China’s national cut of Linux – KylinOS - has emerged in a major new release and one of its important new functions is a symbol of the nation’s ability to get ahead despite US trade bans.
“Galaxy Kylin Advanced Server Operating System V10” emerged last week with support for locally-designed chips using the MIPS, SPARCv9 and Arm architectures. The OS also supports x86 CPUs flowing from the AMD’s joint venture in China and others derived from Via’s abandoned tilt at the x86 market.
KylinOS developer Kylinsoft, a part of the state-owned China Electronics Corporation, said the new release is ideal for Kunbernetes, Docker and LXC virtualisation. Open-source projects like OpenStack Ceph and GlusterFS are all supported too.
Trusted platform modules are enabled and the OS is recommended for “Cloud environment … government, national defense, finance, education, finance and taxation, public security, auditing, transportation, medical treatment, manufacturing and other fields.”
In other words, a solid cut of Linux that should scale well and can run the stuff needed to get modern computing done.
There’s also a desktop cut of the OS that supports Android apps and has somewhat curiously been trumpeted as compatible with Panasonic printers. Take that, Windows!
An older poll by Distrowatch showed similar results, where 91% of users said they don’t use any of these app packages on their current systems.
So it sounds like the Linux community still doesn’t like the new app packages that much, but what could be some possible reasons for that?
[...]
Snaps for example reportedly take a huge time to start, and it becomes annoying in the case of web browsers like Chromium where it would take around 7 seconds to launch. An annoyance which rendered the web browser useless in Ubuntu 20.04. Now waiting that much for launching your other basic apps is just not acceptable.
Snaps also suffer from an issue where bundled apps do not respect the system look-and-feel, causing them to use different themes than the ones used by the system. Now we are in an awkward situation where there are even themes which are made specially for the bundled Snaps apps.
The Linux IO_uring interface for driving some major efficiency improvements in the Linux I/O stack is really screaming when paired with Intel's next-gen Ice Lake Xeon server platforms and the Intel Gen2 "Alder Stream" Optane solid-state drives.
Jens Axboe of Facebook who serves as the Linux kernel's block subsystem maintainer for all the storage code and also the mastermind behind IO_uring shared some latest figures for IO_uring. In these latest IO_uring reference figures he is using the yet-to-be-released Intel IceLake-SP Xeon platform as well as the Intel Gen2 "Alder Stream" solid-state drives with the four-layer 3D XPoint technology and PCI Express 4.0. Both Ice Lake Xeon and the next-gen Optane SSDs are expected to be released before the end of the calendar year.
With all the Linux 5.9 kernel changes you may have noticed no major EXT4 file-system pull request was submitted during the kernel merge window the prior two weeks. Fortunately, the EXT4 work has now been sent out and Linus Torvalds honored the late changes for this widely-used Linux file-system.
EXT4 changes don't end up being too terribly exciting given the maturity of the file-system and its widespread use for years, but it does continue seeing new optimizations and other improvements, especially in the areas of FSCRYPT encryption and other new knobs.
Zstd compression for OpenZFS has been under review for several months as an alternative to the existing ZFS LZ4 and Gzip compression support. OpenZFS with Zstd has a compression ratio comparable to Gzip but with much greater performance, as we've seen with the likes of now the Linux kernel image supporting Zstd compression for speeding up boot times thanks to the decompression speed.
OpenZFS isn't the first to support Zstd for native file-system compression but can already be found as an option with the F2FS file-system as well as UBIFS, Btrfs, and even Reiser4.
Welcome to LPC 2020! This year we have a record number of attendees, around 950. We hope you’ll find the conference as engaging and productive as the ones we had in person for the past 12 years.
As with all of our releases, Istio 1.7 was a community effort. 200 people across over 40 companies contribute to Istio. We’d like to thank our fantastic community for their ongoing efforts: it is because of our amazing community that Istio is able to make so many improvements, quarter after quarter.
Today’s Istio 1.7 release offers significant improvements to Istio’s operational experience. Several new feature improvements, including control plane upgrades, virtual machine integration, and a central Istiod experience, make Istio easier to operate and expands its capabilities for hybrid cloud environments. This blog post introduces you to new features in the release, talks about IBM’s investment in Istio, and explains how Istio is crucial to developing an open hybrid cloud environment.
The GStreamer team is pleased to announce the first release candidate for the upcoming stable 1.18 release series.
The unstable 1.17 release series adds new features on top of the current stable 1.16 series and is part of the API and ABI-stable 1.x release series of the GStreamer multimedia framework.
The 1.17.90 pre-release series is for testing and development purposes in the lead-up to the stable 1.18 series which is now feature frozen and scheduled for release soon. Any newly-added API can still change until that point, although it is very rare for that to happen at this point.
Depending on how things go there might be another release candidate next week and then hopefully 1.18.0 shortly after.
GStreamer 1.18 is gearing up for release in the very near future while for right now a release candidate is available for testing this widely-used open-source multimedia framework.
GStreamer 1.18 finally does away with the Autotools build system in favor of Meson, Cerbero is supported as a meta build system for platforms like Windows/Android/macOS/iOS, a new gst-tester test utility, and a wide variety of other core improvements. The complete release notes / concise change-log for GStreamer 1.18 has yet to be published.
Who loves eye candy? Don’t be shy — you can raise both hands!!
Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We only feature open-source software in this series.
pipes.sh is a Bash script written for the Bash shell. It draws randomly pathed pipes over the terminal. This shell script is dual purpose. It can be used as a screensaver or purely for amusement. A perfect candidate for the Linux Candy series.
The possibilities and plethora of options using free software today are endless.
In 2020, there is a free software equivalent for every mainstream commercial program on the market today. For photographers who use Photoshop, there is GIMP; for illustrators are accustomed to using Illustrator, there is Inkscape; for videographers who need access to tools like Premiere Pro, there are video editing apps like Kdenlive, Flowblade, and more. These programs provide most of the functionality of proprietary software for free. Most of the time, the differences are merely in the extra content and presets that the commercial apps provide. In the PureOS store, we curate the world’s most powerful free software and make it easily accessible to Librem owners to download on their devices.
Probably the most obvious part of the evolution of virtual events is the clearly visible (and audible) quality improvements. A very welcome change especially for the larger events where you spent all day listening to people, and that can be quite exhausting if we don’t properly understand what’s being said and have to manually adjust audio levels for each speaker.
The increased quality requirements also impacted my own setup, moving from built-in webcam and simple headset to full HD external camera, lapel microphone, proper lighting and OBS for scene composition, cleaning the audio feed and recording, with a virtual V4L webcam and a virtual PulseAudio microphone feeding this into the corresponding conference software. A bit too complex and fragile for my taste, but producing a much better result.
[...]
The biggest gain provided by virtual events is the far far lower threshold for attending. No travel, much lower cost (if any), often not even a registration, you can just drop in and see if the event is interesting to you and you feel comfortable there before getting more involved.
I noticed this was even the case for myself, and I’m not exactly facing a particular high threshold there, having attended many events during the past 15+ years, usually belonging to the majority demographic, having a passport that lets me travel easily to most parts of the world and having access to multiple travel expense funding sources. So I can only imagine this to be making a much larger difference for people not checking all those boxes.
Since June I have tried to attend any conference or meetup I became aware of that is vaguely related to KDE Itinerary, not all of which I would have attended physically probably. Every single one however turned out to have been very much worth it, yielding concrete results for KDE Itinerary. If you follow the regular development summaries you will already have spotted a few of those, and there’s more to come.
There's a million and one things you can do with ssh keys, but as a non-power-user I find 99% of the time I'm either trying to get a shell on a different machine or moving a file between machines I trust. So for a long time I didn't really touch ssh configuration.
One of the most commonly used term in desktop Linux world is Desktop Environment (DE). In this jargon buster, learn one of the essential desktop Linux concepts.
Last year Wine itself added emulation for some CPU instructions now blocked by UMIP, the User-Mode Instruction Prevention functionality found in the latest Intel and AMD processors. Now slated for Linux 5.10 is the emulation/spoofing of two of those instructions by the kernel as another attempt to help a small number of Windows programs relying on those instructions.
Brendan Shanks of CodeWeavers who was responsible for the Wine UMIP patches last year has now added support to the UMIP kernel code for emulation/spoofing of SLDT and STR instructions. Those are two of the instructions protected by UMIP as found on Intel Cannonlake and newer or more prominently in AMD Zen 2. This patch is now queued in the x86 code ahead of the Linux 5.10 merge window later this year.
Quite a bit of my own personal time has also been testing out NVIDIA GeForce NOW. It's another game streaming service, which recently opened up to Chromebooks / ChromeOS in the browser so it works on Linux too. You can see a video of Fortnite running here as another example. It's certainly an interesting service but I still personally much prefer Stadia technically speaking, as I find it just works much better overall but I won't deny how good NVIDA did the game access side of things by it using existing accounts for people. Over the next many years, it will be very interesting to see all these cloud services fight for users.
After some months now we’re proud to present our next release providing mostly stability fixes and some smaller new features. This includes an offline message queue and an overhauled message correction.
The flatpak builds are working again and we’ve been working on the Windows builds and macOS builds too (especially JBB). We hope that we can provide Windows and macOS builds again in the next weeks in form of a patch release.
This week I implemented a much-requested feature: KDE apps now remember their main window positions when closed and re-launched! They even remember their positions (and soon their sizes too) on a per-screen-arrangement basis.
KDE applications finally have the ability to keeping their window positions preserved when closed and then re-launched.
KDE developer Nate Graham continues doing great work on various usability improvements and polishing to the open-source desktop, in addition to his weekly development recaps. Among the work outlined this week includes:
- The support for remembering window positions between closing the main windows and re-launching them.This currently works for QWidgets-based KDE applications and currently only on X11. Fortunately, a Wayland-based implementation is being worked on too that will work for all windows at the window manager level so even non-KDE/Qt applications will support the feature. The initial X11 functionality will come with KDE Frameworks 5.74 while the better Wayland support will come in Plasma 5.20~5.21.
I just discovered https://gitlab.gnome.org/Jehan/gimp-flathub-stats that tells you the download (including updates) stats for a given flathub application.
Ran it over the KDE applications that are part of the release service that we have in flathub.
Free open-source image enlarger SmillaEnlarger sees first update in over 10 years.
SmillaEnlarger is small graphical tool, based on Qt, to resize, especially magnify bitmaps in high quality. The used algorithm is an invention of the developer’s own.
SmillaEnlarger 0.9.1 is the first release in over 10 years, features Qt 5 port.
In the past blogs, I wrote about the status of my GSoC work. Continuing the same in this blog I would like to update about one of my major project milestones I have achieved.
It’s been a while since my last update. In this post, I will describe the work I have done up until now in Phase Three of the coding period.
This phase, I worked on making the subtitles displayed on the timeline editable.
Since the text and end positions are both values for the Subtitle model item of a subtitle at a particular start position, I wrote a function that deals with customizing the text as well as the end positions.
Why not "immutable"/"read-only"?
Because it’s very misleading. These system as a whole is not immutable, or read-only, or stateless – there are writable, persistent data areas. And more importantly, those writable data areas allow persistently storing privileged code.
[...] Usually instead of talking about an "immutable" system that allows in place updates, it’d be more useful and accurate to say "image based".
And this gets into another huge difference between traditional package managers and image based systems: The amount of "internal state".
The way most package managers work is when you type $pkgmgr install foo, the fact that you want foo installed is recorded by adding it to the database. But the package manager database also includes a whole set of "base packages" that (usually) you didn’t choose. Those "base packages" might come from a base container when you podman/docker pull, for cloud images the default image, and physical systems they often come from a distribution-specific default list embedded/downloaded from the ISO or equivalent.
A problem with this model then is "drift" – by default if the distribution decides to add a package to the base set by default, you (usually) don’t get it by default when applying in place updates since most package managers just update the set of packages you have. One solution to this is metapackages, but if not everything in the base is covered you still have drift that can be hard to notice over time.
Finally, here it is! My "My First GUADEC" post. It’s been three months since I have been working on my GSoC project, and as the project itself and GSoC approach their final days, I would like to talk about my GUADEC experience. Ever since the GSoC results were announced, I had been aware of the fact that GSoC students, not only get to attend but also get an opportunity to present their work at the annual GNOME Conference called GUADEC, which brings together users and enthusiasts from all over the world. Words are not enough to express the kind of excitement I’ve had for attending this.
It’s been two months since I first announced that Ikey Doherty is working on Serpent Linux as its newest distribution since he left the Solus project, and it looks like things are progressing in the right way.
And we can finally talk about some of the major new features coming to Serpent OS. I believe there are many of you out there that want to know what will make them install and use Serpent OS as their daily driver.
Armbian is a lightweight Debian or Ubuntu Linux-based operating system specialized for ARM development boards. It supports a wide variety of SBCs, such as Orange Pi, Banana Pi, Odroid, PINE64 including SoCs of Allwinner, Rockchip, and more.
Armbian 20.08 ‘Caple’ is the latest release that comes with major kernel upgrades, support for new boards, improvements and bug fixes. Let’s take a look...
The biggest changes in Armbian 20.08 are around hardware support. This release comes with initial support for the Rockchip RK3328-based Rock Pi E 64-bit single-board computer and the NanoPi NEO3 SBC, support for the Odroid N2+ SBC, support for the Helios64 open source Linux NAS (Network Attached Storage), as well as support for Rockchip RK322X SoCs.
Apart from the newly supported hardware, Armbian 20.08 also improves support for several popular SBCs, including Bananapi R2, which should now boot properly, NanoPi M4V2, which should now offer proper Wi-Fi support, and ODROID XU4, which received a much-needed speed boost, as well as updated kernels and boot.ini.
The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor.
The best part about the setup is the notification system. You can program OpenCanary to send you email alerts the moment it detects potential threats. You can use this information to determine what IP address was used and where the potential breach took place.
But USB isn’t the only way to send keypresses to a computer - almost a decade before the USB standard was a twinkle in Compaq’s eye, IBM was using the PS/2 standard (not to be confused with the PS2) to connect mice and keyboards to PCs. It’s still not feasible to use the Pi to bit-bang the PS/2 protocol, but we can use an Arduino as a daughterboard, and the ps2dev library can handle the nitty-gritty of the serial protocol for PS/2.
So that’s what I did. The Arduino Nano pictured on the left is plugged directly into the PS/2 combo port on the back of the motherboard (ignore the unused 5V wire, red). Originally, I planned on cutting the end off of a PS/2 cable and making it all nice, but the Goodwill near me didn’t have any PS/2 junk and it turns out that breadboard wires just fit oh-so-snugly into the DIN holes. So this is how it’s gonna be.
The company provides FreeRTOS real-time operating system for the module, as well as PicoCore RT1-SKIT Starter Kit with PicoCore RT1, a baseboard, a cable kit, a 7-inch RGB TFT display, and access to the FreeRTOS BSP and documentation. Target applications include portable industrial devices as well as other cost-sensitive applications with TFT displays such as Smart Home appliances.
PicoCore RT1 system-on-module is at the sample stage and will be available at least until 2031. PicoCore RT1-SKIT Starter Kit can be purchased now for 360 Euros + taxes via the product page. The starter kit price should not be indicative of the module price, and which I’d expect to cost between $20 and $40 depending on BoM requirements and mass-production volume considering Arch Mix NXP i.MX RT1052 development board sells for $30.
Nuritzi Sanchez is the Senior Open Source Project Manager at GitLab Inc. Previously, Nuritzi has worked at Endless and was the President and Chairperson at GNOME. KDE is excited to have Nuritzi as a keynote speaker at this year's Akademy to talk about Collaborative Communication in the Open Source community.
Lydia Pintscher is KDE e.V.'s current Vice President and Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.'s Product Manager for Wikidata. Lydia is a free software and free culture enthusiast who was the President of the e.V. in years past. As the current Vice President of KDE e.V. you will see her talking about updates on KDE's goals during Akademy.
Today we are lucky to have both of these well accomplished women sit down to take a moment to talk about their lives, accomplishments, visions for the future, and how we can continue to uplift young women in the technology and open source sector.
The last decade or so has seen some significant changes in how businesses operate. The expansion of accessible, affordable, connected technology has removed barriers to many resources, enabling collaboration and execution of work by nearly anyone, from nearly anywhere. Though COVID-19 has made remote operations a necessity for a lot of industries, many businesses had already begun to embrace it as a more cost-effective, agile way of working.
That said, not every business has the budget to subscribe to premium software as a service (SaaS) to keep their remote employees productive. The good news is that open source software can be every bit as robust and intuitive as the premium options that are only available to those with plenty of capital. The key is clearly identifying what you need from those tools in order to focus your search.
The open source community can offer some smart solutions to the challenges of remote working, and we’re going to look at a few key areas of need for businesses exploring how they can operate more effectively.
I teach GNU/Linux. I make a computer school online for Indonesian people by using Free Software and GNU operating systems for living purposes. Among the skills students learn are writing documents with LibreOffice and mastering Ubuntu. I have used Jitsi video call technology for about six month since early 2020 and I found it perfect for my online teaching as I open classes in my country Indonesia for people from Sumatra to Papua islands. Of course I also use Telegram as it is the easiest FLOSS communication tool for me and my students. I am happy to share with you my teaching experiences.
There’s lots of ways of contributing to open source projects.
A common misconception about contributing to open source is that you need to write code. In fact, it’s often the other parts of a project that are in urgent need of assistance. Other ways of helping an open source project include writing documentation, identifying bugs, testing code changes, answering queries from users, planning events, suggesting design improvements, perform user experience testing, making a monetary donation, and more.
I want to share a few of my recent experiences of contributing to open source projects.
Another week, another major change for the popular Ethereum wallet MetaMask. After last week’s announcement of a potential dapp-breaking code change on the horizon, the company announced this week that it will move away from its open-source approach.
Instead, MetaMask has adopted what it calls a “tiered proprietary license,” leaving behind its previous permissive MIT license. MetaMask will remain fully free to users, so there’s no need to worry there. Nothing is changing on that front.
However, this license states that organizations using MetaMask code—which is now owned by ConsenSys—to commercially serve 10,000 or more monthly users must enter a licensing agreement. (Disclosure: ConsenSys funds an editorially-independent Decrypt.)
WordPress for iOS finally received a new update yesterday (August 21) after a period of almost a month. Turns out, the Automattic team that runs the app as well as popular WordPress.com blogging service was blocked by Apple from pushing new app updates as it was not offering an in-app purchase option for WordPress.com’s paid plans and domain purchases, the company’s founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg has revealed. The presence of in-app purchases in the WordPress app would allow Apple to take up to 30 percent cut of all revenue that the app generates using the in-app purchases.
Now, WordPress founding developer Matt Mullenweg is accusing Apple of cutting off the ability to update that app — until or unless he adds in-app purchases so the most valuable company in the world can extract its 30 percent cut of the money.
The thirteenth edition of the Free Software Foundation's (FSF) conference on technology and social justice will be held in spring 2021. The Call for Sessions is now open, and will close on October 28th. Potential talks should examine free software through the lens of this year's theme: Empowering Users.
Every year, LibrePlanet brings together developers, policy experts, activists, hackers and end users. It's a place to learn new skills, share accomplishments, and face challenges to computer user freedom together as a community. LibrePlanet will be held in the spring of 2021 (date TBA). If you're new to the community, check out session descriptions and recordings from the previous LibrePlanet conference.
[...]
While the goal is to hold the LibrePlanet 2021: Empowering Users in person in the Boston area, the coronavirus pandemic may still prohibit large-scale gatherings, so our conference planning will incorporate the possibility of an online conference like the one we held in 2020. As such, we will consider applications for remote only sessions, like all others, with the intent of integrating quality sessions into the schedule.
According to the full budget spreadsheet shared by the Fellowship, Google is contributing approximately twenty percent of the FSFE budget (please also see this analysis from the executive director, Jonas Oberg). People periodically make arguments that this is not something to worry about while at the other extreme, people suggest that FSFE is nothing more than a Google puppet.
A few days ago I wrote about doing a pile of work with concurrent.futures. Since then, I discovered a problem with the code: exceptions raised by the work function were silently ignored.
If there is one message I've been pushing across all of the Talk Python episodes, it's that programming is a superpower. Rather than all of us abandoning what we're interested in and becoming CS majors, we can take our passion or expertise and 10x it with a little programming skill.
In that case, we should be teaching kids fluency in programming at a younger age. And yet, almost every platform or example meant to do so pulls its punches. We'll teach kids programming concepts but not code itself. That's a bridge too far.
Python 3.5.10rc1 was released on August 21st, 2020.
Python 3.5 has now entered "security fixes only" mode, and as such the only changes since Python 3.5.4 are security fixes. Also, Python 3.5.10rc1 has only been released in source code form; no more official binary installers will be produced.
Python 3.5.10rc1 is now available.
As part of the changes to how Django is governed, it is time to have an election of the Technical Board. All current DSF Members are automatically registered for this election.
They belonged to two different social classes and two different generations. However, there was great mutual respect and admiration between Russian writers: Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) and Anton Chekhov (1860-1904). According to Maxim Gorky, another notable Russian writer, Tolstoy had an almost fatherly affection for Chekhov.
Erik Decker, the chief security and privacy officer at University of Chicago Medicine, said during the Proofpoint event that individuals at his institution had been targeted by “weaponized” coronavirus-themed phishing emails, particularly those aimed at stealing credentials or installing malware.
AMC has announced that its theaters will be opening soon with Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet”, a typical summer blockbuster. Social distancing will be followed with no more than 30 percent of the seats filled and the staff wearing masks. I suppose that Nolan will be a magnet for fans of his movies, an experience roughly equivalent to playing a video game while on methamphetamine. Every one that I have seen has left me cold, especially “Interstellar” that inspired this faux trailer.
One of the key right-wing architects of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Stephen K. (Steve) Bannon, was arrested early yesterday morning while cruising in the Long Island Sound on a 150-foot yacht owned by the fugitive Chinese billionaire, Guo Wengui, according to law enforcement officials. Bannon had served as CEO of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and as senior counselor and chief strategist to the president for the first seven months of his term.
There are a lot of years in between the breakup of the Beatles in 1970 and today. People have had plenty of time to disparage and discredit them. The criticisms of their occasionally crass commercialism not only hold true, but remain an industry standard for popular music promotion. The lessons they teach about the hazards of fame are a warning to every Johnny B. Goode. Still, the Beatles persevere. A young man I occasionally work with was recently telling me about his work creating electronic dance music and a YouTube band called Death Grip. After he finished his five-minute exhortation, he looked at his phone and said “but nothing can beat the Beatles. They were the best.” The song “Something” had just popped up on his phone’s music app.
Forty- eight years after its making I’m yet convinced that Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist is not only among the greatest films of the director’s career, but one of the greatest films period.
Start by removing the duct tape from the middle and then tear away the Pringles tubes from the plaster! The cardboard was still a bit damp and made it easy to tear off along the seam of the mega can. The chalk will also still be slightly damp and need another 24 hours or so to fully dry.
These signs, similar to those found at many such rallies now taking place around the U.S., are references to QAnon, the conspiracy theory that has surged in popularity in recent months. It turned out that the rally had nothing to do with the century-old humanitarian charitable group Save the Children.
We’ve talked quite a bit about telephone fraud on our blog — those fake Microsoft tech support guys who try to scare you with malware into paying for their service, or the fake cops who say your kid is in trouble. Everybody hates them, regardless of whether they ever fell for the scam. At the 35C3 hacker congress, I happened to be at a talk that mentioned an amazing solution to all those phone scam problems. That solution has a name: Meet Lenny.
Lenny is a rather unsophisticated voice chatbot that simply reads its lines one by one when the caller pauses for a while. Lenny has several minutes of those lines recorded by a talented elderly voice actor. After it reads the last line, it just starts over. But it sounds so realistic that telemarketers continue talking to Lenny for dozens and dozens of minutes.
In 2009, the anonymous IT worker began using an interactive automated message to handle telemarketing calls to the company where he worked. He called the chatbot “Lenny” in homage to his elderly neighbor who used to collect plastic shopping bags in a “giant man-height stockpile” in his backyard.
For federal law enforcement, there’s a very clear federal law that bars the President (or any other person in the United States government) from sending “any troops or armed men” to any polling place in the country. Thus, this law prohibits, for instance, the troops that were sent to Portland (or any other military troops) from being deployed on election day at the polls. It also prohibits the President from sending non-military law enforcement, such as United States marshals, FBI agents, or U.S. attorneys to election sites if they are armed, which marshals and FBI agents usually are.
Seventeen years ago, against the advice of my parents, I decided to become a public school teacher. Once I did, both my mother and father, educators themselves, warned me that choosing to teach was to invite attacks from those who viewed the profession with derision and contempt. They advised me to stay strong and push through when budgets were cut, my intellect was questioned, or my dedication to my students was exploited. Nobody, however, warned me that someday I might have to defend myself against those who asked me to step back into my classroom and risk my own life, the lives of my students and their families, of my friends, my husband, and my child in the middle of a global health crisis. And nobody told me that I’d be worrying about whether or not our nation’s public schools, already under siege, would survive the chaos of Covid-19.
Seventeen years ago, against the advice of my parents, I decided to become a public school teacher. Once I did, both my mother and father, educators themselves, warned me that choosing to teach was to invite attacks from those who viewed the profession with derision and contempt. They advised me to stay strong and push through when budgets were cut, my intellect questioned, or my dedication to my students exploited. Nobody, however, warned me that someday I might have to defend myself against those who asked me to step back into my classroom and risk my own life, the lives of my students and their families, of my friends, my husband, and my child in the middle of a global pandemic. And nobody told me that I’d be worrying about whether or not our nation’s public schools, already under siege, would survive the chaos of Covid-19.
In a few weeks, I begin my semester as a teaching assistant in an undergraduate sociology class. I am not sure what to expect.
About a third of the way through Plandemic: Indoctornation(or, as I like to call it, Plandemic 2: Electric Boogaloo or just Plandemic 2), the sequel to the conspiracyfest of a video called Plandemic that went viral in May featuring disgraced scientists Judy Mikovits that peddled virtually every conspiracy about the COVID-19 pandemic, the narrator attacks John Oliver for a segment that he did last month on coronavirus conspiracy theories. It’s a brilliant segment, and, in fact, you should watch it right now, before reading my discussion of Plandemic 2, because it will definitely put you in the proper mindset.
A former FDA official compared the move to "letting the Wild West be the Wild West."
The U.S. has coped with Covid-19 far worse than any other country on the globe. Though much, much of this catastrophe of over 170,000 dead can be laid at Trump’s door, some of it has to do with the uniquely awful American system of for-profit health care. Those words, “for profit,” mean that the U.S. public health infrastructure, always stunted, had completely shriveled by the time the plague struck. Other countries dealt better with covid because they have different health care systems – single payer or Medicare for All systems, in other words, ones that are, to varying degrees, socialized.
What the Post Office Needs to Survive a Pandemic Election
Fueled by the president’s unfounded claims about rampant mail-in voter fraud, and reports of sorting equipment being removed, the plight of the United States Postal Service has captured America’s attention. Will it collapse? Here’s what you need to know.
Consumer credit reporting agency Experian has suffered a data breach at their South African branch. The Experian data breach didn’t expose consumer credit or financial information, but other personal information which could be used in phishing attempts were definitely exposed. Experian noted in a statement that they fell victim to a social engineering attack where the attacker claimed to be a client and successfully received the information with a simple request. The statement detailed:
In a declaration to the court, Apple executive Phil Schiller wrote that Epic CEO Tim Sweeney asked for a “special deal with only Epic” that would “fundamentally change the way in which Epic offers apps on Apple’s iOS platform.” When Apple declined, Epic changed its policies to cut Apple out of in-app purchases. Now, the company argues that Epic’s ban is its own responsibility.
We’ve seen a similar attack before. The so-called "XCode Ghost" was a malware-infested version of Apple’s developer environment that was distributed outside of Apple’s channels. Apps built using the software were preinstalled with malware.
While security researchers were rightly concerned about XCode Ghost, the problem was quickly curtailed as Apple used the moment to stress the need to download critical files only from bona fide App Stores. It is much easier to subvert systems via poorly secured third-party app stores, and security is part of what we pay for when we purchase an app.
Software listings remain a sweet spot within the technology sector, which has fared better than any other through the coronavirus pandemic this year. The 18 companies in the space that have gone public on U.S. exchanges this year have climbed about 91% since their debut on a weighted-average basis, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Overall, newly listed companies excluding blank-check firms and real estate investment trusts have risen only 52% since their IPOs, the data show.
Espoo's social and health committee agreed to the trial at a meeting on Thursday.
Regulators in Europe and California have ruled that consumers have the right to collect and move their personal information to new websites -- “data portability” laws that are meant to empower people to choose different products, increasing competition for giants like Facebook. But on Facebook, every user’s data is intertwined with that of their friends and family, through tags on photos, posts and locations. Facebook on Friday filed official comments with the FTC, asking the regulator to explain how the company should make data portability work without violating privacy rules that could lead to a penalty. The request came ahead of an FTC workshop on the topic scheduled in September.
Google parent Alphabet Inc. considered participating in a group bid for TikTok, but the effort fizzled in recent days, according to people familiar with the matter.
Several firms discussed forming a consortium to invest in the popular video-sharing app, with Alphabet weighing a minority, non-voting stake through one of its investment arms, said one of the people.
Alphabet didn’t lead the initiative. It isn’t clear which U.S. company did, or why the effort ended. Alphabet has not ruled out participating in future bids, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing a private matter.
Palantir confidentially filed for an IPO last month, but has yet to announce when it will go public. The S-1 filing shows Palantir had revenue of $742.5 million in 2019, a 25 percent increase from the same period a year earlier. But that wasn’t enough to cover expenses; the company had a net loss of $580 million, according to the Times. It has a private market valuation of $20 billion, and has raised more than $3 billion in funding. That net loss is partly explained by how much money Palantir is burning on marketing — the company spent $450 million on marketing in two years.
From 1830 to 1895, the British and Russian empires schemed and plotted over control of Central and South Asia. At the heart of the “Great Game” was England’s certainty that the Russians had designs on India. So wars were fought, borders drawn, and generations of young met death in desolate passes and lonely outposts.
Three main ingredients make this a recipe for trouble. One is interest in the region’s gas resources, which for a decade have been attracting the attention not just of Greece and Turkey but also Cyprus, Israel, Egypt and others. Several countries aspire to be a regional energy hub, helping supply the European market and providing a strategic alternative to Russian gas. Boosters hoped pipelines running across the eastern Med area could be a catalyst for regional co-operation, which in some cases they have (see article).
The sources said there has been a stalemate in the military talks as the Indian Army was strongly insisting that the Chinese PLA must restore status quo ante of April this year to resolve the over three-month-old border standoff.
The Indian Army has clearly stated to China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) that "shifting" of the Line of Actual Control(LAC) is not acceptable to it, the sources said, adding the Chinese military is now desperately attempting to give "ex post facto strategic meaning" to its actions in eastern Ladakh.
The 26th report of the Analytical Support and Sanctions Monitoring Team concerning ISIS, al-Qaida and associated individuals and entities said that the terror group al-Qaida in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) operates under the Taliban umbrella from Nimruz, Helmand and Kandahar provinces of Afghanistan.
This is not the first time that Pakistan has threatened India of nuclear war. In 2019, Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan on several occasions spoke about nuclear war with India.
With his calls to the international community in the aftermath of India revoking Article 370 from Jammu and Kashmir not getting even an iota of support, Khan assumed an aggressive tone and even mentioned nuclear weapons Pakistan has. His ministers too had spoken of nuclear weapons in the most irresponsible manner possible.
According to David Williams, Mnuchin required members of the USPS Board of Governors to "come to his office to kiss the ring."
Fishs Eddy, 13774€ –Over the last 15 or so years, I’ve had two post offices vanish from towns I live in.
Despite a promise from United States Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to suspend his controversial efforts to “reform” the United States Postal Service (USPS), workers and management at post offices across the country are being told they cannot reinstate mail sorting machines at their facilities.
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, responding to a national outcry over service disruptions and fears of voter disenfranchisement, said this week he would suspend many planned changes until after the election. But postal workers say significant damage has already been done, including the removal of mail-sorting machines, which may not be replaced.
"Millions rely on the Postal Service for prescription drugs that treat diabetes, high blood pressure, and more," said Sen. Bernie Sanders. "Postmaster General DeJoy must go."
In a way, money does grow on trees. So it could pay to help nature restore forests and reduce greenhouse gases.
The group aims to "address cascading collapses in biodiversity due to overfishing, human-caused climate change, deep sea mining, and other marine emergencies."
"We want leaders to step up, take responsibility, and treat the climate crisis like a crisis."
A return to the old ‘normal’ will only lead us further along the path to the next looming catastrophe—that of climate change.
The Trump EPA has aggressively worked to erode and eliminate vital environmental and public health protections.
Saudi Arabian Oil Co., or Aramco, decided to stop investing in the facility in China’s Northeastern province of Liaoning after negotiations with its Chinese partners, said the people, who asked not to be identified as the matter is private. The uncertain market outlook was behind the decision, they said.
Crude oil imports last month slumped about 36.4% from a year earlier to 12.34 million tonnes, or 2.92 million barrels per day, data from the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell (PPAC) of the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gas showed.
That marked a fourth straight monthly decline. Fuel demand in the world’s third-biggest oil importer and consumer also fell, posting a fifth consecutive year-on-year drop.
This week on CounterSpin: No serious observers disagree that climate disruption, left unchecked, will mean disaster for human beings, among other species. Yet somehow, when it comes to actions that will either bring that annihilation closer or stave it off, corporate media get very specific and procedural, rather than putting things in a more urgent, more meaningful context. Hence the conversation around opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas drilling. It’s being reported as a Trumpian bad idea; is that enough? We’ll hear from Karlin Itchoak, Alaska state director at the Wilderness Society.
The watchword defending what’s come to be called the “collaboration and compromise” model of conservation is “practical.” When confronted with its abandonment of the land ethic and conservation aesthetic that Aldo Leopold bequeathed us in the 1940’s, the mainstream and best-funded conservation community defends its approach by pointing out the obvious, that the world has changed since Leopold’s time. Its adherents say that Leopold’s ideas don’t fit in our world, and that we have to be practical.
The Democrats’ 2020 presidential primary race was obsessed with taxes. There was the public debate over how to pay for Medicare for All. There was also the insider dispute among experts, no less contentious, over the feasibility and desirability of a wealth tax. Yet, as was often the case during the primaries, these discussions rarely included the person who was leading in the polls for almost the entire race: Joe Biden, whose tax plan is a serious proposal to reduce the power and income of the 1 percent. The former vice president’s bold scheme provides a useful reference for where the tax discourse among progressives should go next.
Our two party system which has operated as a duopoly on economic issues, especially in regard to letting Wall Street and business leaders shape what globalization is, can’t cover the complexity of forces now surging in the U.S. President Trump is an outlier in that duopoly and as such he’s been the nemesis of the Democrats and probably the death blow to Republicans.
Whether the pandemic’s effect on inequality will be felt for many years to come will depend on whether government action.
Despite President Donald Trump’s boasts about the America’s economy, a new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reveals that initial unemployment claims rose to more than 1.1 million last week — suggesting the economy is still far from healthy.
The Covid-19 crisis has both exposed and exacerbated racial and wealth inequality in the United States. As unemployment skyrockets and tens of millions of Americans struggle with a sudden loss of income, many are unable to pay rents or mortgages and are facing eviction, foreclosure, and possible homelessness.
Top Biden adviser, and long-time personal friend, Ted Kaufman was seen in the Wall Street Journal warning that the debt run up by the Trump administration will seriously limit what Biden will be able to do as president. This is wrong big time, and it is the sort of silly thing that no one in a Biden administration should ever be saying.
On August 8th, Donald Trump took four executive actions on coronavirus relief. One was a memorandum deferring, to the end of the year, payment of the employee portion of the payroll tax for employees making less than $4000 biweekly. (Employer payments had already been deferred in the CARES act.)
“Companies either transform or die in industrial revolutions,” writes former P&G executive Tony Saldanha in his recently published book Why Digital Transformations Fail. “Digital transformation is our current generation’s attempt to transform in the face of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. However, the sad truth is that 70 percent of all digital transformations still fail today… a shocking number, given the extremely high stakes,” he adds.
What accounts for such a high failure rate? An inadequate strategy; competitive pressures; technology; talent; culture? While all these factors are important, “The surprising answer to why digital transformations fail is a lack of discipline in defining and executing the right steps for digital transformations to take off and stay ahead,” notes Saldanha, adding that “It is possible to apply the proven checklist methodology from the airline and medical fields to improve the 70 percent failure rate.”
In a 2015 article, Klaus Schwab, - founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, - positioned the Fourth Industrial Revolution within the historical context of three previous industrial revolutions. The First, - starting in the late 18th century, - was driven by new innovations like the steam engine and marked the evolution from an agrarian to an industrial economy. The Second, - a century later, - was driven by steel, electricity, the internal combustion engine and mass production techniques. The Third, - starting in the 1960s, - saw the advent of digital computers, IT, the Internet, and the automation of process in just about all industries. The Fourth, - driven by increasingly pervasive and inexpensive digital technologies, - is now blurring the lines between the digital, physical, and biological worlds, leading to widespread economic and social disruption.
The Manchurian Candidate is a fascinating backdrop for current political theater best evidenced by the Democratic National Convention right now. Many liberals became very worked up about Russiagate—the obsession over Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Similarly,€ The Manchurian Candidate€ captures a fear about interference from a menacing communist force propping up the right-wing in a horseshoe theory coalition against centrist liberal patriotic democracy.
Politically packaged, extended-play infomercials (i.e., conventions) make abundant use of music. Partly this has to do with the necessity of cleansing the palate and the ear of the monotone of presidential promotion and the same-old pitches (i.e., speeches).
This year’s Democratic National Convention (DNC) has had more Native representation than any other in the party’s history.
The Green New Deal was the signature issue of the Green Party in the 2010s. Howie Hawkins was the first US candidate to campaign for a Green New Deal in 2010 running for New York governor. The Green Party’s presidential candidate in 2012 and 2016, Jill Stein, made “A Green New Deal for America” the theme of her two campaigns.
Jared Dearing, the director of Kentucky’s Board of Elections, had little to do with Louisville, the state’s largest city, having only one polling place for the June 28 primary. It was a county decision, and it made sense. In-person turnout was expected to be low during the pandemic. The polling place, a convention center, offered multiple locations to cast ballots, and transportation by bus there was free.
"American history tells us that it's been in our darkest moments that we've made our greatest progress, that we've found the light. In this dark moment, I believe we're poised to make great progress again, that we can find the light once more."
We air highlights from Joe Biden’s highly anticipated speech on the final night of the Democratic National Convention, in which he formally accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, focused on the dangers of President Trump’s reelection and pledged to address the four simultaneous crises of systemic racism, the pandemic, the economic downturn and the climate crisis. “United, we can and will overcome this season of darkness in America,” Biden said. The 25-minute speech was delivered from his home state of Delaware.
In the early months of 2020, this year’s Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Milwaukee seemed primed for a showdown between the moderate and progressive wings of the party. Organizers with the Coalition to March on the DNC, an alliance of over 70 groups from around the country, initially planned for a huge turnout, and hoped to use the occasion to advance left policy demands.
By now, teeming bacteria on the volcanic floor of the Mariana Trench have heard that last night was the speech of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s life. It was, and he exceeded expectations.
“There’s something happening here/What it is ain’t exactly clear . . .”
Donald Trump is the worst president in American History! That seems to be the downright unanimous opinion of every left wing wonk from here to Noam Chomsky, and I might have a bit more respect for the view if these throngs of progressive intellectuals weren’t so goddamn smug about it. After all I’ve never been particularly tame in my criticisms of the son of a bitch myself. His penchant for pure evil is pretty well documented. Any human being who fucks with children the way he has at the borders deserves things I can’t publicly advocate without being shipped off to Gitmo. As if that weren’t enough, his role in the ongoing genocide in Yemen, the ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, and the downright apocalyptic baiting of Iran and China should make it crystal clear to anyone with half a working soul that Donald Trump is a world class bastard in the first degree. But the worst president in American history? I don’t know, the Donald has some pretty stiff competition there.
The Democrats’ pandemic convention has been an uncanny spectacle to behold. Centrally coordinated from Milwaukee but technically distributed across the country through a combination of live and pre-recorded speeches and performances, the Democratic National Convention (DNC) has sought to portray a Democratic Party whose members have united around the shared goal of defeating Donald Trump. But beneath the canned TV relays, there is an ominous edge to the DNC’s unity: The technical setup of the convention has foreclosed most avenues for dissent, and the DNC’s management of key decisions is palpably out of step with the goals behind which the party claims to be unified.
The Democratic National Convention this week played against the backdrop of compound crises: Covid-19 and climate change, economic instability and racial injustice. Our country is dying, literally, for change, and the current president cannot deliver. So it’s up to the Democratic Party and its nominees, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, to tackle this mess—and they’re off to a good start.
On Friday, August 21, Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya (Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya) gave her first press conference since fleeing Belarus for Lithuania. Here’s a quick rundown of what she had to say (direct quotes are in quotation marks). You can watch the full press conference here.
All of us can remember the days of our youth when we would seek out words and expressions to express annoyance at those who had given offense. In many cases the parties needing remonstrance were siblings, and in some cases, one or both parents by whom we had been admonished or otherwise dealt with in a manner that we, as the child in the event, felt needed to be harshly addressed.
As this old babyboomer gets older, inexplicably, I feel hipper, more in tune with the cosmos than ever before, and yet friskier than ever with the activist thing, the need to save the planet from the oil of dinosaur’s revenge and the slick dinosaurs in DC intent on taking us down with them — like Lost Weekend alcoholics rushing toward the bottom of the bottle.
Has the world gone mad, or have I? Each night I have to pinch myself to make sure that the day’s events weren’t some feverish nightmare.
Every four years America is presented with a false choice, each one essentially a continuation of the status quo by different means, politically and economically related, but optically opposed. Biden had already said that nothing will fundamentally change if he is elected president, so why should any American bother to vote for this specific lesser of two evils? A lesser evil is still an evil. One way to understand the moral panic circling the election is precisely in understanding the Democratic platform, which is essentially ‘we are not Trump,’ though in every other way they are the same, touting strange notions like bipartisanship. What seems to bother most Democrat-leaning Americans is that Donald Trump acts like a mirror for what the entire electorate engages in, namely American exceptionalism. Both parties are guilty of this, though the Democrats pretend that their ‘fight’ is of a higher purpose, a nebulous and abstract identity politics that serves up corrupt authoritarian corporate-backed politicians and attempts to whitewash them in identitarian rhetorical navel gazing. The Trumpian ‘opposition’ consists of directly associating itself and engaging in American exceptionalism, no lip service, no shadow acting, just pure raw cynical absolutism. And this is the crux of the problem. The fight isn’t over policy (the Democratic platform is a clear indication of this) but over image. Americans don’t want to ‘look like’ Donald Trump, but they’ll vote for many of his policies. They’ll happily engage in all the tropism, suicidal foreign policy, corporate propaganda, and patriotic rah rah shopping sprees, just as long as Trump isn’t the one facing them on their smartphone screens.
Both Sen. Ed Markey and Alex Morse outraised their opponents in recent days, even after an endorsement by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for Markey's challenger and a smear campaign directed at Morse.
The Postmaster General's actions are advancing two of President Trump's goals: undermining confidence in vote by mail and laying a foundation for postal privatization.€
"From the most remote village in the Alaskan tundra to the tiniest island in the Everglades, there's one connection we've always depended on: the mail."
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Friday that he has no plans to reinstate mail sorting machines in U.S. Postal Service (USPS) facilities, nor to replace public mailboxes that have been removed across the country.
"DeJoy himself confirmed that there have been significant service slowdowns. It makes no sense at all for him to say USPS sorting machine 'are not needed.' Put them back."
We air highlights from Joe Biden’s highly anticipated speech on the final night of the Democratic National Convention, in which he formally accepted the Democratic presidential nomination, focused on the dangers of President Trump’s reelection and pledged to address the four simultaneous crises of systemic racism, the pandemic, the economic downturn and the climate crisis. “United, we can and will overcome this season of darkness in America,” Biden said. The 25-minute speech was delivered from his home state of Delaware.
While it’s stunning to watch the DNC repeat the losing strategy of 2016, we should know this is part of a decades-long history of moving toward the right: aka Triangulation.
Spreading faster than COVID-19 among those on the portside, warnings of a fascist-style coup by Trump are rampant this presidential campaign season. Should Trump fail to carry the Electoral College, Noam Chomsky admonishes, “he could send Blackshirts out in the streets… preparation for a plan to try to bring the military in to carry out something which would amount to a military coup.”
Skyleigh Heinen, a U.S. Army veteran who suffers from rheumatoid arthritis and anxiety, relies on the Postal Service for timely delivery of her meds to be able to function. She was one of thousands of Americans from all walks of life who spoke out recently to demand an end to a forced slowdown in mail delivery.
The 2020 Democratic National Convention has wrapped up, with speakers on the final night including California Governor Gavin Newsom, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker and 13-year-old Brayden Harrington, who talked about how Joe Biden had personally helped him with his stutter. We air highlights from the evening’s addresses.
In November, we will not be offered a choice between a greater evil and a lesser evil, nor a choice between capitalism and socialism, and certainly not a choice between living in an empire and living in a republic. We will be offered a choice between a common-variety American politician and a dictator. Wake up, folks, we are living in a 21st-century American version of 1933 Germany.
Before long, this year’s Democratic Party convention, its infomercial, will be a distant memory. The production values were good. For the most part, I found it watchable, even when the focus was on Biden rather than Trump. In view of what the Democrats are selling, it could have been a lot worse.
Greg Palast does not mince words about the 2020 elections.
The view passed down from on high in the U.S. is that elections are the effective and legitimate means of collective decision-making in the realm of the political. Conversely, on matters of war and peace, economic distribution, environmental wellbeing, healthcare, education, housing, and social welfare— the areas where collective outcomes matter, these are either considered ‘economic’ in nature, or elected representatives defer to markets, grant decision-making power to corporate pleaders, or act with unanimity across alleged ideological differences. In other words, the liberal conception of politics has remarkably little to do with collective decision-making.
Harvard professor Cornel West and Ben Jealous, president of People for the American Way and former president of the NAACP, discuss the 2020 DNC, Joe Biden’s vow to fight systemic racism and “overcome this season of darkness in America,” the historic nomination of Kamala Harris as his partner on the ticket, and how the convention was a showcase for a broad anti-Trump coalition, including prominent Republican figures given plum speaking slots, but few voices from the party’s insurgent left wing. “At this moment, with the decline and fall of the American empire, it looks as if the system is unable to generate enough energy to seriously reform itself. It remains sanitized, superficial,” says Dr. West. “I want fundamental change.” Jealous says Biden is someone progressives can work with and pressure. “The theme of this convention was really one of unity,” he notes. “This is a time when we have to come together to defeat a president who is the most evil, the most corrupt that any of us have seen.”
TikTok, which has been under scrutiny over its content moderation practices, in March named the initial members of a content advisory council, to give advice on its policies and evaluate the company’s actions.
ADL has alerted TikTok to the range of examples of hate speech on their platform, including the examples that follow, and in recent weeks ADL’s Center on Technology and Society and Center on Extremism have been working closely with TikTok’s Trust and Safety team to help them identify and address the hate on their platform. TikTok has committed to working closely with ADL to address these issues going forward.
Popular anarchist news sites CrimethInc and It's Going Down have released a joint statement on the situation, claiming that it's Facebook cowtowing to bad faith "both side-ism" to appease Donald Trump for his demonstrably-false claims about "antifa violence." From both sites:
[...]
This new Facebook ban affects 790 groups, 100 pages, 1500 ads, and 300 hashtags relating to QAnon; by comparison, they've banned 980 groups, 520 Pages, 160 ads, and over 1400 hashtags allegedly relating to "antifa." Another 1950 groups, 440 pages, and 10,000 accounts are facing additional restrictions while remaining on the platform.
Looking across the globe, however, academics generally agree that democracy is in a slump. One much-watched barometer is the World Values Survey (WVS), a poll published twice a decade. We combined its data with those from the European Values Survey to study trends in 98 countries from 1995 to 2020. Our analysis found that support for autocrats has indeed grown in most parts of the world, but this effect is weakest in healthy democracies, despite their recent flirtations with populism.
Ten thousand moderators at YouTube. Fifteen thousand moderators at Facebook. Billions of users, millions of decisions a day. These are the kinds of numbers that dominate most discussions of content moderation today. But we should also be talking about 10, 5, or even 1: the numbers of moderators at sites like Automattic (Wordpress), Pinterest, Medium, and JustPasteIt—sites that host millions of user-generated posts but have far fewer resources than the social media giants.
Summary: Nextdoor is the local “neighborhood-focused” social network, which allows for hyper-local communication within a neighborhood. The system works by having volunteer moderators from each neighborhood, known as “leads.” For many years, Nextdoor has faced accusations of perpetuating racial stereotyping from people using the platform to report sightings of black men and women in their neighborhood as somehow “suspicious.”
Via the wonderfully entertaining law blog Lowering the Bar comes this interesting First Amendment case involving teens, texting, true threat discussions, and a judicial examination of emojis.
This week, EFF filed suit to stop Texas A&M University from censoring comments by PETA on the university’s Facebook and YouTube pages.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Texas A&M held its spring commencement ceremonies online, with broadcasts over Facebook and YouTube. Both the Facebook and YouTube pages had comment sections open to any member of the public—but administrators deleted comments that were associated with PETA’s high-profile campaign against the university’s muscular dystrophy experiments on golden retrievers and other dogs.
On Wednesday a number of anarchist Facebook accounts, some of which were associated with the antifascist movement, were removed without warning. These included It’s Going Down — a widely followed news and media platform publishing original content and reprinted analyses about “anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements” — and the longstanding anarchist group CrimethInc, which describes itself as “a decentralized network pledged to anonymous collective action.” The removal of these anarchist accounts was part of a general purge, which also included many far right accounts, including those associated with paramilitaries and conspiracy theories that have inspired violence.
"This voter suppression scheme is intended to intimidate voters and cause a chilling effect on the electorate."
On a cool late-summer morning with a seacoast feel here in the landlocked Mohawk Valley, the air’s so sweet and fresh, it feels like I’m breathing health and well-being. But it won’t last. As the sun rises higher, the noxious, hot, humid, locked-in valley air takes over, a descending pall like depressing awareness of the pandemic. Odors – such as those that emanate from the sewer drain in front of our house, linger suggestively, sulfurishly. No wonder the fortunate flock to the shore, to their summer homes in Cape Cod or Kennebunkport in these months! I remember that salt-laden sea air of coastal Maine well, having spent several luxuriously long summers there in my childhood, and in my early adult years lived there working domestic service jobs. Though I long for it still, fortunes being what they are, mine, as far as seacoast summers go, went “south.” Whatever it might have taken to have a means to afford a month on the Maine coast in summer, I took the other road.
It appears the Supreme Court is unwilling to address a another problem it created.
This school year will be unlike any other.
A few days after police lynched George Floyd, I, filled with grief, began writing what became the op-ed “The Problem Is White Supremacy.” I wrote because I needed to do something with my rage and pain. I wrote because I was frustrated with public discussions about race that rarely mentioned—let alone examined—the root cause of this atrocity: white supremacy.
A Response to the Lying Slanderers of the RCP
In mid-July, CounterPunch published, “Minneapolis Ballot Measure to Dismantle the Police Will Test the Strength of Our Movement,” authored by Robin Wonsley & Ty Moore. Intrigued by this article, I contacted Robin, and less than a month later, I interviewed her for my podcast. But already the proposal—which had attracted so much national attention—was dead, killed by the city’s undemocratic and bureaucratic process. Robin and I talked in depth about how this happened, including how the activist community sabotaged itself by giving away its power to the City Council.
Instead of offering a critical analysis of this product of radical imagination, the€ Washington€ Post’s reporting upholds the status quo.
Since the May 25 murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, calls across the US€ to defund police departments—shifting resources from law enforcement to social services—have grown louder. In June, New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio shifted $1 billion from the NYPD—at least on paper (Gothamist, 6/29/20)—and Minneapolis city council members vowed to dismantle the police department and build a new model of public safety (though the city’s charter commission kept an initiative to eliminate a requirement to maintain a minimum number of police officers off the November ballot—Washington Post, 8/5/20).
Doctors at the Omsk hospital treating opposition politician Alexey Navalny have decided to send him to Germany for treatment, reports the local news outlet Gorod55.
The head doctor at the Omsk hospital treating Alexey Navalny says that the main working diagnosis for his condition is a metabolic disease caused by low blood sugar.€
After examining Alexey Navalny, a team of intensive care doctors from Germany have concluded that he can be transported, the opposition politician’s spokeswoman, Kira Yarmysh, wrote on Twitter.€
Alexey Navalny, who is currently hospitalized in the Siberian city of Omsk after showing signs of severe poisoning, didn’t have any toxic substances in his bloodstream, a source familiar with the results of his medical examinations told Meduza.€
Opposition politician and Anti-Corruption Foundation creator Alexey Navalny was hospitalized early on Thursday, August 20, in critical condition. At the time this podcast was recorded, he was in a coma and breathing through a ventilator in Omsk, where his flight home to Moscow was forced to make an emergency landing when he became violently ill.
On the evening of Friday, August 21, doctors in the Siberian city of Omsk finally agreed to evacuate opposition politician Alexey Navalny to Germany. The Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) founder is still in a coma and his exact diagnosis remains unknown. His associates believe that he was poisoned. Navalny is set to leave Omsk on Saturday morning. That said, throughout the day on Friday, local doctors insisted that he couldn’t be transported — and (according to Navalny’s spokeswoman Kira Yarmysh) they lied to the press at least once, claiming that the German doctors who had come to medevac Navalny agreed that he shouldn’t be moved. The plane that will fly Navalny to Berlin was arranged by the Cinema for Peace Foundation — the same organization that medevaced Mediazona publisher and “Pussy Riot” member Pyotr Verzilov to Germany when he was mysteriously poisoned in 2018. Meduza’s special correspondent Svetlana Reiter called Berlin and spoke to the Cinema for Peace Foundation’s founder, Jaka Bizilj, about Navalny’s planned evacuation.
Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of prominent opposition politician Alexey Navalny, has written an appeal to Russian President Vladimir Putin seeking permission to transport her husband to Germany for medical treatment.€
Alexander Murakhovsky, the chief physician at the hospital in Omsk where Alexey Navalny is now fighting for his life, announced on Friday that doctors are reviewing five provisional diagnoses to explain the opposition politician’s apparent poisoning.€
"I'm furious at the incompetence and severe inhumanity of this," one advocate said.
At 11 PM on Tuesday June 30—after 13 hours of public testimony and board deliberations and yes, years of organizing—the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police movement in Los Angeles and nationally took a great leap forward. The Los Angeles School Board, led by Board Member Monica Garcia, with the support of board members Nick Melvoin, Kelly Gonez, and Jackie Goldberg, voted 4 to 3 to cut the $70 million a year budget of the Los Angeles School Police Department (LASPD) by $25 million—35%—and move those funds to programs focused on the needs of Black students. This reduction in the department’s funds will potentially lay off 65 armed officers and cut the department’s overtime budget. We know of no other Defund the Police campaign in a major U.S. City that has made such a major political and material breakthrough—in this case, Los Angeles City, with 4 million residents, 650,000 students, and the second largest school system in the U.S.
This image was taken on July 24, 2020, when the battle was up close at the reinforced iron fence€ surrounding the Mark Hatfield Federal Courthouse.
Jared Dearing, the director of Kentucky’s Board of Elections, had little to do with Louisville, the state’s largest city, having only one polling place for the June 28 primary. It was a county decision, and it made sense. In-person turnout was expected to be low during the pandemic. The polling place, a convention center, offered multiple locations to cast ballots, and transportation by bus there was free.
Nevertheless, as luminaries from LeBron James to U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., tweeted in outrage about the supposed disenfranchisement of Louisville voters, threats poured into Dearing’s office. “You’re too scared to answer your phone,” one man said in a voicemail message from a blocked number. “Go find a gun and kill yourself. Every person that didn’t get to vote because of you should get to beat the shit out of you.” The man, who identified himself as a Washington, D.C., resident, expressed hope that Dearing, a “bigoted whore,” would be mangled in a flaming car crash.
“Despite its peaceful reputation, Canada is not acting as a benevolent player on the international stage."
The notion that ‘Canada is better’, especially when compared with US foreign policy, has persisted for many years. Recent events at the United Nations have, however, exposed the true nature of Canada’s global position, particularly in the matter of its blind and unconditional support for Israel.
Israel is bombing Palestine again, although you likely wouldn’t guess that from watching TV news. For the eleventh straight night, Israeli Defense Force warplanes have been bombing the densely populated Gaza Strip. Israel’s bombs have caused considerable damage, forcing the shutdown of the area’s only power plant.
When the Palestinian actor Mohammed Bakri made a documentary about Jenin in 2002 – filming immediately after the Israeli army had completed rampaging through the West Bank city, leaving death and destruction in its wake – he chose an unusual narrator for the opening scene: a mute Palestinian youth.
Last week, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s office announced a plan to reassess the city’s hundreds of pieces of public art, including monuments and memorials. The announcement came about a month after the city removed two statues of Christopher Columbus — without warning and in the middle of the night — following protests. In a statement, Lightfoot said the effort “is not just about a single statue or mural, but how we create a platform to channel our city’s dynamic civic energy to purposefully reflect our values as Chicagoans.” She also announced the formation of a committee to review “artworks that may be problematic.”
The details of the plan are still being hashed out. But a city spokesperson said that it will include “public art on city or sister agency property,” including public schools and police stations.
Although the amendment was ratified on 18 August 1920, it was preceded by decades of organising and protests - spearheaded by leading figures of US women's suffrage like Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
The 19th amendment is considered to be a seminal piece of legislation, but for minority women - particularly African-American, Hispanic and Native-American women - there was a long road ahead to ensure complete access to the vote.
Several police officers are later seen entering the room to handcuff Chovanec. When this fails to calm him, they return to hold him down, with one sitting on his chest for 16 minutes.
During this sequence, a female officer is seen in the cell dancing and making a Nazi salute.
A woman from Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh has accused her husband of divorcing her by uttering triple talaq over a WhatsApp call, police said. The incident happened on July 31, the 42-year-old woman stated in her complaint.
Various petitions filed on Change.org started circulating on social media after the poster that allegedly sexualised teens was released.
Unable to quell protesters using batons and tear gas, besieged officers opened fire as they risked being overpowered during the violent unrest in a Muslim-dominated neighborhood, the southern city’s police chief told Reuters today.
“Despite elders of the community trying to pacify the crowd, the mob burnt vehicles on the road, they attacked the police station,” Police Commissioner Kamal Pant said.
Since then, there has been a war of words between the opposition Congress and the BJP. The Parliamentary Panel on Information Technology has called Facebook officials to depose before it on September 2 over safeguarding citizens rights and misuse of social media platforms.
Eager to impose higher rates on its mostly captive customers, Charter Communications (Spectrum) has been lobbying the FCC to kill merger conditions affixed to its 2015 merger with Time Warner Cable. The conditions, among other things, prohibited Charter from imposing nonsensical broadband caps and overage fees, or engaging in the kind of interconnection shenanigans you might recall caused Verizon customers' Netflix streams to slow to a crawl back in 2015. The conditions also involved some fairly modest broadband expansion requirements Charter initially tried to lie their way out of.
As previously noted, Space X, Amazon, and others are pushing harder than ever into the low-orbit satellite broadband game. The industry, pockmarked by a long road of failures, involves firing thousands of smaller, cheaper, lower orbit satellite constellations into space to help supplement existing broadband services. The lower orbit means that LO satellite service will offer lower-latency broadband than traditional satellite offerings, which for 15 years or so have been widely maligned as expensive, slow, "laggy," with annoying monthly caps.
The issue: Uber and Lyft were set to be subject to a recently-enacted California labor law, Assembly Bill 5 (aka AB5), which requires “gig economy” companies to reclassify workers as actual employees (instead of contractors). The intent of AB5, which went into effect Jan. 1, was to provide protections for gig workers, so they would be eligible to receive legally mandated employer benefits like a minimum wage, overtime pay, paid leave and health care coverage.
With respect to Epic's claim of suffering irreparable harm unless the court grants its motion, Apple's opposition brief is consistent with a statement it provided to The Verge a few days ago. The term "status quo" plays a central role here. The purpose of temporary relief is to prevent a party from changing a situation to the moving party's detriment in the absence of an injunction (a TRO is the fastest injunction, even more preliminary than what is called a preliminary injunction). Apple explains to the court that Epic's perspective on the status quo is, in reality, something else: the status quo would be for Epic to simply comply with Apple's App Store terms and policies, and with its developer agreement, while its antitrust complaint challenging those terms is pending. If, however, the court granted Epic's motion, it would allow Epic to get away with a breach of its contractual obligations. The requested TRO would not preserve the status quo. It would force Apple to modify its long-standing App Store terms.
Another key term--in connection with any type of injunction--is "irreparable harm." Epic's motion for a TRO argued that the unavailability of Fortnite on the App Store and, as a further consequence of Epic's non-compliance, the termination of its developer agreement (which would prevent Epic from using Apple's developer tools in the further development not only of Epic's games but also of its Unreal Engine) would constitute irreparable harm. Apple's opposition brief dismisses that theory and distinguishes between irreparable harm on the one hand and "self-inflicted wounds" on the other hand. The Ninth Circuit, which is the appeals court for (among many others) the Northern District of California, stated earlier this year that "self-inflicted wounds are not irreparable injury," quoting earlier decisions in this circuit and in the Seventh Circuit.
A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about Apple opposing the trademark for Prepear, a recipe sharing phone app, over its pear logo. The whole thing was completely absurd. The logos don't look anything alike, the color schemes and artistic styles are different, and also a pear is not an apple. I likened the whole thing to those absurd CNN commercials, which should give you some idea of just how dumb this whole thing was. So, thanks to this idiocy being exposed and the public backlash, Apple finally realized the error of its ways and backed off the opposition.
Movie companies and their anti-piracy partners are pressing ahead with their legal action to track down The Pirate Bay. The site reportedly used VPN provider OVPN, which carries no logs, but a security expert - one that regularly penetration tests several major VPN providers - believes that information about the notorious site could still be obtained.
Representatives from the music, publishing, and sports industries have submitted their arguments in favor of Canada's court-ordered pirate site blocks. The groups intervene in TekSavvy's appeal and argue that site blocking is one of the few options to stop rampant copyright infringement on the Internet.
Would you believe it? Copyright troll Richard Liebowitz is in trouble yet again. And yes, we just had a different article about him yesterday, but it's tough to keep up with all of young Liebowitz's court troubles. The latest is that a judge has sanctioned Liebowitz and recommended he be removed from the roll of the court in the Northern District of NY.
