FreeBSD Qt WebEngine GPU Acceleration, the grind of FreeBSD’s wireless stack, thoughts on overlooking Illumos's syseventadm, when Unix learned to reboot, New EXT2/3/4 File-System driver in DragonflyBSD, and more.
helm, jenkins, ansible, documentation, mudds, roleplaying games
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which there is seemingly a theme but it’s wholly coincidental, succulent flaky pastry is mentioned...
In this video, we are looking at MX Linux 19.2 KDE (we created a tutorial before but we made some mistakes so an updated run through was due).
In this video, we are looking at Freespire 6.0.3.
Unfettered Freedom is a video podcast that focuses on news and topics about GNU/Linux, free software and open source software. On this freedom-packed episode: 0:00 - Intro 1:38 - Facebook becomes platinum member of Linux Foundation.
I was recently interviewed by Rocco, the host of the BigDaddyLinux podcast!
It's fair to say that my motivation for keeping up with linux kernel development has been flagging for some time now and the current world situation is not helping. Hearing the news extol the virtues of linux-5.8 being the "biggest release ever" does not particularly aid my situation.
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As time goes on and more and more features get added to the scheduler that have nothing to do with ordinary desktop and mobile platform usage, at some stage distributions will be tempted to become dependent on one or more of those features and if I don't develop MuQSS much further to incorporate my own version of those features, it will become redundant. Given the completely different scheduler architecture of MuQSS versus CFS means I can't simply just port over the code most of the time; I have to write my own complete feature equivalent version and these are far from trivial. The accounting code is completely different, most of the CGROUP features aren't even implemented, and deadline scheduling is not available at all for example. If more of these appear in the future and eventually become showstoppers, then unless some miracle happens to make me find the motivation to work on them, it will be the death of it.
Longtime independent Linux kernel developer Con Kolivas known for his work previously on the BFS scheduler and now the MuQSS scheduler as well as his out-of-tree "-ck" patch set is becoming increasingly concerned over the growing size of the kernel code-base and that ultimately could put an end to his work with a focus on greater desktop interactivity/performance.
Kolivas stopped contributing to the mainline Linux kernel a decade ago but has continued maintaining the "-ck" patch-set for each new kernel release as well as working on the likes of the Brain Fuck Scheduler and Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler. Generally he's been quite punctual in re-basing the work for new kernel releases aside from when the retired anaesthesiologist took a break earlier this year to design equipment for the COVID-19 battle. But now his latest battle is the increasing size of the Linux kernel that often brings core infrastructure changes as opposed to just new drivers.
We are very pleased to announce that our final schedule is public!
Hi everyone,
I'd like to announce Mesa 20.1.6, the sixth bugfix release for the 20.1 branch.
The next bugfix release is planned for 2 weeks from now, on 2020-09-02.
Cheers, Eric
The bi-weekly release cycle of the latest Mesa 20.1 open source graphics stack for the Linux desktop continues with Mesa 20.1.6, the latest stable Vulkan/OpenGL graphics drivers update.
As with all point releases, Mesa 20.1.6 is here to add yet another layer of bug fixes in an attempt to further improve the overall performance, stability and reliability of the included graphics drivers for AMD Radeon and Intel graphics.
Once again, it looks like the Mesa development team concentrated their efforts to improve the RADV Vulkan driver for AMD Radeon graphics cards. For example, Mesa 20.1.6 improves support for the World War Z third-person shooter in the RADV driver by overriding the uniform buffer offset alignment.
While the feature rich Mesa 20.2 should be christened as stable within the next couple of weeks, Mesa 20.1.6 is out today as for what is now the newest bi-weekly stable point release for this collection of open-source OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.
Even though Mesa 20.1.x is getting late in the series, a number of fixes continue to land. This time around for Mesa 20.1.6 there are a number of fixes for the Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV", including a fix for handling World War Z under Wine / Steam Play. That fix for World War Z not only consisted of RADV changes itself but also DriConf handling update to support the selection of the workaround based upon the Vulkan "applicationName" field. That infrastructure may help in adapting other game-specific Vulkan workarounds moving forward.
There is a common misconception that the official AMD Radeon open-source Vulkan driver "AMDVLK" doesn't support FreeSync / Variable Rate Refresh, but that is actually inaccurate as the support was merged earlier this year albeit never announced or made it into the release notes.
Going on for years have been bug reports and feature requests pertaining to FreeSync / VRR / Adaptive-Sync being missing / not supported by AMDVLK as the official open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux.
In the course of working on some code to introduce more granular resource-based pipeline barriers for synchronization, I rediscovered some parts of the xfb implementation we have that use barriers, and this got me thinking about our barrier usage in general for buffer resources.
In the past few weeks, I have been combing two issues on vkms: development of writeback support and alpha blending. I try to keep activities in parallel so that one can recover me from any tiredness from the other :P
Alpha blending is a TODO[1] of the VKMS that possibly could solve the warning[2] triggered in the cursor-alpha-transparent testcase. And, you know, if you still have a warning, you still have work.
With Intel's Lakefield and the future Alder Lake with their hybrid x86 architecture mixing of "little" and "big" cores, operating system optimizations become all the more important and thus will be interesting to see how the battle is between Windows and Linux.
At last week's Intel Architecture Day there was one slide in particular calling out to the "OS optimizations" with hybrid architectures. In that context it was for Lakefield and the mentioned OS optimizations were on Windows.
As alluded to previously, a major overhaul of OpenBenchmarking.org has been in the works for a number of months now including a completely brand new analytics engine as part of the Phoronix Test Suite 10.0 development with its release due out later this year. With the new OpenBenchmarking.org now in good enough shape at least for the internal infrastructure, this new version is being opened up to the public today while over the weeks ahead more features will continue to be flipped on.
The first development release of the forthcoming Phoronix Test Suite 10.0-Finnsnes is now available for evaluation for this open-source, cross-platform, fully-automated benchmarking software framework.
KeePassXC, a community fork of KeePassX password manager, released version 2.6.1 today with some new features, improvements, and various fixes.
It’s like if the whole MUD explosion — all the DikuMUDs, TinyMUDs, MUCKs, MUSHs, MOOs, etc — was all happening inside a single platform, and you could freely jump between worlds with your friends, or create your own.
This is what 150 million monthly active users are playing, most of them children. Roblox is a MUD for the TikTok generation.
The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe has been delayed again into 2021. Sadly we've got a while to wait for more amusing endings to the first-person exploration game.
Wait, what? The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe is an upcoming expansion to the original game with more content, more endings, more whimsical adventures of the two best friends Stanley and The Narrator. It's a continuation of the collaboration between Davey Wreden and William Pugh, who were the creators of the original Stanley Parable. William’s studio Crows Crows Crows will be designing, developing and publishing.
Coming at some point later this year is art of rally, a top-down rally experience from Funselektor Labs and they have a brand new trailer up.
Unlike other racing sims, it's not meant to be ultra-realistic. While it does have a pretty great handling model, which was overhauled from their previous game Absolute Drift, the focus here is more on fun. That goes hand in hand with the view point, being top-down means you get a good look at what's ahead so all types of players from beginners to experts at driving games can get in and get going.
Coming from the mind of indie dev David Shaw, The Long Gate looks like an incredibly promising puzzle game that touches on unique quantum-based puzzles. These puzzles definitely have my curiosity, as Shaw worked directly with an actual actual quantum-computing company: D-Wave on them.
Apart from GNOME, KDE Plasma is one of the powerful and dominant desktop environments that boasts a stunning appearance with polished icons and an amazing look-and-feel. KDE Plasma has evolved and is more crisp and elegant as ever.
This review takes a deep dive into some of the Best Linux distros that can support KDE Plasma 5.
Kali Linux is the best penetration testing distribution with hundreds of tools for testing different devices and services. In Kali Linux 2020.3 update, the team has made several important changes to Kali that make it much better.
Kali Linux is a free and open-source penetration testing Linux distribution built by Offensive Security. The distribution can be installed on various devices including smartphones and Raspberry PI.
Wireless fidelity, or Wi-Fi, is a type of technology employed to provide connectivity to a computer network without a cable or hardwired connection. Wi-Fi works within the 2.4 Ghz to 5 Ghz range and should not interfere with cellphones, broadcast radio, television, or handheld radios. Wi-Fi functions by transmitting data over radio waves between a client device and a device called a router. A router can transmit data to systems internally, or externally to the Internet. Wi-Fi is neither more nor less secure than a traditional hard-wired network but is instead a completely different interface. The most important thing to remember is that Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) was released in 1997 and is easy to break into. WEP can be broken in minutes or less. Your modern devices will not work with the WEP network and most routers no longer support it. The updated WEP can also be broken into through hacking methods.
This article will provide you complete information about XFCE and how to run XFCE in Kali Linux. XFCE is an older project of 1966. Oliver Fourdan, the creator of XFCE, launched XFCE for the first time. His idea was to produce a new version of Linux to run on the desktop environment. XFCE was originally an acronym for X to form a common environment. The OS was based on a project at the time called X forms, which ended up being some of the original downfalls of the early adoption of XSCE because X forms have a license similar to the WPS office. It is not entirely free and open-source, but it is free to use on a personal computer. When XFCE was first included inside Debian and Red Hat, it was rejected. Because it was based on X form, this caused a bit of a problem for the developer. Oliver Fourdan decided to go back in 1999 with version 3 of XFCE, which finally started to take off. XFCE version 4 is the most recent version released. XFCE allows you to use all the functions available on the desktop environment. This is one of its best features.
This year the FreeBSD Foundation is celebrating its 20th anniversary. To commemorate those years of dedication to open source, we are going to take a look at the history of FreeBSD and what exactly the FreeBSD Foundation does. Join me, won’t you?
Unix first appeared when God delivered the source code to the chosen people after they had fled Egypt. Okay, maybe that’s not exactly how that happened (but I’m sure a few greybeards think that is how it happened.).
Waterfox Classic is a free and open source web browser based on Firefox but with additional optimizations for better performance.
Oracle is pleased to announce the availability of the Oracle Linux 7 Update 9 Beta Release for the 64-bit Intel and AMD (x86_64) and 64-bit Arm (aarch64) platforms. Oracle Linux 7 Update 9 Beta is an update release that includes bug fixes, security fixes, and enhancements. The beta release allows Oracle partners and customers to test these capabilities before Oracle Linux 7 Update 9 becomes generally available. It is 100% application binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Update 9 Beta. Updates include...
This week I ported nbdkit, our high performance plugin-based Network Block Device server, to Windows. Currently it’s not upstream but you can download the Windows branch from here.
Red Hat’s partner ecosystem plays an important role in enabling customer success and solving industry problems. As key players in digital transformation, Red Hat partners help organizations and businesses navigate the ever-changing IT landscape through open source solutions.
The Red Hat Asia Pacific Partner Awards 2020 recognize commercial and public sector partners for their continued efforts to develop innovative solutions using Red Hat technologies to meet customers needs and improve business outcomes. This year’s partner award winners have not only acted as catalysts for customer success, but have been important multipliers of enterprise open source by adopting Red Hat solutions, from emerging technologies to hybrid cloud infrastructure. In today’s evolving marketplace, it is more important than ever to work openly and collaboratively to generate meaningful results for organizations throughout their cloud journey.
Selected based on their commitment to innovation, dedication to driving change with open source, and demonstration of collaborative and transparent working ecosystems, we are pleased to announce this year’s Red Hat Asia Pacific Partner Award winners:
As a principal engineer in Red Hat IT focused on container platforms, I know the benefits of using Red Hat OpenShift firsthand and the value it gives to our organization. Since our OpenShift services were first deployed in August 2016, we have seen many key improvements, such as shorter cycle time from code to production, higher density of applications, and better standardization of application architectures.
While these successes were important, we knew we had to face our next frontier. Other business drivers were pushing us to deploy OpenShift across a hybrid cloud environment. These factors included improved multi-site resiliency, the ability to support burst resources on public cloud, avoiding vendor lock-in, and being able to use the most cost-effective infrastructure possible. In addition, with OpenShift being the abstraction layer for public and private cloud, we also needed to offer our application teams an OpenShift interface to the entire hybrid cloud environment so that they could meet the evolving business requirements for their applications.
Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.
RPM of PHP version 7.4.10RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 32 or remi-php74-test repository for Fedora 30-31 and Enterprise Linux 7-8.
Fedora is a Red Hat-sponsored community project that develops a bleeding-edge Linux-based operating system. Fedora 32 is the current stable version released on April 28, 2020.
Continuing the development cycle, the community is already working towards the release of the next stable Fedora 33. Hence, in this article, I’ll list down all the new changes that are confirmed to be available in Fedora 33.
For the past few years there has been a Fedora spin for the "Internet of Things" while with Fedora 33 this autumn the Fedora IoT version is being promoted to an official edition.
As outlined earlier this month, Fedora IoT Edition has matured well and sought promotion this Fedora 33 cycle to become an official spin. Fedora IoT relies upon RPM-OSTree for offering atomic updates, focuses on container-based workloads, and other changes that differentiate it from other Fedora spins while catering for IoT use-cases from industrial gateways to smart city devices.
Messaging is vital to how enterprises work because it underpins many essential tasks that a business has to deal with, such as employee records, customer transactions, or banking. Without messaging, it would be nearly impossible to do these simple tasks safely and securely.
In spite of messaging being so fundamental to the world of computing, it receives little coverage in the classroom, even at the university level. As a result, messaging can seem unfamiliar and inaccessible.
Ever wished messaging software could be easy to use? In the IBM MQ Developer Experience team, we challenged ourselves to make MQ simple enough to use that our team lead’s nine-and-a-half-year-old could write an MQ program. To make this possible, we wrote an extension for Scratch that uses the IBM MQ REST API to send messages. What we ended up with was a great tool to help people to easily understand messaging in general and IBM MQ in particular.
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from Cockpit version 226 and Cockpit Podman version 22.
Depoorter’s “24h Sunrise/Sunset” project uses a pair of Raspberry Pi 3Bs to show the images, and send time and location data to an Arduino Nano Every over serial. The Nano Every then reveals this info on four VFD displays on the console, giving onlookers a frame of reference.
As 2020 comes to a close, it is time to bring you the best 10 Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) programs I have come across during this year.
Some of these programs may not be new in that they weren’t released for the first time in 2020, but they are new to me and I have found them helpful.
A few days ago, we got a backup Internet service at home. I connected both the DSL and the cable modem to the same laptop, configured the routes with weights according to the bandwidth expected from each of them, configured Tor exit node to use only the address where it has not given me headaches, adjusted some scripts to detect port shuffling at reboots, and watched as it worked just as I expected.
Well, almost. The new service also assigned an IPv6 address to the interface connected to it. The old service was supposed to support IPv6, but somehow it would never be assigned. Turns out that, with the new service in place, the old one also started assigning IPv6 to its interface.
I didn't used to monitor the old interface very much. I used to have only SSH and Tor ports open, and the new service did not even offer incoming connections (thanks OpenVPN and Tor's Onion Services for independently enabling me to get in from the outside), but did IPv6 change it?
Though tcpdump is my friend, two ports and all of the noise from Tor and from regular family use makes it all a little more interesting to monitor. Nothing jumped at me for several days.
The other day, my primary laptop seems to have overheated and died. Next day, after I failed to bring it back with parts from another dead sibling, I got its disk and RAM onto another old backup laptop to go online, and then another similar old laptop that plays the role of home gateway spontaneously restarted. Maybe a power fluke and a bad battery, but... Weird...
Community is the cornerstone of what makes open source work so well, in part because innovation thrives on diversity of thought. I am always looking for inquisitive people who share clever ideas and question technology's status quo. Here are nine people in my feed who inspire my love for learning.
KeePassXC 2.6.1 is the first point release in the latest stable KeePassXC 2.6 series, which was released last month, and introduces several new features, such as support for the Xfce screensaver, a new command for retrieving the current TOTP (Time-based One-time Password) value, as well as a new option for auto-typing only the username or password on websites.
For Linux systems, KeePassXC 2.6.1 also introduces OARS (Open Age Ratings Service) metadata that can be used by GNOME Software and KDE’s Discover package managers, as well as web frontends like Flathub. Also, the man pages have been improved with useful links and a copyright section.
New features in this Nextcloud release include end-to-end encryption and a new user interface, which provides deeper integration of Nextcloud Hub on the desktop and lets desktop users more easily access Talk and other apps on the Nextcloud server.
The new end-to-end encryption feature minimizes the need for user interaction or extra work, according to the announcement, and key sharing is handled seamlessly by the server for intuitive syncing. The encryption feature is also supported in the latest releases of Nextcloud’s Android and iOS Files clients.
Accurics unveiled a major upgrade to Terrascan, the open source static code analyzer that enables developers to build secure infrastructure as code (IaC).
In order to contribute to the European Commission public consultation regarding the update of the "Intellectual Property (IP)" regulatory system, the FSFE has published a first feedback. Based on its world-wide experience with Free Software, the FSFE calls for a more inclusive and decentralized regulatory system that allows sustainable knowledge sharing and intangible wealth.
The European Commission has launched an evaluation on the update of the European "intellectual property" regulatory system. In order to contribute to a fair and inclusive assessment, the FSFE took a stand against the expansion of copyrights, patents and trade secrets. We understand that expanding their scope of protection does not necessarily lead to innovation, competition and progress. Instead, increasing patentable or copyrightable matter could rather have the effect of stagnating sustainable innovation by limiting access and improvements to know-how, raising unfairness, and leading to stronger monopolies.
The FSFE urges the Commission to question the outdated notion that expanding monopolies over knowledge means more progress, consider whether EU companies will really benefit under these regulatory tools, and question the existing trend to expand state granted monopolies on software.
Medical imaging applications are a necessity in research and clinical practice. However, unlike years ago there are medical imaging specific frameworks that ease the development of medical imaging applications.
Kotlin has become one of the fastest-growing languages on GitHub and now ranks as one of the top five most-loved languages by developers who use Stack Overflow, while ranking 19th on RedMonk's list of most popular languages.
In 1972, Dennis Ritchie was at Bell Labs, where a few years earlier, he and his fellow team members invented Unix. After creating an enduring OS (still in use today), he needed a good way to program those Unix computers so that they could perform new tasks. It seems strange now, but at the time, there were relatively few programming languages; Fortran, Lisp, Algol, and B were popular but insufficient for what the Bell Labs researchers wanted to do.
As announced on TPF news the Marketing committee of TPF have been running a survey "to learn your responses to the ideas about branding, naming and the perceptions of the values concerning the Perl Foundation itself."
On 2020-08-13, we deployed an update that caused users whose full names contain non-ASCII characters (which is of course very common) to be unable to log into Launchpad. We heard about this serious regression from users on 2020-08-17, and rolled out a fix on 2020-08-18. We’re sorry about this; it doesn’t meet the standards of both inclusion and quality that we set for ourselves. This post aims to explain what happened, technical details of why it happened, and the steps we’ve taken to avoid it happening again.
Launchpad still runs on Python 2. This is a problem, and we’ve been gradually chipping away at it for the last couple of years. With about three-quarters of a million lines of Python code in the main tree and over 200 dependencies, it’s a big job – but we’re well underway!
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python-openid2 uses its openid.urinorm module to normalise parts of the response, decoding and re-encoding it to make sure comparisons work as expected; this is built on top of the URL handling code in Python’s standard library. Now, unlike Python 3, Python 2’s urlencode has undocumented restrictions on values in the query argument: if the doseq argument is False (the default), then it converts values using str(v), while if it’s True then it converts Unicode values using v.encode("ASCII", "replace") (potentially losing information!). In this case, doseq is False, and the input given to it is always text (unicode on Python 2): this works fine if the input is within the ASCII subset, but if it’s not...
Machine learning and data science come with a set of problems that are different from what you’ll find in traditional software engineering. Version control systems help developers manage changes to source code. But data version control, managing changes to models and datasets, isn’t so well established.
It’s not easy to keep track of all the data you use for experiments and the models you produce. Accurately reproducing experiments that you or others have done is a challenge. Many teams are actively developing tools and frameworks to solve these problems.
I announced this a few days back on Twitter, this is just a quick additional blog post to announce Django Views - The Right Way. It’s an opinionated guide to writing views in Django that I’ve been working on for a few months.
This is the final week of the GSoC 2020 Coding Period. It has been a great journey so far and more importantly, I got to learn a lot.
Google's Chromium Project has acknowledged its growing interest in adding more Rust code to the mostly C++ Chromium codebase.
Rust is an open-source systems-oriented programming language championed by Mozilla that's known for its memory safety, a characteristic of particular interest to developers interested in browser security.
The Chromium team makes clear that C++ is "the ruler" and that its current interest is having Rust code make calls into existing C++ rather than the other way around. But its recognition of Rust as a subordinate language suggests that Google devs want Rust to play a more prominent role in the Chromium court.
"Chrome engineers are experimenting with Rust," the techies declared in documentation this month about Rust and C++ interoperability. "For the foreseeable future, C++ is the reigning monarch in our codebase, and any use of Rust will need to fit in with C++ — not the other way around. This seems to present some C++/Rust interoperability challenges which nobody else has faced."
The Rust programming language doesn't just aim to be practical, it also aims to be useful for the people working with it. Not only does this improve productivity, it also helps learning the language! One of the features I want to pick out: the borrow checker of the Rust compiler. This feature helps to avoid a great number of memory related bugs by enforcing correct memory allocation and use of pointers. At the same time, it also seems to be the source for a lot of frustration. This is reflected in in a phrase we often see: "fighting the compiler".
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that occurs when an individual, communicating with other individuals, unknowingly assumes that the others have the background to understand.
Across the U.S., the push to reopen schools is predicated on troubling beliefs about schools and families. Time at home is assumed to result in “learning loss” because our institutions measure learning and achievement by standardized test scores, and do not consider students’ families as a source of education. Besides chasing test score gains, the driving goal for reopening schools is facilitating parents’ return to work — regardless of the health consequences for all involved.
We know that learning to code is difficult and as a beginner, you face a lot of challenges. But if you learn to overcome these barriers, you get a lot of good benefits to it. You become a more independent coder, you make progress faster, you enjoy learning experience much more and in the future, you don’t give up easily on coding whenever you’re stuck. In this blog, we will talk about some obstacles which most of the learners face, and we will discuss some tips to overcome with it…
Many campus resources will remain available even as classes shift online. Research labs, core facilities and libraries will be open to graduate students, faculty and staff. The school's testing center and quarantine and isolation facilities will be operational. And varsity sports teams can continue to gather for approved activities, as long as athletes and staff are subject to routine surveillance testing.
UNC was forced to cancel in-person classes and switch to remote learning after at least 130 students tested positive for Covid-19 in the first week of classes. As of Monday morning, 954 students were tested, 177 students were put in isolation and another 349 in quarantine.
The administration continues to prove they have no shame, and the bar for basic decency keeps getting lower.
They chose to ignore the Orange County Health Department, which recommended that the University restrict on-campus housing to at-risk students and implement online-only instruction for the first five weeks of the semester. They chose to ignore the guidance of the CDC, which placed the University’s housing plan in the "highest-risk" category.
Even faculty — though many of them continued to teach classes in-person — saw it coming.
On the second night of a Democratic National Convention where party leaders have gone out of their way to foster an image of unity, Democrats nominated Joe Biden for the presidency and then he moderated a discussion about expanding access to health care.
As the Democratic Party formally selected Joe Biden as its nominee for president at the virtual Democratic National Convention, one of those who joined in the call to elect him was activist Ady Barkan, who is paralyzed and unable to speak due to terminal ALS. Barkan is a leading advocate of Medicare for All and has publicly challenged Biden, who does not support Medicare for All. “We live in the richest country in history. And yet we do not guarantee this most basic human right. Everyone living in America should get the healthcare they need, regardless of their employment status or ability to pay,” Barkan said, using computer assistance.
As the Democratic Party formally selected Joe Biden as its nominee for president at the virtual Democratic National Convention, one of those who joined in the call to elect him was activist Ady Barkan, who is paralyzed and unable to speak due to terminal ALS. Barkan is a leading advocate of Medicare for All and has publicly challenged Biden, who does not support Medicare for All. “We live in the richest country in history. And yet we do not guarantee this most basic human right. Everyone living in America should get the healthcare they need, regardless of their employment status or ability to pay,” Barkan said, using computer assistance.
Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, politicians from both parties are scapegoating youth—just as they’ve done before with crime and€ drugs.
"Many of the state's 2.89 million registered voters will be forced to make an unconscionable choice between voting and maintaining their health and safety," said the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
Several developing countries, terrified about increasing their spending, are opting for continuing with devastating fiscal austerity measures. This is a mistake we cannot afford. Tax avoidance champions must pay their fair share.
When I was trying to decide what to write about today, the obvious choice was the new nonsense that popped up a couple of days ago, namely the pivot of Donald Trump’s sycophants, toadies, and lackeys from pushing the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine (a drug for which the randomized clinical trials being published over the last couple of months have been uniformly negative) to treat COVID-19 to pushing oleandrin, a potentially toxic extract from oleander, by MyPillow.com founder and CEO Mike Lindell and—surprise! surprise!—former neurosurgeon and Presidential candidate and now Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson, whose propensity for quackery and pandering to antivaccine pseudoscience I’ve documented before. (Carson is a perfect example of why intelligent people are not necessarily skeptics and most physicians are not scientists.) Why? Because apparently there is a preprint (i.e., not peer-reviewed science) concluding that oleander extract can kill SARS-CoV-2 in Vero cells. (Never mind that there are no animal or human data.) However, I was too slow, as Steve Novella and Skeptical Raptor are all over this, and even Anderson Cooper gained many props for slicing and dicing Lindell as a “snake oil salesman” and for having a serious conflict of interest (Lindell is on the board of directors of the company that makes the extract) live on CNN, leaving little left for me. True, that’s never stopped me before (and I might still come back to this topic), but I tend to like to take on topics no one else notices, which brings me to antivaxxers and horseshoe crabs.
Brown-Forman is headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky. Its most famous brand name is Jack Daniel’s Whiskey, though the company also distributes Woodford, Old Forester, Collingwood, Glenglassaugh, and Glendronach whiskey and scotch; Herradura, El Jimador, and Pepe Lopez tequila; Finlandia Vodka; and Sonoma-Cutrer wines.
The ransomware attackers allegedly copied 1TB of the company’s data. Their plan is to sell the most important information to the highest bidder and leak the rest.
The cruise line giant did not identify who was responsible for the ransomware attack. In search of payouts to keep business humming, ransomware gangs have targeted companies in just about every sector.
In fact, CVE-2020-1464 was first spotted in attacks used in the wild back in August 2018. And several researchers informed Microsoft about the weakness over the past 18 months.
At the time, the latest iPod was the fifth-generation iPod, better known as the “iPod with video.” It was relatively easy to pop open the case and close it again without leaving obvious marks, unlike the iPod nano models that became popular shortly after. Plus, the fifth-generation iPod had a 60 GB disk, so there was plenty of room to have lots of songs and still record extra data. And it was the last iPod for which Apple didn’t digitally sign the operating system.
iPod with videoThat was important because it made the fifth-generation iPod somewhat hackable. Hobbyists enjoyed getting Linux to run on iPods, which was hard to do without the special knowledge and tools Apple possessed. We on the iPod engineering team were impressed. But Apple corporate didn’t like it. Starting with the iPod nano, the operating system was signed with a digital signature to block the Linux hackers (and others). The boot ROM checked the digital signature before loading the operating system; if it didn’t match, it wouldn’t boot.
“In this specific attack, we observed the JavaScript blob technique being used to smuggle malicious files via the browser to the user’s endpoint. Constructing content on the client browser like this evades network security solutions such as sandboxes and proxies,” Menlo Security explains.
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For the attack to be successful, however, the victim needs to open the ZIP file and execute the .msi file inside it. Once opened, the file fetches from a remote location another ZIP file that has a .jpg extension, and which contains the malicious payload, Menlo Security reveals.
Then the macro execution is triggered when the document is opened: [...]
Facebook has upgraded its Linux Foundation membership and by doing so will assume a seat on the organisation's board.
Facebook's open-source group has been a long-time member of the Foundation, but has now decided a top-tier platinum membership is its best option. Doing so sees it join the likes of Google, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft, and Intel.
The social media giant contributes to several well-known open-source projects, including the React JavaScript library, the Open Compute Project, and the cGroup2 container software project.
As part of its membership, the company's head of open source, Kathy Kam, will have a seat on the Foundation's board.
In a blog post announcing the membership, the Linux Foundation commended a number of Facebook projects that "leverage open source to unlock the potential of open innovation". This includes Facebook Connectivity, which, together with the open-source Telecom Infra Project Foundation, aims to bring fast, reliable internet to remote areas of the world.
Facebook is the lead contributor to Presto, GraphQL, Osquery, and ONNX, as well as the creator of the PyTorch machine learning library, which is used to create AI in computer vision, natural language processing, and other disciplines.
I just graduated from my internship at Linux Foundation’s Community Bridge program, and I’d like to share my experience and explain why you should also consider applying if you are new to open source or the cloud-native world. I already had some experience with cloud-native projects, I’ve been using cloud-native tools at my workplace for a couple of years. It is thanks to them that I got my first full-time job as an Infrastructure Analyst and later on as a Cloud Architect. And if you are reading this blog post, I assume that you have at least some knowledge about what CNCF does and you do know some of its projects, like Kubernetes and Prometheus, i.e. Even though I had the desire to contribute to open source projects, I was always super cautious and had a false feeling that these projects are super complex and I’m not qualified enough to help. As you will read later, this is far from being true, you can always contribute in some way!
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (ansible, libmetalink, roundcubemail, rubygem-kramdown, sqlite, and swtpm), Slackware (curl), SUSE (python and python3), and Ubuntu (qemu).
Two of the files are a type of malware known as “web shells”: malicious files that, when placed on a server, provide an online entry point through which a hacker can download and upload files or issue commands of their choosing. These backdoors appear with BlueLeaks material obtained from the website of the Arizona High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which is basically Arizona’s fusion center for the drug war. One is called “ntdaddy.aspx” and the other is “blug.aspx.” Their presence has implications for all the affected sites, which were operated by the same company and appear to have run the same software.
Two other files appear to have aided the exfiltration of documents from the servers. The Arizona HIDTA files included a copy of a program for securely transferring files across the internet, which could have been used to move files onto a computer controlled by the hacker. Files for another site, ICEFISHX, Minnesota’s police fusion center, included a copy of a program for compressing files, which would make it much faster for the hacker to upload hundreds of gigabytes of data to their own computer.
A hybrid DDoS botnet known for turning vulnerable Windows devices into Monero cryptomining bots is now also scanning for and infecting Linux systems.
The name Drovorub comes from a variety of artifacts discovered in Drovorub files, Drovo translates to “firewood” or “wood”, while Rub translates to “to fell, or “to chop.” Together, they translate to “woodcutter” or “to split wood.”
Clear Channel, a international traditional advertising company known for its billboards, will be bringing its Radar tracking program to Europe following some tweaks to the program to bring it into compliance with the GDPR. Radar is a program that gives advertisers access to anonymized phone location data of those that pass by billboards with their ads on them and represents the pinnacle of outdoor ad tracking. An advertiser would then be able to retarget people based on if they’ve seen a particular billboard. This program has already been active in the United States for four years.
Californians have a constitutional right to privacy. There is no more important time to protect that right to privacy than during a crisis, such as the current pandemic. That is why EFF, along with the American Civil Liberties Union of California, Media Alliance, Oakland Privacy, Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, and Consumer Reports have called on the state’s political leaders to ensure that any program that asks Californians to share contact tracing information have strong privacy guardrails.
Being upfront and honest about what information contact tracing programs collect, how that information is used, and acting from the start to protect against abuses of that information can protect Californians at a vulnerable time. It can also increase trust in public health programs. The evidence is mounting that people don’t trust—and therefore do not wish to participate in—programs that have not respected privacy from the start. Our groups call on Governor Gavin Newsom, Senate President pro Tempore Toni Atkins, Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, and all members of the California Assembly and Senate to recognize that privacy protections are necessary to public health efforts.
Zoom, the video conferencing app of the COVID era, is about to land on Amazon, Facebook, and Google smart displays.
In a press release, Zoom announced it will make its initial debut on Facebook Portal displays next month, while Zoom integrations for Amazon Echo Show devices and Google Assistant-enabled displays, including the Nest Hub Max, are due this fall.
Yesterday, Facebook infuriated the VR world, announcing plans to require a Facebook login for future VR headsets. The decision broke an early promise from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and was almost universally reviled online, with critics raising concerns about intrusive data collection, targeted advertising, and being forced to use a service they hated. On the Oculus subreddit, some users posted bitter memes about Farmville and data harvesting, while others swapped recommendations for other headsets. One posted a cartoon of Oculus as a sinking ship.
Facebook Inc. won preliminary approval from a judge for a $650 million settlement to resolve claims by users that the company illegally gathered biometric data through a photo-tagging tool.
The decision to move the headquarters comes as Palantir is expected to soon enter the public markets. The company plans to list shares directly in late September, Bloomberg previously reported. Venture investors last valued the company in 2015 at $20 billion, with the value fluctuating since then on the secondary markets.
Originally an acquisition for Facebook, the Oculus Rift and underlying Oculus software ecosystem were initially developed by the then-independent Oculus VR group. After acquiring the company for $2 Billion back in 2014, Facebook has for the last several years largely treated Oculus as a stand-alone entity, selling products under the Oculus brand and leaving Facebook integration an optional feature – a feature co-founder Palmer Luckey even guaranteed during the 2014 acquisition.
None the less, Oculus’s days as a stand-alone ecosystem are now coming to a close, as Facebook has laid out their plans to transition Oculus users over to Facebook accounts, and the significant social media repercussions that entails.
According to Facebook, winding-down Oculus accounts will be a two-part process for the company. Starting in October, all new accounts will need to be Facebook accounts – or more specifically, users will need a Facebook account to log into the Oculus ecosystem. Meanwhile current stand-alone Oculus account holders will be grandfathered in for a time on their existing devices, however any future unreleased devices, even when paired with an existing Oculus account, will still require a Facebook login.
In March, tech publication Protocol reported that multiple government agencies signed millions of dollars worth of deals with Babel Street after the company launched its Locate X product. Multiple sources told the site that Locate X tracks the location of devices anonymously, using data harvested by popular apps installed on peoples' phones.
Protocol found public records showed that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) purchased Locate X. One former Babel Street employee told the publication that the Secret Service used the technology. Now, the document obtained by Motherboard corroborates that finding.
None of Your Business, the privacy NGO established by EPIC Advisory Board member Max Schrems, has filed complaints in all 30 EU and EEA member states against 101 European companies that still forward data about each visitor to Google and Facebook. [...]
The complaints are against Google, Facebook, and major Web sites in European countries that use Google Analytics or Facebook Connect to track visitors to their sites. These systems send data about EU citizens to Google and Facebook, which then forward data to the US, thus contravening the GDPR in the light of last month’s CJEU ruling.
As this blog pointed out back then, there is another important element of the CJEU judgment. The data protection authorities in EU countries now have a “duty to act”. That is, it is not optional whether they pursue companies that are violating the GDPR: the court says they must. That’s a crucial change from the present situation, where the authorities in some countries have decided to let things carry on despite evident GDPR infringements. In his latest legal action, Schrems has said that he will be putting pressure not just on companies, but also directly on the national data protection authorities that fail to act: “We will gradually take steps against controllers and processors that violate the GDPR and against authorities that do not enforce the Court’s ruling, like the Irish [Data Protection Commission] that stays dormant.”
Argentino told The Beast, "The violence we've seen has been by people without acumen and physical training. Where it could get scary is with people who do have training."
The removals coincide with a new, broader moderation policy detailed in a blog post published today regarding how Facebook handles borderline violent content, with a specific focus on QAnon and “US-based militia organizations.” Now, the social network says it will be purposefully disabling these groups’ ability to organize on Facebook, but not banning the topics they organize around outright as they often do not call directly for real-world violence.
Facebook said it removed hundreds of Facebook Pages, groups and Instagram accounts tied to conspiracy-theorist cult QAnon as well as those of “offline anarchist groups” including those that identify with the Antifa movement.
The social giant said that it is restricting such groups’ ability to organize on its platforms, saying it will allow users to post content that “supports these movements and groups” — but only as long as they do not otherwise violate Facebook content policies. As part of the crackdown, Facebook also blocked hashtags associated with QAnon as well as those connected to Antifa and other violent groups.
An inept, out-of-touch government led by a southern elite has done little to stop escalating jihadist violence—and even less to deal with its root causes. In the first half of 2020 more than 1,800 people were killed in fights involving jihadists and ethnic militias, almost as many as were killed in 2019 (see map). The presence of Western forces, 15,000 UN peacekeepers and an EU-led training mission has not stopped the bloodshed. Malian efforts to arm local militias have made matters worse.
Navalny is said to be unconscious and was placed on a ventilator in an intensive care unit. According to Yarmysh, he must have consumed something from the tea he drank this morning.
While QAnon has been seen as a fringe movement for years, researchers and experts say it has emerged in recent months as a sort of centralized hub for utterly false conspiracy and alternative health communities. The group has been linked to several violent, criminal incidents, including a train hijacking, kidnappings, a police chase and a murder.
You will recall the brief clusterfuck that occurred earlier this month in Georgia's Paulding County. The school district there, which opened back up for in-person classes while making wearing a mask completely optional, also decided to suspend two students who took and posted pictures of crowded hallways filled with maskless students. While the district dressed these suspensions up as consequences for using a smartphone on school grounds, the school's administration gave the game away by informing all students that they would be disciplined for any criticism by students on social media in general. That, as we pointed out, is a blatant First Amendment violation.
NBC News had originally posted a (since-deleted) tweet highlighting that Ocasio-Cortez didn’t endorse Biden in “one of the shortest speeches of the DNC” and quoted her seconding the nomination of Sanders. The network has since issued clarifications, writing that they should’ve included more detail on the nomination process and that the Sanders nomination was a procedural move and AOC has already endorsed Biden. But Ocasio-Cortez blasted them for the original angle.
This story is being co-published by The Guardian, The Nation, and Columbia Journalism Review as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 400 news outlets committed to transforming news coverage of the defining story of our time.
Amid the rubble of uprooted trees and fallen power lines, my teenage son set up his climate strike protest last Friday for the 79th consecutive week, holding up a wobbly handmade sign: “Wake up, Iowa. Climate action plan now.”
Environmentalists reacted with outrage late Tuesday to news that the Democratic National Committee this week quietly removed from the final party platform an amendment calling for an end to federal subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, a longstanding demand of climate activists that both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris supported during the primary.
Since the turn of the new century, every aspect of climate change has gone ballistic, up, up, and away, not looking back, leaving the 20th century fairly harmless, but only on a relative basis, especially as compared to the rip-snorting 21st century. It’s a whole new ballgame, starting with this new century.
"We still have the future in our own hands. But time is rapidly slipping through our fingers."
Net Zero: How we stop causing climate change. A new book makes it sound almost easy. Well, it’s not impossible.
Thousands of people were under orders to evacuate in regions surrounding the San Francisco Bay Area Wednesday as nearly 40 wildfires blazed across the state amid a blistering heat wave now in its second week. Smoke blanketed the city of San Francisco.
Thousands of residents have sued the state. Former Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and retired Judge Pamela Harwood of the Wayne County Circuit Court have mediated the ongoing battle over the crisis. Under the final settlement, which must still be approved by a judge, anyone who lived in Flint would be eligible for a payout. The state is expected to begin paying out the settlement beginning next spring, according to the Times.
A month after a New Jersey senate committee passed a resolution calling on the state to take this kind of legal action, New Jersey’s Monmouth University hosted a virtual panel discussion on Wednesday, August 19 titled “Accountability for Climate Change Harms in New Jersey: Scientific, Legal and Policy Perspectives.” The discussion was intended to outline the case for New Jersey to file a climate accountability lawsuit ahead of the full state senate voting on the resolution, which could come later this€ month.
“It would only take 22 tank cars to hold the equivalent energy of the Hiroshima bomb,” Jordan Luebkemann, an Earthjustice attorney, said in a statement. “It’s unbelievably reckless to discard the critical, long-standing safety measures we have in place to protect the public from this dangerous€ cargo.
He told Milenio that when the navy showed up during an oil rig attack two years ago, pirates shot at the marines, precipitating a gunfight between the two parties. The shootout caused “a lot of tension” among the workers on the oil rig, Gómez said, because an errant bullet “could cause a huge explosion.”
Fossil fuel subsidies cost the US between $20 to $649 billion each year, according to different estimates. Ending those subsidies has become a key proposal among progressive and establishment Democrats as the climate crisis looms, as a budget-saving way of fighting climate change. The Trump administration has remained focused on financially supporting the oil and gas industries.
This hasn’t been a great week for America’s college football coaches. The prospect of losing the€ entire 2020 college football season to the coronavirus has a ton of them fuming.
One story of surviving as an artist in the USA, from the collapse of the music industry to the housing crisis to the pandemic.
When James Shelby, a Black St. Louis native who goes by the name Qadhafi, finally took off the shoes he had been wearing since he walked out of prison, his feet were bleeding. It was August of 2019, and he’d been walking from bus stop to bus stop for five days, through Kansas City’s summer rainstorms and muggy heat, trying to find a place to sleep without drawing the attention of the police or anyone else who might send him back to jail. He was 58 years old, and after over two decades of incarceration he was homeless—a condition he was beginning to think his arrest record might keep him in forever.
"Everybody is fundamentally watching the beginning of the dismantling of the Postal Service," one veteran postal worker said.€
This fall’s elections are the latest chapter in the slow-motion collapse of the U.S. Postal Service, one of America’s most venerated institutions. As November approaches, members of Congress and state election officials have grown increasingly concerned that the USPS will fail at a critical moment: a closely contested vote that will involve a record number of people casting a ballot by mail.
That worry was fueled by President Donald Trump’s unfounded allegation that voting by mail leads to massive fraud and by reports from Postal Service employees that key equipment was being removed and overtime was being slashed. The newly appointed postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, responded to what he termed “areas of concern” by announcing that he would approve overtime “as needed” and delay the removal of mail sorting machines until after the election. But the problems at the Postal Service go well beyond those issues and predate DeJoy. Earlier this month, the USPS warned state election officials that it might not be able to meet deadlines for delivering ballots for the November elections.
After massive public outcry against cuts to mail service ahead of November’s election, Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has announced he will suspend changes to the U.S. Postal Service until after the election, when a record number of voters are expected to cast ballots by mail. President Trump has admitted he’s working to undermine the USPS in order to make it harder to vote by mail in November. We speak with Lisa Graves, executive director of the policy research group True North Research, who says Louis DeJoy is “the most partisan person, in 100 years at least, to head the Postal Service” and warns that U.S. democracy is at stake. “We need to really hold this Postal Service accountable.”
The Planning Tools of the Wealth Dynasty Protection Racket
The international financial system’s reliance upon credit ratings – usually based on dubious premises – needs urgent rethinking. The Covid-19 pandemic is just one of the catastrophes leaving many low-income countries – and soon middle-income countries – unable to service foreign debts. Yet, the World Bank and IMF continue squeezing poor countries on behalf of commercial lenders, failing to provide the debt cancellations desperately needed.
It is time for a major and simple overhaul of the corporate income tax system. The main problem with the current system is that it is focused on the wrong target. Instead of taxing corporate profits, we should be taxing stock returns. Before explaining how this alternative would work, it is worth going through some recent history.
There’s no ambiguity in the term: capital punishment is killing, carried out by an entity commonly, but not exclusively, judicially empowered.€ € It refers only to the killing of persons, of course.€ € Doesn’t it?
The word “bounty” has been used in association with the supposed United States of America to describe the resources used for and the possibility of acquiring monetary wealth, but recent rumors have been a reminder that the word also has another connotation/meaning which is equally applicable. It is a payment of reward for the capture/elimination of people who are seen as wayward and as a threat. This simultaneity of bounty has no borders. It is largely maintained through the militarized economics of global and spacial infiltration in the service of private power and it is used as a means of entrapment against the great majority of its servants.
Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) criticized NBC News on Wednesday morning in response to the network’s misleading tweet regarding a nomination statement she had made at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) the night before.
For the second night in a row, the Democratic National Zoom Meeting was a galloping montage of videos that used its time to good effect. After another hiccup-free evening of content that entirely sidelined the network talking heads for two hours — an unanticipated boon — it is hard to imagine the party going back to the old way of doing conventions in four years.
Milwaukee, Wisc.—Representative Gwen Moore kicked off the Democratic National Convention’s primetime presentation Monday night with a rousing celebration of her hometown that spoke to its history and its hopes. “Oh, I sure wish you all were here in the city of Milwaukee, which takes its name from the languages of the First Peoples, interpreted as ‘good land’ and ‘gathering place by the waters,’” she declared. “This is a city where blood was shed for labor rights, where a fugitive slave was freed from prison, where women’s right to vote was first ratified.”
On November 10, 2019, President Evo Morales Ayma of Bolivia announced his resignation from the presidency. Morales had been elected in 2014 to a third presidential term, which should have lasted until January 2020. In November 2019, protests around his fourth electoral victory in October led to the police and the military asking Morales to step down; by every description of the term, this was a coup d’état. Two days later, Morales went into exile in Mexico.
"We must do everything we can to ensure that the post office is fully funded. It's good policy and strongly supported by the public."
"Every single member of the House should vote in favor of our legislation," said Rep. Carolyn Maloney, chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee.
In the summer of 2019, the New York Times reported that President Donald Trump had “joked in a meeting” with staffers about the possibility of trading Puerto Rico, a U.S. territory, for Greenland, a territory of Denmark.
Rick Wilson has worked to elect Republicans for thirty years, but he will “no longer use those skills to serve the party I once loved. That party is gone.” He has not become a Democrat, but he is adamantly anti-Trump. His book, Running Against the Devil; A Plot to Save America From Trump and Democratsfrom Themselves, is a rant against President Donald Trump as the worst president in history. The explosion of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in all fifty states this past month indicates that he is not alone in that opinion.
Elizabeth Warren is on a mission, and she will not fail.
Editors’ Note:€ This € article was written in February 2015, where appeared on Daniel Warner’s blog in€ a Geneva newspaper . The government of Belarus sent a formal complaint about its contents to the government of Switzerland, which was transmitted to me. Given the demonstrations in Belarus today, we thought it might be worthy of republication.€
Belarusian presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya (Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya) has released a new address to the European Council. The English-language video was uploaded to the Youtube channel “Country for Life.”In the video, Tikhanovskaya urges European leaders not to recognize the results of the contested presidential elections in Belarus.€ €
Belarus has witnessed sustained opposition protests since August 9, when state officials declared a landslide re-election victory for long-time incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko (Alyaksandr Lukashenka). The united opposition, led by presidential candidate Svetlana Tikhanovskaya (Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya), says the election was rigged and refuses to recognize the results of the vote. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin was among the first world leaders to congratulate Lukashenko on his alleged win. Here’s what Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told the press on August 19 about the crisis still unfolding in Belarus.
Protests and walkouts continue across Belarus in the wake of contested presidential election results. Staff at Belarus’ state-owned TV stations are striking, too. They protest at studios and newsrooms, demanding unbiased coverage of opposition demonstrations and the ensuing violence inflicted by law enforcement. Some seasoned journalists have already resigned. Meduza spoke with the striking workers about their demands and about censorship on the Belarusian airwaves.€
We are still a very long way from the Promised Land, but the balance of forces has changed, perhaps permanently.
The Crown Office is objecting to the appearance of, and trying to block from court, ALL of my witnesses and ALL of our proposed evidence for my defence at my trial for Contempt of Court. Today I have to complete the first draft of my own witness statement. We understand the Lord Advocate may object to the hearing of my own evidence also.
Norway’s Foreign Ministry has announced the expulsion of a Russian diplomat working in the embassy’s trade department, reports the government broadcaster NRK, citing a ministry spokesperson. The ministry didn’t specify the name of the Russian diplomat in question.
"DeJoy's 'suspension' of policies does not reverse his destructive actions to the USPS or change his countless conflicts of interest."
After the twists and turns of a drawn-out process, on Tuesday, August 11, 2020, the Biden campaign chose Kamala Harris to be his vice presidential running mate, which will make her the first Black woman and South Asian–American person to appear on a major political party’s presidential ticket.
In addition to cyberattacks and disinformation, these governments and their proxies have exploited legal loopholes to funnel money through straw donors, nonprofits, shell companies, and in-kind campaign contributions to buy influence in at least 33 countries, researchers found.
These interference efforts have escalated dramatically over the past decade, with almost 80 percent of the cases documented in the report taking place since 2016.
It’s starting to build: Media are buzzing that the Democratic Party’s likely nominee for president, Joe Biden, has a polling edge against President Donald Trump. And a big one at that.
The blast that flattened a large section of Beirut just over two weeks ago ripped apart the lives and property of countless people. It also created a pivotal moment for the international aid system: Donors and agencies can choose to be complicit in a power structure that supports the ruling junta, or they can take a principled stance that helps us rid ourselves of our corrupt leaders and rebuild the better Lebanon we all know can exist.
Since the end of the civil war in 1990, foreign donors and aid agencies have proven a key pillar of financial sustainability for successive Lebanese governments. Yet in the wake of the 4 August explosion at the Beirut port, calls by the Lebanese people for these groups to cease funding for their government have grown to a crescendo, as they take to the streets and protest corruption.
I have to laugh when I hear Democratic Party presidential nominee Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats say they are the party of inclusion. In fact, they are the party of delusion.
On July 2nd,1999, Ricky Byrdsong was out for a jog near his home in Skokie, Illinois, with two of his young children, Sabrina and Ricky Jr. The family outing would end in tragedy. His children watched helplessly as their father was gunned down. He was the victim of a Neo-Nazi on a murderous rampage targeting Jewish, Asian and Black communities. Ten other people were left wounded. Won-Joon Yoon, a 26 year-old graduate student at the University of Indiana, would also be killed.
What appears to be a very combative divorce between two very combative people in Marin County, California has reached the point of criminal charges. Not justifiable criminal charges, but criminal charges all the same.
Summary: As is the case on any site where consumer products are sold, there's always the chance review scores will be artificially inflated by bogus reviews using fake accounts, often described as "sock puppets."
In today's insanity, Facebook's top lobbyist in India, Ankhi Das, has filed a criminal complaint against journalist Awesh Tiwari. Tiwari put up a post on Facebook over the weekend criticizing Das, citing a giant Wall Street Journal article that is focused on how Facebook's rules against hate speech have run into challenges regarding India's ruling BJP party. Basically, the article said that Facebook was not enforcing its hate speech rules when BJP leaders violated the rules (not unlike similar stories regarding Facebook relaxing the rules for Trump supporters in the US).
A Facebook policy executive out of the company’s India offices has filed a criminal complaint against a journalist, Awesh Tiwari, alleging his critical post he published on the social network constitutes sexual harassment, criminal intimidation, and defamation. Yet the complaint produces no evidence Tiwari engaged in such conduct, according to a report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), and many press advocates are seeing it as an attempt to intimidate journalism critical of the ruling regime.
It cites a comment made by a Facebook user on August 16 in response to a post by Tiwari, and alleges that it constituted a threat. The commenter was responding to a post Tiwari published earlier that day citing the Wall Street Journal article and criticizing Das for her and Facebook’s alleged inaction in controlling hate speech by members of the Bharatiya Janata Party against religious minorities. CPJ reviewed a screenshot of the comment, which has been removed.
In rare testimony Tuesday, two dozen female Pakistani journalists complained that they have encountered “coordinated” vicious social media campaigns to harass, discredit and intimidate them for their work.
The highly emotional testimonies before a parliamentary committee on human rights brought some of the journalists from various Pakistani media outlets close to tears as they talked about the gender-specific harassment and threats they face online.
Some of them alleged that Twitter accounts affiliated with the ruling Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) Party and right-wing elements in the society were behind the “organized” attacks.
But it seems that didn't matter to Carlson. He openly threatened the reporters working on the story.
"Women's needs do not suddenly stop or diminish during an emergency—they become greater."
Toyi toyi was the dance of the Mau Mau people in Kenya, as they fought against British colonialism.
Last week, California Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman ordered Uber and Lyft to comply with AB5, the state law that makes it more difficult for companies to use independent contractors. In his ruling, Schulman dismissed Uber’s argument that it was a technology platform and that drivers were not core to its business. “To state the obvious, drivers are central, not tangential, to Uber and Lyft’s entire ride-hailing business,” Schulman wrote.
But the companies claim they would need to shut down operations in California completely in order to retool their businesses to comply with the law.
Earlier this year we noted that the Australian government was setting up a you're-too-successful tax on Google and Facebook which it planned to hand over to media organizations. We should perhaps call it the "Welfare for Rupert Murdoch" tax, because that's what it is. Murdoch, of course, owns a huge share of media operations in Australia and has been demanding handouts from Google for years (showing that his claimed belief in the free market was always hogwash).
Late Monday, it came out that Oracle is one of the potential American acquirers of TikTok from the Chinese company ByteDance, after President Trump ordered Bytedance sell TikTok out of spite. Microsoft has been the most talked about potential purchaser, though there were also rumors of a potential bid by Twitter.
Pirate IPTV service Area 51 disappeared offline late June with a message that its operators had decided to move on to other things. We can now reveal that the service was shut down by the Hollywood and Netflix-powered MPA and the global anti-piracy coalition Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment.
GitHub has removed the website and APK of the pirate streaming app King Club X. The action was taken in response to a takedown request sent by the MPA acting on behalf of Netflix and several major Hollywood studios. According to the notice, the app is predominantly used as a pirate tool which blatantly infringes countless copyrights.
Under a traditional publishing model, researchers who want to publish their articles in a journal typically need to assign or exclusively license their copyright in the article to the journal publisher. Basically, they hand over their rights to the publisher in exchange for the opportunity to be published in the publisher’s journal. While this model may have worked several decades ago, it is currently unsuitable to the ways in which academic research is funded, conducted, and disseminated. It unjustifiably raises legal, technical, and financial barriers around knowledge and perpetuates unbalanced power relationships among the various players in academia and beyond, from researchers and research institutions to publishers, libraries, and the general public.€
A coalition of cities has filed a desperate, and likely doomed, lawsuit (pdf) against streaming providers like Netflix and Disney. In it, the cities proclaim that they are somehow owed 5 percent of gross annual revenue. Why? Apparently they believe that because these streaming services travel over telecom networks that utilize the public right of way, they're somehow owed a cut:
