The Linux OS and its related distros and flavors have transformed it from hardcore software into an industrial brand. Even if you are not a fan of it, the Linux OS might be as common as the air you breathe if you closely analyze your day to day interactive activities. Almost all the modern technologies that transform and innovate the tech industry have a Linux OS DNA imprinted on them.
Those that are yet to be branded with their innovative uniqueness and recognition are waiting in line for the famed chance. Therefore, you might boldly claim that the Linux OS does not run your life, but the world around you cannot avoid the flirty pursuits of this open-source and free software.
Nowadays, almost anything that can be described as cool is either pursuing Linux or is being pursued by Linux. It is the perfect symbiotic relationship in a world that tries to find a balance in technology and innovation. This article explores the awesomeness and outreach of the Linux OS in the world around us. It might even be an eye-opener for some of us to start taking our Linux skills to the next level. Top500 quotes Linux as the powerhouse or engine behind five-hundred fastest computers worldwide.
I do not know of the speed of the computer composing this article or whether it qualifies to be among the listed five-hundred fastest computers worldwide. However, one thing is certain; it is 100% Linux DNA. On this note, let us start parading the top 20 uses of Linux.
Zededa has launched a cloud-native stack for orchestrating distributed edge computers based on the open source, Linux-based EVE-OS. Zededa supports Docker, Kubernetes, and VMs, and features an app store and zero trust security.
In early 2019, Zededa promised to contribute its edge virtualization technology to the Linux Foundation’s LF Edge group to form the basis for an open source Project EVE, designed as an open, interoperable framework for cloud native edge computing. By mid-year, the code transfer was complete and the resulting EVE-OS has continued to mature. Now, Zededa is using EVE-OS as the centerpiece of a full Zededa orchestration stack for distributed edge computing.
Schools have resumed with students returning with renewed determination and competitive spirit to the classrooms. Are you one of these students? You want every help you get, especially programming assignment help if you are a tech student.
Did someone tell you about Linux and all the advantages of the open-source OS? One of the characteristics of Linux is its numerous distributions. For a student joining the Linux family for the first time, you want to know which of the Linux distros is the best.
While there are no absolute answers to this question, we have provided a review of the best Linux distros for students. You would find these distros easy to use, pre-installed with useful software, hardware compatibility, and easy installation. Check out their features to determine which works best for you.
The number of domains powered by these web servers also fell this month. Microsoft observed the largest drop of 2.2 million domains, while nginx and Apache lost 903,000 and 303,000. This resulted in a small loss of market share for all three, the largest drop being seen by Microsoft which fell 0.8 percentage points to 6.3%.
brave browser, gnome 40, lottalinuxlinks is back, tablets
Matt Asay believes we need a new way to think about open source. This comes on the heels of the Elastic vs AWS controversy. Shawn Powers and new co-host Katherine Druckman join Doc Searls in a lively discussion of ethics and open source on FLOSS Weekly. The panel takes a look at three efforts currently making news: the Ethical Source Movement; Matt Asay's Infoworld post titled A New Way To Think About Open Source; and Openbase, which Venturebeat says "wants to be the Yelp for open source software packages."
Do you ever stop and wonder who are the inventors behind the things you interact with during your everyday life? Everything you touch began life as an idea but you likely don’t give much thought to the people and, more importantly, stories behind those ideas. For season six of Red Hat’s award-winning podcast, Command Line Heroes, we set out to shine a light on some of the lesser-known inventors who have helped shape our world.
As we approach Black History Month, we invite you to explore the latest season. Each episode highlights a Black inventor who has created technology that has become commonplace in our lives but their name may not be well known. From the PC monitor and the text-to-donate function to cartridge-based video games and GPS, these inventors faced unfair hiring practices, unequal education opportunities, and more to bring their ideas to life and pave the way for future technological advances.
By speaking to the inventors themselves, their friends and families, as well as industry experts to weigh in on the importance of their contributions, this season of Command Line Heroes goes deeper into the epic stories of these modern-day superheroes, without which our lives wouldn’t be the same.
GNN's tips for surviving Cabin Fever and Coding from Home, Self-host a password manager on OpenBSD, Preliminary OpenBSD Support added to OBS, Dan's CURL tip of the Day, List of some Shell goodies for OpenBSD, and more
With Facebook's Zstandard compression algorithm becoming quite popular and well supported across many different environments -- including support for Zstd compressing the Linux kernel, among other uses -- there is a renewed effort in allowing Linux firmware to be compressed via Zstd.
In August of last year was a prior attempt for allowing Linux firmware to be Zstd compressed thanks to its faster decompression speeds of Zstd and thus allowing quicker boot times. Zstd firmware decompression was found to be much quicker than the likes of XZ.
User namespaces provide a number of interesting challenges for the kernel. They give a user the illusion of owning the system, but must still operate within the restrictions that apply outside of the namespace. Resource limits represent one type of restriction that, it seems, is proving too restrictive for some users. This patch set from Alexey Gladkov attempts to address the problem by way of a not-entirely-obvious approach.
Consider the following use case, as stated in the patch series. Some user wants to run a service that is known not to fork within a container. As a way of constraining that service, the user sets the resource limit for the number of processes to one, explicitly preventing the process from forking. That limit is global, though, so if this user tries to run two containers with that service, the second one will exceed the limit and fail to start. As a result, our user becomes depressed and considers a career change to goat farming.
Clearly, what is needed is a way to make at least some resource limits apply on per-container basis; then each container could run its service with the process limit set to one and everybody will be happy (except perhaps the goats).
The Linux 5.10 release included a change that is expected to significantly increase the performance of the ext4 filesystem; it goes by the name "fast commits" and introduces a new, lighter-weight journaling method. Let us look into how the feature works, who can benefit from it, and when its use may be appropriate.
Ext4 is a journaling filesystem, designed to ensure that filesystem structures appear consistent on disk at all times. A single filesystem operation (from the user's point of view) may require multiple changes in the filesystem, which will only be coherent after all of those changes are present on the disk. If a power failure or a system crash happens in the middle of those operations, corruption of the data and filesystem structure (including unrelated files) is possible. Journaling prevents corruption by maintaining a log of transactions in a separate journal on disk. In case of a power failure, the recovery procedure can replay the journal and restore the filesystem to a consistent state.
The ext4 journal includes the metadata changes associated with an operation, but not necessarily the related data changes. Mount options can be used to select one of three journaling modes, as described in the ext4 kernel documentation. data=ordered, the default, causes ext4 to write all data before committing the associated metadata to the journal. It does not put the data itself into the journal. The data=journal option, instead, causes all data to be written to the journal before it is put into the main filesystem; as a side effect, it disables delayed allocation and direct-I/O support. Finally, data=writeback relaxes the constraints, allowing data to be written to the filesystem after the metadata has been committed to the journal.
Another important ext4 feature is delayed allocation, where the filesystem defers the allocation of blocks on disk for data written by applications until that data is actually written to disk. The idea is to wait until the application finishes its operations on the file, then allocate the actual number of data blocks needed on the disk at once. This optimization limits unneeded operations related to short-lived, small files, batches large writes, and helps ensure that data space is allocated contiguously. On the other hand, the writing of data to disk might be delayed (with the default settings) by a minute or so. In the default data=ordered mode, where the journal entry is written only after flushing all pending data, delayed allocation might thus delay the writing of the journal. To assure data is actually written to disk, applications use the fsync() or fdatasync() system calls, causing the data (and the journal) to be written immediately.
Since the release of the 5.5 kernel in January 2020, there have been almost 87,000 patches from just short of 4,600 developers merged into the mainline repository. Reviewing all of those patches would be a tall order for even the most prolific of kernel developers, so decisions on patch acceptance are delegated to a long list of subsystem maintainers, each of whom takes partial or full responsibility for a specific portion of the kernel. These maintainers are documented in a file called, surprisingly, MAINTAINERS. But the MAINTAINERS file, too, must be maintained; how well does it reflect reality?
The MAINTAINERS file doesn't exist just to give credit to maintainers; developers make use of it to know where to send patches. The get_maintainer.pl script automates this process by looking at the files modified by a patch and generating a list of email addresses to send it to. Given that misinformation in this file can send patches astray, one would expect it to be kept up-to-date. Recently, your editor received a suggestion from Jakub Kicinski that there may be insights to be gleaned from comparing MAINTAINERS entries against activity in the real world. A bit of Python bashing later, a new analysis script was born.
IO_uring continues to be one of the most exciting technical innovations in the Linux kernel in recent years not only for more performant I/O but also opening up other doors for new Linux innovations. IO_uring has continued adding features since being mainlined in 2019 and now the newest proposed feature is the ability to build new ioctls / kernel interfaces atop IO_uring.
The idea of supporting kernel ioctls over IO_uring has been brought up in the past and today lead IO_uring developer Jens Axboe sent out his initial patches. These initial patches are considered experimental and sent out as "request for comments" - they provide the infrastructure to provide a file private command type with IO_uring handling the passing of the arbitrary data.
It would appear that a serious vulnerability is affecting most GNU/Linux distributions running a Linux kernel before version 5.10.7. The flaw (CVE-2020-28374) was discovered in Linux kernel’s LIO SCSI target implementation and could allow a remote attacker with access to at least one iSCSI LUN in a multiple backstore environment to expose sensitive information or modify data.
This flaw was patched today in Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) systems running Linux kernel 5.8, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) systems running Linux kernel 5.4, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) systems running Linux kernel 5.4 or 4.15, as well as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) and Ubuntu 14.04 ESM systems running Linux kernel 4.4.
Linux Kernel 5.10 was the last kernel release of 2020. It is a long term support release.
There are no hard and fast rules for the lifespan of a kernel release. A normal kernel is maintained by the kernel maintainers for 3-4 months. An LTS release on the other hand gets around 2 years of support usually.
But since there are too much on the stake, at times, LTS release get extended support as well. Take Linux kernel 5.4 for instance. It will be supported for 6 years primarily for Android devices.
Wayland 1.18 released back in February 2020 while now nearly one year later it's been succeeded by Wayland 1.19.
Even with one year passing, Wayland 1.19 is a very minor update over Wayland 1.18. That's part of the reason why they moved off timed releases in the first place was the core Wayland code and protocol being quite stable at this point: there is very little change. Most of the work remaining to get Wayland ready for production use across all workloads is on the compositor side with KDE Plasma's KWin seeing improvements, GNOME Shell + Mutter being in very good shape, etc. There is also the driver obstacle of the NVIDIA proprietary driver support at the moment not being ideal but improvements are pending there. That is all outside of the core Wayland code itself that is the protocol and key libraries.
Technology is a medium that enables us to achieve things in life, ideally in a pleasant way. In the software world, operating systems, programming languages and application frameworks are the tools of the trade. But you need the right tool for the right job. If you’re thinking about writing or porting your code to snaps, there are some interesting things you should consider before you commit yourself.
Most Linux users know vim as a text editor that descended from vi. It can also function as a tool for encrypting text files. In this post, we examine how this is done and how to reverse the process.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SQLite on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, SQLite is a lightweight command-line database program. It is one of the nearly efficient database engines on the planet. In part, thanks to that manufactured in C Language which makes this very efficient in managing the assets of the system.
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 SQLite on a Debian 10 (Buster).
Ping is a commandline network administration utility which is available for virtually all operating systems, including the embedded networking devices. It is mainly used to test the connectivity or reachability of a host on the network. By default, the ping command will not display the timestamp in its output. If you want to print timestamp with ping command output for any reason, this tutorial will show you how.
Helm is a package manager for Kubernetes. One can share, find and use software built for Kubernetes. Helm helps to manage Kubernetes applications. In this article, we will see how to install Helm on Ubuntu 20.04 server. We will not cover the successful deployment of applications using Helm on Kubernetes, yes you read it right. We will see the installation process and the basic commands. If you want to learn to deploy an application using Helm or create a Helm chart then do visit "How to deploy your applications on Kubernetes using Helm?"
The latest Linux Mint 20.1 introduced a new application, Web App Manager, allows to turn any web pages into desktop applications. Like a normal application, web app has its own window, its own icon, and can be launched from system app menu.
Ubuntu used to have web apps integration when it was Ubuntu 14.04. The project was however discontinued.
For those want to try out the new Web App Manager from Linux Mint, here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 20.04.
Elasticsearch is an open-source distributed analytics engine built on Apache Lucene. It takes unstructured data from different locations and stores it according to user-specified mapping and indexes it. It supports RESTful operations and allows you to search and analyze huge volumes of data in real time.
hyve (“BSD hypervisor”) is a free and opensource hypervisor for FreeBSD. We can use Bhyve to run Linux, Windows, and *BSD guest operating system as a virtual machine. Let us see how to install Linux VM using Bhyve on FreeBSD host operating system along with ZFS and bridged networking.
MetaTrader MT4 or MT5 is the popular application for Forex, commodity, and Metal trading, here we will learn the steps to install it on Linux such as Ubuntu 20.04, Debian, Linux Mint, and others including Windows.
As we know MetaTrader 4 or 5 are not available natively for Linux operating systems like Windows, macOS, and Android. Thus, to install MT4 on Linux, we have to use WineHQ, a Windows program loader for Linux distros.
MT4 or MT5 installation on Windows 10/8/7 operating systems is the same as any other software available for Microsoft platforms. Just double click on it and follow the wizard. Therefore, we will discuss how to install MT4 or MT5 on Linux in detail.
Using Buildah, Skopeo, and Quay.io to create a container registry.
In this second article, you'll explore the how-to of Ansible installation.
Earlier this week, WebRTC became an official W3C and IETF standard for enabling real time communication (RTC) between browsers and other mobile applications via a set of simple APIs. GStreamer has a powerful and rapidly maturing WebRTC implementation. So, the obvious question is: how do we build this on Windows?
Ping is a commandline network administration utility which is available for virtually all operating systems, including the embedded networking devices. It is mainly used to test the connectivity or reachability of a host on the network. By default, the ping command will not display the timestamp in its output. If you want to print timestamp with ping command output for any reason, this tutorial will show you how.
You are already aware of shell. It is a program that lets you run commands in Linux. Your major interaction with shell is when you are running commands in a terminal.
Sooner or later, you'll come across a term called 'subshell' and that may confuse you.
Want to give Ubuntu a try on your laptop or desktop? Overwhelmed, not knowing where to start? This tutorial is intended for those of you that are looking for a resource for helping you get started using Ubuntu on your laptop or desktop. You'll learn how to install Ubuntu, set up a dual-boot with Windows, how to navigate the desktop, and more!
Gentoo emerges of sys-kernel/gentoo-sources will nicely install the current kernel into /usr/src/linux-* but it will not compile them.
The Gentoo wiki kernel documentation has a script snippet to automate the kernel build with genkernel.
I do not like to use genkernel as it brings in lots of firmware files to build initrds that are not needed on virtual hardware. It also makes building the kernel slower.
Docker is an Open source technology that allows you to install an run application on several containers (machine) without Interfering with the host or other containers technology is similar to Virtualization, but it is more portable and easy to use.
What is the type of Docker are available? There is two types of Docker are available Docker CE (Community Edition) and Docker EE (Enterprise Edition).
Router setup in linux is fun and important for situations when you have only server, computer. Forwarding, firewall rules and at least 2 network interface cards is the minimal requiremnt for setting up router. Our router setup will be on Rhel 8. The installation and configuration steps are: [...]
For usage with find, all of this is unnecessary on a modern Unix and has been for some time, because find folded this into itself. Modern versions of find don't have just the traditional '-exec', which runs one command per file, but also an augmented version of it which aggregates the arguments together like xargs does. This augmented version is used by ending the '-exec' with '+' instead of ';', like so: [...]
The fmt command is a text utility included in the GNU Core Utilities. It was originally created to format email messages at the command line. However, it can be very useful for reading any text files in the terminal. Sure, modern terminals will wrap text to fit in the window. But they don’t wrap at a word, it could split a word right down the middle. This makes it hard to read and even harder to keep your place.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Observium on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Observium is a Network Management and Monitoring System that collects data from multiple devices using SNMP and allows you to monitor all of the network’s devices via an easy-to-use interface. It is PHP-based and uses a MySQL database to store data.
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 Observium on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
As you might already know, ‘cp’ is the command line program in Linux to copy files and directories.
Epic Games don't support Linux with their store, so the community continues building around it with the Heroic Games Launcher that can run plenty of games from the Epic Store. It does so thanks to the power of the Wine compatibility layer, giving you as many options as possible to keep on gaming on Linux no matter where your games are from. A great free and open source project.
New features added in recently released versions include: the ability to repair installed games, notifications support, a tray icon with the ability to close to the tray, it will remember the filters used, a warning on closing when downloading, a download time estimate on game pages, styling tweaks for light and dark themes, new options to enable extra features like MangoHud, the ability to add launch options and more.
Unvanquished is a free and open source first-person shooter that blends in elements of a strategy game, it's a bit like Natural Selection and they're in the process of doing a big new release.
"Unvanquished is a free, open-source first-person strategy game shooter, pitting technologically advanced human soldiers against hordes of highly adaptable aliens. Players can choose from either team, providing for an entirely different experience on both sides, as humans focus on long-range firepower while aliens rely instead on quick movement and stealth. The goal of each match is to destroy the enemy base, preventing members of the opposing team from spawning. Upgrades for both teams are earned by a combination of individual performance and team map control, unlocking access to more powerful weapons and equipment for the humans, and larger, more ferocious forms for the aliens."
For the latest small release, they've produced a brand new launcher that will keep the game nicely up to date and enabling Linux users to easily launch the game. In addition to the brand new launcher, they also put up a hotfix that was needed due to some library changes stopping it launching on Linux.
Perhaps your prisoners in Prison Architect fancy growing something to pass the time? Give them the gift of green in Prison Architect - Going Green and The Glasshouse free update out now.
Most prison tend to a look a bit…depressing. Grey, lots of walls and just terrible. Now though you can give them a splash of colour and of course all this growing comes with its own type of contraband because no prison can apparently be without some kind of special herbs.
Coming later this Summer the one-woman studio 2054 will launch The Sundew, a dark cyberpunk, retro-styled adventure game. Set in the aftermath of a devastating future war, where the world as we know it was twisted by flames into a terrifying new dystopia, The Sundew follows a lonely beat cop who soon holds the fate of the world in her hands.
"After several years of work and many adventures, The Sundew is finally about to see the light of day. I see this game as a world that players will be able to enter, followed by other games in the same universe. My greatest joy will be to see the players take over this world and make it their own!" - Agnès Vuillaume, solo developer of The Sundew.
[...]
What to expect from it (apart from confirmed Linux support!): alongside classic point-and-click gameplay The Sundew will ask you to make decisions that will change the future of humanity. Playing off contemporary issues, the choices offered are never black and white. Where do you believe mankind’s interests lie, and what means are acceptable to achieve them?
Major updates are going live for Valve's free to play MOBA with Dota 2 nowhaving a CS:GO styled Overwatch mode designed to help sort through all the reports of player behaviour.
Sadly, Dota 2 (and many other online games) end up with a lot of poor behaviour from players. From shouting down microphones, to using every possible slur they can think of in the text chat. It can easily ruin games, and it is quite a big problem.
As noted in the blog post this new Overwatch system allows players to review cases giving them a replay that might show off "negative" behaviour from a certain player, and then choose if that player is "guilty, not guilty, or insufficient evidence".
Wasteland 3 from inXile Entertainment has a big new free update out with the Robots & Rangers" patch, and it's looking to be a good one for all players.
"In Wasteland 3 you take command of a squad of Desert Rangers, lawmen and women in a post-nuclear world, trying to rebuild society from the ashes. More than a century after the bombs fell, you’re fighting a losing battle to keep your beloved Arizona alive. Then the self-proclaimed Patriarch of Colorado radios, promising aid if you'll do a job he can only entrust to an outsider—rescue his land from the ambitions of his three bloodthirsty children."
[...]
Note: for the Linux version, it's been reported that on AMD GPUs you may need to turn off Ambient Occlusion to prevent graphical glitches.
After 4 months of development it's time to aim for the 3.2.4 stable release to bring the numerous new features and even more important bug fixes to all Godot users.
So here's a first Release Candidate to get broader testing of everything that has been iterated upon in the past 6 beta builds.
You can try it live with the online version of the Godot editor updated for this release.
Today, 2021-01-28, is the Plasma Beta Review Day for Plasma 5.21, that is to say, Plasma 5.20.90. Right now it’s a bit after 2 a.m., so after this I’m going to bed so I can be present later.
This month I’ve mostly been enjoying my post-job vacation as last year I was bordering burnout. As such I didn’t help much.
Before bed I’ll be providing a few things I’ve learned about triaging, though. While this blog post isn’t specifically about the Beta Review Day, this should make the general bug triaging process clearer for you, making it quite timely.
I am pleased to announce that Kongress 1.0 has been released. Kongress is a conference companion application enabling users to organize their participation in conferences.
The first release of Kongress offers the following features...
The primary target user-base of Kongress is people attending a conference with a Linux mobile phone. It also works on desktop, leveraging the convergence capabilities of Kirigami.
GParted is one of the most popular partition managers for Linux. It is a graphical tool that allows you to create, delete, resize, move, check, and copy disk partitions and their file system.
MX Linux Fluxbox-RaspberryPi Respin is MX Linux’s first attempt to offer an AArch64 (ARM64) port for the Raspberry Pi single-board computer. The work is done by Jerry Bond and others, and let me tell you that it’s one of the best Linux on Raspberry Pi experiences I’ve tried so far in terms of performance and usability.
I’m not a fan of the Fluxbox window manager, but I understand why Jerry Bond choose it as default graphical environment for this Raspberry Pi spin of MX Linux. It’s super fast and consumes very few resources. For example, the RAM usage is always around 300MB (without any apps running), and that’s very important for older devices, such as a Raspberry Pi 3 with 2GB RAM.
Who’s going to nag when this is all done in the open; when the open source movers are the implementers of the de-facto implementations; when they keep piling the standards until nobody can follow them.
Every once in a while I try Gentoo Linux or something based on it. Redcore Linux is one of those few distributions that made it their mission to "bring the power of Gentoo Linux to the masses". To achieve this it provides a repository of pre-built binary packages on a system that updates on a rolling basis. "Redcore Linux is built from Gentoo Linux stage3. We then add a kernel, a bootloader and a few other things like dbus and initramfs generator (Dracut), we configure the init system (OpenRC) and so we have the core of Redcore Linux, a Gentoo Linux stage4 if you will." A beta build of Redcore 2101 was released only a few days ago that the team apparently feel so confident about that they even think it may be better than some of their earlier stable releases. Given the nature of this distribution one can be sure this is fairly up to date.
Redcore beta is using Linux 5.10.5, GCC 10.2.0, Glibc 2.32, binutils 2.35, LLVM 11.0.1, mesa 20.3.2, libdrm 2.4.103, xorg-server 1.20.10, qt 5.15.2, kde-frameworks 5.77, kde-apps 20.12.1, kde-plasma 5.20.5 and flatpak support. The init in use is OpenRC.
Redcore provides what's called a hardened Linux system to reduce the available attack surface of the OS. The file Redcore.Linux.Hardened.2101.KDE.amd64.BETA.iso is 3.7 GB in size to download. Despite being hardened the system is supposed to work and targets "casual Laptop/Desktop users and, to some extent, Workstation power users".
Yesterday announced EasyOS Dunfell 2.6.1 aarch64 for the Raspberry Pi4:
https://bkhome.org/news/202101/easyos-dunfell-261-released-for-the-raspberry-pi4.html
Today it is the turn for EasyOS Dunfell-series 2.6.1 64-bit on the PC. This is the first official release in this series.
Same packages compiled in OpenEmbedded. Latest SeaMonkey 2.53.6. A different kernel for the PC build, 5.10.11.
Read all about it here:
http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/amd64/releases/dunfell/2.6.1/release-notes-2.6.1.htm
As stated in the release notes, all three streams are being sync'ed to the same version number.
The Buster-series 2.6.1 will probably be uploaded tomorrow. I have to compile the latest 5.4.x kernel, and SeaMonkey 2.53.6.
As to which you would choose for the PC, it is like asking "which is better, strawberry icecream or chocolate icecream?"
The new stable release of Clonezilla Live comes three months after version 2.7.0, it’s synced with the upstream software repositories of Debian Sid (Unstable) as of January 27th, 2021, and it’s powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series for the best possible hardware support.
Another important change in Clonezilla Live 2.7.1 is the replacement of the exfat-utils program for supporting the exFAT file system on Unix-like systems with exfatprogs, a program providing more modern userspace utilities for the new exFAT file system implementation introduced in Linux kernel 5.7 and later. As expected, this should provide users with better exFAT support.
Based on the latest KDE Plasma 5.20.5 desktop environment, Nitrux 1.3.7 is here to introduce a brand-new default applications menu called Ditto menu, which replaces the NX Simplemenu launcher used in previous releases.
Ditto menu looks more generous in displaying installed apps, and it presents the user with an applications grid by default listing installed apps in alphabetical order. This makes it easier to see all installed apps at a glance and to quickly launch your favorite ones.
For those that have been trying to find a desktop-friendly BSD operating system that works smoothly out of the box but haven't yet found the perfect match, NomadBSD 1.4-RC1 is now available for improving this desktop-minded FreeBSD-derived open-source operating system.
NomadBSD 1.4 is working towards a number of improvements for bettering the initial out-of-the-box desktop experience. Besides shifting to FreeBSD 12.2-p2 as its base, NomadBSD 1.4 has been working on installer improvements particularly around UEFI integration, better automatic graphics driver detection has been worked out, and touchpad support is also better off compared to prior releases.
For more than 6 years, OPNsense is driving innovation through modularising and hardening the open source firewall, with simple and reliable firmware upgrades, multi-language support, HardenedBSD security, fast adoption of upstream software updates as well as clear and stable 2-Clause BSD licensing.
21.1, nicknamed “Marvelous Meerkat”, is the relentless continuation of open source dedication. The last 6 years were not always easy, but we are happy to be where we are now and have the community to thank for it.
New and improved are the firewall rules and NAT categories, the traffic graphs supporting IPv6 along with a visual refresh, intrusion detection rule management by policies, an alias for MAC addresses and NAT over IPsec with all phase 2 you could ever want. Last but not least, the serial image now supports UEFI as well.
OPNsense 21.1 is out as the latest version of this BSD open-source firewall/router operating system derived from FreeBSD. OPNsense 21.1 brings new/improved firewall rules and NAT categories, IPv6 traffic graphics support, support for UEFI with the OPNsense serial image, and a wide range of other enhancements and fixes.
One of the original co-founders of CentOS has launched a new company that is hoped to support the development of a CentOS-fork.
Gregory Kurtzer announced Rocky Linux last year in response to the premature demise of the CentOS distro. The project received positive support from the community and also announced that it has received several offers for sponsorship.
Now, Kurtzer has launched Ctrl IQ with a $4 million Series A backing to support the development of Rocky Linux, along with other high-performance computing (HPC) projects.
Ctrl IQ emerged from stealth today as part of an effort to create an orchestration platform based on a fork of the distribution of Linux provided by Red Hat. Founded by Gregory Kurtzer, one of the original creators of a CentOS project that provided developers with access to a fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the company is committing to providing support for a Linux distribution based on CentOS dubbed Rocky Linux.
Last month, Red Hat set off a firestorm when it announced it would no longer be contributing to the CentOS project. Instead, Red Hat is now providing individual developers and small teams access to RHEL itself.
Data Privacy Day is a celebrated reminder of how to protect your privacy and draw awareness on how to stay safe in a digital world. With a new year we can take Data Privacy Day to reflect and develop a renewed focus on privacy.
Developers of any age who are seeking to advance their skills — especially in AI — can earn several new professional certificates through the IBM Developer Skills Network.
Kautilya Katariya of Northampton, U.K., was recently granted a programming Guinness World Record at the age of 6 years and 346 days old, making him the youngest Python programmer. Courses from the IBM Developer Skills Network helped make this possible.
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Tanmay started his journey as a developer by coding at the age of 5. His love of computer science has led him to become an AI expert. He has created multiple apps and even published a book called Hello Swift!: iOS app programming for kids and other beginners.
KubeSummit 2021 brings together adopters, developers, and practitioners to collaborate virtually.
IBM Bayesian Optimization Accelerator (BOA) is a do-it-yourself toolkit to apply state-of-the-art Bayesian inferencing techniques and obtain optimal solutions for complex, real-world design simulations without requiring deep machine learning skills. Fascinating results have been achieved by using this tool on chip design, drug discovery, Formula 1 car design, and even wine quality optimization.
What follows is a hypothetical conversation between an IBM researcher and his intern about the Bayesian optimization method, IBM differentiation, its ease of use, and how IBM Lab Services is helping organizations take advantage of this innovative solution.
It is an unfortunate fact of life that non-free firmware blobs are required to use some hardware, such as network devices (WiFi in particular), audio peripherals, and video cards. Beyond that, those blobs may even be required in order to install a Linux distribution, so an installation over the network may need to get non-free firmware directly from the installation media. That, as might be guessed, is a bit of a problem for distributions that are not willing to officially ship said firmware because of its non-free status, as a recent discussion in the Debian community shows.
Surely Dan Pal did not expect the torrent of responses he received to his short note to the debian-devel mailing list about problems he encountered trying to install Debian. He wanted to install the distribution on a laptop that was running Windows 10, but could not use the normal network installation mechanism because the WiFi device required non-free firmware. He tracked down the DVD version of the distribution and installed that, but worried that Debian is shooting itself in the foot by not prominently offering more installation options: "The current policy of hiding other versions of Debian is limiting the adoption of your OS by people like me who are interested in moving from Windows 10."
The front page at debian.org currently has a prominent "Download" button that starts to retrieve a network install ("netinst") CD image when clicked. But that image will not be terribly useful for systems that need non-free firmware to make the network adapter work. Worse yet, it is "impossible to find" a working netinst image with non-free firmware, Sven Joachim said, though he was overstating things a bit. Alexis Murzeau suggested adding a link under the big download button that would lead users to alternate images containing non-free firmware. He also pointed out that there are two open bugs (one from 2010 and another from 2016) that are related, so the problem is hardly a new one.
Ubuntu developer Sebastien Bacher unveiled today in a short announcement that the Ubuntu Desktop team is considering moving to a display server using the next-generation Wayland protocol by default instead of the more vulnerable X.Org Server.
This isn’t Canonical’s first attempt to enable Wayland by default in Ubuntu, but it might just be the right time since many bugs and blockers were resolved since Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) four years ago, such as desktop sharing.
Ubuntu is going to be trying to switch over to using Wayland by default for the current Ubuntu 21.04 cycle to allow sufficient time for widespread testing and evaluation ahead of next year's Ubuntu 22.04 LTS release.
Canonical engineer Sebastien Bacher announced today they will be trying again for Ubuntu 21.04 to enable Wayland by default, four years after they originally tried but reverted back to using GNOME on X.Org for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and since that point. Ubuntu with GNOME Shell on Wayland has been available as a non-default choice but the hope is now in 2021 they are ready to comfortably switch to Wayland.
OpenRAN-based solutions with components from different vendors offer more flexibility and programmer access, with more functions running in software than hardware, typically under a Linux OS, explains ArsTechnica. However, O-RAN projects are often more expensive and power-hungry, and require more technical expertise, says the story. TechCrunch quotes Ravuri as saying O-RAN tends to provide a “clunky solution” with higher power consumption.
EdgeQ, which is compatible with OpenRAN option 7.x and option 6, promises to offer greater flexibility and openness without the power consumption, expense, and complexity of typical O-RAN projects. Many of these goals are achieved by integrating more functions on a single processor.
Rockchip RK3399 and RK3328 are typically used in Chromebooks, single board computers, TV boxes, and all sort of AIoT devices, but if you ever wanted to create a cluster based on those processor, Firefly Cluster Server R2 leverages the company’s RK3399, RK3328, or even RK1808 NPU SoM to bring 72 modules to a 2U rack cluster server enclosure, for a total of up to 432 Arm Cortex-A72/A53 cores, 288 GB RAM, and 18 3.5-inch hard drives.
Firefly says the cluster can run Android, Ubuntu, or some other Linux distributions. Typical use cases include “cloud phone”, virtual desktop, edge computing, cloud gaming, cloud storage, blockchain, multi-channel video decoding, app cloning, etc. When fitted with the AI accelerators, it looks similar to Solidrun Janux GS31 Edge AI server designed for real-time inference on multiple video streams for the monitoring of smart cities & infrastructure, intelligent enterprise/industrial video surveillance, object detection, recognition & classification, smart visual analysis, and more. There’s no Wiki for Cluster Server R2 just yet, but you may find some relevant information on the Wiki for an earlier generation of the cluster server.
Our goal isn't to rigorously test all of these OSes to the same extent we do Android and iOS, but rather introduce you to the world of alternative mobile experiences. We didn't test every one of these systems for ourselves, but we highly recommend looking up videos that show the latest builds of these OSes running on various hardware to get a better idea of what to expect. You'll see that we've presented these OSes in descending order of convenience; the ones at the top are widely supported and feature complete, and the ones at the bottom are more experimental. At the very end, we've included a hardware platform that supports numerous OSes, including many of the ones we mention here.
One more caveat: a few of the options listed below ship on their own hardware, most of the others will require you to own or buy specific devices. And none of them will work with an iPhone.
Ibase’s compact, -10 to 60€°C tolerant “ISR301” embedded system supplies Android and Yocto Linux BSPs for on an i.MX8M with 3GB LPDDR4, 16GB eMMC, GbE, HDMI, 3x USB, 3x COM, and M.2 and mini-PCIe expansion.
Ibase has announced a fanless, i.MX8M-based embedded computer called the ISR301 that appears to be based on its 3.5-inch IBR210 SBC. The semi-rugged, 172 x 162 x 36mm ISR301 supports space-constrained factory automation, machine vision, edge computing, POS, and digital signage applications.
The Raspberry Pi Pico is a radical change from previous Pis, because it’s not a Linux computer, but a a microcontroller board like Arduino . The biggest selling points of the Raspberry Pi Pico are the price, $4 and the new RP2040 chip which provides ample power for embedded projects and enables users of any age or ability to learn coding and electronics. If you have a Windows, Apple, Linux computer or even a different Raspberry Pi, then you are already well on your way to using the Raspberry Pi Pico in your next project.
For centuries, hourglass instruments have been used to keep track of a certain amount of time. But while long superseded by other methods, this project by Ty and Gig Builds takes things full circle, creating an electronic version around WS2812B addressable LEDs.
The frame takes the form of a sort of 2D wooden hourglass, with RGB strips connected to snake from one end to another. An accelerometer reads whether the device is up or down, which passes orientation info to an Arduino Mega. The Mega in turn controls animations, simulating grains of sand as points of light dropping from the top section. As this happens, the bottom half incrementally fills with lit LEDs (as the top becomes dark), and the instrument can be again turned to reverse the process.
Announced last January at CES 2020, Arduino Portenta H7 is the first board part industrial-grade “Arduino Pro” Portenta family. The Arduino MKR-sized MCU board has plenty of processing power thanks to STMicro STM32H7 dual-core Arm Cortex-M7/M4 microcontroller.
It was launched with a baseboard providing access to all I/Os and ports like Ethernet, USB, CAN bus, mPCIe socket (USB), etc… But as AI moves to the very edge, it makes perfect sense for Arduino to launch Portenta Vision Shield with a low-power camera, two microphones, and a choice of wired (Ethernet) or wireless (LoRA) connectivity for machine learning applications.
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Arduino also had a software announcement to go along with Portenta Vision shield hardware, as the company has teamed up with OpenMV to make the OpenMV IDE compatible with the new shield.
Perhaps the most popular platform for applications is the web. There are many reasons for this including portability across platforms, no need to update the program, data backup, sharing data with others, and many more. This popularity has driven many of us to the platform.
Unfortunately, the platform is a bit complex. Rather than developing in a particular environment, with web applications it is necessary to create two halves of a program utilizing vastly different technologies. On top of that, there are many additional challenges such as the communications and security between the two halves.
Gone are the days when training employees was limited to classroom sessions. With a learning management system (LMS), you can move the entire corporate training process online, from creating courses to tracking progress. The software also lets you add multimedia content and interactive elements to your courses, so the learning experience is fun and engaging for employees.
There are hundreds of LMS tools available on the market, but if you’re looking for free software, there are relatively fewer options. Free LMS software will not only help you save big on IT costs but also let you play around and tailor software functionality to your needs.
To make your search easier, we’ve created a list of the top five free and open source LMS platforms (arranged alphabetically). All tools offer a stand-alone free module that you can choose to upgrade if you need more features. Read our complete product selection methodology here.
These changes mean that organizations “should take a thoughtful approach to how to adopt, integrate, and use open source in their organizations,” says Kevin Casey at the Enterprisers Project. However, as the TODO Group notes, “the majority of companies that use open source do not necessarily understand the benefits to their organization and do not have a strategy aligned with their business needs.”
Very impressed with LCA's organization; a nice video on how to setup your presentation AV locally well in advance, very clear communication on the infrastructure, background chat and green rooms for speakers, tech-checks well in advance, and also minutes in advance, clear scheduling with helpful count-down and music between talks, smooth speaker introductions, hand-over and questions; polished. Using proprietary Discord and StreamYard hopefully a transient tactic to quickly deliver something good for FLOSS in 2021. Overall - an amazingly well done conference, great work!
The FOSSASIA Summit 2021 will take place ONLINE this year. The event will spread out over the week of March 13 – 21 and will run on our own open source virtual event platform ‘eventyay’.
Speakers interested to submit a talk, panel or workshop please propose your session before 4th February (soft deadline). We want to learn from you how to solve the challenges of our time with Open Technologies!
Google has announced that it will be limiting access to private Chrome APIs that enable features such as Chrome sync and Click to Call so that only its browsers can use them.
Google has taken the open-source code for Chromium and has put countless hours on top of it with their own in-house development teams to create experiences that are unique and competitive. The third-party browsers which were able to access Chrome Sync were not identified publicly via the Chromium Blog, but as a result of this, Google is limiting access to its private Chrome APIs starting March 15, 2021.
During a recent audit, we discovered that some third-party Chromium based browsers were able to integrate Google features, such as Chrome sync and Click to Call, that are only intended for Google’s use. [...]
The web giant said that users of some third-party browsers were able to sign in to their Google Account and store and retrieve their Chrome sync data in their third-party browser. The data they could access includes bookmarks and presumably passwords. Google isn’t happy this is happening and has said that the APIs that enable these features will be restricted from March 15, 2021.
To the average Chromium user, this doesn’t sound like much of a problem. In fact, you might even assume it doesn’t apply to you. The language used in the post makes it sound like Google is referring to browsers which are spun off of the Chromium codebase, and at least in part, they are. But the search giant is also using this opportunity to codify their belief that the only official Chromium builds are the ones that they provide themselves. With that simple change, anyone using a distribution-specific build of Chromium just became persona non grata.
Unhappy with the idea of giving users a semi-functional browser, the Chromium maintainers for several distributions such as Arch Linux and Fedora have said they’re considering pulling the package from their respective repositories altogether. With a Google representative confirming the change is coming regardless of community feedback, it seems likely more distributions will follow suit.
The Mozilla Foundation has scorched a pair of monstrosities in the new version 85 of its Firefox browser.
The big target is supercookies which, as explained by Mozilla privacy engineer Steven Englehardt and senior product manager for Firefox privacy and security Arthur Edelstein, are very nasty trackers indeed because they exploit best-practice browser behaviour to offer tracking that goes beyond both that allowed by “official” Cookies and privacy laws.
“Like all web browsers, Firefox shares some internal resources between websites to reduce overhead,” the pair explain, before offering up the Firefox cache as an example of this approach at work. “If the same image is embedded on multiple websites, Firefox will load the image from the network during a visit to the first website and on subsequent websites would traditionally load the image from the browser’s local image cache (rather than reloading from the network).”
Firefox 85 declares war on supercookies, enables link preloading and adds improved developer tools (just in time, since Google's playing games with Chromium users again).
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At some point I'll get around to writing a upstreamable patch and then we won't have to keep carrying the diff around.
On behalf of Mozilla’s Data group, I’m happy to announce the availability of the first milestone of the Glean Dictionary, a project to provide a comprehensive “data dictionary” of the data Mozilla collects inside its products and how it makes use of it.
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Part of the vision of this project is to act as a showcase for Mozilla’s practices around lean data and data governance: you’ll note that every metric and ping in the Glean Dictionary has a data review associated with it — giving the general public a window into what we’re collecting and why.
The COVID 19 crisis increased our reliance on technology and accelerated tech disruption and innovation, as we innovated to fight the virus and cushion the impact. Nowhere was this felt more keenly than in the African region, where the number of people with internet access continued to increase and the corresponding risks to their privacy and data protection rose in tandem. On the eve of 2021 Data Privacy Day, we take stock of the key issues that will shape data and privacy in the Africa region in the coming year.
Tor Browser 10.0.9 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This release updates Firefox to 78.7.0esr for desktop and Firefox for Android to 85.1.0. This release includes important security updates to Firefox for Desktop, and similar important security updates to Firefox for Android.
The Inter-Process Communication (IPC) Layer within Firefox provides a cornerstone in Firefox’ multi-process Security Architecture. Thus, eliminating security vulnerabilities within the IPC Layer remains critical. Within this blogpost we survey and describe the different communication methods Firefox uses to perform inter-process communication which hopefully provide logical entry points to effectively fuzz the IPC Layer in Firefox.
The last yearly report of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) documents its main achievements during 2020. At least two of them, namely the campaign for European public code and the one about Users freedom, and routers, deserve the greatest attention by the general public.
Parted 3.4 has been released. This release includes many bug fixes and new features.
Here is Parted's home page:
http://www.gnu.org/software/parted/
For a summary of all changes and contributors, see:
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/parted.git/log/?h=v3.4
or run this command from a git-cloned parted directory:
git shortlog v3.3..v3.4 (appended below)
Here are the compressed sources and a GPG detached signature[*]:
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/parted-3.4.tar.xz
http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/parted/parted-3.4.tar.xz.sig
Use a mirror for higher download bandwidth:
https://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
[*] Use a .sig file to verify that the corresponding file (without the
.sig suffix) is intact. First, be sure to download both the .sig file
and the corresponding tarball. Then, run a command like this:
gpg --verify parted-3.4.tar.xz.sig
If that command fails because you don't have the required public key,
then run this command to import it:
gpg --keyserver keys.gnupg.net --recv-keys 117E8C168EFE3A7F
and rerun the 'gpg --verify' command.
This release was bootstrapped with the following tools:
Autoconf 2.69
Automake 1.16.1
Gettext 0.21
Gnulib v0.1-4131-g252c4d944a
Gperf 3.1
GNU Parted 3.4 is out as the first update to this open-source partition editor in sixteen months.
GParted 1.2 released earlier this week as the GUI-focused partition editor well known to Linux desktop users. On that front it was a bit of a surprise it took them until now to support the Microsoft exFAT file-system. But even more surprising on the GNU Parted side is that they didn't get their Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) support in order until now.
The guys can't help but laugh when they hear the test tests one well-known online giant is testing. You might say they get a bit testy.
I am a big advocate of learning multiple programming languages. That's mostly because I tend to get bored with the languages I use the most. It also teaches me new and interesting ways to approach programming.
The --write-out (or -w for short) curl command line option is a gem for shell script authors looking for more information from a curl transfer. Experienced users know that this option lets you extract things such as detailed timings, the response code, transfer speeds and sizes of various kinds. A while ago we even made it possible to output JSON.
While git is open source, GitHub is a proprietary system. But the thing is that even if we would go with a competitor and get our code hosting done elsewhere, our code would still be stored on a machine somewhere in a remote server park we cannot physically access – ever. It doesn’t matter if that hosting company uses open source or proprietary code. If they decide to switch off the servers one day, or even just selectively block our project, there’s nothing we can do to get our stuff back out from there.
We have to work so that we minimize the risk for it and the effects from it if it still happens.
A proprietary software platform holds our code just as much hostage as any free or open source software platform would, simply by the fact that we let someone else host it. They run the servers our code is stored on.
Following the LLVM 12 code branching earlier this week, the first release candidate of the forthcoming LLVM 12.0 is now available for testing.
As noted in that earlier article, LLVM 12 is bringing many big ticket items like the x86-64 microarchitecture feature level support in conjunction with the GCC/GNU camp, Intel Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids support, initial AMD Zen 3 support, squaring away C++20 support, and improvements to Clangd and other LLVM toolchain components. LLVM 12 is shaping up to be another great half-year update to this open-source compiler toolchain that is widely used throughout the industry.
I work at Red Hat on the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). In GCC 10, I added the new -fanalyzer option, a static analysis pass for identifying various problems at compile-time, rather than at runtime. The initial implementation was aimed at early adopters, who found a few bugs, including a security vulnerability: CVE-2020-1967. Bernd Edlinger, who discovered the issue, had to wade through many false positives accompanying the real issue. Other users also managed to get the analyzer to crash on their code.
I’ve been rewriting the analyzer to address these issues in the next major release, GCC 11. In this article, I describe the steps I’m taking to reduce the number of false positives and make this static analysis tool more robust.
We are proud to announce that Qt Online Installer and Maintenance Tool 4.0.1-1 have been released today. This version allows open-source users to select a mirror to download packages and their metadata. In addition, a bunch of fixes have been done to the installer UI.
Eiffel is an object-oriented programming language designed by Bertrand Meyer (an object-orientation proponent and author of Object-Oriented Software Construction) and Eiffel Software.
SciPy is a collection of Python libraries for scientific and numerical computing. Nearly every serious user of Python for scientific research uses SciPy. Since Python is popular across all fields of science, and continues to be a prominent language in some areas of research, such as data science, SciPy has a large user base. On New Year's Eve, SciPy announced version 1.6 of the scipy library, which is the central component in the SciPy stack. That release gives us a good opportunity to delve into this software and give some examples of its use.
What is SciPy?
The name SciPy refers to a few related ideas. It is used in the titles of several international conferences related to the use of Python in scientific research. It is also the name of the scipy library, which contains modules for use in various areas of scientific and numerical computing.
In mathematics, there’s a concept called set-builder notation, also called set comprehension. Inspired by this principle, Python offers list comprehensions, too. In fact, the Python list comprehension is one of the defining features of the language. It allows us to create concise, readable code that outperforms the uglier alternatives like for loops or using map().
We’ll first look at the most well-known type: list comprehensions. Once we’ve got a good grasp of how they work, you’ll also learn about set comprehensions and dictionary comprehensions.
The FCC has taken the first steps of opening up terahertz wave spectrum (frequencies between 95 GHz and 3 THz), citing that it will "expedite the deployment of new services in the spectrum above 95 GHz."
In early 2018, the University of Oulu in Finland announced the funding of their 6G Flagship program to research materials, antennas, software, and more that will be required to launch 6G. The idea is to start developing the hardware needed to implement 6G and explore how the new technology might be used.
6G research has begun from Virginia Tech and companies like Samsung and LG. [...]
Every body that hits the ground in Hell will get up should they choose it. There’s plenty of death and destruction but no dead. All ends are artificial, wishful thinking, and even running, even seeing their soft resolve lie face down, you feel sorry for them. Some bodies are so far decided, and in some areas their lying so dense. You try your best not to step on them, but when you do, most times they don’t bother to make a sound. They mimic what they remember of the dead things from when they lived. In the crowds of the bodies still making their way, I’ve found myself running over the planks the lying make, stepping on the backs of their charcoaled heads, their heads inducing a misstep as they sink, as I further bury their faces. It’s the stress of the flames behind us that causes this, that encourages our rapid, collective pacing. It’s easy to fall. One falling becomes many and many makes a felled section, but soon enough the disturbed tide of running finds a balance, and those of us who have gone under it seems for hours are forced to be the fodder of those whose timing is better. I remember watching TV upstairs. Upstairs, the entertainment center held easily the biggest TV in the house, only with the weight distributed as it was with the TV inside, it was even easier for everything to tumble over. My brother half watched while he browsed at the computer. My feet rested on the lower half of the center, not realizing its rocking as I pushed. I’ll admit I understood badly what it meant to be mad at a person. I thought once it happened, they withdrew from you. You could no longer count on them, and to make things even or protect yourself, you’d also withdraw your protection. My father taught me that. I remember learning the lesson from my brother, but also the day he complicated it. The TV stand began to tip over. Having realized right away, I might’ve been able to escape, but I merely fell back and waited to be crushed. My brother, with one arm, pushed it back. I remember thinking, why would you do that? Had you been waiting for something bad to happen to me, this was your chance. It would’ve made me sad, but I would’ve given it to you. Years back, when we were both tiny, the same thing happened to him, only no one was there to save him. I can’t remember if I watched it happen, but I’d seen its aftermath, my brother flailing under the weight of the thing, and crying. I don’t believe I would’ve been strong enough to stop it, but I don’t trust the memory, or myself inside of it, to know I would have had I been, and I thank God for that. I only need to atone for the present. If the only world is a Hell with my brother in it, being with him will make a new one.
Within a day of arriving in Italy from New York, Fraser Wilson, the protagonist of Luca Guadagnino’s We Are Who We Are, gets blood on his prized Raf Simons T-shirt. The garment, from Simons’s 2013 spring/summer collection, is printed with a painting by the artist Brian Calvin of a pale-skinned woman holding a can of Modelo; it’s an item with clout that, until a recent spike in price, tended to sell secondhand for around $200 on the menswear resale site Grailed. Fraser, played by Jack Dylan Grazer, loves it—he name-drops its designer at every possible opportunity—and bloodies it after getting drunk and falling off a bridge railing. The fall cuts his cheek, staining the shirt’s front with a soft crimson splotch.
It was weird to own a Zune in 2005. It is even weirder to own a Zune in 2021 — let alone 16 of them. And yet, 27-year-old Conner Woods proudly shows off his lineup on a kitchen table. They come in all different colors, shapes, and sizes, and each can be identified by that telltale black plastic D-pad just below the screen. He owns the entire scope of the brief Zune lineup — from the svelte Zune 4 to the chunky Zune HD — and among the microscopic community of people who still adore Microsoft’s much-derided MP3 player, no collection of dead tech could possibly be more enviable.
Adjusted for population size, the US equivalent of the UK’s death toll would be 588,000– on January 21 the US death toll stood at 417,211.
The total number of positive tests in the UK since the pandemic began is 3,617,459.
Given how this blog has so thoroughly been dominated by blogging about COVID-19 for nearly a year now, it almost seems quaint to address more typical antics of the antivaccine movement. However, given the prominence of the antivaccine movement that has come about as it’s made common cause with COVID-19 cranks and deniers to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt about the new COVID-19 vaccines, I thought it might be a useful exercise to look at the sort of thing antivaxxers have been doing, well, ever since I started paying attention to the antivaccine movement in a big way 16 years ago—and, of course, long before that. So it was that I started seeing links to an article by Del Bigtree’s antivaccine group the Informed Consent Action Network (ICAN), The CDC Finally Capitulated To ICAN’s Legal Demands and Removed the Claim that “Vaccines Do Not Cause Autism” From Its Website! On Twitter, Del Bigtree was making grandiose claims on ICAN’s Twitter feed to the point that, if you didn’t know better, you might think that ICAN had utterly defeated the CDC:
Amid the continued pandemic-induced horror, we find ourselves getting emotional over our fellow health care workers’ social media posts announcing their receipt of the Covid-19 vaccine. But our joy and relief at the sight of smiling faces next to newly needled biceps and the corresponding “I got my shot” stickers fade when the accompanying announcement specifies which pharmaceutical company name adorns the bottle from which the serum was drawn. We can’t help but wonder: Why are health care workers doing free marketing for pharmaceutical companies?
January has become the deadliest month of the pandemic in the United States, with at least 80,000 deaths from COVID-19 so far, and public health experts worry new, more contagious variants of the coronavirus could make things worse. President Joe Biden has announced plans to acquire another 200 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines, aiming to vaccinate most people in the U.S. by summer, but vaccine distribution continues to be a problem. The Daily Beast reports that of the 41 million vaccine doses handed out to states, fewer than 22 million have been administered. Meanwhile, many states report running out of vaccines. “States are telling federal officials that they believe millions of doses are lost in the distribution system,” says reporter Erin Banco. “What the Biden team is trying to do now is sort of do an accounting exercise to figure out where these vaccine doses are located.”
The seven-day average COVID death toll hit an all time high yesterday, with over 3,400 Americans expected to die on any given day. Educator cases are on the rise. Studies have shown that children are as likely to contract and pass the coronavirus on as adults, making schools potential super spreading hotspots. As a result, European nations like the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, Austria, Denmark, and the Netherlands are shuttering schools, despite, in many cases, having lower infection rates than the U.S.
The more Evers fought for Covid-19 restrictions, the more GOP resistance he faced inside the state Capitol. The state Supreme Court issued several decisions siding with Republicans in limiting Evers’ power to act during a public health emergency.
I mean, it’s completely shaped how I see it. Almost every time I talk to someone about a patient who has gone through some bullshit with their health care, I just want to tell them — because I think people don’t entirely understand how different it can be — that it’s not like this in other countries. I partly just assume that people don’t know how good it is in other countries because I think there would be riots if they did. But yes, it absolutely informs my perspective. And it’s not just having grown up in England.
My stepdad is a doctor, and my mom was a local health care activist for a lot of my life — trying to keep our local hospital open while the Tories and also Labour were constantly trying to close it, downgrade it, and make it smaller and worse. So, I grew up in an NHS-loving family. But there’s also my personal experience as someone who experiences frequent chronic migraines. As soon as I moved to the US, it wasn’t just like a theoretical thing. I pretty much immediately discovered how bad American health care was.
Due to the global nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines and treatments are in short supply and prohibitively expensive for many countries. For this reason, some scholars and foreign governments have argued that all IP rights should be suspended for such drugs for the duration of the pandemic. Others have made the more modest recommendation that countries be permitted to use compulsory licensing under TRIPS Article 31 to produce generic versions of needed drugs, in exchange for paying “adequate remuneration in the circumstances of each case” to the patent holder. This raises the question of whether patent rights are creating an impediment to getting people needed drugs during the pandemic.
The United States has not been particularly consistent in its attitude towards non-permissive government use of patented inventions and compulsory licensing. In the 1950s and 60s, it imported patented drugs from generic manufacturers to cut costs. During the anthrax scare in the early 2000s, after Canada licensed Bayer’s patented Cipro drug to a generic manufacturer, the U.S. government threatened to do the same to help negotiate a better price. Since 2010, there have been at least three cases of patent holders seeking compensation for the government’s unauthorized use of their defense-related inventions.
Notwithstanding the U.S. government’s regular unauthorized use of patented inventions, it has been quick to punish countries that use compulsory licensing to provide life-saving drugs to its citizens. When South Africa was suffering from the worst of the AIDS epidemic and seeking to import generic antiretroviral drugs, the Clinton administration placed South Africa on the Special 301 Report Watch List. Subsequent Democratic and Republican administrations have punished other countries seeking to utilize Article 31 to provide drugs to people who would otherwise go without treatment.
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Finally, the United States needs to join the European Union in revisiting its ugly practice of punishing low- and middle-income countries that utilize compulsory licensing to provide life-saving drugs to its citizens. If South Africa or other countries are forced to utilize compulsory licensing to produce COVID-19 drugs, will we repeat the mistakes we made during the AIDS epidemic? Or will we recognize that a global pandemic represents the kind of extenuating circumstance that TRIPS Article 31 was meant to address?
The company posted $111.4 billion in sales for the three months ended Dec. 26, up 21% year over year. It was a quarterly record and Apple’s first quarter of revenue of more than $100 billion. Net income came in at $28.8 billion, or $1.68 per diluted share (up 35% from the year-ago period). Wall Street analysts on average had expected revenue of $103.28 billion and EPS of $1.41, per Refinitiv.
U.S. and Bulgarian authorities this week seized the darkweb site used by the NetWalker ransomware cybercrime group to publish data stolen from its victims. In connection with the seizure, a Canadian national suspected of extorting more than $27 million through the spreading of NetWalker was charged in a Florida court.
Authorities across Europe on Tuesday said they’d seized control over Emotet, a prolific malware strain and cybercrime-as-service operation. Investigators say the action could help quarantine more than a million Microsoft Windows systems currently compromised with malware tied to Emotet infections.
If the iPad gave tech advisers a few sleepless nights back in the day, the internet of things, today, represents a recurring nightmare.
"Everything is becoming a computer," Mr Schneier says.
"And those computers are vulnerable.
"Whether it's your Peloton bike or your phone, your refrigerator, your thermostat, toys, your car - these are all vulnerable to hacking."
And that is a problem for President Biden, who seems to like his gadgets.
He has been photographed wearing an Apple Watch and reportedly owns a Peloton exercise bike that comes with a computer screen, camera, and microphone all connected to the internet. Can that be made secure?
The FBI has taken down the site of the Windows ransomware NetWalker on the dark web and also arrested a Canadian who was using the malware for attacking companies.
Authorities in a number of European countries, along with the US and Canada, have disrupted the activities of the Emotet botnet.
One proposal has been to ban all ransom payments. Whether such bans could be enforced is not clear. Also, organizations that did their best to safeguard themselves, but still saw their systems get crypto-locked, could go out of business or suffer devastating interruptions due to a ban.
Short of a ban, Ciaran Martin, an Oxford University professor of practice in the management of public organizations who until last August served as the British government's cybersecurity chief, says governments should at least crack down on insurers being able to help victims funnel payoffs to attackers.
As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world, one of the main points of contention has been how to handle schools. Some countries sent all students home to keep them from spreading the virus. Other countries made schools the last thing they shut down, if they ever did, arguing that schools haven't been a major source of transmission and teaching kids is too important to shut down. Here in America, most states did a hybrid model, choosing the absolute worst of both worlds. Teachers get hamstrung having to teach students both locally and remotely, which is basically impossible, while still having students and teachers come into schools to transmit the virus to one another.
Breathless coverage of the SolarWinds hack functions to manufacture consent for NSA's internet hegemony and to divert us from considering alternative models of security.
JP: Hey, I’ve actually used the USB over IP driver when I worked at Microsoft on Azure.
It would appear that "sudo" has a buffer-overflow vulnerability that allows any local user to gain root privileges, whether or not they are in the sudoers file. It has been there since 2011. See this advisory for details, but perhaps run an update first.
Qualys said the vuln gives any local user root access to systems running the most popular version of Sudo.
A doozy of a bug that could allow any local user on most Linux or Unix systems to gain root access has been uncovered — and it had been sitting there for a decade, researchers said.
The bug was found in Sudo, a utility built into most Unix and Linux operating systems that lets a user without security privileges access and run a program with the credentials of another user. Qualys researchers named the vulnerability “Baron Samedit,” tracked as CVE-2021-3156. They said the bug popped into the Sudo code back in July 2011.
[...]
Here’s how the vuln works: Specifically, the bug is a heap-based buffer overflow in Sudo, which lets any local user trick it into running in “shell” mode.
Sudo authors explained in a Tuesday advisory that when Sudo is running in shell mode, “it escapes special characters in the command’s arguments with a backslash.” Then, a policy plug-in removes any escape characters before deciding on the Sudo user’s permissions.
But it’s not just a single bug which exposed these systems, it’s actually the combination of two bugs working in tandem in Sudo that makes the exploitation possible, the authors explained.
“A bug in the code that removes the escape characters will read beyond the last character of a string if it ends with an unescaped backslash character,” the Sudo authors explained. “Under normal circumstances, this bug would be harmless since Sudo has escaped all the backslashes in the command’s arguments.”
Security researchers at Qualys discovered a privilege escalation vulnerability in one of the core utilities present in all Unix-like operating systems including Linux.
If exploited, the heap overflow vulnerability in the Sudo utility could allow any unprivileged user to gain root privileges.
The vulnerability, which has now been patched, has existed for almost a decade, according to a blog post by Animesh Jain, a Vulnerability Signatures Product Manager at Qualys.
U.S. intelligence officials are urging Amrican companies and security workers to fix a software flaw that, if exploited, would give attackers deep access to a victim machine.
The vulnerability, which now has a patch, would have allowed unauthorized users to gain what’s known as root privileges on vulnerable hosts as early as 2011 when the flaw was introduced, researchers at the security firm Qualys found. Root access would enable hackers to obtain administrative privileges over a machine, and quietly collect sensitive information.
The vulnerability has existed for 10 years in sudo, a common tool found on nearly all Unix and Linux-based operating systems that generally allows system administrators to give some approved users root privileges.
The flaw affects legacy versions from 1.8.2 to 1.8.31p2 and all default versions from 1.9.0 to 1.9.5p1, according to Qualys.
Cybersecurity researchers and the U.S. Cyber Command are warning users about a decade-old buffer overflow bug in sudo that can grant root access to malicious users with low level access to systems.
The vulnerability, discovered by Qualys and nicknamed “Baron Samedit,” affects all versions of Linux Qualys has tested against. The glitch allows users, even those off of sudoers list, to gain root access. It has been patched in the latest release of sudo.
“Any user – even the lowest of the low privileged – can access root,” said Mehul Revankar, vice president of product management and engineering at Qualys.
Though other Sudo vulnerabilities have been found in the past, it’s rare that a bug affects any account, rather than accounts meeting specific conditions.
“We expect millions of systems to be affected,” said Revankar.
A major vulnerability impacting a large chunk of the Linux ecosystem has been patched today in Sudo, an app that allows admins to delegate limited root access to other users.
As reported by ZDNet, a major vulnerability was discovered two weeks ago that impacts the Linux ecosystem tremendously. Today, the problem has been patched by an app called Sudo which permits admins in Linux to consign limited root access for other users. It was fixed with the release of the Sudo v1.9.5p2.
[...]
Thankfully, Sudo has already fixed this problem for the Linux ecosystem. It can be found in sudo 1.9.5p2. Sudo added that if users want to check if their version of Sudo is vulnerable, they can key in the following commands to check:
sudoedit -s '\' 'perl -e 'print "A" x 65536''
Ideally, you should receive a usage or error message. This indicated that your version of Sudo is not vulnerable. On the other hand, if the result that arises is a Segmentation for, then you can expect that your Sudo version is indeed vulnerable.
Sudo's update should be applied as early as possible to prevent malicious acts by attackers. If you need to know more technical information about checking your Sudo status, you can check The Qualys advisory.
Researchers from Qualys have disclosed a vulnerability in the sudo utility that could be exploited to grant system administrator privileges to any user that is logged into a system.
Dubbed Baron Samedit (CVE-2021-3156), Qualys recommended that users apply patches for the vulnerability immediately.
The developers of sudo were informed about the security flaw on 13 January and the bug was patched on 19 January — a week before it was publicly disclosed.
Sudo is a widely used program in Unix-like operating systems. Qualys confirmed that the Baron Samedit bug was present in Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora.
A significant vulnerability in the Linux Sudo command could inadvertently grant unauthorised users root access to a system, even if the account isn’t listed as an authorised account.
Sudo allows administrators to delegate limited root access to regular users, but the vulnerability tagged CVE-2021-3156 can be exploited by an unprivileged user to gain root privileges on a vulnerable host.
The flaw has been hiding in plain sight for nearly a decade having been introduced in July 2011, according to Qualys security researchers. Multiple versions of Sudo are therefore likely to be affected, including legacy versions 1.8.2 to 1.8.31p2 and stable versions from 1.9.0 to 1.9.5p1.
A vulnerability has been discovered in the Linux sudo command that’s been hiding in plain sight.
Sudo is the venerable tool that allows standard users to run admin tasks on Linux distributions. Without sudo, users would have to log into the system as the root user (or change to the root user with the su command), in order to run admin commands. Seeing as how that is looked upon as a security risk, sudo has become a required tool for many Linux admins and users.
However, it has been discovered (by researchers at Qualys) that, for nearly a decade, sudo contained a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability. This bug could allow any unprivileged user to gain root privileges using the default sudo configuration.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ansible, firefox-esr, and slurm-llnl), Fedora (firefox, nss, php-pear, seamonkey, and thunderbird), Gentoo (phpmyadmin and telegram-desktop), openSUSE (chromium and python-autobahn), Oracle (firefox and sudo), Red Hat (firefox), Scientific Linux (firefox), and Ubuntu (ceph, kernel, linux, linux-lts-xenial, linux-aws, linux-aws-5.4, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, and tcmu).
The Open Source Software Foundation (OpenSSF) officially launched on August 3, 2020. In this article, we’ll look at why the OpenSSF was formed, what it’s accomplished in its first six months, and its plans for the future.
The world depends on open source software (OSS), so OSS security is vital. Various efforts have been created to help improve OSS security. These efforts include the Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) in the Linux Foundation, the Open Source Security Coalition (OSSC) founded by the GitHub Security Lab, and the Joint Open Source Software Initiative (JOSSI) founded by Google and others.
It became apparent that progress would be easier if these efforts merged into a single effort. The OpenSSF was created in 2020 as a merging of these three groups into “a cross-industry collaboration that brings together leaders to improve the security of open source software (OSS).”
Floodgap sites are down because someone did a mass attack on NetSol (this also attacked Perl.com and others). I'm working to resolve this. More shortly.
Another day, another example of why we might want to actually pass at least a basic privacy law for the internet era. The latest problem bubbled up over at home security vendor ADT, after a technician was caught using home security cameras to spy on people for years. More specifically, the tech accessed customer video cameras in 200 homes some 9,600+ times over a period of four years. His preferred targets were attractive women he spied on while they were having sex, bathing, or getting dressed. This was, as US Attorney Prerak Shah was quick to note, a grotesque abuse of trust:
Canalys and Counterpoint estimate iPhone shipments jumped to roughly 82 million units in the last quarter, marking a new high for Apple and crowning it the leading smartphone vendor. Samsung slumped more than 10% to just over 62 million shipments in a period that was marked by the release of the first 5G-enabled iPhones. Xiaomi Corp., Oppo and Vivo filled out the top five while Huawei suffered a 41% drop after U.S. sanctions deprived it of access to key suppliers and chipmakers.
For years now, the digital landscape has penetrated nearly every aspect of modern living. It’s never been easier to share information, find new music and movies, and communicate with anyone anywhere in the world.
With this abundance of access, many people still fail to adequately consider the safety of their personal data. Most are either uninformed or under informed about how their data is used, collected, shared, and even sold. On Jan. 28—Data Privacy Day—take a moment to learn more about the importance of data privacy.
Data Privacy Day: Are CIOs really prepared for a data breach?January 28 is celebrated as Data Privacy Day around the world with a singular objective to spread awareness about the criticality of data misuse and ways to protect it. From a corporate perspective, data privacy is more than just compliance but an asset to keep secure.
However, despite her assertions she wants to spend more time in nature, reading & writing in quarantine per previous interviews, the final sentence in her post is a little more telling. “Thats what THEY want and can use to make money Control over your brain-” she finished her post with, adding a hashtag: #The BewilderedHerd.
Surprised to see Pamela Anderson using a hashtag associated with posts about propaganda & Noam Chomsky now? So are we. Let’s delve into Pamela Anderson’s departure from social media.
Despite the controversies, 28% said they have no plans to switch to an alternative instant messaging app while 29% said they could switch within a month, 25% said they could do so within a week, and 18% said they have already switched.
Chandlee also weighs in on the challenges of moderating content on TikTok, tackled through a combination of “machine learning” and human policing of posts. Most of the content that is deemed objectionable is caught before it goes public, Chandlee says.
Stevens said an FBI agent told her they were reaching out to every single person whose cell phone put them near the Capitol during the [insurrection].
She was out for a walk with a friend and his two young daughters on the afternoon of Jan. 6, but they were diverted by bomb scares until they ended up right next to the insurrection. Adults and kids were cordoned off and unable to get back to their apartments for four hours.
[...]
"Extremely creepy, because he explained that they have everyone’s phone number from pinging off the cell phone towers, and they know basically exactly where you were, within the vicinity of the Capitol," Stevens said. "And they can actually pinpoint on Google Maps exactly where you were standing. Like, he knew where I was standing on the sidewalk, like specifically, based on my cell phone ping.
For two years now, the largest European police database has had a technique for cross-checking dactyloscopic data. The proportion of false hits is said to be in the per mille range. A comparable German system contains data records on 5.3 million persons.
To jumpstart our efforts, Twitter has acquired Revue, a service that makes it free and easy for anyone to start and publish editorial newsletters. Revue will accelerate our work to help people stay informed about their interests while giving all types of writers a way to monetize their audience – whether it’s through the one they built at a publication, their website, on Twitter, or elsewhere.
I will note that all the people I know projected serious trouble in DC on January 6th (but didn’t predict that).
Yet there was virtually no police presence even though the DC Mayor had alerted the National Guard days ago.
The “humanitarian war” instinct persists even after two decades of the horror shows that followed the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US and UK; the western-sponsored butchering of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi that unleashed a new regional trade in slaves and arms; and the west’s covert backing of Islamic jihadists who proceeded to tear Syria apart.
In fact, those weren’t really separate horror shows: they were instalments of one long horror show.
"This is an important first step in ending our material support for war globally, and the genocide in Yemen in particular," said Rep. Ilhan Omar.
The NYPD is still spending taxpayers' money to prevent taxpayers from accessing police misconduct records. The latest fight over these records was prompted by the New York legislature, which repealed the law that allowed the NYPD to deny the public access to this information last summer.
The attack against members of the group the Committee for Non-Violent Action (CNVA) at the farm came amid the burning dissent of the 1960s, and particularly 1968, following the murders of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. The debacle and police riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention had just taken place against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the antiwar movement. I was a college student and had just joined an antiwar group on my campus. I was about 12 miles from the farm on the night of the attack against members of peace and antinuclear protesters who lived at the farm and it seemed as if the entire society was falling apart around us. How could this be? How could people with entirely peaceful objectives be attacked so viciously?
First, the setting where the antinuclear activists and protesters lived on a farm in Voluntown where they were attacked by right-wing Minutemen on that summer morning: The forest and lakes of the area are pristine and walking within this pristine wilderness a person might think that he or she is far from the great metropolitan swath of highways and cities that comprise the densely popular East Coast of the US. Some of those cities are at most one hour away.
If you don’t know where I’m talking about, it’s because only biblically proportioned catastrophes such as the 1983-85 famine in Tigray, which killed 1,000,000 people, contain enough zeros to make it into the ABC Nightly News running order. This year’s impending disaster in Tigray is on the radar of the more thorough news outlets (The Guardian, BBC, and Al-Jazeera have all done their best, for example).
Yet a news, internet, and phone blackout have restricted reportage to the point where leaks have started to appear. At one relief coordinating committee meeting in the Ethiopian town of Mekele, an official of the interim administration of central Tigray (the federal government has replaced civil servants en masse) said: ‘The situation on the ground is dire.’ He added that Tigrayans were dying in their sleep from starvation.
As the Capitol insurrection on January 6 descended into a frenzy of mob violence, a far-right paramilitary group known as the Oath Keepers marched through the sea of rioters and protesters, up the east steps of the Capitol building and into the rotunda. Video from that day shows the Oath Keepers marching in a military formation known as “Ranger File”, described by the Associated Press as ‘standard operating procedure for a combat team that is “stacking up” to breach a building – instantly recognizable to any U.S. soldier or Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.’
The group of Russian federal agents who allegedly followed Alexey Navalny around the country and supposedly organized his poisoning is also responsible for assassinating several other people, according to a new joint investigation by Bellingcat, The Insider, and Der Spiegel, which presents evidence that Federal Security Service officers were involved in the deaths of journalist Timur Kuashev, politician Nikita Isayev, and activist Ruslan Magomedragimov.€ Meduza summarizes the report’s key allegations.
The Moscow-based electrical equipment supplier and installer “Tesli” recently reported on its website that it was fulfilling a contract “at the Russian presidential administration’s residence” in the town of Praskoveyevka, a few miles from Vladimir Putin’s supposed “palace” in Gelendzhik. The news outlet Open Media was the first to report this information. Meduza summarizes how Tesli and a handful of other firms have inadvertently helped corroborate monumental corruption allegations against Russia’s president.
Russia’s Secret Service, the Federal Protective Service (FSO), isn’t responsible for protecting any properties in the Black Sea resort town of Gelendzhik or in any of its surrounding areas, the department told RBC on Wednesday, January 27.€
On the afternoon of Wednesday, January 27, law enforcement officials in Moscow began carrying out searches of homes and offices belonging to opposition figure Alexey Navalny, his family members, and his associates. In addition to searching Navalny’s Moscow apartment, police officers arrived at the apartment where his wife Yulia Navalnaya is staying, as well as at the FBK office and the “Navalny Live” studio. The police raids are reportedly in connection with a criminal investigation opened over the violation of sanitary and epidemiological rules during the protest opposing Navalny’s detention in Moscow on January 23.
Law enforcement officials are carrying out a search of Alexey Navalny’s apartment in Moscow, reported Anti-Corruption Foundation director Ivan Zhdanov on the afternoon of Wednesday, January 27.
Russian politician Alexei Navalny remains under arrest in Russia after returning to his homeland earlier this month. The event generated worldwide headlines as the 44-year-old lawyer was immediately detained at a Moscow airport, with Western figures hailing his bravery. “Navalny’s heroic struggle is no different from what Gandhi, King, Mandela and Havel fought for. While Navalny has not succeeded yet, there should be no doubt that his cause is good and just,” wrote former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. President Biden also pressed Putin on the issue in a meeting yesterday.
Amid the protest in St. Petersburg in support of jailed opposition figure Alexey Navalny on January 23, a police officer brutally kicked 54-year-old Margarita Yudina in the stomach. She fell and hit her head on the asphalt and ended up in intensive care, where she was treated for a severe head injury and a concussion. Yudina was discharged the next day, but was readmitted to hospital on January 26, after complaining of continued dizziness, headaches, and nausea. According to her lawyers, Yudina has now decided to press charges against the policeman who injured her for criminal abuse of authority.
When the absence of the Soviet Union could no longer justify bloated defense spending, we pursued a Global War on Terror that led to two decades of warfare in the Middle East and Southwest Asia.€ Counter-terrorism can no longer justify increased military spending, so will we settle on China (and Russia) as threats to U.S. security? € The Trump administration did so, driving China and Russia into each other’s arms as they have created their closest bilateral relations since the 1950s.€ U.S. strategists previously worried about Sino-Soviet cooperation, even exaggerating that threat to justify the Vietnam War.€ Now, no one in a sensitive policy position has such concerns even though U.S. relations with both China and Russia have deteriorated.
President Joe Biden will be somewhat hamstrung in his efforts toward China because of his own caustic language toward Beijing during the presidential campaign.€ In addition to hard-line appointments in the national security field, he will have to contend with a strong bipartisan push in the Congress to increase defense spending against the China threat.€ Congress is a major reason for the creation of the national security state that we have become, allowing the militarization of national security policy and the “forever wars” of the past two decades.€ China, of course, financed those wars.
It has now been two weeks since I posted a certain interview on YouTube.€ It has been six days since Twitter exploded in my face — to which I reacted with the most classic array of adolescent defensiveness I have exhibited online in years — and five days since I took the video down from my YouTube channel.€ Then several days followed, consisting largely of an extremely awkward combination of apologizing for my many mistakes in this process, as I began to learn what at least some of them were; listening to friends and comrades I had either upset by posting the video, or who were upset by my reactions to what people were accusing me of on social media; listening to other friends and comrades upset because I took the video down; and probably wasting my time and energy defending myself against accusations of racism, anti-Semitism, sympathizing with fascists, being duped by fascists, or perhaps even being one myself.
Of course, apologizing for what I did wrong while defending myself against false accusations is an impossible combination, especially on social media, where only the shortest posts that inspire the most controversy are the ones most people might see.€ I’m constantly finding that people I know well, of every age, are continually impacted both emotionally and intellectually by these social media algorithms, but I’ll leave that topic aside for now.€ In any case, I now resort to the forum that many people seem to think is extinct, for reasons I have yet to grasp, my blog, where there are no discussion threads to speak of, where there’s a beginning, middle and an end to the articles, and no one is likely to drop in on the most incendiary sentence somewhere in the middle, and see only that one.
Ty Garbin, 25, of Hartland Township, Mich., signed a plea agreement in which he admitted to planning to kidnap Whitmer at her vacation home and to wipe out a bridge to impede any police pursuing them, the Justice Department said in a statement.
The arrest in Kabul on Dec. 10 of an alleged Chinese espionage ring has prompted Afghanistan to recalibrate its relationship with China, its resource-hungry giant neighbor to the east. Afghan government officials said that the country has terminated oil and gas contracts with China and is seeking to renegotiate the terms of a massive mining concession that has been nearly dormant since it was inked by China more than a decade ago.
The Afghan officials said they busted an alleged Chinese espionage ring operating in Kabul to hunt down Uighur Muslims with the help of the Haqqani network, a terrorist outfit linked to the Taliban. A senior security official said the ring had been operating for six or seven years. Afghan authorities have cooperated with China in the past on the detention and deportation of Uighurs suspected of terrorist activity, but officials said they were shocked at China’s duplicity.
U.S. security officials warn ongoing anger over the outcome of the recent presidential election, as well as other grievances, could fuel new violence across the country in the coming weeks and months.
The Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday issued a National Terrorism Advisory System (NTAS) Bulletin, cautioning that a “heightened threat environment” was likely to persist through the end of April.
If Trump’s chief accomplice in the incitement to insurrection on January 6 is allowed to continue to serve in the chamber, the cynical argument would go, how can senators seriously argue that the 45th president should be held to account?
Needless to say, I won’t be making that defense, or any other, for Donald Trump. I couldn’t with a straight face recommend that the disgraced former president be let off the hook. They’ve got him on tape—and on Twitter—inciting the violent mob that invaded the US Capitol in order to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Trump’s guilty of the high crime with which he has been charged. He must be convicted by the Senate and barred from ever again occupying public office.
Yet the Hawley conundrum remains. He is just as guilty as Trump, just as responsible for what happened on January 6.
President Joe Biden is expected to issue executive orders to suspend new oil and gas leasing on federal property, reestablish a White House council of science advisers, and set a goal to protect 30% of federal land and water by 2030. He is also predicted to announce a number of initiatives prioritizing environmental justice by creating a White House interagency council on environmental justice and directing federal agencies to invest more in communities of color heavily impacted by pollution and the climate crisis. These actions, as well as executive orders to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline and put a moratorium on oil and gas permits in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, come after Biden used his inaugural address to declare the climate crisis to be one of the core issues facing the nation. Varshini Prakash, co-founder and executive director of the Sunrise Movement, says Biden is “off to a good start,” but says he needs to go beyond simply undoing the damage of the Trump administration. “We’re going to need to see a lot more from Joe Biden at the executive level and directing every branch of the federal government to action. But we’re also going to need to see him working actively to organize his congressional colleagues to pass what we need to be the greatest green jobs and infrastructure recovery plan that this country has seen,” says Prakash.
Find out where you U.S. Senator and Representative stand with our Vote Climate U.S. PAC 117th Congress Climate Scorecard.
President Biden on Wednesday took a host of executive actions centered around promoting environmental justice, building a green economy, and fostering what he calls a “whole of government” approach to taking on the climate crisis. The actions amount to a top-to-bottom overhaul of the government’s approach to what the president has called the “number one issue facing humanity.”
To address the climate crisis we must restore past adaptation efforts, innovate new ones, and develop a national resilience strategy to organize and guide our efforts in the decades to come.
The frozen world is shrinking at a “staggering” rate. New research takes a measure of the world’s huge ice loss.
"The voice of the people is clear—they want action on climate change."
The EU’s move comes at a perfect time for the new Biden Administration and is a clear signal that the Union wants to work with the U.S. in driving clean energy and ending our fossil fuel addiction.
The U.S. needs to move beyond its legacy of dithering on climate and set firm and meaningful targets on reducing carbon emissions.
"Biden campaigned on eliminating fossil fuel giveaways, and voters agree by a huge margin," said one climate activist.
"Our generation will not accept any excuses for delay or inaction on delivering historic legislation to build back better."
But that's what the Alberta government has done. Its $3.5-million public inquiry into what it calls “foreign-funded anti-energy campaigns” (“energy” only meaning fossil fuels and not renewable sources) commissioned and posted reports that University of Calgary law professor Martin Olszynski called “textbook examples of climate-change€ denialism.”
On the campaign trail, then-candidate Joe Biden proposed a ban on new leases on public lands, a pledge the Trump campaign falsely claimed would “end fracking.” After Biden’s victory, a coalition of nearly 600 organizations from western states wrote a letter in December to the president-elect, urging him to follow through on his promise. The executive order begins that€ process.
The proposal to drill for oil of the coastal plain of the Arctic Wildlife Refuge has overshadowed the Ambler Road. However, I think the Ambler Road represents a greater threat of long-term ecological damage to the wildlands and wildlife of the Brooks Range than drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge. Though do not interpret this to mean I think oil drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge would be benign.
Among other critical lands, the proposed road, if built, will cross the southern portion of the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Kobuk River National Preserve, and the Kobuk River Wild and Scenic River.
Leaders are setting their sights on a national collective bargaining agreement.€
The Federal Taxation Service (FNS) is set to create a special inspectorate to work with wealthy Russians, reports the business outlet VTimes citing two unnamed federal officials.
"Have we learned nothing?"
The official unemployment rate now stands at 6.7%. But that doesn’t feel right, does it? Unless you live in a gated community, the reality on the ground feels more dire and more destitute. Behind that cheery 6.7% stand millions of uncounted people – uncounted by design.
No one inside this political system, anyway.
5.2 million€ Americans filed for first-time unemployment over the last month. The key civilian labor force participation rate is€ 61.5%. Those are staggeringly bad numbers, comparable to the Great Depression. And this is following a year of atrocious job losses.€ “It’s literally off the charts,” Michelle Meyer of€ Bank of America€ said in May. “What would typically take months or quarters to play out in a recession happened in a matter of weeks this time.”
The r/WallStreetBets subreddit’s own moderators made it private for a little less than an hour on Wednesday evening, Reddit confirmed to The Verge — but now, it’s back, with a new post from the moderators themselves that doesn’t quite explain why it vanished in the first place. The subreddit has seen a significant increase in attention in recent days following the meteoric rise in GameStop’s stock driven in part by traders on the forum.
There are three things to remember as you watch the chaos unfolding with GameStop’s stock price. First, Wall Street is just what happens when you mix money with feelings. Second, the internet is real life. And third, the Street always wins, especially if you’re trading with Robinhood.
If you haven’t been paying attention, GameStop’s stock has been soaring in a remarkably volatile fashion; on January 22nd, GameStop zoomed upward 69 percent (nice) before it triggered a circuit breaker halt. The following Monday, January 25th, GameStop trading was halted nine times.
On the surface, this doesn’t make sense. GameStop, founded a year before Blockbuster, is part of a dwindling cohort of IRL businesses that are being starved by online marketplaces. These days, you can just buy video games over the internet instead of going to a soul-killing strip mall in Iowa City to buy a physical copy of the game. GameStop’s business has been suffering as a result.
Subreddit r/WallStreetBets has been the talk of the Internet this week, as its members have driven GameStop’s stock prices from around $20 to over $300. The community brands itself as “like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal,” and as time has gone on, it’s targeted other unlikely stocks like AMC, Blackberry, and Tootsie Roll. They’ve also been banned from Discord for hate speech.
What happened? The jump came after users of r/wallstreetbets, a Reddit forum, which now has almost 3m subscribers, began to take a fancy to the firm. Some posters justified their bullish bets based on company fundamentals, encouraged by Mr Cohen’s involvement. But most seem to have been driven by a vigilante-style desire to stick it to the establishment. GameStop was unloved by the vast majority of institutional investors—and a target of short-sellers. Investors wanting to bet against a company “go short” by borrowing shares and selling them at the market price. The total value of short positions in Gamestop reached around 140% of its market capitalisation. After users discovered that a swathe of hedge funds had bet against the stock, they began frantically buying shares in the hopes of forcing them to take losses.
Like many companies that are in rough shape, GameStop was the subject of what's called short selling, in which professional investors borrow shares of stock to sell and then buy back later so they can return it, which lets them pocket profits if the stock price goes down. They're basically bets that the company will fail.
GameStop was one of the most shorted of all publicly traded companies. Other companies on the list include AMC Theatres, Bed Bath & Beyond and even the mostly defunct Blockbuster. Remember those names.
And then it became the source of a short squeeze.
Amateur online traders fueled by discussions on Reddit sent shares of a struggling video game retailer flying Wednesday, a moment that is underscoring the divorce between the skyrocketing values of companies and the pain in the real economy.
GameStop, a video game retailer struggling to keep up with direct downloads even before the coronavirus pandemic, saw its share price jump to $347 per share on Wednesday. Overall, its share price has risen more than 1,800 percent in January.
It’s not the only seemingly imperiled company that has seen its stock soar because of buys by the nearly 3 million users on Reddit’s subforum r/WallStreetBets (WSB) either.
Online messaging platform Discord on Wednesday banned the r/WallStreetBets (WSB) server, which became the center for discussions among amateur online traders who fueled an unexpected surge in GameStop’s stock this week.
A Discord spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Hill that the decision to remove the server was due to users sharing “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings,” adding that it “did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on Wednesday took to Twitter to comment on GameStop’s recent stock surge spurred by amateur investors, with Warren criticizing hedge funds and wealthy investors “dismayed” by the GameStop trades.
GameStop's nearly vertical surge over the past week has come as retail traders, many of whom have documented their moves on the social media site Reddit, have piled into the stock and call options. The spiking share price has helped to create a stock squeeze, where shorts and options dealers are forced to buy shares of a rising stock to cover their positions, resulting in a feedback loop that drives the stock even higher.
Short selling is a strategy in which investors borrow shares of a stock to sell them at a certain price in expectations that the market value will fall below that level when it's time to pay for the borrowed shares.
WallStreetBets, the investor coalition that gained fame for boosting stocks from its perch on Reddit, was banned by the communications platform Discord for not doing enough to stem hateful speech.
Like many companies, AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon recently made a big stink about how they were pausing all PAC spending in supposed disgust at the insurrectionists in Congress whose bullshit resulted in a fatal riot at the Capitol. As noted already, that doesn't mean all that much. PAC spending is usually paused after an election to help get the lay of the land. Also, pausing PAC spending for a bit doesn't really justify the four years they spent enabling and normalizing fascism and bigotry just to nab merger approvals, deregulatory favors, and massive, pointless tax breaks.
Unless the filibuster is abolished, Democratic candidates in 2022 will have to tell voters that, despite controlling the White House and both chambers of Congress, they were unable to pass the popular policies that they campaigned on.
It seems almost impossible to recall that only a week before the inauguration our nation’s Capitol had been stormed, people died and a violent, misguided attempt to stop Congress from certifying the electoral votes failed. Adding insult to injury, the most unpopular president in U.S. history€ — and his equally unpopular spouse —€ then peevishly ignored the inaugural to fleece the American people out of one last million-dollar ride on Air Force One.
One week later, with a shocking 25,000 National Guard men and women standing armed and ready to repel any further attempts at insurrection, the threats to disrupt the inauguration evaporated, and spectacularly at that. In fact, the very people who had participated in the Capitol’s desecration realized that they, like the American people, had been horribly misled by the serial liar in the Oval Office. As one Proud Boy posted to a right-wing website, “we got played.” And indeed, they surely did. While their “hero” fled, they were left to answer the knock on the door from the FBI and arrested for their part in the failed insurrection.
ARE YOU LOOKING for an interesting story in an uninteresting place? Sometimes that’s the best strategy. And then sometimes it’s not. Bit of a lottery actually, to be honest, particularly when TV ‘celebrities’ get involved.
The NSW Government is offering $250,000 in grants for ideas that use technology to reduce barriers to the state's justice system for those who need it the most.
"Even this amount of money is no substitute for action by Congress, and I will be doing everything I can in Washington to make sure working people in Vermont and across the country get the relief they need in the middle of the worst crisis we've faced since the Great Depression."
On January 6, 2021, Arbeit Macht Frei was seen in the US Capitol. The slogan was on a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt worn by an insurrectionist who mugged for cameras with other pro-Trump rioters as they desecrated the halls of American democracy with Nazi-inspired flags and insignia. Just the month before, members of the Proud Boys had taken to the streets of DC for Trump in “6MWE” shirts (6 million wasn’t enough).
That anti-Semitic, anti-Roma bile is below contempt or comment, other than to say that now is not the moment for the rest of us to stand back and stand by. It’s time to acknowledge and remember.
If you want to win an election at the end of a global pandemic that left your nation, comparatively, unmolested, then the standard Labor Party ‘playbook of spin and obfuscation’ is going to need some tweaking. Chris Graham helpfully weighs in.
Why net neutrality needs to be a first 100 days priority.
A new president, an ousted fascist predecessor, and an obstructionist opposition party that wants nothing to change despite losing a national election is a great time to take on this task.
So let’s go to it.
The media should be honest about that, rather than making him out to be an iconoclast that he isn’t.
According to Greg Palast, the 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 results were all tampered with — votes tossed away, mostly Democratic. Palast convincingly argues that due to voter fraud (tossed votes) Gore should have been president in 2000, Kerry actually won in 2004, only a Palast intervention in 2012 prevented Obama from being robbed of his re-election, and Trump won in 2016 — only because millions of votes were tossed for hideously invalid reasons.
2) Despite the voter fraud Trump ill describes (corrected above), the fucker-in-chief almost won anyway. In five states –Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, North Carolina — the margin 1.5%, and in Nevada it was close at 2.2%.€ Check it out for yourself€ — never just believe what you hear or read. All of these were easily reversible in non-Corona year, where few were paying close attention to the value of mail-in votes. Trump was largely upset because he was led to expect such reversals in 2020 and they couldn’t come because of the scrutiny. That’s what happened in Georgia. He was upset that votes weren’t be tossed as usual. That was the substance of his call — lose some votes. The MSM is probably correct in calling it the most perfect election we’ve ever had, because it’s the first one where they were watching intently for vote throwaways. If only they’d done in 2016, and saved the nation such horror and wasted time in dealing with the ticking f*cking clock of Climate Change (four f*cking years lost!). Now the question for the MSM is will they be as vigilant in the future?
In the summer and fall of 2020 the Belarusian security forces became a collective symbol of brutality as they arrested, beat up, and tortured thousands of protesters for opposing President Alexander Lukashenko.€ At the same time, a number of them refused to fulfill these orders and decided to quit their jobs. Since then, Belarus’s former law enforcement officers have gravitated towards By_Pol — an organization made up of€ ex-security officials who are not only investigating their colleagues’ crimes, but also encouraging others to defect to the opposition. Meduza meets this new team of investigators working to “expose crimes against the Belarusian people.”
Earlier this week, Facebook reportedly suspended the account of Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russia’s national space agency, after he criticized the American political scientist and former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul. In tweets on January 23, McFaul expressed support for nationwide opposition protests demanding Alexey Navalny’s freedom, leading to a heated exchange with Rogozin, another former diplomat.
As amazing as it might be that 74 million would vote for a criminal con-man who could only find time for insurrectionist plots and a few rounds of golf while the nation burned, boiled and died in a covid pandemic and climate catastrophe, the truth lies behind us, they did. Many analysists will devote their time trying to understanding how this whole episode in U.S. history came about but in the end I think, that they will find that a large segment of American voters are living in a world that fluctuates between naiveté and cynicism and that this group of voters is woefully incapable of electing representatives as they should be elected, by the merits of their actions and leadership skills. With a huge population of citizens that remain either uneducated or just misinformed it’s not unexpected that a group of somewhat more savvy political power seekers might take advantage of and then exploit the common ignorance.
There is an appearance of political knowledge in the country. The general population in fact seems to be obsessed with politics. But that obsession is not based on a close study of either political or social history; it’s based on the sensational but shallow info-bites of corporate media, conspiracy theorists and the opinions of friends on Facebook. While this kind of information may be enjoyed by the masses of people who swallow it and then debate it to the point of armed insurrection, it hardly takes the place of well informed and critical thinking. The problem is not restricted to a left or right position, the problem of under-nourished political intelligence falls hard on both sides of the isle and has corrupted almost the entire spectrum of politically engaged citizens. Sadly, the group who has perhaps best escaped the manufactured ignorance and confusion of our times are those souls who have simply walked away from having any interest at all in politics except for when it directly affects them, as in when they are arrested for marijuana possession or the economy crashes around them, events of that nature.
History is likely to remember the days following the Capitol riot of January 6 as the last, best chance the Republican establishment had to break Donald Trump’s hold on their party. In the immediate aftermath of the shocking events, Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell seemed on the verge of breaking with Trump. Fomenting a mob that attacked Congress seemed too much even for lawmakers who had hitherto forgiven Trump’s every transgression. McConnell even described the event as a “failed insurrection.”1
John F Kennedy (JFK) was inaugurated as president of the United States nearly sixty years ago today. In the less than three years before he was assassinated in November of 1963, he managed to initiate major changes in America’s foreign policy.
The media establishment was horrified when the “Stop the Steal” mob stormed the US Capitol on January 6, and the sentence was swift: President Donald Trump, with his baseless fraud allegations and refusal to concede defeat, was responsible for the mayhem.
“Democracy has prevailed,” President Joe Biden said in his inaugural address, reflecting a theme of normalization that the longtime Washington insider sought to portray throughout the day’s pageantry. His aim, according to the Washington Post’s coverage (1/20/21), was to prove with his administration that “the past four years represented an aberration rather than an enduring rift in the national fabric.”
UPDATED In addition to the substantial and very careful redactions made before publication, I have now made six more specific redactions at the request of the Crown Office, which is very agitated. I do not think this prevents the publication of these affidavits from still being useful.
Donald Trump was elected president in 2016 following a campaign of pledges to build a wall along the border with Mexico, repeal and replace his predecessor’s signature health care legislation, “drain the swamp” of special interests in Washington, D.C., and cut through the federal government’s bureaucracy, all to “Make America Great Again.”
Trump ultimately fell short on many of his signature promises, but his administration’s successes in cutting taxes, rolling back regulations and reshaping the judiciary will cast a long shadow, with the national debt reaching historic highs, weakened federal agencies and conservative judges who will remain in position for decades.
Users will still be allowed to join political pages or join movements, but the political content popping up in users’ main news feed will be reduced.
His brother Gurpreet, who lives in Scotland, says Mr Johal was a peaceful activist and is convinced he was arrested because he had written about historical human rights violations against Sikhs in India.
"I think the way he's been manipulated into thinking by these extremist groups and what's been fed to him was worrying enough that I don't know what he was going to do next," he said.
As CNN’s KFile reported, QAnon and other debunked far-right conspiracy theories have been regular fodder for Greene’s social posts. But her account, whether it was her or staff, also made a habit of using Facebook’s “like” option to apparently indicate support for violent and murderous commentary on how to handle Democratic lawmakers. CNN uncovered a bevy of examples where Greene “liked” comments indicating a preference for violence against people like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).
Though her tenure in Congress has only lasted a few weeks, Greene is already facing calls to leave the House for her role in fanning the flames of the Capitol insurrection earlier this month after she objected to the election certification process and falsely insisted that Trump would remain president.
When the Trump administration reinstated the “global gag rule” in 2017, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) lost some $100 million in funding in the following years, impacting a spectrum of healthcare projects in 32 countries and going well beyond the intended goal of preventing abortions.
A health clinic in Haiti’s southern coastal town of Jacmel was one of the first casualties.
Faced with a $300,000 funding cut, Profamil – a nonprofit that provides birth control, HIV testing, and cancer screenings – closed the Jacmel clinic and sent its workers home. Although abortion is illegal in Haiti, the group had been receiving most of its funding from IPPF.
US President Joe Biden will rescind the policy by executive order today in a move that could help restore funding to clinics and NGOs across the globe at a time when women’s access to healthcare has been particularly hampered during the pandemic.
As Congress (on both sides of the aisle) continues to explore new and dumber ways to wreck Section 230, often claiming that they need to do it to "protect" or "help" certain people or groups, over 70 civil rights, human rights, and social justice groups have sent a letter to Congress and the new administration, telling them that they are targeting the wrong thing, and that destroying the open internet will do a lot more harm than good.
Facebook has often been accused of having an anti-conservative bias. But its efforts to clean up its platform following the January 6th attack on the Capitol building indicate it just has an ongoing (and probably unsolvable) moderation problem.
"Treating 'Zionist' as a proxy for 'Jew' would undermine efforts to dismantle real antisemitism... and help the Israeli government avoid accountability for violations of Palestinian rights."
"Section 230 is one of the most important laws protecting freedom of expression and human rights in the digital age."
Summary: Upstart social network Parler (which is currently offline, but attempting to come back) has received plenty of attention for trying to take on Twitter -- mainly focusing on attracting many of the users who have been removed from Twitter or who are frustrated by how Twitter’s content moderation policies are applied. The site may only boast a fraction of the users that the social media giants have, but its influence can't be denied.
The World Socialist Web Site, Socialist Equality Party (SEP) and International Youth & Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) have received an outpouring of support internationally following the announcement on Friday that Facebook had deleted the accounts of leading members of the SEP and shut down the page of the IYSSE at the University of Michigan.
The widespread support—including letters to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, statements on the WSWS, thousands of likes and shares on social media—from workers, young people, journalists and professionals were a critical factor in the decision by Facebook to restore the IYSSE page and SEP accounts.
In a dramatic turn of events, a man convicted and later acquitted in the 2002 killing of American journalist Daniel Pearl admitted a "minor" role in his death, upending 18 years of denials, the Pearl family lawyer said Wednesday.
A letter handwritten by Ahmad Saeed Omar Sheikh in 2019, in which he admits limited involvement in the death of the Wall Street Journal reporter, was submitted to Pakistan's Supreme Court nearly two weeks ago. It wasn't until Wednesday that Sheikh's lawyers confirmed their client wrote it.
Citizens must "demand... that their governments reorder their priorities and cooperate... to reduce the risk of nuclear war, climate change, and other global disasters, including pandemic disease."
At least four men armed with machetes and clubs broke into Anne Johnson’s home. They forced her husband and 11-year-old son into the bedroom and kept Anne and her teenage daughters in a separate room. To this day, she doesn’t know for certain if the men who raped her, her husband, and her daughters were her coworkers. “They spoke the local language,” Anne testified, but “they blindfolded us so we could not see who they were.”1
Here's the latest stupid way pro-Trump rioters are getting arrested for their participation in the Little Insurrection That Couldn't. Surprisingly, the inauguration went off without a hitch, but no one could have seen that coming a couple of weeks ago, when Trump fans raided the Senate building in an attempt to prevent election results from being certified.
I was the new kid in sixth grade. Emmanuel dropped his ball and I picked it up. He said, “Thanks,” then he said, “God, you’re skinny. You look like Olive Oyl.” And ran away. So we became best friends.
They lost touch in high school but, incredibly, rediscovered each other by accident on the Brooklyn Bridge during the August 2003 NYC blackout. They’ve been together, in one way or another, ever since – even after 2005, when Emmanuel was sentenced to 25-to-life for murder – which, Emma tells me, is a wrongful conviction. Four years ago, in a prison ceremony, they were married.
"Blocking needed relief for Americans has nothing to do with 'consent and comity' and everything to do with destroying democracy."
We cannot build back as a nation without confessing the ways we were uniquely unprepared for the multiple crises we continue to face.€
President Joe Biden was elected with massive support from people of color, and in his second week in office he issued four executive orders to advance what the White House calls his “racial equity” agenda. The orders aim to strengthen anti-discrimination policies in housing, end Justice Department contracts with private prison companies, reaffirm sovereignty of Native American tribes and combat xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Biden’s racial justice push comes as COVID-19 has devastated communities of color in the U.S., who are experiencing higher rates of infection, death and unemployment during the pandemic. Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, co-executive director of the Highlander Research and Education Center, says Biden’s executive orders are “a step forward” and credits social movements who have been pressuring the administration to act. “This is not just because of his good graces,” Henderson says. “This is because movement made it possible that racial equity be something that is prioritized in the executive branch of our government.”
A video widely circulated on social media shows a school resource officer in Florida slamming a female student to the ground. CBS Orlando affiliate WKMG-TV reports it happened at Liberty High School in Kissimmee.
Serie A league top manager Luigi De Siervo confirmed that talks with Amazon are ongoing during an appearance on a RAI radio show earlier this week, but he has cautioned that the league wants to avoid fragmenting rights deals to ensure Serie A fans don’t need multiple subscriptions to see all the games.
Right wingers are demanding that their political leaders do something, anything. There must be a response to Twitter's ban on Donald Trump, and to Amazon Web Services' shutdown of Parler. Republicans, once so ardent for free markets, want the government to teach private tech companies a lesson they won't soon forget. Nationalize them. Prosecute them. Whatever. Any measures that convey hate for the scary truth-phobic plutocratic Bolsheviks of Silicon Valley will do.
The Australian competition watchdog claims Google has immense power in the local online advertising industry, and is able to favour its own related business interests while supplying ad services.
Section 230 stands for the simple principle that the party responsible for unlawful speech online is the person who said it, not the website where they posted it, the app they used to share it, or any other third party. That is, the only person responsible for your online speech is you. It has some limitations—most notably, it does nothing to shield intermediaries from liability under federal criminal law—but it is, at its core, a common-sense law that incentivizes new services to allow users to share and store expression. And Section 230 isn't just about Internet companies, either. Any€ intermediary€ that hosts user-generated material receives this shield, including nonprofit and educational organizations like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive.
What Section 230 does not do is grant Big Tech companies a magical shield against competitors or entrench their power. In fact, it does the opposite. If a new Internet startup needed to be prepared to defend against countless lawsuits on account of its users’ speech, startups would never get the investment necessary to grow and compete with large tech companies. Changes to Section 230 would not bring Facebook to heel. Facebook will be able to afford the lawyers, the staffing, or whatever other costs that change would bring. You know who would not? Any service trying to compete with Facebook. This may be why Facebook has endorsed changes to Section 230.
So while many people rightly are concerned with the power of companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, the uproar around Section 230 is misplaced. It’s not 230 that is the problem. It’s oligopoly.
IP litigators relay their recent experience of the logistical challenges of extracting witness testimony in an online courtroom
Blackbird, Dominion Harbor, Acacia, Endpoint IP and Harfang IP share their goals for a pandemic-wrought 2021, including buying up cheap divested patents
Different judge, same chamber, same drug. Eli Lilly has successfully sued competitor Zentiva at the Paris Court of First Instance. The judges also prohibited the company from selling the chemotherapy drug pemetrexed in France.
In addition, the court ordered the provisional sum of 4,000,000 euros to be deducted from the damages. This is a large claim for damages by French standards.
Pemetrexed is a chemotherapy drug. Eli Lilly produces and markets the drug under the brand name Alimta. European patent EP 1 313 508 protects the use of the disodium salt of pemetrexed in combination with vitamin B12.
[...]
The 3rd section of the 3rd chamber handed down the first ruling in the case between Eli Lilly and Fresenius Kabi, presided over by renowned patent judge Carine Gillet. The latest judgment was decided by another highly-experienced judge, Nathalie Sabotier.
In the past, it was relatively difficult for pharma companies to obtain injunctions or large damages in France. But it remains too early to call this a trend, as Fresenius Kabi has since filed an appeal. It is likely the hearing will take place next year.
Zentiva has today lodged an appeal. The merits of this case will be heard on 15 June 2021, the same day that Eli Lilly’s patent expires.
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) entered an Order on Tuesday regarding the motion by Junior Party the University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") in Interference No. 106,115, for leave to subpoena discovery from Luciano Marraffini and Shuailiang Lin, neither of whom is a party to this interference against Senior Party The Broad Institute, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (collectively, "Broad"). Specifically, CVC asserted in its motion under 37 C.F.R. ۤ 41.156(a) that these subpoenas were necessary because these witnesses each possessed knowledge from their work with Feng Zhang and their prior statements CVC characterized as being "material to Broad's priority proofs [and] that contradict its priority statement allegations." This testimony, CVC asserted, was in the interest of justice because the Broad is likely not to proffer their testimony and without it "the PTAB's fair assessment of Broad's priority case will be frustrated."
In utility model cancellation proceedings, if a proprietor defends its utility model only with certain sets of claims, the Federal Patent Court generally has no reason to subject the subject-matter of individual claims to separate examination. However, the situation is different if the proprietor submits for decision a set of claims with independent claims that contain materially different solutions.
A violation of the duty of the Federal Patent Court to consider decisions which have been issued by the instances of the European Patent Office or by courts of other contracting states of the European Patent Convention and which concern an essentially identical issue and, if necessary, to deal with the reasons which led to a deviating result in the preceding decision does not necessarily violate the right to be heard of the party concerned.
Telecoms and pharma sources explain how altered validity standards would create new winners and losers in preliminary injunction proceedings
In Nigeria, trademark trolls and sometimes, local distributors and representatives of international brands, register companies at the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) using existing trademarks as company names. For instance, a company promoter may apply to register “Gucci Nigeria Limited” suggesting that the new company has some relationship or affiliation with the Gucci brand. This practice becomes problematic when such international brands decide to do business in Nigeria. Where their trademark is similar to or the same as their company name, they would be unable to register such trademark/company name at the CAC. Even if the brand does not seek to use its trademark as a company name, the use of its trademark by third parties as company names, may lead to trade mark dilution.
[...]
These new provisions are quite commendable, as it has made the procedure for objecting to an infringing company name less cumbersome. The requirements for instituting an expensive court action and other ancillary procedures are now obviated and replaced by a straightforward and cost-efficient proceedings at the APC whose decision on the matter can be enforced through various self-acting mechanisms including the revocation of the registration of the infringing company name.
Under the CAMA 2004, IP lawyers had to devise creative procedures to deal with the absence of powers for the CAC to enforce its directives to have a company change its name. These procedures included bringing a court action to enforce the directive of the CAC and thereafter instituting a winding up or contempt proceedings to enforce the judgment of the court where the infringing company name does not comply with the judgment. Despite being ingenious, these procedures were admittedly not just unwieldy, but time consuming and costly. [Usually, Court actions in Nigeria take between two to 5 years to conclude at the court of first instance, while high legal fees depending on the nature and complexity of each case and counsel’s experience.]
From the above provisions of CAMA 2020, it is with no doubt that the law makes the procedure to procure the change of name of a company using another’s trademark as company name, cost-effective and uncomplicated. [This Africa Correspondent feels that the level of complexities with this CAMA 2020 procedure merely reduced from 10 to perhaps 4. What would reduce the complexities to zero at least for trademarks registered in Nigeria, is to create synergy between the CAC and the Trademark Registry perhaps by requiring company promoters to present a search report from the Trademark Registry showing that the proposed company name is not similar to or same as any registered trademark.
The Axios report shows that only big players can make meaningful revenue from podcasts. It’s why music streaming giants like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon are snapping up established podcast producers. Gimlet Media, Wondery, and Parcast are all now owned by one of these companies.
One reason why it’s so hard to break out in podcasting is that there’s no ubiquitous platform. Some podcast listeners prefer dedicated apps like Pocket Casts. Others are comfortable listening to whatever Spotify serves up in the podcast category.
Bay State College’s Boston Campus has donated its entire undergraduate library to the Internet Archive so that the digital library can preserve and scan the books, while allowing Bay State to gain much needed open space for student collaboration. By donating and scanning its 11,000-volume collection centered on fashion, criminal justice, allied health, and business books, Bay State’s Boston campus decided to “flip entirely to digital.”
When it came to what to do with the books, Jessica Neave, librarian at Bay State College, had to get creative. “I didn’t have a library close by willing to take our collection,” Neave explained. Shortly after reaching out to our partners at Better World Books, she stumbled upon the Inside Higher Education article about the Marygrove College Library donation. This led Neave to our physical item donation form, where she laid out her library’s tight timeline to deaccession its entire print collection. “You guys made it so easy,” Bay State’s librarian said. “It couldn’t have been any easier!”
Movie studios are increasingly experimenting with shorter release windows or even simultaneous theatrical and digital premieres. But how does this affect overall revenues? According to new research into shortened release windows in Korea, movie studios profit from this strategy. While pirated copies also become available quicker, the overall piracy figures don't change.
French anti-piracy group ALPA, the National Cinema Center, and several major rightsholders have obtained an ISP blocking injunction from a Paris court. The action, which represents the first of its kind in the country, requires major Internet service providers to block access to several overseas pirate IPTV services.