IBM has spoken out against Australia’s controversial ‘anti-encryption’ laws, claiming they undermine previous work to strengthen the country’s defences. The vendor giant has urged the federal government to review the Telecommunications (Assistance and Access) Act 2018, which passed last year and effectively compels technology companies to build ‘backdoors’ into their encrypted data. In a submission to the government’s 2020 cyber security strategy consultation, IBM said the laws “undermined” previous work by the government to create a “regulatory environment that promotes strong cyber security without constraining innovation or digital commerce.” It added that without review, the law has “potentially damaging” consequences for cyber security in Australia.
In just five years, the Kubernetes container orchestration platform has grown from a Google startup project into an important tool being used by more and more midsized to large businesses to automate the deployment and management of their applications using containers.
That growing popularity has also caught the attention of a wide range of major technology companies, including Oracle and Red Hat, who spoke with Channel Futures about how Kubernetes should be embraced by the channel to drive new services and revenue as customers build out their cloud computing strategies into the future.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.1 Officially Released https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-ups-iq-intelligent-operating-system-latest-release-red-hat-enterprise-linux-8 SparkyLinux’s November ISO Brings Debian “Bullseye” Updates https://news.softpedia.com/news/sparkylinux-s-november-iso-brings-latest-debian-gnu-linux-11-bullseye-updates-528100.shtml Microsoft Edge Will be Available on Linux https://itsfoss.com/microsoft-edge-linux/ SINGA becomes top-level project of the Apache Software Foundation https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-software-foundation-announces57 Canonical Will Fully Support Ubuntu Linux on All Raspberry Pi Boards https://ubuntu.com/blog/roadmap-for-official-support-for-the-raspberry-pi-4 Canonical’s Kernel Livepatch Ubuntu Advantage Client Is Out for Ubuntu 14.04 ESM https://news.softpedia.com/news/canonical-s-kernel-livepatch-ubuntu-advantage-client-is-out-for-ubuntu-14-04-lts-528118.shtml Ubuntu Bug Reveals Your Media Files To Others Without Warning https://fossbytes.com/ubuntu-bug-media-files-no-warning/ Libarchive vulnerability can lead to code execution on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD https://www.zdnet.com/article/libarchive-vulnerability-can-lead-to-code-execution-on-linux-freebsd-netbsd/ Credits: Ubuntu “Complete” sound: Canonical
The RISC-V Foundation is relocating, Mozilla publishes its annual report from last year with some disappointing results, UBports has a plan to attract more developers, and Splunk urges self-hosters to patch a timestamp issue.
Any software project that is worked on or used by multiple people will inevitably reach a point where certain capabilities need to be turned on or off. In this episode Pete Hodgson shares his experience and insight into when, how, and why to use feature flags in your projects as a way to enable that practice. In addition to the simple on and off controls for certain logic paths, feature toggles also allow for more advanced patterns such as canary releases and A/B testing. This episode has something useful for anyone who works on software in any language. Summary
Any software project that is worked on or used by multiple people will inevitably reach a point where certain capabilities need to be turned on or off. In this episode Pete Hodgson shares his experience and insight into when, how, and why to use feature flags in your projects as a way to enable that practice. In addition to the simple on and off controls for certain logic paths, feature toggles also allow for more advanced patterns such as canary releases and A/B testing. This episode has something useful for anyone who works on software in any language.
Welcome to Episode 313 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts talk with Stephen "Tag" Loomis, N0TTL, creator of the GridTracker project. We take an in-depth look at the software application, its configuration, utilization and all of the hidden features that you may be hearing about for the first time. It's well designed, well thought out and a triumph of what someone can do when they're motivated to create a great project. And it's free! Hope you enjoy.
The rework of the CFS load balancing logic was pursued by engineers at Linaro and Arm among other organizations due to finding poor task placement with the current algorithm. A large clean-up ensued and after several rounds of revisions they hope they have addressed all regressions. Ingo does acknowledge the risk of some fall-out from this invasive change, "The load-balancing rework is the most intrusive change: it replaces the old heuristics that have become less meaningful after the introduction of the PELT metrics, with a grounds-up load-balancing algorithm. As such it's not really an iterative series, but replaces the old load-balancing logic with the new one. We hope there are no performance regressions left - but statistically it's highly probable that there *is* going to be some workload that is hurting from these changes. If so then we'd prefer to have a look at that workload and fix its scheduling, instead of reverting the changes."
Since 2016 the Linux kernel on ARM has invoked the EFI random number generator (RNG) protocol for serving as an additional source of entropy during early boot. With Linux 5.5 in early 2020 that code is finally happening for x86/x86_64.
The EFI specification has an RNG protocol that is optional for being able to return RNG values from supporting an arbitrary set of RNG algorithms. This has been around since UEFI 2.4 (2013) and while the Linux kernel ARM code has invoked it for years in their EFI code, the x86 (x86_64 included) code has a similar hook-up for Linux 5.5.
For several release cycles already the Linux kernel has supported Intel's 5-level paging for increasing the virtual and physical address space available to systems while for Linux 5.5 the five-level support is being enabled by default.
Using 5-level paging increases the virtual address space from 256 TiB to 128 PiB and the physical address space from 64 TiB to 4 PiB. Intel's 5-level paging works by extending the size of virtual addresses from 48 to 57 bits.
As part of the sound subsystem updates coming with the Linux 5.5 kernel is wake-on-voice capabilities with newer Google Chromebook device hardware.
Thanks to integration with the Google embedded controller (EC), the wake-on-voice functionality can work while the screen is off. In the Chromebook spectrum, this is part of the Google Assistant integration while these Linux 5.5 kernel bits are just about the low-level pieces.
I do not use mutt because I often need to copy-paste, and I hate dealing with line breaks that the terminal inevitably hoists upon me. So, many years ago I migrated to Sylpheed, and from there to Claws (because of the support of anti-aliased fonts).
Greg's approach differs in that it avoids the copy-paste problem by manipulating the bodies of messages programmatically. So, the patches travel between messages, files, and git without being printed to a terminal.
Intel's crew maintaining the Scalable Video Technology open-source video encoders on Monday issued a new pre-release of SVT-AV1 in an effort to further speed-up AV1 video encoding on CPUs.
With the SVT-AV1 0.7.5 pre-release, the encoder should run faster on modern Intel CPUs with adding additional AVX2 and AVX-512 optimizations. However, they did not elaborate on the precise performance benefits to be expected from this additional Advanced Vector Extensions tuning.
While the Radeon "ACO" compiler back-end performance is already looking very good in the speed department over the AMDGPU LLVM back-end for the Vulkan driver as shown in recent benchmarks, it's getting even better.
On Monday another batch of ACO improvements landed. One of the big changes is the introduction of a load/store vectorizer that has been under review for four months before being approved for merging yesterday. This work by Rhys Perry is designed to "greatly reduce the number of memory operations."
Last week marked the release of Blender 2.81 with one of the shiny new features being the OptiX back-end for the Cycles engine to provide hardware-accelerated ray-tracing with NVIDIA RTX graphics processors. Long story short, OptiX is much faster for Blender than using NVIDIA's CUDA back-end -- which already was much faster than the OpenCL support within Blender. For your viewing pleasure today are benchmarks of 19 different graphics cards looking at the CUDA performance from Maxwell to Pascal to Turing and then for the RTX graphics cards also the OptiX performance.
OptiX is only supported with the NVIDIA RTX graphics cards but it offers a significant boost to the rendering performance. This NVIDIA-designed API for exploiting their RT cores introduced with Turing yields an impressive speed-up for Blender render times in common benchmark scenes. For more background information on OptiX with Blender 2.81 can be found via this Blender.org blog post from the summer.
Guide a frog across busy roads and rivers. Mark Vanstone shows you how to code a simple remake of Konami’s arcade game, Frogger.
After a few months in Early Access, the near-future global cold war turn-based espionage sim Sigma Theory: Global Cold War has fully released.
Sigma Theory: Global Cold War tells the story of a world on the brink of rapidly advancing, through what scientists call the Sigma Theory. This sparks a new global Cold War, as every country sets up divisions responsible for attempting to harness that power. A very curious setting, one that requires you to use your own imagination somewhat.
Paradox Development Studio and Paradox Interactive just recently announced that the free update and additional free DLC for Imperator: Rome is arriving on December 3.
Something Paradox are hoping will turn the fortunes around for Imperator, since it had a very rough launch and it's still not a particularly highly rated title compared to their other strategy games.
Planetary Annihilation: TITANS, the massive-scale real-time strategy game from Planetary Annihilation (who took over from Uber Ent) recently had another update and it seems to be a big improvement.
Historically, on Intel and AMD GPUs on Linux their entire UI system was basically broken. They're using Coherent UI, which for some reason just didn't work nice with them. However, since the newer team took over development they've been steadily upgrading the internals of Planetary Annihilation: TITANS.
WRATH: Aeon of Ruin, another retro first-person shooter published by 3D Realms and 1C Entertainment we covered back in March certainly looks awesome and the Linux version is in progress.
The initial press info was a bit confused, with some saying the Linux version would be out right away but they've now confirmed it's happening along with other platforms at the full release. The reason being? They're currently having a few issues as they said on the Steam forum. So for full support we have a bit of a wait, but it's definitely coming.
Barotrauma is a strange one. Clunky in a many ways, ridiculous too but weirdly good fun when you get a good crew together. This latest update is a bit of a beast. Note: Our keys were provided by the developer.
Beast? Sorry, I meant feast. For the creatures that is, there's more of them lurking to feed on your friends. You can now come across the rather large Hammerhead Matriarch and Hammerhead Spawns plus Mudraptor Eggs. Not just more, they're a little bit smarter too, some may even hunt in packs and it all sounds a bit freaky.
To say that I began playing Trine 3: The Artifacts of Power with low expectations would be an understatement. Immediately put off by the 3D viewpoint shown off the in the initial trailers, I nevertheless bought the game soon after it launched to support the developer Frozenbyte only for it to languish in my games library for four years due to it having an OpenGL requirement not supported by my graphics drivers.
Since then the game acquired such a poor reputation that Frozenbyte went as far as to publicly apologize to quell a significant fan backlash. Its development almost bankrupted the developer, forced them to restructure their company, and make deals with outside publishers that ultimately took them out of the Linux market for good, coming close to killing Trine as franchise.
The second full expansion to Tangledeep is out, adding in amongst other things some super powerful boss monsters for you to test your abilities against. Note: DLC provided by GOG.
If you've not yet tried Tangledeep, you're honestly missing a really good roguelike. It's colourful and inviting, easy enough to understand and yet there's plenty of complexity to it to reward players who stick with it and progress far into it.
Valve have today started the big Autumn Sale with tons of ridiculously good deals. On top of that, the Steam Awards have returned so it's time to make your nominations.
Some time ago, I bought a Stadia Founders' Edition, having fallen for the promise that this would change gaming forever. In particular, the idea that we could now play our games on almost any device anywhere without having to download and install games seemed almost too good to be true. Now, I run Linux on my notebook computer and I was particularly interested to see how it would work there.
Just under three months past Lutris 0.5.3 as this open-source game manager/platform tool particularly for Wine-based gaming outside of Steam, Lutris 0.5.4 is now available in getting Linux gamers ready for any extra holiday-time gaming.
And while I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly like I did when Valve discontinued its amazing Steam Link wireless HDMI cable-in-a-box, I will say that $13 is a pretty excellent price if you ever plug your PC into your television, or sling your PC games wirelessly to the Steam Link app on your phone and need an accurate solution.
Originally launched in March 2016, Atari Vault bundles the publisher’s most beloved classic games into a single PC title, along with adding new features and multiplayer capabilities. With this new DLC, fans have instant access to an even-more extensive catalog of titles from the Atari 2600 and arcade as the total count of games increases to 150, which includes fan-favorites like Asteroids€®, Centipede€®, Missile Command€®, and many more.
I’m pleased to announce the immediate availability of Plasma Browser Integration version 1.7 on the Chrome Web Store as well as Firefox Add-Ons page. This feature brings a slew of important bug fixes, translation updates, and exciting new features.
Plasma Browser Integration bridges the gap between your browser and the Plasma desktop. It lets you share links, find browser tabs in KRunner, monitor download progress in the notification center, and control music and video playback anytime from within Plasma, or even from your phone using KDE Connect!
As I’m an amateur photographer, I’m using Open Source tools for developing my images. The software I use is called darktable. I think it is the best tool out there for editing RAW images.
From time to time I contributed small code changes to darktable, mostly bug fixes. Now I nearly finished my first feature for darktable, support for the AVIF image format.
In 2009, I was on the board of KDE e.V. and did this drawing of the members of the board back then. Can you guess who is who?
[...]
One floor down, the KDE Frameworks 6 sprint was happening 1 2 3 4 5, which was moving post-its around at a furious pace and innovated with a virtual David Faure. One of the things the board talked about was equipment to support telepresence at sprints. That’s what the KDE e.V. is for – to support the community in doing good things – and so we’re thinking about good was to help the community while keeping our travel footprint small(er).
If you have a telepresence idea (e.g. a monitor and a rock64 and a nice room-microphone) and can make it work, do let us know.
Other topics were finances, events, people, places and things. That’s not very specific because this blog entry is a public thing and some of what the board works on is sensitive. Reports are sent to the membership of KDE e.V. on a regular basis. But here’s some non-sensitive examples:
Some of the things we talked about were KDE beer mats, which Kai Uwe put together for Qt World Summit. They’re amazing, and you can find them on the promo-materials page that he has also been putting together.
Following Qt Contributor Summit earlier last week, we had the KDE Frameworks 6 (KF6) Kick-off sprint at the MBition office in Berlin last weekend, to define what we want to achieve, and plan how we can get there for the next major iteration of KDE Frameworks.
Looking ahead to 2020, we already have a lot going on in addition to our patent case. There’s kicking off the GNOME Coding Education Challenge in order to expand the tools we have available to learn and teach. We will be seriously expanding our accessibility efforts, and are currently planning an accessibility audit and making plans for updates to the Orca screen reader. We’ve already started planning GUADEC 2020, which will bring us to our first North American GUADEC in Zacatecas, Mexico. We have a GNOME.Asia in the works. There will be more hackfests and newcomer events, intern and mentorship opportunities, and constant efforts to work on, for, and with the community. We’ll do all of this while upholding the standards of technical excellence you have come to expect from the GNOME project, building software for people of every country with every level of ability.
After a few days of Zorin OS 15 Lite release, a Reddit thread surfaced which flagged a privacy concern regarding the Linux distribution.
The Reddit thread focuses on the privacy policy of Zorin OS and warns users that Zorin OS is sending anonymous pings every 60 minutes without users’ consent, which is potentially a privacy issue.
Now, there’s a lot of discussions surrounding the concern. There’s also a YouTube video talking about it.
There are a ton of updates to go over for this release, but the most in your face item that everyone is going to notice first are the changes to the desktop environment and theme. So let’s cover that first.
An update to the desktop environment has been a long time coming. We have been talking about how to address this, what we wanted to do, experimenting on different approaches, and so on for months now.
Powered by Linux kernel 5.3.9, Kali Linux 2019.4 is now available and it's a major update to the very popular ethical hacking and penetration testing operating system due to its massive look and feel changes. This is the first Kali Linux release to switch to the lightweight Xfce desktop environment by default, and also implement a brand-new desktop theme for both Xfce and GNOME desktops.
"We are really excited about this UI update, and we think you are going to love it. However, as UI can be a bit like religion, if you don’t want to leave Gnome don’t worry. We still have a Gnome build for you, with a few changes already in place. As time goes by, we will be making changes to all of the desktop environments," said Offensive Security.
Deepin simultaneously exists as a beautiful and constantly misunderstood Linux distribution. It shatters misconceptions about how sleek and modern a Linux desktop can look, but struggles to shake repeated accusations of being spyware, likely because of its Chinese origins and business ties with Huawei.
Despite the controversy, Deepin is poised to begin thriving thanks to its inclusion on select Huawei laptops in China, and a new version of the distro and desktop environment right around the corner.
I had some burning questions for the folks behind Deepin, and was fortunate enough to briefly connect with Deepin Development Manager Hualet Wang and CTO Raphael Zhang. Both gentlemen collaborated on the answers below.
LibreELEC 9.2 comes nine months after the launch of the LibreELEC 9 series, which is based on the latest Kodi 18 "Leia" open-source and cross-platform media centre, and introduces various improvements to Raspberry Pi 4 Model B devices, such as a firmware updater, a new option for enabling 4K output, and the Linux 4.19 kernel with some extra optimizations.
The LibreELEC developers claim that the 1080p (FHD) playback on Raspberry Pi 4 is almost on-par with that of Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ models, but they promise to improve the 4K video capabilities as soon as possible thanks to the work done by the Raspberry Pi Foundation developers. Also, they promise HDR and 3D video, as well as HBR audio capabilities too in a future update.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Zorin OS 15 Lite and some of the applications pre-installed.
I am pleased to announce that a new release of the libvirt-glib package, version 3.0.0, is now available from
https://libvirt.org/sources/glib/
Currently Fedora Linux supports empty passwords for local users by default but that could change with next year's Fedora 32 release.
Fedora's PAM module currently enables the "nullok" parameter to allow for null/empty passwords for users. Though a password is obviously required for root and the OpenSSH server configuration doesn't allow empty passwords. But with Fedora 32 there is a proposal to no longer allow empty passwords by default for local users.
The Fedora Prioritized Bugs process was introduced a few years ago to bring attention to bugs that are high-impact or highly-visible, but don't violate the release criteria. I recently made some changes to how we implement this in Bugzilla that will help make it easier to handle. This post is to explain the change as well as remind the community that the process exists. This can only work with community input.
org-reveal can be used to author slide decks with org-mode. The slides are displayed as an HTML document animated with reveal.js.
reveal.js allows to progressively display fragments which reveal parts of a page, for instance a bullet list.
It is also possible to display animated diagrams, as reveal.js fragments, provided that such diagrams are made as embedded SVG images included in the HTML.
Adding class="fragment" (and variations, including the associated data-fragment-index attributes) to the SVG elements helps animate parts of the diagram with the same JS actions as for regular bullet fragments.
The Capitole Du Libre 2019 happened two weekend ago on 16th-17th November. I have helped the DebianFrance team on the Debian booth. It was a super event with a lot of cool and interesting people !
We promoted the Debian project and I have also presented a demo of a Raspberry PI 3 running a fresh debian 10.2 with a mainline linux kernel (for instance 4.19.x) with V3D or llvmpipe. The different persons I met were very interested by the availability of the image, so I have decided to write a debos recipe from scratch for ARM64-based RaspberryPI.
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Teus Benschop (teusbenschop) Nick Morrott (nickm) Ondà â¢ej Koblià ¾ek (kobla) Clément Hermann (nodens) Gordon Ball (chronitis) The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Nikos Tsipinakis Joan Lledó Baptiste Beauplat Jianfeng Li
Congratulations!
Insight: Run Ubuntu Touch OS On Raspberry Pi 3 With Touchscreen
Ubuntu Touch which is being developed by UBPorts has recently pushed an update so that you can use or run Ubuntu Touch OS on Raspberry Pi 3 with Touchscreen. Ubuntu Touch was shown running on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 7? touch screen. Raspberry Pis are really maturing as development platforms and will make access to Ubuntu Touch application development possible for a much wider base.
Edge computing is becoming more and more popular, and Ubuntu maker Canonical innovates on the edge and IoT space with its popular Linux-based operating system, and now the London-based company aims to give developers new opportunities to innovate and hack on edge applications with the Raspberry Pi 4, Ubuntu Linux, and EdgeX Foundry as a snap.
"When it comes to IoT edge, EdgeX Foundry is a feature-rich platform for accelerated development. Not only is EdgeX Foundry open source, but it also put a strong accent on interoperability. These factors combine to catalyse an ecosystem of components federating the IoT space. The platform thereby accelerates the development of IoT solutions across various industrial and enterprise use cases," said Canonical in the tutorial.
On Thursday 5th December AWS and Canonical are hosting an interactive roundtable from 11:00 AM to 1:00 PM at re-Invent, Las Vegas.
The purpose of this communication is to provide a status update and highlights for any interesting subjects from the Ubuntu Server Team. If you would like to reach the server team, you can find us at the #ubuntu-server channel on Freenode. Alternatively, you can sign up and use the Ubuntu Server Team mailing list or visit the Ubuntu Server discourse hub for more discussion.
This was a fairly busy two weeks for the Web & design team at Canonical. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work.
Lenovo’s open-spec, $141 “Leez P710” SBC runs Ubuntu or Android 9.0 on an RK3399 with 4GB LPDDR4, 16GB eMMC, 40-pin GPIO, M.2, HDMI 2.0, and 4x USB ports. Up next is a Leez P515 board with a TI AM5708.
Lenovo has followed fellow PC vendor Asus into the community-backed SBC market and is similarly debuting with a Rockchip-based board. Its flagship Leez P710 jumps to a more powerful, hexa-core Cortex-A72 and -A53 Rockchip RK3399 instead of the Asus Tinker Board’s RK3288. (An Asus Tinker Edge R SBC with an RK3399Pro is also on the way.)
Aaeon’s compact “Boxer-8220AI” runs Linux on a Jetson Nano module and offers 5x GbE ports for IP cameras plus 4x USB 3.0, 2x COM, and an HDMI port.
Aaeon has unveiled its first compact Boxer computer with Nvidia’s Jetson Nano instead of the higher powered Jetson TX2 found on the other AI models. The fanless, 154 x 101 x 30mm Boxer-8220AI has much in common with the larger, 180 x 136 x 48mm Boxer-8170AI, which was announced in August, and to a lesser degree, last year’s similarly TX2-based Boxer-8120AI. The Boxer-8220AI ships with Aaeon’s ACLinux 4.4, which is based on Ubuntu 18.04.
Google has come up with its Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution for the Coral Dev Board and System-on-Module (SoM). Called Mendel Linux 4.0 “Day”, the release ships with upgraded GStreamer pipelines and support for Python 3.7, OpenCV, and OpenCL. The Linux kernel has also been updated to version 4.14 and U-Boot to version 2017.03.3, Google said in a blog post
“We’ve also made it possible to use the Dev Board’s GPU to convert YUV to RGB pixel data at up to 130 frames per second on 1080p resolution, which is one to two orders of magnitude faster than on Mendel Linux 3.0 release Chef. These changes make it possible to run inferences with YUV-producing sources such as cameras and hardware video decoders,” said Carlos Mendonça, Product Manager, Coral Team.
AAEON has launched several AI Boxer-8000 series embedded box PCs based on Intel processors plus AI accelerator, or NVIDIA Jetson TX2.
A cheap way to set up a ChromeOS based digital is to get a ChromeBit (around $100 used) and install one of the Digital Signage apps for the OS. But as I checked out Linux 5.4 changelog, I came across AOPEN Chromebox Mini (codename Fievel) powered by a Rockchip RK3288 processor and described as an “enterprise-ready” Chromebox for 24/7 operation as digital signage or kiosk.
Our very own Brian made this lovely What is a Raspberry Pi?€ video for our YouTube channel. Thanks, Brian.
We recently started restoring a vintage1 analog computer. Unlike a digital computer that represents numbers with discrete binary values, an analog computer performs computations using physical, continuously changeable values such as voltages. Since the accuracy of the results depends on the accuracy of these voltages, a precision power supply is critical in an analog computer. This blog post discusses how this computer's power supply works, and how we fixed a problem with it. This is the second post in the series; the first post discussed the precision op amps in the computer.
When smartphones first arrived, it was perhaps not that strange that the devices ran programs that were vastly different from the ones our computers. The portable bricks were different enough to bypass our expectations of computers and we were perfectly fine with having disconnected experiences between the two. These days, however, both devices and users have changed and some do want to have the exact same apps on both their smartphones as well as computers. Neither Android nor iOS have been able to fully accomplish that but one still experimental phone is close to making that geek dream come true.
Based on AOSP (Android Open Source Project) and Android-x86 projects, Bliss OS offers numerous customization and theming options, customized settings for big and small screens, battery optimizations, extra security options and features, support for many gamepads, and ARM/ARM64 app compatibility.
The latest release, Bliss OS 12, has recently entered development, currently in early alpha testing, promising to let you run the latest Android 10 mobile operating system on your PC. But it's not for the faint of heart as the developers ask you to become a tester via this XDA thread.
AFTER A TEASE at this year's IFA, Google has finally taken the covers off its new 'Ambient Mode' for Android.
The feature allows you to display information such as diary entries and notifications on the lock screen and interact with Google Assistant, all without touching the phone, which sits safely on a dock or just on charge.
It’s never too early for a new Samsung Galaxy leak, especially considering the next flagship could be unveiled as early as February. That actually leaves less time to form a complete picture of the Galaxy S11. Thanks to a few renders and common expectations, we may already be prepared for what’s coming next. And that may include a subtle change to an already unfamiliar new camera system for the next Galaxy.
OpenMoji is an open source emoji library licensed under Creative Commons that’s totally, absolutely, and completely free to use.
And I think it looks terrific!
Most desktop Linux distributions (including Ubuntu) ship with full colour emoji support by default, making use of Google’s free, open-source Noto Color Emoji font.
And I’ll state the obvious: Noto is a decent, comprehensive emoji set that doesn’t deviate too heavily in its design from the way emoji look on other operating systems and messaging service look, like Android and WhatsApp.
Similarity is important because emoji that look different on different platforms can easily result in misunderstandings or dramatically alter the meaning and intent of a message.
In recent months, you may have come across the name Mastodon here and there. Especially two weeks ago, when Twitter again made headlines with some, possibly politically motivated, account suspensions that resulted in an influx of users from India to the federated network. Time to look at it a bit, also with regards to accessibility.
Mastodon itself is merely the name of an application that, like many others, uses an open standard called ActivityPub to exchange and manage social media content. The perk is that there is not one centralized service that manages all users or the content they generate. Instead, there are hundreds or thousands of servers all over the world running the Mastodon software and exchange the status messages, called toots, by their users. This is called a federated model. Most of these instances, as the servers are called, are run by private persons or small companies, but as its popularity catches on, one can expect to see more instances by bigger entities as well.
Users are addressed much like in an e-mail, which is also a decentralized service. The address is usually @<username>@<instance.domain>. Users can follow each other across instances. Most instances also have timelines that are only from the users of that instance, and one that is a collective federated view of recent toots from people of instances they exchange their toots with. More on the privacy settings follows further below that control how toots appear in these timelines, or not.
[...]
I already mentioned that Mastodon supports image descriptions from the start. The default Mastodon interface is also quite accessible, and because Mastodon is open source software, everybody can file issues on the Github repository, or even submit pull requests to fix problems and improve the software. In my previous interactions, I have found the maintainers to be open to almost every suggestion. The one instance where the accessibility community has failed so far surrounds a question around underlining links. Some software like Pinafore (see below) therefore offer various options to customize the appearance of various elements far beyond just theming.
And because Mastodon is open and has an unrestricted public API, anyone can write an own client to interact with that. There are very accessible alternatives. Mastodon is OK for most things, too, but a really enjoyable experience is delivered by some other software. See the next section for a few names.
How did we get here: BL Radhakrishnan, Coordinator Industry-Academia collaborations-CSE and Assistant Professor, Computer Science and Engineering Department at Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences, sought out SUSE’ Academic Program in early 2019. Prior to this, the computer, science and engineering (CSE) department had a previous engagement with Novell Software briefly. The department established a relationship and signed the first agreement with Novell in the year 2010. Because of the tremendous academic support and guidance by Novell, the CSE department started offering the Novell Certified Linux Administrator (NCLA) from the year 2010. Currently, the certification is offered as “SUSE Certified Administrator (SCA) in Enterprise Linux.”
Hello testers, Kiwi TCMS is going to FOSDEM 2020.
Here is the third quarterly status report for 2019.
This quarter the reports team has been more active than usual thanks to a better organization: calls for reports and reminders have been sent regularly, reports have been reviewed and merged quickly (I would like to thank debdrup@ in particular for his reviewing work).
Efficiency could still be improved with the help of our community. In particular, the quarterly team has found that many reports have arrived in the last days before the deadline or even after. I would like to invite the community to follow the guidelines below that can help us sending out the reports sooner.
Starting from next quarter, all quarterly status reports will be prepared the last month of the quarter itself, instead of the first month after the quarter's end. This means that deadlines for submitting reports will be the 1st of January, April, July and October.
Next quarter will then be a short one, covering the months of November and December only and the report will probably be out in mid January.
The FreeBSD Q3-2019 quarterly report is now available. One of the interesting bits from this report is the FreeBSD Foundation planning to buy one or more families of new laptops to supply to their core developers in working to improve the modern hardware support.
Increasingly people discovering Guix want to try it on an ARM board, instead of their x86 computer. There might be various reasons for that, from power consumption to security. In my case, I found these ARM boards practical for self-hosting, and I think the unique properties of GNU Guix are making it very suitable for that purpose. I have installed GNU Guix on a Cubietruck, so my examples below will be about that board. However, you should be able to change the examples for your own use case.
Installing the Guix System on an ARM board is not as easy as installing it on an x86 desktop computer: there is no installation image. However, Guix supports ARM and can be installed on a foreign distribution running on that architecture. The trick is to use the Guix installed on that foreign distribution to initialize the Guix System. This article will show you how to install the Guix System on your board, without using an installer image. As we have previously mentionned it is possible to generate an installation image yourself, if your board is supported.
Most boards can be booted from an existing GNU+Linux distribution. You will need to install a distribution (any of them) and install GNU Guix on it, using e.g. the installer script. Then, my plan was to install the Guix System on an external SSD drive, instead of the SD card, but we will see that both are perfectly possible.
The first part of the article will focus on creating a proper u-boot configuration and an operating system declaration that suits your board. The second part of this article will focus on the installation procedure, when there is no installer working for your system.
Dear all,
I am happy to announce the 11th stable release of GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro).
Gnuastro is an official GNU package of various command-line programs and library functions for the manipulation and analysis of (astronomical) data. All the programs share the same basic command-line user interface (modeled on GNU Coreutils). For the full list of Gnuastro's library, programs, and a comprehensive general tutorial (recommended place to start using Gnuastro), please see the links below respectively:
https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-library.html https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-programs-list.html https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/General-program-usage-tutorial.html
Many new features have been added, and many bugs have been fixed in this release. For the full list, please see [1] below (part of the NEWS file within the tarball).
The 11th release of GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) is now available. Please see the announcement for more.
auctex-12.2 cpio-2.13 emms-5.3 gcc-7.5.0 gnuastro-0.11 gnunet-0.11.8 gnupg-2.2.18 guile-ncurses-3.0 health-3.6.2 libidn-3.3.0 libredwg-0.9.2 libtasn1-4.15.0 linux-libre-5.4-gnu mailutils-3.8 mcron-1.1.3 mes-0.21 parallel-20191122
The United Kingdom's naval warfare force, the Royal Navy, launched the NELSON programme as part of its digital transformation strategy. Moving towards open source, the Royal Navy now provides the open source NELSON Standard toolkit, and requires its future IT suppliers to have capability to develop digital services “using a range of Open Source Technologies”.
Java is no doubt one of the most popular programming languages in the world but it?s been difficult for a period time for those non-Golang developers to build up their customized controller/operator due to the lack of library resources in the community. In the world of Golang, there?re already some excellent controller frameworks, for example, controller runtime, operator SDK. These existing Golang frameworks are relying on the various utilities from the Kubernetes Golang SDK proven to be stable over years. Driven by the emerging need of further integration into the platform of Kubernetes, we not only ported many essential toolings from the Golang SDK into the kubernetes Java SDK including informers, work-queues, leader-elections, etc. but also developed a controller-builder SDK which wires up everything into a runnable controller without hiccups.
You should try Lua, a lightweight, efficient, and embeddable scripting language supporting procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. And best of all, it uses explicit syntax for scoping!
Lua is also small. Lua's source code is just 24,000 lines of C, the Lua interpreter (on 64-bit Linux) built with all standard Lua libraries is 247K, and the Lua library is 421K.
You might think that such a small language must be too simplistic to do any real work, but in fact Lua has a vast collection of third-party libraries (including GUI toolkits), it's used extensively in video game and film production for 3D shaders, and is a common scripting language for video game engines. To make it easy to get started with Lua, there's even a package manager called Luarocks.
In this blog post we are going to introduce Multi-cluster Management patterns with GitOps and how you can implement these patterns on OpenShift. If you’re interested in diving into an interactive tutorial, try this link.
In the introductory blog post to GitOps we described some of the use cases that we can solve with GitOps on OpenShift. In today’s blog post we are going to describe how we can leverage GitOps patterns to perform tasks on multiple clusters.
C is a general-purpose, procedural, portable, high-level programming language that is one of the most popular and influential languages. It was designed to be compiled using a straightforward compiler, to provide low-level access to memory, to provide language constructs that map efficiently to machine instructions, and to require minimal run-time support. Many programming languages owe a considerable debt to C. It has become something of the lingua franca in the programming world.
C is fairly simple to understand. It allows the programmer to organize programs in a clear, easy, logical way. It is a very flexible, practical and compact language combined with an easy to read syntax. Code written in C runs quickly, with easy access to the low level facilities in the computer. Compiler directives make it possible to produce a single version of a program compiled for different architectures.
So, what has happened in the meantime? This article is a collection of the work done by the LibreOffice Macro Team in the past few months, as well as any other macro-related things in the project. If you are interested in contributing to the macro team (development, testing or documentation), we’d love to hear from you – please send an email to ilmari.lauhakangas@libreoffice.org and we’ll get in touch.
If you don't use an interactive debugger then you probably debug by adding logging code and rebuilding/rerunning the program. That gives you a view of what happens over time, but it's slow, can take many iterations, and you're limited to dumping some easily accessible state at certain program points. That sucks.
If you use a traditional interactive debugger, it sucks in different ways. You spend a lot of time trying to reproduce bugs locally so you can attach your debugger, even though in many cases those bugs have already been reproduced by other people or in CI test suites. You have to reproduce the problem many times as you iteratively narrow down the cause. Often the debugger interferes with the code under test so the problem doesn't show up, or not the way you expect. The debugger lets you inspect the current state of the program and stop at selected program points, but doesn't track data or control flow or remember much about what happened in the past. You're pretty much stuck debugging on your own; there's no real support for collaboration or recording what you've discovered.
While the Motorola 68000 32-bit processors are from the 80's and early 90's, there still is a loyal following of hobbyists who managed to save the "m68k" compiler back-end from being removed in GCC 11.
The m68k back-end in GCC was at risk of being removed due to plans for GCC 11 to drop the CC0 representation code and the back-ends still depending upon it. M68k was the most notable user relying upon the deprecated CC0 representation but there are also other back-ends like AVR (AVR micro-controller), CRIS (the Axis Communications' ETRAX CRIS embedded processors), H8300 (the Renesas H8 microcontrollers), VAX (DEC VAX), and CR16 (National Semi CompactRISC). But now at least m68k is safe.
If you intended to write a blog post for this years Raku Advent Calendar, you’re too late! Well, sort of. You can still add yourself as a fallback should one of the other participants not be able to write a blog post after all!
I’ve often struggled with accessing MySQL from Python, as the ‘default’ MySQL library for Python is MySQLdb. This library has a number of problems: 1) it is Python 2 only, and 2) it requires compiling against the MySQL C library and header files, and so can’t be simply installed using pip.
There is a Python 3 version of MySQLdb called mysqlclient, but this also requires compiling against the MySQL libraries and header files, so can be complicated to install.
The Kivy Python GUI framework is intriguing.
Not only it’s cross-platform but also supports Android. Java is too verbose and low level for me and Kivy is an opportunity for developing native Android apps without leaving Python.
Outside of the Kivy project documentation, there are few third-party advanced tutorials that go in more depth than the official tutorials. So, before diving into the code of the Kivy demos, I wanted some books to explore more features and get a broader picture of the framework and what it can do.
One of the books I read on Kivy, a Python cross-platform GUI framework, is Building Android Apps in Python Using Kivy with Android Studio: With Pyjnius, Plyer, and Buildozer by Ahmed Fawzy Mohamed Gad (Apress, 2019). My comments on the book, which focused on it not being a good match for my learning needs, sounded negative. Perhaps unnecessarily so.
If you're majoring in Computer Science, Insertion Sort is most likely one of the first sorting algorithms you have heard of. It is intuitive and easy to implement, but it's very slow on large arrays and is almost never used to sort them.
Insertion sort is often illustrated by comparing it to sorting a hand of cards while playing rummy. For those of you unfamiliar with the game, most players want the cards in their hand sorted in ascending order so they can quickly see which combinations they have at their disposal.
Yet another marketing piece was late, and what we had published was underperforming.
In October 2018, Red Hat marketers recognized that our existing project management process, which relied on manual data entry and email updates, was unsustainable given an exploding demand for datasheets, whitepapers, e-books, and other marketing collateral.
Purchasing an existing system didn’t make sense. Our project management tool, CA Agile Central (previously known as Rally), does not allow content requesters to kick off projects through a form.
To initiate a project, requesters had to fill out a template file. The project manager would then manually create a project and pass the template file back and forth as it was edited, designed, and published. When requesters wanted to know the status of a project, they would email their project manager, who would check CA Agile Central.
Python’s KeyError exception is a common exception encountered by beginners. Knowing why a KeyError can be raised and some solutions to prevent it from stopping your program are essential steps to improving as a Python programmer.
This article will discuss several tips and shortcuts for using iloc to work with a data set that has a large number of columns. Even if you have some experience with using iloc you should learn a couple of helpful tricks to speed up your own analysis and avoid typing lots of column names in your code.
If you are interested in using containers, in particular Kubernetes, Digital Ocean has provided a self paced, and free, community curriculum and there's also a fun introduction from the Cloud Native Foundation.
The Linux date command provides more options for displaying dates and times than you can shake a stick at (without hurting your wrist anyway). Here are some of the more useful choices.
Data Science is the most popular field of study in today’s world that leverages scientific methods, processes, algorithms and systems to convert structured and unstructured data into meaningful insights. Since it is mostly comprised of statistics, R is the bridging language of this field. It is a popular programming language and software environment and an important tool for data science.
R is one that enables statistical computing which is used widely by the data miners and statisticians for data analysis. It has various programming features, including data inputs and data management; and distributed computing and R packages – a collection of R functions, with code and sample data.
A political writer’s annual Thanksgiving column can be easy to write, or incredibly difficult to put together. It can also be inspiring or banal. The two are probably connected. It’s always a difficult one for me; its quality is a matter of your opinion. But hey, Turkey Day is just around the corner and it’s time to talk about being thankful. Please bear with.
A dairy farm near Moscow has begun testing virtual reality glasses designed specially for cows. Agriculture officials are betting that the futuristically decked-out bovines will experience heightened moods, which will raise milk yields in turn. Each set of glasses is designed with the cows’ physiology and visual system in mind, enabling the animals to enjoy views of summer fields year-round.
After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans was shock doctrined through a massive, neoliberal transformation, the centerpiece of which was a replacement of the public school system with a system entirely made up of charter schools.
While these schools showed some initial promise, the overall performance of these schools has been in free fall for some time, and this year's state assessment of the district assigned a "failing grade" (D or F) to 35 of its 72 schools.
The release of the state's closely watched school performance scores earlier this month offered an overall update on New Orleans schools that seemed benign enough: A slight increase in overall student performance meant another C grade for the district.
But a closer look reveals a startling fact. A whopping 35 of the 72 schools in the all-charter district scored a D or F, meaning nearly half of local public schools were considered failing, or close to it, in the school year ending in 2019. Since then, six of the 35 have closed.
The federal government recently redesigned a digital tool that helps seniors navigate complicated Medicare choices, but consumer advocates say it’s malfunctioning with alarming frequency, offering inaccurate cost estimates and creating chaos in some states during the open enrollment period.
Diane Omdahl, a Medicare consultant in Wisconsin, said she used the tool Friday to research three prescription drug plans for a client. The comparison page, which summarizes total costs, showed all but one of her client’s medications would be covered. When Omdahl clicked on “plan details” to find out which medicine was left out, the plan finder then said all of them were covered.
Louisiana health officials plan to knock on every door within 2.5 kilometers of the controversial Denka Performance Elastomer plant in St. John the Baptist Parish in hopes of determining exactly how many people in the neighborhood have developed cancer.
Neighbors say the inquiry, first announced in late August, is long overdue.
Over the past few years, abortion providers in Texas have struggled to reopen clinics that had closed because of restrictive state laws.
At the early stage of infection, the victim receives an MS Word document in Office Open XML format. Even though we do not have clear evidence, we are sure that the initial penetration vector is a targeted phishing message with MS Office attachment. The document itself is not malicious, but it abuses the external elements autoloading capability to launch the next stage document.
Communicating with a linked external object The loaded fine is an RTF document exploiting vulnerability CVE-2018-0802 in Microsoft Equation. The main shellcode is preceded by a chain of intermediate ones, each decrypting the subsequent slice with a single-byte XOR with keys 0x90 and 0xCE.
The virus — generally referred to as “ransomware” because it locks users out of infected computers until they pay a ransom — “never executed,” but the NYPD shut down LiveScan that night and reinstalled software on 200 computers citywide out of an abundance of caution, she said.
VMware is the most popular software company providing enterprise-level cloud computing and virtualization solutions. If you’re a tech professional, chances are you have worked with, or at least know its name. VMware is widely used to deploy servers and cloud platforms on the web. Many home users also use it to create their favorite Linux virtual machines. Moreover, they offer a huge list of user convenient utilities, known as VMware tools. These are developed especially to enhance the performance of your virtual machines and make management almost effortless. In this guide, we’ll discuss 30 extremely useful VMtools that can make virtualization more accessible than ever.
The inaugural public meeting the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Networking Special Interest Group (SIG) was held in a session at the KubeCon event on Nov. 19, ushering in a new era for networking at the highly influential open source group.
The CNCF is home to many different projects, including the Kubernetes container orchestration system. Kubernetes itself has its' own set of SIGs, which is the core organizing unit for the project, among those SIGs is one for networking. The CNCF however is a bigger organization that just Kubernetes and includes over 40 projects. CNCF SIGs cut across all projects, with cross project concerns in different topic areas.
Lee Calcote, Founder at Layer5 and one of the leaders of CNCF SIG Network explained during the session that there are already a few network specific projects within the CNCF, including CNI (Container Network Interface), CoreDNS, Envoy, gRPC, Linkerd, NATS and the Network Service Mesh project.
"Part of what we're hoping to do is with SIGs in general is to help more impact fully scale the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee (TOC)," Calcote said.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libxdmcp, nss, php-imagick, and ruby2.1), openSUSE (java-11-openjdk), Red Hat (389-ds-base, kernel, kernel-rt, python-jinja2, qemu-kvm-ma, and tcpdump), SUSE (bluez, clamav, cpio, cups, gcc9, libpng16, libssh2_org, mailman, sqlite3, squid, strongswan, tiff, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (redmine).
In December 2018 I discovered a series of vulnerabilities in Kaspersky software such as Kaspersky Internet Security 2019. Due to the way its Web Protection feature is implemented, internal application functionality can used by any website. It doesn’t matter whether you allowed Kaspersky Protection browser extension to be installed, Web Protection functionality is active regardless and exploitable.
A few weeks back AMD published a TEE "Trusted Execution Environment" driver for APUs on Linux for utilizing the controversial AMD Secure Processor.
The AMD Secure Processor / PSP is what's been built into their processors for a half-decade now for providing a secure hardware environment similar to Intel's Management Engine. This ARM-based secure processor is now seeing a Trusted Execution Environment driver for Linux.
Debate about the merits of lightweight cryptography isn't exactly generating major drama—especially considering NIST itself invited Teserakt researchers to share their industry perspective at its conference. But it's an important issue, especially given the stakes in working to better secure the billions of /[Internet] of things devices lurking everywhere.
Security researchers have warned of a campaign of [Internet] scanning activity by a group of hackers hunting for Docker platforms with exposed API endpoints.
Exposed platforms are then compromised with cryptomining malware.
The campaign started on 24th November, according to Troy Mursch, chief research officer of cyber-threar intelligence firm Bad Packets, who first noticed the activity and its sheer size.
The massive cyberattack just before Thanksgiving 2014 crippled a studio, embarrassed executives and reshaped Hollywood. The FBI blamed a North Korea scheme to retaliate for the comedy 'The Interview,’ but many whose lives were upended have doubts. Says Seth Rogen: "The fact that [co-director Evan Goldberg and I] were never really specifically targeted always raised suspicions in my head."
We've spent many years pointing out that the freak out over Huawei equipment possibly being compromised by the Chinese government still remains without evidence to back it up. This does not mean that it's not there. But we've just noted that many (especially in the US) keep stating it as if it's factual, despite a Congressional investigation that turned up nothing (not to mention competitor Cisco fanning the flames of the attacks on Huawei, and the fact that the NSA is already known to compromise telco equipment for the US government). The usual response to pointing this out is to highlight that most large and successful Chinese companies have close relationships with the Chinese government (because they need to) and that Huawei's founder, Ren Zhengfei, was an engineer in the Chinese military. This is enough for many people to assume that the company would actively sabotage its own equipment to help the Chinese government.
Earlier this year leaked data revealed that the Department of Motor Vehicles in numerous states has spent years selling citizen data to a laundry list of third parties, often without making such financial relationships or data transfers clear to patrons. Some of the data wound up being sold to the usual suspects (auto insurance and credit reporting companies being the most obvious), but much of it is routinely sold to more dubious third-party outfits and private investigators, which fairly obviously poses a risk to folks dealing with stalkers and psychotic exes.
A few weeks ago we wrote about a privacy bill in the House that seemed unlikely to go anywhere, and now we have the same thing from the Senate: a new privacy bill from Senator Maria Cantwell, called COPRA for "Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act." For months it had been said that Cantwell was working on a bipartisan effort to create a federal privacy law, so the fact that this bill only has Democratic co-sponsors (Senators Schatz, Klobuchar and Markey) doesn't bode well for its likelihood of success.
"The Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act gives consumers meaningful rights, holds companies accountable, and protects stronger state safeguards."
Facebook is now operating without a third-party fact-checking service in the Netherlands. The company’s only partner, Dutch newspaper NU.nl, just quit over a dispute regarding the social network’s policy to allow politicians to run ads containing misinformation.
“What is the point of fighting fake news if you are not allowed to tackle politicians?” asked NU.nl’s editor-in-chief Gert-Jaap Hoekman in a blog post announcing the decision. “Let one thing be clear: we stand behind the content of our fact checks.”
Twitter is sending out emails to owners of inactive accounts with a warning: sign in by December 11th, or your account will be history and its username will be up for grabs again. Any account that hasn’t signed in for more than six months will receive the email alert.
Messaging service WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, had accused NSO in its own legal action filed in California last month of helping government spies break into the phones of roughly 1,400 users across four continents in a hacking spree whose targets included diplomats, political dissidents, journalists and senior government officials.
The NSO employees said their Facebook and Instagram accounts, and also those of former workers and family members, had been blocked. They petitioned the Tel Aviv District Court to order Facebook to unblock the accounts, which they claim was done abruptly and without notice.
Pew Research Center conducted a study of U.S. adults to determine American attitudes towards smart speakers. The result reveals that over half of Americans are concerned about data privacy. Unsurprisingly, those most concerned are in the younger demographic.
The study found that one-quarter of U.S. adults say they have a smart speaker in their home. Adults younger than 50 are more likely to have a smart speaker than those 50 and older.
In early November, the New York Times published an article called "I Got Access to My Secret Consumer Score. Now You Can Get Yours, Too." Naturally, this struck my curiosity, and I decide to try and navigate the various labyrinthine processes to try and find out what kind of information the conglomerates have on me, and how I can potentially get rid of it.
As a recent post underlines, law enforcement agencies around the world are still trying to argue that things are "going dark", and that strong encryption is bad and should be made illegal. Techdirt and many others have pointed out what an extremely stupid idea this would be. Here's a further reason why the US shouldn't ban strong encryption: it might lead to the EU making data transfers across the Atlantic much harder. The possibility has emerged thanks to some formal questions to the European Commission (pdf) submitted by a Member of the European Parliament, Moritz Körner.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently released a proposed rule expanding the agency’s collection of social media information on key visa forms and immigration applications. Earlier this month, EFF joined over 40 civil society organizations that signed on to comments drafted by the Brennan Center for Justice. These comments identify the free speech and privacy risks the proposed rule poses to U.S. persons both directly, if they are required to fill out these forms, and indirectly, if they are connected via social media to friends, family, or associates required to fill out these forms.
In the proposed rule, “Generic Clearance for the Collection of Social Media Information on Immigration and Foreign Travel Forms,” DHS claims that it has “identified the collection of social media user identifications . . . as important for identity verification, immigration and national security vetting.” The proposed rule identifies 12 forms adjudicated by DHS agencies U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that will now collect social media handles and associated social media platforms for the last five years. The applications will not collect passwords. DHS will be able to only view information that the user publicly shares.
Over a dozen groups call for a full congressional investigation in the online giant citing threats to privacy, security, and civil liberties posed by Alexa, Ring, and Rekognition.
Even more alarming news has surfaced about Amazon's Ring doorbell/camera and the company's ultra-cozy relationship with police departments.
If it generates records -- especially third-party records -- the government is going to come asking for them.
Last year, Privacy News Online wrote about the important EU ePrivacy legislation. As that noted, it was moving through the EU’s legislative process slowly because of massive lobbying against the new law, which aims to regulate how metadata is gathered and used, and to limit how people are tracked online, for example using cookies. A year ago, there were already warning signs that one of the most important provisions was under threat. Article 10 of the original text reads as follows:
As the old saying goes, hindsight is better than foresight. Certainly, that is no less true than when involving children in the tech world. Sure, the Internet is chock-full of great information, fun games, great social opportunities, etc. But there are also hackers, scammers, and a number of other individuals looking to take advantage. That’s what makes this situation understandable, while at the same time questionable. Thanks to a web backend and mobile app for a cheap children’s smartwatch, details for the kids, including their locations, were exposed. Parent account information was exposed as well.
Caught up in partisan politics, many Americans liberals have been supporting the impeachment hearings hoping that they will lead to President Trump’s ouster.
Western corporate media outlets have often cried foul when foreign elections don’t go the way the US empire wants them to, and find roundabout ways to label the violent attempts by vocal right-wing minorities to use military forces to overthrow leftist governments as “protests” rather than coups (FAIR.org, 5/16/18, 5/1/19). But it’s still rare to see them blatantly call for a right-wing coup without a hint of their usually subtler pretenses.
Francis appeared moved by her story, and he reiterated the stance he made on the subject two years ago.
"The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral," he said Sunday. "As is the possession of atomic weapons."
"The use of nuclear weapons is immoral, which is why it must be added to the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Not only their use, but also possessing them: because an accident or the madness of some government leader, one person’s madness can destroy humanity.”
In addition to repeating this strong message pronounced at Hiroshima, Pope Francis responded to many questions posed to him by the journalists during the flight bringing them back to Rome from Japan.
Nepal€ has made no real progress on€ questions of justice, truth, and reparations€ for victims of gross human rights violations and abuses during its 10-year conflict, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch (HRW), and TRIAL International said today.
The St.-Petersburg-based website Fontanka reported on Friday, November 22, that it’s identified one of the suspected Russian mercenaries who appear in a video showing the torture and execution of a man in Syria in 2017. The individual is supposedly a 39-year-old ex-soldier from Bryansk named Ruslan with alleged ties to the “Wagner” private military company. Sources who know the man told Fontanka that they recognized him from the photo published by the newspaper Novaya Gazeta showing the men posing together beside the dismembered, hanging body.
"The arms race wastes precious resources that could be better used to benefit the integral development of peoples and to protect the natural environment."
Over the weekend, Pope Francis visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the United States dropped the first atomic bombs in 1945, killing more than 200,000 people. Pope Francis said, “A world without nuclear weapons is possible and necessary.” The leader of the Catholic Church met with survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings and declared the possession of nuclear weapons to be immoral. The Pope’s visit comes as a group of seven Catholic peace activists are awaiting sentencing for breaking into the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base in Georgia on April 4, 2018. The activists, known as the Kings Bay Plowshares 7, were recently convicted of three felony counts and a misdemeanor charge for entering the base armed with hammers, crime scene tape and baby bottles containing their own blood. We speak with Martha Hennessy, one of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7. She is the granddaughter of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker movement. We are also joined by Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg. His most recent book is titled, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. Daniel Ellsberg was blocked from testifying in the recent trial of the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.
"A government that expels a leading human rights investigator is not likely to stop its systematic oppression of Palestinians under occupation without much greater international pressure."
Human Rights Watch will keep documenting abuses despite the Israeli government’s expulsion of the Israel and Palestine director of Human Rights Watch on November 25, 2019. The deportation reflects the authorities’ intensifying assault on human rights. The director, Omar Shakir, will depart tonight after Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the government’s deportation order on November 5 and gave him until November 25 to leave.
Latin America’s groundbreaking experiment in 21st century socialism has suffered another devastating setback with the recent right-wing coup which ousted President Evo Morales of Bolivia, who was democratically elected for a fourth term in October, when he defeated his right-wing challenger 47 percent to 36 percent.
Women in Spain demonstrating on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women had the far-right Vox Party to contend with as its leaders called for the repeal of an anti-violence law.
State Duma Deputy Oksana Pushkina has submitted a complaint to Vladimir Kolokoltsev, Russia’s interior affairs minister, asking the country’s national police agency to investigate threats Pushkina and others have received in their push to recriminalize domestic violence. Konstantin Dobrynin, Pushkina’s attorney, told the wire service Interfax about the legislator’s complaint.
On Saturday, November 23, roughly 200 people in Moscow assembled at Sokolniki Park to demonstrate in support of “traditional spiritual and moral values” and protest against a legislative initiative that would increase penalties on domestic violence. State Duma deputy Oksana Pushkina, who helped write the draft law, says she hopes to submit the bill to parliament before the end of the year. Earlier this month, she warned that several activists who helped develop this legislation have received threats on social media. Meduza special correspondent Kristina Safonova attended Saturday’s rally to find out why anyone would oppose the re-criminalization of assault in the home.
It took only a 60-year drought to lay low one of the first superpowers. It crumbled when harvests withered over two millennia ago.
As Bernie Sanders brings his plans for a Green New Deal to Iowa, one part is proving most resonant: the idea that, as our economy rapidly shifts to renewable energy, power companies should be publicly owned and controlled, and the biggest polluters should help underwrite the costs.
On November 14th, the New York Times published an article which discussed the Green New Deal as proposed by Senator Bernie Sanders, claiming to speak for ‘experts,’ and framing the article around what readers were led to believe were authoritative opinions.€
"There is no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline," warns the World Meteorological Organization chief.
Heavy snow and wind shut down highways Tuesday in Colorado and Wyoming, closed schools in Nebraska and forced more than 1,000 travelers to sleep overnight in Denver’s airport after hundreds of flights were canceled just as Thanksgiving travel moved into high gear.
An alarming United Nations€ report€ released Tuesday said global temperatures are on track to rise€ as much as 3.9€°C€ by the end of the century, meaning only drastic and unprecedented emissions reductions can stave off the most devastating consequences of the climate crisis.
"Climate policy proposals that do not squarely confront the issue of supply are not making a serious attempt to avert catastrophe."
Police were about to saw off the leg of a tripod from which a protester was hanging, activists said.
In the latest sign of the U.S. coal industry’s declining ability to compete in the power sector, Peabody Energy is now struggling to find electric utility companies who are willing to accept a “clean coal” award that it presents€ annually.
In early November, Oregon Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley introduced the Malheur County Empowerment for the Owyhee Act, an astonishingly awful public lands and wilderness Bill. It is aimed at enriching ranchers and other local interests. It is the Vale Project reborn from the weed wastelands and wildlife deserts that were generated by that boondoggle project decades ago. The Vale Project was a massive 1960s-1980s federal bailout of these very same Malheur County welfare ranchers. They had rapaciously depleted the “range” and were facing major grazing cuts. Now they’ve done it again. Cheatgrass, medusahead and other weeds caused by their cattle are overrunning public lands and desertification is growing.
The Washington Metro Area Transit Authority board meeting was supposed to start at 10 A.M. on November 21, nearly a month after workers at the Cinder Bed Road garage began their strike. 10:30 came and went, with no sign of the WMATA executive board. The metro workers and community members who packed the room began chanting “time’s up” until a security guard announced anyone chanting would be told to leave.
“We are protesting against problems in the whole system,” a young Chilean protester said on TV in November. “Above all, the neoliberal system.” The increasing cost of everyday life drove more than a million people from numerous world capitals into the street. In October, Chilean protesters fought cops as buses were torched. Ecuadorians used satellite dishes as shields against police tear gas. In Lebanon, people barricaded roads and held mass sit-ins at state buildings. Since July, throngs of Haitians and Iraqis, frustrated at government corruption, filled the streets, even braving sniper fire and pulling down razor wire blockades.
"I never want to hear the term 'free stuff' ever again."
"Not only would your extreme proposal destroy thousands of jobs and devastate local economies, it would be terrible for baseball."
"If we measure the wrong thing," warns Joseph Stiglitz, "we will do the wrong thing."
Over the last year, headlines generated by mass protests on issues of inequality have intensified. From Chile to Ecuador to Lebanon to Haiti to France and well beyond, a particular grievance like a rise in fuel prices or transport fares has been the spark for mass action by citizens who have simply had enough.
The moon pulls 6-year-old Romeo Lugo to the window at night.
The autistic child loves to gaze up at it, howling like a werewolf as it rises like a luminous pearl over the horizon of city buildings and trees he sees from his second-floor apartment.
WTO Shutdown 20-Year Anniversary Series:€ The Shutdown WTO Organizers History Project and Common Dreams have produced this series of ten people's history accounts and forward-looking lessons from organizers who were in the streets of Seattle...
Twenty years ago this month, I joined tens of thousands of activists targeting the World Trade Organization in the Battle of Seattle. Catalyzed in the late 1990s by the ‘future shock’ of increasing capital mobility, I was part of a collaborative project, Workers in the Global Economy, that sought to address the “race to the bottom” on labor standards...
This story was produced by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization. Get their investigations emailed to you directly by signing up at revealnews.org/newsletter.
"If your president husband calls the city 'a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess' where 'no human being would want to live' and then you hold an 'anti-bullying' event there, on behalf of the White House, honestly, what do you expect?"
As 2020 nears, the Democratic Party continues to lag behind its Republican counterpart in fundraising efforts.
Even at age 77, Joe Biden cuts a dashing figure. In 1972, when he was 29 and I was 15, he spoke at my high school in suburban Wilmington Delaware. I practically swooned over the handsome, charismatic young Biden as he spoke passionately about civil rights, environmental protection, womens’ rights and ending the Viet Nam War.€ I’d already told my father that I wanted to work for environmental protection and he had assured me that he’d put me on the first train to Montreal if I were drafted for the war that Nixon had promised to end, but instead had escalated.€ (My friend Rosemary’s older brother had returned from Viet Nam in a box.)€ After hearing Biden, I enthusiastically volunteered to canvass Wilmington for both the presidential candidate George McGovern and Senate candidate Joe Biden. € On Election Day, we knocked on hundreds of doors to get out the vote. Biden’s victory felt like a silver lining to Senator McGovern’s lopsided defeat to Nixon.
"The President has a choice to make: he can take this opportunity to be represented in the impeachment hearings, or he can stop complaining about the process."
President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign and other Republican election groups criticized tech giant Google on Tuesday for making it harder for political advertisers to target specific types of people.
Congratulations, you made it through the public hearings of the impeachment inquiry, one eye on the livestream and one eye on your work email, and somehow you met your deadlines even as you followed along blow by blow. So what are you going to say about it around the Thanksgiving dinner table?
Bruce Fein, a former senior official in the Department of Justice and a constitutional scholar, has identified 12 impeachable offenses committed by Donald Trump. But, as he notes, many of these constitutional violations are not unique to the Trump administration.
Last week, the Democratic leadership put an extension of the Patriot Act into a “continuing resolution” that averted a government shutdown. More than 95 percent of the Democrats in the House went along with it by voting for the resolution. Both co-chairs of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Pramila Jayapal and Mark Pocan, voted yes. So did all 11 of the CPC’s vice chairs.
A trove of State Department documents obtained late Friday by watchdog group American Oversight provided new details on Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s involvement in the White House effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate President Donald Trump’s political rivals.
What follows is a conversation between author and activist David Samson 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.
"This ruling means not only that McGahn must provide testimony, but so must a raft of administration officials who have been stonewalling Congress in attempts to protect this president."
Nigerian campaigners are speaking out against a bill that would regulate engagement on social media with the campaign #SayNoToSocialMediaBill.
Internet provider TekSavvy has appealed the first Canadian pirate site blocking order. According to the Internet provider, the ruling clearly violates Network Neutrality. If it stands, the open Internet will be undermined to advance the interests of a few powerful media conglomerates, the company says.
The Iranian government has written to state-run organisations and private companies asking them which foreign websites they rely on.
The effort has come to light 11 days after the authorities imposed a week-long [Internet] blackout following protests against a rise in fuel prices.
A wave of protests hit Iran this past week, shaking the nation and its ruling regime, to the core. More than a decade after widespread protests over electoral fraud captured the world’s attention, the Iranian people are back in the streets with a vengeance. Reports of demonstrations in more than 100 cities across the country included footage of protestors setting fire to banks and government buildings, clashing with security forces, and chanting slogans calling for an end to the theocracy.
What is it with people who pretend to be free speech "warriors" only to rush to sue someone for stating an opinion about them? And why are so many of them Canadian?!? We've already covered folks like Jordan Peterson suing a university because some professors said mean things about him in a private meeting, and Gavin McInnes suing SPLC for calling the group he founded a "hate group." And now we have Sheila Gunn Reid, who works for The Rebel Media, which is sort of the Canadian equivalent of Breitbart. Sheila pretends to be a free speech supporter in dozens upon dozens of tweets.
Egyptian security forces raided the headquarters of the Cairo-based independent news website Mada Masr on November 24, 2019 as part of the government’s suppression of media freedom in Egypt, Human Rights Watch said today.
Last week, Iranians took to the streets nationwide in protest after an abrupt spike in fuel prices. As the protests grew, the government€ disrupted€ the internet across Iran in an apparent attempt to quell unrest. The slowdown was, for most, experienced as a full blackout of internet and mobile connectivity. EFF joins a number of Iranian and international organizations in expressing grave concerns over the internet blackout and violence against protesters.
A number of complicating factors have led to this shutdown. Renewed US sanctions have exacerbated economic hardship for Iranians, and tech companies’ compliance—and at times over-compliance—with these sanctions has led to diminished reliance on international services (such as Amazon Web Services, Apple and Github outright prohibiting access to users in Iran). This trend has led to further isolation of Iranians from the global Internet.
Egyptian security forces raided the office of Mada Masr, the country’s last independent media outlet, and arrested three of its journalists this weekend. The raid began Sunday afternoon, when nine plainclothes security officers entered the Mada Masr office in Cairo, seizing phones and laptops and holding the staff in the building for more than three hours. They then arrested editor-in-chief Lina Attalah, managing editor Mohamed Hamama and reporter Rana Mamdouh. It came just a day after security forces arrested senior editor Shady Zalat at his home. All four journalists were released from detention Sunday night. The raid and arrests mark a sharp escalation in Egypt’s attack on press freedom under Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who came to power after the 2013 overthrow of former President Mohamed Morsi. We go to Cairo where we’re joined by Mada Masr reporter Sharif Abdel Kouddous. He’s also a Democracy Now! correspondent and was detained with his colleagues on Sunday.
"Tortured to near death for publishing truthful information."
More than 60 doctors have written an open letter saying they fear Julian Assange’s health is so bad that the€ WikiLeaks€ founder could die inside a top-security British jail.
Today WikiLeaks releases documents pertaining to the Fishrot case that have come to light as a result of investigation into bribes, money laundering and tax evasion. These investigations have been launched by several institutions across Norway, Iceland and Namibia as a result of WikiLeaks' Fishrot publication earlier this month.
The first document details internal exchanges between staff at DNB, Norway’s largest bank, from April 2018 to 2019, discussing how to respond to AML flagging (anti-money laundering) from Bank of New York Mellon. Specifically it relates to payments from the international fishing company Samherji to JPC Ship Management (Cyprus), a crew management company supplying services to Samherji.
The second document outlines how DNB (the Norwegian bank) carried out a detailed assessment in 2017 of JPC Ship Management in accordance with KYC principles (Know Your Customer) and did not seem to find anything wrong, despite being classified as a high-risk customer. Another company associated with Samherji financial transactions, Cape Cod FS (Marshall Islands), however was evaluated using the very same principles and its accounts were closed as the bank could not determine who the owner was.
The third document shows how DNB finally decided to terminate its accounts with JPC Ship Management only after receiving AML flagging from Bank of New York Mellon:
“Conclusion: The client is not in need of Norwegian account or within LCI strategy. The client does not have AML Policy and there is considerable risk related to transactions to Russia and Ukraine. The necessary resources to manage the sanction risk will be too high and the client has already disrespected instruction regarding resend once. Our recommendation is offboarding the client.“
Also published today is a spreadsheet overview of transactions to and from various bank accounts of companies owned by and linked to the fishing company Samherji. They include Cape Cod FS (a Marshall Island company), JPC Ship Management (a Cypriot company) and Tundavala (a firm in Dubai set up primarily for Namibian entities to receive bribes from Samherji). The Tundavala payments continued at least until January 2019. This spreadsheet is not an original, however it is derived from the original spreadsheet which cannot be published for reasons of source protection. The original spreadsheet has been verified by WikiLeaks and investigative journalists of their media partners.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments for several cases regarding the legality of the termination of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The DACA decision, which is expected to be announced early next year, will affect thousands of undocumented students and their families.
It made sense that Chesa Boudin became a public defender. His grandfather, Leonard Boudin, was a longtime civil rights lawyer who defended Paul Robeson, Dr. Benjamin Spock and Daniel Ellsberg, among others. Chesa Boudin also has seen the horrors of the criminal justice system up close: he was just a toddler when his parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, members of the anti-war group the Weather Underground, went to prison for driving the getaway car in an armed robbery that resulted in three deaths.
Israel on Sunday expelled the in-country director of Human Rights Watch from the country. Israel thereby joins dictatorships such as Uzbekistan, Burundi, Azerbaijan, and Egypt, which have also expelled HRW human rights workers.
After years of investigation and months of delay, Israel's Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit formally indicted Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes ranging from his violation of public trust to bribery and fraud.
On November 25, a group of activists delivered€ a petition€ to the Nakamoto Group to call out the company for its alleged role in allowing deadly and dangerous conditions in United States immigration detention centers to continue unchecked.
In past years, Russia’s authorities have frequently resorted to the pernicious “foreign agents” law to silence critics of the government. Now a Moscow official is trying to leverage this law against a homeless shelter.
Hot damn. A proper application of the Supreme Court's Rodriguez decision.
The South is home to several states with high rates of incarceration and criminal justice systems rooted in slavery and Jim Crow. People of color are disproportionately incarcerated across the region, as they are across the United States, and harsh sentencing laws have inflated the prison population exponentially over the past several decades. Though efforts to address mass incarceration have helped to decrease the U.S. prison population since it peaked in 2009, the U.S. still incarcerates 2.27 million people, and has one of the highest incarceration rates in the world.
Japanese-American activists and their allies accused Jenni Nakamoto of turning "her back on her community and history."
Greece’s€ recently announced border control plans for the Aegean islands should not come at the expense of asylum seeker and migrant rights, Human Rights Watch said today. The government has said it will relocate 20,000 asylum seekers from overcrowded reception centers on the islands to the mainland by early 2020, but then transform the island reception facilities into detention centers.
Since its start in January, Remain in Mexico has forced€ 55,000 asylum seekers, including€ 16,000 children, to wait in Mexico as their asylum claims grind through prolonged US immigration procedures.
Human Rights Watch on Monday vowed to continue fighting the violation of Palestinians’ human rights by the Israeli government as the organization’s director for the region was expelled from Israel.
"We, the students, have had enough. It is past time to integrate our school system, and we will not relent until the adults stop acting like children."
"The power of the web to transform people's lives, enrich society and reduce inequality is one of the defining opportunities of our time. But if we don't act now—and act together—to prevent the web being misused by those who want to exploit, divide and undermine, we are at risk of squandering that potential."
Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but unpopular reality: the technology is being over-hyped to spike lagging cell phone and network gear sales, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That's not to say that faster 5G networks won't be a good thing when they arrive at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings to the point where, at least in tech policy circles, 5G has become a sort of magic pixie dust, capable of fixing anything.
There have been so many different emails and articles floating around about the ISOC sale of PIR to a new, two-person investment firm with only one investment, it’s hard to piece together exactly what has happened and when. I have put together a timeline based upon what I have read, and I’m sharing it here in case you find it helpful. I think it raises more questions than answers, though…
Earlier this month, within the domain name world, there were significant concerns raised upon the news that Internet Society (ISOC), the (perhaps formerly?) well-respected nonprofit that helps "provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education, access, and policy" had agreed to sell off the Public Interest Registry, which is the registry that manages all .org top level domain (TLD) names, to a private equity company called Ethos Capital. Just having a public interest nonprofit selling off a part of its operations to a private equity group would be trouble enough, but the details make the story look much, much worse.
Stranger still, the memo conflates issues of confidentiality with those of data access. “We’ve seen a recent increase in information being shared outside the company, including the names and details of our employees,” the email opens. It goes on to describe “an individual [who] subscribed to the calendars of a wide range of employees outside of their work group.” It’s unclear if such access to calendars runs counter to any specific company policy. The memo is reproduced below in full: [...]
We’ve been fighting abuses of the patent system for years. Many of the worst abuses we see are committed by software patent owners who make money suing people instead of building anything. These are patent owners we call patent trolls. They demand money from people who use technology to perform ordinary activities. And they’re able to do that because they’re able to get patents on basic ideas that aren’t inventions, like running a scavenger hunt and teaching foreign languages.
Efforts at reforming this broken system got a big boost in 2014, when the Supreme Court decided the Alice v. CLS Bank case. In a unanimous decision, the high court held that you can’t get a patent on an abstract idea just by adding generic computer language. Now, courts are supposed to dismiss lawsuits based on abstract patents as early as possible.
We've been on this for some time now, but the explosion in the craft brewing industry has led to a likewise explosion in trademarks for individual brews and breweries. It's a problem very specific to the craft brewing industry for a number of reasons. First, this trademarking practice deviates from the tradition in the industry, which was one in which craft breweries were largely amicable and permissive with their cleverly named beers. Second, the explosive growth is quickly running into a roadblock of language, in which only so many words can be combined to name brews, even as the number of those brews on offer continues its exponential growth. Third, and perhaps most importantly, craft brewing is now big business, such that many macro-breweries are now gobbling up craft breweries, and those macros tend to be more litigious and more often engage in trademark bullying.
A large coalition of movie and TV companies has filed a new blocking application in Australia's Federal Court. The Roadshow and MPA-led initiative demands that 50 ISPs should block access to 87 domains, offering movies, TV shows, anime and subtitles, or providing proxy access to the same. Considering the range of targets, it's one of the broadest applications yet.
A group of major music publishing companies doesn't want 23 copyright law professors to be heard in a piracy case. The scholars submitted a brief in the ongoing piracy liability lawsuit against ISP Charter, warning that a recent recommendation could harm both ISPs and consumers. However, the music groups suggest that not all profs are completely neutral.
Copyright troll Richard Liebowitz (who once got so offended that he was called a copyright troll that he asked a judge to "redact" the phrase, only to have the judge double down on calling him a troll)... He's been sanctioned for lying to the court, he's been sanctioned for failing to comply with court orders, and is currently facing some serious penalties for lying about the death of his grandfather to a judge (which resulted in the most ridiculous letter he had a family friend send to the court, chalking such mistakes up to inexperience). But Liebowitz has a ton of experience in getting the law wrong. Hell, it was over two years ago that we wrote about him getting a judicial smackdown so bad that the judge began it by stating:
A man who ran several US-based 'pirate' websites has pleaded guilty to one count each of criminal copyright infringement and tax evasion. Talon White, 29, faces up to five years in prison and must pay more than $4m in restitution to the MPAA and IRS, while forfeiting around $4.8m in cash, crypto, and property.
