01.10.20
Posted in Bill Gates, Deception, Microsoft at 11:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
This is the only part (of the very long report) which deals with Gates’ role and it’s more like cover-up, citing nothing but the accused’s legal team (which does exactly what Gates pays it to do)
Summary: MIT does not properly investigate its big ‘donor’ Bill Gates; instead it helps perpetuate the myth that MIT is pure and Gates has no real connections to Epstein (because Gates and his staff say so)
THE TIME that Aaron Swartz died many people blasted MIT and MIT responded with a white-washing report. We cited about a dozen news reports about it back then. But this isn’t about Swartz, whom MIT let down and left exposed — to the point where he killed himself (to avoid potentially more severe consequences for him and his family).
Rafael Reif has just (late on Friday) released this “fact-finding” [sic] report. Who funded it? Well, check the list of MIT donors. Those who fund it can indirectly control the output, obviously…
“Who funded it? Well, check the list of MIT donors. Those who fund it can indirectly control the output, obviously…”This report is hardly independent; we know who commissioned it and it’s hosted by the MIT’s own site (the full report is here [PDF]). In our humble assessment, it’s possibly rewriting history based on nothing except people salaried by Bill Gates. There are also press reports [1-3] from Microsoft- and Gates-funded sites (one of which was formerly owned by Microsoft’s co-founder). So now we have Joichi Ito (Creative Commons) and Richard Stallman (GNU, FSF and more) mentioned in the media, but one wonders if Rafael Reif is trying to distract from the much bigger MIT bribes that came from Bill Gates through his friend, Jeffrey Epstein. The media reports say nothing about it. One report said: “His death was ruled a suicide by New York’s chief medical examiner, though Epstein’s status as a member of the jet-set crowd who socialized with everyone from high-profile scientists to Microsoft founder Bill Gates as well as unanswered questions about his demise have fueled conspiracy theories.”
Oh, we see… anything that doesn’t fit in with the media’s narrative is instantaneously “conspiracy theories…”
Well, based on our past research and reporting, Joichi Ito and Richard Stallman were hardly the culprits; they were more like scapegoats or sacrificial lambs — people used by MIT to claim that firm action was taken and people were severely punished (even if the wrong people).
“In the above screenshot (of the original PDF) it’s worth noting/noticing how they admit that they’ve received money from Gates, so in effect MIT was corrupted by that money and MIT does not want to ‘shame’ or ‘embarrass’ the ‘generous’ donor.”Notice the screenshot at the top. Does that look like the outcome of a real, thorough investigation (as can be expected from a reputable institution such as MIT)? Notice the form of the evidence. It’s like hearsay. Those are people whom Gates pays, reinforcing the perception — however widely held — that people with power and connections having the ability to change the record, rewrite history and so on. What next? Bill Gates coming out with a walking stick or claiming to have dementia (like his father)? The Weinstein and Cosby legal trick? Well, no need… he already managed to remove himself from the interrogation cycle by saying it was all a “mistake”. That’s it. Imagine a shoplifter being released for merely admitting regret.
In the above screenshot (of the original PDF) it’s worth noting/noticing how they admit that they’ve received money from Gates, so in effect MIT was corrupted by that money and MIT does not want to ‘shame’ or ‘embarrass’ the ‘generous’ donor. To hell with MIT. It’s part of the problem because it allowed itself to be corrupted by money, not just Gates’ also Saudi money (a country where such sexual discourse — sex with adolescents — if considered culturally normal). █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Disgraced financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein donated $850,000 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, per a university investigation that has found ex-MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito and mechanical engineering professor Seth Lloyd solicited the contributions.
Epstein died in a New York prison cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges stemming from accounts that he abused and trafficked dozens of minors in Florida and New York. His death was ruled a suicide by New York’s chief medical examiner, though Epstein’s status as a member of the jet-set crowd who socialized with everyone from high-profile scientists to Microsoft founder Bill Gates as well as unanswered questions about his demise have fueled conspiracy theories.
Ito resigned from the MIT Media Lab in September 2019 after his extensive financial ties to Epstein were revealed, including $525,000 in lab funding and $1.2 million for his personal investment fund. By that point, Epstein’s 2008 conviction in Florida on charges of procuring a minor for prostitution and subsequent sweetheart plea deal with prosecutors to escape serious consequences was a matter of public record.
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Today, MIT released a 63-page fact-finding report detailing the institute’s involvement with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. MIT says that the report focused on visits that Epstein made to campus and 10 donations made by Epstein between 2002 and 2017, totaling $850,000. Nine of the donations, totaling $750,000, were made after 2008 when Epstein pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution with a minor.
The report, prepared by the law firm Goodwin Procter, found that while the president of MIT, L. Rafael Reif, was not involved in accepting the money, several prominent members of the MIT community were, including three vice presidents. The report found that all donations made after Epstein’s 2008 conviction went to either MIT’s Media Lab or to engineering professor Seth Lloyd. Lloyd’s lab received two $50,000 donations from Epstein in 2012 and $125,000 in 2017. In addition, Lloyd received a gift of $60,000 from Epstein that went straight into his personal bank account and is not being counted in the totals.
Lloyd and Epstein met in 2004, and were connected by Lloyd’s book agent, and the report notes that the two remained friends after Epstein’s conviction in 2008. The report also found that the two $50,000 donations to Lloyd in 2012 were made to test the waters at MIT. “Specifically, Epstein was disappointed that other academic institutions would not accept his money following his 2008 conviction, and, as Epstein put it (using a fishing metaphor) in an email to Professor Lloyd, “im going to give you two 50k tranches to see if the line jingles,” the report says. In 2016, Lloyd asked Epstein for more money, and received $125,000 in 2017.
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The review, conducted by law firm Goodwin Procter at the behest of the university, also found that MIT’s acceptance of 10 donations from Epstein totaling $850,000, which three vice presidents knew about, “was the result of collective and significant errors in judgment that resulted in serious damage to the MIT community.” On Friday, MIT announced the investigation results and a 61-page report outlining the review.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s ties to Epstein, a multimillionaire, already have had consequences. Joichi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, resigned in September. And Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, resigned from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab after the publication of an email thread in which he’d said one alleged Epstein victim likely “presented herself … as entirely willing.”
Epstein died in August of an apparent suicide in jail while facing federal sex-trafficking charges. Federal prosecutors in New York alleged Epstein sexually abused and exploited dozens of underage girls. Epstein had been convicted as a sex offender, in 2008, and the new charges against him arrived as the widespread MeToo movement brought down other powerful men.
When Epstein made his $850,000 in donations to MIT, there was no formal policy against accepting funding from “controversial” donors, the investigation found. But three administrative vice presidents — R. Gregory Morgan, Jeffrey Newton, and Israel Ruiz — knew of the source. Morgan and Newton are retired. Ruiz is set to step down from his position at MIT this year.
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:30 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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MintBox 3 and MintBox 3 Pro PCs are now available for purchase, which was announced back in July.
It is based on Airtrap 3 but has been customized to provide users with the best desktop Linux experience.
It ships with the latest Linux Mint 19.3 “Tricia” Cinnamon pre-installed.
Compulab offers a 5 year warranty for MintBox 3 and 5% of every MintBox3 sold is donated to Linux Mint.
The MintBox3 is currently available for $1399 and $2499 depending on the specification.
Some of the units have already been shipped to some Linux mint developers. And, they plan to do the same for other developers in the future.
They offer two models – MintBox 3 and MintBox 3 Pro.
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Server
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As a sysadmin, every day I am faced with problems I need to solve quickly because there are users and managers who expect things to run smoothly. In a large environment like the one I manage, it’s nearly impossible to know all of the systems and products from end to end, so I have to use creative techniques to find the source of the problems and (hopefully) come up with solutions.
This has been my daily experience for well over 20 years, and I love it! Coming to work each day, I never quite know what will happen. So, I have a few quick and dirty tricks that I default to when a problem lands on my lap, but I don’t know where to start.
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What does it mean to be the “right” person in a DevOps environment? That’s the question that Josh Atwell, senior tech advocate at Splunk, tried to answer in his Lightning Talk at All Things Open 2019.
“Being the right person for DevOps is being more than just your ops/dev role,” says Josh. “In order to be the right person for DevOps, you have to be improving yourself, and you have to be working to improve for others.”
Watch Josh’s Lightning Talk, “Are you being the right person for DevOps?” to learn why you should add communication, selflessness, self-care, and celebration to your list of core DevOps traits.
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Two industry trends point to a gap in DevOps tooling chosen by many. Operations teams need more than an Infrastructure-as-Code approach, but a complete model-driven operations mentality. Learn how Canonical has addressed these concerns by developing Juju, an open source DevOps tool, to allow it create multiple world-leading products.
[...]
Juju is simple, secure devops tooling built to manage today’s complex applications wherever you run your software. Compute, storage, networking, service discovery and health monitoring come for free and work with Kubernetes, the cloud and the laptop.
Juju allows your software infrastructure to maintain always-optimal configuration. As your deployment changes, every applications’ configuration operations are dynamically adjusted by charms. Charms are software packages that are run alongside your applications. They encode business rules for adapting to environmental changes.
Using a model-driven mentality means raising the level of abstraction. Users of Juju quickly get used to a flexible, declarative syntax that is substrate-agnostic. Juju interacts with the infrastructure provider, but operations code remains the same across. Focusing on creating a software model of your product’s infrastructure increases productivity and reduces complexity.
Automating infrastructure at a low level of abstraction, DevOps has bought the industry from breathing space. But that breathing space is running out.
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“As more and more organizations continue to expand on their usage of containerized software, Kubernetes will increasingly become the de facto deployment and orchestration target moving forward,” says Josh Komoroske, senior DevOps engineer at StackRox.
Indeed, some of the same or similar catalysts of Kubernetes interest to this point – containerization among them – are poised to continue in 2020. The shift to microservices architecture for certain applications is another example.
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A recent Enable Sysadmin article by Kevin Casey asks the question, Do I need a college degree to be a sysadmin? I won’t spoil his conclusions and findings, but my personal opinion is that all professionals should have a degree, even for entry-level positions. Certainly, this “should” can mean an Associate’s degree with the intent of obtaining a Bachelor’s degree during job tenure. Many companies provide tuition assistance or complete reimbursement, so there’s no reason not to work toward a degree.
Of course, a degree is no guarantee of employment or insulation from layoffs, but it can be a deciding factor in both instances. If you have two sysadmins and one has a degree and the other doesn’t, the manager is more likely to retain the degreed individual with all other aspects of the two being equal or comparable. That assertion comes from observations from working in large enterprise organizations for more than twenty years, through dozens of layoff events.
At least until an industry standard is created, I doubt that any educational requirements will ever be set. What currently happens is that educational requirements are company-specific and not job-specific.
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IBM
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In today’s digital economy, companies are looking for an edge. They want to be more efficient, outpace the competition, and deliver a customer experience that builds loyalty and increases revenue. And they’re exploring hybrid cloud and multicloud strategies to accelerate that transformation.
In doing so, more and more companies are realizing they’ll need to welcome public clouds into their IT environment. Of course, some might argue public clouds are not a requirement in either a hybrid cloud or multicloud approach—we’ll leave that debate off the table. But as a refresher, multicloud refers to the presence of more than one cloud deployment of the same type (public or private), sourced from different vendors, while hybrid cloud refers to the presence of multiple deployment types (public or private) with some form of integration or orchestration between them.
Hybrid cloud and multicloud approaches are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but because they always involve more than one cloud deployment and/or cloud type, it’s likely that at some point, a public cloud will be added to the mix. After all, public cloud promises greater elasticity, scalability, and speed of deployment.
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Over the years, I have hardly seen two messaging architectures that are absolutely the same. Every organization has something unique in the way they manage their infrastructure and organize their teams, and that inevitably ends up reflected in the resulting architectures. Your job as a consultant or architect is to find the most suitable architecture within the current constraints, and educate and guide the customer towards the best possible outcome. There is no right or wrong architecture, but deliberate trade-off commitments in a context.
In this article, I tried to cover as many areas of Artemis as possible from an architecturally significant point of view. But by doing so, I had to be opinionated, ignore other areas, and emphasize what I think is significant based on my experience. I hope you find it useful and learned something from it. If that is the case, say something on Twitter and spread the word.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Compiling the Linux kernel with Clang has never been easier, so we explore this alternative compiler and what it brings to the ecosystem.
Plus Debian’s continued init system debate, and our frustrations over 5G reporting.
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– Our Hopes for Linux in 2020
– [Ryan]
– Better professional audio equipment support
– Tablet and mobile support
– A corporate or well financed entity focused on the desktop. Easy install, hardware partnerships, mobile integration, and up to date rolling.
– [Michael]
– reiterate Ryan’s desktop focus point
– more companies using universal app formats regardless which one they pick
– WINE to get some more attention from some kind of backing
– [Zeb]
– Less regression, it always seems that in the process of fixing one thing another thing breaks somewhere else. Now the Devs cannot really do a lot about this without the communities help. So as Linux users we need to volunteer to do more testing.
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Join Alex and Brent for a chat about upgrading your home network with an eye towards stability, simplicity, and hosting things yourself.
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Kernel Space
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Linux creator Linus Torvalds is skeptical of ZFS open source licensing and doesn’t recommend using it on Linux.
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The Linux kernel creator says he refuses to merge the ZFS module into the kernel because he can’t risk a lawsuit from “litigious” Oracle – which is still trying to sue Google for copyright violations over its use of Java APIs in Android – and Torvalds won’t do so until Oracle founder Larry Ellison signs off on its use in the Linux kernel.
“If somebody adds a kernel module like ZFS, they are on their own. I can’t maintain it and I cannot be bound by other people’s kernel changes,” explained Torvalds.
“And honestly, there is no way I can merge any of the ZFS efforts until I get an official letter from Oracle that is signed by their main legal counsel or preferably by Larry Ellison himself that says that yes, it’s OK to do so and treat the end result as GPL’d,” Torvalds continued.
“Other people think it can be OK to merge ZFS code into the kernel and that the module interface makes it OK, and that’s their decision. But considering Oracle’s litigious nature, and the questions over licensing, there’s no way I can feel safe in ever doing so.”
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After several months, it’s time to resume our series of blog posts about building a Linux system for the STM32MP1 platform. After showing how to build a minimal Linux system for the STM32MP157 platform, how to connect and use an I2C based pressure/temperature/humidity sensor and how to integrate Qt5 in our system, how to set up a development environment to write our own Qt5 application and how to develop a Qt5 application, we will now cover the topic of factory flashing.
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Time is quickly running out to get new code into DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.6 merge window. AMD on Thursday did send out another feature pull request with some interesting additions worth mentioning.
This latest batch of AMDGPU material for Linux 5.6 builds off the interesting feature work of previous weeks and now includes:
- The AMDKFD compute kernel code now spreads interrupt work across CPU cores to help reduce latency.
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We’ve already been looking forward to Linux 5.6 with already there being a lot of good stuff coming and now it’s even more exciting: at least the prerequisites have been merged overnight for Multipath TCP (MPTCP) support!
Multipath TCP is the IETF-backed initiative for allowing TCP connections to use multiple paths for greater performance/efficiency and redundancy. There have been various Multipath TCP implementations going back several years while Apple’s macOS/iOS was the first major player with official support. There’s been Linux kernel support available as part of the reference implementation albeit out-of-tree with not much effort to mainline it until recently.
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Among the expected uses of DAMON are for program behavior analysis, debugging, analyzing systems with over-committed memory use, optimizing software based upon actual data access patterns, and other software optimizations.
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Benchmarks
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It’s been four years since last testing out the XanMod kernel as a spin of the Linux kernel with various patches and extra tuning designed to offer better desktop/workstation performance, similar to the Liquorix kernel. But given the recent Liquorix kernel testing and discussions over kernel schedulers and more, here are some fresh benchmarks of the latest XanMod kernel. Long story short, I am quite impressed by these latest XanMod results.
For some fresh XanMod benchmarks, I ran tests of its latest kernel binary at the time (Linux 5.4.8-xanmod5) on Ubuntu 19.10 from an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X test system. I compared the Xanmod performance to the generic Linux 5.4.7 mainline kernel at the time as well as the Linux 5.4.7 low-latency kernel build, both of which were obtained from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA. I also compared results of Liquorix 5.4.0-7.1 as what I started last week’s Liquorix kernel testing with and then again with Liquorix 5.4.0-8.2 for the very latest and using the same kernel point release as XanMod.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Broken Lines, an alternate take on WWII history brings tactical RPG has a fresh trailer out for 2020, plus it seems like a release could be soon.
First, about the upcoming release, while the Steam store states “Q1 2020″ it seems on the Steam forum they said this is looking like end of February.
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It essentially uses Wine, DXVK and other established tools behind the scenes so that you can install Windows games on Linux through Steam. Many games have been officially whitelisted and optimised to work with Steam Play, but thousands more games – including the latest ones – are unofficially supported and likely to work too.
To play Windows games that haven’t been whitelisted, select “Enable Steam Play for all other titles” in the Steam Play settings.
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While more and more games support Linux natively, there’s a huge swath of games that now run on Linux thanks to Valve’s Proton, Wine, DXVK, and communities like Lutris that make installing Windows games on Linux a breeze. In fact, I’ve been playing League of Legends on Linux this way for months now.
Still, there’s always this nagging feeling that Riot, League of Legends’ developer, might one day mess up its anticheat system and ban those of us playing League on Linux. I’ve read on the League of Linux subreddit that apparently, there’s people inside Riot using Linux and that they try to make sure this won’t happen, but that’s far from a guarantee.
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Solo developer ehmprah from Berlin is currently working on Core Defense, a Tower Defense game that mixes things up with randomization and deck-building.
This is actually a spin-off of Coregrounds, a multiplayer Tower Defense game released back in 2018 but it shut down last year due to many reasons and went open source. The lead developer of Coregrounds still wanted to continue in the genre, so Core Defense was created. At least this time they’re not relying on being able to build a multiplayer community, something most indies struggled with. Heck, a lot of AA/AAA fail to build a community.
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Valve have announced that Dota Underlords, their auto-battle strategy game will get the first proper Season by the end of February, which means it will leave Early Access.
However, they still have a lot coming. There’s at least one more update coming before this, with one more Underlord coming as well. The bigger stuff sounds like it’s coming with the Season 1 update to end Early Access with their official Battlepass, City Crawl game mode, Hero / Item rotation and UI updates.
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Valve have released another Beta for the Steam Client, the first Beta of 2020 and it pulls in a couple Linux fixes.
Firstly, the newer Steam Library view got some adjustments which includes the played/unplayed filters no longer including/excluding games that were installed but not played. A good fix, making the filters actually accurate. Valve also improved performance of the library artwork “precacher”, there’s a new “What’s New” settings dialogue (with new options) to make it easier to manage what shows up too like this…
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Kdenlive 19.12.1 is out with many bug fixes and usability improvements. For the whole 19.12 release cycle we will continue focusing on polishing the rough edges in preparation the next major release in April.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GNOME 3.35.3 is out today as the latest development release on the road to GNOME 3.36.
Some of the highlights for GNOME 3.35.3 include:
- A DConf optimization to avoid writing to the disk when write requests do not result in changes to the database.
- The “view source” functionality within the Epiphany web browser now uses highlight.js syntax highlighting.
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Hello,
GNOME 3.35.3 is now available. One of the highlights of this release is the removal of libcroco from the
module set
as both librsvg and gnome-shell dropped the dependency!
Next unstable release, scheduled for first week of February will mark the UI and Feature Freeze.
If you want to compile GNOME 3.35.3, you can use the official
BuildStream project snapshot:
https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/3.35.3/gnome-3.35.3.tar.xz
The list of updated modules and changes is available here:
https://download.gnome.org/core/3.35/3.35.3/NEWS
The source packages are available here:
https://download.gnome.org/core/3.35/3.35.3/sources/
WARNING!
--------
This release is a snapshot of development code. Although it is
buildable and usable, it is primarily intended for testing and hacking
purposes. GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development
status.
For more information about 3.36, the full schedule, the official module
lists and the proposed module lists, please see our 3.35 wiki page:
https://www.gnome.org/start/unstable
Cheers,
Jordan
GNOME Release Team
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The OpenWrt Project is a Linux operating system targeting embedded devices. It is a complete replacement for the vendor-supplied firmware of a wide range of wireless routers and non-network devices. See the Table of Hardware for supported devices. For more information about OpenWrt project organization, see the About OpenWrt pages.
An upgrade from OpenWrt 18.06 to OpenWrt 19.07 is supported in many cases with the help of the sysupgrade utility which will also attempt to preserve the configuration. A configuration backup is advised nonetheless when upgrading to OpenWrt 19.07.
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OpenWrt 19.07 introduces initial WPA3 support, the LuCI web interface to OpenWrt now supports client-side rendering of views for better performance, ath79 replacing the older ar71xx target, updated musl libc and uClibc-ng, Binutils 2.31.1, Linux 4.14.162, and a variety of other enhancements.
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Version 19.07.0 of the OpenWrt router distribution is available. “With this release, the OpenWrt project brings all supported targets back to a single common kernel version and further refines and broadens existing device support. It also introduces a new ath79 target and brings support for WPA3.” There are some known issues; read through the full announcement before updating.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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In this video, we had our first look at a pre-release edition of UOS Deepin V20.
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In this video, I am going over how to make Linux login look better than Windows by modifying the config of LightDM.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 Beta is available for download and testing.
Beta milestone is closer to final release, although still in need of more testing and fine-tuning.
Therefore the developers will be glad to read your feedback and bug reports at our forum or at our bug tracking system.
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In time for some weekend testing is the beta release of OpenMandriva Lx 4.1.
OpenMandriva continues being one of the few Linux distributions defaulting to Clang for compiling its packages rather than GCC. Thanks to upstream Clang now able to build the upstream Linux kernel on x86_64, OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 Beta is offering a Clang-built kernel option while its default kernel is still built using the GNU Compiler Collection.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Ubuntu Studio 19.04 was released on April 18, 2019. As a non-LTS release, 19.04 has a 9-month support cycle, and, as such, the support period is now nearing its end and Ubuntu Studio 19.04 will reach end of life on Thursday, January 23, 2020.
The supported upgrade path from Ubuntu Studio 19.04 is via Ubuntu Studio 19.10. Instructions and caveats for the upgrade may be found at:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EoanUpgrades
If you’re still running Ubuntu Studio 19.04 (Disco Dingo) you need to upgrade to 19.10 as soon as possible in order to continue receiving updates. Failure to upgrade to Ubuntu Studio 19.10 from 19.04 may result in the inability to upgrade at all or require using difficult upgrading techniques.
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Still running Ubuntu 19.04 ‘Disco Dingo’? If so you’ll need to start thinking about shuffling off the dance floor to make your much-needed upgrade to Ubuntu 19.10.
The Ubuntu 19.04 release arrived almost 9 months ago, on April 18, 2019. But as it’s a non-LTS release it only gets 9 months on going app updates and security patches.
[...]
Ubuntu 19.10 is also a non-LTS release but is supported with updates and patches until July 2020.
With Ubuntu 20.04 LTS scheduled to arrive in April, upgrading to 19.10 now ensures you’re all set to hop aboard the LTS train when it arrives in the spring.
Alternatively, you don’t have to stick with Ubuntu. You can wipe your Ubuntu 19.04 install and replace it with a fresh install of an entirely different Linux distribution. Check out our roundup of the best Linux distros of 2019 for some ace recommendations.
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Devices/Embedded
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Xiaomi has launched several affordable WiFi routers over the years.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Are you attending Bett Show this year? Then come to our free educator sessions on Friday 24 January right next to Bett to take a break from the hustle and bustle of the show floor and learn something new!
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Seeeduino XIAO is the smallest Arduino compatible board from SeeedStudio’s Seeduino family.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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The vast majority of Linux users would never be satisfied without access to a graphical user interface. However, even in 2020 there remain many reasons why console based applications can be extremely desirable.
Although console applications are very useful for updating, configuring, and repairing a system, their benefits are not only confined to system administration. Console based applications are light on system resources (very useful on low spec machines), can be faster and more efficient than their graphical counterparts, they do not stop working when X needs to be restarted, and are great for scripting purposes.
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MyPaint is a drawing, painting program dedicated to pressure-sensitive devices, tablets. This program is a must for digital painters which offers distraction-free drawing environments with tons of new features.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla has announced a new version of its email client for Windows, Linux, and mac, and in addition to the typical bug fixes and feature improvement, this one also brings changes for users running an older release.
Specifically, Mozilla Thunderbird 68.4.1 is offered as an automatic download for Thunderbird version 60 users, something that’s worth keeping in mind regardless of the platform you are running.
“Thunderbird version 68.4.1 provides an automatic update from Thunderbird version 60. Note that Thunderbird version 68.4.0 was skipped. If you have installed Lightning, Thunderbird’s calendar add-on, it will automatically be updated to match the new version of Thunderbird,” Mozilla explains.
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Your data is worth more than you can imagine, and this is why advertisers turn to all kinds of tactics to collect information about you, including a method that is known as fingerprinting.
In essence a type of tracking, fingerprinting comes down to an entire profile that ad companies create about you. This profile contains super-detailed information about you, including not only the browser that you use, the operating system resolution, and things like that, but also fonts, screen size, and other unique data that is then used to make a difference between your profile and another.
Obviously, not everyone agrees to give up on this data when browsing the web, so such info is often collected without users to even know about it.
Fingerprint scripts are in many places on the web, and unless you run advanced protections to block them, your data is collected and then stored for longer than you can think. In some cases, fingerprinting leads to profiles being stored for many months after their creation, and sometimes they are saved even if you turn to features that are supposed to boost your privacy, such as private browsing.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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LibreOffice 6.4.0 RC1 was released on December 23 and a Bug Hunting Session took place the same day
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FSF
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GNU Projects
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As usual, GNU Guix will be present at FOSDEM on February 1st and 2nd. This year, we’re happy to say that there will be quite a few talks about Guix and related projects!
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Programming/Development
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Ten years ago, Oracle desperate to monetize its failed Sun purchase sued Google to squeeze profits out of its use of Java APIs in Android. Oracle won its point, that application programming interfaces (API)s were subject to copyright. Now, Google, having gotten the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) to reconsider Oracle’s court victory, is laying out its plan to save software development.
That’s not hyperbole. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) states, “allowing copyright on APIs is a terrible idea for computer science.” That’s because almost all modern software depends on open APIs. When your web browser works with Amazon, Apple, Microsoft — any complex site really — it communicates through APIs. When your smartphone shows you the weather, directions to your doctor’s office, or a video, it uses APIs to bridge the gap between services and servers and your devices. And, it goes on and on.
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In the first post for this series, I took you though setting up a hosting package with Neocities and getting a domain name registered. So in this post let’s actually start making a website!
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Open-source project creators and maintainers take on a difficult role when they decide to release an open-source project. Balter told SD Times that maintainers should think of themselves as managers rather than engineers. Their primary contribution to the project often won’t be in the form of code, but in terms of community management, marketing, recruitment, evangelism, automation, tooling and support.
“You often start a project to solve a specific technical problem, but as the community grows, in order to scale your own efforts and to have the biggest impact on your project, your role often shifts to solving the human and the workflow side of open source, rather than the technical,” said Balter.
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Dear OpenBSD users, due to Firefox being too complicated to package (thanks to cbindgen and rust dependencies) on the stable branch (as this would require testing all rust consumers), the 6.6-stable branch won’t receive updates for www/mozilla-firefox, so it will remain vulnerable to MFSA2020-03 and vulnerabilities that may appear after.
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Rust could spin itself into a foundation of its own this year, after core developer Nicholas Matsakis “offhandedly” raised the idea in a blogpost late last year.
The language was developed at Mozilla and unveiled in 2010, and is community managed and governed through RFCs.
However, this will only get you so far, and Matsakis fleshed out a rationale for setting up a foundation in a followup post this week, highlighting two key reasons for the effort. He also suggested a foundation could be set up as early as this year.
Matsakis said setting up a foundation would, “help clarify Rust’s status as an independent project, and thus encourage investment from more companies”. Second is “to alleviate some practical problems caused by Rust not having a “legal entity” nor a dedicated bank account.”
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Collabora is offering various paid internship positions for 2020. We have a nice range of very cool projects involving kernel work, Panfrost, Monado, etc.
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I wrote about various ways of managing a persistent popup windowfrom Javascript, eventually settling on a postMessage() solution that turned out not to work in QtWebEngine. So I needed another solution.
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If you are using feature detection with SharedArrayBuffer objects today you are likely impacted by upcoming changes to shared memory. In particular, you can no longer assume that if you have access to a SharedArrayBuffer object you can also use it with postMessage().
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Python
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When you code in a low-level language like C, you worry about picking the right data type and qualifiers for your integers; at every step, you need to think if int would suffice or should you go for a long or even higher to a long double. But while coding in python, you need not worry about these “trivial” things because python supports integers of arbitrary size.
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PyCharm’s debugger is one of its most popular features. But many just stick to the basics and don’t learn intermediate and advanced features. In this webinar, two of PyCharm’s core developers who work on the debugger show its less-known but powerful features, while talking a bit about the debugger architecture and future improvements.
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One reason I’m learning Python is its ecosystem. A culture of documentation and the countless learning and training resources create opportunities of growing as a developer.
There are all sorts of free and paid tutorials, books, videos, courses, and other materials on all aspects of the language, the tools, and the libraries. For example, I maintain a list of free Python books.
Still, some important intermediate to advanced topics receive little or no attention.
So, I’d like to offer some suggestions and feedback to Python authors and instructors on what may interest a hobbyist like me. Here are some ideas for topics to cover. Although I found something relevant, the material I’ve seen is still missing something.
If you know of any such resources, please let me know. Not being a visual learner I’m more interested in text-based content than videos. I also prefer books to the more structured approach of courses.
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With the increased speed of SSDs single threaded file access does not always fully utilize the disk. The bottleneck more and more is the CPU itself.
When I started learning the great new language Rust I came across a crate called jwalk. This crate does directory scanning in parallel with a thread pool. The benchmarks are amazing. So I thought I write a Python module as a faster alternative to os.walk which uses jwalk. The result is the new module scandir-rs which can be found on pypi.org.
The API is a bit different and provides more features. But it should be easy to replace os.walk and os.scandir with scandir-rs.
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The uvloop project is great with an amazing performance, and a good replacement for the default asyncio module, if Linux is used. Unfortunately uvloop is not available for Windows.
Just for interest I wanted to know how a multi threaded version competes with the uvloop, which is single threaded. Is a comparable performance possible, or is a solution with multiple threads even faster?
So I took the echoserver.py example from the uvloop project and extended it with support for fastthreadpool.
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Twenty years into the 21st century, and what do we have to show for it?
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Health/Nutrition
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Currently, the federal government offers voluntary safety guidelines for the 80-odd developers working on self-driving vehicles in the US, and it leaves most regulation to the states. Despite calls from some safety advocates—including the National Transportation Safety Board, following a fatal 2018 crash involving an Uber self-driving car—the updated policy doesn’t set out regulations for the tech. The Transportation Department has said it’s waiting for guidance from Congress, which has so far failed to pass any legislation related to self-driving vehicles.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Dozens of subway riders in New York City are being charged extra for their transit rides, and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority suspects that Apple may be partly to blame.
The MTA is not explicitly pointing the finger at Apple, but it appears that some riders may be unwittingly putting their iPhones too close to the system’s new tap-to-pay OMNY readers while simultaneously swiping their MetroCards at the turnstile.
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Openwashing
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Amazon Web Services Inc. today launched a new open-source library to help developers write, with just a few lines of code, machine learning-based applications that use image, text or tabular data sets.
Building machine learning apps that rely on such data isn’t an easy task. For example, developers need to know how to tune the “hyperparameters” that represent the choices made when constructing an AI model. They also need to grapple with issues such as neural architecture search, which enables them to find the best architecture design for their machine learning models.
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The ethical side of open source [Ed: Deeply unethical corporations trying to lecture us about ethics; this is all about control, in the name of 'safety'...]
Over the summer, Facebook’s open-source JavaScript library React was under fire after racism and harassment were discovered within its community. The incident is known as #Reactgate and it ended with the designer Tatiana Mac, who raised awareness of some of the issues, resigning from the industry, and React software engineer Dan Abramov and library author Ken Wheeler deactivating their Twitter accounts temporarily.
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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When source code, documentation and other content is contributed to an OSS project, the copyrights in those contributions typically remain owned by the original copyright holders.
What follows is a discussion of the typical OSS project where each contributing organization and individual retains ownership of their copyrights that they make available under the project’s open source software license. In this case, the copyrights are licensed for distribution as part of the project. Whether a project uses the Developer Certificate of Origin (“DCO”) and/or a Contributor License Agreement (“CLA”), the original copyright holders retain their copyrights.
[...]
If a file only contains code that originates from a third party source who didn’t contribute it themselves, then you would not want to add the notices above. (In a similar vein, you wouldn’t add a notice identifying you as the copyright holder either, if you didn’t own it.) Just preserve the existing copyright and license notices as they are.
If, however, you add copyrightable content to a pre-existing file from another project, then at that point you could add a copyright notice similar to the one above.
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Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)
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Hm, that @nenskins user, that is our old jenkins instance talking to github somehow. Apparently through basic auth. Only… where? Most of the github traffic seemed to use just an access token. Jenkins calls that the secret text type. Basic auth is type username with password in jenkins.
What it turned out to be was the github branch source plugin. This periodically looks at our github organisation to see if there are new projects or new branches that it missed. Normally github tells our jenkins when there’s a new project or pull request or so.
Ok, on to the jenkins settings for my organisation. The confusing thing here is that the “credentials” setting says this:
Note that only “username with password” credentials are
supported. Existing credentials of other kinds will be filtered out. This
is because jenkins exercises GitHub API, and this last one does not
support other ways of authentication.
Huh? Github is refusing user/password basic auth, which is what this plugin only supports? I updated every plugin, but the problem still persisted.
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VVVVVV, the clever platformer from Terry Cavanagh where you reverse gravity instead of jumping has now be made open source.
The open license doesn’t cover the assets (icons, art, graphics or music) which are still under a proprietary license. So you will need some to play with it, which Cavanagh said you can get from the Make and Play Edition for personal use and that edition also has the tools to make levels.
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (ldm and sa-exim), Mageia (firefox), openSUSE (chromium, firefox, and thunderbird), SUSE (containerd, docker, docker-runc, golang-github-docker-libnetwork, firefox, log4j, nodejs10, nodejs12, and openssl-1_0_0), and Ubuntu (firefox).
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Privacy/Surveillance
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You may have heard from a lot of businesses telling you that they’ve updated their privacy policies because of a new law called the California Consumer Privacy Act. But what’s actually changed for you?
EFF has spent the past year defending this law in the California legislature, but we realize that not everyone has been following it as closely as we have. So here are answers to ten frequently asked questions we’ve heard about the CCPA.
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Once again, another crime has been solved with the help of smart devices that shows “going dark” is mainly just an FBI product it’s having trouble moving in such a sunshine-y market.
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It looks like the FBI wants to relitigate the San Bernardino shooting. After that tragedy, the FBI tried (and failed) to obtain legal precedent forcing cellphone manufacturers to crack open seized phones at the drop of a warrant. Finally, a third party sold a solution to the FBI that opened the phone and allowed it to recover nothing useful whatsoever from the shooter’s device.
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Earlier this week, the Android community on Reddit erupted in discussion over a thread titled: “Chinese Spyware Pre-Installed on All Samsung Phones (& Tablets)” that has since been labeled as misleading by moderators. In addition, it’s also been noted by observant redditors that the original poster (OP) of the thread may have been a purchased account fired up with the intent of causing discontent and stirring up anti-China sentiment. The controversy, clarification by Samsung, and ensuing discussion are still worth looking into, though.
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On Thursday, a pair of bipartisan House lawmakers announced that they’d be introducing their own bill that would give parents the right to delete the data that companies have on their children and extend COPPA’s protections to older minors. The bill is called the “Preventing Real Online Threats Endangering Children Today,” or the PROTECT Kids Act, and was introduced by Reps. Tim Walberg (R-MI) and Bobby Rush (D-IL), as first reported by Axios.
The bill would make big updates to the law that’s already brought enormous changes to YouTube and TikTok and infuriated creators. In its settlement with YouTube, the FTC fined the company over $170 million and prohibited the company from running targeted ads on videos the agency could deem child-friendly. Many critics argued that this settlement didn’t go far enough, and if the PROTECT Kids Act was approved, YouTube and other online platforms would be under a lot more pressure than they already are to ensure children’s data remains safe online.
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Confidentiality
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Ring never fails to disappoint. And by “disappoint,” I mean never fails to be disappointing. This pleases me. So, I guess Ring never fails to please… by being incessantly disappointing.
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Defence/Aggression
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Now more than ever, anti-war voices are crucial to end the madness of our ineffective policies.
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War with Iran would be bloodier and costlier even than the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. We can’t afford another war.
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If any good comes out of the US assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani it may be to finally put to rest the lunatic notion that President Donald Trump is an isolationist.
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In an angry Tweet, al-Khazali said that Iraqis were a courageous and competitive people, and their response to the US will not be of less severity than that of Iran.
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Wouldn’t it be the height of hypocrisy if Mr. Bone Spur approved a military draft (with the help of Congress)? The fact that the Selective Service website crashed following the drone assassination of Iranian General Suleimani (“US government agency website crashes amid panic over military draft,” Guardian, January 4, 2020), and will lead to a draft, is the stuff of pure imagination. The repercussions will not be comical, however, since the insatiable appetite for profit in the war industry and the expansion of empire is nothing but dangerous and ugly. Since September 11, 2001, and the democracy movements in some countries in the Middle East and in some countries in Africa, the drumbeat and horror of endless wars has been deafening for those who care about these issues and are willing to listen.
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“I can assure your viewers that those of us that have seen all the evidence—that saw the evidence in real time—know that President Trump made the right decision.”
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On the afternoon of January 9, protesters stormed the Abkhazian presidential administration’s headquarters in Sukhumi. Estimates of the number of people who gathered outside the building range from 500 to 800; some demanded that the president of the partially recognized breakaway republic, Raul Khajimba, submit his resignation. The opposition party Aytaira supported the protester’s demands, calling on Khajimba to leave his post to avoid “a even worse scenario.”
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Private Ramil Shamsutdinov, who killed eight other Russian servicemembers and severely injured two in an October shooting, has written a letter in pretrial detention that was subsequently posted online. After a photograph of the letter appeared in a VKontakte group called Save Private Ramil Shamsutdinov, the soldier’s father and attorney both confirmed its authenticity.
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Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country’s a nightmare of inequality, and there’s a self-promoting president in the White House, so isn’t it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of the American war system.
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By now, anyone who expected Donald Trump to keep his campaign promises has figured out that isn’t going to happen. Unfortunately, one of the things the serial liar in the Oval Office made a big deal about back in 2016 was getting us out of our endless and win-less wars scattered across the globe.
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On the surface, it made not one iota of sense. The murder of a foreign military leader on his way from Baghdad airport, his diplomatic status assured by the local authorities, evidently deemed a target of irresistible richness. “General Soleimani was actively developing plans to attack American diplomats and service members in Iraq and throughout the region.” The words from the Pentagon seemed to resemble the resentment shown by the Romans to barbarian chiefs who dared resist them. “This strike was aimed at deterring future Iranian attack plans. The United States will continue to take all necessary action to protect our people and our interests wherever they are around the world.”
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The current crisis might be averted, but the longer U.S. war with Iran continues.
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The survey also found that 52% the U.S. public believes the Trump administration’s behavior toward Iran has been “reckless.”
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“Members of Congress aren’t going to stand aside as Trump drags us into another possible war in the Middle East.”
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“Congress has been silent for too long,” said Rep. Mark Pocan. “It’s time we reclaim our Constitutional authority over military action from presidents intent on fight forever wars.”
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The Democratic-controlled U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed a non-binding War Powers Resolution that would prohibit President Donald Trump from taking further military action against Iran without first gaining congressional approval.
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As the Trump administration on Wednesday reportedly pressured lawmakers behind closed doors to not debate or even discuss the legality of unilateral military action against Iran, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the House will vote Thursday on a War Powers Resolution aimed at curbing President Donald Trump’s ability to attack Iran without congressional approval.
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Much has changed during the last five decades, but deception remains central to the state of perpetual war that funnels mega-billions in profits to the military-industrial complex. And Democrats continue to play a central role in this costly destruction.
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Donald Trump’s decision to kill Qassim Suleimani, the most influential figure in Iran other than the Ayatollah Khamenei, will increase the terrorist threat to the United States and the global community. Suleimani’s death has already provoked widespread outrage in Iraq and Iran among the Shiia populations. Prior to the killing, Iraqi leaders were campaigning against Iran’s military presence in their country. Now, the Iraqi Parliament has called for the removal of the U.S. military presence. The decision has created more tactical and terrorist opportunities for the Islamic State as the United States has decided to cease operations against the Islamic State.
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President Trump campaigned on pulling the U.S. out of endless wars in the Middle East, which is why his sincerity was rightfully questioned after he ordered a strike killing Iranian military commander Qassim Suleimani last week. Trump defended the strike by describing Suleimani as the “#1 terrorist anywhere in the world” and said he took action to stop a war, not start it. But Trump can’t have it both ways. The assassination, which was an unlawful crime of aggression by an administration which could not prove it was in response to an imminent threat, was not separate from the endless wars; it was part and parcel of the “war on terror.”
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The increasing elevation over the past months of war criminal Eddie Gallagher within Donald Trump’s presidential re-election campaign was already disturbing. But, now, within the context of escalating U.S. tensions with Iran and an impeachment process that has left Trump eager to reassert his primacy, it offers even greater cause for concern. Trump is using Gallagher to rally his base around the crudest possible notions of nationalism and raw power. As Trump continues to skirt the brink of conflict with Iran, the president’s symbolic embrace of Gallagher’s violence bodes ill for how Trump would prosecute any such war.
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CEOs of major U.S. military contractors stand to reap huge windfalls from the escalation of conflict with Iran. This was evident in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. assassination of a top Iranian military official last week. As soon as the news reached financial markets, these companies’ share prices spiked, inflating the value of their executives’ stock-based pay.
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President Trump vowed on Wednesday to hit Iran with new sanctions but appeared to pull back from taking any new military action. Tension between the two countries soared after the U.S. assassinated Iranian commander Qassem Soleimani at the Baghdad International Airport last week. Early on Wednesday, Iran retaliated by firing 22 ballistic missiles at military bases in Iraq housing U.S. forces, but no one was injured in the attack. Iran had warned the Iraqi government about the strike in advance. Two small rockets also later hit the Green Zone near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. During a televised address on Wednesday, Trump urged NATO to become more involved in the Middle East and called for countries to pull away from the Iran nuclear deal. We speak with Andrew Bacevich, president and co-founder of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He is a retired colonel and Vietnam War veteran and author of, most recently, The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory.
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“No voices calling for peace. No voices critical of empire. Just establishment media and current and former Pentagon officials who feed off the trillion dollar war machine.”
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Yes, our infrastructure stinks, our schools are failing, this country’s a nightmare of inequality, and there’s a self-promoting madman in the White House, so isn’t it time to take pride in the rare institutional victories America has had in this century? Arguably, none has been more striking than the triumphal success of the American war system.
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But government sources tell VOA that U.S. officials have examined satellite data and imagery leading them to believe the airliner, just after taking off from Tehran, was hit by a Russian-made surface-to-air missile after being targeted accidentally.
A U.S. official confirmed to VOA that he is “confident” the plane was shot down by Iran.
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Evidence indicates it is “highly likely” that an Iranian anti-aircraft missile downed a Ukrainian jetliner near Tehran late Tuesday, U.S. and Canadian officials said Thursday. They said the strike, which killed all 176 people on board, could well have been a mistake amid intentional airstrikes and high tensions throughout the region.
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“Horrible accidents happen in the context of war so maybe we just shouldn’t be at war with Iran.”
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Evidence suggests an Iranian missile brought down a Ukrainian passenger plane that crashed near Tehran, possibly in error, Western leaders say.
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After Donald Trump’s election, both the New York Times and Washington Post saw huge jumps in subscribers, all hoping that the outlets would hold the president to account. Both papers tapped into this sentiment: In February 2017, the Post adopted the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on its masthead; Times ads have used the slogan, “The truth is more important now than ever.”
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For pundits, what makes a politician strong on foreign policy? Apparently doing something for a long time matters more than honesty and good judgment—and it helps if the bad choices made are the same ones corporate media have cheered.
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Bombs have numbers. Humans have names. Our American military boasts a skill and passion for using numbers to turn names into yet more numbers. But these numbers have grown so gargantuan and out of control that one struggles to comprehend them.
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Journalists immediately wondered whether Trump just revealed the supposed “imminent” threat that top officials claimed for days was too sensitive to make public.
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CEOs of major U.S. military contractors stand to reap huge windfalls from the escalation of conflict with Iran. This was evident in the immediate aftermath of the U.S. assassination of a top Iranian military official last week. As soon as the news reached financial markets, these companies’ share prices spiked, inflating the value of their executives’ stock-based pay.
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The above phrase by Sigmund Freud seems to sum up the central method of how humanity is destined to destroy itself. It seems to be an inevitable trait which is tied to our basic feelings of insecurity and our need to delineate our individual and community identity as a means of overcoming the feelings of insecurity. One of the preferred manifestations of narcissism seems be tied to the use of and the celebration of violence.
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No, that’s not a typo.
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Environment
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As the earth gets hotter, droughts grow deeper and more prolonged. We’ve seen this in California (whose climate is close enough to Australia’s that millions of highly flammable eucalyptus trees thrive in the Golden State as well), and now we see it in the Australian states of Victoria and New South Wales, where record temperatures and record aridity have set the stage for firestorms so intense that they generate their own weather. Last weekend the town of Penrith west of Sydney was the hottest spot on earth, with the mercury near 120 degrees Fahrenheit and a relative humidity in the single digits. This is a precise recipe for an inferno, one that will be repeated across the globe in similar terrain.
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The Australian inferno has yet to reach its worst, but already minds are seeking ways to reduce the bushfire horrors. Could batteries help next time?
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“These changes mean polluting corporations will have an easier time doing whatever they want, wherever they want, with even less consideration for climate change.”
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“We believe a Bernie Sanders presidency would provide the best political terrain in which to engage in and ultimately win that struggle for the world we deserve.”
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Energy
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City is latest in the country to offer publicly-funded transportation for residents and visitors.
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“Stop the Money Pipeline” campaign demands that banks, insurers, and asset managers cut ties with planet-destroying companies.
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If the world uses all the oil and gas from the fields and mines already in production, it will push us beyond 1.5°C of warming.
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The largest rally so far during the presidential campaign, in the first state to vote, was led by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and a teenage crew of Iowa City climate strikers.
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NEPA requires agencies to get public feedback on new projects, and to consider the potential environmental harms associated with any new federal or federally funded project. It’s been used to oppose contested projects like the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. Trump’s proposed changes would exempt projects that aren’t primarily federally funded. It would also place a tight two-year time limit on performing environmental reviews that typically take years longer, and even puts a cap on the number of pages allowed in the Environmental Impact Statements required by the law. Trump said the move would speed up critical infrastructure projects that have “been tied up and bogged down by an outrageously burdensome federal approval process.”
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Wildlife/Nature
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In recent days, Morrison’s position has been bolstered by a group of fringe climate science deniers pushing conspiracy theories and misinformation about the relationship between the fires and climate change.
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Finance
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What happens when we use our credit cards? We all think we know. We charge a purchase on our card, we incur a debt. If we pay off that debt within a month, we face no interest charge. End of story.
Not quite. Something else important is happening whenever we make a credit card charge: We’re making already rich people considerably richer.
Our generosity — to the deep pockets above us — operates on two levels, one that will come as no surprise to anyone who’s been following corporate pay patterns, the other reflecting a cash-register dynamic that hardly any of us know anything about.
The unsurprising reality? Our credit cards are bankrolling some of Corporate America’s largest executive paychecks. K.I. Chenault, for instance, pocketed nearly $400 million from American Express between his 2001 hiring as CEO and his retirement in early 2018. That same year, Visa’s four highest-paid execs all pulled down over $12.5 million each. Last year, the chief executive at Mastercard enjoyed a pay deal worth $20.4 million.
What exactly makes sitting in the credit card industry’s executive suites so lucrative? Must be all that interest the credit card industry collects from people who can’t quickly pay off their balances, right? Again, not quite.
The interest consumers pay on their card purchases certainly does add up, and massively so. But our credit card giants, as former U.S. Treasury Department official Aaron Klein points out, actually get the bulk of their profit from the “swipe fees” the credit card industry charges merchants.
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The number of rich respondents who reported dissatisfaction with their lives was “statistically indistinguishable from zero,” while nearly 40% of low-income people said they struggle to pay their bills.
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The House-approved Raise the Wage Act is among hundreds of bills sitting on the desk of Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the self-declared “grim reaper” of progressive legislation.
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“Boricuas deserve so much better than this.”
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Mike Elrod voted for Donald Trump in 2016, hoping for a break from tight government oversight that his business had endured for years, which he often found unreasonable.
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The same forces that are driving massive inequality between the top 1 percent and the rest of us are creating a vast generational wealth gap between baby boomers — my generation — and millennials.
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There’s nothing like an illegal and utterly reckless U.S. act of war to illuminate the political character of presidential candidates. In the days since the assassination of Iran’s top military official, two of the highest-polling Democratic contenders have displayed the kind of moral cowardice that got the United States into — and kept it in — horrific wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq.
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The 2020 new year marks an historic landmark for dramatically improving many people’s living standards by increasing the minimum hourly wage. According to David Cooper of the Economic Policy Institute, nearly 7 million workers will start the new year with higher wages. This is not due to Trump’s tax cut which reduced the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to as low as 20 percent. That change resulted in doubling the number of companies paying zero in taxes, according to research from the Center for Public Integrity.
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The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program is a form of government rent assistance. In 2018, upwards of 5 million people across the country lived in a household that used a voucher to help pay some or all of their rent.
When Congress established Section 8 of the Housing and Community Development Act in 1974, one of the goals was to make sure people earning low wages could find “decent housing and a suitable living environment” outside of public housing units.
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On a sweltering Saturday afternoon last June, Crystal Carter took a deep breath as she walked toward the red “for rent” sign.
Shaded by tall oak trees, the three-story duplex looked cozy. The first floor siding was painted yellow, with white railings leading to the front door. The windows appeared new, the lawn freshly cut.
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While many of the world’s crypto exchanges do at least some checking of clients to make sure they are not laundering money or connected to terrorists, it’s voluntary for traders to provide information to Deribit. In February, the exchange will require people withdrawing up to 1 Bitcoin over a 24-hour period to provide data such as names and addresses. The exchange still won’t make them provide passport or government identification. People wishing to trade higher amounts will need to provide more documentation.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Only a full accounting of Trump’s high crimes and misdemeanors will shake the Republicans from backing McConnell’s kangaroo court
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“House Democrats should change plans: issue him a subpoena themselves.”
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The awful truth about the corporate and governmental power elites in our democratic society is that they really don’t like democracy at all. They prefer to rule by buying lawmakers, hiring lobbyists, running Orwellian PR campaigns, and relying on authoritarian police power to control people.
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On the most commonly cited rationale for each position—sustainability for universalists and resource constraints for means testers—proponents of universalism have the upper hand.
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Many Americans have forecasted that the outlaw Donald Trump will commit even more illegal acts to increasing his support in the 2020 presidential year. Remember Wag the Dog, a film about using a fabricated war to draw attention away from presidential misdeeds. Those Americans have been proven right by Donald Trump’s attempt to provoke an unlawful war with Iran. Likewise, Trump has illegally ordered his staff or ex-staff to ignore Congressional subpoenas to testify and provide documents.
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“It’s definitely not a good time to be a Nazi,” says a character named Yorki near the end of Taika Waititi’s recent satirical film JoJo Rabbit. But the same can’t be said for fascists in Russia, where the state media suddenly seems committed to resuscitating Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. The scandal started on January 7, when television and radio host Vladimir Solovyov reposted a glowing review of his 2013 short film about Mussolini. The review, written by publicist Igor Molotov, calls Mussolini a “brilliant man” who “gave the world a third way that Russia is partly traveling today.”
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Censorship/Free Speech
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During the run up to the passage of FOSTA, we were told two key things: (1) the law was absolutely necessary to stop sex trafficking websites like Backpage, and (2) that there was no way that the law would be abused to go after perfectly innocent websites. It’s pretty easy to show that both of these claims turned out to be utter bullshit. The first one was especially easy, seeing as the Feds seized the site and arrested its founders a week before FOSTA became law. The second has taken somewhat longer to show, in part because for a long while no one actually seemed to be making use of FOSTA. For a law that we were told was absolutely necessary and that any delay in passing it would mean lives put at risk, it has been notable just how few actual lawsuits have been filed under FOSTA in the 18 months or so since it became law. State attorneys general, who pushed strongly for it, claiming they needed this hole in Section 230 to go after bad actor websites have still never used the law. Not once.
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An updated set of community guidelines reveals that TikTok will explicitly ban conspiracy theories going forward. The move comes as Facebook and YouTube are struggling with their own moderation scandals.
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Spotify hosting Nazi playlists? Several user-generated playlists available to the public drew criticism after a newspaper pointed out the rampant anti-Semitic content.
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Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press
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On this week’s “Dissenter Weekly Update,” host and Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola discusses efforts by unionized employees from the Environmental Protection Agency to obtain whistleblower protections, files posted by a Cambridge Analytica whistleblower exposing information warfare and voter manipulation, and much more.
As the disastrous effects of the climate crisis grow more evident by the day, EPA workers are fighting for protections to blow the whistle on waste, fraud, and abuse within their agency as part of a larger push for an employee bill of rights.
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Despite Wikileaks founder Julian Assange being kept in his prison cell for up to 23 hours a day in London’s high security Belmarsh jail, it has not stopped him winning a major award.
The Catalan Dignity Commission has honoured him with its 2019 Dignity Prize for raising awareness around the world about the plight of the Catalans in the lead up to the 2017 independence vote.
Announced on Friday, the prize recognises his efforts to correct misreporting of events and to provide live video updates to the world of the peaceful Catalan protesters and the brutal crackdown on them by Spanish police.
[...]
He undertook to help the Catalans despite the risk it would create his own problems with the Ecuadorean Government.
As a result, Assange’s support for the democratic process led to a backlash from Spain sparking concerns within Ecuador’s government.
Soon after Assange’s internet connection was cut off and his access to visitors stopped.
Assange has a long a history of helping people get access to internet services. At age 23 he founded one of the first internet provider services in Australia, the non-profit Suburbia, run by volunteers to help underprivileged people get internet access.
Ms Assange said her son also spent a lot of time visiting community groups to show them how to use the internet.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The NYC Bar’s letter represents the first time it or any comparable association has called for an investigation into a sitting attorney general.
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About 10 years ago, I was forced to contend with a cyberstalker. He had written an online novel and posted excerpts on his blog that included threats to rape me and burn my house down. He hoped to kill not only me but my two young children. I still remember the shock I felt as I read his words. My fingers felt as if they had swollen to the size of sausages; I could hardly dial for help.
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Breathalyzers have been in use for more than 100 years at this point and we still don’t have all the kinks worked out. Testing equipment used by law enforcement frequently isn’t calibrated or maintained correctly. Some devices have been set up improperly, which leads directly to false positives when the tests are deployed.
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Video footage of the area around Jeffrey Epstein’s jail cell on a day he apparently tried to kill himself “no longer exists,” federal prosecutors told a judge Thursday.
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According to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), the airing of the second installment of Surviving R. Kelly led to a 40% spike in calls to their hotline.
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New Orleans, Louisiana — With hunger strikes sweeping immigration jails across the country, two Indian asylum seekers protesting their incarceration at a remote Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) jail in Louisiana are reportedly on the brink of death after refusing to eat or drink for 68 days, according to a volunteer who regularly visits the two men.
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In China, a shocking new exposé has revealed that Chinese authorities are systematically forcing Muslims — mostly Uyghurs and Kazakhs — into labor programs to supply Chinese factories with a cheap and compliant workforce. The New York Times investigation, based on official documents, interviews and visits to the far-western region of Xinjiang, reveals a sweeping program to push poor farmers, villagers and small traders into sometimes months-long training courses before assigning them to low-wage factory work. The programs work in tandem with indoctrination camps where an estimated 1 million adults from the Uyghur community are being imprisoned. China claims its labor programs are “vocational training centers” designed to combat extremism and alleviate poverty, while Uyghur activists say they are part of China’s ongoing campaign to strip them of their language and community and to carry out cultural genocide. We speak with Austin Ramzy, a New York Times reporter who co-authored the recent exposé, and Nury Turkel, a Uyghur-American attorney and board chair at the Uyghur Human Rights Project.
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Ugandan security forces beat then detain a protester in downtown Kampala, Uganda, Monday, Aug. 20, 2018. Ugandan police fired bullets and tear gas to disperse a crowd of protesters demanding the release of jailed lawmaker, pop star, and government critic Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, whose stage name is Bobi Wine.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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In 2018, you might recall that Ajit Pai had to cancel his CES appearance due to clearly idiotic death threats. In 2019, Pai had to cancel a scheduled appearance due to the government shutdown. Fast forward to 2020 and Ajit Pai finally made it back to CES, and he used the opportunity to… make up some nonsense about net neutrality.
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Monopolies
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The illegal order of the Republic to block the Uber Platform in Colombia also constitutes an act of censorship in contravention of international human rights instruments that protect net neutrality, freedom of expression on the internet and freedom of use of the internet.
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Patents
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The Finance Committee on Tuesday approved the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) by 25-3 vote. But Grassley said Thursday that at least six other panels must vote on the measure, a process that will stretch until Jan. 16 at the earliest.
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Software Patents
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Earlier this week, Sonos filed a massive lawsuit against Google for stealing its IP. Alongside that salvo, they also warned of a pending lawsuit against Amazon.
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Copyrights
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AI-written articles are copyright-protected, rules Chinese court [Ed: The copyright maximalists have gotten their way. Every garbage generated by some computer program - not the program itself - is copyrighted]
A Chinese court has ruled that AI-generated works are entitled to copyright protection, in a win for tech giant Tencent.
According to state media outlet China News Service (CNS), a court in Shenzhen this month ruled in favour of Tencent, which claimed that work created by its Dreamwriter robot had been copied by a local financial news company.
The Shenzhen Nanshan District People’s Court ruled that, in copying the Dreamwriter article, Shanghai Yingxun Technology Company had infringed Tencent’s copyright.
Dreamwriter is an automated writing system created by Tencent and based on the company’s own algorithms.
According to the reports, Shanghai Yingxun reposted a financial report written by Dreamwriter in August 2018 without Tencent’s permission.
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A domain operated by ‘pirate’ IPTV provider PrimeStreams is causing concern among users today. Instead of displaying the usual service portal, it quickly redirects to the ominous anti-piracy warning of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. However, if one looks closely at the mechanics, this is not a seizure carried out by ACE but probably the work of a malicious actor.
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Two months ago Canada’s Federal Court issued the country’s first pirate ‘site’ blocking order. The order was requested by Bell, Rogers, and Groupe TVA, who recently asked the court to amend the order to ban additional domains that provide access the pirate IPTV service GoldTV. This request was granted. Despite attempts from the rightsholders to keep the update quiet, the new domains have been revealed as well.
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We’ve pointed out for years that there’s always been some level of confusion about the boundaries of the “non-commercial” tag on a Creative Commons license. There are lots of things that are kind of fuzzy about it. Does it mean you just can’t sell the work? Or does it mean you can’t even use it on a website if that website has ads on it? Indeed, we’ve worried that the non-commercial license created a bit of a branding problem for Creative Commons. However, to the organization’s credit, it has spent plenty of time and effort over the past decade or so to try to clarify some of the confusion about non-commercial licensing, saying that it really just refers to the direct sale of such works.
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Last winter, Patrick Cockburn called attention to one of the more disturbing effects of the sanctions against North Korea—their “ghost ships” (in “It’s Time We Saw Economic Sanctions for What They Really Are—War Crimes” . Over the past several years, fishing vessels have been washing up on the western shores of Northeastern Japan in larger and larger numbers. Like a ghost ship from the film the “Pirates of the Caribbean,” some have “skeletonized” remains on board. On others, Japanese find survivors who are desperate for help. A gruesome case of heads found severed from their bodies was discovered the other day.
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Just last week we wrote about the good news that the European Patent Office had decided to reject AI-generated inventions for patent applications and explained why this was good. As we noted, prior to that, most of the discussion on AI and monopoly protections had been focused on copyright, and there are various lawyers and law firms eagerly pushing the idea that AI should be able to obtain copyrights, despite it going against the entire basis of copyright law. So far, we haven’t had a real test of the issue in the US (though the monkey selfie case could be seen as a trial balloon for copyright for non-human creators), but apparently at least one Chinese court has already gone in the other direction.
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Posted in Bill Gates, Microsoft at 3:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The latest in the news (today) and it is indirectly related to Bill Gates, a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein (he also visited him in prison):
Associated Press (widely syndicated): “Video footage of the area around Jeffrey Epstein’s jail cell on a day he survived an apparent suicide attempt “no longer exists,” federal prosecutors told a judge Thursday.”
Summary: Police evidence is still being denied access to (or ‘lost’) while people who work for Microsoft inside large publishers apparently attempt to pro-actively control the narrative
IN part one, part two, part three and part four we’ve covered sufficient background to explain why it’s a legitimate issue. “This report is over 2000 plus pages,” the police said. Yes, there’s police record about an arrest at the mansion of Bill Gates and this concerns pedophilia (the Seattle PD dealt with it). In the fifth part we wrote about apparent media cover-ups. We’ll get back to that in parts VII or VIII. We expect to have at least 10 parts in total. We should politely mention that it has already taken more than 4 months for the Seattle PD to divulge information that it has. What we call “mansion of pedophilia” isn’t merely an allegation. As we noted recently, Gates has quite some history with the police. But we give them the benefit of the doubt and wait patiently for disclosure. They have an obligation to the public — to uphold and enforce the law, not offer immunity (oversight and overlook aren’t the same) to law-breakers who have ‘connections’.
So what can we disclose at this point?
“We prefer not to say much about the Seattle PD at this point; we need to be patient and diplomatic, but they’re really stretching it.”A reader has just informed us of this puff piece from a familiar person, whose close relationship with Microsoft is thoroughly documented here. It’s Dina Bass, who is certainly helping Microsoft and Bill Gates distract from very serious questions about pedophilia and ephebophiles. Is she once again so eager to prove that Bloomberg is full of Microsoft ‘operatives’ disguised as journalists? Her repertoire has been covered here over the years, including disclosed private E-mails that showed how she had collaborated with the company.
Published hours ago by Mike Bloomberg’s site, where Microsoft nowadays chooses to ‘seed’ its puff pieces (Vance on ‘Arctic vault’, Bass on GitHub and so on), was an article entitled “Microsoft releases chat scanner to detect child sex predators” (to detect the very same thing Microsoft Peter, for example, was for many years while acting as Microsoft’s ‘operative’ at Ars Technica, ‘planting’ their puff pieces).
An associate of ours has meanwhile said that “the SDPD [Seattle PD] delays are allowing Microsoft to have time to spin the situation…”
We prefer not to say much about the Seattle PD at this point; we need to be patient and diplomatic, but they’re really stretching it. They apparently use Microsoft software and have struggled for four months to hand over documents because this software isn’t functioning properly. As our associate put it, “Bill’s own software, if that’s what they are trying to use, is not going to help testify against him. They need to do this work on GNU/Linux, it is much easier to use and more powerful and, in this case, less likely to get stuck for “unknown” reasons. That goes also for Bill’s pretend e-mail system.”
“Stonewalling, doxxing and possibly bribery are being leveraged.”More and more suspicious things are happening every day in light of our efforts to get to the documents. We will report all these things one day… we cannot disclose everything at once because it may jeopardise progress.
Stonewalling, doxxing and possibly bribery are being leveraged. Classic tactics used to cover things up or at least discourage/scare interested parties, including petitioners. The downside of all these things is that they only make us even more curious. We’ll get down to the bottom of it… hopefully before the press is totally flooded with articles about how Microsoft “protects children…” █
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Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Marketing, Microsoft at 2:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The media plays along (more like advertising than journalism and Microsoft’s advertising budget for magazine space certainly plays a role)
Does this look like a Microsoft ad or an actual article? They also promote listening devices down at the bottom.
Summary: Microsoft keeps buying ad space in magazines, compromising their integrity and tarnishing brands such as “Linux” (making it look like merely a component available with Vista 10)
“Microsoft EDGE, the browser that’s better and safer than Chrome,” a reader of ours joked, having sent us the above photograph. “Or else, steal the Chrome rendering engine, add-in hooks to the underlying OS then rename it Microsoft EDGE. Have these people no shame?”
“What kind of “Admin” uses that toy? That’s like selling a rickshaw to truck drivers…”Remember that it has KHTML roots (KDE) — a topic we covered here about a decade back.
“Computer mags at the local WHSmith,” as our reader noted, show more of the same pattern. “See image,” he wrote. “See also the front page of ‘Admin’ magazine: “Windows Subsystem for Linux”. If you can’t steal Linux then at least you can steal mindshare :]”
In Microsoft’s very own words [PDF]: “Mind Control: To control mental output you have to control mental input. Take control of the channels by which developers receive information, then they can only think about the things you tell them. Thus, you control mindshare!”
Here’s the latest pile:
Nowadays, with WSL, they use that “Linux” thing to offer more Windows ‘features’ while tying them to the underlying spying machine. Shades of AWS in the server space…
Look closely at the top pick:
Yes, WSL. What kind of “Admin” uses that toy? That’s like selling a rickshaw to truck drivers… █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 2:11 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Recent: Journalism in the Area of Patents and the Domain of Patent Litigation is Dead
Summary: It’s difficult to see any effort whatsoever going into investigation of EPO affairs, including the recent vote for a strike; EPO payments and threats may have played a big role in this apparent indifference
THE YEAR has barely started for the European Patent Office (EPO). No press releases, only rather mindless and unoriginal 'tweets', no press articles…
We suppose that António Campinos prefers it that way. Battistelli failed to duck negative press quite to the same extent (even if nothing has changed since!).
“Patents aren’t a physical thing but a monopoly, granted temporarily in exchange for publication/disclosure.”This does not mean that the EPO is no longer mentioned anywhere. It’s just that nothing at all is mentioned about internal affairs and scandals. They pretend it’s all “business as usual”. Even IP Kat does that. AIPPI’s and patent maximalists’ event has just been promoted by Bristows (one of the IP Kat editors now, after the 'great shuffle') and by other patent zealots. There are also some press releases such as “Cellmid (ASX:CDY) midkine patents granted in the U.S. and Europe” and “Cellect Biotechnology Strengthens IP Portfolio; Receives “Intention to Grant” Patents from European and Israeli Patent Offices” [1] (‘Intention to Grant’).
There’s also this article (self-promotional) [2] about “Protecting AI at the EPO – Two dimensions of technical character” and it’s about getting software patents in Europe by disguising them or their true nature with buzzwords.
This is the kind of thing we’ve been seeing lately; there’s also this widely-circulated press release [3,4] about EPs. It uses lots of misleading propaganda terms such as “property” and “assets”; they’re lying even to themselves. Patents aren’t a physical thing but a monopoly, granted temporarily in exchange for publication/disclosure.
Is there not a single journalist in Europe interested in EPO scandals? Have they all been muzzled? The EPO is Europe’s second-largest institution. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Cellect Biotechnology Ltd. (Nasdaq: APOP), a developer of innovative technology which enables the functional selection of stem cells, received official communication from two jurisdictions, the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Israeli Intellectual Property Office, regarding their intention to grant European Patent Application No. 14851547.1 and Israeli Patent Application No. 244982, respectively. These patent applications include a cell-based product and a method of manufacturing a stem and progenitor cell population with enhanced activity by short incubation with an apoptotic ligand.
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Many users of the European patent system rarely use the appeals procedure. However, a recent revision of the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal (“the RoP”) that comes into effect on 1 January 2020 has implications which extend beyond the appeals procedure into examination and opposition proceedings, and therefore is of importance to all users.
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The European patent office (EPO) is keen to let applicants know that it is open for business when it comes to protecting inventions around AI. This may at first sight seem surprising: much of AI can be considered to be solutions to problems embodied in mathematical models, and Article 52 of the European Patent Convention tells us that mathematical methods are not patentable, at least to the extent that a European patent application relates to the mathematical model as such. So, how can you prevent your AI invention being considered as a mathematical method as such?
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Microbot Medical Inc. (MBOT) has received an official communication from the European Patent Office (EPO) regarding its intention to grant European Patent Application No. 11795301, covering the Company’s Self-Cleaning Shunt (SCS™). Globally, the Company now has 36 patents issued/allowed and 16 patent applications pending worldwide.
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“We have always maintained that a strong and growing intellectual property portfolio is one of our strongest assets and will enable us to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage while establishing barriers of entry to future competitors” said Harel Gadot, Chief Executive Officer, President, and Chairman. “We will continue to expand and seek protection for our unique innovative platforms. This provides the foundation for the establishment of a multi-generation product portfolio, including our latest introduction of the LIBERTY™ Robotic System, the world’s first fully disposable robotic system for use in neurovascular, cardiovascular and peripheral vascular procedures.”
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