Cat memes and videos are nice; but they’re nowhere as important as evidence of corporate crimes
Summary: We’re fishing and putting together plenty of old material about Microsoft’s crimes that got it in antitrust trouble (Microsoft was found guilty, but it was never split up and Bill Gates went on to bribing the media, reinventing his identity, in effect substituting reality with self-serving fiction)
THE reason we’re assessing “Internet rot” every now and then is the importance of preserving history. This past summer we were aiming to preserve as much as possible of IBM history, seeing that IBM went out of its way to obstruct and destroy evidence of its role in the implementation of the Holocaust (falsely claiming that material about it was no longer available or was disposed of). History is a teacher and companies with a "keen sense of Public Relations” want history to just go away.
“Don’t let history go astray in the same way IBM tries to make us forgot what it did 80-90 years ago.”Similarly, Microsoft and Bill Gates have long wanted these videos to go away (become impossible to find, inaccessible to future generations). Seeing that Groklaw is rotting away (in the “Internet rot” sense) due to everything being turned into static pages, we’ve decided to retain key resources. Notably Gates “Deposition Audio and Video” (transcripts also); the reason we reproduce these is that it’s hard to find them anymore. Minutes ago in IRC Chaekyung said: “I searched a bit, it does seem to find very hard to find the videos outside of something called “youtube” [sarcasm noted]” (but they’re not in open formats and there are censorious tendencies there; the poster, moreover, can choose to remove these at any time).
An associate of ours found all the pertinent videos [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13] but then noted: “All that searching yesterday really poisoned YouTube for me. Now it’s recommending all kinds of stuff by Bill’s fanbois and shills.”
“Gates sponsors videos there,” I responded, as I myself saw it. There are “recommended” videos there that are pure PR, likely paid-for Gates puff pieces. In effect, Google profits from laundering the reputation of criminals and it would not be reluctant to net some more money from the Gates Foundation in the name of ‘combatting misinformation’. So one cannot rely on YouTube. In the coming days expect us to provide local copies of all the footage, plus commentary and partial transcripts. Don’t let history go astray in the same way IBM tries to make us forgot what it did 80-90 years ago. Enough of the “dog ate my homework!” As a side note, earlier today I searched a lot for material about IBM’s roots/genesis (over in YouTube and in Google Search). More than 90% of it was self-promotional spam and fluff, obscuring and almost rendering invisible factual or objective information about IBM’s roots and Watson’s controversial beginnings. █
Just deployed a server? Here are some recommended things to do after installing Linux server to make it more secure. Automated script is also provided.
This week the DL Triforce discuss the great news of more Linux hardware from Lenovo but is there a twist to this discussion? Microsoft is bringing Edge to Linux! Is this the death of Firefox as we know it? In the Gaming section, Amazon has decided to join the Cloud Gaming Space. Is this a good move for Amazon or is Cloud Gaming ahead of its time? Later in the show we’ll give you our popular tips/tricks and software picks. Plus so much more, coming up right now on Destination Linux.
DemocracyLab connects tech for good projects with skilled volunteers. This non-profit sets out to empower people who use technology to advance the common good. Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett talk with Mark Frischmuth, the founder and Executive Director of DemocracyLab. They discuss how DemocracyLab is open to not just software developers but also designers, marketers, and financial analysts, which allows projects to get made and adapted by users. The talk about the importance of technologists stepping up and using their cognitive surplus to create a better world.
We embrace new tools to upgrade your backup game, securely move files around the network, and debunk the idea that Windows will ever be based on Linux.
I’ve been using Lf for quite a while now but I’ve always had Vifm just out of sight and I thought I should finally give it a shot, now it’s obviously not perfect and there are some things to get used to compared to switching from ranger to lf but I think ultimately this terminal file manager deserves the praise that it gets.
This week has been “a week of millions” for the Linux Foundation, with our announcement that over 1 million people have taken our free Introduction to Linux course. As part of the research for our recently published 2020 Linux Kernel History Report, the Kernel Project itself determined that it had surpassed one million code commits. Here is how we established the identity of this lucky Kernel Project contributor.
It may be a familiar story for a lot of office workers no matter where you live in 2020. Out of the blue, COVID19 showed up, and suddenly working remotely is the new norm – your company either allowing it or encouraging it. I am also in this situation, stuck for about 6 months at home, more or less. And with all changes, there’s positive and negative aspects. In my case, I have lost a comfortable setup in my workplace (multiple monitors, high resolution).
In order to make the best of working from home, I have purchased an ultra-wide monitor, which happens to be FreeSync compatible as well. But would it actually work on Linux? Especially on a non-AMD GPU configuration?
NVIDIA software engineer Zi Yan sent out on Monday his latest “1GB PUD THP” patches in aiming to boost application performance on Linux for software making use of large amounts of RAM.
This 1GB transparent hugepage support for Linux x86_64 is designed to reduce translation overhead and allow for greater application performance for software with large memory footprints without needing any application changes. NVIDIA’s motivation for this work is on the performance front with aiming to boost virtual memory performance via gigantic TLB entries without needing additional changes as imposed by HUGETLBFS pages. The PUD THP support would be disabled by default but can be toggled via sysfs under /sys/kernel/mm/transparent_hugepage/.
NVIDIA’s Linux Vulkan beta driver build has moved from the 450 series that it’s been on for a while to the current 455 branch.
Earlier this month NVIDIA shipped the 455.23.04 Linux beta driver for RTX 30 series support being most notable for the R455 series. But there are also various other underlying improvements too in the jump from 450 to 455 like a new VkMemoryType that will help out some games, numerous fixes, support for the NGX Updater, and VDPAU additions.
NVIDIA have pushed out a fresh update to their developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver series, here’s the highlights and what’s changed.
For starters it’s now been rebased on top of their mainline 455 driver branch, which brings with it Ampere 30xx series support. So for anyone truly needing this series for all the brand-new Vulkan extensions and other Beta features, you should be good to go.
New features since v0.2.0:
* Copy & paste, thanks to Scott Moreau.
* wayvnc now has a man page.
* wayvnc now exits if authentication is enabled but fails.
Git commit history since v0.2.0:
Alexander Graul (1):
Add openSUSE Tumbleweed installation instruction
Andri Yngvason (15):
buffer: Fix buffer attribute comparison
README: Use "yay" in archlinux installation instructions
Exit if enabling auth fails
Clean up config on exit
Clean up aml on nvnc init failure
data-control: Make offer handling asynchronous
data-control: Don't free data-control-manager twice
data-control: Clean up whole receive context in aml_free_fn
data-control: Destroy data device on exit
Don't init data_control if it's not supported by compositor
Write a man page
Generate and install a man page
man-page: Fix wording
FAQ: Remove outdated Q
Release v3.0.0
Fix man page path
Jan Beich (1):
shm: guard fallback on FreeBSD < 13 as well
Jony (1):
add Void Linux install command to README.md
Scott Moreau (1):
Add basic clipboard support
WayVNC 0.3 released today as the Wayland VNC server built atop the WLROOTS library.
The headline feature of WayVNC is… clipboard support! Yep, this popular Wayland VNC server can finally support copy and paste functionality. This clipboard support landed just last week and allows copy/paste of text to/from the host clipboard. On the Wayland side this clipboard support is making use of the wlr-data-control-unstable-v1 protocol. This WayVNC clipboard support was written by longtime Wayland contributor Scott Moreau.
MoltenVK 1.1 is out as a big update for this graphics translation layer for getting the Vulkan API running on macOS and iOS devices by translating calls to Apple’s Metal API.
MoltenVK 1.1 is out with Vulkan 1.1 support by exposing all core Vulkan 1.1 extensions and other relevant changes. There are also a number of other new Vulkan extensions supported by this release like KHR_multiview, KHR_external_semaphore, KHR_external_fence, and others.
Mir 2.1 has been released as Canonical’s project around offering a set of libraries for constructing Wayland shells particularly with Snap confinement support and other Ubuntu-focused features.
With the Mir 2.1 release comes a –show-splash command line option, reduced locking within the KeyRepeatDispatcher code, support for the zwp_linux_dmabuf_unstable_v1 protocol within the GBM-KMS back-end, and support for the Wayland zwlr_layer_shell_v1 v3 and wlr_foreign_toplevel_management_unstable_v1 protocols. There are also X11 handling improvements too.
A batch of fixes to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver were sent in today for Linux 5.9. While AMDGPU fixes this late in the kernel cycle tend to not be too notable, this time around there are some prominent items worth covering.
When it comes to the next-generation “Sienna Cichlid” and “Navy Flounder” Navi 2x graphics (RDNA2) support, there are continued updates in making the support in good shape for Linux 5.9 stable. This work includes additional Sienna Cichlid PCI IDs being added, fixing for building DCN 3.0 code with older versions of GCC, temporarily disabling GFXOFF capabilities for Navy Flounder until issues are resolved, and the kernel side bits for AV1 decode with these GPUs.
The open-source Panfrost graphics driver, which is now backed/supported by Arm after starting as a reverse-engineering effort, has picked up support for the Mali G72 GPU.
Adding to the many Panfrost open-source driver accomplishments this year is now support for the G72 as their latest support addition. The Mali G72 has been around since late 2017 and is making use of the second-generation Bifrost architecture. The Mali G72 is used by the likes of the Kirin 970, Samsung Exynos 9 9810, Exynos 7 9610, and Helio P60/P70 SoCs.
The sixth spin of Intel DG1 discrete graphics card patches have now been sent out for review, amounting to just about 700 lines of new driver code due to building off the existing DG1 work and more broadly the Gen12/Xe support that’s been refined in mainline for months. With these patches it would appear the Intel DG1 is then in good shape under Linux but due to the timing is unlikely to be mainlined until a stable kernel release in early 2021.
Intel’s Gen12 / Xe Graphics as found in Tiger Lake appears to be in good shape with the latest mainline code (soon to be tested at Phoronix) but for the DG1 discrete graphics card there have been patches lingering.
Just in time for the end of the quarter Intel’s open-source multimedia team has released the Media Driver 2020.3 package for the Intel graphics accelerated media encode/decode component on Linux platforms.
The Intel Media Decode Driver 2020.3 is notable in that it rounds out the Gen12/Xe support. This support is not only for the Tiger Lake support now beginning to appear in shipping notebooks but also for DG1 and upcoming Rocket Lake and SG1 solutions as well.
Last week on the GNU toolchain side was initial work on supporting Intel Key Locker while this week Key Locker support has come to LLVM.
Intel Key Locker is a means of encrypting/decrypting data with an AES key without having access to the raw key. Key Locker relies on converting AES keys into handles that are then used in place of the actual key, until revoked by the system. The goal with this feature is for preventing any rogue attackers from obtaining the actual AES keys on the system.
Ventoy is another awesome Bootable USB Creation Tool that can be used to boot and run multiple ISO files from USB. Its functionality is simple. Just Format your thumb drive using the tool, then drag and drop your chosen ISO files onto your flash drive. The ISO files are directly copied over and added to the boot menu. This should result in a ready to boot USB device. Ventoy is an Open Source tool, so everyone is welcome to dig in to see how it works. It supports legacy BIOS and UEFI boot options, and also works with UEFI Secure Boot. It is important to note that your flash drive can still be used for regular storage as well.
Running new hardware is always fun. The problems are endless. The solutions not so much.
So I’ve got a brand new ThinkPad X13 AMD. It features an AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 4650U, 16GB of RAM and a 256GB NVME SSD. The internal type identifier is 20UF. It runs the latest firmware as of today with version 1.09.
[...]
The system silently fails to boot a signed shim and grub from an USB thumb drive. I used on of the Debian Cloud images, which should properly work in this setup and do on my other systems.
The only fix I found was to disable Secure Boot alltogether.
Free and open source video recording and live streaming software OBS Studio version 26.0 is out now.
Pretty much all you need to get going with video content, OBS Studio being cross-platform and open source opened up a lot of options for Linux users when it arrived a few years ago. It’s been great to see it flourish.
Arcane Fortune is a game we briefly highlighted at the start of August as one that is inspired by the likes of Civilization, SimCity and Dwarf Fortress and it’s getting bigger again.
Quite an interesting experience already, with a lot of features and gameplay already there. You can even play it directly in your terminal – if you wish. However, it does also have a “proper” version that uses SDL2 with mouse support. With a new release that went up on September 27, not only has it pulled in new features, it’s also now properly open source. The original release was under a creative commons license but now they’ve moved the code over to the AGPL.
SCS Software will be launching the American Truck Simulator – Colorado DLC at some point and while work goes on they’ve released a new teaser.
Here’s one for you truckers, as Colorado has what some say is one of the most beautiful roads in America with the ‘Million Dollar Highway’ and it’s going to be featured in the DLC. A pretty long stretch of road that runs from Bernalillo, New Mexico to Montrose, Colorado in the western United States. Sounds like the perfect place to go for a drive.
Black Tabby Games recently released the first episode of Scarlet Hollow, a horror visual novel and choice-driven adventure game set in the mountains of Appalachia. After the initial release, they put up a Linux version too!
It’s made by the award-winning graphic novelist Abby Howard whose previously works include the comics of 2013: The Last Halloween, Junior Scientist Power Hour and The Last Halloween – all of which had very successful Kickstarter campaigns. Scarlet Hollow will have hand-drawn backgrounds mixed with animated sprites together with a “complex relationship system to bring to life an immersive world of charming (and terrifying) characters”.
Transport Fever 2 is a much loved transport sim released with same-day Linux support in December 2019, and it’s only going to keep getting better.
Gathering over seven thousand user reviews it has a Very Positive rating on Steam, so it’s clear that this second edition from Urban Games and Good Shepherd Entertainment has hit the mark. It has a lot of features, quite a lot of content and graphically it looks pretty good too.
However, it has just like the first game suffered some performance problems. They’re aware, they’ve done a few updates to fix parts but more is needed. What’s exciting here is that they announced in a post about upcoming macOS support that Linux and Windows will be getting an upgrade with Vulkan!
Space, sci-fi and farming – what more could you want? One Lonely Outpost is like Stardew Valley for fans who want something a little bit more out there.
The Kickstarter campaign which is now over ended on $123,195 pledged so there’s clearly a lot of interest and that was way more than their $80,000 initial goal. Linux support is confirmed, and is listed very clearly for it too.
Several Foundation staff presented at GNOME Africa Onboard Virtual. Kristi Progri helped kick off the event with Foundation vice-president Regina Nkemchor Adejo. M de Blanc and Rosanna Yuen talked about the GNOME code of conduct. Melissa Wu reprised her session on What it’s Like to Be New to GNOME.
Rosanna will also be presenting at All Things Open. On October 20 at 3:30pm ET, you can catch “GNOME Foundation Then and Now — 20 years of bringing free software to the desktop.”
4MLinux 35.0 BETA is ready for testing. Basically, at this stage of development, 4MLinux BETA has the same features as 4MLinux STABLE, but it provides a huge number of updated packages.
Today we are looking at Fedora 33 Beta. It comes fully packed with Gnome 3.38, Linux Kernel 5.68, and uses about 1.3-1.6GB ram when idling. It comes with Wayland and Btrfs File Manager by default and is a great Beta release. As seen in the video, it is not perfect yet, but I am sure that it will be fixed! Enjoy!
Pale Moon is an open-source web browser with an emphasis on customizability; its motto is “Your browser, Your way”. There are official releases for Linux. Pale Moon is a fork of Firefox with substantial divergence.
Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. It blocks ads and website trackers, and provides a way for users to send cryptocurrency contributions in the form of Basic Attention Tokens to websites and content creators.
The Fedora Project’s latest Linux distribution is now available in beta, bringing with it a new file system, a new GNOME environment and introducing official support for Raspberry Pi.
The Fedora 33 Beta comes ahead of a planned launch of the full distribution at the end of October. Alongside Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server, Fedora 33 Beta adds Fedora IoT as a supported edition for the first time. Fedora IoT supports low-power hardware platforms based on x86 and ARM64 architecture, which includes the Raspberry Pi and Pine64 boards.
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.7. is generally available as of September 30, 2020.
Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
It’s that time again: the time we announce the latest updates and new features in Red Hat Runtimes. The latest release, now available, builds on the work we have done over the past year to create cloud-native, modern applications, with a focus on our work in advancing Java.
Red Hat Runtimes is a part of the Red Hat Application Services portfolio and is a set of products, tools and components for developing and maintaining cloud-native applications that offers lightweight runtimes and frameworks for highly-distributed cloud architectures, such as microservices or serverless applications. We make updates on a regular basis to meet changing customer demands while providing them with the technology necessary to make business-critical decisions while remaining innovative, competitive and flexible. Check out the rest of the post to learn more about the most recent updates to Red Hat Runtimes.
This is a primer on the implementation of the ROLIE protocol. The purpose of this report is to recommend automated processes for information exchange of various security compliance and vulnerability management assets using the ROLIE protocol and its open source implementation, Golie.
[...]
The ROLIE standard helps to discover and consume security content in a standard and automated way. A ROLIE implementation like the golie tool can be used by security vendors or regular users to consume vendor provided CVE content. It can be used as a way to submit checklists to benchmark validation organizations, or it can be used to host subscription-model services around security content.
Have ideas on where else the ROLIE standard or the golie tool can be used or enhanced? Want to get involved in the project? Please provide your input and ideas at the GitHub project. It is very important to note that the vision of the project and tooling is to be multi-platform and multi-vendor. Contributions in any way are always and very welcomed!
Note: The ROLIE standard is still in its early stages of development, and the format may change should the standard change.
It’s hard to believe that we introduced Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7) into the market more than six years ago. RHEL 7 balanced the enterprise need for stability and compatibility with that of tangible innovation. At general availability, we believe that we dispelled the myth that the operating system is “just a commodity” and redefined the Linux operating system.
The IBM Sterling suite offers solutions for supply chain and B2B collaboration. For complete product documentation, including information on how to extend the solutions, check out the following product Knowledge Centers.
For this year’s JupyterCon, which is held online October 5-17, we are excited to have the opportunity to share our experience with the Jupyter ecosystem and showcase some of the contributions IBM has made during the past year.
The GTK documentation for C # is not very up to date, I tried to use a button to change a label and I failed first time. The Fedora team could improve this to develop the development side. Here’s what I’ve managed to do so far with GTK.
I am running Fedora on my desktop since started working for Red Hat. Kind of ‘eat your own dogfood’ style despite fact that I am not active in Fedora development for some time.
Fedora 33 reached Beta status so it was time to upgrade.
Project Thoth develops open source tools that enhance the day-to-day life of developers and data scientists. Thoth uses machine-generated knowledge to boost the performance, security, and quality of your applications using artificial intelligence (AI) through reinforcement learning (RL). This machine-learning approach is implemented in Thoth adviser (if you want to know more, click here) and it is used by Thoth integrations to provide the software stack based on user inputs.
In this article, I introduce a case study—a recent inspection of a runtime issue when importing TensorFlow 2.1.0—to demonstrate the human-machine interaction between the Thoth team and Thoth components. By following the case study from start to finish, you will learn how Thoth gathers and analyzes some of the data to provide advice to its users, including bots such as Kebechet, AI-backed continuous integration pipelines, and developers using GitHub apps.
The Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) team recently announced the release of their latest version, Tails 4.11 with several major security vulnerability fixes added on top the numerous security holes fixed in Tails 4.10.
The Debian-based, live distro with the sole purpose of providing users with Internet anonymity by directing Internet traffic through the Tor network and at the same time, providing built-in tools for a secure work environment just received its latest release which has the primary focus of squashing bugs and toughening security.
The distro has received fixes to numerous major security issues that existed in earlier versions and the developers strongly encourage users to upgrade their versions to the latest immediately.
The biggest news in Tails 4.11 is the fact that it comes with the latest Tor Browser 10 anonymous web browser preinstalled, which is based on the newest Mozilla Firefox 78.3 ESR (Extended Support Release) series and includes Tor 0.4.4.5, Tor Launcher 0.2.25, and NoScript 11.0.44.
On top of that, Tails 4.11 updates the Mozilla Thunderbird email client to version 68.12 and extends the Persistent Storage feature to also save the keyboard, language, and other settings from the Welcome Screen. Users will be able to restore these settings when they reinstall Tails, but only after upgrading to version 4.11.
Before and during FOSDEM 2020, I agreed with the people (developers, supporters, managers) of the UBports Foundation to package the Unity8 Operating Environment for Debian. Since 27th Feb 2020, Unity8 has now become Lomiri.
Since announcing plocate, a number of major and minor improvements have happened, and despite its prototype status, I’ve basically stopped using mlocate entirely now.
First of all, the database building now uses 90% less RAM, so if you had issues with plocate-build OOM-ing before, you’re unlikely to see that happening anymore.
Second, while plocate was always lightning-fast on SSDs or with everything in cache, that isn’t always the situation for everyone. It’s so annoying having a tool usually be instant, and then suddenly have a 300 ms hiccup just because you searched for something rare. To get that case right, real work had to be done; I couldn’t just mmap up the index anymore and search randomly around in it.
I keep forgetting how to make presentations. I had a list of tools in a wiki from a previous job, but that’s now private and I don’t see why I shouldn’t share this (even if for myself!).
So here it is. What’s your favorite presentation tool?
Hardly. But this icon switch does rectify an issue that I publicly opined on before the release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Back in March Ubuntu’s community-led design team decided to swap its discernible Ubiquity installer icon (below left) for what I described at the time as: “Ubuntu being sucked up a hoover”…
The technical hurdles crossed to bring Xen to Raspberry Pi 4 are detailed in a blogpost on The Linux Foundation Projects’ website by Stefano Stabellini, tech lead of US semiconductor outfit Xilinx and creator of Xen on Arm, and Roman Shaposhnik, creator of the Edge Virtualization Engine, or Project EVE.
TechNexion’s rugged “EDM-G-IMX8M-PLUS” and “AXON-E-IMX8M-PLUS” modules run Linux on NXP’s 2.3 TOPS i.MX8M Plus with up to 8GB LPDDR4, 16GB eMMC, WiFi/BT, and starter kits. There are also new i.MX8M Mini and Nano EDM modules.
TechNexion has posted product pages for two compute modules that feature NXP’s i.MX8M Plus. The EDM-G-IMX8M-PLUS is essentially the same as the wireless enabled Wandboard IMX8M-Plus-4G module option on the sandwich-style Wandboard IMX8M-Plus SBC announced in August. However, it offers up to 8GB LPDDR4 instead of 4GB. The AXON-E-IMX8M-PLUS provides essentially the same capabilities but in TechNexion’s more rugged, 58 x 37mm AXON form-factor, which was used on the i.MX8M Mini-based AXON-IMX8M-Mini module.
Aaeon’s compact, $475 “Boxer-8222AI” embedded box runs Linux on a Jetson Nano along with 4x USB 3.1 Gen2, HDMI 2.0, RS-232, M.2, mini-PCIe, 40-pin GPIO, and 2x GbE ports, one with PoE/PD.
In April, Aaeon unveiled two compact systems: the Nvidia Jetson Xavier NX-based Boxer-8251AI and similar Jetson Nano based Boxer-8221AI. At the time, the company mentioned an upcoming Boxer-8222AI, but without offering details. It has now launched the system, which runs the Ubuntu 18.04 based ACLinux 4.9 on the Jetson Nano.
Designed by Brian Harms of NSTRMNT, Light[s]well is a beautifully crafted 4’x8′ light installation for a triple-height living room that’s voice-responsive thanks to the Arduino Alexa skill.
Light[s]well is constructed out of 80/20 extrusions and fasteners, with individually addressable LED strips embedded in the channels of the structure. 74 sheets of laser-cut cardstock make up the undulating light-diffusing wave pattern.
According to Harms, 30 LEDs per meter strips were used to give each gap in the cardstock two LEDs per structural metal beam, for a total of six LEDs per gap. The LEDs are controlled by a MKR1000 (via a logic level shifter) along with the Arduino IoT Cloud.
Last week we introduced you to a premier workflow for film editors and videographers using free software and freedom-respecting hardware – the Librem Mini and a video editing suite called KDenLive. We also dived into the features of KDenLive and how to achieve certain tasks like using chroma key to remove backgrounds and place objects in new environments. In this article we are going to focus on another important video creation task: keyframe animations.
In the video below, we will demonstrate how we achieved a visual in a promo video displaying the workstation power of the Librem Mini, during a transition from a KDenLive screen recording and video footage of a colorful miniature train ride for children on display. Using an image of the minature train captured in a screenshot of the very first frame in the video, I was able to animate the train over the footage of the prior scene to create a captivating custom transition.
This is another incarnation of the software development progress for the Librem 5. This time for July and August 2020 (weeks 27-35).
Some items are covered in more detail in separate blog posts at https://puri.sm/news. The idea of this summary is so you can have a closer look at the coding and design side of things. It also shows how much we’re standing on the shoulders of giants reusing existing software and how contributions are flowing back and forth between upstream and downstream projects. This quickly gets interesting since we’re upstream for some projects (e.g. calls, phosh, chatty) and downstream for others (e.g Debian, Linux kernel, GNOME). So these reports are usually rather link heavy pointing to individual merge requests on https://source.puri.sm/ or to the upstream side (like e.g. GNOME’s gitlab).
New software releases have an extra section so if you’re using phosh, squeekbord, phoc, chatty, etc. outside of PureOS this section might be worth a quick look.
Although I’m only 20 years old, I’ve already had many opportunities to help build solutions for a better tomorrow. I’ve worked with open source technology, research publishing, media, and development. I have served as an administartor and mentor in Google Summer of Code, Google Code-In, and Google Season of Docs with Codeuino, Sugar Labs, Jboss Community, Terasology Foundation, and Open Collective. But my start in open source and technology was not very good.
In 2014, when I was only 14, I decided to participate in the Google Code-In (GCI) contest. I didn’t really know what open source and GCI were before I started, but I was desperate to get the Google swag (a t-shirt, hoodie, and digital certificate) and tried to win the contest by availing the grand prize winner slot. But I didn’t have any experience in coding, so I ended up copying much of someone else’s work, which resulted in a frozen email account from the GCI program manager and disqualification from the contest.
The Open Source Definition (OSD), maintained by the Open Source Initiative (OSI), is a foundational pillar of the open source movement. The OSI’s view is that software validly labeled “open source” must be made available in a manner that satisfies the 10 criteria set forth in the OSD, all but one of which pertain to licensing terms.
Through its license review process, the OSI determines whether a submitted license is OSD-conformant. Widely recognized as authoritative, the OSD is commonly invoked in contractual language and has been referenced in statutes and regulations. The OSD was drafted and adopted by the OSI shortly after its founding in 1998. It is essentially a rebranding of the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG) with relatively minor changes. It has been amended only once, in 2002, with the addition of a tenth plank (“License must be technology-neutral”).
I have discussed some of the best open-source eCommerce platforms to build shopping websites in the past. Recently, I came to know about a new platform called Bagisto. It’s built on Laravel, which is a free and open-source PHP framework.
On the first look, it’s impressive to find an open-source eCommerce solution that lets you craft beautiful shopping experiences. Hence, I decided to give a quick look on what it offers and if it’s something that you can try.
Following last week’s news of Firefox Nightly flipping on their new JIT “Warp” update I was eager to run fresh benchmarks of the current Firefox releases compared to Google Chrome under Ubuntu Linux.
Warp was enabled last week for Firefox 83 nightly builds with this “Warp” just-in-time JavaScript compiler update having various improvements in an effort to provide greater responsiveness and faster page load speeds. Numbers cited by Mozilla engineers on their JavaScript/SpiderMonkey team were frequently in the 5~15% range. Even instances like Google Docs load times on Windows was around 20% faster with Warp.
This round of benchmarking was done with Firefox 81, Firefox 82 Beta 3, and Firefox 83 Alpha 1 nightly as of last week after Warp landed. A secondary run of Firefox 83 nightly was also done with WebRender force enabled on Linux. Plus Google Chrome 85 was also tested as the latest stable release.
I mentioned earlier that documenting data science work is significantly different than documenting engineering work. One of they key differences is that data scientists tend to do more once-and-done work than engineers. Data science is a race against irrelevance. The world is changing around us and we need to deliver insights before our findings go stale.
It’s impossible and inefficient to try to document all of this one-off work. Only a small portion of the resulting documentation would ever be used. Even worse, the useful documentation will be hidden in a sea of useless noise.
Instead, data scientists should focus on keeping good work records, contextualizing their analyses, and preparing themselves to backfill documentation later.
A few weeks ago, we mentioned that we were working on increasing extension support in the Firefox for Android Nightly pre-release channel. Starting September 30, you will be able to install any extension listed on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) in Nightly.
This override was created for extension developers and advanced users who are interested in testing for compatibility, so it’s not easily accessible. Installing untested extensions can lead to unexpected outcomes; please be judicious about the extensions you install. Also, since most developers haven’t been able to test and optimize their extensions for the new Android experience, please be kind if something doesn’t work the way it should. We will remove negative user reviews about extension performance in Nightly.
Currently, Nightly uses the Collections feature on AMO to install extensions. You will need to create a collection on AMO and change an advanced setting in Nightly in order to install general extensions.
Python 3.4 added the asyncio module to the standard library. Asyncio allows us to run IO-bound tasks asynchronously to increase the performance of our program. Common IO-bound tasks include calls to a database, reading and writing files to disk, and sending and receiving HTTP requests. A Django web application is a common example of an IO-bound application.
We’ll demonstrate the usage of concurrent HTTP requests by fetching prices for stock tickers. The only third party package we’ll use is httpx. Httpx is very similar to the popular requests package, but httpx supports asyncio.
Changes Coming To Pip In October 2020: People who deal with Python: Changes are coming to pip, Python’s package installation tool, in October 2020. Please share this migration guide and our video with your circles.
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I’m working on improving the Python packaging toolchain, foundational work that will (in the long run) make the whole Python experience way less confusing. In the short term this may mess with some people’s workflows, so we want lots of people to hear about it now.
This article is based in this documentation page and this video where Mike Coleman takes us how to deploy a Django application on Amazon Lightsail. It was also considered two articles from Bitnami (Getting started with Django, and Deploy a Django project).
Python’s map() is a built-in function that allows you to process and transform all the items in an iterable without using an explicit for loop, a technique commonly known as mapping. map() is useful when you need to apply a transformation function to each item in an iterable and transform them into a new iterable. map() is one of the tools that support a functional programming style in Python.
In this Pandas tutorial, you are going to learn how to count occurrences in a column. There are occasions in data science when you need to know how many times a given value occurs. This can happen when you, for example, have a limited set of possible values that you want to compare. Another example can be if you want to count the number of duplicate values in a column. Furthermore, we may want to count the number of observations there is in a factor or we need to know how many men or women there are in the data set, for example.
Machine Learning is super powerful if your data is numeric. What do you do, however, if you want to mine text data to discover hidden insights or to predict the sentiment of the text. What, for example, if you wanted to identify a post on a social media site as cyber bullying.
The first concept to be aware of is a Bag of Words. When training a model or classifier to identify documents of different types a bag of words approach is a commonly used, but basic, method to help determine a document’s class. A bag of words is a representation of text as a set of independent words with no relationship to each other. It is called a “bag” of words, because any information about the order or structure of words in the document is discarded.
Don’t get me wrong, I really like virtualenv and it’s pretty useful in some scenarios. But sometimes you have to deal with OS dependencies and that forces you to install new packages and it can get a bit messy in some scenarios.
According to official statistics, Russian-annexed Crimea identified its first coronavirus case on March 21. By the beginning of May, when morbidity rates were rising sharply all across Russia, Crimea had recorded 100 cases of the infection; Sevastopol, its largest city, had 85. At that time, the Primorsky Krai, Omsk Region, and Leningrad Region — Russian regions with populations comparable to that of the peninsula (about 2.3 million people) — had recorded 430, 116, and 929 cases, respectively.
One former aide said she saw “senior White House political staff actively undermine the doctors by attempting to manipulate scientific data on the virus and force changes to CDC guidances.”
Officials within the Trump administration sought to pressure the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to downplay the risks associated with coronavirus in children in order to bolster the narrative that it was safe for schools to resume in-person instruction across the United States, according to The New York Times.
Progressive advocacy groups and labor leaders are urging Senate Republicans and the Trump White House to stop stonewalling and immediately approve a Covid-19 relief package unveiled late Monday by House Democrats that would renew the expired $600-per-week federal unemployment supplement, send another round of $1,200 stimulus checks to most Americans, and provide aid to faltering state and local governments.
Last year, a CBP vendor suffered a data breach affecting more than 100,000 people who had crossed the border at checkpoints. The CBP refused to name the contractor involved in the breach, but internal documents indicated it was Perceptics. Perceptics provided and maintained the system that photographed cars and their occupants as they crossed the border.
It was an image years in the making. Brian Kolfage had lost three limbs in an Iraq bomb blast in 2004, making him the most badly wounded airman to survive the war. He had become a motivational speaker, was the subject of sympathetic news profiles and was even a guest at former President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address in 2012.
If the international community is serious about finding lasting solutions, then responsibility sharing is key.
Many Afghans displaced outside their country are stuck in a state of perennial limbo, with no prospects for a genuine, safe return on the horizon. Yet the European Union and Afghanistan are negotiating the extension of a divisive agreement that repatriates failed asylum seekers to a country still at war.
The EU and Afghanistan signed the Joint Way Forward agreement (JWF) in 2016, in response to the so-called “refugee and migrant crisis”, when people from countries including Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq sought shelter and better livelihoods in Europe. This deal was seen by many as an attempt by the EU to shy away from their protection responsibilities, and instead, facilitate the return of thousands of Afghan nationals. Set to expire next week, on 6 October 2020, the EU is currently negotiating a further two-year extension of this agreement.
While the JWF ostensibly offers a straightforward resolution to addressing the issue of irregular migration of Afghans to Europe, the deal fails to acknowledge two crucial factors: the impact of ongoing conflict, and the unequal burden Afghanistan’s neighbours have shouldered for years.
Countless studies have shown factory farming’s contribution to climate change, emitting more greenhouse gases than all the transportation in the world combined.
The book, AS THE WORLD BURNS: The New Generation of Activists and the Legal Fight Against Climate Change, tells the stories of these young people who are part of a generation of youth fighting for their lives and their rights amidst the unfolding climate crisis. “AS THE WORLD BURNS is climate breakdown like you’ve never seen it — through the eyes of the young,” the book’s description notes.
As communities across New Mexico deal with the deadly coronavirus pandemic, the federal government is attempting a massive land grab, offering millions of acres of public land near Chaco Canyon National Historic Park to oil and gas drillers for fracking. This plan has been slowed down before, but it needs to be stopped entirely.
1. If it isn’t disposable, it isn’t safe. So, for the supposed safety of a single generation of humans – us – we are poisoning the next thousand generations of our descendants and those of every other species. For our safety, soils and rivers and oceans are flooded more than ever before with plastic. To add infection to injury, the future is also being prime-pumped with antibiotic-resistant superbugs, which predictably spawn in the seas of sanitizers, seeping into watersheds all over the world. Our sanitized hands have blood on them.
In a historic victory for unhoused people, Philadelphia city officials agreed to hand over 50 vacant homes to a community land trust, following months of organizing and protest encampments. We hear from one of the organizers and speak to Philadelphia-based Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who has written extensively about housing insecurity and says the direct actions there are applicable across the U.S. “This dynamic exists all over the country where you have both empty housing and houseless people, a completely irrational expression of what American capitalism means,” Taylor says. The sustained movement in Philadelphia established “a model for what all tenant organizing and activist groups should be taking up, which is occupy the space, occupy the properties and put political pressure on public housing authorities to do their job and house people that are unhoused.”
Rather than privatizing, one economist argues the USPS should stop self-financing, return to being a “department of the federal government proper,” and expand to offer other services.
Ahead of the first of three presidential debates between President Trump and Joe Biden, we speak with David Cay Johnston, founder and editor-in-chief of DCReport.org, who says the bombshell New York Times report on Trump’s taxes highlights the existence of “two income tax systems, separate and unequal.” The Times reports that Trump paid no federal income tax in 10 of the past 15 years and just $750 in 2016 and 2017. In a follow-up report, the Times reveals Trump made $427 million in connection to the hit reality TV show “The Apprentice,” providing him a financial lifeline as other investments lost money. “People who own their own businesses, like Donald Trump, are under a different system,” says Johnston.
There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the Netflix Documentary The Social Dilemma, which we’ve been told reveals to us “the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.” I know that the documentary has generated widespread discussion — especially among those not in the tech space. But there’s a problem with the film: nearly everything it claims social media platforms do — manipulating people with misinformation — the film does itself. It is horribly one-sided, frequently misrepresents some fairly basic things, and then uses straight up misinformation to argue that social media has some sort of godlike control on the people who use it. It’s nonsense.
President Trump’s nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court may rouse debate over the dubious Christian practice of “speaking in tongues,” or glossalalia.
Tonight’s first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden comes in the teeth of a lethal and still-growing pandemic, a shattered economy, cataclysmic climate-fueled wildfires, vehicle attacks committed by right-wing extremists against racial justice protesters, a looming Supreme Court placement with the fate of basic rights hanging in the balance, and a long-simmering presidential tax scandal detonating directly on the doorstep of the evening’s festivities.
Election Day this November rightly occupies the minds and hearts of American citizens, no matter what their political affiliations. The future of the republic itself is at stake. But the U.S. isn’t the only country in the world with an upcoming election, and where the system of government is at issue. Chile, the South American nation that runs along a narrow strip of land between the Andes and the Pacific Ocean, faces a national plebiscite on 25 October 2020, just two weeks before Election Day in the States.
Amid the bombshell coverage of Trump’s tax records, it might be tempting to believe the tide has turned and will drown his election hopes. But that’s wishful thinking.
The Fourth Amendment says law enforcement needs probable cause to effect an arrest. Further probable cause is needed — as determined by a neutral judge — to continue holding this person. This isn’t even controversial. It has been established law for years. And yet, when ICE goes hunting for people it wants to deport, the Fourth Amendment just kind of vanishes. This happens even when ICE is wrong, and the person officers want to eject from the country is actually a US citizen.
Karelia’s Supreme Court has overturned historian Yuri Dmitriev’s 3.5-year prison term and sentenced him to 13 years in prison under a criminal conviction for violent sexual acts. This was reported to Mediazona by Igor Perov, the lawyer representing Dmitriev’s foster daughter.
Just days after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reinstate the previous October 31 deadline for the 2020 census, the U.S. Census Bureau late Monday released a one-sentence statement announcing that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross plans to shut down the once-in-a-decade count on October 5 in open defiance of court instructions.
We’ve noted a few times that while Space X’s Starlink will be a very good thing for a limited number of rural customers out of the range of traditional broadband options, it’s not going to truly disrupt the busted U.S. telecom market in any revolutionary way. The service should be a step up from traditionally expensive, capped, and sluggish old-school satellite broadband, since new low-orbit satellites can provide lower latency service at a price point Elon Musk insists will be competitive.
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has been first in line to gleefully pump up the still-unsubstantiated-by-any-evidence claim that social media companies are “unfairly censoring conservatives.” In fact, he’s been very vocal about the idea that social media should not be blocking anyone for their political beliefs. Just a few months ago he attacked “conservative bias and threats to free speech on the internet,” saying that “doing nothing is not the answer.” He’s complained loudly about when Twitter briefly banned an infamous Twitter troll/Republican political operative for harassment, saying (falsely) that it was “censorship on social media and an attempt by social media “gatekeepers” to “launch a war on memes so they can control the 2020 narrative.” No, dude. It was Twitter following its rules against harassment.
On September 29, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Velos Media, LLC holding all challenged claims of U.S. Patent No. 10,110,898 unpatentable. The ’898 patent, generally directed to video quantization techniques for limiting the data that results from the encoding process, represents one of the largest patent families known to be owned by Velos Media, LLC.
Velos claims to have and seeks to license patents allegedly essential to the HEVC / H.265 standard. The family of the ’898 patent, originally assigned to Sony Corporation, was transferred to Velos Media in 2018.
In Packet Intelligence LLC, v. Netscout Systems, Inc. the Federal Circuit reversed a jury determination for pre-suit damages, and vacated an enhancement of such damages, for Netscout’s infringement of U.S. Patent 6,665,725, U.S. Patent 6,839,751, and U.S. Patent 6,954,789, all owned by Packet Intelligence.
The patents at issue were all directed to monitoring packets exchanged over a computer network. The ‘798 patent includes system claims, and the ‘725 and ‘751 patents include method claims. It was important in this case that infringement of the various system and method claims have different requirements to qualify for pre-suit damages. Pre-suit damages for the system claims are controlled by the marking requirements of 35 U.S.C. § 287(a), whereas pre-suit damages for the method claims are not.
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Ultimately, the Federal Circuit reversed the determination for pre-suit damages and vacated the enhancement of such damages because Packet Intelligence failed meet its burden in showing that MeterFlow did not practice the invention for the system claims, and had insufficient support for its damage theory with respect to the method patents.
A district court recently dismissed a complaint for failing to properly allege direct infringement with the mobile device recited in the patent claims. Garrett v. TP-Link Research America (N.D. Cal.). An app for installation on a mobile device does not count as a mobile device or as using a mobile device for showing direct infringement, and when pleading indirect infringement, direct infringement by an end user must be alleged. Garrett’s complaint against TP-Link failed on these scores, so the court granted TP-Link’s motion to dismiss the complaint, without prejudice.
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The court granted the dismissal of the direct infringement claims because the app does not satisfy the claim elements requiring a mobile device. Under § 271(a), “whoever without authority makes, uses, offers to sell, or sells any patented invention, within the United States … infringes the patent.” According to the court, to “make” or “sell” the claimed system, TP-Link would have had to make or sell a mobile device. The app didn’t cut it: “An application to be installed on a mobile device is not the same thing as the ‘mobile device’ itself.” To “use” the claimed system, TP-Link would have had to use it in the manner of the end user. “Garrett alleges in the Complaint that the infringing products can be used in an infringing manner but does not allege that TPRA has ever ‘used’ a ‘mobile device’ or assembled the system with a ‘mobile device’ in an infringing manner.” Similarly, to infringe the claimed method, TP-Link would have had to use a mobile device in the same manner as the end user. “Because methods cannot be sold in the same way as devices, the sale of a product for performing a claimed method does not constitute direct infringement.”
In granting a motion to dismiss based on lack of patent-eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and the Alice/Mayo test, a court held that patent claims for multiple patents directed to “wireless surveillance systems for monitoring a target environment” are abstract ideas, and “merely implement[ing] the abstract idea of wireless communication and remote surveillance using well-known, generic computer components and functionalities” does not provide an inventive concept. Sensormatic v. Wyze Labs., No. 19-1543-CFC (D. Del. Sept. 3, 2020) (patents-in-suit are U.S. Patent Nos. 7,954,129; 7,730,534; 7,936,370; and 8,610,772)
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The court applied the two-step Alice framework to Wize Labs’ Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss. The court found the asserted patents here are analogous to a patent invalidated by the Federal Circuit in Chamberlain Grp., Inc. v. Techtronic Indus. Co., because “‘[t]he only described difference between the prior art…systems and the claimed…system [wa]s that the status information about the system [wa]s communicated wirelessly, in order to overcome certain undesirable disadvantages of systems using physical signal paths.” 935 F.3d 1341 (Fed. Cir. 2019), alteration in original. Sensormatic argued that “the patents are not directed to the abstract idea of wireless communication because the asserted patents are directed to direct wireless communication…as opposed to indirect wireless communication.” However, the court disagreed because both direct and indirect wireless communication “merely takes information previously transmitted via a wire and transmits that information wirelessly,” and “both…were basic conventional forms of communication at the time of the invention.”
The Federal Circuit has modified a panel decision and denied a rehearing en banc in a closely watched § 101 case, American Axle & Manufacturing v. Neapco Holdings. The original decision had found all the claims, which were directed to a method of manufacturing driveline propeller shafts, ineligible subject matter (previously covered in this post). The new panel decision maintained that result for two of the independent claims but remanded on a third independent claim. (Stay tuned for a follow-up post on the en banc denial, which revealed a fractured court with multiple concurrences and dissents and a 6-6 tie vote.)
Much of the controversy centered on the subject matter of the patent at issue, U.S. Patent No. 7,774,911—not software or medical diagnostics, as in most applications of § 101, but instead a purely mechanical invention. All three independent claims were for “a method for manufacturing a shaft assembly of a driveline system.” The patent focused on the problem of vibrations in the driveshaft, by making a liner to fit inside the driveshaft. Vibrations came in three flavors: bending mode, which involves vibrations curving the shaft along its length; torsion mode, twisting the shaft; and shell mode, flexing circumferentially around the axis of the shaft. The patent purported to attenuate two out of three modes, rather than just one. The court analyzed claims 1 and 22; claim 36, the final independent claim, is lumped in with claim 22.
The dissents were animated by the scope of possible harm from the panel decision. According to Judge Stoll, “the majority’s decision extends § 101 to place in doubt the patent eligibility of historically eligible mechanical inventions.” If a mechanical invention can be ineligible, then inventions in any field can be ineligible. Combined with the uncertainty generated by the court’s § 101 jurisprudence, the decision’s scope creates widespread disincentives to innovation. “The court’s rulings on patent eligibility have become so diverse and unpredictable as to have a serious effect on the innovation incentive in all fields of technology,” according to Judge Newman. She went on to cite several amicus briefs asserting that investment in technological development will decrease because of the panel decision. “It is essential to restore the incentive role of the system of patents, for technology is the foundation of the nation’s economy, trade, and strength.”
The concurrences disputed that the panel decision constituted a radical departure for the court. Rather, the decision was limited and grounded in precedent. Judge Dyk provided two string citations of Supreme Court and Federal Circuit decisions supporting the outcome, which together spanned three full pages. Judge Chen concluded that “the majority’s opinion in this case does not, and should not be read to, announce a new test for patent eligibility.”
Based on the emphasized language, the claim construction order found that “significant additional details” about how the interface control device 910 interacted with other structures were provided to a person skilled in the art. Accordingly, the claim construction order stated that the defendant had failed to prove” by clear and convincing evidence that the structure of the interface control device [910] is inadequately disclosed by the patent specification.”
Following trial, however, the court agreed with the defendant’s argument that the plaintiff had not proven “that the ‘means for mediating’ limitation is met by the accused products” because the defendant’s products do not use the described configuration registers. The plaintiff’s technical expert made one short statement on direct examination at trial that the accused products “need to be configured, so there’s always configuration information that they can be programmed with.”
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The court further agreed that “the record does not support a new trial.” The plaintiff had argued that it had provided further evidence relating to configuration registers. But this evidence was presented out of context, and at best, the plaintiff pointed to pretrial deposition testimony that configuration registers were “inside the chip[s] . . . everywhere.”
Conclusory legal statements that attempt to invoke a factual allegation do not sufficiently allege an inventive concept to satisfy patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101. Dropbox Inc., Orcinus Holdings, LLC v. Synchronoss Techs. Inc, 2019-1765, 2019-1767, 2019-1823 (Fed. Cir. June 19, 2020) (nonprecedential).
Plaintiff Dropbox asserted infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,178,505, 6,058,399, and 7,567,541 against Defendant Synchronoss. The patents are directed to data security and data uploading to websites and networks. The district court granted Defendant’s motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6), holding that all three patents as ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. In particular, the district court held that Plaintiff failed to allege an inventive concept to satisfy the second part of the two-part Alice test.
The details of the specific patents would warrant their own posts, so we will focus on the Court’s discussion of Plaintiff’s factual allegations of an inventive concept. Some courts have held that sufficient factual allegations of an inventive concept can present an unresolved question of fact to survive Rule 12(b)(6) and that this should be the norm to better develop the factual record. Other courts, like the district court here, are perfectly happy to hold claims ineligible under Section 101 at the pleadings stage.
Representative claims of the other patents are not reproduced here in an attempt at conciseness, but can be found that the above links. For all of the patents, the Magistrate Judge determined they had a “plain focus” on improving “computer functionality,” rather than “on economic or other tasks for which computer is used in its ordinary capacity.” The District Judge disagreed with this conclusion, finding the patents failed step one of the Alice test as directed to the abstract idea of “the secure verification of a person’s identity.”
The ’539 patent, the court said, “is not materially different from the patent at issue in Prism Techs. LLC v. T-Mobile USA, Inc.,” (Fed. Cir. 2017). Similar to the claims there, claim 22 of the ’539 patent recited steps of receiving and processing a transaction request, including authenticating a user to a merchant without the merchant “obtaining knowledge of the customer’s identifying information.” Claim 22 therefore “is directed to the abstract idea of obtaining the secure verification of a user’s identity to enable a transaction.”
Alice step two could not save this claim. The patent itself acknowledged that all of the claim steps “are accomplished by implementing well-known methods using conventional computer components.” The patent owner argued that there was a saving innovation in allowing a transaction to be approved without a merchant obtaining account identifying information. The court’s response was that “sending data to a third-party as opposed to the merchant” was “insignificant post-solution activity” and “not a technological innovation.”
A patent claim directed to adjusting an individual gaming machine control parameter (i.e., the risk/reward level) based on aggregate gaming machine results was held patent-ineligible at summary judgment under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and the Alice/Mayo test. Bot M8 LLC v. Sony Corporation of America, et al, No. C 19-07027 WHA (N.D. Cal., June 10, 2020.)
It’s true that you don’t often find us here siding with copyright holders in debates over copyright. It’s not that there isn’t a place for that sort of thing, of course. It’s just kinda not our beat. Also, it’s a bit of a dog-bites-man kind of thing. As folks who tend to think that ever-expanding copyright laws and a protectionist culture that has lost its way are bad for business, we typically focus more on artists who are doing exciting things in new business models, artists who are overstepping the purpose of copyright law and/or hurting their own causes through protectionism, and artists who choose to go the human and awesome route rather than pulling out the litigious nuclear bombs.
We hear that most of this money went to bring women from Kosovo and Albania to DebConf in Brazil. Most of these women were introduced to Debian by a Developer who resigned in disgust at internal bickering.
Sam Hartman and his gangsters told the women that if they want more trips like this, he wants them to take sides in Debian politics and help spread rumours about people. Isn’t it charming that women’s first impression of professional life comes in the form of blackmail and coercion?
We find it disturbing when the regime of Sam Hartman has so much in common with people accused of war crimes, threatening and blackmailing women to help neutralize volunteers who asked questions about the money. █
Summary: Arthur K. Watson (son of Thomas Sr.) showed chauvinistic and misogynistic behaviour bordering on the criminal; as a US diplomat he was never held accountable for his actions and efforts were made (going all the way up to the US President) to cover everything up
THE BIG technology companies have all pretended to value feminism, diversity (racial, gender/identity, age group, linguistics, nationality and so on) among all sorts of altruism, not to mention greenwashing and openwashing.
Basically, when one works for the PR/marketing department of a multi-billion-dollar monster one’s sole goal is to embellish things, improve the image, whiten the brand (is it OK to say “whiten”?) and basically lie every time there’s a major gaffe that tarnishes the firm’s name (or embarrasses prominent people). IBM is no exception and IBM has spent many decades claiming to champion women’s equality, the cause of feminism, equal pay and so on.
“Bear this in mind next time IBM arrogantly lectures us all (from its high horse) on women’s rights.”One thing that’s almost impossible to find any record of (in 2020) is this incident which was so noteworthy that even the US President (at the time) talked about it.
Here’s the audio which contains declassified stuff and also some context for the recording (Kissinger, Nixon etc.) followed by comparisons to Trump’s “grab her by the pussy” remark. It’s entitled “The head of IBM and the Stewardess Incident” and we’ve cut the critical parts of it, including the old and barely comprehensible chats/ramblings of Richard Nixon (homophobic by today’s standards).
Here’s the article about this incident :
“Nixon’s Peking Envoy Gets Drunk, Boorish On Plane Trip,” Jack Anderson, New Orleans States-Item, 03/16/72
In case you own an old computer or laptop with out-of-date system resources but reliable hardware configuration, you’ve come to the right place because we’re going to list 10 Linux distributions that still support 32-bit architectures. These Linux distros will help you revive your PC and get it up to speed in no time. The reason why these lightweight Linux distros are still relevant and useful is that they only require low system resources and always provide high performance and lag-free user experience.
Despite being the recommended choices for older PCs with 32-bit processors, the following Linux distros work great on newer hardware as well. They will provide good performance if you’re looking to use your PC for rather demanding tasks such as video rendering and editing, etc.
I roll out of bed and start the coffee. The dog follows me around, expecting breakfast. I feed him; take a shower. It is still early and the first rays of sunlight are tangled in the trees over my neighbor’s house. I pour a cup of coffee and sit at the desk in the small bedroom I use as my office…start my Linux system, call up Slack, check my notes: 9 o’clock Zoom call?
Like many companies around the world, our office has gone all-virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic. We meet together online once per week for a roundup of company news, but information passes between us all the time, all day, in email, texts, Zoom calls, and posts to workgroups. A publishing office is a frenetic place even on the slow days, and when it gets busy, it is impossible to imagine how it all can stay floating – text files, layout files, emails, author queries, and social media posts fly in every direction, and all the threads converge magically at a sacred moment when we upload the issue to the printer. I’m always amazed when nothing breaks, and the fact that we have smoothly navigated to a remote workday is a testament to our experience, versatility, and espirit de corps. But you see, it hasn’t always been so virtual. Most of our years we have worked together face-to-face, and our vibrant office culture has always been a source of pride.
Automotive Grade Linux (AGL), a collaborative cross-industry effort developing an open source platform for connected car technologies, announces five new members: L4B Software, Sibros, Sonatus, Telechips and TotalCross Platform.
Cartesi is partnering with Binance Smart Chain (BSC) to unlock the next generation of decentralized applications. Binance Smart Chain is a highly scalable blockchain that supports smart contracts and Ethereum Virtual Machine programmability, featuring high TPS (transactions per second), and fast decentralized trading with low fees. This partnership will enable advanced smart contract capabilities and massive computation for Cartesi DApps atop Binance Smart Chain, allowing DApp developers to jumpstart the next generation of decentralized games and DeFi products.
Lenovo has launched a brand new ThinkPad model which takes the popular X1 shell and shrinks it even further.
The result is the 13-inch ThinkPad X1 Nano device, that weighs a mere 962g, making it one of the lightest business laptops currently on the market.
Inside is a Tiger Lake CPU with Iris X graphics, up to 16GB LPDDR4X memory, up to 1TB PCIe SSD, a 48WHr battery that can power it for up to 17.3 hours, four speakers and four microphones and two Thunderbolt 4 ports. When it comes to connectivity, there’s Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.0 on top of optional 5G.
Not that I should be impressed, of course. Lenovo recently expanded its range of Ubuntu laptops. And the new ThinkPad X1 Nano, which weights less than one kilogram, is at the centre of part of that charge.
Everything about this svelte notebook oozes class. It’s packing a super-fast 11th gen Intel Core i7 processor, a super-sharp 2K screen, and is armed with a smattering of super-speedy Thunderbolt 4 ports to connect to external monitors, storage, and more.
It used to be really hard to find a Linux-powered laptop. You had to turn to small, specialty Linux-friendly PC vendors such as Purism, System76, or ZaReason. Now, Lenovo is releasing almost 30 Ubuntu Linux PCs and laptops. And, in days, Dell will release a new XPS 13 Developer Edition pre-loaded with Ubuntu 20.04 Long Term Support (LTS) Linux and a faster-than-ever 11th Gen Intel Core Tiger Lake processor.
Dell has revealed that the latest version of its XPS 13 Developer Edition will come pre-loaded with Ubuntu 20.04 along with several upgrades to the device’s hardware.
The new Linux-based XPS 13 Developer Edition will be the first of the Austin-based company’s developer-focused laptops to ship with an 11th Gen Intel Core processor. The device will also feature a Thunderbolt 4 port which will make it easy to connect to an external monitor or laptop docking station.
At the same time, the XPS 13 Developer Edition is also getting a memory boost with new LPDDR4x RAM clocked at 4267MHz, up from 3733MHz in the previous model.
People have been bugging me about setting up MPD for a long time now so I thought I might as well do so and I might as well make a bit of a tutorial out of it, in particular showing you how to setup your media keys with MPD if you want to use a tool like PlayerCTL rather than a tool specifically made for MPD, but it doesn’t have mpris support out of the box so we need to fix that with mpdris2
We all have our favourite Linux distros, but what if I told you that it’s more about choosing the right desktop environment? Here’s my recommendations for the best Linux distribution for each of the main Linux desktop environments including GNOME, KDE, Xfce, Budgie, Deepin, LXQt, Pantheon and more.
Intel’s compiler experts in Moscow have been working on OpenCL C 3.0 support for the LLVM Clang compiler front-end.
OpenCL 3.0 allows much greater flexibility in making OpenCL 2.x era features optional. With this on the compiler-side it’s not very invasive when already supporting OpenCL 2.x functionality but a matter in part of just making very features optional.
After announcing oneAPI at the end of 2018 and then going into beta last year, oneAPI 1.0 is now official for this open-source, standards-based unified programming model designed to support Intel’s range of hardware from CPUs to GPUs to other accelerators like FPGAs. Intel’s oneAPI initiative has been one of several exciting software efforts led by the company in recent years while continuing to serve as one of the world’s largest contributors to open-source software.
While yesterday brought the release of Intel’s oneAPI 1.0 specification, the interesting news today is that oneAPI support is coming to AMD Radeon graphics cards.
Intel and the Heidelberg University Computing Center are announcing today they are establishing the “oneAPI Academic Center of Excellence.” Great for academia, but what’s more interesting to the masses that as part of that Intel and the University of Heidelberg are working to add oneAPI support for AMD Radeon GPUs.
I always had the feeling that my server, hosted by Hetzner, somehow has a slow internet connection. Then, I did put it on the distance between Finland and Japan, and didn’t care too much. Until yesterday my server stopped reacting to pings/ssh, and needed a hard reset. It turned out that the server was running fine, only that the ethernet card did hang. Hetzner support answered promptly and directed me to this web page, which described a change in the kernel concerning fragmentation offloading, and suggested the following configuration to regain connection speed:
ethtool -K tso off gso off
And to my surprise, this simple thing did wonder, and the connection speed improved dramatically, even from Japan (something like factor 10 in large rsync transfers). I have added this incantation to system cron tab and run it every hour, just to be sure that even after a reboot it is fine.
We recently covered COM Express and COM-HPC modules powered by Intel Tiger Lake UP3 embedded processors announced last week. ASRock is now the first company to officially announce a Tiger Lake UP3 mini PC based on the new 15W IoT processors.
ASRock iBOX 1000 rugged embedded computer is fitted with the company’s NUC-1100 motherboard that offers four 4K display outputs, 2.5GbE networking, and various other expansions and I/Os in order to target factory automation, AGV, retail kiosk, digital signage, entertainment, transportation, and other AIoT applications.
Ibase’s fanless, Ubuntu-ready “ASB200-919” embedded PC is stocked with an 8th Gen UE-series CPU with up to 32GB DDR4, 2x GbE, 2x DP via USB, 4x USB 3.1, and 2x M.2 with NVMe.
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The ASB200-919 supports 8GB to 32GB DDR4 via dual sockets. For storage, there is an M.2 M-key slot with SATA and NVMe support. Although it’s not listed in the specs or the announcement, the ordering form mentions a default configuration with a 2.5-inch 64GB TLC SSD and the image below shows an easy-open storage hatch. The IB919 SBC offers dual SATA III interfaces, but it is possible the 2.5-inch mention is a typo and the default SSD is an M.2 card.
Kontron announced three Linux-friendly Elkhart Lake based compute modules with support for optional 2.5GbE: a COM Express Compact Type 6 “COMe-cEL6 (E2)” with up to 32GB DDR4-3200 plus a Mini Type 10 “COMe-mEL10 (E2)” and a “SMARC-sXEL (E2).”
Kontron unveiled its first products based on Intel’s Elkhart Lake Atom x6000E, Pentium, and Celeron SoCs. The COM Express Compact Type 6 COMe-cEL6 (E2), COM Express Mini Type 10 COMe-mEL10 (E2), and SMARC 2.1 form-factor SMARC-sXEL (E2) will be available in 1Q 2021 with BSPs for Linux, Windows 10 IoT Enterprise, and VxWorks 7.0.
File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a popular and time-honored method of transferring files to and from a remote network site. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and uses separate control and data connections between the client and server applications. The FTP client connects to the FTP server, and enables the user to send and retrieves files from that server.
FTP is one of many different file transfer protocols that are used. Other examples include the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), BitTorrent, the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), and Secure Copy (SCP).
HPLIP 3.20.9, HP print, scan, and fax drivers for Linux, now is available to download.
Though the release note is not ready at the moment of writing, HPLIP 3.20.9 package is already available to download in its website. Normally, there will be a list of new supported printers.
This article will cover free and open source markdown editors available for Linux. You can use these apps to write documents, notes, ebooks etc. and format them for better readability and accessibility.
DAPS is OpenSUSE’s “DocBook Authoring and Publishing Suite” that is used to build documentation for SUSE and OpenSUSE. It actually requires A LOT of dependencies when being installed and for that reason alone, it’s actually better to run it in a container. This is my image and how I use it.
Welcome to the 1st part of computer graphic design for students. This is your easy guide to learn graphic editing with the software Inkscape. In this article you will learn both the theory and practice and followed by an exercise making your first design with logo and typography. Enjoy!
Google announced today that Dead By Daylight will launch free for Stadia Pro on October 1, and it will have cross-platform online play with all other platforms. That’s huge and exactly how it should be done. Not only that, it’s also coming with Crowd Choice, the new Stadia feature that’s like Twitch integration – giving viewers of livestreams on YouTube the chance to vote on things. It was said that Crowd Choice will come to other games too like Baldu’rs Gate 3 and more to come.
It’s possible to play chess using email. This is possible because there are notations like PGN (Portable Game Notation) that describe the state of a game.
By playing on your computer and sending the PGN of the game to your opponent, that person will be able to play their move and send you the new PGN so you can play.
Nitrux 1.3.3 comes exactly one month after Nitrux 1.3.2, which dropped systemd in favor of the OpenRC init system. This release brings the usual updates, starting with the latest KDE Plasma 5.19.5 desktop environment and continuing with the KDE Frameworks 5.74 and KDE Applications 20.08.1 software suites, built against Qt 5.15.
Among other updated components included in the Nitrux 1.3.3 update, there’s the Mozilla Firefox 81 web browser, LibreOffice 7.0.1 office suite, Inkscape 1.0.1 vector graphics editor, GIMP 2.10.20 image editor, Kdenlive 20.08.1 video editor, LMMS 1.2.2 digital audio workstation, and appimage-manager 0.1.2.
It’s too early to say “Job done”. But we’ve passed the biggest milestone on the project we announced last year: version 3.0 of Tracker is released and the rollout has begun!
Following the news yesterday of NetBSD changing its default X11 window manager after two decades with TWM to now using CTWM by default, some wondered why they don’t jump on the Wayland bandwagon.
NetBSD does actually have Wayland support albeit very limited and thus far better off with X11 support until Wayland compositors have better BSD support and other improvements made for benefiting the NetBSD support as well as the likes of FreeBSD.
Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope.
GnuCash is a personal finance manager. A check-book like register GUI allows you to enter and track bank accounts, stocks, income and even currency trades. The interface is designed to be simple and easy to use, but is backed with double-entry accounting principles to ensure balanced books.
The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: It prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.
I came across two separate discussions on LinuxQuestions.org that had a common root cause; a lack of Windows VST support in Carla and missing PE binary support in Wine causing Windows games to fail on Slackware.
They made me think about how I could help fix the core issue, which is that both SlackBuilds.org and Slackware 3rd party repositories (like mine) do not offer MinGW packages or scripts. To address the issue I needed to create a MinGW-w64 package, which is what I did. More on that, further down.
Back to the issue at hand and their common root cause.
Andrew Hughes (aka GNU/Andrew) announced a new release for IcedTea 2 on the distro-packager mailing list earlier this week.The new version 2.6.23 builds OpenJDK 7u271_b01. This release includes the July 2020 security fixes for Java 7 from Oracle.
It is recommended that you upgrade your OpenJDK 7 to the latest version. If you have already moved to Java 8 then this article is obviously not relevant for you.
The Fedora Project has announced the beta availability of Fedora 33. In addition to Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server, Fedora 33 Beta also formally adds Fedora IoT as a supported edition.
It also includes the use of BTRFS as the default file system for Fedora Workstation to offer more modern features.
Geared towards edge devices, Fedora IoT supports a range of hardware platforms based on x86_64 and aarch64, including Raspberry Pi and Pine64.
Fedora 33 Beta was scheduled to be released during September, and on the eve of the final day of that month, the pre-release operating system is finally here! Yes, if you love Fedora and want to give an early version of 33 a try, today is your lucky day.
As you can imagine, Fedora 33 Beta comes with the excellent GNOME 3.38, which was only released a couple of weeks ago. The biggest change, however, is BTRFS being made the default filesystem — ext4 is no longer the standard. Wow. Also significant? The new default editor is nano.
“Fedora 33 Workstation Beta includes GNOME 3.38, the newest release of the GNOME desktop environment. It is full of performance enhancements and improvements. GNOME 3.38 now includes a welcome tour after installation to help users learn about all of the great features this desktop environment offers. It also improves screen recording and multi-monitor support,” says Matthew Miller, The Fedora Project.
It took longer than expected, but in 2014, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.0 was finally released. It became one of the most influential business Linux distributions of all time. Now, with the release of RHEL 7.9, the end of the RHEL 7.x story is in sight.
A new version of Stratis is ready to go as Red Hat’s open-source storage solution built atop LVM and XFS for offering easy and modern local storage management on Linux systems that aim to rival the likes of Btrfs and ZFS but without having to rely on a new file-system.
The scope of IBM’s endeavor reaches across the channel, including global IT services firms and technology distributors selling to smaller resellers. Earlier this year, IBM reshaped its channel program to enlist partners in what the organization sees as a battle for the hybrid and multi-cloud market. Alliances with cloud partners have been a regular occurrence in 2020.
I would say that I always have a problem with accessing the knowledge base related to errors, errors and configurations in Linux and Fedora distro.
I think it would be very necessary to have as up-to-date documentation as possible in the Fedora distribution system and possibly a database based on questions and answers.
That makes me think of the pilots’ manuals … where all the possible problems are listed.
Data is often the elephant in the room. It is obvious that applications are useless without data, that data is no less important now than it was at the dawn of computing, and that there’s no end in sight to the exponential growth of data. The term “exponential” is tossed about rather flippantly these days — it’s easy to lose sight of its basic mathematical implications — but some analysts suggest that more data will be created in the next three years than has been created in the last thirty.
Our first webinar, Application modernization: Steps to take today, will examine the need for a cloud-native development strategy, reasons for moving to the cloud and lessons learned from our customers. Containerization to cloud-native will cover how to launch modernization journeys through container platform onboarding and how to extend those gains through cloud-native practices and technologies. Cloud-native integration will examine integration from a cloud-native perspective, through the lens of financial services customers.
Later this year, we’ll introduce DevOps for machine learning, which will address how to build intelligent applications by tying machine learning workloads into the same delivery pipelines that accelerate applications on container platforms. We’ll conclude with a webinar about a specific modernization project type. Intelligent customer engagement will cover a cloud native approach for real-time, customer-centric decisioning and automation.
While we’re in the midst of a pandemic, I’m sure you can think back fondly to when we could travel and be part of some great tech conferences. Tell us about your favorite city to visit for a tech event or developer conference! Where is it and why do you enjoy it so much?
Open source technologies can drive innovation, allowing customers to deliver more and exceed business expectations. And the growing customer interest in multicloud environments and consumption-based pricing models offers an opportunity for service providers that partner with Red Hat to meet evolving business needs.
To investigate this trend further, Red Hat collaborated with CRN UK and Channelnomics Europe to identify insights into winning and retaining customers in the hyperscale world. The Red Hat-sponsored report includes the results of the survey of 150 EMEA decision makers, such as IT professionals, managers, directors and above, from industries including banking and finance, logistics, manufacturing, retail and education.
The idea to do an official port bubbled up from the Xen community and then reached the desk of George Dunlap, chairman of the Xen Project’s Advisory Board. Dunlap mentioned the idea to an acquaintance who works at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and was told that around 40 percent of Pis are sold to business users rather than hobbyists.
With more than 30 million Arm-based Pis sold as of December 2019, and sales running at a brisk 600,000-plus a month in April 2020, according to Pi guy Eben Upton, Dunlap saw an opportunity to continue Xen’s drive towards embedded and industrial applications.
Stefano Stabellini, who by day works at FPGA outfit Xilinx, and past Apache Foundation director Roman Shaposhnik took on the task of the port. The pair clocked that the RPi 4′s system-on-chip used a regular GIC-400 interrupt controller, which Xen supports out of the box, and thought this was a sign this would, overall, be an easy enough job. That, the duo admitted, was dangerous optimism. Forget the IRQs, there was a whole world of physical and virtual memory addresses to navigate.
The pair were “utterly oblivious that we were about to embark on an adventure deep in the belly of the Xen memory allocator and Linux address translation layers,” we’re told.
“The first hurdle was the availability of low memory addresses,” the pair wrote in an announcement heralding the Xen Pi port, seen by The Register ahead of its public release today. “RPi4 has devices that can only access the first 1GB of RAM. The amount of memory below 1GB in Dom0 was not enough. Julien Grall solved this problem with a simple one-line fix to increase the memory allocation below 1GB for Dom0 on RPi4. The patch is now present in Xen 4.14.”
Raspberry Pi (RPi) has been a key enabling device for the Arm community for years, given the low price and widespread adoption. According to the RPi Foundation, over 35 million have been sold, with 44% of these sold into industry. We have always been eager to get the Xen hypervisor running on it, but technical differences between RPi and other Arm platforms made it impractical for the longest time. Specifically, a non-standard interrupt controller without virtualization support.
Then the Raspberry Pi 4 came along, together with a regular GIC-400 interrupt controller that Xen supports out of the box. Finally, we could run Xen on an RPi device. Soon Roman Shaposhnik of Project EVE and a few other community members started asking about it on the xen-devel mailing list. “It should be easy,” we answered. “It might even work out of the box,” we wrote in our reply. We were utterly oblivious that we were about to embark on an adventure deep in the belly of the Xen memory allocator and Linux address translation layers.
As the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 is only expected for next year, companies are still launching products based on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+ (CM3+), and Sfera Labs has just introduced Iono Pi Max industrial computer powered by a Raspberry Pi CM3+ system-on-module.
Housed in a DIN rail enclosure, the Linux controller offers Fast Ethernet, three USB ports, isolated CAN and serial boards, some analog I/Os, a relay, as well as a real-time clock (RTC), integrated UPS, and more.
All those boards are however based on entry-level FPGAs like Lattice Semi ICE40 or QuickLogic EOS S3, and if you’d like a more powerful FPGA board that fits into a breadboard, MicroNova Mercury 2 development board may meet your requirements with a Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA.
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The baseboard comes with a 64-bit socket for the FPGA devboard, as well as a 4-digit seven-segment display, four push-buttons & eight toggle switches, a PS/2! port for keyboard or mouse, a VGA port, a Pmod-compatible connector, 3.5mm audio jacks, an analog temperature sensor, a light sensor, and a potentiometer for use with the analog-to-digital converter.
Running Tide built a 60-by-24-foot oyster processing boat, now docked in a finger of Casco Bay in the town of Harpswell, with two oyster reefs floating at each end of the vessel. Inside the processing boat are a half-dozen Raspberry Pis that feed data to the cloud on water conditions, including temperature and acidity. The boat is essentially a huge catamaran that allows the 11-by-36-foot oyster reefs to float into it.
Running Tide’s Margaux Filippi, who has a PhD. from MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, said the company is working on underwater video cameras to monitor the oysters’ growth. The 29-year-old data scientist has built machine learning algorithms for ocean research and spent six years at MIT’s mechanical engineering department, where she mastered the process of rapid prototyping. She clearly enjoys Running Tide’s hacker culture.
A switch on the front lights up the printed flame assemblies emanating from the engines, using a trio of SMD LEDs on each exhaust. These LEDs are controlled by an Arduino Nano nestled inside the wooden base to produce random lighting effects when an activation button is pressed.
When you need to grab someone’s attention at an event, an interactive screen is a good idea. MakerMan, however, went several steps beyond this, creating an installation with a bank of static screens that depict the Moscow skyline. In front of this, a single touch-enabled display moves back and forth automatically to present information on various points of interest.
Sliding action is handled by a large stepper motor, which pulls the screen along on a carriage assembly. The motor, in turn, is controlled via an Arduino Uno and a stepper driver. All of these electronics are hidden behind a nicely painted wooden facade, letting the technology driving it fade elegantly into the background.
Right after celebrating a great LibreOffice 10th Anniversary, we are delighted to present the 2020-version of our LibreOffice growth infoGraphic, including beautiful visuals and interesting numbers! We do hope you appreciate it and would love to hear your feedback. And of course it is great if you find the format, in which it is presented, convenient to share.
Many numbers are again up. Our devs are top code contributors to LibreOffice with 7518 code commits. And the popular “Collabora Online Development Edition” (CODE), for home use & small teams (find details here), has over 50 million Docker image pulls! We are extremely grateful for all partners and customers working with us to make this possible.
The International Day for Universal Access to Information 2020 focuses on to the right to information in times of crisis. It also highlights the advantages of having constitutional, statutory and/or policy guarantees for public access to information to save lives, build trust and help the formulation of sustainable policies through and beyond the COVID-19 crisis.
UNESCO and its intergovernmental programs – the International Programme for Development of Communication and the Information for All Programme – provide a platform and frame for all the stakeholders to participate in international discussions on policy and guidelines in the area of access to information. Both programs also enable positive environment for ATI to flourish through the development of projects aimed to strengthen open science, multilingualism, ICTs for disabled and marginalized, and media and information literacy.
As editor of I Programmer, I’m keen on the history of computer programming and this week I’ve come across a new resource – a series of podcasts in which Lex Fridman interviews some of the biggest names in computer science.
The Lex Fridman Podcast was formerly known as The Artificial Intelligence Podcast and the first one dates from April 2018. They are all conducted by Lex Fridman, an AI researcher at MIT. Fridman does have some specifically AI-oriented interviews, there’s one with Andrew Ng, for example.
The one that alerted me to the series, however, was one posted on You Tube a week ago with James Gosling, the creator of the Java Language and is the one hundred and twenty sixth in the series.
Under specific scenarios, you may require different identical copies of your repository. At this point, you are probably thinking about cloning your storage – but there is a better solution.
Git offers a better and more reliable workflow model – Git worktree. It gives a perfect copy of your entire repository.
In this article, I will explain all you need to know about worktree and how you can use it step-by-step with the Git best practices. And once you know all these basics, Git Worktree will be relatively easy to implement as compared to other practices like cloning with Git Clone your repository.
A string literal is a sequence of characters in a constant array pointer terminated by the nul character, \0. When identified, by a variable, the string literal cannot really reduce or increase in length. Many operations cannot be done on the string literal. So, there is a need for a string class. The C++ string class is for a data structure, a collection of characters in sequence, which allows member functions and operators to act on the characters. The string class allows more manipulations on the corresponding string literal, than just the string literal. You need to have good knowledge of string literal, to understand this article.
Laravel collection is a useful feature of the Laravel framework. A collection works like a PHP array, but it is more convenient. The collection class is located in the Illuminate\Support\Collection location. A collection allows you to create a chain of methods to map or reduce arrays. It is not changeable, and a new collection returns when the collection method is called. It is an API wrapper for PHP array functions and a collection can be generated from an array. This tutorial shows you how to create and use a collection in any Laravel project.
Eloquent ORM (Object Relation Mapper) is easy to use for users who know how to use objects in PHP. The ORM is an important feature of the Laravel framework, considered a powerful and expensive feature of Laravel. The ORM works with database objects and is used to make relationships with database tables. Each table of the database is mapped with a particular eloquent model. The model object contains various methods to retrieve and update data from the database table. Eloquent ORM can be used with multiple databases by implementing ActiveMethod. This feature makes database-related tasks, such as defining relationships, simpler by defining the database tables. This tutorial explains how to apply Laravel Eloquent ORM in your Laravel projects.
Multiple authentication features are implemented in Laravel version 5.2. Different authentication systems are required to implement different routes that were time-consuming and inefficient. The same authentication system can be used for Web and API by using a token-based authentication feature. But this authentication system is not more secure for the application. Now, the authentication system of the Laravel application can be secured by using the new Passport authentication feature of Laravel. It uses two ENV which are the secrets of the Laravel passport OAUTH API. These are API_CLIENT_ID & API_CLIENT_SECRET. An access token generates for each user when Laravel passport is used and it allows the user to access some secure endpoints. How you can build a secure API authentication system by using Laravel passport and access authorized content are shown in this tutorial.
If you want to check how your Laravel project works online without publishing the project on any real server then you can use Valet or Homestead package to develop a visualized development environment. Homestead is used to develop a fully visualized Linux development environment with Nginx configuration and it consumes more resources. If you want to develop a fast local development environment with minimum resources then the Valet package is a good choice. It works with the Nginx web server. How you can install Valet on Ubuntu and use it to run your Laravel project online for certain times are shown in this article.
Some long-time subscribers may remember that I am teaching math to 10-18 year old students. The COVID-19 situation nearly made me quit and look for an alternative to earn my rent, but my love for the kids and teaching them was stronger. After a few months of shortage, we found ways to responsibly resume the meetings, either online or with safety measures.
When schools were closed, some parents wondered what they could do to drag their offsprings away from computers; playing computer games seemed to be the new all-time favorite hobby. Of course, resistance was expected. Why not turn this interest into something useful? I didn’t expect that kids as young as eight are interested to learn how to create games. But why not? I learned from electronic magazines and books how computers, MS BASIC, and Z80 assembly worked when I was ten, and I am sure I would have been interested with eight, if my classmate had broken his leg two years earlier… But that’s not the story I want to tell.
After some contemplation, Charles Babbage’s ghost replied, “This is all well and good, but here you only take the number of rows and give the number of marbles. With my table, I can also tell you how large a pyramid you might construct given a certain number of marbles; simply look it up in the table.”
Python had to agree that this was indeed the case, yet it knew that surely this must be solvable as well. With little delay, Python came back with another short script. The solution involves thinking through the math in reverse.
Did you know that the freely available PyCharm community edition is perfectly suited for developing and debugging Django web applications? The goal of the article is to help you setup a new Django application framework in the PyCharm community edition, to the point that you can run and debug the Django application in PyCharm. We’ll also setup a virtual environment for the PyCharm project and install Django inside this virtual environment.
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PyCharm comes in two editions: the professional edition and the community edition. The professional edition needs to be bought. In contrast, JetBrains makes the community edition free and open source. With other words, you can download the community edition for free and get started with it right away.
When inspecting the differences between the PyCharm editions, you’ll notice that the PyCharm professional edition features all sort of Django specific support as you can read here. From this information you might think that you absolutely need to purchase the PyCharm professional edition, when programming and debugging Django applications. This is incorrect. You can definitely program and debug your Django application with the free PyCharm community edition. In this article, I’ll explain step-by-step how you can setup and debug a Django application in the free PyCharm community edition.
In this course, you’ll work through the creation of a Flask web application. Your application will allow a user to log in using their Google identity instead of creating a new account. There are tons of benefits with this method of user management. It’s going to be safer and simpler than managing the traditional username and password combinations.
In a previous post, we introduced the Versioned HDF5 library and described some of its features. In this post, we’ll go into detail on how the underlying design of the library works on a technical level.
Versioned HDF5 is a library that wraps h5py and offers a versioned abstraction for HDF5 groups and datasets. Versioned HDF5 works fundamentally as a copy-on-write system. The basic idea of copy-on-write is that all data is effectively immutable in the backend. Whenever a high-level representation of data is modified, it is copied to a new location in the backend, leaving the original version intact. Any references to the original will continue to point to it.
Python is one of the best programming languages used across a plethora of industries. The healthcare sector is a significant benefactor of the language. With Python programming in healthcare, institutions and clinicians can deliver better patient outcomes through dynamic and scalable applications.
Today, healthcare is generating tons of data from patients and facilities. By making the best use of this data, doctors can predict better treatment methods and improve the overall healthcare delivery system.
The Python return statement is a key component of functions and methods. You can use the return statement to make your functions send Python objects back to the caller code. These objects are known as the function’s return value. You can use them to perform further computation in your programs.
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Most programming languages allow you to assign a name to a code block that performs a concrete computation. These named code blocks can be reused quickly because you can use their name to call them from different places in your code.
Programmers call these named code blocks subroutines, routines, procedures, or functions depending on the language they use. In some languages, there’s a clear difference between a routine or procedure and a function.
Sometimes that difference is so strong that you need to use a specific keyword to define a procedure or subroutine and another keyword to define a function. For example the Visual Basic programming language uses Sub and Function to differentiate between the two.
Friend of Mu, Kevin Thomas has been hard at work creating free-to-use resources for kids (and older kids) who want to learn Python, with the BBC micro:bit and Mu.
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Meanwhile, in our secret fortress of solitude, the Mu “minions” (Munions..?) have been hard at work on some fantastic updates which we hope to reveal very soon.
Python is a powerful and expressive programming language with a vast ecosystem of incredible applications. Unfortunately, it has always been challenging to share those applications with non-technical end users. Gregory Szorc set out to solve the problem of how to put your code on someone else’s computer and have it run without having to rely on extra systems such as virtualenvs or Docker. In this episode he shares his work on PyOxidizer and how it allows you to build a self-contained Python runtime along with statically linked dependencies and the software that you want to run. He also digs into some of the edge cases in the Python language and its ecosystem that make this a challenging problem to solve, and some of the lessons that he has learned in the process. PyOxidizer is an exciting step forward in the evolution of packaging and distribution for the Python language and community.
Building large-scale web applications take a monumental effort. Testing the quality of these applications requires a whole other level of dedication. From a developer’s vantage point, the focus is on improving the feature set, speeding up the overall performance, and building a scalable product. As far as QA is concerned, a lot of focus is on usability testing and compatibility testing while testing a website or web application.
If you are building a consumer-facing website or web application, your product is likely to be accessed by users from across the globe. Your product must be tested on various combinations of web browsers, devices, and platforms (operating systems) to ensure top-notch performance. Hence, browser compatibility testing becomes even more critical. No one wants to lose potential customers because of unpleasant user experience on select few browsers, devices, or platforms.
Greetings Python community, October is fast approaching with vibrant fall colour and our favourite apples. This is the occasion to set the table for our 80th event – Pedal Kayak – which will take place this coming October 26.
It’s easy to write a fingerprint search tool. Peter Willett tells a story about how very soon after he, Winterman, and Bawden published Implementation of nearest-neighbor searching in an online chemical structure search system (1986) (which described their nearest-neighbor similarity search implementation and observed that Tanimoto similarity gave more satisfactory results than cosine similarity), he heard from a company which wrote their own implementation, on a Friday afternoon, and found it to be very useful.
Now, my memory of his story may be missing in the details, but the key point is that it’s always been easy to write a fingerprint similarity search tool. So, let’s do it!
I’ll call my program ssimsearch because it’s going to be a simplified version of chemfp’s simsearch command-line tool. In fact, I’ll hard-code just about everything, with only the bare minimum of checking.
Files are used to store and organize data on a disk. We often use files when we need to store data permanently on a hard disk. For example, say we are building a software system that maintains student records. Now, we need to store the student data permanently for future use. For this purpose, we can use files to store data, and later on, we can open these files and access the stored data at any time.
Reading and writing files are very common functions in Python. It is easy to create, read, and edit files in Python. Python comes with built-in functions for reading and writing files. You can open, write, and read files using the Python built-in functions.
Yesterday I developed an simple program to search chembl_27.fps.gz for records with a Tanimoto similarity of at least 0.7 to caffeine. I started by mentioning the 1986 paper by Willet, Winterman, and Bawden Implementation of nearest-neighbor searching in an online chemical structure search system. As you can read from the title, that paper does a k-nearest neighbor search (k-NN search, also called a top-N search), and compares a Tanimoto similarity search to a cosine similarity search. So really, I’m only halfway there. In this essay I’ll go the other half and implement the nearest neighbor search. As before, this code will do almost no error handling, and will only work for the uncompressed chembl_27.fps in the local directory.
Python is one of the modern, multi-purpose, and high-level programming languages. Python is used for various purposes i.e. software development, data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, deep learning, and back end development. More often, in any programming language, we need to print some data or string on the console. In python, we use the print () function to print the string or any kind of data on the console.
awk is a kind of Swiss Army knife for text files. However, some of its limitations are often a bit annoying. I’ve used a simple set of functions to make awk a bit better, although I will warn you: it does require GNU extensions to awk. That is, you must use gawk and not other versions. Your system probably maps /usr/bin/awk to something and that something might be gawk. But it could also be mawk or some other flavor. If you use a Debian-based distro, update-alternatives is your friend here. But for the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume you are using gawk.
But new research suggests that the biggest jolt to QAnon came from the so-called “Save the Children” movement. It started out as a fund-raising campaign for a legitimate anti-trafficking charity, but was then hijacked by QAnon believers, who used the movement to spread false and exaggerated claims about a global child-trafficking conspiracy led by top Democrats and Hollywood elites. This hijacking began in July, around the same time that Twitter and Facebook began cracking down on QAnon accounts.
Marc-André Argentino, a doctoral student at Concordia University who studies QAnon, has been tracking the growth of “Save the Children” Facebook groups, many of which operate as soft fronts for the movement.
Mr. Argentino identified 114 groups that bill themselves as anti-trafficking concerns, but are actually dominated by QAnon content. Since July, he found, these groups have increased their membership by more than 3,000 percent — yes, 3,000 percent — with a corresponding surge in activity within these groups.
Life is not the Olympics, where talent and training determine an athlete’s performance. It’s more like a Roman arena in which well-armed gladiators vanquish unarmed victims who lose not because they did not try hard enough, but because of the asymmetrical initial distribution of armor.
In the immediate aftermath of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s murder on November 2, 1975, the Italian press published articles comparing the poet, novelist, filmmaker, and polemicist with a whole “canon of contrarian prophets, talismans and poètes maudits,” according to the literary scholar Robert Gordon, who compiled the list: St. Augustine, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Jean Genet, Federico García Lorca, Cesare Pavese, Arthur Rimbaud, Girolamo Savonarola, Socrates, François Villon, Elio Vittorini, and even the archeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, as well as Ariel, Midas, Narcissus, Don Quixote, and Jesus. Nearly all those associations have some plausibility, but at least in a certain mood, I might lean toward Savonarola, the 15th century friar who became a populist tribune and scourge of religious and secular powers before being burned at the stake. If Pasolini seemed to profane everything, it was because he wanted everything to be sacred.
A group of almost 250 people have signed a letter to the head of Karelia’s Supreme Court, Anatoly Nakvas, asking that the case against historian Yuri Dmitriev be transferred to another region. The independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta published the letter on its website.
The TJ story is playing out in many other places. A technology magnet school in Seattle switched to a lottery system for admissions four years ago. Hundreds of colleges and universities dropped their SAT/ACT admissions requirement because of COVID-19, and are considering making the change permanent in order to address diversity concerns. Magnet schools in New York City are considering dropping their entrance exams. Several departments at my university are considering dropping the GRE as an admission requirement to graduate programs, under the same rationale.
The result will be that the competence-sorting function that once was the domain of admissions officials will now be kicked down the road to professors, who, in turn, will be pressured to maintain a racially balanced grade curve. Inevitably, employment recruiters will have to take on the sorting role, perhaps by administering the same kind of basic tests that schools are now shunning.
Shemar, a 12-year-old from East Baltimore, is good at math, and Karen Ngosso, his fourth grade math teacher at Abbottston Elementary School, is one reason why. “I would try to pump him up and tell him, ‘You’re a good student,’” she said. But she knew that he didn’t get enough sleep, and he was often absent. His home situation, like those of many of her students, was unstable: his mother suffered from drug addiction, and they moved frequently.
Ngosso kept an eye on Shemar even after he started fifth grade, which is when I met him, in late 2018, at First & Franklin Presbyterian Church, a few blocks from the transitional housing where he and his mother were living. I volunteered to tutor Shemar, and once a week I picked him up from school and we’d do homework at a coffee shop.
On August 11, Russia announced the registration of the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, named “Sputnik V” by its developers at Gamaleya National Research Institute of Epidemiology. According to the terms of the drug’s registration, the vaccine’s developers must conduct large-scale “phase III” clinical trials on tens of thousands of volunteers. Meduza special correspondent Svetlana Reiter agreed to be one of these test subjects. We asked her to catalog the vaccine’s effects on her body and describe what it’s like to participate in such a momentous clinical study. Here is her diary.
Workers at a number of meatpacking plants across the United States are being denied workers’ compensation packages by their employers, who are rejecting claims that workers contracted coronavirus while working on their premises.
A quarter-century in prison and this decade past now in solitary confinement is part of my integrity. As responsibility for the serious transgressions of my past, prison is not a good place no matter how well a fellow strives to do his time here.
During a phone conversation on a commercial airplane late last week overheard by an NBC News reporter, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention slammed one of the White House’s top Covid-19 advisers for providing President Donald Trump and the U.S. public with misleading information about the deadly pandemic.
An outage of 911 service affected multiple cities and counties across northern and southern Arizona on Monday afternoon.
At least two other states were affected, with agencies in parts of Minnesota and Nevada also reporting outages.
Throughout Arizona, at least six counties and four cities have reported 911 service outages on social media. The counties affected include Pima, Yavapai, Pinal, Gila, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties and the cities affected include Tucson, Oro Valley, Prescott Valley, Marana, Coolidge, Nogales, Cottonwood, according to officials.
Authorities said 911 service was down throughout parts of northern and southern Arizona and Nevada for a brief time Monday night and the cause wasn’t immediately clear.
In Nevada, Reno police said the cause of the outages was under investigation after 911 was down in the Washoe County, Reno and Sparks areas.
Epic is not the first to challenge Apple’s software practices (see table). But it is the most serious yet. It started in August, when Epic offered “Fortnite” players who use iPhones 20% off in-game purchases if they paid Epic directly rather than through Apple’s App Store, which takes a 30% cut on most transactions made in iPhone apps. This violated the App Store’s terms; “Fortnite” was duly booted from the platform. Expecting this, Epic responded with the lawsuit (and a cheeky PR campaign).
The game developer and the iPhone maker filed a joint statement Tuesday with U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland, California, saying that Apple is withdrawing the demand for a jury trial it made when it filed its counterclaims.
The judge had suggested at a hearing Monday that a jury trial would be preferable because jury verdicts are less likely to get overturned on appeal and because it might be better to test the companies’ arguments, whether Apple operates an illegal monopoly in its app store, before ordinary people.
Apple has announced major changes to the Swift System, a “library for Apple platforms that provides idiomatic interfaces to system calls and low-level currency types.”
In a recent blog post, Michael Ilseman, engineer on the Swift Standard Library team at Apple, announced that the Swift System is being open sourced and that the team is adding Linux support.
As the rate of technological advancement and change continues to accelerate, new tools are being developed and released at such a swift pace that no individual tech professional can stay on top of them all. Consequently, this leads to talent gaps that can delay digital transformation. For example, a recent study found that “only 23% of organizations believe they have the talent required to successfully complete their cloud native journey.”
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr and mediawiki), openSUSE (firefox, libqt5-qtbase, and rubygem-actionpack-5_1), Red Hat (qemu-kvm, qemu-kvm-ma, and virt:rhel), SUSE (dpdk, firefox, and go1.15), and Ubuntu (dpdk, imagemagick, italc, libpgf, libuv1, pam-python, squid3, ssvnc, and teeworlds).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has released YAYA (which stands for Yet Another YARA Automation), an open source tool to help manage multiple YARA rule repositories.
The open source YARA tool helps malware researchers identify and classify malware samples. According to the EFF announcement, “YARA lets you create descriptions of malware (YARA rules) and scan files or processes with them to see if they match.”
An unintended or accidental flaw in the software code or any system that makes it potentially exploitable in terms of access to illegitimate users, malicious behaviours like viruses, trojans, worms, or any other malware is called a security vulnerability. The use of software that has already been exploited or the use of weak and default passwords also results in making the system vulnerable to the outside world. These types of security vulnerabilities require patching to prevent hackers from using previously used exploits on them again to gain unauthorized access to the system. A security vulnerability also called security hole or weakness is a flaw, a bug, or a fault in the implementation of code, design, and architecture of a web application and servers, which when left unaddressed can result in compromising of the system and makes the whole network vulnerable to the attack. The people going to be infected include the application owner, application users, and any other person relying on that application. Let’s look at the most dangerous and common security risks to web applications.
It’s been six years since Heartbleed was first discovered, and the OpenSSL vulnerability can still be found and exploited across the internet. As a matter of fact, 19% of global attacks target the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability due to the volume of unpatched public-facing servers. Whether it’s from poor scanning or fear of rebooting production servers, leaving servers open to OpenSSL exploits leaves customers and their data at risk. This article takes a deep dive into Heartbleed and the threat it has on data privacy and compliance. It also discusses how to identify if your processes still use outdated libraries, even if you’ve updated them on disk.
Schools have had to shut down over this. Hospitals. City governments and businesses. And as far as I can tell there’s no end in view here. We don’t have enough security people to cover the surface area, even if these targets had the budget to hire them.
We can stop waiting for Cyber Pearl Harbor. It’s here already, and we’re living it.
The Albuquerque Police Department (APD), with the help of private companies, built a large and sophisticated intelligence gathering operation. One company is slowly building a database of every license plate in the United States. Another has clients that include neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites, and more than a half dozen groups listed as terrorist organizations by the U.S. Department of State. A third sells its surveillance technology to authoritarian regimes that use it as part of investigations that include torture. A fourth is partly owned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). And a fifth, as we previously reported, is linked to a company investigated by the New Mexico Attorney General for hosting child pornography on its servers.
We need your help. On September 11, 2020, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced its intention to significantly expand both the number of people required to submit biometrics during routine immigration applications and the types of biometrics that individuals must surrender. This new rule will apply to immigrants and U.S. citizens alike, and to people of all ages, including, for the first time, children under the age of 14. It would nearly double the number of people from whom DHS would collect biometrics each year, to more than six million. The biometrics DHS plans to collect include palm prints, voice prints, iris scans, facial imaging, and even DNA—which are far more invasive than DHS’s current biometric collection of fingerprints, photographs, and signatures. (For an incisive summary of the proposed changes, click here.)
DHS has given the public until October 13, 2020 to voice their concerns about this highly invasive and unprecedented proposal. If you want your voice heard on this important issue, you must submit a comment through the Federal Register. Your visit to their website and comment submission are subject to their privacy policy which you can read here.
The new hub serves two purposes. One, it’ll benefit prolific posters, like brands and influencers who want to post the same content across their social profiles. They can now do so automatically and within Facebook. Second, saving payment information makes it easier for people to shop on Facebook and Instagram. Adding a credit card to either service is a small hurdle, but still, it’s a barrier to buying a product. With Facebook Pay syncing, people can get straight to buying regardless of the platform on which they see the ad.
Two Homeland Security aircraft monitored protests in Louisville Wednesday after a grand jury failed to indict the police officers who killed Breonna Taylor, Motherboard has learned by monitoring Air Traffic Control feeds.
The airspace was crowded with many law enforcement air assets from state, local, and federal departments. DHS flew both an AS50 helicopter and a Cessna 206 spy plane, which did not show up on radar maps but were identified via air traffic control communications.
With more of us than ever working from home during the coronavirus pandemic, there has been a spike in demand from employers for surveillance software.
US-based Hubstaff says its number of UK customers is up four times year-on-year since February.
Another company called Sneek offers technology that takes photos of workers through their laptop and uploads them for colleagues to see.
Photos can be taken as often as every minute, although the firm describes itself as a communication platform and says “everyone on the app has the same experience whether they are an employer or an employee”.
It was caught on tape. A Seattle police officer lunged into the backseat of a patrol car. The Black woman detained inside had been combative, but she already had her hands cuffed behind her back. Still the cop punched her in the face, breaking an orbital bone.
The Seattle Police Department moved to fire the officer for excessive force, but in November 2018, the cop’s union lawyer was able to convince an arbitrator to overturn the termination.
A few minutes after noon on a September day in 2018, Jacarvi Jackson and Darcell Williams were crossing Euclid Avenue, a main road through Cleveland’s medical area. Both of them worked for a vendor that supplies food to patients at the world-renowned Cleveland Clinic. Still in their work uniforms after finishing their eight-hour shifts at the hospital’s loading dock, they were heading to a Burger King lot where their cars were parked. They were in a hurry — Jackson was worried about getting to his classes at Cleveland State University — and didn’t take the crosswalk.
The coordinator of Alexey Navalny’s Arkhangelsk office, Andrey Borovikov, is facing charges for the criminal distribution of pornography. He could now face between two and six years in prison.
Historian Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor says the Breonna Taylor case is contributing to an “unfolding dynamic of radicalization” in the United States as people see repeated cases of police misconduct go unpunished. A grand jury recently declined to charge any of the officers involved in the 26-year-old EMT’s killing for her death. “To have it go through the ‘proper channels’ and still come out with a rigged decision raises existential questions for people about the legitimacy of the institutions of governance in the United States,” says Taylor, assistant professor of African American studies at Princeton University.
It’s been a terrible week for those of us in Kentucky. After Attorney General Daniel Cameron announced last week that the officers who murdered Breonna Taylor would walk away from their crime essentially without punishment, I and the rest of my community were left reeling. Breonna Taylor, a Black woman who had devoted her life to taking care of other people, had been resting her head in her own home, guilty of nothing, but died at the hands of police officers whose salaries she helped pay. I stood at a press conference this week and said what I believe to be true: that justice, like it did with Trayvon Martin, and Amadou Diallo, and Sandra Bland, and Eric Garner, failed us.
In a statement on Saturday, Borno state police said eight police officers and three members of a government-approved militia were killed, and 13 people were wounded in the attack around noon (11:00 GMT) on Friday.
Two soldiers, a police officer and a member of the government-approved militia – all speaking anonymously because they were not authorised to speak to journalists – told Reuters at least four soldiers were also killed.
Instead, let’s talk about Trump’s strategy to suppress the vote, as polls show that he is likely to handily lose an election already in process.
What Trump is saying with his refusal to guarantee a peaceful transfer of power is, “Either you re-elect me, or you acquiesce in my holding on to power by other means, or I will trigger civil conflict.” And what he is saying when he tells supporters to check on polling stations to make sure things are going OK is that he wants his foot-soldiers to intimidate people into not voting. And what he is really saying when he says that no matter what the voters decide, he hopes to compel a “continuation” of his presidency is that there’s no point in going out to vote, because he’s going to attempt to treat Americans like serfs rather than citizens.
Facebook is being sued again for its involvement in another act of gun violence. [half a h/t to MediaPost, which covered the lawsuit but apparently couldn't bring itself to post the actual filing]
Kommersant FM: The fighting in Karabakh continued throughout the night and is continuing now, despite world leaders’ calls for a ceasefire. And the parties [to the conflict] continue to accuse each other of escalation, and express different views on who started it and who is interested in the conflict. Does the Kremlin really have an understanding of who was the initiator of the confrontation and who might be interested in it?
Armenia’s Armed Forces have suffered more than 550 casualties in renewed fighting in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, claims Azerbaijan’s military. Officials in Baku say their army also destroyed 22 Armenian tanks and other heavy armored vehicles, 15 “Osa” anti-aircraft missile systems, 18 drones, eight artillery installations, and three ammunition depots.
More than 50 women have accused Ebola aid workers from the World Health Organization and leading NGOs of sexual exploitation and abuse in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an investigation by The New Humanitarian and the Thomson Reuters Foundation revealed.
[...]
The number and similarity of many of the accounts from women in the eastern city of Beni suggest the practice was widespread, with three organisations vowing to investigate the accusations uncovered by reporters. After being made aware of the allegations, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for them to be “investigated fully”.
Women said they were plied with drinks, others ambushed in offices and hospitals, and some locked in rooms by men who promised jobs or threatened to fire them if they did not comply.
Fifty-one women told reporters they had been sexually abused or exploited by men identifying themselves as aid workers in Beni, one of the outbreak’s epicentres. Not one said she knew of a hotline, email address, or person to contact to report the incidents. Most spoke with reporters during several weeks in July and August.
Only a handful of aid groups said they had received formal claims of abuse, and a local police official said his team had heard rumours, but women had not come forward. Most groups said they had practices in place to stop such abuses.
Of the aid workers and locals who told reporters they knew about accusations of abuse, few said they reported it. Some said they were hoping to strengthen policies and programmes that were being developed to prevent and report the abuse, rather than taking an adversarial approach as whistleblowers.
But sports-style coverage has never been more inappropriate than it is today, because it also fundamentally equates the two candidates. It suggests that they are playing the same game, when they are playing entirely different games. It casts them as competing on an even playing field, when they are not playing by remotely the same rules.
First and foremost, of course, Donald Trump notoriously doesn’t care about facts. Debate rules should require truth-telling, and include methods for the moderators to call out outrageous violations and exact some sort of penalty. But real-time fact-checking has actually been ruled out by the debate organizers (to their shame).
The second feature is the new occurrence of fire in fire-resistant landscapes. As tundra in the far north becomes hotter and drier under the influence of a warmer climate, vegetation types not typically thought of as fuels are starting to catch fire: dwarf shrubs, sedges, grass, moss, even surface peats. Wet landscapes like bogs, fens, and marshes are also becoming vulnerable to burning.
No, it’s nonsense, to dismiss climate change, of course it plays a role as a performance enhancer. It is true, especially in the 19th century, there was a whole wave of huge mega fires, which often claimed many more lives than today. But at that time, the driving force was the new railroad lines, which opened up the land and triggered a wave of settlement, accompanied by the immense load of debris or slash left by land-clearing and logging. Sometimes more than 400 people died in a single fire. This phase continued into the 1930s. Since then, those conditions have passed and wildland fire fighting has been professionalized and expanded, and California is probably the world leader in this field. So, it looked like the problem was solved, but it wasn’t. There are many reasons for this, including the fact that California’s wildfire season now lasts over a month longer than it did then.
Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for president, said today that his Green New Deal would create a manufacturing revival and full employment in Ohio and across the nation.
He presented his Ecosocialist Green New Deal as an emergency economic and climate recovery program that puts unemployed people to work caring for the people and the planet.
His plan projects the creation of 38 million jobs rebuilding all productive systems in the economy for zero greenhouse gas emissions and 100% clean energy by 2030. In order to rapidly complete the economic transformation, the plan features public enterprise and planning in the energy, transportation, and manufacturing sectors.
[...]
“Their theory is that the government gives rich people and corporations more money and they will invest in new production that creates jobs. But working class consumer demand is depressed due to growing economic inequality and the high unemployment of the covid depression. So the rich invest in financial assets like stocks, bonds, commodities, and real estate instead of new productive assets like factories. These financial investments just rearrange and further concentrate ownership of the real productive assets the economy already has. The tax cuts and subsidies never trickle-down to working people as more jobs and income,” Hawkins said.
Hawkins said the direct government employment of people in public enterprises in his Green New Deal would revive manufacturing and the whole economy.
Over the past months, while communities have been struggling to meet basic needs like water and health care, bad-acting corporations like Tyson and Smithfield fight (or quietly settle) class-action lawsuits over their refusal to protect their workers during a global pandemic. They’ve also been leading a quiet campaign to dupe Americans into accepting their carefully crafted narrative of being “good stewards of the planet.” Supporting this false narrative is a new polluting partner in crime: the emerging biogas industry.
When Carolina’s neighbor came to tell her that the fire was coming for her home, she was doubtful. She didn’t see any smoke. But within half an hour it was there, dark and ugly.
When President Donald Trump visited California on September 14 and dismissed the state Secretary of Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot’s plea to recognize the role of climate change in the midst of the Golden State’s worst and most dangerous recorded fire season to date, he gaslighted the tens of millions of West Coast residents suffering through the ordeal.
The great white whale of Trump-era journalism was finally harpooned and boated on Sunday night — Tax returns, ho! — and the resulting product is a thunderclap of venality and greed astride a form of grasping self-interest unseen in the White House since the epic corruption of Warren Harding.
Amid a summer rife with climate-related disasters, the liability lawsuits came like an advancing flood, first Minnesota and Washington D.C. within days of each other in June, followed by Hoboken, Charleston, Delaware and Connecticut in rapid succession in September. Their suits have turned a summer of unrest into a quest to make fossil fuel companies pay for the damages caused by the burning of their products, joining a trend that began three years ago but evolving to match the circumstances of today.
I’ve had a lot more opportunity to travel since I joined Mozilla, and it eventually occurred to me: I could rent aircraft in some of these places I was visiting, and see those places in a different way. A large part of why I chose to fly is the glory of seeing new places. Road trips with more of the good stuff and less of the boredom, basically.
I’m going to write about several of these flights I’ve taken while traveling in recent years, but starting with the one most likely to involve a water landing.
In December 2016, all of Mozilla went to Waikoloa, Hawaii, about an hour north of Kona for a worldwide-company work-together week. That Saturday, when everyone was flying home – or to wherever their travels next took them, it was December in the tropics, after all – I had the whole day to myself. I booked a red-eye back to the mainland, leaving at midnight.
But nevertheless, I woke up early and took the shuttle bus the hour down to Kona International airport: I had a 7am “adventure flight” with a flight instructor and a Cessna 172K Skyhawk that I found at a local FBO via the airport’s AirNav page.
A former prosecutor in the Watergate investigation believes that revelations from a recent report on President Trump’s tax returns over the past several years may result in legal troubles related to allegations of tax fraud for the president once he leaves office.
In a historic victory for unhoused people, Philadelphia city officials agreed to hand over 50 vacant homes to a community land trust, following months of organizing and protest encampments. We hear from one of the organizers and speak to Philadelphia-based Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who has written extensively about housing insecurity and says the direct actions there are applicable across the U.S. “This dynamic exists all over the country where you have both empty housing and houseless people, a completely irrational expression of what American capitalism means,” Taylor says. The sustained movement in Philadelphia established “a model for what all tenant organizing and activist groups should be taking up, which is occupy the space, occupy the properties and put political pressure on public housing authorities to do their job and house people that are unhoused.”
The new revelations about President Trump’s tax returns confirm what we already suspected. Trump might be a lousy businessman, but he is a master tax-dodger. He paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years before his election. In 2016 and 2017, he paid all of $750 a year. The self-proclaimed billionaire paid less than many of the lowest-paid workers in America, many of whom are risking their lives providing essential services during the pandemic.
A new data visualization series illustrates how the pandemic and flawed policy responses have widened long-standing economic, racial, and gender divides.
“The American people should be angry about President Trump’s tax evasion, but that’s not all. They should be much more angry about how much of what Trump did is legal.”
Financial records that President Donald Trump has persistently fought to keep hidden from the American public show that the billionaire real estate mogul didn’t pay a dollar in federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years prior to his White House victory and paid just $750 in both 2016 and 2017, revelations that further expose the extent to which the U.S. tax code imposes greater burdens on the working class than the ultra-wealthy.
Amid the numerous revelations from The New York Times’s reporting on President Trump’s tax returns is the fact that he spent around $70,000 on hair styling appointments, writing those costs off as business expenses for his work on “The Apprentice.”
It is a cult among policy types to say that CEOs maximize shareholder returns, as in this NYT piece. This is in spite of the fact that returns to shareholders have not been especially good in the last two decades. And, this is even though returns were boosted by a huge corporate tax cut in 2017 that increased after-tax profits by more than 10 percent, other things equal.
“We need strong leadership to negotiate trade with other countries and trade policies that serve workers, not multinational companies that send jobs overseas.”
Disney’s parks unit, which brought in more than $26 billion in fiscal 2019, was crushed during the second quarter of this year. The segment’s operating profit fell 58% compared with the previous year, and Disney reported a loss a billion dollars in profit just a few weeks into the global health crisis.
“Complying with a federal court’s order is not optional. The Trump administration is flouting the rule of law to undercount and erase our communities.”
As if climate change, its consuming heat and fires, and the killer pandemic plague were not enough, the country is getting closer to tyranny — by the day.
Past performance is no guarantee of future returns but there are few more reliable ways to predict what comes next than to examine the historical record because, most of the time, history really does repeat.
The United States has never been an equal, peaceful, or functional nation, despite what the history textbooks say. It was built from genocide, slavery, and stolen land. This year, the Black Lives Matter protests and the abolition movement, coupled with a pandemic that preys most on people consistently excluded from the broken health care system, demonstrate the lie of our “more perfect union” even more. Will there ever come a time to abandon this myth and the 50 “united” states altogether? If so, is that moment already here?
It is ironic that for someone who built his fortune on real estate construction, Donald Trump’s singular “achievement” as president has been as a wrecker. He has shattered virtually every single presidential norm in American politics. Paradoxically, the sheer magnitude of this wreckage presents Joe Biden and the Democratic Party with an excellent opportunity to reconstruct the American economy in a way fundamentally different from anything that has been tried over the past 40 years. That means going beyond “Never Trumpism” and embracing a positive vision of national developmentalism, especially in regions that the market has neglected for decades.
The United States is understandably going through a Supreme Court nomination frenzy. The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the cynical postures of the Senate, and the prospect of decades of conservative court domination should Amy Coney Barrett be confirmed all provide more than enough drama. There is, however, another nomination getting much less attention—even though, arguably, it poses at least as much risk: Trump’s nomination of Judy Shelton to the Federal Reserve board.
We witnessed this cynical ploy before when George Bush chose a black man—Clarence Thomas—to fill the seat of Thurgood Marshall, the champion of civil rights.
The New York Times released sequel six in the best-selling Putin-the-Poisoner series on September 22. The incredibly gifted junior G-men and women in the Times Tower have sleuthed yet another episode of boundless evildoing by the arch-villain Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
As President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden face off in the first presidential debate in Cleveland, we speak to author and academic Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who says the multiple crises facing the United States are not getting enough attention leading up to the November election. “We’re in the midst of a national reckoning about systemic racism in this country, about the way that things are governed, the way that this country functions,” says Taylor, historian and contributing writer at The New Yorker. “There is such a myopia with Donald Trump that every sentence, every breath, everything that he does absorbs the entirety of public attention.” She also says it’s time to reimagine the U.S. Supreme Court, which has for most of its history acted to enforce “a conservative social order.”
Presidential debates are rarely won or lost on points. The candidates who prevail are usually the ones who deliver the right line at the right moment and, in so doing, frame the discourse not just on the debate stage but for the rest of the campaign.
Russia’s Constitutional Court has agreed to weigh in on the legality of governors’ self-isolation orders during the coronavirus pandemic. According to the newspaper Kommersant, the high court will hear a lawsuit from the town of Protvino against measures imposed by Moscow Regional Governor Andrey Vorobyov. The case sets up a legal review of the restrictions that were central to how Russia tackled the spread of coronavirus earlier this year, just as the country confronts what appears to be a second wave of mass infections.
Another eight Russian State Duma deputies were hospitalized with COVID-19 in the past week, Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin announced on Tuesday. Since the start of the pandemic, 18 federal lawmakers (including the latest cases) have required such care. “In total, the number of deputies who have had the illness, recovered, and developed antibodies is now 60,” says Volodin.
American democracy is threatened, but not for the reasons depicted in recent election law porn. Donald Trump’s comments about mail-in-voting being rift with fraud or his refusal to respect a peaceful transition of power if he loses, while troubling, are merely a symptom of deeper problems plaguing American democracy.
Support for abolishing the Electoral College has reached its highest level in nearly 10 years as calls to reform other minoritarian structures, including the composition of the Senate and the Supreme Court, come under increasing scrutiny after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Angella Foster, 56, has worked as a nanny in the Boston area since immigrating from Jamaica in 2000. She is also a local political activist. Foster has been reaching out to voters since the early days of the 2020 presidential primary, before COVID-19 hit.
The Biden campaign previously published an open letter to Facebook in June, asking the company to remove false information and enforce its rules against voter suppression. Since then, Facebook has launched a voter information hub and announced that it will stop accepting political ads before the US presidential election. But its attempts to label Trump’s voting-related posts have often stopped at offering generic election information, not actually fact-checking the messages.
New Tron hires would be initiated into Sun’s worldview, and within a matter of months, the company’s internal business strategy was apparently “copy Ethereum,” a former employee told me. The other was “get the pump on the coin.” The oft-repeated phrase meant doing anything to make Tron look flashy and lobby people across the world to convert their national currencies, whether they be renminbi, rupees, or dollars, into Tron’s digital cryptocurrency — thus, pumping up the value of Tron and Justin Sun himself.
But in private, many of Trump’s comments about religion are marked by cynicism and contempt, according to people who have worked for him. Former aides told me they’ve heard Trump ridicule conservative religious leaders, dismiss various faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who constitute his base.
Chinese-owned TikTok launched an in-app guide to the 2020 U.S. elections “to provide access to authoritative information as we continue our work to protect against misinformation,” Michael Beckerman, VP, head of U.S. public policy, wrote in a blog post.
TikTok will include a link to the guide at the bottom of videos related to the U.S. elections, as well as on posts from verified political accounts. The elections hub also will be on the app’s Discover page and will show up in search results. “We expect everyone — verified or not — to follow our Community Guidelines which apply to everyone who uses TikTok and all the content they post,” Beckerman said.
Neither of the campaigns for the two U.S. presidential contenders, Trump and Joe Biden, has a presence on the app. Biden’s campaign earlier this year told staffers to delete TikTok from their phones over security concerns.
Here is some practical advice for casting informed votes to improve the livelihoods of all Americans where they live, work, and raise their children and also to lessen their anxiety, dread, and fear.
For someone who knows little about anything but how to cater to himself, Donald Trump has an eye out for the divine right of kings and how to pursue dictatorship. But there may be limits to his creep toward autocracy.
The Trump campaign categorized millions of Black Americans as individuals to be actively discouraged from voting in the 2016 presidential race, according to a report from the British television network Channel 4.
In the hours after Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, shocked Americans speculated about whether or not Republican Senator Mitt Romney would oppose a Senate confirmation vote just weeks before the election. After all, Romney had emerged as the highest-profile Republican lawmaker critical of the president and was the lone senator from his party who voted to convict Trump earlier this year in the Senate impeachment trial. Back then he had accused Trump of “attempting to corrupt an election to maintain power” and of being “guilty of an appalling abuse of public trust.” Yet, after Ginsburg’s death, Romney did an about-face, lured by the prospect of a decades-long rightward tilt in the nation’s highest court. He remarked to reporters that “my liberal friends have, over many decades, gotten very used to the idea of a liberal court,” and that it was now “appropriate for a nation which is center right to have a court which reflects center-right points of view.”
At this point, Trump supporters who are not plutocrats or diehard Republicans are white supremacists, nativists, Islamophobes, stooges or some combination of all of the above. In a word, they are morons. There is no more reason to take their views seriously than there are reasons to believe a word Donald Trump says.
There has already been much talk about Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s qualifications and controversies—and there will be much more. But the real Supreme Court story is not about Donald Trump’s latest nominee. The real story is a nomination process that, if it progresses as anticipated, will rob an already discredited court of whatever constitutional legitimacy it retains.
As President Trump nominates conservative federal judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat, we look at how an emboldened 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court could dramatically loosen gun laws, hurt immigrant communities and play a possibly central role in deciding a close presidential election. “Her religious conservatism is not what’s extreme about her. It’s her actual judicial opinions,” says Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for The Nation. “She does not use her religion to guide her through her decisions; she uses her extremist conservative views.”
Let’s open our eyes to the majority of human cultures—including and especially indigenous Australian ones—that have consistently enriched the biosphere.
As the League of Women Voters noted in past presidential debates, when the two corporate parties demand control of the process and have a contract with each other rather than allowing for free and open debate, the debates become a “hoodwinking of the American public.”
Of tonight’s debate between Republican Donald Trump and Democrat Joe Biden, Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins said, “I consider this debate a fraud. This debate isn’t sponsored by an independent organization, the Democrats and Republicans have a contract with each other. They have veto power over moderators. This isn’t a debate, it’s a farce.”
Hawkins is in Cleveland outside the debate site at Case Western University. He will be participating in demonstrations for black lives and climate justice from 5 pm to 8 pm. He will be available for media interviews during these demonstrations.
September 27 marked the most recent Sunday protests in Belarus. In an attempt to counter the secret inauguration of Alexander Lukashenko, demonstrators declared the rally the “people’s inauguration” of opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya (Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya). According to media estimates, the fiftieth consecutive day of protests in the Belarusian capital, Minsk, saw a significant decrease in the number of demonstrators. That being said, the rally still had more than 100,000 participants at its height. The demonstration went on for more than four hours, despite strong rain and wind. Protesters from different parts of the city gathered in columns around the Minsk – Hero City obelisk; the first arrests also took place there, as well as satirical performances (some of the demonstrators dressed up in costumes, wore crowns and mustaches, and many carried posters and portraits of Tikhanovskaya). This time around, the march that followed the rally took an unusual route: instead of marching to Lukashenko’s residence, the protesters went to the Academy of Sciences and, from there, proceeded along Independence Avenue to the Uruchcha microdistrict in the city’s northeast — where the Belarusian riot police (OMON) have their base. In total, the protesters walked more than 10 kilometers. After the end of the rally, police officers began making arrests in Uruchcha. According to preliminary figures, approximately 200 people across the country were arrested during opposition protests on September 27, and 140 of them were arrested in Minsk. In the Belarusian regions, the most severe arrests took place in Gomel — there, law enforcement officers used tear gas and flash-bang grenades against protesters.
The European Parliament‘s Internal Market (IMCO) Committee today adopted its report on the proposed Digital Services Act (DSA). The Civil Liberties (LIBE) Committee adopted its report on the Digital Services Act two weeks ago, focusing on privacy and fundamental rights. The Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) will vote on its report on Thursday, focussing on content moderation and freedom of speech.
Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party, Greens/EFA group), the Legal Affairs Committee‘s opinion rapporteur on the Digital Services Act, comments: „In all documents the European Parliament is calling on the Commission to effectively protect our privacy online. The Digital Services Act needs to contain strict sector-specific rules to prevent personal data misuse and identity theft. Citizens shall be given the right to use internet services anonymously, and the permanent recording of our digital life shall come to an end. Europe needs to put an end to the age of surveillance capitalism!“
As we noted late on Friday, even with the weird grifty deal between TikTok and Oracle, Trump’s ban on TikTok was scheduled to go into effect last night — but a court was rushing to review a request by TikTok/Bytedance to put in place a temporary injunction to stop the rules from taking effect.
Earlier today we wrote about a judge blocking Trump’s TikTok ban, though noting that the full reasoning why was under seal. Right about the time that post went up, the details were unsealed. Unlike the WeChat injunction which was done on 1st Amendment grounds, the injunction here doesn’t touch the 1st Amendment questions and just says that the Trump White House (even with presenting evidence under seal) totally failed to substantiate the national security threat of TikTok, even under the IEEPA (International Emergency Economic Powers Act) which grants the President tragically and dangerously broad powers to claim a “national emergency” to block international commerce.
Mostafa Kamel Mostafa, also known as Abu Hamza, was accused of terrorism offenses and extradited to the United States from the United Kingdom in 2012. His extradition was permitted by the European Court of Human Rights and the British courts because the U.S. government assured them Mostafa would not be confined at a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, for a “lengthy indefinite period.”Yet, for the last five years, Mostafa has been housed at ADX Florence in solitary confinement and subject to special administrative measures (SAMs). Mostafa’s attorney Lindsay Lewis maintains the U.S. government misled the courts in order to make it seem like he would not be subject to cruel and inhuman treatment if extradited.Lewis testified at WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition trial on September 29 and told the British magistrate court “the unreliable nature of the U.S. government’s assurances” should be a concern for the court and British authorities in “determining whether to extradite” Assange to the United States. Assange was charged by the U.S. Justice Department with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer intrusion that, as alleged in the indictment, is written like an Espionage Act offense.
The charges criminalize the act of merely receiving classified information, as well as the publication of state secrets from the U.S. government. It targets common practices in newsgathering, which is why the case is widely opposed by press freedom organizations throughout the world.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s legal team called their last witness in the extradition trial, which has unfolded over the past four weeks at the Old Bailey Courthouse in London. The defense and prosecution will file closing submissions to the magistrate court, and a decision on extradition is expected in January 2021.
Throughout the extradition trial, independent media have led the way in defying a blackout by corporate media institutions around the world. They have worked to focus on the substance of testimony from witnesses instead of trivial moments that establishment reporters have turned into sensational clickbait headlines that distract from what is at stake for global press freedom.
Former prison warden Maureen Baird, who presided over the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York and who worked in the U.S. prison system for more than 20 years, testified today about the Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) that she believes Julian Assange would be subjected to if he were extradited to the United States.
Tibetan residents of the New York City area called on Sunday for Tibet’s freedom, demonstrating outside the city’s Chinese consulate to mark the 33rd anniversary of a protest in Tibet’s regional capital Lhasa, the first since 1959, that saw monks, nuns, and laypeople pour into the streets to call for independence.
Organized by the Regional Tibetan Youth Congress of New York and New Jersey, the weekend protest saw slogans raised for the release of political prisoners held by China in Tibet, for greater access to Tibetan areas for foreign media, and for the long life of exiled Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama.
To ensure her skin tone doesn’t lead ExamSoft remote test monitoring software to raise red flags, Caton will keep a light shining directly on her face throughout the two-day process, a tactic she picked up from fellow law school graduates with dark skin.
“If someone has to shine a light in their face, they’re probably going to get a headache, or if they have sensitivity to light or are susceptible to migraines or anything like that it’s going to affect their performance, and that’s something I’m really concerned about,” Caton said.
Next week, law school graduates from 20 states — including Caton, who is in California — will simultaneously take the bar exam from remote locations using ExamSoft. In order to take part, they must first surrender biometric data like an iris scan or facial scan.
To administer the test, ExamSoft will collect and store the biometric data of a generation of legal professionals. More than 30,000 law school graduates will participate, a National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) spokesperson told VentureBeat. This appears to be the largest attempt to remotely administer state bar exams in U.S. history.
The human rights community lost one of its titans on Monday when Moscow Helsinki Group founder Yuri Orlov passed away. He was 96 years old. The group announced his death on its website but did not specify the cause.
Driving along Throckmorton street off Route 9 in central New Jersey, one sees the railroad tracks appearing almost out of nowhere, side by side with the road, out of the shrubbery and trees that have grown like a hood around it. The immigrant workers of Freehold Borough call it La Via—the Way; for years they have walked along these tracks into the center of town to gather and look for work. You see them walking or sitting along the embankment—Hispanic men carrying backpacks, our pandemic era signaled now by the blue surgical masks they’ve donned to protect against Covid-19.1Editor’s Note: Because of their undocumented status, many of the subjects in this article are identified by their first name and the initial of their last name.
While the eastern Mediterranean country of Cyprus was in coronavirus lockdown, on 10 April, Jamal Alhadzi, a 20-year-old Syrian asylum seeker was abducted and driven to a beach near the town of Chloraka along the island’s picturesque western coastline. The police found his body a few days later. Eleven Syrian men were eventually arrested and charged with Alhadzi’s murder, and police described the motive of the killing as a “matter of honour”.
News crews descended on Chloraka and the surrounding region of Paphos, producing dramatic reports, replete with action-movie soundtracks, describing the “ghettoisation” of the town. The coverage generally presented the murder as the latest and most extreme example of alleged anti-social behaviour being perpetrated by refugees in the area, and depicted Syrians and other Muslims as being from a fundamentally alien culture steeped in violence, with little hope for assimilation.
Data on crime in Chloraka is not made public by the Cyprus police, but island-wide statistics show that incidences of serious, economic, and petty crime have all steadily fallen since 2017. Data from the Paphos district, where Chloraka is located, also shows a decrease in crime from 2016 to 2018. Data for 2019 is not yet available. Reports of racist incidents across the island however, have been increasing since 2013.
More than fifty California organizations, businesses, and public officials—including the AARP of California, the San Francisco Tech Council, the California Center for Rural Policy, the Khan Academy, and a number of California cities and counties—join Common Sense Kids Action and EFF in urging Governor Gavin Newsom to call the legislature back into a special session to address the state’s digital divide.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accentuated California’s longstanding broadband access crisis. Governor Newsom himself has identified this as a pressing issue, with a recent executive order to establish a state goal of 100 mbps download speeds for all Californians. More than 2 million Californians lack access to high-speed broadband today. As KQED recently reported, that includes some 1.2 million students across the state who lack adequate Internet access to do their work. In a nationwide survey from Common Sense on the “homework gap,” 12 percent of teachers say a majority of their students lack home access to the internet or a computer to do schoolwork at home, though 20 percent of K-2 students and 41 percent of high school students need broadband internet access outside of school at least once a week.
The cable industry was already struggling last year, when a record number of cable customers “cut the cord” and flocked to over the air or streaming alternatives. That was before a pandemic came to town. Now, with some sports on hiatus and folks desperate to cut costs, the trend has only accelerated, to the point where 6 million Americans are poised to cut the cord this year alone:
Some of this nationalistic dis-integration of the [Internet] has been foreseen as the 1990’s open/global internet gradually became a principal domain of war, news, espionage, politics, propaganda, banking, commerce, entertainment, and education since around 2005. The process of creating hundreds of individual, national internets has been slow because the global Internet — the network of networks — was never designed to recognize national borders and because the United States had been a forceful opponent of a fragmented set of national internets. Both of these conditions have changed — and they are changing rapidly.
Jimerson adds that GroupWatch has been in the works for some time, but the engineering team at Disney Streaming Services waited to roll the out the feature widely until they knew it would work as intended. In particular, they focused on making sure that all the video streams would sync up. Jimerson notes that the feature was designed to work even if people are watching on different devices, in different countries and with different [I]nternet bandwidth.
The jury found the patent to be invalid under 35 U.S.C. § 102(b) as being anticipated by two prior art references that taught MS treatment using naturally occurring IFN-β. The jury also found that Defendants had not established by clear and convincing evidence that the asserted claims were invalid for obviousness, lack of enablement, or for failing to provide an adequate written description and that patients and prescribers directly infringed and Serono contributorily infringed but did not induce infringement.
The court just denied Sandoz’s petition for en banc rehearing in this case, but the issue is pretty interesting and is set-up for a Supreme Court petition. The basic question in the case is whether companies are permitted to work-out an ownership scheme that avoids court scrutiny for obviousness-type-double-patenting.
The basic setup here is that folks at Immunex invented a tumor necrosis factor (TNF) blocker known as etanercept and obtained two patents on the protein and methods of use. U.S. Patent Nos. 5,605,690 and 7,915,225. Roche separately patented its own fusion protein, and Immunex (Amgen) effectively purchased this third patent. However, rather than receiving a formal assignment, Immunex “insisted on styling the U.S. agreement as a license.” Although a license, the grant included sole rights to make, use, sell, import products covered; grant sublicenses; and exclude others (including the patent owner) from commercializing the invention. The license also included a right to sue to enforce the patent and control any litigation including authority to determine any settlement as well as the right to control patent prosecution. En banc petition. This was a complete assignment – except that Roche continued to hold legal title even though Immunex effectively held all rights.
[...]
In its decision, the Federal Circuit agreed with Sandoz that a strict common-ownership test for OTDP could allow for “unjustified patent term extensions” and “harassments” of defendants from multiple lawsuits. In particular, the court focused on transfer of right to control prosecution of the patents as a key feature. In the end, however, the court found that all-substantial-rights had not been granted since Roche retained a “secondary right to sue” infringers “if Immunex fails to rectify any infringement within 180 days after written request by Roche.” The distinction here of course is not actually meaningful in any way with regard to Immunex’s attempt to extend its exclusive rights over its product.
On September 29, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,500 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 7,739,302. The patent is owned by FireNet Technologies, LLC, an NPE and entity of IPinvestments Group. The ’302 patent generally relates to firewalls for protecting network attached devices.
Two movie companies have filed a lawsuit accusing an Arizona couple of downloading and sharing its movies through the YTS website. The husband and wife pair initially appeared to resolve the issue with an out-of-court settlement. However, instead of paying up, the husband lashed out in a tirade against the movie companies’ lawyer, while accusing him of spying on their three-year-old kid.
A new streaming service set to premiere blockbuster movies before they reach theaters is facing legal action. Due to launch on October 2, the Zee Plex “Cinema2Home” platform hopes to pull in large audiences watching from their own homes. However, the use of the word ‘Plex’ is unacceptable to US-based Plex, Inc., which claims that the Zee Plex service is abusing its trademark.
The real story of Canadian film and television production is not lost billions or unbalanced contributions as there has been significant growth in the sector and huge contributions from the unregulated foreign services. Rather, it is how Canadian film and television production has demonstrated it can compete without regulatory intervention. In other words, web giants are already paying without interventions from the CRTC or Minister Guilbeault that may increase consumer costs, reduce competition, violate net neutrality rules, and spark tariff retaliation from the U.S.
Summary: We’re fishing and putting together plenty of old material about Microsoft’s crimes that got it in antitrust trouble (Microsoft was found guilty, but it was never split up and Bill Gates went on to bribing the media, reinventing his identity, in effect substituting reality with self-serving fiction)
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