Lenovo’s introduction of Ubuntu as an OS in their systems started back in June. Initially “only accessible to enterprises via a customised bid”, Lenovo is about to add 13 ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series workstations and 14 ThinkPad T, X, X1 and L series laptops with 20.04 LTS (L series with 18.04 LTS) version of Ubuntu to Lenovo’s website.
Igor Bergman, vice president of PCSD software and cloud at Lenovo, stated that Lenovo plans to enable smarter technology “for all”. Thanks to the device certification back in June, Linux is now easier to install in Lenovo devices, offering to the Linux community the “premium experience” that Lenovo is known for in a simpler way. This is why Lenovo took the “next step to offer Linux-ready devices right out of the box”.
It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.
We get fancy with Traefik labels, and gush over some new Home Assistant features while saving our data from inevitable future failure.
Doc Searls and Katherine Druckman talk to Kyle Rankin and Petros Koutoupis about TikTok and who controls your phone.
Intel continues bringing up the DG1 discrete graphics card under Linux with continued refinements set to hit for Linux 5.10.
Besides all of the Intel (i915) DRM kernel graphics driver improvements coming for Linux 5.10 some of which explicitly benefit Gen12/Xe and the DG1 discrete graphics card, the sound subsystem updates for this next kernel cycle are bringing up the audio support.
I spend most of the past few months listening to music. My favorite pastime is to see an eclectic range of bands, solo artists, and orchestras live. It’s such a life-changing and exhilarating experience. It’s one thing to be sitting at home listening to a CD or watching music videos on TV or on YouTube, but being in the audience, packed out in a stadium or music hall, takes it to another level. But it’s an expensive pastime, and still on hold given the current coronavirus pandemic. These days, I’m listening to music from my CD collection which I’ve encoded to FLAC, a lossless audio format.
Linux is endowed with a plethora of open source music players. And I’ve reviewed the vast majority. But I seem to keep finding interesting music players. Musiko is the latest I’ve stumbled across.
Musiko is a free to use, open source and cross platform music player. It supports a good range of audio formats including both lossy and lossless formats. Musiko uses JavaScript, Electron, VueJS, the music-metadata module and a few others.
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Musiko definitely doesn’t get our recommendation. It’s really slow at loading in a fairly small music folder, it’s poorly designed, and offers only a fairly limited set of features.
If it was the only music player available for Linux, it would be bearable to use. But there’s so many vastly better open source music players available. Our recommended GUI music player is Tauon Music Box. And if you prefer console based software, musikcube gets our seal of approval.
But it’s really huge memory footprint consigns Musiko to the bin. With a subset of my music folder loaded, the program uses 1.8GB of RAM (as reported by ps_mem). That’s truly ridiculous. Just look how this memory footprint compares with Byte and other music players.
Welcome back, calibre users. It has been a year since calibre 4.0. The two headline features are Highlighting support in the calibre E-book viewer and that calibre has now moved to Python 3.
There has been a lot of work on the calibre E-book viewer. It now supports Highlighting. The highlights can be colors, underlines, strikethrough, etc. and have added notes. All highlights can be both stored in EPUB files for easy sharing and centrally in the calibre library for easy browsing. Additionally, the E-book viewer now supports both vertical and right-to-left text.
calibre has moved to using Python 3. This is because Python 2 was end-of-lifed this year. This should be completely transparent to calibre users, the only caveat being that some third party calibre plugins have not yet been ported to Python 3 and therefore will not work in calibre 5. For status on the various plugin ports, see here. This effort involved porting half-a-million lines of Python code and tens-of-thousands of lines of extension code to Python 3. This would not have been possible without the help of Eli Schwartz and Flaviu Tamas.
Clonezilla, the best disk imaging and cloning software that is not only free but opensource as well. However, it is a Linux (Debian or Ubuntu) based software thus you cannot install on Windows to use it like any other software listed in this list. Nevertheless, the best thing is its capability of booting as a LIVE Linux which makes it a bare metal Hard disk cloning platform. Thus, it doesn’t matter you are using Windows, Linux, macOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, VMWare ESX, and Chrome OS/Chromium OS or any other operating system. The user can simply boot the PC or Laptop using Clonezilla and this will clone the whole disk drive of the system without modifying internal files or folder.
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R-Tools is the company that proving different solutions related to storage and recovery; the R-Linux or Windows is a free recovery utility that is available for both Windows and Linux operating systems. If your goal is a data recovery and Imaging of disk partitions then R-Linux is the free one to go for. However, unlike Windows which has multiple solutions available above, the availability of this software for Linux gives it an upper hand. Thus, those are using open source distros and looking for some recovery solution that can be used without issuing commands, they should try out R-Linux.
After Dota 2 Auto Chess made the auto-battle chess-like system popular, a few more have popped up and the latest is King of the Board from developer StandArts.
It seems they're going with a similar competitive theme like Valve did with Dota Underlords, having multiple players battling together online to be the last one standing. It's not entirely clear on how exactly they plan to be unique, although the trailer did show some sort of skill tree you can pump a lot of points into as you play through the battles.
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We spoke with StandArts over email, who confirmed King of the Board will be supporting Linux.
Megan Fox of Glass Bottom Games announced that SkateBIRD has a demo up again, to celebrate being included in the Tokyo Game Show 2020 and you can play until September 28.
SkateBIRD is a game that doesn't need much of an introduction. It's skateboarding, with birds. Funded on Kickstarter in July 2019 with thanks to 2,526 backers giving the team $67,220 it's not actually due to release until later in 2021, so this small slice gives a quick look at what to expect from it.
What's different to the original demo? According to Fox, quite a lot behind the scenes. It's the same map but they've given it all new skating physics, "We iterated on momentum, top speed, pushing behavior, and grind friction. It's also a new iteration of the camera. Goal was to address prior feedback and see how folks felt about it now." and they also improved the balancing behaviour and lots of other little things.
You all love to tinker right? SteamTinkerLaunch is an open source project to bundle together tons of available extra options for running your Steam games.
It's a wrapper which allows you to customize game launching so it can get your games to hook in with other tools like MangoHud, GameMode, vkBasalt, ReplaySorcery, automatically run a growing list of tweaks needed for specific games, it has support for Steam Play (including Proton and other Steam Play tools) and the list goes on for a while.
Klei continue going through all the characters in Don't Starve Together to bring them up to date with all the new content and game mechanics with a fresh upgrade out now.
Additionally, they have an open ticket tagged as "help wanted" to sort a proper Linux build out so if you know Haxe it might be a fun project for you to help with.
Paradox are set to return to my favourite grand strategy game, with the announcement of a brand new DLC coming to Stellaris with the Stellaris: Necroids Species Pack.
Right now Paradox are keeping all the details close and more will be revealed later. From what they said Stellaris players "will learn that death is not the end, but rather the beginning of their intergalactic journey as new changes reincarnate playthroughs of Stellaris for long time players, as well as bringing new undeath to established playtypes. To live amongst the Necroids, embracing death is not only encouraged, it’s required!".
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Paradox also mentioned how they wanted their ships to look a little sinister, along with their portraits too, since the big theme here is death. While not undead or decaying, they wanted to give a pretty dark theme and they say that they've managed to make "something really great" with more details in future developer diaries.
Ink Stains Games have released a major upgrade to the challenging turn-based RPG Stoneshard, one they've been working on for some time now and it's quite the overhaul.
Sid Meier's Civilization VI has another expansion out now for the New Frontier Pass with the Byzantium & Gaul Pack available now.
This is part of their ongoing process hopping between new DLC and afree upgrades, with this available now to anyone who owns the New Frontier Pass or you can buy it directly. If you do own the New Frontier Pass instead of picking up each newer DLC, they're throwing in the exclusive Teddy Roosevelt and Catherine De Medici Persona Packs.
Following word last week that the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan layer was seeing 50~100% performance gains, more details are now available.
This Mesa OpenGL software implementation over Vulkan has been seeing more performance optimizations by developer Mike Blumenkrantz following his remarkable work on getting OpenGL 4.6 up and running. He's been making a number of optimizations recently while last week's note of a "50~100%" improvement was certainly enticing albeit left wondering if it was just up to some OpenGL micro-benchmarks.
Following the monthly development cycle, KaOS team has finally released a new Stable ISO, KaOS 2020.09. Superseding the previous v2020.07, the latest version 2020.09 comes with major software package updates, KDE Applications 20.08, and Linux 5.7.
For those who don’t know, KaOS is an independent rolling Linux distribution built from scratch. It mainly focusses on one desktop environment (KDE), one toolkit (QT), and one architecture (x86_64).
Linux is a very powerful operating system and that is one of the reasons why it powers a lot of servers on the Internet. Though there have been concerns about its user-friendliness which has brought about the debate of how it will overtake Mac OSX and Windows on desktop computers, I think users need to accept Linux as it is to realize its real power.
Today, Linux powers a lot of machines out there, from mobile phones to tablets, laptops, workstations, servers, supercomputers, cars, air traffic control systems, refrigerators, and many more. With all this and more yet to come in the near future, as I had already stated at the beginning, Linux is the operating system for future computing.
Because the future belongs to the kids of today, then introducing them to technologies that will change the future is the way to go. Therefore they have to be introduced at an early stage to start learning computer technologies and Linux as a special case.
One thing common to children is curiosity and early learning can help instill a character of exploration in them when the learning environment is designed to suit them.
Having looked at some quick reasons why kids should learn Linux, let us now go through a list of exciting Linux distributions that you can introduce your kids to so that they can start using and learning Linux.
During this week we have released ‘only’ three Snapshot (0919, 0922 and 0923). But some of you might have noticed that we are finally sending the ‘build fail notification mails’ again, helping you be more laid back, not having to look at your packages all the time, as the bot does that for you. Unfortunately, due to some OBS issue, this feature was broken for a little while.
We’ve been teasing this for a while, but today it’s finally true—Fedora Workstation is now available preinstalled on the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8, ThinkPad P53, and ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 laptops. The ThinkPad X1 Carbon is available today for direct consumer purchase from Lenovo’s online store. The Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 2 and ThinkPad P53 will be available next week via the “Contact Us” icon on Lenovo.com. What’s more, the successor models are in the works for pre-load and online ordering as well!
After missing the preferred target date of 15 September and the secondary beta target date of this week, Fedora 33 Beta is now on track to ship next week.
Fedora 33 is ready to make its beta debut next week for increasing the testing of this half-year update to the Red Hat sponsored distribution.
Ben Cotton announced on Thursday that it's a "GO" for releasing Fedora 33 Beta next week with the current images in good shape and no blocker bugs pending.
Red Hat sees three fundamental areas of modernization that financial institutions should focus on in order to modernize their payment service and benefit from the same technologies that upstart new entrants to the payments industry already have: microservices, cloud-native integration, and intelligent process automation.
The best analogy for understanding containers is a shipping container. That’s why the majority of all container articles and blog posts show a photo of a shipping container. We’re sure you’ve seen the transport of those big steel shipping containers. (We’ve also seen some people use them to build houses and swimming pools.) The shipping industry standardized on a consistent size container. Now, the same container can move from a ship to a train to a truck without unloading the cargo. The container contents do not matter.
Just like a shipping container, a software container is a standardized package of software. Everything needed for the software to run is inside the container. The software code, runtime, system tools, system libraries, and settings are all inside a single container.
Ulyana brings friendliness to computer users continuing Mint's tradition. This traditional article is for you who purchased a new preloaded Mint computer or simply install it by yourself. This contains tips and tricks including some apps recommendation for new comers plus a nostalgic remembrance for long timers. Okay, now let's enjoy this elegant operating system!
The Snap Store has been designed to enable upstream developers and enthusiastic community contributors to publish snaps. As with most Linux packaging solutions, the wider community are often responsible for starting and maintaining software packages. This is a double-edged sword, especially for humans with limited life spans and other shiny things to steal their attention.
If a community contributor decides to move on from maintaining software packaging, has too many other things on their plate, or life just gets in the way, it’s not necessarily a problem. Users are appreciative that someone packaged up their favourite application, but can get upset quickly if that software is no longer updated. Snap publishers who are overwhelmed or busy doing other things have some options here.
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When the maintainer of a snap has decided to focus on other things, we can handle that too. Where possible, we recommend snap publishers transition their applications to another individual or organisation rather than let them become outdated. Ideally snaps should be published in the Snap Store by the upstream project. So the first port of call would be to offer to transition the snap upstream. Sometimes this isn’t possible if the developers are unable to take on the additional workload themselves, however small that might be.
Alternatively we recommend seeking out another enthusiastic, trustworthy community member to take on the mantle of maintaining the snap package. Often just starting a conversation on the upstream issue tracker, or in their real-time chat of choice will yield good results. Someone keen may even be found within the wider community of the upstream project.
If that fails, a further option would be to find someone within the snapcraft community. There are a group of dedicated snapcraft enthusiasts who love the challenge of maintaining new snaps, and taking on existing ones if necessary. They can be found in the snapcraft forums. Start a new thread, looking for a new maintainer, and typically one can be found.
Once a new maintainer is found, the transition from one publisher to another can be actioned via the forums. Start a thread in the store-requests category indicating who the snap(s) are moving from, and who to. The store admins team can do the necessary validation checks behind the scenes, and move the snap(s) to their new home. It’s then up to the new maintainer to hook up whatever build or CI system is needed to seamlessly continue publishing of the snap.
Note that when a snap is transferred, by default the previous maintainer is kept as a collaborator on the snap. They can continue to be involved but without being named as the publisher, or they can be removed as a collaborator, and no longer maintain the snap.
So the take away from this is, if you’re feeling overwhelmed and need to offload maintainership of snaps to others, don’t panic. We can help, and our community can too.
Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K powered by a MediaTek MT8695 quad-core SoC for launched for $50 about two years ago. The company has now introduced two cheaper variants with Amazon Fire TV Stick Lite and Fire TV Stick powered by a similar MediaTek MT8695D quad-core processor designed for 1080p (Full HD) HDR video playback.
If you’d like to connect a 2.5-inch SSD or hard drive disk to your Raspberry Pi 4, and are not a fan of the micro HDMI ports, DeskPi Pro enclosure might be what you are looking for.
The “Set-top Box” enclosure offers an alternative to the popular Argon One case, as it also re-arrange the ports in a more user-friendly way with most Raspberry Pi ports found on the rear panels, and the front panel adds an additional MicroSD card socket, plus two USB ports for a total of 5 USB ports, as well as a safe-shutdown & reset button.
We talk a lot about “verifiable hardware”, but it’s hard to verify something when you don’t know what you’re looking at. This post takes a stab at explaining the major features of the Precursor motherboard by first indicating the location of physical components, then by briefly discussing the rationale behind their curation.
OSI’s Joshua Simmons examines the current state of open source in this presentation from the recent State of the Source Summit. Paragraphs In his keynote presentation at the recent State of the Source Summit, Joshua Simmons, President at Open Source Initiative, provided a thoughtful look at the state of open source today, acknowledging strengths and shared history and examining challenges with an eye toward conscious, collaborative improvement.
Open source has gone “from fringe to mainstream,” Simmons said, and the ecosystem has understandably undergone many changes. In this moment, he said, open source is being tested, with questions being raised about the sustainability of projects, the health and safety communities, fair treatment of maintainers, and open source’s overall ability to weather attempts at redefinition.
In the talk, Simmons explored various open source narratives, discussed OSI’s role, and described the organization’s
Enterprise and often government are required to handle dozens of incident reporting sources at once, which is not resources or cost-effective at all.
Some companies are still using emails, ticket systems, CRMs, or messaging systems for incident reports.
To resolve this issue, they need a centralized incident tracking management system and here comes Cyphon.
Cyphon is an open-source incident management and response platform. It helps the enterprise to track incident from different sources, prioritize them and automate the response system for them.
Tor Browser 10.1a1 is now available from the Tor Browser Alpha download page and also from our distribution directory.
Note: This is an alpha release, an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommend downloading the latest stable release instead.
So the Mozilla Webcompat team is entering a new era. Mike Taylor (by the time this will be published) was the manager of the webcompat team at Mozilla since August 2015. He decided to leave. Monday, September 21 was his last day. We had to file an issue about this.
The new interim manager is… well… myself.
So last week and this week will be a lot about: * have a better understanding of the tasks and meetings that Mike was attending. * trying to readjust schedules and understanding how to get a bit of sleep with a distributed organization which has most of its meeting toward friendly European and American time zones. Basically, all meetings are outside the reasonable working timeframe (8:00 to 17:00 Japan Time). * trying to figure out how to switch from peer to manager with the other persons in the webcompat team. I want to remove any sources of stress.
Technically, a static website means the webpages are not generated on the server dynamically. The HTML, CSS, JavaScript lie on the server in the version the end user receives it. The raw source code files are already prebuilt, the source code doesn’t change with the next server request.
It’s FOSS is a dynamic website which depends on several databases and the web pages are generated and served when there’s a request from your browser. Majority of the web is powered by dynamic sites where you interact with the websites and there are plenty of content that often change.
Static websites give you a few benefits like faster loading times, less server resource requirements, and better security (debatable?).
Traditionally, static websites are more suitable for creating small websites with only a few pages and where the content doesn’t change too often.
This, however, is changing thanks to static website generator tools and you can use them to create blogs as well.
I have compiled a list of open source static site generators that can help you build a beautiful website.
The last few months have put data protection back in the spotlight. During a crisis of this kind, do we have to choose between safety and privacy? We talked about this with Richard Stallman, digital privacy activist and the founder of the Free Software Movement.
With more kids learning from home this year, it's important to engage them with unique learning opportunities. The classroom looks very different than it did before, and it's going to continue to evolve. So should the lessons we teach.
In the first article in this series, I shared how my students taught me to code. Over the next few weeks, I will be exploring how educators and parents can harness the power of coding to teach kids a wide variety of skills.
"But I don't know anything about coding!" you may be shouting at your computer. That's one of the beauties of open source code: everyone is a learner, and everyone is a teacher. Whether you're new to coding or you've been doing it all your life, part of the process is making mistakes. It's all about problem-solving and learning how to find information. The greatest tool an educator has in a coding classroom is the phrase, "I don't know; let's find out together!"
Before getting down to the actual writing part of documenting another one of your open source projects, and even before interviewing the experts, it's a good idea to answer some high-level questions about your new document.
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Or, what company is behind the document? What brand identity does it want to convey to its audience? The answer to this question will significantly influence your writing style. The company may also have its own style guide or at least a formal mission statement, in which case, you should start there.
If the company is just starting out, you may ask the questions above to the document's owner. As the writer, it's important to integrate the voice and persona you create for the company with your own worldview and beliefs. This will make your writing sound more natural and less like company jargon.
The R language is the de facto standard among statisticians for the development of statistical software, and is widely used for statistical software development and data analysis. R is a modern dialect of S, one of several statistical programming languages designed at Bell Laboratories.
R is much more than a programming language. It’s an interactive suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation, and graphical display. R offers a wide variety of statistical (linear and nonlinear modelling, classical statistical tests, time-series analysis, classification, clustering, …) and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. The ability to download and install R packages is a key factor which makes R an excellent language to learn. What else makes R awesome? Here’s a taster.
Perl got this syntax that allow to use a while loop without having to explicitly increment an index by doing an i++. It is made possible by the each function.
After many days, trying to implement linked lists by nested hash (link to Rosetta Code) (link to my code) or Struct::Dumb, I get how to write the (singly) linked list in object-oriented style by Perl. One with bless, another one with Moose. Keep the learning record here.
Our task is to find all the prime numbers that are less than n in Linear Time.
We use Sieve of Eratosthenes to find the prime numbers till n. But the time complexity is O(N log (log N)). Here our desired time complexity is O(N). Hence a modified version of the Sieve of Eratosthenes is to be used.
The interpreters are based on much the same codebase, thus the multiple release. This is a micro release, all APIs are compatible with the 7.3.0 (Dec 2019) and 7.3.1 (April 2020) releases, but read on to find out what is new.
Conda Forge now supports PyPy as a python interpreter. The support is quite complete for linux and macOS. This is the result of a lot of hard work and good will on the part of the Conda Forge team. A big shout out to them for taking this on.
Development of PyPy has transitioning to https://foss.heptapod.net/pypy/pypy. This move was covered more extensively in this blog post. We have seen an increase in the number of drive-by contributors who are able to use gitlab + mercurial to create merge requests.
The CFFI backend has been updated to version 1.14.2. We recommend using CFFI rather than c-extensions to interact with C, and using cppyy for performant wrapping of C++ code for Python.
Dying on September 18, 2020 at 81 from lung cancer, the esteemed Russia historian and public intellectual Stephen F. Cohen left behind a world quite unlike that which he aspired to create. In rereading his early book Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938, it is impossible not to be heartbroken by the Shakespearean tragedy reaped from his efforts.
Recently, we deployed the first of many changes to a set of early adopter projects: Basque Wikipedia, Farsi Wikipedia, French Wikipedia, Hebrew Wikipedia, French Wiktionary, and Portuguese Wikiversity. Users with accounts on other projects can also view these changes by selecting the latest version of the Vector skin within their user preferences.
The University of Maiduguri has stayed open at the epicenter of the Boko Haram insurgency. A new book gives voice to the Nigerian academics who faced off with the radical Islamists who reject Western education as sinful.
"Nationalism and isolationism in the face of a pandemic are, as far as we are concerned, a prescription for failure."€
"Not being reimbursed by Medicare would be crippling—akin to a household losing nearly half its income."
Wealthy families and profitable corporations can afford it, and states can’t afford not to.
With so much at stake—including social justice, human rights and this planet’s climate—Autumn 2020 is a time when people have the decisive opportunity to prevent the consolidation of illegitimate power by an authoritarian regime.
Biden and his party are "walking into a trap in the battleground states," warned one voting rights expert.
A company owned by West Virginia’s billionaire governor has agreed to a multimillion-dollar legal settlement in a case over missed coal shipments, adding at least $4.4 million to the tally of judgments and settlements involving Jim Justice’s business empire.
A document filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in the Southern District of New York indicates that Justice’s Southern Coal Sales Corp. has resolved a case brought by Essar Steel Algoma over the shipments for a Canadian steel mill.
In March 2015, Bill Gates showed an image of the coronavirus during a TED Talk and told the audience that it was what the greatest catastrophe of our time would look like. The real threat to life, he said, is ‘not missiles, but microbes.’ When the coronavirus pandemic swept over the earth like a tsunami five years later, he revived the war language, describing the pandemic as ‘a world war’.
During the peak of the pandemic’s first wave in mid-May, St. Petersburg was recording more than 500 new coronavirus cases per day, according to official statistics. But these numbers started to decline steadily from the beginning of June onwards.
"Trump and his political appointees have inappropriately pressured, intimidated, and overruled career public health officials too many times already, but the stakes are far too high for that to happen again with this upcoming FDA guidance."
The former pharmaceutical executive tapped by President Donald Trump to lead the administration’s race to a COVID-19 vaccine is refusing to give up investments that stand to benefit from his work — at least during his lifetime.
With the Food and Drug Administration reportedly planning to propose stricter guidelines for emergency approval of a coronavirus vaccine, President Donald Trump late Wednesday threatened to block the agency’s push for tougher standards because he trusts for-profit pharmaceutical corporations to conduct adequate safety testing.
By now most people are aware of Donald Trump’s latest blunder when he claimed “herd mentality” would ultimately save us from the coronavirus pandemic that has decimated the nation’s economy, killed nearly 200,000 American citizens, and shows no sign of “disappearing almost like a miracle” as he predicted six long months ago. Given Trump’s denial of science and increasing disparagement of those who actually understand infectious diseases, the “herd mentality” of those who believe his baseless drivel may, in fact, doom us.
So the first of three grants was submitted on Tuesday, and, I must confess, I was so tired that I let things slide a couple of days before dipping my toe back into social media and the news to see what’s been going while I was distracted that piques my interest sufficiently, and it wasn’t long before I found it. By way of background, I’ll take a backseat to no one when it comes to being provaccine, not even Paul Offit or Peter Hotez. yet, over the last four months I’ve written four posts expressing concern about a potential COVID-19 vaccine. It started when I became concerned about Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s program to break all vaccine development speed records to produce a COVID-19 vaccine. In August, I pushed back against Russia’s approval of its Sputnik-V vaccine with barely even a phase I clinical trial and suggestions that we should approve a vaccine without necessarily completing phase 3 clinical trials. Just before I took my brief hiatus to attend to the first of three grant deadlines, I even wrote a post entitled Can we trust the CDC and FDA any more?, which was partially about whether the politicization of these agencies by the Trump administration would lead the FDA to approve a COVID-19 vaccine without sufficient safety evidence. (The rest was about how the Department of Health and Human Services was actively interfering with the CDC’s messaging on the coronavirus pandemic.)
The fine levied against Iowa Premium Beef—for a minor record-keeping violation—was cut in half by a state official.€
First things first. Get your flu shot.
"Solving the Covid-19 pandemic requires stopping the spread of the virus. Solving the ozone hole crisis required ending the production of ODSs. And solving the climate crisis requires leaving the fossil carbon in the ground."
Last week, voters and election administrators who emailed Leanne Jackson, the clerk of rural Hamilton County in central Texas, received bureaucratic-looking replies. “Re: official precinct results,” one subject line read. The text supplied passwords for an attached file.
But Jackson didn’t send the messages. Instead, they came from Sri Lankan and Congolese email addresses, and they cleverly hid malicious software inside a Microsoft Word attachment. By the time Jackson learned about the forgery, it was too late. Hackers continued to fire off look-alike replies. Jackson’s three-person office, already grappling with the coronavirus pandemic, ground to a near standstill.
An unnamed U.S. federal agency was hit with a cyber-attack after a [attacker] used valid access credentials, authorities said on Thursday.
While many details of the hack weren’t revealed, federal authorities did divulge that the [attacker] was able to browse directories, copy at least one file and exfiltrate data, according to the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, known as CISA.
The [attacker] implanted malware that evaded the agency’s protection system and was able to gain access to the network by using valid access credentials for multiple users’ Microsoft 365 accounts and domain administrator accounts, according to authorities.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (rails), openSUSE (chromium, jasper, ovmf, roundcubemail, samba, and singularity), Oracle (firefox), SUSE (bcm43xx-firmware, firefox, libqt5-qtbase, qemu, and tiff), and Ubuntu (aptdaemon, atftp, awl, packagekit, and spip).
The future of work is here, ushered in by a global pandemic. But is it turning employment into a Worker’s Paradise of working at home? Or more of a Big Brother panopticon?
For all of the DOJ and FBI's protestations that Apple (and others) just aren't doing enough to help out the federal government, the company actually provides a lot of assistance. No, Apple won't break encryption or build backdoors, but we live in a golden age of surveillance -- one so golden it's putting the surveillers at risk.
Instead of being fixed in one position, as with every prior Echo Show model, the new Echo Show 10’s display is perched on a motorized base that swivels around automatically whenever you interact with the device. By using a blend of computer vision technology and echolocation (pun not intended), the Echo Show 10 can determine where you are in a room and swivel itself around to face you so you can always get a good view of the screen.
The Always Home Cam is fully autonomous, but owners can tell it what path it can take and where it can go. When you first get the device, you build a map of your home for it to follow, which allows you to ask it for specific viewpoints such as the kitchen or bedroom. The drone can be commanded to fly on demand or programmed to fly when a disturbance is detected by a linked Ring Alarm system.
The charging dock blocks the camera’s view, and the camera only records when it is in flight. Ring says the drone makes an audible noise when flying so it is obvious when footage is being recorded.
If you have a Ring camera, you know how easy it is to set up zones and alerts so you can keep an eye on the foyer, or say, your kids’ rooms. But static cameras have inherent blind spots. The Ring Always Home Cam is Amazon’s very futuristic solution to that age-old problem. Essentially a mini autonomous drone that patrols your home when you’re away, the Always Home Cam integrates with the Ring Alarm to “automatically fly a set path to see what’s happening.”
The BIS working paper compares digital currency initiatives by the central banks of China, Sweden, and Canada. Describing the Swedish e-Krona project, “preference will be given to solutions built on open source code,” the paper says. BIS refers to a study by senior advisers working for the Riksbank, published in June.
The bankers outline their ideas for the e-Krona, which is intended as a complement to cash. They bank prefers an 'open architecture' (see 2018 report on the Riksbank’s e-krona project) but the researchers in June seem to be still undecided on the choice between proprietary or open source technology, listing weaknesses for both. (In the case of proprietary software: IT vendor lock-in, and for open source: the risk of the community being abandoned or the build-up of dependence on open source consultants.)
Blacklight works by visiting each website with a headless browser, running custom software built by The Markup. This software monitors which scripts on that website are potentially surveilling the user by performing seven different tests, each investigating a specific, known method of surveillance.
The Markup recently launched Blacklight, a free, instant privacy-inspection tool. Enter any website, and it reveals how you may be tracked when you visit the site, names the companies receiving your data, and explains what the trackers are doing—some of them watch your every mouse move and record your every keystroke. Trust us, it’s more than you’re expecting, raising the question: What can you do about it?
One option is to ensure your web browser is protecting your privacy. In this guide, we’ll walk through some of the different techniques used to track people across the web and detail what each of the major browsers does, or doesn’t do, to circumvent it.
We’ll also add some tips at the end about ways you can slightly alter your behavior to protect yourself.
Clegg said Facebook will not be leaving the EU, giving the reason that the company wants to keep serving its customers along with small and medium-sized businesses. Without explicitly mentioning the billions of dollars that Facebook makes in advertising revenue in the European market, he talked about the large number of jobs Facebook helps create in the EU. He added that during hard times the company was essential in Europe’s economic recovery. He also talked about the problem at hand: data transfers.
John Hersey, Hiroshima, and the end of world.
If the Democrats manage to push Joe Biden over the finish line in November’s election, he will find himself presiding over a decadent, declining empire. He will either continue the policies that have led the American empire to decadence and decline, or seize the moment to move our nation into a new phase: a transition to a peaceful and sustainable post-imperial future.
The longstanding involvement of the United States in the conflict in Yemen is facing renewed scrutiny. On September 16, State Department officials testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee about whether the State Department misled Congress — and the American people — by circumventing controls designed to limit arms sales and ensure congressional oversight.
Court marshals have seized the apartment opposition figure Alexey Navalny owns in Moscow.
When discussing opposition figure Alexey Navalny, the Russian political establishment does its best to adhere to two principles: try never to refer to him by name and always describe him as a “blogger,” not a politician or even an activist. A new survey by the state-owned Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM) helps explain why the Kremlin is so eager for the public to see Navalny as a blogger: 75 percent of respondents said they object to their own children and grandchildren becoming bloggers. Most of these people say they don’t consider such work to be a serious or particularly useful profession.
When it rains, pieces of glass, pottery, and metal rise through the mud in the hills surrounding my Maryland home. The other day, I walked outside barefoot to fetch one of my kid’s shoes and a pottery shard stabbed me in the heel. Nursing a minor infection, I wondered how long that fragment dated back.
Whether you’re reading this with your morning coffee, just after lunch, or on the late shift in the wee small hours of the morning, it’s 100 seconds to midnight. That’s just over a minute and a half. And that should be completely unnerving. It’s the closest to that witching hour we’ve ever been.
Donald Trump has called armed, right-wing militias, like the fascist Oath Keepers “great patriots.” Attorney General Bill Barr has concurred, directing his wrath instead at Black Lives Matter protesters whom he has called “anarchists, agitators, and criminals.” Both have claimed that dangerous, Antifa militants are surreptitiously fanning out across the country — though travelling together and uniformly dressed in black.
When the decision dropped this month, it came through the small screen but with a huge impact.
Indeed, QAnon is on its way to becoming the most dangerous cult in the world – the first ideology to come from the digital realm and to emerge from an online niche into real life, aided by Donald Trump-supporters and right-wing demagogues. The "Q” cult is fueled by one or several anonymous users who regularly post to the web and who claim to have access to top-secret U.S. government documents – a claim that is more than questionable.
Speaking to Le Point magazine, Ms Bret said: "I had 10 minutes to do my business and leave my home, 10 minutes to give up part of my existence... I won't be coming home."
She added that the threats started again with the start of the trial and the republication of the cartoons of Prophet Mohammed earlier this month.
"Since the start of the trial and with the republication of the cartoons, we have received all kinds of horrors, including threats from al-Qaeda and calls to finish the work of the [gunmen from the 2015 attack]," she said.
President Donald Trump on Wednesday refused to clearly guarantee a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the upcoming US election in November to Joe Biden.
"Today's charging decision is the manifestation of what the millions of people who have taken to the streets to protest police violence already know: Modern policing and our criminal legal system are rotten to the core."
As outrage mounts over the grand jury ruling in the police killing of Breonna Taylor, we look at the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where an investigation is in its final stages. The case sparked renewed national protests in August after viral video showed Kenosha police shooting the Black father in the back seven times, paralyzing him. We speak with Blake’s father, Jacob Blake Sr. He says police shootings and killings of Black people reveal there are “two systems of justice” in the United States, and asks, “Why are our children scared to death of people that are supposed to protect and serve them?”
We go to Louisville, where protests erupted after police officers who shot Breonna Taylor in her own home were not charged for her death. A grand jury indicted a third officer for “wanton endangerment” for shooting into an adjacent apartment during the fatal raid that killed Breonna Taylor in March. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in cities across the country demanding justice for Taylor and defunding of police departments. “The lack of indictments in the grand jury process is an indictment on the system itself,” says Sadiqa Reynolds, president and CEO of the Louisville Urban League. “They have created a completely separate grand jury system for police officers.”
We go to Louisville, where protests erupted after police officers who shot Breonna Taylor in her own home were not charged for her death. A grand jury indicted a third officer for “wanton endangerment” for shooting into an adjacent apartment during the fatal raid that killed Breonna Taylor in March. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in cities across the country demanding justice for Taylor and defunding of police departments. “The lack of indictments in the grand jury process is an indictment on the system itself,” says Sadiqa Reynolds, president and CEO of the Louisville Urban League. “They have created a completely separate grand jury system for police officers.”
The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) condemns the outcome of Kentucky’s grand jury proceedings and renews its calls for justice for Breonna Taylor. On March 13, 2020, Breonna Taylor was murdered in her home by police officers executing a no-knock search warrant. The officers were acting outside of the scope of the warrant, which required them to knock and announce their presence at Taylor’s apartment, and with a wanton disrespect for human life which ultimately led to her death. Protests erupted in Kentucky—and around the world—over the summer in response to Taylor’s death, as well as in reaction to the killing of George Floyd, and state and local law enforcement have reacted with extreme force and brutality, arresting over 500 activists in Kentucky since June. On September 23, 2020, a grand jury investigation of the police killing led to the indictment of only one officer involved in the no-knock raid on three counts of wanton endangerment—in other words, not for Breonna Taylor’s death. There were no charges issued for the other two officers.
The results of the grand jury proceedings over the killing of Breonna Taylor highlight the historically unjust and uneven criminal legal system that protects the interests of white supremacy, continuing the oppression of Black and Brown lives. The NLG renews calls for an end to the racist criminal legal system, abolition of incarceration, and accountability and reparations for the countless victims of police violence. As the grand jury proceedings in the murder of Breonna Taylor show, the criminal legal system will not resolve the injustices done to Black people by its own volition. Justice will remain elusive until the police are defunded, prisons closed, and resources are reallocated to Black and Brown communities in the form of the social services, education, and economic support needed to reverse centuries of racist exploitation and oppression. It is imperative that we dismantle white supremacy and settler-colonialism in all its manifestations.
A Telemundo spokesperson said Wednesday that recent social media posts claiming that Mr. Biden used a teleprompter during an interview with Noticias Telemundo and the anchor Jose Diaz-Balart were false.
Vow by social media giant to reject political ads that prematurely declare election winner slammed as 'another hollow gesture.'
The Northern Hemisphere saw a record high temperature increase, to +1.38€°C above the global average temperature during 1881-1920, during this COVID-19 pandemic summer of 2020. [1]
What follows are not candidate endorsements. Rather, this nonpartisan guide aims to inform voters’ choices, help journalists decide what races to follow, and explore what the 2020 elections could portend for climate action in the United States in 2021 and beyond.
Our planet is in serious, irrevocable trouble. There’s no bigger issue.
The ongoing US-UK trade talks have been seen by some lobby groups€ as an opportunity to strip back environmental and food safety regulations to allow them to sell products – pesticides, hormone-fed meat, genetically modified crops (GMOs), and chemicals – that have been previously banned under EU law. The groups represent industries worth billions of dollars, and are supported by some of the world’s largest€ polluters.€
This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
The sun peeked over the rim of the trees here in my little corner of New Hampshire last week like a dusky gold coin, no shine, no glare, easy enough to look straight at. My daughter in the back seat rolled down her window and said, “Daddy, it smells like the beach!” when the air hit her face. The sky stayed eggshell white all day long though the forecast had called for straight blue, and my lungs — always a martyr to the allergens of the season — felt slightly heavier than usual.
Online, QAnon supporters have helped spread misinformation about climate change, including a recent claim that wildfires in the western United States were caused by antifa activists, View said. The notion that disasters like wildfires or the pandemic must have been planned is characteristic of QAnon adherents, he said.
“People say that QAnon is a conspiracy theory. That undersells it. It’s not like believing there are UFOs in Area 51 or that Bigfoot lives in Oregon,” View said. “This is an all-encompassing worldview, and it’s an extremist belief that you are a digital soldier fighting evil, and that by posting and meme-ing, you can revolutionarily change the world.”
Currently, two in 10 Americans, including four in 10 Republicans, say that QAnon is a “somewhat good” or “very good” thing for the country, according to Pew Research. Some 81 current or former congressional candidates have in some way promoted QAnon, according to Media Matters.
As the Washington Post first reported this week, President Trump is naming Ryan Maue to the role of chief scientist at NOAA, a position that will help enforce its scientific integrity process. Maue is a meteorologist who has downplayed the degree and impacts of global warming, particularly ties between€ extreme weather events and human-caused climate change, and he has a past connection with the Cato Institute.
In the five months since,€ climate-fueled wildfires have torched the Western U.S., the World Meteorological Organization ran out of hurricane names in the overheated Atlantic, the Arctic ice cap contracted to a nearly unprecedented minimum, and polar scientists announced that Greenland’s ice sheet has melted “past the point of no return.”€
What Joe Biden would need to do starting from Day One to correct the course of US climate policy.
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday defended his administration’s record on oil regulation in California, following an investigation by The Desert Sun and ProPublica that showed petroleum companies are profiting off dangerous inland spills.
The state enacted regulations last year to curb the spills, known as surface expressions, but the news organizations found that more than two dozen have occurred since then. Three are still running, according to state officials, including one that’s spilled more than 2 million gallons of oil and wastewater.
As the world moves deeper into the climate crisis, too many of the official solutions to slow global warming and transition to a decarbonized society stop short of stating the obvious: our economic system is broken and must be replaced. Capitalism is incompatible with life on Earth. This irrefutable truth is something we all know deep down, whether we can bear to admit it or not.
The new OCI report makes it clear that Big Oil is hiding behind claims that they are changing while continuing to push fossil fuels despite the harm to our health and climate.
"After four years of chaos, tragedy, and absolute corruption, the choice we face in November could not be any clearer or more important."
California governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order today that calls for a complete ban of the sale of any new gasoline-powered cars and light trucks in the state by 2035, the LA Times reports, in an effort to slash greenhouse gas emissions. Medium- or heavy-duty trucks will also be have to be zero-emission by 2045.
Emphasizing that California must stay at the forefront of the fight against climate change, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday issued an executive order to require all new cars sold to be zero-emission vehicles by 2035 and threw his support behind a ban on the controversial use of hydraulic fracturing by oil companies.
Under Newsom’s order, the California Air Resources Board would implement the phaseout of new gas-powered cars and light trucks and also require medium and heavy-duty trucks to be zero-emission by 2045 where possible. California would be the first state in the nation to mandate 100% zero-emission vehicles, though 15 countries already have committed to phasing out gas-powered cars.
It is time for African governments to step back from the failing Green Revolution and chart a new food system that respects local cultures and communities by promoting low-cost, low-input ecological agriculture.
Wildlife could flourish if humans opted for a better diet. Think of humble, healthy lentils as the green choice.
Behind the apocalyptic wildfires in California and Oregon, another ominous trend is creeping across the globe: Everywhere in the world, trees are dying, with the biggest trees going first. Entire forests are threatened worldwide.
"We know how to reduce inequality and combat poverty. The tools are there and the evidence backs it up."
On September 20th, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) –the reporters who brought us the “Panama Papers” and the “Paradise Papers” — released the “FinCEN Files,” in collaboration with Buzzfeed News.
Russia’s Federal Financial Monitoring Service (Rosfinmonitoring) has commented on documents leaked earlier this week from the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCen) showing that banks and the U.S. Government were away of wide-scale money laundering but did little to stop it. Russian officials told the news agency RBC that they don’t ignore banking transactions that could be linked to money laundering:
"The president is€ openly and explicitly considering a coup to hold onto power. Make no mistake:€ Autocracy is at our doorstep."
Around Chicago, it’s safe to say that the City Council hasn’t always been viewed as a model of legislative independence.
By law, of course, the council is the city’s legislative branch, responsible for passing ordinances and providing oversight of city operations. But the council has long been characterized as a rubber stamp for powerful mayors. Even aldermen have noted — and in some cases boasted — that they saw their primary responsibilities as delivering services in their wards, leaving much of the legislative process in the hands of the executive branch.
"It is a gross abuse of public trust, and with each conflict, he becomes more complicit in the destruction of the ethical norms that form the cornerstone of a working democracy."
On July 15, a civil rights group formed by Black union workers called on the Ohio secretary of state to make voting amid the pandemic easier and safer. It advocated placing multiple secure ballot drop boxes in counties across the state.
When a deputy to Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose received the A. Philip Randolph Institute’s press release, he responded quickly — but not to the group. Instead, according to records obtained by ProPublica, the deputy contacted the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, a leading advocate for the discredited argument that American elections are tainted by widespread voting fraud.
In taped interviews with Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, President Donald Trump repeatedly said the coronavirus “ ‘is deadly stuff,’” but “knowingly played down” the pandemic “because, ‘I don’t want to create a panic.’” So he kept reassuring Americans with statements like, “We have it very much under control in this country.” All the while people were dying, never mind panicking. Aware that the coronavirus “was life-threatening and vastly more serious than the seasonal flu ” he “dismiss[ed] concerns about the lethality of the virus,” publicly saying, “ ‘It’s a little like the regular flu that we have shots for . . . and we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner.’”
The presidential election is once again upon us, and, once again, I am wondering if I should sit on the sidelines. I have never casted a vote for a president even though I became a US citizen a long time ago. This is not just because I am lazy. That, I might be. But laziness has not prevented me from doing a lot of things in life that I dread, such as going to the proctologist. So, what is it that prevents me from voting for a president? Is voting for Donald Trump or Joe Biden worse than having a colonoscopy?
Every day it's something new. The latest is that the Justice Department has come out with its official proposal to revise Section 230. As you may recall, back in February, the DOJ held some hearings about Section 230, followed by announcing some vague and contradictory guidelines for reform in early March.
During the local elections earlier this month, Marina Udgodskaya was elected head of the Povalikhino Rural Settlement, a tiny locality found in Russia’s Kostroma Region. Previously, she worked as a cleaner for the very same government administration that she’s now expected to lead.
Trump is bragging about his jobs record in the Midwest. So why didn’t he lift a finger when 14,000 GM workers were laid off?
"Trump and his Senate allies have found time to fast-track their SCOTUS plans while Americans are continuing to suffer without a new relief package."
The history of most ancient civilizations is one of caste and the ritualized enforcement of hierarchy. Subjects of these societies were conditioned to venerate a priestly class. Those ordained and ceremonially clad minsters of temple law who were untouchable figures endowed with enormous power over the day to day lives of ordinary people. Their primary role was protecting the interests of the ruling class through the dispensing of restrictions or rights on the laboring classes.
We cannot afford a Supreme Court that has abandoned its constitutional duties to cement right-wing minority rule.
It may be small comfort as we watch Donald Trump try to cheat and bully his way to a second term, but a recent study of his demagogic predecessor, Senator Joseph McCarthy, offers one. In Louis Menand’s review of the book by Larry Tye, appropriately titled Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy, Menand points up elements of McCarthy’s behavior that describes Trump’s as well: the constant lying, the disdain for opponents, the “lazy, ignorant, and unprepared” approach to politics, the bombast and conspiracy mongering.
While speaking to reporters at the White House on Wednesday, President Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, should he lose the presidential election in November.
Noting that she gets "constant death threats," Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said "such hate and risk should not be the inherent cost of any woman participating in politics."
Nonviolent resistance to Trump means more than just defeating him and jettisoning him from the presidency; somehow it also means reaching his supporters and transcending the civil war they’re ready to wage.
Donald Trump’s attacks on Ilhan Omar are coming with greater frequency and greater vitriol as the 2020 election approaches. Last week, he devoted a substantial portion of a rally in Minnesota to vilifying the Democrat representative from the Twin Cities. He followed up this week with a racist rant in Pennsylvania.
The Trump administration says the groups, including Rock the Vote, haven't been injured yet (and may never be) because the government is still just studying internet policy and hasn't taken any "concrete" action.
All of which is to say that there is no version of the Interregnum in which Trump congratulates Biden on his victory. He has told us so. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention on August 24. Unless he wins a bona fide victory in the Electoral College, Trump’s refusal to concede—his mere denial of defeat—will have cascading effects.
Social media giant Facebook said it has taken down more than 150 fake accounts that originated in China over interfering in Philippine politics, including those that promote Beijing’s interests in the South China Sea and that back President Rodrigo Duterte’s daughter as his successor in 2022.
After several years of dealing with trolls on social media, I’ve discovered most are motivated by the same desire that drives us all: the genuine need to connect and belong. Satisfy that and they’ll miraculously transform into decent people who just want to talk politics.
Through trial and error, I’ve gradually developed a system for managing obnoxious behavior that charms all but the worst of the worst. With this method, I’ve converted erstwhile trolls to friends; extremists to moderates; and adversaries to allies. Best of all, I’ve made trolling rare in my politically-diverse and highly public social media communities.
The mainstream media, however, does not seem to understand that. Its inability to cover the political fallout from the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a modicum of accuracy borders on bad faith. Here’s New York Times pollster Nate Cohn Columbusing the idea that maybe Senate Republicans are just acting in their political self-interest. Here’s a Politico headline saying “McConnell fends off accusations of hypocrisy”—which is like writing “Iceberg fends off Titanic.” And while the media is doing a better job of juxtaposing Senator Lindsey Graham’s past statements—insisting that he would not confirm a justice in the last year of a presidential term—with his current stance, I’ve seen him called “defiant” when all he’s really saying is that he’s a liar whose word is worthless.
President Trump was booed by a crowd gathered at the Supreme Court building on Thursday while paying respects to late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Mourners also shouted "honor her wish"—a reference to the dying justice's desire for her vacant Supreme Court seat to be filled by the next president.€
"This is an election between Donald Trump and democracy—and democracy must win."
Rodino has a background in public relations and is co-chair of the Maryland Green Party. In 2004, Rodino served as Deputy Press Secretary to the Ralph Nader/Peter Camejo presidential campaign while Zeese was the campaign’s Press Secretary and Spokesperson. Rodino has held several positions including in academia and as communications specialist for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).
“I’m honored to follow in the footsteps of my friend Kevin Zeese,” said Rodino, “I am pleased to join Howie and Angela’s team. This is a continuation of my decades long work to build a party for the people.”
Over this series of policy posts, I’m exploring the evolution of internet regulation from my perspective as an advocate for constructive reform. It is my goal in these posts to unpack the movement towards regulatory change and to offer some creative ideas that may help to catalyze further substantive discussion. In that vein, this post focuses on the need for "critical community" in content policy -- a loose network of civil society organizations, industry professionals, and policymakers with subject matter expertise and independence to opine on the policies and practices of platforms that serve as intermediaries for user communications and content online. And to feed and vitalize that community, we need better and more consistent transparency into those policies and practices, particularly intentional harm mitigation efforts.
The objective is to force Facebook to alter its hate speech definition so that its own "detection algorithm" will characterize any criticism of Israel as hate speech and automatically remove the pertinent content from the platform.
"When it comes to speech advocating for Palestinians. Facebook swiftly censors and removes content, often with no explanation."€
The policy will prohibit using profile images with political content. The company will also create dedicated groups on its internal employee network for people to talk about important social issues, a spokeswoman said, a move to keep heated debates from spilling out into the more public spaces where employees talk about work. The company uses a business version of the Facebook social network, called Workplace, to conduct most of its internal affairs and communication.
Pervaiz claims his supervisor, who had been trying to convert him to Islam, had accused him of blasphemy after he quit his factory job.
Human rights groups say blasphemy laws are often misused to persecute minorities or even against Muslims to settle personal rivalries. Such accusations can end up in lynchings or street vigilantism.
The six-episode play, "Love in Days of Corona [virus]," starring Mahtab Nasirpour, Sima Tirandaz, and Behnoosh Tabataba'ei, was staged at the Bagh (Graden) Cafe in the Roudaki Complex. After just three nights, the show was blocked from continuing due to censorship issues.
Julian Assange is not on trial simply for his liberty and his life. He is fighting for the right of every journalist to do hard-hitting investigative journalism without fear of arrest and extradition to the United States. Assange faces 175 years in a US super-max prison on the basis of claims by Donald Trump’s administration that his exposure of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan amounts to “espionage”.
Dr. Sondra Crosby, who visited WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the Belmarsh prison and in the Ecuador embassy in London, testified during his extradition trial.She is one of the only witnesses to provide statements to the court based on her observations of his mental condition while he was in the embassy.An American doctor (who Crosby did not name) organized an “academic evaluation of the effects of living in the embassy,” and in October 2017, she visited Assange for the first time. Crosby also visited Assange twice in Belmarsh in October 2019 and January 2020.Based upon his mental and physical health, Crosby said Assange is at “high risk of completing suicide if he were to be extradited” to the United States.She said Assange suffers from osteoporosis. He would face severe risks to his physical health—in addition to his mental health—if detained or incarcerated in a U.S. facility, given the abysmal state of health care in jails and prisons.According to Crosby, Assange has concealed the “full extent of his depression and suicide plans” when meeting with prison doctors and mental health specialists. He was worried if he revealed his plans or the “extent of his suicidal ideations” that he “may be put under more surveillance” or face further isolation.The U.S. Justice Department charged Assange with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer crime that, as alleged in the indictment, is written like an Espionage Act offense.
At the very end of today’s proceedings, the defense read aloud an important and consequential witness statement from John Young, host of cryptome.org.
On Wednesday the trap sprang shut, as Judge Baraitser insisted the witnesses must finish next week, and that no time would be permitted for preparation of closing arguments, which must be heard the immediate following Monday. This brought the closest the defence have come to a protest, with the defence pointing out they have still not addressed the new superseding indictment, and that the judge refused their request for an adjournment before witness hearings started, to give them time to do so.
A human rights lawyer, who requested anonymity, told the South China Morning Post that Mr Chen had been moved to Qingdao where his parents live and where he is registered.
"Qiushi, who is together with his parents, is under strict supervision by the authorities," the lawyer said.
"Since the authorities have decided not to prosecute him, it is actually not lawful to continue to keep him in close surveillance."
Only Myth Can Replace Myth
Good weather in Hamburg
Before the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin touched off protests across the nation, the Rochester (NY) Police Department was dealing with a potential tinderbox of its own. Unfortunately for Daniel Prude -- the mentally ill man restrained to death by officers -- no bystanders recorded the incident as it unfolded. Instead, documents released to Prude's family show the Rochester PD worked with the city to keep this damning information hidden for as long as possible.
Claudia Rankine’s latest unsettling of American racial discourse is Just Us: An American Conversation, a book of reflections on her encounters with whiteness as it manifests in friends, therapists, students, and passersby. Rankine, who teaches poetry at Yale and is also a playwright, most recently of The White Card, has been interested for decades in the language we use to build our identities. Just Us is a close reading of the way we talk, write, and think about race. It is thoroughly considered, never complacent, and often puzzling. We talked over the phone about the protests this summer, the responsibilities of individuals, and the use of conversation at all.
The student, identified only as Elisabeth, 22, said she was punched in the face "by three individuals who complained about me wearing a skirt".
The government has denounced the "very serious" incident as unacceptable.
A lot has been written about Ginsburg's legacy, and much of it has been wonderful, but the who's-up-who's-down coverage about her succession is pushing aside necessary context about what is at stake if she's replaced by someone with essentially opposing views.
We've noted repeatedly that despite a lot of breathless pearl clutching from U.S. leaders and regulators about the "digital divide," the United States doesn't actually know where broadband is (or isn't) available. Historically the FCC has simply trusted major ISPs -- with a vested interest in downplaying coverage and competition gaps to maintain their domination -- to tell the truth.
During this webinar, we discussed the 5G patent landscape and ETSI declarations. Our discussions revolved around the interesting observations of the 5G landscape and highlighted why declarations are important to SEP licensing. We covered the latest development on FRAND jurisprudence and the ramifications of declared and undeclared patents.
Broad argued this portion of the specification referenced some (but not all) aspects of the invention to encompass single RNA guide RNA species. Broad also argued that "used interchangeably" does not mean that the listed terms are themselves the same molecules. CVC disputed these characterizations, arguing that "the specification specifically states that the terms 'guide RNA,' 'chimeric RNA,' 'chimeric guide RNA,' and 'single guide RNA' all 'refer to the polynucleotide sequence comprising the guide sequence, the tracr sequence and the tracr mate sequence.'" And CVC further argued that "this portion of the specification defines "guide RNA" as a singular polynucleotide sequence comprising a guide sequence, a tracr sequence, and a tracr mate sequence and corresponding to the fused crRNA and the tracrRNA."
These arguments were persuasive to the Board, which stated that "this paragraph of the Broad specification indicates that 'chimeric RNA,' 'chimeric guide RNA,' 'single guide RNA,' as well as 'guide RNA' include these three components."
To hear many politicians (and, tragically, many academics) tell the story, patents and patent policy are keys to innovation. Indeed, many studies trying to measure innovation use the number of patents as a proxy. For years, we've argued that there is little evidence that patents are in any way correlated with innovation. Indeed, in practice, we often see patents get in the way of innovation, rather than being a sign of innovation. If anything, an influx of patents seems to indicate a decline in innovation, because as the saying goes, smart companies innovate, while failed companies litigate. Litigating patents tends to happen when a more established company no longer is able to compete by innovation, and has to bring in the courts to block and stop more nimble competitors.
On September 24, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 8,948,684, owned and asserted by Targeted Radio LLC, an Acacia Research Corporation affiliate and well-known NPE. The ’684 patent is generally directed to the insertion of advertising or other content into an Internet radio stream based on the user's location. This patent was asserted against Pandora Media but the case was terminated on July 8, 2020.
Back in April, we wrote about a trademark dispute between Jack Daniels and VIP Products LLC. At issue was a doggy chew toy made as clear parody of the Jack Daniels bottle, with the branding changed to "Bad Spaniels", along with other parody references. While Jack Daniels had initially won in court when VIP sought declaratory judgement that its use was non-infringing, upon appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th District, that decision was reversed. Key to that ruling was the court's assessment that, due to the parody nature of the product, it was an "expressive work", and the lower court ought to therefore have applied the Rogers test, and vacated an injunction the lower court had applied.
While it could be worse (copyright is not mentioned despite Guilbeault telling a publisher town hall earlier this week that he hoped to introduce copyright reform within months), the government’s anti-digital agenda is fraught with risk and unsupported by industry data. It is likely to increase costs for Canadian consumers, undermine the competitiveness of the Canadian broadcast sector, hurt net neutrality, threaten trade sanctions, and perversely leave U.S. companies as the guardians of Canadian content.
Police in Italy are reporting a large operation against a network involved in IPTV. The Guardia di Finanza says that 58 sites and 18 Telegram channels have been blocked while four IT experts with familiar nicknames have been referred for prosecution along with 1,000 subscribers of pirate IPTV services.
The CC Copyright Platform is an active space for copyright advocates and experts to coordinate copyright law and policy-related activities. This year, CC launched an Activities Fund to support copyright-related activities by Platform members. The Fund made available a total of US$20,000 to platform members, who were invited to propose activities in the field of copyright that advance our shared CC mission and in alignment with the goals and principles of the CC Copyright Platform.€
Several movie companies have filed a new lawsuit targeting three users of the popular torrent site YTS. The alleged pirates were identified based on data that was previously provided by the site's operator. The three were initially approached for an out-of-court settlement but, according to the rightsholders, they failed to respond.
