07.29.20
Posted in IBM at 8:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Earlier this week: Meet the IBM Watsons: Sponsors of Richard Nixon and Abusers of Women (the brother)
Watson with Jimmy Carter, January 20th, 1978 (Public Domain)
Summary: While studying the full (and real) history of IBM we’ve stumbled upon interesting bits of diplomatic documents, declassified for public access only as recently as several years ago
LAST week we started researching a bunch of old material for a big piece or a short but very detailed series, which will be 100% factual. Accuracy is the priority. In our endeavour (slow research) we came across all that Holocaust stuff (sort of ‘old news’; there’s literature and films [1, 2, 3] about IBM’s role in Holocaust machinery/implementation). We don’t see the need to cover in depth issues that were already covered properly, as well as in great depth, before. A long time ago (two decades in the past) millions of people became aware of this dark chapter in IBM’s history. We don’t have additional or unique insight in that area.
“Shortly after the father (IBM founder) died Khrushchev decided to go to IBM of all places…”Conspicuously but not mysteriously, not much is said about IBM and “the bomb” (or bombs, as the US has loads of nuclear weapons now). IBM was the dominant force in technology throughout the Cold War era, but a lot of it was understandably shrouded in secrecy. It was — and still is — a sensitive subject (maybe more so because of the current administration). But now in 2020 we know that IBM, being a “patriotic” company in service of supremacist agenda (since its early days, even eugenics), also did nukes. One ought not be shocked that IBM profited a lot from nuke assessment/nuclear simulations, nukes C&C (they still used floppies last year; there are many reports like this one from last year, following up on embarrassing revelations [1, 2, 3] dated 3 years earlier), and nuclear munition recovery. As History.com put it (article updated this year): “Using an IBM computer, experts tried to calculate where the [nuclear] bomb might have landed, but the impact area was still too large for an effective search…”
“Perhaps it’s not too shocking that the ‘Watson sons’ of IBM both eventually entered politics, just like their father.”There’s more to be found regarding the trip of Nikita Khrushchev (Никита Хрущёв) to IBM (video here and here); “During his American tour in 1959, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev toured the IBM factory in San Jose, California,” the latter says and there’s a lot of footage (photography and motion film). Shortly after the father (IBM founder) died Khrushchev decided to go to IBM of all places…
“This is not about ‘bashing’ IBM; it’s about understanding what we’re dealing with.”Perhaps it’s not too shocking that the ‘Watson sons’ of IBM both eventually entered politics, just like their father. That’s why he was getting to meet all sorts of people including Hitler. The military angle of it never helped IBM. IBM is still very close to the US Army and Red Hat's Chairman of the Board was introduced to GNU/Linux when it helped his 'regime change' in Haiti, by his very own admission. IBM now owns Red Hat, which is a close DoD and NSA partner. A match made in Heaven? IBM’s projects that deal with American nuclear arsenals (to this date) go beyond supercomputers; as noted before, many systems responsible for dealing with real nukes — not mere simulations — are IBM systems.
We recently studied documents about Thomas Watson Jr. (the son of the founder) as a US diplomat, representing the US in the Soviet Union (USSR) at a time the Cold War persisted but was no longer at its peak. Using these old documents, which were only declassified some years ago, we gain a slightly better understanding of IBM’s political gameplay and its role in ultimate power games (determining perhaps the fate of human civilisation as a whole; there are enough nukes in each superpower’s arsenal to wipe it all out). We’re going to show transcripts and originals; we’ll abstain from speculation. These documents aren’t easy to find, but they are searchable in Wikileaks and are catalogued sensibly enough for digestion.
This is not about ‘bashing’ IBM; it’s about understanding what we’re dealing with. Corporations and governments have long been connected. █
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Posted in Bill Gates, Site News at 7:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Received about 2,700 additional pages; still exploring ways to move forward with this longstanding investigation
Summary: With Epstein files set to be released soon (Gates and Epstein were extremely close) we’re gratified to say that we have all the material about Mr. Jones, the engineer of Bill Gates who was stockpiling a lot of child pornography and child rape footage
HOURS ago we received what the police in Seattle claims to be everything it has on this case. The Police Department (SPD) was asked again to assure us that this was everything and it confirmed. “The Epstein files are going to be unsealed soon,” a reader has told us, so we’re likely to resume on this subject some time later this year. At the moment we’re studying some IBM history and will be focusing on that over the coming days. A lot of that history predates the Web and even the Internet (history of IBM is over a century old!), but national archives can still be accessed, at least partly. We’re doing the best we can to assess the material and get the facts. It is very time-consuming, but someone needs to do it… █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:43 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The past, present and future of Linux on Arm. The major challenges still facing full Linux support, and why ServerReady might be a solution to unify Arm systems.
Plus we chat with the Manjaro team about recent changes.
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Kernel Space
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Building off the work sent out by Google engineers in recent months and merged for Linux 5.8 around RAPL support for AMD Zen / Zen 2 CPUs with supporting the “runtime average power limiting” counters on Linux similar to Intel’s longstanding support, that work has continued now with Zen RAPL support in the PowerCap driver.
Google engineer Victor Ding sent out a set of patches this morning for AMD Zen / Zen 2 RAPL support within the PowerCap Linux driver that allows power capping of the CPU(s) if so desired and some new interfaces via sysfs.
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For those using the Intel ICE Linux network driver that is used for the likes of the E800 series, it’s now going to be easier updating the device firmware from Linux.
A PLDM firmware update library is being introduced with Linux 5.9 to support hardware flashing the firmware using the devlink flash command. ICE firmware updates are using the PLDM file format. PLDM is the Platform Level Data Model firmware update specification developed by the DMTF industry consortium.
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Worked out in recent months by an Amazon engineer was optional L1 data cache flushing on context switches to allow for greater computer security in an era of data sampling vulnerabilities and other data leakage issues via side channels. It was sent in for Linux 5.8 but Linus Torvalds characterized it as “beyond stupid” and not being convinced by it. Well, now it’s been revised but isn’t yet clear if it will appease Torvalds for mainline inclusion.
The overall concept of this new L1d flushing work remains the same is that it’s entirely opt-in and interested programs can make use of it via the prctl interface. The focus remains on providing an additional level of security for CPUs affected by the likes of L1TF and other data snooping vulnerabilities.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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It feels like FOSS is on a roll lately, with more and more great open source applications seeing funding from big names. Blender is back in the spotlight again, with backing from Microsoft.
Announced by the Blender team today, July 29 2020, Microsoft has joined them as a ‘Gold’ level Corporate Member. This means Microsoft will be giving the Blender Foundation at least €30K a year, which the Blender team say pays for half a year of developer time to improve Blender.
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It’s hard to believe that until now, Beneath a Steel Sky wasn’t available on Steam. With the launch of the sequel Beyond a Steel Sky recently, Revolution Software decided to fix that.
Currently, the build on Steam is only officially available for Windows. Thankfully though, with it being such an old game now from 1994, it’s easy to get it running on Linux and through Steam directly too thanks to the Steam Play feature in the Linux Steam client. Remember, Steam Play is just a feature to run compatibility layers (the biggest being Proton) and there’s one named Roberta designed for running adventure games like this using a native Linux build of ScummVM.
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Currently in Early Access, Wayward is a wilderness survival roguelike from developer Unlok and the 9th major update is out now with the Seafarer expansion.
With this now out, the developer mentioned this brings an end to the limited amount of exploration that was possible as you can now sail the seas to explore new lands. Sounds like a pretty huge advancement for the game and not something that was easy for the team, a feature they had originally said ‘would probably never happen’ but an important milestone for making it much more enjoyable.
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For about as long as the Atari VCS has been in development, critics have often wondered about who this device is marketed towards and what it’s packing under the hood to execute and deliver once it’s in the living room. To that end, Atari VCS COO Michael Arzt recently published a lengthy FAQ to try to clear up some of the remaining mysteries about the device. Among the many questions taken on, Arzt goes into further detail on the tech of the VCS, as well as Atari’s priorities in game availability and customer appeal.
Michael Arzt published a Q&A on the Atari VCS on Medium on July 29, 2020. The goal of the publishing was to answer many of the common questions that are still coming up in regards to the purpose and priorities of the Atari VCS. Interestingly enough, Arzt claims it’s wrong to think of it as a “retro console” such as the Atari Flashback and other such devices.
“The Atari VCS is a much more powerful PC-based device, with a premium build quality, significantly more power, internet access, and an online store full of games, apps and streaming services, so it really can’t be compared to the “throwback” consoles,” Arzt wrote.
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Emulator developer Tony Wasserka has announced that he is going to be joining Valve, to work on open-source graphics for Linux. As part of Valve’s general push to improving gaming on Linux, his first project is going to be working on the RADV Vulkan driver, an open-source driver project for AMD GPUs on Linux.
Wasserka has been a major contributor to the development of the leading Gamecube and Wii emulator, Dolphin, where he maintained the GPU subsystem and implemented a Direct3D 11 rendering engine. Dolphin is the gold standard for console emulation, offering the most compatible and robust emulation of games for these classic Nintendo systems, and it’s a fully open-source project.
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GDevelop is an in-development free and open source game engine, one that is powered by a drag and drop event system and it continues bringing in new and fun features.
One feature it just added in the latest release is Live Previews, otherwise known as Hot Reloading. This is where you can apply a bunch of changes in the game engine editor, with the game currently running and then at the click of a button have your changes applied. It’s a useful feature, one that could aid debugging and prototyping nicely.
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Shutter Stroll, a walking sim about taking nice photographs across hundreds of generated islands is a pretty sweet experience for when you want to properly relax.
There’s no goal, no timers and not much else. It’s a small game about slowing down, taking things in and just appreciating a bit of beauty. With you starting off in a little boat, camera in hand, you set off to find the perfect shot. Once you find a spot you bring up your camera, switch between different filters by pressing F and take your snap. Then it’s back to your boat to pick some coordinates and explore somewhere else.
Here’s a few snaps, click to enlarge the thumbnails because they’re high resolution shots. Having the coordinates of the island generation on the pictures is a nice touch too.
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If it wasn’t enough that there’s multiple good Humble Bundles going on, and a big RPG sale on GOG – Valve have launched a sale to celebrate Swiss Games.
Never one to miss an opportunity to run a sale, Valve picked this to go along with Swiss National Day, a national holiday of Switzerland on August 1. With the Swiss sale running until August 3 at 5PM UTC, you can save big on some quality games made by people all over Switzerland. There’s some really good indie choices there too.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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In the last couple of days we’ve got a lot of feedback and bug reports from our users testing the current code and helping us to finalize the next release of LabPlot. Most of this feedback is addressed now and today we’d like to invite more people to contribute and we announce the availability of the beta release of 2.8.
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Many find the idea of switching to Linux intimidating. Let’s face it: despite being the most-used operating system for servers, it’s yet to see major commercial and consumer use. This is mostly because there still aren’t many off-the-shelf computers that have Linux pre-installed, and most people don’t want to deal with the hassle of installing a new OS. After all, you’ll have to worry about so much more – most notably, app and driver compatibility.
Luckily, the latest version of Endless OS presents us with solutions to many of our concerns. Released on May 18, Endless OS 3.8.1 is the latest version of this Debian-based OS initially introduced to the public back in 2014. Like its previous versions, Endless OS 3.8.1 comes with a lot of digital literacy initiatives that make computing easier than ever before.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Another new feature of RHEL 8.3 beta is the addition of security profiles for the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). System administrators can use these new SCAP (Security Content Automation Protocol) profiles to configure their RHEL systems based on best security practices and standards.
For a full list of new features, improvements, and fixes, you can read the RHEL 8.3 beta release notes.
If you have an active subscription for RHEL, you can directly try RHEL 8.3 beta from Red Hat’s Customer Portal. Or else you can download it from developer.redhat.com where it’s available as part of the no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Subscription.
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Devices/Embedded
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In this week’s blog, I look at some of the ways you can run programs from different operating systems on the AWOW AK41. I examine hardware virtualization, dual booting, as well as using a compatibility layer.
To recap, the AK41 has an Intel Celeron J4115 processor with 4 cores. It uses the Intel Gemini Lake chipset, comes with 8GB of DDR4 RAM (which cannot be increased), and a 128GB NVMe M.2 SSD.
In computing, virtualization refers to the act of creating a virtual version of something, including virtual computer hardware platforms, storage devices, and computer network resources. The host machine is the AWOW AK41 running the Manjaro distribution. The guest machine is the virtual machine. The words host and guest distinguish the software running on the AK41 from the software that runs on the virtual machine.
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Wind River®, a leader in delivering software for the intelligent edge, today announced that Wind River Linux has achieved conformance to the latest Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) Technical Standard, a standard of The Open Group®. Wind River Linux is the first and only General Purpose Profile (GPP) Operating System Segment (OSS) of any kind to conform to the FACE™ Technical Standard, Edition 3.0.
As the aerospace and defense industry digitally transforms towards a cyber defense future, increasingly autonomous systems will require real time intelligence and function at the edge of the network. The industry is faced with the pressure to innovate and accelerate development cycles faster than ever, but their systems must also maintain the intrinsic need for the highest levels of security given ever increasing cyber threats.
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Note they had to modify the Ethernet library for Arduino for the Web server sample, so you’d have to copy libdeps directory from Github into the libraries directory of your Arduino IDE installation.
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When Benjamin Vernoux is not working on open-source firmware & tools for AirSpy R0/R2/mini SDR, he spends his time on other projects such as HydraBus STM32 board with NFC support which we covered back in 2014.
The HydraNFC Shield that came with the board was based on Texas Instruments TRF7970A NFC chipset with limited features and not compliant with any RF/NFC standard. Benjamin has now launched HydraNFC Shield v2 powered by STMicro ST25R3916 NFC chipset and equipped with a differential antenna. The new version of the shield still works with the original HydraBus board and allows much more output power (1,600mW vs 200 mW) and supports a wider range of NFC features & standards.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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When I entered the engineering program as a freshman in college, I felt like a frivolous teenager. In my sophomore year, and in a fortunate stroke of serendipity, I joined Zairza, a technical society for like-minded students who collaborated and built projects separate from the academic curriculum. It was right up my alley. Zairza provided me a safe space to learn and grow and discover my interests. There are different facets and roadways to development, and as a newbie, I didn’t know where my interests lay.
I made the switch to Linux then because I heard it is good for development. Fortunately, I had Ubuntu on my system. At first, I found it obnoxious to use because I was used to Windows. But I slowly got the hang of it and fell in love with it over time. I started exploring development by trying to build apps using Android and creating data visualizations using Python. I built a Wikipedia Reader app using the Wikipedia API, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I learned to use Git and put my projects on GitHub, which not only helped me showcase my projects but also enabled me to store them.
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The Apache® Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today the availability of the annual report for its 2020 fiscal year (1 May 2019 – 30 April 2020).
Now in its 21st year, the world’s largest Open Source foundation’s “Apache Way” of community-driven development is the proven process behind thousands of developers successfully collaborating on hundreds of Apache projects. The Apache Way has directly influenced the InnerSource methodology of applying Open Source and open development principles to an organization. The Apache Way has been adopted by countless organizations, including Capital One, Comcast, Ericsson, HP, IBM, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, SAP, T-Mobile, Walmart, and countless others.
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For fiscal year 2019 the Apache Software Foundation valued their codebase at around $20 billion USD. The open-source organization has now published their annual report for fiscal year 2020.
The Apache Software Foundation’s FY2020 report values their massive code-base now in excess of $20 billion dollars using the CoCoMo model. With eight million lines of code added over their fiscal year, they estimate that increase to be approximately worth $600 million USD worth of work.
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For example, technology developed by UK software company Element is to be rolled out by the German education system to provide collaboration tools for half a million seats in the states of Schlesweig-Holstein and Hamburg.
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“We want to democratize control over communication,” Element’s CEO Matthew Hodgson tells ZDNet – needless to say, over an open-source video call. “People in Germany shouldn’t be beholden to the legislation happening in the US, or trusting their data through an app controlled by a particular government.
“Empowering organizations to run their own stuff is just a re-levelling effect to decentralize the control of that data to the people who own it in the first place,” he continues, “rather than holding it all in whatever organization it might be and hope it doesn’t get compromised or pressured by the authorities.”
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Tor Browser 10.0a4 is now available from the Tor Browser Alpha download page and also from our distribution directory.
Note: This is an alpha release, an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommend downloading the latest stable release instead.
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Tor Browser 9.5.3 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This release updates Firefox to 68.11.0esr, NoScript to 11.0.34, and Tor to 0.4.3.6.
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FSF
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GNU Projects
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GNU nano is probably one of the most popular text editors for the command line. It’s probably included in almost all GNU/Linux distribution is it usually comes in handy whenever there’s some configuration files you need to edit.
Dubbed “Among the fields of barley,” GNU nano 5.0 introduces a new –indicator parameter that displays some sort of scrollbar to show you where the viewport is located in the buffer and how much it covers, along with the –bookstyle parameter that makes nano consider any line that begins with a whitespace the start of a paragraph.
It’s now possible to tag any line with an anchor using the shortcut. You can then jump to the nearest anchor using and . GNU nano 5.0 also lest you access the Execute Command prompt directly from the main menu with ^T, as well as to toggle the help lines in all menus (except for the linter and help viewer) with M-X and list the possibilities at a filename prompt with .
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Programming/Development
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The obvious counterargument to this is the tried-and-true if all your friends jumped off a bridge would you do it too response known by every parent in the world. The second, much lesser known counterargument is that this statement is not actually true.
Google does not actually rebuild all code in their projects from source. Don’t believe me?
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Configuring medium-sized to large CMake projects in Qt Creator can be a challenge. This is due to the number of options that you would need to pass to CMake to configure the project in the right way.
Let’s take Qt Creator’s CMake build. Unlike its qmake build, the CMake build lets you configure which plugins you want to build.
Let’s say you would just want to build the CMake project manager, the Git source control, only C++ and only for the Desktop platforms.
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This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi.
After having had some success with a sysroot in having a Qt5 cross-build environment that includes QtWebEngine, the next step is packaging the sysroot so it can be available both to build the cross-build environment, and to do cross-development with it.
The result is this Debian source package which takes a Raspberry Pi OS disk image, provisions it in-place, extracts its contents, and packages them.
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Carefully note that the golden rule of software quality does not mandate that you have to fix problems upstream. The rule advises that you should prefer to upstream fixes, all other things equal. Sometimes other considerations can prevent one from doing so (such as limitations on time or money). However, when quality is paramount then you should strive to observe the rule!
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Perl/Raku
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This is the final article to the series demonstrating Perl with Tic-Tac-Toe. This article provides a module that can compute better game moves than the previously presented modules. For fun, the modules chip1.pm through chip3.pm can be incrementally moved out of the hal subdirectory in reverse order. With each chip that is removed, the game will become easier to play. The game must be restarted each time a chip is removed.
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Line 12 demonstrates that a regular expression can be pre-compiled and stored in a scalar for later use. This is useful as performance optimization when you intend to re-use the same regular expression many times over.
Line 59 demonstrates that some system library calls are available directly in Perl’s built-in core functionality. Using the built-in functions alleviates some overhead that would otherwise be required to launch an external program and setup the I/O channels to communicate with it.
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Python
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A short while ago I discovered HackInScience, a fantastic site for learning Python by doing exercises. It currently includes 68 programming exercises, with increasing level of difficulty.
I learned about it via an issue filed for Friendly-traceback: yes, HackInScience does use Friendly-traceback to provide feedback to users when their code raises Python exceptions. These real-life experiences have resulted in additional cases being covered by Friendly-traceback: there are now 128 different test cases, each providing more helpful explanation as to what went wrong than that offered by Python. Python versions 3.6 to 3.9 inclusively are supported.
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Deep learning is one of the most interesting and promising areas of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning currently. With great advances in technology and algorithms in recent years, deep learning has opened the door to a new era of AI applications.
In many of these applications, deep learning algorithms performed equal to human experts and sometimes surpassed them.
Python has become the go-to language for Machine Learning and many of the most popular and powerful deep learning libraries and frameworks like TensorFlow, Keras, and PyTorch are built in Python.
In this series, we’ll be using Keras to perform Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA), Data Preprocessing and finally, build a Deep Learning Model and evaluate it.
If you haven’t already, check out our first article – Deep Learning Models in Keras – Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA).
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Complete the full Pull Request workflow, quickly catch exceptions, and apply project-wide refactorings. All without leaving your IDE. Download the new version now, or upgrade from within PyCharm.
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Standards/Consortia
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It’s not enough to say that the Internet is built on interoperability. The Internet is interoperability. Billions of machines around the world use the same set of open protocols—like TCP/IP, HTTP, and TLS—to talk to one another. The first Internet-connected devices were only possible because phone lines provided interoperable communication ports, and scientists found a way to send data, rather than voice, over those phone lines.
In the early days of the Internet, protocols dictated the rules of the road. Because the Internet was a fundamentally decentralized, open system, services on the Internet defaulted to acting the same way. Companies may have tried to build their own proprietary networking protocols or maintain unilateral control over the content on the network, but they ultimately failed. The ecosystem was fast-moving, chaotic, and welcoming to new ideas.
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Baseball is my favorite sport. I know that’s weird since I’m a Black guy under the age of 80, but it is what it is. I’m one of those guys who can pound out “baseball is an allegory for the American experience” takes like a hitter spraying singles to all fields.
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Teen romance stories are almost always about the feeling of a shift in power. They channel the thrill of turning a position of weakness into one of strength: the ugly, poor, or otherwise disadvantaged using their less apparent abilities—talent, wit, emotional acuity—to claim for themselves a better role in the social hierarchy. In teen romance, things tend to change all at once rather than gradually. A relationship’s subtext shifts through strange, rare moments of shared perception, and then, in some moment of truth—often a school dance or other public event—the subtext becomes explicit and replaces what came before. A received, social understanding is replaced with an interpersonal, emotional truth that levels all disparities.
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Health/Nutrition
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Solution: slash the prices and kill the ads.
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“My two eldest sons worked for two days for the patil [farm owner] and earned Rs. 150 each. They used that money to buy kanyaa from him,” said Vanita Bhoir. She opened a yellow plastic jar and took out a few rice fragments in her hand to show me. These are collected when the harvested paddy is threshed to separate the chaff, and are cheaper than the rice grain. Along with these kanyaa, there was a week’s stock of salt, chilli and turmeric powders, cooking oil and a few potatoes in 52-year-old Vanita’s straw-and mud hut. Even these had been given to the family by local social workers.
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“It’s like opposing the New Deal during the Great Depression. Unforgivable.”
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This history of Democratic obstruction and vacillation to corporate interests and the greed of insurance companies must come to an end. The need for Medicare for All has never been more clear than it is today.
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With 30,000 people taking part in the first major COVID-19 vaccine study in the United States, hopes are high that the collaboration between drugmaker Moderna and the National Institutes of Health will yield positive results as early as November. Researchers around the world are working on more than 165 vaccine candidates, though only a handful are conducting large-scale human trials. We speak with BBC science journalist Richard Fisher, who took part in the vaccine trial run by Oxford University that is among the most promising. “It was both a personal decision and a journalistic one,” Fisher says of his decision to volunteer. “I wanted to do something that helps the collective effort to get us closer to a vaccine.”
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1421 From whose eaves pigeons tumble Its permanent winter of shit Where she would like to put a thin strip of suspended garden Something in love with guano like hay Some ruffling infancy of color
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In 1948, Harry Truman pushed for a national nonprofit health insurance program in his successful, come-from-behind presidential campaign. When Truman’s plan was denounced as “socialized medicine” and “un-American” by the powerful American Medical Association, “Give ‘Em Hell Harry” stood his ground, defending his proposal as “simple Christianity.”
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As COVID-19 devastates Amazonian communities, spiritual tourists are abandoning the cultures holding the sacred traditions of Ayahuasca.
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A Democratic National Committee panel on Monday voted down an amendment that would have inserted a plank supporting Medicare for All into the party’s 2020 platform, a move progressives decried as out of touch with public opinion and a slap in the face to the millions of people who have lost their health insurance due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
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As researchers around the world race to find a vaccine for COVID-19, we speak with Peter Maybarduk, director of Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines Program, about who is profiting from government efforts to fund vaccines, testing and treatment. The Trump administration has announced major contracts with pharmaceutical companies as part of its $6 billion program, Operation Warp Speed, including with firms that have never brought a vaccine to market. Meanwhile, a New York Times investigation shows corporate insiders from at least 11 companies working on coronavirus research have sold shares worth more than $1 billion since March. “The problem is that the companies, the executives, the hedge funds are feeding on people’s hope and desperation, and it only takes a little bit of positive news to send stocks soaring,” says Maybarduk. Public Citizen recently released a database that tracks the billions of taxpayer dollars supporting COVID-19 research.
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On Tuesday morning, Anthony Fauci, a member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force and the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, responded to criticisms made against him on social media that were shared by the commander-in-chief.
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COVID-19 has largely spared the isolated villages of Western Alaska. Yet it has been a summer of burials.
On June 22, troopers say a woman stabbed and killed her boyfriend in the Yukon River village of Grayling. Later that week, about 330 miles away, a man was accused of beating his wife to death with a crowbar in the Northwest Arctic village of Noatak. The day after that, neighbors found the body of a 50-year-old woman, missing a portion of her scalp, in the home she shared with her boyfriend in the Kuskokwim River village of McGrath. Then, on July 1, two Alakanuk men stabbed each other to death in what troopers called a “domestic dispute.”
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Professional sports is now fully in the weeds trying to navigate reopening live sports events during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It’s not going great, frankly. NFL players are beginning to opt out of the season, citing health concerns. Golfers have been trickling out of events due to positive COVID-19 tests. MLB, meanwhile, just found itself with four teams unable to play the other night due to roughly a third of the Florida Marlins popping positive for the virus. Given that these leagues just started reopening, it’s not a good sign.
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A recent spate of reports in US media features US officials accusing Official Enemies Russia and China of “stealing” the US’s coronavirus vaccine research data. To accuse another party of “stealing” something, of course, is to imply unjust deprivation. If my wallet is stolen, it means I no longer possess it or its contents, while someone else does. Does it make sense to describe the alleged actions of Russian and Chinese hackers as a form of “theft”? If so, what kind of “theft” is it?
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During an interview with a local television station in North Carolina on Monday evening, President Donald Trump suggested he was one of the most successful chief executives this country has ever seen.
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The information had previously been classified, but officials said it had been downgraded so they could more freely discuss it. Officials said they were doing so now to sound the alarm about the particular websites and to expose what they say is a clear link between the sites and Russian intelligence.
Between late May and early July, one of the officials said, the websites singled out Tuesday published about 150 articles about the pandemic response, including coverage aimed either at propping up Russia or denigrating the U.S.
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Russian intelligence services are using a trio of English-language websites to spread disinformation about the coronavirus pandemic, seeking to exploit a crisis that America is struggling to contain ahead of the presidential election in November, U.S. officials said Tuesday.
Two Russians who have held senior roles in Moscow’s military intelligence service known as the GRU have been identified as responsible for a disinformation effort meant to reach American and Western audiences, U.S. government officials said. They spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Opera web browser 70 was released a day ago improvements to existing features and tools.
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ExamSoft, one of the three vendors offering the exam that certifies potential attorneys, said the test had been hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, which involves a hacker or group attempting to take down a server by overwhelming it with traffic.
[...]
“If this was such a sophisticated attack, what do they have to say about the biodata collected during exam administration?” the group tweeted.
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Security
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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Although Zuckerberg is now very critical of China’s approach to the [I]nternet, he spent the better half of the decade pushing to overturn the country’s ban on Facebook.
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Twitter has explained that trending topics are “determined by an algorithm” and tailored based on who a person follows, their interests and their general location.
“This algorithm identifies topics popular now, rather than topics that have been popular for a while or on a daily basis, to help you discover the hottest emerging topics of discussion on Twitter,” it says. “The number of tweets that are related to the trends is just one of the factors the algorithm looks at when ranking and determining trends.”
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But safety is only one attraction of in-cabin monitoring. The systems also hold huge potential for harvesting the kind of behavioral data that Google, Facebook, and other surveillance capitalists have exploited to target ads and influence purchasing habits.
Automakers and advertisers have come to a “vast realization” that as cars become more autonomous and embedded with screens, “many passengers in your vehicle are kind of a captive audience in an entertainment context,” Gabi Zijderveld, Affectiva’s chief marketing officer, told Motherboard.
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Included in last month’s ban was the very popular video-sharing app TikTok, which was a big statement by India. At the time of the ban, a Chinese Foreign Ministry official said that the country was “strongly concerned regarding the decision of the Indian government.”
On Monday, a spokesperson for the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology said that some of the new bans were apps operating as clones for the ones already prohibited.
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Republican Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz on Monday sent a criminal referral to U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr, asking that the justice department investigate Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg for allegedly lying to Congress.
Gaetz based his request for an investigation on information he said he learned from a reports by the right-wing group Project Veritas. According to Gaetz, the James O’Keefe-founded group learned that Facebook censors conservative-leaning content on its platform, despite Zuckerberg’s April 2018 testimony to the contrary.
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Rep. Matt Gaetz asked Attorney General William P. Barr on Monday to have the Department of Justice investigate whether Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lied under oath to Congress.
Mr. Gaetz, Florida Republican, wrote Mr. Barr to raise concerns about statements Mr. Zuckerberg made when he appeared on Capitol Hill twice in April to testify about Facebook.
Citing reporting from sting-group Project Veritas, the congressman suggested Mr. Zuckerberg may have misled lawmakers when he asserted his social network does not suppress or otherwise censor content supportive of conservatives including President Trump.
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On Monday afternoon, Project Veritas, the discredited rightwing attack organization run by James O’Keefe that specializes in sting operations against liberal groups and the established media, was itself thoroughly exposed. The Washington Post turned the spotlight that O’Keefe had tried to put on the newspaper back on him by disclosing a plot to dupe its reporters into publishing an entirely false story.
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In subsequent years, O’Keefe has launched one failed scam after another designed to “catch” liberals and Democrats on video doing something unethical or illegal. The tactic has failed again and again. O’Keefe and three others were arrested and pled guilty to charges after posing as telephone repairmen in an apparent attempt to bug Sen. Mary Landrieu’s office. After calling a staffer at George Soros’s Open Society Institute using an assumed name, he forgot to hang up the phone and left a long message in which he and colleagues discussed their plan to infiltrate the foundation. He put on an Osama bin Laden mask and waded into the Rio Grande.
In short, O’Keefe is a fraudster and a buffoon. But here’s what’s important to know about him: He’s a fraudster and a buffoon who is treated like a serious person by substantial parts of the conservative movement. His organization, Project Veritas, had a budget of just under $5 million in 2016. He’s got dozens of employees.
And O’Keefe won’t be slowed down by this latest embarrassment, because people on the right will still give him their money. How do I know that? Because it’s what they’ve been doing for decades.
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Defence/Aggression
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July 28 will mark almost the 90th anniversary of one of most controversial protests in U.S. history and yet it remains virtually unknown to most Americans. On that day, in 1932, 500 U.S. army infantrymen with loaded rifles, fixed bayonets and gas grenades containing a vomit inducing ingredient, 200 calvary, a machine gun squadron, 800 police and 6 M1917 army tanks, prepared to attack 17,000 unarmed men, plus thousands of their wives and children. Moments before the assault, Gen.Douglas MacArthur, in charge of the operation, turned to a police official standing next to him and said, “I will break the back of the enemy.”
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The phrase “thinking about the unthinkable” has always been associated with the unthinkable cataclysm of a nuclear war, and rightly so. Lately, though, I’ve been pondering another kind of unthinkable scenario, nearly as nightmarish (at least for a democracy) as a thermonuclear Armageddon, but one that’s been rolling out in far slower motion: that America’s war on terror never ends because it’s far more convenient for America’s leaders to keep it going—until, that is, it tears apart anything we ever imagined as democracy.
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That Russia paid the Taliban financial bounties to kill 18 U.S. and “coalition” soldiers in Afghanistan is in dispute to say the least. Both Democrats and Republicans cite various and conflicting official U.S. intelligence agencies on the veracity of this latest New Cold War episode. The July 9 New York Times reported, “The C.I.A. – as well as analysts at the National Counterterrorism Center – expressed medium or moderate confidence in that conclusion. The National Security Agency, which puts greater stock in surveillance intercepts, was more skeptical, officials have said.”
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Are any of the grand brains in administration of Donald Trump—or possibly a future Joe Biden presidency—thinking systematically about the costs of containing China; i.e., waging a Cold War against a nation of 1.4 billion people or actually fomenting a hot conventional war in the Western Pacific? It’s madness made worse by the fact that Trump, Biden and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are using tired tropes reminiscent of the language of that was employed during the USA vs USSR Cold War that saturated the consciousness of the American people and its Western European comrades.
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“Just how twisted is the Senate GOP coronavirus bill you ask? It includes $686 million for new F-35 fighter jets.”
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In a floor speech late Monday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described the GOP’s newly released coronavirus stimulus package as a “carefully tailored” plan to provide financial relief to desperate Americans.
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No matter the administration in Washginton, impunity and lack of accountability have been constants in the so-called War on Terror.
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An email tip sent in last week alerted authorities about the man’s intentions to “sow discord and racial unrest,” Minneapolis police Officer Emily Christensen said in the affidavit, which was filed Monday.
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Christensen wrote in the affidavit that she watched “innumerable hours” of videos on social media platforms like Tik Tok, Snapchat, Instagram and YouTube to try to identify the suspect, to no avail. Investigators finally caught a break when a tipster e-mailed the Minneapolis Police Department identifying the man as a member of the Hell’s Angels biker gang who “wanted to sow discord and racial unrest by breaking out the windows and writing what he did on the double red doors,” the affidavit said.
A subsequent investigation revealed that the man was also an associate of the Aryan Cowboy Brotherhood, a small white supremacist prison and street gang based primarily in Minnesota and Kentucky. Several of its members were present at the Stillwater incident.
In the days after the rioting started, video of “Umbrella Man” ricocheted around social media, prompting a flurry of speculation about the man’s identity.
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While each service is undertaking a slightly different approach toward information warfare, Defense officials have said there is a broad buy-in to a larger vision of how to fuse capabilities and better prepare to fight. Collectively, they show the breadth of the movement.
Here are several ongoing efforts within the services and the Pentagon underway.
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Turkey’s choice of names for its gas exploration ships are also a giveaway. The name of the main ship that Turkey is using for seismic “surveys” of the Greek continental shelf is Oruç Reis, (1474-1518), an admiral of the Ottoman Empire who often raided the coasts of Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean that were still controlled by Christian powers. Other exploration and drilling vessels Turkey uses or is planning to use in Greece’s territorial waters are named after Ottoman sultans who targeted Cyprus and Greece in bloody military invasions. These include the drilling ship Fatih “the conqueror” or Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, who invaded Constantinople in 1453; the drilling ship Yavuz, “the resolute”, or Sultan Selim I, who headed the Ottoman Empire during the invasion of Cyprus in 1571; and Kanuni, “the lawgiver” or Sultan Suleiman, who invaded parts of eastern Europe as well as the Greek island of Rhodes.
Turkey’s move in the Eastern Mediterranean came in early July, shortly after the country had turned Hagia Sophia, once the world’s greatest Greek Cathedral, into a mosque. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan then linked Hagia Sophia’s conversion to a pledge to “liberate the Al-Aqsa Mosque” in Jerusalem.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Film director Oliver Stone is in a class by himself. He has dared to go into the political mine fields where only a few other Hollywood-based moviemakers have ventured. Perhaps, the fact that the talented Stone was a Vietnam War U.S. Army veteran (1967-68), toughened him up to take on the Establishment.
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Donald Trump Jr., the eldest child of President Donald Trump, has received a suspension from the social media site Twitter for sharing potentially harmful information related to coronavirus.
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The message to Trump Jr. said he faced the restrictions because he had violated Twitter’s “policy on spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.” Twitter explained that Trump Jr. was not blocked from browsing on the social media site, but he would only be able to send direct messages for the next 12 hours and would not be able to post public tweets.
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Environment
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Citing his pre-season forecast predicting as many as 20 named storms, the expert now warns that “if anything, that might be too low…”
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Staycationing − spending holidays at home − can protect the planet by cutting the aircraft emissions which heat the Earth.
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Morandi, who has enjoyed a safe and isolated retreat during Italy’s Covid-19 emergency, believes authorities will serve him his eviction notice once summer is over.
“All I ask is, if I must be sent away during the renovation works, that I can come back after and keep doing what I do each day: guard the endangered pink coral beach, keep tourists at bay, protect the nature. I fear that if I’m gone, it will be the end of Budelli too”.
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The poll comes on the heels of a high-profile moderation incident that called Facebook’s impartiality into question for many critics. Last August, Science Feedback reviewed an article from the Washington Examiner op-ed that used inaccurate information and cherry-picked datasets to cast doubt on the accuracy of climate change models. Science Feedback’s experts determined that the article was “highly misleading” and rated it as false.
That rating should have reduced its reach on Facebook. But the CO2 Coalition, a group that that rejects mainstream climate science and posted the Washington Examiner article, put up a fight. Ultimately, it convinced Facebook to remove the “false” rating, E&E News reported in June.
“Placing statements that are verifiably false in an opinion section shouldn’t grant immunity from fact-checking,” Scott Johnson, science editor of the organization Science Feedback, told The New York Times this month. Science Feedback is one of Facebook’s third-party fact-checkers that helps it “identify and review false news.”
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Energy
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Natural gas constitutes a vast majority, about 80 percent, of the direct fossil fuel CO2 emissions from the residential and commercial sectors, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Transitioning away from direct fossil fuel use in buildings is key for de-carbonizing and meeting climate targets, experts say.
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Fossil fuel companies dramatically understate the risks posed to them by climate change and threaten the global economy, according to the National Whistleblower Center (NWC).
NWC, a whistleblower advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., compiled a report [PDF], “Exposing a Ticking Time Bomb: How Fossil Fuel Industry Fraud is Setting Us Up For A Financial Implosion—and What Whistleblowers Can Do About it.”
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Finance
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“Senators can no longer ignore the calls of voters, local elected officials, and economists who have repeatedly called for this relief.”
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“The Republican proposal is nothing less than a policy of mass evictions, mass homelessness, mass poverty, and mass hunger.”
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In the late 1960’s, McGeorge Bundy, who had been the national security adviser to Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, in a debate at MIT, said he had turned against the Vietnam War. Bundy said he now favored U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam not because the U.S. war was immoral or wrong or not in U.S. “interests”, but rather because college students, including at elite schools were becoming radicalized. Rather than becoming government officials and administrators or corporate managers, they were rejecting these future possibilities and becoming revolutionaries who wanted to overthrow and transform the U.S. economic and social system. McGeorge Bundy, a faithful servant of the ruling class, was in essence admitting that the social costs of pursuing the Vietnam War had become too high because it was weakening the stability and reproduction of the U.S. empire and domestic rule.
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What if we ignored corporations and their billionaire CEOs and owners altogether, gave them nothing, and instead directed all our efforts to providing unemployment and other benefits to individual human beings?
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“Millions of families in this country are facing hunger; there’s not an additional nickel in their package for nutrition programs for children or for working people.”
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In a recent essay for The Nation, I argued that property destruction needs to be taken seriously as a coherent, intelligent form of political speech. Reframing property destruction as a fully conscious, intelligent form of resistance is important for a number of reasons. It forces us to distinguish between violence against people (often in the name of property protection) and violence against non-living things. It explicitly acknowledges the role of coercion in political struggle that is obscured by a reductive notion of nonviolence as the gold standard of democratic change. And it invites us to examine something so fundamental to the very terms of our political thought that it often escapes scrutiny. Namely, private property.
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This bill will lead to deep and prolonged pain.
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“Republicans have wasted months coming up with a proposal that, remarkably, would make the pandemic and economic pain even worse—especially a corporate immunity provision that would be a literal death sentence to countless Americans.”
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Capitalism is not, as its defenders like to claim, defined by “free” or “private” enterprises. Likewise, “free” or “unregulated” markets do not define capitalism. Politics and ideology drive its defenders to choose those definitions over clearly better, different definitions. The causes and consequences of conflicts over definition are part of today’s mounting battles over capitalism.
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Increasingly, activists are drawing connections between police killings and rising inequality across class and racial lines.
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COVID-19 has not only presented the global economy with its greatest public health challenge in over a century, but also likely killed off the notion of America’s “unipolar moment” for good. That doesn’t mean full-on autarky or isolationism but, rather, enlightened selfishness, which allows for some limited cooperation. Donald Trump’s ongoing threats to impose additional tariffs on a range of EU exports are exacerbating this trend as the old post-World War II ties between the two regions continue to fray. Even the possibility of a Biden administration is unlikely to presage a reversion to the status quo ante. Regionalization and multipolarity will be the order of the day going forward.
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A Silicon Valley-based installment lender that caters to Latino immigrants announced on Tuesday that it would drop all the lawsuits it has filed against borrowers who fell behind on payments, including during the coronavirus pandemic.
Oportun Inc. also said it would cap interest rates on new loans at 36% — a percentage that consumer advocates consider the gold standard for smaller personal loans.
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Well, here’s a clue: Tucked away on page 203 of the COVID stimulus package backed by Trump, is an obscure provision that delivers a whopping $135 billion in tax breaks to millionaire real estate developers and hedge fund managers. One real estate tycoon who stands to profit handsomely from the provision is none other than the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In total, the cash secretly spent on tax cuts for millionaires in the COVID-19 package is more than three times as much money as was included for emergency housing and food relief.Kushner isn’t the only Trump insider getting paid off during the pandemic. Forty lobbyists with ties to Donald Trump have helped clients secure more than $10 billion in federal COVID aid. And if Trump succeeds in getting the Supreme Court to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the richest 0.1 percent of Americans will get an average additional tax cut of $198,000 each per year. Donald Trump is no working-class champion. He’s a corporate con man – the culmination of a rigged-for-the-rich system that’s shafting working Americans at every turn.
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Landlords have been urged not to evict people who cannot pay rent due to the economic crisis prompted by the lockdown, and instead practice “ubuntu”.
This is an appeal by Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation Minister Lindiwe Sisulu, after meeting Cape Town Mayor Dan Plato on Tuesday.
Plato, in his statement after the pair met, said he had warned Sisulu about a “lack of police support for anti-land invasion operations in Cape Town” and she agreed to take this up with Police Minister Bheki Cele.
“It was agreed by all that land invasions cannot be tolerated and must be prevented. I appreciate the national minister’s support in this regard given the overwhelming coordinated nature of land invasions and related criminality,” Plato said.
Sisulu, in her statement, explained her “appeal to landlords who have been providing shelter to our people not to evict them”.
“We all understand that the impact of the Covid-19 epidemic has resulted in people losing their jobs and has hit already destitute communities particularly hard.”
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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While the United States talks a lot about our heroic efforts to combat robocalls and unwanted text messages, the reality is we just aren’t very good at it. Most of our initiatives go comically out of their way to fixate exclusively on “scammers,” ignoring that the biggest source of unwanted robocalls and spam texts is usually legitimate companies and debt collectors, who often utilize many of the same tactics to harass targets they know can’t pay. And while we like to crow often about “record” fines levied against bad actors, the FCC has only collected $6,790 in actual penalties of the $208 million in fines doled out so far.
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With Joe Biden’s polling lead growing, more attention is being paid to what he might do as president. The signals have been contradictory to say the least. After positioning himself as a resolute moderate to win delegates for the nomination, he announced that this was “a real inflection in American history” not unlike “what Roosevelt [faced].” When the six task forces he set up with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) hammered out a party platform, Sanders announced that “the compromise that they came up with, if implemented, will make Biden the most progressive president since FDR.” But as The New York Times’ Michelle Cottle pointed out, Biden’s closest advisers are veteran Democratic Party operatives from the Clinton and Obama eras, not known for original, much less radical, thinking. So the question remains—what will Biden do?
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Winning is the primary task of any political organizing effort. Generally speaking, in order to win, people must change the power dynamic between elites and the rest of us. Right now, ordinary people have very little actual power, but plenty of potential power. Elites hold institutional power, but their power is unstable, based on coercion, and requires our cooperation and participation.
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There is little doubt about it. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is the puffed-up hawk of the Trump administration, talons at the ready, beak protruding. While the president coos at the prospect of seeing, or admiring, the next strongman of international relations, Pompeo hovers over selected authoritarian targets. This Jekyll-Hyde appraisal of foreign policy is a ready recipe for chaos and one that has done much to confuse Washington’s friends and foes.
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“This provocation is resulting in direct physical harm to our communities and must end.”
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President Donald Trump’s recent reelection campaign advertisement is straight out of the plot of a horror movie. Just days after he deployed federal officers to the streets of Portland, Oregon, his campaign released a 30-second television spot featuring an elderly white woman watching on her television the news of activists demanding a defunding of police. The woman shakes her head in disapproval as she notices a figure at her door trying to enter her house. She nervously calls 911, but apparently the activists she disapproves of have been so effective in their nefarious demands that the universal emergency hotline Americans rely on now goes unanswered. The vulnerable woman drops her remote control as the intruder enters her home, and we are only left to imagine the horror of what he does to her as the words “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America” appear on the screen. In this dystopian version of America, only Trump promises law and order.
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A mid-July Washington Post-ABC News poll found that Biden leads Trump by double digits. It was conducted by telephone among a random national sample of 1,006 adults, with 75 percent reached on cell phones and 25 percent on landlines. Results have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
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“An impeachment inquiry is the only way to put an end to the dangerous path we are on.”
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Catholic bishops in Brazil are also accusing the government of systematically using “unscientific arguments… to normalize a Covid-19 plague that is killing thousands.”
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This self-styled wartime president’s disposed To mock all masks and states that keep bars closed. A list of acts like these we should compile, In case some day we hold a war crimes trial.
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If you take Donald Trump’s word for it, he’s “all there,” while his presumed Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, may not be. According to Trump, doctors at Walter Reed Medical Center found the president’s performance on a recent cognitive exam “unbelievable,” given the extent to which Trump “aced the test.” Trump told Sean Hannity on Fox News that the test refutes claims from “the radical left” concerning the president’s diminished mental state. “I proved I was all there,” he exclaimed, while also insisting that Biden “should take the same exact test, a very standard test.”
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In 1999, Justin Kruger and David Dunning wrote a paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” The paper provided, with unparalleled accuracy, an explanation for Donald Trump’s temperament and behavior.
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The Senate Republican proposal fails to come close to meeting the scale and nature of the challenges we face.
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“There is absolutely no reason for this,” said immigration rights activist Erika Andiola. “Nothing. Not a legal reason. Not a political reason. Just hate.”
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Attorney General William Barr is expected to attack Democrats and the Department of Justice’s own investigation into the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia during his first appearance Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee.
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On Tuesday, July 28, Moscow’s Simonovsky Court issued two 300,000-ruble ($4,140) fines to opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) for violating Russia’s “foreign agents” law, MBK Media reports.
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Let us now turn our primers to the chapter titled, “Stuff That Should Have Happened Months Ago But Didn’t Because Mitch McConnell Said ‘No.’”
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Perhaps we could’ve been
Much less discreet
About dragging garbage
Out into the street
For barricades and towers
Like Simon Rodia’s, in Watts —
But to keep out the cars
And to keep out the cops —
Perhaps not
It’s obvious, replies Democritus
That some things can’t be cut
Squares? They’re abstractions!
You think these exist?
Oh, no, rejoins Plato
Who burns all Democritus’ books
That! Is! The Nomos! Haha!
He says, with a mouthful of baklava
A fact!
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Mikhail Degtyarev was appointed the acting governor of Russia’s Khabarovsk region on July 20, after President Putin declared a “loss of confidence” in Governor Sergey Furgal, following the latter’s arrest on murder charges. Degtyarev has been in office for about a week now and in that time mass protests against his predecessor’s ouster have only grown. The most recent Saturday rallies on July 25 were the biggest yet, according to multiple independent estimates. Demonstrators appear to be adopting more radical slogans, as well, as protesters last weekend shouted anti-Putin chants not previously heard in the region. Meduza special correspondent Anastasia Yakoreva, who’s spent more time in Khabarovsk than its acting governor, reviews Mikhail Degtyarev’s first week on the job and examines why his affinity for Russia’s federal authorities alienates his new constituents.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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As we mentioned on Friday, on Monday, the NTIA followed through on a key part of Trump’s executive order on Section 230, asking the FCC to weigh in on interpreting the law. Everything about this is crazy. The NTIA request was almost certainly written by a recently hired lawyer who has spent the last couple of years attacking Section 230. He’s also the same lawyer who sued Twitter on behalf of a white supremacist, and when I had reached out to him over email to ask him how that made sense under 230, insisted to me that Section 230 was a narrow statute that only applied if it was about protecting children. I can’t say for sure, but my email exchange with him suggested to me that he was wholly unaware of Section 230 prior to me asking about it. Either way, that case failed spectacularly, and Adam Candeub has spent the past two years attacking 230 on various panels. And now he’s deputy secretary at NTIA in charge of this issue.
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On Friday, we wrote about the bad reporting concerning Nick Sandmann’s settlement with the Washington Post, that nearly every knowledgeable lawyer figures was likely for “nuisance value” to get rid of the lawsuit. We noted that the NY Post’s coverage of it misleadingly suggested that the kid got many millions of dollars, when there’s no evidence to support that conclusion, and plenty to suggest he got very little. If you want a thorough debunking of “the kid got paid” narrative, this thread by @RespectableLawyer lays out the details. As we had noted in our post, the court had already rejected nearly all of the claims in the case, and only allowed it to be reinstated to allow for very narrow discovery on very narrow issues which Sandmann almost certainly would not have won on. There was basically no chance Sandmann would win the case. So, a nuisance fee settlement makes it worthwhile to everyone. The paper gets out of the case for less than the cost of going through discovery and the whole summary judgment process, and Sandmann gets to say he got paid, without ever saying how little.
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YouTube has permanently blocked the account of the right-wing, Christian Orthodox news network Tsargrad TV. According to Interfax, Google’s press service cited the “violation of legislation on sanctions and trade rules” as the reason behind the decision. The United States sanctioned the network’s founder, Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeyev, in 2014.
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After many months of debate, the University of Hong Kong (HKU) council has voted to fire Benny Tai, an associate professor of law and pro-democracy figure.
The council’s decision overrides a decision by the university’s senate earlier this month, which concluded that there were no grounds for Mr Tai’s dismissal. The council, the university’s governing body whose members are mostly not teaching staff or students, is responsible for management, finances and human resources. The senate, comprised mostly of professors and teachers, is responsible for academic matters and student welfare.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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For the past two years, several major state news organizations in Russia have been working with the China Media Group, a conglomerate of the biggest state media outlets in the People’s Republic of China, formed in 2018 on orders from Xi Jinping. The leadership in Beijing has adopted a policy of aggressive publicity abroad, which has flooded Russia’s state media with hundreds of pro-China stories (including, for example, an unlistenable rap about Chinese politics with nods to opposition activist Alexey Navalny). Under the terms of a bilateral agreement, Russia’s state media is required to publish Chinese propaganda in exchange for the right to send content about Russia to China, though this reciprocity has proved elusive, even when it came to an article written by Vladimir Putin himself.
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Former investigative journalist and Roscosmos communications advisor Ivan Safronov turned down a plea bargain with investigators that would have required naming his journalistic sources, Interfax reports, citing Safronov’s lawyer, Ivan Pavlov.
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In a series of tweets, Julian Assange’s partner Stella Moris, who on Monday testified before the Spanish court Audiencia Nacional, wrote that she had spoken to Julian Assange and that she anticipates “the US will drop its existing extradition request and then re-arrest him on the very same 18 charges, under a different extradition request.”
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Khabarovsk’s Central District Court has sentenced local protester Rostislav Buryak to eight days in prison, lawyer Vitaly Tykhta from the rights group “Human Rights Postcards” (“Pravozashchity Otkrytki”) told MBK Media. Buryak, an active participant in the ongoing protests in Khabarovsk, is best known as the owner of the so-called “Furgalmobile,” a food truck decorated with slogans in support of the region’s ousted governor, Sergey Furgal.
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Lois Jones started at McDonald’s when she was in her 20s. It was her first job. “I loved working for McDonald’s,” she said. “Don’t make no mistakes about it. I can take some food and turn it into a Sunday dinner. As long as I’m in the kitchen, I’m happy.”
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limpets leave once they’ve sealed into the rock and know
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“The public needs to know whether Attorney General Barr thinks President Trump can conduct mass surveillance of protesters without congressional authorization.”
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“Mr. Barr… I’m starting to lose my temper.”
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Support independent cartooning: join Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!
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The excuse for sending federal police here is to protect federal property. The reality is that this is a cynical re-election ploy aimed at earning support for a law-and-disorder president.
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Federal agents poured into Portland, Oregon this month to crack down on anti-racism protests. They beat up peaceful protesters and fired impact munitions at demonstrators, seriously injuring one of them. They drove around the city in unmarked vans pulling people off the street.
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Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul responded appropriately to the news that President Trump intends to dispatch federal agents to Milwaukee, as Trump’s agents continue to create chaos in Portland, Ore.
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A new Gallup survey shows that 65% of U.S. adults support the protests.
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The only reason the corrupt, repressive and illegitimate Jovenel Moïse is currently president of Haiti is due to US (and Canadian) support.
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Federal authorities are using a new tactic in their battle against protesters in Portland, Oregon: arrest them on offenses as minor as “failing to obey” an order to get off a sidewalk on federal property — and then tell them they can’t protest anymore as a condition for release from jail.
Legal experts describe the move as a blatant violation of the constitutional right to free assembly, but at least 12 protesters arrested in recent weeks have been specifically barred from attending protests or demonstrations as they await trials on federal misdemeanor charges.
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Soon after George Floyd, an unarmed 46-year-old Black man, was suffocated to death by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020, a nationwide response to his killing reenergized the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. BLM was founded in 2013 after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer. It has only grown and evolved in the years since, especially strategically. The movement’s demands include an end to systemic racism, racial injustice and police brutality; the arrest, prosecution and conviction of killer cops; the removal of monuments and statues which commemorate Confederate figures and other white supremacists; and the defunding of our archaic and oppressive policing system. The movement for Black lives operates based on the principle that the interconnected roots of structural racism, racial oppression and police violence – colonialism, genocide, white supremacy and capitalism – must be confronted and dismantled together. Moreover, it recognizes the importance and significance of functioning as an intersectional and multiracial struggle for liberation and justice.
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Under a shocking new Trump administration policy, hundreds of people who came to the United States seeking asylum were secretly held in hotels for days on end before being expelled from the country, often with little or no paper trail. This includes more than 200 unaccompanied immigrant children — including babies and toddlers — who were taken to hotels near the Texas-Mexico border by a private contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “The Trump administration has been just basically expelling them without due process and without any paper trail,” says Zenén Jaimes Pérez, advocacy director for the Texas Civil Rights Project, which helped uncover the abuse. We also speak with Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.
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Under a shocking new Trump administration policy, hundreds of people who came to the United States seeking asylum were secretly held in hotels for days on end before being expelled from the country, often with little or no paper trail. This includes more than 200 unaccompanied immigrant children — including babies and toddlers — who were taken to hotels near the Texas-Mexico border by a private contractor for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “The Trump administration has been just basically expelling them without due process and without any paper trail,” says Zenén Jaimes Pérez, advocacy director for the Texas Civil Rights Project, which helped uncover the abuse. We also speak with Norma Pimentel, executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.
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Since we published The NYPD Files, we’ve fielded a number of questions about the data from readers. We’ve answered a few of the most common ones here.
What data did you release?
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Forty-five years after a law was passed in New York allowing public agencies to withhold employees’ disciplinary records from the public, it was finally taken off the books by the state’s legislature. The law — known by its statute number “50-a” — hadn’t really been an obstacle to the limited transparency begrudgingly extended by the NYPD until the department suddenly decided it was no longer interested in sharing information about disciplined officers with journalists.
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Surprising exactly no one, an NYPD official has declared NYPD officers to be above the law. In response to the George Floyd killing — a killing carried out by a Minnesota police officer who crushed Floyd’s throat with his knee until no pulse could be detected… and then continued for another three minutes — resulted in the city passing a new law forbidding officers from choking the life out of arrestees. Seems reasonable.
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In an exchange with Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Washington) before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Attorney General William Barr revealed that he is oblivious to widely reported threats of violence made by right-wing “reopen” protesters, even as he has backed the Trump administration’s vicious crackdown on racial justice protesters.
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On July 22, an unknown man phoned Dagestani journalist Svetlana Anokhina several times and threatened to kill her. The caller promised to “deal with feminists,” apparently referring to Anokhina’s work as the chief editor of Daptar.ru, an independent outlet that has been reporting on women’s issues in Russia’s North Caucasus region for the past six years. After she reported this death threat to the police, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) called for a “swift and thorough investigation,” underscoring Anokhina’s need for adequate protection. In conversation with Meduza, Anokhina discusses the most recent threats against her and the reality of reporting on women’s rights in Dagestan.
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“The fact that they have expiration dates makes it deeply concerning that they’re using expired tear gas,” Dr. Rohini J. Haar, an adjunct professor of epidemiology at University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health who focuses on human rights issues, told Salon. “It’s really difficult to know what the breakdown products are because manufacturers are not transparent about what exactly is in those canisters — the solvent, the combustibles and all of that.” After noting that there is no evidence about whether expired tear gas is more or less dangerous, Haar argued that the bigger problem is that we do not know what is in the canisters in the first place.
“I think some transparency about what chemicals are in there would give us some insight into how they break down and what the degradation products are. We don’t have that information,” Haar explained.
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Six people were arrested. The mayor of Richmond thanked the Black Lives Matter protesters he said tried to stop the white supremacists from spearheading the violence.
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“The Economic Court in Cairo sentenced Mawada al-Adham and Haneen Hossam and three others to two years in prison and fined them 300,000 Egyptian pounds each,” the state-owned website al-Ahram reported.
“They are accused of violating the values and principles of Egyptian society and posting indecent photos and videos disturbing to public morals,” al-Ahram added.
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On June 15, 2020, Al-Jazeera Network aired a documentary about the 1992 assassination of Egyptian secularist Farag Foda by members of the Al-Jama’a Al-Islamiyya Islamist group. In the documentary, Islamic researcher Ayman Abd Al-Rahim and former Al-Jama’ah Al-Islamiyyah leader Nageh Ibrahim criticized Farag Foda’s views regarding the Islamic caliphate and its legitimacy. One of Foda’s assassins, Egyptian Islamist Abu Al-Ela Abd Rabbo, said that he killed Farag Foda because of the fatwa issued by Al-Azhar University scholars, that declared Foda to be an apostate and because the Mubarak regime had been suppressing Islamist groups while allowing Foda to continue spreading secular ideologies. Abd Rabbo said that he acted in accordance with shari’a law and that he does not regret his actions because he hopes Allah will reward him on Judgement Day.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Frontier’s bankruptcy has serious consequences for Americans, including 2 million Californians, who are stuck with their deteriorating DSL monopoly. After deciding for years to never upgrade their networks to fiber—despite the fact that, according to their own bankruptcy filing, they could have profitably upgraded 3 million customers to gigabit fiber already—the pyramid scheme of milking dying DSL assets caught up to the company. This has forced rural communities in California that either lack access to the Internet, or have been dependent on decaying copper DSL lines provided by Frontier Communications, into a serious predicament. The solution, of course, is for the state to build fiber in those markets by empowering local governments and small private ISPs to do the job Frontier neglected for so long.
But, rather than leave this mega-corporation to its own demise and chart out a better future for Californians, a bill introduced by Assembly Member Aguiar-Curry, A.B. 570, proposes to amend the state’s Internet infrastructure program to prioritize DSL upgrades over fiber.
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Monopolies
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Critics of America’s largest tech firms hope that a congressional hearing on July 29th—postponed by two days because the late Congressman John Lewis was lying in state in the Capitol—will unleash a similar dynamic. For the first time the chief executives of Alphabet (Google’s parent), Amazon, Apple and Facebook will together face the questions of lawmakers in Washington. Yet the chances are that the proceedings will prove far less momentous.
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The main purpose of Wednesday’s hearing is for Zuckerberg, Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Apple’s Tim Cook to address the evidentiary record the committee has already prepared over the last 13 months, an intimidating number of documents that no tech CEO has reckoned with since Microsoft’s antitrust charges in the ‘90s. At the end of this probe, the committee intends to publish a report in the coming months detailing how the executives’ respective companies have avoided liability under current antitrust laws because those competition rules were never crafted with the tech industry’s behaviors in mind.
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Patents
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According to the Office’s notice, the revisions to the rules will specify a period of reduction corresponding to “the period from the beginning to the end of the applicant’s failure to engage in reasonable efforts to conclude prosecution” as opposed to the consequences to the Office of applicant’s failure to engage in reasonable efforts to conclude prosecution.
In Supernus Pharmaceuticals, Inc. v. Iancu, the Federal Circuit reversed the entry of summary judgment by the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, which concluded that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office had not erred in calculating the PTA for U.S. Patent No. 8,747,897. During prosecution of U.S. Application No. 11/412,100, which issued as the ’897 patent, the Examiner issued a final Office Action, and Supernus responded by filing a Request for Continued Examination (RCE). After filing the RCE, Supernus was notified that an opposition had been filed in related European Patent No. EP 2 010 189 (which had issued from a European application corresponding to an International application that claimed priority from the ’100 application). One hundred days after the European Patent Office’s notification of the opposition, Supernus filed a supplemental Information Disclosure Statement (IDS) citing the Notice of Opposition and other documents concerning the opposition. The USPTO ultimately issued the ’100 application as the ’897 patent, determining that the ’897 patent was entitled to 1,260 days of PTA. The Office’s PTA determination included an assessment of 886 days of applicant delay, of which 646 days were assessed for the time between the filing of the RCE and the submission of the supplemental IDS. Supernus filed a request for Reconsideration of Patent Term Adjustment, but the Office rejected Supernus’ request, concluding that the 646-day reduction in PTA was proper.
Supernus challenged the Office’s PTA determination in the Eastern District of Virginia, contending that it was entitled to at least 546 of the 646 days of PTA reduction (i.e., the period of time between the filing of the RCE and the EPO notification of opposition). The District Court granted summary judgment in favor of the USPTO, finding that the USPTO did not err in the PTA calculation for the ’897 patent.
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Copyrights
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What do Elton John, the Rolling Stones, Lionel Richie, Courtney Love, Panic! at the Disco, Pearl Jam, Sia, Aerosmith, Lorde and Linkin Park have in common? Among probably many other things, one definite is a desire for politicians to keep their grubby hands off their music. (Unless, perhaps, they ask nicely.)
Those and dozens of other artists have put their signatures to an open letter from the Artist Rights Alliance, addressed to to the Democratic and Republican national, congressional and senatorial committees, asking all parties to put an end to appropriating popular songs for political purposes without authorization.
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The mobile-first video venture of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman scored 10 nominations across the five shortform categories, the most of any platform. It was a strong show of support from the television industry after a bumpy start for Quibi, which launched in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic in April and has struggled to attract subscribers. (The company said 5.6 million people downloaded the app in its first three months but has yet to disclose how many paying subscribers Quibi has.)
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Levandowski, who agreed to plead guilty, countered that 12 months of home confinement and community service is enough.
Levandowski “raided Google’s repositories and stole proprietary information that would have undoubtedly been useful to him,” prosecutors said in a filing. Had he not been caught, the stolen files might have made the engineer “the savior” of Uber’s self-driving program.
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EUFA has published a tender inviting anti-piracy companies to minimize the effect of unauthorized streaming and downloading. The European football body is looking for a company that can provide protection on all fronts, covering live and non-live content, apps, IPTV services, help with blocking orders, and more.
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New research published by cybersecurity firm Group-IB aims to shine a light on the shadowy world of ‘pirate’ CDNs, the streaming sites they fuel, and the companies helping to finance their operations. Online casinos and bookmakers reportedly play a major role, with platforms using players’ gambling activities and losses to keep pirate sites afloat.
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For years and years we’ve pointed out that, if they were invented today, copyright maximalist authors and publishers would absolutely scream about libraries and probably sue them out of existence. Some insisted that we were exaggerating, but now we’ve seen nearly all of the big publishers sue the Internet Archive over its digital library that acts just like a regular library.
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Infamous copyright troll Richard Liebowitz didn’t have a very good Monday. Facing massive sanctions and quite an incredibly detailed order exposing his long trail of disobeyed orders and lies to courts across the country, with just a week before he had to comply, Liebowitz (1) appealed to the 2nd Circuit to put a stay on the original order, and (2) asked the original judge to lift the non-monetary sanctions as being unfair. The district court judge, Jesse Furman, wasted almost no time at all in rejecting that request highlighting (among many other things) that Liebowitz and the actual lawyers he hired to represent him waited until about the last possible minute to make that request.
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Posted in Deception, FUD, GNU/Linux, Security at 1:25 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Another ‘own goal’ for the world’s worst ‘tech’ site, which spreads fear based on misunderstandings and misinformation (anything for clicks and to help push their sponsor, Microsoft)
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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I won’t try to do any benchmarking here. More interesting to me is the perceived performance.
Here I can say that the biggest difference is as, already mentioned, Docker.
Apart from that file search in my editor and also starting applications are both definitely faster on Linux. KRunner in KDE also feels faster than searching in Gnome or Spotlight on a Mac.
I mostly cannot tell a difference between Manjaro+KDE and Ubuntu+Gnome, but looking at the system status you can see that Manjaro+KDE consumes less ressources and has less systemd services running. For me it was definitely a surprise to find out that in 2020 KDE is more lightweight than Gnome. That used to be very different.
Booting the system I have to say that Dell BIOS seems to be the fastest and Lenovo Thinkpad the slowest. Or Lenovo prefers likes to show their giant red logo for a bit longer.
The actual Linux distros are both pretty fast. I find that KDE gives you a smoother booting experience and Manjaro doesn’t have a loading screen while Ubuntu shows a loading screen for 1-2 seconds.
One point for the MacBooks is that their sleep mode (closing the laptop lid) lasts longer. I think the Mac switches to hibernate automatically. While hibernate works on the Linux laptops, it seems to be not faster than rebooting from scratch.
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Last week we announced that the Librem 14 would feature a special “kill switch” of sorts on the motherboard that would write-protect the BIOS and EC chips. We’re pleased to announce another enhancement that will be in the Librem 14: the microphone kill switch will also kill microphones connected through the headphone jack.
Our camera/microphone hardware kill switch has long been a unique feature on our laptops. While covering your webcams with tape is better than nothing (even if Apple has no tolerance for webcam covers), that only solves half of your privacy issues. Even if a snoop can’t watch you through a webcam cover, they could still listen to you so we’ve made sure our camera/microphone kill switch disables the webcam at the top of the laptop screen and the embedded microphone.
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Google has been ramping up the Linux environment on Chrome OS lately, with features like microphone support and USB connections. For those of you who spend a lot of time in the command-line Terminal, Chrome OS 84 has updated the app with new themes and customization options.
The Terminal app on Chrome OS has changed very little since the Linux container was originally released — it’s a single window with text. However, the new version shipping in Chrome OS 84 offers tabs, pre-made themes, customizable colors and fonts for text, and even cursor options.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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In this opener to series two of the Tech Means Business podcast, we were delighted to speak to Stefanie Chiras, the Vice President and General Manager, RHEL Business Unit at Red Hat.
With a skew of qualifications that would make a recruitment professional weep (Harvard, Princeton, UCSB), Stefanie was a career IBM-er until two years ago, when she shifted up a gear into Red Hat, post-acquisition of the latter by the former. Now at the helm of the pivotal Red Hat Enterprise Linux Business Unit, she’s in the business of making the case for all things FOSS at organizations across the world.
We talk about getting the message right, open-source monetization, and how it’s not about the details of the code, but the outcomes for the business that matter. As the world transitions to open, cloud-y, platform-agnostic solutions and services, we hear how RHEL makes its particular case among the Ubuntus, SUSEs, Salesforces and SAPs of this world.
Stefanie & Joe mull over upstreaming code, communities of developers, high-performance & supercomputing, microservices and monolithic applications: all in all, a substantial series two opener, with more food for thought than an open buffet at a rocket science convention!
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On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got some really cool hardware news, we’ve finally got some Linux laptops equipped with an AMD Ryzen 4000H series processor. These laptops are thanks to Tuxedo Computers and KDE Slimbook. Cooler Master has launched a kickstarter campaign to make a pretty slick Case for the Raspberry Pi 4. We’ve also got a LOT of App News this week with the latest release of the most popular open source email client, Thunderbird 78 from Mozilla. KDE has released version 7.0.0 of digiKam. If you’ve been wanting an open source way to control your RGB lights on your devices then OpenRGB may be the tool for you. And finally, PeerTube has announced the 2.3.0 release that comes with the much anticipated Global Search feature! All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
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Welcome to Episode 359 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts take a deep dive into the world of real-time backups, archiving, replication, data storage, cloud services and more. Everyone should have a reasonable backup and disaster recovery solution and this episode hopes to provide several options for accomplishing that goal with open source software and hardware in mind. Thanks for listening and we hope you have a great week and good backups.
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First up, in our Wanderings, Jason prints a masterpiece, I get knee deep in Mint, Tony Hughes becomes a journalist, Moss has new toys, Joe springs a leak, and Tony Watts is rockin’ in the free world.
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Kernel Space
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One of the new network drivers now queued up for Linux 5.9 is the SFC EF100 driver for the EF100 NIC architecture.
The EF100 NIC architecture has been developed at Xilinx and based partially on Solarflare IP. Given the similarity to existing Solarflare SFC9000/SFC9100 series hardware, the EF100 support is being extended within the “SFC” Linux networking driver.
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Graphics Stack
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“Navy Flounder” as the codename for another Navi 2 GPU following the “Sienna Cichlid” Linux driver work has made it into Mesa 20.2 for the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver.
The Navy Flounder AMDGPU kernel driver support for Linux was sent out several weeks ago and will come with the Linux 5.9 kernel alongside the newly-enabled Sienna Cichlid support for these initial Navi 2 GPUs seeing open-source Linux driver support.
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Today I’m going to briefly go over a big-ish API change that’s taking place as a result of a MR from Jason Ekstrand.
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Today I thought it might be interesting to dive into how mesa detects version support for drivers.
To do so, I’m going to be jumping into mesa/src/mesa/main/version.c, which is where the magic happens.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Here’s your regular dose of Stadia news, as today Google revealed a bunch more games coming to their Linux-powered game streaming service.
For Stadia Pro on August 1 subscribers will get free access to play Strange Brigade, Kona, Metro 2033 Redux and Just Shapes & Beats. If you don’t subscribe to Pro, all games will be available to purchase on Stadia as normal. Zombie Army 4: Dead War will also be leaving Stadia Pro at the end of this month, so claim it now if you haven’t already. On top of that Google has confirmed that Rock of Ages III will release on Stadia on August 14, launching right into Stadia Pro.
If you enjoy playing PUBG on Stadia, it’s also getting a new season on July 30 with the latest ‘Survival Pass’ being given free for Stadia Pro subs as well.
[...]
For any Android mobile/tablet gamers amongst our readers, Stadia will also soon let you play across 4G/5G with a new experiment you can opt into in the Stadia App. This is on top of the current experiment that lets you opt into playing on any Android device that can install the Stadia App.
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Godot 3.2.2 was released on June 26 with over 3 months’ worth of development, including many bugfixes and a handful of features. Some regressions were noticed after the release though, so we decided that Godot 3.2.3 would focus mainly on fixing those new bugs to ensure that all Godot users can have the most stable experience possible.
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It appears that Valve aren’t stopping their push to improve Linux gaming, as they just recently hired another developer to help improve open source graphics drivers.
The new hire is Tony Wasserka, a programmer with a lot of experience. Looking over their resume, Wasserka previously worked for the likes of Imagination Technologies where they worked on the Vulkan driver for PowerVR graphics chips. Additionally they also help to found the Nintendo 3DS emulator Citra, they’re a contributor to the GameCube and the Wii emulator Dolphin, they also contributed in the past to the Wine compatibility layer and more. It’s pretty safe to say they know their way around some complicated code.
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Valve appears to have hired yet another open-source graphics driver developer and will initially be working on the Mesa Radeon “RADV” Vulkan driver.
Tony Wasserka, new to the Mesa scene but has spent years in the embedded and graphics space, shared today that he has been hired by Valve to contribute to their open-source graphics work on Linux and will be first taking a stab working on RADV.
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Another game bundle has been released today with the Humble Raw Fury 2020 Bundle and there’s some good looking Linux games included with it.
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Here’s your regular dose of Stadia news, as today Google revealed a bunch more games coming to their Linux-powered game streaming service.
For Stadia Pro on August 1 subscribers will get free access to play Strange Brigade, Kona, Metro 2033 Redux and Just Shapes & Beats. If you don’t subscribe to Pro, all games will be available to purchase on Stadia as normal. Zombie Army 4: Dead War will also be leaving Stadia Pro at the end of this month, so claim it now if you haven’t already. On top of that Google has confirmed that Rock of Ages III will release on Stadia on August 14, launching right into Stadia Pro.
If you enjoy playing PUBG on Stadia, it’s also getting a new season on July 30 with the latest ‘Survival Pass’ being given free for Stadia Pro subs as well.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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MATE is one of the great Linux Desktop Environments for those who are looking for something very traditional and nostalgic. It is the living descendant of one of the most popular Linux desktops, GNOME 2, and has a classic feel and approach. In this MATE review, we’ll look at the user interface, performance, and some notable features, and we’ll cover who should try MATE.
MATE feels classic when you first boot up. This makes sense, as MATE is a fork and continuation of GNOME 2, one of the most beloved Linux desktops of all time. MATE follows traditional desktop paradigms and gives you a great-looking and great-feeling interface. MATE is incredibly sharp out of the box with a great theme and icon pack. The feel is great as well, with very minimal resource usage and a fast, snappy interface. Things run well, and MATE would be a great choice for a lower-end system or those looking to remain efficient on system resources.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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With the subtitle information, i.e., the text, the start and end points of each subtitle, being correctly stored in the abstract list model, I shifted my focus in these two weeks towards the UI development of subtitles in the timeline.
First, to confirm whether the information is stored properly, I worked on displaying vertical lines across the timeline according to the start positions of each subtitle.
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The second coding period for GSoC’20 is now over. I am excited to share that the first part of my project is now over. I have finally finished porting kde.org to hugo and am now working on a refresh for the Season of KDE Website
Porting kde.org allowed for easy resuability of code and helped in removing a lot of extra files. This code reusability can be achieved in two ways – shortcodes and layouts.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Porting of Basic and Permissions pages, have been covered in the previous posts, but like the heading suggests there sure was something left. The candidates which remained to be ported were the volume usage widget featuring the pie-chart and the change permissions dialogue which can be used to change permissions of enclosed files in a folder.
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I’ve been selected as a student developer at Pitivi for Google Summer of Code 2020. My project is to create an object tracking and blurring feature.
In this post, I introduce a feature in development which allows the user to track an object inside a video clip.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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Along with OpenMandriva working on a rolling-release version of its distribution long ago derived from Mandrake/Mandriva, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is coming along as the next stable release.
OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 pulls in the Linux 5.7 kernel as a significant step forward in its own right, now makes use of the KDE Plasma 5.19 series along with Qt 5.15, KDE Applications 20.04 series, and a variety of other software package updates.
Aside from many package upgrades, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 adds Zstd compression support to their kernel build, upgrades its Calamares installer, and has a variety of other alterations.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Red Hat today announced the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 (RHEL 8.3), the latest minor release of the RHEL 8 platform. The RHEL 8.3 beta keeps the open-source software provider on track to provide a predictable six month release cadence for minor updates. This update includes new security profiles, updated and expanded RHEL System Roles, and updated developer tools via Application Streams.
The Application Streams (AppStreams) repository, introduced to RHEL 8 in 2018, allows Red Hat to deliver components as modules, which are collections of packages representing logical units–say, an application, a language stack, a database, or a set of tools. These packages are built, tested, and released together.
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Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 beta, which focuses primarily on delivering updated stable and supported developer tools, new RHEL System Roles for logging and environmental metrics and several new security profiles to improve IT security and compliance stances.
To provide access to many of the latest, stable open source tools and utilities, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 beta features new and updated Application Streams. These include Git 2.26, NGINX 1.18, Node.js v14, Perl 5.30, PHP 7.4 and Ruby 2.7.
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Red Hat has announced the public beta of the forthcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 release.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 is bringing new system roles for logging and for metrics, a new profile for HIPAA compliance in the healthcare space, updates to performance tools and debuggers, and a variety of other updates.
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The beta will work on all major RHEL architectures. These are AMD and Intel 64-bit, 64-bit ARM, IBM Power, and IBM Z. On the AMD architecture, RHEL now supports Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). On every platform, RHEL 8.3 beta uses the 4.18.0-221 Linux kernel.
As is usually the case, this new RHEL 8 mostly features developer updates. These come, beginning with RHEL 8, in Application Streams. These bundle together up-to-date programming tools and libraries with the underlying base operating system programs. The result is developers get the newest tools, while, simultaneously, administrators retain the same foundation operating system for better operational stability.
[...]
RHEL 8.3 beta also comes with new security profiles. Specifically, it now supports the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) as Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) profiles. These provide you with pre-set security best practices. Finally, the beta also adds a System Role for Network-Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE) to help add disk encryption configuration consistency and repeatability.
Want to start checking it out? RHEL 8.3 beta is now accessible for Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers via the Red Hat customer portal and as part of the no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Subscription.
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Energized members gang up and start new initiatives in opposite directions. Now, things have escalated, and you risk rogue activities springing up that dilute or derail your efforts. This is a very difficult stage to navigate because the energy that was available in the previous stage is now undirected. Unfortunately, much of what happens in this stage is often quite counterproductive to what the initial change should achieve.
In large scale projects, these types of activities might be political in the sense that they try to undermine your change. The activities could also be practical, such as inviting a different provider, installing another software, or employing different processes to include or invalidate part or all of your change.
Here is where you need management support, especially when it comes to big changes. If you have the board or senior management on your side, the opposition will soon realize that “resistance is futile.” However, use your powers wisely so as not to prolong the next stage.
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This guide will help you navigate the people aspect of change management regardless of which process or tool(s) you use. One of the most important lessons is to stay on course. Keep your focus on the desired outcome and don’t give up, but be flexible. Reality seldom matches the plan, so you have to adapt as you go along. Help others do the same by keeping an open discussion going and, at the same time, make sure you have strong support from senior management. Empower those around you to take the lead.
Heed this advice, as well as the warning signs that your technical project might fail (see articles linked below) and you will be in a strong position to manage change and navigate the complex landscape of IT that is made up of fantastic people and interesting technology.
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Debian Family
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Tails 4.9 is a monthly update that’s here to replace last month’s Tails 4.8 release for those who want to install the popular amnesic incognito live system on new computers.
Therefore, Tails 4.9 is just an updated installation media containing various up-to-date components. The most important updated component in this release being the Linux kernel, which has been updated to version 5.7.6.
Tails 4.8 was using Linux kernel 5.6, which is no longer supported, so the inclusion of the latest Linux 5.7 kernel series in Tails is great news for those who want to run the Debian-based distribution on newer hardware.
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This release fixes many security vulnerabilities. You should upgrade as soon as possible.
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Hmm, this is the latest I’ve posted my monthly updates yet (nearly by a month!). June was both crazy on the incoming side, and at the same time I just wasn’t that productive (at least since then I caught up a lot). In theory, lockdown means that I spend less time in traffic, in shops or with friends and have more time to do stuff, in practice I go to bed later and later and waste more time watching tv shows and playing mobile games. A cycle that I have at least broken free from since June.
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Sometimes I enjoy reading the source code to projects I like, use, or am about to install for the first time. This was something I used to do on a very regular basis, looking for security issues to report. Nowadays I don’t have so much free time, but I still like to inspect the source code to new applications I install, and every now and again I’ll find the time to look at the source to random projects.
Reading code is good. Reading code is educational.
One application I’ve looked at multiple times is redis, which is a great example of clean and well-written code. That said when reading the redis codebase I couldn’t help noticing that there were a reasonably large number of typos/spelling mistakes in the comments…
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Devices/Embedded
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Single-board computer maker Radxa has finally released the Rock Pi 4C, over six months after announcing the bare-bones computer, which now gives developers an alternative to the dual video output Raspberry Pi 4.
One of the headline features of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B was that it supports 4K displays across two screens, allowing Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton to call it a true PC.
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Toradex has launched an open-spec “Dahlia” carrier for its i.MX8M Mini and Nano based Verdin modules with GbE, 2x USB 3.0, 3x USB Type-C, MIPI-CSI, DSI-based HDMI, and mini-PCIe. Toradex also revealed a Verdin module with the NPU-enabled i.MX8M Plus.
When Toradex announced a new family of Linux-driven, i.MX8M driven Verdin compute modules at Embedded World this year, it also launched a high-end Verdin Development Board along and revealed an upcoming, open-spec Dahlia carrier. The 120 x 120mm, Nano-ITX form factor Dahlia has now arrived with a surprisingly low $148.90 price.
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Hilscher cifX M.2 and half-size mini PCIe cards powered by the company’s NETX 90 network-on-chip multi-protocol Cortex-M4 SoC bring real-time Ethernet and FieldBus to compatible systems. The tiny cards are designed for PC-based devices such as IPC’s, HMI’s and robots, and support various firmware for PROFINET IO-Device, EtherNet/IP Adapter, EtherCAT Slave, or OpenModbus/TCP. The company claims its cifX M.2 (A+E key) and half-size mini PCIe cards are the smallest multiprotocol PC cards on the automation market with a size of 22×30 mm and 30×26.8 mm respectively. The cards also support extended temperature from -20°C to 70°C and offer one hardware platform for all real-time Ethernet slave protocols. Besides PROFINET IO-Device, EtherNet/IP Adapter, EtherCAT Slave, and OpenModbus/TCP, Hilscher will provide support for CC-Link IE Field Basic and Ethernet POWERLINK Slave in new firmware available in Q4 2020, and OPC UA and MQTT functionalities are planned for future releases.
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ControlBits EMIT (Environmental Monitoring for the Internet of Things) is a baseboard compatible with DOIT ESP32 DevKit V1 development board and equipped with a temperature and humidity sensor, a relay, a 12-pinGPIO connector, and a MicroSD card.
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Sequent Microsystems is Kickstartering a stackable, $30 and up “Mega-RTD” HAT that supports up to 64 Resistance Temperature Detector (RTD) channels for precise temperature measurements.
Resistance Temperature Detector (RTD) sensors, which are used for highly precise temperature measurements in industrial and laboratory systems, can be found on embedded systems such as Advantech’s WISE-710 IoT gateway and NI’s CompactDAQ controller. Now Sequent Microsystems has won Kickstarter funding for a Mega-RTD HAT that can be stacked to provide the Raspberry Pi with up to 64 RTD channels. Shipments are due in October.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Researchers at Linköping University in Sweden have developed an Arduino-based logger to measure levels of methane and carbon dioxide in greenhouse environments. The device also implements a DHT22 temperature and humidity sensor, data from which can be correlated with gas readings. Figures are stored on an SD card using an Adafruit data logging shield.
Importantly, the team’s study outlines a procedure for calibrating the methane sensor module at atmospheric concentrations, much lower than its normal use. The entire unit can be made for around €200, or about $235 USD. While an inexpensive method for monitoring CO2 has been available for some time, this fills in the need for a low-cost methane sensor that could be used for distributed measurements.
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The Internet of Things sounded stupid at first, but as you get to know more about it, the more fascinating it is to figure out how it can be used in your toaster. The idea is that you create a small device that collects a small amount of data that it sends to a service that can draw conclusions from it. You can use the same technology for devices at home. Most kits contain a single board computer with sensors and a manual to help you get started. Distributors use a range of devices in these packages; the Raspberry Pi is the most common example.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Chef Habitat changes the way applications are defined and deployed enabling automation teams to describe in code everything the application needs to be built, run, and managed. By standardizing this process, Chef Habitat provides a way to automate application deployment in even the most heterogeneous environments. To illustrate this, we recently hosted a webinar where we showed how Chef Habitat can be used in concert with Jenkins to drastically simplify pipeline creation.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Firefox web browser 79.0 was released a few hours ago with new features and various security fixes.
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Firefox 79 will be made into official Ubuntu security / updates repositories for Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, and Ubuntu 20.04 in a few days!
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Firefox 79 is out. There are many new web and developer-facing features introduced in this version, of which only a couple are of note to us in 64-bit PowerPC land specifically. The first is a migration of WebExtensions storage to a new Rust-based implementation; there was a bit of a pause while extension storage migrated, so don’t panic if the browser seems to stall out for a few long seconds on first run. The second is a further rollout of WebRender to more Windows configurations, so this seemed like a good time to me to check again how well it’s working on this side of the fence. With the Raptor BTO WX7100 installed in this Talos II, I’ve forced it on with gfx.webrender.enabled and layers.acceleration.force-enabled both set to true (restart the browser after) and worked with it all afternoon with no issues noted, so this time I’m just going to leave it on and see how it goes. Any GCN-based AMD video card from Northern Islands on up (the WX7100 is Polaris) should work. about:support will show you if WebRender and hardware acceleration are enabled, though currently no Linux configuration has it enabled by default.
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Modern JavaScript depends on promises, async/await, events, and timeouts to orchestrate complex scheduling between your code, libraries, and the browser. And yet, it can be challenging to debug async code to understand control and data flow. Operations are broken up over time. Async stack traces solve this by combining the live synchronous part of the stack with the part that is captured and asynchronous.
Now you can enjoy detailed async execution chains in the Firefox JavaScript Debugger’s call stack, Console errors, and Network initiators.
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Starting with Firefox 79, developers of tab management extensions can improve the perceived performance when users switch tabs. The new tabs.warmup() function will prepare the tab to be displayed. Developers can use this function, when they anticipate a tab switch, e.g. when hovering over a button or link.
If you’re an extension developer and your extensions sync items across multiple devices, be aware that we ported storage.sync area to a Rust-based implementation. Extension data that had been stored locally in existing profiles will automatically migrate the first time an installed extension tries to access storage.sync data in Firefox 79. As a quick note, the new implementation enforces client-side quota limits. You should estimate how much data your extension stores locally and test how your extension behaves once the data limit is exceeded. Check out this post for testing instructions and more information about this change.
Take a look at the Add-ons Blog for more updates to the WebExtensions API in Firefox 79!
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Firefox 79.0 has been released. This version has improved accessibility for people using screen readers. See the release notes for more details.
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We’d like to extend a special thank you to all of the new Mozillians who contributed to this release of Firefox.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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MariaDB Corporation recently announced the general availability of MariaDB Platform X5, which represents a major update to the open source database solution. According to the announcement, MariaDB Platform X5 includes upgrades to every component of the platform as well as the new MariaDB Xpand smart engine for distributed SQL.
“With MariaDB Platform X5, our customers can start small and go big – adaptively, pragmatically and with extreme ease,” said Michael Howard, CEO, MariaDB Corporation.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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Today, the majority of screens and projectors is using the 16:9 aspect ratio, while in the past has been using the 4:3 aspect ratio. So, many people have a large number of slide decks based on the old 4:3 aspect ratio, which have to be converted to the new 16:9 aspect ratio. Using LibreOffice Impress in the right way, which means that all slides are based on a slide template, the conversion procedure is rather trivial, and this blog post provides a step by step tutorial.
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CMS
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The first release candidate for WordPress 5.5 is now available!
This is an important milestone in the community’s progress toward the final release of WordPress 5.5.
“Release Candidate” means that the new version is ready for release, but with millions of users and thousands of plugins and themes, it’s possible something was missed. WordPress 5.5 is slated for release on August 11, 2020, but we need your help to get there—if you haven’t tried 5.5 yet, now is the time!
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FSF
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Right now, in a rapidly changing and uncertain world, free software has a special role to play. This issue of the biannual Free Software Foundation Bulletin addresses some of the challenges that life during the COVID-19 pandemic poses to software freedom, but it also highlights some of the unique contributions that activists are making to safeguard your rights today. Whether through manufacturing desperately-needed medical supplies, advocating for and supplying free and secure videoconferencing for remote learning, or creating flexible and portable libre medical information systems, activists have put in extraordinary effort to ensure that our user freedom is protected along with our safety.
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GNU Projects
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There has to be a notion of a controlling owner, and the eventual recording of the transfer in a ledger against double spend. This is the case even in bitcoin. Inevitably, the owner and a ledger creep back into the equation. There are designs like the David Chaum’s DigiCash and GNU Taler which do have technical solutions for anonymous peer to peer transfers. Digicash declared bankruptcy, GNU Taler is brand new. Pure peer to peer and customer to merchant could operate in a disconnected setting, but for small amounts.
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Programming/Development
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The next major version of the PHP language will support named arguments after 76 per cent of lead developers voted to include it.
PHP 8.0 is now expected to be released in November 2020 and feature freeze is on 4 August. The RFC (Request For Comments) for Named Arguments was submitted in September 2013 but revived for the PHP 8.0 release. Approval required a two-thirds majority. There is a pull request for a partial implementation, but it seems there is a fair amount of work still to do.
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Over the last few days, a number of Usenet groups have been banned. The two that I am aware of are comp.lang.lisp and comp.lang.forth, two programming languages groups in the Usenet comp hierarchy. This is the message I see;
Banned content warning
comp.lang.forth has been identified as containing spam, malware, or other malicious content.
For more information about content policies on Google Groups see our Help Center article on abuse and our Terms of Service.
As with most of Usenet, the comp.* hierarchy is largely unmoderated. These two groups definitely are, so this is a Google action to ban them and not one of moderation, since there aren’t any moderators. It’s unclear how these groups have breached the rules.
Of specific concern is the archive. These are some of the oldest groups on Usenet, and the depth & breadth of the historical material that has just disappeared from the internet, on two seminal programming languages, is huge and highly damaging. These are the history and collective memories of two communities that are being expunged, and it’s not great, since there is no other comprehensive archive after Google’s purchase of Dejanews around 20 years ago.
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As Alex McDonald notes in this support request, Google has recently banned the old Usenet groups comp.lang.forth and comp.lang.lisp from the Google Groups system. “Of specific concern is the archive. These are some of the oldest groups on Usenet, and the depth & breadth of the historical material that has just disappeared from the internet, on two seminal programming languages, is huge and highly damaging. These are the history and collective memories of two communities that are being expunged, and it’s not great, since there is no other comprehensive archive after Google’s purchase of Dejanews around 20 years ago.” Perhaps Google can be convinced to restore the content, but it also seems that some of this material could benefit from a more stable archive.
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Hello everyone,
We're a little bit behind schedule, but RC1 is now here. It was tagged
earlier today as llvmorg-11.0.0-rc1.
Source code and docs are available at
https://prereleases.llvm.org/11.0.0/#rc1 and
https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases/tag/llvmorg-11.0.0-rc1
Pre-built binaries will be added as they become available.
Please file bug reports for any issues you find as blockers of
https://llvm.org/pr46725
Release testers: please start your engines, run the script, share your
results, and upload binaries.
RC2 was originally scheduled for Friday, but seeing as we just cut
this one it will come a little later.
Thanks,
Hans
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While LLVM 11.0 was branched almost two weeks ago with many new/improved features for this open-source compiler stack, it has taken until today to get into shape for issuing the first release candidate.
LLVM 11.0-RC2 was already due to be released this week per their original schedule but with LLVM 11.0-RC1 only now surfacing, that second release candidate will be pushed back slightly.
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A bugfix release of our (still small) ttdo package arrived on CRAN overnight. As introduced last fall, the ttdo package extends the most excellent (and very minimal / zero depends) unit testing package tinytest by Mark van der Loo with the very clever and well-done diffobj package by Brodie Gaslam to give us test results with visual diffs:
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Python
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If you have experience with other programming languages, like C or Java, then you’ve probably heard of the concept of null. Many languages use this to represent a pointer that doesn’t point to anything, to denote when a variable is empty, or to mark default parameters that you haven’t yet supplied. null is often defined to be 0 in those languages, but null in Python is different.
Python uses the keyword None to define null objects and variables. While None does serve some of the same purposes as null in other languages, it’s another beast entirely. As the null in Python, None is not defined to be 0 or any other value. In Python, None is an object and a first-class citizen!
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It has been a long time since our previous update. This release of the R plugin comes with enhancements and stability improvements as well as with the new features for remote work. Also, in this release, we discontinue supporting R 3.3.
R plugin introduces the new type of the R interpreters, so that you can execute your R scripts remotely. Consider a task when you write your R code on one machine and need to execute it on another.
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Welcome to Early Access PyCharm, a brand-new podcast that goes behind the scenes of how the PyCharm IDE is made and all the thinking that goes into it. In the upcoming episodes, you will hear from the people who work daily to make you more productive and your code even better.
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Had given myself a day, to see if I could get a good Python development environment using Elpy and Emacs.
It does work.
Just not well enough for me.
At the end of the day today, I was happy I learnt so much about Emacs.
But that is not my focus right now. Python is.
Emacs knowledge can come slowly and organically.
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I’ll be putting you in contact with Packt marketing folks who will get you your advanced copy so you can write blurbs and reviews and — well — actually use the content.
It’s all updated to Python 3.8. Type hints almost everywhere. F-strings and the walrus operator. Bunches of devops and data science examples. Plus a few personal examples involving sailboat navigation and management.
See me at LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-lott-029835/ and I’ll hook you up with Packt marketing folks.
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PyTorch is a widely used, open source deep learning platform used for easily writing neural network layers in Python enabling a seamless workflow from research to production. Based on Torch, PyTorch has become a powerful machine learning framework favored by esteemed researchers around the world.
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sphinxcontrib-spelling is a spelling checker for Sphinx-based documentation. It uses PyEnchant to produce a report showing misspelled words.
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Many people labour under the assumption that pop culture is trivial and useless while only ‘high’ art can grant us genuine and eternal knowledge about the world. Given that we have a finite time on this planet, we are all permitted to enjoy pop culture up to a certain point, but we should always minimise our interaction with it, and consume more moral and intellectual instruction wherever possible.
Or so the theory goes. What these people do not realise is that pop culture can often provide more information about the world, humanity in general and — what is even more important — ourselves.
This is not quite the debate around whether high art is artistically better, simply that pop culture can be equally informative. Jeremy Bentham argued in the 1820s that “prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry”, that it didn’t matter where our pleasures come from. (John Stuart Mill, Bentham’s intellectual rival, disagreed.) This fundamental question of philosophical utilitarianism will not be resolved here.
[...]
In summary, we can simultaneously say that pop culture is not worthy of our time relative to other pursuits while consuming however much of it we want, but deliberately dismissing pop culture doesn’t mean that a lot of other people are not interacting with it and is therefore undeserving of any inquiry. And if that doesn’t convince you, just like the once-unavoidable millennial pink, simply sticking our collective heads in the sand will not mean that wider societal-level ugliness is going to disappear anytime soon.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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The Linux Foundation has partnered with edX to update the Open Source Jobs Report, which was last produced in 2018. The report examines the latest trends in open source careers, which skills are in demand, what motivates open source job seekers, and how employers can attract and retain top talent. In the age of COVID-19, this data will be especially insightful both for companies looking to hire more open source talent, as well as individuals looking to advance or change careers.
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Security
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Data encryption has never been more important. New data protection and privacy regulations, such as GDPR, mean that companies storing unencrypted customer information are vulnerable to paying heavy fines. The public is now more aware of the importance of encryption, with massive data breaches impacting companies like Facebook receiving major media coverage.
With these issues in mind, it’s only natural that many of us want to start encrypting our sensitive data – both at work and at home. But how exactly should you go about it? This blog aims to answer that question by showing Linux users how to install and set up encryption on their systems.
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Security updates have been issued by openSUSE (cacti, cacti-spine, go1.13, SUSE Manager Client Tools, and tomcat), Red Hat (postgresql-jdbc and python-pillow), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (python-Django and python-Pillow), and Ubuntu (clamav, librsvg, libslirp, linux-gke-5.0, linux-oem-osp1, linux-hwe, linux-azure-5.3, linux-gcp-5.3, linux-gke-5.3, linux-hwe, linux-oracle-5.3, and sqlite3).
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TRAMPFD aims to better secure trampoline code used by the likes of GCC nested functions and the Foreign Function Interface library (libffi) where the pages with the instructions tend to be mapped with execute permissions. While there are Linux security modules and SELinux that try to protect against pages that have both write and execute permissions, Microsoft’s Madhavan Venkatarama is aiming to provide a way to safely execute trampolines without making any security exceptions and to further reduce the potential attack surface.
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For years, the Peerlyst social network has been a resource for software developers looking for a job or cybersecurity enthusiasts wanting to host meet-ups across the world. But on Aug. 27, the website will shut down, Peerlyst founder Limor Elbaz said Monday, citing financial pressure.
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Nextcloud GmbH, the company behind the worlds’ most deployed on-premises content collaboration platform, announces the immediate availability of Nextcloud Forms. Similar to Google Forms, this app makes it easy to create surveys for anything from market research or customer feedback to planning an office party. Privacy is an issue with surveys, as a third of people who abandon a form do so for privacy and security reasons. With Nextcloud Forms, data remains secure on the Nextcloud server and the privacy of respondents is respected.
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Have you ever filled in a form using Google Forms, Typeform or any other SaaS platform? How was the experience like? Did it leave you worried about your security and privacy as a surveyed participant?
Well, here is some good news for surveyors! Nextcloud GmbH has announced Nextcloud Forms—an integrated platform to build a variety of forms, gather data, view and export it! The best part: no data leaves the Nextcloud server.
Similar to Google Forms, this app makes it easy to create surveys for anything from market research or customer feedback to planning an office party.
Privacy is an issue with surveys, as a third of people who abandon a form do so for privacy and security reasons. With Nextcloud Forms, data is said to remain secure on the Nextcloud server and the privacy of respondents respected.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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The EU is doubling down on reducing migration from Africa, funding both voluntary return programmes for those stranded along migration routes before they reach Europe while also doing its best to increase the number of rejected asylum seekers it is deporting.
The two approaches serve the same purpose for Brussels, but the amount of support provided by the EU and international aid groups for people to get back on their feet is radically different depending on whether they are voluntary returnees or deportees.
For now, the coronavirus pandemic has slowed voluntary return programmes and significantly reduced the number of people being deported from EU countries, such as Germany. Once travel restrictions are lifted, however, the EU will likely resume its focus on both policies.
The EU has made Nigeria one of five priority countries in Africa in its efforts to reduce the flow of migrants and asylum seekers. This has involved pouring hundreds of millions of euros into projects in Nigeria to address the “root causes” of migration and funding a “voluntary return” programme run by the UN’s migration agency, IOM.
Since its launch in 2017, more than 80,000 people, including 16,800 Nigerians, have been repatriated to 23 African countries after getting stuck or having a change of heart while travelling along often-dangerous migration routes connecting sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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ENDRA Life Sciences Inc. (NDRA) share are up around 7.21% in Friday market trading with stock price surged as much as 12.0% to hit day high of $1.09, before returning a portion of gains to finally trade around $1.04 in the green before the closing bell in New York.
About a week ago, the company announced that it has been issued a European Patent 3328285 from the European Patent Office (EPO). Moreover, recently, a member of ENDRA’s Board of Directors, Sanjiv ‘Sam’ Gambhir passed away on July 18 as the company mourns on his passing.
With the issuance of European Patent, it will allow ENDRA to expand TAEUS’s coverage across Europe that is covered in the related U.S. patent, US10022107. The following patent covers ENDRA’s method and network that will enhance the image quality of ultrasound and spatial resolution in tissues. ENDRA’s ultrasound method also reduces the computation-time which is used to correct for fat-related aberrations.
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