As we welcome the return of Linux Journal, it’s worth recognizing the impact of the September 22nd announcement of the magazine’s return and how it sparked many feelings of nostalgia and excitement in thousands among the Linux community. That being said, it is also worth noting that the ways in which journalism has changed since Linux Journal’s first publication in 1994. The number of printed magazines have significantly decreased and exclusively digitally published content has become the norm in most cases. Linux Journal experienced this change in 2011 when the print version of the magazine was discontinued. Although many resented the change, it is far from the only magazine that embraced this trend. Despite the bitterness by some, embracing the digital version of Linux Journal allowed for its writers and publishers to direct their focus on taking full advantage of what the internet had to offer.
Despite several advantages of an online publishing format, one concern that was becoming increasingly concerning for Linux Journal until September 22nd, 2020 was the survival of the Linux Journal website. If the website were to have shut down, the community would have potentially lost access to hundreds (or thousands) of articles and documents that were only published on the Linux Journal website and were not collectively available anywhere else. Even if an individual possessed the archive of the monthly issues of the journal, an attempt to republish it would be potentially legally problematic and would certainly show a lack of consideration for the rights of the authors who originally wrote the articles.
Dell has introduced the XPS 13 and XPS 13 2-in-1 devices with 11th-gen Tel Tiger Lake processors at a starting price of $999 and $1,249 respectively. Dell has mostly bumped up the specs. There’s upgraded memory and support for Thunderbolt 4 along with Intel Xe graphics. The design is mostly the same but the screen appears slightly bigger. The company has also launched a XPS 13 developer edition. This device comes with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Dell will also allow any XPS 13 user to download to use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on their device whether it’s the developer edition or not.
Dell’s XPS 13 devices are getting an upgrade on Wednesday. XPS 13 and XPS 13 2-in-1 are getting new refreshes. They are getting Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake processors and will be available from September 30 in the US and Canada.
This week, Dell announced the availability of its XPS 13 Developer Edition, preloaded with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, has been updated with Intel’s€® new 11th generation coreâ⢠processors. This is the first laptop to preload Linux together with Intel’s 10nm Tiger Lake processor. The XPS 13 Developer Edition is focused on bringing out-of-the-box usability, stability and performance for software engineers.
Intel’s 11th generation Core processor brings two key updates to the XPS 13 Developer Edition. First, it includes the option of an integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics card, which brings gaming-capable graphics to light and thin laptops, and can scale up to 32GB RAM, which means developers can do more right from their workstation. Second, Intel’s 11th gen Core processor supports Thunderbolt 4 ports, to make the XPS 13 compatible with data, video and storage devices, achieving a minimum of 40GBPS transfer speed.
When Intel announced 11th Gen "Tiger Lake" last month it wasn't clear how long it would be until seeing systems actually appear with these new processors. Fortunately, the new Dell XPS systems with Tiger Lake and Intel EVO certification are on sale beginning today with shipping dates reported to be later this month.
Coming at the same time as the new Dell XPS 9310 with Windows 10 is a Dell XPS Developer Edition update with the same hardware but running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It's really great seeing the "same day" support for this next-generation of Intel hardware from Dell compared to previously where the Ubuntu preload option didn't tend to come until months later.
A developer edition of the XPS 13 will be available, too (via The Verge). A Linux-based device that’ll be the first laptop to have Ubuntu 20.04 LTS pre-installed on it, so you can start developing right out of the box.
While I did not take the time to install a GNU/Linux distro to local storage and test battery life and long-term performance, I did take an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS LiveUSB for a spin and found that almost everything seemed to be working out of the box.
The world’s first OpenZFS based live image, FreeBSD Subversion to Git Migration video, FreeBSD Instant-workstation 2020, testing the shutdown mechanism, login_ldap added to OpenBSD, and more
This week we have been writing a computer game. We take the tiling window manager challenge and discuss our experiences, bring you some command line love and go over all your wonderful feedback.
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which no news is good news, hardware makes us hard-wary...
We provoked quite a response and cover the feedback that puts us in our place. Then we dive into the wild era of text editor of yore and solve an age-old question.
Unfettered Freedom is a video podcast that focuses on news and topics about GNU/Linux, free software and open source software. On this freedom-packed episode: 0:00 - Intro 2:04 - Eric S. Raymond has some predictions about Windows 10 and Linux.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.8.13 kernel.
All users of the 5.8 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.8.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.8.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
I asked Greg Kroah-Hartman to tell me about the work that goes into making computer peripherals do — mostly — what we ask them to. Greg is the maintainer of the Linux kernel’s stable releases and an author of books about writing Linux drivers. He took me on a journey from a tiny processor embedded in a mouse to deep inside the guts of an operating system.
Oh, and he explained printers to me, too.
This test loops 5000 times, using a different sampler texture for each draw, and then destroys the texture. This is supposed to catch drivers which can’t properly manage their resource refcounts, but instead here zink is getting caught by trying to dump 5000 active resources into the same command buffer, which ooms the system.
The reason for the problem in this case is that, after my recent optimizations which avoid unnecessary flushing, zink only submits the command buffer when a frame is finished or one of the write-flagged resources associated with an active batch is read from. Thus, the whole test runs in one go, only submitting the queue at the very end when the test performs a read.
Today I’m taking a break from writing about my work to write about the work of zink’s newest contributor, He Haocheng (aka @hch12907). Among other things, Haocheng has recently tackled the issue of extension refactoring, which is a huge help for future driver development. I’ve written time and time again about adding extensions, and with this patchset in place, the process is simplified and expedited almost into nonexistence.
A Content Management System (CMS) is software designed to simplify the publication of Web content. In particular, it enables content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files. A CMS is most commonly used in creating an intranet or in establishing a presence on the Web.
This type of software that keeps track of every piece of content on a Web site. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of.
Most CMS use databases to hold their content. This can make installation and maintenance confusing, complicated, and require some technical skill. Other problems can surface over time. For example, it can be difficult to modify, edit, or migrate content, although some CMS make things a little less complicated.
A system profiler is a utility that presents information about the hardware attached to a computer. Having access to information about your hardware can be indispensable when you need to establish exactly what hardware is installed in your machine. For example, the information helps a technical support individual diagnose problems, or help evaluate whether a system will support certain software or hardware.
This type of software lets individuals establish hardware details without opening the computer case. This may not be an option if you do not have direct access to the hardware, relying on the internet to connect to the machine. System profilers let you remotely interrogate a system.
In Windows circles, CPU-Z is a popular freeware tool that gathers information on the main devices of a system without having to conduct technical and manual searching. CPU-Z lays out the raw technical data out to read in easy-to-read tables and is well presented.
Sayonara Player is a free and open-source audio player written for Linux and BSD operating systems using the C++ programming language. It is built with support for the Qt framework and it uses GStreamer as its audio backend.
From the moment you launch Sayonara for the first time, you will notice that it is built with speed in mind. Its simple, clutter-free UI makes it easy to navigate without sacrificing the feel of familiarity even for those using it for the first time.
In as much as this audio player offers blazingly fast performance, it packs a lot of features that are seldom available in some supposedly advanced MP3 players and they are categorized into Main, Nice to have, web-based, and Look and feel. Some of these include a crossfader, an MP3 converter, speed and pitch control, an equalizer, customizable spectrum analyzer, and level meter, an inbuilt tag editor, etc.
KDiskMark is a free and open source alternative to CrystalDiskMark (which is Windows only) for Linux, a GUI HDD / SSD benchmarking software.
KDiskMark comes with a simple user interface, very similar to the one used by CrystalDiskMark, with presets. Under the hood, it uses FIO (Flexible I/O Tester), and it features configurable block size, queues, and threads count for each test. The application can also generate benchmark reports (File -> Save) that you can use to easily share the benchmark results with others, and for future comparisons.
Despite its name (starting with K), this Qt5 application does not have any KDE-specific dependencies, so you can install it no matter what desktop environment you're using without having to install a large number of dependencies.
This blog post covers some of my favorite settings for configuring the behavior of an ssh client (i.e. what is in the man pages for ssh_config). Whether you are looking to add some additional security constraints, minimize failures, or prevent carpal tunnel, ssh_config is an often underutilized, yet powerful tool.
This article will take a look at a few useful ways to modify your ssh_config file to achieve a greater degree of security and control. This post is not about server-side configuration via sshd_config, which deserves its own separate article.
Stacer is a GUI based application written in C++ to monitor and optimize Linux OS. The latest build version of Stacer is 1.1.0, which provides all in one stop for our common activities we perform using Terminal like package management, process management, Host details, CPU, Network and Disk monitoring, startup applications, and a few more.
After being in Beta for quite some time now, the team behind Zombie Panic! Source are almost ready to push out the big overhaul with Linux support into the stable version for everyone.
This has been a long time coming, after initially announcing their Linux plans back in 2018. Work on Zombie Panic! Source version 3.1 went on a lot longer than they originally planned for but it's sounding like all their effort is going to be worth it with a much better game.
Love your digital adaptions of board games, or those that got turned into some form of real-life board game? Well, Valve are going to run a festival dedicated to all that.
Starting on October 21 and running until October 26 there will be all sorts going on. Talks, sales and more.
Here is a look back some of the most popular articles on GamingOnLinux for September 2020, an easy way to for you to keep up to date on what has happened in the past month for Linux gaming, open source and other general Linux news that we cover! If you wish to keep track of these overview posts you can with our Overview RSS - we might bring this back as a regular overview column to enable some catch-up and a place for chat in the comments.
Sword Slinger is a unique physics-based puzzle game about slaying goblins by controlling a sword with magical behaviours. You'll combine chains of magical behaviours together to create complex and original solutions.
Made in the wonderful Godot Engine, it's now confirmed to be releasing along with Linux support on October 20, although the Steam page mentions October 21 so there might be some timezone differences there.
Rip Them Off is a fresh puzzle game that in a small way resembles tower defence, with you trying to make as much money from people passing by as you can.
Just like in a tower defence game, you're dealing with waves of enemies. This time your enemy is the people, and you need to satisfy the demands of the people upstairs. You go through various levels, all of which act like puzzles for you to find the best way to earn enough monies to complete it.
Lord Hector's Demise is the name of the first major free update to Dying Light - Hellraid, the dungeon-crawling DLC for the open-world zombie smasher from Techland.
The problem with this DLC is how far the negative user reviews have gone on Steam. People seemed to have really high expectations for what's quite a small DLC overall. Perhaps this update will be the beginning of a turnaround for it. Techland said this is "just the beginning".
This is brilliant! Unity Technologies creators of the Unity game engine, which is ridiculously popular with indie developers, have started a series of open source game development projects.
With this idea they're hoping to pull together people as part of Unity’s first open-source game development program. Part of the reason is due to the ongoing COVID19 pandemic, with people often unable to meet and miss out on vital experience and team work. So, why not work together online to build something? That's the plan here. Not only that though, it's an opportunity to see how game development can work out in the open from all sides - using the Unity game engine as the base for it all.
Inspired in parts by Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo and Puyo Puyo Tetris with its own unique spin on block-matching battles, Aloof has a demo up now.
What's interesting about Aloof, is that the blocks don't fall by themselves. You're not racing to find a position against a timer. You can move them down, to the side and back up to position them exactly where you want them. The developer said it's all about keeping up with your opponent, taking your time and thinking about what you're doing.
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It's quite a fully featured demo too with single-player, online play which is cross-platform for Linux / macOS and Windows plus there's even local multiplayer too.
Continuing with our series of Desktop Environment Reviews, today is a choice that definitely has a specific purpose. Enlightenment is an extremely lightweight window manager that has a huge amount of utility baked into it. It’s a really specific choice that you either like or dislike. In this Enlightenment review,we will cover its user experience, notable features, performance, and recommendations as to who should use it and where to experience Enlightenment.
Landing in master, plasma has an optional new startup method to launch and manage all our KDE/Plasma services via a system --user interface rather than the current boot scripts. This will be available in Plasma 5.21.
It is currently opt-in, off by default. I hope to make it the default where available after more testing and feedback, but it is important to stress that the current boot-up method will exist and be supported into the future. A lot of work was put into splitting and tidying so the actual amount of duplication in the end result is quite small and manageable.
While Plasma 5.20 isn't shipping until later this month, already for Plasma 5.21 down the pipe is a big change and that is the optional support for systemd starting up of the Plasma session. This can lead to faster startup/load times and other improvements while even the process of bringing up the systemd support helped uncover other KDE bugs.
Longtime KDE developer David Edmundson who was involved in this process of optional startup support via systemd has provided a deep dive on the process. This KDE Plasma 5.21 feature (not the imminent 5.20) allows for using systemd startup in place of the conventional boot scripts though those boot scripts will continue to be supported into the future for still being able to run the KDE desktop without systemd.
There are lots of new features mentioned in the release announcement, I like in particular the ability that settings changed from the default can now be highlighted.
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These packages require Qt 5.15, which is only available in the experimental suite, and there is no way to simply update to Qt 5.15 since all Qt related packages need to be recompiled. So as long as Qt 5.15 doesn’t hit unstable, I cannot really run these packages on my main machine, but I tried a clean Debian virtual machine installing only Plasma 5.19.90 and depending packages, plus some more for a pleasant desktop experience. This worked out quite well, the VM runs Plasma 5.19.90.
The wiki instance we use, there migrated to MediaWiki 3.34 the latest LTS version, this bring a few improvement in the translations module and fix the problem that translated pages couldn’t be moved arround. The commenting plugin was sadly discountinued in this version and instead the Echo extension was added and provide a way to ping people.
The Season of KDE is a 3 weeks long program that provides an opportunity for people to do mentored projects for KDE.
We are still looking for more mentors for SoK 2021. So please consider mentoring for this year season and adding ideas related to the project you are working on in the Wiki page. And joining the #kde-soc channel.
The GTK 3.99.2 release continues the topics from 3.99.1: api cleanup, new and polished demos, better documentation. You can see the details here.
One small note on the topic of documentation is that we are relying on some unreleased gtk-doc features. Therefore, we now include gtk-doc as a subproject in the gtk release tarball. If you are a distributor, don’t be surprised that building GTK installs gtk-doc tools now.
The big news in this snapshot is our work on exposing the power of the new GL-based rendering stack a bit more.
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This is not our first attempt to make a shadertoy lookalike. When we first looked at it, we thought that we would make a shader abstraction that applications could use. We put it to the side when it turned out that making it work across different renderers and backends would require us to write our own shader compiler—too much work.
But after our shadertoy success, we revisited the idea of shaders as first-class objects, with more modest goals: We use GLSL, and don’t attempt to make the shaders work with anything but the OpenGL renderer.
As you may have heard, GNOME 3.38 is out and it’s packed with goodies, which will please long-time fans of the desktop environment (that includes me, of course). But it’s not yet on any distro, so you’ll have to wait a few more weeks for it to land on some of the most popular Linux OSes out there to enjoy the new improvements.
One of the upcoming GNU/Linux distributions that will ship with GNOME 3.38 by default is Canonical’s Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla), which is expected to be released next month on October 22nd. If you can’t wait until then, you’ll be able to take it for a spin as soon as October 1st when the beta release hits the streets.
The 2016 movie, Hidden Figures, highlighted IBM technologists who played a crucial role in NASA’s mission to put a man on the moon. Fifty years later, IBM is still actively working to open possibilities for the new space age. The IBM Blue Tech Innovation, Space Tech Hub team, led by Naeem Altaf, IBM’s Distinguished Engineer and CTO Space Tech, designs and builds framework and technical prototypes for cubesats and space situational awareness, at times with varying degrees of collaborations from space agencies, universities, and space technology companies.
Today, the Space Tech Hub team is excited to announce two new open source projects, the Space Situational Awareness project and the Kubesat project. By open sourcing these two projects, we hope to give more people access to space tech and democratize access to space for all. Developers with an interest in space technology can help take these projects to the next level. These two containerized solutions are built with cloud-native principles and run on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.
Red Hat is helping our customers succeed across a variety of industries. This month, we’re highlighting stories on customers in financial services, energy, and telecommunications that have turned to Red Hat to help improve their IT infrastructure.
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Migrating to a private cloud environment based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform has helped Grupo ASD optimize its hardware use. By repurposing more than 100 underused servers, the company can now provide faster, more stable services to customers. "For example, we had hardware that was used for services related to the Colombian electoral process," said Morales. "With Red Hat OpenStack Platform, we can now use it to support new, cloud-like services based on Kubernetes containers and run workloads on either physical or virtual machines."
Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.9. This is the last RHEL 7 minor release as RHEL 7 enters the Maintenance Support 2 phase.
The future release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform director will bring some changes to how the overcloud nodes are configured during the deployment and how it makes it faster with custom Ansible strategy plugins.
Note: if you haven’t read about "config-download" yet, we suggest you take a look at this previous post ("Greater control of Red Hat OpenStack Platform deployment with Ansible integration") before reading this one.
This post is going to take a deep dive on the changes we made regarding how Ansible strategy plugins can impact the way overcloud nodes are deployed at a large scale, and present a new feature which allows a certain amount of nodes to fail during a deployment or day 2 operation.
A recent article, The present and future of CI/CD with GitOps on Red Hat OpenShift, proposed Tekton as a framework for cloud-native CI/CD pipelines, and Argo CD as its perfect partner for GitOps. GitOps practices support continuous delivery in hybrid, multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.
In this two-part article, we’ll build a CI/CD workflow that demonstrates the potential of combining Tekton and GitOps. You’ll also be introduced to Red Hat OpenShift Serverless, as we’ll use Knative service resources in our CI/CD workflow. Let’s start with an overview of the CI/CD workflow that we’ll implement for the demonstration.
Red Hat OpenShift‘s web console simplifies many development and deployment chores to just a few clicks, but sometimes you need a command-line interface (CLI) to get things done on a cluster. Whether you’re learning by cut-and-paste in a tutorial or troubleshooting a deep bug in production (also often done by cut-and-paste), you’ll likely need to enter at least a line or two at a command prompt.
Starting with version 4.5.3, OpenShift users can try out a tech preview of the new Web Terminal Operator. The new OpenShift web terminal brings indispensable command-line tools right to the web console, and its Linux environment runs in a pod deployed on your OpenShift cluster. The web terminal eliminates the need to install software and configure connections and authentication for your local terminal. It also makes it easier to use OpenShift on devices like tablets and mobile phones, which might lack a native terminal.
This article introduces the new OpenShift web terminal, including how to install and activate the Web Terminal Operator.
Open Liberty 20.0.0.9 lets developers experiment with the type-safe SmallRye GraphQL Client API, and write and run GraphQL queries and mutations more easily with a built-in GraphiQL user interface (UI).
One of the fundamental changes with Fedora 33 is making use of systemd-resolved by default for network name resolution. A number of users testing out Fedora 33 on desktops and servers have run into various issues with systemd-resolved and sought to revert and delay this default behavioral change until a later release.
Following a lengthy mailing list discussion that ticked back up in recent days over systemd-resolved by default in Fedora 33, feedback was sought from the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) on delaying this change until a later release.
This month I started working on ways to make hosting access easier for Debian Developers. I also did some work and planning for the MiniDebConf Online Gaming Edition that we’ll likely announce within the next 1-2 days. Just a bunch of content that needs to be fixed and a registration bug then I think we’ll be ready to send out the call for proposals.
We are pleased to announce that the beta images for Lubuntu 20.10 have been released!
While we have reached the bugfix-only stage of our development cycle, these images are not meant to be used in a production system. We highly recommend joining our development group or our forum to let us know about any issues.
The Linux Mint project unveiled today the codename of the upcoming Linux Mint 20.1 release and an approximate release date of mid December. What’s coming after Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana”? Linux Mint 20.1, of course, and it’s codename has been revealed today by Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre as “Ulyssa,” continuing the long tradition of naming new Linux Mint releases alphabetically.
Linux Mint 20.1 is the first point release of the Linux Mint 20 series, so the codename also uses the “U” letter. As expected, it will be based on Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS (Focal Fossa) point release, which includes various updated packages, but not a major kernel or Mesa graphics stacks bump.
The codename for Linux Mint 20.1 will be “Ulyssa”. The release is planned to arrive just before Christmas.
Hailo has launched a line of M.2 and mini-PCIe cards for Linux systems equipped with its up to 26-TOPS, 3-TOPS per Watt Hailo-8 NPU. The Hailo-8 is featured in Foxconn’s BOXiedge v2 AI edge server.
In May we reported on Foxconn’s BOXiedge v2, which runs Linux on Socionext’s 24x Cortex-A53 SynQuacer SC2A11 SoC and a 3-TOPS per Watt Hailo-8 NPU that can run at up to 26 TOPS. Now Hailo has launched an M.2 implementation of the Hailo-8, with a mini-PCIe version on the way. The M.2 M-key 2242 form-factor accelerator is the world’s highest performance AI M.2 module, claims Hailo.
Arm has announced new CPU, GPU, and ISP specifically designed for autonomous automotive and industrial applications with respectively Cortex-A78AE CPU, Arm Mali-G78AE GPU, and Arm Mali-C71AE ISP.
STMicro launched STM32H7 single-core Cortex-M7 microcontroller family a while ago, followed by some dual-core Cortex-M7/M4 models, with most clocked up to 480 MHz.
The company has now announced five faster parts clocked at up to 550 MHz with STM32H723, STM32H733, STM32H725, STM32H735, and STM32H730 which STMicro claims is “the fastest core speed in the market among MCUs that integrate Flash storage on-chip to run deeply embedded applications”. The embedded flash storage is important, as you may now NXP i.MX RT1170 Cortex-M7/M4 crossover processor can reach up to 1 GHz but does not include flash storage.
We’ve heard about Amlogic S905X4 processor for 4K TV boxes with AV1 support for about year, and while we’ve written about upcoming S905X4 TV boxes such as SDMC DV8919, none of them have launched so far, as silicon design and/or software development have taken a bit longer than expected, and we’re now far from the Q4 2019 launch date shown on the roadmap.
Almost everybody collects something. But keeping up with that collection isn’t always easy. You could just write it all down, but wouldn’t an app be easier? There are plenty of great apps just for collecting one type of thing, like books. However, collection organizing Android apps are ideal for managing nearly any type of collection and even multiple collections in a single app.
Here’s the latest updates to our compilation of recommended software.
The table above shows articles updated in September 2020.
For our entire collection, check out the categories below. This is the largest compilation of recommended software. The collection includes hundreds of articles, with comprehensive sections on internet, graphics, games, programming, science, office, utilities, and more. Almost all of the software is free and open source.
Early this morning I read a post from Colin Levy on Twitter informing the open movie Sintel had its 10th anniversary today. Ten years... This project really influenced so many components of my life (especially about the software and licenses I use now). I also met a lot of great people on it and my artworks started to get a lot of visibility at that time. So, I took my stylus, opened Krita 4.4beta2 and started a quick painting to meditate about it. I hope you'll like it! Thank you again Sintel team and happy anniversary!
One of the more popular operating systems, Linux, is open source. Linux powers the servers for many of the services we feel comfortable sharing personal information on every day.
In a recent article I wrote: Web browser developers are failing their most important task, I took aim at web developers for forgetting the most important task of a web browser was rendering web pages. In this article, it's time I took a turn at web developers.
Once upon a whimsical time, web sites were nothing more than simple HTML. Those now ancient relics were static, sometimes hard to read (remember Geocities and all those black backgrounds and red fonts?), but a lot of fun to explore. They also, for the most part, were rendered the same across the board. Even text browsers like Lynx could faithfully render those sites, minus the animated backgrounds and various images. But the text? Oh yeah, Lynx could handle it.
So too could Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer (IE), Opera (which actually came into being on April 10, 1995), and Mozilla (the original Firefox).
Mozilla Thunderbird 78.3 open-source and free email client has arrived with more improvements and bug fixes, and you can now finally upgrade from older Thunderbird releases. When Thunderbird 78 launched earlier this year, it didn’t support automatic upgrades from version 68 or earlier.
Automatic upgrade was blocked intentionally due to the revamped extension system that only supports MailExtensions, not classic extensions, to no break your Thunderbird installations. Three months later, Mozilla enabled automatic upgrades in Thunderbird with version 78.2.2 released a couple of weeks ago. Now Thunderbird 78.3 is out and it disables the installation of “legacy” MailExtensions.
Firefox 81.0.1 is here only a week after the launch of Firefox 81 to fix a bunch of nasty issues that could disturb your web browsing. One of the important issues addressed in this point release is a high memory bug that occurred when add-ons like Disconnect were installed, causing the web browser to become unresponsive.
Also fixed in Firefox 81.0.1 is an issue with the Picture-in-Picture (PiP) controls not being visible on web pages with audio-only elements, several issues that affected the printing functionality, the missing content on Blackboard course listings, as well as an issue with legacy preferences not being properly applied if they’re set via GPO.
Firefox puts people first. In fact, we’re backed by a not-for-profit and our profits go back into making the internet UNFCKING BELIEVABLE FOR YOU.
Luckily, we aren’t the only ones who believe that the internet works best when your privacy and security are protected. There are a number of us out there pushing for an internet that is powered by more than a handful of large tech companies, because we believe the more choice you have the better things are for you — and for the web. We vetted these companies for how they treat your data and for their potential to shake up things up. In short: they’re solid.
It’s noisy out there. We are inundated with sensational headlines every minute, of every day. You almost could make a full-time job of sorting the fun, interesting or useful memes, feeds and reels from those that should be trashed. It’s hard to know what to pay attention to, and where to put your energy. With so much noise, chaos and division, it seems that one of the only things we all have in common is relying on the internet to help us navigate everything that’s happening in the world, and in our lives.
Pale Moon, an open-source Goanna-based web browser, released version 28.14.0 (and 28.14.1 with quick fix) with stability and security improvements.
Mozilla and the African Telecommunications Union (ATU) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for a joint project that will promote rural connectivity in the Africa region. “The project, pegged to the usage of spectrum policy, regulations and practices, is designed to ensure affordable access to communication across the continent,” said ATU Secretary-General John OMO. “Figuring out how to make spectrum accessible, particularly in rural areas, is critical to bringing people online throughout the African continent,” said Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla, “I’m committed to Mozilla making alliances to address this challenge.”
While half the world is now connected to the internet, the existing policy, regulatory, financial, and technical models are not fit for purpose to connect the poorer and more sparsely populated rural areas. More needs to be done to achieve the United Nations’ universal access goals by 2030. Clear policy and regulatory interventions that can support innovation, and new business models to speed up progress, are urgently required.
We have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to unfck the internet. We should take it. How we talk, work, and play online depends on it.
Dramatic? No, Kardashians is dramatic. The truth is we have more than a few problems to deal with. A whole sh*tton of how we communicate is controlled by a few centi-billionaires. That’s a new word for all of us: centi-billionaire. It means worth over $100 billion USD. Each.
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People deserve to feel safe with the knowledge that their personal information is shielded from hackers, spies and strangers. Let’s Encrypt, an alliance Mozilla helped found, now delivers greater security to over 85% of web transactions — while adding the “s” in “https://” — proving that security is possible on a large scale. With security comes trust, and trust will be the bedrock of a better internet.
In talking to a number of friends, one mentioned that the idea of 'gratis everything' is an increasing problem in many FOSS projects. It's interesting, many years back the fashion was to talk about Open Standards (which are of course great) instead of Open Source (which is better). Noawadays that's less popular and I hear people emphasising the vital Freedom from Price (or even reminders to contribute) in place of Software Freedom. Possibly both of these betray an emphasis on users's rights rather than the responsibility to contribute.
The LibrePlanet call for sessions is open now and will be open until November 20 and we want to hear from you!
Speaking at a conference, and even submitting a proposal, can be intimidating or hard. Luckily, some great, experienced speakers are volunteering their time to help out during the CFS office hours.
Whether you want to propose a talk and want feedback on your idea, proposal wording, talk title, or just advice on how to deal with nerves, there is one more office hour slot scheduled over the next few weeks.
Not bad, eh? Also with plenty of cute characters on the Spritely site (thank you to David Revoy for taking my loose character sketches and making them into such beautiful paintings!)
But those cute characters are there for a reason! Spritely is quite ambitious and has quite a few subprojects. Here's a video that explains how they all fit together. Hopefully that makes things more clear!
Actually that video is from ActivityPub Conference 2020, the talks of which have now all have their videos live! I also moderated the intro keynote panel about ActivityPub authors/editors. Plus there's an easter egg, the ActivityPub Conference Opening Song! :)
When a game was out of date, and he had developed a whole new gaming engine, he would remove licensed third-party code and toss the source out for all to play with under a GPL license, and see what they came up with. All kinds of mods would be made, but more important, it gave coders a chance to show off their chops.
Governance plays a crucial role in our world by determining and defining acceptable ways of interacting and doing business with one other. When governance is done well, it provides a supportive framework that facilitates interaction and fades into the background. When it’s done poorly, things don’t run as smoothly. The same is true within open source projects, where governance is key to providing overall operating guidelines, defining rules of conduct, and stating specific goals.
For the last couple of years, DigitalOcean has run Hacktoberfest, which purports to “support open source” by giving free t-shirts to people who send pull requests to open source repositories.
In reality, Hacktoberfest is a corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community.
So far today, on a single repository, myself and fellow maintainers have closed 11 spam pull requests. Each of these generates notifications, often email, to the 485 watchers of the repository. And each of them requires maintainer time to visit the pull request page, evaluate its spamminess, close it, tag it as spam, lock the thread to prevent further spam comments, and then report the spammer to GitHub in the hopes of stopping their time-wasting rampage.
The rate of spam pull requests is, at this time, around four per hour. And it’s not even October yet in my timezone.
We would like to contribute our supports for Motorola 68000 series CPU (also known as M68k or M680x0) into LLVM. And we want to hear feedbacks from you
Here is some background for M68k: Motorola 68000 series CPU was one of the most popular CPUs used by personal computers in the ‘80, including some of the earliest Apple Macintosh. Fast-forwarding to modern days, M68k is still popular among retrocomputing communities - a bunch of people doing cool stuff, mostly porting modern software and systems, on old computers. For example, Planet m68k (http://m68k.info/ <http://m68k.info/>) is a portal and a bulletin board for many communities that focus on specific M68k computer models, Amiga, Atari, Mac68k to name a few, to share their news. Major operating systems like Debian [1] (Adrian in the CC list can back me up on the Debian part) and NetBSD [2] also support M68k. Long story short, there is a big community and a huge amount of developers in this ecosystem.
Some of you might remember that LLVM backend for M68k has been brought up in the mailing list sever times. The latest one was in 2018 [3]. Though those attempts never went through, we learned precious lessons: It’s important to show who’s behind this backend, how sustainable they are, and how we can make these changes easy to review.
As I illustrated earlier, majorities of the participants in the M68k community are hobbyists and non-profit groups. So do the people behind this backend: Currently there are three core members (CC’ed): Adrian, Artyom, and me. All of us participate in this project as individual contributors. I know the fact that we’re not supported (financially) by any institution or organization will put us in a lower hand when it comes to reliability. However, the quality of the backend has improved quite a lot since the last discussion. We’ve also settled down the code owner / primary maintainer. Not to mention we’ve been working closely with the rest of the M68k community to help us improve the testing. On the financial side, we’re trying to open up a donation campaign (e.g. Patreon). Though that involves many other practical issues so we’re still discussing that. LLVM is an open and inclusive community accepting contributions from talented people all over the world, regardless of their backgrounds. I believe this virtue can still be seen in the support of hardware backends, where each of the targets is judged by its code quality, maintenance, and user base. Rather than which company supports it.
Hobbyist developers are trying once again to get a Motorola 68000 back-end merged into the upstream LLVM compiler. Yes, the M68k processors that are some 30+ years old.
The Motorola 68000 series processors have been around since the 80's thanks to the likes of the early Apple Macintosh computers. Fast forward to 2020, the Motorola 68000 is still a popular target for vintage computer enthusiasts and hobbyists. Community developers have worked on improving the Linux kernel support for M68k hardware like early Apple Powerbooks as recently as a few years ago and the compiler support is a continued target.
[...]
We'll see how this attempt pans out over the weeks ahead if LLVM could finally see a mainline Motorola 68000 series back-end in 2020/2021.
This month I interview Damian Conway, one of the Guardians of Perl. Damian is computer scientist and excellent communicator—his presentations and courses are widely popular around the world. He was the Adjunct Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at Melbourne’s Monash University between 2001 and 2010.
It was an honour to interview my idol. I enjoyed talking to him and I am sure you would have many “aha” moments. For example, Raku’s built-in grammar construct is inspired by the work of Damian’s Parse::RecDescent.
Well, ever since I decided to go slow on submitting Pull Request, I find it hard to find anything simple and easy to work with. Another reason, I don't spend much time review latest upload on CPAN. Earlier, I would constantly watch every upload on CPAN and find anything needed helping hand.
Most of my spare time these days dedicated to "The Weekly Challenge", I rarely find time to review any CPAN module. Having said, I still manage to submit just few to keep the continuity. I struggle to even get 2-digits number each month. Last month, I could only submit 6 Pull Request, at least it is better than August.
During the quarantine I was able to find the good side of the home confination: I hadn’t enough time to read a book due to school’s tests, but for my luck, I had enough time for reading one or two Request For Comments (RFC) documents.
Since my first days studying computer security, the concept of “protocol” fascinated me. Maybe for their enormous diffusion in almost every computer system, our daily lives heavily depends from these processes. As I say “trust on machines but don’t trust humans”. The RFC approach reminds the open source philosophy, which has the same objective (give everyone the opportunity to learn new things through sharing) and the same propagation channel: the internet.
I find it too hard to search for these documents on the IETF website, so I made a fast and efficient script that permits me to download RFCs through a keyword and lets me decide which ones to read and which ones to ignore.
I’ve previously written about Stupid Open Tricks, so know it’s time for some stupid DATA tricks. You probably already know that you can “embed” a file inside a Perl program then read it from the DATA filehandle. David Farrell wrote about this in Perl tokens you should know and he’s the one who reminded me about the curiousity that I’ll demonstrate here.
Logging is a crucial step to be performed by a programmer during software development. It helps developers to track events happening during the execution of a program, which can be helpful for the future debugging process. If you are a new learner or working on a new project, it is a good practice to use logging for tracking the code flow and for solving errors.
Being a Python developer is a fantastic career option. Python is now the most popular language with lots of growing job demand (especially in the fields of Web, Data Science and Machine Learning). You have many job opportunities, you can work around the world, and you get to solve hard problems. One thing that is hard, however, is staying up to date with the constantly evolving ecosystem. You want to be a top-performing python developer, coder, programmer, software developer, but you don’t have time to select from hundreds of articles, videos and podcasts each day.
Using is is around 60% slower than if variable (17.4/10.9ââ°Ë1.596), but using == is 120% slower (24.9/10.9ââ°Ë2.284)! It doesn’t matter if the variable is actually True or False - the differences in performance are similar (if the variable is True, all three scenarios will be slightly slower).
The release package and checksums are available from our downloads page, as well as from the Python Package Index. The PGP key ID used for this release is Mariusz Felisiak: 2EF56372BA48CD1B.
Most Linux admins are hard-pressed to avoid the terminal window. It's almost as though it's in your blood to automatically use commands. And when you do, you usually work with Bourne Again Shell, also known as Bash.
But what is a shell? It is a program that accepts input from a keyboard and hands it off to the OS. As you type commands, the shell interprets them such that the OS can understand them.
This is the second weekly changelog for Knurling-rs, our push to sustainably build better tooling for developing and debugging Rust software for embedded systems. Knurling-rs includes a suite of tools that make it easier to develop, log, debug, and test your embedded Rust libraries and applications!
We're announcing the start of the Portable SIMD Project Group within the Libs team. This group is dedicated to making a portable SIMD API available to stable Rust users.
Developers in search of a Java application server have no shortage of options to consider. But before any enterprise selects and ultimately adopts a Java application server for development and deployment, there are multiple variables that need to be considered.
Development teams will need to know what exactly the application server will be used for in deployment. Is the main goal to act as a basic file server? And if that's the case, what sorts of file formats will be used the most?
Let's compare Apache Tomcat with other servers on the market and examine which one will make the most sense for your situation.
However, the survey of around 32,000 people across the globe found wide variation between some countries and according to which side of the political divide respondents occupied.
The study, conducted for the Pew Research Center in the US before the main onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, found that a median of 36 per cent of people across 20 nations trusted scientists “a lot” to do what was right for the country, the same result as for the military.
My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book. Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming second to it!
To me, the success of this book was totally unexpected: while I was writing it, I thought that it was going to be a bit niche, and I set myself the goal of selling 10,000 copies over the lifetime of the book. Having passed that goal tenfold, this seems like a good opportunity to look back and reflect on the process. I don’t want to make this post too self-congratulatory, but rather I will try to share some insights into the business of book-writing.
Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was overruled by other members of President Trump’s coronavirus task force over whether a “no-sail ban” on cruise ships should continue for another four months, apparently thwarting a public health expert’s understanding and concern about COVID-19 in favor of appeasing the cruise ship industry.
America’s first COVID death was on February 29 of this year, roughly 200 days ago. In that time, more than 200,000 Americans have died of the disease, the equivalent of 1,000 people a day.
Africa reports 1.3 million positive COVID-19 cases, leading some health officials to consider that the continent may have escaped the worst of the coronavirus.
During the first presidential debate, former Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly criticized President Trump over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed over 205,000 people in the United States — the highest death toll in the world. Trump mocked Biden for wearing a mask, while claiming that a vaccine would be available within weeks. “It was very bizarre,” says Marc Lamont Hill, author and professor of media studies and urban education at Temple University. “The idea of not erring on the side of caution is representative of the entire Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis.”
As one of the largest private employers in the world, it probably shouldn't come as too big a surprise that McDonald's is fairly protective of its trademarks. The company, large legal coffers though it has, is not undefeatable, however. It was only a year or so ago, for instance, that McDonald's famously lost its "Big Mac" trademark in Europe when another chain, Supermacs, got it cancelled as it expanded into more European markets.
"To recap here: The drug didn't get any better, the cancer patients didn't get any better, you just got better at making money—you just refined your skills at price gouging."€
This summer Stacy Brosius, a third-grade public school teacher in Peoria, Ariz., painted a message for Republican Governor Doug Ducey on the rear window of her car: “We are not sacrificial lambs.”
"Like just about everything else he has said over the last five years, Donald Trump's claims on lowering drug prices in last night's debate, particularly his outrageous claim about insulin, were nothing but spin and lies."
"He's been blocking the original HEROES Act for 138 days. As always, his priorities are appalling."
According to the Covid Tracking Project, the Midwest is currently experiencing a coronavirus surge. And while there's a mix of reasons behind this new surge— including the (possibly premature) reopening of some cities, universities and schools, and big gatherings like the the Sturgis motorcycle rally— there is a strong link between the low likelihood of public mask-wearing and the places where cases are rising, as The New York Times has reported. Indeed, the Midwest seems to struggle uniquely with mask-wearing, as the Times county-level data reveals.
Given what we know about the success of mitigation strategies like donning a mask, it may seem peculiar for states like Iowa to suddenly surge in cases. That suggests that the midwestern surge originates not because of lack of public health knowledge, but because of cultural reasons, or because of the politicized nature of masks, or both — something that is borne out by locals' observations.
On Monday, the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) released a study (PDF) that tracked a large uptick in phishing attacks in Q2 of 2020. The surge involves rogue sites using the cryptographic protocol Transport Layer Security or TLS, most commonly referred to by its legacy name Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL.
SSL padlocks indicate that a browser is using a secure and encrypted communication pipe to the server hosting the desired website. SSL warnings are also complemented by the additional “HTTPS” indication within a browser address bar, meaning the browser is transmitting information safely using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure.
According to the APWG report, 80 percent of phishing sites used SSL certificates in Q2. Attacks ranged from phishing lures pointing to bogus wire-transfer sites, to social-media platforms Facebook and WhatsApp being pelted with links to shady domains.
In his blog post, Raymond had this to say:
“The economic motive is that Microsoft sheds an ever-larger fraction of its development costs as less and less has to be done in-house.”
There are several factors why Raymond’s theory around open-source, Linux based Windows operating system in the future is far from bizarre and far-fetched. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
Emergency 911 systems were down for more than an hour on Monday in towns and cities across 14 U.S. states. The outages led many news outlets to speculate the problem was related to Microsoft‘s Azure web services platform, which also was struggling with a widespread outage at the time. However, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity the 911 issues stemmed from some kind of technical snafu involving Intrado and Lumen, two companies that together handle 911 calls for a broad swath of the United States.
Here is a practical example found in the wild. The initial PowerShell script has a VT score of 8/59 (SHA256:f4a4fffaa31c59309d7bba7823029cb211a16b3b187fcbb407705e7a5e9421d3). The script is not heavily obfuscated but the technique used is interesting. It uses the CSharpCodeProvider[1] class: [...]
A Russian [attacker] was sentenced to more than seven years in a U.S. prison for stealing the logins of 117 million users of LinkedIn, Dropbox and the defunct social media site Formspring, according to federal prosecutors.
Yevgeniy Nikulin, 32, was convicted in July after a six-day jury trial in San Francisco in what was said to be one of the largest data breaches in U.S. history.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ruby-json-jwt and ruby-rack-cors), Fedora (xen), SUSE (aspell and tar), and Ubuntu (ruby-gon, ruby-kramdown, and ruby-rack).
It is hardly news that we are being tracked as we visit Web sites, and move around the Internet. As this blog has reported, it’s the basis of today’s main online business model: using information about where we go, and what we view, in order to allow advertisers to offer highly-targeted advertising based on the profile that can be constructed from that data. That’s despite the fact that such microtargeted advertising has real risks, is not wanted by the public, and isn’t even very effective. Nonetheless, it’s clear this kind of “surveillance capitalism” is not going away anytime soon. The question is: what can we do to minimize its harmful effects?
At least five bar owners in Grenoble, France have been arrested for providing WiFi at their businesses without keeping logs. The bar owners were arrested under a 2006 law that technically classifies WiFi hotspot providing establishments as ISPs, and require them to store one year’s worth of logs or connection records for anti terrorism purposes. This requirement is in place even if the WiFi network is password protected.
The San Francisco Police Department has found a way -- perhaps inadvertently -- to bypass the city's ban on facial recognition use. As Megan Cassidy reports for the San Francisco Chronicle, all the SFPD has to do is notify other law enforcement agencies about crimes it's investigating.
Now, two never-before-seen documents, “Intermediate Course” and “Advanced Course” training manuals, reveal how the Los Angeles Police Department has taught its officers to use Palantir Gotham, one of the most controversial and powerful law enforcement tools in the world.
Much of that LAPD data consists of the names of people arrested for, convicted of, or even suspected of committing crimes, but that’s just where it starts. Palantir also ingests the bycatch of daily law enforcement activity. Maybe a police officer was told a person knew a suspected gang member. Maybe an officer spoke to a person who lived near a crime “hot spot,” or was in the area when a crime happened. Maybe a police officer simply had a hunch. The context is immaterial. Once the LAPD adds a name to Palantir’s database, that person becomes a data point in a massive police surveillance system.
After nearly four years of the Trump administration, U.S. voters have a pretty good idea of the policies that the President and his Republican allies champion when it comes to America’s dealings with other nations. These policies include massive increases in military spending, lengthy wars abroad, threats of nuclear war, withdrawal from climate and nuclear disarmament treaties, a crackdown on refugees, and abandonment of international institutions.
Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said he would comply with a judge’s order to release the grand jury recording in the Breonna Taylor case after a grand juror alleged that Cameron had misrepresented the deliberations.
"Trump fans the flames of racism, embraces white supremacy, and employs state violence against Americans exercising their rights," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren. "That's Donald Trump's America."
Donald Trump and Joe Biden were asked about how to address racism during the first presidential debate held in Cleveland. While Biden expressed sympathy with victims of police brutality, President Trump insisted that most violence came from left-wing groups — a false claim ignoring that the vast majority of political violence in the U.S. comes from right-wing extremists, according to the FBI and others. Trump’s refusal to reckon with the issue “poses a real and grave threat to Black and Brown people in particular in our country who are often the victims of racial violence,” says Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
"Trump has repeatedly made it clear that he considers violent white supremacists to be a valued part of his base, even after people are murdered."
Asked at yesterday’s presidential debate if he would condemn white supremacist violence by groups like the Proud Boys, President Trump was defiant, remarking: “Almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not the right-wing.” But that very same day, the FBI issued an intelligence report warning of an imminent “violent extremist threat” posed by a far-right militia that includes white supremacists—identifying the current election period up to the 2021 inauguration as a “potential flashpoint.”
The white mobs didn’t care whom they killed as long as the victims were Black. They murdered people in public with guns and rocks. They set fire to houses and slaughtered families trying to escape the flames. In East St. Louis in July 1917, white vigilantes lynched Blacks with impunity.
As hundreds of people flooded into Peninsula Park in Portland, Oregon, last weekend despite the pouring rain, they brought a level of energy that few would expect months into an unending protest in the city. While the city braced itself for dueling rallies between an influx of far right Proud Boys on the one side and anti-fascists on the other, instead, the latter triumphed in a celebration of the strength they have found in continually taking a stand against the far right and police violence.
President Trump refused to condemn white supremacists during the first of three scheduled presidential debates with Joe Biden. When pressed by moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News to disavow far-right extremism, Trump name-checked the Proud Boys and told them to “stand back and stand by,” words widely denounced as a tacit endorsement of the violent, white supremacist organization classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. The Proud Boys almost immediately responded by changing its logo online to include the Trump quote. Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi who now leads the Free Radicals Project, a group focused on helping people disengage from violent extremism, says Trump’s words were a clear encouragement for “continued violence” from far-right groups. We also speak with Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill, who says Trump’s performance at the debate is a continuation of his white supremacist project. “He wants violence in the streets, he wants chaos at the polls, because he wants Americans to feel a sense of unsafety. It’s its own kind of diplomatic terrorism,” he says.
President Trump once again refused to take a hard stance in condemning white supremacy and white supremacist violence during Tuesday night’s tumultuous and bizarre presidential debate with his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
On August 26th, during the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence closed out his acceptance speech with a biblical sleight of hand. Speaking before a crowd at the Fort McHenry National Monument in Baltimore, he exclaimed, “Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire.” In doing so, he essentially rewrote a passage from the New Testament’s Book of Hebrews: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross.”
Donald Trump and Joe Biden were asked about how to address racism during the first presidential debate held in Cleveland. While Biden expressed sympathy with victims of police brutality, President Trump insisted that most violence came from left-wing groups — a false claim ignoring that the vast majority of political violence in the U.S. comes from right-wing extremists, according to the FBI and others. Trump’s refusal to reckon with the issue “poses a real and grave threat to Black and Brown people in particular in our country who are often the victims of racial violence,” says Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. We also speak with Marc Lamont Hill, author and professor of media studies and urban education at Temple University.
Poll watching can be a very safe and very nice thing, but it isn’t just random people in MAGA hats the president has summoned to descend on polling places. This can lead to voter intimidation. In fact, it already has. Earlier this month, a group of flag-toting Trump supporters obstructed voters from entering a polling place in Fairfax, Virginia, forcing officials to open up another portion of the facility.
This is voter suppression, it’s fundamentally anti-democratic, and it’s exactly what Trump was calling for emphatically Tuesday night at the debate. He wants more of this.
A few years back, the gift shop of The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum used to sell this poster with 14 early signs of fascism listed on it. Apparently, the list was originally created by self-proclaimed amateur historian Laurence Britt in 2003 for an article published by Free Inquiry magazine. Even though the gift shop of the museum doesn’t sell this poster anymore, it still goes viral on the internet every once in a while. Why, you ask? Apparently, people find it particularly familiar at this point in American politics.
Everybody honest knows that last night’s debate didn’t matter to most voters. Trump’s ignorance and incompetence have contributed to over 206,000 American deaths; if you’re still willing to vote for Trump, there’s nothing he can say in a two-hour “debate” that’s going to change your mind.
What’s harder for people to wrap their minds around is the fact that we’ve already lost. I know I’m supposed to say that “the 2020 election is the most important election of our lifetime,” but it’s not. The 2016 election was the most important election of our lifetime, and we, as a nation, failed. The media failed, and still fails, to cover Trump accurately. The left failed to get enthused by an imperfect candidate. The right failed to demonstrate any moral or intellectual integrity. Over 100 million people failed to show up. I failed to help enough people understand what was coming, because I understood the inherent danger of John Roberts’s disastrous decision to gut the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder.
So the 2020 election is not, in fact, our last chance at victory. It’s not an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past. This electoral battle is more like the Battle of Dunkirk. We’re fighting for the chance to retreat. We’re fighting for the chance to fight another day.
After nearly a decade of war, aid workers in Syria say untreated trauma and the abuse of pain medications are leading to addiction problems they don’t have the resources to treat – both inside the country and outside its borders. Dr Sulaiman Haj Ibrahim was working for Syria Relief and Development, a Syrian NGO, in 2018 when a young man came to his hospital in the city of Azaz, northwest of Aleppo, desperately seeking help to get off drugs.
The patient was taking the opioid painkillers tramadol and dextropropoxyphene for injuries sustained during an airstrike in his hometown of Eastern Ghouta, outside Damascus. His leg had been amputated; he walked with crutches and had undergone reconstructive surgeries that required medication to ease the pain. He was hooked and he knew it.
He asked the doctor, a urologist by training, for any kind of assistance that might curb his drug use. “He was crying, ‘Please help me, support me’,” Haj Ibrahim told The New Humanitarian during an interview conducted in Gaziantep, a city on Turkey’s southern border with Syria that is home to around half a million refugees.
The conspiracy originated on social media before appearing in a text message sent by President Trump’s re-election campaign to supporters. It was then regurgitated by media outlets like Fox News and New York Post, who cited the Trump campaign, throughout the day, according to NBC News.
A conspiracy theory that Joe Biden would wear an electronic device in his ear during the first presidential debate went wildly viral Tuesday in the hours before the debate, and the groundless theory was later amplified by conservative news outlets that claimed that Biden had backed out of an ear “inspection.”
The conspiracy theory, which was pushed in a text message sent by the Trump campaign after it went viral on Facebook and YouTube, claimed that Biden had declined to “undergo inspection for electronic ear pieces before debate.”
Amazon collapse could soon mean the end of one of Earth’s richest habitats, leaving the rainforest destroyed by humans.
After massive outcry from activists and young voters, debate moderator Chris Wallace questioned President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden about the climate crisis at the first presidential debate. He did not include it in his initial list of debate topics. Kate Aronoff, author and staff writer at The New Republic, says she didn’t expect climate change to come up, but was unsurprised by the responses. “We’ve known for years that Donald Trump denies the science of climate change,” she says. “And we know that Joe Biden doesn’t support a Green New Deal.”
"They talked about climate for 10€ minutes and 30 seconds. This is an€ existential threat we have 10 years to address. We need a climate debate."
Ten years ago, some humans came to the table. We sat down together and looked at the facts. We looked at each other. Looked at the world. And looked at the facts again. The scientific facts. The planet is warming, we said to each other. Species are dying. The Sixth Mass Extinction, we murmured under our breath. What can be done. Must be done. So we made a pact. Signed a treaty. Nodded our heads and dusted our hands and went back to our respective countries. Masters of solutions. Inventive solvers of problems. Phew, we thought to ourselves. That was a close one.
During its planning process for Point Reyes National Seashore, the National Park Service received overwhelming public input opposing commercial ranching on and supporting the recovery of the rare tule elk. The Trump administration, after sparring with the California state government on climate issues, has now unveiled a proposed plan that would expand ranch operations, and further harm elk recovery on these Park Service lands. It’s shaping up to be an anti-environmental decision that advances extractive industries and undermines efforts to maximize carbon sequestration on public lands.
The resolution's success, said one organizer, "is a testament to the social movement power demanding both transformative climate action and concrete steps to remedy the legacy of systemic racism."
What can you say about people for whom the beauty of Nature does not inspire, and the fear of its destruction does not motivate?
For years, the Chamber opposed action to slow climate change, prompting activists to dub the organization the “Chamber of€ Carbon.”
"At a time of rapid biodiversity loss, we are failing to access the treasure chest of incredible diversity on offer and missing a huge opportunity for our generation."
The organizers of the Moscow International Film Festival have pulled Armenian director Jivan Avetisyan’s film “Gate to Heaven” about the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh from the festival’s non-competitive program.
A profound transformation of food systems is needed and such a shift must happen rapidly to constructively address the multiple crises that are threatening humanity.€
In the decade since Leonard Green & Partners, a private equity firm based in Los Angeles, bought control of a hospital company named Prospect Medical Holdings for $205 million, the owners have done handsomely.
Leonard Green extracted $400 million in dividends and fees for itself and investors in its fund — not from profits, but by loading up the company with debt. Prospect CEO Sam Lee, who owns about 20% of the chain, made $128 million while expanding the company from five hospitals in California to 17 across the country. A second executive with an ownership stake took home $94 million.
This story is published as part of StudentNation’s “Vision 2020: Election Stories From the Next Generation,” reports from young journalists that center the concerns of diverse young voters. In this project, working with Dr. Sherri Williams, we recruited young journalists from different backgrounds to develop story ideas and reporting about their peers’ concerns ahead of the most important election of our lives. We’ll continue publishing two stories each week over the course of September.
"This is a sad state of affairs when thousands are dying from a pandemic, an economic crisis is destroying millions of lives and climate change is burning down the planet's ecosystem."
The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced on Wednesday that it would seek to make changes to the format of future debates in this year’s election cycle in response to the chaos that took place in Tuesday night’s debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden.
Before the first presidential debate, I had both hopes and fears. Hopes that Biden would be able to call out Trump’s lies, or at least expose the president’s callous indifference to the terrible suffering Americans have experienced these past few months. Fears that Trump—a far more gifted television performer than he’s usually given credit for—would present a sufficiently plausible counterfeit of competence and leadership to con the tiny, but potentially decisive, sliver of voters who still haven’t made up their minds. (And yes, “Where the f**k have you people been?!” is a totally fair question.)
Trump knows that the white nationalists, championed by misshapen rags like€ Breitbart, are part of his constituency and he cultivates them with his racist rhetoric.
"If you believe in democracy, if you believe in the Constitution and in the rule of law, Trump has got to go."
We cannot blame the Founding Fathers for the “democracy” that we have because we don’t truly have a democracy.€ In fact, the Founding Fathers did everything they could to avoid the possibility that the entire citizenry would have an essential role in electing our government.€ After all, they created the Electoral College that placed Donald Trump in the White House in 2016…and could keep him there for another four years.
If Trump stays in office, can The Purge be far behind?
In the first confrontation between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, democracy lost and the audience took a beating.
The only winner of last night's "debate" was dictatorship and oligarchy.
I don’t know about you, but I held my breath for almost two hours Tuesday night. I knew it was obvious, by any decent standard, that Donald Trump was lying and bullying his way through the first debate—cheating, really—but I’m not used to my mainstream colleagues’ calling him out on it. Instead, I thought former vice president Joe Biden should have entered the trash talk contest and challenged Trump for who could be more obstreperous.
Mikhail Popov, the head of the Federal Center of Informatization (FCI) at Russia’s Central Election Commission, has resigned following controversy over the addition of a captcha test to the website where the commission publishes official data on election results. His resignation was reported by Central Election Commission Chairwoman Ella Pamfilova.
On September 29, the Karelian Supreme Court considered an appeal in the case of historian and human rights activist Yuri Dmitriev. The court ended up overturning his previous three and half year sentence and sentencing him to 13 years in prison. This decision is unprecedented, even among Russian courts — the historian’s defense lawyer has already announced plans to challenge the verdict. Meanwhile, human rights defenders and Dmitriev’s colleagues are calling the sentence the “system’s revenge” for his research on the Soviet Gulag. In a (not so successful) attempt to discuss the political dimension of Dmitriev’s case, Meduza spoke to his defense lawyer, Viktor Anufriev, and attorney Igor Perov, the representative for the victim in the case, Dmitriev’s foster daughter.
President Trump and his allies are already working to cast doubt on the fairness and integrity of the election as early voting begins in some states and the president trails Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the polls. Across the country and especially in battleground states, the Republican Party has worked to restrict access to the ballot as political operatives seize on irregularities arising from a hasty pandemic-era transition toward mail-in voting in order to bolster Trump’s false claims about widespread voter fraud.
"The people stealing everything won last night's debate."
We're seeing an egomaniacal incumbent who's so weak and nefarious that he and his obsequious political party are actually spending untold millions of dollars in a disgraceful effort to try to keep American voters from casting ballots.€
"President Donald Trump, in need of another dose of fear to keep his sputtering reelection bid afloat, is now, officially, throwing the kitchen sink of chauvinism at American voters."
In the lost innocence of yesterday morning, I wrote, “If a thumb-sized Winston Churchill on a spring bursts from Trump’s forehead tonight and bellows ‘Buy War Bonds!’ at the audience, his base will nod sagely to themselves and say it’s all part of The Plan.”
Best practices in election administration matter, and fully institutionalizing vote-by-mail across all states could reduce socioeconomic and racial disparities in voting and improve the accuracy of election results.
Barrett acknowledges she applies a "religious test" to every legal decision. Her legal philosophy should disqualify her.
The first presidential debate of 2020 was a wretched affair, more a verbal brawl than a discussion. The candidates were constantly interrupting each other, with Trump especially given to heckling while Joe Biden made a forlorn effort to get a few words in edgewise. Trump was manic and Biden often seemed dispirited and baffled.
As the battle to restore voting rights in Florida continues, I experienced Florida Voter Suppression 2.0.
"This is a clear voter suppression tactic," said one critic after the president urged his backers to show up at polling places and "watch very carefully."
Among the stream of authoritarian remarks President Donald Trump let loose during his disastrous performance at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, one of the most alarming to voting rights advocates came at the tail-end of the 90-minute event, when the incumbent openly encouraged his supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.”
Here in the United States, we're used to the FBI radicalizing terrorists in order to arrest terrorists. If you don't have any aspiring terrorist friends, the FBI can set you up with some. Don't have a plan to do some terror stuff? No problem, the FBI has all kinds of ideas. Low on cash and unable to pick up your own terrorist supplies? Petty cash has you covered, my man. Just looking for a little acceptance? The FBI can fill that void in your life, just before it arrests you and takes that life away.
“It’s a rigged election,” claimed President Trump when he and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden were asked about election integrity during last night’s debate as the two men sparred over mail-in voting. Trump ended the debate by calling for poll watchers. We speak with Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who says Trump is promoting unlawful intimidation and voter suppression, and has vowed to go to court to block any attempt to discourage or block people from freely casting their ballots.
I first reached out to Stephen Cohen because I was losing my mind.
"It's critically important that people understand the forces at work and also understand that this is not the year to skip voting," says the director of Right Wing Watch.
One new measure could be to cut the microphones if the candidates try to interrupt each other, US media report.
In a number of the adverts, it has been doctored to show Mr Biden wearing wireless Apple headphones. This was not the case in the original image. Some versions circle the ear featuring the headphone.
By Wednesday evening, there were at least 15 different versions of the advert, and according to Facebook's Ad Library, they had reached at least 10 million users.
Facebook has pledged to label posts containing voting misinformation and point users towards accurate information ahead of the election. However its policy does not involve fact-checking political speech, including in advertisements.
The company declined to comment about the latest Trump ad campaign.
Malcolm Bligh Turnbull served as a member of Parliament from 2004 until 2018, and as Prime Minister from September 2015 until August 2018. But he has been a public figure in Australia for decades. He’s an Oxford-educated lawyer who studied there under a Rhodes scholarship, he’s worked as a journalist, as the personal lawyer to Australian media baron Kerry Packer and was a leader of the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to make Australia a republic in the 1990s.
He can also list a number of achievements in the business world. In 1994 he invested half a million dollars into Australian ISP Ozemail, selling his stake to Worldcom in 1999 for $57m.
The money raised by the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) comes from untraceable sources — and Barrett previously rebuffed a Democratic senator’s request that she ask outside groups to refrain from spending big money to try to influence a congressional review of her appellate court nomination.
JCN previously spent as much as $27 million to block President Barack Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court pick and place conservative jurists Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the high court. As the Daily Poster previously reported, JCN received $15.9 million from a single anonymous donor between July 2018 and June 2019, the tax period covering the Kavanaugh fight.
“2020’s a raging hellscape,” he sings while asking the first question. “Any ideas on how to stop a worldwide plague?” Yankovic also addresses the economy, the Supreme Court and climate change as the candidates’ words are turned into auto-tuned, sung responses.
Another day, another truly terrible bill to "reform" Section 230. This is another "bipartisan" bill, which should be a reminder that bad Section 230 ideas are happening across the entire spectrum of political ideologies in Congress. It's being released by Senator Joe Manchin along with Senator John Cornyn, and it's obnoxiously called the See Something Say Something Online Act. I do wonder if they licensed that term, because it was the NYC Metropolitan Transit Association who holds the trademark for "see something, say something" and is notoriously litigious about it. Indeed, the DHS program under the same name "licensed" the name from the MTA, though I still fail to see how either has anything to do with "commerce."
Summary: After a UK teen took her own life in response to bullying on social networking site, ask.fm, her father asked both the site and the UK government to take corrective measures to prevent further tragedies. This wasn't an isolated incident. Reports linked multiple suicides to bullying on the teen-centered site.
The grand mufti of Russia's North Caucasus region of Chechnya, Salakh Mezhiyev, has approved a sentence of torture and humiliation for a 19-year-old Chechen blogger and warned of consequences for an exiled member of the Chechen separatist government, Akhmed Zakayev, who condemned the penalty.
In a video statement posted on Instagram on September 13, Mezhiyev called the teenager "a dirty creature, who received what he deserved."
Video of the torture and humiliation of the young Chechen, who criticized Chechen police and the region's authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov on the opposition 1ADAT Telegram channel, circulated over the Internet last week and shocked people in Chechnya and beyond.
"To put it simply, freedom of speech is in bad shape around the world. Including in Denmark, France and throughout the West. These are troubled times; people prefer order and security to freedom." — Flemming Rose, Le Point, August 15, 2020.
The father of Ali Hassan, a young man who stabbed two persons in an attack using a meat cleaver outside the former Paris office of the controversial Charlie Hebdo magazine last week, has said he is “proud” of his son. In an interview to the web-based channel Naya Pakistan, the father, whose name is not revealed, said his son has “done a great job” and he is “very happy” about the attack.
The French government had condemned the stabbing on Friday outside the former office of the satirical magazine as an act of “Islamist terrorism”.
A man who injured two people in a knife attack outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week admitted that he wanted to set its offices on fire, the lead prosecutor in the case said Tuesday. The suspect also said he lied to police about his age, later confessed to being 25 years old.
Ricard said the suspect planned to force his way into the magazine's offices but when he came across a man and a woman smoking beside a mural to the victims of the 2015 attack on the publication in which 12 people were killed, he thought they were staff at Charlie Hebdo and attacked them with the meat cleaver.
In an interview published in the August 13 issue of the center-right magazine Le Point, titled “Have the Islamists won?” Charlie Hebdo’s lawyer Richard Malka, however, argued that “the situation [of freedom of expression] is much worse than five years ago.” The threats are real. After the republication of the cartoons Al-Qaeda again threatened Charlie Hebdo, the staff of which has been under police protection for years since before the attack and now works from a secret place. On September 21, the magazine’s human resources director had to be rushed to a safe place by the police after death threats against her were considered imminent.
The defense read several witness statements aloud in court today, including two statements from anonymous former employees of UC Global, the Spanish security company led by David Morales which spied on Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The witness statements testify to the particular zeal Morales had in recording conversations between Assange and his lawyers as well as his contract with an American company to report the recordings back to American intelligence officials.
The defense read several witness statements aloud in court today, including two statements from anonymous former employees of UC Global, the Spanish security company led by David Morales which spied on Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The witness statements testify to the particular zeal Morales had in recording conversations between Assange and his lawyers as well as his contract with an American company to report the recordings back to American intelligence officials.
A former warden at ADX Florence has described doing time in the Colorado prison as "a fate worse than death."
An IT expert who worked for UC Global, the Spanish security company which engaged in an espionage operation against Julian Assange while he was in the Ecuador embassy, refused to install numerous microphones and camera systems with “streaming capabilities” because they believed it was illegal.
UC Global director David Morales was told Assange would discover the cameras were streaming in order to “restrain Morales.”
September 29. Central Criminal Court, London.
Tuesday has been another day on which the testimony focused on the extreme inhumane conditions in which Julian Assange would be kept imprisoned in the USA if extradited. The prosecution’s continued tactic of extraordinary aggression towards witnesses who are patently well informed played less well, and there were distinct signs that Judge Baraitser was becoming irritated by this approach. The totality of defence witnesses and the sheer extent of mutual corroboration they provided could not simply be dismissed by the prosecution attempting to characterise all of them as uninformed on a particular detail, still less as all acting in bad faith. To portray one witness as weak may appear justified if they can be shaken, but to attack a succession of patently well-qualified witnesses, on no basis but aggression and unreasoning hostility, becomes quickly unconvincing.
Turkish journalist Abdullah Bozkurt, who is exiled in Sweden, was attacked near his home in Stockholm by three men on 24 September. The International and European Federations of Journalists (IFJ/EFJ) stand in solidarity with Abdullah Bozkurt and join the Swedish Union of Journalists in calling for a thorough investigation into the attack.
Bozkurt and his team of journalists in Sweden run the Nordic Monitor news website which provides exclusive and critical coverage on Turkey and exposes the clandestine activities of the notorious Turkish intelligence agency.
Bozkurt and his team of journalists run Nordic Monitor, which covers Turkey with exclusive stories backed by documents on rampant rights violations in the country and the activities of the Turkish intelligence agency (MðT).
Similarly, last week another attack on a dissident was carried out last week in Sweden. Abdullah Bozkurt, a Turkish journalist forced to live in exile, was attacked by three men near his home in Stockholm. After the violent attack, the perpetrators ran away, while the journalist sustained injuries to the face, head, arms and legs.
Imagine if you could be sued for blocking other users on Twitter, or limiting who could see your Facebook posts. Or if every website were full of racial slurs, conspiracy theories, and fake accounts. Parental control tools could no longer prevent your kids from seeing such heinous content. If that sounds like the Internet you’ve always wanted, then you’ll love Republicans’ new “Online Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Act” and “Online Content Policy Modernization Act!”
Massive opposition to SYSTEMIC RACISM… a racism and the inseparable generalized social inequality that permeate every institution in U.S. society, are the only serious explanations for the magnificent, unprecedented, defiant daily multi-racial mass mobilizations in 2000+ U.S. cities and towns. In the face of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic and police repression courageous millions have taken to the streets. The resounding declarations of Black Lives Matter! and No Justice, No Peace! have reverberated across the world. An unprecedented 84 percent of the U.S. population, according to CNN polls, agree with the anti-racist demonstrators.
Phoenix—In 2010, after the passage of the most punitive anti-immigrant law in the nation, Arizona Senate Bill 1070, I stood up at a meeting of mostly white community and business leaders and angrily lamented: “My people are being hunted.” No one in the room said a word, but I’m sure most knew it was true.
On July 22, the Petrozavodsk City Court in Russia’s Karelia handed down a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence to Yuri Dmitriev for sexually assaulting his underage foster daughter. Had this ruling been allowed to stand, Dmitriev — a historian and activist who led the Karelian chapter of the human rights group Memorial — would have gone free in November of this year, due to the time he has already spent in pre-trial detention.
“Compton—and Los Angeles as a whole—was chock-full of great lyricists with something viable to say,” Marcus Moore writes about rapper Kendrick Lamar’s hometown, “so what made Kendrick the one to rise above it all?” It’s a question at the heart of his new book, The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America, out in October, and one Moore uses to guide readers through wider discussions of artistic achievement and what it means to be the voice of a generation.
The fight for Ms. Doe’s vision of “reproductive freedom for all” is far from over, including for others trapped in immigration detention.
Meagan Burrows is a Staff Attorney for€ Reproductive Freedom Project at ACLU.
The election of Donald Trump and the upsurge of protest against police violence has catalyzed a new wave of activism among professional athletes. Colin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe, LeBron James, and Sean Doolittle are among the growing number of athletes who have been using their celebrity platforms to speak out. Players on championship baseball, football, basketball, and soccer teams have refused to attend White House ceremonies with Trump. Entire leagues were shut down last month when players went on a political strike for Black lives following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis.
"No mayors in good conscience should agree to attend the U20 Summit until Loujain and the other imprisoned Saudi human rights defenders are freed and the bombing and blockading of Yemen ceases."
The United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, on Tuesday, urged the Federal Government to grant Presidential amnesty to 13-year-old Omar Farouq, who was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment by a Sharia Court in Kano State for alleged blasphemy.
I find this notion that there is something wrong that there aren't this or that group of people in a field and they must be pushed and pulled in to be extremely infantilizing. I find the notion that is is racist and horrible that there aren't that many black microbiologists -- or Jews in the NBA -- to be based on a faulty assumption: that it's important that all groups be equally "represented" in each area.
In July, Dmitriyev was sentenced to 3 1/2 years after he was convicted of “violent acts of a sexual nature committed against a person under 14 years of age,” allegations he denies and that he believes are aimed at curbing his research into the crimes of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
[...]
Under Stalin, millions of people were executed, sent to labor camps, or starved to death in famines caused by forced collectivization. During World War II, entire ethnic groups were deported to remote areas as collective punishment for alleged collaboration with the Nazis.
During his research in the late 1990's, Dmitriyev located the secret mass graves at Sandarmokh and Krasnyi Bor in the Republic of Karelia, where thousands of people, including hundreds of Finns, were shot and buried during Stalin's Great Terror in the late 1930s.
According to Reuters news agency, due to time he'd already served, Dmitriyev would have been freed in November. But on Tuesday the supreme court announced that the 64-year old's sentence would be increased to 13 years, in a high-security penal colony.
UN rights experts asked Nigeria on Monday to release a 22-year-old singer who was condemned to death over an allegedly blasphemous song, and said the sentence broke international law.
Yahaya Aminu Sharif was sentenced last month by a sharia court in Kano, in Nigeria’s mostly Muslim north, after he performed the song and shared it on WhatsApp.
The seeds for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s pioneering sex-discrimination Supreme Court briefs were planted in the early years of her legal career of the 1960s, from an unlikely source: Sweden, under the prime ministership of social democrat Olof Palme.
Hillary Clinton warned us.
Vladimir Putin’s spokesman declined on Wednesday to comment on the Karelian Supreme Court’s damning ruling against historian and human rights activist Yuri Dmitriev, though the Kremlin vowed to “take a closer look” at the case. “We know there are media reports [about the new verdict], but honestly this issue is outside our control. I don’t think the president knows about it,” Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
Media headlines in the UK have been dominated by the Tory government’s endless bungles and mishaps in its handling of the Covid pandemic.
Undoubtedly one of the most quoted of Marx’s many quotable lines is the opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, where Marx quipped ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ Such a wonderful observation is timeless and is certainly applicable in the present day. It is easy to see Trump as the reincarnation of Nixon, simply copying the ancient dog-whistle playbook of protecting the suburbs from urban chaos. Back in October 1975, the New York Daily News published the headline ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’, the most infamous headline in New York’s history. If Ford had real power over a city in crisis at the time, the Trump administration now futilely threatens to withhold federal funding for ‘anarchist cities.’ Back in June 1975, the city’s police unions, in protest of large proposed cuts to the department’s budget, were part of the brief Fear City campaign. That campaign featured leaflets emblazed with a hooded gothic skull titled Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York, which advised tourists to ‘stay away from New York City if you possibly can.’ That campaign was quickly squashed due to public outrage. Today police unions openly applaud the threat to cut federal funding to the city they are meant to protect and serve. In July, Ed Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, the second-largest police union in the city, gave at least two television interviews with a mug emblazoned with QAnon imagery clearly seen in the background.
After the federal government rolled back net neutrality protections for consumers in 2017, California stepped up and passed a bill that does what FCC wouldn’t: bar telecoms from blocking and throttling Internet content and imposing paid prioritization schemes. The law, SB 822, ensures that that all Californians have full access to all Internet content and services—at lower prices.
Partnering with the ACLU of Northern California and numerous other public interest advocates, businesses and educators, EFF filed an amicus brief today urging a federal court to reject the telecom industry’s attempt to block enforcement of SB 822. The industry is claiming that California’s law is preempted by federal law—despite a court ruling that said the FCC can’t impose nationwide preemption of state laws protecting net neutrality.
For years now we've discussed how large ISPs have (ab)used the lack of competition in the broadband market by imposing completely arbitrary and unnecessary monthly usage caps and overage fees. ISPs have also taken to exempting their own content from these arbitrary limits while still penalizing competitors -- allowing them to use these restrictions to tilt the playing field in their favor (or the favor of partners with the deepest pockets). For example an AT&T broadband customer who uses AT&T's own streaming service faces no penalties. If that same customer uses Netflix or a competitor they're socked with surcharges.
A new WhatsApp update will allow users to delete an image, video or gif on someone else’s phone after sending it to them.
The Expiring Media feature, first spotted by the website WaBetaInfo, causes media to disappear after being viewed within a chat.
In order to enable the feature, the sender needs to select a “view once” button when sending the image, video or gif.
[...]
These features are developed in such a way that users are unable to take a screenshot of the media in order to save the image to their phone or device.
One area that does not appear to have been affected by a worldwide pandemic are patent disputes, as they appear to be tracking higher than the last several years. The third quarter saw a 13.7% decrease in litigation from last quarter, but assuming this stays the same 2020 litigation is set to reach its highest level since 2017, largely driven by an increase in NPE litigation. On the other hand, PTAB filings increased 16.1% compared to last quarter, its highest level since the fourth quarter of 2018. Combined patent disputes are tracking to increase 12.7% from 2019. One might think a second wave of disputes since winter is coming.
[...]
Figure 1: Assuming current trends continue, 2020 litigation is expected to be the highest since 2016 (3777 cases) and PTAB will be the highest since 2018 (1513). View all District Court and PTAB litigation on Unified’s Portal.
In the context of trade marks, bad faith jurisprudence usually falls into one of two camps. First are cases based on a wrongful claim of proprietorship: these cases commonly involve ex-employees, ex-suppliers, or ex-licensees who may have registered the trade mark of an employer or principal. The second are cases based on providing misleading or false information to the Registrar, e.g. where an applicant declares a bona fide intention to use the mark where no such intention exists.
However, the opposition in the case of Comite Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne v. Keep Waddling International Pte. Ltd. [2020] SGIPOS 10 falls into neither of these camps. Here, an allegation of bad faith was levelled against the Applicant simply because its trade mark contained the word “CHAMPENG.” To the French trade associations charged with the protection of champagne, this made-up word came too close for comfort.
Creative Commons and exceptions and limitations—Creative Commons is strongly committed to furthering exceptions and limitations in international copyright law, as we recently stated in relation to our engagement in policy work at WIPO. It’s also worth recalling that, by design, CC licenses do not reduce, limit, or restrict any rights under exceptions and limitations to copyright. If a use of CC-licensed material would otherwise be allowed because of an applicable exception or limitation (such as those provided in the Marrakesh Treaty, where they apply), one does not need to rely on the CC license or comply with its terms and conditions. This is a fundamental principle of CC licensing. *Learn more.
Techdirt recently wrote about how copyright companies are not satisfied with the already one-sided EU Copyright Directive, but want to tilt the playing-field even further in their favor. In particular, they want to ignore one of the few safeguards that the new law includes: the requirement that legal content must not be blocked by the upload filters that will inevitably be introduced by Article 17 (formerly Article 13). The bad news is that the German government is planning to give the copyright maximalists what they want in its national implementation of the new EU legislation.
UKTVEverywhere, an IPTV service that streamed UK TV channels globally, has reached a shutdown settlement with the BBC and ITV. After being championed as a great platform by business giant Lord Sugar and outspoken broadcaster Piers Morgan, the domain of UKTVEverywhere is now in the hands of Britbox, the digital subscription service owned by the BBC and ITV.
Nintendo has come to an agreement with Uberchips.com, an online store it sued for offering Team-Xecuter's Switch hacks and chips. Ohio-based Uberchips.com and its operator agreed to a $2 million judgment. The consent agreement, which has yet to be signed by the judge, also requires the store to destroy all remaining stock.
