Purism, the San Francisco-based computer hardware, and software company that focuses on security, privacy, and user freedom, has presented the Librem 14. This is a 14-inch screen laptop featuring hardware kill switches that enable the user to be 100% sure that the camera, microphone, Wi-Fi, or Bluetooth are indeed switched off. In addition to this, the Librem 14 has the Intel Management engine disabled and neutralized, while all unneeded firmware is also disabled or stripped out. In the area of protecting the user against hardware tampering, there’s the Librem Key that performs a series of checks upon boot, and the PureBoot that makes tampering a lot harder. The laptop is photographed upon shipping, and an image is included as proof for the recipient.
Purism has rolled out its latest privacy-focused laptop. The sleek looking device comes with the promise that it has been designed “chip-by-chip, line-by-line, to respect your rights to privacy, security and freedom.” In a world where every company wants a slice of your data, it is a sales pitch that certainly offers some appeal. It further backs up on its promise with hardware kill switches that physically disconnect the camera and mic, or wireless and Bluetooth, helping to further set it apart from the competition.
The Purism 14 comes pre-installed with PureOS, a custom enhanced privacy and security focused version of GNU/Linux with FSF (Free Software Foundation) accreditation. The company has built in better security defaults, HTTPS wherever it can be implemented, ad blocking, tracking protection and Apparmor sandboxed debs and Flatpak. It also works with its PureBoot and Librem key that detects software and hardware tampering, sold separately.
Back in January, it was reported that plans were afoot for Chromebooks to get an almighty gaming shot in the arm. ChromeOS users would no longer have to content themselves with Android titles: instead, limited support for Steam games was on the horizon. Now an investigation by Android Police suggests that plan is progressing nicely, and that the feature might not be too far off.
As expected, it’s not something that should be oversold: games will be supported via a Linux virtual machine, which seriously impacts the quantity available. But while Chromebooks won’t rival even the cheapest Windows 10 gaming laptop in terms of variety, it’ll still prove a nice bonus for anyone who values the portability, battery life and responsiveness of Chrome OS.
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At the time of writing, Steam lists 2,007 games in its Linux section — not all of which will run nicely on meagre Chromebook hardware. But there are some low-spec options that ChromeOS users would no doubt love to try: Counter Strike, Hollow Knight and Stardew Valley to name but three. And while that number is only a fraction of the 24,000-plus Steam games compatible with Mac, this upgrade could make Chromebooks a slightly more viable competitor to the likes of the MacBook Air when it comes to gaming.
Chromebooks are big business, especially for students — a market that contains a whole lot of gamers. According to StatCounter, Linux represents just 1.84% of US OS installations, which isn’t a hugely significant slice of potential gamers — but that would more than double if it included the 2.75% of ChromeOS devices out there. Perhaps this will make developers work that bit harder to ensure their games perform well outside of Windows.
We knew the Steam compatibility was going to rely on the support for running Linux apps on Chrome OS, but according to code changes in Chromium open-source, the key is a new project with the codename "Borealis." This is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu that will apparently run inside Chrome OS just as Crostini (which is based on Debian Linux) does now.
The reason for using it appears to be to maximize compatibility with Steam on Linux, which Valve has already put considerable work into; Ubuntu is the service's preferred Linux distribution.
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Now, there aren't a lot of Chromebooks with Intel 10th Gen processors just yet (we've reviewed the Samsung Galaxy Chromebook and the Lenovo Flex 5 Chromebook) but more should arrive before the end of the year.
It will be interesting to see if this project finally reaches a public beta stage soon and whether gaming on Chromebooks is something that users actually want. With premium Chromebooks seemingly carving out an admittedly small place in the market now, it at least seems plausible compared to just a year or two ago when Google was alone in producing high-end Chromebooks.
By the year 2020, it is estimated that there are close to 600 Linux distributions in the market. It includes both servers and Desktop versions; therefore, if you are looking for lightweight Linux distribution for your old PC or a reliable desktop version for employees in your organization, you may be overwhelmed with the number of choices for finding one for your use.
In this post, we will focus on Linux server support, looking at some of the best server distros available. Currently, Linux is known as one of the leading server operating systems with stable and wide-range features and hence there is no doubt why it powers 90% of the world’s servers.
Before jumping in, you should know exactly what Dillo doesn’t include, just to temper your expectations. Dillo does not include Flash, Java, or Javascript and only has limited support for frames. It also doesn’t allow you to create a user profile. Presumably, that will be most of the modern Internet out of the picture, but who knows? We’ll see.
The advantage of all that feature-cutting is that it will run on almost anything – even a 486 with dial-up Internet. Running at idle, Dillo was using 2.9 MB of RAM and 9.5 MB of shared memory, which is microscopic compared to the gigs of RAM used by modern browsers.
If you’re willing to trawl the Internet, people have run it on Mac, DOS, and a bunch of Unix variants, but now the website just has source tarballs, mostly focusing on Linux. It can also run on Windows, but the Dillo team actively dislikes the platform!
Wine 5.12 was released a day ago as the latest development release of the compatibility layer allows to run Windows apps on Linux and Mac OS. The official apt repository has made the packages for all current Ubuntu releases.
I’m going to begin this rant by saying that there are some things that that the Stack Exchange network is really good with: mainly, programming help.
However, it really sucks when it comes to providing help with a specific application where there is already a community. For the past year, I have been the #1 person to answer questions on tor.stackexchange.com. I’m not saying that to pat myself on the back; just to say that I have actually been doing this for a little while.
In late 2019 I successfully ship multiboot drives with Zorin OS as one among many operating systems within them. I have made the articles in making them multibootable most notably openSUSE, Deepin, and Slackware, as they were actually not supported by GLIM multiboot maker. However, I forgot that I have not made such article about Zorin as I thought I have. Now I remembered it in 2020 and this is the article you can learn once again to make it bootable like what I am currently doing with my latest Zorin articles. Enjoy!
Wine-Staging at one point was traditionally 800+ testing/experimental patches on top of the upstream Wine code-base, even as recently as March when it was 850+ patches. Thanks to more work being upstreamed, last month it hit just over 700 patches and now with today's release of Wine-Staging 5.12 it represents a delta of just 665 patches.
With Friday's release of Wine 5.12 upstreamed out of staging were many patches relating to Direct Manipulation, NTDLL, Wine Server, include files, and other bits. Thanks to that this is one of the smallest patch sets to staging in recent memory.
The new Atari VCS PC-console hybrid is set to start shipping to Indiegogo backers this Fall, the company said in a recent press release. The news comes alongside an announcement of Missile Command: Recharged, the latest remaster-style re-release of an old-school classic on the VCS system. The fleet of newly redesigned classics serve as the major draw to the VCS insofar as software, but it's the system's unique Linux-based design that stands out.
Atari is branding the VCS as a true multmedia console that can switch to and from an open-ended PC at will. Gamers can load up multiple operating systems like Windows 10, Chrome OS, or Linux and play PC games in the console's Sandbox Mode. This allows lots of flexibility for the platform and is pretty innovative. Gamers can also switch back over to the VCS' native mode and play games specifically made for the platform on Atari's storefront, which will sell old-school retro classics and re-imagined titles with new modern designs.
The VCS also has modular parts and will let you swap out or upgrade new RAM sticks. Other multimedia includes a built-in web browser, access to streaming services, and digital video/music playback.
KDE developers remain very active with improving this open-source desktop environment even amid the coronavirus pandemic.
KDE developer Nate Graham is out with another weekly summary of all the accomplishments for this open-source community over the past week. Some of the highlights for this week in the KDE world include:
- The Dolphin file manager and Konsole terminal now have a "copy location" menu item.
- HiDPI scale factor fixes for various non-default task switchers.
A lot of exciting things are happening behind the scenes these days, but in terms of what landed this week, we focused on bugfixing–including a few nice high DPI fixes–and also got a few nice Dolphin and Konsole features.
Manjaro Plasma for ARM v8 (Pi 4 among others) is an interesting concept. But it's not mature enough just yet. There are too many teething problems, chief among them being video performance and heating. The conflict with package manager is also troubling, as it renders the system unusable with ordinary users. Various other bugs and papercuts, including some that I've not really mentioned, the styling and branding, plus the leftovers from the image building process all leave their negative mark on the total score.
From the usability perspective, Manjaro Plasma runs just fine. The speed is quite decent when it comes to how quick and responsive the desktop is. I am quite pleased with the overall concept - this is an advanced and complete desktop solution - weighed down with sub-optimal performance and bugs. I hope these will be resolved soon, because I would then even consider Manjaro for my mini-real production setup, and that would be quite a step from where my workflow normally floweth. At the moment, Raspberry Pi OS remains the optimal if not ideal distro for Raspberry Pi 4. Well, we shall see how this evolves. Take care and stay tuned.
In the last blog, I wrote about my first two weeks on the GSoC period. In this blog, I would write about the activities to which I have worked further and implemented multiple datasets.
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Why multiple datasets to GCompris activities?
As previously all of the activities were having a generalized dataset so for some of the age groups as for 3-5 yrs the activity seems quite difficult to play, and also for some of the age groups the activity seems to be quite easy. So, multiple datasets help in resolving this issue and we have multiple data for various age groups and all the activities can be more adaptive for the children.
Thanks to my business going well with shipping many usb flash drives in Indonesia, I managed to make multiboot many distros previously I could not. Most notably are Deepin, openSUSE, Slackware which are not supported, aside from the ones automatically supported to make multiboot with notably Ubuntu family and Fedora, not to mention others. Now as I have many notes about them I want to list them out here in one place. Happy booting!
The openSUSE team has finally announced a new stable version openSUSE Leap 15.2. The new release includes several security updates, bug fixes, new tools, and features.
It is a successor to the previous version Leap 15.1 and also a regular release that comes with a maintenance life cycle of 18 months.
So, if you’re using the current Leap 15.1, you should upgrade to the latest Leap 15.2 within the next six months as v15.1 will reach its EOL (End-of-Life) by the end of November 2020.
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For Kubernetes, Leap 15.2 has also added Helm package manager that helps developers and system administrators manage Kubernetes applications.
Besides new tools, v15.2 has upgraded its several core packages. Here, I’m listing a brief list of improvements in Leap 15.2.
I’ve found a lot of people who are new to security, particularly those with an interest in penetration testing or red teaming, install Kali Linuxâ⢠as one of their first forays into the “hacking” world. In general, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, I also see many who end up stuck on this journey: either stuck in the setup/installation phase, or just not knowing what to do once they get into Kali.
This isn’t going to be a tutorial about how to use the tools within Kali (though I hope to get to some of them eventually), but it will be a tour of the operating system’s basic options and functionality, and hopefully will help those new to the distribution get more oriented.
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, has officially announced that Ubuntu 19.10 “Eoan Ermine” will reach its end-of-life (EOL) on July 17, 2020. This means the Ubuntu developer team will no longer provide security patches, bug fixes, or any other updates.
Additionally, you won’t even get updates for installed applications. In fact, you won’t be able to install new software using apt-get command without manually modifying sources.list. Hence, if you’re using v19.10, you should upgrade your system to the latest long-term release Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa.
Ubuntu can help you to enlarge screen items and easily display cursor movements to your audience. This article is a company to Focal For Teachers and continuation to Screen Zoom on KDE. This is practicable to every GNOME operating system not only Ubuntu but also Fedora, Red Hat, Zorin and others. You can watch practical examples in this new video below and also image editing videos I published recently. For teachers and tutorial makers, this article is for you. Enjoy!
Back in early 2017 "Mircade" was introduced as an arcade-style game launcher on Ubuntu powered by Mir. We hadn't heard much of Mircade since 2017 but the effort is still alive for this Mir-based launcher that can trigger various apps to run under Wayland/Mir.
Canonical's Alan Griffiths published an Ubuntu blog post on Friday outlining this Snap confined shell based on Mir.
Answer: The kernel strategy for NXP’s i.MX family BSPs closely follows the annual cadence of kernel.org’s LTS kernel selection. As soon as kernel.org establishes the next official LTS kernel version, NXP transitions our internal development to that particular kernel. However, the migration of the kernel is only one aspect of our next major release. There may be a number of associated updates to be included, such as a new version to Yocto, updates to U-Boot, and many other package changes we integrate into the Yocto release specific to the i.MX BSP. These factors, plus our rigorous testing process create an inevitable delay between the community version of the latest LTS kernel release and NXP’s i.MX board support package (BSP) based on that same kernel.
We must also consider a number of other factors that come into play between our planned cadence of Linux LTS kernel updates. NXP may introduce new products, or there may be updates to various packages, and of course, there are issue resolutions (including LTS minor version updates) to be considered. Our engineering team must balance all these factors while maintaining consistent quality standards for the entire i.MX product family being supported by each BSP release.
If Google decides to use its new operating system Fuchsia will it lead to the company abandoning Linux - the kernel is used in Android - and lead to what one security professional is claiming will be "withdrawal of resources, investment, and Linux's largest userbase"? If this happens at the same time as the rise of Fuchsia is it certain it "will have a devastating effect"?
In the end, I don't really see any compelling reasons for most people to buy the LG Stylo 6. Perhaps if you can get an exceptionally good deal on one (like, free), this phone will hold you over until you can afford something better. But the performance issues are extremely unlikely to be resolved by software updates, and we just don't think MediaTek's budget Helio chips make any sense to choose when Qualcomm alternatives are readily available at the same price point (albeit without a stylus). LG goofed on the Stylo in 2020—hopefully they'll see the error of their ways and correct course on the next iteration.
The project is built with HTML5/ JavaScript and uses TensorFlow.js for AI. It's deployed currently on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The developers uses several open-source libraries and packages most of them are battle tested in enterprise projects here is a list of them included resources that helped in creating this project, we are really proud in Medevel to see it's listed there...
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MedSeg is a free, openly available segmentation tool that requires little training and no prior set-up to start using. You may manually segment your images or take advantage of their developed AI-models to ease the segmentation process of your interest. MedSeg may also contribute in your own segmentation work by developing further AI-models for your need.
While recent Firefox releases have seen VA-API video acceleration working when running natively under Wayland, the Firefox 80 release later this summer will bring VA-API support by default to those running on a conventional X.Org Server.
The bits are now landed that VA-API support within Mozilla's Firefox web browser should be working fine on X11.
Look at LibreOffice logo with "Personal Edition" phrase, look at sidebar in Start Center with the same phrase and note to "The Personal edition is supported by volunteers and intended for individual use." And what is mean? Where is any public announcement? They say it was in marketing mail list. How many people read that mail list? Five? It means that I can't install LibreOffice 7.0 in any organization in Russia, because our controlling people will be see very simple to legality in this case: open the About dialog -> read that "intended for individual use" and LibreOffice logo with "Personal Edition" -> you can't use LibreOffice here! Nobody will check what say MPL 2.0 license about it or why TDF made it, they just point a finger at it and they will be right! It will close for LibreOffice any education organizations like schools or colleges or universities. I wont popularize LibreOffice for young people because they will never see LibreOffice in them schools. I against these changes. Please revoke it!
Data is a set of values. Data can be collected and put in a row, or in a column, or in a table or in the form of a tree. The structure of data is not only the placement of data in any of these forms. In computing, the data structure is any of these formats, plus the relationship among the values, plus the operations (functions) perform on the values. You should already have basic knowledge on tree data structure before coming here, as the concepts there, will be used here with little or no explanation.
Perl does not have a built-in combinations function, but there are several modules (for example Math::Combinatorics) providing the functionality. However, this being a coding challenge, I don’t want to use a third-party ready-made solution and prefer to show a way to do it yourself.
If we knew in advance how many items we want in each combination, nested loops might be the best solution. But if we want to be flexible about the number of items in each combination, then it is often simpler to use a recursive approach. Here, the combinations subroutine is recursive and is called once for every item wanted in the combination.
I swear it was Perl 5 just a moment ago. I turned my back for all of 5 minutes ...
I don't need the new features, but I don't like boilerplate and I'm happy to accommodate those who seek progress. Harking back to lessons from the past, SysAdmins of a certain age may remember the venerable a2p program for converting awk scripts to perl and the horrendous (but working) code that it produced. We had one of those running in production less than 2 years ago until I finally decided to re-write it in Modern Perl. A bit like moving house, as a community we need to face the pain every so often and address the risks and ptifalls, not as reasons to keep to the status quo, but as a checklist of problems to be solved.
In this example, you are expected to find the coefficients of the quadratic equation of the given two roots (x1 and x2) with a python function.
The Quadratic Equation looks like this ax^2 + bx + c = 0. Our mission is to find the coefficients of the equations which is a, b, and c. The return type from the function is a Vector containing coefficients of the equations in the order (a, b, c). Since there are infinitely many solutions to this problem, we fix a = 1.
Below is the method to find the return Vector.
Python 3.9 is still in development. This release, 3.9.0b4, is the fourth of five planned beta release previews. Beta release previews are intended to give the wider community the opportunity to test new features and bug fixes and to prepare their projects to support the new feature release.
On behalf of the entire Python development community, and the currently serving Python release team in particular, I’m pleased to announce the release of Python 3.9.0b4.
Dictionary is used in python to store multiple data with key-value pairs. It works like an associative array of other programming languages. The curly ({}) brackets are used to define a dictionary and the key-value is defined by the colon(:). The content of the key and value can be numeric or string. Python has many built-in methods to do different types of tasks on the dictionary data such as add, update, delete, search, count, etc. 10 most useful dictionary methods of python are explained in this article.
The string data is the characters of an array that contains one or more characters as value for any programming language. All printable characters such as alphabets, numbers, special characters, etc. are commonly used in the string data. ASCII code and Unicode are mainly used for converting any character to a number that the computer can understand. Python uses Unicode characters for string data. We need to perform different types of tasks based on the programming purpose on the string data such as searching the particular character or characters, capitalizing the first character, making all characters uppercase, etc. Python has many built-in string methods to do these types of tasks very easily. The 10 most useful python string methods are explained in this article.
Time is a simple thing, right? And working with it in Python is great. You just import datetime and then (somewhat oddly) use the datetime class from that module.
Oh except, there are times with timezones, and times without. And why is there a total_seconds() but not total_minutes(), hours() or days() on timedelta? How about computing the number of weeks?
What if you wanted to iterate over the next 22 workdays, skipping weekends?
Ok, we'd better talk about time in Python! Good thing Paul Ganssle is here. He's a core developer who controls time in CPython.
You must have played with variables quite a bit if you did any sort of programming.
If you never worked with variables before, you can think of them as a container that stores a piece of information that can vary over time.
Variables always come in handy while writing a bash script and in this tutorial, you will learn how to use variables in your bash scripts.
The Khronos Group is celebrating the US Independence Day with the release of a new Vulkan spec.
Vulkan 1.2.146 is out today with many documentation corrections/clarifications along with two new extensions.
Intel Capital, the investment arm of chipmaker Intel, has invested $253 million in India’s Reliance Jio in exchange for a 0.39% stake.
This is the 12th investment in Reliance Jio in the last 11 weeks, taking the tally to $15.5 billion. Jio Platforms has raised more money in 2020 than all of India’s startups combined last year.
Jio is India’s biggest mobile network provider with more than 388 million customers on board. Jio Platform is an umbrella company for its digital businesses including the carrier.
Ambani’s digital unit has sold about 25% in stakes and has said it reached its goal of reducing net debt to zero earlier than its March 2021 target. Jio is expected to use its roughly 400 million wireless phone subscribers as the cornerstone of an e-commerce and digital services business.
Intel Capital's investment represents a 0.39% equity stake in the Indian telecom operator Jio, which has more than 388 million subscribers.
What If Working From Home Goes on … Forever?, asks science and technology journalist Clive Thompson in the title of his June 9 NY Times Magazine article. “The coronavirus crisis is forcing white-collar America to reconsider nearly every aspect of office life. Some practices now seem to be wastes of time, happily discarded; others seem to be unexpectedly crucial, and impossible to replicate online. For workers wondering right now if they’re ever going back to the office, the most honest answer is this: Even if they do, the office might never be the same.”
A recent survey found that of the 56% of respondents employed pre-Covid-19, half were working from home, - 35% having recently switched to working from home, while another 15% were already doing so pre-Covid; 37% continued to commute to work, and 10% had been recently laid-off or furloughed. The survey was based on two separate national samples of US data, - one which gathered 25,000 responses in early April, and the second another 25,000 responses in early May.
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Besides increasing the productivity and job satisfaction of their employees, another attraction for employers is shrinking real estate costs. The USPTO estimates that they’ve saved over $38 million in headquarters office space. In addition, companies have access to a larger pool of talented employees who may not afford to relocate to expensive cities or prefer not to do so for family or other reasons. “And in the pandemic, they may need to accommodate employees who - even after health authorities reopen their state - don’t want to come back,” added Thompson. “Many will hesitate at the idea of riding a crowded, unventilated elevator to an open office where people are crowded together.”
“The truth, as I heard from many of the newly remote workers I interviewed, is that as much as our offices can be inefficient, productivity-killing spreaders of infectious disease, a lot of people are desperate to get back to them,” wrote Thompson in conclusion. “That’s because office work is more than just straightforward productivity - briskly ticking off to-do items. It also consists of the chemistry and workplace culture that comes from employees’ interacting all day, in ways that are unexpected and often inefficient, like the stray conversations that take place while people are procrastinating or bumping into one another on the way to lunch. During the pandemic, though, many employees worry that this culture is eroding.”
Four quiet days before filing a lawsuit against the State of California this past May and with a make-or-break space launch less than a month out, grand genius and world savior Elon Musk took time out of his busy schedule to visit with Joe Rogan and put the COVID-19 crisis into terms we lesser minds could all understand. “Yeah th-the- these were, these were [sic] definitely not stand up, uh, you know, if if, fs’the [sic?] Supreme Court here I mean it’s, obviously c-complete violation of rights.” Genius language is tricky to parse even when intentionally pared down. Ever since it was revealed to Kanye West by Kanye West that he was a genius, popular media has laid supine to the myth that all geniuses are crazy and say whackadoodle things. So Mighty Musk was simply following the dictates of this natural law, espousing debunked conspiracy theories about COVID-19, and patriotically/selflessly extolling the constitutional privilege of citizens to work at his factories despite the unabating global pandemic.
"Immigration status shouldn't be a death sentence, but if Congress doesn't act soon, it will continue to be."
"As we've seen all too often from Big Pharma, saving lives is incidental to their business model—the profit motive always comes first."
At the outset of the corona crisis I wrote an€ article,€ about the essential uselessness of the term € “corona€ cases“ in our public discourse at that moment. Leaning € on the ideas of the Swiss linguist Saussure, who argued that € all semantic meaning € is relational, I described the term as a classic “empty” or “floating” signifier.
Instead of protecting people, Senator Mitch McConnell and Rep. Kevin McCarthy—backed by the White House—are working hard to impose corporate immunity—ensuring negligent employers can't be held responsible for failing to follow basic safety rules.
If the coronavirus/COVID-19 outbreak can be considered a national crisis (ignoring, in good American style, the global dimensions of the pandemic), it’s the third crisis in less than twenty years to hit the U.S.
At first, we had no masks. The plan for social distancing was chaotic at best, nonexistent at worst. Hundreds of angry customers were clamoring to get in.
Several months ago, Médecins Sans Frontières€ (MSF) called to end medical profiteering during the recent coronavirus pandemic where the development of drugs, tests, and vaccines will be integral to our getting through this difficult moment in our collective history. While MSF is foreseeing a future inevitability, it is also highlighting what is already happening as many businesses are price-gouging essential products during this crisis.
The NCAA has just ruled that mandatory football practices can begin in July, anticipating a full season of college football. This is nuts. The pandemic isn’t going away; it’s surging in more than 29 states, with seven reporting new records for cases in a day. States that opened early without adequate safeguards — Texas, Florida, Arizona — now face a spread of the pandemic that may soon exhaust the supply of hospital beds. Deaths are now over 125,000. Increasing numbers of young people are contracting the disease, presumably because of the lack of social distancing, the scorn for masks that has accompanied the reopening in many states — and, of course, in the White House itself.
Sixty percent of Venezuela’s COVID-19 cases are in its border states of Apure, Bolívar, Táchira, and Zulia. Roughly 70,000 Venezuelans who had moved to nearby countries of Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru (largely in response to crippling U.S. sanctions) have returned in the last two months via these Venezuelan border states since the COVID-19 crisis exploded in their new countries. Abandoned by their new homes during the pandemic, and many of them infected there, they are now returning in large numbers to Venezuela.
The bizarre “conservative” idea of “freedom” has struck again.
If I told you that Covid-19 was sparking recently reported episodes of madness here in the U.S., what do you imagine would be the reason? Maybe it would be the consequences of isolation. If you are alone and have few resources, lockdown might send you over the edge. Maybe it would be the pandemic’s impact on those with chronic hypochondria. This is obviously not an easy time to be stuck with an irrational fear of disease. Or maybe it is coming from the fundamentalist crowd (both Christian and Jewish) who believe that Covid-19 is the wrath of God yet can’t figure out why it is being visited upon their congregations. If you guessed any of these possible etiologies, you would missing the main cause.
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is no longer united, as most recently illustrated by the vastly dissimilar tactics to control the Covid-19 pandemic taken by England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. This follows the differences of opinion in each region concerning the disastrous Brexit decision to quit the European Union, as Scotland, for example, strongly€ supported€ remaining in the EU, and now 51 percent of Scots have indicated they would€ vote€ for independence from Britain — if they were permitted to have a vote on the matter. The citizens of Northern Ireland€ indicated€ their preference to remain in the EU by a majority of 56% to 44% and although 52.5 per cent in Wales€ voted to leave, there has been growing realisation that Brexit is a potential economic disaster, and in June the Welsh government announced that it will€ campaign€ for the UK to remain in the EU.
Major changes in society can be accomplished by a fast-emerging, broad-based civic jolt so obvious and persuasive that it overwhelms the entrenched powers. The most urgent job is for people to organize to get Trump and Pence to step aside from their bungling, making-matters-worse mismanagement of the Covid-19 pandemic. The White House should let a professional pandemic control specialist with public health experience and an appreciation of science replace the current and ongoing Trump horror show.
Available under the RaaS (Ransomware-as-a-Service) model, Sodinokibi is operated by a threat actor likely affiliated to “Pinchy Spider,” the group behind the GandCrab ransomware.
While investigating the malware itself, AppGate discovered that it includes functionality to escalate privileges by leveraging 32-bit and 64-bit exploits for the CVE-2018-8453 vulnerability in the Win32k component of Windows.
Databricks, the company behind big data processing and analytics engine Apache Spark, contributes open source machine learning platform MLflow to The Linux Foundation. The announcement was made by Matei Zaharia, the creator of Apache Spark and MLflow projects, in his keynote presentation at the recent Spark AI Summit 2020 Conference which was held as a global virtual event.
MLflow was created to help data scientists and developers with the complex process of ML model development which typically includes the steps to build, train, tune, deploy, and manage machine learning models. It manages the entire ML lifecycle, from data preparation to production deployment, including experiment tracking, packaging code into reproducible runs, and model sharing and collaboration, and is designed to work with any ML library.
Tim Hortons is facing a class action lawsuit for its data collection practices – which include tracking your GPS location through their mobile app even when the app was turned off. This privacy violating behavior was not properly disclosed by the company’s privacy policy. While most people know Tim Hortons as the Canadian morning coffee brand of choice for those addicted to sipping hot caffeine, they are now being called out for their mobile app’s lack of respect for privacy. The lawsuit is being filed by two law firms out of Quebec: LPC Advocat Inc. and Consumer Law Group and follows the announcement of a formal investigation by the federal Privacy Commissioner as well as commissioners from Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia.
Linkedin and Reddit both check your clipboard and copy and paste your clipboard contents with every keystroke – even when you’re in another app. Another set of potential privacy violators have been called out by iOS 14’s new paste notifications. The discovery was publicized on Twitter by Don Cubed of urspace.io, who noted that his discovery was very similar to the experience of Jeremy Burge who called out Tik Tok for the same behavior early this week.
Should the police be able to force Google to turn over identifying information on every phone within a certain geographic area—potentially hundreds or thousands of devices—just because a crime occurred there? We don’t think so. As we argued in an amicus brief filed recently in People v. Dawes, a case in San Francisco Superior Court, this is a general search and violates the Fourth Amendment.
The court is scheduled to hear the defendant’s motion to quash and suppress evidence on July 7, 2020.
The new incident involves about 5,000 app developers having access to user data if the users hadn’t been active on the app in the last 90 days, the point at which access was meant to be cut off. The cutoff date is an arbitrary figure set by Facebook rather than any legal requirement, but it was set by Facebook in response to previous concerns about data sharing.
Reuters reported today that the groups said they’re concerned that the acquisition of Fitbit could lead to reduced competition and help Google to extend its data collection apparatus for the purposes of targeted advertisements.
Fitbit is a maker of smartwatches that enable users to track their workouts, sleep quality and health. The company’s latest product, the Versa 2, packs additional features including an integration with the Alexa voice assistant. It has shipped more than 100 million devices to date and claims that its smartwatches are used by 28 million people worldwide.
Twenty advocacy groups from Europe, Latin America, the United States and other regions have signed a joint statement urging government regulators to take a closer look at the acquisition. The groups include Access Now in Europe, Privacy International, Public Citizen in the U.S. and Brazil’s Institute of Consumer Defense.
Google announced the deal in November to take on competitors in the crowded market for fitness trackers and smart watches. Fitbit’s market share has been threatened by deep-pocketed companies like Apple Inc (AAPL.O) and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd (005930.KS).
Australia’s competition authority said this month that it may have concerns about the deal and would make a final decision in August.
EU antitrust regulators will decide by July 20 whether to clear the deal with or without concessions or open a longer investigation.
However, recently, “we discovered that in some instances apps continued to receive the data that people had previously authorized, even if it appeared they hadn’t used the app in the last 90 days,” said Konstantinos Papamiltiadis, vice president of Platform Partnerships with Facebook, in a Wednesday post.
The snowbound winter is a deep freeze. The wind is icy. All work stops, including the fighting. Everything is compressed into the thawed late spring, summer and early autumn … including the fighting. It is here that the Indian and Chinese armies face each other over a historically uncertain border. The troops are fractious.
Is the party finally willing to recognize the failures—both morally and politically—of its pro-war stance?
A small "left-right anti-war coalition," warns€ The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald, remains "no match for the war machine composed of the establishment wings of both parties."
The history of outside forces helping wage war within Afghanistan—including the U.S. establishment of the mujahideen forces to fight the Russians in the 1980s—is a bloody history indeeed.
Seven Stories Press just released Ted Rall’s new book,€ “Political Suicide: The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party.”€ Rall is a graphic novelist, a syndicated columnist and the author of many books of art and prose, including biographies of Edward Snowden, Bernie Sanders and Pope Francis. You’ve probably seen his political cartoons, which are often published in urban weeklies.
"It is insane to issue bayonets to soldiers for crowd control."
With all the talk of meddling in U. S. elections and bounties on U.S. soldiers, it’s no small wonder that a Russian named Berlin can still claim to have composed this nation’s best-loved song. Born in the Russian Empire in 1888, the immigrant Irving Berlin wrote both the words and the music to “God Bless America.” This hymn will be heard on the 40th edition of a Capitol Fourth, the Independence Day concert that has for the past thirty-nine years taken place on the West Lawn of the White House. This time around, Covid has thwarted the full display of military pomp that Trump had promised the beleaguered country.
On June 19, 1865, the news of emancipation finally reached Galveston, Texas. On that day, the crack of the master’s whip would no longer be sanctioned by the laws of the United States. Exercising the powers vested in him by President Lincoln, Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, along with more than 1,800 federal troops, marched into Galveston to announce General Order Number 3. Addressed to the “The people of Texas,” the order set out Granger’s task: to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863.
They don’t know how to stop. They just don’t know how. It doesn’t matter how many people march in how many cities calling for the police to stop killing people, they don’t stop.
Protesters demonstrating against white supremacy and police brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s public lynching have been met with illegal repression by law enforcement. Police have utilized toxic chemical and sonic weapons, dangerous projectiles, intrusive surveillance, physical violence and “kettling” to trap demonstrators after dispersal orders are given.
The 2021 Defense Budget is making its way through Congress. The annual drama of this event has always been of particular interest to residents of the north Pacific Coast, as the US Navy’s nursery lies only twelve miles off our coast. This is where many of the weapons purchased by Congress take their first baby steps of testing and training before deployment. As a requirement for approval of the Navy’s Environmental Impact Statement regarding these exercises, the Navy must consult us every few years. This opportunity to confront Navy personnel has provided an opportunity to become acquainted with the environmental effects of these weapons, and, just as importantly, the menace their ever-increasing lethality constitutes for life on earth.
On Monday, June 22nd, Pvt. Ethan P. Melzer, 22,€ was charged with planning an ambush of members of his unit during an upcoming deployment with the help of an “occult-based neo-Nazi” group known as the “Order of the Nine Angles” and a related group known as the “RapeWaffen Division.”
Even Orwell would be at a loss to make sense of some of the recent antics of leading governments. We would expect Orwell to be out-satirized by the American actions to impose penalties and sanctions on officials of the International Criminal Court, not because they are accused of acting improperly or seem guilty of some kind of corruption or malfeasance, but because they were doing their appointed jobs carefully, yet fearlessly.
The visit by newly-elected Tunisian President Kais Saied to France on June 22 was intended to discuss bilateral relations, trade, etc. But it was also a missed opportunity, where Tunisia could have formally demanded an apology from France for the decades of French colonialism, which has shattered the social and political fabric of this North African Arab nation since the late 19th century.
+ If I recall, there were serious discussions inside the White House about turning the Afghan War into a bounty hunting operation led by mercenaries on contract with Erik Prince. I’m pretty sure many elements of that scheme have been in place since 1979 at the beginning Carter’s secret war and have continued in one way or another over the last 40 years.
This is not a column defending Donald Trump.
Opposing the current president is a worthy goal for anyone who wants a better world. But if that opposition is based on TV ratings and ad sales, then it is just as morally bankrupt as the president himself.
Asked how the civilian got killed, he said that they found two magazines in the mosque. “The elderly man got killed in the firing from the mosque. We are technically clear that the bullet was fired from the mosque that hit the civilian in his back. I have personally visited the spot, met people and checked the camera. It is beyond doubt that the civilian was killed by militant fire,” he said.
The rules of the global economy got us into this mess. But rules can change.
Arguments over where to dump huge amounts of potentially radioactive mud are now ensnarling the UK’s nuclear plans.
Trump’s Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue flew into Missoula on June 12 to sign a memorandum directing the U.S. Forest Service to essentially double-down on its continued push to prioritize logging, mining, drilling and grazing, all while limiting environmental reviews. During the campaign-style signing event, Secretary Perdue—a former agribusiness CEO whose previous political campaigns were bankrolled by Monsanto and Big Ag interests—not only€ bragged that “we see trees as a crop,” but also ironically compared America’s bedrock environmental laws to “bubble wrap.” Apparently it was lost on Secretary Perdue that bubble wrap protects valuable things from being destroyed.
A recent€ article in Wyofile€ by Angus Thuermer was full of quotes from the ranchers grazing the Upper Green River allotment on the Bridger Teton National Forest in Wyoming.
The global pandemic of Covid-19 has challenged the notion of business as usual and exposed a systemic crisis rooted in capitalism and the neoliberal economic model. The pandemic has proliferated in unpredictable numbers, killing thousands in a flash and spreading unhesitatingly beyond borders and boundaries. Millions of people are unemployed and in need of food, medicine and other basic necessities as a result of the collapse of an economic system already stacked against them. On all fronts we are in a physical, mental and spiritual crisis.
Putting worker safety and public health first means picking and choosing carefully, not just which activities are the safest, but which are the most urgent for a functioning society—which, it bears emphasizing, is not the same thing as what’s best for businesses' bottom lines.
"She is fighting with the nonpartisan GAO on basic data that lets them do their job of transparency and accountability," Porter said of small business administrator Jovita Carranza.
Senator Martha McSally’s American TRIP Act would provide a federal tax credit of up to $8,000 for individuals and families for vacation expenses — including food, beverages, transportation, sporting events, and other live entertainment — incurred within the United States. Yesterday, Trump’s economic advisor Larry Kudlow said that the White House is considering something along the lines of the McSally proposal.
The grassroots Tax Amazon movement in Seattle is on the cusp of winning a historic victory against Jeff Bezos.
The June employment report showed the economy adding back 4.8 million jobs, following a gain of 2.7 million (revised up by 200,000) in May. This two-month gain leaves the economy down by just under 14.7 million jobs from its pre-pandemic level in February.
On March 12, Secretary of Education Bety DeVos sold shares worth as much as $5 million in BDT Capital Partners Oak Co-Invest, a secretive fund for wealthy investors that operates out of the Cayman Islands.
The Trump administration has turned sharply toward economic nationalism. It attacks and undermines the World Trade Organization, NATO, and the UN. Trump and other top officials explicitly insult many world leaders. He imposes high tariffs. Official statements renew and sustain Cold War-type attacks on China, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. Trump flirts openly with nationalists who also stress white supremacy and anti-Muslim activity.
In politics, moral purity is just a fashionable way of being morally indifferent.
Barbara Lee participated in her first Democratic National Convention in 1972, as a delegate supporting Shirley Chisholm’s groundbreaking bid for the presidency. Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, mounted a militant anti-war campaign that stressed the need for economic, social, and racial justice. With limited resources and in the face of skeptical media, she said her bid was all about “sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.” Chisholm told Lee, “These rules, these laws inside were not made for you, they weren’t made for me. So you’ve got to get in there and shake things up.’”
Once again the Democratic Party is asking progressives to vote for a presidential nominee who says he disagrees with them about every major issue. This is presented as an offer they cannot refuse. If they cast a protest vote for a third-party candidate like the unionist and environmentalist Howie Hawkins of the Greens or stay home on that key Tuesday in November, Donald Trump will win a second term—which would be worse than Biden’s first.
The decision to retire the Mississippi state flag is not erasing history, it is telling the truth about it.
The news that President Trump is planning to stage a “massive fireworks display” before a sizable crowd on Independence Day eve at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial (notwithstanding the prospect of both wildfires in the tinder-dry surroundings and the further spread of Covid-19) has left me mulling over once again the possible creation of another such epic-scale monument. Maybe it could even be incised into a nearby ridge in the same Black Hills area of South Dakota as the original, if the Lakota Sioux could be convinced to allow it, which they certainly didn’t the first time around.
"We won't be social distancing," said the South Dakota governor.€
President Donald Trump’s planned July 3 fireworks ceremony at Mount Rushmore is facing sustained criticism over its risks to public health and the environment and is being rebuked as “an attack on Indigenous people.”
On June 13, President Donald Trump told the graduating class at€ West Point, “We are ending the era of endless wars.” That is what Trump has promised since 2016, but the “endless” wars have not ended. Trump has dropped€ more bombs€ and missiles than George W.€ Bush or Barack Obama€ did in their first terms, and there are still roughly as many US bases and troops overseas as when he was elected.
So, here we are again at the granddaddy of all of the official U.S. celebrations of militarism and white power.€ Only the hard won observances of Labor Day and MLK’s birthday are exceptions.
In May 2017 President Trump tweeted “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” That garbled nonsense received 21, 663 Likes. In the throes of this Covid-19 pandemic, social media has posted false attacks on what the NIH prescribes.
Sergei Khrushchev, son of former USSR premier, Nikita Khrushchev, who relocated to the United States after the USSR collapsed and became a professor of international relations at Brown University, died several days ago at the age of 84. Mr. Khrushchev died from a gunshot to his head. The Rhode Island police that came to his home in Cranston, following a call by his wife, ruled out foul play.
For coalition forces in Afghanistan, it’s always been hard to tell who’s shooting at them. In two decades of war, the US military and its allies have battled Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, Hezb-e Islami Gulbuddin, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Islamic State, to name a few groups. Tribal warlords, sometimes friend and sometimes foe, control small armies. Some former militant leaders have ascended to powerful positions in the Afghan government, leaving coalition intelligence puzzling at those leaders’ enduring ties to combatants. Foreign interference and aid to insurgents, especially from Iran and Pakistan, is commonplace; reports that Russia may be arming the Taliban came not last week but in early 2018.
Based upon a bombshell New York Times report (6/26/20), virtually the entire media landscape has been engulfed in the allegations that Russia is paying Taliban fighters bounties to kill US soldiers.
"This suffering cannot be forgotten."
Crafted in 2016 by Edward Leung Tin-kei, the helmsman of the local Hong Kong Indigenous movement, these eight characters conjured anxiety and anger from local authorities and Beijing. The slogan was officially denounced by Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, on August 5 and was the target of fierce critiques from official media outlets such as the Global Times, whose attack was published under the signature of its chief editorialist Hu Xijin.
It is essential to define clearly what we mean about disinformation. Without this, fight against disinformation—especially during state of emergency—can effectively lead to censorship (see for instance Hungary). Freedom of expression is applicable not only to “information” or “ideas” that are favorably received or regarded as inoffensive or as a matter of indifference. We need to make clear that in case of disinformation, there’s an intention to deceive, cause public harm, or make economic gain.
We also need to define who can decide on the authenticity, accuracy, or authoritative nature of the content. So far, instead of legislation, we relied on industry self-regulation at European level (Code of conduct on disinformation). Private companies were tasked to arbitrate on free speech matters and urged to monitor their platforms for suspicious activity. This can have a negative impact on public debate, if there’s no remedy available for those whose content is mislabeled. Unfortunately—despite several criticism—this wasn’t corrected by the Commission, instead they encourage new companies to join the Code of Conduct.
An author forced to change printers at the last minute says taking out two words the Chinese censor refused to print would have been a travesty.
Sydney-based author Miro Bilbrough’sââ¬â¹ upcoming memoir, In the Time of the Manaroans, due to be printed in China before the words “Tibetan Buddhism,” were requested to be removed from the manuscript.
Bilbrough, who grew up in New Zealand, said leaving the words in the book was “non-negotiable”.
She said China had overt, geo-political views about Tibet, by not recognising it as a country.
Taken independently, these changes might have felt incremental and isolated — the kind of refereeing and line-drawing that happens every day on social media.
But arriving all at once, they felt like something much bigger: a sign that the Wild Wild Web — the tech industry’s decade-long experiment in unregulated growth and laissez-faire platform governance — is coming to an end. In its place, a new culture is taking shape that is more accountable, more self-aware and less willfully naïve than the one that came before it.
A Turkish court will open the trial on Friday of 20 Saudi officials indicted over the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a step his fiancee hopes will shed more light on the death and reveal where his body was hidden.
3 July 2020
WikiLeaks publisher turns 49 in prison, facing U.S. extradition
We at DiEM25 see Julian’s trial not only as a free press issue, but more importantly as a human rights concern.
To lock away a journalist for exposing secrets defines authoritarianism. Recent events have showcased the increasing deterioration of our democratic institutions. This year’s COVID-19 pandemic, and documented accounts of police brutality worldwide have shed light on the disregard of many ‘democratic’ governments for their own citizens’ lives.
We need to protect people like Julian Assange now more than ever. Whistleblowers ensure the functioning of our democracies by revealing what is being done by governments in the name of citizens.
As a movement committed to the belief that transparency makes strong democracies, we stand with and will fight for Julian, WikiLeaks, and the free press.
Dozens of press freedom, human rights and privacy rights organisations across five continents have co-signed an open letter to the UK Government calling for the immediate release from prison of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The Australian, who is 49 on Friday, is being held in Belmarsh Prison in London, facing extradition to the United States.
He has been indicted under the Espionage Act.
The co-signers write: “This (indictment) is an unprecedented escalation of an already disturbing assault on journalism in the US, where President Donald Trump has referred to the news media as the ‘enemy of the people’.
Amnesty said in June the Moroccan authorities used software developed by Israeli security firm NSO to insert spyware onto the cellphone of Omar Radi, a journalist convicted in March over a social media post.
The Pegasus software can switch on the phone's camera and microphone as well as access data.
If the international watchdog fails to provide evidence, the kingdom "will take the necessary steps to defend its national security" and "clear up public opinion" on the allegations, Prime Minister Saad-Eddine El Othmani said in a statement carried by the Moroccan Press Agency on Thursday.
Ordinance in city of Graham "sends a clear message that racist monuments are valued more highly than Black lives and our constitutional rights.”
Investor coalition worth $620 billion pushed FedEx, Pepsi, and Nike to change stance, prompting team owner to announce a review of the name.
As the righteous rage of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of the Minneapolis Police continues to simmer, marches and other displays of solidarity have spread to places where it is least expected. Small, majority-white towns, typically considered antithetical to diversity and radical politics, are holding their own protests and calling for meaningful action against police brutality and systemic racism. Some smaller, liberal cities predictably showed up; however, collective action can be seen in even unlikelier places — places like the 24,000 person town of Norfolk Nebraska, or my own hometown of Casper, Wyoming – which is in the least inhabited state, and likely one of the most conservative, in the country.
At about 4:30 pm on Sunday, June 28, I was both elated and exhausted. After marching for two and a half miles as a lead organizer of the Queer Liberation March for Black Lives and Against Police Brutality, I had taken a short break to rest and replenish near our end point, Washington Square Park. But now I was ready to go back into the post-march celebration in the center of the park. I saw in the distance that there seemed to be a commotion at the north end of the park, near the Washington Square Arch, and started to walk toward it. On my way, I ran into my friend Liz, who told me that the NYPD had pepper-sprayed the tail end of our march and that Sasha Alexander of Black Trans Media, who was running the post-march speak-out at the small stone stage in the middle of the park, had successfully implored the White people viewing the speak-out to form a barrier around the perimeter of the area to protect the Black and Brown and Trans folks speaking and watching. I glanced over at the stage area and saw the line of White faces lined up facing any danger that might be on its way and felt proud to be among these people. Then I headed to the arch. Soon, I saw people on the ground trying to flush their eyes out and ran into my friend Dinetta, who gave me more details on the police’s actions: She had seen cops ramming into protesters with their motor scooters, unleashing pepper spray on the crowd and intentionally escalating tensions. How had we gotten here?
Chile’s national police force, the Carabineros de Chile, have filed a legal suit against the feminist artistic collective Las Tesis for allegedly inciting violence against the police. In doing so, the Carabineros have lain bare the mechanisms by which the violence of Chile’s patriarchal rapist state is entrenched and institutionalized, conjuring an insidious through-line connecting the censorship and violence of the country’s civic-military dictatorship (1973-1990) to the struggles against police brutality in Chile—and much of the world—today.
For decades, we’ve been told that policing is a public good: available to all, for the benefit of all. But in practice, that’s never been true.
George Floyd’s killing by a policeman in Minneapolis reverberated across the world in an unprecedented fashion. On all continents, young people took to the streets to pay tribute to Floyd. They protested against police brutality which they regarded as ‘systemic’. Citizens expressed their anger at the racial profiling of Black people by the police.
Why are certain Christians democratic and other Christians authoritarian, yet both profess belief in the same Bible and God? Why do some Christians emphasize personal authenticity and others biblical authority? Why do certain Christians want to empower people, and other Christians want to gain power over people? Why do some Christians believe that the goal of faith is human solidarity with people in this life, while others preach that the goal is individual salvation in an afterlife? Not that Christians are either democratic or authoritarian; but one of these two personality tendencies often dominates and determines which passages of the Bible will be underlined and which will be sidelined.
The Fourth of July has never meant much to me or my family. It was just a day that started at 7 a.m. with my mother at my door, blasting gospel music and telling me to get to work cleaning my room, “now that I had the time.” At best, it meant I got barbecue and went outside to watch my neighbors set off fireworks, just in case they accidentally set our house on fire.
As progressives in a country with a long, grim history of racism continuing to the present day, it's our responsibility to fight racism everywhere we see it.
To me, being an anti-racist activist means that one consistently challenges the structures of racist exclusion, exploitation, repression and incarceration
Deniability only is as good as credibility.
I’m not talking about a fairytale matriarchy from long ago and far away. I’m talking about a matriarchy here and now in northern California. I live in one, though I imagine that some might say that it’s not a true matriarchy. Maybe not, but as far as I’m concerned it’s as close to a true matriarchy as I’m likely to get in my own life, unless I move to China and live among the Mosuo women who practice Tibetan Buddhism or to Indonesia and live with the Minangkabau women.
Over the past fifty-three years as a socialist, I have seen repeated calls for purifying the left of capitalist influences, both governmental and corporate. The latest flare-up was a Jacobin article titled “Don’t Let Blackwashing Save the Investor Class” by Cedric Johnson, a black African American studies professor. Just as Deep Throat advised Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men,” Johnson followed the money:
Exactly a month after George Floyd’s death, driving along Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, ‘Black Lives Matter’ tags have converted the plywood board-ups that line the street into a tapestry that establishes a rhythmic mantra – proclaiming a society of equality and justice. Approaching Crescent Heights Boulevard, the currently closed Laugh Factory is covered with images of George Floyd as though he were the featured stand-up comedian at the club. Floyd, however, achieved his eight minutes, forty-six seconds of fame with his neck pinned to the ground by a white police officer’s knee. His life was unregarded and his potential death, as his last moments ebbed away, entirely ungrieved by his assailant.
Since the onset of the Great Recession, a debate has persisted over creating what is described— depending on one’s premises, as either a trans-ideological working class movement or a red-brown alliance of socialists with fascists. ‘Socialist’ in this configuration is a classless movement that maps quite remarkably to the base of the Democratic Party. It is a mix of the right-thinking rich, the PMC and the slivers of working class and poor whose historical oppression threatens the rule of capital if not managed through social divisions and symbolic acts. Class here is a proxy for one’s social utility in a self-organized system of capitalist employment.
Like many cities, New York City began equipping its police officers with body-worn cameras a few years ago. The footage is often invaluable evidence for the civilian agency charged with investigating complaints about NYPD abuses.
But first, the agency’s investigators need to get the footage. And increasingly, the NYPD is not turning it over.
As protesters continue to occupy the streets around the U.S., many are filming police brutality. If you are in a situation with the cops or witnessing one that has the potential to turn violent, whether at a protest or simply while out in your community, you should be prepared to take video and document events with your smartphone. While taking a video isn’t that difficult — we do it every day — recording police brutality or other atrocities comes with a whole set of concerns that many of us don’t have to face on a daily basis.
Scholars Cornel West and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor respond to the global uprising against racism and police violence following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. “We’re seeing the convergence of a class rebellion with racism and racial terrorism at the center of it,” said Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. “And in many ways, we are in uncharted territory in the United States.”
The murder of black people has been a constant in American barbarity since Colonial times.€ Persistent white murder has caused black agony to erupt in spasms of despair that have only altered its methods, not ended it.€ White racism, officially supported, has suppressed black outrage but not stifled it.€ Whites continue to murder blacks but cannot murder black spirit.
In July 1864, Confederate forces led by General Jubal Early attacked Fort Stevens and Fort DeRussy on the outskirts of Washington, DC. Union forces drove them away after two days of skirmishes, but the battle threw a scare into the capital city and constituted a high point in the Confederacy’s Shenandoah Valley campaigns.
It took some time for Vincent Wade-Robinson to come around to the idea of having his name inscribed on a memorial. His experience had been painful. He didn’t want to dwell upon it.
“How can you describe torture?” he asked me. “Every day I look in the mirror I have that scar across my nose. That’s my reminder of what happened to me.”
My idea is to understand police violence and private property by taking a historical look at their relationship, and the year 1776, if not July 4, is a crucial part of it as we shall see. It might help us understand “looting” and “police reform.”[1] Is the 2020 George Floyd uprising a kind of déjà vu?
Amid a worldwide uprising against police brutality and racism, we discuss the historic moment with legendary scholar and activist Angela Davis. She also responds to the destruction and removal of racist monuments in cities across the United States, and the 2020 election.
In a Fourth of July holiday special, we hear the words of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery around 1818, Douglass became a key leader of the abolitionist movement. On July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, he gave one of his most famous speeches, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro.” He was addressing the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. This is actor James Earl Jones reading the speech during a performance of historian Howard Zinn’s acclaimed book, “Voices of a People’s History of the United States.” He was introduced by Zinn.
Unfortunately, the problems with the EARN IT Act overshadow its good intentions. Insufficient protections for encryption threaten to make all users more vulnerable to the crime it is trying to address. It also puts the digital economy at risk by taking away a key feature that has been essential for the Internet’s success: liability protection.
Although an amendment was added to the bill to provide protections for encryption, they are far from powerful enough. The protections from the amendment would be tested in state courts across the country, leaving strong encryption on unstable ground. Companies will face a choice, risk their future by implementing end-to-end encryption when it is unclear what the future holds for the legality of the technology in any of the states they operate in, or not take the risk and use less secure encryption. In an uncertain legal environment, companies will refrain from implementing end-to-end encryption, leaving all of us less safe.
Although the U.S. Supreme Court has famously spoken of a “historic kinship” between patent and copyright doctrine, the family resemblance is sometimes hard to see. One of the biggest differences between them today is how much ingenuity they require for earning protection. Obtaining a patent requires an invention so innovative that it would not have been obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art. Copyright, by contrast, makes no such demand on authors, requiring an original work of only minimal creativity.
Except sometimes it doesn’t. Puzzlingly, in some copyright cases dealing with musical arrangements, courts have demanded a patent-like level of creativity from putative authors. While these cases might seem like outliers, they have a pedigree that is both lengthy and largely unrecognized. The proposition that copyright originality should require patent-style inventiveness beyond artisans’ everyday creations goes back all the way to an 1850 music-infringement decision by Justice Samuel Nelson. In fact, only four months later, Nelson himself would author the Supreme Court patent opinion that is now credited as the touchstone for patent law’s own nonobviousness doctrine. His corresponding vision for copyright, though, came first.
Drawing on original archival research, this Article challenges the standard account of what originality doctrine is and what courts can do with it. It identifies Nelson’s forgotten copyright legacy: a still-growing line of cases that treats music differently, sometimes even more analogous to patentable inventions than to other authorial works. These decisions seem to function as a hidden enclave within originality’s larger domain, playing by rules that others couldn’t get away with. They form originality’s other path, much less trod than the familiar one but with a doctrinal story of its own to tell. Originality and nonobviousness’s parallel beginnings reveal a period of leaky boundaries between copyright and patent, when many of the Justices considered a rule for one to be just as good for the other. Their recurring intersections, meanwhile, muddy today’s conventional narrative about copyright’s historic commitment to protecting even the most modestly creative works.
This Chapter, part of a book examining the history of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), focuses on WIPO’s activities in the patent realm. The Chapter begins with a description of the successful procedural initiatives undertaken by WIPO and its administrative predecessor, the United International Bureaux for the Protection of Intellectual Property (BIRPI), notably the development of the Patent Cooperation Treaty, the Strasbourg Agreement, the Budapest Treaty, and the Patent Law Treaty (PLT). It then considers the less successful substantive efforts of WIPO and BIRPI to raise the level of patent protection, notably through the failed attempt to revise the Paris Convention in the 1980s and, later, in negotiations over a Substantive Patent Law Treaty. We argue the lesson to be learned is that when a regime governs a single area of law (in this case, intellectual property), especially one that is closely tied to health, safety and economic growth, it is not possible to achieve substantive gains without giving due consideration to the interests of all relevant parties. We end more optimistically by asking whether recent developments provide the basis for a renewed attempt to craft a better harmonized normative framework. In addition to the effort to raise substantive standards, these include an interest in procedural mechanisms to facilitate transnational litigation involving intellectual property rights, concerns about the adequacy of defenses and limitations, and a desire to recognize new kinds of intellectual contributions, such as traditional knowledge and genetic resources.
Artificial intelligence systems are being increasingly employed in pharmaceutical R&D to develop new drugs and medical treatments. In such a scenario, the patentability of new pharmaceutical inventions seems more and more problematic, given that the computational power of AIs increases the likelihood that a new chemical composition is deemed to be obvious. In this article I argue that with the advent of AI- generated inventions both EU and US patent law cannot rely exclusively on the traditional standard of the “person having ordinary skill in the art” to evaluate the non-obviousness condition of patentability. However, I also maintain that a legislative reform is not necessary. Rather, the judges should start to more strongly consider the so-called “secondary considerations” of non-obviousness that have been intermittently and inconsistently applied both in US and EU case-law.
The Trump administration will join Fortress Investment Group in court Thursday in an antitrust fight with Apple Inc. and Intel Corp. with billions of dollars in patent royalties at stake.
The U.S. Justice Department threw its weight behind the fund manager owned by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp., which is asking a judge to throw out a lawsuit by the two Silicon Valley heavyweights accusing Fortress of bombarding them with frivolous patent-infringement claims and aggressive payment demands.
The case tests Apple and Intel’s argument that Fortress is acting anti-competitively by stockpiling patents to target others with infringement litigation. Similar legal...
With people around the world self-isolating at home in order to curb the spread of Covid-19, Apple has received a patent for software that would allow people to take group selfies while socially distancing from one another.
The US Patent and Trademark Office recently granted Apple a patent for the software that would allow for "synthetic group selfies," or socially distant group selfies. The software would allow a user to invite others to participate in a group selfie that would arrange multiple people into a single image. It would remove the background image from other users' selfies and place them into the user's photo.
Apple Inc. will have a chance to convince the Patent Trial and Appeal Board that a mobile network patent was too obvious to get intellectual property protection, the tribunal determined in granting two validity trials.
Apple is trying to knock out mobile software company Seven Networks’ 10,110,534 patent by arguing that its claims are obvious in light of prior inventions. The patent involves mobile network connection architecture.
Internet provider Telia must block The Pirate Bay, a local court has decided on appeal. The order, which was requested by copyright holders including several prominent Hollywood studios, also requires the ISP to prevent customers from accessing Dreamfilm, FMovies, and NyaFilmer. It's not clear whether Telia plans any further appeals.
The applicant rightholders (Disney, Universal Studios, Warner Bros, and several others) claimed that Telia Рby supplying internet connection to its own customers (thus enabling access to the sites at issue) Рwas aiding and abetting (objectively) infringements of copyrights belonging to the claimants. The request for dynamic blocking injunction was made in accordance with ۤ53B (first sentence) of the Swedish Act on Copyright in Literary and Artistic Works (1960:729) (the Copyright Act).
In late 2018, the Patent and Market Court ordered Telia - by way of an interim ruling – to block access to the above-mentioned sites by means of a dynamic blocking injunction [commented on The IPKat here, here and here].
Telia appealed the ruling to the Swedish Patent and Market Court of Appeal, which confirmed the findings in a decision (available in Swedish) issued earlier this week.
Over the past several years, the right of communication to the public in art. 3(1) of the InfoSoc Directive has progressively and consistently taken centre stage in the EU copyright system. This has been so also given the great number of referrals (over twenty since the 2006 decision in SGAE) to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU).
EU law does not define the concept of ‘communication to the public’. Lacking a definition, the CJEU has sought to determine the meaning and scope thereof in light of the objectives pursued by the InfoSoc Directive, notably that of ensuring a high level of protection of intellectual property (recital 24). Like the other economic rights harmonised in the InfoSoc Directive, the right of communication to the public “should be understood in a broad sense” (recital 23).
The two key requirements of art. 3(1) of the InfoSoc Directive are a ‘communication’ directed at a ‘public’. A simple example might be a free-to-air broadcast: the broadcast is an act of communication and it is to the public, because any member of the public with a suitable device can receive the signal and watch/listen to the broadcast. But what if the broadcaster operated online and made available works previously communicated online by the relevant rightholder? Would that activity require a licence?
[...]
The one suggested is a solution that is readily implementable without the need to ‘depart’ from earlier case law. It also allows a more streamlined reasoning on the side of the CJEU, which is respectful of the language, content, and aims of both international and EU law provisions. Although the analysis mostly focuses on the case law issued in respect of art. 3(1) of the InfoSoc Directive, the findings are generally applicable to the various rights of communication/making available to the public and public performance under EU and national law, including inter alia the Rental and Lending Rights Directive and the recently adopted DSM Directive.
In sum, the elusive ‘new public’ concept that has dominated CJEU case law on communication to the public since 2006 may not be as key as the Court has instead considered and conveyed it to be.
Maria Schneider has filed a class action lawsuit against YouTube, claiming massive deficiencies in its copyright enforcement measures. The Grammy award-winning musician says YouTube restricts access to its takedown tools, profits from infingement, and fails to terminate repeat infringers.
