This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers.
Desktop search is a software application which searches the contents of computer files, rather than searching the internet. The purpose of this software is to enable the user to locate information on their computer. Typically, this data includes emails, chat logs, documents, contact lists, graphics files, as well as multimedia files including video and audio.
Searching a hard disk can be painfully slow, especially bearing in mind the large storage capacities of modern hard disks. To ensure considerably better performance, desktop search engines build and maintain an index database. Populating this database is a system intensive activity. Consequently, desktop search engines will carry out indexing when the computer is not being used.
Over the weekend a headline at Android Police caught my eye: “Chromebooks desperately need more than 4GB of RAM in 2020”. That was followed by “8GB RAM or bust”. Despite the provocative title, which I think is an extreme position, the article does make sense. But we shouldn’t ask for every new Chromebook to come with 8 GB of memory.
Let’s start with the data to see if it supports the position of requiring 8 GB of memory on new Chromebooks. There aren’t many hard numbers in the article, but it’s true that if you use Android apps on a Chromebook, you’ll be using memory even when you aren’t running those apps.
I verified that by doing several memory tests on my Chromebook: When I removed the Google Play Store option, less memory was used upon the next bootup.
First up, in our Wanderings, Dale’s been driving, Dann’s been migrating, Leo’s been checking out the beta, Tony Hughes spreads the car love, Moss is doing double-duty distrohopping, Joe reads again
It's time to challenge some long-held assumptions.
Today's Btrfs is not yesterday's hot mess, but a modern battle-tested filesystem, and we'll prove it.
Plus our thoughts on Github dropping the term "master", and the changes Linux should make NOW to compete with commercial desktops.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got so much news it’s kind of ridiculous! We’ve got a new kernel release with Linux 5.7. SpaceX Used Linux to send NASA Astronauts into Orbit. KDE released the latest version of their Plasma desktop environment with Plasma 5.19. We’ve got a lot of hardware news this week because Pine64 announced that the PineTab is now available for PreOrder. Lenovo announced that they will certify their full ThinkPad line for Linux. System76 announced their New 12-Core AMD Ryzen powered laptop, the Serval. Linux Mint has been in the news with a controversial topic related to Snaps and Chromium. Destination Linux, a podcast that I co-host, had a livestream this week at the SouthEast LinuxFest conference. Peertube announced the release of version 2.2.0 which brings some much needed improvements to this YouTube alternative software. I found some really interesting projects that we’re going to talk about. The first being a project called Weylus, which lets you use a touchscreen tablet as a drawing tablet in Linux. The other being a Linux Distro with a python userland called Snakeware. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
FSGSBASE - The long-standing FSGSBASE patches that can offer some performance advantages for some workloads were recently revised as recently as v13 at the end of May. But it didn't land for Linux 5.8 sadly but perhaps in 5.9 we'll finally see this ability come to mainline for this instruction set extension around since Intel Ivy Bridge days.
AMD Radeon "Navi 2" / Sienna Cichlid - Since the start of June AMD has been publishing "Sienna Cichlid" GPU enablement patches that appear to definitely be for Navi 2 graphics cards launching later this year. The patches were sadly a few weeks too late for being reviewed and queued in DRM-Next for Linux 5.8. In turn this work will come in Linux 5.9. Unfortunately though this means the patches won't be in a stable mainline kernel until October rather than with 5.8's debut in August. We'll see when Navi 2 graphics cards end up launching but there is good chances we could see Navi 2 debut before October and thus no mainline stable kernel release with that support. If the patches came earlier for 5.8, it would also allow for out-of-the-box support in the likes of Ubuntu 20.10.
“The pure size made this merge window a bit more stressful than I like”
Nearly 20 percent of the files in the Linux kernel source repository are about to get an overhaul as Linux kernel 5.8 is set to be its biggest stable release ever with more than 800,000 lines of new code.
The head of Linux Kernel development Linus Torvalds has stated that Linux 5.8, due to have a stable release over the summer, will be the ‘biggest releases of all time’ with 14,000 file changes, 14 non-merge commits and more than 800,000 new lines of code.
As a change past the Linux 5.8 merge window now that the flurry of code activity has settled down was changing the use of zero-length arrays in structs with flexible array members. Linus Torvalds did pull the change into Linux 5.8 but then decided shortly afterwards to drop the change at least for the time being.
The pull request replaced all the existing zero-length array usage within the kernel with C99 flexible array members for dynamically-sized trailing elements in a C structure. Using flexible array members is intended to provide proper sizeof() calculations, the ability for the code compiler to generate errors when improperly used, and avoid potential undefined behavior scenarios.
Let's face it, using synchronization primitives such as RCU can be frustrating. And it is only natural to wish to get back, somehow, at the source of such frustration. In short, it is quite understandable to want to torture RCU. (And other synchronization primitives as well, but you have to start somewhere!) Another benefit of torturing RCU is that doing so sometimes uncovers bugs in other parts of the kernel. You see, RCU is not always willing to suffer alone.
One long-standing RCU-torture approach is to use modprobe and rmmod to install and remove the rcutorture module, as described in the torture-test documentation. However, this approach requires considerable manual work to check for errors.
Double Commander is a free and open source dual pane file manager. It is an excellent file manager, especially for those who prefer a consistent file manager experience, while trying out different Linux desktop environments. This article assists you with getting Double Commander installed and configured on your Linux system.
Each desktop environment ships with its own file manager: Nautilus on Gnome, Dolphin on KDE, Thunar on XFCE, etc. Working in the file manager forms and integral part of my daily PC work flow. Therefore I do not enjoy being forced to switch to a different file manager, each time I try out a different desktop environment on Linux. Additionally, I really enjoy dual pane file managers. If you recognize yourself in these file manager preferences, then I can highly recommend giving Double Commander a try.
Alexander Koblov develops and maintains Double Commander and he selected the Lazarus IDE for programming Double Commander. Here is an appetizer of what Double Commander looks like, while I am writing this article:
FFmpeg 4.3 is out as the latest version of this key open-source multimedia library. FFmpeg 4.3 is quite a big release.
FFmpeg 4.3 ships with support for handling TrueHD in MP4, Intel QSV accelerated MJPEG and VP9 decoding, and on Linux the Vulkan-powered AMD AMF encoder is now supported. AMD's AMF is the Advanced Media Framework that has been around for a few years and can support Vulkan. It will be interesting to see if FFmpeg's support of AMD AMF will spur further Linux adoption of it.
There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.4.1-alpha from the download page. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release by early July.
Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual.
The passwd command in Linux allows you to change user password, lock accounts, expire passwords and more. Learn how to use the passwd command with practical examples.
Today, Desperados III from Mimimi Games and THQ Nordic releases on PC for Windows but it's now confirmed to be heading to Linux and macOS too.
On Twitter, THQ Nordic mentioned how multiple big updates are already planned to launch across July and August and in the same tweet they also said, "Additionally, there will be an update this summer, adding Mac & Linux support."—awesome! Considering Mimimi Games did a great job on Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun I'm keen to see Desperados III on Linux.
Here's just a few of the Linux games included:
>observer_ Armello Baba Is You Company of Heroes 2 FTL
Want to get a peek at some upcoming games? The Steam Game Festival - Summer Edition is live now with lots to have a look at for the interested Linux fan.
Currently Steam appears to be having issues rolling out demos, we will update this with a Linux list as and when we see them appear. Please check back often. We will not be listing all demos, just what looks interesting.
Feral Interactive is a company and distributor of games for different platforms (macOS, Linux, iOS devices, Android devices and Nintendo Switch) to which we can attribute several quite good titles.
Well, for some time now the company has been working and improving its tool called “GameMode” which is an impressive tool that can improve performance while playing on Linux.
From the AT&T Bell Labs to personal smartphones, Unix systems have come a long way since their inception. Earlier Unix systems did not provide users with any sort of graphical interactions that we see in modern Linux distros. However, the GUI has become an important part for many, and it’s hard to imagine life without it today. The KDE desktop environment is arguably the most innovative and popular choice for users who want a cutting-edge graphical experience. Continue reading if you want to know what contributes to KDE’s enormous popularity and if it’s the right choice for you or not.
There are a plethora of desktop environments available for Linux. Some popular ones are GNOME, XFCE, Cinnamon, Mate, Unity as well as our beloved KDE plasma. This guide highlights some of the reasons KDE outshines many of these desktop environments.
We have released 9th patch release to Qt 5.12 LTS today. As usual it doesn't bring any new features but many bug fixes & other improvements.
Qt 5.12.9 has more than 90 changes and it fixes ~ 40 bugs. There is couple of security fixes (CVE-2020-11655 & CVE-2020-11656) to sql lite 3rd party component as well. Please check details from Qt 5.12.9 Change Files.
Qt 5.12.9 can be updated to existing online installation by using maintenance tool. For new installations, please download latest online installer from Qt Account portal or from qt.io Download page. Offline packages are available for commercial users in the Qt Account portal and at the qt.io Download page for open-source users. You can also try out the Commercial evaluation option from the qt.io Download page.
  KDE Plasma 5.19.1 is here just one week after the launch of the KDE Plasma 5.19 desktop environment series, which brought more polished features, consistency changes, and improved usability.
As expected from a first point release, KDE Plasma 5.19.1 includes only bug fixes. These address various important issues reported by users, such as the battery applet not being displayed in the system tray area or the Bluedevil applet tooltip displaying the wrong name for connected devices.
Moreover, OpenVPN support was improved in the Plasma NetworkManager (plasma-nm) applet to avoid enabling TCP if the remote has been set on another line, the former default action of the Plasma Vault applet has been restored, and KRunner KCM now opens in System Settings.
Now that the project is under KDE organization, I'll start with the planned new capabilities, such as the Kirigami support and the html element to help with online documentation of qml snippets.
And to finish this quick update, be invited to help with the project and send Merge Requests, feature requests and opinions.
QML Online is a Qt/QML adaptation for the web powered by EmScripten / WebAssembly.
Last month marked the first stable version of QML Online for running QML code within the web browser thanks to WebAssembly compilation.
This QML Online open-source project is now being hosted under the KDE organization. QML Online is continuing to work on Kirigami support and other improvements for developing QML on the web.
This week I worked on making the UI interactive and configuring the interaction between the comment model and the storyboard model. I also implemented the switching of modes.
The comment model stores the name and visibility of comment fields. It is responsible for the comments menu’s items. Storyboard model’s items have fields to store the contents of each comment field. So whenever a comment is added to the comment model we need to add a child to each storyboard item. Similarly with removing and moving (reordering) of comment items. I connected signals for removing, adding and moving items from the comment model to storyboard model. This signals were used to perform the required actions. Remove and add signals were easy, but qt does not use the moveRows(..) function for drag and drop. Instead it inserts the row to be moved in the desired place and deletes the row. So basically the moving is faked. This results in rowsAdded, dataChanged and rowsRemoved signals. To get the rowsMoved signal I had to reimplement the mimeData and dropMimeData and call moveRows explicitly. Also we must return false in the dropMimeData function otherwise the row at previous position will be deleted as qt assumes the default actions are being followed.
First of all, sorry for not making a blog post early on during the community bonding period. I couldn't because I was mostly busy with Krita's Android release.
Secondly, some of you might remember me from the previous year. I was GSoC student for Krita. Now it is my second time! :-)
It has been more than 2 weeks since the coding period began and I didn't post much because the project was just begun and there was no big progress. Coming to the project, the MyPaint brush engine plugin has been integrated into Krita and is working. Though, it is very rudimentary as of now, we can't customize it, we can't load/save brushes and there is no settings widget. All we can do as of now is just use the default settings for painting. The rest of the things will be taken care of during this summer.
Coming five weeks after GNOME 3.36.2, the GNOME 3.36.3 stable update continues to fix bugs, update translations and add various other smaller improvements to the GNOME 3.36 desktop environment in an attempt to offer users a more stable and reliable release.
As expected with any point release, GNOME 3.36.3 addresses numerous bugs reported by users since previous versions across numerous components and apps, and updates many language translations.
But there are also some improvements. For example, the Mutter window manger adds better monitor screencast on X11, implements touch-mode detection for the X11 backend, and removes external keyboard detection from touch-mode heuristics.
Currently, when a game which needs a firmware to run is added to GNOME Games, the user has to manually make a new platforms directory (if it does not exist already), make a directory corresponding to the name of the firmware being added, then copy the firmware file and rename the firmware file to match what’s written in the core.
First task towards completion of the GSoC project was to refactor existing code such that it can be used later in the project.
Originally, GNOME-Games handled firmware checks directly through the retro core source. While refactoring, GNOME Games’ model of individual modules must be kept in mind. But firmware are predominantly used by retro consoles (libretro) such as Game Boy Advance, Famicom Entertainment System, Super NES etc. So, to not break the model an abstract was needed such that retro consoles are able to use the refactored code easily, keeping the new code generic such that it theoretically works for any given platform.
To achieve this, a Core interface was made with abstract functions which will be used by the check sum code. But since Core is an interface, it can not have function bodies. Which is why a subclass called RetroCore was also made, which defines all the abstract prototypes defined in Core that will be used by retro platform.
The reason an abstract was needed in the first place was because of the fact that a Retro.CoreDescriptor object is needed to conduct check sums of firmware. But because it’s a Retro class function, it will be against GNOME Games programming model. Hence the need for Core interface. Which is intended as a wrapper for Retro.CoreDescriptor. These wrappers are then defined in RetroCore and used when needed.
GTK+ supports the separation of user-interface layout from your business logic, by using UI descriptions in an XML format that can be parsed by the GtkBuilder class. So what GtkBuilder does is it processed a UI definition given in XML format and does all the heavy-lifting that needs to be done for allocating widegets, styling them ID-ing, packing etc. and than allows you to obtain a reference to the concerned widget in C code which allows for tweaking or manipulating the behaviour of the widget based on business logic. Thus importantly keeping the UI definitions seperate from the business logic. Thus very similar to what Bob The Builder does, takes a blueprint and turns it into real houses and building. GtkBuilder parses objects definitions in XML and creates real runtime objects of the same property, thus sparing us the part where we call the same functions again and again to create, destroy and style widgets.
Do you want to start your learning on hacking with a perfect toolbox in the format of Linux box, you come to the right place. Here I have listed 10+ Linux distro, which can help you to learn ethical hacking.
Whether you want to learn security practices or pursue your career in cyber/information security or already working as a security professional, you need a perfect Linux distro that helps you.
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth and final release of the stable/11 branch.
Glen Barber, release engineering lead at FreeBSD, has announced the fifth and final version 11.4 of the FreeBSD 11-STABLE branch. The new FreeBSD 11.4 comes with several changes and updates to userland applications, hardware support, devices, and device drivers. FreeBSD has supported the ZFS filesystem for longer than any operating system. To further enhance its functionality in FreeBSD, v11.4 now includes support for renaming ZFS bookmarks. Additionally, it has improved the latency of synchronous 128KB writes to increase 15 to 20% performance.
For those not on the current FreeBSD 12 stable series but currently relying on FreeBSD 11, the FreeBSD 11.4 stable release is now available.
FreeBSD 11.4 ships with various updates for this N-1 stable series. There are many bug and security fixes, camcontrol utility improvements, the ZFS utility now supports renaming bookmarks, the certctl utility is now available, support for newer JMicron AHCI controllers, D-Link DWM-222 LTE dongle support, and lower latency for ZFS synchronous 128KB writes while also allowing the ZFS ZIL max block size to be configurable.
After about 20 months of hard work, the Haiku team has finally released, a few days ago, the second beta version of Haiku, the BeOS-inspired open-source operating system that aims to offer a fast, simple to use, and powerful alternative for personal computing. This time, I am particularly happy, even a bit proud myself, because I have also been contributing with Portuguese translations for the user interface, and this is the first beta which includes those translations. So, let’s celebrate!
I first wrote about Haiku back in 2018, right after the first Haiku beta was released. As an old time BeOS user, I had been waiting for that moment. You can read my review of Haiku R1/beta1 in case you’re curious. So, today, I will write a few paragraphs about some things that have changed and share with you some of my impressions on what there’s to love on this new operating system. And, just because it can be done and it’s more fun, I will be writing, editing, and publishing this article just using Haiku R1/beta2. I will include a brief note explaining what software I used and if there were any difficulties.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Haiku R1 Beta 2 and some of the applications pre-installed.
An exciting week of openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots have brought even more KDE software, a new stable kernel and more.
A week ago Plasma 5.19 arrived in the 20200609 snapshot and just a couple of days ago in snapshot 20200614 KDE’s 20.04.2 Apps Update arrived.
A large amount of the packages updated in snapshot 20200614 were Applications 20.04.2 packages, which included improvements to the music player Elisa, search tags for the file manager Dolphin and faster editing with KDE’s advanced video-editing application Kdenlive. Several other packages were included in the snapshot like an update to image editor gimp 2.10.20, which now allows the tool-group menu that hovers to expand. The Generic Graphics Library, gegl, 0.4.24 added new horizontal and vertical shapes for vignettes. Other packages updated in the snapshot were autoyast2 4.3.13, pam 1.4.0, instant messaging client pidgin 2.14.1 and GNOME document reader evince 3.36.5. The snapshot is trending unstable with a few known issues like a bootloop and a failure to build vmware modules. The current rating was at 68 during the release of this article, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
 HPLIP 3.20.6 arrives exactly a month after the HPLIP 3.20.5 release, which added support for Canonical’s Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series, and introduces support for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, Fedora Linux 32, and Manjaro Linux 20.0 distributions.
That means you can now use your HP printer or scanner on these distributions if you install the HPLIP 3.20.6 release, which you can download right now from the official website. Select your favorite distro from the list and download the automatic installer, which can be easily installed using these instructions.
HPLIP, HP print, scan, and fax drivers for Linux, released 3.20.6 today with new printers and Linux distributions support, though it still does not install on Ubuntu 20.04.
The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F32-20200601-Live ISOs, carrying the 5.6.18-300 kernel.
This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have about 900+MB of updates)).
A huge thank you goes out to irc nicks dowdle, Southern-Gentleman, vdamewood for testing these iso.
A few common questions which we hear from Red Hat Satellite users are "do I have adequate hardware?" and "Is my Satellite environment tuned as per my environment needs?" Let's take a look at some options to tune Satellite and how to choose the right profile for your environment.
There is no one size fits all for Satellite tuning because the usage differs a lot among customers. If you don't have enough hardware or if proper tunings are not applied, you may see performance degradation of the Satellite server.
The Satellite tuning guide is a great resource to identify and tune specific Satellite components. Over the years working with several large customer installations, we learned that we can standardize some common tunings based on the environment size. In this post we'll review the Satellite predefined tuning profiles of Satellite 6.7 which help you automatically apply Satellite tuning based on your environment size.
Last year, Satellite 6.6 introduced pre-defined tuning profiles which provided Satellite customers with ready to use custom-hiera.yaml tunings that can be applied in their deployments. Now, with Satellite 6.7 these tuning profiles are integrated into the satellite-installer for ease of use.
As a developer participating in the 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge taking on two of the world’s most urgent issues, security in your solution might not be at the top of your mind. But it should be if you want your application to be deployed to address the impact of COVID-19 or climate change.
A successful Call for Code solution might involve health records, personal information, or other sensitive data. It might be implemented at an enterprise, federal agency, or other organization where security concerns are paramount. As such, Call for Code submissions using proven and popular open source technologies as well as IBM Cloud and Red Hat OpenShift are more likely to be secure and have a leg up in their journey to real-world deployment.
In Part 1 I've shown you how to create your own distribution image using the freedesktop.org CI templates. In Part 2, we'll go a bit further than that by truly embracing nested images.
Our assumption here is that we have two projects (or jobs), with the second one relying heavily on the first one. For example, the base project and a plugin, or a base project and its language bindings. What we'll get out of this blog post is a setup where we have...
So there's been some discussion within Red Hat about inclusive language lately, obviously related to current events and the worldwide protests against racism, especially anti-Black racism. I don't want to get into any internal details, but in one case we got into some general debate about the validity of efforts to use more inclusive language. I thought up this florid party metaphor, and I figured instead of throwing it at an internal list, I'd put it up here instead. If you have constructive thoughts on it, go ahead and mail me or start a twitter thread or something. If you have non-constructive thoughts on it, keep 'em to yourself!
As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.
Devuan is a "protest distro" that is a fork of Debian but without systemd. I've never looked at Devuan before, so I downloaded their standard desktop-live ISO and run through a quick installation.
Earlier last month, I got selected as a Google Summer of Code student for Debian again!
The donated servers have been deployed at the University of British Columbia, our hosting partner in Vancouver, Canada. The Debian System Administrators (DSA) have configured them to run arm64/armhf/armel build daemons, replacing the build daemons running on less powerful development-grade boards. On virtual machines with half as many allocated vCPUs, the result has been that the time to build Arm* packages has been halved with Ampere's eMAG system. Another benefit from this generous gift is that it will allow DSA to migrate some general Debian services currently operating in our present infrastructure, and will provision virtual machines for other Debian teams (e.g.: Continuous Integration, Quality Assurance, etc.) who require access to Arm64 architecture.
The team behind the popular Linux distribution Linux Mint plans to release Linux Mint 20 next month. The release features several changes and improvements. One of the changes was announced in the June 2020 news roundup on the official Linux Mint blog.
According to information posted there, the team behind Linux Mint is worried about the direction that Ubuntu Snap is taking, and decided to block snap by default in Linux Mint 20.
Snap offers one way of installing applications on Linux systems. Its main advantage over traditional installation systems is that it bundles the application and its dependencies. In other words, less worries about missing dependencies when installing applications.
For quite some time, Ubuntu has held the position of being the most popular Linux Operating System in the market. To ensure it keeps this status and keep customers coming back, Ubuntu comes in several variations.
The first is that Ubuntu comes in two flavors; Ubuntu Stable release and Ubuntu (LTS) Long Term Support iteration. It splits further into Ubuntu Cloud, Core, Kylin, Desktop, and Ubuntu Server. Let’s focus on Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu desktop for now and look at the difference between the two.
The Ubuntu Appliance initiative provides the Linux community with a new class of Ubuntu derivatives, build by Canonical and designed for the Raspberry Pi in collaboration with well-known Open Source projects like Nextcloud, OpenHAB, Mosquitto, AdGuard, and others.
They come in the form of specialized appliance images that you can install on a Raspberry Pi single-board computer to instantly transform it into a smart device that’s secure, updates itself automatically and does exactly what you want. If you don’t have a Raspberry Pi, the appliances also work on PCs.
Are you waiting to try the latest long-term Ubuntu 20.04 after its first point release? Well, then you still have to hold on to your patience for extra two weeks.
Yesterday, Steve Langasek, Ubuntu release manager, informed on the Ubuntu mailing list that the new point release date of Ubuntu 20.04 and 18.04 has now been rescheduled. The target date for the first 20.04.1 is now 6 August 2020 instead of the previous 23 July; for 18.04.5, the release date is now 13 August 2020 instead of 6 August.
The Raspberry Pi is a series of single-board computers developed with the main purpose of promoting computer science education in schools and developing countries. Its line of computers is designed with affordability, portability, and extensibility in mind – factors that have significantly contributed to its popularity and increasing use in major fields of computing including Robotics and IoT, to mention a few.
If you’re familiar with the Raspberry Pi then you must be excited about today’s new because, after all the rumours, speculative moments, and feature requests, the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 is finally available!
GNU Health is leading the way when it comes to open-source health management platforms. The team recently expanded its support to include GNU Health Embedded images for the Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi 4.
As spotted by CNX Software, GNU Health Embedded is a full server package complete with its own database. Users can access data on the Pi locally instead of relying on a network. The Raspberry Pi is a low-resource option, making it ideal for small-scale deployment in local offices.
The GNU Health Embedded package includes everything you might expect in a Hospital Information System. It can be used to manage medical records electronically between various departments in an organization.
By combining the app with a Raspberry Pi and display, vital signs are compiled and displayed on a screen real-time. The app can also retrieve records, interact with laboratory instruments and even operate as a personal health tracker.
Elecrow is Kickstarter-ing a $140-and-up, 2nd gen “CrowPi2” STEAM education laptop and hacker kit for the Raspberry Pi with a 11.6-inch HD screen, 2MP camera, mic, speakers, and a hacking bay full of sensors and modules.
Hong Kong based Elecrow has followed up on its 2018 Kickstarter campaign for its Raspberry Pi based CrowPi computer education laptop with a CrowPi2 model that is available with an optional Raspberry Pi 4B with up to 8GB RAM. While the original CrowPi has a 7-inch touchscreen and is set inside a briefcase, the 291 x 190 x 46mm, 1.3 kg CrowPi2 looks more like a standard laptop, and it offers even more embedded Linux hacking opportunities than the original.
  Congatec’s Intel IoT RFP qualified “Realtime Workload Consolidation Starter Kit” for robotics and automation runs 3x VMs including RT Linux and Ubuntu using the RTS Hypervisor on an 8th Gen Conga-TS370 module with an Arria 10 GX FPGA and a Basler camera.
Several years ago, Intel launched an Intel IoT RFP (Request for Proposal) qualification program for IoT kits that use Intel technology for specific use cases like visual retail, smart buildings, security surveillance, and remote health care. The Intel IoT RFP kits include an UP Squared AI Edge Retail Suite from AIM2. Congatec has now joined with Intel to announce the latest qualified Intel IoT RFP, which uses virtualization technology to run multiple OSes on a single system.
While portable displays have been available as far back as at least 2012, they’ve become more popular in recent years as they can both offer a secondary display to your laptop, or add a larger screen to your smartphone.
In the last two years, we’ve already covered BlitzWolf BW-PCM1, T-bao T15A, TAIHE Gemini (which ended up being a failure), Airview, and Desklab among others. But apparently, there’s room for more with the launch of AirTab, a 15.6ââ¬Â³ portable touchscreen or non-touch monitor, on Kickstarter that’s already surpassed its $10,000 funding target.
Since this is a barebone mini PC, no operating system is specified, but it’s clear Windows 10 will work after drivers installation, while Linux distributions may have to be tested first.
When you use a laptop or computer with Windows or Linux, you’re pretty much assured to get regular security updates. That’s partially why I prefer to do things like online banking on my computer rather than a phone, despite banks pushing for mobile apps.
Why? Because most mobile phones get limited support. I selected an Android One phone, namely Xiaomi Mi A2, because I would get updates for at least 18 months. When you think about it it’s quite pathetic, but that’s about the best Android has to offer. It’s quite better on Apple side with updates for 4 to 5 years for iPhones, while Google Pixel phones are said to get updates for about 3+ years. How you deliver updates also matter, as I recently heard Samsung users complain about frequent updates, while they had somehow no such complaint about their iPhone.
I tried Syncthing, a free and open-source alternative. And you know what? It’s been liberating. The sanity, the simplicity, the reliability, the features. It brings the joy of use and makes you believe the collapse of civilization can be slowed down a bit.
Syncthing is everything I used to love about computers.
It’s amazing how great computer products can be when they don’t need to deal with corporate bullshit, don’t have to promote a brand or to sell its users. Frankly, I almost ceased to believe it’s still possible. But it is.
[...]
Another ugly thing both iCloud and Dropbox routinely do is trying to scare you from walking away.
Nikita Prokopov reviews Syncthing (a file-synchronization system) and, seemingly, rediscovers free software...
I've made no bones about being an ardent fan of Brendon Chung and his work under the Blendo Games moniker. While only clocking in at only 15 minutes, Thirty Flights of Loving does more cinematically in its short time than any triple-A game could hope to. Quadrilateral Cowboy, an id Tech 4 game released in 2016, enthralled me so much that it was my personal game of the year.
On top of making some truly stellar games, Chung is also an avid supporter of the art of game development and giving hobby programmers a leg up. Keeping in line with this, Chung has released the source codes for three of his games for all to see and use on GitHub. The newly-released games are Quadrilateral Cowboy, Thirty Flights of Loving, and Gravity Bone. All three were released under the GNU license which is the gold standard of open source, so have at it. The games join Flotilla which also had its source code released a few months ago on the same platform, under the zLib License.
Yes, I’ve spent the last ten years working on a bachelor’s degree. That’s because I’ve been working full-time as a software engineer, and going to school part-time. It’s long overdue, but California State University, East Bay has just awarded me a bachelor’s of science degree in computer science, with a minor in mathematics and cum laude honors.
With no college debt, to boot.
An interesting document has turned up at the Internet Archive: the specification to the Scorpius CPU, the originally intended RISC successor to the 68K Macintosh.
In 1986 the 68K processor line was still going strong but showing its age, and a contingent of Apple management (famously led by then-Mac division head Jean-Louis Gassée and engineer Sam Holland) successfully persuaded then-CEO John Sculley that Apple should be master of its own fate with its own CPU. RISC was just emerging at that time, with the original MIPS R2000 CPU appearing around 1985, and was clearly where the market was going (arguably it still is, since virtually all major desktop and mobile processors are load-store at the hardware level today, even Intel); thus was the Aquarius project born. Indeed, Sculley's faith in the initiative was so great that he allocated a staff of fifty and even authorized a $15 million Cray supercomputer, which was smoothed over with investors by claiming it was for modeling Apple hardware (which, in a roundabout and overly optimistic way, it was) and to see, in Al Kossow's words, "what could be done if you had a Macintosh with the power of a Cray."
Even in the “before” times, the Firefox UX team was distributed across many different time zones. Some of us already worked remotely from our home offices or co-working spaces. Other team members worked from one of the Mozilla offices around the world.
Interesting article on REPUBLICWORLD.COM about LibreOffice Writer Keyboard Shortcuts, which – according to the editor – help to improve the usability of the software...
In our June Newsletter read among other things about the FSFE's achievements regarding Router Freedom in Europe, about a new coalition agreement in Hamburg that puts a focus on Free Software and about the European Parliament demanding "Public Money? Public Code!". As always, also read about our diverse community activities. Router Freedom in Europe challenged by new set of rules Since 2013, the FSFE has been advocating for Router Freedom in Europe with outstanding results in Germany and with positive influence across Europe. Now, a new set of rules comes into play regarding Router Freedom, the new Guidelines on the Location of the Network Termination Point (NTP). These are the draft results by the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC). In a next step, these guidelines have to be implemented locally by states' National Regulatory Agencies (NRAs). We summarised the positive outcomes as well as the challenges ahead.
On the positive side, BEREC acknowledged the contribution brought into the discussion by the FSFE. Most important, BEREC modified the official text in order to adopt our position to the extent that Router Freedom should be the rule when determining the NTP. BEREC also explicitly recognised a lot of other arguments we brought into the discussion in favor of real Router Freedom - from net neutrality to end-users' digital sovereignty to improved innovation and competition. Unfortunately, the new guidelines from BEREC still grant the different NRAs the discretionary power to restrict Router Freedom if they decide that there is an "objective technological necessity" for routers to be part of the ISP's network.
These vague terms used by the guidelines will probably cause discrepancies during the national implementations of 27 different countries. Now help us monitor their implementation. The next six months will be essential to understanding if the NRAs' approach will benefit or harm Router Freedom.
Reading Dr. Roy's Techrights.org made me want to write more about Help Quit GitHub in general and Codeberg.org in particular. What is Codeberg? It is a free home for free projects. It is like GitHub.com, but unlike GitHub, it is powered by Free Software for Free Software Projects without Microsoft proprietary software giant behind it. I am not a programmer, but live within a worldwide community of programmers, and care about Free/Libre Open Source Software just like you do. So I make this short review of Codeberg and I wish everybody to know it and helped to make switch. Happy hacking!
Not leet enough to learn Vim or Emacs? OK, but don't settle on being just another "nano noob." There is a middle ground. And that middle ground text editor is called micro! It is a modern and intuitive terminal-based text editor that features syntax highlighting, splits, tabs, multiple cursors and a plugin system.
Some of the viewers have asked me to take a closer look at Haskell since I've done so much content regarding Xmonad, a tiling window manager written in Haskell. Well, I'm not a programmer by trade. And I certainly wouldn't say I "know" Haskell.
The most common thing people know about software projects is that they fail. They might get delayed for months and years. They might be ten times more expensive than expected. They might be completely unusable pieces of garbage. And so on. Over the past 50 or so years many theories have been presented on why that is and how things could be made better. A lot of progress has been made, but no fundamental breakthrough has been made. Software projects still fail fairly often for unexpected reasons.
Typically this implies that there is some fundamental issue (or, more likely, several of them) causing these problems. Since nobody really knows what the real cause is, we are free to wildly speculate and hypothesize that the problem lies somewhere in the human brain. Not any single person's brain, mind you, but fundamental properties of the brain itself.
[...]
This is the essence of creating software. Since it exists purely in the realm of logic and mathematics, you can't really see it, smell it, touch it or feel it. It has failure modes unfathomable with physical processes and these problems occur fairly regularly. This means that all the builtin functionality of your brain is useless in evaluating the outcome and quality of a software project. Code can only experienced through thinking, which is slow, difficult and error prone. As opposed to cars, comparing two different code bases for quality and suitability is a big undertaking. But it gets worse.
The output of code, like the web browser you are using to read this blog post, look and feel a lot like physical objects made of atoms. This means that when people who have no personal experience in programming either buy or manage software projects, they are going to do it as if they were dealing with physical real world objects. That is what they are trained to do and have years of experience in after all. It is also actively harmful, because software is electrons and, as such, beyond the immediate instictive grasp of the human brain. It does not play by the rules of atoms and trying to make it do so will only lead to failure.
I have been experimenting with using pip-tools to manage my python project dependencies. If you're not familiar with it, I encourage you to read Hynek Schlawack's excellent introduction to dependency management in Python which introduces it and offers some comparisons to other alternatives like Poetry and Pipenv.
The simple explanation, though, is that pip-tools offers two commands: pip-compile and pip-sync that work to keep a virtualenv's dependencies both reproducible and in sync with the expressed requirements. This is done by having the developer edit a requirements.in file, which is compiled into requirements.txt, and then synced into the project virtualenv.
Now, in all the examples here we will both insert empty strings and/or missing values as both could be considered being empty. In the first section, however, we will create a dataframe from a dictionary. After we have created a dataframe we will go on to the examples on how to create empty columns in a dataframe.
This video is based on a chapter from my book, Python 101 2nd Edition.
At Montréal-Python, everyone is welcome.
Have you ever had to work with a dataset so large that it overwhelmed your machine’s memory? Or maybe you have a complex function that needs to maintain an internal state every time it’s called, but the function is too small to justify creating its own class. In these cases and more, generators and the Python yield statement are here to help.
The modulo operation is an arithmetic operation that finds the remainder of the division of one number by another. The remainder is called the modulus of the operation.
For example, 5 divided by 3 equals 1, with a remainder of 2, and 8 divided by 4 equals 2, with a remainder of 0.
The long face-off between the Trump administration and Huawei involving standards development has finally been resolved. Well, yes and no, on which more below.
Initially the issue was whether standards setting organizations (“SSOs”) would be able to permit the Chinese 5G technology company and scores of its affiliates (collectively, “Huawei”) to participate in their working groups. But over time, the political landscape shifted – many of the SSOs where the action was taking place took the position that their processes were sufficiently open to make the issue moot. But some of the most active American technology companies came to a different conclusion, thereby making it impossible for them to participate without risking liability to their own government (more details can be found here).
The saga began in May of 2019, when Huawei was added to the Bureau of Industry and Security (“BIS”) Entity List, making it illegal for U.S. companies to share many kinds of technology with Huawei without a special BIS license. Initially, a Temporary General License (“TGL”) was provided that included a clause that allowed Huawei to continue to participate in (only) 5G standards development, but in August 2020, that clause was removed. At the same time, BIS released a General Advisory Opinion, noting its determination that existing regulations sufficiently addressed how the Entity List-based license requirements applied to standards development bodies, including 5G. That left SSOs in the difficult position of determining whether their standards development rules were sufficiently open to meet the requirements of one of two safe harbors (participating in meetings and contributing to journals), neither of which was a very good fit.
I used a tool to reach a tool I used to make a tool I used to make a metaphysics. The crows, those rocket scientists, those medieval scholars, were exhaustively doing and knowing the heavy spatial world, writing their summa, scolding us, singing while dreaming, knowing foe from friend. I used the body to make beliefs I used to renounce others I spoke to in words I thieved from trash and made further rips in the system and I went on flying with a slice.
Pop quiz: a couple publishes a relatively small news website critical of your massive and hugely profitable corporation.
I think about my kneecaps, my ear canal, the slight webbing between toes & fingers; I think about brown bodies, my body; how my belly ebbs & sinks & floats & calms in water; I think about black bodies, about statistics, how 65% of black American children cannot swim; 60 for Latinx children; 79 from low income families. How statistics hold history in the sharp end of a tack; my brother & me thrown out of swim lessons for causing trouble; limbs reach & tread, lacking know-how; how a statistic takes a term like access, wads it into a crumpled shape, in search of any receptacle other than a docket; our cells contain wet & wombing history of sea & salt in our nervous systems; our cells crave water & in turn crave equity; no magic equation exists to explain why what’s made of water wants water; no need. The human body consists of organs & tissues & hydrogen & calcium & sodium & chlorine & water & water & water & water. Why must my water offend your water? Fuck your count of my offensive features—labia, mustache, mammary glands, black hair on my nipples, thoughts in my cranium, uterus, hopes sewn in cerebrum, words readied at tongue— you dominate narrative: a scratched record caught in dilapidated loop, white noise that coats ammonia down my throat to attempt erasure; history of attempts. You cannot remove water from water, sea from sea.
This is a tale of two drugs, whose individual fortunes have taken very different turns just this week. (And it’s only Wednesday!) The first is a drug that I’ve written quite a lot about going back to March, while the second one came out of nowhere in a press release announcing clinical trial findings just yesterday. Those of you who follow the news can no doubt immediately identify the two drugs. The first drug is hydroxychloroquine, while the second drug is a steroid called dexamethasone. From an evidence-based perspective, the first has, other than a blip, nearly completed its cycle of a meteoric rise followed by a punishing fall.
When Mr. Smith, a teacher at Crotona International High School on the Grace Dodge Campus in the Bronx in New York City, started to feel sick, he thought it might be because he’d been training hard. (Smith is a pseudonym, to protect the teacher from reprisals.) An avid runner, he didn’t at first think that his achiness might be the novel coronavirus he’d been hearing about. That was Monday, March 9.
The total value of fines handed out for violations of quarantine restrictions in Russia since the start of the coronavirus pandemic is approaching 1 billion rubles (approximately $14.4 million), says a new report from the rights organization “Apologia Protesta.”€
A few weeks ago, I was talking to Noam Chomsky about the state of the world. At one point, Noam smiled and said that he is not aware of any German doctors in Italy, even though both countries are in the European Union; instead, Cuban and Chinese doctors went to Italy to help the Italians fight the global pandemic.
"This dishonesty has caused increased deaths and will cause more. They are effectively killing people for perceived political gain."
Let's be very, very clear: the president is willing to take specific, willful, intentional actions that will lead to the deaths of other people in order to get what he wants, even when they are members of his own family.
On April 3, Stephanie Gilmore, a 34-year-old nurse working at the Diamond Hill nursing home in Troy, New York, was summoned to a supervisor’s office. The home’s administrator and nursing director were there to relay some distressing news.
Gilmore said they told her that a resident in the home had recently gone to the hospital, where she tested positive for COVID-19. The resident was set to return to Diamond Hill, making her the first confirmed COVID-19 case at the 120-bed facility north of Albany.
This video contains graphic footage. Read why we’re publishing it.
Phillip Garcia was in psychiatric crisis. In jail and in the hospital, guards responded with force and restrained the 51-year-old inmate for almost 20 hours, until he died. Warning: graphic video content.
Today, we are publishing a story and video about Phillip Garcia, a 51-year-old man who died in the custody of the sheriff’s department in Riverside County, California. We have attached a note to the video warning that viewers may find the content disturbing. We did, and we want to be transparent about why we have chosen to share this material with the public at this time.
Garcia was taken to the Larry Smith Correctional Facility, the largest of Riverside County’s five jails, on the morning of March 22, 2017, after neighbors reported that he was screaming obscenities and racing around his backyard. His 87-year-old roommate told police that he had been attacked by Garcia, who the roommate said had been up all night “rambling, making no sense.” A police report said Garcia banged his head against the Plexiglas barrier in the patrol car as he was taken to the jail. Deputies were unable to complete the intake and shoved him in a “sobering cell” where he showed clear signs he was in a psychiatric crisis.
The number of known cases in the facilities has doubled since mid-May to over 68,000.
So great is the admiration for Cuban doctors that a global campaign has sprung up to award them the Nobel Peace Prize.
"Anything is better than pretending that the market can deliver healthcare—because it can't," says laureate Angus Deaton.
"This is a major step forward."
On June 9, Moscow lifted many of its most severe quarantine restrictions implemented to curb the spread of coronavirus. Many of the remaining limits on ordinary life — such as indoor cafe and restaurant service — will expire in just more than a week. This abrupt policy shift, rolled out shortly before a July 1 nationwide plebiscite on constitutional amendments (including reforms that could extend Vladimir Putin’s presidency to 2036), puts the Russian capital in a small group of large cities that have abandoned major containment measures before overcoming their coronavirus outbreaks. The spread of coronavirus peaked in Moscow and several other cities across the country back in mid-May, but infection rates have “stalled” at this level. Based on Meduza’s calculations, the capital remains Russia’s COVID-19 epicenter and still has hundreds of thousands of “active cases” — infected people who are capable of spreading the disease. Will Russia’s hurried containment exit lead to a new wave of infections? Scientific models used to predict the path of coronavirus say this is a near certainty.€
Vice President Mike Pence is wrongly asserting that the spread of coronavirus in Tulsa, Oklahoma, isn’t something to worry about, days before President Donald Trump’s first campaign rally since March is set to take place there.
The lockdown was supposed to be a temporary emergency measure, put in place so that the federal government could draft a long-term plan to ramp up testing and tracing, as well as medical response, so the country could be reopened in a safer manner and our health care systems wouldn't be overwhelmed.
Trump got in the way of formulating such a plan, much less implementing one, because he committed early on to the idea that the best approach was to let people get infected by the millions and simply deny that it was happening (which is why he is so opposed to testing).
Based in Boston, Starburst is the second collaboration of Borgman and cofounder Matt Fuller, who sold an enterprise software startup called Hadapt to Teradata in 2014. Borgman was intrigued by an open-source project in data analytics that had come out of Facebook called Presto. “What struck me about Presto was that it allows you to do data warehousing analytics, essentially SQL analytics, without storing data,” Borgman says. “And I think that’s what makes it so fundamentally different from any other database in history.”
In an earlier piece, we discussed how, over the last 20 years, the Linux Foundation has grown from a single project, the Linux kernel, to an organization that has helped to convene and host hundreds of the world’s most important open source communities.
The Linux Foundation’s support programs add value for our communities as they enable our projects to engage and grow a technology ecosystem worldwide.
Alexander wanted to become a more effective open source contributor in the future, so he applied for and was awarded a Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) Scholarship in the Kernel Guru category.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (galera, grafana, libjcat, libvirt, mariadb-connector-c, and perl), Gentoo (asterisk, bubblewrap, cyrus-imapd, faad2, json-c, openconnect, openjdk-bin, pcre2, PEAR-Archive_Tar, thunderbird, and tomcat), Mageia (mbedtls and scapy), openSUSE (libntlm, libupnp, prboom-plus, varnish, and xen), Oracle (libexif), Red Hat (kpatch-patch), Scientific Linux (libexif), SUSE (mariadb, nodejs6, and poppler), and Ubuntu (apport).
If you care about privacy, Signal messenger is currently the gold standard of how messenger services should be build. It provides strong end-to-end encryption, without requiring any effort on the user’s side. It gives users an easy way to validate connection integrity via another channel. Its source code is available for anybody to inspect, and it’s generally well-regarded by experts.
The strong commitment to privacy comes with some usability downsides. One particularly important one was the lack of a cloud backup – if you ever lost your phone, all your messages would be gone. The reason is obviously that it’s hard to secure this sensitive data on an untrusted server. That isn’t an issue that other apps care about, these will simply upload the data to their server unencrypted and require you to trust them. Signal is expected to do better, and they finally announced a secure way to implement this feature.
On Monday June 15, the developers of the Tor Project announced the initial plan for the deprecation of Onion services v2. You can identify v2 addresses easily as they are only 16 character long, where as the v3 addresses are 56 character long.
How these tools work varies from vendor to vendor, but the basics are the same. The network-based tool monitors traffic on the network and matches it to a long list of known signatures. These signatures describe a variety of attacks ranging from simple corrupt packets to more specific attacks such as SQL injection.
Host-based tools tend to have more capabilities as they have access to the entire host. A host-based IPS can look at network traffic as well as monitor files and logs. One of the more popular tools, OSSEC-HIDS, monitors traffic, logs, file integrity, and even has signatures for common rootkits.
More advanced tools have additional detection capabilities such as statistical anomaly detection or stateful protocol inspection. Both of these capabilities use algorithms to detect intrusions. This allows detection of intrusions that don't yet have signatures created for them.
[...]
The second EPEL package is fail2ban. Fail2ban is more of an IPS style tool in that it monitors and acts when it detects something awry. One common implementation of fail2ban is monitoring the openssh logs. By building a signature that identifies a failed login, fail2ban can detect multiple attempts to login from a single source address and block that source address. Typically, fail2ban does this by adding rules to the host's firewall, but in reality, it can run any script you can come up with. So, for instance, you can write a script to block the IP on the local firewall and then transmit that IP to some central system that will distribute the firewall block to other systems. Just be careful, however, as globally blocking yourself from every system on the network can be rather embarrassing.
It’s a very ironic world when the very products we buy to help keep us safe and secure are themselves vulnerable and not secure. This is the situation with more than 100,000 HiChip wireless cameras in the UK that have been identified as being prone to hacking. HiChip Wireless Cameras Vulnerable A consumer watchdog has found that more than 100,000 cameras that were manufactured by HiChip, a Chinese company, have security flaws, leaving them vulnerable.
Python-Backdoor is a fully undetectable backdoor written entirely in Python with the main purpose of contributing to the cybersecurity field. Rich in features, although it's server can be operated from the whole range of well known operating systems, it targets the Windows machine.
Having tested this cyber weapon on my own lab, I came to the conclusion that such tool is worth being shared with anyone who is passionate about computer security, or penetration testing.
LinuxSecurity.com, the open-source community’s go-to source for security news and information, celebrates providing the Linux community with timely, authoritative industry content for nearly two and a half decades. LinuxSecurity.com is a valuable resource for Linux users, system administrators and ethical hackers - informing community members of the latest cyber security-related news, trends and advisories.
The comprehensive website design is packed with informative guides and articles to help system administrators, security analysts and developers get answers to their top Linux and open source security questions.
Just a quick update on the Linux Security Summit North America (LSS-NA) for 2020.
The event will take place over two days as an online event, due to COVID-19. The dates are now July 1-2, and the full schedule details may be found here.
While Intel updated the CPU microcode for Skylake and other affected generations last week as part of the SRBDS / CrossTalk vulnerability that was made public last week Tuesday, today Intel quietly released another microcode revision but this time just for Skylake.
All schools in Russia are set to install surveillance cameras with facial recognition technology, Vedomosti reports.€
Last week, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at Vice had a bombshell of a story about Facebook helping the FBI track down a horrible, horrible person by paying a cybersecurity firm to build a zero-day attack on Tails, the secure operating system setup that is recommended by many, including Ed Snowden, for people who want to keep secrets away from the prying eyes of the government.
Several scripted and unscripted shows have recently fired cast members over racist comments and behavior in light of the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.
Last week, MTV cut ties with another reality show cast member, Dee Nguyen from “The Challenge,” over insensitive comments she made about the Black Lives Matter movement. Bravo fired four cast members, including Stassi Schroeder and Kristen Doute, for past racist actions. “The Flash” star Hartley Sawyer was cut after racist and misogynistic tweets from his past resurfaced as well.
Racist comments and white supremacist posts allegedly made by Kompothecras recently resurfaced and have been circulating by fan accounts online.
The company has made the 2020 election one of its top priorities after foreign actors used the social network to sow division among voters in 2016. It has made numerous changes to protect the integrity of elections, including a new application process for running political ads, but has still been criticized for enabling misinformation on the platform. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden castigated Facebook last week, saying the company has allowed Trump “and his allies” to lie on the service. Facebook has a policy that the company will not fact-check political ads from politicians.
"Redundant nuclear weapons, off-books spending accounts, and endless wars in the Middle East don't keep us safe."
Ever since the spring of 1954, when I was a precocious 12-year-old kid who watched the Army-McCarthy hearings on TV, I have loved to hate Roy Cohen (1927-1986), Joe McCarthy’s co-conspirator and dark twin. One year earlier, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg died in the electric chair at Sing Sing—the single most significant event in my boyhood. Even more important than when the Dodgers beat the Yankees, the Russians launched Sputnik and Beatniks appeared on the scene.
It is now 2:00AM in Portland, Oregon. I just got through€ watching Spike Lee’s 2hr. and 35min. film on Viet Nam. I have two words to describe this film:€ EXTREMELY SHALLOW.
Demanding that Congress “prioritize our safety and our future, not more war,” Rep. Barbara Lee on Monday unveiled a resolution proposing up to $350 billion in cuts to the Pentagon budget by closing U.S. military bases overseas, ending ongoing conflicts, scrapping weapons programs, and eliminating President Donald Trump’s Space Force.
"These extremists cannot be allowed to silence peaceful protests or inflict violence."
"Accountability and an end to impunity must become an immediate priority for the international community," the experts wrote. "Palestinians and Israelis deserve no less."€
A demonstrator at a peaceful protest in Albuquerque demanding the removal of a statue of a controversial Spanish conquistador was shot by a right-wing militia group member on Monday night.
It turns out that the BBC really does believe that God is an Englishman. When the simple impossibility of the official story on the Skripals finally overwhelmed the dramatists, they resorted to Divine Intervention for an explanation – as propagandists have done for millennia.
As Portugal's consul in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes faced a moral dilemma. Should he obey government orders or listen to his own conscience and supply Jews with the visas that would allow them to escape from advancing German forces?
Sousa Mendes' remarkable response means he is remembered as a hero by survivors and descendants of the thousands he helped to flee.
But his initiative also spelt the end of a diplomatic career under Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, and the rest of his life was spent in penury.
Portugal finally granted official recognition to its disobedient diplomat on 9 June, and parliament decided a monument in the National Pantheon should bear his name.
"It is an extraordinary escalation. No shots fired for 45 years, and then at least 20 soldiers dead in one evening in rock-throwing and bludgeoning."
hree Indian soldiers have been reported killed after a clash with Chinese troops along the disputed Himalayan border between the two countries on Monday.
The Indian army announced Tuesday that one officer and two soldiers have been killed in the violence, and claimed there were also casualties on the Chinese side. The Chinese government has not yet confirmed the assertion, though the editor of the state-run Global Times newspaper said on Twitter he believed there were Chinese casualties.
The Indian army said that military officials are now meeting at the site of the fighting to defuse the situation.
The Indian and Chinese armies had been locked in a stand-off at three sites in Ladakh, an Indian territory at the northernmost tip of the country, for over a month. In April the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) broke off from exercises and occupied a series of remote border posts along the disputed frontier, known as the Line of Actual Control (LAC). Both sides quickly moved troops and heavy weapons towards the LAC. As troops squared off, punch-ups erupted twice in May, at Pangong lake, in Ladakh, and at Naku La in Sikkim, 1,200km to the east, resulting in serious injuries on both sides. In total, the PLA grabbed around 40 to 60 square kilometres of territory that India considers to be its own, estimates Lieutenant-General H.S. Panag, a former head of the Indian army’s northern command.
Monday's confrontation in the Ladakh region was the first deadly clash in the border area in at least 45 years.
India said China had tried to "unilaterally change the status quo". Beijing accused Indian troops of "attacking Chinese personnel".
The two armies later held talks to try to defuse tensions.
During the Korean War, captured American soldiers found themselves in POW camps run by Chinese Communists. The Chinese treated captives quite differently than their allies, the North Koreans, who favored savagery and harsh punishment to gain compliance
The Red Chinese engaged in what they called “lenient policy,” which was a sophisticated psychological assault on their captives. After the war, American psychologists questioned the returning prisoners intensively, because of the unsettling success of the Chinese program
The Chinese were very effective in getting Americans to inform on one another, in contrast to the behavior of American POWs in WWII. For this reason, escape plans were quickly uncovered and escape attempts themselves were rarely successful.
In a small corner shop on a back street in Aden, 17-year-old Mohammed fills the shelves of a glass-fronted refrigerator with cartons of juice. It’s a futile task when the fridge is little more than a warm display cabinet, after 12 hours without electricity in 36 degrees Celsius of sweat-filled heat.
Added to the daily grind of climbing temperatures, the lack of regular power, and recent flash floods – and amidst a war now in its sixth year – the southern city of Aden has recently become the epicentre of Yemen’s COVID-19 outbreak.
Officially, cases in Yemen are below 850, with 209 deaths, but – with minimal testing capacity and a health system that has largely collapsed – aid agencies warn the real figures are likely far higher.
On a stifling night in April, Ibrahim Abdi was sitting outside his home in Wajir, trying to catch a breeze after evening prayers, when his Kenya Police Reserve unit came for him. They said a group of al-Shabab jihadists had been spotted in a nearby village in the remote northeastern region, close to the Somali border, and he should get his gun and come with them.
Abdi’s wife remembers he was reluctant. He asked why he always had to prove his loyalty by confronting the Somali-based insurgents, but he went nonetheless. The next morning, Abdi was dead: killed in an ambush 15 kilometres from his home, along with six other reservists in the eight-man unit.
Abdi was an unlikely member of the KPR, an auxiliary home guard that in the rest of Kenya usually chases poachers. He was a relatively well-to-do shop owner – not the economic profile of a typical rough-and-ready recruit.
But Abdi, a Somali-speaking Kenyan, was struggling with a reputation problem. His brother’s body had been found in a shallow grave two years earlier, and the government alleged he had been al-Shabab. The suspicion in Wajir was that he had been killed by the security forces. For Abdi, that meant a dangerous guilt by relation.
“We have strict publisher policies that govern the content ads can run on and explicitly prohibit derogatory content that promotes hatred, intolerance, violence or discrimination based on race from monetizing," the spokesperson wrote. "When a page or site violates our policies, we take action. In this case, we’ve removed both sites’ ability to monetize with Google.”
After publication of this story, Google backtracked Tuesday, clarifying that The Federalist had been warned about policy violations but still had time to address them. It now has three days to remove the violations before a ban goes into effect.
Google notified ZeroHedge of the policy violations last week and banned the website from its ad platform.
The two sites were found to be in violation of Google’s policies on content related to race when they pushed unsubstantiated claims about the Black Lives Matter protests sparked in recent weeks by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody on May 25, NBC News first reported.
Thirteen years ago in Iraq, US soldiers in an attack helicopter killed 11 people in what the US described at the time as a firefight — nine were insurgents and two were employees of the Reuters news agency — a photojournalist and a fixer.
A cockpit video captured the killings and was later leaked to Wikileaks.
The release of that footage, called "Collateral Damage", showed the US military targeting the journalists and made WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a household name.
He's now detained in a British prison, facing extradition to the US on espionage charges.
I modeled mathematically the thermal imbalance of our biosphere, which we call global warming, so as to gain my own quantitative understanding of the interplay of the two major effects that give rise to this phenomenon. This is a “toy model,” an abstraction of a very complicated planetary phenomenon that teams of scientists using supercomputers have been laboring for decades to enumerate in its many details, and to predict its likely course into the future.
"We will take it to the courts, to the halls of power, and to the streets."
In the march of the news cycle in U.S. media, the devastation of Cyclone Amphan in Bangladesh and Eastern India is all but forgotten. But the several million people who live there, and those of us with ancestral ties to the region, don’t have the luxury of forgetting.
The Russian Investigative Committee has opened a criminal case for the violation of environmental protection laws over the dumping of wastewater from the Talnakh Concentrator Plant into a river in Norilsk, Krasnoyarsk Krai.
Every day new renewables are coming on stream and the reality is we do not need coal for electricity generation.
It’s all change as one oil major writes down its assets, seeing a possible 30-year slump ahead in global demand.
Known as the Section 29 Unconventional Fuels Production Tax Credit, this subsidy resulted in more than tripling the production of unconventional gas, at a cost of at least $10 billion to taxpayers, from 1980 to€ 2002.
Koch kickstarted the fund with a $5 million contribution, pocket change for a man who runs the second largest privately held corporation in the country, which makes about $5 million every twenty€ minutes.
It was only in 2012, when she traveled to Bryce Canyon, Utah, to be a crew member of the Mars Desert Research Station, that she reencountered the enduring nighttime. “I hadn’t seen a dark sky like that for decades. It hadn’t dawned on me in the intervening years that there were no more stars — not on the East Coast. And that’s really when I started campaigning for people to notice that there’s light pollution and to try to do something about it,” Turnshek said.
"Private equity firms will now be allowed to access—and skim fees off of—the $9 trillion in 100 million workers' 401(k) plans and IRAs."
The survey was taken as the country faced its worst unemployment crisis since the Great Depression and as the nationwide uprising over racial injustice began.
The Republicans have been working hard to ensure that the $600 weekly supplement to unemployment insurance benefits, which was put in place as part of the pandemic rescue package, is not extended beyond the current July 31 cutoff. They argue that we need people to return to work.
How can you tell if you’re living in a democracy? The answer can get rather complicated. Simple yardsticks can often confuse more than clarify.
How ECON 100 obscures the relationships among capitalism, racism and racial inequality.€
The lawmakers' letter came as a new analysis showed at least 620,590 clean energy workers in the U.S. lost jobs from March through May.
French law enforcement decided to send reinforcements into the city Dijon in eastern France due to ongoing unrest that arose against the backdrop of a confrontation between two minority groups — immigrants from Russia’s Chechnya and from North Africa.
Moscow’s Department of Information Technology (DIT) is using an online system to track how many government employees have registered to vote in Russia’s July 1 plebiscite on constitutional amendments. Now, opposition politician Alexey Navalny has published copies of tables containing this data, claiming that the documents were sent to him from the Moscow DIT.€
After the fifth debate of the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, The Washington Post published one of its infamous fact-checks highlighting those moments when, in the paper’s estimation, someone got too loose with the truth. Among the 10 claims flagged by the Post was Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s remark that the United States has “500,000 people sleeping out on the street.” This statement was “exaggerated,” the Post admonished, because while it’s true that in 2018 the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimated that there were 553,000 people experiencing homelessness in America, not all of them were technically on the streets; some 360,000 were in shelters or transitional housing.
So, earlier today, NBC reported that Google had "banned" two well known websites from its ad platform, namely The Federalist and Zero Hedge. The story was a bit confusing. To be clear, both of those sites are awful and frequently post unmitigated garbage, conspiracy theories, and propaganda. But, it turns out the story was highly misleading, though it will almost certainly be used to push the false narrative that the big internet companies are engaged in "anti-conservative bias" in moderation practices. But that's wrong. Indeed, it appears what happened is exactly what Google has done to us in the past, in saying that because of certain comments people put on our stories, they were pulling any Google ads from appearing on that page. Now we've explained why this is a dumb policy, that only encourages bad comments on sites to try to demonetize them, but it's not got anything to do with "anti-conservative bias." Also, it's just pulling ads from a single page, not across the board.
Led by the passion of a young and diverse generation, the country must finally address the systemic inequality that increasingly endangers all of us.
Donald Trump has crossed many red lines over the past three and a half years, but he has finally crossed one that could cost him politically.€ The trappings of his fascist march to St. John’s Episcopal Church and his blasphemous display of a bible (held backwards and upside down) in front of the church have elicited significant criticism, including from the highest military and civilian leaders of the Pentagon.€ The military obviously didn’t share the view of Trump’s press spokeswoman, Kayleigh McEnaney, who compared the president’s bible-toting stroll to something “Like Churchill…inspecting bombing damage….”
If he’s so tough, one asks, why did he hunker Inside that White House armor-plated bunker? With protests peaceful, why did it make sense To build a fence around the White House fence? Because, perhaps, he must have shelter when Those bone spurs get to acting up again.
If 100% of the population would simply wear masks when they go out, evidence shows, the rate of transmission falls below 1 and the number of cases dwindles. Why don't so many people? Because the president has told them not to.
Omar arrived in the U.S. with her father in 1995 as a Somalian refugee, and was elected to Congress 23 years later.€
LaTosha Brown, the cofounder of Black Voters Matter, was out until past midnight last Tuesday, helping Georgians who had waited in line for five hours or more to cast ballots in a primary where voters in predominantly African American precincts faced unconscionable delays. Now, she wants answers—and action. “The voter suppression we witnessed in Georgia,” she says, “is a dress rehearsal of what will come in November unless we work together and demand accountability now.”
Let me say this first: I don’t know who Joe Biden should pick as his running mate. If you forced me to choose, I’d say Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris. Or Kamala Harris or Elizabeth Warren. Just in case you count my choice to list one first as evidence of my real preference.
Under cover of the coronavirus chaos and amid our national uprising, Republicans have quietly uprooted some of their most controversial right-wing members of Congress — only to replace them with even more radical contenders for federal office, including devotees of the nonsensical QAnon conspiracy theory, ahead of this fall’s election.
Brazilian Justice Minister Sergio Moro resigned from his post in the far-right Bolsonaro government on April 24, accusing the president of “political interference” in the country’s police force.
Last month the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case challenging state laws that bind Electoral College electors to vote for the presidential candidate they are selected to support. The case was brought in response to four 2016 electors — three from Washington and one from Colorado — who tried to vote against their state’s popular vote winner, and, in the case of the Washington electors, faced fines for having broken their pledges.
These so-called “faithless electors” have long been a feature of American presidential elections, but it’s possible that the Supreme Court could shake up the Electoral College system, striking down state laws that try to guarantee electors’ votes by replacing or punishing those who don’t vote as they promised to. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the overall lack of enforcement of electors’ pledge to vote for the winner of their state troubled her, saying, “I made a promise to do something, but that promise is unenforceable.” But Justice Samuel Alito said that overturning the state laws could “lead to chaos where the popular vote is close.”
The early 1930s resembled the present moment in some striking ways. The nation’s economy was in free fall, connected to a global economic downturn, with no clear end in sight. Previous years of national prosperity had badly deepened economic inequality, making the crisis all the more severe for those left behind during the boom times. At home and abroad, authoritarian movements were on the march, demonizing ethnic and racial minorities and trashing liberal democratic values. Dissatisfaction was rampant, but it remained unclear who or what would replace the status quo.
After having his little whine fest in the form of a toothless Executive Order about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, it was reported that the President has directly tasked Senator Josh Hawley to introduce a law that attacks 230. This was a fairly obvious choice. Hawley is a big Trump supporter, and Trumpian in his tactics. And, also, Hawley has been confusingly attacking 230 with questionable legislative ideas for quite some time now.
I think it's fair to say that the lawyers for wrestling's WWE have found themselves playing the heel in the past. Perhaps it's the result of the company being run by known crazy person Vince McMahon, who has found his way to our site by being an IP protectionist among other things. WWE's lawyers have tried some pretty nefarious methods for going after those they believe violated WWE's intellectual property rights. For instance, they tried to get the mailing address of the operator of a streaming site by falseloffering a gift bag.
Dozens of Tunisian, Syrian and Palestinian activists and journalists, many of whom use the platform to document human rights abuses in the region, say their Facebook accounts have been deactivated over the last few months.
Civil liberties and human rights groups have argued this shows that Facebook appeals to free speech principles only when they are politically advantageous.
The proposal was sent out for comment by various bodies and the public on Tuesday.
The plan stems back to a complaint filed by the Finnish Media Federation (Finnmedia) with the European Commission three years ago.
Commercial media wants less competition
"The complaint focuses on question of how much online publication-type content Yle can have. There was a desire to have space for commercial media to offer lifestyle-type articles," says Yle's CEO, Merja Ylä-Anttila.
The memoir’s release has been delayed for months as a result of a prepublication review process spearheaded by the White House National Security Council (NSC) that began when Bolton submitted the book for review in late December.
According to the Justice Department’s complaint, NSC official Ellen Knight had completed her review of Bolton’s book around April 27 “and was of the judgment that the manuscript draft did not contain classified information.” Knight informed Bolton that the process remained ongoing when he asked for an update thereafter, the complaint states.
Journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva’s criminal case is back in session. On June 16, a court in Pskov heard preliminary arguments against the reporter, who is accused of “justifying terrorism” in written comments about a suicide bomber who attacked federal agents in Arkhangelsk in October 2018. Prokopyeva now faces up to seven years in prison for her remarks.
On June 15, five deputy chief editors resigned from Vedomosti, after the newspaper’s new parent company made Andrey Shmarov its permanent editor-in-chief. Shmarov was named acting editor-in-chief three months ago, in the midst of a deal with another buyer. Almost immediately, Shmarov came into conflict with the newspaper’s other editors, who openly stated that they could not work with him. In an interview with Meduza, outgoing Vedomosti deputy chief editor Dmitry Simakov explains why the newsroom’s leadership held out hope until now.
Some journalists at VOA fear that Pack — best known for making films with a conservative bent — will interfere with the organization's independent newsroom and turn it into a pro-Trump messaging machine.
The CIA was so focused on developing whizzbang exploit code, it left any thought of basic computer security principles on the kitchen counter before dashing off to work each morning.
That oversight led to the super-agency inadvertently spilling its hacking tools ultimately into the hands of WikiLeaks, which duly disclosed details of the spies' malware, viruses, remote-control software, and other materials under the Vault 7 banner in 2017.
If you followed our coverage of the trial of Joshua Schulte, the CIA sysadmin accused of passing the files to WikiLeaks, this much will already be known to you. The fact the virtual machine that held all of the tools apparently used 123ABCdef as its password is perhaps all you need to know. Schutle's trial ended with a hung jury, though he was found guilty of contempt and lying to FBI.
Don't just take our word for it. An internal CIA report into the embarrassing affair came to much the same conclusion: Uncle Sam's snoops lost control of at least 180GB of hacking tools and documentation, which ended up in the lap of WikiLeaks, due to lax security. From shared admin passwords to no limitations on removable storage, the agency broke or snubbed virtually every rule in the book.
Chicago has seen some of the largest and most militant demonstrations in the United States during the two weeks that followed the murder of George Floyd. Thirty thousand people marched and rallied on June 6 in Union Park, for example. While demonstrators have suffered repeated acts of violence by the Chicago Police Department and seen their constitutional rights trampled on by Mayor Lori Lightfoot, others were menaced by self-appointed “neighborhood protectors.”
Trump and Barr are at the forefront, trying to scare the citizenry with tales of anarchy and destruction.
The report comes as White House and state officials have been accused of manipulating scientific data regarding Covid-19 deaths and infections.€
Mother Earth is giving us a time out, sending us all to our rooms to reflect on how we address the triple evils about which Dr. King warned us.
Donald Trump claims to be the law-and-order president of the United States. There does not seem much sign of this as the stitching of the Republic gets undone. Protestors have been given a considerable roughing up across several states; police forces are in retreat before proposals of defunding while protocols for arrests are being changed. Police chiefs are resigning and, in the rarest of cases, officers are being charged for police brutality.
A carefully posed photo of dangerous driving attracted some attention online in early May. The photo shows a picture from the driver’s seat of a Nissan. The photographer is driving, doing 90 mph as he brandishes a handgun with his finger resting on the trigger. To make matters worse, there’s an alcoholic cider propped against the dash. This extensive set of unsafe behaviors was intended to outrage, offend, and attract attention — all goals it undoubtedly met. And such foolishness is an invitation to a lengthy imprisonment. But it would be a mistake to treat Nissan, Heckler & Koch, Angry Orchard Hard Cider, the driver’s cell phone manufacturer, and whatever platform he used to share the photo as responsible for his misbehavior.
The killing of 27 year old Rayshard Brooks on Friday, June 12th, in Atlanta, Georgia, occurred less than three weeks after the murder of George Floyd. Both were killed by a white police officer. It seems that 18 days of protests over the May 25 murder of Floyd did not deter from this new heinous murder. Brooks was shot in the back as he was running away from the two police officers who had fooled him by their seemingly cordial demeanor only to suddenly and unexpectedly handcuff him from the back.
In response to one of its own officers killing an unarmed, cuffed black man by kneeling on his neck until he was long past dead, the Minneapolis City Council pledged to defund the police department. It did this as the city burned and protests erupted around the nation. It maintained this pledge as city schools said "no thanks" to offers of assistance from police officers seeking to bring this level of violence to public schools and state colleges.
Civil rights advocates slammed the president's law enforcement executive order as "a band-aid for a bullet wound."
Protests linked to the George Floyd killing are still occurring on a daily basis around the nation. With increased citizen activity comes increased police activity. Apparently, police departments can't handle these protests on their own. In some states, the National Guard has been called in. In others, surveillance tech on loan from federal agencies is being deployed to keep an eyes on protesters.
How we understand the current uprising in the wake of multiple police killings is critical. It is not only a protest. If we are fortunate, it stays an uprising — against a whole system built on anti-Blackness. This is not about a few “bad apples,” but an entire institution that has a monopoly on the definition of “justice.” It is about people’s psychic, emotional and economic investments in a heavily resourced system that functions to protect white supremacy through anti-Black violence. It is about George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Oscar Grant, Sandra Bland, Rekia Boyd and so many others, as well as the hundreds of years’ worth of violence against Black communities. As such, and as the world is witnessing — because of the gravity and depth — every strategy to disturb, let alone upend this world, will be taken.
Northrop Grumman, the third largest military contractor in the world, was allegedly involved in falsely accusing CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou of “revenge porn.”
The false accusation allegedly resulted in his arrest, improper charges, and a police raid that violated his privacy rights.
Kyrie Irving, the All-Star point guard for the Brooklyn Nets, is often mocked in the press for being, shall we say, “out there” with his opinions on a wide array of subjects. It’s been debated whether he has been sincere or engaged in performance art, mocking the media’s willingness to take him seriously and furtively chase like mice whatever crumbs he throws in their direction. Yet there is nothing performative—not a hint of artifice—in the ideas that Irving is currently expressing.
After three police officers in New York City had consumed milkshakes that made them ill, police unions in the city alleged the incident was a purposeful “attack” on cops. But an investigation of the matter later found that it was accidental, not criminal.
Across the nation, protesters fill the streets outraged by police brutality and systemic racism. At least 114,000 and counting lie dead from the novel coronavirus. Thirty million have been tossed out of work. Thousands of businesses large and small have closed forever. Midland, Mich., is flooded by a collapsing dam. And hurricane and wildfire seasons are still to come. Events feel increasingly biblical: plagues, fires, floods, chaos—a reckoning of sorts. “Make America Great Again” this is not.
As protesters worldwide continue to topple monuments to racists, colonizers and Confederates as part of the wave of demonstrations against racism and state violence, we speak to Bree Newsome Bass, artist and antiracist activist based in North Carolina, who five years ago was arrested at the state Capitol in South Carolina after scaling a 30-foot flagpole to remove the Confederate flag. She says the current backlash against racist symbols reflects “impatience with the pace of incremental progress” both in the United States and elsewhere. “People are tired of centuries of colonialism and white supremacist ideology.”
Several years ago a man called me and apologized for taking my time, but explained he had to speak with me since he was writing about the Emmett Till murder trial and “you are the only one who was there who is still alive.”
Conservative leaders snigger at protesters seeking the removal of statues memorialising those whose fortunes came from the exploitation of slaves.
As uprisings ignite across the United States in response to decades of racist and biased policing that exacerbates an unjust social order, police departments are going on the offensive. To complement nationwide violent tactics of unnecessary and excessive force roundly condemned by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, police departments have adopted a more subtle charm offensive.
They were relegated to the protest equivalent of a ghetto. Their assigned route shunted them to the far fringes of the city. Their demonstration was destined for an ignominious demise far from any main thoroughfare, out of sight of most apartment buildings, out of earshot of most homes, best viewed from a dinghy bobbing in the Hudson River.
In this interview, Henry A. Giroux argues that the current rebellions taking place across the globe offer new hope for both educating people about the interrelated registers of racism, militarism, neoliberalism and scandalous inequality. This is a diverse political rebellion inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement that is arguing not simply against police violence, but for real structural change that begins with defunding the police to changing the totalizing infrastructures of power and injustice that have been used against people of color since the time of slavery.
In April, Tasmania amended its archaic sexual assault victim ‘gag law’. Now, as the Northern Territory considers amending a similar law, Dr Zahra Stardust discusses the case of ‘Sandra’ – a woman who was raped while working at a buck’s party near Darwin in 2017 – who now wishes to speak out under her real identity, but is prohibited from doing so.
And so on across the highest reaches of corporate America, an outpouring of solidarity with those protesting brutal police killings of black Americans and systemic racism.
Throughout our nation’s history, racial inequality has hit our tribal nations the hardest. From the inception of the United States, native people have had to face unprovoked attacks from the American military again and again, endure the manifest destiny philosophy of American territorial expansion that removed us from our homelands, to the stealing of our children and taking them to government boarding schools in attempts to eliminate the essence of our cultural heritage. Of course, there’s the ongoing racial disparities many tribal members face today in the forms of poverty, health disparities and inadequate housing.
But Obama, the nation's first Black president, who confronted and addressed race and racism frequently, did take action to reform police and try to reduce bias in law enforcement. The Trump administration is well aware of that, too: It unraveled those changes
"He said President Obama did nothing on police reform, but the fact is they made a lot of progress and President Trump rolled it back," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday..
The spotlight—the harsh glare that erases nuance—has moved on to new outrages in bigger cities. The local aftermath has fallen into familiar and frustrating tropes: police circling the wagons, a package of ill-defined reform proposals, and attempts at scapegoating that serve politics rather than progress.
An old, Russian-made Baikal .380-caliber semi-automatic handgun was found about three feet from Fong's left hand, free of fingerprints or blood.
In 2004, a man reported his gun stolen in a burglary. He was later told by Minneapolis police that his gun had been recovered in a snowbank and it would be in police custody until an investigation had concluded. The gun matched the serial number on the Baikal .380 caliber found by Fong Lee's body.
When that was pointed out at trial by Padden, the police provided an explanation -- the gun found in the snowbank was not the Baikal .380. There had been a mix-up with the identification and the paperwork, and the Baikal had never been in their custody.
The Minneapolis Police Department did not respond to questions from the BBC about the case.
The Mass Defense Committee (MDC) Steering Committee and NLG National Office have been concerned about an increasing number of reports of police targeting Legal Observers (LOs) in a variety of ways, either with chemical or projectile weapons, physical force and brutality, or arrest and/or questioning. We strongly condemn these actions against any LO and against any participant in the movement for Black Lives. The NLG recognizes the brunt of police violence is aimed at Black, Brown, Trans, gender non-conforming people, and that police killing people is a public health pandemic.
We also want to take this moment to let all MDC members and LO volunteers know that we stand in solidarity with you and are here to help and support whenever the police target you in any way. We know that donning our neon green and being clearly marked with “Legal Observer” is both a crucial way of supporting movements in the streets and an easy way to be targeted by the forces that seek to maintain the status quo. This support might look like working with your local chapters to help you figure out your options for dealing with legal, physical health, or mental health needs after surviving police harassment or brutality. It might look like the MDC issuing more public statements decrying police violence and the targeting of LOs. It might look like adapting our mass defense resources to better support LOs in this constantly evolving political moment. It might look like things we have never done before that this political moment calls for.
S. 3630. I wonder what percentage of patentees would take this trade-off. Patents covering COVID-19 related inventions rights don’t begin until the National Emergency officially ends; 10 years is then added to the patent term.
Among the issues to be clarified are whether the proposed legislation would apply to existing patents or only patents granted after its effective date, and what it means for a patent to be “used or intended for use in the treatment of … COVID–19.”
The proposed legislation would delay the term of such patents “until the date on which the national emergency declared by the President under the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. €§ 1601 et seq.) with respect to that disease terminates.”
The proposed legislation would extend the term of such patents thereafter, “for 10 years longer than it otherwise would” be under Title 35. Also among the issues to be clarified is whether the extended term could be added onto an FDA review-based patent term extension granted under 35 U.S.C. €§ 156.
The Federal Circuit during 2019 and 2020 has issued a spate of decisions on the proper application of the Doctrine of Equivalents (see, e.g., UCB, Inc. v. Watson Laboratories Inc. and Galderma Laboratories, L.P. v. Amneal Pharmaceuticals LLC) and its related limiting doctrines, prosecution history estoppel (Amgen Inc. v. Coherus BioSciences Inc. and Pharma Tech Solutions, Inc. v. Lifescan, Inc.) and the dedication-disclosure doctrine (Eagle Pharmaceuticals Inc. v. Slayback Pharma LLC and Indivior Inc. v. Dr. Reddy's Laboratories, S.A.). There then followed, like night follows day, a slew of petitions for certiorari. The Supreme Court has already denied cert in Actavis Laboratories FL, Inc. v. Nalproprion Pharmaceuticals, Inc., and on Monday, the Court showed equal disinterest in the issue, denying certiorari in Eli Lilly & Co. v. Hospira, Inc.
To recap, this case arose in ANDA litigation over Eli Lilly's U.S. Patent No. 7,772,209 directed to "improved" methods for administering its anticancer drug Alimta€® (pemetrexed disodium), a frequent target for generic drugmakers. The drug itself, an antifolate metabolic inhibitor of thymidylate synthase, inhibits cell growth (normal and malignant) by interfering with production of DNA precursors and hence inhibiting replication. The anticancer efficacy for this drug (like many anticancer drugs) relies on the greater replicative activity of cancer cells compared with normal cells.
Pemetrexed, and its disodium salt, is not a new drug, being disclosed and claimed in U.S. Patent No. 5,344,932, and Eli Lilly's licensed U.S. Patent No. 4,997,838, that disclosed a large genus of structurally related compounds that encompass pemetrexed but did not disclose the molecule itself. This reference also taught that "pharmaceutically acceptable bases," such as "alkali metals, alkali earth metals, non-toxic metals, ammonium, and substituted ammonium" could be prepared from the disclosed antifolate inhibitors.
[...]
The Federal Circuit reversed-in-part (regarding literal infringement) and affirmed-in-part (regarding infringement under the Doctrine of Equivalents), in an opinion by Judge Lourie joined by Judges Moore and Taranto. With regard to DOE infringement, the Court found that the District Court had not erred in finding the substitute salts to be equivalents. With regard to prosecution history estoppel, under Festo Corp. v. Shoketsu Kinzoku Kogyo Kabushki Co., 535 U.S. 722, 733 (2002) the question was whether the amendments made in the earlier patent from which the '209 patent claims priority were made for reasons related to patentability and do not fall within Supreme Court-recognized exceptions.
Eli Lilly did not dispute that its amendments satisfied the fundamental requirements of behavior that raises the estoppel: that "the amendment in question was both narrowing and made for a substantial reason relating to patentability." But the District Court found and the Federal Circuit affirmed that prosecution history estoppel did not bar DOE infringement because the amendments made to the claims during prosecution "[bore] no more than a tangential relation to the equivalent in question," citing Festo. Hospira and Dr. Reddy's Laboratories colorfully argued that "the tangential exception is not a patentee's-buyer's-remorse exception" and that the tangential relationship exception should be construed narrowly, but the Federal Circuit held that appellants had advanced a "too rigid" application of prosecution history estoppel. The Court agreed with the District Court's assessment that Lilly had narrowed the claims of the earlier, related application to overcome rejection based on treatment with methotrexate, and that "the particular type of salt to which pemetrexed is complexed relates only tenuously to the reason for the narrowing amendment," which was to avoid prior art directed to methotrexate administration. The panel also refused to adopt Dr. Reddy's position as a bright-line rule, stating that "such a bright-line rule is both contrary to the equitable nature of prosecution history estoppel, [citing Festo], and inconsistent with the equitable spirit that animates the doctrine of equivalents," citing Graver Tank & Mfg. Co. v. Linde Air Prods. Co., 339 U.S. 605, 608 (1950).
On June 16, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 9,026,673. The patent is owned by SITO Mobile R&D IP, LLC, an NPE. The '673 patent generally relates to the transmission of multiple digital media streams from a server to a client device, e.g., where one media stream may be a piece of requested media, and another media stream may be an advertisement.
I want to thank Lisa Ouellette for inviting me to blog about United States Patent & Trademark Office v. Booking.com, a trademark case argued before the Supreme Court in May, with a decision expected soon. The Court selected that case for its first live telephonic oral argument. The night of the historic oral argument, Christine Farley of American University Washington College of Law hosted a discussion where I joined Rebecca Tushnet, Marty Schwimmer, and Cara Gagliano to recap the argument and discuss the case. Below, I summarize the oral argument in some detail (with page and line references to the transcript) and offer my prediction of what the forthcoming opinion might hold.
[...]
Like the recently decided Romag Fasteners, Inc. v. Fossil Group, Inc., this case exposes tension between an older, more restrictive judicial rule and the more recent and arguably less restrictive federal statute. The PTO’s support for its categorical rule is drawn primarily from a pre-Lanham Act Supreme Court opinion, Goodyear’s India Rubber Glove Manufacturing Co. v. Goodyear Rubber Co., 128 U.S. 598 (1888). The Court in Goodyear’s held that a mark combining a generic or descriptive term (‘Goodyear’s’ for vulcanized rubber products) and ‘Company’ or ‘Co.’ cannot qualify for trademark protection. Following that logic, the PTO argues courts and examiners are required to ignore evidence that consumers see a ‘generic.com’ mark as a source signifier, because ‘.com’ is the functional equivalent of ‘Co.’
Erica L. Ross, Assistant to the Solicitor General, made an outstanding argument for the PTO, repeatedly pointing the Court back to Goodyear’s as providing an easy disposition for these issues. Some of the Justices, however, seemed inclined to turn to the primary significance test Congress embedded in the cancellation provision of the Lanham Act, 15 U.S.C. €§ 1064(3), which states that “[t]he primary significance of the registered mark to the relevant public rather than purchaser motivation shall be the test for determining whether the registered mark has become the generic name of goods or services on or in connection with which it has been used.” Courts look for primary significance when considering whether a source signifying mark has become generic. In Kellogg Co. v. National Biscuit Co., 305 U.S. 111 (1938), another pre-Lanham Act decision, the Supreme Court held that secondary meaning required a showing that the “primary significance of the term in the minds of the consuming public is not the product but the producer.” Id. at 118. The search for primary significance typically includes survey evidence in ex post genericness cases. The Fourth and Federal Circuits have used the primary significance test to assess genericness in registration proceedings. As Justice Roberts observed, “it makes more sense to follow the language that Congress chose in the statute rather than a 130-year-old case of ours.” Tr. 6:6-8. Justices Alito (Tr. 18:18-20), Sotomayor (Tr. 22:3-11), Kagan (Tr. 29:2-11), and Gorsuch (Tr. 30:13-17) also pressed petitioner’s counsel on the government’s preferred alternative to the primary significance test.
In practice, however, advocates of open licenses in the realm of public-service media face several hurdles, such as:
Senator Thom Tillis (or perhaps some staffer in his office who is desperate for a job as a legacy copyright industry lobbyist in his next job) really seems to have it in for the Internet Archive. Beyond trying to rewrite copyright law to make it favor the legacy players even more than it already does, and beyond telling copyright experts that they shouldn't even dare think of commenting on the state of copyright law today, Tillis really seems to have an infatuation with the Internet Archive wanting to help people by providing them information. I don't know what the library ever did to Tillis as a child, but as a Senator he sure seems to hate the very concept. He sent one very confused, misinformed, and angry letter to the Internet Archive over its National Emergency Library, and now he's sent another one after news broke that the Archive had purchased the distressed, but famed, Bop Street Records in Seattle.
With a new law criminalizing the downloading of manga content set to come into force in 2021, a new anti-piracy campaign in Japan is hoping to persuade fans to go legal. Spearheaded by anti-piracy group CODA with the assistance of well-known manga artists, the campaign will project its message through the medium of manga itself.
Cricket fans were welcomed with a shocking message a few hours ago when the largest fan-created Cricket video archive on Twitter was targeted. Rob Moody, whose videos generate hundreds of thousands of views every month, was told to remove all copyrighted videos or lose his Twitter account. This threat prompted public outrage and soon after Cricket Australia retracted its claims.
