12.19.19
Posted in Europe, Finance at 3:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Overview
Understanding Thierry Breton
Epilogue will follow.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s soujourn on Riker’s Island in May 2011 opened up an unexpected window of opportunity for the “killer shark” from Baker & McKenzie
Summary: In this part we will look at her connections to Macron and how he helped the “killer shark” to resurface in European waters earlier this year by means of his political machinations in Brussels
The Rothschild connection is just one of the links to the world of international finance shared by Emmanuel Macron and Thierry Breton who are also both well acquainted with Christine Largade, the former boss of the IMF in Washington and now head of the European Central Bank in Frankfurt.
In this part we will look at her connections to Macron and how he helped the “killer shark” to resurface in European waters earlier this year by means of his political machinations in Brussels.
“In this part we will look at her connections to Macron and how he helped the “killer shark” to resurface in European waters earlier this year by means of his political machinations in Brussels.”Largarde had over two decades of experience with Chicago-based law firm Baker & McKenzie before returning to France in June 2005 to follow a career in politics.
She started as Minister for Trade under Jacques Chirac and continued as Minister for Economy and Finance under his successor, Nicolas Sarkozy until she was parachuted in as head of the IMF in an emergency operation to replace Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) in July 2011.
DSK on his travels as IMF boss. Is he waiting for the room service?
Her big break at the IMF came as a result of DSK’s sudden resignation in May 2011 following his arrest in New York on charges of sexual assault.
“Largarde had over two decades of experience with Chicago-based law firm Baker & McKenzie before returning to France in June 2005 to follow a career in politics.”Lagarde is the living personification of the Davos neo-liberal open economy idea of modern globalised capitalism. However, during her time at the head of the IMF, she occasionally dropped hints that the decades-long run of unrestrained laissez-faire by, for, and of the rich was no longer sustainable.
Unfortunately, despite all the impressive sound-bytes it has never been clear what concrete policies and programs “Madame Bailout” advocates to deal with the problem of rising inequality which she loves to talk about.
Breton’s links to Lagarde have already been examined in an earlier part of the series.
Macron’s ministerial photo-ops with “Madame Bailout of the IMF”
During his time as Minister for the Economy in the government of the great vacillator François “Flanby” Hollande, Macron often appeared in photo-ops with the IMF’s “Madame Bailout”.
“During his time as Minister for the Economy in the government of the great vacillator François “Flanby” Hollande, Macron often appeared in photo-ops with the IMF’s “Madame Bailout”.”More recently, at an EU summit at the start of July 2019, Macron played a key role in brokering a deal for the distribution of top jobs which amongst other things saw Lagarde being “repatriated” from her lair in Washington and parachuted in to lead the European Central Bank (ECB) in Frankfurt.
It remains to be seen whether the new head of the ECB will show the same level of passionate and unquestioning devotion to her current political sponsor as she did to her earlier patron, Nicolas Sarkozy.
“Dear Nicolas… use me for as long as it suits you and suits your plans and casting call…”
Whatever about the extent of Christine’s devotion to Emmanuel — who is reputed to have a way with older more mature women — it’s worth noting that the Macron-Lagarde connection appears to go beyond the purely political level and extends to Christine’s elusive companion and domestic partner, Xavier Giocanti.
On 11 November 2018, Brigitte Macron had the task of hosting a reception for spouses of foreign dignitaries attending ceremonies marking the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Armistice which ended World War I. On that occasion, she was spotted in the company of Giocanti at the Palace of Versailles where the reception was held.
Brigitte Macron greeting Lagarde’s elusive companion Xavier Giocanti at a lunch and concert held at the Palace of Versailles in November 2018
In contrast to his better known partner, Giocanti seems to be keen to avoid the limelight as much as possible and there may be good reasons for his desire to keep a low profile.
“In contrast to his better known partner, Giocanti seems to be keen to avoid the limelight as much as possible and there may be good reasons for his desire to keep a low profile.”The businessman’s track record is not necessarily something that the recently appointed head of the European Central Bank would want to be publicly associated with.
Giocanti, who was born on 16 September 1954 in Marseille, has family roots in Guagno in southern Corsica.
From 2003 to 2005, he was in charge of the Center for the Promotion of Employment through Microenterprise (CPEM), now renamed the Marseille Métropole Initiative, a micro-credit platform supported by public and private funding and dedicated to the creation and implementation of small businesses.
In July 2010, following an investigation by the EU anti-fraud agency OLAF into “serious irregularities” in CPEM’s accounts, the European Court of Justice ruled that CPEM should reimburse an amount of almost € 1 million in EU subsidies.
As we saw in an earlier part of the series, Christine is no stranger to getting a slap on the wrist from the courts of law for misuse of public funds.
“The businessman’s track record is not necessarily something that the recently appointed head of the European Central Bank would want to be publicly associated with.”Given her high-profile position at the head of the ECB, it is understandable that she would prefer to keep Xavier’s misdemeanours out of the glare of public scrutiny as much as possible.
In the next part we will see at how Macron not only helped the “killer shark” to resurface in Frankfurt but also helped Ursula von der Leyen to secure another plum EU job at the head of the European Commission where amongst other things she will be Thierry Breton’s “boss” when he takes up his new job as Commissioner for the Internal Market. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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Microsoft has once again begun including advertisements in both their mail and calendar apps that are built into Windows 10. According to official sources, the ads are here to stay and cannot be removed. What’s gotten users frustrated about this is that these apps are bundled into Windows 10 – a product that they paid money for. Is this the beginning of mass advertisement in premium software?
This is apparently not the first time Microsoft has attempted integrated ads. The same ads were spotted last year at which time the company claimed they were just an experiment. It would appear that the experiment has ended and ads are now live across all devices. Even though there is currently no way to disable or remove the advertising, Microsoft has suggested that users submit formal feedback on the decision if they want the ads to disappear.
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The Kubuntu team announced today in collaboration with Tuxedo Computers and MindShareManagement Inc., the upcoming availability of the first-ever officially recognized Kubuntu laptop, called Kubuntu Focus.
Targeted at gamers, developers, and power users, Kubuntu Focus comes with very powerful components and it’s ideal for those who seek performance and compatibility in a portable computer that comes pre-installed with the latest Kubuntu release, an official Ubuntu flavor featuring the KDE Plasma Desktop environment.
The Linux-powered laptop will also come pre-loaded with some of the most popular Open Source software for video and image editing, web development, as well as deep learning, support for Steam games, and many other supported software packages for the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
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Just a few days after the release of its Chrome 79 web browser, Google promoted the Chrome OS 79 Linux-based operating system for Chromebooks to the stable channel, rolling out now to all supported devices.
Based on the recently released Google Chrome 79 web browser, which landed for Linux, Android, macOS, and Windows platforms last week, Chrome OS 79 is here with a bunch of improvements and new features, starting with media controls in the lock screen to make it more convenient for users to control their media.
The new media controls in lock screen feature allows users to control their media right from the lock screen when they’re listening to audio on their Chromebook. Users will be able to play, pause, and skip audio tracks Spotify, YouTube Music, and many other apps without unlocking their Chromebook.
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Server
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Over the past several decades, the various forms of Hewlett Packard have found and leverage profit pools – it is really amazing just how much of the company’s success came from LaserJet ink and how priting’s profits allowed it to make the investments to broaden its systems business from a small line of proprietary machines to a big player in scientific workstations (the original Apollo systems, thanks to an acquisition) to an innovator in RISC/Unix systems for the datacenter. The cash flows from its revenue streams gave it the chance to eat Compaq/Digital/Tandem as well as EDS to create an alternative to the IBM behemoth in the datacenter in the late 1990s and early 2000s. But in more recent years, Hewlett Packard has been paring itself down to the bare enterprise essentials and walked away from unprofitable hyperscaler, cloud builder, and service provider system sales and sold off most of its services and software businesses to boot.
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IBM
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Communication service providers (CSPs) regularly invest in their network and business operations in order to deliver the best customer experience they can. To advance their operations support systems (OSS) and business support systems (BSS), they and their solution vendors are using cloud-native applications built on microservices architectures to accelerate innovations and enable dynamic, elastic scaling. This foundation also allows them to migrate to DevOps methodologies and automated CI/CD pipelines. All of these can help deliver shorter time to market and increased agility, key elements for improved customer experience.
ACG Research expects automation, as well as artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics, to permeate all the BSS and OSS. Consider some of the benefits that can be achieved by adding a common task automation platform: faster, dependable delivery of services and new tools to help with security and compliance. Orchestrating this with business process automation and decision management could allow for complex, highly flexible service provisioning.
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As more organizations realize the advantages of open source, many are looking for ways to integrate open source technologies and strategies into their own business practices. But they’ve learned that simply throwing developers into an open source project and hoping for the best isn’t enough to really reap those advantages. Increasingly, organizations are also recognizing the need for building centralized open source programs offices (OSPOs) that nurture, guide, and align open source best practices with business strategy.
In fact, that work is so important that even a company like Red Hat, which lives and breathes the open source way, established an OSPO.
So what does an OSPO do?
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this episode, we interview Michael W. Lucas about his latest book projects, including the upcoming SNMP Mastery book.
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Kernel Space
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Graphics Stack
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PhysX 5.0 is just around the corner, and we wanted to provide a look at all the new features! In this version, available soon in 2020, we?ll be introducing support for a unified constrained particle simulation framework.
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NVIDIA’s PhysX SDK physics implementation, which NVIDIA has been providing open-source code drops on, will soon see a 5.0 release.
NVIDIA’s PhysX 5.0 is bringing a unified constrained particle simulation framework, built-in Finite Element Model (FEM) support, improvements around liquid simulations, arbitrary mesh enhancements, and various other changes.
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Benchmarks
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The Mesa RADV Vulkan driver paired with the Valve-funded ACO compiler back-end is yielding an incredibly power competitor to AMD’s own AMDVLK Vulkan driver that is derived from the source-code of their shared Windows Vulkan driver code-base. Here are some year-end benchmarks looking at the RADV vs. RADV ACO vs. AMDVLK Vulkan driver Linux gaming performance on Ubuntu with several generations of Radeon graphics hardware.
Mesa 20.0-devel was from the Oibaf PPA this week for providing the very latest RADV Vulkan driver support as well as ACO, which has been mainlined since Mesa 19.3 but requires the RADV_PERFTEST=aco environment variable for enabling. The AMDVLK driver used was their latest public release, AMDVLK 2019.Q4.4 that came out last week. Throughout all testing, a Linux 5.5 kernel snapshot was in use.
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Applications
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A Terminal multiplexer is a program that can be used to multiplex login sessions inside the Terminal. This allows users to have multiple sessions inside a single Terminal window. One of the important features of the Terminal multiplexer is that users can attach and detach these sessions.
In this article, we will learn about the most popular Terminal multiplexers that are Tmux and Screen. We will first learn what these tools are, along with some of their features and working. In the end, we will compare both tools.
We are using Debian 10 OS for explaining the procedures discussed in this article.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Try running “telnet postcard.sfconservancy.org 2333″ in your terminal… you won’t regret it, I promise! You should get to see a fun “season’s greetings postcard” animated live in your terminal. My friends at Software Freedom Conservancy are running a supporters drive and I was happy to do this to help (if you were a supporter in the past, you should be getting a matching postcard in the mail!)
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Games
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Another year is almost up, it’s getting chilly and Valve’s annual Steam Winter Sale has now gone live so go warm yourself up with a toasty new game.
There’s thousands on sale as always. You likely know what you’re after already, I’m sure most readers have wishlists full of games ready to be picked up.
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Valve have tweaked how you play Dota Underlords once again with some significant changes to the flow of the game.
Now, you no longer choose an Underlord before you start a game. Instead, you pick them during a match. In Standard and Duos, Underlords are chosen at Round 10, while in Knockout this happens at Round 2. You don’t pick specific talents for them now either, instead they have two fighting styles to pick between.
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Developed Namo Gamo recently released their retro-inspired sports game Basketball Classics, what they say “bridges the gap between retro and today’s simulation games”.
After being in Early Access for over a year, it released yesterday with a few improvements to the AI and some Steam Achievements added in.
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Today, Google announced that Typhoon Studios have joined their new Stadia Games and Entertainment studio.
Typhoon Studios are currently working on Journey to the Savage Planet, which they’ve confirmed is still being developed and published across multiple platforms. It wasn’t mentioned directly, but it likely means that Journey to the Savage Planet will release on Stadia too.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Ho, ho, hurrah — my favourite Linux video editor has a new version out and boy does it deliver a some pretty substantial improvements!
“Highlights include huge performance improvements resulting in a faster and smoother timeline, a new audio mixer, master effects (audio/video), and better audio waveform display to name a few,” says Farid Abdelnour, a developer on the app.
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The new mixer appears to offer far greater control over audio and should enable those who know-wot-dey-are-doin to craft some really immersive sound mixes — so keep an eye, and perhaps an ear, out when watching your favourite ‘nix YouTubers!
New ‘Master Effects‘ let editors quickly apply audio or video effects to ALL tracks, i.e. the entire composition. This is a really important feature that will make it much, much easier to create highly stylised edits with less effort.
A major memory issue with the timeline has been solved, and rendering thread settings have been tweaked to provide faster rendering times.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Before we go into what a clipboard manager is, I suppose we should mention what a clipboard is. When you copy, paste or cut, you are using the clipboard. You would be surprised how many people do not know the cut, copy, and paste program is called a clipboard. When you copy (highlight text and hit Ctrl+C or right click and select copy) you save that highlighted text to the clipboard. The clipboard usually only provides a single “slot” to save data and is overwritten with each new copy.
A clipboard manager is a program that adds functionality to the operating systems clipboard. The most basic function is to keep a running history of things saved to the clipboard for later use. As we will find out, GPaste builds on this with many more features.
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Ladies and gentlemen and rare penguins. It’s time for another best-of article. Today, I’m going to cover the Gnome desktop. Just a handful of sunsets ago, we did the Plasma finals, with Kubuntu 19.10 Eoan Ermine as the lucky winner. Now, we shall look across the playground at the other major camp.
Gnome hasn’t been the same since the integer increment from 2 to 3. What used to be super-slim, super-fact and super-ergonomic desktop became a minimalistic platform that just doesn’t work for me, mostly because it removes essential components from the classic desktop formula that people need and expect. That doesn’t mean Gnome can’t be enjoyed, with some rigorous alterations and tweaking. In fact, there are some pretty decent systems wearing this guise out there. Let’s see which one deserves to be the champion for this year. Follow me.
Zorin OS 12.4 Core
I tested this distro around March. Beforehand, I did some Fedora 29 tweaking and a Mint Cinnamon review, but while these could be bundled under the Gnome banner, I decided to exclude them; the former since I had really tested it back in 2019, and we have Fedora 30/31 for the current year, and the latter because Cinnamon is its own desktop.
I have to say, Zorin delivered a pretty impressive show – near-flawless results in the important categories, like phone connectivity, network connectivity and such, good customization and accessibility, a colorful application set, and lots of small gestures toward the common users. Definitely sailing smooth on the uniqueness front. But performance and battery life were typically bad, and font clarity was quite tricky. That said, this was a pretty slick distro, and a fresh dose of hope for my jaded, battered soul.
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Sometimes, it’s not easy wrapping up articles, especially when they carry a less-than-ideal resolution. I am biased when it comes to certain things, but then I have to externalize my message and think of what the common user would want or need. When it comes to Gnome, I spend more time with CentOS than other distro, and maybe one day it could become a daily driver in my home. Maybe. A big maybe. But as a desktop, it takes effort that Zorin doesn’t, and Zorin is a smart, brave effort to transform a difficult baseline into a friendly, unique system, which is why it’s the winner in this article.
We’re not done, though. There’s still Xfce to do, and after that, we’ll look across the entire Linux spectrum, and see what gives. My needs are quite simple and yet quite stringent, and it often takes a lot of work and testing before I allow myself to introduce new software into my production setup. So far, no big cliffhangers here, you know where I stand when it comes to operating systems. But I am always looking out for the next thing, hoping there might be something out there, something that will break the cycle of apathy and compromise. To be continued.
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New Releases
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Back in May of 2019, Peppermint 10 was released. The Ubuntu-based operating system is great for those switching from Windows, but also, it makes a fine operating system for Linux experts too. It may not be as popular as, say, Linux Mint, but it is still a solid option.
Today, fans of Peppermint — and the entire Linux community, really — have reason to celebrate. No, version 11 of the operating system is not released. However, Peppermint 10 Respin is now available for download!
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An updated version of Peppermint 10 is now available to download.
The latest refresh of the lightweight Linux distro comes based on top of the Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS point release and, somewhat notably, provides both 32-bit and 64-bit install images.
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Flash these bootable images to a USB stick and you can “try” the OS out on your hardware without installing anything. If you like what you see, you can use the same image to install the complete system.
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We are pleased to announce the release of Alpine Linux 3.11.0, the first in the v3.11 stable series.
NEW FEATURES AND NOTEWORTHY NEW PACKAGES
Linux 5.4 kernel (linux-lts)
Support for Raspberry Pi 4 (aarch64 and armv7)
Initial GNOME and KDE support
Support for Vulkan
MinGW-w64 and DXVK support
Rust is available on all architectures except s390x
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Alpine Linux creator Natanael Copa announced today the availability of Alpine Linux 3.11.0, a major update that brings numerous new features, improvements, updated components, and lots of bug and security fixes.
Shipping with the latest Linux 5.4 kernel series, the Alpine Linux 3.11.0 release is here to add support for Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Raspberry Pi 4 Model B single-board computer, which can be installed using either the AArch64 (ARM 64-bit) and ARMv7 images.
Alpine Linux 3.11.0 also adds initial support for the GNOME and KDE Plasma Desktop environments, which users can install from the main software repositories, support for the next-generation Vulkan graphics API, along with support for the DXVK Vulkan-based translation layer for Direct3D 9, 10, and 11.
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Alpine Linux is a distribution that prides itself on being “small, simple and secure” with being a lightweight distribution built off Musl libc and Busybox and popular for use within containers. But with today’s Alpine Linux 3.11 release they are seemingly pursuing desktop Linux support.
With Alpine Linux 3.11 is support for running the KDE and GNOME desktops on the distribution. Beyond that, Alpine Linux 3.11 has support for Vulkan and even support for the DXVK translation layer that is used for Linux gaming.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Mint 19.3 “Cinnamon” and some of the applications pre-installed.
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Slackware Family
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In the comments section of a previous post I already hinted at the problems I have in getting a Chromium package compiled on 32bit Slackware 14.2.
The issue started with the first stable release of the Chromium 79 sources and in particular with the ‘gn’ tool which is used by Google to generate the ninja build files for Chromium. The ‘gn’ code was updated with C++17 features and that is too modern for the gcc-g++ 5.5.0 compiler package in Slackware 14.2.
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Fedora Family
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Linux Day is an Italian event promoted by the Italian Linux Society and locally organized by many LUGs and associations in a lot of cities all around the country. It could be considered the main Italian FLOSS event organized by non commercial entities, and community-driven by many passionate volunteers. The fact that it is held in many cities instead of organizing a big event in a single place, it is a way to facilitate the approach of people to local Linux/FLOSS communities, then also many students, people with limited time and resources and also just merely curious citizens have the possibility to get in touch with the FLOSS universe and know people that animate such world.
Sadly, in the last years we are looking at a slow decrease of cities where Linux Day events are organized. Last year there were 77 events (92 in 2015 and 135 in the 2010 edition, just to give an idea), while this year there were 58 events. Although, it’s worth noting that some cities and communities joined forces in one single place. But unfortunately such decrease is perfectly in line with the current status of many FLOSS communities: it is so hard to find new passionate contributors. There are some proposals to change the style of the Linux Day, and transform it in many regional events in order to join forces and ideas where needed. We will see how it will go.
This year there were Fedora representatives in four cities: Bari, Ivrea and Pisa. Linux Day in Catania was postponed due to a weather alert that was disastrous in some places of Sicily. However it took place on November 23.
In Ivrea there was a talk hosted by dariolesca. In Bari there was a talk (and much more!) hosted by corsaro. In Pisa there was a booth managed by alciregi, and lewis41.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Canonical and Dell EMC have announced the release of a new OpenStack reference architecture – providing customers with a tested, certified framework for deploying Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack solution on top of Dell EMC’s best-of-breed PowerEdge servers. This follows the availability of a Kubernetes reference architecture solution made available in 2018.
Enterprises looking to modernise their IT infrastructure are all too often held back by the time it takes to configure and test new technology in their environments. Overcoming this challenge demands ready-made solutions that can minimise the cost and complexity of implementation.
EMC hardware is the preferred platform for OpenStack deployments, powering 33% of users’ clouds. While on the software side, Canonical is a leader in delivering cloud infrastructure, and more than 50% of production OpenStack deployments run on Ubuntu. The new reference architecture will help enterprises enjoy the best of both worlds, offering proven guidance on how to rapidly deploy the leading OpenStack solution on the leading hardware.
With the benefits of predictable costs and open standards, OpenStack has established itself as a highly popular alternative to traditional virtualisation technologies – and this newly published reference architecture makes it easier than ever to migrate from VMWare to Canonical OpenStack on Dell EMC servers. Similarly, OpenStack is increasingly replacing inflexible, proprietary network function virtualisation (NFVi) solutions, and Ubuntu-based OpenStack already powers the majority of Tier 1 telcos.
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Devices/Embedded
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Last year, we wrote a tutorial showing how to control an RGB LED strip Control ANAVI Light ESP8266 controller.
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After launching RAK831 Lite LoRaWAN gateway based on Raspberry Pi 3 board in 2018, RAK Wireless introduced Pilot Gateway Pro RAK7243 gateway with the more recent Raspberry Pi 3B+ SBC…
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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The real “plus” about the PinePhone is the cost: $149. This makes the device cheap enough for casual geeks like me to join in the fun, with no major “needs” than it scratches an itch as a tinkerers toy. just like Linux netbooks back in the day.
And this is important. The price and the product here is not being pitched as an absolute Android alternative. This is a phone that many will, for a while, use alongside their main device rather than as their main device.
Again, sort of like how we all used netbooks alongside regular laptops until the software and hardware matured into something that was “good enough”.
So while PinePhone doesn’t boast the fastest specs or even come with a pre-installed OS (yet) the thing is dripping with potential — and you don’t need to be a particularly nerdy Linux geek like me to see that.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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We are currently seeing two changes in computing: improvements in network bandwidth and latency brought on by the deployment of 5G networks, and a large number of low-power mobile devices and headsets. This provides an opportunity for rich web experiences, driven by off-device computing and rendering, delivered over a network to a lightweight user agent.
As we’ve improved our Firefox Reality browser for VR headsets and the content available on the web kept getting better, we have learned that the biggest things limiting more usage are the battery life and compute capabilities of head-worn devices. These are designed to be as lightweight, cool, and comfortable as possible – which is directly at odds with hours of heavy content consumption. Whether it’s for VR headsets or AR headsets, offloading the computation to a separate high-end machine that renders and encodes the content suitable for viewing on a mobile device or headset can enable potentially massive scenes to be rendered and streamed even to low-end devices.
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The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.40.0. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
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Always wanted to contribute to open-source projects but didn’t know where to start? Every week we highlight some tasks from the Rust community for you to pick and get started!
Some of these tasks may also have mentors available, visit the task page for more information.
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We are very happy to announce the launch of the first edition of a global, annual study of designer and developer needs on the web: The MDN Web Developer Needs Assessment. With your participation, this report is intended to shape the future of the web platform.
The MDN Web DNA Report 2019.
On single-vendor platforms, a single entity is responsible for researching developer needs. A single organization gets to decide how to address needs and prioritize for the future. On the web, it’s not that straightforward. Multiple organizations must participate in feature decisions, from browser vendors to standards bodies and the industry overall. As a result, change can be slow to come. Therefore, pain points may take a long time to address.
In discussions with people involved in the standardization and implementation of web platform features, they told us: “We need to hear more from developers.”
And that is how the MDN Web Developer Needs Assessment came to be. We aspire to represent the voices of developers and designers working on the web. We’ve analyzed the data you provided, and identified 28 discrete needs. Then, we sorted them into 14 different themes. Four of the top 5 needs relate to browser compatibility, our #1 theme. Documentation, Debugging, Frameworks, Security and Privacy round out the top 10.
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A couple of weeks ago, I posted a set of questions about the Internet Society’s plan to sell the non-profit Public Interest Registry (PIR) to Ethos capital here on the Mozilla blog.
As the EFF recently explained, the stakes of who runs PIR are high. PIR manages all of the dot org domain names in the world. It is the steward responsible for ensuring millions of public interest orgs have domain names with reliable uptime and freedom from censorship.
The importance of good dot org stewardship spurred not only Mozilla but also groups like EFF, Packet Clearing House and ICANN itself to raise serious questions about the sale.
As I noted in our original post, a private entity managing the dot org registry isn’t an inherently bad thing — but the bar for it being a good thing is pretty high. Strong rights protections, price controls and accountability mechanisms would need to be in place for a privately run PIR to be trusted by the dot org community. Aimed at the Internet Society, Ethos and ICANN, our questions focused on these topics, as well as the bidding process around the sale.
On Monday, Ethos CEO Erik Brooks published a blog post replying to Mozilla’s questions. The public response is appreciated — an open conversation means more oversight and more public engagement.
However, there are still critical questions about accountability and the bidding process that have yet to be answered before we can say whether this sale is good or bad for public interest organizations. These questions include:
1. For the Internet Society: what criteria, in addition to price, were used to review the bids for the purchase of PIR? Were the ICANN criteria originally applied to dot org bidders in 2002 considered? We realize that ISOC may not be able to disclose the specific bidders, but it’s well within reason to disclose the criteria that guided those bidders.
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We knew from the beginning that this was going to be a hard process; that it had to be not just transparent but open, not just legitimate but seen to be legitimate, that we had to meet our hard operational requirements while staying true to our values in the process. Today, after almost a year of research, consulting, gathering requirements, testing candidate stacks and distilling everything we’ve learned in the process down to the essentials, I think we’ve accomplished that.
I am delighted and honored to say that we have one candidate that unambiguously meets our institutional and operational needs: we have decided to replace IRC with Riot/Matrix, hosted by Modular.IM.
While all of the candidates proved to be excellent team collaboration and communication tools, Riot/Matrix has distinguished itself as an excellent open community collaboration tool, with robust support for accessibility and community safety that offers more agency and autonomy to the participants, teams and communities that make up Mozilla.
That Matrix gives individual community members effective tools for both reporting violations of Mozilla’s Community Participation Guidelines (“CPG”) and securing their own safety weighed heavily in our decision-making. While all of the candidates offered robust, mature APIs that would meet the needs of our developer, infrastructure and developer productivity teams, Riot/Matrix was the only candidate that included CPG reporting and enforcement tooling as a standard part of their offering, offering individual users the opportunity to raise their own shields on their own terms as well as supporting the general health and safety of the community.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Developing in C++ is not easiest thing you can do in ICT. But if you have some C++ knowledge and skills, it brings you great possibilities. What to think of building LibreOffice and working somewhere in the million lines of code? In Ankara, at the Hacettepe University’s Beytepe Campus, 40 students joining the LibreOffice Developer Bootcamp, just arrived at that point.
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Programming/Development
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A new version of the GStreamer Rust bindings, 0.15.0, was released.
As usual this release follows the latest gtk-rs release, and a new version of the GStreamer plugins written in Rust was also released.
This new version features a lot of newly bound API for creating subclasses of various GStreamer types: GstPreset, GstTagSetter, GstClock, GstSystemClock, GstAudioSink, GstAudioSrc, GstDevice, GstDeviceProvider, GstAudioDecoder and GstAudioEncoder.
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I know this was a big surprise for everybody — our customers, and the staff of both companies! As part of the announcement we provided a high-level view of the vision for bringing the companies together, and naturally, that leads to a bunch of questions. Today, I want to give some more clarity & answer many of the customer questions we’ve seen out there.
Let me start by reiterating the vision. Ryan & I started A Cloud Guru because we believed there was a better way of helping people learn technology & access to new opportunities. We’ve always cared about building training that is engaging, hands-on and focused on helping people put their learnings into practice. Training for technology shouldn’t be boring. It should be as exciting & engaging as the technology itself… you’ll achieve your goals if you are enjoying the learning experience. The best way to do this is to build, get hands-on & have fun (even laugh!)
We’ve always deeply admired Linux Academy’s commitment to hands-on learning. The LA team took it to the next level with their hands-on labs’ capabilities & integrated training environments. We LOVE this and love the deep & comprehensive content that Linux Academy has produced.
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Over the past few posts, we’ve taken a look at some of the innovations, milestones, and proud moments of the past 20 years of enterprise Java. Now it’s time to look forward and think about where enterprise Java is going in the next few decades.
Even the most optimistic Java practitioners probably wouldn’t have predicted that enterprise Java would be as healthy and ubiquitous as it is today. In the past 20 years, other platforms have grabbed at the brass ring and wound up eating dirt instead. Will Java continue to hold its ground, flourish, or decline?
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Python
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In this episode, we set up a couple of tools that will be at the base of development. The first tool was django-environ to control Django settings from environment variables. The second tool was the django-debug-toolbar to help with debugging pages in future work.
We started the stream with an upgrade to Django 3.0.1 because of a security release that was announced today. For a new project, I don’t recommend upgrading packages all the time, but security releases are my exception to that rule.
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Have you made some plans to build a cool side project over the holidays? We polished PyCharm further to make sure you can focus on getting it done! Tweet us @pycharm to tell us about your project!
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Web scraping is an automated way to extract and process information from internet websites in a very large amount. Data on the internet websites is not structured, which can be collected and structured through web scraping. Search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo have bots that scrape data from internet websites and index them on their search pages. Data can also be extracted using APIs, which is probably one of the best ways to extract data from the web. Famous websites like Facebook, Google, Amazon provide users with well structured APIs to interact with data, but you won’t see these APIs everywhere.
For example, if you want to get regular updates on your favorite products for discount offers or you want to automate the process of downloading episodes of your favorite season one by one, and the website doesn’t have any API for it then the only choice you’re left with is web scraping.Web scraping may be illegal on some websites, depending on whether a website allows it or not. Websites use “robots.txt” file to explicitly define URLs that are not allowed to be scrapped. You can check whether if website allows it or not by appending “robots.txt” with the website’s domain name. For example, https://www.google.com/robots.txt
In this article, we’ll use Python for scraping because its very easy to setup and use. It has many built-in and third party librariaries that can be used for scraping and organizing data. We’ll use two Python libraries “urllib” to fetch the webpage and “BeautifulSoup” to parse the webpage to apply programming operations.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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There you have it, readers! Just a peek behind the features and good look at the major improvements that are headlining this release.
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Vivaldi Technologies released today the Vivaldi 2.10 web browser for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows desktop platforms, a release that introduces a major change to offer out-of-the-box compatibility with websites.
The major change in the Vivaldi 2.10 release is about the web browser changing its UA (User Agent) string, which would identify it as a supported Chromium web browser on numerous websites where Vivaldi was not supported before, such as Google Docs or Netflix, because it was blocked by the competition.
As such, after updating to Vivaldi 2.10, users will be able to smoothly browse all those websites without any incompatibility issues. For more technical details about why Vivaldi is changing its user agent, we recommend checking out the video attached below and a more in-depth blog by Vivaldi’s QA Lead, Ruarí Ødegaard.
[...]
Other than that, Vivaldi 2.10 continue to improve the overall experience for users by adding more tweaks in keyboard handling, improvements in the Address Bar layout, improvements in extension toggling, as well as improvements in Quick Commands. You can download Vivaldi 2.10 for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows systems right now through our free software portal.
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Openwashing
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Israel-based open source SD-WAN vendor flexiWAN said it has teamed up with Telefónica to create value added SD-WAN based services through the flexiWAN open source and modular SD-WAN solution.
As part of the alliance, flexiWAN and Telefonica are working towards service differentiation, feature modularity with the ability to easily integrate 3rd party applications and tiered service cost structure.
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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The Update Framework (TUF) has become the first specification and first security-focused project to graduate from the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
TUF is the ninth project to graduate, following Kubernetes, Prometheus, Envoy, CoreDNS, containerd, Fluentd, Jaeger, and Vitess. For projects to move from the maturity level of incubation to graduation, they must demonstrate thriving adoption, an open governance process, and a strong commitment to community, sustainability, and inclusivity.
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Security
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Cliff Stoll (previously) is a computing legend: his 1989 book The Cuckoo’s Egg tells the story of how he was drafted to help run Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s computers (he was a physicist who knew a lot about Unix systems), and then discovered a $0.75 billing discrepancy that set him on the trail of East German hackers working for the Soviet Union, using his servers as a staging point to infiltrate US military networks.
[...]
Stoll’s work in the Cuckoo’s Egg affair presaged many of the common tools used by security pros today, like the ubiquitous “intrusion detection system,” as well as “honeypots.” And Stoll’s work also inspired one of the first cybersecurity research centers, at Lawrence Livermore National Labs. Security researchers still treat the book as a touchstone and find new lessons in it.
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Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (git, libgit2, and shadow), Debian (debian-edu-config and python-django), Fedora (python-django), Mageia (apache-commons-beanutils, fence-agents, flightcrew, freerdp, htmldoc, libssh, pacemaker, rsyslog, samba, and sssd), Oracle (freetype and kernel), Scientific Linux (freetype and kernel), SUSE (firefox, spectre-meltdown-checker, thunderbird, xen, and zziplib), and Ubuntu (python-django).
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OSSEC is an open-source, host-based intrusion detection system that works on both Linux and Windows operating systems.
Typically, your security teams will deploy OSSEC whenever they need something running on the server to alert them about potential intrusions. You can use it to monitor log files and send automated alerts if it detects a rootkit or a suspicious file change.
The OSSEC configuration uses a client-server architecture, so OSSEC can be run with or without an agent. On the latter, the server will connect with each machine, analyze its status, and report the findings.
Since its inception in 2008, OSSEC has established itself as a reliable tool among security professionals. Today, OSSEC is still in use in many big industries, including finance, banking, and also tech companies. In all cases, these are companies with a meaningful Linux footprint; you would very rarely see an all-Microsoft shop using OSSEC.
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Zigbee/Surveillance
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Amazon, Apple, Google, and the Zigbee Alliance have formed a “Connected Home over IP” group to develop an open source smart home connectivity standard. Meanwhile Silicon Labs plans to relaunch its Z-Wave spec as a “ratified, multi-source wireless standard” open to all silicon and stack vendors for development.
Three of the leading smart home device vendors have joined up with the Zigbee Alliance to launch a royalty-free, IP-based home automation connectivity standard. The Project Connected Home over IP working group will develop open source reference implementations for the standard posted on GitHub, followed by a device certification program.
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The biggest names in the connected home category are reaching across the aisle to create an open-source standard. Marquee names Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance are leading the charge here.
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Apple, Google, Amazon, and the Zigbee Alliance have all teamed up to work on an open-source network standard. The new working group has already gone live under the name of “Project Connected Home over IP” or CHIP.
According to the new website, the project is aimed at simplifying development for manufacturers and increase compatibility for consumers. By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.
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Environment
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Energy
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Unknown terrorists have blown up the Gas Pipe Line (GPL) leading to Quetta with explosive material .According to Gas Department gas supply to different parts of Quetta has been suspended.
Teams have departed to repair GPL. Levies forces have cordoned off the area and started. Search operation.According to Levies unknown terrorists have blown up GPL in Dahadar near Bolan. The pipe line caught fire after explosion resulting suspension of gas supply to different parts of Quetta.
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As his coal mining company hurtled into bankruptcy, Robert E. Murray, the former chief executive, paid himself $14 million, handed his successor a $4 million bonus and earmarked nearly $1 million for casting doubt on man-made climate change, new court filings show.
The company, Murray Energy, filed for bankruptcy protection in October, reporting $2.7 billion in debts and more than $8 billion in obligations, in large part to pension and health care plans for workers. But those debts appear to have done little to scale back the spending habits of Mr. Murray, a prominent supporter of President Trump who helped engineer dozens of climate change and environmental rollbacks over the past three years.
The 79-year-old coal executive has been a vocal denier of the established science that human activities like the burning of coal are causing climate change and once warned that his dying industry must receive subsidies from the federal government “to make sure grandma doesn’t die on the operating table.”
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Finance
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Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS) board Chairman Lee Sang-hoon was sentenced to 1-1/2 years jail on Tuesday for sabotaging legitimate union activities, a South Korean court said.
Lee and about 25 other defendants were charged with sabotaging union activities by subcontracted workers at Samsung Electronics’ repair unit, Samsung Electronics Service Co Ltd.
When union activities took place at Samsung Electronics Service in 2013, Samsung Group’s now-defunct elite strategy office developed and implemented strategies to hinder the union’s operation, Seoul Central District Court ruled.
Samsung executives and employees were, to different degrees, involved in finding out sensitive information about union members to convince them to leave the union, inducing the closure of subcontracting firms with active unions and delaying negotiations between labor and management.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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The Australian appeared via videolink in Westminster Magistrates Court in London on Thursday for a case management hearing.
Assange sniffled as he sat unshaven and wearing glasses, a white shirt and a mauve sweater.
At the court, his lawyer Edward Fitzgerald outlined some of the evidence Assange’s team would put forward at the full extradition hearing due to start on February 24, saying they could call up to 21 witnesses to testify.
“We say that there is in the treaty a ban on being extradited for a political offence and these offences as framed and in substance are political offences,” he told the court.
Other arguments would feature medical evidence, public denunciations by leading US political figures, and details from the case of Chelsea Manning, an ex-intelligence analyst who was convicted by a US Army court-martial in 2013 of espionage and other offences for leaking secret cables to WikiLeaks.
There would also be information from an investigation led by a Spanish judge into “revelations about bugging of conversations with his lawyers” during Assange’s long stay in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.
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Monopolies
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The Brussels Bar Association (Dutch speaking section, hereafter BBA) recently issues the third guideline since it was created in 1994. In this Guideline the BBA instructs its members how they should safeguard the attorney-client privilege in the event of a saisie contrefaçon at the client. Since the Brussels courts have exclusive competence for patent litigation in Belgium and since most Belgian patent litigators are a member of the BBA, the Guideline essentially covers any patent-related saisie contrefaçon in Belgium.
The Guideline was issued because shortly before a court appointed expert leading a saisie contrefaçon had among others seized the strategic memorandum drafted by specialised intellectual property lawyers retained by the party that was subject to the saisie. Notwithstanding explicit protest by that party as well as by its lawyers, the expert studied and even used the legally privileged content of the document. The lawyers informed the Dean of the BBA of the violation of their legal privilege, as required by their professional ethics rules. The Dean consequently instructed the lawyers of the seizing party to order the expert to stop using and return any legally privileged information. Notwithstanding repeated demands from the lawyers of both sides, the expert refused to comply with these. He stated that he could only be instructed by the judge that had appointed him. This left the lawyers of the party that was subject to the saisie no other choice but to initiate court proceedings against the expert. In parallel the Guideline was adopted by the BBA.
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“Joining me today is patent attorney and libertarian theorist Stephan Kinsella. Mr. Kinsella is the author of the book, Against Intellectual Property, and is the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom. He is also the founder and editor of Libertarians Papers, and he’s a member of the Editorial Board of Reason Papers.
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Patents
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As part of the appeal, VG Colours requested the CoA to stay enforcement of the decision pending the appeal. The CoA granted VG Colours’ request for three reasons [par. 4.10]: (i) the district court had failed to consider some of VG Colours’ arguments; (ii) the enforcement caused very significant damage to VG Colours; and (iii) there was a considerable risk that HE Licences would not be able to provide recourse for this damage if the district court’s decision was overturned on appeal.
The district court’s failure to take into account some of VG Colours’ arguments. In first instance, Hanson/HE Licences had partially abandoned the patent, limiting its claim scope. VG Colours was allowed to respond to the limitation and it did, but the district court refused to hear some of its arguments because they did not relate to the limited claims per se and so should have been advanced at the beginning of the proceedings.
According to the CoA, this was unjustified. VG Colours advanced the arguments it felt were strongest against the original claims; it could not be expected to advance every imaginable argument in anticipation of a potential change in claim scope. What is more, the district court had not taken into account VG Colours’ non-infringement defence because it was supposedly advanced too late. But the CoA found that VG Colours’ first written submission clearly stated the defence so that the district court should have dealt with it.
[...]
All in all, this Kat applauds the CoA for the pragmatic approach it takes in its decision. There is certainly room for reasonable disagreement on the outcome: in the preliminary relief proceedings, VG Colours had put forward exactly the same arguments for a stay, but there the court denied them. Indeed, the absence of non-infringing alternatives and great damage to VG Colours’ business may just as well be read as a confirmation of the patent’s value. That’s a call that only the court can make and it is probably impossible to convey all the underlying factual nuances in the decision.
The important thing, then, is to signal a willingness to consider the real-world consequences of injunctions and the circumstances of their grant. Parties and courts in future cases can build on such signals and so further develop the European acquis on the complex issue of patent injunctions. This decision represents an important step towards that goal.
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In early November, Senior Party the Broad Institute (along with Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) filed their response to Junior Party the University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, “CVC”) Opposition to the Broad’s Substantive Motion No. 1 in Interference No. 105,166.
Pursuant to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s rules, the Broad’s Reply Brief follows formulaically with Senior Party’s point-by-point rebuttal of CVC’s grounds for opposition. CVC’s first asserted opposition argument was that “judgment estoppel” (quotation marks in opposition brief) does not exist in any form that would prelude this interference. The Broad characterizes this argument as “remarkable,” and that it “not only displays a lack of understanding regarding the development of the estoppel rule in interferences, but it also misstates common law estoppel principles.” Segueing to the question of “motion estoppel” under Rule 41.127(a), the Broad traces the provisions of this Rule to former Rule 1.658(c), which provided (according to the Broad) for “broad application of estoppel for any type of interference judgment and further listed specific motions that needed to be raised lest motion estoppel apply, including failure to move to add a new claim” (which the Broad argues is the case here). These considerations did not change with revision of the interference rules, according to the Reply Brief, and thus the Board remains empowered under the rules to grant its motion that CVC should be estopped in this interference by the Board’s judgment in the prior interference (No. 105,048).
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IV sued Trend Micro back in 2010 for infringing its U.S. Patent Nos. 5,987,610, 6,073,142, 6,460,050, and 7,506,155. After substantial back and forth, we eventually learned that the patents are invalid as directed toward abstract ideas. See Intellectual Ventures I LLC v. Symantec Corp., 838 F.3d 1307 (Fed. Cir. 2016). On motion, the Judge Stark then awarded attorney fees to Trend Micro based upon the changed testimony of IV’s expert witness at trial in the parallel Symantec case.
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Trademarks
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Lawyers have welcomed a “common-sense” US Supreme Court ruling which determined that the USPTO is not automatically entitled to recover attorneys’ fees from parties who sue the agency over rejected patent applications.
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Copyrights
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Overall, the book argues for a more holistic approach in the consideration of the parody exception, specifically determining the legality of the use with reference to freedom of expression.
This book is the go-to book for Parody. It would be of interest to anyone curious about the copyright defence for parody, and a vital source for lawyers, practitioners, academics, and policy makers who are involved in the interpretation, application, or research of parody. It will also be of use to copyright and other stakeholders, including users who might benefit from the parody exception.
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Does EU copyright law allow the establishment of second-hand markets for subject matter (other than software) in digital format?
This is the question that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) substantially answered this morning when it handed down its much-awaited judgment [not yet available on the Curia website] in Tom Kabinet, C-263/18.
The answer of the Court is that there is NO such thing as ‘digital exhaustion’ of the right of distribution under Article 4 of the InfoSoc Directive. More specifically, the provision of ebooks falls within the scope of the right of communication to the public, in relation to which there is no possibility of exhaustion (see Article 3(3)).
[...]
First, Recital 28 in the preamble to the InfoSoc Directive appears to link the right within Article 4 of the InfoSoc Directive to the ‘right to control distribution of the work incorporated in a tangible article’ (emphasis added).
Second, Recital 29 in the preamble to the same directive clarifies that ‘[t]he question of exhaustion does not arise in the case of services and on-line services in particular’. In relation to this recital, in its follow-up to the 1995 Green Paper, the European Commission noted how ‘a large consensus exists that no exhaustion of rights occurs in respect of works and other subject matter exploited on-line, as this qualifies as a service.’
Third, in relation to the right of communication/making available to the public, Article 3(3) of the InfoSoc Directive rules out that this right be subject to exhaustion.
Fourth, it should be recalled once again that, by adopting the InfoSoc Directive, EU legislature transposed into the EU legal order the WIPO Internet Treaties. The agreed statements to Article 6 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty provide that the expressions ‘copies’ and ‘original and copies’ in the context of the right of distribution exclusively refer to fixed copies that may be put into circulation as tangible objects.
Finally, since its early case law, the CJEU has been careful in drawing a distinction between the right of distribution, which would be subject to exhaustion, and other rights for which no exhaustion would occur. For instance, in Coditel, the Court did not find that requiring payment of a fee for each public performance of a film would be contrary to EU law. A similar distinction between the consequences of the first sale of a copyright work or a copy thereof for the exhaustion of the right of distribution and other economic rights was also made in Warner Brothers and Metronome Video and Tournier.
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Posted in News Roundup at 8:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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The Kubuntu Council are delighted to announce that recently the community was approached by MindShare Management with a proposal to bringing a high-specification laptop to market using the Kubuntu operating system.
We were both delighted and excited to see such a project undertaken.
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The Kubuntu Council, MindShareManagement Inc, and Tuxedo Computers proudly announce the the officially authorized Kubuntu Focus Laptop.
The target audience are power users and developers who seek performance and compatibility with Linux deployment environments. It comes pre-loaded and pre-updated with the latest, professionally vetted software for web development, deep learning, Steam games, video editing, image editing, and dozens of additional supported software packages.
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There are a growing number of options for folks who want to buy a high-end laptop that comes with a GNU/Linux distribution rather than Windows, Mac, or Chrome OS. And next year it looks like there may be at least one more.
The upcoming Kubuntu Focus notebook has the kind of specs you’d expect to find from a high-end gaming laptop. But while most gaming PCs ship with Windows, this one will run Kubuntu (Ubuntu Linux with the KDE desktop environment).
It’s expected to be available in mid-January for $2,399 and up.
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Fancy winning a swanky new Linux laptop? Well if you put your creative skills to work, you might!
The KDE community is running two new community competitions, both of which tout Tuxedo-branded hardware as main prizes.
Videographers are encouraged to take part in the KDE Plasma 5.18 Video Competition where two Linux PCs are up for grabs.
The creator of the best promotional video about KDE Plasma will net themselves a Tuxedo Gaming PC, while the creator of the best promotional video showcasing KDE applications will receive a Tuxedo InfinityBox.
Just don’t expect an easy battle! There are a tonne of ace Linux YouTubers out there with the editing savvy to score well so be prepared to flex your imagination if you want to win!
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Two frosty weeks on from sharing an ice-cool set of winter wallpapers I figured some of you might be in need warming up.
So I tasked myself with selecting a crop of cosy “Christmas” backgrounds for this fortnight’s cadre of colourful computing centrepieces.
And I think you’re gonna love them!
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The MintBox line of mini PCs are small, fanless desktop computers that come pre-loaded with the Linux Mint operating system. And the latest version is the most powerful (and expensive) model to date.
First announced in July, the MintBox 3 is now available for purchase from the Fit-IoT website for $1399 and up, and the little computer should begin shipping to customers in January.
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Coinciding with the release of Linux Mint 19.3 is the debut of the MintBox3 Linux Mint pre-loaded small form factor desktop computer that is fan-less.
The MintBox3 comes via the continued partnership between Linux Mint and Israeli PC vendor CompuLab. The MintBox3 in particular is Linux Mint on the powerful Airtop 3.
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The MintBox 3, which was announced back in July, has finally gone on sale.
The fanless desktop PC is made by established PC maker CompuLab and comes pre-loaded with the Linux Mint operating system (which just got a new release, in case you hadn’t heard).
Just don’t expect something low-power or low-cost, like the earlier MintBox PCs.
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The Linux Mint project, in collaboration with Compulab, have announced the general availability of MintBox 3, the 5th-generation of the Linux Mint-powered PC.
Based on the Compulab Airtop3 design, MintBox 3 offers customers a small footprint, an aesthetic all-metal industrial design with silent cooling, accessible I/O ports, and high performance for intensive workloads and graphics tasks. It’s the most powerful MintBox computer ever made and ships with the latest Linux Mint 19.3 “Tricia” Cinnamon edition pre-installed.
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Server
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For many developers, distributed deployment of an application is often achieved using a cloud-native approach with the Kubernetes container orchestration platform. Ray is orthogonal to Kubernetes as it runs on top of Kubernetes as well as laptops, and on public clouds, Stoica said.
In Stoica’s view, Kubernetes makes it easy to deploy and manage different applications on the same cluster and is targeted at DevOps. That said, he noted that Kubernetes doesn’t solve the problem of actually making it easy to develop distributed apps. For example, to implement a large-scale reinforcement learning application today, the application needs to handle the logic for scheduling tasks, handling machine failures, efficiently transferring data and so on. Kubernetes simply runs applications once they have been developed, he added.
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The Kubernetes scheduler is being overhauled with a series of improvements that will introduce a new framework and enhanced capabilities that could help cluster administrators to optimize performance and utilization. Abdullah Gharaibeh, co-chair of the Kubernetes scheduling special interest group (SIG Scheduling), detailed what has been happening with the scheduler in recent releases and what’s on the roadmap in a session at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2019.
The scheduler component of Kubernetes is a controller that assigns pods to nodes. A Kubernetes pod is a group of containers that is scheduled together, while a node is a worker machine (real or virtual) within the cluster that has all the services needed to run a pod.
Gharaibeh explained that as pods are created they are added into a scheduling queue that is sorted by priority and then processed through two phases. In the first, the pod is run through a filter that makes a determination of what nodes are feasible for that pod to run on. For example, the filter checks to make sure the node has enough resources (CPU and memory) to run the pod. The pods then go through the scoring phase, where the pods are ranked according to additional criteria such as node affinity. If for some reason a pod ends up with no feasible nodes it will be placed back into the queue so it can be scheduled when that becomes possible.
[...]
The Kubernetes Enhancement Proposal (KEP) for the scheduling framework outlines all of the different extension points for plugins. One of the key extension points is called “queue sort”, which he said enables an administrator to define a single plugin that defines how the default scheduling queue will be sorted. That’s different than the current default scheduling behavior where pods are sorted by priority.
Other extension points include “pre-filter”, which checks to make sure that certain pod conditions are met, and “filter”, which is used to rule out nodes that can’t run a given pod. The “reserve” extension point provides an opportunity to help better schedule pods that are running applications or services that need to maintain state, according to the KEP. “Plugins which maintain runtime state (aka ‘stateful plugins’) should use this extension point to be notified by the scheduler when resources on a node are being reserved for a given Pod.”
The framework also includes what are known as permit plugins, which allow other scheduling plugins to delay binding a pod to a node until a specific condition has been satisfied. Gharaibeh noted that the permit plugins can be useful to enable gang scheduling of a group of pods that need to all be deployed at the same time. “One interesting use case we had was trying to make the scheduler friendlier for batch workloads,” he said.
Overall, Gharaibeh emphasized that the scheduling framework will make it easier for Kubernetes developers to extend and add new features into the scheduler. The scheduling framework is currently targeted for the Kubernetes 1.19 milestone, which will be out in mid-2020.
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IBM
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CloudForms is Red Hat’s supported version of upstream ManageIQ, an infrastructure management platform. It lets you see, manage and deploy to various platforms like OpenStack, VMWare, RHEV, OpenShift and public cloud like AWS and Azure, with single pane of glass view across them all. It has its own orchestration engine but also integrates with Ansible for automated deployments.
As best I can tell, their CloudForms updated Statement of Direction article (behind paywall, sorry) shows that Red Hat is killing off support for non-Red Hat platforms like VMware, AWS, Azure, etc. The justification is to focus on open platforms, which I think means CloudForms will ultimately disappear entirely with Red Hat focusing on OpenShift instead.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Rolisteam is a free virtual table software. Pen and paper role-playing games are traditionally conducted around a table. Virtual table software seems to be the right solution to overcome real-life difficulties. It provides many features to enjoy a better game experience online (such as maps, images, dice roller, character sheet, background music).
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Apple, Amazon, and Google are teaming up with the Zigbee Alliance to create a new standard for smart homes, Krita gets $25k, and a new version of Mint ships.
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First up, in our Wanderings, Leo suffers from new computer ills, Tony Hughes works on his cars, Moss fiddles with more distros, it’s reading and repairs for Joe, Tony Watts is rockin’ it, and Josh goes mad and gets an iPhone.
Then, in our news, Linux Mint 19.3 is almost here, Canonical has been very busy, New elementaryOS and Firefox, and more
In security, two Linux vulnerabilities and a takeover of PIA goes weird
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Resin printing, relational data, starwars good stuff
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Sometimes one project can lead to a hundred more. We celebrate Home Assistant’s new release, the inclusion of the WLED integration and fall down the DIY project rabbit hole.
Plus some clever power solutions, cheap LED light strips, and a test drive of Project Off-Grid.
We recorded our first ever live stream to accompany this where we flash an ESP8266 board in seconds using WLED and esptool. This can be found on YouTube.
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Welcome to Episode 317 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts (minus Bill) talk about some of the best Open Source of 2019, Santa on the Air, Ofcom, inter-satellite communication, ksnip, QEMU, open-source oscilloscopes and much more. Thank you for listening and we hope you have a great week and a happy holiday season.
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Kernel Space
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By the end of the merge window, 12,632 non-merge changesets had been pulled into the mainline repository for the 5.5 release. This is thus a busy development cycle — just like the cycles that preceded it. Just over half of those changesets were pulled after the writing of our first 5.5 merge-window summary. As is often the case later in the merge window, many of those changes were relatively boring fixes. There were still a number of interesting changes, though; read on for a summary of what happened in the second half of this merge window.
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A “split lock” is a low-level memory-bus lock taken by the processor for a memory range that crosses a cache line. Most processors disallow split locks, but x86 implements them. Split locking may be convenient for developers, but it comes at a cost: a single split-locked instruction can occupy the memory bus for around 1,000 clock cycles. It is thus understandable that interest in eliminating split-lock operations is high. What is perhaps less understandable is that a patch set intended to detect split locks has been pending since (at least) May 2018, and it still is not poised to enter the mainline.
Split locks are, in essence, a type of misaligned memory access — something that the x86 architecture has always been relatively willing to forgive. But there is a difference: while a normal unaligned operation will slow down the process performing that operation, split locks will slow down the entire system. The 1,000-cycle delay may be particularly painful on realtime systems, but split locks can be used as an effective denial-of-service attack on any system. There is little disagreement among developers that their use should not be allowed on most systems.
Recent Intel processors can be configured to execute a trap when a split lock is attempted, allowing the operating system to decide whether to allow the operation to continue. Fenghua Yu first posted a patch set enabling this trap in May 2018; LWN covered this work one year later. While many things have changed in this patch set, the basic idea has remained constant: when this feature is enabled, user-space processes that attempt a split lock will receive a SIGBUS signal. What happens when split locks are created in other contexts has varied over time; in the version-10 patch set posted in late November, split locks in the kernel or system firmware will cause a kernel panic.
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Benchmarks
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Hi list,
I'd like to announce meas 19.3.1. I know it's a week earlier than normal, and
it's a pretty small release. But with the upcoming Holidays (at least for me) it
would otherwise be 4 weeks before a 19.3.1, so I've decided to make an early
release, so that 19.3.2 won't be quite so huge.
There's not much to look at here, just a few small fixes, mostly to Intel
drivers, but with a radv, virgl, and core dri fix too.
See you in the new year with a 19.3.2,
Dylan
Shortlog
========
Bas Nieuwenhuizen (2):
amd/common: Fix tcCompatible degradation on Stoney.
amd/common: Always use addrlib for HTILE tc-compat.
Dylan Baker (4):
docs/19.3.0: Add SHA256 sums
cherry-ignore: update for the 19.3.1 cycle
docs: remove new_features.txt from stable branch
VERSION: bump version for 19.3.1
Gert Wollny (1):
virgl: Increase the shader transfer buffer by doubling the size
Iván Briano (1):
anv: Export filter_minmax support only when it's really supported
Kenneth Graunke (1):
iris: Default to X-tiling for scanout buffers without modifiers
Lionel Landwerlin (2):
anv: fix fence underlying primitive checks
mesa: avoid triggering assert in implementation
Luis Mendes (1):
radv: fix radv secure compile feature breaks compilation on armhf EABI and aarch64
Tapani Pälli (2):
dri: add __DRI_IMAGE_FORMAT_SXRGB8
i965: expose MESA_FORMAT_B8G8R8X8_SRGB visual
git tag: mesa-19.3.1
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While Mesa 19.3 was just released last week, Mesa 19.3.1 is now available rather than on its bi-weekly release cadence in order to avoid the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.
Due to just one week having passed, Mesa 19.3.1 is quite a small release. Found in this release is exposing B8G8R8X8 sRGB visual support for the Intel i965 driver, defaulting to X-tiling for scanout buffers without modifiers on Intel Iris, and the Intel Vulkan driver only now exposing filter_minmax extension support when it’s actually supported. On the Radeon side is a Stoney APU fix and a fix for the new RADV secure compile functionality breaking ARM support. The Virgl driver also doubles the size for the shader transfer buffer in this release.
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Applications
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In this article we will show some of the best download manager applications for Linux Ubuntu and similar distros. This kind of software is a must for every new and professional Linux user. You will hopefully find some guidance to choose the right download manager that suits your needs.Let’s get started.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Devespresso Games have returned to their roots with The Coma 2: Vicious Sisters, so I took a little look at what to expect from this in-development atmospheric, story-driven horror.
It’s been out in Early Access for little over a month and it already seems like it could be a small hit, they’ve managed to quickly get a “Very Positive” rating from hundreds players so that’s a great start. After trying it out myself, it definitely hits the spot.
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Hella yeah! Originally developed by DONTNOD Entertainment and published by Square Enix on Windows and console, Feral Interactive have now officially released Life is Strange 2 for Linux.
This means we now have Life is Strange, Life is Strange: Before the Storm and Life is Strange 2 all ported and supported on Linux thanks to the work from Feral which is awesome.
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UK-based video games publisher Feral Interactive announced today the availability of the Life is Strange 2 episodic graphic adventure video game for the Linux and macOS platforms.
Developed by Dontnod Entertainment and published by Square Enix, Life Is Strange 2 is a single-player, episodic graphic adventure video game that continues the award-winning narrative series with a new location and cast of characters. The game is powered by Unreal Engine 4 and it’s now playable on Linux and macOS systems.
Life Is Strange 2 is the second main instalment in the Life Is Strange series, which was released over a year ago on September 2018 only for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One platforms. Feral Interactive has been working since then to port it to Linux and macOS, just like they ported Life Is Strange and Life Is Strange: Before the Storm.
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The Linux port of this game does require Vulkan driver support and on the Radeon side they recommend a Radeon R9 380 at least or NVIDIA with at least a GeForce GTX 680. There hasn’t been any recent Vulkan driver workarounds/changes required so with AMD the driver support works going back to the Mesa 19.1 series or on the NVIDIA side the 430 series. Feral says Intel graphics are not supported.
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While rather rough around the edges, The Sapling has a good idea and the groundwork done to become an interesting evolution sim where you design plants and animals.
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Releasing in Early Access sometime next year with Linux support, Jakub Klementewicz has been building the survival game Rocky Planet and it certainly looks like we need to keep an eye on it.
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Dicey Dungeons already has a lot of items, some of them quite amusing but how about 600 more to give your run just that extra bit of variation? Enter the More Fluff mod.
The More Fluff mod adds in so many items it’s just nuts, from “the unassuming Paintbrush, to the mathematical Primal Punch; survival-heavy Regen or the risky Really Spiky Shield; the pun-worthy Pee Shooter or Gooplicate… there’ll be an item for you”.
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BolHut (You Died but a Necromancer revived you) just released their latest game, a wave-based shoot ‘em up PuPaiPo Space Deluxe.
Quite a deceptive looking twin-stick shooter, you start off thinking it’s super easy and overly simple and then it starts to really throw everything at you. It gets absolutely crazy! Still simple overall though, a very nice pick up and play shooter, with friendly and inviting colourful visuals.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Maybe you don’t like desktops. Maybe even a lightweight window manager seems excessive to you. Maybe all you really use is a graphical user interface (GUI) application or two, and you’re otherwise perfectly happy living in a terminal all day. If one or more of these sentiments sound familiar, then Ratpoison is the solution.
The Ratpoison window manager models itself after GNU Screen. All window controls are performed with keyboard shortcuts, so you don’t have to grab the mouse just to move a window out of your way. The trade-off is that it’s impossibly minimalistic, which is, conveniently, also its greatest strength.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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After four months of intense work and more than 200 commits, Jean-Baptiste Mardelle and the Kdenlive team are happy to announce the release of Kdenlive 19.12.0. This release comes with many changes under the hood, new features and nifty eye candy additions. The highlights include huge performance improvements resulting in a faster and smoother timeline, a new audio mixer, master effects (audio/video), and better audio waveform display to name a few. Not to mention the usual round of stability and usability fixes.
Grab the latest version from the download section and give it a spin.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GNOME Project is built by a vibrant community and supported by the GNOME Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity registered in California (USA). The GNOME community has spent more than 20 years creating a desktop environment designed for the user. We‘re asking you to become Friend of GNOME, with a recommended donation of $25/month ($5/month for students). We’re working to have 100 new Friends of GNOME join by January 6, 2020.
GNOME is about so much more than a desktop environment. In addition to the eponymous GNOME desktop, we work on projects like GStreamer, GTK, and Flatpak. We have a mostly complete list of technologies you can read on our web site. While the Foundation largely works on support, we also do development and outreach for GTK and GNOME core application development platform.
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GTK 4.0 isn’t expected until autumn 2020 but a lot of work remains for that to happen as the next big update to GNOME’s toolkit.
Among the GTK4 work left includes completing the constraints layout code, advancing their proposed animation framework API for GTK, and working on various bugs and other issues. There is also a desire to have improved continuous integration around GTK (and other projects like Glib).
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We have brought you twelve Core Updates – each packed with lots of new features, improvements and some with just security fixes. A special thank you for Intel again, which kept us especially busy with their hardware bugs, their deceiving marketing campaigns to play down those problems, and of course no support in terms of providing good fixes. We unfortunately had to invest a lot of time in assessing how these vulnerabilities affect IPFire systems and what is best to do about them. All of that held back development and frankly was the most frustrating thing to deal with this year.
But on the plus side, we found some time to invest into an updated web proxy and our reworked Intrusion Prevention System which probably was the single biggest project this year. Routed IPsec VPNs, DFS for Wireless Access Points in higher 5 GHz channels, a new GUI to configure VLANs and finally a rewritten Quality of Service were more of the bigger things that we released this year.
We had a number of Core Updates which only shipped a kernel, either with fixes for Intel’s problems or the famous SACK vulnerabilities. Although these might not seem very exciting to you users and the change logs are a short and cryptic read, they are the most important updates that we release. They are what makes IPFire IPFire. A secure and rock-solid firewall OS.
I do not really have to tell you this, because you are all installing your updates swiftly – with only a couple of exceptions. Earlier this year we asked you to migrate from an old 32 bit installation to 64 bits, because we can only provide best security on that platform. And you listened! When we had two thirds of the systems still running on 32 bit, this has now changed to two thirds being on 64 bit.
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New Releases
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The Peppermint OS team released today the first respin images to their latest Peppermint 10 Linux-based operating system for personal computers.
The initial Peppermint 10 release arrived earlier this year at the end of May, based on the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system series and featuring a Linux 4.18 kernel, as well as various other improvements, new features, and updated components.
Based on Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS (Bionic Beaver) release, the Peppermint 10 Respin images are here with up-to-date components, as well as kernel and graphics stacks as of December 10th, 2019, including the recently released Mozilla Firefox 71 web browser and Linux 5.0 kernel.
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Debian Family
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In November, the topic of init systems and, in particular, support for systems other than systemd reappeared on the Debian mailing lists. After one month of sometimes fraught discussion, this issue has been brought to the project’s developers to decide in the form of a general resolution (GR) — the first such since the project voted on the status of debian-private discussions in 2016. The issues under discussion are complex, so the result is one of the most complex ballots seen for some time in Debian, with seven options to choose from.
Debian being what it is, the actual voting period for a contentious issue can be rather anticlimactic; the real debate happens during the framing of the ballot to be voted on. This time around was no exception, with extensive discussions on how to best represent various proposed policies, and even a debate over the use of the word “diversity” to describe the issue at hand (it was eventually taken out). Debian practice dictates that ballots work best if each option is written by its proponents, so there are many hands involved in creating the final product.
That process also takes some time. Debian project leader Sam Hartman has seemed somewhat impatient throughout, trying to keep the discussion period to the minimum required by the Debian constitution. By his count, the minimum period ended on November 30; he issued his call for votes three days later. That, however, was too soon for Ian Jackson, who posted a proposal to override Hartman’s call for votes so that further work could be done on the framing of the issues on the ballot. While some participants agreed with this idea, the project as a whole appears to be somewhat tired of this discussion and ready to make a decision.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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The Linux Mint project has opened the upgrade path from the old Linux Mint 19.2 “Tina” release to the newly launched Linux Mint 19.3 “Tricia” release.
Based on Canonical’s long-term supported Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system and shipping with the Linux 5.0 kernel and the latest Cinnamon 4.4, MATE 1.22, and Xfce 4.14 desktop environments, the Linux Mint 19.3 “Tricia” operating system is now available to download.
However, the live ISO images of Linux Mint 19.3 “Tricia” are here only for new deployments of the operating system or for those who choose to reinstall their computers, as a fresh install is always recommended, but many users would prefer to upgrade from an older version.
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In this video, we are looking at Linux Mint 19.3 Cinnamon.
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In this video, we are looking at Linux Mint 19.3 MATE.
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In this video, we are looking at Linux Mint 19.3 XFCE.
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Linux Mint 19.3 has been released. The update of the popular Linux distribution is available in the flavors Xfce, Mate and Cinnamon as usually. The new version of the Linux distribution is a long term support release that will be supported until 2023.
New and existing users may download the ISO images from the official project download site. The new version introduces several changes and new features, brings refinements, and bug fixes among other things.
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The team behind Linux Mint has announced the availability of Linux Mint 19.3, the announcement comes less than a week after we reported that the final disc images were undergoing tests. As is the case with the last few Linux Mint version, Tricia will be available in three editions: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce.
This update is quite big, it includes a new boot screen, a new logo, a new drawing app, a new video player, and an improved System Reports app, among other things.
If you’re running Linux Mint 19, 19.1, or 19.2, it’s possible to upgrade to 19.3. In order to upgrade you should make a Timeshift backup, disable your screensaver and upgrade any installed Cinnamon spices, then select ‘Upgrade to “Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia”’ from the Edit menu in the Update Manager. From there you just need to follow the on-screen instructions. If you want to install the new packages you can run sudo apt install celluloid gnote drawing neofetch. Once you’re done, just reboot the computer.
Linux Mint 19.3 includes Cinnamon 4.4, Linux kernel 5.0, and is based on Ubuntu 18.04 which means packages designed for that system also run on this version of Linux Mint. This version will continue to get security updates until 2023 but work on Linux Mint 20, which will be supported until 2025, will commence shortly with a release due around May or June.
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There’s also a new System Reports feature that will display a warning icon in the system tray to let you know about problems the operating system encounters. For example, if there’s a missing language pack, hardware driver, media codec, or OS update, the icon will let you open a window to see problems, system info, and crash reports.
Linux Mint has also changed some default apps. The GIMP image editing app has been replaced by a simpler “Drawing” app. The Xplayer media player has been replaced with Celluloid. And the Tomboy note taking application has been replaced by Gnote.
If you prefer to use GIMP or any of the other old defaults, you can still install them from the Linux Mint repository.
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Devices/Embedded
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Do you need to run a script whenever your Raspberry Pi turns on? Here’s Estefannie to explain how to edit crontab to do exactly that.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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We have been waiting for a full-fledged Linux phone for close to a decade now but nothing interesting enough has happened yet since the Meizu Pro 5 Ubuntu Phone got unboxed and Purism put a smile on the faces of many users. At least not until this week – because the community-driven PinePhone is here. Hopefully, it is here to stay as well.
The PinePhone is a Quad-Core ARM Cortex A53 64-bit SOC-powered open-source smartphone capable of running any Linux and BSD Mobile operating system – especially Linux.
PinePhone is created to not only provide end-users with an excellently functioning Linux phone but to also create a market for Linux devices as well as to complement the existing support for Linux-on-Phone projects worldwide. It supports all major Linux Phone-centric projects together with other free and open-source operating systems to boost collaboration among developers.
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CERN, The European Organization for Nuclear Research that is home to the Large Hadron Collider and much more, has been working on alternatives to Microsoft software and recently some of their recommended options for various tasks / application replacements was published.
Back in June we reported on CERN working to migrate away from Microsoft projects and find other software alternatives that besides Windows, Skype for Business and other Microsoft proprietary software license/fee increases were eating into their budget.
After evaluating various open-source and freeware replacements to various proprietary software packages they have been relying on, recently they put out a guide detailing some of the replacements and their current status within the organization.
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Compared to the inaugural Rav1e 0.1 release just over one month ago, Rav1e 0.2 was released on Wednesday with 40~70% better performance depending upon the encode settings.
Since the rav1e 0.1 release in early November there has been various optimizations like more Assembly optimizations and forward-transform SIMD. That has now culminated with the release of rav1e 0.2 as the newest official release and succeeding the recent weekly-ish snapshots.
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Events
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Since 2010, the LibrePlanet wiki has provided a space for connection between free software activists, with the following mission statement: “To empower a global network of both local and project-based teams, all working together to advance free software as a social movement for user freedom.”
This idea of participation and space for connection between free software activists is what motivates both the wiki and the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) yearly conference by the same name. Our LibrePlanet wiki uses the same software as what powers Wikipedia, which makes it the perfect tool for global collaborative work. We use the wiki as a tool to help organize free software supporters all over the world, so everyone can collaborate around their projects and ideas, as well as communicate with each other using our mailing lists for discussion and development, and our #LibrePlanet IRC channel on Freenode.
LibrePlanet is about spreading the free software ideals, organizing activists and supporters of the free software philosophy, as well as about organizing GNU/Linux, or other technology-specific user groups. The site can be used for a broad range of uses, by expert software developers and budding community activists alike.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The Linux desktop has seen great advances in desktop app containerization and process-isolating sandbox-technologies. Keeping programs from getting hold of each other’s environments and files can greatly improve security if something where to go wrong with a program. Flatpak and Snap are the two leading implementations on the desktop.
I’ve previously praised the added security I get when playing Steam games inside a Flatpak container. I’m overdue to extend that protection to the web browser. I believe I’ll sleep better at night knowing there was an additional security layer between my web browser and the rest of my system.
To this end, I wanted to compare the current versions of Firefox Flatpak and Firefox Snap on Fedora 31. Due to the nature of containerized apps, you can expect my experiences to translate to other Linux distributions.
I’ll test Firefox 71 from the Fedora Flatpak repository, and Firefox 71 stable from the Canonical Snapcraft Store. I’ll refer to these as “Firefox Flatpak” and “Firefox Snap” throughout this article. Please note that you can use alternative Flatpak repositories such as Flathub. These alternate repositories may come different variants of Firefox with other default limitations and capabilities.
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We are very happy to announce the results of our Mozilla Research Grants for the second half of 2019. This was an extremely competitive process, and we selected proposals which address seven strategic priorities for the Internet and for Mozilla. This includes studies of privacy in India and Indonesia, proposals to rethink how we might manage personal data, and explorations of the future of voice interfaces. The Mozilla Research Grants program is part of our commitment to being a world-class example of using inclusive innovation to impact culture, and reflects Mozilla’s commitment to open innovation.
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If you’re waiting to switch to Firefox because you think that Google Docs or Hangouts won’t work as well, we’re happy to debunk this myth. You have nothing to worry about. Firefox works great with Google Docs, Hangouts, G Suite and just about every Google service.
Not only do we work hard to keep Firefox working great with G Suite, but so does the G Suite team because they want to make sure everything works for you in Firefox and other major browsers. (See these pages here and here, but note that Firefox does in fact support desktop notifications.)
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I thought we involved stakeholders in research pretty perfectly, here at Mozilla. Stakeholders come to research studies, listen attentively to research report-outs, and generally value the work our team does. Then I read “It’s Our Research”. I still think the Firefox User Research team has great buy-in across the organization, but after reading Tomer Sharon’s book, there are so many more things we could improve on! And what fun is a job, if there’s nothing to improve, right?
I’d like to call in some stakeholders to help me tell four short stories related to four pieces of advice Tomer Sharon provides in his book. (By the way, there are so many ideas in that book, it was hard to pick just four.)
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CMS
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WordPress 5.3.2 is now available!
This maintenance release features 5 fixes and enhancements.
WordPress 5.3.2 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.4.
You can download WordPress 5.3.2 by clicking the button at the top of this page, or visit your Dashboard → Updates and click Update Now.
If you have sites that support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process.
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BSD
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A new mechanism to help thwart return-oriented programming (ROP) and similar attacks has recently been added to the OpenBSD kernel. It will block system calls that are not made via the C library (libc) system-call wrappers. Instead of being able to string together some “gadgets” that make a system call directly, an attacker would need to be able to call the wrapper, which is normally at a randomized location.
Theo de Raadt introduced the feature in a late November posting to the OpenBSD tech mailing list. The idea is to restrict where system calls can come from to the parts of a process’s address space where they are expected to come from. OpenBSD already disallows system calls (and any other code) executing from writable pages with its W^X implementation. Since OpenBSD is largely in control of its user-space applications, it can enforce restrictions that would be difficult to enact in a more loosely coupled system like Linux, however. Even so, the restrictions that have been implemented at this point are less strict than what De Raadt would like to see.
The eventual goal would be to disallow system calls from anywhere but the region mapped for libc, but the Go language port for OpenBSD currently makes system calls directly. That means the main program text segment needs to be in the list of memory regions where system calls are allowed to come from. Static binaries will also need to have their text segment included, since libc will inhabit part of that address space.
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Programming/Development
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Why does C need “securing”
C as a language is unsafe in every meaning of the word. The best C programmers on the planet are incapable of writing a secure program. This is because to code in C you have to express a concurrent problem, into a language that is linearised, which is compiled relying on undefined behaviour, to be executed on an asynchronous concurrent out of order CPU. What could possibly go wrong?!
There is a lot you need to hold in mind to make C work. I can tell you now that I spend a majority of my development time thinking about the code to change rather than writing C because of this!
This has led to C based applications having just about every security issue known to man.
How is C “secured”
So as C is security swiss cheese, this means we have developed processes around the language to soften this issue – for example advice like patch and update continually as new changes are continually released to resolve issues.
Distribution packages have always been the “source” of updates for these libraries and applications. These packages are maintained by humans who need to update these packages. This means when a C project releases a fix, these maintainers would apply the patch to various versions, and then release the updates. These library updates due to C’s dynamic nature means when the machine is next rebooted (yes rebooted, not application restarted) that these fixes apply to all consumers who have linked to that library – change one, fix everything. Great!
But there are some (glaring) weaknesses to this model. C historically has little to poor application testing so many of these patches and their effects can’t be reproduced. Which also subsequently means that consuming applications also aren’t re-tested adequately. It can also have impacts where a change to a shared library can impact a consuming application in a way that was unforseen as the library changed.
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The Grantlee community is pleased to announce the release of Grantlee version 5.2.0.
For the benefit of the uninitiated, Grantlee is a set of Qt based libraries including an advanced string template system in the style of the Django template system.
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Ruby is a general purpose, scripting, structured, flexible, fully object-oriented programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. Ruby is a very conservative language. It’s equipped with very carefully chosen features that have been fully tested.
Ruby possesses a high portability running a large number of platforms including Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Cygwin, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, Tru64 UNIX, and HP-UX. At the time of publication, the TIOBE Programming Community index ranks Ruby in 11th place.
Ruby’s popularity was enhanced by the Ruby on Rails framework, a full-stack web framework which has been used to create many popular applications including Basecamp, GitHub, Shopify, Airbnb, Twitch, SoundCloud, Hulu, Zendesk, Square, and Highrise.
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Python
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An effort to protect package downloads from the Python Package Index (PyPI) has resulted in a Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) and, perhaps belatedly, some discussion in the wider community. The basic idea is to use The Update Framework (TUF) to protect PyPI users from some malicious actors who are aiming to interfere with the installation and update of Python modules. But the name of the PEP and its wording, coupled with some recent typosquatting problems on PyPI, caused some confusion along the way. There are some competing interests and different cultures coming together over this PEP; the process has not run as smoothly as anyone might want, though that seems to be resolving itself at this point.
PEP 458 (“Surviving a Compromise of PyPI”) has been around since 2013 or so; LWN looked at the PEP and the related PEP 480 (“Surviving a Compromise of PyPI: The Maximum Security Model”) in 2015. PEP 458 proposes a mechanism to provide cryptographic-signature protection for PyPI packages using TUF. No changes would be required for package authors or those downloading the packages, but client-side programs like pip would be able to ensure that they are getting the latest version of the code—and that the code itself is what is stored on PyPI.
A message was posted to the Python discussion forum in mid-November about the PEP. One of the PEP’s authors, Trishank Kuppusamy, wondered about the status of it, but the message mostly seemed to be aimed at Donald Stufft, who is the “BDFL-Delegate” for the PEP. That means that the steering council has deferred the decision on the PEP to Stufft; a week or so later, he had seemingly replied to the request but via some other channel.
Neither message was a general call for discussion of the PEP, however, which might be expected, so it would seem that many may have skipped over the message entirely. In early December, Guido van Rossum noted in the thread that he had merged a pull request (PR) for a bunch of updates to the PEP, but cautioned that discussion of the PEP should be done on the forum rather than in a PR. That is the normal course of action on a PEP; clearly Van Rossum was a bit surprised that it wasn’t being followed in this case.
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The technology doesn’t quite exist yet, but it’s not that far away.
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The Russian search engine and technology giant Yandex has issued a press release listing the most searched-for events of 2019 among its users. At the top of the list were the national election in Ukraine, the fire at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, and the protests that swept Moscow in advance of the Moscow City Duma elections.
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“A brawler who tattoos a message onto his knuckles does not throw every punch with the weight of First Amendment protection behind him,” the brief stated. “Conduct like this does not constitute speech, nor should it. A deliberate attempt to cause physical injury to someone does not come close to the expression which the First Amendment is designed to protect.”
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There have been a great deal of emotional energies and complicit psychic delusions recently causing great tumultuousness in the Palaces of the Corporetum Exceptionalis around the world. The causes of this tumult are often unseen and simultaneously assumed to be clearly distinguished by the overwhelming numbers of the courtiers. The single most assumed cause and focus of distress is the degree to which the latest application of a deceitful beauty mark meets with the traditional standards of dissolute predation on the most prominent face in the chambers of glittering toxic debauchery.
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Education
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The prospect of free public college is shaping up as one of the major divides between the more progressive candidates (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren) and the more centrist candidates (Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg). Buttigieg in particular has been especially vocal in his opposition to making college free for everyone.
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State Representative Harold Dutton, a Democratic, persuaded Representative Dustin Burrows, a Republican, to implement an amendment to the property tax bill that would require a commission to review every tax exemption and recommend reforms. This would ensure a way for Texan tax-payers to be protected from having their taxes increased due to House Bill 3.
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The Walton Family Foundation’s original press release about the Teach for America donation made no mention of the grant’s unusual terms.
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As Politico reported, the latest NAEP results showed declines in average scores for fourth- and eighth-graders, compared with the 2017 results.
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According to its website, the mission of Ohio Excels is “to provide an informed business perspective to help improve and transform Ohio’s education system so that it better prepares students to meet the demands of our evolving economy.” However, as Bacha reports, business-led education may not be the best way to improve students’ job prospects or the economy. Ohio Excels’ plans could produce a “pipeline” from public schools to corporations, and shift education policies away from well-rounded curriculum and towards a greater focus on business. “The programs and policies Ohio Excels is implementing are actually a way for corporations funding the program to ensure they will have a pool of workers fully conditioned to fit the needs of their companies right out of school,” writes Bacha.
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Andrade documented that protesters targeted worsening problems, including the nation’s increasing austerity, the “string of political interventions in the elections of new deans across federal institutions,” and the censorship of books, movies and plays.
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Low-income students and first-generation students often lack equal access to test preparation resources that benefit students of higher socio-economic status. Schools’ decisions to go test-optional may therefore benefit lower-income, first-generation, veteran and rural students.
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Hardware
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If you’re unfamiliar with it, DOSBox is an x86 emulator specializing in running PC DOS games (and, presumably, any PC DOS application). For many DOS-based titles, in fact, it may be the only way to run them on modern PCs, let alone Macs. Besides emulating old hardware like video cards and SoundBlasters sufficiently for games to run, one of its key features on supported platforms is dynamically recompiling x86 machine language for enhanced performance. Unfortunately, DOSBox on Power Macs, while it is still supported as of this writing (10.4 and up), runs x86 code strictly in an interpreter and as a result can be quite slow on low-spec systems. For certain games requiring 80486-level performance, only the G5 can realistically emulate those at any reasonable level, and even then uses a lot of CPU doing so or requires skipping some portion of frames to make the game at all playable.
Over on Vogons earlier this year one of the DOSBox contributors wrote up a PowerPC JIT for the dynrec core under Linux which was then ported to OS X. Like the TenFourFox JIT compiles JavaScript to PowerPC machine code, this patch compiles x86 machine code to PowerPC machine code and runs that instead of requiring labourious interpretation. There was briefly a build available on Dropbox with this JIT, which is currently not part of the DOSBox source tree, but that build can no longer be downloaded. So, I went ahead and reconstructed it against the current trunk (at the time I pulled it, r4301) along with a minor tweak and another of this developer’s big-endian fixes, and have tidied it up for download.
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Health/Nutrition
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“EPA is rewarding dirty slaughterhouses at the expense of the public.”
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A federal lawsuit filed Wednesday by the Cook County public guardian alleged that children as young as 7 were sexually abused, while others were injected with sedatives to control them and physically attacked, at a Chicago psychiatric hospital. Child welfare officials, meanwhile, allegedly worked with the hospital to cover up the abuse.
Charles Golbert, the Cook County public guardian, filed the lawsuit on behalf of seven children who are in the care of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services and who had been involuntarily admitted to Chicago Lakeshore Hospital in 2017 and 2018.
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After months of hearings and negotiations, millions of dollars in attack ads, full-court press lobbying efforts and countless rounds of negotiations, Congress appeared to be moving toward a solution to the nation’s surprise medical bill problem. Sort of.
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One critic said Rep. Richard Neal, the Democratic chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, is “actively helping private equity-owned doctor groups rip off and destroy the lives of people at their most vulnerable.”
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Transformation of our health care system to a more humane model based on health care as a human right, not profits and ability to pay would sharply reduce systemic and institutional racial disparities.
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On December 17, customs officials at Moscow’s Vnukovo airport announced that they had confiscated a large quantity of methadone. Methadone is endorsed by the United Nations as a therapeutic substance to combat heroin addiction, but its use is banned in Russia.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Starting today, Microsoft Teams is available for Linux users in public preview, enabling collaboration experiences for the open source community at work and in educational institutions. Users can download the native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats here.
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Today I received a link to a news article from Brazili where first-term state deputy Emerson Bacil of Jair Bolsonaro’s PS party is proposing to change a law that prefers Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) used by government over closed source, proprietary software. Mr. Bacil claims that this is necessary because the software is not “free”…it has maintenance and updating costs that have to be considered, and that free software vendors would not provide assistance at the level the government required.
Mr. Bacil thinks that the software should be chosen on a case-by-case basis depending on what is needed, including security and confidentiality.
The law, written in 2003, already allows this type of evaluation and selection to be done. If the entity selecting the software can prove that closed source software is demonstrated to be superior or less expensive, than it can be purchased. But the law requires that this comparison be done.
The law was first written because large closed-source software companies would visit purchasing agents and argue that “of course” the contract should be given to the company, often due to unproven claims of functionality or support, and often with no investigation of FOSS products or services which did the same thing. Often these large companies would “help” the purchasing agents outline “needs” which only their products could supply.
The 2003 law requires that the comparison and selection be done openly and fairly. If there was no comparison and justification than the purchaser broke the law. Not only can the purchasing agent be fired, they could be found guilty of breaking this law.
Weakening or eliminating the 2003 law would invite corruption, something that the PS party, and President Bolsonaro, have pledged to fight.
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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Every enterprise has its own set of challenges. You have a large business to run, while also navigating a changing market and evolving customer needs. And while technology can help address some obstacles, it is not a strategy by itself.
So many executives that I talk to get caught up in which technology to choose that they fail to realize the actual technology is, in many ways, the least important decision. During the next five years, the cloud native boom will entirely transform the foundations on which we build and rely every day — from company culture to developer workflow to product development.
If you have a well developed and forward-thinking strategy, it will make a tremendous difference in whether your organization rides this wave of success or becomes just another business wondering what could have been.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Purchasing devices that constantly monitor, track and record us for convenience or a sense of safety is laying the foundation for an oppressive future.
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The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the normally-secretive federal court based in Washington, D.C. that oversees much of the nation’s foreign intelligence surveillance programs, took an unusual step yesterday: it issued a public order chastising the FBI for its handling of the applications submitted to conduct surveillance of Carter Page, a former adviser to the Trump Campaign.
The FISC gave the FBI less than a month to report “what it has done, and plans to do, to ensure” that future surveillance applications “accurately and completely reflect[]” the facts the FISC needs to evaluate whether surveillance should be authorized. The FISC’s unusual public filing comes on the heels of the Department of Justice’s Inspector General report, released earlier this month, which reported a number of significant problems with the Page surveillance applications. The IG found that there were omissions and misstatements in the FBI’s applications to conduct surveillance—inaccuracies that went uncorrected, despite three subsequent renewals of the FBI’s surveillance order. In light of the problems with the Page application, the IG indicated it would conduct a more comprehensive review of FBI applications to the FISC.
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This didn’t take long. The Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s Trump campaign investigation had nothing positive to say about the FBI other than it sucked at its job. Unbelievably, this was better than the IG saying the FBI performed its job in a biased fashion as part of a concerted Deep State effort to prevent Trump from taking office. (Or from staying in it, I guess, since the prevention plan obviously didn’t work.)
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Amazon may have started out by selling books, but it is now getting heavily into the surveillance market. There are four main sectors where it is already working on solutions that pose risks to privacy. Three of them have been covered extensively in this blog before. They are: the home, with its Alexa devices; the street, where its Ring doorbell cameras are creating massive community surveillance systems; and police forces, with its cloud-based facial recognition system called “Rekognition”. The fourth sector where Amazon is using surveillance as the basis of its offerings is in retail. Although the idea of what came to be called Amazon Go was first revealed three years ago, the roll-out has been relatively sedate. Today there are a couple of dozen stores, with more planned. Amazon’s explanation of how these stores differ from conventional outlets is as follows:
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A federal judge ruled the United States government may confiscate proceeds NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden earned from the publication of his book, Permanent Record, as well as his speeches. The government accused Snowden of violating secrecy agreements he signed with the NSA and CIA when classified information was published that did not go through prepublication review.Judge Liam O’Grady in the Eastern District of Virginia declared [PDF], “Because there is no genuine dispute of material fact, that Snowden publicly disclosed the type of information and materials described above in Permanent Record and his speeches, the government is entitled to summary judgment.” Snowden exposed mass surveillance programs that violate or undermine the Constitution and brought attention to countless abuses by the NSA, as well as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The case, United States v. Marchetti, established the prepublication review process used currently by U.S. intelligence agencies to enforce secrecy. As described in a pending lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and Knight First Amendment Institute, in the 1970s, former CIA employees increasingly spoke out against the Vietnam War and other “executive branch abuses of power exposed and documented by the Church and Pike Committees.”
The courts ruled they could enforce a secrecy agreement signed by Victor Marchetti, a former CIA employee.Marchetti’s 1974 book, which was censored, denounced the “cult of intelligence.” He described the CIA as a “secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy.” And added, “The purpose of the cult is to further the foreign policies of the U.S. government by covert and usually illegal means, while at the same time containing the spread of its avowed enemy, communism.” CIA Director George H.W. Bush setup the Publications Review Board (PRB), and his successor, Stansfield Turner, expanded the board’s ability to ensure former employees complied with their secrecy agreements. In 1980, a divided Supreme Court ruled that the government could impose a “constructive trust on proceeds” earned by former CIA officer Frank Snepp, who published Decent Interval on the CIA in Vietnam without submitting it for review.Snowden argued the United States breached the secrecy agreements he signed by “indicating it would refuse to review Snowden’s materials in good faith and within a reasonable time.” Agencies have 30-60 working days by law to review books. Regardless of whether Snowden has a pending leak case against him that accuses him of violating the Espionage Act, they have to review any books, reports, or manuscripts he might submit. Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who submitted all three of his books to the PRB for approval, said he believes there is merit to Snowden’s argument that they would not review the book in a reasonable amount of time.
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A Ring account is not a normal online account. Rather than a username and password protecting messages or snippets of personal information, such as with, say, a video game account, breaking into a Ring account can grant access to exceptionally intimate and private parts of someone’s life and potentially puts their physical security at risk. Some customers install these cameras in their bedrooms or those of their children. Through an issue in the way a Ring-related app functions, Gizmodo found these cameras are installed all across the country. Someone with access can hear conversations and watch people, potentially without alerting the victims that they are being spied on. The app displays a user-selected address for the camera, and the live feed could be used to determine whether the person is home, which could be useful if someone were, for example, planning a robbery. Once [an attacker] has broken into the account, they can watch not only live streams of the camera, but can also silently watch archived video of people—and families—going about their days.
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These measures prohibit foreign companies from encrypting data so that it cannot be read by the Chinese central government and the Communist Party of China. Businesses will be required to turn over encryption keys. Companies will not be able to employ virtual private networks to keep data secret, and some believe they will no longer be allowed to use private servers.
Together, these measures allow Beijing to take all the data and communications of foreign companies.
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When Edward Snowden was a tyke in North Carolina in the mid-1980s, his father, an engineer in the Coast Guard, got a Commodore 64. One night little Ed saw him playing a rudimentary game in the den and he was instantly enthralled. After the family moved to the Beltway, his father set up a Compaq Presario 425 in the dining room. “From the moment it appeared, the computer and I were inseparable. If previously I’d been loath to go outside and kick around a ball, now the very idea seemed ludicrous.”
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Google has removed Avast and AVG extensions for Google Chrome from the Chrome Web Store following the user data concerns that made the headlines several times in the last couple of weeks.
The issue was brought to light by Wladimir Palant, the developer of Adblock Plus, one of the leading ad-blocking extensions for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
According to his findings, Avast and AVG extensions published in add-on stores collected information about users’ browsing habits, including data that would allow the security company to reproduce your browsing session.
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Defence/Aggression
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Unless grassroots action somehow stops it, it looks likely that the Trump scheme for a Space Force, a sixth branch of United States armed forces, will happen. The U.S. House of Representatives last week passed the $738 billion military policy bill that gives Trump his sought-for Space Force as he moves for what he terms “American dominance in space.”
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(Kinshasa) – Authorities in the Democratic Republic of Congo have not brought to justice those responsible for the massacres of ethnic Banunu in Yumbi territory one year ago.
On December 16 and 17, 2018, hundreds of ethnic Batende assailants killed at least 535 people and wounded 111 more, though the actual death toll is most likely much higher. The assailants also damaged, destroyed, and pillaged more than 1,500 houses as well as health centers, schools, and polling places, according to witnesses, the United Nations, and the Congolese government.
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The Washington Post’s publication of the “Afghanistan Papers” (12/9/19) unveiled over 2,000 pages of unpublished notes of interviews with US officials involved in the Afghanistan War, from a project led by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to investigate waste and fraud. Hailed by some as the “Pentagon Papers of Our Generation” after the Post won access to those documents under the Freedom of Information Act in a three-year legal battle, the Post’s exposé found that
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A spate of leaks from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international inspectorate created for the purpose of implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention, has raised serious questions about the institution’s integrity, objectivity and credibility. The leaks address issues pertaining to the OPCW investigation into allegations that the Syrian government used chemical weapons to attack civilians in the Damascus suburb of Douma on April 7, 2018. These allegations, which originated from such anti-Assad organizations as the Syrian Civil Defense (the so-called White Helmets) and the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), were immediately embraced as credible by the OPCW, and were used by the United States, France and the United Kingdom to justify punitive military strikes against facilities inside Syria assessed by these nations as having been involved in chemical weapons-related activities before the OPCW initiated any on-site investigation.
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Gunmen shot and killed two police officers escorting a polio vaccination team on Wednesday forcing a suspension of the immunization campaign in a district of northwest Pakistan, where the crippling disease is endemic.
Previous attacks have been inspired by religious hardliners spreading false rumors, and the latest ambush of a vaccination team comes at a time when the polio cases in Pakistan have jumped from 12 to over 100 in the last one year, making it only one of three countries in the world where the disease is endemic.
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The Moro War: It was “progress” all the way then, too.
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On December 16, a small arsenal of weapons was confiscated from the home of a large family in the northwestern Russian village of Khimozi. 47News reported that the weapons in the home were two Kalashnikov machine guns, one handheld Kalashnikov machine gun, two Kedr automatic weapons, and Makarov and TT pistols stored alongside bullets and bulletproof vests printed with the letters “FSB,” the acronym for Russia’s Federal Security Service. Anonymous sources told the business newspaper RBC that a grenade launcher was also found in the home. According to both 47News and 78.ru, police officers, employees of Russia’s Investigative Committee, Russian National Guard troops, Emergencies Ministry officials, and FSB officers were all active on the scene.
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Noting that studies of greenhouse gas emissions usually focus on how much energy and fuel civilians use, Neimark, Belcher, and Bigger wrote that US military emissions “tend to be overlooked in climate change studies.” Nevertheless, they reported, “Significant reductions to the Pentagon’s budget and shrinking its capacity to wage war would cause a huge drop in demand from the biggest consumer of liquid fuels in the world.”
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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The 15-page report, “Fashion’s Next Trend: Accelerating Supply Chain Transparency in the Apparel and Footwear Industry,” describes how dozens of brands and retailers are publicly disclosing information about their supplier factories. This has become a widely accepted step toward better identifying and addressing labor abuses in garment supply chains.
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Environment
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Yet rather than digging into the events of the past year or arguing for a particular set of policies or programs, On Fire makes the case for the Green New Deal by tracing the evolution of climate politics over the past decade. Setting the recent surge of GND momentum against ten years of Klein’s reporting — on the BP oil spill, the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipeline protests, and wildfires in British Columbia — serves as a reminder of how much it has taken to get to this point.
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The world has already warmed by 1.1 degrees compared to pre-Industrial Revolution levels. The IPCC believes that meeting the 1.5-degree target would require an extremely ambitious effort, requiring that the world halve its CO2 to roughly the level of 1979. And we would have to do so by 2030, just 10 years from now. It would also require that CO2 emissions be further reduced to zero by 2040. For the more realistic 2-degree target, CO2 emissions would have to be reduced by a quarter by 2030.
If both targets are missed, the only other possibility for a future with a climate that is still bearable would be for humanity to find a way to artificially extract hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere at extremely high costs, using large-scale technologies for which there are no guarantees that they will work.
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The United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) report, “The Production Gap,” stated: “Governments are planning to produce about 50% more fossil fuels by 2030 than would be consistent with limiting warming to 2°C and 120% more than would be consistent with limiting warming to 1.5°C.”
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Peltier’s speech followed shortly after students around the globe went on strike to call attention to climate change. Inspired by Greta Thunberg, the teenaged Swedish environmental activist who initiated a strike outside the Swedish Parliament while school was in session, young people from more than one hundred countries flooded the streets in order to increase awareness of what Thunberg calls a “climate crisis.”
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Prior to the UN Convention on Climate Change talks held in Madrid, the sense that tradition would assert itself was hard to buck. Weariness and frustration came in the wake of initial high minded optimism. Delegates spent an extra two days and nights attempting to reach a deal covering carbon reduction measures before the Glasgow conference in 2020. The gathering became the longest set of climate talks in history, exceeding the time spent at the 2011 Durban meeting by 44 hours.
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“We cannot simultaneously claim to fight climate change on one hand and enact climate-denying trade deals on the other.”
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What are opinion polls and what exactly do their outcomes signify?
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It’s hard to imagine a political party getting it any more wrong than the Greens NSW have in their handling of the sexual assault allegations levelled against Jeremy Buckingham. Chris Graham brings you the latest development.
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Admittedly, they help keep New Matilda out jail, so we’re hopelessly biased. But if you’re not following Marque Lawyers’ Twitter account, then you’re missing some of the most sublime burns in the social media stratosphere.
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“We are in a climate emergency,” said meteorologist Eric Holthaus.
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The analysis found that “exposure to toxic air, water, soil, and chemical pollution” causes 8.3 million premature deaths worldwide each year.
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By supporting women at all levels, from the village to the global stage, this vital perspective can inform the creation of robust, sustainable and effective solutions to our climate crisis.
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Energy/Mining
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Romanian and U.S. environmental justice activists demonstrated in Washington, DC, outside a World Bank tribunal hearing on a case brought by Canadian-based Gabriel Resources.
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The Formosa settlement victory sets a major legal precedent to advance other citizen lawsuits against polluters, requiring that the polluters (not taxpayers) pay for their messes.
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A few years ago its future looked dim, but new technology is offering Germany’s solar sector a fast new lease of life.
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The tax credit is meant to help offset the upfront cost of electric vehicles and boost the EV market. Consumers who purchase an EV can currently claim a credit up to $7,500, and the credit phases out once auto manufacturers sell 200,000 qualifying vehicles. Tesla and General Motors have both hit the 200,000-vehicle cap and had lobbied for an extension. A bipartisan proposal called for allowing a $7,000 credit for an additional 400,000 vehicles sold.
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New data about the 2018 incident sparks fresh warnings about the dangers of natural gas and renewed calls for a rapid transition to renewable energy.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Ranil Senanayake is the originator of the science and art of Analog Forestry, and founder of the Belipola Arboretum and the International Analog Forestry Network. He is respected as the foremost systems ecologist in Sri Lanka, and has lectured and worked throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In addition to scientific papers, he also writes for the local Sri Lankan press. His book “Clowns and Jokers” chronicles these writings for the last “thirty years of attempting to affect change in Sri Lanka.” [1] This fall, while the Amazon and the Congo and the Sri Lankan hill country forests all burned, I sat down with him in search of answers to the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced.
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Overpopulation
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Some suggest that the Paris climate agreement’s target for limiting global warming can be achieved only by stopping economic expansion. But there is ample room to change the quality of growth and significantly reduce its environmental impact without condemning billions of people to lives of deprivation.
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Finance
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“Taxman,” the only song written by George Harrison to open one of the Beatles’ albums (it featured on the band’s 1966 Revolver album), is a snarling, biting, angry commentary on government greed and how little control “we the taxpayers” have over our lives and our money.
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“In the richest country in the history of the world, we have an obligation to turn this around and make sure our kids live healthier and better lives than we do.”
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CHICAGO — Two decades ago, the Chicago Community Development Corp. rescued a run-down affordable housing apartment complex from the verge of foreclosure and promised tenants conditions would improve.
It was the kind of promise that low-income residents across the country often hear. But in this case, it seemed different. The company and its founder, Anthony Fusco, were the subject of numerous newspaper articles that hailed their work buying buildings like this one, renegotiating contracts with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and saving more than 2,000 apartment units in the process. A New York Times headline referred to one such building as a “Cinderella.”
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The Boeing executives and marketeers responsible for over-ruling Boeing engineers on the 737 MAX are still in charge of this very troubled aerospace company. Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg and the rubber-stamp Board of Directors, with two trophy ambassadors, are still running Boeing – thirteen months after the deadly 737 MAX crash in Indonesia and nine months after the deadly 737 MAX crash in Ethiopia that together took 346 lives. Boeing said in October that it would appoint a board member with deep air safety experience, but it has not happened yet. (Muilenburg is the only board member with an aeronautical engineering background)
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Neoliberal globalization has fueled the rise of right-wing nationalist leaders around the world — from Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro in the Western hemisphere, through Viktor Orbán and Boris Johnson in Europe, to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Narendra Modi in Asia.
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The U.K. election demonstrated the urgent need for grassroots organizing.
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“Not a good look for Larry Page.”
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Let the baggage handlers eat cake… but definitely don’t let them eat the airline meals, because we need them to be fit and healthy enough to shift our bags. Chris Graham reports.
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The obituaries for Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chair who died last Sunday at age 92, have been consistently echoing a truly heroic narrative. Between 1979 and 1987, as one prominent obit pronounced, Volcker’s bold and sweeping interest rate hikes shocked “the U.S. economy out of a cycle of inflation and malaise and so set the stage for a generation of prosperity.”
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“When it comes to giving the Pentagon $738 billion—even more money than it requested—there is a deafening silence within Congress and the ruling elites about what our nation can and cannot afford.”
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In a British election campaign overshadowed by Brexit, one important Labour initiative attracted little or no attention. Buried on page 60 of the party’s manifesto was a pledge to introduce a pilot scheme to explore Universal Basic Income (UBI), commonly defined as an unconditional cash transfer to all members of a political community, as a matter of right, without means-tests or work requirements. Giving few details, the manifesto described the program as an innovative way of responding to low pay and job insecurity. It marks the first time a major UK party expressed interest in UBI—though the commitment was echoed by the Green Party, which promised to implement the policy for all residents of the country by 2025.
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“Psychosocial risks are the great pandemic of this century and they are related to the precarious conditions of the labor market,” warns Ana García de la Torre, secretary of occupational health of Spain’s General Union of Workers (UGT).
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As predicted, the Republican plan signed into law in December of 2017 “only caters to the super-wealthy, historically white, corporate class.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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It would be an understatement to claim that Bougainville, that blighted piece of autonomous territory in Papua New Guinea, had been through a lot. Companies have preyed upon its environment with extractive hunger. Wars and civil strife have beset its infrastructure and economy. Some 900 kilometres from the PNG mainland, it has been what might be described as “a reluctant part” of that political compact, indigenously separate and stubborn.
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As in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, when writers would hold up a “mirror” for the instruction of princes; so too this essay is an admittedly speculative mirror held up to allegedly democratic republics to help them judge whether or not they are truly democratic and in what ways it could be said that they are truly republics.
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The scale of the Tory victory in the UK general election last week is known to all who read a half-decent newspaper or news site—the biggest Tory win since Mrs Thatcher’s success in 1987, and the biggest Labour loss since 1935.
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“Collins has toyed with Mainers long enough with her political games… We will not stop until she is unseated in November 2020.”
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Yet Sanders remains something of an ideological outlier among Democrats despite the fact that some of his signature ideas, such as his “Medicare for All” plan to replace private health insurance, have become much more mainstream than they were just a few years ago. And he continues to swear off the big-money donors who are helping propel some other candidates for the Democratic nomination, such as South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and former Vice President Joe Biden.
[...]
A recent Forbes list found that Sanders was the only candidate among the fields’ top tier, which also includes Biden, Buttigieg, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, to not have a single billionaire donor. According to Sanders and his campaign, this means that the senator is the true champion of the working class, relying almost exclusively on small donors while his opponents show open hands to the open wallets of the ultra-wealthy.
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A “vulture” hedge fund manager, charter school founder, and lawyer who represented Wall Street banks during the financial crisis were among the bundlers who were not previously disclosed.
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A new spending bill allotted the Department of Homeland Security’s cybersecurity agency more than $2 billion for fiscal 2020, a $334 million increase over last year for the year-old agency tasked with protecting federal networks and critical infrastructure from cyberattacks.
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“Most recently he decided … to send a completely unhinged letter to Nancy Pelosi filled with dozens of falsehoods, characteristically deranged capitalization, insults, historic self-pity, and incredible claims like the one about how he’s been treated worse than ‘those accused in the Salem Witch Trials.’ It’s the sort of document that itself makes the case that Trump is unfit for office, but which his staff, in all its infinite wisdom, apparently decided to let him put on White House letterhead and release for the world to see.”
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US Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) makes no bones about his position on the likely upcoming impeachment trial of US president Donald Trump. “I am trying to give a pretty clear signal I have made up my mind,” he tells CNN International’s Becky Anderson. “I’m not trying to pretend to be a fair juror here.”
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“If you thought the comparisons to Salem were perhaps misguided, we now have the Crucifixion itself.”
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“If my congressman, Jared Golden, votes for only one article of impeachment, I will work with all my might to see him defeated next year,” warned the famed novelist.
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“Today, to uphold my oath to Constitution and country, I will vote to impeach Donald J. Trump.”
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“This is what democracy looks like.”
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President Donald Trump is on the cusp of being impeached by the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives, with a historic vote set today on whether to formally accuse him of abusing his power in dealing with Ukraine to help himself politically, and then obstructing Congress by blocking their investigation. Trump lashed out directly at the vote on Tuesday, calling the proceedings to remove him from office an “attempted coup.” Should the House approve either of the articles of impeachment, the Republican-controlled Senate will hold a trial with all 100 senators acting as jurors, with a two-thirds supermajority — 67 votes — required to convict. Meanwhile, thousands of protesters in favor of impeaching Trump took to the streets Tuesday in cities across the country. On what many are calling “Impeachment Day,” we go to Capitol Hill to speak with Rep. Al Green of Texas, who was the first congressmember to call for President Trump’s impeachment from the floor of the House of Representatives in 2017.
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Now that House Democrats are holding an official inquiry into allegations that President Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, FiveThirtyEight is following how public opinion responds with an impeachment polling tracker.
And since we first launched our tracker on Oct. 2, we’ve updated it to break out the impeachment polls we’re collecting into three separate views: First, a view of all the polls we’re collecting; second, a view of polls that ask if respondents support Congress beginning an impeachment inquiry; and third, a view of polls that ask whether respondents think Trump should be impeached or impeached and removed from office. (The first would require a simple majority vote in the House while the second would also require two-thirds of the Senate to vote to convict.) Because the impeachment process includes multiple steps, we’ve tried to split up questions about each step to give you a fuller sense of where public opinion stands. We may add additional filters in the future if the questions pollsters ask — or voters’ opinions on them — begin to diverge.
In addition to tracking the polling averages for and against impeachment among all Americans, we are also keeping tabs on how opinion breaks down by party. As you can see below, Democrats are strongly in favor of impeachment, Republicans are strongly opposed and independents hover somewhere in between.
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A sample of the sights and sounds across Washington on a momentous day in Washington as the House lurches toward a Wednesday evening vote on two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump (all times local):
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President Donald Trump was impeached by the U.S. House of Representatives Wednesday night, becoming only the third American chief executive to be formally charged under the Constitution’s ultimate remedy for high crimes and misdemeanors.
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A watershed moment in history is upon us. Later today – probably after the sun sets and all the House members have spoken their piece – Donald Trump will almost certainly join Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton in the presidential impeachment club. Richard Nixon is an honorary member, though he slithered out of town like a septic snake before his impeachment ticket was officially punched.
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President Donald Trump woke up in the White House Wednesday morning and expressed utter disbelief that he will likely become just the third U.S. president to be impeached by the House of Representatives.
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“Every single Republican in the House of Representatives became an accomplice to Trump’s subversion of our democracy. By failing to impeach Donald Trump, GOP lawmakers showed their blind loyalty to their party and to a corrupt president—and history will remember them for the cowards they are.”
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“Bernie Sanders’ willingness to criticize Israel, his support for Palestinian rights—these are not anti-Semitic.”
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Progressives are taking the initiative to destroy and defeat accusations that Sen. Bernie Sanders, a frontrunner for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, is running or at the least tolerating an anti-Semitic primary campaign—accusations that come while the right-wing sharpens its knives for the Vermont senator as he rises in the polls.
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The 2020 elections are significant for many reasons. But perhaps most importantly this could be the last hurrah for the Silent Generation, those born between 1924 and 1944, and it is also the beginning of the end of the Baby Boomer era of politics. What the passing of these two generations may mean for American politics is potentially dramatic, especially as it bodes in the next decade a possible dramatic shift to the left in America.
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It looks like the media might finally have to take Sanders seriously.
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He has decided the presidency is above the law, as well as beyond the reach of Congress and courts.
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“It is our considered judgment that if President Trump’s misconduct does not rise to the level of impeachment, then virtually nothing does.”
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“Those marching in the streets will send a clear message to Congress: Voters are watching, and we will remember who shows more loyalty to Donald Trump and the Republican Party than to the Constitution and their oath of office.”
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Speaker Pelosi: when the Impeachment Resolution is passed, do not send it immediately to the Senate. Withhold it instead until the court cases are settled, until Don McGahn and others are forced to respond to their subpoenas, until the President is forced to submit his tax returns, until all the evidence has come to the surface and makes an airtight case to remove him from office.
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“The Attorney General,” says president of Common Cause, “has repeatedly proven unwilling to put the interests of the nation before those of the man who appointed him and he must be removed from office before he does more harm to the nation.”
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Slavoj Zizek has a very specific definition of the Trump fetish. For Freud, the fetish was the last thing the boy sees before he finds out the girl has no penis. For left-liberals, Trump is the last thing they see before they see working-class struggle. How does a fetish function? Rather than deal with what is true and terrifying, we deal with an entity we can grasp, hold and even disavow. Zizek argues that Trump’s election proves there is a class struggle.
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Speaking before Sheldon Adelson’s Israeli-American Council the other day, Trump took a shot at Jewish Americans who he says don’t “love Israel enough.”
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This was an election of two illusions.
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Thursday’s UK General election effectively spells the end of British politics as we know it. All that remains is to catalogue events as what is left of the British state and its constituent institutions are rapidly disassembled and the marrow picked clean from their bones. The cackling, mop-topped ghoul that is Boris Johnson is the ideal figure to preside over the death of the Britain. A return of the madness of King George without the humanizing qualities – Johnson is a leader, much like Donald Trump is to America, who embodies all the negative national stereotypes about the English and none of the good ones.
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Trump’s policies are making life harder for Cuba’s 10 million people.
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Warning of 2020 impact, one critic said Georgia could remain a red state solely “due to the GOP purposefully denying people the right to vote.”
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These individuals—including former CIA Director John Brennan, who is now a national security and intelligence analyst for NBC News; Jim Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence, and now a CNN analyst; and Fran Townsend, a former homeland security advisor to George W. Bush who appears as security analyst on CBS News—act as spokespersons for their former employers under the guise of reliability and truthfulness. Their public influence casts is bolstered by their credentials as former intelligence and security officials.
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In order to have a revolutionary process, it is necessary to go through revolutionary stages. First, what’s needed is a raised consciousness that may trigger some outrage by a sector of society which may subsequently grow into sustained protests. The protests might gather a critical mass with the support of the general population and turn into general strikes. If the popular movement becomes large enough to impact the economy and the normal functioning of the government, and if the movement is able to seize critical institutions of the government and civil society under a strong and trusted political leadership, then we may have the foundations on which to build a Revolution.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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In Mike’s piece about Greg Doucette’s lawsuit against the Sons of Confederate Veterans for abusing the DMCA, he suggests that the lawsuit might not belong in the Northern District of California. I thought it worth exploring why it might very much belong here, because those reasons may apply to most other DMCA Section 512(f) jurisprudence as well.
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The Washington Post’s Erik Wemple (who, for reasons I’ve never understood, always refers to himself as “The Erik Wemple Blog,” which is really annoying for readers), had a truly bizarre article recently about Devin Nunes’ defamation lawsuit against CNN, in which Wemple suggests that maybe this Nunes lawsuit is “halfway decent.” It is not. As we discussed in our own post about the lawsuit, this one may be his worst one yet and has little chance of surviving.
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When the NAFTA replacement “USMCA” agreement was first announced last year, we noted that it included a mix of good and bad ideas. The key good idea was that the USMCA contained a bit of language establishing a requirement for strong intermediary liability protections, similar to (but not exactly the same as) Section 230′s protections in the US. Among the really bad ideas was expanding the data protection term for biologics — which, we’ve noted, is really dangerous for basic science and innovation for new drugs — but was supported by big pharmaceuticals to increase their monopoly power and ability to extract monopoly rents.
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Three sources told the BBC Russian Service that Moscow City Hall demanded that the rappers “Timati” (Timur Yunusov) and “Guf” (Alexey Dolmatov) delete a music video they published this September, on the eve of hotly contested local elections.
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Moscow police officers have arrested Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina, the activist and musician told MBK Media.
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I know that it’s become hip and cool for folks in Washington DC to attack Section 230 lately. This is true on both sides of the traditional political aisle, as hating on 230 is a sort of wink-and-a-nod gesture that means “I, too, hate big tech.” This is the case, even though the reasons given for ripping apart 230 are often self-contradictory or simply wrong. None of that matters. All that matters is showing the world that you are part of the “anti-big tech tribe.” The latest to join? Attorney General William Barr. In a speech to the National Association of Attorneys General, Barr devoted some time to hating on 230.
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Today is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, an annual observation supported by and dedicated to those that participate in the sex trade. It’s also nearly the end of 2019—the first full calendar year since Congress passed the Internet censorship law SESTA/FOSTA. EFF fought the bill in Congress, concerned that its vague, ambiguous language and stiff criminal and civil penalties would drive constitutionally protected content off the Internet. And we represent organizations and individuals that are challenging the law in federal court. Activists and organizers from within the sex working community made it clear from the beginning as well: though this bill was intended to curb violence that occurs in the sex trade, its result would be just the opposite because it deprived a community of many of the online tools they used to stay safe and to organize. 2019 has brought us the unfortunate statistics to prove that they were right.
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Democratic presidential hopefuls Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren appear to be reconsidering their votes for a 2018 package of laws known as SESTA-FOSTA that is widely criticized by activists and the media for shutting down websites that sex workers use to screen clients and make their lives much safer.
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For much of the last decade, oppressive regimes like Iran have made ample noise about wanting to cut themselves off from the internet. Much like Russia, Iran isn’t keen on this whole factual reality and free speech thing, so they’ve repeatedly floated the idea of severing Iranian internet access and replacing it with a local intranet — one that’s far easier to filter, censor, and otherwise disable during times of pesky democratic protest. You know, like last month, when at least 180 Iranian citizens protesting oil price hikes in Tehran were brutally murdered.
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Last week, as you may recall, we wrote about a bizarre situation in which print-on-demand t-shirt maker, Teespring (who we had happily used for most of our t-shirts for years), had taken down our “Copying Is Not Theft” t-shirt, first claiming that it was infringing on someone else’s work (it was not). When we escalated the issue (as per their instructions), we were suddenly told it had nothing to do with infringement (despite the initial email) but because it violated their Acceptable Use Policies — which, again, I assure you, we did not.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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“Everything is dangerous here—the cold, the place I sleep, the fights. I don’t feel safe.”
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“On this historic day, New Jersey has lifted… 83,000 ghosts of democracy out of the shadows.”
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People in New York and New Jersey are celebrating two victories for immigrants’ rights. In New York, thousands of undocumented people waited in line for hours at Departments of Motor Vehicles on Monday to apply for a driver’s license, as the “Green Light Law” went into effect six months after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo signed it. The law allows undocumented people to apply for a driver’s license using alternative forms of identification instead of providing a Social Security Number. Meanwhile, in the neighboring state of New Jersey, state lawmakers also passed a bill Monday to allow undocumented people to apply for driver’s licenses. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has already said he’ll quickly sign the bill, benefiting nearly 500,000 undocumented people in the state who are eligible to drive. Fourteen other states, including Delaware and California, also allow undocumented people to apply for a driver’s license. We speak with Yaritza Mendez, associate director of organizing at Make the Road New York, who helped push the state’s new Green Light Law. We’re also joined by Haydi Torres, an organizer with Movimiento Cosecha, which led the push to pass a New Jersey bill granting driver’s licenses to undocumented people, and David Cuautle, a 9-year-old who testified in front of the New Jersey state Assembly Judiciary Committee.
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Russian police have reportedly raided the home and several businesses of Ingush billionaire Mikhail Gutseriyev. The Telegram channel Mash was the first news outlet to report the searches, though Gutseriyev later denied the information in an interview with the television station REN-TV, calling the news a defamation attempt.
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One of the unfortunate calamities of India’s historical past is that today religio-cultural tensions continue to sharpen divisions along communal lines in the country.
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Tens of thousands in India are protesting a discriminatory citizenship law embraced by the Bharatiya Janata Party-led government on December 12.
At the forefront of these protests are students from across India’s universities who have gathered to sing songs, wave placards, and shout slogans. While some may have taken part in violence – burning buses and damaging public property – many peaceful protesters have been met with police using brutal and excessive force.
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Aisha al-Shater, 39, has been detained for over a year in solitary confinement. Authorities have failed to provide her with sufficient medical care.
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Despite heavy cooperation with federal authorities, Tekashi 6ix9ine is still going to prison on a raft of criminal charges.
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Ásta Guðrún Helgadóttir is a former Pirate Party member of the Icelandic parliament who currently serves as a digital policy advisor to a member of the European parliament. She’s known online for her passion for the Internet and digital policy, as well as her love of golden retrievers.
I first met Ásta at conference in Croatia in 2013, where we bonded over our shared interests in dogs, and in the censorship of sexual content on the Internet. In a recent video chat (with a dog in the background, naturally), we discussed a topic near and dear to my—and Asta’s—heart: The hypocrisy that progressive governments display when they proclaim a belief in free expression while simultaneously enacting regulations that have undermined the expression of their citizens.
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The man who called neo-Nazis “very fine people” has no business defining anti-Semitism for the rest of us.
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The Trump administration relentlessly targets immigrant communities and ICE continues to exploit state and local resources, including databases, to act as force multipliers for immigration enforcement.
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Marking a big win for privacy and immigrant rights, the California Department of Justice (CADOJ) has cut off deportation agents from access to the state’s law enforcement network.
Earlier this year, the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was required to sign an agreement that its officers wouldn’t use certain sensitive California databases for immigration enforcement operations. In an email, a CADOJ representative confirmed that ICE ERO refused to sign the new agreement and lost access to the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System (CLETS) on October 15, 2019.
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As debate – and memes – continue to rage about Mildura’s most famous couple, ‘Racist Rob’ and ‘KKK-Karen’, attention has begun to swing further north… much further north, where the sun is brighter and the necks, they say, are quite a bit redder.
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The Democrats are pursuing two charges in their impeachment of Donald Trump: First, that the president tried to enlist Ukraine’s help for his own political gain. And second, that he’s continued to obstruct Congress in its investigation into this abuse of power.
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Part of what makes me a great fit for Google is that the company is always telling us to take initiative to deliver high impact work. Recently Google was forced to post a list of rights that we have in the workplace. So when I heard that Google had hired a union busting firm and started illegally retaliating against my coworkers, I decided to make sure that my coworkers knew about the posting.
I created a little notification, only a few lines of code, that pops up in the corner of the browser whenever my coworkers visited the union busters’ website or the community guidelines policy. The notification said: “Googlers have the right to participate in protected concerted activities.”
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“If this is what happens when a group of attorneys and reporters are looking, imagine what happens when they are not.”
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The Donald J. Trump’s indifference to human rights, law, and basic morality was on display again in December 2019.
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The report by Democracy Now! featured Colorado’s secretary of state, Jena Griswold. Griswold told Democracy Now! that Colorado offers same-day voter registration. “So an eligible person can literally go to the polls today, register to vote and cast their ballot.”
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By law that children should not be held in custody by Border Patrol for more than 72 hours. Beyond that time, detained children are supposed to be transferred to custody of the Department of Health and Human Services, and either reunified with family in the US or another caregiver.
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Under the 1949 Geneva Convention on the treatment of Occupied populations, it is a war crime for Israel to impose collective punishment on all Palestinians in Gaza to get at Hamas.
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San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has bolstered its European policy work with the hiring of two important new staffers: Icelandic poet, artist, and free expression activist Birgitta Jónsdóttir, and European Internet policy expert Christoph Schmon.Birgitta Jonsdottir, EFF’s first Internet Archive Fellow, will be working across Europe as an advocate for the public interest Internet, focusing on protecting and balancing online speech, privacy, and innovation. In her years of activism in Iceland’s Parliament for the parties she co-founded, the Civic Movement and Pirate Party in Iceland, she championed for democracy in the digital era, with special focus on making Iceland into a digital safe haven for freedom of expression, freedom of information and speech and the right to privacy both online and off. Birgitta’s role is financially supported by one of the strongest examples of the public interest Internet: the Internet Archive, the non-profit digital library that aims to provide “universal access to all knowledge.”
“Digital rights are human rights. People around the world must work together to protect privacy, transparency, and free expression,” said Birgitta.
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As Bragg reported, the state of Mississippi has a terrible history of racial discrimination—including its legacy as the state with the most known lynchings—that has been compounded by laws dating back to 1946, during the Jim Crow era, that permit children as young as 13 to be prosecuted as adults.
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However, SFPD’s data show that more than ten times as many black people as white people per capita were targets of use of force and arrests.
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Ken Armstrong of ProPublica and Christian Sheckler of the South Bend Tribune have uncovered more pseudoscience cops rely on to put people behind bars. It’s called SCAN, and it’s the creation of Avinoam Sapir.
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Oregon’s Supreme Court threw local law enforcement for a loop by removing the pretext from “pretextual stop.” The ruling handed down late last month went further than the US Supreme Court’s Rodriguez decision. The SCOTUS decision simply said traffic stops can’t be extended without reasonable suspicion. When a citation or warning is handed out, the stop ends.
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No one who was cognizant during the 2000 election will ever forget it. Hanging chads, pregnant chads, dimpled chads. Butterfly ballots. Men in suits. Nepotism. Voter purges. Bush v Gore.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Buried underneath the blistering hype surrounding fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a quiet but growing consensus: the technology is being over-hyped, and early incarnations were rushed to market in a way that prioritized marketing over substance. That’s not to say that 5G won’t be a good thing when it arrives at scale several years from now, but early offerings have been almost comical in their shortcomings. AT&T has repeatedly lied about 5G availability by pretending its 4G network is 5G. Verizon has repeatedly hyped early non-standard launches that, when reviewers actually got to take a look, were found to be barely available.
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When Steve Beshear was governor of Kentucky, he told experts to go fuck themselves and instead allowed the Australian investment bank Macquarie Capital to manage Kentuckywired, a program to build out broadband to rural Kentuckians.
Four years later, the project is massively overbudget, massively behind schedule, and state auditor Mike Harmon just released a report blaming the delays and overages on the decision of Beshear and his cronies to sideline experts and go with the bankers. The total bill is expected to be some $1.5b. During the time in which Beshear was ignoring expert advisors, Frank Lassiter, husband of Beshear’s cabinet secretary, took a high-paid consulting gig for Macquarie.
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San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) today said a private equity firm newly created by domain name industry insiders should be stopped from acquiring the .ORG domain registry, which provides a home on the Internet to thousands of public interest nonprofits organizations.EFF joins groups ranging from the Girl Scouts and the League of Women Voters, to Farm Aid and Meals On Wheels, and other organizations working in the public interest around the world in the arts, culture, the environment, race, and poverty, in opposing the sale.EFF this week called on the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to halt a transaction that puts nonprofit organizations at risk of censorship and financial exploitation. EFF also provided to ICANN a petition signed by over 500 nonprofit groups from around the world, plus thousands of Internet users, all voicing opposition to the $1.1 billion sale.In a sneaky attempt to wrest control over the lucrative .ORG registry, Ethos Capital, a new private equity firm that lists two employees on its website and has no track record in public interest work, announced it would acquire Public Interest Registry (PIR). PIR is itself a nonprofit that, as a subsidiary of the nonprofit Internet Society, has for the past 17 years overseen the registry used by millions of organizations large and small.“We are concerned that PIR may wield the threat of domain suspension to influence the political, social, religious, journalistic, or personal expression of .ORG registrants and their users at the request of corporations or governments,” EFF said in the letter.
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In what will probably be the 3rd best blog post I write this year, I’d like to make a case for why the parkrun.com website needs to update one of their JS dependencies (and I guess anyone else using it).
Let me set the stage: in Bug 1388931, Rick Byers filed a bug asking Gecko to consider removing the SVGPathSeg interfaces (see (1)(2) if you love reading old specs and (3) if you love seeing things get ripped out of specs), as Chrome successfully removed them in late 2015.
Some people weren’t (aren’t?) happy about this, and some sites and apps were broken. e.g., svg-edit. But a polyfill was created and it seems to be pretty actively maintained, and that generally seems OK (though polyfills are rarely perfect).
OK, now the stage is set for the rest of this amazing blog post.
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The Internet Museum translated to Swedish becomes “internetmuseum“. It is a digital, online-only, museum that collects Internet- and Web related historical information, especially focused on the Swedish angle to all of this. It collects stories from people who did the things. The pioneers, the ground breakers, the leaders, the early visionaries. Most of their documentation is done in the form of video interviews.
I was approached and asked to be part of this – as an Internet Pioneer. Me? Internet Pioneer, really?
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Monopolies
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One of the most important recent developments in the world of diabetes has been the arrival of relatively low-cost continuous blood glucose monitors. These allow people with diabetes to take frequent readings of their blood sugar levels without needing to use painful finger sticks every time. That, in turn, allows users to fine-tune their insulin injections, with big health benefits for both the short- and long-term. The new devices can be read by placing a smartphone close to them. People use an app that gathers the data from the unit, which is typically placed on the back of the upper arm with an adhesive.
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“The future of our democracy shouldn’t be left to the whims of a few reckless billionaire CEOs and their dangerous corporate empires.”
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On Tuesday—in the midst of the most dangerous week of the year for Amazon warehouse workers—former employees, labor activists, and politicians protested high injury and production rates outside the new Queens distribution center, which opened in July, as well as the anticipated opening of two additional distribution centers in Queens and the Bronx.
“Amazon opened this warehouse in the dark of the night without community input,” Jessica Ramos, a state senator from New York’s 13th district, where the newest distribution center is located, told Motherboard at the protest. “We really want the workers here to understand the red flags about working with Amazon directly from people who’ve worked here.”
“It’s not that we don’t want jobs,” Ramos continued. “It’s that we want these jobs to be good paying jobs where workers have a voice at the table when it comes to health and safety, and where they’re recognized formally.”
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Trademarks
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This very morning, I paid $5 for a breakfast burrito at a place near where I work. To be frank, I regret to say that it was ultimately disappointing. How in the world do you construct a steak breakfast burrito that lacks salt? The great news for me is that there are roughly a gazillion places around me that also advertise breakfast burritos, so I currently have other places to get them. The bad news, however, is that someone out there is taking a run at trademarking “breakfast burrito”, so that might not be the case in the future.
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Copyrights
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A web-series dedicated to debunking myths surrounding copyright and copying has run into trouble. The latest episode, “The Creativity Delusion: Geniuses Steal”, uses video and audio snippets to show how great inventors and artists base their work on the creations of others. Unfortunately, YouTube’s ContentID system has hit the video with four complaints, including one, ironically, over the use of the track Blurred Lines.
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Internet provider Cox Communications is currently on trial, where several major music companies accuse it of not doing enough to curb piracy. Now that both parties have presented their arguments, the ISP is asking the court to step in, instead of leaving crucial piracy liability questions up to the jury.
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As the U.S. Justice Department prepares to take legal action against Live Nation, U.S. Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) attacked what she called a “broken ticketing industry.”
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In 2015, cellist Zoë Keating suffered tragedy when her husband and business partner of 17 years died. Despite the loss, there wasn’t even the thought in Keating’s mind of ending her indie music career.
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We were just discussing the deafening silence coming from two of the most prolific copyright trolls in federal courts, Malibu Media and Strike 3 Holdings. While both trolls had set a record-breaking pace for the better part of this year, both also suddenly went mostly silent over the last couple of months. As we indicated in that post, Strike 3 specifically appears to have simply moved its operations to Florida state courts. While we were not totally sure why that would be at the time of the last post, we had a theory.
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The streaming service Twitch has deleted copies of English Premiere League matches that had previously drawn a copyright challenge from Rambler.
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Posted in Deception, FUD, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 6:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Perception management operations ‘on the cheap’ (mere ‘slush funds’ to Microsoft)
Summary: The Register (or El Reg) is becoming more of a Microsoft megaphone again; it all makes sense if one goes back a decade and a half to their Microsoft partnership (preceded by a lot of harsh criticisms of Microsoft)
THE VARIOUS “Linux” podcasts have more lately spoken quite a bit about “WSL”; it seems like a coordinated charm offensive, facilitatef partly by Microsoft and partly by Canonical. Similarly, in recent days we saw Red Hat pushing .NET quite a few times and some Python podcasts had Microsoft as guests. It’s very clear Microsoft tries to dominate the discussion in order to push Windows, Visual Studio, GitHub, Azure and so on.
“It’s very clear Microsoft tries to dominate the discussion in order to push Windows, Visual Studio, GitHub, Azure and so on.”“The Register on “Microsoft Linux”,” one reader wrote to us last night, is a trend worth taking stock of. “We would be familiar with the typical Microsoft strategy,” he explained. “In this case, “partner” with a Linux company, generate some mindshare goodwill, then make sure the Linux subsystem isn’t any use and will only run on Windows.”
He cited yesterday’s article about “multipass” — a project Canonical released on… Microsoft GitHub. And guess whose agenda the article promotes….
As our reader put it (somewhat rudely): “What the fuck was Canonical thinking in ‘partnering’ with the borg?”
“No, we haven’t missed the irony of Microsoft lovers with virtually no history in GNU/Linux development taking the ‘lead’ on this.”He also took note of Canonical’s decision to give Microsoft money for WSL’s propaganda outlet. We alluded to this before.
“This is what Lenin refereed to supporters of Soviet-ism in the west “useful idiots”,” our reader asserted, pointing to some of the culprits (we’ll try to keep this impersonal and therefore redact some bits).
No, we haven’t missed the irony of Microsoft lovers with virtually no history in GNU/Linux development taking the ‘lead’ on this. Nor have we overlooked their disdain for GNU/Linux and tacit support for Microsoft's patent blackmail against GNU/Linux. This is what WSL is. These are the people who take the lead! The managers…
Back to our reader: “Censorship at The Register” has meanwhile been claimed as well. They apparently censor a lot of comments that don’t suit the narrative Microsoft wants. “Do an article on what advertising revenue (bribery) The Register gets from Microsoft, same with ZDNet and the rest,” the reader said.
“They apparently censor a lot of comments that don’t suit the narrative Microsoft wants.”We actually wrote a lot about that in the past. Heck, we have a whole wiki page with articles about ZDNet — a site I repeatedly encourage people to boycott (nowadays it’s managed by a Microsoft fan, not even a closeted one, who writes clickbait as headlines and we know for whose agenda).
Our reader is certainty aware. It’s difficult not to notice.
“I have a new slogan for The Register,” he said. “The Register, whatever you do, don’t mention ‘MICROSOFT’. I’m afraid the Reg has gone bad for a long time. The only time you read about Linux is in relation to the MICROSOFT Linux sub-system, or Linux in relation to malware, but when it’s on Windows then it’s referred to as “banking” malware, else they keep pushing ‘cloud’ solutions.”
A lot of their “Linux” or “FOSS” coverage (more so nowadays) comes from Microsoft Tim, just like Microsoft Peter (the pedophile) at Ars Technica up until his arrest. Their whole “Open Source” section was nothing except Microsoft lies and marketing. Literally all of it was just that when he was arrested. Need we mention that Ars Technica UK was — by admission/confession made to me by its editor — funded by Microsoft? Guess what dominated that site until it perished…
But let’s go back to The Register. Microsoft Tim’s case merits a post of his own. It’s like Microsoft took journalistic authority over “Linux” and “FOSS”. It calls the shots and sets the tone/narrative at The Register. Another person who once had this role, Ashley Vance, is nowadays doing propaganda pieces for Microsoft at even larger publishers (like some mythical Arctic vault — basically fake news that helped distract from ICE controversies).
The reader suggested doing this search or that search. Find a negative article below…
Need we remind readers that back in the old days The Register was renowned for Microsoft criticism?
Then Microsoft struck a partnership with The Register (yes, money involved).
“I’ve also noticed it’s hard to find announcements of Bill Gates bribes (payments for particular publishes) — which they openly disclose initially — because they’re once paid they’re googlebombing the relevant search phrases with puff pieces (paid-for lies).”We would need to unearth that old article about the El Reg-Microsoft partnership. “Probably found in the 2003 or 2004 series,” an associate of ours recalls, “but just as an announcement… not necessarily a main article.”
These things are hard to find after all these years. I’ve also noticed it’s hard to find announcements of Bill Gates bribes (payments for particular publishes) — which they openly disclose initially — because they’re once paid they’re googlebombing the relevant search phrases with puff pieces (paid-for lies). It’s a real problem and it goes beyond advertising money. In the past we also showed examples of Bill Gates paying publishers critical of him and of Microsoft; soon afterwards they deleted all those past articles. It seemed rather clear what they were paid for. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Captain Campinos goes to Zimbabwe. African countries aren’t even listed as top applicants, so it’s more about reinforcing ‘European [patent] supremacy’ in Africa (with virtually nothing for Africans to gain).
Summary: Africans are once again targeted by the man whose father was born in Africa (Portuguese colonialism) to reinforce colonialism, this time using patent monopolies
WE HAVE certainly deviated somewhat from the topic of software patents in Europe, seeing all sorts of abuses that are connected to that or facilitate those patents, e.g. the UPC.
“We mean no disrespect to Africa, but objectively speaking Africa does not account for many European Patents.”The European Patent Office (EPO) is once again signing deals for António Campinos photo ops, agreements being signed with places that have virtually no European Patents. The latest example is “EPO and ARIPO sign agreement on Reinforced Partnership” (warning: epo.org link) and to quote:
In an effort to enhance international co-operation in order to strengthen the global patent system, the EPO has signed a Reinforced Partnership agreement with the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO). Under the Memorandum of Understanding, signed on 16 December by EPO President António Campinos and ARIPO Director General Fernando dos Santos in Zimbabwe, the EPO will support ARIPO in building up its capacity to efficiently search and examine patent applications that are validated in its member states.
We mean no disrespect to Africa, but objectively speaking Africa does not account for many European Patents. Calculating the sums and percentages is possible (open data); it only takes time. Battistelli did the same kinds of things, usually in former French colonies. Campinos is hardly different from him.
For over a decade we’ve repeatedly argued that Africa stands to gain little or nothing (or only lose) from acceptance of these Western orders — a system of codified (into law) protectionism, monopolisation etc. ARIPO is likely more of a Western construct (originally) than a truly African entity, working to advance African interests. For natural resources Africa is the world’s ‘warehouse’ or ‘bank’ (it should be noted that China too — not just ‘the West’ — exploits the continent and uses debt as an extraction and oppression tool). This view is actually not controversial at all; there are two types of people — those who speak about the matters and those who don’t.
“For over a decade we’ve repeatedly argued that Africa stands to gain little or nothing (or only lose) from acceptance of these Western orders — a system of codified (into law) protectionism, monopolisation etc.”As readers are aware, Breton is now a Commissioner in the EU and it seems rather obvious he’d support the UPC as well as software patents. Having just published part 19 of the Thierry Breton series, we’re ready to finish it all by year’s end. “The project fell behind schedule as a lot of new material was uncovered,” said the authors, “especially about Breton’s current political patron, Emmanuel Macron.”
There’s lots more to come.
“The series has now been expanded to 24 parts in total,” the authors noted. “To round things off, there will be one further installment in the form of an epilogue.”
We now focus on financial aspects, which are inherent in the patent system. Breton’s connections to patents and the EPO are very much noteworthy. His role in the EU is widely viewed (by very many) as a form of corporate colonialism, turning democracy into governance by corporations. █
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Posted in Europe, Finance at 2:07 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Overview
Understanding Thierry Breton
Epilogue will follow.
The Rothschild family motto: Concord, Integrity and Industry
Summary: Macron has never made any secret of his Rothschild connections
After graduating from the ENA in 2004, Macron started off his career as a senior civil servant in the Inspection Générale des Finances (IGF), an elite corps within the Ministry for the Economy and Finance whose members are recruited from the highest-ranking ENA graduates.
In 2007, he had his first taste of the limelight as deputy rapporteur on the “Commission to Unleash French Growth”, a cross-party commission on economic reform convened by the newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy who charged it with studying “the bottlenecks that constrain growth”.
Macron (right), in 2007 as part of the cross-party Attali commission set up to look at ways to boost French economic growth
The commission was chaired by the Algerian-born Jacques Attali, an economic and social theorist, writer, political adviser and senior civil servant, who had served as a counsellor to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991 and was the first head of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in 1991-1993.
“After graduating from the ENA in 2004, Macron started off his career as a senior civil servant in the Inspection Générale des Finances (IGF)…”But the ambitious young Énarque was growing restless and starting to get bored with his nine-to-five civil service job.
In 2008, he paid €50,000 to buy himself out of his government contract so that he could move to the private sector.
It wasn’t just any old job that Emmanuel had set his sights on. He joined the prestigious investment bank Rothschild & Cie where he worked on mergers and acquisitions from 2008 to 2012 and acquired the sobriquet of the “Mozart of Finance”.
Between 2008 and 2012 Macron pursued a short but highly lucrative career at Rothschild & Cie
The French branch of the Rothschild financial dynasty was founded in Paris in 1812 by James Mayer de Rothschild who was sent there from his home in Frankfurt, Germany, by the patriarch, Mayer Amschel Rothschild. In collaboration with the other branches of the family, the French branch soon rose to prominence in the world of international finance.
“In 2007, he had his first taste of the limelight…”Over the years, the family’s fortunes have flowed and ebbed with the tide of political events. For example, the interests of all Rothschild family branches across Europe were adversely impacted to a significant degree by the popular uprisings of 1848, the Great Depression of the 1930s and the rise of anti-Jewish resentments followed by World War II.
In the 1930s, their substantial railroad holdings were nationalized by the French government and after the fall of France 1940 the Nazis confiscated the Paris bank.
The bank was restored to family ownership at the end of the war but in 1981 it was once again removed from their hands, this time following nationalisation by the Socialist government of President François Mitterrand.
“But the ambitious young Énarque was growing restless and starting to get bored with his nine-to-five civil service job.”It was only after the Socialists lost power in 1986 that the Rothschilds managed to obtain a new banking license in France.
In 1987 Baron David René de Rothschild joined by other family members including cousin Eric de Rothschild created a successor company, Rothschild & Cie Banque.
Capitalised at a mere $ 1 million and starting with just three employees, they rapidly expanded their operation into a major player in France and continental Europe.
“Macron’s share of the fees on this € 9 billion deal made him a millionaire.”According to French media reports, Macron was head-hunted by François Henrot, one of David de Rothschild’s most trusted associates, on the recommendation of Jacques Attali and Alain Minc — another Énarque and former Inspecteur des Finances.
After working on the recapitalization of the newspaper Le Monde and the acquisition of Siemens IT Solutions and Services by Atos in 2010 / 2011, Macron was promoted to a partner.
Soon afterwards, he was appointed as managing director and put in charge of Nestlé’s acquisition of one of Pfizer’s largest subsidiaries, its infant food unit. Macron’s share of the fees on this € 9 billion deal made him a millionaire.
The “Mozart of Finance” got a good return on the € 50,000 he invested to buy himself out of his civil service contract
According to a French media report published in 2014, an official declaration of financial interests filed by Macron as Minister for the Economy revealed that he had earned € 2.4 million at Rothschild over a period of 18 months.
Macron’s connections to the Rothschilds go beyond purely financial affairs.
Both he and his wife are often seen rubbing shoulders at social events with senior members of the banking dynasty such as his old boss David de Rothschild and cousin, Eric, chair of the Rothschild Archive Trust.
Macron with Eric de Rothschild in April 2017 during the presidential election campaign
The Macrons are regular guests of David de Rothschild at the annual dinner organised by CRIF, an umbrella organisation of French Jewish associations.
Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron with David de Rothschild at the 2018 CRIF annual dinner
Brigitte Macron having a good old giggle with David de Rothschild at the CRIF annual dinner in 2019
Brigitte was also spotted in the company of David de Rothschild together with Claude Chirac, reputed to be a former girlfriend of Nicolas Sarkozy, at the 90th birthday celebrations for the French singer and actress Line Renaud in July 2018.
Claude Chirac, David de Rothschild and Brigitte Macron at the 90th birthday celebrations for actress Line Renaud in Paris
Macron’s well-publicised connections to the Rothschilds and his connections to leading figures of France’s large and influential Jewish community have often made him the target of criticism and denunciation and all kinds of off-the-wall conspiracy theories before during and after the 2017 presidential election campaign.
“Macron’s connections to the Rothschilds go beyond purely financial affairs.”Back in March 2017 when the election campaign was in its final stages and Macron’s victory was by no means certain, the Financial Times noted that “Emmanuel Macron’s Rothschild years make him an easy election target”.
The article cited Luc Rouban, a professor at CEVIPOF, research centre of the Paris Institute of Political Studies known as “Sciences Po”. According to Rouban, the Eurozone debt crisis, along with an underlying suspicion of the monetary system and globalised capitalism, had intensified anti-bank sentiment among the public with the consequence that most candidates — with the exception of Macron — were promising to rein in the power of financial institutions.
“According to Rouban, the Eurozone debt crisis, along with an underlying suspicion of the monetary system and globalised capitalism, had intensified anti-bank sentiment among the public with the consequence that most candidates — with the exception of Macron — were promising to rein in the power of financial institutions.”According to Rouban: “This makes Macron look like the candidate of the globalised elite.”
The FT article also referred to an incident at the start of March 2017 in which the centre-right Les Républicains party, successor to the UMP, triggered a political “shitstorm” by tweeting a caricature that appeared to borrow heavily from the anti-Semitic propaganda iconography of the 1930s.
Macron was depicted as “the banker’s candidate” with a long hooked nose and a top hat, using a sickle to cut a cigar and surrounded by allies from his circle of trust.
A caricature of Macron tweeted by Les Républicains borrowed heavily from anti-Semitic tropes of the 1930s and unleashed a storm of criticism about the standard of the political debate.
The caricature sparked an veritable “shitstorm” on social media, and it was soon replaced with more innocuous photograph of Macron. Les Républicains were quick to issue an apology on the party’s Twitter account saying that it desired to “avoid any pointless controversies”.
An apology was quickly issued and the controversial caricature was replaced by a photograph.
François Fillon, the party’s candidate, was also quick off the mark to tweet a statement condemning the drawing as “unacceptable” and saying he would not tolerate the dissemination of caricatures that used features of “anti-Semitic propaganda”.
“The caricature sparked an veritable “shitstorm” on social media, and it was soon replaced with more innocuous photograph of Macron.”“I understand the emotion it may have triggered because it alluded to drawings from a dark period in our history and had echos of an ideology I have always fought against,” Fillon said. “Political combat is tough but it must remain dignified,” he added, saying he had asked the party’s secretary general to punish those who have given the party an “image totally contrary to our values”.
The En Marche! spokesman, Benjamin Griveaux, criticised Les Républicains‘ “use of terms and images that tap into the anti-Semitic imagination” and he expressed concerns about the quality of the debate and “the state of mind that prevails among the management of some [campaigns]“.
It deserves to be said at this point that Macron has never made any secret of his Rothschild connections. These connections have been well documented in the French media and in books such as “Rothschild, une banque au pouvoir” (“Rothschild, a bank in power”) which examines the influence of the bank in French politics.
“It deserves to be said at this point that Macron has never made any secret of his Rothschild connections.”Thierry Breton on the other hand is much more circumspect in this regard and he seems to do everything he possibly can to conceal his close business and social connections to the illustrious financial dynasty.
A quick glance at the LinkedIn entries of the French President and his newly appointed Commissioner in Brussels confirms their difference approaches on this issue.
Emmanuel makes no bones about disclosing his previous employment relationship with Rothschild & Cie from 2008 to 2012. For him it’s like a badge of honour that he wears with pride.
“A quick glance at the LinkedIn entries of the French President and his newly appointed Commissioner in Brussels confirms their difference approaches on this issue.”However, Thierry prefers to keep shtum about his own stint as a senior advisor for the US branch of the Rothschilds between 2007 and 2008.
Come on Thierry, it’s an open secret so what exactly is it that you are trying to hide?
In the next part we will look at how Thierry’s old pal, the “killer shark” from Baker McKenzie and the IMF, resurfaced in European waters earlier this year as a result of Macron’s political machinations in Brussels. █
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