The future of personal computing looks rather bleak to me. The golden age of personal computing in the 1980's is long over. During the past ten years or so, I have been hearing about and seeing the effects of new approaches that governments and computer hardware and software vendors have been inventing to limit the power and utility of our computers. As far as I can see, the end is our subjugation within their ecosystems and our dependence on their cloud solutions. Whether their tools are UEFI, the elimination of useful software (as in the DMCA take-down of the Youtube Downloader website last week), the creation of new operating systems that move computing power out of our computers and into the cloud, "secure" hardware that we cannot modify, or some other approach does not matter. The point is that they are making it harder and harder for us to do what we want with our computers. They are successfully taking away our general-purpose computers and replacing them with little more than Internet appliances.
While an Internet appliance has its place, so does a general-purpose computer. General-purpose computers allow us to own our music and videos--not just watch them until Netflix's contract for our favorite Star Wars movie expires or Apple decides to somehow prevent us from accessing our favorite song in its inventory. A general-purpose computer also allows us to own applications that governments, computer hardware and software companies, and the music and movie industries would rather we did not have--software like Kodi, Handbrake, VLC player, Youtube Downloader, DVD rippers, and open source decentralized applications, just to name a few.
Much of what I do not like about the new computer hardware has been thrust upon us in the name of thinness. I can only surmise that laptop manufacturers' fixation with thinness is about profitability, because it certainly is not about usability. Thin laptops are thermally throttled due to insufficient airflow. They are also less repairable and upgradeable. Some are not upgradeable at all. In fact, it seems that a higher percentage of laptops are completely nonupgradeable every year. User-replaceable batteries are long gone.
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Perhaps my use of Linux will forestall the future to which others have already succumbed, but I cannot continue buying old laptops forever. I have been using laptops manufactured before 2012 partly to avoid UEFI and secure boot. I know that new "open" laptops are still available, but most of them--the System76's, the Purisms, etc.--are overpriced in my opinion. I also know that HP and Dell continue to be more Linux friendly. How long with that last? For years, I have put up with the drawbacks of laptops in exchange for their use wherever I wanted. Now, nine or more years out of date in computer technology, I am still using laptops with mostly USB 2.0 ports and internal SATA SSD's. That means dealing with very slow backups. I seem to be forever making backups. Eventually, laptops manufactured before 2012 will be too slow to do the things I need to do. When that time comes, I will have to transition to something else.
Writing applications for multiple operating environments is one of the major requirements for a developer nowadays. Kubernetes has got the attention as it eliminates the restrictions and extends the core capabilities of the containers. Besides, discoverability, observability, horizontal scaling, and load balancing are the other benefits that Kubernetes can offer through its collection of pods that can perform similar functions. Management has become easy, and we can also use the Deployment Controller to achieve scalability, visibility, time savings, and control over versions. Kubernetes tools are also there to extend the functionalities and eliminate the imposed restrictions for better performance and help you check out the list of seemingly-exhaustive features of Kubernetes.
I think it's time to talk about the Linux noobs. Specifically, how much we need them to keep being relevant, and improve.
pi 400, 3d printing, power woes fixed
It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.
Are you ready to move beyond flat files for your data in Python? Maybe you're not sure where to start with databases and SQL. This week on the show, David Amos returns with another batch of PyCoder’s Weekly articles and projects. We cover a Real Python article about managing data with SQLite and SQLAlchemy.
We have a philosophical debate on cloud vs local and Alex experiences full-blown Americana this Halloween.
Plus how Chris built the most reliable and high-performance mobile internet setup possible in his RV.
For those fond of the Sega Saturn video game console controllers from the mid-90s, the Linux 5.11 kernel has a fix so a common USB adapter for them will behave nicely.
Raising eyebrows this morning was seeing in HID-next a commit mentioning HID: add support for Sega Saturn. What the heck is a kernel being released in 2021 doing with the Sega Saturn from more than two decades prior?
The commit is adding a USB HID quirk (HID_QUIRK_MULTI_INPUT) so that it's exposed to user-space in a consistent manner.
Dell plans to add hardware kill switches for microphone and camera of all the laptops models from 2021 onwards.
As you may know, Dell is one of the few big PC vendors that produce special laptop editions with Linux pre-loaded like Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition that currently runs Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Continuing its interest in the Linux community, the PC maker is now preparing to add a new hardware-level privacy driver for its next-gen Linux-powered Dell laptops.
Dell is adding new code in Linux kernel that will enable you to disable newer Dell system’s webcam and microphone with keyboard shortcuts. Why? Because privacy.
Privacy is no longer a luxury. It has become the basic necessity.
Privacy-oriented niche devices like Librem notebook series offer hardware kill switches to block webcam, microphone, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
Dell will also be providing hardware kill switches in 2021 in the form of keyboard combination. It is implementing kill switch at kernel level and thus allowing you to disable webcam and microphone with keyboard shortcut.
During my presentation at the X Developers Conference I stated that we had been mostly using the Khronos Vulkan Conformance Test suite (aka Vulkan CTS) to validate our Vulkan driver for Raspberry Pi 4 (aka V3DV). While the CTS is an invaluable resource for driver testing and validation, it doesn’t exactly compare to actual real world applications, and so, I made the point that we should try to do more real world testing for the driver after completing initial Vulkan 1.0 support.
To be fair, we had been doing a little bit of this already when I worked on getting the Vulkan ports of all 3 Quake game classics to work with V3DV, which allowed us to identify and fix a few driver bugs during development. The good thing about these games is that we could get the source code and compile them natively for ARM platforms, so testing and debugging was very convenient.
Unfortunately, there are not a plethora of Vulkan applications and games like these that we can easily test and debug on a Raspberry Pi as of today, which posed a problem. One way to work around this limitation that was suggested after my presentation at XDC was to use Zink, the OpenGL to Vulkan layer in Mesa. Using Zink, we can take existing OpenGL applications that are currently available for Raspberry Pi and use them to test our Vulkan implementation a bit more thoroughly, expanding our options for testing while we wait for the Vulkan ecosystem on Raspberry Pi 4 to grow.
The V3DV Vulkan driver that provides support for the Raspberry Pi 4 and newer can now run the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan translation layer.
It was just a few days ago that AMD engineers released AMDVLK 2020.Q4.2 as their newest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver snapshot while that has already been succeeded by version 2020.Q4.3.
AMDVLK 2020.Q4.3 is a small update and the only official changes are enabling VK_EXT_robustness2 support for pre-Vega/GFX9 GPUs and updating against the Vulkan 1.2.158 API. There are also fixes for counter collection hangs with the RenderDoc debugger and fixing Vulkan app failures in conjunction with Mesa 20.1+.
I’ve been busy cramming more code than ever into the repo this week in order to finish up my final project for a while by Friday. I’ll talk more about that tomorrow though. Today I’ve got two things for all of you.
Bit is a new Git CLI written in Go that features autocompletion / suggestions for commands, flags, files and branch names, and even some new commands. It's available for Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows.
Type bit, press the Enter key, and the interactive bit prompt is displayed. Use the Up and Down arrow keys to navigate through all the available Git options, or type a few letters of the command you're looking for to filter the results. bit checkout and bit switch will also show interactive prompts after you press Enter.
If you are looking for a solid standalone, video editor that works really well we would recommend that you are looking at their video editors, they are all free, legal, safe, and reliable.
It is Kdenlive, Shotcut, Blender, Olive, FlowBlade, Openshot, Pitivi, and Natron.
A thing about Linux video editors is that all the data which you want to use in your video, must either be in your Linux folder, which you will find in your file manager or share any folder with your Linux Apps to access the data.
We created this video, of basic editing with Kdenlive 18.12.3 on a Chromebook but there are some tips and tricks for all Linux editors inside a Chromebook so it is good to have a look at it.
Doesn’t matter if you’re a system administrator or a normal user, as it is very important to keep your computer infrastructure and network running smoothly. Hence you need a reliable system monitoring tool that will help you keep track of all the system activities like CPU performance, Memory Usage, Network Monitoring, and status of all the connected devices.
There are many choices available on the internet for system monitoring tools, and we have crafted a list of the best system monitoring tools for you by testing each of them in different circumstances. So, sit back and enjoy the ride to find the best system monitoring tool for Ubuntu, which matches your requirements.
Linux Candy is a series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We only feature open source software in this series.
Some of the programs in this series are purely cosmetic, frivolous pieces of fun. Candy at their finest. But we also include some programs that aren’t purely decorative.
There’s a diverse range of programs included in this series. Programs such as eDEX-UI and Variety are actually highly practical programs. ASCIIQuarium has soothing and relaxing qualities for your desktop. Other programs included in this series (such as lolcat, cacafire) are included purely for their decorative qualities. And then there’s some really fun software that just raises a smile or two.
Pywal is Python software that generates a color palette from the dominant colors in an image. This palette is then applied system-wide and on the fly in various programs.
As a computer user, we completely realize that multiple users can use a single machine as per their requirements. These users generally create separate user accounts to which they logged in whenever they want to access that computer system. In any operating system, whenever an issue arises during the execution of any process, the most important concept is accountability which can only be achieved if you can attribute an action to the actual doer. It means that if an error has occurred just now, then there is a very high chance that the user who is currently using the computer system has somehow caused this issue to occur. Also, if a system administrator wishes to make any changes to the configuration files within the system, then before doing that, he needs to make sure that no user is currently logged into the system so that he cannot cause any hindrance in the system configuration.
All these scenarios point to one common goal and that is to look out for how you can find out the currently logged in users of a system. So, in today’s article, we will be explaining to you all the different methods of printing the user names of the users currently logged into the Linux system on the terminal.
How do I find the angular version used in my application? or how to check installed Angular version on my system?
This tutorial will help you to find the Angular version used by the application. Also, you can find what angular version is installed on my system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install qBittorrent on Debian 10 Buster. For those of you who didn’t know, qBittorrent is an open-source BitTorrent client that aims to provide a free software alternative to üTorrent, available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and FreeBSD.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of qBittorrent on a Debian 10 (Buster).
Sometimes, you may need to remove special characters from a string for programming purposes. PHP has many built-in functions that can be used to remove special characters from string data. This tutorial shows you how to use a few different types of PHP built-in functions to remove special characters from a string.
You can check the Internet speed on Linux by using the Python-based CLI (Command Line Interface) tool Speedtest-cli. This article focuses on checking the Internet speed on CentOS 8.0. You will learn how to install speedtest-cli on a CentOS 8.0 desktop or server and check the internet speed.
In this quick installation guide, you will learn about the different ways to install Discord in your favorite Linux distribution(s).
Discord is a popular VoIP, instant messaging, and digital distribution application. It is mainly designed for creating a specific community(s). Users in these community(s) can talk to each other with voice, calls, video calls, text messaging, stickers, and emojis. Apart from that media and files can also be shared.
Despite being that much, Discord is fast, responsive, and smooth providing a very rich user experience.
FreeOffice doesn’t offer all applications as we have in MS-office, instead, it focuses on three main day to day usage office apps. They are Text (an alternative to MS Word), Presentation (like PowerPoint), and PlanMaker (SpreadSheet).
With the help of this free office suite, we cannot only open native file formats of Microsoft office such as DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX, even saving of files into them is possible as well.
Those who are already familiar with the interface of Microsoft office would not feel a problem in getting used to FreeOffice because of its MS-office like ribbon menu panel. However, a classic one is also available if some of us would like to use that.
Even though it took me a long time to get motivated, I finally containerized several personal Linux services. I've documented the project in this series. In this article, we'll take you through a final example, Request Tracker.
To kick off, we looked at some general principles for migrating applications to containers. Then we looked at the containerization of WordPress, and next, we discussed moving MediaWiki into a container. That project was a bit more involved than the first, with the addition of task scheduling. In this final article, we're going to consider a much more complex migration. Specifically, we'll look at Request Tracker. This service might be the most tricky because both the build and run are fairly sophisticated.
Editor's Note: For the purpose of this article, we assume you'll be building your containers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 using podman build. You may be able to use the instructions on other distributions or with other toolchains, however, some modifications may be required.
The most commonly used Git command is the ‘Git Clone’. This is used to create a copy or clone of an existing target repository in a new directory. The original repository will be stored on the remote machine or the local file system with accessible supported protocols.
In this article, you will explore the use of the Git clone command in detail. A command-line utility of Git that is used to point an existing repository and creates a copy of that targeted directory. Here, we will examine the different Git clone command configuration options and their corresponding examples. We have implemented the Git clone examples on Ubuntu 20.04 Linux system.
This brief tutorial explains what is Nerd Fonts project, how to install Nerd Fonts in Linux and how to add glyphs (icons and symbols) in your code or simply print the icons in the shell with Nerd Fonts.
A step by step guide on how to create task definition in Amazon ECS and how to run tasks in Amazon ECS Cluster
Learn how to fine-tune your WildFly server or Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform configuration using the Ansible collection for JCliff.
On Ubuntu Linux snaps are app packages for desktop, cloud and IoT that are easy to install, secure, cross–platform and dependency–free and their main selling point is security and confinement.
Traditionally packaging for Ubuntu is via .deb packages but much as I try, I never find it straight forward to create or maintain deb packages and I find creating snap packages much easier.
One use case of snaps which doesn’t get talked about much is using snaps to bring no longer supported software back to life. For example, in Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) which is soon to be released there is no longer support for python2 by default and many other packages have been deprecated too in favour of newer and better replacements. This does mean though that packages which depended on these deprecated packages are not installable and will not run. Snaps can fix this.
Following cow_killer‘s recent article on the Dual Sense Controller (for the upcoming PS5 console), he has prepared a full video to show how the controller performs hands-on in different games, despite the current limitations of the driver support.
If you want a quick view of a Linux system’s process load, you can use top or — slightly nicer — htop. But what if you want a quick snapshot of how the disk system is doing? There are a few tools you can use, some of which are not nearly as common as top.
Take a look at how to select your favorite live operating system from a single USB drive.
qemu-sbuild-utils, which were recently accepted into unstable, are a collection of scripts that wrap standard features of sbuild, autopkgtest-build-qemu and vmdb2 to provide a trivial interface for creating and using QEMU-based environments for package building...
We know about the most popular text editor notepad++ which is used on the Windows operating system. Notepad++ is the best text editor for programmers, developers, writers, and researchers also. Users who are working on the Linux operating environment like Ubunto, CentOS, Debian, etc. they also want to use notepad++ editor on their operating system. But, unfortunately, you can’t install it there without using emulators like Wine. So, to solve this problem a clone text editor of notepad++ is available in Linux known as “Notepadqq”. Notepadqq is similar to notepadpad++ that supports the syntax of more than 100 various languages like C, C++, C#, PHP, HTML, Latex and more. You can install different packages on notepadqq according to your needs or you can download code from GitHub or any other source and run in it.
There are many other text editors like the sublime, atom, etc on Linux but, if you want to work on specific applications and need all features on one platform then you must try notepadqq. It provides help to programmers in code understanding.
Filesystems, like file cabinets or drawers, control how your operating system stores data. They also hold metadata like filetypes, what is attached to data, and who has access to that data. For windows or macOS users
Quite honestly, not enough people consider which file system to use for their computers.
Windows and macOS users have no valid reason to look into filesystems because they have one that’s been widely used since its inception. For Windows that’s NTFS and macOS that’s HFS+. For Linux users, there are plenty of different file system options to choose from. The current default in the Linux field is known as the Fourth Extended Filesystem or ext4.
Currently there is discussion for changes in the filesystem space of Linux. Much like the changes to the default init systems and the switch to systemd a few years ago, there has been a push for changing the default Linux filesystem to the Btrfs. No, I'm not using slang or trying to insult you. Btrfs stands for the B-Tree file system. Many Linux users and sysadmins were not too happy with its initial changes. That could be because people are generally hesitant to change, or because they change may have been too abrupt. A friend once said, "I've learned that fear limits you and your vision. It serves as blinders to what may be just a few steps down the road for you." In this article I want to help ease the understanding of Btrfs and make the transition as smooth as butter. Let’s go over a few things first.
Nextcloud has become my go-to on-premise cloud solution. It's a drop-in replacement for Google services and does an outstanding job of integrating with most platforms. With the release of the latest iteration of the desktop client, users can take advantage of end-to-end encryption and a new interface that brings Nextcloud Hub closer to the desktop.
For most platforms, it's incredibly easy to install the desktop client. On both Windows and macOS, it's just a matter of downloading and running the installer file. Once installed, you can then log in to your Nextcloud instance and not only enjoy that desktop to server integration, but sync your files and folders to your local machine.
YAML has gained a lot of popularity over the last few years as it became part of crucial DevOps tools, technologies and processes such as Ansible, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines and so on.
We have already covered lots of tutorials on Ansible and Kubernetes. I thought of covering YAML essentials so that you must be aware for a smoother working with your DevOps tools configuration.
In this video, we are looking at how to install the Brave Browser on Ubuntu 20.10.
Git's git config command (hereafter referred to as "config") enables you to set repository or global options for Git. It has many options, and one of them, includeIf, is handy when you have dual roles using Git, for example, working full time as a developer and contributing to open source projects in your spare time. Most people in this situation don't want to use a common config for both roles or, at the very least, would rather keep certain portions of their config distinct, especially if they use the same computer in both roles.
Fedora releases a new version in approximately every 6 months. Each now version is supported with updates for 13 months in total. The distribution is a good place to get the latest stable software and technologies consistently.
The latest stable version is currently Fedora 33, you can download it from the Fedora official website.
If you are a new Fedora user, you may be wondering about what to do after installation. The guide will help you through this part. No matter the supported Fedora version you use, you can apply everything on this list.
WordPress dashboard is an important page for the website administrators. In this article of the WordPress 101 series, we will learn to read and customize the WordPress dashboard.
If you do not know to set up WordPress, we have written a detailed guide on how to install WordPress – Step By Step. Do check it out.
Today we are looking at how to install WinRAR on a Chromebook with Crossover 20. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Want a few more color scheme options for Qutebrowser? I will show how you can add popular color themes like Solarized, Dracula and Gruvbox to Qutebrowser, and how to bind them so you can easily switch between them. I also discuss custom userscripts in Qutebrowser.
Superliminal's timed exclusive period on the Epic Games Store is now up, and it has released on Steam along with Linux support with a port from Ethan Lee. Note: key provided by EvolvePR.
This perspective puzzle game from Pillow Castle is something of a mind-melting trip through a dream world, where you're able to change the size of objects depending on how you're looking at them while holding them. Bring objects closer and they can shrink, do the same from afar and they can grow huge. It gets a little weird but it's such a fantastic idea and it has been a lot of fun to play through.
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So not only are you playing with bending the rules of reality and changing the size of various objects, the environment is also playing with your sense of depth too and the result is most of the time pretty great. Lots of what you see just sort-of jumps out at you before you've fully realised something isn't entirely right. You also need to study your environment often, since here perception is reality and you will need to look around and match parts of the environment to be able to then interact with certain needed objects.
I recently got a new mouse, and I searched for a way to configure it under Linux. The mouse is a Logitech G102. In most places, Solaar is the recommended go-to software to configure Logitech mice (and other Logitech devices like keyboards or trackpads) on Linux, but it doesn't seem to support my G102, as I'm getting an error saying "No Logitech receiver found".
After some digging I discovered that "Solaar will detect all devices paired with your Unifying, Lightspeed, or Nano receiver, and at the very least display some basic information about them. Solaar will detect some Logitech devices that connect via a USB cable or Bluetooth". So it seems that Solaar is mostly for Logitech devices that use a USB receiver.
Steam has now been available on Linux, at least in Beta, for eight years now and it's come a long way.
What began with a limited Beta that saw over 60,000 people originally sign up for testing, Valve quickly expanded to a fully public release in December of 2012 and then onto a proper release in February 2013.
What looks to be a HD remaster done rather well, the 1991 title Crystal Caves got remaster with Crystal Caves HD back in October and it's now supported on Linux. I've no doubt many of our older readers will have fond memories of this one, it is something of a true classic.
Speaking about the modernizing of the game they said that a "true remastering of a classic game must mean preserving everything that made the original game challenging, fun and addictive, well we did this and more with Crystal Caves by incorporating a new vibrant color pallet to the not only the gameplay action but the storyboard elements as well".
Stripping back fighting games to the ground-based combat experience and back to the basics, FOOTSIES Rollback Edition is out now on Linux. Created by HiFight, a popular Twitter user and blogger that covers the world of fighting games.
"FOOTSIES is a 2D fighting game where players can control character movement horizontally and use one attack button to perform normal and special moves to defeat their opponent. While the controls (and graphics) are super simple, FOOTSIES retains the fundamental feeling of fighting game genre where spacing, hit confirm and whiff punish are keys to achieve victory."
Google continue pushing their Stadia game streaming service, with new game releases and some useful new features that are available now.
Firstly, Stadia now has Family Sharing. Something no doubt many people have been waiting on, and it sounds like they've done it in a pretty ideal way too. With Steam, if someone is using your shared library you're unable to access it at all (unless you kick them off), however with Stadia they're only locking out that one specific game in use. Something I hope Steam eventually do too, as it's a much nicer way to do it.
Not only will Stadia share purchased games, but those you've claimed with Stadia Pro will also be shared, everything including any add-on you own. You can also individually turn on / off sharing for specific titles in your library - useful if you do not want to be even temporarily locked out of one or two. On top of that, if multiple copies are shared in your Family settings, multiple people can play that same game at the same time, it's not based on a priority of who purchased it. Seems like a well thought-out system. Note: the Stadia team noted Family Sharing may take a week to fully roll out.
A long time coming! The popular pixel-art village building sim that gives you god powers, Rise to Ruins, has now launched DRM-free on GOG.com. This is after officially leaving Early Access in October 2019, and going on to gross over $2 million USD back in September 2020.
"Rise to Ruins is at heart a godlike village simulator, but it also throws in plenty of familiar game play mechanics from classic real-time strategy and resource management games like Black and White, Settlers, ActRaiser and many others. It also throws in some twists by melding in some tower defense and survival elements in an attempt to create a new kind of godlike village simulator. The goal is to try to bridge the gap between the depth and complexity of traditional village simulators, the fun of godlikes and tower defense, with the simplicity of real-time strategy games."
The biggest news is that the official kde.org/applications app store has a new home over at apps.kde.org, which not only is easier to remember but also easier to browse in other languages. If you’re new to KDE and you want to see what apps it includes, check out this unified place for browsing all of KDE’s apps.
And now for the updates, as KDE’s November 2020 Apps update (a.k.a. KDE Applications 20.08.3) introduces the latest Krita 4.4 release with its many new features and improvements, KDE Partition Manager 4.2 with improved /etc/fstab handling and support for partitions containing unknown file systems and mount points, and RKWard 0.7.2 IDE/GUI for R with lots of awesome changes.
So it is finally happening. On US Election Day 2020, Pat Volkerding added “vtown” into the ‘testing’ directory of Slackware-current.
The “vtown” in Slackware is essentially my ‘ktown’ repository containing KDE Plasma5 plus its dependencies, with a few exceptions, a number of my packages removed, some caveats and a couple of renamed packages.
A lot of useful information from early adopters can already be found on linuxquestions.org in the dedicated thread about vtown.
One of the benefits of this testing version of Plasma5 in Slackware is the merging of several Slackware and ktown packages. Mostly because I needed to provide Qt5-supporting versions of existing Slackware packages, I needed different names for the ‘ktown’ versions that I was going to provide. I could not risk that people would end up with old Slackware Qt4 based packages which would break Plasma5. So to avoid clashing with packages like “plasma-nm”, “attica”, “baloo”, “kscreen” etc… I had to use alternative package names like “plasma5-nm”, “attica-framework”, “baloo5”, “kscreen2” and several (actually, many) more. Here is the full list of my packages that got merged back into packages with the original Slackware names...
We’re pleased to announce the first release candidate for Qubes OS 4.0.4.
Exactly six months since our last release we are happy to announce latest release, ArchLabs 2020.11.04. Available for immediate download.
OpenBGPD-portable is known to compile and run on FreeBSD, and the Linux distributions Debian, Ubuntu and Alpine Linux. It is our hope that packagers take interest and help adapt OpenBGPD-portable to more distributions.
The mobile ticketing market reached US$ 1.2 Bn in 2019 and was anticipated (before Covid-19) to exhibit an impressive CAGR of 17% during the forecast period of 2020 to 2030. Adoption of mobile ticketing systems and apps to drive ticket sales, reduce reliance on printed paper and plastic tickets, and to encourage digitization and cashless payments are all aiding the growth of the mobile ticketing market. The transportation and event sectors will lead the way in terms of sales through 2030, thereby pushing the growth of the global mobile ticketing market in a big way.
Of the many improvements to Ceph itself, I’d like to point out three areas: Performance, Rados Block Device (RBD) and health alerting. Listing of RGW buckets has been improved significantly. Recovery of objects is now much faster since only the modified portion of the object needs to be copied, this increases latencies during recovery. Mirroring of block devices now supports a snapshot-based mode and cloning of a disk preserves now the sparseness of the underlying objects thus greatly reducing storage needed. Health alerts have been improved, they can be muted now – either temporarily or permanently. If a daemon crashes, administrators can get notified about those. A newly introduced ‘simple’ alert module allows sending emails without using any external monitoring infrastructure. A nearly complete list of changes is in the Ceph upstream release announcement by my colleague Abhishek Lekshmanan, who’s in charge of releasing Ceph upstream.
While IBM is known for its hundred years plus as a technology leader and innovations throughout the decades, none of it would be possible without the talent and skills of new knowledge workers. Let’s follow the path of three recent additions to the IBM developer workforce: Da-in, Diana and Luc who all recently joined Big Blue in the summer of 2019.
We’ll take a dive into their recruitment and growth as enterprise developers at one of the biggest technology companies in the world. You’ll have a front-row seat to their stories as they adjust to corporate culture, the business world and life in the bustling city of Austin, TX. This post is chapter one of a seven chapter series.
This strange time has given us, on one hand, the chance to slow down, yet on the other, it's busier than ever. Especially if you have others in your life to care for in addition to yourself. But you can't give from an empty cup, so, this list of evening rituals is focused on what you can do for yourself right after you turn the computer off, shut the laptop, or say goodbye to the last virtual meeting of the day.
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Can you combine some of these to get even more out of your evening ritual time? If you're working in tech, creating rituals like this—whether they're in the morning, middle of your day, or evening—is critical as we live out a new normal working from home, taking meetings virtually, and missing the energy of in-person connections with colleagues.
This is the latest in our monthly series summarizing the past month on the Community Blog. Please leave a comment below to let me know what you think.
This article introduces the new Debezium Db2 connector for change data capture, now available as a technical preview from Red Hat Integration. Get a quick overview of using Debezium in a Red Hat AMQ Streams Kafka cluster, then find out how to use the new Db2 connector to capture row-level changes in your Db2 database tables.
This is the fifth chapter of RHCE Ansible EX 294 exam preparation series. And in this, you'll learn about using loops in Ansible. The tutorial will be available to public after a week. Become a free member to access it today.
LVM is a tool for logical volume management which includes allocating disks, striping, mirroring and resizing logical volumes. It is commonly used on Fedora installations (prior to BTRFS as default it was LVM+Ext4). But have you ever started up your system to find a message like the image above, after you logged in? Uh oh, Gnome just said the home volume is almost out of space! Luckily, there is likely some space sitting around in another volume, unused and ready to re-alocate. Here’s how to reclaim hard-drive space with LVM.
The key to easily re-alocate space between volumes is the Logical Volume Manager (LVM). Fedora 32 and before use LVM to divide disk space by default. This technology is similar to standard hard-drive partitions, but LVM is a lot more flexible. LVM enables not only flexible volume size management, but also advanced capabilities such as read-write snapshots, striping or mirroring data across multiple drives, using a high-speed drive as a cache for a slower drive, and much more. All of these advanced options can get a bit overwhelming, but resizing a volume is straight-forward.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.3 was announced last week and is now generally available. We encourage Linux developers to download this update and give it a try. We also recommend updating both development and production systems to the new 8.3 release. This article is an overview of the developer highlights of RHEL 8.3, including new application streams for Node.js 14, Ruby 2.7, PHP 7.4, GCC Toolset 10, and more.
Back in August we reported on Red Hat engineers developing Stalld as a new Linux service for detecting stalled threads and also allowing select threads to be boosted based on policy. In the months since Stalld continues to be developed and recently saw new releases.
Stalld continues to mature as this modern Linux solution for detecting stalled system threads and those that are ready-to-run but not allotted any processor time. The boosting is handled via using the SCHEAD_DEADLINE policy.
When you think of cloud-based businesses, telecommunications companies may not be the first ones to spring to your mind. They should be. Telecom, thanks to software-defined networking (SDN) and Network functions virtualization (NFV), runs on the cloud. Now, Canonical, best known for Ubuntu Linux, has won a significant customer for its Charmed OpenStack: Leading Russian telecom MTS.
The Linux Mint team has announced it'll bring an official Chromium package to the distribution
For those who prefer their Linux a bit mintier, but aren’t terribly keen on everything installed via snap, the developers of Linux Mint have announced they’ll be bringing an official Chromium package to the next release of the distribution (20.1, aka Ulyssa). Unlike some Ubuntu-based distributions, Linux Mint users will be able to install Chromium from the traditional apt repositories, instead of having to go with the snap package (which is blocked by default). That installation is as simple as sudo apt-get install chromium -y.
The upcoming major release of elementary OS 6 - code-named "Odin" is under development. In a recent announcement, the team promises about the complete dark style across the system with applications.
Jason unboxes the adorable $100 kit that is the Raspberry Pi 400 (the book is amazing!) then addresses 3 of your burning questions, with answers straight from the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Kontron unveiled a -20 to 85€°C tolerant, full-size SMARC form-factor “fA3399” module that runs Linux on a RK3399K with up to 8GB LPDDR4 and 128GB eMMC plus support for 2x GbE and 3x PCIe.
Today Kontron announced its first product based on the Rockchip RK3399. The Linux-powered fA3399 adopts the rarely used 82 x 80mm full size variant of SMARC 2.1. Kontron says it is also working on a 3.5-inch SBC based on the hexa-core RK3399.
It has been over a year since Shenzhen Xunlong Software announced its enticingly priced Orange Pi Zero2 mini PC, which as you might imagine is intended to compete against the Raspberry Pi Zero. If you have been waiting around for it to arrive, you patience has finally paid off—it is available to order starting at around $16.
Like the Raspberry Pi line of mini PCs, this is a single board computer (SBC) that packs a bunch of hardware and features into a rather minuscule and affordable package. The heart and soul of the Orange Pi Zero2 is the Allwinner H616 SoC, consisting of a quad-core 64-bit Arm Cortex-A53 processor clocked at 1.5GHz, and a Mali G31 MP2 GPU for graphics.
We were expecting Amlogic S905X4 TV boxes with products like Ugoos X4 or Mecool KM6 by the end of last month, but due to supply issues manufacturing has been delayed.
However, if you’d need a device to get started with your own project as soon as possible, for example, to work on AV1 hardware decoding implementation, SEI Robotics has launched an Amlogic S905X4 developer kit for Android TV & RDK development under their DroidLogic brand. The devkit looks like a standard TV box, and the company also provides a choice of tuners with DVB-S2, DVB-T2/C, DVB-S2+DVB-T2/C Combo, ISTB-T, or ATSC-T.
In order to keep smartphones thin while still offering versatile camera features, smartphone makers have largely taken the same approach in recent years – instead of using cameras with lots of moving parts, throw a bunch of different stationary cameras on a phone.
That way you can have different focal lengths to mimic the kind of zoom photography you’d get with a telescopic lens, offer wide-angle photography, and allow users to capture depth of field.
But from time to time we see something different. Earlier this year Vivo introduced a smartphone with a gimbal camera for image stabilization. And once upon a time Samsung and Panasonic used to sell phones with true telescopic lenses for telephoto zoom, but they were bulky.
Raspberry Pi 400 is your complete personal computer, built into a compact keyboard.
Advantech’s “ROM-5780” and Engicam’s “SmarCore RK3399” SMARC 2.1 modules run Linux or Android on a Rockchip RK3399 with 2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC, and optional carrier boards.
Yesterday while researching Kontron’s fA3399 SMARC module, we were unable to find any other Rockchip RK3399-based SMARCs on LinuxGizmos so we cast the Inter-net and found two more. Advantech’s ROM-5780 appears to be recent and Engicam’s SmarCore RK3399 is listed as “coming soon.”
What if you could print circuit “tattoos” right on your body? While the idea of augmentation with a pre-assembled electronic sticker isn’t new, the technique proposed by a team of KAIST and MIT Media Lab researchers takes things to a new level.
Their small BodyPrinter device — composed of a custom 3D-printed plotter with a movable head and a mounted extruder — can be strapped directly to multiple body parts, including fingers, arms, back, stomach, forehead, neck, laps and shoulders. After a little calibration, it deposits conductive ink on a “liquid bandage” substrate that’s already attached directly to a subject’s skin.
Can you make an Arduino-controlled neon sign? While certainly possible, such a setup would involve working with rather high voltages, and the skill to shape glass tubing. As an easier alternative, Max Danilin (who also goes by “gabbapeople”) created an animated pub display using lengths of LED strips made to look like old-school neon tubes.
Although such tubes don’t quite have the same glow as their true neon counterparts, shaping segments was a matter of arranging them on a wooden backing with nails for support. Everything is powered by an Arduino Uno, programmed using the XOD IDE. This activates different LED segments via a pair of eight-channel MOSFET switch arrays.
Adafruit Feather form factor has become more popular in recent years with third-parties introducing Feather compatible boards such as the Giant Board (Linux capable), OrangeCrab (FPGA), or FeatherS2 (ESP32 WiFi + Bluetooth), and as well as FeatherWing add-on boards.
Azerbaijan based MakerTronika Labs has launched their own Feather compatible board with LoRa connectivity: Penguino Feather 4260. The development board is powered by a RAK4260 module based on SAMR34 LoRa SiP and supports both 868 and 915 MHz bands.
Right to repair advocates hailed the measure — which passed with 75 percent approval — as a victory. “Tuesday’s victory shows that people overwhelmingly support fair repair,” wrote iFixit’s Kevin Purdy. “And they want people they trust to fix the things they own.” As cars become increasingly computerized, telematics contain important mechanical data that aids in repairs — and by controlling that data, manufacturers could limit “unauthorized” third-party repairs. The original Massachusetts bill, while groundbreaking, didn’t cover this wirelessly transmitted information. Question 1 will grant users access via a smartphone app.
Massachusetts has been a key battleground for right to repair advocates, who successfully fought claims that Question 1 posed a security risk to car owners. While the state’s law is unique, making companies comply could effectively drive a nationwide standard.
Consumers should have the right to control the data created by the products they own—and that's true not only for automobiles. Consider the outcome of this expensive ballot initiative fight in Massachusetts to be one more small victory for freedom on an Election Day where that was an under-the-radar trend.
On Election Day, Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly voiced their support at the ballot box for Ballot Question 1, which will preserve their right as vehicle owners to have access to and control of their vehicle’s mechanical data necessary for service and repair at the shops of their choice.
Question 1 (Amend Right to Repair Law) read: “Allows car owners to access and share data generated by the operation of the vehicle with independent repair shops.” Voters approved the measure 75% to 25%, according to the Associated Press.
The goal of the new regulation is to give independent shops a level playing field with dealerships' service centers. Should something go wrong on with systems affected by this data, car owners would have to take it to a dealer. Now any shop can access the data, which proponents believe gives owners more freedom to take their car anywhere they'd like, or simply tackle a job on their own.
Not only are AMD Ryzen 5000 series completely dominating in performance but they could soon see open-source Coreboot support as an alternative to the proprietary firmware/BIOS. Project X is an interesting effort around blob-free Coreboot/Oreboot support on AMD Zen.
Ron Minnich of Google who has been one of the original developers to Coreboot/LinuxBIOS has been engaged in "Project X" for providing "pure open-source" support on AMD Zen platforms.
This summer, eLife was pleased to launch Executable Research Articles (ERAs) in partnership with Stencila, allowing authors to post computationally reproducible versions of their published papers in the open-access journal.
The open source ERA technology stack delivers a truly web-native format that treats live, interactive code as a first-class asset. It was developed to address current challenges around reproducing and reusing published results—challenges mostly caused by the lack of infrastructure for publishers to showcase the richness and sophistication of the computational methods used by researchers in their work.
I play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons (D&D), a tabletop role-playing game in which players take control of mythic heroes to explore imaginary dungeons and fight make-believe dragons. D&D players often like to draw maps on big sheets of butcher's paper, or buy and craft evocative set pieces, so that they can track their progress through the realms with gaming miniatures.
However, when you're playing online, you need digital maps and digital miniatures plus a way to share these components among all players. For years, I've used the excellent MapTool software, an open source client that runs locally on each player's computer and shares maps and miniatures among all. When one player moves her piece forward on her map, another player sees it on his. It's a powerful application that makes my gaming life easy, private, and flexible.
Her latest book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software, published by Stripe Press a few months ago, is a great read and if this topic interests you, I highly recommend it.
The book itself is simply gorgeous; bright orange, textured hardcover binding, thick paper, wonderful typesetting — it has everything to please. Well, nearly everything. Sadly, it is only available on Amazon, exclusively in the United States. A real let down for a book on Free and Open Source Software.
Last week I received the official notice: There is now a German company named "Fre(i)e Software GmbH" registered with the German Trade Register.
[...]
This is all pretty fresh. I'll be happy about hearing your feedback, ideas and worries. If you are interested in joining the company, please let me know. If you are interested in supporting a company with such values, please also let me know.
In July of 2016, Anthony Jones made the case that the Mozilla-built Firefox for Linux should stop supporting the ALSA backend (and also the WinXP WinMM backend) so that we could innovate on features for more modern audio backends.
(( You don’t need to know what an audio backend is to understand this story. ))
The code supporting ALSA would remain in tree for any Linux distribution who wished to maintain the backend and build it for themselves, but Mozilla would stop shipping Firefox with that code in it.
But how could we ensure the number of Firefoxen relying on this backend was small enough that we wouldn’t be removing something our users desperately needed? Luckily :padenot had just added an audio backend measurement to Telemetry. “We’ll have data soon,” he wrote.
By the end of August we’d heard from Firefox Nightly and Firefox Developer Edition that only 3.5% and 2% (respectively) of Linux subsessions with audio used ALSA. This was small enough to for the removal to move ahead.
We are pleased to announce beta release 2.69d of GNU Autoconf.
This release includes five weeks' worth of bug fixes since the previous beta release, 2.69c. We are closing in on a final release, but there are some known, important regressions from 2.69 that still need to be fixed before we can make a final release. See yesterday's release status update, https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/autotools-announce/2020-11/msg00000.html for details.
Please test this beta thoroughly and report bugs **to the Savannah bug tracker**: https://savannah.gnu.org/support/?func=additem&group=autoconf (Sending mail to bug-autoconf does not file the report in the bug tracker, unfortunately, and then it has a good chance of getting forgotten about.) Please be clear about whether each bug you report is a regression from 2.69 or not; at this stage, I will only be adding regressions to the release blocker list, not other bugs.
I need to reiterate something I said in the status announcement yesterday: the funding I had to work on the 2.70 release has been completely used up. I will continue as volunteer release manager for 2.70, but I cannot promise to fix all of the regressions myself as an unpaid volunteer. If you have time to help by developing and testing patches for the release blockers, please do.
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Want to learn about producing technical videos on YouTube and gaining an audience? Nelson Jamal, who has experience with both, joins us to take a deep look at his soon-to-be-released PyCharm tutorial on YouTube: planning, recording, and publishing. He’ll compare these with some of his other popular videos and what he’s learned along the way.
Docker packaging is an exercise in shoving square pegs into round holes, over and over and over again.
Consider the Poetry packaging tool for Python. One of Poetry’s features can make Docker rebuilds slower, by breaking Docker’s caching.
And it’s not a bad feature, there’s nothing really wrong with it, it just—doesn’t fit.
Let’s see what the problem is, go over some workarounds—which have their own problems, obviously—and then briefly consider why everything about Docker packaging is always slightly broken.
The Jupyter project offers interactive ways to write software with technology like JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebook. This software is commonly used for data analysis, but what you might not know (and the Jupyter community didn't expect) is how many things you can do with it.
If your company produces physical products, you might think that your most important asset is the in-depth experience acquired in your field, your loyal customer base, or your top-notch manufacturing facilities, not your software.
In a recent column in ACM Queue, Kode Vicious (aka George V. Neville-Neil) answered a reader’s question about removing code from a system.
“Code removal,” Kode Vicious says, “is like cleaning house, only sometimes you clean house with a flamethrower, which, honestly, is very satisfying. Since you're using a version-control system (you had better be using a VCS!), it's very easy to remove code without worry. If you ever need the code you removed, you can retrieve it from the VCS at will.”
Kode Vicious advises that “if you have truly dead code that can no longer be reached from anywhere in the system and that is not simply conditionally compiled-out test code ... then that code should be removed immediately. A good compiler or other tool will tell you when you have dead code, which should make the job fairly straightforward.”
With much of the nation’s attention understandably consumed by developments in the high-stakes presidential election, the United States on Wednesday reported a daily record of more than 104,000 new Covid-19 infections, the latest alarming indication that — far from President Donald Trump’s repeated insistence that the virus is fading away — the deadly pandemic is only getting worse as the winter months approach.
"I dreaded this day... Historic and unprecedented abandonment of the American people."
Microsoft has warned Windows 10 users that recent updates come with a number of bugs. Reportedly, one of the flaws prevents individuals from updating Office products due to a certificate loss issue.
After downloading October 2020 Patch Tuesday updates, some Windows 10 users received an error message reading, “Download of Office 365 file failed, error =” when trying to apply the latest Office updates. Microsoft is yet to reveal a workaround for the problem, meaning individuals must uninstall the faulty Windows update, then update Office and then re-install the Windows patch.
Since its founding in the 1930s, Hewlett-Packard has been synonymous with innovation, and many's the engineer who had cause to praise its workhorse oscillators, minicomputers, servers, and PCs. But since the turn of this century, the company's changed its name to HP and its focus to sleazy ways to part unhappy printer owners from their money. Printer companies have long excelled at this dishonorable practice, but HP is truly an innovator, the industry-leading Darth Vader of sleaze, always ready to strong-arm you into a "deal" and then alter it later to tilt things even further to its advantage.
The company's just beat its own record, converting its "Free ink for life" plan into a "Pay us $0.99 every month for the rest of your life or your printer stops working" plan.
"youtube-dl" is a popular free software tool for downloading videos from YouTube and other user-uploaded video platforms. GitHub recently took down youtube-dl’s code repository at the behest of the Recording Industry Association of America, potentially stopping many thousands of users, and other programs and services, that rely on it.On...
The video downloading utility youtube-dl, like other large open source projects, accepts contributions from all around the globe. It is used practically wherever there's an Internet connection. It's especially shocking, therefore, when what looks like a domestic legal spat–involving a take-down demand written by lawyers representing the Recording Industry...
Have you tried modifying, repairing, or diagnosing a product but bumped into encryption, a password requirement, or some other technological roadblock that got in the way? EFF wants your stories to help us fight for your right to get around those obstacles.Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)...
"youtube-dl" is a popular free software tool for downloading videos from YouTube and other user-uploaded video platforms. GitHub recently took down youtube-dl’s code repository at the behest of the Recording Industry Association of America,€ potentially€ stopping many thousands of users, and other€ programs and services,€ that rely on it.
On its face, this might seem like an ordinary copyright takedown of the type that happens every day. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a copyright holder can ask a platform to take down an allegedly infringing post and the platform must comply. (The platform must also allow the alleged infringer to file a counter-notice, requiring the copyright holder to file a lawsuit if she wants the allegedly infringing work kept offline.) But there’s a huge difference here with some frightening ramifications: youtube-dl doesn’t infringe on any RIAA copyrights.
The video downloading utility youtube-dl, like other large open source projects, accepts contributions from all around the globe. It is used practically wherever there's an Internet connection. It's especially shocking, therefore, when what looks like a domestic legal spat–involving a take-down demand written by lawyers representing the Recording Industry...
Have you tried modifying, repairing, or diagnosing a product but bumped into encryption, a password requirement, or some other technological roadblock that got in the way? EFF wants your stories to help us fight for your right to get around those obstacles.Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)...
The antitrust lawsuit against Google filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and eleven state attorneys general has the potential to be the most important competition case against a technology company since the DOJ’s 1998 suit against Microsoft. The complaint is broad, covering Google’s power over search generally, along...
This is an Open Access Week guest post by Jordan Bunker, prototype engineer and open access advocate.After the world went into lockdown for COVID-19, Makers were suddenly confined to their workshops. Rather than idly wait it out, many of them decided to put their tools and skills...
A critical vulnerability (CVE-2020-27955) in Git Large File Storage (Git LFS), an open source Git extension for versioning large files, allows attackers to achieve remote code execution if the Windows-using victim is tricked into cloning the attacker’s malicious repository using a vulnerable Git version control tool, security researcher Dawid Golunski has discovered.
Upstream Linux kernel developers are looking at changing some of their Spectre mitigation defaults around what's applied to SECCOMP threads by default in part due to the performance hit as well as other reasons.
For mitigating Spectre Variant Two and Spectre Variant Four (Speculative Store Bypass Disable - SSBD), SECCOMP threads see the mitigation by default while other threads rely on per-thread controls via prctl. Linux kernel developers from the likes of Red Hat and Google are now looking at not applying the mitigations by default to SECCOMP threads for the Spectre V2/V4 mitigations.
SECCOMP is the Linux secure computing mode and used by software like QEMU, OpenSSH, systemd, Snap, and more. Up until now at least the mitigations unless using the kernel parameter overrides would apply their mitigations by default to all SECCOMP threads.
Google has launched a program to alert users of security vulnerabilities in Android phones manufactured by third-party companies. The security program, Android Partner Vulnerabilities Initiative (APVI), has already made headlines after revealing a major flaw in a popular browser.
According to Google, APVI is an initiative to detect vulnerabilities in an Android device that could compromise its “security posture.” The initiative follows ISO’s guidelines for disclosing security issues and also covers device code maintained by Android Security Bulletin.
Welcome to our brand-new tutorial series on Linux security hardening. In this tutorial series, we will cover security and hardening techniques that apply to any Linux based server or workstation. By following this guide, you can make sure that no attacker can compromise your Linux system. This guide will contain a total of 7 sections as shown below.
You may have heard about firewalls before. Firewall is a security solution that can be used to monitor and control traffic that comes into and going out from our system. Iptables is the built-in firewall in a Linux machine. With Iptables, you can set rules to filter out unwanted incoming/outgoing traffic to your system. In this tutorial, let’s see how we can do that
Listed Australia media monitoring company Isentia has informed the ASX that its net profit before tax will fall by between $7 million and $8.5 million due to a ransomware attack on its infrastructure which has disrupted the services offered by its SaaS platform, Mediaportal.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (sddm and wordpress), Fedora (blueman, chromium, pngcheck, and salt), openSUSE (chromium, salt, tiff, tigervnc, tmux, tomcat, transfig, and xen), Oracle (freetype, kernel, libX11, thunderbird, and xorg-x11-server), SUSE (bluez, ImageMagick, java-1_8_0-openjdk, rmt-server, salt, and u-boot), and Ubuntu (dom4j, firefox, netqmail, phpldapadmin, and tmux).
New findings were published today on the “Gitpaste-12” worm, which uses GitHub and Pastebin to store component code and has at least 12 different attack modules available to exploit a range of vulns. It relies on GitHub and Pastebin to download payloads, two sites that aren’t usually blocked and their connection is encrypted, making it more difficult for traditional security measures to block this attack. Current targets are Linux based x86 servers, and Linux ARM and MIPS based IoT devices (see link at bottom). Experts with Security offer observations.
A new worm has been discovered by researchers at Juniper Threat Labs that targets Linux-based x86 servers, in addition to Linux ARM and MIPS-based IoT devices. It is believed that the malware, dubbed Gitpaste-12, could potentially be deployed against additional targets in the future, as its test code suggests the malware is still in development.
The threat uses GitHub and Pastebin to house component code and uses at least 12 attack modules to compromise target devices. Juniper has reported both the Pastebin URL and GitHub repository that was initially used by the worm, resulting in both being shut down.
The Gitpaste-12 exploit operates by first using known exploits or brute forcing passwords to gain entry into a system. It then uses a cron software utility to schedule updates to the botnet. System defences are systematically taken down, including those connected to large-scale public cloud deployments.
On election day, California voters chose to pass Proposition 24, which alters the newly inaugurated California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) with some pretty significant changes that can be viewed as a net negative for privacy. There are modest improvements to the CCPA; however, some such as those in the No on Prop 24 campaign, think that those modest gains are far outweighed by the negatives. One of those negatives is formally allowing tech companies to pay for privacy.
Belatedly realizing its reputation is a burning dumpster floating in a sewage retention pond, Clearview is finally trying to turn things around. Building a database of personal info and photos scraped from public websites, the company turned its product over to anyone who was interested. Private companies, billionaires, dozens of police departments -- all were invited to play with Clearview's toy, which set an untested facial recognition algorithm loose in the billions of images in its database.
Clearview AI extracts faceprints from billions of people, without their consent, and uses these faceprints to offer a service to law enforcement agencies seeking to identify suspects in photos. Following an exposé by the New York Times this past January, Clearview faces more than ten lawsuits, including one brought by the ACLU, alleging the company’s faceprinting violates the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). That watershed law requires opt-in consent before a company collects a person’s biometrics. Clearview moved to dismiss, arguing that the First Amendment bars this BIPA claim.
EFF just filed an amicus brief in this case, arguing that applying BIPA to Clearview’s faceprinting does not offend the First Amendment. Following a short summary, this post walks through our arguments in detail.€ [...]
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality in your home can involve the creation of an intimate portrait of your private life. The VR/AR headsets can request audio and video of the inside of our house, telemetry about our movements, depth data and images that can build a highly accurate geometrical representation...
Clearview AI extracts faceprints from billions of people, without their consent, and uses these faceprints to offer a service to law enforcement agencies seeking to identify suspects in photos. Following an exposé by the New York Times this past January, Clearview faces more than ten lawsuits, including ...
Updated as of 11/5/2020: This blog post has been updated with a statement from Amazon in regards to the pilot program described in the Jackson Free Press. You can find their response at the bottom of the page. This is not a drill. Red alert: The police surveillance...
EFF opposes police Body Worn Cameras (BWCs), unless they come with strict safeguards to ensure they actually promote officer accountability without surveilling the public. Police already have too many surveillance technologies, and deploy them all too frequently against people of color and protesters. We have taken this...
As of September 2020, 721 people have been shot to death by the police and, of them, 96 percent (694) were male and 4 percent (27) were female. This was same percentage of police killings in 2019 when, out of a total of 1,004 people who were killed, 96 percent (961) were male and 4 percent (43) were female. A similar pattern is evident in the breakdowns of police killings for 2017 and 2018.
A similar pattern of police killings was evident during the period of 1980 thru 1998 when 98 percent of those killed were males. Of those killings, over half (56%) were White people while about two-fifths (42%) were Black people. During the period of 1976 to 1998, the FBI reports “8,578 felons were justifiably killed by police”; killings by police were referred to as “justifiable homicides” and the persons that police killed were referred to as “felons.”
Facebook is seeing an increase in worrying activity around the US election, according to reports from The New York Times and BuzzFeed News. According to BuzzFeed News, which viewed a post on Facebook’s internal message board, the company has been tracking a rise in “violence and incitement trends” associated with hashtags and keywords.
Facebook did not respond for comment about a potential rise in the organization of violent activity on its platform by the time of publication, but Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois told BuzzFeed News that the company is “staying vigilant in detecting content that could incite violence during this time of heightened uncertainty.” In a statement given to The Verge and others, Facebook said that the company is seeing a rise in misinformation about the election. “As vote counting continues, we are seeing more reports of inaccurate claims about the election,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. “While many of these claims have low engagement on our platform, we are taking additional temporary steps, which we’ve previously discussed, to keep this content from reaching more people.
Increasingly, extremism trackers say, the threat of unrest isn't just from a radical fringe but from ordinary people who are whipped up by partisan, conspiratorial messages. Already, Trump voters are coalescing by the tens of thousands in Facebook groups associated with the hashtag campaign "Stop the Steal"; one group amassed more than 350,000 members before it was removed for spreading disinformation. The group had called for "boots on the ground to protect the integrity of the vote."
Scores of people, reportedly Turkish and Azerbaijani nationals, took to the streets of Lyon on Wednesday night, allegedly “looking for Armenians”, according to videos shared on social media.
In one video shared by an independent Armenian outlet, people can be seen marching in Lyon with Turkish flags and chanting the phrase "allahu akbar", meaning “God is the greatest”.
In the same piece of footage, a man can be heard saying in French: “Where are you Armenians? Where are you? We are here… sons of b*****s”.
France is to ban a Turkish ultra-nationalist group known as the Grey Wolves, the interior minister said Monday, after a memorial to victims of the Armenian Genocide was defaced at the weekend.
Pakistan's controversial Interior Minister Brigadier (retired) Ijaz Shah, who is known for his links with terrorist groups, has threatened opposition parties of attacks by the Taliban.
Pakistan Opposition has sought the interior minister's resignation and said such statements "validate" the allegations of supporting terrorists, being levelled against the country by the world, Dawn reported.
Another telling story about the Decline of the West that we briefly noted here: the French ambassador to Sweden, who bears an ancient French title of nobility, has declared that “France is a Muslim country” during an interview on Swedish television.
“The permanent questioning of freedom of expression and the repeated attacks on public schools are evident symptoms of the ultimate will of our enemies: to undermine the democratic foundations of the French Republic”. Marcel Gauchet (philosopher), Jean Glavany (former minister), Catherine Kintzler (philosopher), Richard Malka (lawyer), Henri Peña-Ruiz (philosopher) and many others signed the appeal. “We must change the laws, organize an ideological but also a legislative war against the Islamists”, philosopher Elisabeth Badinter told L’Express. “And that wouldn't have happened without terrible aftershocks from the opposing camp. New attacks, more numerous, more bloody. All this can no longer be solved with pacifism, because it has gone too far. It's a war, but I'm not sure if the French are ready”.
If the French are not ready, nobody will be in Europe. Not a single political head of state in Europe still dares to face this Islamist penetration and separatism. Denmark surrended in the battle over freedom of expression (the Jyllands Posten newspaper has embraced programmatic self-censorship on Islam). After Samuel Paty's beheading, will Macron's France offer its head to the Islamist guillotine?
France is at an existential crossroads. Islamist beheadings are now taking place in its streets and churches. Stopping radical Islam or facing a “civil war”, as the former Chief of Staff of the French army Pierre de Villiers declared. They cannot run away and hide.
Ethiopia’s leader justified his decision to launch a war in the north of the country, saying on Friday it was necessary to disarm a powerful ethnic faction that had oppressed the country for decades and whose leaders were fugitives.
President Trump strode into the White House press room on Thursday and spoke for roughly 15 minutes about the 2020 election. His remarks were so laden with lies, misinformation, half-truths, and conspiracy theories that there’s no reason to repeat them.
Trump is trying to undermine U.S. democracy, and we’re not going to help him do it.
Instead, here are a few correctives to the president’s desperate attempt to undermine the public’s faith in its elections.
MSNBC, ABC, CBS, CNBC, and NBC cut away from his speech. It’s not the first time networks have opted not to carry Trump’s remarks live; in March, several ended their live broadcasts of one of the president’s briefings on the coronavirus, after he contradicted his own health experts. While there has been a great deal of focus on how social networks moderate election-related disinformation, there has been less scrutiny on TV news — and the clips it generates usually aren’t moderated by the platforms, even if they contain disinformation.
Parts of the UK are in a second lockdown aimed at stopping Covid-19’s spread. The first one left some useful lessons.
China expects about a fifth of all cars sold in the country in 2025 to be electric vehicles.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers€ announced on November 4 that the agency plans to reevaluate its wetlands permit€ for€ Formosa Plastics’ sprawling€ plastics manufacturing complex, known as the Sunshine Project, along a heavily industrialized stretch of the Mississippi River known by some as Cancer Alley. During the permit review, the Corps said it will address criticisms raised by environmental and community groups in a lawsuit filed in January this€ year.
A cryptocurrency stash worth nearly US$1 billion (A$1.37 billion) has been seized by American federal authorities on Tuesday and court action has been launched seeking forfeiture of the cache.
"We don't need slumlords running our country—we need to cancel rent and ensure that housing is a human right."
Sharma’s latest tells us that we should be worried because house prices are rising even as we are in a recession. While it is true that house prices are rising, people who have been paying attention to the data, know that large segments of the population are doing just fine, in spite of the recession. The job loss has been hugely concentrated among those in relatively low-paying industries, like hotels and restaurants. These lower-paid workers are much less likely to be home buyers than the workers who kept their jobs.
With interest rates at historic lows, people can afford to pay more for housing, as Sharma notes. And, with many more workers now able to work remotely, it should not be surprising that we would see a strong housing market.
The president's flailing lawsuits, hypocritical inconsistencies, and glaring lies were fodder for critics in politics, the press, and entertainment.€
Our brains are made to forget pain or there would never be second€ babies born.€ Anecdotally I had heard many coworker Trump supporters calling him among other things “a dumbass” for getting covid. I thought maybe that was a sign that he was losing even those cultists—but in the last couple of days, I heard murmurs among the same people voicing ample disgust at Biden. They sure weren’t shifting in his direction. Trump was a dumbass, but he was their dumbass, by god.
I also thought covid would be a gamechanger, but the Trump supporters view the shutdowns as the enemy, not the virus.
However inequitable its bias, capitalist democracy at least offered the possibility of incremental and piecemeal reform. We are past that now.
"It's undemocratic. It's pathetic.€ And it won't work," Sen. Elizabeth Warren said of the president's attempts to stop the counting of ballots.
Not long after, U.S. Senator Marco Rubio took to Twitter to announce that this move “will cause real harm to relationship with U.S. including their role in #AllianceforProsperity.” Earlier, both the Dominican Republic and Panama had made the shift, but Rubio said that El Salvador would be specially punished because it was ruled by the left-wing Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). It did not seem to matter to Rubio that his own country, the United States, had shifted its ties to China from Taiwan in 1979.
The “Alliance for Prosperity,” which was Rubio’s hashtag, referred to U.S. President Barack Obama’s deal with several Central American countries to provide some modest development aid in exchange for a beefed up police force and the prevention of transit of migrants toward the United States; this was border enforcement dressed up as development. Rubio’s threats were inconsequential; the money was too little, and the price paid by the populations of Central America was too steep.
AUOB continues its heroic work in trying to weld together the disparate forces of the Yes movement, including the SNP. It is vital that we do pull together as it will take the entire Yes movement to get us over the line to Indy. AUOB is to be congratulated in securing top level SNP support for a virtual Assembly on 14 November, at which SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford will speak alongside wider movement figures such as Lesley Riddoch, George Kerevan and Robin Mcalpine, plus the more open face of the SNP, Kenny Macaskill. The Assembly on 14 November is an online event, and you can sign up for it here. There have of course been a number of efforts to unite the disparate elements of the Yes movement, but I feel this may turn out to be the most hopeful initiative. Neil Mackay of AUOB in particular is to be commended for his indefatigable behind the scenes work and diplomacy.
Governor Tony Evers lashes out at Trump's claims of fraud as 'beyond irresponsible.'
Will the media continue to align themselves with a demagogue by failing to identify his refusal to leave as a "coup," or will they finally embrace the perspective demanded by their First Amendment mandate.
Trumpism has not been repudiated, not even close.
No one who cares about democracy can take heart from the place in which we now find ourselves.
Protesters blocked an interstate highway in Minneapolis and took to the streets of Manhattan, where some were violently arrested by NYPD officers.€
Although I’ve written (FAIR.org, 9/15/20) about US media’s refusal to forthrightly report that President Donald Trump is trying to steal the 2020 election—despite giving every indication that he intends to do so—it’s still surreal to watch journalists continue to engage in euphemism and indirection as Trump tries to execute a soft coup in real-time.
On the afternoon of November 4, we found ourselves in the scenario many feared: a dead-heat election with the incumbent president refusing to accept the results if they do not favor him, declaring widespread fraud and calling for an end to the vote count while hundreds of thousands of legally cast ballots remain untallied.
The ongoing strategic collaboration between Trump, Hannity and Limbaugh is obvious and has been widely documented in newspapers and books. Both Hannity and Limbaugh have collaborated with President Donald Trump to turn their invaluable radio and television programming time into soap-boxes for his 2020 re-election efforts.€ Also, Hannity and Limbaugh have made no effort to hide it: they openly boast about it.
The in-kind programming contributions Hannity and Limbaugh have made to Trump’s campaign vastly exceed $2,800 in value based on the costs of 60 seconds of advertising on their respective shows.
The president's campaign has been peppering its email list with outrageously false claims of victory and telling them that Democrats are stealing the election.
Donald Trump is not the root of our American problems. He is a side effect, a megaphone, and a permission slip to no longer hide one’s true capitalistic and supremacist desires.
"It's only afterwards, once we’ve won, that the real difficulties begin. In short, there is still much to do."
But let’s be frank, Donald Trump was never the real problem, he was and is the rancid product of a centuries long experiment in racist colonial settler imperialism, first born on the continent, then later exported to the entire world. It started when European settlers set foot on this occupied “New World” and declared it their own, Native peoples be damned.
Trump’s penchant for detached, sadistic cruelty is what has always lied under the surface of American “exceptionalism.” This is the same cruelty that spawned Indigenous genocide, the African slave trade, lynching, Jim Crow, and a nation that put its citizens in concentration camps, normalized the nuking of civilians (the only nation on earth to ever do so), carpet bombed South Asian villages and doused their children with napalm and Agent Orange. The same one that trained death squads in Central America and Indonesia. The same one that assassinated Lumumba and ousted democratically elected presidents like Allende and Mossadegh. The same one that allowed for the decimation of Iraq and an entire region based on lies, that tortured children and their parents in the dank cellars of Abu Ghraib, that drone bombed a grandmother picking okra in her field. The same one that turned Libya, once Africa’s wealthiest nation, into a center for the modern slave trade. The same one that has bestowed tanks to its police, trophies of its bloody forays in the global south, now destined to crush its own people. The same one that locked up an entire generation of Black and Brown kids for the possession of a plant or because they injected something into their impoverished arms to alleviate the agony of living in a hellscape of hopelessness.
There can be no honeymoon period, no expectation that Biden and his running mate, now Vice-President Elect Kamala Harris, can be persuaded to propose, let alone to have the backbone to enact, serious policies to address issues such as racism, climate change, poverty, and America’s perpetual bombing of other nations around the globe.
Biden and Harris helmed Democrats right to the brink of losing for the second time to a disgraced game show host whose CoVID-19 failures have helped along the deaths of 240,000 Americans, a death rate per one million population 2.5 times that of neighbors to the north in Canada.
In 2006 the Chilean American brothers Rodrigo (RodStarz) and Gonzalo (G1) Venegas formed Rebel Diaz, a hip-hop duo based in Chicago and the South Bronx. With a distinctly Chilean flare, sampling elements from local and Indigenous folk music, Rebel Diaz’s hip hop marries class struggle with international solidarity. Their lyrics lambaste capitalism and racism in the United States and imperialism and fascism in Latin America.
I imagine if Trump could, he'd put every anti-Trumper in the country into border cages. All 69,567,432 of us.
"Now, in this unprecedented moment," Sen. Sanders€ said€ on Wednesday afternoon, "is the time to reaffirm our belief in democracy and to give states the time they need to count every ballot so that the will of the American people is heard."
"All of us are committed to a fair and efficient count of all votes," Maricopa County officials said.
A U.S. district judge has ordered several United States Postal Service (USPS) facilities to perform twice-daily sweeps of their grounds to ensure that every ballot sent before Election Day this year arrives at its proper destination.
I sincerely hope that this is the last column I have to write about some wackadoodle legal case that has been brought by Donald Trump. When all the votes are counted, Trump appears likely to lose the Electoral College in the race for president. His attempts to overturn that result in the courts is likely to fail as well.
Vowing not to be intimidated by the possibility of armed federal agents showing up at ballot-counting sites, Pennsylvania's attorney general said: "Nothing is going to stop the counting of these legal ballots."
Joe Biden is a rule-follower running against a rule-breaker. So, while Donald Trump was busy announcing in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, “Frankly, we did win this election”—when in truth the race was too close to call—Biden counseled caution. Trump’s statement was rated “egregiously false” by fact-checkers. Biden’s statement hit such a proper note that it got compliments even from Republicans for his “patient” but “confident” message.
Joe Biden appears positioned to win enough battleground states to put himself in the White House—possibly pending four weeks of courtroom brawling that Americans anticipated but desperately hoped to avoid. Democrats, who have been focusing intensely on the opportunity to take down Trump for four years, could treat this as the brink of an enormous victory. Instead, a feeling of disappointment and defeat prevails even with an outcome—Trump’s impending defeat—that would have inspired unbridled joy six months ago.
If Trump loses the presidential election against former Vice President Joe Biden, he would stop being an acting government official on Jan. 20. As a result, his Twitter account — he largely tweets from personal account @realDonaldTrump where he has more than 88 million followers — would no longer receive special treatment.
A Twitter spokesman confirmed to THR that its policies for world leaders do not apply once an elected official leaves office. For instance, former President Barack Obama, who left office in 2017 but still regularly tweets to his 125 million followers from his @BarackObama account, is treated like any Twitter user.
Bannon, in an episode of his online show “War Room Pandemic,” had earlier called for the heads of Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Christopher Wray, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, to be mounted on pikes at the White House.
A Twitter spokesman said Bannon’s @warroompandemic was permanently suspended for violating the platform’s rules, “specifically our policy on the glorification of violence.” Such policies require enforcement action against clear threats of violence, abuse, harassment and hateful content, a spokesman said.
MANY Zimbabweans have welcomed the push by the MDC to hold talks with President Emmerson Mnangagwa and Zanu-PF, with a view to forming a new government of national unity in a bid to end the country's myriad challenges.
Among those who have hailed the move are ordinary citizens and analysts, who told the Daily News yesterday that a GNU would help to unite Zimbabweans and end the worsening divisions among citizens of various political persuasions.
This comes as the interim MDC leadership led by Thokozani Khupe has announced plans to hold talks with Mnangagwa and Zanu-PF over another inclusive government - similar to the short-lived but stability-inducing arrangement of 2009 which came about after the hotly-disputed 2008 elections.
That these men understand what so many Western leaders seem not to recognize is at once heartening and disturbing – heartening to see leaders in the Arab world condemn the terrorists, and not the victims, but disturbing that more Westerners fail to understand why this response matters.
In a tribute to Van Gogh written after his murder, then-Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali recalled his words even as he faced the threats against him: "As soon as such considerations dissuade you from expressing your opinion, isn't that the end of free speech?"
Yes. Yes, it is.
The OpenStack Foundation (OSF) Board of Directors supports removal of wording identified as oppressive, racist and sexist by members of our communities from the software and documentation they produce. While we know there will be challenges, both technical and non-technical, this is an action we feel is important.
The newspaper Derniere Heure reported that the education authorities have launched disciplinary proceedings against the teacher.
A bank manager was shot dead by its security guard allegedly over blasphemy allegations in Punjab's Khushab district on Wednesday, police and relatives said.
A teacher from the Emmauscollege in Rotterdam went into hiding because he was threatened over a cartoon that hung in his classroom, according to newspaper NRC.
The cartoon was drawn by cartoonist Joep Bertram about the attack on satire magazine Charlie Hebdo. It depicted a decapitated man in a Charlie Hebdo shirt sticking his tongue out at the jihadist who beheaded him. According to NRC, the cartoon hung in the classroom for five years.
Many people helped make this story. The two groups that made the story are:
Amy Silverman wrote the story. Amy is a journalist. She did 125 interviews for this story. These are the kinds of people she talked to...
The Arizona Daily Star and ProPublica wrote a story about people with developmental disabilities in Arizona. Developmental disabilities are sometimes called DD. We looked at how people with DD get help from the state.
Arizona is known for doing a good job helping people with DD. But our story says not everyone gets what they need.
Kyra Wade’s favorite color is pink. The 11-year-old likes road trips and the movie “Monsters, Inc.” She loves to watch people laugh. Her culinary preferences run to noodles and rice.
Beyond that, her parents don’t know much about her needs and wants.
Today, the Arizona Daily Star and ProPublica are jointly publishing an in-depth examination of Arizona’s system for helping some of its most vulnerable residents: people who are intellectually and developmentally disabled.
Arizona enjoys a national reputation for its efforts to keep such individuals with their communities and families instead of warehousing them in impersonal institutions. But our stories chronicle disturbing shortcomings in the promise of help offered by the state’s Division of Developmental Disabilities.
Many people think Arizona does a good job helping people with developmental disabilities. But some people have problems getting help. It can be confusing. People wait a long time.
These are stories about people who had problems getting help in Arizona.
Pretextual stops are bread-and-butter for cops. There's plenty of real crime out there waiting to be solved, but that requires time and attention that law enforcement apparently just doesn't have. So, a lot of what passes for "law enforcement" is just officers rolling the dice on vehicle searches, hoping to find something illegal (or at least some cash) to justify the roadside harassment.
It doesn't pay to anger the man in charge. Trump's DOJ is more vindictive than most, it appears. Documents obtained via a FOIA request by Lawfare shows the FBI is more motivated to hunt down internal critics of this administration than any other it has served previously.
Sometimes there are “puff pieces,” stories meant to make us feel good about the state of our world, that actually reveal something rancid beneath the fluff. Such is the case in Missouri, where Kansas City Chiefs All-World quarterback Patrick Mahomes stepped up when he had to, and by doing so, revealed that we actually live a step down from a decent democracy.
In Der Klang der Familie, the definitive oral history of the birth of Berlin’s techno scene in the wake of German reunification, it is said that the city’s inaugural acid house party, a series called Ufo, began one night in 1988 in an old potato cellar in Köpenicker Straße. The ceiling barely hit seven feet, and plaster chips drifted down onto stacks of records as squelching bass lines shook the building’s foundation. The basement flooded when it rained, and power strips floated around in the muck like inner tubes coasting down a lazy river. A year later, at the very first Love Parade, which became an annual open-air electronic music festival that later typified Berlin’s club milieu’s most commercial leanings, 150 people danced and marched in the streets of West Berlin. They came together under the motto “Friede, Freude, Eierkuchen,” or “Peace, Joy, Pancakes,” a political commitment to disarmament, music as the route to understanding, and fair food distribution.
In Pakistan, child marriage combined with a “conversion” to Islam commonly covers up rape, he said. Another girl in a similar situation, Maira Shahbaz was abducted and gang-raped. Her captor told her that if she didn’t back him with her court testimony, he would release video of the rape online, Stark said. It’s likely something similar happened to Raja.
Islamic law keeps child rapists from facing justice, he said. Pakistani courts decide cases based on secular, Islamic and ethnic law. Sindh province law forbids marriage to girls younger than 18. But under Islamic sharia law a girl can be married after her first period, Stark said. It happens to about 1,000 Pakistani women each year, a study from the Pakistan Movement for Solidarity and Peace said.
Mariam is the latest victim in Egypt’s sexual harassment and abuse crisis, which has rocked the country in recent months.
Rights advocates have long lamented the government’s tendency to treat women who have suffered sexual abuse as the perpetrators rather than the victims. At the same time, sexual harassment and abuse often goes unpunished.
The recovery of the girl came nearly a month after the girl's parents alleged that she was abducted by Ali Azhar, 44.
The courts had failed to act earlier because they accepted statements the girl gave saying she was 18 and had married of her own free will.
But pressure from campaign groups and a public outcry prompted action.
Later, the account tweeted a video that showed an officer knock a protester over a trash can to the ground near the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Leroy Street.
The Minnesota chapter of the National Lawyers Guild (NLG-MN) stands in solidarity with the hundreds of demonstrators kettled and arbitrarily arrested last night on I-94. These protesters gathered to demand that all votes be counted—a fundamental tenet of a political system that claims to be democratic. At the direction of elected officials, law enforcement arrested over 600 people and cited many others, including four NLG Legal Observers (LOs) and half a dozen or more minors. At least one person was taken into custody, a young Black woman charged with assault of an officer, and is still in jail. NLG-MN unequivocally condemns these arrests and citations.
Leading up to the arrests and citations, law enforcement gave no orders to disperse. As people attempted to exit the freeway using access roads, they were not allowed to leave by officers and were then subject to pepper spray. The action was carried out by Minnesota State Troopers, Hennepin County sheriffs, and Minneapolis Police Department (MPD); there are unconfirmed reports that the National Guard was also present. A number of legislators and others have contacted Governor Tim Walz’s office, and have reported the governor’s remarks that last night’s law enforcement actions were intended to “teach a lesson.” After being cited, arrestees were put on buses and dropped off at random locations, including the University of Minnesota campus, U.S. Bank Stadium, Lake Harriet, Bloomington, and others. NLG-MN worked with local activists and jail support to organize car caravans to safely shuttle arrestees back to Minneapolis.
Anonymous is readying for its coveted Million Mask March, each year Anons with all sorts of differing views, ideas, and goals come together united in unity to march in the street to peacefully show resistance and the governments of the world our presence.
The fifth of November like Christmas only happens once a year. The date is quickly approaching for activists and hacktivists who associate themselves with the decentralized leaderless Anonymous collective. Anons are beginning to organize together for rallies across the world. So grab a sign, print out your paper Guy Fawkes mask, (provided for convenience in this article), and get ready to remember the fifth of November.
This year activists from all over the world plan to partake in the march highlighting human rights abuses, the rise of the surveillance state, the dangers of losing our internet, and the combined loss of our ever-decreasing freedom of speech and press.
November 5th is also seen as a day to remember those within the collective who have been incarcerated and charged with the “Computer Fraud and Abuse Act” for their actions like Jeremy Hammond, or passed on like Aaron Swartz or the brother Tayyeb Shehadah, who was shot for protesting in Palestine by an Israeli sniper (mask seen below).
This longer version may not happen. There are many examples of processes that run less than a year. However, there are also cases like the CRTC’s decision on simultaneous substitution and the Super Bowl, which took years to unfold with long hearings and court appeals. For all stakeholders – whether the Internet streamers, broadcasters, producers or consumers – the bill marks a period of some uncertainty that is likely to have some ramifications on investment decisions. That isn’t a reason not to proceed, but recognizing that legislative and policy participation is not delay and setting more realistic expectations on timing is essential.
Disgruntled shareholders have been given the go-ahead to file a class action against Apple, after its chief executive, Tim Cook, allegedly played down the falling demand for iPhones in China, resulting in huge losses for investors.
28 U.S.C. €§ 1400(b). You’ll see that I underlined “where the defendant has committed acts of infringement” in the quote above because Valeant focuses on the location-of-infringement.
Valeant is an innovator-generic ANDA case. ANDA lawsuits are peculiar because the statutory act-of-infringement is submitting an Abbreviated New Drug Application (ANDA) to the FDA for a patented drug/use. 35 U.S.C. €§ 271(e)(2)(A) (“submit an application”). Here, the court held that that the location-of-infringement for venue purposes is “where actions related to the submission … occur.” The court further clarified that Section 271(e) infringement (for venue purposes) does not consider “locations where future distribution of the generic products specified in the ANDA is contemplated.”
[...]
Although I have not developed this argument, the court’s straight-read of the statute here places the provision on rocky First Amendment grounds regarding both speech and gov’t petitions.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has been the subject of human fascination and awe (and Hollywood movies) for many years. Who can forget the iconic scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the intelligent computer HAL 9000 says “I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” and refuses to allow Dave to re-enter the pod bay doors because HAL knows that Dave is planning to disconnect it (him?). AI is busy learning, growing, computing, and in some cases inventing, all while we sleep.
It is therefore no surprise that the patentability of AI is a current focus of many innovators and Patent Offices around the world. Recent decisions and practice in Canada, the UK and Europe, bring into sharp focus the unique challenges of protecting these innovations. Below we consider some of the foibles of the AI-related patent practices of these jurisdictions.
Sonos kicked off its dispute with Google at the start of the year by lodging an infringement suit and parallel case at the International Trade Centre (ITC). The tech giant filed a countersuit in June and in the latest development Google has made a request for a declaratory judgment of non-infringement in anticipation of a second Sonos attack.
The speaker pioneer rarely takes things to court, but when push comes to shove the company is said to have a collection of high-quality assets on which to draw. Back in April 2017, Tanya Moore, Sonos’s former chief licensing officer, told IAM: “The portfolio is so foundational that you can’t build a wireless, multi-room audio system without tripping over it.”
While this is not the first time that the audio pioneer has gone on the offensive, it is its first time against the deep pockets of a company like Google.
[...]
Although Sonos had its intellectual property validated in suits against its two rivals, Google is a very different opponent. The tech giant kicked things up a notch in June when it filed a lawsuit against Sonos using legacy Motorola patents. Google rarely asserts against other corporates, so this speaks volumes to how seriously it is taking this litigation.
In two suits of the Google campaign where Sonos is the plaintiff, it is being represented by Lee Sullivan Shea & Smith and Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe. In one case where it is the defendant, it is being represented by both these firms as well as McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff.
Overall, Potter Anderson & Corroon and Lee Sullivan Shea & Smith are the firms that represent Sonos the most in US district court litigation (see Table 4). Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe is the top national firm sought out by the speaker manufacturer.
EZTV, one of the world's most popular torrent sites, appears to have lost control of its main domain after its registry marked it with a serverHold status code. Meanwhile, Torrents.io, which is believed to be operated by the same team, received the same treatment at roughly the same time.
Netflix has sent over a hundred takedown requests this week targeting tweets that are critical of the movie 'Cuties' and/or urged people to cancel their subscriptions. The takedown notices list the full tweets but only the linked media, which reportedly includes trailers, were removed. The takedowns are highly unusual as Netflix usually targets classic pirated content.
Publishers warn that the pirate repository carries security risks, but critics say the threat is overhyped to justify greater surveillance of researchers.
This report offers an overview of the important work CC did last year across the many domains and subject areas we work in. (Look for CC’s 2020 annual report to be released in early 2021, where we will have lots to share about this year’s accomplishments.)
