The first consumer-facing Lenovo laptop shipping with Fedora is available to purchase, with several additional forthcoming featuring Fedora, RHEL and Ubuntu. To celebrate the achievement, Red Hat Senior Software Engineering Manager Christian Schaller has penned an enormous and decidedly effusive blog post regarding these new Fedora-powered ThinkPads. Schaller also summarizes Red Hat’s prior efforts to push Linux forward, and teases a few interesting things on the laptop roadmap.
If you are in the market for a new next laptop you may be interested to know that the previously launched ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 laptop installed with Microsoft Windows 10 operating system is now available to purchase pre-installed with the Fedora Linux operating system instead.
AWS has released a new open source Linux distro called Bottlerocket that has been built specifically to run on containers.
The cloud giant already has its own Linux distro optimized to run inside the AWS cloud called Amazon Linux which can be run in a Docker container or with the Linux KVM, Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESXi hypervisors.
In a blog post, product manager at AWS Samartha Chandrashekar explained why the company created Bottlerocket, saying...
Amazon Web Services (AWS) this week announced the general availability of Bottlerocket, a lightweight instance of Linux optimized for container applications running on the AWS cloud.
Peder Ulander, director for open source at AWS, says the cloud service provider opted to create its own lightweight distribution of Linux to better optimize the experience of developers who rely on AWS to automate back-end IT operations on their behalf. Bottlerocket makes it easier for AWS to spin up and down both the operating system and the underlying virtual machines resources that developers use to deploy container applications on various AWS infrastructure services optimized for containers, he notes.
Earlier this year Amazon announced Bottlerocket as a Linux distribution for running containers. This week Bottlerocket crossed the general availability milestone.
Bottlerocket from Amazon Web Services is a Linux distribution optimized for running containers with an emphasis on security, operations, and manageability. Bottlerocket is open-source and available via GitHub. A lot of Bottlerocket's own tooling is written using the Rust programming language.
Some applications need additional storage but don't care whether that data is stored persistently across restarts. For example, caching services are often limited by memory size and can move infrequently used data into storage that is slower than memory with little impact on overall performance. Other applications expect some read-only input data to be present in files, like configuration data or secret keys.
Kubernetes already supports several kinds of such ephemeral volumes, but the functionality of those is limited to what is implemented inside Kubernetes.
CSI ephemeral volumes made it possible to extend Kubernetes with CSI drivers that provide light-weight, local volumes. These inject arbitrary states, such as configuration, secrets, identity, variables or similar information. CSI drivers must be modified to support this Kubernetes feature, i.e. normal, standard-compliant CSI drivers will not work, and by design such volumes are supposed to be usable on whatever node is chosen for a pod.
The Raspberry Pi might be getting a small software fix that makes a big performance improvement.
Plus, we attempt to combine two internet connections with Linux live from the woods!
We would like to welcome Owen Peery to the team. He’s our new editor!
1:27 Linux Innards 21:44 Vibrations from the Ether 43:17 Check This Out 48:10 Outro
In our Innards section, how we use droidcam!
The latter is then installed on a computer as a distribution such as Ubuntu, elementary OS, Fedora, OpenSUSE, etc. However, because there are Linux distributions that come paired with more software other than GNU, some people feel we cannot generalize all ‘Linux-Kerneled‘ operating systems as GNU/Linux.
The Linux Kernel was developed in 1991 by Linus Torvalds and has since then ported to a wide range of computer architectures. Linux was adopted as the main Kernel for the GNU Operating System, meant to be a free and open source. Since then, Linux has gained popularity and deployed in different computing systems such as mobile devices (Android), PCs, Servers, embedded devices, supercomputers, and mainframes. Please read our article on the Top 10 New Features in Linux Kernel 5.8 released recently.
Let’s understand the difference between a Kernel and an Operating System.
One important bit not covered in today's GeForce RTX 3070/3080/3090 announcement but now detailed via the NVIDIA website is confirmation that the RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs do in fact have dedicated AV1 hardware decode capabilities.
The RTX 30 series is NVIDIA's first line of GPUs supporting AV1 decode (though sadly no AV1 encode) for this open-source, royalty-free video codec that competes with H.264/H.265 and has shown much industry interest and growing adoption.
Today the 'Ultimate Countdown' from NVIDIA ended with the announcement of the RTX 3090, RTX 3080 and the RTX 3070, all of them being absolute monsters with 2nd generation RTX. Powered by their Ampere generation, this definitely sounds like a big generational leap. It's really easy to be excited about it and I am.
Not just in terms of power, the price of the main two RTX 3080 and the RTX 3070 puts them well in line with the current 20xx generation which is pretty amazing for the difference in power. We need to take anything with a pinch of salt though of course, until independent benchmarks can be done.
Just a quick post for today to talk about a small project I undertook this morning.
As I’ve talked about repeatedly, I run a lot of tests.
It’s practically all I do when I’m not dumping my random wip code by the truckload into the repo.
The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t leave much time for performance improvements. How can I possibly have time to run benchmarks if I’m already spending all my time running tests?
If you want to use One Drive or Google Drive on Linux natively and effortlessly, you can opt for a premium GUI tool like Insync (affiliate link).
If you can put some effort in the terminal, you can use Rclone to sync with many cloud storage services on Linux. We have a detailed guide on using Rclone for syncing with OneDrive in Linux.
Rclone is a pretty popular and useful command-line tool. A lot of power users will need to use Rclone for its features.
However, not everyone is comfortable using it from the terminal even if it’s useful enough.
So, in this article, I’ll talk about an impressive GUI “Rclone Browser” that makes it easy to manage and sync your data on cloud storage using Rclone.
It is also worth noting that Rclone does offer an experimental web-based GUI — but we are going to focus on Rclone Browser here.
recently finished writing a book about C programming, which I self-published through Lulu.com. I've used Lulu for several book projects, and it's a great platform. Earlier this year, Lulu made changes that give authors greater control over creating their book covers. Previously, you just uploaded a pair of large-format images for the front and back book covers. Now, Lulu allows authors to upload a custom PDF exactly sized to your book's dimensions.
You can create the cover using Scribus, the open source page layout program. Here's how I do it.
This guide, we explore yet another monitoring tool - auto-cpufreq - a CPU speed and power optimizer. In an earlier article, we looked at a user-friendly resource monitor known as Bashtop and saw just how easy it is to keep tabs on the system's performance straight from the terminal.
Auto-cpufreq is an opensource command-line utility based on Python under the GPL 3.0 license. The tool monitors your CPU and prints metrics on the terminal such as the CPU usage, and frequency & temperature of each CPU core. Additionally, it monitors the state of your battery, system load, and turbo boost management.
RSS Guard is a simple (yet powerful) feed reader. It is able to fetch the most known feed formats, including RSS/RDF and ATOM. It's free, it's open-source. RSS Guard currently supports Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian. RSS Guard will never depend on other services - this includes online news aggregators like Feedly, The Old Reader and others.
Courtesy of open-source software, you could not only save a large amount of cash but also get the chance to make amendments to the code so that the application better fits your needs. When it comes to video games, most of the popular titles won’t be open-source. With that being said, if you look hard enough, you’re going to find a plethora of open-source games on the Internet.
Although such games are only a Google search away, it should be noted that there is a wide variety of open-source games out there, so it might take quite a while for you to get to the best ones. Considering this, FOSSLinux thought to do all the research for you and compile this list of the best free and open-source games to play in 2020.
The Linux requirements and recommended hardware are the same as the Windows ones with the sole difference that the player run Ubuntu 18.04.
Another game bundle is here, this time it's the Humble 1C Publishing Bundle which comes with some pretty great Linux gaming titles ready for you.
Tenderfoot Tactics looks like it really does put a fresh spin on tactical battling, with an open world and a deterministic combat system it could be great.
Releasing on October 21, you take control of a small party of adventurers granted magic by the friendly spirits of the archipelago. Your quest is to discover the truth and hopefully put an end to the terrible Fog - one vast, voiceless, and cruel spirit - has been eating the once-thick forests of the mainland
"Manipulate the elements to turn the battlefield to your advantage, but beware the consequences, as nature is complex and fickle. Open chasms, raise mountains, boil lakes, drain rivers. Start fires you later regret."
I don't quite know what to make of this. My Exercise is completely bizarre and yet ridiculously charming at the same time, all about some chubby kid doing sit-ups with their dog.
"Softly sink into the dog’s body or comfortably rub your head against his fur. More animals join this festival of private comforts as it builds up to a climactic end. Repeat the exercise to unlock more animals. There are also other secrets, hidden delicately. Let's do sit-ups!"
With the next release of ScummVM upcoming, the team have put out a call to arms for helping testing a bunch of new titles that will be supported with ScummVM 2.2.0.
Another wonderful bit of FOSS software, which enables tons of classic games to be perfectly playable on all sorts of modern operating systems. From Blade Runner to The Secret of Monkey Island there's a lot it supports.
As a reminder GRID, Kona and Get Packed have left Stadia Pro, so you now have to buy them on Stadia as normal. You can see the full list of current claimable Stadia Pro games here.
Other recent Stadia launches include that are not in Pro: DOOM, HITMAN 2, PGA Tour 2K21, Relicta, Rock of Ages 3: Make & Break, Spiritfarer, Strange Brigade, SUPERHOT: Mind Control Delete, Windbound. More to come in future including Avengers, Baldur's Gate 3, Serious Sam 4, Watch Dogs: Legion, WWE 2K Battlegrounds and so on. Quite a busy year for Stadia as it builds up a healthy selection of titles new and old.
Fatbot Games have revealed that Vaporum: Lockdown will be launching on September 15, with the official Linux PC release to follow along 'shortly after'.
Acting as a prequel to Vaporum, it expands on everything from the original. A grid-based, single-player, single-character game, seen from a first-person perspective in an original steampunk setting, and inspired by old-school games like Dungeon Master I and II, the Eye of the Beholder series, and the more recent Legend of Grimrock I and II.
Follow the story of Ellie Teller, a scientist who is a part of a mysterious research project in the middle of an ocean. After disastrous events, she struggles to survive and escape the tower of Arx Vaporum.
Golden Krone Hotel is an approachable, easy to understand and thoroughly underrated roguelike that you should check out. Especially now, with a big update out that overhauls lots.
A gothic horror roguelike, one where you fight vampires with sunlight or become a vampire yourself and sneak in the shadows. It has a fun setting and the approachable mechanics also make it a really great roguelike for playing on coffee breaks.
The free and open source game engine and editor GDevelop continues maturing, with new features constantly being pulled it to make it more powerful. If you missed it, a recent previous release added a live preview feature.
Never heard of it before? GDevelop is a full-featured, open-source game development software, allowing to create HTML5 and native games without any knowledge in a specific programming language. All the game logic is built up using an intuitive and powerful event-based system.
Release '5.0.0-beta99' is now live, which continues expanding the graphical power with the addition of support for dynamic 2D lights. So you can now add a Light object to scenes, with a customizable colour and radius which looks and sounds extremely useful. Testing it myself, it does work really well and it's super easy to use.
After early success on Steam, retro Pokemon inspired creature capture / taming game Monster Crown has its first major update available now and it sounds exciting.
This first and rather large content update introduces three new game features: NET Eggs, the 'Move Learner' and online monster trading. A NET Egg lets players breed with a random monster egg, which contains monster genes from players all over the world. The egg serves as a wild-card parent, resulting in a surprise monster. The 'Move Learner' allows monsters to remember a new set of moves from its large roster of attacks. Monsters can learn a lot of moves, but they can only remember six at a time. Now players can select which moves their monsters remember at any given time. Lastly, online monster trading lets players exchange their monster creations with the world.
Crusader Kings III is a difficult game to describe succinctly. While a great deal of the game is about being a character, gameplay spans generations of rulers of your dynasty. Things like interpersonal disputes and interactions can have large administrative and strategic consequences. It’s possible to, through cunning and good marriages, come up from a lowly count to a great emperor in a generation or two. It’s also possible to be said emperor and be murdered by a scorned wife and have half of your realm rise up in revolt when your inbred son comes to power.
All of this takes place on a beautiful map that lovingly details terrain and kingdoms ranging from West Africa to Northern Europe, vast Russian steppes, the Middle East, and India and Tibet. Still images don’t really do the game justice—character models are fully 3d and are animated. These are vibrant and lively, reflecting their current lot in life at a glance. The level of detail is fantastic with banners fluttering from the parapets of castles or rivers lazily babbling around villages when zoomed in. Zooming out reveals the colors of the different realms before finally yielding to a faux-parchment map complete with fantastical beasts drawn in the water and margins.
[...]
It is because the game acknowledges all this freedom in its design that the underlying systems are coherent and universal. Now, if you’re a newer player it’s still all complex, perhaps to the point of being initially overwhelming, but I believe that it’s needfully so. To its credit, Paradox has made strides in easing players in with a comprehensive tutorial. Beyond that, the game has tooltips for just about anything and concepts that remain unclear can be looking up in an in-game encyclopedia at any moment.
Understanding the basics doesn’t take too long; exploring the game’s other systems can be done at leisure or according to taste. Focusing on intrigue and scheming is just as valid as diplomacy and conventional warfare. Characters spend their lives improving their skills according to the lifestyle chosen for them. This system, complete with skill trees, can result in tailor-made characters for your preferred play style.
It’s perfectly fine to play as a virtuous ruler, a dreaded tyrant or anything in between. Intimidating your vassals and courtiers can be just as effective as being the very model of chivalry. Some lifestyle perks feed into systems like stress, dread or respect, providing a powerful feedback so that you can rule as you like. The favors system—called hooks—adds to this and can compel vassals and courtiers to accept your demands. They can be gained by various means ranging from intrigue and blackmail or to simply being a good friend. These can be leveraged to change feudal contracts, keep characters out of faction and all sorts of other actions. It is a system more intuitive in action than it is to describe and also provides plenty of opportunity for players.
Linux terminals can be fun too. Learn how to play chess in Linux terminal that too with a formidable opponent Stockfish chess engine.
The KDE Project released today the KDE Plasma 5.19.5 maintenance update as the last in the Plasma 5.19 desktop environment series.
Launched in early June 2020, the Plasma 5.19 desktop environment is currently the most advanced stable version of KDE’s modern and powerful user interface for Linux-based operating systems. But being a short-lived branch, it only receives five maintenance updates, Plasma 5.19.5 being the last one, and also a small update that includes only a few changes.
The most important ones being the support for printing of multiple copies and print scaling from Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird using the KDE Print dialog, the ability for KSysGuard to detect changes in monitors list, and support for the Powerdevil daemon to remember the keyboard brightness level and restore it when waking up the computer from suspend.
Cutelyst a Qt web framework got a new version, this version has one important fix for async apps using FastCGI or HTTP2, also fixes for SO_REUSEPORT, and as a new feature is has support for listen queue backlog on UNIX, sadly QTcpServer doesn’t support both of these (I need to find time to write some patches…).
Cutelyst is available for many Linux distributions but doesn’t for Debian/Kubuntu, so I’m also adding the CPack deb built will all but uWSGI support for 20.04 amd64.
that is a major new feature, so please read carefully and take full backup before updating to Latte v0.9.86~ [~, stands for rapid development, in your distro package repos is mentioned as git version]
It’s called Fly-Pie and despite being at an early stage in its development (i.e. expect bugs, missing features, possible death, etc) it’s already looking pretty functional as this YouTube video ably demonstrates...
Now, I’m sure some of you (i.e. those with a bit of Linux lineage behind ya) might see some familiarity with GNOME Pie (which, for those unaware, was an radial app launcher for Linux popular during the Compiz years),
GNOME Pie was the work of developer Simon Schneegans and — cue faux shock — he’s also the developer of Fly Pie! But Fly Pie isn’t a straight up clone or a direct continuation of his old project. It’s very much its own thing (like Wayland compatible, hurrah).
In the PureOS for Creatives series, we’ve covered how the Librem line of products work for creative use, particularly for recording studios: commercial or home. There are many more tools like Ardour and LMMS, available from the PureOS Software Store (where everything is free as in libre) and ready to go right after download. Many of the dependencies needed for the programs to run as intended are available on your Librem computer out of the box, such as ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) and PulseAudio – which both provide low-latency audio suitable for professional music production.
ALSA and PulseAudio are integrated within the audio/MIDI settings for all music creation software, and both are great audio systems for MIDI and audio handling. But if you need two programs to share audio between one another or any external studio gear that you would like to communicate with each other as well as the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), you might want to familiarize yourself with JACK.
Hello there! This is the final report on my project which aimed at initiating support for XFS Filesystem on Haiku, by first making a read only driver.
Developers in the Linux community have recently become aware of a severe problem in the GRUB2 bootloader that allows a bad actor to completely circumvent UEFI Secure Boot. This vulnerability was discovered by researchers at Eclypsium and given the name BootHole. While a group of engineers worked to fix this bug, they also performed an in-depth audit of GRUB2’s source code, fixing a few other vulnerabilities in the process. A full list can be found in Debian’s Security Advisory 4735 (which we use as base for our GRUB2 package).
All vulnerabilities mentioned above are now fixed in Endless OS 3.8.6. We are also using a new secure boot signing certificate to sign these new packages, and have revoked the old certificates, to prevent a downgrade to the vulnerable binaries.
The Linux From Scratch community announces the release of LFS Version 10.0.
This version of the book has undergone a major reorganization. It uses enhanced cross-compilation techniques and an environment isolated from the host system to build tools for the final system. This reduces both the chance for changing the the host system and the potential of the host system influencing the LFS build process.
Major package updates include toolchain versions glibc-2.32, gccc-10.2.0, and binutils-2.35. In total, 37 packages were updated since the last release. The Linux kernel has also been updated to version 5.8.3.
You can read the book online, or download to read locally.
In coordination with this release, a new version of LFS using the systemd package is also being released. This package implements the newer systemd style of system initialization and control and is consistent with LFS in most packages.
Just over twenty years after the Linux From Scratch project was started as a guide/book to building all of the software components manually from source, Linux From Scratch 10.0 has been released.
Linux From Scratch continues to teach the user how to roll their own Linux installation from source and while hearing "LFS" has been less common in recent years the effort still continues.
At the beginning were text mode consoles. Traditionally, *BSD and Linux on i386 and amd64 used text mode consoles which by default provided 25 rows of 80 columns, the "80x25 mode". This mode uses a 8x16 font stored in the VGA BIOS (which can be slightly different across vendors).
OpenBSD uses the wscons(4) console framework, inherited from NetBSD.
Theo (deraadt@) has just committed the crank to 6.8-beta to CVS
Garuda Linux, a user-friendly and gaming oriented GNU/Linux distribution based on Arch Linux, has a new ISO release that brings various improvements, new features, and updated components.
New features in this release include a revamped Welcome app with support for Adguard DNS, a new option for switching the GDM (GNOME Display Manager) login screen to Wayland, a new option to enable the HiDPI mode for 4K screens, as well as support for enabling and disabling the guest account.
The Network Assistant app has been improved as well in Garuda Linux 200831 and it now features buttons for restarting the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections, and supports detection of NetworkManager or Connman backends to allow you to start the networking service.
Garuda team has released a new version 200831 of Garuda Linux, which includes numerous updates and improvements to applications and desktop environments.
For those who don’t know, Garuda Linux is an Arch Linux-based rolling distribution focussing only on performance. But unlike Arch, it comes with a graphical Calamares installer and other advanced GUI tools like Garuda Settings Manager and Garuda Boot Repair for managing the system easily.
It’s that time of the year again, when the famous Arch Linux distribution gets a new ISO release with the latest and greatest Linux kernel. Arch Linux’s September 2020 snapshot is out as the first to use Linux kernel 5.8.
If you’ve been waiting to install Arch Linux on your personal computer or server with the Linux 5.8 kernel series out of the box, the wait is finally over. The Arch Linux 2020.09.01 snapshot is out now and it’s powered by Linux Kernel 5.8.5.
Dubbed as one of the biggest releases of all time, the Linux 5.8 kernel introduces mitigations for the Special Register Buffer Data Sampling (SRBDS) a.k.a. CrossTalk hardware vulnerability, a new initrdmem= boot option to allow you to specify an initial RAM disk image, as well as support for LZO-RLE compression in the F2FS file system.
A colleague of mine asked me today to prove that rootless podman has worse I/O performance than running podman as root. Which I claimed.
My instinct is that it gotta be worse, because fuse-overlayfs is overlayfs implementation in userspace, so it gotta be less performant than a kernel module. Let’s see.
The core Podman runtime environment only runs on Linux operating systems. Other operating systems can use remote client software to manage containers on a Linux backend. The remote client is nearly identical to the standard Podman program. Certain functions that do not make sense for remote clients have been removed. For example, the --latest switch for container commands is not present.
The eternal goal of every good sysadmin is to be replaced by a script.
It seems self-defeating, but sysadmins know that only when a technology is understood completely can it be automated, and new technology appears every year. By the time you've automated one thing, there's something new to learn and eventually automate.
Automation makes sense because computers are better and more reliable at repetition than humans. And because it's so popular a goal, there are dozens of tools to make automation possible, and most aren't mutually exclusive.
Over the last couple months, I’ve created a pretty sweet setup for running meetups — including the IBM Developer SF Meetup — and the ForwardJS conference series from my home. Let me show you how!
Q4OS 3.12 "Centaurus" released its latest long term support release with Debian Buster 10.5 update.
I previously wrote about how I installed the Jitsi video-conferencing system on Debian [1]. We used that for a few unofficial meetings of LUV to test it out. Then we installed Big Blue Button (BBB) [2]. The main benefit of Jitsi over BBB is that it supports live streaming to YouTube. The benefits of BBB are a better text chat system and a “whiteboard” that allows conference participants to draw shared diagrams. So if you have the ability to run both systems then it’s best to use Jitsi when you have so many viewers that a YouTube live stream is needed and to use BBB in all other situations.
One problem is with the ability to run both systems. Jitsi isn’t too hard to install if you are installing it on a VM that is not used for anything else. BBB is a major pain no matter what you do. The latest version of BBB is 2.2 which was released in March 2020 and requires Ubuntu 16.04 (which was released in 2016 and has “standard support” until April next year) and doesn’t support Ubuntu 18.04 (released in 2018 and has “standard support” until 2023). The install script doesn’t check for correct apt repositories and breaks badly with no explanation if you don’t have Ubuntu Multiverse enabled.
Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and Debian Extended Long Term Support (ELTS), which extend the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor.
In August, the monthly sponsored hours were split evenly among contributors depending on their max availability - I was assigned 21.75h for LTS (out of my 30 max; all done) and 14.25h for ELTS (out of my 20 max; all done).
We had a Birds of a Feather videoconf session at DebConf20, sadly with varying quality for participants (from very good to unusable), where we shared the first results of the LTS survey.
This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
This blog follows up on the earlier report about Daniel Lange, who was accused of aggression but accepted into Debian anyway at almost the same time Jacob Appelbaum was expelled.
We quote the following two emails from the debian-private (leaked) gossip network, little comment is needed to see the hypocrisy at work inside Debian.
Linux Mint project’s lead developer Clement Lefebvre announced today that the Warpinator network transfer tool from the Linux Mint 20 distribution is now available as a Flatpak for all distros.
One of the attractions of the Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana” release was Warpinator, a small utility that makes file sharing on the local network a breeze, and it also provides encryption so no one can intercept your network transfers. Warpinator was also recently ported to the LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) 4 operating system.
Warpinator is made by the Linux Mint team for Linux Mint, and, until now, there was no way to install it on other GNU/Linux distributions. But, as of today, Warpinator is available as a Flatpak app that you can install on virtually any Linux distro that supports the Flatpak universal binary format.
We’re happy to announce that Warpinator, the network transfer tool which shipped with Linux Mint 20 and was ported to LMDE 4, is now available to all users of Linux as a Flatpak.
If you are using Linux Mint 19.x or Linux Mint 18.x open the Software Manager and search for “Warpinator”.
If you are using a different Linux distribution head over to Flathub at https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.x.Warpinator.
If you want to share files between computers running different releases of Linux Mint or different distributions, note that you can use both Flatpak and non-Flatpak versions of Warpinator on the same network.
Imagine this situation. You are working on a certain topic and you have more than twenty tabs open in your web browser, mostly related to the work.
Some of these tabs are for YouTube or some other music streaming website you are listening to.
You finished the work on the topic and close the browser. Your intent was to close all the work related tabs but it also closed the tabs that you were using for listening to music or some other activities.
t’s been over two months since the exciting release of the current stable Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana.” Over this period, it has also received several bug fixes, and the Linux Mint team is already working towards the development of the next point release v20.1.
Now, in the latest monthly blog, Linux Mint founder Clement Lefebvre has revealed the WebApp Management system, one of the features they’re working to implement in the upcoming Linux Mint 20.1.
The $199 ARM laptop from Pine64 has gained a cult following amongst tech-savvy Linux enthusiasts thanks the combination of low entry price and decent build quality. Heck, even I’m saving up for one!
Now Pinebook Pro owners have even more choice.
Anyone wishing to sample elementary OS experience can do so using a new version of the OS custom-built for the Pinebook Pro. This “early access” build is based off the upcoming elementary OS 6 release. It is only available to download by financial supporters of the project, e.g., via Github Sponsors.
The popular Ubuntu Linux gets two new versions a year, with one coming in April, and the other in October. Its version numbering scheme is based on year (YY), a period, and the month (MM). For instance, the most recent stable version was released this past April and it is numbered as 20.04. In addition, Canonical (the operating system's owner) assigns names -- sequentially and alphabetically. The alphanumeric code name is always based on two words starting with the same sequential letter -- an adjective followed by an animal name. The aforementioned 20.04 is named "Focal Fossa."
Obviously, the next version of Ubuntu will be numbered 20.10, and it will be given a two-word code name based on the letter "G." This time, the operating system will be called "Groovy Gorilla." Thankfully, development of the operating system seems to be on schedule, as it recently received a feature freeze. What does this mean? Essentially, moving forward, Ubuntu 20.10 should only receive bug fixes -- no more features will be introduced unless by exception. It also signals that the upcoming Beta release should be released on schedule as expected.
In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu 20.10 Daily Builds with Gnome 3.28 Beta.
VIA’s “Pixetto” is a 130€° FoV HD camera board for teaching AI to students and makers. The board runs Linux on a Cortex-A7 with WiFi, HDMI, micro-USB, microSD, and a Grove interface for links to Arduino, micro:bit, and Raspberry Pi boards.
VIA Technologies recently launched an $85 HD vision sensor board aimed at teaching AI and machine vision basics to students 12 years or older. The VIA Pixetto board includes a Grove connector for connecting to Arduino, micro:bit, and the Raspberry Pi boards, presumably via adapter boards such as Seeed’s Grove Base Kit for Raspberry Pi.
VIA Technologies has launched the VIA Pixetto vision sensor aims to teach artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to students aged twelve and above.
The Linux board features an Hisilicon Hi3518E V300 Cortex-A7 HD camera SoC combined with 64MB RAM, 128MB SPI flash, a MicroSD slot, as well as GalaxyCore GC2053 2M CMOS sensor offering 1920 x 1080 resolution and a 130€° field of view.
M5Stack has just launched an upgrade to its M5Stack Core development with M5Stack Core2 based on the same Espressif ESP32 WiFI + Bluetooth SoC, but adding capacitive touchscreen support to the 2-inch TFT LCD, as well as a motion sensor and a microphone.
The new version also adds 8MB PSRAM, a larger 390 mAh battery, and targets IoT terminals for Smart Home, industrial automation or robotics, STEM Education, and DIY prototyping.
Sourino — which comes from the French word for mouse, “souris,” plus Arduino — is a small robot by 11-year-old maker Electrocat, meant to entertain kitties and kids alike.
The device features a 3D-printed body roughly shaped like a mouse, controlled by a Nano along with three HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors poking out for autonomous navigation. An IR sensor is implemented for remote operation, and two small gearmotors with a driver board enable it to move around on the floor.
La Toulouse Robot Race is an annual racing event held in Toulouse, France, which includes a 10-meter autonomous sprint for multi-legged robots. The current record for quadrupeds is 42 seconds, so Sebastian Coddington decided to construct a robot in hopes of taking the category at the next race in January 2021.
His “GorillaBot” quadruped features limbs made from two-servo five-bar linkage systems, controlled using an Arduino Nano. In autonomous mode, the robot stays on course thanks to a magnetometer; however, if it does lose its way, an on-board ultrasonic sensor helps to keep it from crashing.
Espressif Systems has unveiled two new ESP32-S2 WiFi modules part of the new MINI series modules, namely ESP32-S2-MINI-1U with IPEX antenna, and ESP32-S2-MINI-1 with a PCB antenna.
Pine64 is producing PinePhone Linux phone in batches and each time there’s a different Linux operating system. It started with the BraveHeart edition in November 2019 without any OS at all, following by the UBPorts community edition, then the PostMarkerOS community edition, and we should expect pre-orders for PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition to start mid-September 2020.
These days we almost all use personal Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds at work, such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive. But, if privacy and security are at the top of your mind, these public clouds are, well, public. That's where the open-source, private IaaS cloud software Nextcloud enters. You control your data. Now with Kaspersky Scan Engine added on, you make sure your files are free of malware before they're loaded into the cloud.
Like any of the personal IaaS clouds, with clients on mobile and desktop operating systems and files saved to your server, users can unknowingly upload and share infected files. The integrated antivirus Scan Engine intercepts and blocks such potentially dangerous files as they're uploaded on the server-side. This makes sure malware isn't spread to other users.
Blender, the free and open source 3D creation suite continues going from strength to strength, with a brand new release out now. Let's go over the highlights.
After seeing many more big names chip-in over the last year or two to help fund Blender like AMD, NVIDIA, Epic Games, Ubisoft, Unity and plenty more they've now got over €106,265 coming in per month. Amazing, since that work ends up free for all to use like this. Blender 2.9, released August 31 it "builds on the success of the 2.8x series, Blender 2.90 continues to polish the user experience, introducing improvements to EEVEE, Cycles, sculpt, VR, animation, modeling, UV editing and so much more".
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For game developers, film makers and more Blender is becoming essential and it's fantastic to have it so well supported on Linux.
Open source 3D creation software Blender 2.90 was released as the new major series with huge feature updates and performance improvements.
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And improvements to EEVEE, Cycles, sculpt, VR, animation, modeling, UV editing and so much more.
It's been five years and a heck of a journey from being a non-programmer to becoming an associate software engineer at Red Hat. It's a story worth telling—not because I have achieved a lot, but because of so much drama and so many pitfalls. So grab a cup of coffee, and I will share the unturned pages of my love story with technology.
People say love is as powerful as hate. And love stories that start with hate are often the most passionate ones. My love story with technology was just like that. I got into the world of programming in my freshman year of college. It was my most painful subject. Even though I have always been passionate about futuristic technologies, I didn't know how to move forward towards my passion.
Becoming knowledgeable about computers and being able to manage them efficiently is easier with Free Software than proprietary software. Free Software creates a healthy relationship between developers and users whereby the former plays nice with the latter because he or she has may redesign the software to better fit their needs or completely stop using it. Its openness allows everyone to dig into technical details and discover how it works. Therefore, Free Software puts users in control, allowing them to better understand technology.
Since its launch in 2010, Rust has forged a path directly to the heart of the developer’s community, reaching the enviable top position among the most loved languages, according to the Stack Overflow Developer Surveys.
Part of that success is the language's flexibility: Rust can be used to create game engines, operating systems, file systems, browser components, websites and tools, and more.
In short, Rust is a static multi-paradigm programming language, more focused on performance and security. In practice, its usage resembles a lot of C++, being very light, simple, and fast.
It was created by Graydon Hoare for Mozilla and later refined until it reached a stable version for release.
The impact: This seems like some good problems to have for the Rust community; maturity level "needs an independent foundation" activated!
A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk titled “Leveraging Rust to build cross-platform mobile libraries”. You can find my slides as a PDF. It was part of the Rusty Days Webference, an online conference that was initially planned to happen in Poland, but had to move online. Definitely check out the other talks.
One thing I wanted to achieve with that talk is putting that knowledge out there. While multiple teams at Mozilla are already building cross-platform libraries, with a focus on mobile integration, the available material and documentation is lacking. I’d like to see better guides online, and I probably have to start with what we have done. But that should also be encouragement for those out there doing similar things to blog, tweet & speak about it.
Today we are officially launching the Tor Project Membership Program, a new way for nonprofit and private sector organizations to financially support our work.
For a while, we have been thinking about how to continue to increase the diversity of funds in the Tor Project’s budget, and more importantly, how to increase unrestricted funds. The latest is a type of funding that allows us to be more agile with software development of tor and other tools.
WordPress 5.5.1 is now available!
This maintenance release features 34 bug fixes, 5 enhancements, and 5 bug fixes for the block editor. These bugs affect WordPress version 5.5, so you’ll want to upgrade.
You can download WordPress 5.5.1 directly, or visit the Dashboard ââ â Updates screen and click Update Now. If your sites support automatic background updates, they’ve already started the update process.
WordPress 5.5.1 is a short-cycle maintenance release. The next major release will be version 5.6.
To see a full list of changes, you can browse the list on Trac, read the 5.5.1 RC1 and 5.5.1 RC2 posts, or visit the 5.5.1 documentation page.
August was special for WordPress lovers, as one of the most anticipated releases, WordPress 5.5, was launched. The month also saw several updates from various contributor teams, including the soft-launch of the Learn WordPress project and updates to Gutenberg. Read on to find out about the latest updates from the WordPress world.
As we enter the tail-end of Summer, everything can start to look a little bleak. On the Qt front however, we're happy to say that things are just about to heat up. This challenging year has caused us to heavily adapt our content plans, redirecting our focus from physical events to producing as much helpful and informative online content for our community as possible. Most of which is just about to come to fruition.
So here's a little forecast to help you ride the heatwave. Find out exactly where and when to pick the ripest pieces of content for you.
We are super-excited that a significant milestone, the feature freeze of the next major version of Qt, has been reached! We now have the functionality in place, and the following months will be spent in polishing and tuning the release. Target is to complete the maturation phase in the coming months to be able to release Qt 6.0.0 in December.
Over the past few years, we have been working to research, plan, and create the next Qt version. Qt 5 has been a great success, and it is a solid foundation for the development of applications and devices still for many years to come. But the world is changing, so we are introducing a version that takes Qt users into the new decade. The Qt 6 technical vision blog post by Lars offers a great overview of Qt 6.0 future strategy.€ € €
The Qt Company has announced the feature freeze for the big Qt 6.0 toolkit milestone.
No more feature work is happening for Qt 6.0 in order to make this month's planned Qt 6.0 Alpha release followed by beta releases in October, the Qt 6.0 release candidate in November, and ideally releasing Qt 6.0.0 in December.
Qt 6.0 has a lot of work on its graphics stack, continued Wayland improvements, big improvements for QML, improved C++ APIs, better Python bindings, and more -- The Qt Company will begin organizing feature blog posts and more comprehensive release notes as the 6.0.0 milestone closes in.
PHP is an object-oriented programming language and we can define classes and functions like any other OOP language. Laravel is a PHP framework and provides great advantages over other PHP frameworks.
Laravel classes can easily be imported anywhere in the application. If you are thinking to create your own classes and functions in Laravel, it is equally easy to do.
One of the reasons we may want to create our own classes is to have customized functionality in our Laravel app. Though we can write code in the controllers but it’s recommended to extract extra functionality from controllers to other classes or functions. This way, we can keep controllers clean and more focused on the main task.
If you are allowed to choose which programming language to use for an application, you usually pick one you know and that offers the shortest path to your goal. If you require a high runtime speed, programming languages that compile directly to machine code—ââ¬Å like C++—are your best option.
In modern applications, the back and forth of memory addresses, jumps, loops, and the (sometimes unnecessary) copying of data areas consumes a huge share of machine code. In this article, I'll highlight the C++ move semantics, which enable you to avoid unnecessarily copying processes. Even if you are not a programmer, you can still analyze memory allocations with the valgrind heap profiler massif.
Flutter is a popular project among mobile developers around the world. The framework has a massive, friendly community of enthusiasts, which continues to grow as Flutter helps programmers take their projects into the mobile space.
This tutorial is meant to help you start doing mobile development with Flutter. After reading it, you'll know how to quickly install and set up the framework to start coding for smartphones, tablets, and other platforms.
This how-to assumes you have Android Studio installed on your computer and some experience working with it.
A little over a month ago I learned about the Perl Weekly Challenges. The site states the challenges are for any skill level. So, I went and took a look. After looking at the first challenge that week, I realized “any skill level” did not mean my skill level.
It was the most busiest month of the year 2020 for me. Of course, most of my spare time was dedicated to The Weekly Challenge. We, as a team, created record of 100+ contributions 4 weeks in a row. It was hectic and exhausting, I must admit.
With every passing week, the team is also growing. Team members are blogging more often. As of today, we have received 3000+ Perl contributions and 2000+ Raku contributions. For blogs, very soon we would cross 1000 mark, currently it stands at 940. Did I expect such response in the beginning? No, never dream of such support.
Encouraged by Gabor Szabo, I created my Patreon profile for the first time. I am overwhelmed by the support I have received so far. I would like to take this opportunitity to thank each and every supporters.
Less than a week to go until the candidacy period for the first election of the Raku Steering Council ends (at midnight UTC on 6 September 2020, to be precise). So far, ten people have announced their candidacy, which is great to see! Yours truly feels that, to make the Raku Steering Council truly reflect the Raku userbase, there should be more women, more younger people and more people who do not have English as their first language. If you feel you belong to these groups, and you want to be a part of the future of Raku, please consider adding your candidacy! If you have any questions about the process, please feel free to open an issue!
A special edition of the Rakudo Weekly News to inform you all of an exciting development in the world of the Raku Programming Language.
I got a handful of LoRa modules from Reyax a while back, the RYLR896 model based on Semtech SX1276 chips. Instead of using an SPI interface they operate over UART using a small set of AT commands. This made them easier to work with since I didn't have to dig too deeply into a bunch of SPI registers and Semtech specs and they communicate between one another really well. My Espruino JS module for them is available here, which I've used in a few of my YouTube videos.
Python Turtle Graphics is awesome! It can be used to learn and teach Python programming and Computer Science from elementary to advanced level. There is a post on my blog about the Turtle Graphics demos which come with IDLE (the development environment that ships with Python) - check them out to get an idea of some of the fun stuff you can do!
You can play to a version of the Classic Snake Game on repl.it here.
Click on the Turtle window to enable keyboard control using the arrow keys.
In accordance with our security release policy, the Django team is issuing Django 3.1.1, Django 3.0.10 and Django 2.2.16. These releases address the security issue detailed below. We encourage all users of Django to upgrade as soon as possible.
Python is a programming language with objects, modules, threads, exceptions and automatic memory management. The benefits of pythons are that it is simple and easy, portable, extensible, build-in data structure and it is an open source.
This month we got a major improvement with a new theme for the web client.
In this video, you will learn how to create conditional statements using the Python programming language.
AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript And XML is a set of web development techniques using web technologies on the client-side to create asynchronous web requests.
In simpler words, AJAX allows web pages to be updated asynchronously by exchanging data with a web server behind the scenes. This means that updating parts of a web page is possible, without reloading the whole page.
We can make AJAX requests from Django templates using JQuery. With the jQuery AJAX methods, you can request text, HTML, XML, or JSON from a remote server using both HTTP Get and HTTP Post and you can load the external data directly into the selected HTML elements of your web page.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to make AJAX HTTP GET and POST requests from Django templates.
The internet is a rich source of information, but a majority of it isn’t accessible programmatically through APIs or databases. To address that shortcoming there are a variety of web scraping frameworks that aid in extracting structured data from web pages. In this episode Attila Tóth shares the challenges of web data extraction, the ways that you can use it, and how Scrapy and ScrapingHub can help you with your projects.
Excel spreadsheets are one of those things you might have to deal with at some point. Either it’s because your boss loves them or because marketing needs them, you might have to learn how to work with spreadsheets in Python, and that’s when knowing openpyxl comes in handy!
First up is a process change: I have started doing weekly performance triage. Each Tuesday I have been looking at the performance results of all the PRs merged in the past week. For each PR that has regressed or improved performance by a non-negligible amount, I add a comment to the PR with a link to the measurements. I also gather these results into a weekly report, which is mentioned in This Week in Rust, and also looked at in the weekly compiler team meeting.
The goal of this is to ensure that regressions are caught quickly and appropriate action is taken, and to raise awareness of performance issues in general. It takes me about 45 minutes each time. The instructions are written in such a way that anyone can do it, though it will take a bit of practice for newcomers to become comfortable with the process. I have started sharing the task around, with Mark Rousskov doing the most recent triage.
This process change was inspired by the “Regressions prevented” section of an excellent blost post from Nikita Popov (a.k.a. nikic), about the work they have been doing to improve the speed of LLVM. (The process also takes some ideas from the Firefox Nightly crash triage that I set up a few years ago when I was leading Project Uptime.)
The speed of LLVM directly impacts the speed of rustc, because rustc uses LLVM for its backend. This is a big deal in practice. The upgrade to LLVM 10 caused some significant performance regressions for rustc, though enough other performance improvements landed around the same time that the relevant rustc release was still faster overall. However, thanks to nikic’s work, the upgrade to LLVM 11 will win back much of the performance lost in the upgrade to LLVM 10.
Patreon, whose platform lets creators earn money from fans through subscriptions, has raised $90 million in new funding. The seven-year-old company says it now has a valuation of $1.2 billion, and it’s planning to use the financing to expand internationally and beef up tools for creators (and their fans).
The FBI on Tuesday served a search warrant on a 16-year-old related to his alleged role in the July 15 [attack] on Twitter Inc., the New York Times reported.
The youth was believed to have played a significant role in the attack, the Times reported. The attack took over the accounts of some of Twitter’s most prominent users, including Barack Obama and Elon Musk, as part of an alleged crytocurrency scam.
In mid-July, during a 48-minute Instagram Live interview with the Black culture and art website Afropunk, Georgia Anne Muldrow explained the meaning behind Mama, You Can Bet!, her third album under the pseudonym Jyoti. As she put it, single mothers forgo their own desires for the betterment of their children; the album was written to celebrate them. “I wanted to make a song for when a daughter sees their mother as a woman, for when the child respects a mother’s right to have passionate love in her life,” Muldrow said. “They say after a certain age, you’re not beautiful. They say that this woman, who’s given her whole body [and] done the holiest thing known to man, has now depreciated in value.” On the title track, which also opens the album, Muldrow speaks specifically to Black mothers. And with its distinctly West African sound—a woozy mix of goblet drums, upright bass, and quiet piano chords, produced by Muldrow in her home studio—it’s meant to empower a group of women who’ve been historically mistreated and disconnected from their ancestry. “There’s many a man who’d love your hand,” she sings. “Love is waiting for you.”
Anti-pollution advocates responded with alarm to the American Chemistry Council's reported efforts to influence a pending U.S.-Kenya trade deal.
Companies tend to find workarounds for most data privacy guidelines, and Apple’s latest change won’t slow down the biggest digital data hogs of all, Google and Facebook. But I think Apple is taking a good step to put more guardrails around companies that try to follow our every move online and in the real world.
It is also a reminder that in the absence of effective government policy in the United States to limit digital privacy intrusions, we have Apple and Google remaking how the digital world works without input or oversight on this important policy issue.
Animation is an area that has generally been able to keep production moving forward amid COVID-19. Several top editors of animated features — all of whom are currently working, albeit from home — are also speculating that, post-pandemic, more filmmakers might split editing between a home and office environment.
Stonehenge Lego, as Cox dubbed the model, was assembled assuming that Stonehenge’s outer circle of standing sarsen stones — a type of silcrete rock found in southern England — had originally consisted of 30 stones. Stonehenge today includes 63 complete stones, including five standing sarsen stones and 12 other stones in fragments. Based on an estimated total of 157 stones placed at the site around 4,200 years ago, the researchers 3-D printed 27 stones of all sizes and shapes. Then, the team used silicone molds of those items and plaster mixed with other materials to re-create the remaining 130 stones. Simulated stones were constructed to minimize sound absorption, much like actual stones at Stonehenge, Cox says.
I contacted the UPenn admissions department, who assured me that the marketing department – responsible for the envelope – would never use a fake quotation. Despite my request, marketing never contacted me.
The CC Open Education Platform is a vibrant, international network of over 1120 open education advocates, educators, librarians, lawmakers, graduate students, and more, spanning 79 countries. This year, CC launched an activities fund to support Platform members’ good work to further open education in their countries. The activities fund offered up to $5,000 USD to community members who proposed efforts that: 1) Build and sustain community; 2) Increase educational access and equity; and/or 3) Use policy to open education opportunities for all. Accepted proposals focus on work supporting these goals in Brazil, Chile, Francophone Africa, India, Ireland, and globally.€
It’s been a weird time, the last six months, and so it continues; perhaps it always was. It’s certainly been an unjust violent mess in varying degrees of severity, for as long as most can remember. With selfishness, division and pleasure firmly in the driving seat, and the planet beautiful, slowly choking to death under the weight of human greed and stupidity.
"It's not edgy, contrarian," one public health expert said of the "herd immunity" approach. "It's dangerous and terrifying."
Hurricane has left residents without power during a deadly heat wave while lack of running water and offline air quality monitors intensify Covid-19 threat, yet climate change is not mentioned once by ABC, CBS, and NBC.€
There has been plenty of talk about how technology has impacted how we live during the pandemic, but it's interesting to see how that's impacting things beyond the most obvious -- including some interesting cultural changes. Over in the NY Times, reporter Taylor Lorenz, who always has her finger on the beat of the most interesting cultural changes due to technology, has an article about college collaboration houses. That is, because so many colleges are remaining in distance learning to start the school year, thanks to the ongoing pandemic, students are recognizing that just because they don't need to be on campus, it doesn't mean they need to stay at home either:
Almost immediately after the coronavirus began to spread throughout New York City, art historian Han Hongzheng, an immigrant from China, started seeing anti-Asian slurs on social media.
It is hard to explain just how bad the US death rate under Trump from the novel coronavirus is.
"Circumventing clinical trials would place huge numbers of people at risk," warned one leading virologist.€
The pandemic has made it clearer than ever that we need better care that honors everyone's humanity.
Ever since COVID-19 collided with the enormous bubble governments have been using to re-float the financial sector since 2008, booming equity markets became compatible with wholesale economic implosion. That became clear on August 12 in London and New York.
In the 2014 elections, Republicans rode a wave of anti-Affordable Care Act sentiment to pick up nine Senate seats, the largest gain for either party since 1980. Newly elected Republicans such as Cory Gardner in Colorado and Steve Daines in Montana had hammered their Democratic opponents over the health care law during the campaign and promised to repeal it.
The calls started at 6 a.m., and Patrick McCauley was ready, having retreated to the privacy of his garage where he sat waiting for Angelenos to share how they’re coping with the stresses of the coronavirus pandemic.
A new top COVID-19 adviser to President Trump, Scott Atlas, is pushing the White House to embrace a “herd immunity” approach to the pandemic, which would allow the virus to spread nearly unmitigated through the population while protecting nursing home residents and other vulnerable people, reports The Washington Post.
These tweets all reflect a profound misunderstanding of what "comorbidity" means, Dr. Alfred Sommer, an epidemiologist and dean emeritus at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told Salon by email.
It’s always weird to try to get blogging again after an absence due to a health issue with a member of the family and other pressing issues that were more important than my little side hobby and thus crowded it out. True, the absence was only a week and a half, but it’s weird nonetheless. Sometimes, it’s hard to pick a subject. Fortunately (or unfortunately), over the weekend I started seeing memes and content on various social media that went something like this about “only 6%,” as shown by this collection of memes from @BadCOVID19Takes:
Almost one in three of Peru’s 32 million inhabitants identify as Indigenous. Long neglected by the central government, and in the country with the highest per capita death rate per million in the world, they are among those hardest hit by COVID-19.
The vast majority of their remote communities are inaccessible by road, making transfer to hospital all but impossible. And for the many who have already migrated to towns and cities, or travel to them for urgent assistance, access to overcrowded public healthcare facilities is still a struggle.
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The eastern Amazonian city of Pucallpa, with a population of approximately 326,000 people, is one of Peru’s worst-hit areas for COVID-19. A large cemetery has been carved out of the surrounding forest exclusively for victims of the pandemic. Local authorities told TNH these were not mass graves, but the ditches fit four caskets each, and family members are given the option to move the body to another burial site within 12 months. When TNH visited in late July, over 300 people had already been buried here.
Driven partly by increased hardship as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, almost three times as many Tunisian migrants have crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Italy already this year than did so in all of 2019.
Italy is putting pressure on Tunisia to reduce departures, but the decades-long history of migration between the two nations suggests these efforts may do little to deter Tunisians intent on escaping their country’s long and worsening economic malaise.
The arrival of more than 7,800 Tunisians in 2020 – including over 4,000 in July alone – has overwhelmed the migration reception centre on Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost island, 130 kilometres from Tunisia’s coast, and helped right-wing Italian politicians stoke anti-migrant sentiment during the pandemic.
According to security researcher Patrick Wardle, Apple approved an app that contained code used by a well-known malware called Shlayer. Shlayer is a trojan downloader that spreads through fake applications, bombarding users with an influx of adware. Shlayer is the “most common threat” to Macs, cybersecurity and anti-virus firm Kaspersky said in 2019.
Videoconferencing platform Zoom had a huge second quarter, with $663.5 million in revenue compared to $145.8 million a year ago, the company announced on Monday. It now has around 370,000 customers with more than 10 employees, an increase of 458 percent year over year.
The Linux Foundation has announced plans to user AI-enhanced open source analytics and open data to tackle climate risk and opportunity.
The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the intent to form the LF Climate Finance Foundation (LFCF), a new initiative with the goal of empowering investors, banks, insurers, companies, governments, NGOs and academia with AI-enhanced open source analytics and open data to address climate risk and opportunity. Allianz, Amazon, Microsoft and S&P Global have already committed to be founding members. The Climate Finance Foundation’s planning team includes representatives from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Ceres and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB).
The signing of the Paris Climate Accord in 2015 brings both unprecedented opportunity and challenges to the global investment community. Avoiding catastrophic levels of global warming and ensuring resilience will require at least $1.2 trillion more financing of climate solutions each year. Achieving this dramatic increase in investment requires better data and analytic tools to fully account for climate-related risk and opportunity. To help with this effort, the LFCF is building the OS-Climate platform, with the goal of enabling asset owners, asset managers and banks to manage climate risk and identify the climate-aligned companies, infrastructure, capital projects and technologies that will thrive in a low-carbon economy.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache2 and libx11), Fedora (batik, ecj, eclipse, eclipse-cdt, eclipse-ecf, eclipse-emf, eclipse-gef, eclipse-m2e-core, eclipse-mpc, eclipse-mylyn, eclipse-remote, eclipse-webtools, firefox, httpd, jetty, lucene, selinux-policy, and univocity-parsers), Mageia (hylafax+), openSUSE (ark and chromium), Red Hat (virt:8.2 and virt-devel:8.2), SUSE (freeradius-server, freerdp, php7, php72, php74, and xorg-x11-server), and Ubuntu (freerdp2, keystone, net-snmp, python-django, and python-rsa).
IPFire is based on glibc 2.32, the standard library for all C programs, and GCC 10.2, the GNU Compiler Collection. Both bring various bug fixes and improvements.
The most notable change is that we have decided to remove a mitigation Spectre 2 which caused that user space programs in IPFire were running about 50% slower due to using a microcode feature which is called "retpoline". Those "return trampolines" disable the branch prediction engine in out-of-order processors which was considered to help with mitigating leaking any information from any unaccessible kernel space.
This is however not as effective as thought and massively decreases performance in the user land which mainly affects features like our Intrusion Prevention System, Web Proxy and URL filter. We still use this mechanism to avoid leaking any kernel memory into the user space.
On top of that, we have updated various tools used for building IPFire as well as core libraries.
We have also enabled a new GCC feature called "stack clash protection" on x86_64 and aarch64 which adds additional checks to mitigate exploits and we have enabled "CF protection" which hardens all software against attackers gaining control over a program flow and circumventing security checks like password or signature validation.
With a regular password-based method which doesn’t require things like scanning fingers or smiling at a camera, attackers don’t have a lot of opportunities to interfere in the login process. Either the system validating the authentication must be compromised, or the shared secret must be guessed. Biometric authentication doesn’t work like that. Because, by definition, it’s tied to your body, the attacker can easily make a copy of the secret. They just have to make a copy of the biometric data. And one leave plenty of them around. For example, think about the number of fingerprints we make every day, the number of pictures of people online, the number of times our voices may be recorded, and more generally, the number of biometric traces we leave. In 2014, hackers replicated fingerprints from high resolution photos and showed how to fool fingerprint readers. One has to keep in mind that biometric data are not bullet-proof and have a wide the attack surface. Avoiding biometric data leaks and protecting against replay attacks is complicated.
With growing frequency, the digital world calls for verification of our digital identities. Designed poorly, digital identification can invade our privacy and aggravate existing social inequalities. So privacy and equity must be foremost in discussions about how to design digital identification.
Many factors contribute to one's identity; degrees, morals, hobbies, schools, occupations, social status, personal expression, etc. The way these are expressed looks different depending on the context. Sometimes, identity is presented in the form of paper documentation. Other times, it’s an account online.
The name ‘Edward Snowden’ represents different things to different people. For those interested in government transparency and the rule of law, he is a hero, a man who initially tried to go through the ‘proper’ channels to publicize the blatant injustices he saw. To others, he is a traitor, a government employee who had the temerity to question the basic U.S. government doctrine that whatever the U.S. does is good, the citizens are too ignorant to form a reasonable opinion of it, and U.S. allies should be kept in the dark.
One of the more frustrating aspects of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been the frankly haphazard manner in which too many folks are tossing around ideas for bringing it all under control without fully thinking things through. I'm as guilty of this as anyone, desperate as I am for life to return to normal. "Give me the option to get a vaccine candidate even though it's in phase 3 trials," I have found myself saying more than once, each time immediately realizing how stupid and selfish it would be to not let the scientific community do its work and do it right. Challenge trials, some people say, should be considered. There's a reason we don't do that, actually.
A recent research paper has reaffirmed that our internet history can be reliably used to identify us. The research was conducted by Sarah Bird, Ilana Segall, and Martin Lopatka from Mozilla and is titled: Replication: Why We Still Can’t Browse in Peace:On the Uniqueness and Reidentifiability of Web Browsing Histories. The paper was released at the Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security and is a continuation of a 2012 paper which highlighted the same reidentifiability problem.
The Intercept spotted the files in the BlueLeaks data trove aggregated from law enforcement agencies. One 2019 analysis describes numerous ways police and the FBI could use Ring surveillance footage, but it also cites “new challenges” involving sensor- and camera-equipped smart home devices. Specifically, they can offer an early warning when officers are approaching a house to search it; give away officer locations in a standoff; or let the owner capture pictures of law enforcement, “presenting a risk to their present and future safety.”
The country’s proposed News Media Bargaining Code law, which is in draft form at present, stemmed from a 2019 inquiry that found tech giants like Facebook and Google take too large a share of online advertising revenue from media organizations in Australia. The Treasurer of Australia ordered the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to develop a voluntary code of conduct which would force the platforms to pay media companies. The ACCC told the government it seemed “unlikely” that a voluntary agreement could be reached, however.
Under the proposed legislation, Google and Facebook would have to provide publishers with advance notice of changes to their algorithms, with penalties for failing to comply. Both companies have pushed back strongly against this provision. with Facebook saying it would give news organizations in Australia an unfair competitive advantage.
Social media giant, Facebook says that it would rather cut people’s access to news in Australia than comply with the country’s proposed law which would make it pay local news publishers.
On Tuesday local time Facebook said that it would stop allowing news publishers and individuals in Australia from sharing local and international news via Facebook and Instagram.
The reason right-wing content performs so well on Facebook is no mystery. The platform is designed to amplify emotionally resonant posts, and conservative commentators are skilled at turning passionate grievances into powerful algorithm fodder. The company also appears willing to bend its rules for popular conservative influencers. Recent reports by BuzzFeed News and NBC News, based on leaked documents, found that Facebook executives had removed “strikes” from the accounts of several high-profile conservative pages that had shared viral misinformation in violation of the company’s rules.
Why it matters: The two companies, along with Google and Amazon, are being challenged over a range of issues, from abuse of power to violations of privacy to allowing hate and misinformation to flourish. By trading accusations, Facebook and Apple could just be handing more ammo to critics and regulators — but at the same time, conflict between these giants could be read as a sign of competitive life and a rebuttal to antitrust charges.
The threat escalates an antitrust battle between Facebook and the Australian government, which wants the social-media giant and Alphabet Inc.’s Google to compensate publishers for the value they provide to their platforms.
The legislation still needs to be approved by Australia’s parliament. Under the proposal, an arbitration panel would decide how much the technology companies must pay publishers if the two sides can’t agree.
A group of 17 university researchers will look at how Facebook and Instagram influence issues such as political polarization, and whether people vote, said Talia Stroud, a communications professor at the University of Texas who is co-charing the research group. Users must consent to participate, and will be paid, says Chaya Nayak, who leads Facebook’s open research and transparency team. While Facebook is covering the costs to participants, the researchers are not taking money from the company. The researchers won’t need Facebook’s approval before it can publish its findings, the company said in a blog post.
Today, critics of the Kremlin still have a much higher chance of succumbing to rare poisons than the general population – although the Russian government has consistently denied any involvement in the string of suspicious deaths and illnesses that have befallen politicians, spies and journalists down the years.
Trayvon Martin, a Black teenager, was killed for walking home at night—Kyle Rittenhouse, a white teenager, is being defended by Republicans after murdering two BLM protesters.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) has appeared to endorse violence against protesters while appearing on CNN, saying that “citizen soldiers” are needed to quash anti-racist protests across the country. His statement comes days after 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse was charged with murdering two Kenosha, Wisconsin, protesters and shooting a third.
Moscow police are investigating the assault and battery of 22-year-old blogger and radio host Egor Zhukov, who was attacked and beaten near his home late on August 30. A popular libertarian YouTuber, Zhukov became an oppositionist icon in the summer of 2019 when, for supposedly inciting acts of extremism, he was sentenced to three years of probation and prohibited from blogging for two years after a major protest on July 27, 2019.€
According to a new report by the news outlet RBC, Belarus’s National State TV and Radio Company is leaning on Russian state journalists — especially staff from Russia Today — to maintain operations after hundreds of employees walked off the job to protest against police brutality and censorship following Alexander Lukashenko’s most recent re-election. Former and current staff told RBC that the loss of many technical workers (camera operators, video engineers, lighting technicians, and so on) threatened to paralyze work at Belteleradio, which controls several different TV networks, six of which broadcast original content. RBC’s sources say Russia Today is now even preparing its own segments for Belteleradio networks, where the news coverage has suddenly embraced a conspiratorial tone similar to RT’s own reporting.€
In fact, Trump's surrogates are saying it right out loud. Fox News' Chris Wallace asked Trump campaign adviser Lara Trump whether she agreed with White House counselor Kellyanne Conway's assertion that "the more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who's best on public safety and law and order." Lara answered, "Well, I think it paints a very clear picture." She might as well have said, "You go, boys!"
Kenosha, Wis.—Reverend Jesse Jackson came to Kenosha last week on a moral mission. He stood in the parking lot of Bert and Rudy’s Auto Service in the heart of this shaken Wisconsin city, near the locations where two nights earlier a 17-year-old white vigilante shot and killed two men who were protesting the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man who is now paralyzed from the waist down. Jackson’s anguish was evident. He decried “a system of racism in law enforcement” in Kenosha and nationwide.
The simple fact is that the president is tacitly encouraging armed vigilante groups to act in his name, which may feel like something new for 2020, but is really a blood-chilling echo of the political leadership style people so often ascribe to the president — i.e., fascism. While they may yet lack the uniformity and formalization of groups like Adolf Hitler’s Sturmabteilung or Benito Mussolini’s Camicia Nera, last week made it impossible to deny that the president has armed and dangerous supporters willing to fight political dissidents in the streets.
This has not been established. At a press conference Sunday Police Chief Lovell was asked by a reporter: “Do you know if the shooting was politically motivated?” He responded: “I do not know that, no.” He cautioned reporters about jumping to conclusions and counseled patience as police investigators do their jobs.
That advice has gone unheeded everywhere. The New York Times headline framed the killing as the result of political violence: “One Person Dead in Portland After Clashes Between Trump Supporters and Protesters.” And that assumption has taken hold.
If social media companies won't step up, it's up to all of us to inoculate our own communities against harmful disinformation, particularly as it pertains to voting. Make sure your people—especially the elders in your community, who might be less savvy when it comes to suspicious social media activity—have the information they need to vote.
Because algorithms reward engagement, amplifying disinformation, even to correct the record, often only makes it stronger. "Don't engage with disinformation or suspicious activity directly," Licona said. "When you retweet, reply or share a post, even to disagree with it, you're helping to amplify the original message and allowing it to reach more feeds and more people." Focus instead on uplifting positive, accurate information.
One of the ideas that comes up a lot in proposals to change Section 230 is that Internet platforms should be required to produce transparency reports. The PACT Act, for instance, includes the requirement that they "[implement] a quarterly reporting requirement for online platforms that includes disaggregated statistics on content that has been removed, demonetized, or deprioritized." And the execrable NTIA FCC petition includes the demand that the FCC "[m]andate disclosure for internet transparency similar to that required of other internet companies, such as broadband service providers."
At a glance, these provocations might appear disconnected. But they are deeply intertwined. In the span of a week, Trump and Carlson both gave the green light to extremist elements on the Right, QAnon conspiracy theorists on the one hand and armed pro-police adventurists on the other. In the process they each drew on the same bedrock narrative: that the streets of America — especially Democrat-run cities, but nowhere is safe — are teeming with lawless agents of anarchy who flout authority, terrorize innocents, and threaten civilization itself. Thus besieged, right-wing extremism of one variant or another is not really extreme at all. It is rational, even heroic and patriotic.
On Sunday, Barkan, who has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and uses a computerized voice to speak, called out the House Minority Whip before Twitter placed a “manipulated content” label on the post.
“These are not my words. I have lost my ability to speak, but not my agency or my thoughts. You and your team have doctored my words for your own political gain. Please remove this video immediately. You owe the entire disability community an apology,” Barkan wrote.
The campaign tweeted a 3-second clip of Biden saying, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” that was clipped to separate it from the line before where Biden clearly stated that he was quoting the message the Trump campaign has been pushing.
In this era in which climate change and global warming occupy ever more of the public discourse and awareness, it is striking that its brethren environmental concerns, all of no less consequence, remain starkly and fatefully off the public radar screen. These threats could be enumerated to include, among others, deforestation, ocean acidification, grasslands and desert destruction, stream de-watering, wetlands subsidence, ubiquitous pollution, massive species extinctions, unendingly growing human overpopulation of the planet, and intractably continuing shrinkage of wildlands and the flora and fauna dependent upon them. When we hear of climate change or global warming, it is almost always stated as though it were our sole environmental worry, and as though the world’s biotic community would be just fine if only we solved that one problem. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. We ought to be speaking of the multi-pronged threat of environmental collapse. Environmental collapse, not sheer climate change, should be the watchword.
The cost of UK energy from renewables like wind and sun continues to plunge, beating British official expectations.
The rising and falling of the sea is a phenomenon upon which we can always depend. Tides are the regular rise and fall of the sea surface caused by the gravitational pull of the moon and sun and their position relative to the earth. There are some factors that cause the tides to be higher than what is "normally" seen from day to day. This bulletin tells you when you may experience higher than normal high tides for the period of time between between September from November 2020.
We also publish annual high tide flooding reports that present a broad outlook of what to expect for a given year in terms of high tide flooding, as well as a summary of high tide flooding events for the previous calendar year.
The phrase carried echoes of his remarks on€ COVID-19 — made at a time when the coronavirus had killed over 156,000 and infected over 4.7 million in the U.S.€ —€ that the virus’s death toll “is what it€ is.”
People held in immigration jails in Louisiana report horrific conditions and continued mistreatment after Hurricane Laura devastated the area. Immigrants detained at the LaSalle and Jackson Parish jails say that after the storm, the two facilities have flooded with urine and feces and lack electricity, clean food or water. Many of those protesting the conditions are from Cameroon, and refugee rights groups, including the Cameroon American Council, are demanding an investigation into conditions. “The current immigration system is based on the racist practices, the white supremacy of 400 years,” says Sylvie Bello, founder of the Cameroon American Council, one of the leading immigration advocacy groups working with Black and African communities in the U.S. She says it’s vital during a time of “racial reckoning” to fight for Black immigrants in ICE detention.
Tobacco advertisements are often banned these days. So why not ban adverts for gas-guzzling cars that damage the planet?
Janine Jackson interviewed the Wilderness Society’s Karlin Itchoak about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the August 21, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Pennie Opal Plant spent much of last weekend anxiously scanning the horizon for smoke from California’s growing wildfires, packing and repacking treasured items into her car, and trying to decide which to bring if she needed to€ evacuate.
The Bitterroot National Forest today formally withdrew its decision authorizing the Gold Butterfly Project.€ Friends of the Bitterroot and the Alliance for the Wild Rockies filed a lawsuit on July 10th against the Bitterroot National Forest seeking to stop the Gold Butterfly timber sale which was called “the largest project in memory” by the Ravalli Republic.
Ever since Frederic Taylor’s falsely labelled “Scientific Management”, the managerial elite has been on a stratospheric rise. Rather cunningly and often even deceitfully, Taylor named his book “scientific” even though it does not contain a single scientific experiment. What he presented was an engineering ideology – not science. Despite this and together with French factory administration expert Henri Fayol, modern management was born. But managers are not only the people who control workers and tell employees what to do, but they are also a powerful group of corporate apparatchiks and worse, they have established themselves as an ever more powerful social class.
The next economic calamity of the Trump regime’s Year Four? That will come October 1 when the federal coronavirus aid deal brokered last March for the airline industry expires.
"Workers, families, small businesses, and communities desperately need the Senate to act in our interests—now. We'll be in the streets and at their doors on September 1st to tell them that #ReliefIsDue."€
HOUSTON — On an afternoon in mid-June, Analleli Solis was walking home from her brother’s house just down the street when she noticed someone she didn’t know retreating from the front door of her modest brick home.
Solis approached the woman, who handed her an envelope.
In May, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune set out to answer a question: Which debt collectors were filing the most lawsuits in Texas during the coronavirus pandemic, which has put more than 3 million Texas residents out of work?
To do this, reporters focused on Texas’ 800-plus justice of the peace courts, where most debt claims are filed. The vast majority of the state’s 254 counties don’t post justice records online, but an initial search of records in two large counties that do, home to the cities of Houston and Fort Worth, revealed one of the top filers of debt lawsuits was a small, publicly traded consumer lender called Oportun Inc.
Around 200 unionized workers who make sports equipment for Wilson Sporting Goods, Mizuno, and CCM Hockey at a factory in Yangon, Myanmar, were fired at the end of June 2020 after orders from companies stopped due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Workers say management shut down the VIP 1 factory while non-union workers were transferred to other nearby factories.
Our richest corporations are much to blame for the free-market "winner take all" philosophy that has caused over€ half€ of our nation to try to survive without adequate health care and life savings.
The important thing to remember is that the big money takeover of our democracy prevents us from advancing all of the policies we need to overhaul our racist, oppressive system and create a society that works for the many, not the few.
The Biden-Harris campaign released four sign designs for players to download, featuring the official Biden-Harris logo, Team Joe logo, the “Joe” Pride logo, and an image of aviator sunglasses shaded in red, white, and blue. Players will be able to access the designs in-game by scanning the design QR codes through the Nintendo Switch Online app.
In a new essay on Naked Capitalism called "How an 'Act of God' Pandemic Is Destroying the West: The US Is Saving the Financial Sector, Not the Economy," Hudson reveals the abyss on whose brink we are balanced, and what we must do to pull back from it.
The pandemic will probably accelerate a shift online. During the pandemic the governors of New York and California legalised digital marriages. When New Jersey’s leaders realised the extent of the shutdown, they invested in putting more services online, says Beth Noveck, the state’s chief innovation officer. Her office created a single website through which residents can find information and book covid-19 tests, for example, remotely. Other states have followed suit. Her office is also trying to find ways to streamline the awkward process of verifying people’s identities online in America, which like Britain has no ID cards. In France social-security paperwork, which once had to be sent by post, can now be submitted electronically.
Some of Russia’s most notorious internet trolls have launched a news website that hired real-life journalism freelancers — including Americans — to contribute, Facebook said Tuesday.
The site, called Peace Data, launched this year with coverage focused largely on the environment and corporate and political corruption. Facebook learned through a tip from the FBI that people formerly associated with the Russian Internet Research Agency, which created a number of influential Twitter and Facebook personas to inflame political tensions in the 2016 election, ran Peace Data and has taken down its known affiliated accounts. It had yet to gain a serious following, said Nathaniel Gleicher, the company’s head of cybersecurity policy.
For me the incredibility of the editorial championing Snowden’s total forgiveness is that a more deserving person sits in a federal prison and will stay there until her excessive five year and three- days sentence (longest sentence ever under the Espionage Act) is completed, no matter how well-behaved or repentant she made be. In a more just time, Ms. Winner’s crime compared to Snowden’s crime, would have made her eligible for a patriot’s medal of service to her country.
In May 2017, she printed a document showing how Russian intelligence hacked a U.S. voting software supplier and attempted to breach more than 100 election systems in the days before the Nov. 6, 2016 election. The importance here is that the document was shared in August 2017 well after the United States and the world had accepted as fact that the Russian government interfered with the U.S. election. What was missing was the newly elected president’s and the GOP congressional legislators’ refusal to believe what everyone else knew was fact. Reality Winner, an intelligence specialist found proof that Russian interference occurred and was being hidden from the nation. She shared it with a news outlet and was punished severely by those who continued to deny the evidence.
The social media platform announced it took down 13 accounts that it attributed to “individuals associated with past activity by the Russian Internet Research Agency” after receiving a tip from the FBI.
The accounts were directing people to a news site called Peace Data, a “global news organization” that’s focused largely on the environment and corporate and political corruption. Though the company, which launched this year, recruited some real journalists, several accounts that posed as “editors” were not real.
The emergence in recent weeks of a coalition of neocon Republicans and former national security officials who have thrown their support behind the candidacy of Joe Biden is an ominous development to those who believe U.S. foreign policy should be guided by the principles of realism and military restraint, rather than perpetual wars of choice.
Media personality figure and former prosecutor, Kimberly Guilfoyle, perhaps gave the most crazed speech at the Republican National Convention. In a shrill tone, she repeatedly claimed that Joe Biden and the Democrats are socialists. This is how far down the rabbit hole the American political landscape has fallen. If they are socialists, they are the worst ones in living memory.
Donald Trump continually breaks multiple laws. Yet the serial lawbreaking, lying Trump is playing the “law and order” card against street protestors reacting to fatal cases of police brutality. Armed pro-Trump provocateurs are attending civic protests and generating casualties and property damage, as was the case recently in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump uses such mayhem to attack Joe Biden and his hyped “radical leftists.” This is grotesque, but then that is how corrupt, dangerous, devious Donald operates when cornered by falling polls, and growing opposition from leading retired military leaders and national intelligence officials. Trump’s attack on the U.S. Postal Service is also producing a nationwide backlash and even red-state conservatives are troubled by delays in deliveries of medicine and Social Security checks.
For nearly four years, we have been laser focused on November 3, 2020, the day that Donald Trump could be voted out of office. In all likelihood, however, the election will not be decided that evening as it has in the past (with the notable exception of the 2000 election). That is because in order to protect themselves against COVID-19, a record number of people will forego the polls and mail their ballots, which take longer to count. There are several scenarios of what could transpire between November 3 and January 20. All of them are frightening.
The fake other worldly Republican national séance was marked by an orchestrated festival of lies, distortion, fear-mongering and cult-like worship of Donald Trump. At its apex, the people’s White House blatantly was used as a prop that violated a longtime tradition of not mixing up governing and politics.
Federal officials in Russia have been unable to launch a criminal investigation against Sergey Furgal regarding the key offense in their case against the former Khabarovsk governor: the murder of businessman Evgeny Zorya in 2004. According to the newspaper Kommersant, the Investigative Committee has hit a snag because a detective in the Khabarovsk Prosecutor’s Office issued an order in October 2004 terminating all prosecution of Furgal in Zorya’s killing, citing a lack of evidence that he was involved. (Kommersant has not named the detective who filed this decision.)
In a letter to Trump on Sunday, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers warned the president's visit "will only delay our work to overcome division and move forward together."
If Trump’s lengthy rap sheet of lies, threats, obstruction, and incitement doesn’t add up to fascism, then what would?
The Kremlin ditched it as a national development goal just a month ago, but Vladimir Putin’s advisers now say Russia is one of the world’s top-five major economies. On Monday, August 31, presidential adviser and former Economic Development Minister Maxim Oreshkin announced the good news: “If you open up the latest IMF forecast for this year, you’ll see that Russia will be the fifth economy in the world — that it’s rising to this level. From this perspective, we can say that [the goal] has been achieved.”
As a part of my series on talking to the foreign diplomats in Sri Lanka for our newly initiated talk show; The New Normal, I have had an opportunity to sit with newly appointed Turkish Ambassador to Sri Lanka. In this exclusive interview she has detailed with me about diplomatic relationship between Sri Lanka and Turkey as well as the prevailing situation in Turkey. Ambassador R. Demet à žekercioßlu was born in 1969 in Bonn, Germany. She graduated from the Department of Economics of the Faculty of Political Sciences, Ankara University in 1995. After joining the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkey in 1995, she assumed duties at the Turkish Embassy in Rabat, Brussels, Kuwait and Islamabad as well as at the Turkish General Consulate in Lyon throughout her professional career. She served in the Directorate General of Consular Affairs, Europe and lately South Asia at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkey. She was appointed as the Ambassador of the Republic of Turkey to the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka and assumed her duties in Colombo in January 2020.
"Rather than being straight with the American people and creating a national plan to fix the problem, the president and his enablers kept these alarming reports private while publicly downplaying the threat to millions of Americans."
"He has repeatedly demonstrated an unwillingness to share documents and information with Congress, and we don't have time to wait for him to find a moral compass."
When Anti-Corruption Foundation lawyer Lyubov Sobol woke up this morning, she discovered that two of her bank accounts are now overdrafted by more than 34 million rubles ($460,700). The debt, it turns out, is the work of Russian court marshalls acting on behalf of catering magnate Evgeny Prigozhin and several organizations controlled by the Moscow Mayor’s Office. Until Sobol can pay off the negative total on her bank statement, her accounts are inoperable.€
The Anti-Corruption Foundation has published part of the investigation Alexey Navalny was compiling before he was poisoned on August 20. The 40-minute documentary film, titled “Who Captured Siberia’s Capital and How to Liberate It,” focuses on City Duma deputies and City Hall officials in Novosibirsk who are also the beneficiaries of major construction companies and municipal services enterprises. The report draws attention to the public officials’ expensive watches and cars, as well as real estate they allegedly own abroad.
Three political scientists from the United States closely studied allegations of fraud in the Bolivian election of 2019 and found that there was no fraud. These scholars—from the University of Pennsylvania and Tulane University—looked at raw evidence from the Bolivian election authorities that had been handed over to the New York Times. They suggest late-counted votes came from rural regions where the candidacy of incumbent President Evo Morales Ayma was popular; the character of these votes, and not fraud, accounts for the margin of victory announced by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) on October 21, 2019.
Last week’s Republican National Convention gave us a muzzled Donald Trump. Although his concluding speech had some red meat for the base, it wasn’t a freewheeling rant of the sort the president usually delivers when he has a crowd in front of him. Instead, Trump stuck to script and kept to his best behavior, in keeping with the larger thrust of the convention, which was to win back wavering Republicans. A recurring theme of the convention was to focus on Trump’s actions delivering results for Republicans—rather than his incendiary tweets. “I recognize that my dad’s communication style is not to everyone’s taste, and I know that his tweets can feel a bit unfiltered, but the results, the results speak for themselves,” Ivanka Trump said.
President Trump was having a normal one on Sunday morning, tweeting and retweeting 89 times over the course of three and a half hours. Many of them were tweets of polling numbers from obscure firms showing him in the lead after the Republican convention. But most of the tweets and retweets were incitement to violence among his true believers and complaints about “Democrat cities,” an ongoing mantra which he seems to think is a slam dunk to get him re-elected.
In Part Two of our interview with Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, we air excerpts from the families of Jacob Blake and George Floyd at the massive protest marking the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington, and discuss President Trump’s planned visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin, as he blames Democrats for violence during protests there and in Portland, Oregon. “Racism has spread to every part of the body,” says Kendi, comparing U.S. racism to cancer, “and then we have a president who is claiming that it doesn’t exist.”
A panel of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals decided today, over a dissent, that TSA checkpoint staff at airports (“Transportation Security Officers”) are “officer[s] of the United States … empowered by law to execute searches… for violations of Federal law”, making TSOs liable for damages if they commit assault, battery, or certain other torts against travelers.
With today’s decision in Iverson v. TSA the 8th Circuit joins the 3rd Circuit (en banc) in what is now a 2-1 split with the 11th Circuit, which ruled in 2014 that TSOs, despite their title and the fact that their primary job is to carry out searches, are not “officer[s] of the United States … empowered by law to execute searches… for violations of Federal law” and thus are completely immune from liability for even intentional assaults on travelers.
Most people unfamiliar with the law assume that the government is generally liable for damages if its agents attack innocent citizens. While the law is complex, the general principle is just the reverse: The US government generally enjoys “sovereign immunity” — a despicably undemocratic vestige of the idea that the king is above the law — and private individuals can sue the government only with the government’s permission.
The United States Postal Service (USPS) Board of Governors Chairman, Robert M. Duncan, is a director of the Mitch McConnell-allied Senate Leadership Fund Super PAC, as paperwork filed Monday confirmed. The ties between Duncan and McConnell deepen concerns about the integrity of what will likely be an election largely conducted with mail-in ballots, which has also been complicated by issues with a Republican-led gutting of the USPS.
The House passed legislation to defend the Postal Service, but unless the Senate takes action, the Postmaster General will be free to continue policies that have slowed the mail and raised concerns about mail-in voting.
A President Biden could make public financing of elections happen early next year—and end the quest he began almost five decades ago.
A pair of leftist historians has undertaken a massive project: compiling a six-volume collection of Eugene Debs’s writings and speeches. We spoke with one of them, who detailed Debs’s extraordinary journey from moderate young trade union leader to courageous socialist militant.
In Part Two of our interview with Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, we air excerpts from the families of Jacob Blake and George Floyd at the massive protest marking the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington, and discuss President Trump’s planned visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin, as he blames Democrats for violence during protests there and in Portland, Oregon. “Racism has spread to every part of the body,” says Kendi, comparing U.S. racism to cancer, “and then we have a president who is claiming that it doesn’t exist.”
Hopefully that won't get me sued in Australia. Because a court there has determined that the zipper mouth emoji is capable of defamatory meaning. I should note, as we have many times in the past, that Australian defamation law is totally fucked up. They are among the worst of any industrialized nation, and we've been on end of absolutely ridiculous threats and harassment for years because of our coverage of totally wacky censorial Australian court decisions regarding defamation. To which I say: ðŸËâº
Twitch signed Beahm to an exclusive contract at the beginning of the year. But in June, his account disappeared from the platform, and Twitch refused to say why or even confirm that he had been banned. It was a big surprise given that Beahm was one of the platform’s top streamers. The ban came amid criticisms about Twitch failing to deal with sexual harassment, though no complaints had been publicly made about Beahm.
French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo, the target of a massacre by Islamist gunmen in 2015, said on Tuesday it was republishing hugely controversial cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed to mark this week's start of the trial of alleged accomplices to the attack.
The next edition of Charlie Hebdo, which will be published as the trial begins on Wednesday, carries not only the cartoons but a tribute to the magazine's employees who were killed in the attack on January 7, 2015.
The growing sensitivity to race, ethnicity and religion has clashed with France’s traditionally forceful commitment to freedom of expression and secularism. Many traditionalists have expressed concern that the country is yielding to American-style identity politics, long widely rejected in France.
Charlie Hebdo’s editors wrote in the new issue that it was “unacceptable to start the trial’’ without showing the “pieces of evidence” to readers and citizens. Not republishing the caricatures would have amounted to “political or journalistic cowardice,’’ they added. “Do we want to live in a country that claims to be a great democracy, free and modern, which, at the same time, does not affirm its most profound convictions?’’
More than five years after a three-day killing spree in the Paris area that claimed 17 lives – including some of France’s leading cartoonists – victims of the January 2015 attacks and their loved ones will finally face suspects during a special terror trial.
Over the next few months, 14 suspects – including three in absentia who may be dead – will be tried at a courthouse in northwest Paris amid tight security.
Twelve people, including some of the magazine's best-known cartoonists, were killed when Said and Cherif Kouachi stormed the Paris offices of Charlie Hebdo and sprayed the building with automatic gunfire.
The Kouachi brothers and a third Islamist gunman who killed five people in the 48 hours that followed the Charlie Hebdo massacre were shot dead by police in different stand-offs, but 14 of their alleged accomplices go on trial on Wednesday.
At Free Press, we work in coalition and on campaigns to reduce the proliferation of hate speech, harassment, and disinformation on the internet. It’s certainly not an easy or uncomplicated job. Yet this work is vital if we’re going to protect the democracy we have and also make it real for everyone — remedying the inequity and exclusion caused by systemic racism and other centuries-old harms seamlessly transplanted online today.
I regret to inform you that AT&T is at it again. For over a decade now, the company has had a weird infatuation with Google. It seems to truly hate Google and has long decided that anything bad for Google must be good for AT&T. Because Google was an early supporter of net neutrality -- a concept that AT&T (stupidly and incorrectly) seems to think is an existential threat to its own business plans of coming up with sneaky ways to spy on you and charge you more -- over a decade ago, AT&T started floating the lame idea that if it's to be held to "net neutrality" Google ought to be held to "search neutrality." Of course, there's a problem with that: there's no such thing as "search neutrality" because the whole point of search is to rank results for you. A "neutral" search would be a useless search that ranks nothing.
Tensions are rising anew in the once-prosperous southern African country. Inflation is over 800 percent, amid acute shortages of water, electricity, gas and banknotes and a health system collapsing under the weight of drug shortages and strikes by nurses and doctors.
Revelations of alleged corruption related to COVID-19 medical supplies led to the sacking of the health minister and further pressure on Mnangagwa.
His government has responded to the rising dissent with arrests and alleged abductions and torture.
After voluntarily submitting textbooks for review, several publishers were advised last week that certain content had to be modified or even removed, if the volumes were to appear on the “recommended book list” on the bureau’s website.
An incredibly wide range of subjects was censored, from an innocent discussion of the constitutional idea of the “separation of powers”, to a photograph of a “Lennon Wall”.
Explanations of the concept of “civil disobedience” were, of course, scrapped, and some textbooks even added “warnings” of potential legal consequences that can occur when engaging in such activities.
Yet the fears over censorship are well-founded. Some of the Chinese bureaucrats’ demands are silly, like their insistence that dirty laundry be removed from a Shanghai skyline in “Mission: Impossible III”. But airbrushed underpants are not the end of it. Flags are removed and maps altered. To get a release in China, movies must avoid the “three Ts” of Tiananmen, Taiwan and Tibet. American actors who once liked to pose with the Dalai Lama know that a selfie could get them blacklisted by the Chinese authorities. The sanctions are asymmetric: when Liu Yifei, who plays Mulan, tweeted support for the police who put down pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, Disney said nothing.
The trouble is that the proposed cures are often worse than the disease. Ted Cruz, a senator from Texas, wants studios that agree to censors’ demands to be banned from working with the Department of Defence, which lends its hardware as props. That would turn the government into an arbiter of what is politically acceptable—surely an idea more at home in the Communist Party than the Republican one. PEN America, a free-speech body, says studios should disclose any changes they make to their Chinese releases. A fine idea—but studios have little incentive to do so, and if forced, they might respond by ensuring the original cuts of their movies were inoffensive enough to pass without edits, thus subjecting the whole world to China’s censorship.
On September 7, Julian Assange will be facing another round of gruelling extradition proceedings, in the Old Bailey, part of a process that has become a form of gradual state-sanctioned torture. The US Department of Justice hungers for their man. The UK prison authorities are doing little to protect his health. The end result, should it result in his death, will be justifiably described as state-sanctioned murder. This picture was not improved upon by a prison visit from his partner, Stella Morris, accompanied by their two children. Almost six months had passed since the last meeting.
The Ninth Circuit Appeals Court has just stripped away the protections granted to journalists and legal observers covering ongoing protests in Portland, Oregon. After journalists secured an agreement from local police to stop assaulting journalists and make them exempt from dispersal orders, the DHS's ad hoc riot control force (composed of CBP, ICE, and Federal Protective Services) showed up and started tossing people into unmarked vans and assaulting pretty much everyone, no matter what credentials they displayed. Shortly after that, a federal court in Oregon granted a restraining order forbidding federal agents from attacking journalists and observers.
Today, videos of police attacking unarmed people have become commonplace, due to the ubiquity of smartphone cameras and the rise of social media. And the protests against police violence have become one of the largest movements in American history — itself fueled by access to cameras, social media distribution, and organizing tools across the internet.
A prominent opposition blogger in Russia, Yegor Zhukov, has been beaten up in Moscow and taken to hospital for treatment.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, which holds consultative status with the U.N., is an independent, nonprofit organization that defends the rights of journalists worldwide to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal. CPJ reports on and mobilizes against hundreds of attacks on the press each year, such as killings, assaults, restrictive legislation, imprisonment, media closures, online harassment, and other threats.
According to CPJ’s research, at least 64 journalists are missing around the world. Nearly one-third of them disappeared while covering armed conflict in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen.
The United Nations (UN) maintains that Britain must free and compensate Assange. So why hasn't it done that and why hasn't Australia insisted on it?
Twenty-six million people around the world have official refugee status, but only 487 of them live in Russia. Tens or even hundreds of thousands of people are engaged in the Russian government’s asylum application process at any given time, but it’s vanishingly rare for an application to be accepted. This is in part because Russia’s UN delegations often criticize human rights violations abroad, but the Russian government refuses to recognize armed conflicts and persecution as valid causes for granting asylum. Even of the 42,000 people who have temporary, one-year asylum status in Russia, all but 487 are from Ukraine. This pattern leaves asylum seekers from other countries to fend for themselves, including those who have fled civil wars much like Ukraine’s. Journalist Vladimir Kabeyev and photographer Maria Muzalevskaya spoke with 12 people from a range of countries who decided to seek asylum in Russia and contacted the Civic Assistance Committee, a legal aid NGO, for help.
When the uprisings against police-perpetrated violence first hit Chicago in late May, the phone lines of AGB Investigative Services started ringing off the hook.
On Monday, Wisconsin’s state Senate and Assembly met. But it was more of a skeletal session than a special session. Both chambers gaveled in and out almost immediately. A television camera panned a gallery of empty mahogany chairs. By NBA standards, neither chamber stayed in session even the length of the 24-second shot clock. “Senators do not need to be present,” the Senate president’s chief of staff told reporters, “and no bills are being taken up.”
Wisconsin’s Republican-controlled legislature cannot be budged. Not by the governor. Not by the people. Not by vigilantes in the streets. Not by the Milwaukee Bucks. Wisconsin’s brutally gerrymandered state legislative maps — by almost every standard, the nation’s most biased — guarantee that they can’t even be budged at the ballot box. And so they remain an immovable and unaccountable force.
Despite repeated calls from activists, lawmakers and celebrities for the officers involved in Taylor's death to be held accountable, no arrests have occurred. Hankison was fired from the force in June after it was determined he "blindly" fired 10 rounds into Taylor's apartment. Mattingly and Cosgrove remain with the department, both placed on administrative reassignment.
The "Intelligence Analyst" and "Sr Intelligence Analyst" positions were with Amazon's Global Security Operations’ (GSO) Global Intelligence Program (GIP), which handles the ecommerce giant's corporate and physical security.
The postings described several kinds of threats that the analysts would focus on in addition to "organized labor," including "protests, geopolitical crises, conflicts impacting operations."
Labor activists said the posting suggests Amazon is trying to prevent workers from collective bargaining to improve their pay and working conditions. Amazon employs thousands of hourly warehouse workers who pack and ship orders, which has made it a target of union organizers.
“This job description is proof that Amazon intends to continue on this course,” said Dania Rajendra, director of Athena, a coalition of activist groups that frequently criticizes Amazon. “The public deserves to know whether Amazon will continue to fill these positions, even if they’re no longer publicly posted.”
This past weekend a man was shot to death near the Justice Center in downtown Portland, where protests have been taking place every night for over three months. The deceased was a heavily-armed member of the far right. Another member of the far right was just arrested in the working class Portland suburb of Milwaukie. He was arrested for having fired into a crowd the day before with live ammunition, apparently, in a separate incident from the killing at the Justice Center.
Two federal magistrate judges in three separate opinions€ have ruled that a geofence warrant violates the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause and particularity requirements. Two of these rulings, from the federal district court in Chicago, were recently€ unsealed and provide a detailed constitutional analysis that closely aligns with arguments EFF and others have been making against geofence warrants for the last couple years.
Geofence warrants, also known as reverse location searches, are a relatively new investigative technique used by law enforcement to try to identify a suspect. Unlike ordinary warrants for electronic records that identify the suspect in advance of the search, geofence warrants essentially work backwards by scooping up the location data from every device that happened to be in a geographic area during a specific period of time in the past. The warrants therefore allow the government to examine the data from individuals wholly unconnected to any criminal activity and use their own discretion to try to pinpoint devices that might be connected to the crime. Earlier this summer, EFF filed an amicus brief in People v. Dawes, a case in San Francisco Superior Court, arguing that a geofence warrant used there violates deep-rooted Fourth Amendment law.€
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) indicated on Sunday that his committee may subpoena intelligence officials, following Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s announcement that regular election security briefings will be scaled back ahead of the general election.
Now comes the part where white people abandon us. Now comes the part where the white majority impatiently demands a return to normalcy. Now comes the part where white people say, “I believe that Black Lives Matter, but…” Now comes the part where white people start literally telling Black people to stop protesting because some “bad” people are also protesting.
Tributes continue to pour in for beloved actor Chadwick Boseman after his death at age 43 following a private four-year battle with colon cancer. Boseman is best known for his iconic role as King T’Challa in the groundbreaking “Black Panther” — the first mainstream Black superhero movie and a smash hit that earned more than $1 billion at the box office. He is also widely acclaimed for his portrayal of major historical figures such as Thurgood Marshall, James Brown and Jackie Robinson. Boseman’s death has highlighted the higher rates of colon cancer among Black men and the links to systemic racism. “Cancer, like heart disease, there’s all sorts of racial disparities, just as there are with COVID-19 deaths,” says professor Ibram X. Kendi, cancer survivor and director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. “What is happening in our society that is causing so much Black death? Why is Black death so normal?”
As the Golden State burns amid a firefighter shortage, AB 2147 would expedite criminal record expungements so ex-inmates can apply for EMT licenses.€
The story of the 2020 wave of sports strikes against racism is already one of both inspiration and cooptation. It’s also a story that is being written in pencil, not pen. In other words, it’s a story that still does not have an ending, and we should be wary of anyone who thinks they have an ironclad analysis of where all of this is headed. But to even have a sense of where it might go, we need to understand why it detonated in the first place.
On August 26, the third day of the Republican Convention and two days after a Kenosha, Wisconsin cop fired seven bullets into the back of Jacob Blake, an unarmed Black man, the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play. Then the rest of the NBA players, 75% of whom are Black, chose to go on strike as well and the National Basketball Association halted the NBA playoffs. As CounterPunch’s Nathaniel St. Clair noted, they kicked the Republicans out of center court and into the parking lot.
Professional sports are trying to function within the constraints of the coronavirus. The National Basketball Association, in a most novel solution, has tried to finish its interrupted season within a bubble at Walt Disney World in Florida. The remaining games have been played under strict supervision; the players have been in virtual lockdown. But the bubble has burst, and not because of the virus.
A court in Yekaterinburg has fined a local woman 20,000 rubles ($270) for trying to organize an unpermitted protest through the video-sharing social network TikTok. According to the newspaper Kommersant, Kristina Altshuler shared a message on TikTok on July 29, calling on city residents to gather outside the Sverdlovsky Drama Theater to support protesters in Khabarovsk. The video attracted almost 190,000 views and 31,000 likes, says the news website Znak.com.€
The El Camino Real Charter High School teacher whose name is being withheld, said a parent took a photo of her wearing a shirt reading, “I can’t breathe” — a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement and some of the last words of people gunned down by police. The photo, according to the teacher, was sent out with a link to the teacher’s email address and invitations to harass her.
The demonstration was connected to an incident earlier in the day in which protesters burned a copy of the Islamic holy book, police spokesman Rickard Lundqvist told Swedish tabloid Expressen.
California is facing a broadband access crisis, as parents are relying more on the Internet every day trying to keep their jobs in the midst of the pandemic while remotely educating their kids. The people of California need help, and the state should move forward now to begin the work needed to finally close the digital divide. Yet with just hours left in this year’s legislative session, the California Assembly refused to hear SB 1130, or any deal, to expand broadband access—a refusal that came out of the blue, without any explanation to the more than 50 groups that supported this bill. And that kind of blockade is only possible at the direction of California’s Speaker of the Assembly, Speaker Anthony Rendon.
A deal to expand broadband would have secured more than 100 million dollars a year to secure access to high-speed Internet for families, first responders, and seniors across the state. Senator Lena Gonzalez built a broad coalition of support for this bill, and had the support of the California Senate and Governor Gavin Newsom.
Last May, a largely overlooked report by OpenSignal detailed how, despite endless hype, U.S. 5G is notably slower than 5G in most other developed countries. Because U.S. regulators failed to make mid-band spectrum (which offers faster speeds at greater range) widely available, many U.S. wireless carriers like Verizon embraced higher millimeter wave spectrum (which has trouble with range and building wall penetration) or low-band spectrum (which offers greater range but at notably reduced speeds). The result of the study was fairly obvious:
Over twenty years ago, the United States enacted a law known as the DMCA. The law amended the Copyright Act of 1976, implementing a series of rules addressing the changing technology landscape. The most damaging aspect of that law is section 1201, which implements rules preventing the circumvention of Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and the sharing of tools needed for circumvention. This aspect of the law creates legal penalties for any user trying to control their own computing, or who tries to help their neighbor do likewise. It's pretty strange to refer to this activity as circumvention since really it's just regaining full control of bits present on your own computer, but this is the terminology used in the law. While ostensibly meant to enforce copyright, companies and government agencies over the past two decades have abused this law for whatever purpose they see fit.
[...]
For years now, we have called on the government to end this madness and repeal the anti-circumvention provisions. So when the Copyright Office released a report on the DMCA earlier this spring, there was some hope that change would come. But our hopes were dashed when the report's main recommendations related to other rules in the DMCA, in particular the safe harbor provisions. The DMCA's safe harbor provisions implement the take-down notice system that many users are likely familiar with via video sharing sites. Users stung by take-downs likely won't enjoy the Copyright Office's recommendations on that aspect of the law, and the failure to meaningfully address or recommend change to the anti-circumvention provisions is shameful.
The recommendations do nothing to protect the rights of users, who have demanded for years that the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions must be repealed. The report comes at an important time, as the United States Congress is considering amending the decades-old law. But like the Copyright Office, they too seem more interested in twisting up the Internet over the law's safe harbor provisions.
Someone places several devices in a tree located close to the station where deliveries originate. Drivers in on the plot then sync their own phones with the ones in the tree and wait nearby for an order pickup. The reason for the odd placement, according to experts and people with direct knowledge of Amazon’s operations, is to take advantage of the handsets’ proximity to the station, combined with software that constantly monitors Amazon’s dispatch network, to get a split-second jump on competing drivers.
That drivers resort to such extreme methods is emblematic of the ferocious competition for work in a pandemic-ravaged U.S. economy suffering from double-digit unemployment. Much the way milliseconds can mean millions to hedge funds using robotraders, a smartphone perched in a tree can be the key to getting a $15 delivery route before someone else.
The accelerating negative effects that have accumulated since the collapse of anti-trust enforcement in the US have been a prominent theme on this blog. This search currently returns 16 posts stretching back to 2009. Recently, perhaps started by Lina M. Khan's masterful January 2017 Yale Law Journal article Amazon's Antitrust Paradox a consensus has been gradually emerging as to these negative effects. One problem for this consensus is that "real economists" don't believe the real world, they only believe mathematical models that produce approximations to the real world.
Now, Yves Smith's Fed Economists Finger Monopoly Concentration as Underlying Driver of Neoliberal Economic Restructuring; Barry Lynn in Harpers and Fortnite Lawsuit Put Hot Light on Tech Monopoly Power covers three developments in the emerging anti-monopoly consensus: [...]
Let's be blunt: big email providers would love this. Google would be quite happy in a world where almost everyone used one of a few sources of email and Google could make deals or strongarm most or all of them. Such a world would significantly strengthen the current large incumbents and drive more business to their paid offerings. Even the current world where it's rather easier in practice to get your email delivered reliably if you're a Google Mail or Microsoft Office365 customer does that; a world where only a few identities had their email reliably accepted would make that far worse.
I really wish there was a way for people like me, just Joe or Jane Bloggs off the street, to fight back against these wankers. If I can prove my name contains Quirk and I have no financial incentive, should that give me some rights to own the domain? I think so.
If it was being used legitimately, I’d have absolutely not problem with someone else owning the domain. But domain squatters are in it purely for profit and they really are the scum of the earth as far as I’m concerned.
At some of those Nokia v. Daimler patent trials in Germany, an unnamed American car maker was mentioned as a Nokia patent licensee, as I most recently wrote in April. I thought it was Tesla, but wasn't sure. With all that's going on in that context, such as last month's Mannheim injunction and this week's Dusseldorf trials, I asked around and learned from a U.S. source (which I obviously can't disclose) that the provisional license had actually been granted to, but terminated by, the Ford Motor Company.
The Ninth Circuit’s recent decision in FTC v. Qualcomm (9th Cir., Aug. 11, 2020) is generally viewed as a resounding victory for Qualcomm. In a strongly worded opinion, the Ninth Circuit reversed the entirety of the district court’s holding, which found that Qualcomm violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act. The Ninth Circuit exonerated Qualcomm with respect to each of its allegedly anticompetitive practices, concluding that these practices merely reflected the flexing of Qualcomm’s “economic muscle” with admirable “vigor, imagination, devotion, and ingenuity” (slip op. at 55).
Among Qualcomm’s challenged practices was its refusal to license rival chip makers under patents that are essential to one or more wireless telecommunications standards (standards-essential patents or SEPs). While the District Court found that this refusal violated Qualcomm’s antitrust duty to deal under Aspen Skiing Co. v. Aspen Highlands Skiing Corp., 472 U.S. 585 (1985), the Ninth Circuit disagreed. It reasoned that Qualcomm did not violate any duty to deal because it uniformly refused to grant patent licenses to chip makers and did not “single[] out any specific chip supplier for anticompetitive treatment” (slip op. at 35).
[...]
If a SEP holder licenses a chip manufacturer, then its SEPs covering a particular chip will be exhausted as soon as the manufacturer sell that chip to a device manufacturer, just as LG’s patents were exhausted in Quanta. This means that if the SEP holder licenses a Tier 2 chip manufacturer, it cannot separately license, or collect royalties from, Tier 3 smartphone manufacturers for the same SEPs. Qualcomm was keenly aware of the risk of patent exhaustion, which is why it refused to grant “exhaustive” licenses to chip makers like Intel. 411 F.Supp.3d at 748, 761.
If SEP royalties were standardized on a per-unit basis (e.g. $0.50 per product embodying the standard), then it would not matter whether the SEP holder licensed its SEPs at Tier 2 or Tier 3. In either case it would receive the same payment. However, due to longstanding industry practice, that is not how SEP royalties are calculated. Instead, they are usually based on some percentage (say 2.5%) of the price of the product embodying the standard. So for a 4G LTE wireless radio chipset priced at $30, the royalty would be $0.75. But for a $600 iPhone incorporating that chipset, the royalty would be $15. For this reason, SEP holders strongly prefer to license their SEPs to end device makers (Tier 3). As explained by one Ericsson licensing executive, “we choose to license the patents as late in value chain as possible …. One big advantage with this strategy is also that it is likely that the royalty income will be higher since we calculate the royalty on a more expensive product.” Or, as more succinctly expressed by a Qualcomm attorney at trial, licensing SEPs to device makers is “humongously” more lucrative than licensing them to chip makers. 411 F.Supp.3d at 754, 758, 796. The practice by which a SEP holder licenses its SEPs at only one tier of the supply chain is sometimes called “level discrimination.” (Courts and commentators disagree whether level discrimination is permitted under the nondiscrimination prong of a FRAND commitment – see this article for a discussion).
One of the banes of any practicing patent attorney's professional existence is counseling clients on licensing agreements where the parties attempt to avoid setting forth definitive terms on contract provisions regarding circumstances expected to arise in future. This is an understandable inclination, because such terms are likely to depend on such future circumstances that neither party wishes to anticipate and thus later find that they are at a disadvantage as a consequence. But such an inclination neglects to consider other ways to structure a contract to avoid these risks, and also neglects to acknowledge the possible consequences of failing to address these issues during current contract negotiations. For such clients, the Federal Circuit's recent decision in Phytelligence, Inc. v. Washington State University provides a cautionary tale (as well as an example for the intrepid attorney to use for convincing such clients of the pitfalls that can arise and problems that can be created by fainthearted conduct during contract negotiations).
The predicate facts are these. WSU and Phytelligence negotiated a Propagation Agreement for propagating a new apple cultivar named WA38 and patented by WSU. The Propagation Agreement permitted Phytelligence to propagate the trees but not to sell them unless the company obtained permission under a separate license.
Patent litigation about ventilator technology in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic may not seem too surprising, although this case started in 2017, long before ventilators came to worldwide attention. The most recent decision of the Swiss Federal Supreme Court on ventilators deals with the fundamental concept of the technical character of an invention.
[...]
Both the claimant, Hamilton Medical AG, and the defendant, imtmedical AG, manufacture ventilators for use in intensive care. Hamilton is the registered owner of EP 1 984 805 B1, related to a "method and a device for simplifying a diagnostic assessment of a mechanically ventilated patient". Independent claim 1 relates (in summary fashion) to a ventilator having a screen that represents a lung shape designed such that –
a volume change of the ventilated lung which is acquired with each breath, is represented in an animated manner by way of a size change of the lung shape corresponding to this volume change, involving an animation of a contour line of the lung shape, the design of which containing qualitative information on the compliance of the lung.
Hamilton sued imtmedical for patent infringement before the Swiss Federal Patent Court and was awarded a permanent injunction in first instance. Upon appeal by imtmedical, the Federal Supreme Court affirmed the judgment.
[...]
This decision must be read against the backdrop of the COMVIK-approach, which the Supreme Court has now formally accepted to be applicable in Swiss patent law. Under the COMVIK-approach (named after the Boards of Appeal decision T 641/00 of the same name), "where a feature cannot be considered as contributing to the solution of any technical problem by providing a technical effect, it has no significance for the purpose of assessing inventive step."
Though this Kat does not disagree with the result, he regrets not being able to have read more detailed explanations on the causal link between the graphical presentation of the change of volume of the lung and the healthcare provider's decision to modify the ventilation parameters. This may be easy to understand with the facts of this case, but may be more difficult to argue in future cases. Further guidance would have been welcome.
Finally, one important takeaway is the Court's insistence on the fact that it is not necessary for the patentee to provide an improved technical solution. "Credibly assisting" the user does not mean "better assisting" them. Alternatives to existing solutions do not need to be assessed on whether they also constitute improvements, provided that they are new and inventive.
On September 1, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 8,892,600, owned and asserted by FireNet Technologies, LLC, an IP Investments affiliate and well-known NPE. The ’600 patent, generally directed to a proxy firewall system for protecting devices within a network. FireNet had previously sued Kemp Technologies, Fortinet, Citrix, A10 Networks, and Fujitsu (now terminated).
The takedown came on the same day that Grant sued the Trump campaign for the unauthorized use of his song, according to CNN. Grant’s lawyer issued a cease and desist letter to the campaign the day after the president posted the video. A post on Grant’s website says that he is the “sole and exclusive rightful copyright owner of the musical composition.”
I've mentioned before that my father spent his whole career, apart from WW2 as an RNVR watch officer on convoy escorts, at Harrods, the iconic London department store. He even published a textbook on retail distribution. So I can't resist a shout-out to the amazing work of Eric Hutton and the volunteers of Project Gutenberg who, over the last 13 years, have scanned, OCR-ed and proof-read the entire Harrods catalog from 1912. Below the fold, the details.
In its legal action to track down The Pirate Bay, anti-piracy group Rights Alliance presented the court with testimony from an expert who found that VPN provider OVPN probably had some useful information on its alleged customer. However, OVPN has now produced comments from the same person who, given additional information, may have reconsidered.
Several pirated copies of the sci-fi thriller 'Tenet' have appeared online. The leaks, which were recorded in theaters, appear to have at least two sources. One has badly cropped Korean subtitles and the other, which is sponsored by a gambling company, reveals partial German subtitles. Whether Warner Bros. should be overly concerned about these leaks is up for debate.
