2020 is over and it’s finally time for you to check out this so-called “Open-source Linux operating systems” for yourself to see what the hype is all about. Or maybe you’re not all that new to Linux but you would like to reset your journey with a distro that is designed with ease of use in mind. Either way, you’re in luck.
Different from my article on the Best Linux distros for developers, my focus today is on a list of the best Linux distros that any beginner – new to computing or the Linux world – can get up and running with.
It wasn’t too long ago that we published an article on the best Linux distros that looks like MacOS. Today, our focus is not necessarily on distributions that have a similar UI to that of Windows, but ones that are, firstly, convenient for Windows users to use due to familiarity, and secondly, without technical hurdles during installation or application set up.
Certain features common to the above-listed recommendations include customization options, a familiar User Interface, window animations, and a welcoming community, among others, so feel free to test them all out for yourself first.
Are there any recommendations you would like us to add to the list? Feel free to pen your thoughts in the comments section below.
I received this laptop, which has been custom-made for me by a company called Eurorra. It's a bit of a weird story, and this won't be a traditional laptop review, because... well, you'll see.
Linux 5.12 release was expected last Sunday, but Linus Torvalds decided to release one more release candidate, namely Linux 5.12-RC8, to “make sure things are all settled down“, so the latest Linux kernel is now expected this weekend. Tihs should not yield any significant changes, so we can check what’s new in Linux 5.12, notably with regards to Arm, MIPS, and RISC-V architectures often used in SoC’s found in embedded systems.
Around two months ago, the release of Linux 5.11 added support for Intel’s software guard extensions (SGX) and Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT), AMD “Van Gogh” and “Dimgrey cavefish” graphics processors, MIPI I3C host controller interfaces, and much more.
How to set up httpd to survive when OOMKiller kills one of its children.
In Copr, we have had a leaking process in our frontend. It is one route, which was leaking few megabytes. The route has a separate child process in httpd, so only one process has been leaking. We still did not identify the culprit, and in the meantime we had to fight with OOMKiller.
Few megabytes here and there and the process was too big. And we run out of memory. OOMKiller came and killed the process (as it was the biggest one). Usually, you will not care. Httpd is killing its children periodically, and when one is killed, the master process starts new child immediately. But…
The Khronos Group continues tweaking and expanding Vulkan with the 1.2.176 specification update out, which includes a new extension and NVIDIA have already hooked up support.
VK_EXT_extended_dynamic_state2 is the new extension which "adds some more dynamic state to support applications that need to reduce the number of pipeline state objects they compile and bind.". The original version was released back in 2019 and included contributors from Valve like the creator of DXVK. This new and improved version was tweaked by a few NVIDIA engineers.
While work is ongoing in Mesa to get AMD GPUs to support Ray Tracing, AMD directly have released Radeon Software for Linux 21.10 that brings along support to Linux.
Before getting too excited, keep in mind this release states that Ray Tracing for AMD RDNA 2 based chips is a "developer preview" aimed to help developing and testing with the newer vendor neutral Vulkan Ray Tracing Extensions - so if you're going to try playing some games with it, keep in mind it's not yet finished.
AMD Radeon graphics cards on Linux can finally enjoy Vulkan ray-tracing! AMD has published a new Radeon Software for Linux driver release that enables the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions for use with RDNA2 / Radeon RX 6000 series graphics cards.
Since last November the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions were firmed up but due to the timing not jiving with the prior Radeon Software for Linux driver releases and then some last minute issues ended up holding up the Linux driver support. The AMD Radeon Software for Linux driver has been supporting Vulkan ray-tracing while now with today's Linux driver update these extensions are enabled.
Well known open-source AMD Linux graphics driver developer Marek Olšák published an initial proposal this week as "a redesign of how Linux graphics drivers work."
This redesign, which can safely co-exist with the current driver behavior, is about using explicit fences everywhere and a new memory management approach that doesn't make use of buffer object (BO) fences.
Last week 4A Games released Metro Exodus for Linux and while there were a few issues at launch, at least one of them is now resolved.
Those managing to get Metro Exodus running on Linux with Radeon graphics via the Mesa RADV Vulkan driver were finding the game crashing ten to sixty minutes into play. This stems from a memory leak and ultimately encountering out-of-memory issues.
Blender has an exciting year still ahead with a road-map they just published that does include Vulkan API support.
Among the ongoing and planned improvements for this open-source 3D modeling software for this calendar year includes work on their asset browser, continuing to replace their old animation proxy system, continuing to expand upon Blender's geometry nodes, Vulkan support, improving the grease pencil, continuing to enhance the Cycles engine, a USD importer thanks to NVIDIA, and working on the Blender 3.0 user-interface.
2021 promises to be a busy and exciting year. We will be working on the second LTS release and on Blender 3.0, which includes a lot of new development. This year also marks the 10th anniversary of Cycles.
There will be more emphasis on the modules as a way for everyone in the development community to get involved. Combined with the Blender HQ project teams, this should help bootstrap new and existing initiatives while making sure they are maintained in the long run.
Just one week after having published the provisional Vulkan Video extensions, The Khronos Group has another exciting announcement today in the form of ratifying KTX 2.0.
KTX is the industry group's container file format for storing GPU-ready texture data. KTX 2.0 adds support for Basis Universal compression to the specification. These KTX 2.0 compressed textures can then be used by OpenGL, Vulkan, and other APIs. With KTX 2.0, Khronos is also introducing the KHR_texture_basisu extension for glTF for allowing glTF to contain KTX 2.0 textures.
We are always envious of the Star Trek Enterprise computers. You can just sort of ask them a hazy question and they will — usually — figure out what you want. Even the automatic doors seemed to know the difference between someone walking into a turbolift versus someone being thrown into the door during a fight. [River] decided to try his new API keys for the private beta of an AI service to generate Linux commands based on a description. How does it work? Watch the video below and find out.
Some examples work fairly well. In response to “email the Rickroll video to Jeff Bezos,” the system produced a curl command and an e-mail to what we assume is the right place. “Find all files in the current directory bigger than 1 GB” works, too.
Last year, I acquired a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4. The main purpose was to improve the quality of my live coding sessions, and also to allow me experiment with recording my own songs.
It was a pain from the moment I plugged this card into my laptop, until now.
As of today, I’m happy that I’m finally getting rid of it.
Allow me to explain how much of a disaster their approach is. Most USB digital audio interfaces are compatible with industry standards – they’re class compliant. That means they advertise features, inputs, outputs, etc, using a standard USB protocol.
Not Focusrite.
Focusrite decided they didn’t like hardware buttons. So they removed them, and switched to software-controlled features.
For some reason that I’m yet to understand, Focusrite decided they wouldn’t use any standard protocol to advertise these features. So they invented a proprietary protocol only to control these features. This protocol is only usable through their Focusrite Control software – which, as you might have guessed, is proprietary, and only runs on Windows and Mac.
Focusrite decided they didn’t want their hardware to work on Linux, so not even a minimal documentation about routing was published. That makes it even harder for the heroes trying to reverse-engineer their cards.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu Budgie 21.04.
One of the greatest things about Linux is how much control you have over your system. You can edit whatever you want, and there’s so much that’s flexible and available to you. Additionally, Linux is very transparent – error messages are very clear, and it’s not hard to see the inner workings of your system. One of the best ways to see those inner workings is the “/proc” directory. Here we show you how to use the “/proc” directory to examine the inner workings of your Linux system.
Cron does the job it was written for. But this was years ago, and these days Kernels offer neat things like CPU quotas and memory limits. Cron has no means to use those – but other tools have.
Additionally, newer tools provide dependencies, a proper configuration language (instead of hard-to-maintain bash lines), multiple triggers, randomized delays and real logging.
Especially the last bit, real logging, is essential: Cron can forward log messages it thinks needs to be forwarded. But without real kernel backed process management (cgroups) there is no real way for Cron to see if a job is running or has finished, and what log lines belong to it.
Systemd has all this – and thus it makes sense to create new recurrent jobs in Systemd and even migrate old ones sometimes.
Data must be shared. This is especially so in a busy company, where employees are constantly working with data and files. When this is the case, you have to make sure the data and files are available to anyone who needs them. For that, you might don several hats to try and get everything to everyone.
Or you could turn to those Linux servers in your data center. With the help of NFS, you could sync those directories from server to server or server to desktop, with ease. In just a few quick minutes you can get this done.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install Mozilla Firefox 88 in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Linux Mint 20.1, and CentOS 8.1 / 7.x.
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla foundation and generally utilized by thousands and thousands of individuals in their daily actions.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Samba on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Samba allows you to share files and printers with other computers remotely, regardless of their operating system. It lets you access your desktop files from a laptop and share files with Windows and macOS users.
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 the Samba on a Debian 10 (Buster).
The ss command is a tool that is used for displaying network socket related information on a Linux system. The tool displays more detailed information that the netstat command which is used for displaying active socket connections.
In this article we are going to explore some of the best ways to use the command for best results.
Forgot your wireless access point password? Well, there are a few ways to find it out in Ubuntu.
Interested in giving Linux a try? Then you came to the right place. In this article, you’ll learn step-by-step how to install Ubuntu as a VirtualBox virtual machine. I picked the Ubuntu distribution, because it is a popular and beginner-friendly Linux based operating system. We’ll use VirtualBox to install Ubuntu as a virtual machine. That way there is zero risk of messing up your current operating system.
Learning something new can require a lot of effort and Red Hat OpenShift is no exception. The platform has a significant learning curve. However, that's not meant to say it's hard to get started if you know how.
Red Hat Academy is an initiative within Red Hat that turns academic institutions into centers for enterprise-ready talent by outfitting them with Red Hat training and certification. If you get to know me well, you'll discover that I have a natural tendency to learn and contribute to the community.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FileZilla Client on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, FileZilla is a widely used FTP client that allows users to connect to FTP servers and upload or download files. It’s a cross-platform FTP client that is open source and free to download and use under the GPL license. It supports FTP, FTP over SSL/TLS (FTPS) and SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP). FileZilla using its graphical interface one can easily transfer files from local system to remote and vice-versa.
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 the FileZilla Client on a Debian 10 (Buster).
Managing partitions is serious business, especially when you have to remove them. I find myself doing this frequently, especially after using thumb drives as live disks and Linux installers because they create several partitions that I won’t need afterwards.
In this tutorial, I will show you how to remove partitions in Linux using both command line and GUI tools.
Some day ago I got a brand new Xerox multifunction Wi-fi printer (B215 model for the record), so what’s the best chance to test the power and the ease of use of Yast to install it? This is also my first Wi-fi printer and I was very curious to see how user-friendly was the procedure, without knowing anything about the supported protocols.
OpenMAINT is open-source software for property and facility management. The application is suited for the management of real estate assets, industrial facilities, infrastructures, and related maintenance activities. It can be used to manage mobile assets, technical devices, furniture, etc., and the related logistical, economical, and maintenance activities, scheduled or unplanned ones.
OpenMAINT can be extremely helpful to various types of organizations, like banks, public departments, construction, and manufacturing companies, etc. in organizing, maintaining, and distributing their inventory and supplies, scheduling repairs, and reporting problems. It can be customized according to the needs of the organizations.
For 20 years, Arch Linux has provided users access to a completely custom and unique system. Over those years, it has built a reputation for customization, at the expense of user-friendliness.
As a rolling release distro, Arch doesn’t provide any set releases, instead they just update the image each month. However, if you have downloaded Arch in the last few weeks, you may have noticed a new addition: archinstall. It makes installing Arch Linux way easier.
Automating the tasks we perform is one of the most important parts of our jobs as sysadmins. It's not just about performing those many tasks required to keep the systems we support up and running. It's about making it easy on ourselves and other sysadmins who might stand in for us while we are on vacation or out sick; it's about ensuring that we can perform our jobs quickly and easily with a minimum of work and intervention on our part; it's about—hmmm, should I really say this—about being the lazy sysadmin.
I've written extensively about automation in my books and articles, and my mantra is always, "automate everything." But how do you know where to start?
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We have all had Pointy-Haired-Bosses (PHBs), and sometimes they are the pain point. Suppose some PHB asks for a list of all RPMs on a particular Linux computer and a short description of each. This happened to me while I worked at the State of North Carolina.
Most people connect to at least two networks every day. After you turn on a computer or mobile device, it connects to a local WiFi network, which in turn provides access to the interconnected network of networks that is "the internet" (a combination of the words interconnected networks).
But how do networks actually work? How does your device know how to find the internet, a shared printer, or a file share? How do these things know how to respond to your device? What tricks do system administrators use to optimize the performance of a network?
Open source is firmly embedded into networking technology, so resources on networking are freely available to anyone who wants to learn more. This article covers the basics of network management using open source.
We can manage EC2 instances from the command-line using aws-cli. We can create, start, stop, reboot, terminate, modify and do a lot with EC2 instances using aws-cli. Click here to learn more about managing EC2 instances from using the aws-cli.
In this article, I will show you several commands to operate EC2 instances and this can be a guide to get started with aws-cli to manage EC2 instances from the terminal. It is assumed that you are already aware of EC2 service on AWS. Click here if you want to learn to create an EC2 instance from the AWS console. We will not go into detail about EC2 instances.
SigNoz is an open source application observability platform. Built in React and Go, SigNoz is written from the ground up to allow developers to get started with their observability goals as soon as possible and with minimum effort.
This article looks at the software in detail, including the architecture, Kubernetes-based deployment, and some common SigNoz uses.
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SigNoz's components include Apache Kafka and Druid. These components are loosely coupled and work in tandem to ensure a seamless experience for the end user. Given all the components, it is best to run SigNoz as a combination of microservices on Kubernetes or Docker Compose (for local testing).
This example uses a Kubernetes Helm chart-based deployment to install SigNoz on Kubernetes. As a prerequisite, you'll need a Kubernetes cluster. If you don't have a Kubernetes cluster available, you can use tools like MiniKube or Kind to create a test cluster on your local machine. Note that the machine should have at least 4GB available for this to work.
Sometimes, you might want to apply a chmod to files only and not directories. This guide shows you three different ways to achieve that goal on the Linux command line.
Puppet is an popular infrastructure management tool. With the help of Puppet server, you can easily manage a large number of servers from a master server. Puppet server node is responsible for managing multiple client node. Its necessary that all the client nodes must of Puppet Agent server installed and running.
Our previous tutorial describes you to configure Puppet master node on a Ubuntu 20.04 system along with client node. If you need to add more client server to existing Puppet network, just install the Agent server on the server.
This tutorial describes you step-by-step setup to install Puppet Agent on Ubuntu 20.04 system. Also helps you to connect a client node with master node.
In the previous article, we have seen how to install Centos 7 Minimal on VirtualBox. In this article, you will learn how to install guest additions in VirtualBox.
Guest additions are drivers and software applications that enable some of the features in VirtualBox which is not enabled by default.
You are new to Docker and you are learning to create custom Docker images using Dockerfile.
You come across a variety of Dockerfile instructions like FROM, RUN etc.
Then you come across COPY and ADD and realize that both instructions do the same job; copy the files and directories to your modified Docker image from the host.
Once the PlayStation network is retired for the PS3 and PS4, there will be no network time server available for your old consoles. And when the clock battery dies in your PS3 or PS4, much of--if not your entire--PlayStation library will become entirely unplayable.
The new Linux port of Metro Exodus sadly came with a rough launch but for AMD GPU owners it's set to get more playable, with a fix in the Mesa RADV driver now merged. I've been following this quite closely, first posting about it on Twitter yesterday after being told about it.
What's the issue then? Well, this Vulkan port caused a lot of RAM to be eaten from a leak, it got real hungry really fast. A bug report was made with Mesa on April 16, and as of April 19 the fix was merged in - a pretty amazing turn around and shows again the power of open source drivers for solving issues.
Since it's merged it will for sure be in the Mesa 20.2 release, and should also be backported to the next stable update to the current Mesa drivers.
Death Carnival, originally called BulletRage, is an upcoming fast-paced top-down shooter with extreme weapons & online multiplayer mayhem.
While we've known for some time that it would come to Linux back when it was called BulletRage, and even then the builds ran quite well, it's been a while since hearing much on it. The name was changed, they had a failed Kickstarter campaign too but they've continued building up the game into something big.
It's Free Game Tuesday! Today we have Istrolid, a free fleet-design strategy game from developer treeform that recently hit the big 1.0 release.
The idea is that you design your own spaceships from various parts, fitting whatever strategy you plan to go for. There's no set units, no factions and so you can create pretty much whatever you want from basic fighters and bombers to hulking battleships and speedy destroyers.
Goblinz Publishing and developer TeaForTwo have put their Snowtopia: Ski Resort Tycoon onto Linux with the latest Early Access update available now. It actually was available for Linux previously, during the Alpha builds they have on itch.io but now that it's on Steam it took a bit more time to get it right with all the new features.
As a quick update for fans of Valve's MOBA, Dota 2, it has been confirmed that the Anime series they teamed up with Netflix for DOTA: Dragon's Blood is getting a second season. Looks like for a video game adaption, it might be one of the better ones. Sitting with a high 8.2 / 10 rating from users on IMDB it definitely must have hit the mark for a lot of fans and newcomers alike.
They also showed off a teaser with a caption of "i know what you’re thinking, and it's not who you think it is..."
It's been over one year already since the debut of DragonFlyBSD 5.8 while fortunately DragonFlyBSD 6.0 will be here soon for this popular BSD operating system.
DragonFlyBSD 6.0 is overdue for release compared to their usual bi-annual release rhythm. One of the hold ups towards the end of last year was a DRI bug that was delaying things. DragonFlyBSD 6.0 is the version number rather than 5.10 since that is an "annoying version number".
It's fairly common that many longtime Linux kernel developers use their personal email addresses for signing off on kernel patches or dealing with other patch work, especially when they are engaging with kernel development in their personal time too and occasionally jumping between employers over time while still sticking to interacting with the upstream kernel community, etc. There are also understandably some companies that mandate the use of their corporate email addresses for their official work/patches while now IBM seems to be taking things one step to the extreme.
An IBM employee was listed as one of the maintainers to the IBM Power SR-IOV Virtual NIC driver for the upstream Linux kernel alongside several other IBM engineers. Except in this case the employee was listed as a maintainer with his Gmail address.
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The "you are an IBM employee 100% of the time" is surely a bit awkward and seemingly denying what a developer can work on in his off-hours, especially when it comes to just improving the company's own open-source driver... It seems in this case it may be a manager over reacting or so. It will be interesting to see how this plays out... Pretty strange considering IBM now owns Red Hat and how IBM has with time spent billions of dollars on Linux.
The claim that Lijun Pan belongs to IBM "100% of the time" and that he is not allowed to use his personal email account as a "hobby" appears to be in violation of labor laws in most countries. We do not know what country Lijun Pan is working from. The name does sound like it may be a country where there aren't any laws against IBM's otherwise grossly criminal behavior.
It is somewhat concerning that IBM, who owns and controls Red Hat and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora operating systems, is telling their employees that they are not allowed to work on free software projects in their spare time. It is equally concerning that IBM appears they have some kind of right to dictate what their employees do or don't do with their personal e-mail accounts.
We can only speculate as to how many other IBM employees there are in a similar situation. What we can say for sure is that there is at least one who would like to contribute to free software in his spare time who can't unless he finds another job and/or moves to a country with stronger and stricter labor protection laws.
At the end of 2020, Red Hat announced that they would no longer ship CentOS (Community Enterprise Linux Operating System), the free distribution of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Instead of CentOS Linux, Red Hat will now ship CentOS Stream. [Note that IBM purchased Red Hat in July 2019.]
CentOS Stream is described as “a rolling preview of what’s next in RHEL”. CentOS Linux has tracked releases of the RHEL product, built from the same source code but without the Red Hat commercial support. CentOS was particularly useful to developers building software that targeted compatibility with the commercial RHEL.
You’re excited about hearing Red Hat's plans for the next year, product announcements and learning from other Red Hat customers, but feeling a little virtual fatigue? We get that, and we're adding some features and have a few tips to help make Summit much more fun.
The Red Hat Summit is also the annual highlight for many Red Hatters, so we have a little idea of what Summit-goers might be missing about our in-person setup. We’ve incorporated some concepts into the virtual environment that might help.
This post compares the performance of some of the most popular database workloads on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 powered by Intel’s Cascade Lake and the recently available Intel’s Ice Lake CPU. In our performance runs, the two CPU designs are compared on the performance lab’s "white-box" hardware servers with similar performance optimized memory configurations using the same NvME IO controllers and the HammerDB workload driver.
When it comes to running a database for your mission-critical application, performance is a crucial decision factor. In fact, delivering low latency, and high-throughput application responses comes down to tuning your database to run in a consistent and reliable operating system environment—one that can provide a solid foundation for performance, and run on bare metal, virtual, private and public cloud environments.
Red Hat partners continue to be a driving force behind open source innovation and customer success. The circumstances of 2020 brought many changes to the industry landscape and IT market, but Red Hat partners remained resilient and customer-centric to build new solutions and support scalable, flexible hybrid cloud environments for sustainable growth. The annual Red Hat North America Partner Awards recognize partners for their commitment to open innovation and collaboration with Red Hat.
The awards honor commercial and public sector partners for developing solutions using Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio to meet unique customer needs. From cloud-native applications to managed services to automation solutions, the award winners demonstrated skill and expertise to guide customers through digital transformation and IT modernization to achieve business outcomes. This recognition is based upon Red Hat partner efforts during 2020.
We are pleased to announce that Red Hat Satellite 6.8.6 is generally available as of April 19, 2021.
Red Hat Satellite is part of the Red Hat Smart Management subscription that makes it easier for enterprises to manage patching, provisioning, and subscription management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux infrastructure.
Traditional IT organizations have long understood the value of a Standard Operating Environment (SOE). Historically, administrators implemented an SOE as a disk image, kickstart, or virtual machine image for mass deployment within an organization. This reduced operational overhead, fostered automation, increased reliability by reducing variance, and set security controls that increased the overall security posture of an environment.
SOEs often include the base operating system (kernel and user space programs), custom configuration files, standard applications used within an organization, software updates, and service packs. It is far easier to troubleshoot a failed service at 2 a.m. if every server is running the same configuration. Some major advantages of an SOE are reduced cost as well as an increase in agility. The effort to deploy, configure, maintain, support, and manage systems and applications can all be reduced.
Understanding the value of an SOE, a mature IT organization tightly controls the number of different operating systems and OS versions. The ideal number is one, but that isn’t usually feasible, so there are efforts to keep the number as small as possible. IT organizations expend considerable effort to make sure that boxes aren’t added to the network with ad-hoc OS versions and configurations.
Rashik started working for IBM ‘some 38 years ago’. He worked mainly in client facing technical roles with a focus on how to apply technology to business problems – or as Rashik summarizes: ‘complex and large and challenging technical projects, that’s where my real focus is’. The IBM Developer Staff caught up with Rashik to learn more about his perspective on technology.
In this week’s Training Tuesday blog, we present a set of free, short videos and tutorials on Oracle Linux Cloud Native Environment. This training helps facilitate your usage of the technologies, software and tools used by Oracle to develop and manage cloud-native applications.
In this example, I am using Red Hat CodeReady Containers (CRC) for my local cluster. CodeReady Containers is a developer tool that lets you create local Kubernetes clusters on Red Hat OpenShift 4. I have another cluster from the Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift that I can access from anywhere.
In the winter months, the Community Outreach Revamp team conducted a survey. We set ourselves to host, curate and report back our results, with some interesting conclusions. Furthering on the same train of thought, we are working with the Fedora Council and Mindshare Committee on community-oriented questions for an annual contributor survey. We hope to receive a greater and more diverse set of responses as the annual contributor survey will be targeted toward Fedora’s entire contributor community, not just Mindshare and Outreach teams.
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In the last few months, we have seen the benefit of keeping one source of truth. In the past, we kept our on-going tasks documented at multiple places. This led to the challenge of keeping everything updated and was not a good use of time for the team. With this in mind, we retired the Trello board and we are using a HackMD document to track our progress.
A few words of gratitude to Fedora Council and the whole community for supporting the Revamp as a Fedora Objective. We are also thrilled to be incorporated into an updated Fedora Organizational Chart.
Based on the Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system series, Tails 4.18 contains updated Intel (intel-microcode 3.20210216.1~deb10u1) and Linux firmware (firmware-linux-nonfree 20210315-2) packages to ensure support for the newest hardware (e.g. Wi-Fi, graphics, networking, etc.).
It also ships with the latest Tor Browser 10.0.16 web browser to facilitate anonymous surfing of the World Wide Web, as well as the Mozilla Thunderbird 78.9.0 open-source email client, which is a bugfix release that introduces various improvements around the Address Book, Calendar, Add-ons Manager, and email notifications.
Here in this quick post, we give you a quick update on the top 10 features of Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo. Take a look.
In the past, we have published articles listing the reasons to use a handful of Linux distros such as 10 Reasons to Use Arch Linux, 10 Reasons to Use Manjaro Linux, The 10 Best Reasons to Use Fedora Linux, and today, we have a shift in our focus as this time around, our subject matter is Linux Mint.
Linux Mint is a community-driven Linux distribution with a major focus on making open-source goodies freely available and easily accessible in a modern, elegant, powerful, and convenient operating system. It is developed based on Ubuntu, uses dpkg package manager, and is available for x86-64 and arm64 architectures.
Linux Mint has been hailed by many as the better operating system to use when compared to its parent distro and has also managed to maintain its position on distrowatch as the OS with the 3rd most popular hits in the past 1 year.
Don't expect radical new changes like GNOME 40. Experience subtle changes here and there.
The beauty of open source in this context is that it is based on having many minds working at the same time. Developers can cherry pick which components of the operating system they wish to utilise at any given time and so, by running the likes of Ubuntu or Ubuntu Core on a particular device, they are using a system that has been worked on by many experienced developers in its conception.
The dispersion of components and complexity of infrastructure thus makes it harder for hackers to breach security networks on open source systems, because they are not centralised in the way other providers own their systems, for example. This increases the challenge for hackers and malicious attackers, and enables security to be a fundamental aspect of the UX. It works best when insights are informed by the crowd sourcing of multiple projects and perspectives into one platform.
Rather than dictating everything, open source is a community-based project and Canonical helps as the guardian of that. While it is vital to have the right technology, including rollback functionality and containerised software, it is also vital to foster and support the community around this. The community does not need to view user experience and security as separate binaries, but rather it plays into both.
While the exact categories are still up in the air, we could see the company going for something similar to the Linux distro Ubuntu, which organizes system search results into different categories for applications, files, folders, websites, and more.
Beyond that, Xilinx Kira SOM starter dev kits will support Yocto PetaLinux out of the box, with future support this summer for Canonical’s wildly popular Ubuntu distro. This will instantly expand the familiarity footprint with thousands of developers, in AI disciplines and otherwise, and help foster Xilinx Kira dev kits with a much broader audience that’s looking for more than just command line interface support. "For smart vision applications, developers and innovators want the Ubuntu experience they're used to from cloud to desktop,” said Thibaut Rouffineau, vice president of marketing, Canonical/Ubuntu. “Together with Xilinx, we’re excited to provide Kria SOM customers with out-of-the-box productivity, frictionless transition from development to production, and guaranteed stability and security in the field."
Wireless-Tag has launched a $26 “IDO-SBC2D06-V1A” SBC that runs Linux on a dual -A7 SigmaStar SSD201 or SSD202 with 2x 10/100 Ethernet ports, WiFi/BT, 40-pin GPIO, and a choice of MIPI-DSI connectors for 4- or 7-inch LCDs.
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Neither the Taobao shopping page or the Wireless-Tag website listed any additional specs that we could see, although the images suggest there is a microSD slot, 40-pin GPIO, and USB 2.0 host and micro-USB ports. You can also see UART and microphone headers and possibly a power input jack and coin-cell battery holder.
This package, the TwinCAT/BSD, will support all TwinCAT runtime functions and the installation of FreeBSD applications and Linux programs in one system.
if you’d like to use terminal blocks with your Raspberry Pi Pico, or compatible board, instead of soldering wires to the MCU board, HCDC’s Terminal Block Breakout Module may meet your requirements with variants for either screw or DIN rail mounting.
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I have not mentioned it in the introduction, but after reading the specifications, it appears (Xuken) HCDC may be based in Taiwan. The company explains its Terminal Block Breakout Module for Raspberry Pi Pico is best suited to industrial control, home automation, and other applications that may benefit from terminal blocks.
The breakout module comes with two 20-pin 2.54mm pitch pin header connectors to be soldered to Raspberry Pi Pico, and a 3-pin 2.54mm pin header connector for debugging (SWD). The screw mounting version also includes two 10mm M3 wood screws.
Users have every right to be concerned about the safety and security of their data. When you create data on a computer, it's reasonable to want exclusive control over it.
There are many ways to protect your documents. At the filesystem level, you can encrypt your hard drive or just a file. A good office suite affords you many more options, though, and I've gathered five of the methods I use to secure my documents with open source software.
A fair while ago, in the before times of late 2016, a release was made of a piece of software known as Peruse. Since then, it spent some time getting work done on it on and off, until sometime last year when we decided that it really was time to stop the thing just floundering in some free software equivalence of development hell, and actually get it ready for its next release.
First things first. For those of you who are new, Peruse is KDE's comic book reader project, which consists of the reader application, Peruse Reader, and the comic book creation tool called Peruse Creator.
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The original release of Peruse was built on top of Kirigami 1, during the early days of the development towards what would eventually become Plasma Mobile. One of the first things to happen after the release of version 1.2 was to port Peruse to Kirigami 2, and the result for the user is partly just more modern and stable code, but also much more easily navigable using a keyboard. Since then, the Peruse team has been working to bring more of the features of Kirigami' which didn't exist in the first version into Peruse, such as the way the search field works, the way scrolling pages are handled, page row layers, action handling, and a whole bunch more.
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Before we get to the downloads: This is a beta version, and you should expect it to behave like one of those: Things may well be a bit broken or unpolished, and we will be very happy to see reports any bugs you run into over on the Peruse product category on bugs.kde.org. With that out of the way, head over to peruse.kde.org to grab yourself a shiny new copy of Peruse :)
Earlier this year, when Elastic changed the licensing model of Elasticsearch and Kibana from open source Apache v2 license to the Server Side Public License (SSPL), AWS stepped up to ensure the packages remained available and well supported.
Our hands are our primary operating tools, so their location, orientation, and articulation in space is vital for many human-computer interfaces. Automated hand post estimation can be very useful for diverse applications such as virtual/augmented reality (XR), sign language recognition, gesture recognition and robotics. Collabora is particularly interested in using hand pose estimation in XR as this application meshes nicely with our work on Monado, the world’s first open-source OpenXR runtime.
Recent interest in hand pose estimation is driven by the marked advantage it can give to many fields, such as virtual sports coaching and factory worker safety. Pose estimation has the potential to create a new generation of automated tools designed to precisely measure human movement. In addition, pose estimation enhances existing applications in a broad range of areas, including: Augmented Reality, Animation, Gaming and Robotics. This is not by any means an exhaustive list, but it includes some of the primary ways in which pose estimation is shaping our future.
Although the two fields of hand post and body pose estimation have significant overlap regarding their objectives and difficulties, hand pose estimation has a unique set of problems such as lack of characteristic local features, pose ambiguity, and substantial self-occlusion, making it a challenging problem to solve.
With the advent of new and powerful GPU-capable devices, the possible use cases that we can execute at the edge are expanding. The edge is growing in size and getting more efficient as technology advances. NVIDIA, with its industry-leading GPUs, and Arm, the leading technology provider of processor IP, are making significant innovations and investments in the edge ecosystem landscape. For instance, the NVIDIA Jetson Nano is the most cost-effective device that can run GPU-enabled workloads and can handle AI/ML data processing jobs. Additionally, cloud native technologies like Kubernetes have enabled developers to build lightweight applications using containers for the edge. To enable a seamless cloud native software experience across a compute-diverse edge ecosystem, Arm has launched Project Cassini – an open, collaborative standards-based initiative. It leverages the power of these heterogenous Arm-based platforms to create a secure foundation for edge applications.
K3s, developed by Rancher Labs and now a CNCF Sandbox project, has been a key orchestration platform for these compact footprint edge devices. As a Kubernetes distro built for the edge, it is lightweight enough to not put a strain on device RAM and CPU. Taking advantage of the Kubernetes device plugin framework, the workloads running on top of these devices can access the GPU capabilities with efficiency.
I'll participate to talks and give a Krita workshop about character design (a penguin wizard; a small creature possible to start on a 1h session). If you don't know what is Penguicon and are curious to attend their virtual event this week-end, you can find all information here...
In early 2020, I outlined our efforts to expand Mozilla’s boards. Over the past year, we’ve added three new external Mozilla board members: Navrina Singh and Wambui Kinya to the Mozilla Foundation board and Laura Chambers to the Mozilla Corporation board.
Today, I’m excited to welcome Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation, to the Foundation board.
For many years now — and well before I sought out the job I have today — I thought: the world needs more organizations like Mozilla. Given the state of the internet, it needs them now. And, it will likely need them for a very long time to come.
Why? In part because the internet was founded with public benefit in mind. And, as the Mozilla Manifesto declared back in 2007, “… (m)agnifying the public benefit aspects of the internet is an important goal, worthy of time, attention and commitment.”
Today, this sort of ‘time and attention’ is more important — and urgent — than ever. We live in an era where the biggest companies in the world are internet companies. Much of what they have created is good, even delightful. Yet, as the last few years have shown, leaving things to commercial actors alone can leave the internet — and society — in a bit of a mess. We need organizations like Mozilla — and many more like it — if we are to find our way out of this mess. And we need these organizations to think big!
It’s for this reason that I’m excited to add another ‘hat’ to my work: I am joining the Mozilla Foundation board today. This is something I will take on in addition to my role as executive director.
On 11 May, Mozilla will host the next instalment of Mozilla Mornings – our regular event series that brings together policy experts, policymakers and practitioners for insight and discussion on the latest EU digital policy developments.
This instalment will focus on the DSA’s provisions on third-party platform auditing, one of the stand-out features of its next-generation regulatory approach. We’re bringing together a panel of experts to unpack the provisions’ strengths and shortcomings; and to provide recommendations for how the DSA can build a standard-setting auditing regime for Very Large Online Platforms.
According to the Firefox release calendar, during the first quarter of 2022 (probably February), Firefox will reach version 100.
And Chrome release calendar sets a current date of March 29, 2022.
Mozilla announced today that Mozilla's Firefox web browser won't support the FTP protocol from Firefox 90 onward. It was clear that FTP support would be removed from the browser, but it was not clear until today when that would happen.
Rumors about the removal of FTP support in Firefox and Chrome emerged back in 2015, but it took Mozilla until 2018 to introduce a preference in the browser that would disable FTP support.
Members – more formally known as the “Board of Trustees” – are a crucial part of The Document Foundation. They are people from across the globe who contribute time, effort and skills, whether on a voluntary or paid basis. Members can vote for the Board of Directors (aka BoD) and the Membership Committee (MC), and also nominate themselves for a position in the BoD and the MC. The mission of the MC is to administer membership applications and renewals following the criteria defined in the Foundation’s Statutes.
In July, we announced the process of elections for the next MC, which is in place from 19 September 2020 until 18 September 2022. Initially, we started by opening up nominations; TDF members could nominate themselves for a position in the MC, or nominate others.
On 1 September, Franklin Weng announced the final list of 13 candidates, along with the voting phase, which ran from 4 – 10 September. All members were sent tokens so that they could vote anonymously during this time. On 16 September, Franklin announced the final results, where voting preferences were considered according to the Meek STV method with Droop-Dynamic-Fractional setting, default threshold.
In our third birthday publication we interview Fernanda Weiden - co-founder of the FSF Latin America and former Vice President of the FSFE - about the early starts of Free Software in Latin America, nowadays use of Free Software in Big Tech and about support of diversity in different communities.
Fernanda "nanda" Weiden has a long history of personal engagement for Free Software and the FSFE. Actually a way too long to fit into this introduction but we try at least to shed light on some of her contributions: Raised in Porto Alegre, Brasil, Fernanda organised FISL, the largest Free Software conference in Latin America. Later she became founding and council member of the Free Software Foundation Latin America, before moving to Europe, where she joined the FSFE as a volunteer. Just a little bit later she was elected Vice President of the Free Software Foundation Europe from 2009-2011.
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When I became a Free Software activist, one had to argue about the platform to be used to build software. Today, Free Software isn't a question anymore. It is the norm in many places. Big companies play an important role because they hire and pay engineers to continue to produce state of art software that is then available through Free Software licenses. Of course not all engineer hours go into that, but it is definitely something that both big tech companies I worked for appreciated and contributed to in different ways.
The most important thing, in my view, is to make it a priority to build an inclusive environment. [...] It is a virtuous cycle: once you start making positive moves, more diverse talent will keep coming because they will feel safe.
The FSF have also used their clout to affect software outside their remit. The BSD and Python licences have had clauses updated or removed to accommodate GPL restrictions, at the behest of the FSF. I happen to think these clarifications were useful, but I’m wary of one organisation dictating how everyone else does software. This is why I find the Open Source Definition more useful.
But has it at least been worth it? I’m not sure. The Linux kernel, once the poster child of GPL code protection and collaboration, won’t budge from the GPLv2. I haven’t seen much evidence that the GPL shepherds code more effectively than permissive licences, given the latter’s success without the GPL’s redistribution requirements. It’s also complicated integrations, for no good technical reason. Like dedicated licencing servers for certain proprietary software, I bristle at the idea of code and infrastructure being built to service arbitrary human constructs instead of improving functionality.
GPL violations are also among the worst-kept secrets in infocomm circles. This isn’t the fault of the FSF or GPL, but political movements are judged on their effectiveness. High-profile legal cases have forced dodgy companies to comply with their licence obligations. But we all know there are plenty of others, and there aren’t enough lawyers or money in the world to go after them. We can keep chasing people down this rabbit hole, or acknowledge this reality and figure out alternative ways to foster collaboration that aren’t as punitive.
This post is a continuation of a series of blog posts about the most interesting debugging tricks I’ve found while working on GStreamer WebKit on embedded devices.
I’m not a fan of the GIMP name, but I the GNU Image Manipulation Program has been an open-source alternative to Photoshop for as long as I can remember—decades, really. While I never found it to be as feature-filled as PhotoShop, but before Photopea, it was the software I’d turn to whenever I needed to make some edits on a system that didn’t have a graphic-editing app installed. GIMP is fairly easy to use, but even if you have to spend a little time getting a feel for the app, relish in the fact that you’re paying absolutely nothing to use it.
Then there’s Glimpse, a fork of GIMP that’s reasonably up-to-date (though it isn’t based off of the latest version of the GIMP app as of this writing). However, if you really detest that name, it’s a perfectly fine alternative.
The J programming language, developed in the early 1990s by Kenneth E. Iverson and Roger Hui, is an array programming language based primarily on APL (also by Iverson). It’s available on a wide variety of computers and operating systems. J is distinguished by its simple and consistent rules, a large set of built-in capabilities, powerful facilities for defining new operations, and a general and systematic treatment of arrays.
The J system provides: an engine for executing J; various front ends that provide user interfaces to the J engine; a library, written in J, that provides an IDE (interactive development environment), numerous tools, utilities, demos, tutorials; and online documentation.
J is a very terse array programming language, and is most suited to mathematical and statistical programming, especially when performing operations on matrices. It has also been used in extreme programming and network performance analysis.
A returning question I get is: “I see, that you can send alerts from syslog-ng to Slack and Telegram, but do you happen to support XYZ?” Replace XYZ with Discord and countless others. Up until recently, my regular answer has been: “Take a look at the Slack destination of syslog-ng, and based on that, you can add support for your favorite service”. Then I learned about Apprise, a notification library for Python, supporting dozens of different services.
This blog is the first part of a series. It covers how to send log messages to Discord using the http() destination of syslog-ng and an initial try at using Apprise for alerting.
The next part will show you a lot more flexible version of the Apprise integration: making fields configurable using templates and using a block to hide implementation details from the user.
The Python code in these two blogs is sample code, provided to you for inspiration. They are not for production use, as among others, they lack error handling and reporting. If time and my Python knowledge permits, I might have a more production-ready code later on, that I plan to cover in a third blog.
Jeremy Evans is the lead developer of the Sequel database library, the Roda web toolkit, the Rodauth authentication framework, and many other Ruby libraries. He is the maintainer of Ruby ports for the OpenBSD operating system, and has contributed to CRuby and JRuby, as well as many popular Ruby libraries. We are happy to present a brand-new interview with Jeremy to our readers. Hope you enjoy it!
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I have been contributing patches and bug reports occasionally to Ruby since 2009. However, I started to get more involved with Ruby in early 2019 when hearing about the direction for keyword arguments in Ruby 3. The original proposal for keyword arguments in Ruby 3 was for full separation, so that passing a hash to a method that accepts keywords would raise an error, but also that passing keywords (a hash without braces) to a method that accept an optional hash argument would also raise an error. I thought this proposal went too far, by breaking compatibility with Ruby code that did not use keyword arguments at all. I built a patch on top of the original proposal that was more backwards compatible. I ended up presenting this proposal with Yusuke Endoh at the developer meeting at RubyKaigi 2019. While waiting on a decision from Matz about keyword arguments, I started sending in patches to fix other Ruby bugs, and after quite a few patches, Endoh-san recommended I become a committer, and Matz approved.
Karl Marx never publicly referred to his Jewish background. That background was known to all his friends, and Marx gave no sign of wishing to deny it. But even his daughter Eleanor, who studied Yiddish after becoming politically involved with the working-class Jews of London’s East End, refrained from mentioning her father’s conversion to Christianity.
As its title suggests, Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution, by the distinguished Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri, is not, in spite of the “Jewish Lives” series for which it was written, primarily about Marx’s Jewishness, such as it was. The book gives us, along with a quick and readable account of the life and works, a Marx whom Avineri takes as more useful for what he sees as our nonrevolutionary times. In his view, Marx was less inspired by the desperation of the 19th century working class, which cried out for immediate revolutionary change, than by the Enlightenment ideals of liberty and justice, whose realization might be seen as following a less pressured timetable. This fidelity to liberty and justice, Avineri goes on to argue, came in part from his family’s mixed experience of those ideals, dangled in front of them as members of the Rhineland Jewish community during the French Revolution and then jerked away in its aftermath. For Avineri, that jarring experience inspired both Marx’s commitment to an egalitarian universalism and his skepticism as to whether liberalism could deliver on that commitment.
They all have the same purpose: To undo public education—not only the institution but also the public funding of schools.
A few years ago I ran a piece by Joanne Barkan about the long history of the movement to privatize public education. It began:
ARM processors have seen unprecedented growth in the last three years and are now being used in everything from smart watches to Apple's new M1 desktop and laptop systems, but there is one sector where they have yet to take hold: the enterprise market. For years, many of the largest cloud providers have designed computers around ARM chips, and in December 2020, Microsoft said it was joining the fray by designing its own ARM-based chips for Azure and Surface PCs. Now we are seeing technology based on ARM chips float down from the cloud providers and rise up from the consumer market and start to take hold in the datacenter. In this article, I will highlight some different ARM devices and discuss ways that they have made their way into the datacenter.
Escaping ecological catastrophe and reducing the frequency of pandemics that might be lurking in the decades ahead is well within our capability, but it will require assiduous respect for ecological limits and great restraint in our interactions with nature.
Humanity's transgression of ecological limits has caused widespread damage, including a climate emergency, catastrophic loss of biodiversity, and extensive degradation of soils around the world. Earth abuse is also at the root of the Covid-19 pandemic and the grim likelihood that new pathogens will continue to emerge from other animal species to infect humans.
All across the nation, online signups for shots have been far easier for white-collar families with fast computers and high-speed Internet.
On March 29, Eric, the most prominent lay leader at my church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, perished from COVID-19. He was one of 685 people across the United States and one of 15 in Massachusetts to die from the disease that day. On April 6, Eric’s mother Elmo also died from the coronavirus, one of 907 in the US and one of 12 in Massachusetts.
"Unless we vaccinate all nations, there is a huge risk that the protection offered by vaccines will be shattered by fresh mutations."
Fueled by surging cases in India, Brazil, and other developing nations, new global coronavirus infections hit a seven-day high of 5.2 million last week as world leaders face growing pressure to take bold action against vaccine inequities that have left much of the world unprotected from the deadly pathogen.
The United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union (EU) have effectively blocked poor countries from accessing affordable COVID-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The proposal on the table from India and South Africa — to waive the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) — would have forgone patents to significantly expand global vaccine production. Over 100 countries supported the proposal before it was blocked in March, and on April 14, more than 170 Nobel laureates and former heads of state and government sent an open letter urging President Joe Biden to back the waiver. Despite growing pressure, the U.S. has made no promises ahead of the next WTO meeting on April 22.
This past Friday saw 78,932 official diagnoses of new COVID-19 cases nationally. On the same day, New Hampshire’s Republican Gov. Chris Sununu officially lifted the state’s mask mandate, while making it clear that he still thinks wearing masks is really important, you guys. This move came only days after Sununu ordered all children back into full-time on-site schooling, beginning today.
Several studies suggest that natural immunity against SARS-CoV-2 infection is far more widespread than anyone imagined. Most of the evidence in both Covid-19 patients and animal models shows that the immune response to COVID is quite typical for an acute viral infection. “Most people who recover from Covid-19 have detectable neutralizing antibodies months after infection,” Rasmussen observed. “This suggests that Sars-Cov-2 infection does produce an immune response that is protective, at least for several months,” she wrote. Rasmussen also noted that some people who have never tested positive for Covid-19 have “memory T-cells from prior common-cold coronavirus infections that cross-react with Sars-Cov-2, suggesting that there may be some existing protection in the population.”
The seed varieties that ordinary farmers develop and those handed down through generations are genetically diverse and continually evolving. In addition to GM seeds, these diverse varieties are being strictly controlled by another type of intellectual property legislation called Plant Variety Protection.
Herd immunity? Don’t count on it. Not if that “herd” is the US military.
According to news reports, at least a third of active-duty military personnel or those in the National Guard have opted out of getting the coronavirus vaccine. That figure, by the way, doesn’t even include American troops stationed around the world, many of whom have yet to be offered the chance to be vaccinated. As a Navy spouse whose husband has moved to five separate US duty stations in the decade we’ve been together, one thing is hard for me to imagine: An administration pledging to do everything it can to beat this pandemic has stopped short of using its executive powers to ensure that our 2.3 million armed forces members are all vaccinated.
One of my favorite movies of all time is the Stanley Kubrick film€ Dr. Stangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb. It is one of the greatest comedies of all time and arguably the greatest black comedy of all time. In brief, its plot concerns an unhinged purity-obsessed Air Force general named Gen. Jack D. Ripper (Kubrick obviously wasn’t aiming for subtlety), who manages to subvert chain of command and protocol and order the B-52 bomber wing under his command to launch a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union. The film then follows the increasingly desperate (and darkly comical) efforts of the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and an RAF exchange officer under Gen. Ripper’s command to stop nuclear Armageddon, while showing the parallel efforts of the crew of one B-52 bomber to get through to its target, with Peter Sellers playing three roles (the President, the RAF officer, and Dr. Strangelove, the mysterious ex-Nazi scientist/advisor who personified the dark id behind the Cold War). I realize that it might be difficult for those too young to remember the Cold War, nuclear fallout shelters, and air raid drills to fully comprehend the terror that Kubrick was playing with in this film, but the film nonetheless holds up as an artifact of a period from decades during which mutually assured destruction was a fact of life and that destruction could have come about due to accident or something like what was portrayed in this film.
Glaser’s extensive archive of nearly 4,000 documents, now available to the public, provides clear evidence that the US government, and in particular the military, has known for decades of the harm wireless technology can cause to human health—long before cell phones and other wifi technology were commercialized in the early 1980s.
Two weeks ago, I went to the Bronx High School of Science to get my first COVID vaccine – Moderna's.
It was an exciting day, and not just because I was getting the vaccine. I felt like I was part of history. After all, getting this shot just over a year after the start of the pandemic, as have 40% of the US population (131 million people) as of publication, was nothing short of a miracle.
According to the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation focused on health research based in London, it usually takes around 10 years to develop a vaccine.
CureVac is currently developing a vaccine against the coronavirus, CV-nCoV. The biopharmaceutical company is expanding a broad integrated European production network, with experienced contract development and manufacturing organisation, in order to produce the vaccine. Marco Rau, general counsel at CureVac, says, “It gives us continued control over the process and closer involvement in production.”
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The company frequently works with Graf von Stosch and Maiwald to file its patents.
Great news, everyone! The FBI has been fighting a cyberwar on your behalf… perhaps utilizing your own computer. Here's Zack Whittaker with some details:
The Treasury Department on Thursday slapped six Russian technology companies with sanctions for supporting Kremlin intelligence agencies...
Scores of projects potentially affected by supply chain attack. A malicious alteration to a shell script lay undetected since January this year at software testing coverage report provider Codecov, sparking fears of another significant supply chain attack.
Forensic analysis shows that an unknown threat actor exploited an error in Codecov's Docker container image creation process, and gained access to the credential that allowed the modification to the company's Bash Uploader script.
Codecov said a Google Cloud Storage key was accessed starting January 31 this year, and not secured until April 1 US time.
The script is normally used to upload coverage reports to Codecov, but it was altered to transmit the UNIX shell environment, which can be used to store variables.
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The company said it has rotated all credentials, including the key that was captured by the attackers, and set up monitoring and auditing to ensure that the Bash Uploader cannot be compromised like this again.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (xorg-server), Fedora (CImg, gmic, leptonica, mingw-binutils, mingw-glib2, mingw-leptonica, mingw-python3, nodejs, and seamonkey), openSUSE (irssi, kernel, nextcloud-desktop, python-django-registration, and thunderbird), Red Hat (389-ds:1.4, kernel, kernel-rt, perl, and pki-core:10.6), SUSE (kernel, sudo, and xen), and Ubuntu (clamav and openslp-dfsg).
For many years I've tried to point out that no one seems to have a very good conceptual framework for "privacy." Many people act as if privacy is a concrete thing -- and that we want our information kept private. But as I've pointed out for years, that doesn't make much sense. Privacy is a set of tradeoffs. It's information about ourselves, that we often offer up freely, if we feel that the tradeoff is worth it. And, related to that, there's a big question about who is controlling the data in question. On top of that, things get confusing when we consider just who is controlling what data. If we're controlling our own data, then we have some degree of autonomy over our privacy trade-offs. But when we hand that data off to a third party, then they have much more say over our privacy -- and even if they agree to "lock down and protect" that data, the end result might not be what we want. For one, we're giving those companies more power of our data than we, ourselves have. And that can be a problem!
Talk of peace in Afghanistan, Yemen, the streets of the U.S., is not coherent while waging wars with drones.
On Thursday, April 15, the New York Times posted an article headed, "How the U.S. Plans to Fight From Afar After Troops Exit Afghanistan," just in case anyone misunderstood the previous day's headline, "Biden, Setting Afghanistan Withdrawal, Says 'It Is Time to End the Forever War'" as indicating the U.S. war in Afghanistan might actually come to an end on September 11, 2021, almost 20 years after it started.
As protests continue in Chicago and nationwide over the police killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, we get an update from community activist and independent journalist Mateo Zapata, who says, “People in Chicago are just tired of seeing Black and Brown youth murdered by police.” Released bodycam video showed Adam had his hands up in the air when he was shot by an officer. We also speak with Rutgers professor Lilia Fernández, who studies Latino Chicago history and says police brutality toward this community is “not a new phenomenon” and goes back many decades. “Adam Toledo would not be dead today if he were white, if he were from an affluent family or if he lived in a predominantly white neighborhood,” Fernández says.
At least 90 percent of charges against Black Lives Matter protesters in a dozen jurisdictions have been dropped, dismissed or not filed, according to an analysis by The Guardian . Such a high percentage suggests that the police may have been arresting people simply to suppress dissent.
Much of the money spent in Afghanistan was wasted and disappeared into a fog of corruption.
The Costs of War Project at Brown University has just brought out a new report on Afghanistan.
Though most of the men on suicide missions that day were Saudi Arabian, the Bush II administration quickly made the decision to send an expeditionary force against the devastated nation of Afghanistan in revenge. Maybe some readers remember that time and the blood lust whipped-up by the chattering classes. Radio shock-jocks replaced pop music programming on all the local radio stations with endless rumor-peddling and exhortations for the domestic population to embrace a remorseless slaughter of peasants half a world away. “Americans have to get the stomach to kill women and children,” they said: Literally. Maybe you heard the cry as I did.
The guy down the street was working on his roof that week with his radio blaring the relentless, bloody sanctimony. One day the cable guy up on the pole across the street€ also had his RevengeRadio thumping out the same species of propaganda in a dueling cacophony echoing in and around our roadside vegetable stand.
In his April 14 speech, President Joe Biden made the point that should have long been evident: that Washington could not “continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create the ideal conditions for our withdrawal, expecting a different result.”€ As if to concede to the broader failure of the exercise, “the terror threat” had flourished, being now present “in many places”.€ To keep “thousands of troops grounded and concentrated in just one country at a cost of billions each year makes little sense to me and to our leaders.”
For such a long stay, the objectives have been far from convincing.€ The US presence in Afghanistan should focus “on the reason we went there in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again.€ We did that.€ We accomplished that objective.” A debacle is dressed up in the robes of necessity, the original purpose being to “root out al Qaeda” in 2001 and “to prevent future terrorist attacks against the United States planned from Afghanistan.”
Like so many Black Americans, Wright justifiably feared police interactions. His mentor Jonathan Mason said, “He was afraid police would do something like this to him.” Attorney Benjamin Crump, who has represented the families of countless police victims in civil lawsuits, said, “We don’t see these sort of things happening to white young people that we see happen over and over and over again to young marginalized minorities.”
The Black fear of police is grounded in provable police bias. The Stanford Open Policing Project studied nearly 100 million police stops and found that “officers generally stop black drivers at higher rates than white drivers,” and that “black and Hispanic drivers are searched more often than white drivers.” Moreover, “police require less suspicion to search black and Hispanic drivers than white drivers,” which the researchers concluded “is evidence of discrimination.”
Both Wang Junzheng and Chen Mingguo responded by condemning these sanctions that were not only imposed by the U.S. but also by Canada, the UK and the EU. Wang Junzheng said that the sanctions “are a gross slander,” while Chen Mingguo said that he was “very proud of being sanctioned by these countries.”
The United States Pivots to Asia
But, in true Orwellian form, black is white and white is black under this new administration. And nowhere is this bizarre view more pronounced than in the context of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action).
Let us set a baseline of understanding.
But faith in the nuclear future lives on at “Whoops!,” today rebranded as Energy Northwest. On April 1, the day perhaps also inadvertently fitting, the consortium of Washington state public utilities€ announced€ a move aimed at the first advanced nuclear reactor deployment in the U.S. Energy Northwest will partner with Grant County Public Utility District, a member utility serving a desert county in the center of the state, and X-energy, a leading developer of the nuclear industry’s bright shining hope, the small modular reactor (SMR).
“The partners€ will collaborate and share resources to evaluate their mutual goal of siting, building, and operating a Xe-100 advanced nuclear power plant at an existing Energy Northwest site north of Richland, with the potential to generate up to 320 megawatts of reliable, carbon-free energy,” they announced. “Through the TRi Energy Partnership, the parties will evaluate each step of the project and identify the best approach to licensing, permitting, construction, operation, and ownership.”
Amid nationwide protests over police abuse, we speak with Cariol Horne, the Buffalo police officer whom a New York court has just vindicated for stopping a fellow cop from choking a handcuffed Black man during an arrest. In 2006, Horne, who is Black, saw a white officer repeatedly punching the man in the face before putting him in a chokehold. After Horne heard the man say “I can’t breathe,” she intervened by grabbing the officer’s arm. Horne was sanctioned by the Buffalo Police Department, reassigned, then fired in 2008, just months before she was eligible to receive her full pension. A new ruling makes her eligible for back pay and pension benefits. Horne says she is now calling on state governments and Congress to follow the lead of Buffalo, which passed Cariol’s Law, legislation that makes it the duty of officers to intervene in cases of brutality. “I knew that I did the right thing,” Horne says. We also speak with Intisar Rabb, a Harvard Law professor who is one of three attorneys representing Horne. Cariol’s Law “should spread far and wide” to other cities and states, Rabb says.
We speak with the lawyer for a lieutenant in the Army Medical Corps who is suing two Virginia police officers who pepper-sprayed him, pushed him to the ground and pointed their guns at him during a traffic stop at a gas station last December. Video of the encounter has gone viral and shows Caron Nazario, who is a Black and Latino man, was wearing his Army uniform during the stop. When Nazario says he’s afraid to get out of his car, one officer responds, “You should be.” Nazario says he drove about a mile to the gas station after he noticed a police car flashing its lights at him — a common practice to avoid pulling over on a dark road. It is shocking that a police officer “felt it appropriate to threaten a man with state-sanctioned murder” for simply asking why he was pulled over, says Jonathan Arthur, Nazario’s attorney. “My client’s looking just to hold these officers accountable under law.”
As protests continue in Chicago and nationwide over the police killing of 13-year-old Adam Toledo, we get an update from community activist and independent journalist Mateo Zapata, who says, “People in Chicago are just tired of seeing Black and Brown youth murdered by police.” Released bodycam video showed Adam had his hands up in the air when he was shot by an officer. We also speak with Rutgers professor Lilia Fernández, who studies Latino Chicago history and says police brutality toward this community is “not a new phenomenon” and goes back many decades. “Adam Toledo would not be dead today if he were white, if he were from an affluent family or if he lived in a predominantly white neighborhood,” Fernández says.
Amid the Republican-led push to crackdown on protestors in the wake of the Georgia Floyd protests, state lawmakers throughout the country are now attempting to lessen penalties for drivers who unintentionally kill protestors blocking roadways.
One-hundred days after the breach of the United States Capitol building by a mob of Donald Trump loyalists, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) renewed her push to establish a “9/11-style” commission to examine what exactly happened that day and how to address potential acts of violence like it in the future.
I found my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side listed for sale in an old newspaper advertisement: “Stephen, 50, sawyer and sailor.” The announcement, headlined with the word “SLAVES” in bold capital letters, stated that he was to be auctioned off at Maspero’s Coffee-house in New Orleans on February 3, 1820, along with the other property that had belonged to Francis Cousin, a wealthy white plantation owner in St. Tammany Parish. 1
Cousin died the previous year, and the executor of his large estate placed a paid announcement in the January 4, 1820, edition of the Orleans Gazette and Commercial Advertiser that all of the planter’s earthly possessions would be sold to the highest bidder: the 4,000-acre farm, the furniture, the two sailing ships, and the 760 heads of horned cattle. Among the “moveables and immoveables” in the estate’s inventory were more than three dozen Black human beings—children, women, and men—including my ancestor, Stephen (or Etienne, as he was most often called in French-speaking Louisiana). 2
"Facing George Floyd that day that did not require one ounce of courage, and none was shown on that day. All that was required was a little compassion and none was shown on that day."
The trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin—who is charged with second-degree unintentional murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in the death of unarmed Black man George Floyd last year—wrapped up on Monday as attorneys for both sides delivered lengthy closing statements as the city and nation began bracing for the jury's verdict.€
Now, after nearly twenty years of a war that has been as bloody and futile as all those previous invasions and occupations, the last 3,500 U.S. troops and their NATO brothers-in-arms will be coming home from Afghanistan.
President Joe Biden tried to spin this as the United States leaving because it has achieved its objectives, bringing the terrorists responsible for 9/11 to justice and ensuring that Afghanistan would not be used as a base for a future attack on the United States. “We achieved those objectives,”€ Biden said. “Bin Laden is dead and Al Qaeda is degraded. It’s time to end the forever war.”
U.S. leadership has stumbled from one military debacle to another, a trajectory mirroring the sad finales of other historical imperial powers.
America's defeat in Afghanistan is one in a string of catastrophic military blunders that herald the death of the American empire. With the exception of the first Gulf War, fought largely by mechanized units in the open desert that did not—wisely—attempt to occupy Iraq, the United States political and military leadership has stumbled from one military debacle to another. Korea. Vietnam. Lebanon. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. The trajectory of military fiascos mirrors the sad finales of the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian, French, British, Dutch, Portuguese and Soviet empires. While each of these empires decayed with their own peculiarities, they all exhibited patterns of dissolution that characterize the American experiment.
America’s defeat in Afghanistan is one in a string of catastrophic military blunders that herald the death of the American empire. With the exception of the first Gulf War, fought largely by mechanized units in the open desert that did not – wisely – attempt to occupy Iraq, the United States political and military leadership has stumbled from one military debacle to another. Korea. Vietnam. Lebanon. Afghanistan. Iraq. Syria. Libya. The trajectory of military fiascos mirrors the sad finales of the Chinese, Ottoman, Hapsburg, Russian, French, British, Dutch, Portuguese and Soviet empires. While each of these empires decayed with their own peculiarities, they all exhibited patterns of dissolution that characterize the American experiment.
Chris Hedges€ is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times,€ where he served as the Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for€ The Dallas Morning News,€ The Christian Science Monitor, and NPR. He is the host of the Emmy Award-nominated RT America show€ On Contact.
In various projects, the military and the defence industry are investigating the networking of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles. For the Air Force, they could in small numbers support air combat; for the Army, they can detect and destroy nearby targets in large swarms.
On the other hand, Gillett says that the EU ‘certainly’ deserves praise in some areas. He emphasised the importance of emissions from renewable energy systems manufacturing, supply, and infrastructure, known as ‘embodied carbon’.
He says: “Embodied carbon is a very important topic, which is currently subject to international debate. The EU Emission Trading System is one of the tools used by the EU to drive its decarbonisation agenda, but it risks pushing some carbon intensive industries out of Europe, where they can produce their products more competitively by avoiding carbon pricing.
“A new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism to tackle this problem is currently under discussion and he EU is widely recognised as a world leader in this area.
“The EU Green Deal and its legislative initiatives are pioneering the way that other countries across the world will surely follow. Without the EU, there would be no Paris Agreement and, although it will not be easy, the goal of delivering carbon neutrality by 2050 is inspiring massive changes in thinking across the world.
“The EU is doing more than almost anyone else at this very challenging time, as we work our way out of the Covid-19 pandemic. No, it is not yet enough to be sure of avoiding overshooting the 1.5€°C limit for global warming that was agreed in Paris. However, this will require a global effort at all levels and in all countries, so it is great that the EU is pushing ahead and learning by doing.”
The Data for Progress survey also found that an overwhelming majority of all likely voters favor the GND's individual components.€
As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders€ reintroduced€ their "Green New Deal for Public Housing," a survey published Monday affirmed that most U.S. voters support the Green New Deal and want their members of Congress to co-sponsor legislation to make the ambitious climate emergency plan a reality.
Such a plan, said Rep. Jamaal Bowman, "would allow people to live with dignity and respect, to know that our federal government cares about their well-being and their health."
Expressing hope that the Democratic Party would expand its "scope and ambition"€ regarding an infrastructure plan, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders reintroduced the Green New Deal for Public Housing on Monday, calling on Congress to pass the€ far-reaching legislation to address the interlocking housing, economic,€ environmental injustice, and climate crises.
"The urgency of this climate crisis and environmental racism demands that we equip our cities and our local governments with this funding."
In the latest of a flurry of proposed Green New Deal legislation, Reps. Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday introduced the Green New Deal for Cities Act of 2021, a $1 trillion plan to "tackle the environmental injustices that are making us and our children sick, costing us our homes, and destroying our planet."
What happens in the Arctic may not stay there. Loss of Arctic sea ice can dump the polar blizzards elsewhere.
The warning came alongside the release of the World Meteorological Organization's State of the Global Climate in 2020, which said it was one of the three warmest years on record.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres warned Monday that humanity stands "on the verge of the abyss" as the climate crisis pushes the world "dangerously close" to hitting the 1.5 degree Celsius target limit of warming.
"We're not only sending a message that we're running out of time, but that there is still time to act and save our planet!" said climate leader Alexandria€ Villeseñor.
Climate justice advocates with€ 350.org€ and the€ Build Back Fossil Free coalition€ on Monday€ announced their intention to deliver a replica of New York City's famous Climate Clock to top White House officials this week, calling for an ambitious carbon emissions target from the Biden administration.€
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) are set to unveil new legislation on Monday focusing on improving public housing and making it more climate friendly.
"We don't only need to phase out coal and fossil fuels," said Sandra Beckerman, member of the Dutch Parliament. "We need to phase out the power that these companies... have over our governments."
By weaponizing an arcane energy treaty to sue European Union governments that are phasing out fossil fuels, dirty energy corporations are siphoning off billions of taxpayer dollars that could otherwise be used to fund renewable energy development and climate action.
The largest union of coal miners in the U.S. announced Monday that it would accept a transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy as long as the federal government takes care of coal workers through the provision of green jobs and income support for those who become unemployed.
"Saying 'corporations must pay their fair share' should mean that pre-Trump rates are the starting point."
Senate Democrats are reportedly considering lowering the corporate tax rate proposed in President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan from 28% to 25% to mollify centrists in the caucus, a backtrack that would leave hundreds of billions of dollars in potential revenue on the table.
The issue of whether a deficit is too large depends entirely on whether it causes us to push the economy too far, leading to inflation. The deficit for last year was $3.1 trillion, which was equal to 15.2% of GDP. This was by far the largest deficit, relative to the size of the economy, since World War II.
Yet, the inflation rate actually slowed in 2020, as the pandemic related shutdowns created an enormous gap in demand in the economy. It would be difficult to find any major sector of the economy that was operating near its capacity last year, and therefore raising prices.
Senate Democrats are reportedly considering lowering the corporate tax rate proposed in President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan from 28% to 25% to mollify centrists in the caucus, a backtrack that would leave hundreds of billions of dollars in potential revenue on the table.
The federal government has quietly reversed course on a policy that had kept thousands of businesses from applying for pandemic economic aid, with only weeks to go before funds are expected to run out.
In late March, ProPublica reported on a Small Business Administration rule that disqualified individuals or businesses currently in bankruptcy from getting relief through the Paycheck Protection Program, an $813 billion pot of funds distributed to small businesses in the form of loans that are forgiven if the money is mostly spent on payroll. The agency had battled in court against several bankrupt companies attempting to apply for PPP loans, and did not change course even after Congress explicitly passed legislation in December allowing it to do so.
IBM workers and their unions from across Europe are taking part in a joint day of action to protest management’s move to cut 10,000 jobs. While workers brought in over €60 billion in revenue last year and increased profit margins during the pandemic, the corporation’s management have announced mass layoffs across Europe.
As part of the day of action, 26 unions from 16 countries have jointly written to IBM’s European management. In the letter, unions are highlight the bewildering lack of transparency that has shrouded the move, which management have officially dubbed “operation sunrise”. Neither has the need for such drastic measures been evidenced to workers’ representatives, nor have objective criteria for determining which workers will be fired been clarified.
Negotiations between management and workers’ representatives are ongoing but tensions are mounting. In response to the lack of clarity, unions have called coordinated workplace actions under the banner #NoSunsetForIBMers. The corporation employs roughly 90,000 workers, and the unprecedented scale of the layoffs would result in 1 in 9 workers losing their job.
Josh Hawley is gonna Josh Hawley. The Senator from Missouri, who still has not apologized or admitted to supporting the invasion of the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election, has a long history of nonsense bills that are performative for his riled up base. His latest is more of the same. On Monday he introduced the "Bust Up Big Tech Act" and even if you're a supporter of antitrust and think that big tech should be "busted up," it should give you pause before supporting Hawley's nonsense. The bill itself is... weird. It seems to pick seemingly random activities and insist that no company can do two of them. Basically, he looked at different businesses that Amazon and Google are in, and the bill says "you're no longer allowed to do those different things." As some have pointed out, under this bill it appears that Walmart can no longer sell under a house brand, because the bill bars any company that qualifies from selling, advertising or otherwise promoting your own products.
Last week the press was jam packed with headlines discussing how Elon Musk and his Neuralink co-founder Max Hodak would soon "have the technology to build a real life Jurassic Park." From the New York Post to The Hill, outlets quickly parroted the claim that Neuralink might soon get into the reanimated dinosaur business, triggering not only waves of Jeff-Goldblum-themed ridicule on social media, but a lot of free advertising for Elon Musk and Neuralink.
America’s old industrial policy was stifling innovation and gauging taxpayers and consumers. The challenges ahead demand a very different economy.
America is about to revive an idea that was left for dead decades ago. It's called industrial policy, and it's at the heart of Joe Biden's plans to restructure the U.S. economy.
How to make a gulf monarchy all-American.
Princess Reema bint Bandar Al-Saud, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the U.S., was on the hot seat. In early March 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the world, oil prices collapsed and a price war broke out between Saudi Arabia and Russia, leaving American oil and gas companies feeling the pain. As oil prices plummeted, Republican senators from oil-producing states turned their ire directly on Saudi Arabia. Forget that civil war in Yemen—what about fossil-fuel profits here at home?
A majority of Americans want to do away with lifetime appointments for Supreme Court justices, according to new polling data. The poll results are an indication that the public is open to reforming the highest court in the U.S.
It happened again. Police killed another person. This time it was a child, 13-year-old Adam Toledo. Video shows Toledo turning around and raising his empty hands before Eric Stillman, a six-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, shoots him in the chest. And since his death, police have shot dead at least 43 other people, according to a count by The Washington Post.
On March 29, a ShotSpotter notification brought the police to South Sawyer Avenue in Toledo’s Little Village neighborhood. The company claims the gunfire location technology helps make communities safer. The officer had a police camera manufactured by Avon, which says its body cams increase police safety and enable accountability by having officers be videotaped. Of course, the ShotSpotter didn’t prevent a lethal gun shooting, and the officer didn’t show restraint. New, expensive policing technology is not the answer to the problem of cops shooting people.
On the morning of April 14, police officers searched the newsroom of the student journal “Doxa,” as well as the homes of its editors Armen Aramyan, Alla Gutnikova, Vladimir Metelkin, and Natalya Tyshkevich. After the raids, the journalists were interrogated by state investigators and a court banned them from using the Internet and leaving their homes. More than 250 academics from around the world have signed a solidarity statement in support of Doxa. In addition, Russian university students, postgraduates, and alumni are urging the leadership of Moscow’s Higher School of Economics (HSE) — where students and alumni founded Doxa in 2017 — and other Russian universities to show support for the editors, who are now facing criminal charges. Meduza is sharing a full translation of their open letter, which has 400 signatures at the time of this writing. The signature drive is set to continue until May 1.€
Alexey Navalny is dying in prison. After he miraculously survived being poisoned with the chemical weapon Novichok last year, his condition is deteriorating again. In an effort to get access to his own doctors, Navalny launched a hunger strike. Almost three weeks later, the hunger strike continues. This is an act of desperation. Navalny’s team of doctors believes that his life is now at risk.
During his daily press briefing on Monday, April 19, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was bombarded with questions about opposition politician Alexey Navalny. With Navalny’s health worsening amid his ongoing hunger strike, his associates have announced plans to hold countrywide protests in the days to come. What’s more, international governments and cultural figures are calling on the Russian authorities to provide the Kremlin critic with better medical care, and the U.S. even warned of “consequences” if Navalny dies in prison. Nevertheless, Peskov insisted that the Kremlin doesn’t “monitor the health of Russian prisoners” and that isn’t taking the international outcry into account.€
Alexey Navalny has been on a hunger strike since March 31 to protest his medical treatment in prison. The incarcerated opposition politician demands access to his own team of doctors, and his spokespeople now warn that his health is deteriorating so rapidly that he could die “in a matter of days.” In the West, open letters in Navalny’s defense have attracted the support of cultural celebrities and scholars, including Nobel laureates. One of these people is Andre Geim, the Russian-born Dutch-British physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010. Geim first spoke publicly in support of Navalny in early February. In an interview with Meduza special correspondent Kristina Safonova, he explained why he’s no longer “a Putin apologist” and why he’s decided now to criticize the Russian authorities’ treatment of Navalny.
In the aftermath of a database of email addresses registered for the upcoming “Freedom for Navalny!” protest leaking online, Navalny’s chief of staff Leonid Volkov claims that the information was stolen by an Anti-Corruption Foundation ( FBK) employee who was recruited by the Russian FSB.
Following reports of Alexey Navalny’s health deteriorating critically amid his prison hunger strike, Russian prison officials announced on Monday that the opposition politician is being transferred to a prisoners’ hospital in the Vladimir region. The hospital is located on the grounds of Correctional Facility No. 3 — a notorious prison where inmates have reported experiencing torture and abuse inside the medical ward. One former inmate said that patients who protest the prison hospital’s conditions are beaten up and tied to their beds for days on end.
The Moscow City Court has formally registered a lawsuit by the prosecutor’s office to ban Alexey Navalny’s political and anti-corruption network as “extremist.” Officials want the court to designate three organizations — the Anti-Corruption Foundation and the Citizens’ Rights Protection Foundation (both of which Russia’s Justice Ministry has already designated as “foreign agents”) and Navalny’s nationwide network of campaign offices — as illegal “extremist” groups.€
Officials in Russia’s Vladimir Region announced on Monday that they are transferring Alexey Navalny to a nearby hospital for prisoners, though they describe his condition as “satisfactory.” Navalny is now receiving “vitamin therapy” apparently with his consent, though he has been on a hunger strike since March 31. In recent days, the opposition politician’s spokespeople have warned that he could die within a week due to untreated illnesses.
West Virginia Democratic Senator Joe Manchin announced on Monday he would support pro-union legislation that passed the House of Representatives last month, clearing the first of many obstacles that still remain toward its eventual passage in the Senate.
At the end of March, US Representative Mark Pocan got into a pissing match with Amazon about restroom breaks and availability for workers—a contentious issue in the Alabama union-organizing drive the corporation eventually thwarted. After Pocan criticized Amazon, the company attacked the former Congressional Progressive Caucus cochair, claiming his facts were wrong. Actually, it was Amazon that was wrong, and it had to apologize. Pocan immediately refocused attention on working conditions in Amazon’s warehouses. That’s typical of how the Wisconsin Democrat—a dues-paying member of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades who recently spearheaded an effort to form a House labor caucus—fights for worker rights. I interviewed Pocan about battling Amazon and working to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act of 2021.
—John Nichols
"Amazon has left no stone unturned in its efforts to gaslight its own employees. We won't let Amazon's lies, deception, and illegal activities go unchallenged."
The Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union on Monday formally filed nearly two dozen objections to Amazon's conduct during the closely watched Bessemer, Alabama organizing drive, which the company defeated with an aggressive counter-campaign that observers say was replete with abusive and legally dubious activity.
The NYPD has an uneasy relationship with Clearview. The facial recognition startup -- one that has compiled a database of millions of images by scraping info from social media platforms and other websites -- claimed in an emailed pitch that the nation's largest police force used its software to identify a suspected terrorist.
"Every single Floridian should be outraged by this blatant attempt to erode our First Amendment right to peacefully assemble."
Florida's Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis on Monday signed into law a bill that civil rights groups warn is designed to crack down on peaceful demonstrations and criminalize dissent by redefining "rioting" in an overbroad way and creating draconian new felonies for protest-related offenses.
For four years, Americans had to deal with a similar sonic blast, namely the “music” of Donald Trump. His voice was everywhere: on TV and radio, screaming from the headlines of newspapers, pumped out nonstop on social media. MAGAmen and women danced to the repetitive beat of his lies and distortions. Everyone else experienced the nonstop assault of Trump’s instantly recognizable accent and intonations as nails on a blackboard. After the 2016 election, psychologists observed a significant uptickin the fears Americans had about the future. One clinician even dubbed the phenomenon “Trump anxiety disorder.”
The volume of Trump’s assault on the senses has decreased considerably since January. Obviously, he no longer has the bully pulpit of the Oval Office to broadcast his views. The mainstream media no longer covers his every utterance.
The Russian Attorney General’s Office has issued an official warning ahead of this week’s planned protest action in support of jailed opposition politician Alexey Navalny.
The lawless Libyan mess has turned into a highly efficient migrant funnel which has facilitated right-wing rhetoric in a Europe that appears to have forgotten why the UN refugee conventions were instituted. No doubt Europol focus groups are telling representatives that ethics don’t sell. Libya is a textbook example of Western hubris, where ‘decisive’/’surgical’ violence is labelled ‘humanitarian’, though followed by Stone-Age living conditions and warlordism. It’s taken ten years to finally fix an agreed a date for new elections, due in December, but the social legacy of the Western intervention will take much longer to heal.
In the decade that Libya has been a deadly place to live, migration from Africa to Europe has risen sharply. Sub-Saharan applications for asylum in Europe were barely 50,000 in 2010, but close to 170,000 in 2017. Most transited via Libya. Libya’s hundreds of miles of coastline, effectively unpoliced, was an own goal in the classic Western mold: (‘We had to destroy the town to save it.’).
Donald Trump, who led the way championing physical limits on voting with his repeated lies about a “rigged” and fraudulent presidential election, called for a boycott of companies that are against curtailing the ability to vote. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned them to stay out of politics but, uhm, to keep donating.
Corporate America, which long has sided with Republicans who have given it tax breaks and deregulation in return for their donations, may be turning away from the GOP and the extremism that flared under Trump. It’s become a party of an alternative reality that just doesn’t carry water in the corporate world.
Technology can never predict crime. Rather, it can invite police to regard with suspicion those people who were victims of crime, or live and work in places where crime has been committed in the past.€
For all these reasons and more, EFF has argued that the technology should be banned from being used by law enforcement agencies, and some cities across the United States have already begun to do so.€
Now, a group of our federal elected officials is raising concerns on the dangers of predictive policing. Sen. Ron Wyden penned a probing letter to Attorney General Garland asking about how the technology is used. He is joined by Rep. Yvette Clarke, Sen. Ed Markey, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Jeffery Merkley, Sen. Alex Padilla, Sen. Raphael Warnock, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee..€
IBM faces a massive group of age discrimination claims. The company says it never made hiring or firing decisions based on age. We take a deep dive look at both sides, and how hard it is to prove age discrimination when it does occur.
Subscribe to my two podcasts: “The Sharyl Attkisson Podcast” and “Full Measure After Hours.” Leave a review, subscribe and share with your friends!
Shortly after Charter Communications (Spectrum) acquired Time Warner Cable in 2016, the company simply stopped negotiating with its unionized employees in the New York City region. Not long after in 2017, around 1,800 Charter employees went on strike over a lack of any traction on healthcare and pensions... and they've been on strike ever since. At four years and counting, it's technically the longest strike in US history, and there's absolutely zero indication that Charter has any real interest in negotiating with the striking employees.
Despite demands for a 5G moratorium from hundreds of scientists and thousands of medical doctors, the 5G rollout continues undeterred.€ The media push for 5G has been enormous—with constant advertising by the Telecom industry, and censorship (disguised as “conspiracy theory” management) of those questioning 5G tech on social media platforms.
Credits: CBC News, CRTC’s Opening for Smaller Wireless Companies Disappoints Advocates
This Kat has had the pleasure to review “The Protection of Intellectual Property Rights Under International Investment Law”, co-authored by Simon Klopschinski, Christopher Gibson and Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan (Oxford University Press, 2021, 592 p.).
The book discusses the treatment of intellectual property rights in the context of investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS), an area that is drawing the increasing attention of governments, lawyers and academics alike. By investor-state dispute settlement, we mean a mechanism through which an investor from one state can bring arbitral proceedings against a different state, in which it has invested.
Back in 2011, Simon Klopschinski, one of the book’s co-authors, published a German-language PhD thesis on this issue, which quickly became a seminal work in the field. The 2021 publication is an English edition based on that research (much to the joy of non-German-speaking readers!). It is enhanced with contributions from Christopher Gibson and Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan, and thoroughly updated with discussions of the legal developments that have taken took place in the last 10 years.
In direct response to--and partly even as a pre-emptive strike before--the announcement that 12 of the most popular and successful soccer clubs are going to set up their own international break-away league, The Super League, European soccer body UEFA and various national associations and league bodies threatened with retaliation, including but not limited to banning those clubs from domestic tournaments and their players from representing their nations. The founders of the Super League had obviously prepared for that scenario, and they are going to file antitrust lawsuits against those sports bodies. At the same time, some observers predict that the associations will allege that the Super League constitutes an anticompetitive cartel.
The European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP) is not at all inclined to act. Instead, the Commission points to other forms of dispute resolution, such as arbitration (though the Switzerland-based Court of Arbitration for Sport farcically ignores even the most basic principles of competition law as its "judges" are handpicked by association officials).
In an unmistakable sign that existing competition laws in the EU, its Member States, and the UK (from which 6 of the 12 Super League founding members hail) actually favor the clubs, not the associations, politicians especially in France (Le Parisien: "la France prête à se pencher sur le droit européen pour aider l'UEFA à sanctionner les dissidents") and the UK are already talking publicly about modifying competition law to legalize the assocations' envisioned sanctions.
This means the Super League founders have to win a game not only against their opponents and public sentiment, but also play their most important match on a field with moving goal posts...
The Italian Institute of Technology is a driver of technological innovation. Director Metta says in an interview with IO that he aims to create an Italian Fraunhofer.
The American Bar Association committee on professional ethics issues opinions on issues which, while not binding on any jurisdiction, often have sway over courts and bar associations in malpractice or disciplinary matters. If you follow their guidance, you, in a sense, start off in safe harbor. Most state rules are similar to the Model Rules, and the USPTO’s disciplinary rules are similar, but not identical, and the USPTO did not adopt the comments to the model rules. Thus, the OED is not bound by ABA ethics opinions but they hold sway.
In ABA Formal Ethics Opinion 498 (March 10, 2021) (here), the ABA provided guidance on the ethical issues that we all have done a lot of the last year, and which I am guessing we will continue to do for a while: practice law outside the confines of a typical brick-and-mortar, or steel-and-glass, law office. The abstract of the opinion states...
In its second go-round in the case, the Federal Circuit has ordered District Court Judge Albright to grant TracFone’s motion to transfer its case to the S.D.Fla. on convenience grounds under 28 U.S.C. €§ 1404(a). “We conclude that the district court clearly abused its discretion in denying transfer under €§ 1404(a).” Generally, Section 1404(a) provides substantial discretion to the district court to determine whether or not to transfer a case to a different venue. The statutory guidelines focus on “the convenience of parties and witnesses [and] the interest of justice”
George James and Monika Rai, who work at intellectual property law firm EIP, recently conducted a study looking at microbial trends in the food and drink landscape. Using EIP’s search and analytics tool, Patently, they examined patent filings placed between 2009 and 2019.
A recently published study by the European Patent Office (EPO) showed that the Austrian AM market had the largest AM patent applications increase between 2014 and 2017 globally. While the AM patent applications increased by an average of 270% in this period, Austria secured the top international position with a tremendous increase of 1300%.
On April 16, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all grounds challenging certain claims of U.S. Patent 9,757,066, owned by Fat Statz, LLC, an NPE. The ’066 patent is generally directed to a behavior management system that allows users to track and compare fitness and health-related data. The ‘066 patent was asserted against Samsung in early 2020.
While the patent owner attempted to thwart institution by raising an RPI issue at the preliminary stage, the Board noted that the patent owner does not allege that any time bar or estoppel applies in this case and declined to reach the issue, relying on the precedential decision in SharkNinja Operating LLC v. iRobot Corp., IPR2020-00734, Paper 11 (Oct. 6, 2020).
Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Vibhor Dimri, who received a cash prize of $3,000 for his prior art submission for U.S. Patent 8,165,867. This patent is owed by Cedar Lane Technologies, Inc., an NPE. The '867 patent relates to wirelessly controlling an electronic device with another electronic device in real time. The '867 patent has been asserted against D-Link, Disney, Dish Network, Comcast, LG, iHeart Media, ViacomCBS, TCL Communication, and SiriusXM.
While I write about a great many trademark disputes in these pages, there are certain stories that pique my interest above others, or otherwise become more fun. Writing about trademark issues in the alcohol industries has been something of a passion of mine, for instance. It's also fun to highlight when the courts get trademark questions right, since far too often the opposite occurs. And, when you have a judge who chooses to embed some humor in their rulings, that gets pretty fun as well.
Bing has a relatively small market share but that doesn't mean that copyright holders ignore it. In response to DMCA takedown requests, more than 125 million links were removed from the search engine last year. While this is a significant number, the removal requests were actually slashed in half over the past two years.
Last year the U.S. Government indicted three members of the infamous Team-Xecuter group, the alleged masterminds behind various Nintendo hacks. One of those men, Canada resident Gary Bowser, is now being sued by Nintendo in a civil lawsuit demanding damages for numerous and sustained breaches of the DMCA.
