The open-source darling, System76, is about to launch the Launch keyboard and you can pre-order yours now.
System76 loves to push every envelope possible. They’ve created one of the finest desktop computers on the market, have an outstanding lineup of laptops, and their servers are all top-notch. Soon, users will also be able to purchase an open-source keyboard, called Launch.
The Launch keyboard is a highly customizable piece of hardware with firmware based on QMK and even includes a space bar that’s been split into two keys, so you can customize one to serve a different purpose. Speaking of keys, the Launch is lit with RGB lights that can also be customized.
The robots have donned their space gear, and are now boarding the rocket. The Launch configurable keyboard is available for pre-order!
Before we start the countdown, here’s a quick rundown of the things we love about La—oh my that’s a lot of things. Let’s see…What info about our fully configurable keyboard can we sum up about how much we love the fully configurable Launch? It’s on the tip of our tongue, but we can’t fully configure it…
While the experience is limited, this does open Chrome OS devices up to a large ecosystem of Debian Linux apps. Google was quick to remind that this is mostly intended for developers to test dev systems with IDEs and code editors, but it also allows for you to run traditional desktop apps. Think Firefox, Thunderbird, Signal, or even LibreOffice.
As Google continues to mature the software behind Chrome OS, and in extension Android apps, Linux support could be a key cog in developers taking the platform seriously. Being able to champion the platform you are making applications to run on is huge and isn’t very easy without the Linux runtime.
The next version of Chrome OS will move a great developer feature from the Beta to Stable channel: Linux integration will finally exit beta with Chrome OS 91. This move should broadly increase Linux usage and development on Chromebooks.
Since their debut years ago, Chromebooks have long been criticized for lacking native apps. That’s something Google has addressed by delivering support for Android apps and, more importantly, Linux apps on Chromebooks, and now the latter is finally dropping its beta label.
Google first announced the ability to bring Linux apps to Chromebooks at I/O 2018, launching the functionality in beta on some devices that same year. In the time since, the functionality has expanded to virtually all Chromebooks as long as they have the performance chops to handle it.
Chrome OS has come a long way since it was introduced by Google as a “web-first” operating system in 2011. Over the course of the last few years, Google enabled support for Android apps on the platform, bringing the massive Google Play catalog of apps over to Chromebooks. And more recently, Linux app support was added to capable Chromebooks as well. Linux app support is currently in beta, but developers will be glad to know that the next release of Chrome OS will see Linux support graduate from beta.
Linux on Chromebooks is finally coming out of beta with the release of Chrome OS 91, Google said at its developer I/O conference.
Three years after Chrome OS first started offering support for Linux apps, the feature is leaving beta, the search giant announced during a Google I/O 2021 developer session. It’s happening in Chrome OS’s “next release,” which Android Central notes is version 91, due to enter the stable channel in the next couple of weeks.
Chrome OS as an operating system has always been based on Linux, but since 2018 its Linux development environment has offered access to a Linux terminal, which developers can use to run command line tools. The feature also allows full-fledged Linux apps to be installed and launched alongside your other apps. In addition to Linux apps, Chrome OS also supports Android apps.
Google confirms Linux app support on Chromebooks leaves beta status in ChromeOS 91, due for release soon. Read why this is good news for Linux fans.
TUXEDO computers is popularly known for their Linux laptops.
It looks like they have unveiled something exciting after a while that sports a gorgeous 3K res display with a 16:10 aspect ratio.
While that sounds good on paper, let me briefly highlight what it offers.
The latest Linux laptop from Tuxedo Computers is a thin and light powerhouse with up to a 14 inch, 2880 x 1800 pixel LTPS display, a 28-watt Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor, and a body that measures just 0.6 inches thick and weighs just 2.2 pounds.
The Tuxedo Infinity Book Pro 14 is available with a choice of Ubuntu or Tuxedo_OS Linux distributions, or you can choose no operating system at all if you’d prefer to load your own. It’s available for pre-order for 1249 Euros ($1530) and up and the notebook should begin shipping May 31.
Don’t get me wrong, FHD isn’t terrible (and it’s not as thought fractional scaling is super perfect on some distros anyway) but it feels like regular HD panels have been the stock option for too long.
Which is why I am excited to hear that European computer company TUXEDO — which is stylised in all caps; that’s not me shouting — offers higher-resolution displays in its 6th-generation InfinityBook Pro 14 laptop.
It’s not a typical 3K screen either, but an LTPS IPS in a 16:10 ratio at 2880Ãâ1800 pixels running at 90 Hz.
Many of you have been mentioning you want better screens with your Linux laptops, so TUXEDO listened closely with the brand new and flashy InfinityBook Pro 14.
"Omnia is the equivalent of totality, of the whole. In order to enjoy complete sharpness of detail accordingly, the InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen6 has a 16:10 format instead of the usual screen format and is available under the name "Omnia" as a 3K premium variant with 2880 x 1800 pixels, measured 99% sRGB coverage as well as 400 cd/m2 brightness for optimal viewing possibilities while working and surfing." — Tuxedo Computers.
The Linux-powered TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 laptop is now in its 6th generation, and, for the first time, it ships with a bigger, brighter, and sharper 14-inch display with a 16:10 format, 99% sRGB coverage, 400 cd/m2 brightness, and up to 2880x1800 pixels (3K) resolution. There's also a variant with a 2K display, featuring 1920x1200 pixels resolution.
In addition, TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 has a compact, business oriented design with a magnesium case of only 1.5 cm thin and 1 kg in size, narrow bezels and a huge glass touchpad with integrated mouse buttons. This makes it one of the smallest and lightweight 14-inch 16:10 notebooks on the market, according to TUXEDO Computers.
I installed KDE Neon on the main studio PC and not really liking it. Let's just go back to Debian and my first livestream install when I had 1,000 subs.
Why You Should Use BSD Licensing for Your Next Open Source Project or Product, Update on FreeBSD Foundation Investment in Linuxulator, OPNsense 21.1.5 released, FreeBSD meetings on the Desktop, Running FreeBSD jails with containerd 1.5, Markdown, DocBook, and the quest for semantic documentation on NetBSD.org, and more.
replacing technology, 3d printing, grills
today we FINALLY have an affordable Linux laptop to review! This here is the Slimbook Essential, basically the least expensive laptop you can get from this Spanish Linux hardware manufacturer, coming in at 550 euros, 20% Value added tax included. Let's take a look at what you get at that price point!
This week we got a 65% keyboard and played Pokemon Snap. We round up the community news and events, then some picks from the wider tech news.
It’s Season 14 Episode 11 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
With the Linux 5.13 merge window past, Intel's open-source graphics driver developers have submitted their initial queue of new patches to DRM-Next of material they have ready ahead of the Linux 5.14 kernel cycle this summer.
The first of several expected pull requests were sent in this week to DRM-Next of Intel kernel graphics driver changes to target Linux 5.14.
Back in July 2020, NVIDIA announced the open source release of various parts of the NVAPI interface to help "Windows emulation environments" and they've now produced a much newer version.
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An NVIDIA developer sent word about the update, which expands the support across a ton more Functions, Structures, Enums and so on. For regular gamers, it doesn't mean all that much. However, for people working on the DXVK / VKD3D-Proton translation layers, this can help. One possible use case is so the likes of DXVK might not have to keep spoofing being an AMD GPU for certain games to work around issues with the NVAPI.
There’s no shortage of very smart people working on Mesa. One of those, aspiring benchmark-quadrupler Marek Olšák, had a novel idea some time ago: Could C++ function templates were used to optimize draw dispatch in driver?
The answer was yes, and so began what was probably five or ten minutes of furiously jamming brackets and braces into a C++ file in order to achieve the intended result. Let’s check out what’s going on here.
Earlier this week I posted some benchmarks looking at the compiler performance of GCC 11 vs. LLVM Clang 12 on the Intel Core i9 11900K "Rocket Lake" processor while in this article the same tests and same software are being carried out on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X "Zen 3" desktop. With these AMD Linux tests the Clang 12 compiler not only yielded the fastest binaries at -O2 but carried through in the more optimized configurations as well.
This article is looking at the Ryzen 9 5950X compiler performance with the recently released GCC 11 and LLVM Clang 12 compilers. The same benchmarks and same software stack as used in the Rocket Lake comparison were done for this Zen 3 benchmarking of these fresh open-source compilers. That includes testing both compilers with the "-O2" optimization level, "-O3 -march=native" for the more optimized configuration, and then "-O3 -march=native -flto" for also flipping on link-time optimizations (LTO).
The AMD Ryzen 9 5950X with ASUS CROSSHAIR VIII HERO system was tested with Fedora 34 on Linux 5.11 just as with the Rocket Lake tests while evaluating GCC 11.1.1 and LLVM Clang 12.0 with their release builds from the F34 repository.
Technological advancements have allowed us to store terabytes of data in the palm of our hands, which we take for granted every day. The fact that a library with tens of thousands of books is just a few clicks away is truly mind-boggling and is something that people in old age would’ve never imagined.
This brings us to EPUB, which stands for Electronic Publication, an e-book format used by many E-Book readers and e-book software. There are many EPUB readers for platforms like Windows and Android, but if you’re among the 2% of users in the world who use Linux, you might not know which one would be the best for you. In this article, we’ll be looking at some EPUB readers for Linux that won’t disappoint you.
A digital audio workstation (DAW) is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integrated stand-alone unit, all the way to a highly complex configuration of numerous components controlled by a central computer.
A DAW is usually used alongside an audio interface, mixing desk, microphones and other bits of external gear. Designed for those in the recording industry, the DAW’s user interfaces replicated many of the same features of a multi-track tape recorder. Play, record, and other controls such as waveform, track controls, a mixer, and so on. In fact, many of the most popular DAWs have very similar interfaces.
Are you in a noisy environment? Need to filter out all the nuisances? NoiseTorch for Linux seems like a really great open source tool you need to check out.
We introduced you to NoiseTorch back in July 2020, and we were quite impressed with the results back then. It's come along with quite a few updates since then to solve bugs, enhance features and more. The latest of which is NoiseTorch 0.11.0 / 0.11.1 which went out this week.
Webmin is a free web-based software platform meant to manage Linux servers and their services. It is distributed under a free license thus, anybody can use it without paying any cost. Here we will find some best alternatives to Webmin for Ubuntu, CentOS, RHEL, Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and other Server distros.
Do you need to add users to groups on your Linux PC or Linux server? Don’t understand how the group system works and need some guidance? We can help! Follow along with this guide as we show you how to add users to groups with the “usermod” tool on Linux!
Someone asked how I achieved the refreshed look & feel on slackware.nl and download.liveslak.org with the fancier directory listings and a graph of the current network bandwidth usage at the bottom.
It’s not so difficult but if you are new at setting up a web site mainly oriented at content delivery and have not worked with dynamic page generation using server-side includes (SSI), it may be useful to have some kind of reference.
An IP address is a numerical label that uniquely identifies devices on a network. There are two types of IP addresses, public and private. A private address is used for labeling devices within an internal network and is globally unreachable.
On the contrary, public IPs are globally routable and are important for connecting to the internet. This guide shows how easy it is for Linux users to get IP address information on their computers.
OpenProject is an outstanding platform for project management. With OpenProject you can manage meetings, control project budgets, run reports on your projects, communicate with a project team, schedule your projects from the top-down, create forms for a project, work with agile boards, customize the theme and workflow and manage nearly every aspect of your project via a beautiful web-based interface.
If you've ever attempted to install the software, you know how problematic it can be. Although I've successfully deployed the tool manually, the installation is about as flaky as they come. You might nail it once, but the next time around (using the same process), it might fail.
Fortunately, there's a much easier and more reliable method of getting OpenProject up and running. Said method is by way of a Docker container. Using this route, I've never had a deployment fail on me. I'm going to show you how to do just that.
As you might have heard the phrase a backup is no good if it is not restorable.
There are a variety of ways to do a backup of your essential files on a cloud server. But what is also important is that you always have an updated copy of those files on your local systems.
Backing them up on the cloud is fine. But a true backup is only a fresh and regularly updated copy that is available at your end at all times. Why? Because it's YOUR data!
Just made a discovery that is extraordinary. I didn't know this is possible... One of the things that I don't like about Puppy is the save-file. When you run out of space, you have to increase the size. And of course, you have to choose an initial size.
A save-file is required on a partition with a non-Linux filesystem, such as FAT or NTFS. With a Linux filesystem, such as ext4, you have the option of having a "save-folder", which does not require resizing -- you just use it as much as you want, until the partition is full.
With EasyOS, I did away with the save-file, and only use the save-folder. So a frugal install of Easy must be to a partition with Linux filesystem, preferably ext4.
In an article published in August 2020, Authorizing multi-language microservices with Louketo Proxy, I explained how to use Louketo Proxy to provide authentication and authorization to your microservices. Since then, the Louketo Proxy project has reached its end of life, with developers recommending the oauth2-proxy project as an alternative.
In this article, I will outline how to secure a microservice with Keycloak and oauth2-proxy.
There have been many life-changing Linux moments for me, but most fade into my backstory as they become the status quo. There's one little keyboard trick Linux taught me that I'm reminded of every time I use it (maybe 1,000 times a day), and that's converting the Caps Lock key to Ctrl.
I never use Caps Lock, but I use the Ctrl key all day for copying, pasting, navigating within Emacs, and invoking Bash, GNU Screen, or tmux actions. Caps Lock occupies valuable real estate on my keyboard, forcing the actually useful Ctrl key down to the awkward-to-reach bottom corner.
In this video, we are looking at how to install OBS Studio on Deepin 20.2.
SSH (Secure Shell) is an encrypted protocol to connect with the remote device. By default, it works on TCP port 22. There are two methods to connect with the remote server using SSH, one is by using password authentication, and another way is to authenticate is by public key. In this tutorial, you will learn how to generate an SSH key and copy files over SSH (SCP) without entering a password in CentOS8.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to use port knocking to secure SSH service on Debian and Ubuntu servers.
OpenProject is an outstanding platform for project management. With OpenProject you can manage meetings, control project budgets, run reports on your projects, communicate with a project team, schedule your projects from the top-down, create forms for a project, work with agile boards, customize the theme and workflow and manage nearly every aspect of your project via a beautiful web-based interface.
If you've ever attempted to install the software, you know how problematic it can be. Although I've successfully deployed the tool manually, the installation is about as flaky as they come. You might nail it once, but the next time around (using the same process), it might fail.
Has there been a scenario in which you had to perform a task repeatedly on a single system or multiple systems?
If we are into IT support or an IT administrator, it could be well assumed that the answer is YES.
Every Linux file can be given the executable privilege. To understand how this concept works, we need a sample file to reference.
In this video, I am going to show how to install UbuntuDDE Remix 21.04.
Learn commands to install Steam application on Debian 10 Buster or 11 Bullseye and enable Steam Play to run various PC games on Linux.
If you’re not happy with the UFW firewall on your Linux PC and want to uninstall it but don’t know where to start, it’s understandable. For as good as this firewall is, no mainstream Linux OS goes over how to use it.
In this guide, we’ll go over how you can shut off and even uninstall the UFW firewall. To start, ensure you have system-level access to your Linux PC, as turning off the firewall requires root access. Then, follow along below!
I’ve had an annoying issue with the login screen on my Linux computer: it’s using the wrong keyboard layout. I can’t log in without first doing some mental mapping of where the keys are on the wrong keyboard layout. Here’s how you change the keyboard on the LUKS password screen, and graphical login screens.
I first noticed the issue after switching from GNOME to the Plasma Desktop. To get the full Plasma experience, I also switched from the GNOME Display Manager (GDM) to the Simple Desktop Display Manager (SDDM). I believed the issue to be unique to SDDM, and focused my troubleshooting on finding out how to switch the keyboard layout in SDDM.
We have already written a detailed guide on how to use a Windows laptop as a monitor for Raspberry Pi, and it requires a wired ethernet connection. However, if you want to remotely access Raspberry Pi from your Windows 10, Mac, or Linux PC, you can do so with Wi-Fi and VNC server. In this article, we also explain the steps to connect to your Raspberry Pi remotely from a Chromebook in detail. Even if you are a beginner, you can follow the instructions and get it running in a few minutes. So without any delay, let’s go through the tutorial.
If you are using a Linux server and not familiar with the command line then the control panel will help you to manage the Linux server from the web browser. Ajenti is a free, open-source, lightweight control panel for managing Linux servers.
Want to run a command or a script daily, weekly, monthly, or on other given schedule? It’s easy to do this in Ubuntu via cron job.
Cron is a time-based job scheduler to run command or script periodically at fixed times, dates, or intervals. It’s typically used for system maintenance or administration, though it can be useful for general purpose, e.g., downloading file from internet at regular intervals.
Learn how to change UUID of a disk in Linux. Utilities such as tune2fs (for ext2 or ext3 or ext3), xfs_admin (for xfs), btrfstune (for btrfs) can be used to change UUID.
SQLite is not enough for large Rails applications. This guide explains how to use PostgreSQL with Ruby on Rails application in Ubuntu Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Fail2Ban on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Fail2ban is an open-source tool that helps protect your Linux machine from brute force and other automated attacks by monitoring the services logs for malicious activity. These apps run as a daemon that uses python scripts to parse log files for system intrusion attempts and adds custom rules to Iptables configuration files to ban access to certain IP addresses.
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 Fail2Ban on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
To give a shout out to TNgineers, they worked with us on sorting out Linux gamepad support as Game Maker Studio does some really weird things with their Linux support. As it turns out, it detects pretty much everything in their input system and so you need to filter out anything without a D-pad to stop them messing with an actual gamepad. Took us a while to find it, mostly by accident when I unplugged my mouse to test and the gamepad suddenly worked. A small fix later, and it's looking really good. So yeah, if you know a developer using Game Maker Studio, get them to look out for anything with "GMS Gamepad Direction Count" set as zero.
While Godot Engine has been going from strength to strength, the co-creator and technical lead Juan Linietsky has reminded people how they rely on support to keep going.
Considering the masses of work that goes into an open source game engine, they don't actually get all that much money from donations or sponsors. On their Patreon for example, it only gives around $15,000 per month which doesn't go far when it's split between multiple people.
Heroes of Might and Magic II is an absolute classic right? Released back in 1996, it lives on thanks to fheroes2.
fheroes2 is a free and open source game engine reimplementation. Think like OpenMW for Morrowind and openXcom for the original UFO/X-COM game. You need a copy of the data from the original to work with fheroes2, which you can find up on GOG.com.
"Lord Ironfist is dead and the Kingdom is plunged into a vicious civil war by his feuding sons. At stake is the ultimate prize: control of the land and succession of the royal throne. Will you support the villainous usurper and lead the armies of evil or be loyal to the righteous prince and deliver the people from tyranny." — Heroes of Might and Magic II synopsis.
A few weeks ago we wrote about Mesa 21.x drivers with OpenGL threading causing issues for the "Trust Factor" within the popular game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Thanks to possible intervention by Gabe Newell, this trust factor issue seems now resolved for allowing these Linux gamers with open-source graphics drivers to play on the more competitive CS:GO servers.
Following the change earlier this year to Mesa 21.0 that enabled OpenGL threading (gl_thread) by default for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Linux gamers began reporting their Trust Factor being lowered. Valve's Trust Factor is their matchmaking system in use for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for finding gamers to compete against with similar scores. Cheating and other opaque inputs go in to calculating the Trust Factor value for a particular game. Presumably in the case of Mesa OpenGL threading, the Trust Factor algorithms were seeing a differing thread count from what is normally expected and ended up causing the Trust Factor to be lowered thinking it was a possible hack/modification.
For quite some time now, there's been a few troubles for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive on Linux with players Trust Factor being severely reduced. Now though, it looks to be finally solved.
Going back since at least January 2021, users have been reporting an issue with Mesa drivers (Intel / AMD GPUs) that has seen their CS:GO Trust Factor drop sharply. This is unrelated to another issue that appeared recently, where practically Linux and macOS players Trusted Mode didn't seem to be working - which was quickly solved by Valve.
People speculated on what the cause was, which caused the Mesa driver developers to end up disabling "glthread" (OpenGL multithreading) for CS:GO. Thankfully though, it looks like Valve have managed to actually solve the root cause of the issue.
ALTARI GAMES and DANGEN Entertainment recently released Lost Ruins, an action-platformer metroidvania. A game that's taken me by surprise on how wonderful it is to look at. Note: key provided by Dangen Entertainment.
It has some excellent pixel art, blended together with tons of modern touches. There's lots of fancy lighting effects, giving it a feel a bit like Dead Cells, with the shiny glow of something like Noita. Add to that the cast of cute anime styled characters and their silly voice effects for fights it makes it quite a treat to play through. That is, if you can get over the ridiculous idle animation for the protagonist that makes it look like they're about to wet themselves at any moment.
[...]
Lost Ruins, they say, is a survival experience. Made primarily for those who enjoy some tough combat, keeping an eye on your items to keep your health and mana up and exploration. However, there is a more relaxed mode for people who want to focus more on the story too.
Here is an artwork (click on the picture above for the 3510x1740px resolution) plus a video timelapse of a digital painting of a Spooky Cute House made using Krita. I made this artwork for myself, a single day personal project to train with my new XP-Pen Pro Artist 24 pen display. The tablet was sponsored; this video is not. XP-Pen sent me Promo codes and I mention it in the beginning of the video so my audience can benefit with a discount. That's all.
So, after a week, what do I feel about the tablet? This tablet reminds me a lot the Cintiq 21UX: the smooth surface, the parallax the compact frame; but it is way better than the 21UX thanks to the QuadHD monitor, the colors, the stylus. The Digimend driver hack works fine for me. I'll still prefer my large Intuos4XL because I prefer non-display tablets for the ergonomics; but I'll keep the XP-Pro 24 next to me as my second monitor; so when I need to sketch, I don't plug the Cintiq13HD anymore but I just swing the 24Pro on a Ergotron arm I connected to it. Good setup, the "detailing step" was a pleasure to do on this device.
In recent weeks, I’ve been working on a major update to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). The motivations for this work were varied. The HIG is fairly out of date, both in relation to contemporary design practice, as well as GNOME platform capabilities, and so needed updating. But we also wanted to improve the quality of the design guidance that we offer, and do a much better job at integrating our design docs with the rest of the developer platform.
As part of these changes, large parts of HIG have been restructured, and the vast majority of the content has been rewritten to some extent. It has also been expanded to cover a greater range of topics, including app naming, app icons, UI styling, accessibility and tooltips.
In case you haven't heard, many Linux distros have been dropping support for devices with 32-bit architectures left and right. Fortunately, some distros are staying strong for those running older devices, and we're going to take a look at them today.
[...]
Even certain distros that promote themselves as lightweight and ideal for older machines are following suit. Both Xubuntu and Linux Lite dropped their 32-bit versions in April 2021.
Worried you and your trusty 32-bit machine will be left behind? Fear not, because there are a few distros out there that have you covered.
One of the best things about Linux is its access to all the different Linux distributions – commonly known as Linux distros. Each distro holds a unique philosophy and thereby bundles in different software and utilities, making it perfect for certain users but not all.
So what’s the best Linux distro for students?
Well, there aren’t many specific distributions curated with student usage in mind. However, depending on what students most want and need from their computers, we have put together a list of the best Linux distros.
LibreELEC 10.0 BETA 3 is released! bringing Kodi (Matrix) v19.1 to LibreELEC users.
Changes from LibreELEC 10.0 BETA 2 are listed here. As discussed in the recent Upcoming Changes blog post it, the 10.0 release is a disruptive and limited hardware release. If you have not read the blog post – please do – because we are not releasing images for all hardware. In summary: this is a stable release for Generic (x86_64 PCs). Stable-Beta for Allwinner and Rockchip. Stable “Alpha” for Raspberry Pi 4 as the code is still very new. RPi 2/3 are still in development targetting an LE10.2 release. RPi 0/1 are discontinued. All others hardware is still in development and not in a state for formal releases.
Following the OpenBSD 6.9 release, OpenBSD-current has been updated to LLVM 11.1.0 and GCC 4.2.1 is not built anymore on amd64. GCC 8.4.0 (released in March 2020) is available in the ports collection.
Among the remaining platforms still using GCC 4.2.1 as the default compiler, only sparc64 will be able to switch in the future. LLVM has a Sparc V9 backend and work has been done in OpenBSD to make the switch possible. For all the other remaining ones, there are no alpha, hppa, sh4, nor m88k backends in LLVM, and even if this changed in the future, the hardware is too slow to be able to self-host the compiler.
Recently I reviewed Bodhi Linux 6 on a live stream, but I ran into some difficulties. I decided to do a full review after having spent more time with this distro - and I came away impressed.
SUSE recently kicked off SUSECON Digital 2021, the first SUSECON to feature Rancher technical content and expertise. The company announced major updates to its two product families, SUSE Linux Enterprise and SUSE Rancher technologies.
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 Service Pack 3 (SLES 15 SP3) will deliver full binary compatibility between openSUSE Leap and SUSE Linux Enterprise while SUSE Rancher 2.6 will feature a new, clean, crisp user interface design that enhances the overall cluster management experience, whether managing one or one million clusters.
The latest version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server boasts binary compatibility between the community openSUSE Leap release and SLES.
Swedish private equity firm EQT had high hopes for its SUSE IPO on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, and set the European Linux and cloud power's IPO price at €30 per share. Alas, SUSE's shares opened at €29.50 per share.
By the close of business on May 20th, the stock crept up to €30.39. This gave it a market cap of around €5 billion (approximately $6.1 billion). This is nothing to sneeze at, but it wasn't what EQT hoped for either. Before the IPO, EQT had sought an IPO price as high as €34 per share.
Enterprise-grade open source software provider SUSE announced the latest news in its SUSE Linux Enterprise product, as well as new edge computing and hybrid IT solutions during this week’s SUSECON Digital 2021 conference.
SUSE, or "Software und System Entwicklung" (software and systems development, for the non-German speakers), made the announcements this week during its annual SUSECON conference, broadcasting from Nuremberg.
The Arch Linux repositories are quite extensive, and usually contain up-to-date software. And if something is not available in the repositories, it's most probably available in the AUR (ArchLinux User Repository).
What if you could convert the packages from the Arch Linux repositories and AUR into DEB packages, for easy installation using APT on Debian / Ubuntu, and Linux distributions based on these (Pop!_OS, Linux Mint, etc.)?
Well, you sort of can. makedeb, mpm and makedeb-db is a set of tools that allows you to do just that.
Let’s have a quick look into the list of the alternatives to CentOS 8 operating system.
Let’s start our list with Rocky Linux. There is an interesting story behind the idea of Rocky Linux. Gregory Kurtzer, founder of the CentOS project announced a new project by the name Rocky Linux to provide RHEL fork to CentOS users on the day when Red Hat (IBM) announced its plans to replace stable CentOS 8 with rolling release CentOS Stream.
Rocky Linux is a community enterprise operating system. It says that it is designed to be 100% bug-for-bug compatible with America’s top enterprise Linux distribution now that its downstream partner (CentOS Project) has shifted direction. Rocky Linux Release Candidate 1 is now available for testing and you download your copy from here.
Searching through the seemingly endless repository of information online has been, and always will be, a useful tool in the pocket of any sysadmin. The vast archive of collective wisdom and shared experiences is a tribute to The Open Internet. Having access to such a huge repository of information is not something any sysadmin takes for granted. That said, there are certainly advantages to knowing how one can find answers to a problem without having to rely on the World Wide Web for every question or problem. For one, you might find yourself working in an air-gapped environment in which access to the Internet isn't possible. Or, if you have ever sat a Red Hat exam, you're aware that access to the Internet is also not an option, and knowing how to look things up fast may mean the difference between a pass and no pass result.
I've seen a broad range of hardware decommissioning (decomm) processes in my years as a sysadmin. It can be as simple as an email with a dire warning about a soon-to-be decommissioned system all the way up to a multi-layered, multi-month, multi-approver process that makes government red tape seem like a pale pink by comparison.
The process in the last two companies I worked in, decommissioning was a 30-day process that started with notifications, a so-called "Scream" test, and a final shutdown, unracking, and palletizing for disposal. I love the term "Scream" test. This part of the process involves unplugging the system from the network for two weeks to see if anyone screams about a lost service. It's effective and I've had my share of opportunities to reverse a decomm for last-minute file recovery and then to restart the process again.
In this post we're going to look at the next part of our fictional company's journey to digital transformation. Over the past several months Davie Street Enterprises’ (DSE) digital transformation has progressed quickly with much success. Now it's time to tackle predicting and preventing, if possible, outages and improving user experience.
Ranbir Ahuja, Senior Director of Operators, has been following the efforts with much curiosity. For the most part, Ahuja is excited at the progress yet is concerned that from his perspective one of the largest single drivers for this transformation hasn’t been directly addressed.
While the official competition at Think 2021 is over, you can test your skills and grow your experience with Kubernetes by participating in the lab exercises and workshops. Explore the lab exercise guide, complete the exercises, and demonstrate what you learned by earning the Build Smart on Kubernetes Badge.
Red Hat is now hiring two more graphics engineers working on the Linux graphics drivers. This will be focusing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, and upstream graphics drivers for the open-source code around Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA. Remote work is a possibility. The second of these job openings will have some exposure to the ARM graphics scene and tie in at least some extent to Red Hat's growing automotive / infotainment efforts.
So we are looking to hire quite a few people into the Desktop team currently. First of all we are looking to hire two graphics engineers to help us work on Linux Graphics drivers. The first of those two jobs is now online on the Red Hat jobs site. This is a job in our core graphics team focusing on RHEL, Fedora and upstream around the Intel, AMD and NVidia open source drivers. This is an opportunity to join a team of incredibly talented engineers working on everything from the graphics system of the Linux kernel and on the userspace bits like Vulkan, OpenGL and Wayland. The job is listed as Senior Engineer, but for the right candidate we have flexibility there. We also have flexibility for people who want to work remotely, so as long as there is a Red Hat office in your home country you can work remotely for us. The second job, which we hope to have up soon, will be looking more at ARM graphics and be tied to our automotive effort, but we will be looking at the applications for either position in combination so feel free to apply for the already listed job even if you are more interested in the second one as we will discuss both jobs with potential candidates.
Kubernetes is about giving up control. As someone who likes to understand what’s going on that’s made it hard for me to embrace it. I’ve also mostly been able to ignore it, which has helped. However I’m aware it’s incredibly popular, and there’s some infrastructure at work that uses it.
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Of course I’m running Debian. I’ve got a Bullseye (Debian 11) install - not yet released as stable, but in freeze and therefore not a moving target. I wanted to use packages from Debian as much as possible but it seems that the bits of Kubernetes available in main are mostly just building blocks and not a great starting point for someone new to Kubernetes. So to do the initial install I did the following...
I do have some amd64 hardware revived and it is running Xubuntu Impish Indri. It is very early on so it is not as if there has been any opportunity for anything to go wrong. I will have to come up with something wild or crazy to push limits this cycle in terms of testing that box, I suppose.
Lakes are tranquil, large pools of cool water, right? Well possibly. I grew up in Scotland, where lakes are called lochs, and rumours of monsters that lurk in the depths of ancient lochs abound. Scotland also has salt water sea lochs, full of stinging jellyfish. But one thing is for sure – lakes, lochs, call them what you will – they’re popular places to go fishing.
In current technology vernacular, a data lake is essentially a very large body of cool data, typically in the 100s of terabytes to petabytes in size. The data lake differentiates from other cool storage systems such as MAIDs (Massive Array of Idle Disks), storage vaults and tape archives, because the data remains online and fully accessible on a low-cost storage media like Apache HDFS, Ceph, or AWS Simple Storage Service (s3). This makes it an interesting and cost-effective solution for performing ad-hoc research, analysis and reporting on the aggregated data – essentially enabling data “fishing expeditions”, as well as being the feedstock for applications using deep learning or other data-intensive artificial intelligence approaches. The “big data” need not be restored from a tape or extracted from a vault or deep storage solution in order to be queried, which are tasks that usually come with a significant cost.
Data in the lake can take many forms, the most popular format is semi-structured machine data – for example telemetry data (system, application usage and activity logs, user tracking, things like that), log data (weblogs, crash logs, network element logs, application logs, firewall logs, industrial machine data and so on) and data feeds (like stock ticker data, weather data, etc.). Another popular format is system of record (SoR) data – operational database extracts, data warehouse change data capture, and so on. And many data lakes capture vast amounts of unstructured data (free-text – like chat or audio transcriptions, document scans, binary photographs and images like x-rays, binary audio – like call centre recordings, and binary video – like security camera recordings).
Last month, we wrote about Allwinner D1 SBC & processor that promised to offer a relatively low-cost RISC-V Linux solution. We were not given a name at the time, but there was a logo of Nezha, a fictional character from Chinese literature.
The board is now known as the Nezha SBC and has been launched on Indiegogo for $99 and up as a board designed for IoT projects running Linux, but can also be purchased directly on Aliexpress for the same price.
The latest version of Wind River Titanium Linux, developed by the Wind River technology protection and cybersecurity group Star Lab, offers a robust Linux system-hardening and security capability and is available on the market for operationally deployed Linux systems. Key features for Titanium Linux include secure boot, anti-tamper protections, and the ability to simplify mandatory access control (MAC) policy creation.
Last month, we wrote about Allwinner D1 SBC & processor that promised to offer a relatively low-cost RISC-V Linux solution. We were not given a name at the time, but there was a logo of Nezha, a fictional character from Chinese literature.
The board is now known as the Nezha SBC and has been launched on Indiegogo for $99 and up as a board designed for IoT projects running Linux, but can also be purchased directly on Aliexpress for the same price.
Robots are often filled with a myriad of different sensors but being able to detect touch is still fairly tough. This is primarily due to needing a large sensing area, flexible surfaces, and usually having complex circuitry. Imagine a robotic gripper that uses several “fingers” to lift and manipulate produce, or a humanoid that can respond to feedback on its hands. Other technologies such as capacitive and vision sensors have been tried in the past, but both use complicated and expensive components. A team at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at UC Berkeley was able to engineer a solution to this problem by utilizing a novel combination a two-layer structure. The first layer is a conductive fabric that is responsible for sensing the contact force, whereas the second layer of four rubber elements senses where the touch took place.
The Arduino Uno is famous for its ease of use and compact size, yet its microcontroller, the ATmega328P, is quite small. The 328P contains a mere 32KB of flash storage for programs and 2KB of RAM, which has traditionally made it unsuitable for machine learning applications. However, a team at the Institute of Physics and Technology at Petrozavodsk State University was able to cram an algorithm that can recognize the handwritten digits within the MNIST dataset. Without getting too complicated, the Uno takes in an array of pixels that range in value from 0 to 255, or one byte. The entire 28 by 28 grid is then flattened to a single array of 784 elements that is passed into a reservoir that holds the weights for each pixel. As the model continues to get trained, these weights are gradually adjusted until the output matches the correct digit.
Google has flicked "publish" on its Android 12 beta, with the bleeding-edge OS winging its way to enrolled devices.
With the version number, Google has taken an axe to the core Android experience, emphasising personalisation while cribbing some privacy-centric features from Apple.
GitHub, which has 5.8 million Indian contributors, announced a grant of Rs.1 crore to support India-based open-source contributors
The PostgreSQL Global Development Group announces that the first beta release of PostgreSQL 14 is now available for download. This release contains previews of all features that will be available in the final release of PostgreSQL 14, though some details of the release could change before then.
PostgreSQL developers continue working on juicing the maximum performance possible out of this popular open-source SQL database server.
If you are a Linux user and looking for the best PowerPoint alternative (either desktop or web-based), you have come to the right place. In this article, you will find a brief overview of some interesting presentation applications that can be natively installed on a Linux distribution or used online via the browser.
Less than two weeks after publishing about the broken user experience of the former Dark Mode plugin being renamed and repurposed, another plugin development company decided to do the same. The consensus seems to be that this is a bad idea. However, the ProfilePress Team forged ahead and repurposed the WP User Avatar plugin. Instead of a simple, single-purpose custom avatar solution, it is a full-fledged user registration, profile, login, and membership management plugin. It is now called ProfilePress. But, let’s call it ProfilePress Lite because there is a commercial component where you can upgrade to the actual ProfilePress premium plugin. We need to differentiate the two. Plus, the plugin itself uses that term, at least once, in the admin.
Implementing one of the many themes WordPress has to choose from can be fairly straightforward, however, if you want to customize the theme to better suit your needs, that can get a bit tricky. Page builder plugins, whether it’s Elementor vs. Beaver Builder, can help you create new pages and blog posts for your website and customize your WordPress layout via a drag-and-drop interface and beautifully designed templates.
o Fix incorrect sensor read corner case on BMCs that use non-default LUNs (LP#1926299). o Remove hard coded paths from system config files (i.e. mostly files in /etc). Have paths updated based on options to configure.
The low-code market is seeing meteoric rise across the world, as companies try to keep up with digitization demands and shrinking IT budgets. Even as we witness increasing low-code adoption among professional as well as citizen developers, an intriguing question comes to mind – What lies ahead for low-code, and could it ever become a mainstream approach for modern development teams? The answer may well be an open source, low-code platform that offers high productivity, while supporting seamless integration with the overall fabric of modern software development practices within an enterprise. It’s feasible to assume that low-code will evolve to become open low-code, resulting in greater innovation and agility. To further understand what this means, let’s dive deeper. What are open systems?
Working with data from an art museum API and from the Twitter API, this lesson teaches how to use the command-line utility jq to filter and parse complex JSON files into flat CSV files.
RcppDate wraps the featureful date library written by Howard Hinnant for use with R. This header-only modern C++ library has been in pretty wide-spread use for a while now, and adds to C++11/C++14/C++17 what will be (with minor modifications) the ‘date’ library in C++20.
The official Python software package repository, PyPI, is getting flooded with spam packages, as seen by BleepingComputer.
These packages are named after different movies in a style that is commonly associated with torrents and "warez" sites hosting pirated content.
Each of these packages is posted by a unique pseudonymous maintainer account, making it challenging for PyPI to remove the packages and spam accounts all at once.
This is the ninth in a series of articles about features that first appeared in a version of Python 3.x. Python 3.8 was first released in 2019, and two years later, many of its cool new features remain underused. Here are three of them.
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Entry points are used for various things in Python packages. The most familiar are console_scripts entrypoints, but many plugin systems in Python use them.
Until Python 3.8, the best way to read entry points from Python was to use pkg_resources, a somewhat clunky module that is part of setuptools.
Python creator Guido van Rossum last week introduced a project to make CPython, the official implementation, five times faster in four years. Now Mark Shannon – one of the three initial members of the project – has opened up about the why and the how.
Shannon is a research engineer at Semmle, a code security analysis company which is part of Microsoft-owned GitHub. At the Python Language Summit last week, Van Rossum said that he would be part of a new team, funded by Microsoft, alongside Shannon and Eric Snow (a senior software engineer also at Microsoft), with the aim of speeding up CPython. He referred to the "Shannon plan" here as the basis for achieving a "2x speedup in 3.11" with a hope for 5x in four years. Version 3.11 of CPython is likely to be released around October 2022.
Collected quotes and snippets from people publicly sneezing off or belittling what curl is, explaining how easy it would be to make a replacement in no time with no effort or generally not being very helpful.
These are statements made seriously. For all I know, they were not ironic. If you find others to add here, please let me know!
The primary motivation behind the Shenandoah garbage collection (GC) project in the OpenJDK was to reduce garbage collection pause times. Reference processing has traditionally been one of the primary contributors to GC pauses. The relationship is mostly linear: The more references the application is churning, the higher is the impact on garbage collection pauses and latency. The key here is "churning," or how many references need to be processed at every GC cycle. The references with referents that never die, or that die along with references themselves, are not a problem.
I have myself recommended in the past that if you care about latency, you had better not churn soft, weak, and phantom references or finalizees. In this article, I want to show why reference processing has contributed to Java garbage collection pauses in the past, and how we solved that problem by making reference processing concurrent in JDK 16.
TL;DR: If your application churns through soft, weak, or phantom references or finalizees, JDK 16 with its concurrent reference processing in Shenandoah GC might significantly improve your application's latency.
A child of Tumblr, Larissa Pham never learned to take the defensive posture that, by her account, characterizes contemporary writing and public life. Instead, she named her debut essay collection Pop Song to align its aspiration with a different form—to speak directly to the heart, as shamelessly romantic pop songs do. She asks that her readers receive her as she writes to them: openly and generously, as though they were listening to their favorite tracks with headphones in, eyes closed.
Even now that New York galleries are open, and have been for nearly a year after being closed from mid-March through late June in 2020, I haven’t been able to bring myself to frequent them as diligently as I used to. Yes, I go, and gladly, but I’m far more selective about what I see. I mostly walk in where I already have some hope of seeing something that might raise my spirits and skip the ones where I have no inkling of what I’m going to see.
In the long run, that’s no way to practice art criticism, I know. Privileging the already-known, or the already-known-about, has probably deprived me more often than I realize of one of the great (though not so common) pleasures afforded by gallery-going. I’m talking about the pleasure of walking into a space and encountering something quite unfamiliar, unanticipated—and wonderful. It’s what my fellow critic Martin Herbert recently called “that what-the-hell-is-this space of unanswered doubt.” Experiencing that encounter with the unknown is exciting for any art lover, but for the critic on the beat, the excitement is laced with a frisson of anxiety: Will you be up to the challenge of writing about something you had no idea about until just now, something that may not already be surrounded by the penumbra of discourse that surrounds almost all the art one sees, not just the classics enshrined in museums but, for the assiduous gallery visitor, just about everything? Even before you walk through the door, you’re already clued in to how to see the work or, at least, how you are expected to see it. Not that artists don’t pull surprises out of their sleeve or that expectations can’t be overturned—but those are the happy exceptions.
Adult entertainment company Pornhub today announced the release of 20 early 20th-century erotic films, recolourised using machine learning algorithms applied to over 100,000 of Pornhub’s current library of adult videos and images.
But from the mid-1970s on, as the historian Larry Gerber writes, shared governance was supplanted as the dominant model of university administration as boards of trustees and their allies in the offices of provosts and deans took advantage of public funding cuts to higher education and asserted increasing control over the hiring of the professoriate. They imported business models from the for-profit corporate world that shifted the labor model for teaching and research from tenured and tenure-track faculty to part-time faculty on short-term contracts, who were paid less and excluded from the benefits of the tenure system, particularly the academic freedom that tenure secured by mandating that professors could only be fired for extraordinary circumstances.
Winterbloom is a boutique, open-source synthesizer company and it has exactly one engineer - me. I am responsible for everything - from the hardware design, to the firmware, to the documentation, and everything else! Because this is a ton of work I've had to be very deliberate with the tools and tech that I use.
Micromanaged, controlled, sterile, the city state was always going to be seen as a model for combating the spread of SARS-CoV-2. Digital check-ins were rapidly introduced to facilitate contract tracing, along with temperature scans. Plans such as SG Clean were implemented in February 2020, covering businesses in shopping malls to the hawker markets. Good personal hygiene habits were encouraged, among them hand washing, temperature monitoring, the use of tissues, binning of litter. The initiative duly inspired international examples. In April 2020, Portugal launched its own version of SG Clean. Abu Dhabi went with its Go Safe certification scheme a few months after.
But cracks in the Disneyland with the death penalty approach have appeared. The novel coronavirus, as it has done to the most effective responses, has gone through the pandemic guards and health officers, outflanking them with much customary dexterity. On May 11, the then Minister for Health Gan Kim Yong conceded in parliament that several clusters had mushroomed: an ICA (Immigration & Checkpoints Authority) officer with his family; cases at Tan Tock Seng Hospital and Tuas South Community Care Facility; a cluster at Pasir Panjang Terminal, and the dreaded emergence of a cluster at Changi Airport. But of deep concern were “several unlinked cases, 10 in the last week. This suggests that there are unknown cases in our community that caused these infections, which is a cause for concern.”
"Time to face the music, not run and hide," said one critic of the agency's latest legal maneuver.
"This bill empowers rapists and abusers, and lawyers and trolls who want to abuse and clog up our courts," said state Rep. Donna Howard, D-Austin, said in a floor speech. "And this forced pregnancy act will drive women back into the [pre-Roe] shadows out of fear of harassment through lawsuits that anyone in this country can file."
The law also allows people who sue to file lawsuits in their home districts and prevent the case from being moved to a different court. Legal experts told the Tribune that this could make it more costly and difficult for abortion providers to fight lawsuits because the court may be hundreds of miles away and abortion activists can shop for districts they think will be more sympathetic.
1Password for Linux, which is written completely in Rust, lets users secure credentials across devices and seamlessly manage infrastructure secrets through the Secrets Automation tool.
The app offers encrypted browser and desktop integration and is available for all major Linux distributions, including Debian, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora, Arch Linux, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's also compatible with other distributions through a standard .tar.gz download, the announcement states.
IBM cloud had five Severity One issues in April 2021 alone, one of which was a recurrence of a problem previously deemed to have been solved. Today’s incident is the second Severity One issue in May 2021...
Colonial Pipeline has confirmed it paid a $4.4m (€£3.1m) ransom to the cyber-criminal gang responsible for taking the US fuel pipeline offline.
Recent intrusions into federal agencies and critical infrastructure are causing the government to more closely examine how software is made, in addition to who’s making it and where.
Even before President Joe Biden and his transition team entered the White House amid the unfurling SolarWinds crisis, the executive branch was working to collectively reduce weaknesses in the government’s software supply chain. A new executive order gets deeper into core software development techniques than anything from previous administrations.
Nobody wants to be a proverbial guinea pig; least of all, developers donating their time and energy to making the world a better place. You’d think with all the recent discussion about consent, researchers would more carefully observe ethical boundaries. Yet, a group of researchers from the University of Minnesota not only crossed the line but ran across it, screaming defiantly the whole way.
In response, the Linux Foundation, which is the core of the open source community, took the unprecedented step of banning the entire University of Minnesota from contributing to the Linux kernel. The open source community is built upon the principles of trust, cooperation and transparency. This group donates time and high-value industry skills to create, maintain and improve free and widely adopted software in the interest of making technology more accessible. Linux is a widely used operating system found in everything from servers to cell phones.
Yet, a group of researchers abused this community’s trust by not only sneaking vulnerabilities into the code base but then effectively bragging about it in the name of research. In February 2021, a team from UMN published a research article outlining how they systematically and stealthily introduced vulnerabilities into open source software. They did this through comments that appeared beneficial but, in actuality, introduced critical vulnerabilities. Though stating it targeted open source as a whole, much of the researcher’s attention was aimed at the Linux Kernel. The Kernel is the foundation of the operating system and manages the interactions between hardware and applications.
The Linux Foundation has launched a free, online training course, called WebAssembly Actors: From Cloud to Edge (LFD134x). The course explores the portability, efficiency, and security of WebAssembly (Wasm) modules and how to leverage a number of open source frameworks to create distributed and seamlessly connected actors that can be deployed in a browser, on a laptop, in the cloud, on a Raspberry Pi, or practically anywhere.
If you are a developer working with native cloud applications and want to get rid of the overheads that come with several cloud providers, taking a look at WebAssembly (Wasm) will only make things easier.
WebAssembly basically helps you add capabilities to your web applications, potentially leading to a stable and richer website experience.
It is incredibly useful for cloud, mobile, networking, and other applications. Hence, a free training course from Linux Foundation is a great initiative to help developers who want to learn more about it.
In a rapidly changing and unpredictable enterprise technology landscape, flexibility rules the day. That’s why businesses of all sizes are embracing hybrid cloud strategies for data and application mobility and agility. Enter Kubernetes, a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services. In the latest GigaOm research report, Key Criteria for Evaluating Kubernetes Data Storage, analysts Enrico Signoretti, Max Mortillaro, Arjan Timmerman examine the ongoing storage questions around Kubernetes adoption.
Kubernetes has been gaining popularity for several years, but the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 put that movement into overdrive, forcing many organizations to come up with contingency plans to support their transformed activities, business processes, and users. The agility, flexibility, and efficiency offered by the Kubernetes platform meant that demand for scalable and enterprise-ready Kubernetes storage solutions spiked.
Service meshes have proliferated, and they aren't compatible. Will a Kubernetes equivalent emerge in this space?
Many online services allow users to reset their passwords by clicking a link sent via SMS, and this unfortunately widespread practice has turned mobile phone numbers into de facto identity documents. Which means losing control over one thanks to a divorce, job termination or financial crisis can be devastating.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (cacti, cacti-spine, exif, firefox, kernel, mariadb, and thunderbird), Mageia (kernel, kernel-linus, and libxml2), openSUSE (exim and jhead), Oracle (slapi-nis and xorg-x11-server), Scientific Linux (slapi-nis and xorg-x11-server), Slackware (libX11), SUSE (djvulibre, fribidi, graphviz, grub2, libass, libxml2, lz4, python-httplib2, redis, rubygem-actionpack-4_2, and xen), and Ubuntu (pillow and python-babel).
Mozilla has been fuzzing Firefox and its underlying components for a while. It has proven to be one of the most efficient ways to identify quality and security issues. In general, we apply fuzzing on different levels: there is fuzzing the browser as a whole, but a significant amount of time is also spent on fuzzing isolated code (e.g. with libFuzzer) or whole components such as the JS engine using separate shells. In this blog post, we will talk specifically about browser fuzzing only, and go into detail on the pipeline we’ve developed. This single pipeline is the result of years of work that the fuzzing team has put into aggregating our browser fuzzing efforts to provide consistently actionable issues to developers and to ease integration of internal and external fuzzing tools as they become available.
There are many low-cost smart plugs based on ESP8266 that provide a convenient way to control lights or home appliances with your smartphone. But cybersecurity firm A&O IT Group found vulnerabilities in ITEAD’s Sonoff S26 and Ener-J Wi-fi (Tuya) smart plugs that would allow an attacker to easily access your wireless network.
The first security vulnerability is pretty common and hard to exploit since it’s only a concern during the setup. Sonoff S26 starts itself into access point mode with ITEAD-1001xxxxxx SSID, and is set up through the eWelink app with the user not needing to know the password. But with older firmware is was needed, so ITEAD still shares the default password: 12345678 in the user manual, and it can be used to connect to the smart plug by anyone. But once configured, it’s not accessible anymore as the smart plug should be in client mode connected to your router with your own credentials. So that’s not ideal, but not such a big issue.
A Belgian security researcher discovered several Wi-Fi security vulnerabilities affecting the Wi-Fi standard itself and subsequently “affect most devices” in the market.
Additionally, he discovered other related vulnerabilities originating from design flaws, such as “widespread programming mistakes.” The vulnerabilities dubbed “FragAttacks,” an acronym for “fragmentation and aggregation attacks,” affect devices released since 1997.
When exploited, they could allow hackers to execute malicious code, intercept information, hijack the affected devices, or become launchpads for more sophisticated attacks.
The government of small African island nation Mauritius seems to want to entirely upset the internet applecart for a number of poorly explained reasons. Its Information & Communications Technologies Authority (ICTA) has bundled together some bad ideas and is presenting these as a cure-all for everything social media related -- including "fake news" and the distribution of content considered illegal by the Mauritius government.
“Dark patterns” design tactics are used to trick people into doing all kinds of things they don’t mean to, from signing up for a mailing list to submitting to recurring billing. Examples seen by users every day include hard-to-close windows urging you to enter your email address on a news site, email opt-outs on shopping sites in difficult-to-find locations in difficult-to-read text, and pre-checked boxes allowing ongoing charges.
“Your submissions to the Dark Patterns Tip Line will help provide a clearer picture of peoples’ struggles with deceptive interfaces. We hope to collect and document harms from dark patterns and demonstrate the ways companies are trying to manipulate all of us with their apps and websites,” said EFF Designer Shirin Mori. “Then we can offer people tips to spot dark patterns and fight back.”
If you see a dark pattern, head to Darkpatternstipline.org, hosted by Consumer Reports. Then, click “submit a pattern,” and enter the name and type of company responsible, a short description of the misleading design, and where you found it. You can also include a screen shot. Submitting to the Dark Patterns Tip Line requires you to agree to the Consumer Reports’ user agreement and privacy policy. The Dark Patterns Tip Line site has some special limitations on Consumer Reports’ use of your email, and the site doesn’t use cookies or web tracking.
So today, we’re joining Consumer Reports, Access Now, PEN America, and Harry Brignull (founder of DarkPatterns.org), in announcing the Dark Patterns Tip Line. It’s an online platform hosted by Consumer Reports that allows people to submit and highlight deceptive design patterns they see in everyday products and services.
Your submissions will help privacy advocates, policymakers, and agency enforcers hold companies accountable for their dishonest and harmful practices. Especially misleading designs will be featured on the site.
Dark patterns can be deceptive in a variety of ways. For example, a website may trick visitors into submitting to unwanted follow-up emails by making the email opt-out checkbox on a checkout page harder to see: for instance, using a smaller font or placing the opt-out in an inconspicuous place in the user flow. Consider this example from Carfax:€
Today the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a competition between hardware and software vendors to demonstrate the facial-recognition systems that are most useful for surveillance and other malign uses: cameras or other sensors and facial and/or other biometric matching algorithms that can identity travelers (or other people in public places) even if they are wearing masks:
Requiring travelers to remove their masks at checkpoints operated by or on behalf of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and/or other DHS components endangers travelers and makes clear that the U.S. government has put surveillance and tracking of travelers ahead of safety and health.
But the way to completely eliminate the threat to travelers’ health and safety posed by unmasking is to stop trying to identify travelers,€ which is based on the “pre-crime” fantasy that identity-based algorithms can read travelers’ minds and predict which of them intend to€ commit future aviation-related crimes. Instead, the TSA should confine its searches to those intended to detect genuinely threatening objects: weapons and explosives.
The corporate shake-up comes weeks after ByteDance’s Singapore-based chief financial officer Shouzi Chew stepped into the role of TikTok CEO.
TikTok has tried to distance itself from its Chinese ownership amidst concern that its ties to Beijing could compromise users’ data security.
Last month ByteDance was one of 13 online platforms called on by Chinese regulators to adhere to tighter regulations in their financial divisions, as part of a wider push to rein in technology companies.
While vaccination passports could already be printed off from a patient's details on the digital patient portal, they can now be scanned using the QR code displayed on a smartphone or other device – in much the same way as plane and other tickets can be.
Amazon and Microsoft have been hit separately with biometric data privacy lawsuits that, if proven in court, would strike at the heart of facial recognition’s biggest weakness — the sense that it cannot be trusted. Both proposed class actions allege that each company is not obeying Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA) by not getting informed consent before collecting, analyzing and storing state residents’ digital likenesses.
The large numbers of freed men and women meant that the authorities could not assume every Black man or woman was a slave and therefore subject to the laws regarding the behavior of slaves. Nor could other white residents make that assumption. This fact seems to have changed very little in the way which Black people were policed before their emancipation. Indeed, the authorities methods of control in antebellum Baltimore did not give freed Black people the same rights as whites in the courts or in the streets. Among other things, Blacks could not testify against whites nor challenge them in court. This meant they could not retrieve debts owed them or take legal recourse should their property or persons be harmed by a white person. Their status was that of second-class citizens at best.
In a new book titled The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation, author Adam Malka examines the nature and history of policing in Baltimore during the time described. The scenario he describes is one which places the Black residents of the city at the whim not just of uniformed police, but also at the whim of every white skinned man a Black person might encounter in their daily business. Utilizing anecdotal tales drawn from newspapers of the time, statistics regarding arrests and incarceration rates, and a historical understanding that draws a distinct line between policing and white supremacy in the United States, Malka’s text provides an understanding of why Black people in Baltimore and the greater nation continue to be policed the way they are.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Andrew Womble, Pasquotank County, N.C., district attorney, announced that no cops would be charged for gunning down an unarmed Black man, Andrew Brown Jr., last month. Authorities had descended on Brown’s home to arrest him on a felony drug warrant. Womble claims that Brown “turned his car into a weapon,” though the brief body camera footage Womble bothered to release doesn’t show that to my eyes. What I saw was Brown attempting to drive away from the officers when they opened fire, killing him.
This year, as in every year, the Department of Defense will seek to extract budget increases from Congress by highlighting the severe threats to US security posed by its foreign adversaries. Usually, this entails a litany of such perils, ranging from a host of nation-state adversaries to nonstate actors like ISIS and Al Qaeda. This year, however, the Pentagon is focusing almost entirely on just one threat in its funding appeals: The People’s Republic of China. Sensing that a majority in Congress—Democrats as well as Republicans—are keen to display their determination to blunt China’s rise, senior officials are largely framing the military budget around preparation for a possible conflict with that country. “The Department will prioritize China as our number one pacing challenge and develop the right operational concepts, capabilities, and plans to bolster deterrence and maintain our competitive advantage,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin declared on March 4.
On March 23, Alexey Navalny’s team announced plans to hold nationwide protests demanding the opposition politician’s release from prison. To help people organize, they created a website called “Free Navalny!” where his supporters could register their email addresses. On April 2, unknown hackers gained access to the site’s email address database —€ but the cyberattack remained undiscovered until April 16, when the attackers began sending threats to the registered addresses. The data was ultimately obtained both by employers and by the authorities: some people lost their jobs, while law enforcement investigated dozens of others. Meduza correspondents Liliya Yapparova and Denis Dmitriev followed the hackers’ tracks, which lead all the way to the presidential administrative directorate and the presidential administration — specifically to a “talented programmer” and the budding young head of a strategic research institute. The two are longtime business partners, and they share a common understanding of how “special operations on the internet” ought to work.
Chile is€ reducing€ its military spending by 4.9% in order to better address the health crisis. I did say “small,” but small percentages tend to be significant amounts of money when you’re talking about military spending.
I was put onto this topic by€ Angelo Cardona, a member of World BEYOND War’s Advisory Board, who told me about Chile and about what he has been doing to reduce military spending in€ NATO partner Colombia. In 2020, Cardona said, he led the Global Campaign on Military Spending (GCOMS) in Colombia. As part of that effort, he proposed along with 28 Colombian Congress Members to transfer 1 billion Colombian pesos from militarism to the health sector. The Colombian Ministry of “Defense” agreed to do 10% of that,€ moving€ 100 million pesos (or $25 million). This action, Cardona reports, inspired Chilean Members of Parliament to do the same.
The Israelis were kept well-informed of such threatening initiatives from their own highly placed sources. In March 1977, for example, Henry Kissinger invited the Israeli ambassador, Simcha Dinitz, to dinner. According to an Israeli report of the conversation, Kissinger took his guest aside and stated that as a Jew, he could not go on if he did not share certain information. Carter, he said, had told President Sadat of Egypt that the US would get Israel to retreat to the 1967 borders and to agree to the establishment of a Palestinian state. Dinitz asked Kissinger what he thought Israel should do to counter this threat. “Organize forces in the US and Israel,” counseled the man who had been Secretary of State less than two months before, “Don’t appear too hawkish, but be determined. The trick is to fight Carter’s plans in a resolute manner.”
In October of that same year, the administration displayed a foolhardy insensitivity to Israeli concerns by issuing a joint statement with the Soviet Union on the Middle East. Clearly, it was taking the former governor of Georgia a little time to understand some of the fundamentals of the US/Israeli relationship. Moshe Dayan, who had deserted his Labor colleagues to become foreign minister in Menachem Begin’s Likud government, was quick to enlighten the American president. A few days after the US/Soviet announcement, the one-eyed ex-general demanded that Carter state publicly that he stood by all secret agreements reached with Israel by previous administrations. If this was not done. said Dayan, “Israel would consider making them public,” which would certainly have been embarrassing all round. Carter’s naive notions about a comprehensive Middle East settlement swiftly fell apart, and Begin’s initial judgment on the president, “cream puff,” seemed vindicated.
"The Pentagon and the military industrial complex have been plagued by a massive amount of waste, fraud, and financial mismanagement for decades," said Sen. Bernie Sanders. "That is absolutely unacceptable."
"The American people deserve answers about how this happened, why it happened, and what we will do to ensure our democracy is never threatened in this way again."
The office of Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), which distributed the statement, told fellow staff offices that “multiple” USCP members were behind the letter, according to Politico. CNN reported that it spoke to one of the officers responsible, and that the letter represents the views of around 40-50 officers. The USCP later stressed on Twitter that the statement is not official and that they do not take stances on legislation.
Now, as U.S. troops hastily withdraw from Afghanistan after two decades of war, President Joe Biden faces another major moral inflection point in U.S. foreign policy: Will Washington save the lives of Afghans who worked with the American military?
It’s a race against the clock and a battle against bureaucratic red tape, with life-or-death implications for thousands of interpreters and other Afghans who helped U.S. and coalition troops in exchange for visas to the United States. It is fueled by the specter of a Taliban takeover of Afghanistan after U.S. troops withdraw and by a grim and growing death toll of Afghan interpreters who have been targeted by militants while awaiting their long-promised visas.
The Atlantic hurricane season officially begins June 1. Top researchers at the University of South Carolina are available to discuss multiple aspects of the 2021 hurricane season, including forecasting, disaster planning and historical perspectives. To coordinate an interview, contact the staff member listed with each expert entry.
Oxford University is facing criticism after the UK’s principal climate science denial group appointed a second professor to its ranks.
Emeritus Fellow Professor Peter Dobson has defended his decision to accept a position on the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)’s academic advisory council, just weeks after his colleague Professor Peter Edwards joined the organisation as trustee.
The director of the Science Museum in London has defended Shell’s sponsorship of a climate change exhibition amid growing public calls for the museum to cut ties with the energy giant.€ €
Ian Blatchford, director of the Science Museum Group, wrote in an email to staff on 29€ April, posted online by€ Culture Unstained,€ that sponsorship by energy companies like Shell, BP, and Equinor were achieving a “public good” by educating people about climate change, including possible solutions.€ € € €
On May 19, the U.S. House Natural Resources Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations held a hearing scrutinizing wasteful fossil fuel subsidies. Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA), who chairs the subcommittee, invited the CEOs of Devon Energy, EOG Resources, and ExxonMobil, as well as executives from the energy industry lobby group Western Energy Alliance. None accepted the invitation to appear before the committee.€
“Devon Energy is a Fortune 500 company, and the biggest oil producer on federal land in the Lower 48 states. That should have been reason enough for Devon to be here today, answering questions with significant implications for our public lands and natural resources,” Rep. Porter said in her opening statement. “Like all oil companies, Devon gets special tax breaks intended to encourage fossil fuel production.”€
"With U.S. leadership on international clean energy investments, we can stop financing the climate crisis, support domestic clean energy jobs, and join the global community in moving away from fossil fuel investments."
“While historic drought is the primary cause of the lack of water, previous BOR water allocation decisions led to the widespread fish kill, which could have been prevented with a flow increase,” according to the Yurok Tribe, the largest Tribe in California with more than 6,300 members, in a news release.
“Right now, the Klamath River is full of dead and dying fish on the Yurok Reservation,” said Frankie Myers, the Yurok Tribe’s Vice Chairman. “This disease will kill most of the baby salmon in the Klamath, which will impact fish runs for many years to come. For salmon people, a juvenile fish kill is an absolute worst-case scenario.”
President Bolsonaro wants to slash Brazil’s environmental licences, a move critics say will open a free-for-all in the Amazon.
Those who know me know that, as a young Boomer born at the tail end of the Baby Boom, my musical tastes growing up were pretty typical for a young male who came of age in the late 1970s and 1980s. I’m talking classic rock. Lots of classic rock. True, starting in the 1980s my musical tastes diversified considerably (a process that’s really accelerated, oddly enough, over the last several years), but I never lost the love I had for those classic rock gods of the late 1960s and into the 1970s. High up in the pantheon of those classic guitar gods of that era is, of course, Eric Clapton. That’s why I became interested when I started seeing Tweets like this popping up last week:
The new law permits the killing of wolves by various cruel and unethical means, including night hunting with night-vision equipment, aerial gunning, and hunting from snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles. In addition to letting individuals kill as many wolves as they want, the new law authorizes year-round wolf trapping on private lands, including during the season when pups and females are most vulnerable.
This new Idaho wolf extermination law is only possible because ten years ago this month federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) protections were stripped from gray wolves in Idaho, Montana, eastern Washington, eastern Oregon, and northern Utah via a rider attached by U.S. Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) and U.S. Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID) to a must-pass budget bill.
BPA chemicals may not be solely to blame. Another study, published by Environmental Pollution in 2018, collected the semen samples of 5,000 men living in northern Italy between 2010 and 2016. By geocoding the men’s home addresses it found that sperm counts deteriorated most when air pollution was highest.
Has the law killed SAC? “No. We have produced a comprehensive inquiry in which a new strategy is presented. According to our assessment syndicalists can still fight lawfully for both collective agreements and alternatives to such agreements.” These are the words of SAC representatives Jenny Stendahl, Erik Bonk and Rasmus Hästbacka.
It is often claimed that Sweden has the world’s strongest trade union movement. Perhaps the trade union bureaucracies are strong, but the movement and struggle have long been in decline. In Sweden, there are only two nationwide unions that take member democracy seriously: the syndicalist SAC and the Dockers union (Hamn). For SAC and Hamn, it is self-evident that the member base should have the right to make decisions about union demands, industrial action and agreements with the employer side.
A consistent theme of the postmortems on the failed union drive at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., is that the organizers just weren’t ready to take on the tech behemoth. If the labor movement is going to beat a corporate giant, the argument goes, it needs to be smarter and more strategic. It must provide organizers with new and better skills and more carefully pick and choose the sites of its campaigns. To win a single-site union vote or even a broader one against a regional employer, this may be true. But organizing Amazon is taking aim at the core of the global economy. It’s the kind of campaign in which victory could spark a labor surge that brings millions of people into unions and shifts the balance of workplace power for generations. And these sorts of fights rarely happen at the time and place of our choosing.1
In February, one of Musk’s companies, Tesla, announced that it had purchased $1.5 billion worth of Bitcoin; in March, that it would accept Bitcoin for purchases of its cars.
Then, in Mid-May, Musk announced that Tesla was suspending vehicle purchases in Bitcoin over “increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions” (while mentioning that “we are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction”).
I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because on the day I left they told me to put my equipment on someone’s desk on my way out the door. I packed everything up carefully, wiping it all down and trying to make it look as good as new. The guy I was meant to leave my Macbook ($1200) and my headphones ($350) with wasn’t even there. There was no security, no oversight, no locker and no inventory list. Nobody had walked me away from my desk to keep me from stealing pens or staples or secrets. Nobody watched me at all, or asked to check my bag on my way out the door. Because they have never been poor, they had no idea what I might do. Why would I steal, when everyone clearly has enough? What even is scarcity? Why drink yourself to death tonight when there’s another sponsored event a week from now? Why eat like there will never be enough, when there has always been more than enough?
Ireland will oppose much of the European Commission’s plan for a more unified corporate tax regime across the bloc and believes it will be joined by many other sceptical member states, Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said on Wednesday.
The European Union's executive adopted the proposals on Tuesday. Its plans for EU corporate taxation rules have failed before, as setting tax rates is a jealously guarded prerogative of national parliaments, not least in low-tax Ireland.
Most people think of nerds as quiet, diffident people. In ordinary social situations they are — as quiet and diffident as the star quarterback would be if he found himself in the middle of a physics symposium. And for the same reason: they are fish out of water. But the apparent diffidence of nerds is an illusion due to the fact that when non-nerds observe them, it's usually in ordinary social situations. In fact some nerds are quite fierce.
The fierce nerds are a small but interesting group. They are as a rule extremely competitive — more competitive, I'd say, than highly competitive non-nerds. Competition is more personal for them. Partly perhaps because they're not emotionally mature enough to distance themselves from it, but also because there's less randomness in the kinds of competition they engage in, and they are thus more justified in taking the results personally.
[...]
The idea that there could be fierce nerds is an unfamiliar one not just to many normal people but even to some young nerds. Especially early on, nerds spend so much of their time in ordinary social situations and so little doing real work that they get a lot more evidence of their awkwardness than their power. So there will be some who read this description of the fierce nerd and realize "Hmm, that's me." And it is to you, young fierce nerd, that I now turn.
I have some good news, and some bad news. The good news is that your fierceness will be a great help in solving difficult problems. And not just the kind of scientific and technical problems that nerds have traditionally solved. As the world progresses, the number of things you can win at by getting the right answer increases. Recently getting rich became one of them: 7 of the 8 richest people in America are now fierce nerds.
Indeed, being a fierce nerd is probably even more helpful in business than in nerds' original territory of scholarship. Fierceness seems optional there. Darwin for example doesn't seem to have been especially fierce. Whereas it's impossible to be the CEO of a company over a certain size without being fierce, so now that nerds can win at business, fierce nerds will increasingly monopolize the really big successes.
“Let’s not fight for social progress because it could be taken away at a later point.”
UBI is the acronym of “Universal Basic Income”. I have explained what the real meaning and value of UBI may be here, and several other times before that.
The next paragraph of this post is a verbatim excerpt of a Facebook conversation about how and why UBI would be wrong. The last paragraph, part, posted as the other here to make it more accessible even in the future, is my answer, whose short form is: whatever the feasibility of UBI may be, that particular argument seems really… weak to me.
At the launch of bitcoin in 2009 the size of the potential of the underlying technology, the blockchain, was not fully appreciated.
What has not been fully exploited is the unique features of blockchain technology that can improve the lives of people and businesses. These include the fact that it is an open source software. This makes its source code legally and freely available to end-users who can use it to create new products and services. Another significant feature is that it is decentralised, democratising the operation of the services built on it. Control of the services built on the blockchain isn’t in the hands of an individual or a single entity but involves all those connected to the network.
[...]
Bitcoin has been embroiled in massive controversies, attracting a host of criticisms. These include the fact that it’s speculative and volatile, and that it doesn’t provide any utility. Its price is driven largely by what investors think of it rather than any intrinsic value. This is unlike other asset classes from which value can be derived such as gold (jewellery), real estate (rent), stocks and bonds (interest).
On May 19, Natalya Rodikova — the editor-in-chief Domashny Ochag (Good Housekeeping) — posted the cover of the magazine’s forthcoming June issue on Instagram. The cover photo features Margarita Gracheva — a domestic violence survivor whose husband was sentenced to fourteen years in prison for cutting off her hands.
The year of the pandemic was, against all odds, a year of unprecedented civic activism. We may have been confined to our homes and Zoom screens, hunkered down with small pods of relatives, but we were also in the streets, at the ballot boxes, and engaged as citizens like never before. All summer, hundreds of thousands left the security of their homes to join demonstrations across the country to protest the killing of George Floyd. And in November 2020, more Americans voted than ever before in a presidential election, as two out of three eligible voters cast a ballot.
"This forced pregnancy act will drive women back into the [pre-Roe] shadows," warned one Democratic lawmaker in the state.
Erin Chlopak of the Campaign Legal Center said that this "is yet another example of the agency's dysfunction and its disregard for the campaign finance laws it was designed to oversee."
There is broad and deep public majorities—even among Republicans—supporting Biden's infrastructure plan and an increase in corporate taxes to pay for it.
We, as organizers and members of various movements and organizations in the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s (and their allies)—who organized for economic and social justice and against racism and war— wholly support the direction the AFL-CIO Vermont Leadership Council and other progressive unions are taking in support of those same goals in 2021. We call on the AFL-CIO national leadership to back off from its threats and intimidation of these labor organizers and join in developing a national movement for economic and social justice now.
2021 is a year of change, potentially great change. It is also a year of continuing crisis. The COVID 19 virus shut down much of the world beginning in march 2020. The economy dove, leaving millions of workers without work for months. In spite of a slight recovery, millions remain unemployed with increasing debt. Despite some efforts to minimize the economic pain from Washington, the future remains uncertain. Meanwhile, the world’s wealthiest people have seen their wealth magnify exponentially.
"This is huge," said Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Republican governors in state after state are cutting off the federal aid. They'd rather turn away free money than relieve pressure on the poor.€
The core issue is that in order for the imbalance of power to continue to favor the elite,€ systemic racism must continue.
"When working people stand together, they cannot be defeated."
There are many startling aspects to this, none more so than the fact that SOGIC members now apparently conceive of themselves as speaking, at least implicitly, with the moral authority of the entire provincial bar.
The popular uprising against the neoliberal austerity measures and political repression of the Duque government in Colombia entered its fourth week today with the National Strike Committee announcing a new round of strikes and mass marches.
We demand that the Biden administration use its influence on the Colombian military and police to stop the brutal repression of free speech and assembly happening in the streets of Colombia over the past three weeks. The United States must use its influence to ensure the upcoming 2022 elections for president and parliament are fair and free of the fraud and political assassinations that we have witnessed conducted by the Far Right in the past.
Colombia has the highest wealth inequality in South America, and the divisions between the rich and poor are incredibly stark. Throughout the pandemic the working class across the globe bore the brunt of the suffering, and in Colombia it is no different.
The Colombian government is trying to make workers and the poor pay for the economic crisis. President Ivan Duque used the country’s deficit to try and justify increased taxes on working people. But Colombians have stood together and protests have forced the right wing government to back down from plans to raise taxes on goods such as food and gas. Duque is still clinging to other regressive tax reforms and said he will push ahead with a newly modified bill.
Summary: Substack launched in 2018, offering writers a place to engage in independent journalism and commentary. Looking to fill a perceived void in newsletter services, Substack gave writers an easy-to-use platform they could monetize through subscriptions and pageviews.
Well, that was fast. I mean, this all actually happened a few months ago but the unsealing process makes this all seem very sudden.
Russian-Tajik singer Manizha, who is representing Russia at Eurovision 2021, has progressed to the song competition’s final stage with her song “Russian Woman.” Her performance in Rotterdam on May 19 ended with a video featuring more than 100 Russian women, including a number of well-known public figures. Manizha said she wanted her performance to “show the freedom” of Russian women. The Eurovision final will take place on Saturday, May 22.
Andrey Shmarov has stepped down from his post as editor-in-chief of the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti, the paper announced on May 19.
Belarusian journalist Katerina Borisevich (Katsiaryna Barysevich), who was imprisoned for divulging confidential medical information about the death of opposition activist Raman Bandarenka, was released from custody on the morning of May 19.
"Simply put, the government should not collect journalists communications records unless it's investigating them for a crime or as part of an investigation into foreign espionage in which case it should get a warrant."
Looking back over that period, I have come to appreciate that I was among the first generation of journalists to break free of the corporate media – in my case, the Guardian – and ride this wave of new technology. In doing so, we liberated ourselves from the narrow editorial restrictions such media imposes on us as journalists and were still able to find an audience, even if a diminished one.
More and more journalists are following a similar path today – a few out of choice, and more out of necessity as corporate media becomes increasingly unprofitable. But as journalists seek to liberate themselves from the strictures of the old corporate media, that same corporate media is working very hard to characterise the new technology as a threat to media freedoms.
One afternoon in mid-July, hundreds of people gathered around a stage in front of the historic gray stone courthouse at the heart of the small town of Graham, North Carolina. They were listening to a song of protest.
“We don’t want to die,” a local musician sang out to the diverse crowd.
New Orleans—I have been working at home since the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in 2005. So has the rest of the staff at Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children (FFLIC), the organization I cofounded in 2001. One man-made disaster was followed by another, as gentrification raked the city. The building FFLIC was renting in a historically Black community was sold, and we were forced to do what has become commonplace everywhere since Covid-19 was allowed to run wild. We telecommuted, since much of our work involved outreach and out-of-office meetings. To maintain connection to the community, we rented a small office in a neighborhood building with coworking space, so staff and families could meet in its conference room. At first, working this way was emotionally and logistically difficult: not to see everyone’s face, to catch up on one another’s life, or pop in for a quick question or support; not to have the physical space that, for many youth and families, had become not just a place to address an immediate need but a home away from home. The chatter, laughter, and freedom of our own space were lost, transformed suddenly, just as life had been after the flood, when the streets went silent because people were displaced, some never to return. As native New Orleanians, we are constantly forced to be resilient; true to our saying Laissez les bons temps rouler (“Let the good times roll”), we made “gumbo,” something out of not very much. We used group texts and plenty of emojis and memes to bring levity to working remotely. We scheduled more staff retreats and utilized other community spaces to meet with youth and families. It’s still not the same; “our lives were forever changed.” People say that a lot now.
According to top Navalny aide Ivan Zhdanov, his father Yuri — who is currently in pre-trial detention — is now facing more serious criminal charges.
State investigators in Moscow have summoned Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) employees for questioning en masse, in connection with a fraud case against jailed opposition politician Alexey Navalny, FBK director Ivan Zhdanov wrote on Telegram.
"We hear all this talk about how somehow progressive prosecution can't survive. That's not what I see. What I see is that traditional prosecution can't survive."
We have built up civilization to a scale that can temporarily be supported by finite and polluting energy sources, and we have simply assumed that this scale of activity can continue to be supported by other energy sources that haven't yet been developed or substantially deployed.
In North Carolina, the Pasquotank County District Attorney’s Office has found the April 21 police shooting of Andrew Brown Jr., a 42-year-old Black father, in Elizabeth City was justified. Meanwhile, Andrew Brown Jr.'s family and their attorneys have said body-camera and dashcam videos of his killing show it was an “execution” and that he was not a threat. Andrew Brown Jr.'s family has requested the full release of the body-camera video, and the FBI is conducting a federal civil rights investigation into the killing. “We are disappointed, but we are not surprised,” Bakari Sellers, one of the attorneys representing the family of Andrew Brown Jr., says of the district attorney’s decision. “The video speaks for itself. Show people the video.”
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner faced a rival candidate on Tuesday’s Democratic primary ballot in the nation’s sixth largest city, but the progressive prosecutor’s loudest opponent was Philadelphia Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #5.
The Guttmacher Institute warned at the beginning of March that “states will be the main abortion battleground in 2021,” as legislators had already passed eight restrictions and bans. Two and a half months later, the number of restrictions signed into law has risen to 69 (including 9 bans), across 14 states, with a total of 549 restrictions introduced in 47 states.
Many communities have found Community Control of Police Surveillance (CCOPS) laws to be an effective step on the path to systemic change. CCOPS laws empower the people of a community, through their legislators, to decide whether or not city agencies may acquire or use surveillance technology. Communities can say “no,” full stop. That will often be the best answer, given the threats posed by many of these technologies, such as face surveillance or predictive policing. If the community chooses to say “yes,” CCOPS laws require the adoption of use policies that secure civil rights and civil liberties, and ongoing transparency over how these technologies are used.
The CCOPS movement began in 2014 with the development of a model local surveillance ordinance and launch of a statewide surveillance campaign by the ACLU affiliates in California. By 2016, a broad coalition including EFF, ACLU of Northern California, CAIR San Francisco-Bay Area, Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA) member Oakland Privacy, and many others passed the first ordinance of its kind in Santa Clara County, California. € EFF has worked to enact these laws across the country. So far, 18 communities have done so. You can press the play button below to see a map of where they are.
Three of the women still work at Amazon. Two have left the company. Their cases are all being brought by Wigdor LLP, the law firm representing Charlotte Newman — a Black Amazon manager who is also suing the company for race and gender discrimination.
The women range in age from early 20s to mid-60s, and all allege that they were retaliated against by white managers for complaining internally about race, gender, or sexual harassment or discrimination that they experienced. Two of the women are Black, one is Latina, one is Asian American, and one is white. Three of the women still work at Amazon and two are former employees. All five cases were brought by the same New York City law firm that is representing a Black Amazon Web Services manager who sued Amazon and several executives in a discrimination and sexual harassment and assault case in March.
One of the earliest themes on Techdirt, going back decades, is the difficulty of jurisdiction on the internet that easily crosses nearly all geographical borders. We wrote a post back in 2002 raising the question of how is it possible to enforce local laws on a borderless internet. Of course, that hasn't meant that various countries haven't tried -- either trying to issue global injunctions or going even more extreme. One preferred idea is to just jail the employees of a company who happen to be in the country that wants content blocked. Over the years we've seen that happen (or attempt to happen) in Italy, Brazil, and recently India.
SpaceX says the company has received more than 500,000 pre-orders for the company's growing low-orbit satellite broadband service. The company opened up pre-orders back in February, and says it currently has about 10,000 users around the world participating in the beta. Starlink, which (for now) costs about $100 per month (plus a $500 first month equipment charge), should provide a welcome new option for many folks currently stuck without any broadband whatsoever.
Earlier this month, Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby decided to do something she definitely shouldn't have. Mosby may claim to be part of the "progressive prosecutor" movement, but her decision to ask the federal government to investigate a prominent critic of hers is pretty goddamn regressive.
Despite some bold but vague promises, it's still not clear exactly where the Biden administration is going to fall on broadband policy. While the administration is promising a $100 billion investment and "bold action" on broadband, it's also oddly in no rush to appoint a permanent FCC boss, or restore the FCC consumer protection authority gutted during the Trump administration. There's also a lot of telecom industry lobbyists standing in the long stretch between the administration's promises on broadband, and actual implementation.
The reality is that government has left little doubt that lobbying interests carry far more weight than the views of Canadians when it comes to Bill C-10. Those lobbyists may be “shocked” to find Canadians concerned with the regulation of user generated content, yet that is precisely the approach that they lobbied the government to implement. If Bill C-10 passes and the CRTC is left to sort out the implementation of the regulations, those groups seem likely to continue their efforts to regulate the user generated content of millions of Canadians.
I came to The Nation as an intern at the start of the Reagan years, and edited the magazine from 1995 to 2019. I am deeply committed to my role as steward of this remarkable institution, and I am determined to bring it into the 21st century. But that task has proven increasingly challenging.1
If nothing else, the COVID-19 pandemic has been an incredibly instructive case study in what the neoliberal dogma that now governs our waking lives really means when stripped of artifice or pretense. As things stand, just a handful of profit-driven private companies currently control the knowledge and expertise required to produce vaccines — with people in many poorer countries not expected to be vaccinated until at least 2024. It didn’t have to be this way, of course.
Enabled by a monopolistic global intellectual property (IP) regime and with a tip of the hat to billionaire Bill Gates, Big Pharma and its political allies have largely succeeded in controlling and defining the narrative during the early vaccine rollout — transforming the prospective solution to a global crisis into yet another occasion for narrow corporate profit, in this case at the expense of public health and a speedy end to the pandemic.
The ground, however, may slowly be shifting. With the Biden administration’s recent announcement that it will support a waiver of IP protections for COVID vaccines, worldwide moral outrage toward vaccine apartheid may finally be having an impact. As for Gates himself, the billionaire is currently experiencing a messy divorce and may be facing the most serious crisis for his meticulously crafted personal image since the antitrust actions of the 1990s.
[...]
And having a monopoly is a hard thing to defend! If you’re anxious that your monopoly isn’t quite doing it for you and you go to your legislature and you say, “My monopoly needs to be bigger,” you’ll get kind of a skeptical hearing.
So there was this other term, which first occurred in the 1930s, but really gained currency in the 1970s: “intellectual property.” Intellectual property was popularized by an industry body called the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), which convinced the United Nations to sanction it as a UN specialized agency like UNICEF. Except its purpose was to defend intellectual property, and it embarked on a program to replace the term monopoly with intellectual property for obvious reasons. If property is now the state religion, then arguing that your property rights are being undermined is basically an appeal to prevent heresy: “Blasphemy is afoot! Bring out the witch finder!”
While the incompetence of the Indian government is starkly visible in its handling of the second wave of the Covid-19 crisis, its performance has been far worse on the vaccine front. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which seems to believe in the ideology of free-market capitalism, thinks that the market will magically produce the number of vaccines the country needs. This would explain why it has starved seven public sector vaccine manufacturing units – according to a 17 April article in Down to Earth – of any support instead of ramping up much-needed vaccine production.
The rights to produce the public sector vaccine, Covaxin, which has been developed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and National Institute of Virology (NIV), in collaboration with Bharat Biotech, have been given to the private company partner on an exclusive basis.
The Indian government also believed that Serum Institute of India, another private-sector company and the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, which has tied up with AstraZeneca for producing Covishield, would make vaccines according to the country’s requirements without any prior orders or capital support. The government did not even see the necessity to intervene and prevent India’s new Quad ally, the US, from stopping sending India supplies of the required raw materials needed by India for manufacturing vaccines.
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Bill Gates recently spoke to Sky News in the United Kingdom regarding India and South Africa’s proposal to the World Trade Organization on the need to lift intellectual property (IP) protection for Covid-19 vaccines and medicines during the pandemic. Gates claimed that IP is not the issue and that “moving a vaccine … into a factory in India … It’s only because of our grants and our expertise that can happen at all.” In other words, without the white man coming in to tell India and other middle-income countries how to make vaccines and provide them with his money, these countries would not be able to make vaccines on their own.
This is a rehash of the Aids debate, where the Western governments and Big Pharma argued that developing generic Aids drugs would lead to the manufacturing of poor-quality drugs and theft of Western intellectual property. Gates, who built his fortune on Microsoft’s IP, is the leading defender of IP in the world. With his newfound halo as a great philanthropist, he is leading Big Pharma’s charge against the weakening of patents on the global stage. The role of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a major funder of the World Health Organization (WHO), is also to dilute any move by the WHO to share patents and knowledge during the pandemic.
As China’s Supreme People’s Court hints at increasing the availability of preliminary injunctions, counsel say this aim should be taken seriously
In light of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, the EPO has decided to further extend the pilot project for conducting opposition hearings by VICO until 31 January 2022. Where there are serious reasons preventing the use of VICO for oral proceedings in opposition, oral proceedings will be postponed until after that date.
Healthtech has been on the rise in recent years and the Covid-19 pandemic has flat out accelerated the sector further. Digital innovations have an increasing presence in healthcare and are redefining how and what care is delivered. In fact, a McKinsey survey of European physicians suggests up to 58 percent of them believe telemedicine will play a significantly greater role in the future.
Earlier this month, US President Joe Biden shocked the pharmaceutical industry with his declared support for an intellectual property waiver for COVID-19 vaccines.
In this Inter Partes Review, the PTAB sided with the patentee Qualcomm and issued a final written decision that the challenged claims had not been proven obvious. (Note – this was after Qualcomm disclaimed some of the more dubious claims). Apple appealed. (U.S. Patent No. 7,844,037).
Apple has a right to appeal under the statute, but Federal Courts will only hear cases involving an actual case-or-controversy that involves “an injury in fact.” “To establish injury in fact, the alleged harm must be ‘concrete and particularized and actual or imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical.'” Slip Op; quoting Spokeo, Inc. v. Robins, 136 S. Ct. 1540 (2016) and Lujan v. Defs. of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555 (1992). The standing requirement is derived from Article III of the U.S. Constitution. Thus, although Congress purported provide a statutory right to appeal, no appeal is permitted unless the appellant can show some injury stemming from the outcome of the case below.
On May 18, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,715,476, formerly owned by Intellectual Ventures but now owned by DigiMedia Tech LLC, an NPE and an IP Investments Group entity. The ‘476 patent is generally related to displaying video images generated by a camera on a display, and more particularly to tracking a head portion of a person image in camera-generated video images. The ‘476 patent has been asserted against Olympus Corp., Fujifilm Holdings, Sakar International, Nikon, JK Imaging, and Elite Brands.
This decision concerns a European patent application relating to the translation of a human language into an abstract formal language which was considered non-technical by the EPO's Board of Appeal in charge. Here are the practical takeaways from the decision T 2825/19 (Natural language to machine language translator/RAVENFLOW) of 19.3.2021 of the Technical Board of Appeal 3.5.07:
The Supreme Court of Austria (Oberster Gerichtshof) recently rendered a remarkable (to this blogger) decision on the interpretation of Art. 58(1)(c) of the EU Trade Mark Regulation (EUTMR) in the context of how indications of tradition (in this case "since 1875") are perceived by the relevant public. The case has also potentially far-fetching implications regarding the valuation and the transfer of trademarks containing such indications.
In 1875, Jakob Pauscha founded Cooperage Pauscha ("Fassbinderei Pauscha"). The company engaged in the production of wooden casks, barrels and the like. The company was held and managed by the Pauscha family until its bankruptcy in 2010. At that point, the company and the Pauscha family parted ways. The assets of the bankrupt company were transferred to a newly founded entity, Pauscha Fassbinderei GmbH, which eventually also went bankrupt, this while K. Pauscha, the latest representative of the family, founded the plaintiff, a new cooperage firm.
It isn't some novel revelation that scammers and malware purveyors have used the public's fear and lack of knowledge about copyright laws and processes to pull off their nefarious deeds. For more than a decade, bad actors have looked at the shady methods of copyright trolls and noticed that those tactics are perfectly suited to convince the public to download malware or fraudulently extract money from people's wallets. None of this is new or surprising. What should be surprising, however, is that absolutely nothing has been done about any of this. Never has a hard look been taken as to why copyright enforcement so resembles these illegal activities, nor has any serious consideration been given to what this culture of permission and fear has done to so well prepare the public to be susceptible to these scams.
The European Parliament has adopted a report that urges the EU Commission to propose legislation that will combat sports streaming piracy. Specifically, the report calls for new rules that require online services to take down unauthorized live streams within 30 minutes of being notified by a copyright holder or 'trusted whistleblower'
With a history dating back to 2003, the rights to the new .MUSIC top-level domain are firmly in the hands of DotMusic Limited after an agreement was signed with ICANN. More than ten years ago, the RIAA was sounding the alarm, claiming that .MUSIC would be used to enable massive copyright infringement. However, it appears that .MUSIC will implement some of the most stringent and specific anti-piracy policies ever seen, making it a hostile place for pirates.
We've covered a variety of issues Twitch is facing as a platform over the past several months, but there has also been a theme to all of these issues. Whether it's been Twitch's decision to simply nuke a bunch of creator content due to DMCA claims it received for them, its tone-deaf attempt to redirect the focus onto a dumb emoji, changes to its affiliate program, or how it chooses to roll out, or not, tools for creators to respond to the DMCApocalypse it kicked off, those stories all have one thing in common: they demonstrate that Twitch does a brutally terrible job of communicating to its most valuable asset, its own creative community.
