Chrome Apps were first introduced back in 2013. It was an ambitious project that aimed to make app development much easier for developers since a single app could work on almost every platform that supported the Google Chrome browser.
Not only is Chrome OS based on Linux, but an increasing number of Chromebooks offer access to a Linux development system. If you've always wanted to learn how to use Linux, then Chromebooks are a great way to start.
But what's the difference between Linux on normal laptops and Chrome OS on Chromebooks? And which one's better for beginners who are learning the Linux operating system? We'll find out in this post.
The story of the bash shell begins with Brian Fox, who wrote the original, and it continues on this show packed with interesting forays into the achievements and challenges of free software and open source. In conversation with Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett, Fox also unpacks the thinkings and workings behind the Orchid VPN, and all the primary and secondary effects of simply making one's work maximally useful.
The dev archived the repo before I could upload this, still uploading because it's cool. There are tons of fetch applications out there, the most notable being neofetch but it's quite slow, so today we're looking at Paleofetch a fetch application written in C, that you're intended to modify in the Suckless sort of manor.
Mike's unique take on the bold promises made at MS Build this year, and the one item he REALLY wants announced at WWDC next week.
Plus a batch of your emails, a little proxy war, and more!
First up, in our Wanderings, I’ve been system building, Joe has been playing with his new 3D printer, Bo has range anxiety and Tony has been learning about creating YouTube videos
Then in our news, Freenode taken over by Andrew Lee and Ubuntu and Fedora abandon ship, Material Shell for Gnome 40, Fedora 32 is end of life, and more
In security, a Linux rootkit that shows its face…fish.
Look, the idea of a Contributor License Agreement makes sense. But there should definitely be provisions in any CLA worth its salt that any license chosen in the future will conform to the definition of "free software."
This special live event will be the first live stream from the new office, assuming we don't have any networking issues. I will talk about the move, the equipment, some of the challenges I've encountered so far. I will also share my thoughts on a number of Linux-related topics and interact with you guys hanging out in the YouTube chat.
Announced last year by AMD was SmartShift Technology for laptops with both AMD CPUs and GPUs to allow dynamically shifting the power budget between the CPU/GPU depending upon the current workload. AMD promoted SmartShift as delivering up to 14% extra performance and now this technology is being worked on for their Linux driver.
AMD describes SmartShift as "AMD SmartShift enabled notebooks feature a hardware boosting interface between the Processor and Graphics with machine learning algorithms to automatically boost performance where workloads demand it. This interface links the common Infinity Control Fabric blocks together so that the CPU and GPU react quickly to different workloads."
As reported by Phoronix, AMD is focusing on expanding its SmartShift ecosystem to support operating systems beyond Windows 10. AMD has released two patches this week that continue adding support of SmartShift's features to the Linux ecosystem. That's excellent news for Linux buyers who want to use AMD's shiny new PowerShift notebooks.
SmartShift was released last year by AMD (with only one laptop, the G5 SE) as a way to further improve notebook performance and efficiency when using AMD CPUs and discrete GPUs together. The technology aims to turn both the CPU and GPU into one cohesive system, allowing both chips to dynamically share power depending on the workload at hand.
Libinput as the input handling library commonly used these days by the Linux desktop both under X.Org and Wayland environments is out with version 1.18 as its newest feature release.
With libinput being quite mature these days, the recent releases haven't been too exciting on the feature front compared to the early days. But even still libinput releases in 2021 are seeing new features added in.
Simplifying AGL's existing Wayland-based graphical stack and avoiding the use of modules that aren't maintained upstream has lead to the creation of a new compositor based on libweston, bringing more reliable and fine-grained system control.
Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) is a collaborative project of the Linux Foundation about improving open source components for automotive use cases. Using a common reference platform for test and integration purposes, it follows an upstream-first policy in publishing the improvements.
On the graphical side of things, the AGL project is using Wayland, a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol. With it, it delivers a rich user experience (usability and user satisfaction) and supports customization of design and behaviour as to meet different needs of vehicle type.
I said I’d be blogging every day about some changes? And that was a month ago or however long it’s been? And we all had a good chuckle at the idea that I could blog every day like how things used to be?
Yeah, I remember that too.
Zink as Mesa's OpenGL implementation atop Vulkan continues seeing a lot of work particularly by Mike Blumenkrantz working under contract for Valve. The latest is a major rework to Zink's shader cache implementation so it will actually work as desired and in an optimal manner.
NVIDIA this week at Computex Taipei announced the RTX 3070 Ti and RTX 3080 Ti while today the actual review embargo expires on the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti as this new flagship gaming graphics card. Here are our initial benchmarks of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti under Linux.
NVIDIA has stated that the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti should be about 1.5x faster than the prior generation RTX 2080 Ti or 2x the performance of the GeForce GTX 1080 Ti for rasterized games. The RTX 3080 Ti is rated for 34 shader TFLOPS, 67 RT TFLOPS, and 273 Tensor TFLOPS. The GeForce RTX 3080 Ti features 10,240 CUDA cores and 12GB of GDDR6X video memory. The 10,240 CUDA cores is up from the 8,704 CUDA cores found on the RTX 3080 and there is also 2GB of additional vRAM compared to that non-Ti model from last year.
On top of everything else going on in May ahead of Phoronix turning 17, there were several new benchmarks / test profiles added for the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org and numerous updates to existing test profiles.
Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org now offer 661 distinct test profiles (benchmarks) that have seen combined 2,247 revisions and some 233 different test suites. The average run-time if wanting to run every possible test with every possible option is at roughly 36 days and 19 hours -- but fortunately most users run only the small relevant portion of tests to their own workloads.
Open Broadcaster Software is a free and open-source streaming/recording solution available for multiple platforms.
Not long ago, we spotted native Wayland support coming to OBS Studio.
Now, with the release of OBS Studio 27, it is finally a reality. Not just limited to wayland support, but there are some significant feature additions.
Like most Blender releases, Blender 2.93 is a major update that brings numerous new features and improvements, but the biggest change is the fact that it’s an LTS (Long-Term Support) release, which will be supported for the next couple of years. This means that you can use it for long-term projects.
Apart from being an LTS release, Blender 2.93 introduces a new Spreadsheet Editor that promises to help you inspect your mesh, instances, and point clouds. It also introduces a new Fill tool, new Depth of Fiel, and new Eevee with faster volumetrics, as well as support for area lights and soft shadows.
Just like most people around these parts, I was a DOS and Windows user. It was a time before I even heard of Linux, much less tried it. Early Windows users -- I'm talking about Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 -- spent an equal amount of time in DOS as they did in Windows. Back then, Windows ran on top of DOS, so knowledge of the DOS command prompt was pretty much a requirement.
One program that I **always** installed on my DOS systems was Vernon D. Buerg's excellent LIST program. It was a simple file manager for the DOS command prompt that mostly did one thing, and did it well: it listed files in the selected directory. It also allowed users to view the contents of the selected file. Simply highlight the file and press the "Enter" key. The contents of that selected file -- whether it was a simple *.txt file or a binary file -- was opened in a simple viewer. The user could view the contents of the selected file. When a user was finished viewing the contents of a file, hitting the "Escape" key brought the user back to the listing of files. List was small, efficient, and pretty much stayed "out of the way," allowing users to navigate and work quickly.
OBS Studio 27 has been released with native support for Wayland, new PipeWire capture source, browser docks on macOS and Linux, and more.
OBS Studio is a free and open source Qt application for live-streaming and screen recording, which runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.
The tool can broadcast to any RTMP supporting destination, having presets for streaming on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram and Facebook. It offers pretty much everything you'd need, including multiple scenes and sources (like live and recorder video, text and audio), audio mixer, transitions, and more.
OBS Studio 27.0 is now officially out marking one of the biggest releases they've ever done, especially if you're a Linux user and it's looking great.
This release further closes the gap between Linux, macOS and Windows on certain features. On the Linux side they've managed to now hook up service integration along with browser panel docking! What does this mean though? You can now attach any sort of web address into your OBS Studio to have everything together in one window - it's useful! With service integration, you're also able to login to Twitch and Restream directly too.
Blender has introduced the Blender 2.93 LTS 3D creation suite as their last major milestone of the Blender 2.x series before moving to the next-generation 3D creation pipeline with Blender 3.0.
Blender 2.93 LTS brings user experience improvements, introduces 22 new nodes to its Geometry Nodes editor, mesh primitives support, adds the much anticipated Line Art modifier to automatically generate grease pencil lines around objects, a new and faster fill tool, and many Eevee renderer improvements.
The wget command is a command line utility for downloading files from the remote servers. It’s also used to triggers server side scripts using the cron jobs.
This article is the first in a series centered around 'crowd sourced' command recommendations. I asked a group of our core contributors what their favorite Linux commands were, and the feedback was overwhelming. We received 46 individual commands, and many of them were underscored by multiple submissions.
This series represents the complete list, broken down by category. I have dubbed these first seven commands "Networking commands that everyone should know."
bat is a simple command line tool for easily setting and checking the ASUS battery charging stop threshold, in order to help extend battery life.
According to its wiki, bat aims to "replicate the functionality ASUS Battery Health Charging utility for ASUS laptops on Windows which aims to prolong the battery's life-span".
I've already covered how to limit battery charging (set a charge threshold) for ASUS laptops on Linux, but with the help of this tool, you'll be able to easily change the charging threshold, reset it, and see the current charging threshold level. bat can also print the current battery level and charging status.
To be able to install Ubuntu or any other Linux OS or even any other OS like Windows etc, we either need a bootable FlashDrive or a DVD of the OS. In this tutorial, we will discuss how we can create a bootable Linux Flash Drive or a USB drive using a Ubuntu System.
There are many tools on almost all operating systems available with most of them being 3rd party tools, but we have an inbuilt tool on Ubuntu for creating a bootable flash drive, called ‘Startup Disk Creator'. We will be using the same tool to create a bootable Linux flash drive.
You probably have used https://identity.ic0.app/ to log into various applications (the NNS UI, OpenChat etc.) before, and if you do that, you are trusting this service to take good care of your credentials. Furthermore, you might want to check that the Internet Identity is really not tracking you. So you want to know: Is this really running the code we claim it to run? Of course the following applies to other canisters as well, but I’ll stick to the Internet Identity in this case.
It's a gross hack but works for now. To prevent overly sensitive mic settings autotuned by the browser in web conferences, I currently edit as root /usr/share/pulseaudio/alsa-mixer/paths/analog-input-internal-mic.conf. Change in [Element Capture] the setting volume from merge to 80.
Do you know how your system will respond to an arbitrary failure? Will your application fail? Will anything survive after a loss? If you're not sure, it's time to see if your system passes the Litmus test, a detailed way to cause chaos at random with many experiments.
In the first article in this series, I explained what chaos engineering is, and in the second article, I demonstrated how to get your system's steady state so that you can compare it against a chaos state. This third article will show you how to install and use Litmus to test arbitrary failures and experiments in your Kubernetes cluster. In this walkthrough, I'll use Pop!_OS 20.04, Helm 3, Minikube 1.14.2, and Kubernetes 1.19.
The problem with both of these error messages is that they're not specific. They don't tell me what certificate purpose the certificate has that the library considers unsupported, or what is incompatible, or what purpose and key usage either library is actually looking for. The second library doesn't even clearly say what TLS certificate it's reporting an error about; as it happens, there were a chain of three TLS certificates involved, two of which I had just generated and one that was old enough it might be missing things the library now wanted.
The secure shell protocol (SSH) is the most common method for controlling remote machines over the command line in the Linux world. SSH is a true Linux original, and it is also gaining popularity in the Windows world. There is even official Windows documentation for SSH, which covers controlling Windows machines using OpenSSH.
FreeDOS is an open source DOS-compatible operating system that you can use to play classic DOS games, run legacy business software, or develop embedded systems. Any program that works on MS-DOS should also run on FreeDOS.
But if you've never used DOS, you might be confused about how to navigate the system. FreeDOS is primarily a command-line interface; there is no default graphical user interface (GUI) in FreeDOS. You need to type every command at the command line.
Two commands that help you find your way around FreeDOS: CD and DIR. I've written those commands in all uppercase, but DOS is actually case insensitive, so you can type your commands using either uppercase or lowercase letters. DOS doesn't care.
Now that a little more than 40 percent of the adults in the U.S. are considered to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 (persons who receive both of the mRNA Moderna or Pfizer vaccines, along with persons who receive the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine), many of those vaccinated are wondering how to "protect" their vaccination card. These cards, given out with the first vaccination, enable vaccinated people to keep track of their vaccination(s), and to offer proof down the road that the person has received their COVID-19 vaccination.
But, they are fragile. They are nothing more than printed cardstock that the end consumer is expected to carry in their wallet. Over time, it just isn't going to endure years and years of wear and tear. Many are opting to laminate their vaccination cards, which will certainly make it much more durable. But, what if you could digitize your vaccination card? A digital copy should be able to endure for eternity.
Fortunately, there are a couple of popular options emerging that do just that. Let's cover some ways you might use to digitize your vaccination card. The two methods I'll present are just two options that I've tried. You might think of others that might better fit your needs. Also, since I don't have an iPhone (I've never owned an "i" anything), I'm not able to try out methods on that platform ... but I can provide a link to others who have tried it out, later on in the article.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 21.04.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install BpyTOP on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Bpytop is a terminal-based resource monitor that shows various device resources in an effective and visually appealing manner. It has a game-inspired theme. Bashtop users can expect similar features in bpytop since bpytop is ported from bashtop and completely written in Python.
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 the step-by-step installation of the BpyTOP resource monitor on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ZesleCP on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ZesleCP comes with a lot of features out of the box including, Server Config, Domains, Email Accounts, SSL, Databases, File Manager, advanced caching, and more. is a light, fast and secure Linux hosting control panel. Easily manage your server and build any website, like WordPress, with few clicks. ZesleCP comes with a lot of features out of the box including, Server Config, Domains, Email Accounts, SSL, Databases, File Manager, advanced caching, and more.
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 the step-by-step installation of the ZesleCP control panel on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
I used to create bootable Ubuntu USB installer with UNetbootin, then with Ubuntu’ built-in USB creator. Now Ventoy is a good choice you should try!
Have you ever tried working on some changes, and you did not create a backup first? It’s dreadful to lose your important files, right? One good rule of thumb in making changes with your system is to secure a backup first. It’s also a good practice to back up your files even if you’re not making big changes. You never know when you might need it.
You probably need a backup solution because you are here. Backup solutions may vary depending on the operating system you are using. If you are a Linux user, this article is for you.
Custom facts (local facts) are the variables which are declared on ansible managed host. Custom facts are declared in ini or json file in the /etc/ansible/facts.d directory on managed host. File names of custom facts must have .fact extension.
In this article, we will cover how to create and use custom facts to install samba file server and starts its service on ansible managed host. Here we are using host1 and host2 as a part of fileservers group in the inventory.
Lynis is an open-source and much powerful auditing tool for Unix/Linux-like operating systems. It scans the system for security information, general system information, installed and available software information, configuration mistakes, security issues, user accounts without a password, wrong file permissions, firewall auditing, etc.
Lynis is one of the most trusted automated auditing tools for software patch management, malware scanning, and vulnerability detecting in Unix/Linux-based systems. This tool is useful for auditors, network and system administrators, security specialists, and penetration testers.
Today I created a new Virtual machine with Arch Linux vagrant box. I started the Arch Linux virtual machine with vagrant up command, but it didn't start.
Wget is a popular free command-line utility used for downloading files from the web using HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols. It supports both Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) and Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) addresses.
If you want to forcibly choose either IPv4 or IPv6 for wget while downloading files, you need to do it explicitly or change the default configuration.
KVM, or Kernel-Based Virtual Machine, provides a virtual environment in which one or more additional operating systems can run alongside the primary system without affecting its functionality. In KVM, the Linux kernel makes use of virtualization technology by leveraging your existing system and hardware resources. The new virtual environment created by KVM can be used to provide additional workspace for software testers, developers, architects and even home users.
This tutorial describes how to install and use a virtual machine with the KVM open source virtualization platform. The commands and procedures described in this tutorial were run on Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 18.04 systems on an x86_64 (64bit x86 Intel or AMD processor).
When you're working on a Linux system, numerous processes run in the background. These processes take up system resources in the form of CPU usage and time.
While in most situations, the OS manages these processes automatically, sometimes a resource-intensive process can over utilize the CPU due to heavy processing or poor development. The answer is usually to kill the process directly or limit its CPU usage to a certain limit.
Luckily on Linux, you can limit a process's CPU usage using a command-line utility called cpulimit.
One of the essential Docker commands is docker inspect. It lets you extract information about various docker objects, knowing how to use it is something EVERYONE should know about.
In case you were wondering, Docker objects or resources are simply things like containers, volumes, networks etc.
The main strength of inspect comes from its formatting capabilities.
Drupal is a free, scalable, and open platform used to create and manage website content. It has a large community and is used by millions of people and organizations around the world. Drupal provides a simple and user-friendly web interface that helps you to create a variety of websites ranging from personal websites to large community-driven websites. In this guide, we will show you how to deploy multiple Drupal instances with Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04.
PostgreSQL is a popular worldwide used open-source database. It is available for Linux including other common operating systems such as macOS, Windows 10/7, and BSD. Here we will install and configure the latest PostgreSQL version on AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux 8.
PostgreSQL implements the 2008 SQL standard very comprehensively. In addition to common data types, the database can also natively handle XML and version 9.2 with data in JSON format. Postgres is based on the typical client-server model: The central server component called ” postmaster ” manages all database files and all connections that are established for communication (input and output) with the database server.
Just like MYSQL, the user only needs a client program to connect and start creating a database via the command line or the integrated terminal. Whereas to handle MariaDB or MySQL graphically we have a simple web application phpMyAdmin and in the same way, we have a graphical user interface for PostgreSQL as well – such as pgAdmin or phpPgAdmin that can be optionally installed and used.
If you have any type of entertainment hardware in your home, be it a TV, tablet, phone or computer, there is a good chance it can run Kodi. Raspberry Pi users can even get in on the Kodi fun as can users on iOS, Android, Linux, macOS and Windows. Even with all of the different hardware opportunities, few run as well or as seamlessly as Kodi does on a computer. Whether it’s streaming pictures, playing back video or watching TV shows, sports or movies on a computer, it’s great to have Kodi installed on what is likely the second-largest display in your home.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Sublime Text on Deepin 20.2.
Netcat is a command-line network tool used to open ports, associate a shell to a port, establish TCP/UDP connections, and more. This tutorial shows how to use Netcat to scan ports on remote targets. Examples included in this tutorial explain individual port scan, scanning several ports, scanning port ranges, and banner grabbing using Netcat.
After Netcat examples, I added examples of the same scan types using Nmap and Nmap Scripting Engine for banner grabbing.
VirtualBox is one of the popular virtualization platforms from Oracle Corporation. With VirtualBox, we can run multiple operating systems simultaneously. We do not need to mess up with our main Host OS. It has many powerful networking features to set up any desired configuration.
Hyper Backup is an app for the Synology NAS for backing up important data from the NAS to other external devices and cloud backup platforms (i.e., Google Drive, Dropbox). Hyper Backup can also restore data from the backup.
Today we are looking at how to install the Vivaldi Browser on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
As CentOS 8 draws steadily to End of Life on December 31st, 2021, efforts have been made to come up with centos alternative distributions which will fill in the big shoes left by CentOS 8. This comes following RedHat’s decision to dump CentOS 8 in favor of CentOS Stream, something which has elicited mixed reactions.
For Linux, the user terminal is the most crucial program to manage almost everything in the operating system. But many people do not prefer the command line because they assume that it is a very technical program and require particular expertise to use it. Though knowing it is pretty handy.
Various reasons keep a new Linux user away from the command line, one of them handling files in the terminal. Files and directories in Linux can have different names, and some names can have “spaces” in them. So what’s the big deal? The issue is, the terminal reads the “space” differently; for instance, if your directory has the name “new folder,” the terminal will assume two different directories, i.e., “new” and “folder.” Accessing such files in the terminal can become really frustrating. Luckily, there are various methods to deal with the files/folders with spaces in their names.
Collecting multiple files into a single file is called archiving, and “zip” is one of the widely used archive formats that come with lossless data compression support. Archiving files is an efficient way to save your machine’s storage and make it easier to transfer files through email or FTP.
Linux has a built-in zip utility to archive the files with a set of options. This utility provides several methods to archive the files. When you archive a directory using zip utility, it includes all the files in that directory and zip it. So, is it possible to archive a file and excluding the particular files using the “zip” utility? The answer is yes! The “zip” is a versatile Linux utility that lets you archive files, excluding specified files or folders. How does it happen?
Why do we need Java on our computers? There are tons of applications developed using the java environment, so we need to install java on our computers to make the java-based application run with no difficulty.
In many cases, you may need to remove java from your computer, such as installing the latest version of java or freeing up space from your machine. Installing Java on Ubuntu is pretty straightforward, but uninstalling it is a hard nut to crack for many folks. In this guide, we will learn how many versions of java are there, what distinguishes them, and how to erase them from your computer completely.
While using Linux, you might have noticed that many packages come with a “.tar” file extension. So, what is a tar file? A tar file is a collection of many files into one file. Tar (Tape Archive) is a program that collects the files and grabs some helpful information about files it archives, such as permissions, dates, etc. It is noteworthy that the Tar utility does not compress the files; for compression, you need “gzip” or “bzip” utilities.
As a Linux administrator, you often have to deal with tar files. In many situations, you have to extract the data of a tar file to some specific directory. So, how to extract the tar file to a particular path? One way is to extract the tar file in the current directory and then copy it to the desired directory. It will do the job, but the procedure is time-consuming. This guide is focusing on finding solutions to extract various types of tar files to a specific directory.
Any git repository contains many files, folders, branches, tags, etc. Sometimes it requires searching the particular content in the git repository using a regular expression pattern. `git grep` command is used to search in the checkout branch and local files. But if the user is searching the content in one branch, but the content is stored in another branch of the repository, then he/she will not get the searching output. In that case, the user has to run the `git grep` command to apply the search in all repository branches.
If you are a keen book reader, it would be quite difficult for you to carry even more than two books. That’s no more the case, thanks to ebooks that save a lot of space in your home and your bag as well. Carrying hundreds of books with you is literally no more a dream.
Ebooks come in different formats, but the common one is PDF. Most of the ebook PDFs have hundreds of pages, and just like real books, with the help of a PDF reader navigating these pages is quite easy.
Suppose you are reading a PDF file and want to extract some specific pages from it and save it as a separate file; how would you do that? Well, it is a cinch! No need to get premium applications and tools to accomplish it.
This guide focuses on extracting a specific part from any PDF file and saving it with a different name in Linux. Though there are multiple ways to do this, I will be focusing on the less cluttered approach.
NVIDIA is bringing its DLSS image upscaling technology to Linux users via Proton. This will enable supported games on Linux to leverage the Tensor cores on RTX GPUs for AI-based supersampling. NVIDIA said that DLSS will be enabled for Vulkan games this month followed by DirectX titles in the fall.
NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) is a technology that renders games at a lower resolution and uses the AI capabilities of the tensor cores on RTX GPUs to upscale the frames with almost no perceivable loss in visual quality. NVIDIA is now bringing DLSS goodness to Linux users via Proton. For those not in the know, Proton is Valve's tool that is integrated with Steam to provide a seamless experience for Linux users to play popular Microsoft Windows games.
Linux gamers with modern Nvidia gaming graphics cards will soon be able to play their favorite games with DLSS enabled, thanks to work from Valve and Nvidia. Both companies have been working together to the upscaling technology to Linux via Steam Proton, Valve's open-source tool to run Windows apps on Linux-based systems.
Steam Proton is a compatibility layer developed by Valve and CodeWeavers that allows gamers to run Windows games on Linux-based operating systems. Steam Proton is based on Wine.
DLSS was launched in 2018 and later revamped in 2020 as DLSS 2.0, in both instances as a Windows-only option, but Nvidia and Valve have come together to change that. Soon enough, the Linux gaming community will have the chance to use it on compatible games using Steam Proton.
After only recently adding Linux support, Klei Entertainment has now officially released their incredibly stylish and engrossing deck-builder Griftlands.
What is it? "Griftlands is a deck-building roguelite where you fight and negotiate your way through a broken-down sci-fi world. Every decision is important, be it the jobs you take, the friends you make, or the cards you collect. Death comes quickly, but each play offers new situations and strategies to explore."
Emulation is the practice of using a program (called an emulator) on a PC to mimic the behaviour of a home computer or a video game console, in order to play (usually retro) games on a computer.
Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single non-technical user.
Back in the 1980s, home computers came to the forefront of teenagers’ minds. Specifically, the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Atari ST were extremely popular. They were hugely popular home computers targeted heavily towards games, but they also ran other types of software.
Well, as I wrote in my review of Streets of Rage 4, the game was a disappointment. But, it is a very difficult game to criticize, as it is very well done. How is anyone going to speak ill of SOR 4? Okay, we're not going to bash SOR 4 in the reviews, but let's say it should have been better. However, there is a game, which was released before SOR 4, but which captured the spirit of SOR and delivered much more than SOR 4.
Almost summer! Here is our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much?) perfectly with Proton since May 2021 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks...
Star Drifters recently did their first native Linux release with Danger Scavenger, so their Community & PR Manager got in touch to mention how it all went.
If you missed it: Danger Scavenger is fast-paced action, cyberpunk-themed, roguelite skyline crawler. Blow up, cut, shoot enemy robots on the roofs of skyscrapers. Choose your way to higher levels, loot, buy stuff, upgrade yourself, fight against greedy corporations, be a rebel! We covered the release the release in a previous article.
Proxy Studios, developer of Warhammer 40,000: Gladius and Pandora: First Contact have just recently announced their brand new upcoming 4x strategy game ZEPHON.
Coming along with Linux support (confirmed) just like their previous games, it looks like another enhancement on their existing engine setup used with their previous games with a brand new setting. ZEPHON is a post-apocalyptic 4X strategy game, where you guide survivors through a grim-dark future, navigating unexpected disasters, eldritch horror and cyberpunk monstrosities.
PINE64, the hardware project that aims to bring ARM and RISC-V devices to FOSS enthusiasts world-wide, widely known for their PinePhone and PineBooks, joins KDE's supporting members program as a KDE Patron.
"We have a long-standing relationship with KDE, and our Pinebook Pro and PinePhone shipping with Plasma are a testament to this commitment. Indeed, the promise early Plasma Mobile development held was the deciding factor for us to create the PinePhone. We are thrilled to have been made a patron by KDE e.V. and are excited at the prospect of an even closer cooperation in the future."
Krita is an open-source graphics editor that has historically specialized in raster graphics editing. However, an update in Krita 4.0 meant that it’s had an overhaul of the vector tools at its disposal and has become a pretty handy app for the creation of vector graphics.
You can create vector layers, draw all kinds of special shapes, and use the calligraphy and text tool to make more bespoke vectors resembling brush strokes and other fine shapes.
A big part of Krita’s recent development has been its move from the ODG to the more popular SVG file format, which makes it much more versatile for importing and exporting vector graphics.
With travel remaining problematic, we mainly used the time since the previouls summary blog for a number of improvements on foundational infrastructure KDE Itinerary relies on.
Would you like to have a tiled menu in Plasma? Maybe. Yes? Well, read on! As it happens, a few weeks ago, I tried to make the Plasma desktop look like Windows 10. One of the ingredients needed to bake this delightful cookie was Tiled Menu, available as an optional extra to Plasma users when it comes to the system menu look & feel. By default, Plasma users get three choices - menu, launcher, dashboard. Now, there be a fourth way.
Tiled Menu lives as a widget in Discover. It ain't always easy to find, but it's there, and it's available to anyone on Plasma 5.12 and above. It offers a Windows 10 behavior, and if this be your thing, you can have it. Boom. The widget comes with tons of options, so I thought, perchance we can have an entire article dedicated to it, to go over the different settings and tweaks. All right, onwards then!
[...]
Tiled Menu is a fantastic little widget. It's simple yet powerful. You can tweak to your heart's desire. Anything goes really. Every setting can be edited and changed, you can use tiles - or not, there's integrated search, everything. Even if you are not aiming to transform your Plasma desktop into a Windows 10 clone, you can still enjoy this menu on its own. It uses system settings, so it won't override your theming or look out of place, whether you use Breeze or something else. Sweet.
Well, hopefully, this little tutorial will spur you to give it a go, and perhaps delve into Discover, and look for other useful widgets and decorations. Plasma comes with a mindboggling arsenal of tools and tweaks, and the greatest downside is that they aren't always easy to discover [sic]. But looking back at my different Plasma desktop transformation guides, I have always found something new and cool and fun to try and enjoy. A whole wealth of great ideas and concepts. So there. Try this one, and then start exploring.
More than seven months in the works, NixOS 21.05 is dubbed “Okapi” (a.k.a. the forest giraffe) and comes with major component updates, starting from the core as the default kernel has been upgraded from Linux 5.4 LTS to the latest long-term supported series, Linux 5.10 LTS.
Another big change of the NixOS 21.05 release is the bold move to the latest GNOME 40 desktop environment. The main edition, which is recommended for more users, ships with GNOME 40.1 and offers the same layout that we can see in other popular distros, namely with the Activities Overview as default view.
Hey everyone, I'm Jonathan Ringer, the release manager for 21.05. As promised, the latest stable release is here: NixOS 21.05 “Okapi”.
System upgrade from Debian Bullseye repos as of June 2, 2021 Update Linux kernel to 5.10.0-6 Update Tor Browser to 10.0.17 Update Thunderbird to 78.10.0-1 Update Libreoffice to 7.0.4-4 Update apt to 2.2.3 Update tor to 0.4.5.8-1 Update gnupg to 2.2.27-2 Update mat2 to 0.12.1-1 Update privoxy to 3.0.32-2 New software: Elisa
ââ¬â¹Kali Linux 2021.2 was released today by Offensive Security and includes new themes and features, such as access to privileged ports, new tools, and a console-based configuration utility.
Kali Linux is a Linux distribution designed for cybersecurity professionals and ethical hackers to perform penetration testing and security audits.
With this release, the Kali Linux Team introduces the following new features outlined below.
The distribution’s team have released Kali Linux 2021.2 which includes two new significant tools: Kali Tweak Tool and Kali Application Boxer.
Kali Linux is a Debian-based Linux distribution that specifically caters to the likes of network analysts and penetration testers. The presence of a plethora of tools that come pre-installed with Kali Linux transforms it into an ethical hacker’s swiss-knife. So, when it comes to ethical hacking or playing with networking tools, the first Linux distro that should come to your mind should be Kali Linux.
Today we’ll be checking out the latest Kali Linux 2021.2 release. This is the second release of the year for Kali Linux and it usually comes in quarters. The first quarterly release was in February and now we’re getting one in June. So, let’s check out what’s new.
Offensive Security has introduced two new tools for making Kali easier to use: Kaboxer and Kali-Tweaks.
Kaboxer is a tool for packaging “tricky” applications in Docker containers so they can be used on Kali. These include apps that are hard to package correctly due to complex dependencies, legacy programs and libraries, and apps that need to run in isolation.
Kali-Tweaks is an automation tool that’s aimed at helping Kali users customize the OS quickly and painlessly. For example, it can be used to install or remove groups of tools, change the default login shell, enable or disable “bleeding-edge” and “experimental” branches. New options are in the works and users are welcome to suggest tweaks that they would find helpful.
In Kali Linux 2021.2, opening a listener on TCP and UDP ports 0-1023 no longer requires super-user access (but that’s possible only on Kali flavors that operate with the kernel).
The Firefox browser has been updated to 89.0 and shipped to the software repository. Firefox uses the Gecko layout engine to render web pages, which implements current and anticipated web standards.
Opera browser has been updated to 76.0.4017.175 and shipped to the software repository. Opera browser is based on Google Chromum code with extra features that make it unique.
TeamViewer provides easy, fast and secure remote access and meeting solutions to Linux, Windows PCs, Apple PCs and various other platforms, including Android and iPhone.
Blender is the essential software solution you need for 3D, from modeling, animation, rendering and post-production to interactive creation and playback. Professionals and novices can easily and inexpensively publish stand-alone, secure, multi-platform content to the web, CD-ROMs, and other media.
Shotcut is a free and open-source cross-platform video editing application. Shotcut supports many video, audio, and image formats via FFmpeg and screen, webcam, and audio capture. It uses a timeline for non-linear video editing of multiple tracks that may be composed of various file formats. Scrubbing and transport control are assisted by OpenGL GPU-based processing and a number of video and audio filters are available.
Recently, sam2fish started a post in the PCLinuxOS forum, asking members to post about their favorite pizza joint. There are probably as many ideas about what makes the ideal or best pizza as there are pizza lovers.
Of course, I replied about our (mine and my wife's) favorite pizza shop in the Kansas City area. Leo's Pizza (Leo died several years ago, but the place has been kept going by his family) makes what some call St. Louis style pizza. This pizza has a thin, crispy cracker-style crust (no large rim of flavorless, bready crust around the edge), ingredients all the way to the edge, and uses a special, custom blend of Provel cheese (a processed cheese mix of white cheddar, provolone and swiss cheese) made especially for Leo's.
Built on top of binary packages from the SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 3 (SP3) release, openSUSE Leap 15.3 is fully binary identical with the upstream operating system, unifying feature sets to make the seamless migration experience from openSUSE Leap to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) almost instantaneous.
Highlights of openSUSE Leap 15.3 include support for the latest Xfce 4.16 desktop environment, which is now available as an option in the installer alongside the KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS and GNOME 3.34 desktops, as well as a standalone Live ISO image. In addition, this is the first release to replace the i3 tilling window manager with the Sway tiling Wayland compositor and window manager.
The newest minor version of openSUSE Leap is the most recent, rock-solid addition to the openSUSE 15.x series that carries all the positive attributes of its predecessors. There is one huge change from the previous Leap versions. openSUSE Leap 15.3 is built not just from SUSE Linux Enterprise source code like in previous versions, but built with the exact same binary packages, which strengthens the flow between Leap and SLE like a yin yang.
“The software craftsmanship of this release makes server, workstation, desktop and container use on openSUSE Leap a desirable distribution for IT professionals, entrepreneurs, hobbyists, small businesses and educational practitioners,” said release manager Lubos Kocman.
OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 is now officially available as this latest openSUSE Linux distribution release built using the same exact binary packages as SUSE Linux Enterprise.
The openSUSE Leap 15.3 release is based on SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3 and will see at least eighteen months of updates.
OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 pulls in the DNF 4.7 package manager, the Xfce 4.16 desktop is now an offered option, and a wide variety of other updates. Also new to openSUSE Leap 15.3 is now supporting IBM Z and LinuxONE/s390x systems.
The latest stable version of openSUSE Linux distribution - openSUSE Leap 15.3 is now available. In this post, we round up the release with changes and download details.
OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 has been released. "There is one huge change from the previous Leap versions. openSUSE Leap 15.3 is built not just from SUSE Linux Enterprise source code like in previous versions, but built with the exact same binary packages, which strengthens the flow between Leap and SLE like a yin yang." There are a lot of new features as well, see the announcement for details.
Last year, with openSUSE Leap 15.2 release they aimed to close the gap between SUSE Linux Enterprise by building it with the same binary packages used in the enterprise version.
This would ease up the migration process for the deployments if anyone switches to the SUSE Linux Enterprise after testing with openSUSE. Also, openSUSE Leap will be the easy choice for development teams for testing.
Finally, with openSUSE Leap 15.3 release, that is a reality. Here, I shall highlight the key changes of this release.
Event-driven architecture was an evolutionary step toward cloud-native applications, and supports serverless applications. Events connect microservices, letting you decouple functions in space and time and make your applications more resilient and elastic.
But events come with challenges. One of the first challenges for a development team is how to describe events in a repeatable, structured form. Another challenge is how to work on applications that consume events without having to wait for another team to hand you the applications that produce those events.
This article explores those two challenges and shows how to simulate events using CloudEvents, AsyncAPI, and Microcks. CloudEvents and AsyncAPI are complementary specifications that you can combine to help define an event-driven architecture. Microcks allows simulation of CloudEvents to speed up and protect the autonomy of development teams.
In this article, I will demonstrate how to use Apache Camel applications in Red Hat Fuse 7.8 to produce and consume messages from Red Hat AMQ 7 or its upstream project, Apache ActiveMQ Artemis. This approach uses AMQ Core Protocol Java Message Service (JMS). Users who want to migrate from Red Hat Fuse 6 and Red Hat AMQ 6 to Red Hat Fuse 7 and Red Hat AMQ 7 will also find this tutorial helpful.
Kubernetes is a robust yet complex infrastructure system for container orchestration, with multiple components that must be adequately protected. In order to know how to more effectively secure your Kubernetes environments, it is important to understand the architecture of Kubernetes itself as well as where and how to focus efforts on valuable mitigations.
This is the 40th edition of the Kafka Monthly Digest. In this edition, I’ll cover what happened in the Apache Kafka community in May 2021.
Today at OpenJS World, IBM announced our contribution of LoopBack to the OpenJS Foundation as an incubating project. LoopBack is an extensible Node.js and TypeScript framework for building APIs and microservices that connect to databases, services, and infrastructure with minimal coding.
We believe that joining the OpenJS Foundation will help the project continue to grow its community contributors base through open governance within the foundation.
While enterprises throughout the world have embraced the concept of digital transformation, these transitions are often less successful than one would expect. According to a 2020 study from BCG, only 30 percent of transformations met or exceeded their target value and resulted in sustainable change.
However, many enterprises are accelerating their digital transformation efforts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. IDG reported that 59 percent of IT leaders are increasing digital transformation efforts as a result of pandemic pressures.
Policy-based Decryption (PBD) is a collection of technologies that enable automated unlocking of encrypted volumes of hard drives on physical and virtual machines using a variety of unlocking methods. When the unlocking method uses a special network server, we call it Network-Bound Disk Encryption (NBDE).
As you can see in many recent releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat is committed to bringing improvements to PBD and NBDE. This article attempts to introduce some of them.
CloudLinux OS Solo comes with a high degree of automatization, reducing risks associated with manual operations.
CloudLinux OS Solo is a new commercial Linux distro based on RHEL built by the creators of the established CloudLinux OS. CloudLinux is also the owner of the community-driven open-source project AlmaLinux, which aims to be 1:1 binary compatible CentOS drop-in replacement.
This is why CloudLinux has developed its Solo Operating System, providing businesses with a fully supported and stable OS that is simple to administer and tune for optimal performance. Targeted as a low-cost WordPress optimized Linux OS for small businesses with one hosting account, it incorporates a range of features needed for growing businesses that include website reliability, performance, and SEO enhancement. The simple and straightforward UI provides a clear user flow, making website management more efficient. The OS is also fully compatible with popular applications, including cPanel, WordPress and other popular tools.
The CloudLinux OS Solo has been developed to efficiently monitor managed servers with enhanced scalability and flexibility. This offers end-users a better experience and offers hosting companies market differentiators and process efficiencies. OS Solo offers high-quality hosting services that provide the framework for online business owners to expand their business operations smoothly and seamlessly.
The Fedora Council is running the first Annual Fedora Contributor Survey and we want to hear from you! The survey will be open to take for the month of June, and there is a shiny Fedora Badge to earn. Our goal is to gather authentic and valuable feedback to better support the Fedora contributor community. We plan to analyze the results and share findings at Nest with Fedora, 2021. Take the Annual Fedora Contributor Survey today!
Linux Mint devs have announced a new XApp (what Mint calls its homegrown apps) will feature in the upcoming Linux Mint 20.2 “Uma” release. Named Bulky, its aim is evident: let users bulk rename files in the Cinnamon and MATE desktops.
Now, batch renaming files in Linux isn’t a task lacking options. A number of apps catering to this task exist, ranging from command-line based batch renaming utilities to use-friendly GUI apps.
At the beginning of May, the speakers & moderators of the event organized by Canonical went to the Italian virtual space and enjoyed the presence of experts from DXC, GARR, and Canonical, who shared with us their knowledge about multi-cloud infrastructure.
With regret, we have to inform you that Aaron Farias Martinez’s involvement in the Ubuntu Community will be on pause for an indefinite period of time. After discussions, the Community Council saw no other course of action but to ask him to refrain from his activities in the project, which did not reflect behavior acceptable in the Ubuntu Community.
Making a phone that avoids Big-Tech spying is one thing (yep, we did that). Making a convergent operating system that is not Android nor iOS is another (yep, we did that too). But manufacturing that phone in the USA is a feat that few thought possible (yep, did that just now). Not only have we proved it’s possible… it’s shipping.
Purism’s Librem 5 USA offers consumers a privacy-first smart phone with a secure supply chain
Purism begins shipping its newest privacy-first smartphone, Librem 5 USA. The smart phone retains the software security and privacy features of the Librem 5 while adding a transparent, secure supply chain with manufacturing in the USA. This makes it one of the most secure alternatives to the iOS and Android phones offered by the big tech companies.
The Librem 5 is a phone built on PureOS, a freedom respecting, open source, and fully verifiable operating system that is neither based on Android nor iOS. It has unique hardware kill switches to disconnect the cellular modem, WiFi and Bluetooth, and microphone & cameras. The premium upgrade—Librem 5 USA—additionally sources its components via a controlled and secure US supply chain, with full electronics manufacturing done at the Purism operations headquarters in the United States. The new Librem 5 USA adheres to strict US labor, environmental, and materials laws with US-based staff. It brings together trusted hardware and secure software—all in one phone.
Vecow’s compact “VAC-1000” runs Ubuntu Server on a Foxconn FXN3102 with 24 Cortex-A53 cores and a choice of Lightspeeur 2801S and Hailo-8 NPUs. Features include 16GB DDR4, 64GB eMMC, 2x GbE, 2x USB 3.0, SATA, and M.2 expansion.
Like most embedded system manufacturers, Vecow focuses on Intel-based products. Yet earlier this year the Taiwan-based company released an i.MX6 UL powered VIG-120 IoT gateway for electric vehicles and it has now unveiled a similarly compact and Arm/Linux-driven VAC-1000 series. The rugged, 170 x 118 x 40mm system features a Foxconn FXN3102 SoC with 24 up to 1GHz Cortex-A53 cores and offers a choice of GTI Lightspeeur 2801S (VAC-1000) and Hailo-8 (VAC-1100) NPUs.
Inkplate 6PLUS is an updated version of Inkplate 6 ESP32 powered 6-inch ePaper display that was introduced in 2019, wand comes with a higher 1024 x 758 resolution, and the addition of a touchscreen and a frontlight.
Just like the original product, Inkplate 6PLUS makes use of recycled e-paper displays without thousands of screens currently in stock. Refresh performance per pixel is faster and similar to Inkplate 10, which leads to a complete screen refresh being about as fast as on the original Inkplate 6 despite the higher resolution.
While diabetes is still very much a serious disease, medical advancements over the past few decades make it much easier to live with. Wearable glucose monitors in particular provide a convenient way for people to keep an eye on their blood sugar, so they can get the extra insulin that they need before they start feeling the effects of low blood sugar. DiaFit is a customizable glucose monitor system that gives people options and it relies on an Arduino Nano 33 IoT board.
Most wearable glucose monitors available today, like the popular FreeStyle Libre 2, are small patch-like devices that stick to the skin. They connect through Bluetooth to a separate device that users can check to see their blood sugar levels. Those are often either bulky units that take up space in a purse or pocket, or wearable gadgets that resemble smartwatches. DiaFit is modular and gives people more options.
Joysticks are common input devices widely used in games, but in some cases they can also replace mouse when we need to attach them in a small space. Joysticks can work with Raspberry PI Pico as this microcontroller has analog inputs
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to connect and put into work an analog joystick with Raspberry PI Pico, using MicroPython.
Are you one of those who are interested in electronics but find it intimidating at the same time? You’ve probably been thinking of your first electronics project but not sure how and where to start. Suppose you at least have a decent understanding of electronics concepts like circuits, current, voltage, power, and integrated circuits. In that case, there’s a tool that can help you get started with your dream electronics project.
Arduino is an open-source electronics platform with simplified hardware and software to make learning easy for novices but flexible enough to be used by professionals. The Arduino was born in 2005 out of the collaborative effort of the faculty and students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (IDII) in Ivrea, Italy. The goal was to provide students at the Institute with low-cost, easy-to-use circuit boards for their electronics projects. Unexpectedly, Arduino soon reached a wider audience – students, hobbyists, programmers, and even professionals. What makes Arduino so popular? Read on to know more about this development board that is well-loved by electronics enthusiasts.
Along with various open-source projects leaving the Freenode IRC network following infighting/managerial changes at Freenode, Fosshost that provides web hosting services for many open-source projects also shifted from Freenode to Libera.Chat. But now this week, Fosshost announced they have entered into a long-term partnership with Freenode.
Last week this not-for-profit hosting provider announced they would be moving their IRC presence to Libera.Chat from Freenode. But the plot twist now is a new announcement made on Tuesday that they have entered into a long-term partnership with Freenode Limited and Andrew Lee.
Fosshost C.I.C, a UK non-profit provider of cloud computing services for FOSS, enters into a long term partnership with Freenode Limited ('freenode').
Work has begun, and the two organizations have directed staff toward constructing long-term plans for freenode on the Fosshost network. In the immediate, Fosshost staff will begin assisting the volunteer team at freenode and enter long term planning and conversations about immediate needs, including with infrastructure and hosting IRC nodes, web teams, and the IRC network's platform and operations.
In the near term, the two projects will partner to launch co/cross branded public and tenant-facing SaaS offerings, available BYOD or levering the combined network for DNS.
Firefox 89 would not have been possible without our community, and it is a great privilege for us to thank all the developers who contributed their first code change to MR1, 44 of whom were brand new volunteers!
Lots of progress on the Glean Dictionary since I made the initial release announcement a couple of months ago. For those coming in late, the Glean Dictionary is intended to be a data dictionary for applications built using the Glean SDK and Glean.js. This currently includes Firefox for Android and Firefox iOS, as well as newer initiatives like Rally. Desktop Firefox will use Glean in the future, see Firefox on Glean (FoG).
Mozilla offers GPG signing to let you verify the integrity of our Firefox builds. GPG signatures for Linux based builds are particularly important, because it allows Linux distributions and other repackagers to verify that the source code they use to build Firefox actually comes from Mozilla.
We regularly rotate our GPG signing subkey — usually every two years — to guard against the unlikely possibility that the key has been leaked without our knowledge. Last week, such a rotation happened, and we switched over to the new signing subkey.
The new GPG subkey’s fingerprint is 14F2 6682 D091 6CDD 81E3 7B6D 61B7 B526 D98F 0353, and will expire on 2023-05-17.
LibreOffice's Print Dialog in GTK4 Port with fancy "suggested-action" blue "Print" button.
The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice.
We are looking for an individual or company to implement automated ODF filter regression testing.
The default file format of LibreOffice is ODF, the Open Document Format. From time to time, there are regression bugs reported towards these filters, that involve loss of data. The respective unit tests do not provide sufficient coverage to prevent these regressions to happen.
This article will cover a list of useful “static site” generators that can be used to generate static sites on Linux. A static site is a full-fledged, multi-page website or a single webpage that delivers content “as is” from servers. There are no dynamic components in these websites that can change based on certain events or user interactions. Everything is fixed and what you see is what you get. You can sort of think about them as ebooks that can be viewed in web browsers. Note that some developers do add some dynamic components to static sites by embedding code from third-party services and plugins (comment system for example), but the main core remains static.
Handesk is a nifty open-source solution for a helpdesk that helps them organize their customer services, have multiple teams with multiple users by having a powerful simple Ticketing system.
The project gained popularity among PHP developers. It is built primarily with PHP. Handesk looks very nice, and it is elementary.
It is originally developed (by At Revo Systems www.revo.works) a modern Laravel-based App. It was released under the MIT license.
Guess you have an e-commerce store business, or a product, and it is growing, gaining more customers, then you get many questions lined up. The problem is that your team cannot provide a timely response to all of them, unanswered questions not being able to give instant support to customers makes all the difference in having happy customers and having no customers at all this is where ticket system comes in with.
By using the ticketing system, help desk team can view and answer all the tickets from a shared inbox either from their desktop or a mobile device a shared inbox allows them to see who is working on a ticket which tickets are pending, review customer history and even assign tickets to other agents and more.
Trudesk is an open-source Web-based HelpDesk solution. It is started in 2014. It helps to keep workloads organized and simple. Trudesk was built with Node.JS and MongoDB.
Trudesk has to make the customer's experience good as possible. All client communications come together under one solution.
It works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. It also has an online demo. and full documentation.
The Free Software Foundation announced on June 1, 2021 that it would no longer require and assignment of rights from contributors to GCC (GNU C Compiler) project. Instead, it will require a DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin), following the practice lead by the Linux Foundation for the kernel.
This move brings the GCC project into line with community practice, and it’s a welcome development. Over the years, various contributors had refused to agree to the FSF’s contribution assignment agreement, a document that is unusual in both substance and form. As to substance, while assignments for contributions were more common a couple of decades ago, today they are quite rare; most open source projects today either use license in=out (with or without a DCO), or a CLA with a non-exclusive license grant. As to form, the FSF’s assignment contains some truly unique language about patents* that patent licensing lawyers find perplexing, causing companies to balk at making contributions to FSF projects simply because they can’t parse the terms.
Given the widespread rejection by open source communities of CLAs, the FSF’s outlier stance on its contribution terms over the years has been surprising. Its premise that “Our ability to enforce the license on packages like GCC or GNU Emacs begins with a copyright assignment” was never exactly correct. It’s the kind of statement that looks good on paper, but doesn’t make so much sense in practice. It is true that only a copyright owner or exclusive licensee can enforce a copyright. See HyperQuest, Inc. v. N’Site Sols., Inc., 632 F.3d 377, 382 (7th Cir. 2011). But that’s because a court does not want to be asked by a plaintiff to enforce a copyright, when other parties, who are not before the court, have the right to grant licenses to the defendant and inoculate the defendant from the claim.
I am not, and SFLC is not, counsel to FSF, the GNU Project, or the GCC Steering Committee. We do not speak for any of them. I have read the GCC Steering Committee statement on copyright assignment, and on that basis I can give an independent legal opinion.
[...]
The GCC Steering Committee has decided, on the “inbound” side of its projects, not to require copyright assignment to FSF for contributions. Copyright assignment to FSF was traditionally required for “core” GNU Project components. Instead, the Steering Committee has decided to allow contributors to keep their own copyrights, if they wish. Such contributors can submit a Developer Certificate of Origin, stating that the contribution is their own work, or the work of others who have given them authority to certify origin, and that they have the necessary rights to make the contribution. This is the mechanism by which the Linux kernel project, among other non-FSF managers of GPL’d code, accept contributions to their works.
When the Free Software Foundation (FSF) recently returned its disgraced founder Richard M. Stallman (RMS) to its board, the FSF board hadn't reckoned with how others would see his return. Even the GCC Steering Committee, which oversaw the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) free software's primary collection of programming language tools, removed Stallman, the original GCC creator, from its membership. Now, the GCC Steering Committee has relaxed its decades-old requirement that new and modified GCC code should have its copyright assigned to the FSF.
It has been a while since my last report. In my last post, I've mentioned GDNative, but since I've done only a bunch of "boring" stuff, I ended up not writing anything about it. Work on GDNative is not completed yet, so maybe I'll have something interesting to report later on. For now, let me show what was done on GDScript.
Welcome to the June 2021 edition of the monthly Fortran newsletter. The newsletter comes out at the beginning of every month and details Fortran news from the previous month.
Grown-up software developers know perfectly well that testing is important. Butââ¬â°—ââ¬â°speaking here from experienceââ¬â°—ââ¬â°many aren’t doing enough. So I’m here to bang the testing drum, which our profession shouldn’t need to hear but apparently does.
Code Blocks is an open source IDE written in C++ and ideal for C, C++ and Fortran development. It is cross-platform and runs on Linux, macOS and Windows.
Code Blocks is lightweight and fast. It supports workspaces, multi-target projects, inter project dependencies inside workspace.
You get syntax highlighting, code folding, tabbed interface, class browser, smart indentation and more. You can also extend the feature of the IDE via plugins.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn to install Code Blocks on Ubuntu-based Linux distributions.
A binary search is a searching algorithm used to search target elements in a container where elements must be arranged in ascending order. Generally, binary search is used to search the index number of the target element in a sorted array. The binary search uses the divide and conquers approach, in which it divides the array into equal parts until it finds the target element.
A Binary search algorithm is implemented iterative as well as a recursive statement. Binary search is more efficient and faster as compared with linear search.
In this article, we will cover function overriding in the C++ programming language. C++ supports runtime polymorphism. In function overriding, the child class redefines the function which is already defined in its parent class.
It enables the programmer to provide derived class-specific functionality (even though it is defined in the base class).
Now, we will see a few examples and understand the function overriding concept in C++.
I wrote a program that got exactly one user that is not me and is used once a week. Hence, I can proudly claim to be 520% efficient. The result can be found at the bottom of each Raku Weekly News. While casting my Raku spells I once again had felt the urge for a simply but convenient way to inline fragments of html in code. The language leans itself to the task with colon pairs and slurpy arrays.
A variable is a place to store an object in the computer’s memory. This article explains how to declare a variable using the builtin command called to declare. It then describes the meaning of variable attributes and gives some examples. After that, some predefined variables are talked about. The name of a variable is the name given to by the programmer.
In the ordinary execution of commands, one command is executed after another. The first command is executed, then the next command, then the command after, and the one following, and so on. Imagine a script with one hundred commands, with each command in a line. It is possible to have two, three, or more consecutive commands that repeat in different portions of the script. In other words, the same segment of commands occurs after different unique commands, as the script is observed from top to bottom.
It would be better to have the segment of commands as one group when it should first occur. Then, simply call the group each time the group is needed down in the script. In order to do that, the group needs to be given a name.
A function is a named group of commands that is called whenever it is needed, down in the script. The group of commands is not executed when the function is defined at the top of the script. The group is only executed when the function is called.
The title of this post may sound a little strange. A data CSV is already a table, isn't it? With fields separated by commas?
True, but the data ops demonstrated below aren't so simple. The first one comes from a 2019 Stack Exchange question. Given this CSV (I'll call the file "datacsv")...
In the grip of a nor’easter, you come bearing grief, have in pieces not come in peace. You arrive bladed with certainty. You slam shut the car door and smolder before the locked cabin, rough trip up the Hudson as you distracted yourself with a list of flowers awaiting deft penmanship to groom them tight and blow them clean. News of your brother’s death intercepted your drive to this residency, fellowship among the crude Madonnas of empty mailboxes draped in robes of days-old ice. You have not written about the passing of family before, their antagonistic absences. Intrusive their teething tombstones in the brain. Pill after pill to sleep, to create, to erase, you swallow and scratch into a notepad what the frozen earth refuses: bougainvillea, lilac, burning bush. Another close kin added to the Bible’s kept obituaries. You hated your brother’s left eye, unruly wanderer settling away from you and observing a world you could not sense. Glossy ivy in all its tenure, the tender fingers of buckeye. The white page frozen before you like rime. You dig and discover what you already knew: decaying kin, meandering roots catching his beautiful ankles. You were looking for a way out through beauty but beauty only goes where needed. On the pad you write: enough what you’ve had, how much more of you there is, how much of you will be left when you’re gone.
Daddy, you always wake up at that hour. Not in my time zone, but in the deceased’s time zone, at that hour.N Daddy, a new daddy showed up like the way you whisper inside my crying.N His close-cropped hair was as wintry as the dawn and his buttocks were smaller than cherries, poking the well of my tears.N Is it Daddy? No, bird. Is it bird? No, a face, like snow flurries, like white flour that I stir with my hand. My face vanishes after bird lands on it and takes off.N Only the quiet echoes of adverbs or absence of adverbs remain in the spot where my face was.N I’m whitish like life that disappears even before it has a name. My head becomes empty like the North Pole made of paper.N I cover my eyes with my right arm and swoon on Verona Cathedral’s cold floor. I thought it was that hour again.N Daddy, your time of death is 11. Daddy, I had a premonition of your death at 4 in the morning. I shouted, Daddy! out the window in my dream. One bird flew by. Bird’s neck was creepy like the night bus driver’s neck—somehow it was like yours,Daddy.N Everyone gathered at the cathedral lights a candle for each of the deceased and sings Assumption of Mary. Today is National Liberation Day in Korea.N Like water leaking from the ceiling. Cold birds one by one.N Daddy, you’re a tiny coat, the size of my palm. You’re wearing a little overcoat like the ones newborns are dressed in.N You endure the coldness of death like a tiny, shrunken lifeN Daddy, when your delirium begins the Korean War starts up again. Daddy, you always crawl onto the battlefield, carrying a shotgunN The blanket falls down from your bed and, Daddy, your candle keeps flickering in the trenches of whichever side. Mommy’s a nursing officer, and I’m a medic. We charge toward the screaming soldier.N Mommy and I kept asking you, Daddy, do you know who I am? Daddy, do you know who I am? Daddy who has forgotten nouns and verbs answered, Already earlier already earlier, shouting only the adverbs again, already earlier already earlier.N I leave the cathedral and pull a suitcase as noisy as an ambulance, with my left hand, then my right, back and forth. What’s inside my bag? Are you in there, Daddy? Tiny Daddy wrapped in white paper, like a gift wrapped in North Pole.N Daddy, when the little overcoat that brings you wherever flutters the rippling landscape that has lost its owner and its weight follows me.N After we are all dead the world left only with adverbs enfolds me.N In between already and earlier.NN (Translated by Don Mee Choi)
The pandemic served as a stark reminder of at least two things: that the nuclear family is not enough and that schools can't be its sole safety net.
The fire had broken out in the attic of the University of Cape Town's Jagger Reading Room after a wildfire that swept across the slopes of the city’s Table Mountain amid high winds on April 18. The library's reading room and everything inside fell victim to the flames.
"There's nothing left but a few charred books," Löhr said, adding that nothing was salvageable.
The situation was different in the basement beneath the reading room, where the special collections are held. There, the restorers were in demand.
In the four-month Battle of the Somme in 1916 some 125,000 British soldiers were killed compared to 127,000 dead so far in the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. Nobody has any doubt that the catastrophic loss of life in the First World War battle was greatly increased by the incompetent and overconfident leadership of General Sir Douglas Haig and General Sir Henry Rawlinson, who was in charge of day-to-day operations. Haig had earlier saved Rawlinson from being sacked so he felt compelled to carry out whatever his commander-in-chief told him to do, even when he knew that Haig’s decisions were wrong and likely to lead to the mass killing of British soldiers.
The similarities between Haig and Rawlinson a century ago and Johnson and Matt Hancock today are striking. In all four cases, leaders out of their depth turned a crisis into a calamity, but never paid a personal price for their failure because of subsequent British successes for which they claimed credit.
"Let's build a healthcare system that people aren't terrified to use," said one Medicare for All advocate.
In her introduction to The Undocumented Americans, Karla Cornejo Villavicencio reveals that some names and physical descriptions have been changed to protect the vulnerable. Or maybe, she adds playfully, they haven’t. Readers are thus forewarned when, midway through the book, she offers “Macondo” as the name of a pharmacy that sells prescription drugs to uninsured immigrants. The name of the pharmacy, the same as that of the famous fictional town in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, hints at an underlying goal of Cornejo Villavicencio’s debut: In order to capture—and protest—the ways that the press and politicians misrepresent undocumented Americans, she has sought to tell their stories in a radically new way that fuses journalism and creative writing.
Every other month, Jay Alexander Benitez would be hospitalized with pneumonia or other respiratory infections that stemmed from the profound brain damage he suffered at birth. “It was heartache,” the boy’s mother, Alexandra Benitez, said. “Being in the hospital scared him.”
Jay’s pulmonologist said that regular therapy with a nebulizer — a machine that delivers vaporized medication to the lungs to improve breathing — might prevent some of those illnesses. But Benitez said she was forced to wait months before the treatments could begin.
Under the new system, the variants of concern take on the following names: the hitherto so-called British variant B.1.1.7 becomes Alpha; the B.1.351 first discovered in South Africa becomes Beta, while the Brazilian P.1 becomes Gamma.
The so-called Indian variant B.1.617 is split into sub-lineages, of which the B.1.617.2 variant of concern becomes Delta.
The B.1.617.1 variant of interest is called Kappa.
Now that the European Union's General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) has pushed the big tech to state what they are collecting from their users, I decided to give a look on the privacy policy of MS Windows 10 -- the most widely used desktop/laptop operating system in the world -- and try to find out what is the bare minimum of data that Microsoft is collecting from a user.
Navigating through the jungle of the several and different Microsoft's privacy policies and webpages is not an easy task. Their "Privacy Statement" is 140 pages in length, and if you really want to delve into the details, they have a "Windows 10 & Privacy Compliance: A Guide for IT and Compliance Professionals" with nothing less than 1,243 pages containing six different privacy policies to the several versions of Windows 10!
As of June 15, 2022, Internet Explorer 11 will be officially retired from most versions of Windows 10, according to "The Windows Experience" blog post on May 19, 2021. Microsoft has spent much of the past couple of years just wishing that Internet Explorer would just go away. They even replaced it with Microsoft Edge, and then reworked Edge to use Chromium as the basis for its web browser.
Internet Explorer, despite all of its awfulness and non-adherence to established web standards (for a while, Microsoft thought its britches were big enough to entitle it to SET the standards, rather than follow the standards that EVERYONE ELSE had already agreed upon), had to be one of the absolute worst web browsers around. Yes, it did have a few shining moments, but mostly, it was just awful.
Internet Explorer was first released in August 1995, based on the Spyglass Mosaic web browser. Since Mosaic was produced by NCSA, a public entity, a much heavier reliance was placed on its commercial licensing partner, Spyglass. Initially, Spyglass delivered two versions of Internet Explorer. The first one was based entirely on NCSA source code, and the other was made from scratch by Spyglass, but conceptually modelled after the NCSA browser. Much to everyone's chagrin, Microsoft chose the Spyglass code model, rather than the NCSA code model.
The latest version of Internet Explorer is 11, and was released in 2013. Yes, nearly 8 years ago! It's the browser that refuses to die. The main reason is to support all the legacy websites and applications that vitally depend on IE to run. To facilitate the end of IE, Microsoft Edge has a built-in Internet Explorer mode (IE mode) for the times that those legacy IE websites and applications need to be accessed.
You might have noticed that the headline says that IE "dies" on June 15, 2022 ... sorta. Well here's the "sorta" part, spelled out in a "Note" after the first paragraph of the announcement on the Microsoft blog:
"This retirement does not affect in-market Windows 10 LTSC or Server Internet Explorer 11 desktop applications. It also does not affect the MSHTML (Trident) engine. For a full list of what is in scope for this announcement, and for other technical questions, please see our FAQ."
So, we may not be "officially" done with IE just yet. But, come June 15, 2022, there might just be a LOT fewer users of it than before. We can only hope. After all, hope springs eternal.
Jean-Pierre noted that JBS USA, which is the nation’s top beef producer, had notified the White House on Sunday that they had been hit by a ransomware attack, the same type of attack recently used by a Russian-based cyber criminal group that forced Colonial Pipeline to shut down systems for a week.
The suspected ransomware attack prevented the USDA from publishing wholesale beef and pork data as well as shutting down slaughterhouses.
Details are still emerging about the extent and severity of the attack — which became apparent to JBS on May 30th, and was disclosed to staff in a memo on the 31st — but it has caused some of the largest slaughterhouses in the US to shut down already, and at least one in Canada. According to Bloomberg, JBS has suspended its own IT systems in Australia and North America, though the company’s backup servers appear to be unaffected. Naturally, the shutdowns of computer systems and physical plants are likely to cause supply delays.
There have been more than 40 publicly reported ransomware attacks against food companies since May 2020, said Allan Liska, senior security architect at cybersecurity analytics firm Recorded Future.
JBS USA, which is primarily based in Colorado, is the largest producer of beef in the nation and one of the largest producers of poultry and pork. It is part of JBS Foods, which has locations in Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Canada and other parts of Europe.
IT systems are essential in modern meat processing plants, with computers used at multiple stages including billing and shipping.
JBS is also Australia’s largest meat and food processing company, with 47 facilities across the country including abattoirs, feedlots and meat processing sites. JBS employs around 11,000 people.
JBS USA said in a statement from Greeley, Colorado, on Monday that it was the target on Sunday of an “organized cybersecurity attack” affecting some of its servers supporting its North American and Australian IT systems.
A statement from the company's American arm on Sunday said it had determined that was the target of an organised cyber-attack.
Monday was Memorial Day in the US, the equivalent of Anzac Day on this side of the world.
JBS has nearly a quarter of a million employees and provides beef, chicken and pork to countries around the globe.
Curiefense is a new, open-source application security platform that protects sites, services and APIs. It extends Envoy proxy to defend against a variety of threats including SQL and command injection, cross-site scripting (XSS), account takeovers (ATOs), application-layer DDoS, remote file inclusion (RFI), API abuse and more. By building it on top of Envoy, we benefit from the many advantages of Envoy such as service discovery, HTTP/2, and gRPC support, as well as seamless integration into cloud-native API gateway and service mesh deployments. Curiefense inspects every request and analyzes it according to security policies. Some of these policies are inherent, some are customized by the user, some are received from external threat feeds, and some are automatically generated and adapted as the threat environment evolves.
Anyone that has worked in IT long enough has heard of Salt as a leader in the configuration management area. Whether you’ve used it or not, you understand how much power can be gained with the platform. But Salt alone isn’t the perfect fit for everyone, especially if you need more than pure configuration management. As a command-line tool, Salt does require a learning curve that is significantly steeper than the tools traditionally used by most admins. You not only have to learn the commands to be used, but you also have to know how to create Salt states, modules, formulas and pillars.
The Open Organization community celebrates its sixth anniversary on June 02. That's six years of articles (hundreds), books (an evolving series), conversations (always inspiring), teaching (we love it), and learning. We're so proud to be a vibrant community of open experts and leaders working to bring open principles to organizations large and small. In fact, many of the Open Organization Ambassadors have made careers out of helping others become more open, and our community remains dedicated to helping leaders across various industries integrate open mindsets and behaviors into their communities and contexts.
Let's say you're building some form of appliance on top of general purpose x86 hardware. You want to be able to verify the software it's running hasn't been tampered with. What's the best approach with existing technology?
Let's split this into two separate problems. The first is to do as much as we can to ensure that the software can't be modified without our consent[1]. This requires that each component in the boot chain verify that the next component is legitimate. We call the first component in this chain the root of trust, and in the x86 world this is the system firmware[2]. This firmware is responsible for verifying the bootloader, and the easiest way to do this on x86 is to use UEFI Secure Boot. In this setup the firmware contains a set of trusted signing certificates and will only boot executables with a chain of trust to one of these certificates. Switching the system into setup mode from the firmware menu will allow you to remove the existing keys and install new ones.
Matthew Garrett has written up the long, complex series of steps required to build an x86 device that only boots code that the creator wants to run there.
Whaling or whale phishing attacks are a type of social engineering attack directed against specific wealthy individuals. The term whale phishing implies victims belong to strategic positions, usually economically.
This is the main difference between whaling or whale phishing attacks and other types of phishing attacks, usually launched massively.
Whale phishing or whaling is a type of digital fraud through social engineering which encourages victims to take a specific action, such as delivering funds to an attacker’s account. Whale phishing attacks are growing popular among scammers.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (squid), Fedora (dhcp), openSUSE (gstreamer, gstreamer-plugins-bad, gstreamer-plugins-base, gstreamer-plugins-good, gstreamer-plugins-ugly and slurm), Oracle (glib2 and kernel), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, perl, and tcpdump), Scientific Linux (glib2), SUSE (bind, dhcp, lz4, and shim), and Ubuntu (dnsmasq, lasso, and python-django).
We know that live patching has real benefits because it significantly reduces the downtime associated with frequent patching. But live patching is relatively difficult to achieve without causing other problems and for that reason live patching is not implemented as frequently as it could be. After all, the last thing sysadmins want is a live patch that crashes a system.
Reproducible builds are one of the tools that can help developers to implement live patching consistently and safely. In this article, I explain why reproducible builds matter for live patching, what exactly reproducible builds are, and how containers are coming to the rescue.
I’m very proud and excited to announce the release of PGPainless version 0.2! Since the last stable release of my OpenPGP library for Java and Android 9 months ago, a lot has changed and improved! Most importantly development on PGPainless is being financially sponsored, so I was able to focus a lot more energy into working on the library. I’m very grateful for this opportunity
According to research carried out by the privacy organization NOYB.eu, the majority of major EU Web sites do not offer an option to reject cookies at all. Many use deceptive colors and contrasts – so-called “dark patterns” – to cajole or trick users into clicking on the “accept” option. In total, 90% of the sites examined did not provide an easy way to withdraw consent to cookie tracking. NOYB.eu and its founder, the privacy activist Max Schrems, have had enough of this blatant disregard for the rights of users under the GDPR. They have launched a new campaign against what they call “cookie banner terror”:
Amazon says that Sidewalk will get switched on this coming June 8th (Tile functionality will be enabled June 14th), and that it plans to automatically opt in all the eligible devices. The company’s published list of devices includes: Ring Floodlight Cam (2019), Ring Spotlight Cam Wired (2019), Ring Spotlight Cam Mount (2019), Echo (third gen and newer), Echo Dot (third gen and newer), Echo Dot for Kids (third gen and newer), Echo Dot with Clock (third gen and newer), Echo Plus (all generations), Echo Show (all models and generations), Echo Spot, Echo Studio, Echo Input, Echo Flex.
These details are provided by Minister of Immigration Jean Asselborn, in his answer to a parliamentary question from the Left Party (Déi Lénk). The corresponding law provides for the possibility of both a body search and a search of an applicant's personal belongings, should there be doubts about their identity or background.
The Minister confirms that in the case of searches, mobile phones belonging to applicants may also be examined. However, Asselborn stressed in his reply that "this is not a forensic search of an electronic device, but a simple viewing of its contents".
The new app is initially a voluntary supplement to the physical card. You do not miss any offers or help from the public if you do not use the app, according to Jette Skive, the chair of the health and elderly committee from Kommunernes Landsforening.
The group said it would present more than 500 draft complaints over what it calls the "cookie ban terror."
NOYB said the pop-ups fail to give the user a simple "yes or no" option for permitting their data to be collected, instead providing only a very complex way to refuse to allow the site to track the user's activity.
The activists say making it "extremely complicated to click anything but the 'accept' button" is a breach of the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
NOYB said it was lodging the complaints with companies in 33 countries, including every European Economic Area member state except Malta and Liechtenstein.
The group says it had notified the companies, but would only file the legal complaints in a month, if the sites haven't rectified their "unfair" and "frustrating" design in the mean time.
In early 2017, a terrifying rumor began to drift around the internet. An iPhone software update was coming, and the anarchists at Apple had decided to add a new feature: Starting soon, your device would register every screenshot that you grabbed of a text conversation, and notify the other participants. Apple users imagined total mayhem, or the necessity of owning two phones—one for daily use, and one for photographing the other phone. Others dug in their heels and promised never to stop screenshotting their texts: “iOS 11 is gonna have screenshot alerts so if you get a notification from me you can pull up honestly I could care less,” one man wrote on Twitter. The feature never materialized, which we can be sure of because we still live in a society.
Denmark has now been added to the unofficial list of states who are believed to have treated supposedly friendly countries as if they were enemies. From 2012 to 2014, Germany's northern neighbor is said to have assisted the National Security Agency (NSA) in spying on the electronic communications of prominent German politicians: Chancellor Angela Merkel, Frank-Walter Steinmeier — then foreign minister, now German president — and Peer Steinbrück, the Social Democrats' chancellor candidate in the 2013 election.
Thanks to Edward Snowden, it has been common knowledge for some time that the NSA had targeted Merkel and Steinmeier. His 2013 revelations sent shockwaves around the world. It was always obvious that secret service agencies, even those of democratic states, are not simply harmless associations. But the degree of ruthlessness and lack of scruple astonished even political heavyweights like Angela Merkel, a victim of the NSA's surveillance. Her comment at the time — "Spying among friends is unacceptable" — has become a familiar bon mot. Because, in reality, anything goes. Spying knows no limits, either moral or geographical.
Denmark served as an outpost for NSA agents spying on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and other politicians across the Rhine, as well as French, Norwegian and Swedish personalities between 2012 and 2014, if not longer. That revelation, made public on May 30, was the result of an investigation by Danish public television (DR), with the cooperation of several European media outlets, including France’s Le Monde daily.
The inspiration of this analytical opinion piece comes from realizing that if we gave up our Internet privacy, maybe we have gained something else? And what would we further gain if we gave up other privacies? Then it dawned on me that maybe even the term privacy is harmful because of its multiple meanings, causing possible confusion and self-destruction.
Users of pre-paid local SIM cards will have to register their real names from next March in what the Hong Kong government describes as an overdue move to fight crime.
The Executive Council on Tuesday approved the new arrangements, which will allow law enforcement agencies to access users’ personal information when investigating crime.
People who buy pre-paid SIM cards will from March be required to provide their name, identity card number, date of birth, and a copy of their identification document.
A patent application from Apple showing how future Mac keyboards could have a fingerprint biometric button featuring a textured ceramic key cover has been published, Patently Apple reports. The iPhone giant was first granted a patent for Touch ID for MacBooks in 2015, but it was only one year later that Apple introduced Touch ID on a single key within the Touch Bar.
The European Union’s data regulator is investigating whether agencies and institutions in the bloc using Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure cloud services are sufficiently protecting EU citizens’ data.
The investigation could see EU institutions and bodies migrate away from cloud services provided by Amazon and Microsoft, experts have said.
The European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) launched its investigation into the use of Azure and AWS in light of the landmark “Schrems II” judgement. In July 2020 the EU’s highest court declared that Privacy Shield, the legal mechanism for transferring data between the EU and US, was no longer legal.
Telegram is a cloud-based instant messaging app that can be used for staying connected with family, friends and colleagues. The app was originated in Russia in 2013 by Nikolai and Pavel Durov, and is available for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows, macOS and GNU/Linux users.
NEW YORK — Academic Gilbert Achcar, in an article appearing originally in The Nation and picked up by New Politics, proves by his own example that what he calls “progressive democratic anti-imperialists” are not progressive. Rather, they serve to (1) legitimize reaction, and (2) obscure the singular role of U.S. imperialism, while (3) attacking progressive voices. Such anti-anti-imperialism provides left cover for the foreign policy of the U.S. as well as the U.K., where Achcar is based.
“A blow has been struck against the Republic’s democratic institutions and the Constitution,” said Celia Medrano, a human rights activist and former candidate for secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). “Democracy has been wounded, the damage done. We saw that danger to democracy with the unequivocal use of the armed forces for political coercion, starting with the military assault on the Legislative Assembly [last year], with no forceful action taken at the time.”
Bukele’s legislators removed the justices and attorney general without legal cause, and in their place named five justices who were not on the list of candidates for the process in place. Moreover, two of the de facto-seated justices are the targets of legal complaints and have direct ties to Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas (New Ideas) party.
Despite our differences with China—some of them profound—we would do well to prioritize pursuing mutually beneficial diplomacy and building collaborations to address the existential threats to survival over preparing for catastrophic war with the Middle Kingdom.
"Let that sink in for a minute," said Sister Helen Prejean, a prominent death penalty abolitionist. "Then take action."€
"We urge members of Congress to do whatever is necessary—including suspending the filibuster—in order to pass national voting and election administration standards."
HAVANA — Silvia from Miami, Eduardo from Hialeah, Abel from Lakeland. The names pour in on the donations page for “Syringes to Cuba” as Carlos Lazo promotes the campaign on his popular Facebook livestream. An energetic Cuban-American high school teacher in Seattle, Lazo created a group called Puentes de Amor, Bridges of Love, to unite Cuban Americans who want to lift the searing U.S. blockade that is immiserating their loved ones on the island.
This, however, does not preclude the fact that the 11-day Israeli war on the besieged Gaza Strip has fundamentally altered some elements about Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians, especially the Palestinian Resistance, in all of its manifestations.
Let us examine the main actors in the latest confrontation and briefly discuss the impact of the Israeli war and the determined Palestinian resistance on their respective positions.
This wasn’t 12-year-old Ibrahim Hammad’s first war, but his parents said it was the first war he’ll remember. The youngest of five children, Ibrahim was born in Gaza and has never left. Outside of narrow exceptions, Gaza residents are unable to leave the 140-square-mile territory. Ibrahim has Down syndrome, and his disability is apparently not worthy of an exception. There are therapies and services outside Gaza that Ibrahim cannot access.
What is the significance of this summit? For the Americans, according to the White House, it will restore a degree of predictability and stability in the tense bilateral relations. For the Russians, according to the Kremlin, it will be an opportunity to review the pandemic and various regional conflicts. Not exactly the importance of the Reagan-Gorbachev discussion of reducing nuclear arms or bringing an end to the Cold War. But an improvement over Biden’s calling Putin a killer in response to a journalist’s question.
What could be on the agenda? Following Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov last week on the Arctic, a serious agreement on climate change would be a major breakthrough. More sensitive would be discussions on Russian build-up on the eastern border of Ukraine, its takeover of Crimea, its election interference during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the SolarWinds cyberattack, the situation of the dissident Alexi Navalny or the Belarusian skyjacking and arrest of their dissident as well as the American claim of Russian offers of bounty on killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan. This long list could also include Russia’s role in Syria or eventual support for a solution to the Israel-Palestinian dilemma.
Biden ignores the crisis in Cuba at his own peril.
Once you have been active in politics for a few decades, you get used to the popular convulsions of support for Palestine every few years when Israel military action against Gaza becomes particularly intense. Then follows a ceasefire, the media move on and Israel resumes the daily routine of low level evictions, destruction of tree crops, imprisonments and murders that accomplishes the gradual extinction of the territories that the Western powers pretended to intend for a Palestinian state.
Flynn made the comments at an event in Dallas on Sunday that was attended by prominent peddlers of the QAnon conspiracy theory and the Big Lie.
"I want to know why what happened in Minamar (sic)can't happen here?" a member of the audience, who identified himself as a Marine, asked Flynn.
"No reason, I mean, it should happen here. No reason. That's right," Flynn responded.
I write a lot about the comms the Oath Keepers used to plan insurrection. There was the post about how they figured out, too late, not to plan an insurrection on Facebook; of the five counts of obstruction on the Oath Keeper indictment released Sunday, two pertain to Facebook. Then there was the post where I cataloged how many social media platforms were described in the last iteration of the indictment against them.
As Moscow seeks to assert its influence in the Arctic, military disputes have intensified in recent years, with both Russian and NATO forces carrying out maneuvers to display their ambitions.
[...]
Russia has invested heavily to develop the route, which cuts the journey to Asian ports by 15 days compared with using the traditional Suez Canal route.b
Paris, April 4, 2017. 4:00 am. A man breaks into the home of Sarah Halimi, a 65-year-old retired Jewish physician and educator. He beats and tortures her for over an hour while reciting verses from the Quran and repeatedly shouting, “Allahu Akbar!” [Allah is the greatest!”]. He uses anti-Semitic slurs and calls her “Sheitan” (Satan). He throws her from the balcony of her apartment and she falls to the ground, three floors below, dead. The police arrest him.
What happened was an unspeakable antisemitic murder. It was also the start of a process that brought to light once again the many serious and shameful dysfunctions that mark today’s France.
The answer is this: The Muslims who seek Israel's destruction do so because Israel is Jewish, not because Israel occupies the West Bank or Gaza.
First, the Muslim world sought Israel's destruction from the day Israel was established in May 1948, before it occupied a centimeter of the West Bank or Gaza.
Second, Israel does not occupy Gaza. Israel withdrew completely from Gaza 16 years ago.
Third, the Palestinians rejected a state of their own five times: [...]
The complaint described Williams as "self-radicalized" and said he first came to the FBI's attention when he was 16. That's when administrators at his high school reported that he was telling others he wanted to join IS and that the fatal terrorist attack on an Ariana Grande concert in England was justified by the way the singer dressed.
At the time, his mother told the FBI that Williams had been kicked off social media for his pro-IS posts and that she cut off the internet service at their home to keep him from accessing extremist websites, the complaint said.
In a heatwave, global warming driven by fossil fuels becomes an act of self-harm. It causes 1 in 3 heat-related deaths.
"While this buys some time, the fight to protect this unique and pristine area is not over," said an Environment America campaigner. "We're calling on Congress to establish permanent protections."
Six reasons why the EU isn't as green as it claims.
Biden's timetable is not enough to halt colossal climate damage.
The International Energy Agency’s new “Net Zero by 2050” report has won plaudits for its bold recommendations on how the world can limit warming to 1.5€°C, in line with the Paris Agreement:€ no investment in new fossil fuel projects, and an end to petrol and diesel cars by 2035.€
But the vision it presents governments is fantastic in another sense of the word, too.
Case in point, the Custer Gallatin National Forest just approved — then pulled — the South Plateau logging project on the border of Yellowstone National Park that called for clearcutting 5,551 acres. As if 8.6 square miles of clearcuts in grizzly bear and lynx habitat aren’t bad enough, the project will also require bulldozing in 56.8 miles of new logging roads.
The Forest Service says they pulled the decision because the Fish and Wildlife Service was too busy to sign off on the project’s effects on grizzly bears and lynx. And get this, since the project violates the Custer Gallatin Forest Plan, which requires 30% of the forests around Yellowstone to be old growth for grizzly security, the agency intends to issue a new Forest Plan that will allow the massive clear-cuts and impacts because the old growth standard will be eliminated. Adding fiscal insult to ecological injury, the Forest Service estimates taxpayers will lose $3.2 million subsidizing this deforestation.
Representative Yvette Herrell cried wolf to New Mexico State Land Commissioner in early May, 2020 with a letter that discusses the state’s having granted permission to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to conduct cross-fostering on state lands. The letter states, “These activities are occurring less than two miles away from the home of several of my constituents who have expressed to me their extreme alarm and fear for the safety of their family and livestock.”
Seems like someone is not clear on the concept of cross-fostering. It entails moving 10- to 14- day old wolf pups from captivity into established wild dens with litters of their own. The wild wolves have already denned at the site, independently. Depending on the litter size, a number of the wild puppies might be removed from the same den where the captive-bred babies are inserted to ensure that the overall pack size isn’t too great to risk its survival, which really amounts to no new wolves. And in any case, the cross-fostered pups are still teeny, tiny € and really shouldn’t be cause for “extreme alarm.” It’s almost like someone just felt like making a stink about nothing, because the introduction of € a few baby wolves onto state land is not a threat to anyone.
As folks may know, over the past few years, the Copia Institute (the think tank arm of Techdirt) has been building out a series of games -- both of the tabletop variety and for events (both in person and virtual). It began with an election simulation we helped to design with some political consultants (which got a lot of attention for bizarre reasons) and has included a number of other projects, including making a boxed version of a CIA training game, a scenario planning game that was used to inspire science fiction writers to write about the future of work, an election disinformation simulation game, to a fun game to explore a variety of future timelines by looking backwards from the future, and a game workshop to explore the future of AI (the results of which are about to be used in a new X-Prize competition).
But what exactly was the source of this media ascribed relief? Was it that justice finally had been served? That a police officer who willfully and recklessly took the life of a helpless man was found guilty when the vast majority of his colleagues are acquitted or rarely charged to begin with? Relief suggests that the worst is over, that one can find respite, that a weight has been lifted, that one can, unlike George Floyd, breathe again.
This use of the word is both odd and disturbing. Why not use an unequivocal “vindication” or even a definitive “day of reckoning”? The obvious answer, the dog whistle tooted by both liberal and conservative media, is that people were relieved because the verdict preempted the presumably inevitable rioting that they were certain would have ensued had Chauvin not been convicted. No wonder then, that long before the verdict was announced, the media had already evoked the L.A. riots, with the implication that a Chauvin acquittal would have produced a similar outcome, albeit on a national level.
Revolution.€ The working class is increasingly bereft of rights, blocked from forming unions, paid starvation wages, subject to wage theft, under constant surveillance, fired for minor infractions, exposed to dangerous carcinogens, forced to work overtime, given punishing quotas and abandoned when they are sick and old. Workers have become, here and abroad, disposable cogs to corporate oligarchs, who wallow in obscene personal wealth that dwarfs the worst excesses of the Robber Barons.
Former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn belongs in prison, but his corrupt political allies helped him go free. First, Attorney General Bill Barr attempted to dismiss all charges against him last spring, even though Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his foreign contacts; when a federal judge attempted to block that move, Donald Trump issued him a full pardon.
Support independent cartooning: join€ Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s€ Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!
The New York Times editorial page, to its credit, recognizes that newspaper endorsements still have the potential to influence elections—especially the Democratic primaries in which a substantial portion of paper’s readers, and those who might be influenced by the paper’s stance, are inclined to participate. Yet, bizarrely, the editors of the Times keep missing the strategic mark when it comes to helping the candidates and the causes they favor.
When Alice Sparkly Kat, a queer Chinese Brooklyn-based astrologer, started studying the planets in the early 2010s, there were few books about astrology, let alone ones by people of color. Last year, while teaching astrology to Cantonese- and Mandarin-speaking elders, she€ began to receive a lot of questions: Why is the West so central in astrological discussions and study, and what are its limitations? These conversations are what inspired them to write Postcolonial Astrology: Reading The Planets Through Capital, Power, and Labor.
"Democrats backed themselves into a corner a long time ago when they began sacrificing bold action for marginal wins," said People's Action. "Our 2022 strategy will finally kick this habit."
In “The Four Lost Men,” an elegiac short story written in the 1930s about his dying father’s memories of life in post–Civil War America, Thomas Wolfe memorably conjured up the era’s presidents: “My father spoke then of the strange, lost, time-far, dead Americans…the proud, vacant, time-strange, and bewhiskered visages of Garfield, Arthur, Harrison and Hayes…. Who was Garfield, martyred man, and who had ever seen him in the streets of life?… Who had heard the casual and familiar tones of Chester Arthur? And where was Harrison? Where was Hayes? Which had the whiskers, which the burnsides: which was which? Were they not lost?”
To Mar-a-Lago lapdogs wend To kiss Trump’s ring, lament his trials. They’re piling high upon his lap. The yelping can be heard for miles.
By any reasonable measure, the Freedom Caucus and its members are not conservative. Because of their disruptive tactics and rhetoric, their contempt for bedrock conservative values like the rule of law, and their embrace of the most radical populist in modern U.S. history, they are more akin to European far-right politicians like those in the Alternative fur Deutschland in Germany and Fidesz in Hungary. Traditional Republicans recognize that the Caucus and its members have nothing to do with the party they joined many years ago. Former House Speaker John Boehner, a more traditional Republican, gave an apt description of the caucus when he said in 2017, “They’re anarchists. They want total chaos. Tear it all down and start over. That’s where their mindset is.”
The misidentification of the Freedom Caucus as “conservative” is not the only example of the misuse of this term. At various points over the last four years, Donald Trump was called a “conservative” president. Certain policies, like the dismantling of environmental regulations or the promotion of laissez-faire economics, have also been erroneously called “conservative.” Various media outlets and personalities, from One America News to Glenn Beck, have likewise been mislabeled “conservative.” When The Washington Post tries to rectify the problem by labeling far-right activist Ali Alexander an “ultraconservative,” it only makes matters worse. An ultraconservative should be even more determined to uphold the status quo rather than, like Alexander, trying to undermine it.
The scope of what they won't do is breathtaking.
The GOP is increasingly defined not by its shared beliefs but by its shared delusions. This right-wing political party puts us all in peril.
"We must pass S. 1, the For The People Act. The future of American democracy is at stake."
Democratic lawmakers in Texas staged a dramatic walkout to prevent the Republican-controlled Legislature from passing a sweeping bill to rewrite election laws in the state. Critics say the bill will lead to mass voter suppression, especially of Black and Latinx voters, by eliminating drive-thru and 24-hour voting, as well as ballot drop boxes. The Republican bill would also make it easier for elections to be overturned even if there is no evidence of fraud. Trey Martinez Fischer, a Democrat representing House District 116 in the state Legislature, says the legislation would have “a tremendous impact” on ballot access in the state. “Just like every bad policy, Hispanics, Latinos and Asian Americans will be disproportionately impacted,” Fischer says. “The time is now for a national response.”
The Delhi High Court, on Monday, directed Twitter to submit details of its compliance with India’s revised Intermediary Guidelines in three weeks’ time. It also sought a response from the union government on a petition stating that the microblogging platform had not complied with the regulations that came into effect on May 25.
The court was hearing the plea filed by Amit Acharya on Friday, which also stated that Twitter had not designated a Grievance officer to respond to user complaints. In its ruling the court also told Twitter that it must comply with India's new IT rules (Intermediary guidelines and digital media ethics code) if it has not been stayed.
"These politically extremist, non-violent groups aim to establish an order according to their Islamist ideas by actively preventing integration, dividing Western societies into 'believers' and 'unbelievers,' rejecting equality and religious freedom.... They use democratic structures to undermine and ultimately abolish democracy." — CDU/CSU policy paper.
"The present focus on groups prepared to use violence has led to disregarding the ideological justification of violence. These politically extremist, non-violent groups aim to establish an order based on their Islamist ideas by actively preventing integration, dividing Western societies into 'believers' and 'unbelievers,' rejecting equality and religious freedom, and alienating Muslim youth from Western societies. They use democratic structures to undermine and ultimately abolish democracy." — CDU/CSU policy paper.
"Religious extremism doesn't come out of nowhere. On the contrary, it thrives in isolated parallel worlds that have nothing in common with our values. We urgently need to shed light on this and not only wake up when violence erupts." — Bundestag Member Nina Warken, Integration Commissioner, CDU/CSU parliamentary group.
An Yle investigation has found that the online video platform YouTube has become a breeding ground for Finnish anti-vaccine content due to the algorithm's failure to filter out conspiracy theories and religious propaganda when searching for the keyword koronarokote (coronavirus vaccine).
The investigation revealed that Finnish users rarely encounter videos created by medical experts and researchers when using the vaccine search term.
I keep pointing out that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. There are always going to be mistakes. And lots of them. We've spent years highlighting the many obvious mistakes that websites trying to make moderation decisions on thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of pieces of content are going to make every day. It's completely natural for those who are on the receiving end of obviously bogus suspensions to take it personally -- though there does seem to be one group of people who have built an entire grievance complex on the false belief that the internet companies are targeting them specifically.
Indian and Chinese soldiers clashed with iron rods, sticks, and stones last June in what was the deadliest clash between China and India in more than four decades.
New Delhi said Chinese troops had intruded into its side of the territory, triggering tensions. China had denied the transgression and accused Indian troops of provocative behavior.
Amid a crescendo of criticism from foreign and domestic observers over incompetent handling, the embattled and embarrassed government has blocked 100 critical tweets, including by opposition lawmakers, journalists and other civil society figures.
These events represent an escalating trend of suppressing free speech in India following a face-off with Twitter in February 2021. The government ordered Twitter to suspend 500 accounts and block access to several others amplifying the Indian farmer protests and highlighting the government’s poor handling. The government justification was to ‘curb misinformation and inflammatory content’. Such was the resolve of the government that when Twitter struck a defiant note — unblocking the accounts and disagreeing with the government’s assessment of the legality of the content — it served Twitter with a non-compliance notice, threatening jail for executives in India.
Qui Ziming was sentenced Tuesday in a courtroom in the eastern city of Nanjing. The court ordered the 38-year-old Qui to publicly apologize within 10 days, noting that he had openly admitted to his crime and apologized during an appearance on China’s state-owned broadcaster CCTV back on March 1.
Qiu Ziming — with over 2.5 million followers on China’s twitter-like Weibo — was sentenced to eight months in prison, the court in the eastern city of Nanjing announced Tuesday.
He is the first person to be jailed under a new provision of China’s criminal law that bans the “defamation of martyrs and heroes”.
People manning street booths calling on Hongkongers to remember victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre were harassed by passers-by and approached by police officers over the weekend, as the authorities warned the public against attending an annual candlelight vigil to commemorate its 32nd anniversary this Friday.
Hong Kong’s Security Bureau has warned Hongkongers not to take part in this year’s Tiananmen Massacre vigil on June 4, or commemorative long-distance run this Sunday.
Since May 20, dozens of anonymous people have called and sent text messages to Nkanga, an Abuja-based reporter with the BBC, angered over a recent documentary aired by the broadcaster, according to the journalist, who spoke to CPJ in a phone interview and shared copies of the threats.
Nkanga told CPJ that he had gone into hiding for fear for his safety.
“Nigerian authorities must promptly and thoroughly investigate the threats made to BBC journalist Peter Nkanga and ensure his safety,” said Angela Quintal, CPJ’s Africa program coordinator, in New York. “Death threats and systematic harassment can be a form of censorship, and authorities must take any attempts at intimidation seriously.”
Ahead of World Refugee Day on June 20, the One Free Press Coalition releases its monthly "10 Most Urgent" list with a spotlight on journalists forced to flee their homes or go into exile, as well as threats faced by journalists reporting at borders.
The type of threats that force journalists to leave their homes can vary, ranging from sustained harassment to physical and legal threats, or threats of imprisonment, all impeding their ability to live and work without fear. Journalists from all regions seek safety elsewhere when press crackdowns intensify, with recent examples in Myanmar and Ethiopia. When facing threats, local journalists, unlike international journalists who may be able to move more freely, often have no other option than to leave behind their homes and even their families. As CPJ found in a 2015 report, only about 17% of journalists who fled their countries were able to continue working during their time in exile.
The Biden administration must now "swiftly move to dismantle the Trump administration's other attacks on the asylum system, including the unconscionable Title 42 order," said one prominent ACLU attorney.€
Deliveroo was supposed to be the biggest IPO on the London Stock Exchange in a decade. The Amazon-backed, venture capital–fueled food delivery company operates in 12 countries. Despite having never turned a profit, the company was praised by UK Chancellor Rishi Sunak as a “true British tech success story” as it sought a valuation of $12 billion.
Shortly after the George W. Bush administration started bringing so-called “enemy combatants” to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba in 2002, Michael Ratner, a lawyer in New York City, gathered a group of colleagues at the Center for Constitutional Rights to discuss filing a suit on the prisoners’ behalf. When I asked him, some years later, what chance he thought he had of prevailing, he answered, “None whatsoever. We filed one hundred percent on principle.”
On April 27, a California state Senate subcommittee passed a bill to return oceanfront real estate stolen from a Black couple by white city officials in 1924 to the living descendants of its original owners. The vote brings the Bruce family one step closer to a restoration of their rightful inheritance. “This will be a precedent for this country,” Duane Yellow Feather Shepard, a Bruce family descendant and spokesperson, told me. “It needs to be studied by young people as to how they should proceed in trying to get justice for their families and their people in the African American nation within this white nation.”
"The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is rooted in the xenophobic history of our country... It is that same xenophobia that has fueled the thousands of anti-Asian incidents and crimes this past year."
Polk County, Iowa prosecutors are making a name for themselves. And that name is "Enemy of the First Amendment." Earlier this year, Polk County prosecutor John Sarcone tried and failed to convict a Des Moines Register journalist for attending a protest and attempting to comply with conflicting orders from law enforcement.
"The technologies that these programs employ only further entrench the criminalization of immigration and pose barriers to social and economic wellbeing."
Notes: Mnar Muhawish Adley is the founder and editor-in-chief of MintPress News. Abby Martin is founder of Media Roots and The Empire Files.€ Her recent documentary is Gaza Fights For Freedom. Nolan Higdon, author of€ The Anatomy of Fake News, teaches history and media studies at California State University,€ East Bay. He and Mickey Huff are the co-authors of the 2019 book United States of Distraction.
The Canadian government is facing pressure to declare a national day of mourning after the bodies of 215 children were found in British Columbia on the grounds of a school for Indigenous children who were forcibly separated from their families by the government. The bodies were discovered at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, which opened in 1890 and closed in the late 1970s. Over the span of a century, more than 150,000 Indigenous children were separated from their families and sent to residential schools to rid them of their Native cultures and languages and integrate them into mainstream Canadian society. “These children are just some of the children who died in the schools,” says Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada. “There are many others in unmarked graves across the country.” In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada concluded that residential schools were part of “a conscious policy of cultural genocide” against Canada’s First Nations population.
A major new report on police killings suggests far more people of color have died in police custody than previously known. The report by the Raza Database Project and UnidosUS found that deaths of Latinos, Asian and Indigenous peoples have been historically undercounted. Researchers documented the deaths of 32,542 people who have been killed by police since 2000, 60% of whom constitute people of color, who make up just 40% of the U.S. population. “We found many more killings than expected,” says Roberto Rodríguez, professor at the University of Arizona and director of the Raza Database Project, a network of researchers, scholars, journalists, activists and family members of victims killed by law enforcement. “There is no systematic effort to count, to collect this data. The FBI is supposed to, but they don’t. It’s up to the media and independent researchers, and it’s really difficult,” Rodríguez says. We also speak with Marissa Barrera, who became an advocate against police violence after police in Woodland, California, killed her brother, Michael Barrera, in 2017. “All the other families that I work with, they have similar stories just as bad,” Barrera says. “We go through the same things.”
Early on, Madigan tells us:
“Not long into my research, I realized that what happened in Tulsa in 1921 was scarcely an isolated event. It might have been the worst incident of its kind in our history but almost every month, American newspapers of that time carried new accounts of racial bloodshed in another town or city, new atrocities perpetuated against Black people by mobs of white people. Rather than an exception, I learned, what happened in Tulsa was a metaphor for that period of our history.”
The story of prosperity of Black communities in Tulsa, Oklahoma is incomplete without discussing their roots.
In 1997, the state Legislature created what was called the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, and it published its final report in 2001. It found that the city of Tulsa had conspired to destroy Greenwood.
"This Commission fully understands that it is neither judge nor jury. We have no binding legal authority to assign culpability, to determine damages, to establish a remedy, or to order either restitution or reparations," commissioners wrote. However, the report suggested that reparations to the Greenwood community "would be good public policy and do much to repair the emotional and physical scars of this terrible incident in our shared past."
According to the commission's report, the massacre destroyed some 40-square blocks in Greenwood. Nearly 10,000 people were left homeless as 1,256 homes were looted and burned down. And the thriving commercial district was destroyed — some of the finest Black-owned and operated businesses in the country, including hotels, restaurants, grocery stores, a theater, a roller skating rink, hospitals and doctors' offices, law firms and churches.
We've already noted how the Biden broadband plan is good, but arguably vague. As in, the outline proclaims that the government will boost competition and lower prices, but it doesn't actually get at all specific about how it actually hopes to do that. There are some promising aspects, like a pledge to embrace the growing wave of grass roots community broadband efforts popping up around the country, but again, it's not clear how that's going to happen. For example there are 17 state laws (usually written by telecom lobbyists) prohibiting such efforts, and federal efforts to shoot down those protectionists laws haven't gone well.
Over the weekend there was a bit of a reasonable fuss raised after Ars Technica noted that all of the various Amazon connected devices (including Alexa, Echo, Ring, etc.) would become part of a mesh network called Amazon Sidewalk, in which the devices would be sharing a tiny tiny bit of bandwidth across the network of devices. The idea behind the mesh network is kind of cool, and there are some clear benefits to using it.
If you use Alexa, Echo, or many other Amazon devices, you have only 10 days until you're opted in to an experiment that leaves your personal privacy and security hanging in the balance.
On June 8, the merchant, Web host, and entertainment behemoth will automatically enroll the devices in Amazon Sidewalk. The new wireless mesh service will share a small slice of your Internet bandwidth with neighboring Sidewalk-capable devices that don’t have connectivity. Sidewalk will also help your Amazon devices to a sliver of bandwidth from other Sidewalk users when you don’t have a connection.
The impact of not having key witnesses appear before committee has become increasingly obvious as clause-by-clause has proceeded. The reality is that the MPs may be well-meaning, but there is too much they simply don’t know about the bill and its implications. This includes the numerous terms that are not defined, the likely impact on creators, the consequences of discoverability, and the ability to implement provisions that are not found anywhere else in the world among them. Without that knowledge, many simply revert to platitudes about making web giants pay, instead of acknowledging the obvious: the committee’s study of Bill C-10 has been deeply flawed and embarrassingly incomplete. As MP Kevin Waugh told committee yesterday, “Bill C-10 is a disaster now. We need to take a step back.”
The Biden team appears to be aware of this. Administration officials propose to encourage new companies to deliver broadband, to add competition and thus contain prices.
But there is little evidence that phone and cable companies compete much on price. In many areas, there are one to three providers of high-speed access, and they can set prices as they wish without fear of losing customers.
Back in 2015, frustration at John Deere's draconian tractor DRM helped birth a grassroots tech movement dubbed "right to repair." The company's crackdown on "unauthorized repairs" turned countless ordinary citizens into technology policy activists, after DRM (and the company's EULA) prohibited the lion's share of repair or modification of tractors customers thought they owned. These restrictions only worked to drive up costs for owners, who faced either paying significantly more money for "authorized" repair (which for many owners involved hauling tractors hundreds of miles and shelling out thousands of additional dollars), or toying around with pirated firmware just to ensure the products they owned actually worked.
"Amazon's abysmal health and safety record is not an accident," the report states.
The company’s decision to overhaul its productivity targets coincides with a series of news reports that the rate of injuries at Amazon warehouses is higher than its peers in the logistics industry. Some employees have identified the fast pace of work as a contributing factor in repetitive stress injuries. Workers have also previously told Bloomberg that sometimes they are considered “off task” when they are visiting the bathroom.
Regulators in Washington state found there was a “direct connection” between Amazon’s employee monitoring and discipline system and musculoskeletal disorders among workers at a company warehouse in DuPont, Washington. Amazon said it would appeal the citation, which included a $7,000 fine, the Seattle Times and Reveal reported. During Amazon’s Prime Day sales rush last year, workers at a company warehouse in New York said Time off Task protocols made it impossible for them to abide by pandemic safety guidelines.
A recent case heard by the UK Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) in Claydon Yield-O-Meter v Mzuri Ltd aimed to clarify what constitutes public prior use. The judgement handed down, on the face of it, appears to be extremely harsh on the patent proprietor, or does it?
[...]
Interestingly, the burden-of-proof for public prior use is much higher at the European Patent Office (EPO) where the strict standard of ‘up to the hilt’ (T 472/92) must be proven, i.e. ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ (T 97/94). It is not sufficient that the alleged act is merely probable.
To succeed with a public prior use attack in opposition proceedings before the EPO, an opponent needs to show: (i) when the prior use occurred; (ii) what was made available to the public and (iii) the circumstances of the use, i.e. where, how and by whom (T 1856/11). If any one of these criteria are not met, the attack will fail.
The much-anticipated review into the legality of making oral proceedings by video conference at the European Patent Office compulsory has been postponed.
When commentators discuss innovation’s externalities, they often classify them into one of two categories. On the positive externalities, or “spillovers” side, legal and economics scholars often speak of the benefits innovation confers on other innovators. Future innovators profit from past innovation as they “stand on the shoulders of giants” to develop progressively new and better innovation. Discussion of innovation’s negative externalities, on the other hand, has mainly focused on social harms not directly related to future innovation that particular advances impose on third parties—the classic example being pollution. Thus, the common understanding is that innovation’s spillovers positively impact innovation (among other things), while innovation’s negative externalities are only indirectly related to society’s collective capacity for further innovation, if at all.
This Article challenges that view, arguing that innovation does impose negative externalities on contemporary and future innovators, thereby making it more difficult for them to innovate. It discusses three mechanisms by which these negative externalities arise. The first is through path dependencies. Path dependencies in innovation can limit the innovative potential of other innovators by effectively foreclosing particular areas of study or by directing innovation along less productive paths. A second mechanism by which innovation imposes negative externalities on other innovators is through the workings of social norms. Social norms that become entrenched in innovative communities can lead innovators to adopt sub-optimal research agendas and methodologies. Third, particular innovations may work on those who adopt them at a psychological level, changing their cognition and thought processes in ways that negatively impact their future ability to innovate.
Uncovering innovation’s hidden externalities has profound implications for discussions of innovation policy. Currently, the conventional wisdom holds that innovation’s spillovers should be addressed through innovation subsidies, while innovation’s negative externalities can be addressed by taxing the externalities directly. Recognizing that innovation has both positive and negative externalities for contemporary and future innovators, however, challenges the view that the conversation about innovation subsidies (like intellectual property, tax breaks, grants, and prizes) should concern itself only with innovation’s spillovers, and not with its negative externalities.
In reviewing whether the Patent Trial & Appeal Board (Board) correctly interpreted the meaning of “intercepting” in the context of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that the claim language and prosecution history supported the Board’s decision. The Court thus affirmed the Board’s construction and subsequent finding of obviousness. Uniloc 2017 LLC v. Apple Inc., Case Nos. 20-1403, -1404 (Fed. Cir. May 12, 2021) (Prost, C.J.)
Uniloc owns a patent directed to a system and method for using various VoIP features, such as caller-ID, call waiting, multi-line service, and different levels of service quality known as the “codec specification.” The patent explains that in order to generate revenue for these features, service providers must maintain control over which subscribers have paid for these additional features. To achieve that control, the system employs an enforcement mechanism that sits between the sender of the communication and the intended recipient. The enforcement mechanism ensures that both parties are authorized to use the particular features by intercepting the signaling message, determining whether the client is authorized, and filtering the signaling message based on the authorization. The majority of the claims require authorization related to only one service type. However, one of the claims (claim 18) requires authorization related to at least two service types.
New patent applications submitted by Tesla in 2020 but published Thursday have revealed a bit more information about the Cybertruck, which is currently slated to start shipping at the very end of this year or in early 2022. One includes (in rather grainy detail) a bunch of screenshots of the new UI Tesla has been working on. Another details how the company plans to integrate solar panel tech onto the retracting tonneau cover for the truck bed — something CEO Elon Musk said might be an option. And there even appears to be an application for what could be Tesla’s so-called “armor glass,” which memorably failed during an onstage demo in 2019.
Apple Inc.‘s successful agency challenge to a camera patent will stand after the Federal Circuit rejected the owner’s argument that the case should be reheard.
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board invalidated parts of Corephotonics Ltd.'s patent on a multi-aperture imaging system that fuses wide-angle and telephoto images.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the board’s ruling in a nonprecedential opinion, rejecting Corephotonics’ argument that the board issued its decision in violation of the appointments clause.
Millions of Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses in Europe, Africa and Canada are still awaiting clearance for use. India’s vaccinations drop as infections reach a new high.
"The public is being left in the dark as to the demands, influencing strategies, and full firepower of the Big Pharma lobby at a time when the debate over who gets to keep monopoly control of Covid-19 patents is raging."
This is a tariff (importation tax) case, so you might stop reading here. But, it also involves Ziploc brand food-grade sandwich bags. SC Johnson manufactures the bags in Thailand for US import.
There is a big (electronic) book known as the Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States (“HTSUS”) that is used to classify commercial imports. Each classification will have its own tariff rate, that will often also depend upon other factors such as the country of origin.
In this case, the Customs (part of Homeland Security) classified the bags under HSTSUS Subheading 3923.21.00, but SCJohnson argues that the proper classification is 3924.90.56, which would reduce the tariff from 3% ad valorem to 0% (duty free).
[...]
The United States Court of International Trade found that the bags could be classified under either heading and consequently chose what it deemed to be the more specific–bags made of ethylene. On appeal, the Federal Circuit has affirmed.
TikTok uses open-source, but its competitor, the Kuaishou Group, is betting on Linux and open-source software by joining the largest patent non-aggression community, Open Invention Network.
On June 1, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,756,507, owned by Monarch Networking Solutions LLC, an NPE and an Acacia Research entity. The ‘507 patent is generally directed to device-based dual-factor authentication using one-time passwords. The ‘507 patent is currently being asserted against Cisco, Meraki, and Duo Security.
In Korea, unlike for patents, utility models and designs, in the case of trademark infringement, the Supreme Court had ruled that use of a registered trademark which is identical or similar to an earlier trademark, does not constitute infringement of the right of the earlier trademark until a trial decision to invalidate the registration of the later-registered trademark becomes final and conclusive. This was because such use should be considered as “exercising the right holder’s own trademark”, and thus constitutes legitimate use of the registered trademark (Supreme Court Decisions 86Do277, July 8 1986, and 98Da54434, 98Da54441, February 23 1999).
The Supreme Court has granted certiorari in the procedural copyright case of Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz. Anyone who has registered copyrights know that the Copyright Office has a set of seemingly arcane and odd rules that often arise when registering a collection or series of works. A copyright owner that fits within the rules can save quite a bit on copyright office fees. In this case, the copyright owner seemingly lied to get a lower fee. In particular, during January 2011 Unicolors created 31 different fabric designs. It published 22 of those together as a collection, but the other 9 were not published by Unicolors. It then submitted all 31 to the copyright office and indicated that they had all been first published as a bundle. This saved them a few hundred dollars in governmental fees. Although I do not know, I believe that many copyright holders have taken similar steps.
[...]
But, as noted above, what have here is a relatively minor, but still knowing inaccuracy in the registration. And the question for the Supreme Court is basically whether the statutory statement requiring referral “in any case in which inaccurate information” is submitted to the copyright office include some implicit materiality standard?
The technical producer, VR Studio Zoan, worked on the project with 30 employees from seven different countries. Half of them - many of the 3D modelers, for example - are long-term Nightwish fans who were ready to put everything in the game for their favorite band. The specialties of the virtual world included a tavern with its many details, as well as a combination of high-end technology such as photorealistic scans and the latest Unreal Engine game engine technology that enables high-quality concert execution.
The makers of movies such as “Dallas Buyers Club,” “Rambo V: Last Blood,” and “The Hitman’s Bodyguard” are putting hosting companies that work with VPN services under pressure. In two separate lawsuits, Leaseweb and Sharktech stand accused of failing to terminate customers that have repeatedly been linked to copyright infringement.
FindAnyFilm was launched more than a decade ago to act as a search engine to deter people from pirating movies. Today the service took a significant step forward by adding Disney+ titles to its indexes but there are still major shortcomings. Despite being the leading streaming movie platform with more than 200 million subscribers, Netflix content is still inexplicably absent.
