed disclosure of its related patents for several years. Although the patents were eventually disclosed, the district court found that the Nokia’s actions were problematic enough to hold the patent unenforceable.
I have not written as much about inequitable conduct since the Federal Circuit swept the issue away in, Therasense, Inc. v. Becton, Dickinson and Co., 649 F.3d 1276 (Fed. Cir. 2011) (en banc). Perhaps parties are now too busy with IPR proceedings.
In an appeal from an inter partes review decision of unpatentability, a losing Patent Owner-Appellant is more than three times as likely to receive a one-word summary affirmation than a losing Petitioner-Appellant. The Federal Circuit issues these one-word summary affirmations under Federal Circuit Rule 36.
This Court has already requested briefing on a related question regarding Federal Circuit Rule 36(e) in Straight Path IP Group, LLC v. Apple Inc., et al., Sup. Ct. No 19-253.
The Questions Presented below address disparities of outcomes for Patent Owners versus Petitioners, but they may be considered companion issues.
The patent licensee ASSIA was held to be entitled to conduct the present infringement action but was not successful in its claim. Independent claims 1 and 16 were deemed invalid because of added subject matter (intermediate generalization) and in an obiter dictum the court also mentioned that the claimant had not succeeded in proving infringement.
A copyright troll that failed in its quest to target Virgin Media customers earlier this year is having another bite at the cherry against a different ISP in Belgium. This time, however, a local court has referred several questions to the European Court of Justice, specifically related to the BitTorrent mechanism and EU privacy law.
American Films Inc, a company that 'acquired' the US operations of notorious 'copyright troll' outfit GuardaLey earlier this year, says it has made a new acquisition. With the addition of "strategic data company" Maker Data Services LLC, the company hopes to help Hollywood bring lawsuits against ISPs and VPN providers.
Copyright lawyer Richard Liebowitz has been sanctioned by a federal court in New York for repeatedly lying about his grandfather's date of death, which made him miss a hearing. The lawyer, who many see as a photography 'copyright troll', refused to hand over the relevant death certificate for months. When he finally provided the document this week, the Judge found out that he hadn't been honest about the date.
Earlier this week we already covered infamous and oft-sanctioned copyright troll lawyer, Richard Liebowitz, showing up in court to explain to the judge why he lied about the timing of the death of his grandfather multiple times over the course of many months as he tried to explain away why he missed a discovery conference. As we noted, Liebowitz actually showed up in court this time (good call, considering that the judge made it clear she was considering sending him to jail), and brought a lawyer with him (also a good call). He did remain out of jail, though Judge Cathy Seibel noted that she had referred the matter to the Grievance Committee, which could lead to sanctions. She also warned that her various contempt rulings against Liebowitz will require him to disclose the sanctions both to other courts and to prospective clients.
We've joked in the past that, given the insane state of copyright maximalism, if libraries were invented today, it's quite clear that book publishers would insist they were dens of piracy and had to be stopped at all costs. It is, at best, the luck of history that libraries got "grandfathered" in before copyright system maximalists went completely out of their minds. But, in fact, copyright holders still do appear to hate libraries and wish they'd go away. Case in point: publishing giant Macmillan, which has decided that libraries shouldn't be lending ebooks any more. Back in July it announced a new plan, starting November 1st, to "embargo" ebooks offered to libraries.
Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren retweeted Swift’s Thursday message about her former record label preventing her from performing her old hits at the American Music Awards, adding that Swift is “one of many whose work as been threatened by a private equity firm.”
“They’re gobbling up more and more of our economy, costing jobs and crushing entire industries,” she continued. “It’s time to rein in private equity firms — and I’ve got a plan for that.
The US Supreme Court has agreed to once and for all decide the copyright case between Oracle and Google after nine years of legal wrangling.
The nine judge panel on Friday issued a grant of certiorari (PDF), agreeing to hear the case over Android's use of copyrighted APIs owned by Oracle via the purchase of Sun Microsystems.
Yes, that case.
The fight kicked off back in 2010 shortly after Oracle acquired Sun and decide to weaponize its intellectual property by filing a copyright infringement suit against Google and its wildly popular Android mobile platform.
At issue is code Google was said to have cribbed from Sun in order to piece together the Java API in Android. The big sticking point throughout the nearly decade-long back and forth is the issue of whether the APIs were copyrightable.
The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide whether Google should have to pay Oracle billions of dollars in a long-running copyright infringement lawsuit over software used to run many of the world’s smartphones.
In a brief urging the Supreme Court to hear its appeal, Google called the dispute “the copyright case of the decade.”
Oracle asked for $9 billion in damages over what it said was Google’s wrongful copying of about 11,000 lines of software code in Android, its mobile phone operating system.
In 2016, a San Francisco jury found that Google had not violated copyright laws because it had made “fair use” of the code. But last year a specialized appeals court in Washington, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, disagreed with that assessment and sent the case back for a trial to determine how much Google must pay in damages.
Issues: (1) Whether copyright protection extends to a software interface; and (2) whether, as the jury found, the petitioner’s use of a software interface in the context of creating a new computer program constitutes fair use.
At issue are pre-written directions known as application program interfaces, or APIs, which provide instructions for such functions as connecting to the internet or accessing certain types of files. By using those shortcuts, programmers don’t have to write code from scratch for every function in their software, or change it for every type of device.
Some big news out of the Supreme Court this morning, as it has agreed to hear the appeal in the never-ending Oracle v. Google lawsuit regarding whether or not copyright applies to APIs (the case is now captioned as Google v. Oracle, since it was Google asking the Supreme Court to hear the appeal). We've been covering the case and all its permutations for many years now, and it's notable that the Supreme Court is going to consider both of the questions that Google petitioned over. Specifically:
Odds are good that the biggest patent case of the year will be a copyright case. The Supreme Court recently granted certiorari in Google v. Oracle — a case focusing on copyright protections for the JAVA programming interface. The innovations at issue in the case sit near the fuzzy ‘borders’ of copyright and patent law and a number of members of the court will be looking to define those dividing lines.
[...]
Even if the Supreme Court was serious at the time that Seldon should have gone after patent protection, today we know that such an attempt would be seen as improperly claiming an abstract idea under Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, 573 U.S. 208 (2014). In its petition, Google explains that – as in Seldon, a “monopoly over those methods and diagrams could be secured only by patent law, not copyright.”
Sci-Hub describes itself as "the first website in the world to provide mass & public access to research papers". At the time of writing, there were 77.5 million academic papers available on the site. Many, perhaps most, of them were funded by taxpayers, through government grants to researchers working at educational institutions. The person behind Sci-Hub, Alexandra Elbakyan, presumably sees her site as a way of letting people have access to the work they paid for. The publishing giant Elsevier doesn't agree. For some reason, it seems to think it has a right to a profit margin of 35-40% arising from its role as a gatekeeper to the papers that the public has paid for.
