Need a reasonably high-end Linux powered ultrabook? Slimbook think they have it ready with the Slimbook Executive. This is another "3K" laptop with a 16:10 2880x1800 screen and a sweet 90Hz refresh rate,.
Announced today, they claim "Our new ultrabook bests even our top sales champion, the Slimbook ProX. The Executive is even lighter, has a sturdier chassis with an elegant and minimalist design, a higher resolution display, larger battery and better I/O.". Not only that, they say it rivals the likes of the Microsoft's Surface Book or the Zenbook Ultralight from Asus.
Spanish PC vendor Slimbook sells laptops with a choice of Windows or Linux, and the company’s latest is the Slimbook Executive, a 2.2 pound notebook with a 14 inch, 2880 x 1800 pixel 90 Hz display and an Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor.
Tim Berners-Lee jumps the shark, Chrome OS is 10, KDE Korner, good things about all sorts of projects, our Linux frustrations, Android or iOS, and more.
00:00 = Welcome to DL 231 00:53 = Community Feedback: ProtonMail Tutanota & Other Mail Services 06:47 = How To Send In Your Community Feedback 07:13 = Digital Ocean: App Platform / Cloud ( https://do.co/dln ) 09:59 = End of the Linux Desktop: Fact or FUD? 38:19 = Bitwarden Password Manager ( https://bitwarden.com/dln ) 41:06 = Google Invests Into Hardening Linux Kernel with Rust Programming Language 49:22 = Linux Gaming: Mighty Goose 52:49 = Software Spotlight: Deskreen (Make Any Device A Second Monitor) 53:50 = Tip of the Week: Encrypt Your Files With GPG 54:56 = All of Our Picks at destinationlinux.org/picks 55:13 = Outro
Google engineers have prepared a set of Linux kernel patches allowing for AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) / SEV-ES encrypted state to allow for local migration support of these encrypted virtual machines on the same host.
Local migration of VMs allow for moving the guest to a new user-space VMM within the same host such as when upgrading/changing its resources or other alterations to the virtual machine but short of remote migration to a different host.
Last week, Nicolas wrote about KernelCI's newly added ability to detect regressions on the Linux kernel that can directly affect camera. This new test was one of many that was written during the recent KernelCI hackfest, which took place from May 27 to June 4. Initiated as a joint effort by the Google Chrome OS team and Collabora, it was a public event with engineers and developers from different communities in attendance.
What led to the KernelCI hackfest?
KernelCI is community-led test system focused on the upstream Linux kernel. While following mainline and LTS branches is the best way to maintain stability and security, there are numerous products in a wide variety of industry segments that run on their own versions of Linux with their own, custom changes. Several members of the KernelCI Linux Foundation project make such Linux-based products and rely on testing upstream, as every issue caught is something they won't have to fix in their downstream, Linux-based products. In fact, over time, the more these issues are fixed, the closer it brings their products to the upstream kernel.
One such member is Google, and their Chrome OS products. There are an increasing number of Chromebook devices in KernelCI (mostly located in Collabora's lab) which can be used to test upstream kernels, and in particular stable kernels, which are working quite well on this hardware. They are currently running all the regular tests that other platforms also use, such as LTP, kselftest, igt, v4l2-compliance, etc. As a member company, Google wanted to extend coverage with additional tests that are only currently available within Chrome OS. Hence, Google encouraged the KernelCI community to hold a hackfest to write tests.
We are pleased to announce that the Toolchains and Kernel Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference. Toolchains are the main part of any development, as they create the executables from the code a developer writes. In order to run efficiently on the operating system, there needs to be a strong understanding of the interface between the application and the kernel it runs on. This microconference is focused on the integration of toolchains and the Linux kernel.
NVIDIA announced earlier this month that they would be bringing DLSS to Linux / Steam Play and tomorrow they will be introducing that initial driver support.
There aren't yet any Linux native games making use of DLSS but this support is focused on Steam Play (Proton) for Windows DLSS-enabled games to also benefit from that upscaling technology under Linux.
Tomorrow NVIDIA will provide their initial Linux driver for supporting DLSS on Linux with Vulkan API games. It won't be until autumn that all the pieces are in place for allowing Direct3D-based DLSS games to make use of the functionality with DXVK/VKD3D-Proton under Steam Play.
While DLSS has been technically available in the NVIDIA drivers for Linux for some time now, the missing piece was support for Proton which will be landing tomorrow - June 22.
In the war to prove who’s better at high-resolution gaming performance, Nvidia on Monday added three more allies: Rust, Doom Eternal and Lego Builder’s Journey are joining the more than 55 other games to support its DLSS technology. The company also said Linux gamers would soon get access to DLSS through Proton for Vulkan.
DLSS, or Deep Learning Super Sampling, taps the AI Tensor cores on Nvidia’s 2000- and 3000-series GPUs to render games at a lower resolution, with comparable visual quality when increased to a higher resolution. We’ve tried DLSS, and it’s like black magic.
The company said that starting June 22, Linux gamers can download the Nvidia Linux Driver and enable Proton by going into steam to get DLSS in such games as Doom Eternal, No Man’s Sky and Wolfenstein Youngblood.
Nvidia’s announcement comes just a day before its rival AMD is set to unveil its highly-anticipated FidelityFX Super Resolution technology. Although we don’t yet know how AMD’s FSR works, the company has said FSR will offer increased performance on graphics cards as old as its Radeon RX 480, as well its current Radeon RX 6000-series of GPUs. AMD has also said FSR can improve performance even on Nvidia’s older GeForce GTX 1060. AMD’s technology is obviously built without the need for AI cores on the graphics card, so many assume it’s some type of advanced upsampling.
After months and months of the construction crews hammering away, VK_EXT_multi_draw has now been released for general use.
Will this suddenly make zink the fastest GPU driver in history?
This article will cover a list of useful “Optical Character Recognition” software available for Linux. An optical character recognition (OCR) software attempts to detect text content of non-text files whose content cannot be selected or copied but can be viewed or read. For instance, an OCR software can identify text from images, PDF or other scanned documents in digital file formats using various algorithms and AI based solutions. These OCR software are especially useful for converting and preserving old documents as they can be used to identify text and create digital copies. Sometimes the identified text may not be 100% accurate but OCR software removes the need for manual edits to a great extent by extracting as much text as possible. Manual edits can be made later to improve accuracy further and create one-to-one replicas. Most OCR software can extract text into separate files, though some also support superimposing a hidden text layer on original files. Superimposed text allows you to read content in original print and format but also allows you to select and copy text. This technique is specially used to digitize old documents into PDF format.
Some of the commands replace very common commands. For example, bat is like cat with syntax coloring and git integration. The exa and lsd commands are like ls, and lsd is even compatible with ls. There’s delta for replacing diff, and duf or dust to replace du. Instead of cd, you can use zoxide to get some advanced capabilities that are native so some shells.
Many of the commands offer less power to make common tasks easier. For example, you can use sed to search and replace text, but sd is easier. You can use cut to pull parts of a file or stream out, but choose makes it easier. Sometimes the man command gives you too much detailed information. The tldr and tealdeer commands give you just the common options for commands and cheat offers interactive cheat sheets.
Rounding out the list are commands that offer dedicated network help where you might use telnet, wget, or curl. Programs like xh, curlie, and httpie, for example, offer easier ways to do various network requests.
Alex Colomar and I have released released man-pages-5.12. The release tarball is available on kernel.org. The browsable online pages can be found on man7.org. The Git repository for man-pages is available on kernel.org.
This release resulted from patches, bug reports, reviews, and comments from around 40 contributors. The release includes more than 300 commits that changed around 180 manual pages.
Updated my simple web recording app to support multiple cameras and selecting from it. WebRecord. I didn't need it until today because I didn't use a device with more than one camera as often, but I got hold of a HDMI USB capture device and that changed the game.
Like most of my colleagues, I use LaTeX to write papers, reports, notes, or what have you. In fact, I think all of the places that I regularly write supports some variable subset of LaTeX. Also like most of my colleagues, I’m not a TeXnician. I’m not proud to be ignorant in this regard, but there’s only so many hours in a day, and the gains from properly learning a huge ecosystem like LaTeX seems minuscule compared to the initial buy-in cost.
Still, I was curious.
The kill, pkill, and killall commands are used to terminate processes on a Linux system. They are default command line utilities that all pretty much do the same thing, but in different ways. Mastering these commands will allow a Linux user to exercise more control over their system, as they’ll have the ability to end (or kill) services and processes that are running.
This guide will show you how the commands work, and take you through some examples to learn the proper syntax. Let’s go kill some processes.
Screen is command line utility which works in Linux systems as a terminal multiplexer. Sometimes we may face some issues like terminating the remote ssh connections due to network issues while performing an important task. It may be painful if the task is running on production environment. So, to handle this kind of issues, separate screen session is recommended which does not terminate with the end of terminal sessions.
In the Linux system, we have command line utility tool called screen which is used to manage terminal sessions. In this article we will cover how to use screen command in Linux to manage terminal sessions while working on important task in production systems.
Red Hat subscription model is a software support model that allows Red Hat to manage their customers.
It allows customers to download Red Hat tested and certified enterprise software packages, patches, updates, and upgrades for Redhat Enterprise Linux.
In addition to software support, customers will also receive technical support for the product and vast knowledge base articles.
Red Hat Subscription Management (RHSM) is a customer-driven solution that allows users to track their subscription quantity and consumption.
In this guide, we’ll show how to register or un-register a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux system to the Customer Portal using Red Hat subscription-manager.
Fwupd is a daemon to help to manage the installation of firmware on Linux. Fwupd is configured by default to download firmware from the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS). LVFS is a secure website that allows hardware vendors to upload their firmware updates.
Fwupd aims to make firmware update on Linux systems automatic, safe, and reliable. It is mainly used to update UEFI firmware. There are many companies that already support native firmware updates such as Dell, Lenovo, HP, Intel, and System76.
Whether you prefer to use a command-line or graphical application, several tools are available for free to combine multiple PDF files in Linux.
Gnome Terminal is customizable, due to this some prefer to use default settings and some prefer to customize their terminal. I always have different profiles created with different color schemes and switch between them.
There are thousands of configuration files on your computer. You may never directly interact with the bulk of them, but they're scattered throughout your /etc folder and in ~/.config and ~/.local and /usr. There are probably some in /var and possibly even in /opt. If you've ever opened one by accident or to make a change, you may have wondered why some configuration files look one way while others look completely different.
Back in the "old days", it was Important to get the system time in the right ballpark before starting ntpd. This was usually done by running ntpdate before starting ntpd. Originally, ntpdate and ntpd used duplicated code to decide what the correct time. Over time, the algorithms (and therefore code) used by ntpd evolved, but the code for ntpdate started to suffer serious bit-rot. It became evident that there were 2 camps using ntpdate, those who wanted to set the time as quickly as possible, and those who wanted to set the time as well as possible. This was still generally "something to do" before starting ntpd.
A package manager is a set of integrated services that facilitate installing, updating, removing, and configuring packages/programs on a computer.
Talking specifically about the Linux operating system, you get to choose from a wide range of package managers, such as APT, YUM, RPM, and Pacman. Each of these package managers has some distinct feature that sets them apart from the other.
However, a relatively new package manager, Snap, has emerged as a viable alternative to traditional package managers. Let's check out Snap, its pros and cons, and how to install and use it on Linux.
If you have a directory with many files (a few thousand in my case) and need to know which one is the newest, then the following command might be useful.
The users need to connect with the remote host by using SSH (Secure Shell) to run different commands for multiple purposes remotely. It helps the user do their task more easily. Many administrative tasks can be done remotely by the user with some simple steps that save the time and effort of the user. The user may require to run a single or multiple SSH commands remotely and terminate the connection safely from the remote host. How the SSH command can be run in the remote host and exit have shown in this tutorial.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install the brotli module for Nginx on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Brotli is a high-performance, lossless compression algorithm developed and maintained by Google. It can be used by webservers to compress files like .html and .css files and increase the perforce of websites and reduce their bandwidth requirements.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step enabling Brotli Compression on Nginx. You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
If the user remains inactive for long times after connecting to a remote server, the user must connect again with the server using SSH. The connection of the server resets if the user is not doing any activity for a while. It is necessary for security purposes. But when the user tries to perform any task on the server that needs long times to complete, the user will require to log in multiple times after a certain time. Sometimes it becomes very irritating for the user. The user will require to increase the SSH connection timeout to solve this problem; It can be done in two ways. One way is to set the keep-alive options in the server configuration file, and another way is to set the keep-alive option in the client configuration file. Both ways have been explained in this tutorial.
This short tutorial explains how to disable the screen lock in Ubuntu, which is enabled by default. Below you’ll find instructions to turn off the screen lock from Gnome settings and the command line using the gsettings cli. You’ll also find instructions to disable the screen lock at boot, allowing automatic login.
In Linux systems, we constantly work with executable files either in the terminal or graphical applications. Executables contain shared libraries, which are files that are shared and reused across programs. In windows, these are typically in the form of DDL files. In Linux, however, they are in the form of .o or .so files.
This guide will show you how to use the ldd command-line utility to show shared objects and the dependencies in an executable.
Virtualization involves running a virtual computer system in a separated layer from the actual computer hardware. It allows users to run more than one operating system without installing them on the actual hardware.
Operating systems that run using a hypervisor will operate as they would in the actual hardware. That allows you to install tools, test systems, and other tools on your virtual machine without affecting the main host.
This tutorial will show you how to use Virtual-Box as the Hypervisor to run Kali-Linux as a virtual machine.
Before we begin, allow me to give a few theory concepts about virtualization before getting to the practical part. Feel free to skip if you are familiar with the concepts.
In Linux, a job refers to a process started and managed by the shell. That can be a single command, a long and complex shell command including pipes and redirections, an executable, or a script. Each job in Linux is managed by assigning a sequential job IP associated with a specific process.
Time is a crucial factor in our daily lives and the technical side of things.
Therefore, maintaining an accurate time between the Linux systems is an important factor. It allows you to accurately know when various accounts are logged, file changes, network packets, and other critical system logs. This can, in turn, be useful in troubleshooting and fixing problems.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to synchronize the time between two servers using SSH.
This tutorial offers an easy explanation of how to use Netcat to transfer files between devices.
In version 5.0, MySQL implemented the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database, which is visible as a normal database. Although its behavior and functionality are similar to a normal database, the information contained in the database is not all regular data.
Here is the best way I can describe the MySQL INFORMATION_SCHEMA database. It is a database containing information about other databases. It is available in every MySQL instance and is used to store metadata information about all other databases in the server. It is also called the system catalog or data dictionary.
Like all the MySQL databases, the information in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database gets stored in read-only tables. However, in actuality, they are views and not base MySQL tables. In that sense, you can not perform MySQL triggers against the tables stored in the database, nor are there any files associated with them.
NOTE: You will also not find a directory in the name of INFORMATION_SCHEMA.
Despite all that, the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database is the perfect place to query information about other databases stored on the server. This tutorial aims to provide you with an overview of the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database and give you a few examples of using the database.
The xargs command is a command-line tool used to read data from standard input and later runs a command based on the standard input. It is a useful tool in file management, especially when used with other commands such as mkdir, grep, rm etc. In this tutorial, we are going to learn how to use xargs on Linux.
Adding more memory to your PC can be one of the most rewarding upgrades you can make, resulting in an instant boost in responsiveness, decreased loading times, and the ability to keep more applications and web browser tabs open without annoying slowdowns.
But RAM sticks come in many different sizes and from many different brands. As such, you have a good reason to wonder if using a random stick of RAM that’s been sitting in your drawer for ages or buying a discounted memory kit instead of the one that’s currently on your computer is a good idea. The answer may surprise you.
Neos CMS is a free and open-source content management system that allows you to build your website easily. It has its own CMS system that helps you to manage websites and blogs without any coding knowledge. It is designed for ease of use and allows business owners to collaborate with users across multiple devices. It offers a rich set of features including, full Unicode support, complete internationalization, SEO, inline editing, and more.
In this post, we will show you how to install Neos CMS with Apache on Ubuntu 20.04 server.
SSH or Secure Shell is a useful encrypted protocol to secure connections between the client and the server for different administrative tasks. It supports various types of authentication systems. Public key-based authentication and password-based authentication are mostly used. Key-based authentication is more secure than password-based based authentication. Authentication key pairs for the SSH are generated by the ssh-keygen tool that can be used for different purposes such as authenticating the host, automating login, etc. How this tool can be used in Ubuntu has been shown in this tutorial.
The purpose of web servers is to store files belonging to a website and broadcasting them further online to your audiences. Web hosting is simply the service offered by hosting providers where they lease web server resources to other users.
The newer generation UEFI motherboards come with UEFI Interactive Shell. The UEFI interactive shell is a simple shell program (like bash) responsible for booting your operating system. You can also use the UEFI interactive shell to run EFI shell commands and scripts. It can be used to update the System Firmware of your motherboard as well.
This article will show you how to access the UEFI interactive shell on UEFI motherboards and use some of the common EFI commands on the UEFI interactive shell. So, let’s get started.
The BIOS of your UEFI-supported motherboard is also called the UEFI firmware of the motherboard. There are times when you will need to update the BIOS/UEFI Firmware of your motherboard. You may have different reasons for that. For example, your motherboard manufacturer may have released new features or bug fixes for your motherboard that are important for you. Or, you may want to replace the processor of your motherboard with a later generation one, and for that, a BIOS/UEFI Firmware update of the motherboard is required. Or, you may just want to keep the BIOS/UEFI Firmware of your motherboard up to date.
Whatever the case may be, if you’re thinking of updating the BIOS/UEFI Firmware of your motherboard, this article should assist you on your job. So, let’s get started.
The SSH server is a critical, ubiquitous service that provides one of the main access points into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for management purposes. Over my career as a system administrator, I can not think of any RHEL systems I have worked on that were not running it.
RHEL 8.4 adds new roles to manage the SSH server and SSH client configurations, which are the sshd and ssh roles, respectively. This post will walk you through an example of how to use the sshd RHEL system role to manage the SSH server configuration. In the next post, you’ll see how to adapt to different real-world scenarios where servers need a slightly different configuration.
Why automate SSH server configuration?
Having a properly configured and secured SSH server is a key component of hardening a RHEL system. This is why security benchmarks such as the CIS benchmark and DISA STIG specify SSH server configuration options that need to be set. This makes the SSH server a great candidate for automation.
While it is possible to manually configure the SSH server, doing so is time consuming and prone to error. Additionally, if you manually configure SSH, there is no guarantee it will stay properly configured (e.g., when a fellow system administrator is troubleshooting and makes a few "temporary" changes to the configuration that end up being permanent).
Red Hat introduced RHEL System Roles in RHEL 7. These are Ansible roles and collections that provide a stable and consistent interface to manage and automate multiple releases of RHEL. RHEL System Roles are a feature included in RHEL subscriptions and are supported by Red Hat.
Thanks to a new patent that went public on June 17, we can see a little more behind the scenes work on what Valve has planned for their next VR kit with what could be a Valve Index 2. The news and speculation comes thanks to a video from SadlyItsBradley.
The patent itself was actually filed back in December 2019, so it's not actually new. However, it did only just this month go public so now we're able to dive in and see what Valve were thinking about their next steps. It goes to show that they were clearly already thinking about the next generation as the Valve Index was releasing back in June 2019.
Wireless VR is the next true step to make the experience even better. As an owner of a Valve Index (and it's awesome), a can safely say it would be far nicer without the big thick wire attached to it. It gets in the way, you can easily step on it and unplug it, and it's just another part that can break. Part of the problem with wireless or standalone VR kits, as Valve say in the patent, is that they can be heavy and hot due to doing all of the rendering. Some of the skimp on the power to get around this but then you get less of an experience. So how to do deal with those and other issues?
Monday was the first day of Akademy 2021 BoFs, group sessions and hacking. There is a wrap-up session at the end of the day so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present.
In the early hours of Monday morning, a Debian blogger released the video of former GNOME employee Magdalen Berns singing Zombie.
Less than twenty-four hours later and we have the news that GNOME Foundation has sacked Molly de Blanc. Now there really is a Zombie. Berns once won a championship title in women's boxing. She packs a punch, even when she sings.
 
Today there is Linux distribution for every type of computer user present on this planet irrespective of their work. From a kid studying in school to a professional working in a multinational company, there is Linux distribution available for every user.
Linux is an open-source operating system; developers worldwide use various open-source technologies to develop a new surprising fork of Linux.
Everyone gets tired of looking at the same desktop every day; we need something refreshing at a fixed interval of time to keep ourselves fresh and focused on work. Especially if you’re working on Windows or Mac OS, you get tired of the same look and layout because they generally possess the same look and feel even after some major updates.
Today we are looking at Debian 10.10 LXQt. It uses Linux Kernel 4.19, LXQt 0.14.1, and uses about 500-600MB of ram when idling. Enjoy
In this video, we are looking at Debian 10.10 LXQt.
Rocky Linux—one of at least two new distributions created to fill the void left when CentOS Linux was discontinued by parent corporation Red Hat—announced general availability of Rocky Linux 8.4 today. Rocky Linux 8.4 is binary-compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4, making it possible to run apps designed and tested only for RHEL without RHEL itself.
Rocky Linux is a community enterprise operating system, created by Gregory Kurtzer, founder of the CentOS project. Rocky Linux 8.4 has been released for x86-64 and aarch64. "Sufficient testing has been performed such that we have confidence in its stability for production systems."
So according to LWN.net, Rocky Linux 8.4 reached General Available (GA). This is great as it means that there are two* 'community rebuild' to move CentOS 8 systems to if CentOS Stream is not a good match.
[...]
My other reason was to remind people that if they are using CentOS Linux, that the end of life for 8 is December 31, 2021. Before that time it would be good to look at switching to Alma, CentOS Stream 8, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, or Rocky. These transitions take time, and there are only ~190 days before it needs to be done.
Nearly three months after CentOS replacement AlmaLinux reached it's first stable release, Rocky is ready to be a contender.
Back in 2016, technology and business consultancy Everest Group published a report entitled “No DevOps, No Digital.” They were onto something: While DevOps is not necessarily mandatory for digital transformation, it’s awfully close. The processes and tools involved certainly accelerate the digital journey on a number of fronts.
“DevOps, in its simplest form, is the coming together of various technology design, build, delivery, and operations teams to serve business objectives,” says Yugal Joshi, vice president of digital, cloud, and application services research for Everest Group. For years, these teams have worked independently. DevOps brings them together to not only accelerate software delivery and better manage infrastructure, but also to illuminate each team’s pain points for the other.
“It makes them appreciate other people’s point of view rather than throwing something ‘over the wall’ and hoping it works,” Joshi says. In fact, he adds, “it is next to impossible for any enterprise to digitally transform without using concepts of DevOps.”
You’re a rising star at your company. Everything is going right, and your team is working on a big project – the biggest in the company’s history.
Launch day arrives … and there’s a massive glitch in the system. All the hard work you’ve put in has been for nothing! Or so you might think.
Stay calm. Take a breath. Setbacks are part of every career. It’s how you handle those setbacks – how you push through the feelings of shock, anger, and fear – that will define your career (and your life) for years to come.
As part of the Red Hat "Leap into RHEL 8 Giveaway," we will give swag to the first 500 people to migrate a system to RHEL 8 through July 31.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 688 for the week of June 13 – 19, 2021. The full version of this issue is available here.
Digi’s rugged “ConnectCore 8M Mini” module runs Linux or Android on an i.MX8M Mini with Digi TrustFence security, up to 2GB LPDDR4 and 8GB eMMC, and 802.11ac/Bluetooth 5.0. A dev kit offers mini-PCIe and Digi XBee expansion.
Digi has launched a Digi ConnectCore 8M Mini module and development kit that feature NXP’s i.MX8M Mini and support for Digi XBee modules including cellular add-ons. The ConnectCore 8M Mini has the same 45 x 40 x 3.5mm dimensions as the i.MX8X based Digi ConnectCore 8X module from 2018. We missed a similarly sized, i.MX8M Nano based ConnectCore 8M Nano from 2019, which has many of the features of the ConnectCore 8M Mini but is limited to 1GB RAM instead of 2GB.
Wearable displays are nothing new, but many of them lack that all-important “fun” element. That’s why OlivierZ over on Instructables created Wilson the IoT hat. The smart hat contains a large 232mm by 22mm flexible LED strip on its front that prominently shows rainbow text across a 71Ãâ7 LED matrix. The whole thing runs on a single 9V battery, which powers an Arduino Nano, HC-05 Bluetooth module, and LED matrix. All of these components are nicely tucked away within the top of the hat to prevent wearers from seeing unsightly wires.
Yet-another reminder of how disrespectful Apple, Google, and Microsoft are with their software update process was highlighted to Android phones that were in Massachusets, USA. The unintentionally descriptively named “MassNotify” application was installed to all Android phones in Mass.—en masse—without consent.
Mass Upgrade, Without Consent
From a forced album install by Apple, to the forced upgrade to the Microsoft Edge browser, to the truth is stranger than fiction forced removal of the book 1984 from Kindle devices, mass forced upgrades/updates has been abused as technological dictatorship in the name of “security”. All technological advancements—even software updates—can be done where it respects the freedoms and civil liberties of humans. Not only can it be done, we can look at one of the earliest (and one of the most secure) operating system distributions and how they did software updates the right way.
In light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, being able to quickly determine a person’s current health status is very important. This is why Manivannan S wanted to build his very own COVID Patient Health Assessment Device that could take several data points from various vitals and make a prediction about what they indicate. The pocket-sized system features a Nano 33 BLE Sense at its core, along with a Maxim Integrated MAX30102 pulse oximeter/heart-rate sensor to measure oxygen saturation and pulse.
From this incoming health data, Manivannan developed a simple algorithm that generates a “Health Index” score by plugging in factors such as SpO2, respiration rate, heart rate, and temperature into a linear regression. Once some sample data was created, he sent it to Edge Impulse and trained a model that uses a series of health indices to come up with a plausible patient condition.
I've implemented a USB stack for the pinephone keyboard's firmware, to be able to perform printf debugging and tracing of what the MCU does. It's now possible to see MCU's operation using a simple USB debugging tool that shows the output from debugging code on the MCU in real-time.
I've used the new debugger it to get to understand precise behavior of I2C slave peripheral. How interrupts are fired, and what's the contents of various status registers during various I2C transfers from the pinephone SoC over POGO pins.
This understanding can be used to write a more proper I2C control interface for the keyboard, that will be modelled as is typical with various other I2C devices a set of I2C ââ¬Å¾registers“ that can be read from and written to. The proposed specification for the register set is here. It will be possible to configure the keyboard's scanning behavior in various ways over the I2C, and perform self-tests for QA purposes.
I've also finalized the USB flashing tool. It now has a very nice interface and is quite useable and better documented.
Samuel shared his keyboard kernel driver recently. So you'll have a choice between kernel and userspace drivers for the keyboard. Both have their strengths. Userspace one will be easier to customize and play with, and the kernel one will be more available and better integrated into kernel's suspend/resume functionality, I assume.
Email remains the killer information and communications technology. Email volume shows no sign of diminishing, despite the increasing popularity of collaborative messaging tools. There were over 4 billion email users in 2020.
Messages are exchanged between hosts using the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol with software programs called mail transfer agents, and delivered to a mail store by programs called mail delivery agents, frequently referred to as email clients.
Within the Internet email system, a message transfer agent, or mail transfer agent, or mail relay is software that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another using SMTP. The terms mail server, mail exchanger, and MX host are also used in some contexts.
Tor Browser 10.0.18 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This version updates Tor to 0.4.5.9, including important security fixes. In addition, on Android, this version updates Firefox to 89.1.1, and NoScript to 11.2.8 This version includes important security updates to Firefox for Android.
Stories like these are far too common. According to a survey released by the California Student Aid Commission, nearly two-thirds of California students say their biggest obstacle to succeeding in college is costs and juggling jobs with school. Many do not have the financial means to cover the costs of college, unfortunately skipping meals, sleeping in cars or falling deeper into poverty due to student debt. Ultimately, students should not have to worry about the price of materials in a course they already paid to take.
This issue has a simple solution — adopting university-wide Open Educational Resources. These are free, peer-written and peer-reviewed materials that are downloadable and published under an open access license — allowing professors to assign them to students without purchase. There is an urgent need to transition to these resources and the California PIRG chapter has launched its Affordable Textbook Campaign to focus on this issue. Its immediate goal is to have the UC Regents invest funding into a grant program that would incentivize faculty to use open-source textbooks in the classroom. This program would compensate faculty members for the time they spend transitioning their classes to this new approach.
At the recent Google I/O conference, Google announced version 2.2 of its cross-platform UI toolkit, Flutter. According to a study, it is now the most popular cross-platform option. Google concentrated on fixing issues, optimizing performance, and refining existing features in this release. Microsoft, Samsung, Adobe, Sony, and Ubuntu Linux all increased their Flutter support. Google cited SlashData's "Mobile Developer Population Forecast 2021" and said that 45% of developers select Flutter now, with a 47% year-over-year growth. This would make Flutter the most popular cross-platform UI toolkit. Google also announced that 200,000 apps in the Play Store are built with Flutter. That is 50,000 more than at the end of 2020 and shows a growth rate of 440% since December 2019. In those same 16 months, though, the number of Google teams building Flutter apps only grew by 50%, from "over 20" to "more than 30". For comparison: In the 27 months from February 2019 to April 2021, Google's Angular applications increased 430% from "600+" to "2600 or 2700", as Google Developer Advocate Emma Twersky explained in this podcast (28:35 min).
Reduce() seems to be a Python method that performs the folding or compression of the mathematical approach. When you’re about to implement a method over an iterable and limit it to a singular cumulative value, reduce() comes in handy. Python’s reduce() method is famous among functional programmers, although Python has many more to offer. You’ll learn how to use reduce() functions and how to implement them efficiently in this article.
Python sleep () is used to delay the specific processes by adding a sleep function in the source code. The time provided in seconds allows a delay in the process. In this article, we will perform many examples to enhance your knowledge of the sleep method in Python. We have used the Spyder tool for the execution of code.
You may use the Python time package to interact with all time-related methods. The majority of them merely call the same-named platform C library routines. There would be minor changes across platforms. The time package is included in all Python releases.
We’ve praised the ACCESS Act as “a step towards a more interoperable future.” However, the bill currently before Congress is just a first step, and it’s far from perfect. While we strongly agree with the authors’ intent, some important changes would make sure that the ACCESS Act delivers on its promise.
One of the biggest concerns among proponents of interoperability is that a poorly thought-out mandate could end up harming privacy. Interoperability implies more data sharing, and this, skeptics argue, increases the risk of large-scale abuse. We addressed this supposed paradox head-on in a recent whitepaper, where we explained that interoperability can enhance privacy by giving users more choice and making it easier to switch away from services that are built on surveillance.
Requiring large platforms to share more data does create very real risks. In order to mitigate those risks, new rules for interoperability must be grounded in two principles: user consent and data minimization. First, users should have absolute control over whether or not to share their data: they should be able to decide when to start sharing, and then to rescind that permission at any time. Second, the law must ensure that data which is shared between companies in order to enable interoperability—which may include extremely sensitive data, like private messages—is not used for secondary, unexpected purposes. Relatedly, the law must make sure that “interoperability” is not used as a blanket excuse to share data that users wouldn’t otherwise approve of.
NHS Digital’s Terminology Server, which is FHIR conformant, transforms the way in which data is captured, shared and analysed across the health and care system.
At the heart of the solution is the ability to translate items into a common ‘language of health’ when professionals describe something using different terms. For example, a symptom could be described as “back-ache” or equally referred to as “lower lumbar pain”. When such information is recorded and shared across the health and care system the Terminology Server can be used to match the disparate descriptions so that all the organisations and software involved in a patient’s journey can ‘talk’ to each other and the patient data can be reconciled and compared effectively.
Social media posts are twice as likely to go viral if they are negative about politicians they oppose rather than positive about those they support, a Cambridge University study suggests.
It analysed 2.7 million tweets and Facebook posts from US media outlets and political figures over five years.
The negative posts were also twice as likely to be commented on.
In Brazil, where more than 474,000 people have already died due to Covid-19 — second only to the United States — pseudoscience has become government policy. Bolsonaro regularly promotes repurposing unproven and cheap drugs to his nearly 40 million social media followers as he continues to minimize the gravity of the pandemic and dismiss its victims. Meanwhile, his administration has spent millions of dollars to produce, purchase, and promote pills such as the lice medication ivermectin, the antimalarial chloroquine, and popular antibiotic azithromycin, as well as anticoagulants, painkillers, and a set of vitamins. The Ministry of Health and numerous doctors endorsed using a combination of these medications to treat Covid-19, even though there is no solid evidence that it works.
So that’s what I set out to find: people who used to be professional engineers and then became professional software developers. I call these people crossovers, hybrids between the two worlds. I interviewed 17 crossovers on common software misconceptions, how the two worlds relate to each other, whether we can truthfully call what we do engineering, and what the different fields can teach and learn from each other.
There’s a lot I want to talk about here, much more than can comfortably fit in one blog post. I divided the write up into three parts, dealing with my three core topics. Part one is about the term “engineering”. Is what we do engineering, and can we honestly call ourselves engineers?
This legislative movement received a big push from the demonization of the New York Times’ 1619 Project and from Trump’s short-lived 1776 Commission. But it has its roots in decades of conservative accusations of liberal bias in the teaching ranks. Yes, teachers are more liberal than the nation at large, but not dramatically. A 2017 Education Week survey found 41 percent self-identified as Democrats, higher than the 33 percent of registered voters polled by Pew around the same time. Just as many teachers as voters overall were Republicans.
And that doesn’t take into account how hard many teachers work to keep their politics out of the classroom. For many, this is a pride point; they want to produce independent thinkers, not clones. For others, it’s fear; they want to avoid complaints from parents, reprisals from administrators, or swarming by trolls.
Fifteen months ago, the SARS-CoV-2 virus unleashed Covid-19. Since then, it's killed more than 3.8 million people worldwide (and possibly many more). Finally, a return to normalcy seems likely for a distinct minority of the world's people, those living mainly in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, the European Union, and China. That's not surprising. The concentration of wealth and power globally has enabled rich countries to all but monopolize available vaccine doses. For the citizens of low-income and poor countries to have long-term pandemic security, especially the 46% of the world's population who survive on less than $5.50 a day, this inequity must end, rapidly—but don't hold your breath.
Humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders on Monday urged BioNTech—one of the makers of a Covid-19 vaccine—to share its vaccine technology with the world to lessen the stark inequality in dose access and save lives.
The demand from the group, also known Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), came on the eve of BioNTech's virtual shareholder meeting and amid concerns over the emergence of new coronavirus variants.
We look at the push to end what the World Health Organization is calling “vaccine apartheid,” as many countries have yet to see a single COVID-19 vaccine shot amid mounting infections. “What we’re looking for is an alternative to a system that has basically allowed for COVID-19 vaccines to be absolutely concentrated in the higher-income countries,” says Carina Vance Mafla, former health minister of Ecuador, who co-chaired this weekend’s emergency Summit on Vaccine Internationalism. She argues vaccine access can be improved by expanding vaccine “production in other countries … that have developed vaccine candidates, but also having pricing that is based on solidarity.” We also speak with Achal Prabhala, coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa. Prabhala says the pandemic is now “largely a developing country problem.”
More than 2.6 billion COVID-19 vaccines have been administered worldwide, but many countries have yet to see a single shot amid mounting infections. Eighty-five percent of vaccines administered worldwide have been in high- and upper-middle-income countries. Only 0.3% of doses have been administered in low-income countries. Last week, G7 nations pledged to donate just 613 million new vaccine doses — far less than the 1 billion originally promised. This was the focus of an emergency four-day virtual Summit for Vaccine Internationalism this weekend, attended by government ministers, parliamentarians and public health officials from many countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Vietnam, India, Greece, the United Kingdom, Canada and Cuba. The summit was organized by Progressive International, an organization founded by Senator Bernie Sanders and former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis. “This is how we radicalize the world in order to be able to end the patent monopoly of Big Pharma,” says Varoufakis in his address, “so that there are no more patents that prevent people from access to pharmaceuticals … available in order to save lives.”
Last year as COVID-19 laid siege to the nation, many U.S. hospitals dramatically reduced their aggressive tactics to collect medical debt. Some ceased entirely.
Last year Sankt Hans Aften was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A record number of Americans are relying on Medicaid for healthcare coverage during the pandemic. Nearly 74 million people are currently enrolled on Medicaid, the highest number participating in the program on record, according to a report by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). During the pandemic, from February 2020 to January 2021, an additional 9.7 million individuals enrolled in Medicaid, increasing the size of the program by nearly 14 percent.
In an interview with the Washington Post’s Amy Goldstein, CMS Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said that Medicaid has been a “lifeline” for many Americans. “We’ve really seen how important Medicaid is to ensuring the overall health of our country and have seen this through the pandemic,” she said.
So, how do we get back to a bootstrappable system today? That’s the purpose of the Bootstrappable.org family of projects. They seem to be mostly GNU-affiliated these days, so their goal is to go backwards from a working gcc build environment to as close to “nothing” as possible.
Ultimately, the goal is to have the miraculous pre-existing seed of software be small enough that a single human can inspect and verify its machine code by hand, and build back up using source code from there on.
Here’s a summary of the current state of the art (meaning, a very small number of distros bootstrap this way, and are the “most bootstrappable” distros out there): [...]
Amid multiple recent reports of hackers breaking into and tampering with drinking water treatment systems comes a new industry survey with some sobering findings: A majority of the 52,000 separate drinking water systems in the United States still haven’t inventoried some or any of their information technology systems — a basic first step in protecting networks from cyberattacks.
The SolarWinds [crack], one of the largest cybersecurity incidents in U.S. history, may have been deterred or minimized if basic security measures had been put in place, a top government official acknowledged earlier this month.
In a June 3 letter to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) provided to The Hill on Monday, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) acting Director Brandon Wales agreed with Wyden’s question over whether firewalls placed in victim agency systems could have helped block the malware virus used in the SolarWinds attack.
If that link is followed, users will end up at a bogus website which will automatically install malware on Android phones. Then, the software begins seeking out personal information like banking details.
"After that, it's open, which means that scammers can empty people's accounts and make payments," Pöyhönen explained, saying that the software can even help scammers apply for payday loans in a victim's name.
The problem for law enforcement is that ransomware - a form of malware used to steal organisations' data and hold it to ransom - is a very slippery fish.
Not only is it a blended crime, including different offences across different bodies of law, but it's also a crime that straddles the remit of different policing agencies and, in many cases, countries. And there is no one key offender. Ransomware attacks involve a distributed network of different cybercriminals, often unknown to each other to reduce the risk of arrest.
So it's important to look at these attacks in detail to understand how the US and the G7 might go about tackling the increasing number of ransomware attacks we've seen during the pandemic, with at least 128 publicly disclosed incidents taking place globally in May 2021.
Pity the poor libertarians. Their audience fades because the same intrusive government they blame for all economic ills demands loyalty in its fight with China. Former President Richard Nixon was less dishonest 50 years ago when he reportedly said, “We are all Keynesians now.” In contrast, today’s GOP mouths “conservative economics,” yet merely quibbles over details of the government’s gigantic money creation and deficit financing.
Today’s declining U.S. capitalism can no longer repeat its previous bland celebrations of private enterprises and free markets. Too much is going wrong, provoking criticism, and deepening divisions across U.S. society. The last time U.S. capitalism stumbled this badly—the Great Depression of the 1930s—public health did not suffer massive failure at the same time. Yet, then too, criticism of capitalism reached far, wide, and deep. It was expressed in the unionization by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) of millions alongside zooming enrollments in two socialist parties and one communist party.
The Linux Foundation is making available a set of free tools for building software bills of material (SBOMs) based on the software data package exchange (SPDX) file format it curates.
Backed by more than 20 organizations, SPDX is an effort to standardize the way metadata describing the contents of a software package is described.
The DOJ is testing some waters it may not want to be troubling, not with hundreds of prosecutions stemming from the January 6 Capitol raid on the docket. It has asked the DC court to compel a defendant to decrypt his laptop so the FBI can search it for evidence. (h/t Marcy Wheeler)
A coalition of worker advocacy and racial justice organizations marked the start of Prime Day on Monday with an open letter demanding that state and federal lawmakers take action to end Amazon's systems of employee surveillance, which critics say are at the heart of the company's devastating injury crisis.
"Amazon knows their system physically harms workers and ruins lives, but refuses to roll back the system that injures workers at such a despicable rate: workplace surveillance."—Evan Greer, Fight for the Future
The haul was certainly more than the usual: over 32 tonnes of an assortment of drugs including cocaine, cannabis, amphetamines and methamphetamines; 250 firearms, 55 luxury cars, and some $48 million in cash, both tangible and digital.
Operation Trojan Shield arose because of a grand dupe.€ It involved recruiting an FBI informant who had developed an adulterated version of the encryption technology platform Anom, to be used on modified cell phones for distribution through a range of organised crime networks.€ The platform included a calculator app that relayed all communications sent on the platform back to the FBI.€ € “You had to know a criminal to get hold of one of these customised phones,” the Australian Federal Police explained. “The phones couldn’t ring or email.€ € You could only communicate with someone on the same platform.”
CityNews, RCMP Violated Privacy Act by Using Facial Recognition: Privacy Commissioner
Researchers have discovered a backdoor in 2G encryption, one that was deliberately created. As this report by Lorenzo Franchesi-Bicchierai for Motherboard points out, the researchers didn't necessarily know it was deliberate when they discovered it.
Carnival spokesperson Roger Frizzell told The Hill in a statement Friday that the company detected an intrusion to parts of its IT systems on March 19. It quickly shut down the [attack], and engaged a cybersecurity firm to investigate.
Thus Google and CloudFlare have some easy to remember DNS server IPs: 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1
But a nameserver can see all websites & services that a device requests access to (looking up the websites & service’s ip address), so if the user does not want to turn over what is essentially the “record of dialed phone numbers” to Google or Cloudflare: what about alternatives that do not store the user’s browsing habbits for eternity for AIs to dig into that BigData and try to exploit it somehow?
"A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." These words echoing the Reagan— Gorbachev Principle issued thirty six years before in Geneva came as a joint statement at the conclusion of Presidents Biden and Putin’s Summit last week.€
Sunday, June 20 marked the United Nations’ World Refugee Day, a time to highlight refugees worldwide, applaud their courage, and highlight their contributions. This year’s theme, “Heal, Learn, Shine,” recognized the challenges of COVID-19, the need to uphold the right to education, and how refugees persevere despite the challenges presented to them. According to the UN, there are greater than 1.1 million refugees from my home country of Burma, making it one of the top five source countries of refugees worldwide. While many may celebrate World Refugee Day, those forced to flee Burma continue to witness repeated mass atrocities.
Until a few months ago, the main debate centred on whether the talks could be a truly national peace process, or whether they would merely be a locus of foreign policy manoeuvring by exogenous powers. Today, though, people are asking each other a more difficult question: will conferences and negotiations even take place? The media are currently unable to provide an answer to this question.
To try and get some answers, Ahmad Soheil Ahmadi spoke to Professor Mohammad Akram Gizabi, the Afghan writer, journalist, and political activist. He gave us a seasoned perspective on today’s media and journalistic landscape in Afghanistan and the jockeying among participants of the peace talks.
New research released Monday shows the post-9/11 wars launched by the U.S. military since 2001 have resulted in over 30,000 suicides by active duty American solders and veterans—over four times the number killed in combat operations.
According to Brown University's€ Costs of War Project—established€ in 2010 to account for the loss of lives and taxpayer dollars spent on U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—an estimated 30,177 veterans and service€ members have killed themselves over the last nearly two decades, compared with 7,057 members of the military who have been killed in combat.€
Hard-line cleric Ebrahim Raisi won the Iranian presidential election with about 62% of the vote. Raisi has headed Iran’s judiciary since 2019 and is seen as a protégé and possible successor of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Turnout in the election was just 49% — the lowest since the 1979 Iranian revolution — and dozens of candidates were barred from running in the election, including former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Raisi appears to “have higher ambitions than just [the] presidency,” says Nega Mortazavi, an Iranian American journalist and host of “The Iran Podcast.” “He is preparing to be a potential successor to the supreme leader,” Mortazavi says. “The hard-liners tried to disqualify any serious moderate or reformist rival to Ebrahim Raisi to clear a path to victory for him.”
The government’s radio silence is handing a propaganda victory to the insurgents.
Sweden's largest daily, Dagens Nyheter, published an article in its science section of a study planned by the Accident Investigation Authority at the MS Estonia wreck. In short, it is planned to bring representatives of the relatives on board the research vessel. However, Jonathan Lindstrom, a journalist who lost his parents in the shipwreck, is protesting against the way these representatives are being selected, using the recent Estonian master's thesis as the argument.
The purpose of the underwater survey is, according to the Swedish Accident Investigation Authority, to prepare for the investigation of holes found in the wreck, and the trip will take place on July 8-18. According to Lindstrom, the choice of representatives has been entrusted to Lennart Berglund, chairman of the management board of the next-of-kin association Stiftelsen Estoniaoffren och Anhoriga (SEA). He protests that the SEA, whose representatives have threatened next-of-kin with different views, is now trying to independently represent all the relatives of the victims. Lindstrom emphasized that while he respects the work of the Swedish Accident Investigation Authority and its balance, he would like to point out that the SEA is far from representing all the relatives of the victims.
The article, “Climate Change and State Evolution,” was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on April 6 and was authored by Carmine Guerriero from the University of Bologna in Italy and Giacomo Benati from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen in Germany. The authors note in the article’s abstract that prior literature on climate disasters in ancient societies focuses on “collapse archaeology,” and tends to correlate “severe droughts” with “institutional crises.” The article instead used a game theory approach to analyze a stream of papers that have been published in recent years on Bronze Age Mesopotamia that challenge this narrative.
As the article’s abstract states, the papers the authors analyzed for the study have been “building on more detailed data on Bronze Age Mesopotamia and a more credible theory-based empirical strategy.” The abstract further states that the authors’ study of these papers yielded the following two results:
Millions will either have to flee from climate heat’s tides, or find new ways to stay above water.
It’s been a bumpy start for the new kid on the block. Such have been the teething problems of Britain’s youngest news channel that there’s already a dedicated Twitter account posting clips of the gaffes and technical hitches besetting its programmes.
The channel has also been subject to an advertising boycott from some major brands, some of which quickly rowed back on the decision once some unpalatable truths about their own activity came to light. Who needs soap operas when you’ve got drama like this?
The Group of 7 leaders last week ended their summit without a firm and clear commitment on how they're going to deliver on the annual $100 billion climate finance pledge they made over a decade ago, sparking criticism from United Nations climate chief Patricia Espinosa.
The climate finance for developing nations, Espinosa has said, is "absolutely crucial" to the success of ongoing climate negotiations.
Geoff€ Russell spent weeks reading and researching the International Energy Agency’s landmark report into the planet’s energy future, so that you didn’t have to. You can thank him later.
Governments, the private sector and many other actors are using the pandemic as an excuse to justify harmful practices.€ These actors are pushing extraction strategies, such as mining and oil concessions and agricultural expansion, in order to re-start economic growth.
As usual, the Amazon is on the frontlines of the war for the appropriation of the natural world. Most people when they hear ‘Amazon’, think only of Brazil. And while the situation in that country certainly is alarming, the battlefields of the Amazon region span northern Bolivia, various departments of Peru, several areas of Ecuador and southern Colombia and Venezuela.
The tide is turning against Louisiana’s proposed $2 billion Mississippi River sediment diversion project, that supporters say is needed to save the coast from rapid land loss due to€ subsidence, damage done by the oil and gas industry,€ extreme weather events, and sea level rise quickened by climate change.
The proposed Mid-Barataria sediment diversion project, is a key part of the state’s $50 billion master plan to restore the rapidly eroding coast. If constructed, the diversion is designed to let the river’s natural land building process restore Louisiana’s disappearing marshland.€
Yes, America was built on cheap labor. Maybe you’ve noticed. It still is. And as the Founding Fathers understood in their bones, the cheapest labor is the slave kind. Early America was heavily peopled by indentured “servants” who might, after a period of servitude, eventually emerge from their bondage. But a large population of “chattel slaves” were property: Owned by the purchaser as one might own a machine or a piece of furniture. The Framers’ constitution which made a claim to independence and popular government was, however, diligent in protecting the “peculiar institution” of slavery.
Daniel Lazare’s important book, The Frozen Republic€ numbered the ways by which the Framers sought to keep the public structurally at-bay. The “separation-of-powers” that we are taught to revere as children is part of this matrix. The utterly unrepresentative “rotten borough” of the U.S, Senate was a key element. There, slave states could block “wicked projects” like emancipation. There, thinly populated states could block the interests of more populous ones. The subversive€ principle of One person/one vote is an affront to the institution of the this millionaire’s club.
An election watchdog organization on Monday demanded a state-level criminal probe into Postmaster General Louis DeJoy after research uncovered "suspicious" new details surrounding a straw donor scheme he allegedly orchestrated during his time as chief executive of the North Carolina-based firm New Breed Logistics.
"These new, detailed findings reveal an alarming and highly suspicious pattern of campaign donations by Louis DeJoy's employees while he led New Breed Logistics."—Bob Phillips, Common Cause North Carolina
At 3:30 am on a warm fall morning in 2009, Glenn D. Capel, a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch, was speeding down the Interstate in his Lexus LS 400 from his home in Greensboro, N.C., toward Candor, 75 miles away. A half-hour earlier, his 84-year-old mother had called from her home in the rural town and said that her heart felt “heavy” and that she had pain going down her left arm. “I’m on my way,” he had told her.1This story was reported in partnership with Type Investigations with support from the Puffin Foundation.
In the cardiologist’s office hours later, Capel stepped outside the room where his mother was being monitored to check his voice mail before the 9:30 am opening of the stock market. It was then that he was dealt the day’s second blow.2
Australia paid a big price for the over reliance on insecure jobs prior to the pandemic. But as our economy recovers, insecure jobs account for about two out of every three new positions. Dan Nahum from the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute explains why that’s a very bad thing for everyone.
Amid ongoing negotiations over federal infrastructure legislation, progressive lawmakers and advocates on Monday reiterated their commitment to a popular policy that could help pay for a sweeping package: taxing the rich.
"Taxing the rich isn't about discouraging wealth, it's about making sure the wealthiest Americans play by the same rules as the rest of us."—Tax March
When people talk about censorship they'll talk about Social Media giants like Facebook and Twitter, but the true evil of the internet are the payment processors they are the ones truely [sic] in control.
From the perspective of New York City’s left, the current mayoral race is a mess. In April, many prominent progressives hastily suspended endorsements of Scott Stringer, at the time the leading left-leaning candidate, after he was accused of sexual harassment. In the aftermath, many progressives tried to drum up enthusiasm for the nonprofit executive Dianne Morales, despite reservations over her shallow roots on the left—only to see her campaign implode last month after she fired four staffers leading a unionization drive.
Among despairing progressives in New York City, there is an urgent, ongoing debate: In the ranked-choice Democratic primary for mayor on Tuesday, should Andrew Yang or Eric Adams be left off your ballot?
For Al Jazeera’s€ Marwan Bishara, “in a confident and prosperous Israel, personal ambition trumps politics, and politicking outweighs ideology.” Thus, as he (Bishara) put it in a separate interview, Benjamin Netanyahu’s ousting was a ‘family feud’, not a signifier of any ideological shift. Indeed, most of the key figures in the new government served as ministers in the right-wing Likud-led government of Netanyahu.
It is reasonable to assert that the prospects of any changes that may be brought about by the new Israeli government are almost nil. As Bishara concludes: “Netanyahu may be finished, but short of a miracle, Netanyahu’s Netanyahus are here to stay.” The key concern for activists around the world therefore should be how the struggle for the liberation of the Palestinian people should continue to be prosecuted.
New York Mayor David Dinkins, just months after taking office in 1990, welcomed members of the Socialist International to Manhattan with a robust reflection:1Socialist ideals have played a powerful role in this city and this country—which have served as gateways for millions of immigrants, many of whom were socialist activists. Public education, a strong and vibrant trade union movement, and many great cultural institutions are products of the socialist movement. As Eugene Debs said, socialists believed in an America of “great possibilities, of great opportunities and of no less great probabilities.”2Subscribe to The Nation Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month! Get€ The Nation’s Weekly NewsletterFridays. The best of the week. By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and€ agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.
Similarly, the stories of how they fell have points in common. Each has lost office by the narrowest of margins – Trump in the presidential election last November; Netanyahu by a single vote in the knesset on Sunday. Their personality cults may be damaged, but they retain a commanding status on the far right – and with it a fighting chance of winning back power.
Any such return to national leadership is likely to be through stirring up antagonism on every side.
If you get your foreign policy news today from CNN or MSNBC or NPR or similar outlets, then you’re bombarded hour after hour with the idea that the United States has the absolute right to impose sanctions on country after country overseas if they violate human rights or are not democratic.
Following calls from progressives to include an expansion of Medicare in the infrastructure bill being negotiated in Congress, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced late Sunday his support for covering dental, vision, and hearing care under the popular 56-year-old program, backing a proposal long pushed by Sen. Bernie Sanders.
"With the current Medicare platform, those three things are just left out, like it's€ no big deal. But it is a big deal and we should fix it," Schumer told reporters at a news conference.€
With the Senate set to vote this week on a sweeping bill that would revamp U.S. election laws and expand ballot access, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday condemned state-level GOP attacks on the franchise and said Congress must combat such voter suppression efforts "in any and every way" possible.
"What Republican legislatures and governors are doing in the most disgraceful way imaginable is to try to deny people of color, young people, poor people the right to vote, people with disabilities," the Vermont senator said in an appearance on CNN. "That is outrageous."
New York City voters will finish choosing their Democratic mayoral candidate in primary elections tomorrow. With no strong Republican candidates, the winner of the primary is widely expected to become the next mayor of the country’s biggest city.
After six weeks of marching 400 miles from New Orleans to Texas amid fruitless federal infrastructure negotiations, Sunrise Movement activists concluded their march on Monday with arrests outside the Houston home of renowned Republican climate villain Sen. Ted Cruz.
Eight demonstrators with the movement's "Generation on Fire" campaign were arrested on the Texas Republican's lawn while delivering a message to President Joe Biden.
Fears are growing in Peru that supporters of right-wing presidential candidate Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of imprisoned former dictator Alberto Fujimori, will stage a coup to prevent her rival, the socialist teacher and union leader Pedro Castillo, from taking power. With 100% of votes counted from the June 6 election, Castillo has a 44,000-vote lead, but Fujimori is claiming fraud without offering any evidence. She is calling for hundreds of thousands of votes, mostly from poor Andean regions, to be annulled. Thousands took to the streets in Lima to protest against Fujimori’s claims. We speak with José Carlos Llerena, a Peruvian educator and activist, who recently co-authored a piece for Peoples Dispatch titled “The coup that is taking place in Peru.”
These tensions culminated in a dramatic fight over the SBC’s presidential election, held on Tuesday during the organization’s annual meeting in Nashville, Tennessee. In the election, two prominent far-right candidates lost to a more mainstream conservative named Ed Litton, blunting the momentum of a Tea Party-style group aiming to lurch the SBC in an even more right-wing direction.
Currently, despite leaving the European Union via Brexit, British films and TV series still qualify as “European works” under EU law, meaning they count towards those content quotas.
But an EU document from June 8 tabled with diplomats takes aim at this classification, suggesting British programming accounts for a “disproportionate” amount of content on European television and may threaten “cultural diversity” in the EU.
The European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, is set to launch an impact study on British programming, a move that could be the first step in re-classifying U.K. content.
As I’ve long been saying, when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic, everything old is new again, at least with respect to the antivaccine movement. I listed a number of the€ tropes repurposed by antivaxxers€ for COVID-19 last week, including (but not limited to) misinformation claiming that COVID-19 vaccines are loaded with “toxins” (the€ lipid nanoparticles€ in the mRNA-based vaccines, given that they can’t contain aluminum, don’t you know?); blaming every€ death€ reported to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) database on vaccines, not designed to determine causation and we€ would expect€ a€ large baseline number of deaths€ in the time periods covered by random chance alone; claiming that€ vaccines cause Alzheimer’s and prion disease;€ blaming the vaccines for cancer; resurrecting the favorite old trope of “shedding” from the vaccinated in the€ most risible manner possible; invoking evolution to predict the selection of more deadly coronavirus variants that€ could wipe out humanity;€ warning that the vaccines can “permanently alter your DNA“; and that they€ cause female infertility. So what other evil thing could vaccines do? “Depopulation,” anyone?
Twitch is once again struggling with how to handle sexually suggestive streams from some of the most popular women on its platform. Over the weekend, the service banned two top female streamers — Amouranth and Indiefoxx — who had been broadcasting ASMR streams from their beds. Both streams involved the creators licking a microphone while wearing what appeared to be the TikTok-famous leggings known for making your butt look great. It’s just the latest instance of Twitch making itself the arbiter of what counts as too sexy for its audience and advertisers.
As usual, Twitch declined to explain why either streamer was banned. But the reason seems to be a breach of Twitch’s restrictions on “sexually suggestive” content. The rules ban behaviors like “erotic dances,” showing sex toys for purposes other than education, and perhaps most relevant in this case, posing in ways that “deliberately highlight” a person’s “breasts, buttocks, or pelvic region.”
Esra Assery, CEO of the General Commission for Audiovisual Media (GCAM), said that the commission has taken all the measures to expedite the release of foreign publications after completing censorship and all other related procedures.
Speaking to Okaz/Saudi Gazette, she said that the simplified censorship procedures for books from abroad are aimed at enhancing the accessibility of the books to Saudi readers.
Over the last few years, Microsoft has been lucky enough to avoid the attention of crusading antitrust legislators, but the company may have overplayed its hand, after its recent Tiananmen Square fiasco where it censored searches for the image of the so-called Tankman worldwide instead of just in China.
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“Despite Microsoft’s size and market dominance, House Democrats curiously did not significantly examine Microsoft’s conduct during their investigation of competition in digital markets,” the letter reads. “Democrats also seem to have excluded Microsoft from scrutiny in their large package of bills to radically rewrite American antitrust law.”
Julian Assange remains in a maximum security jail, despite never being sentenced for anything but a long ago served spell for bail-jumping, and despite the US Government’s request for extradition having been refused.
I am writing in the hope that I might contribute to changing the way that people think about the laws with regards to the draconian life without possible parole sentences, as well as other extreme sentencing.
Conservatives would have us believe there is an unresolved conflict in our laws between two legitimate but competing interests. On one side are the overwhelming majority of Americans who think discrimination and bigotry should not be supported by the secular government. On the other side are the vocal minority of Americans who believe that state-sponsored discrimination and bigotry is required by God. Conservatives are pretty sure discrimination and bigotry should win the day always, but they’re deeply divided about how to get there legally.
Eight Republican senators representing seven states recently sent a letter to President Biden imploring the president to keep Guantánamo Bay open, claiming that a bipartisan majority of members of Congress and most Americans support this view. They assert that this would ensure “justice.”
For the entirety of Donald Trump’s presidency, academics and pundits continually debated if he was a fascist, a populist, a nativist, a businessman president, and so forth. This debate continues. Sometimes sidelined in these conversations was a perspective that might’ve understood the heart of Trump and Trumpism from the start—feminism. From beginning to end, some of the most sustained protest against Trump’s presidency came from feminists galvanized by his blatant misogyny and the fear that their rights stood endangered by it. Indeed, given Trump’s macho manner and sexism, feminist criticism offers rich resources for making sense of the Trump phenomenon to encompass man and movement.1
To his credit, Schumer added, “But we must continue to work to ensure equal justice and fulfill the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation and our Constitution.” Ensuring “equal justice” is precisely the step that would carry real meaning and add teeth to the very short, one-page Juneteenth bill. So why is that critical aspect missing from the bill?
There are many historical accounts of how Juneteenth came about, but the most widely accepted one is that enslaved Black people in Texas were the last in the U.S. to know that they had the legal right to be free—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863. The revelation that freedom was at hand came from General Gordon Granger in Galveston on June 19, 1865, and if ever there was a declaration of American independence that carried any moral weight, it is the day that came to be known as Juneteenth—rather than the Fourth of July and the syrupy and blind patriotism that accompanies it.
One woman, a refugee, arrived in the United States in February. Originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, she lived most of her life in a refugee camp in Tanzania. Although she still has some family at the camp, she has a job, receives resettlement services and lives with her husband in the U.S.
Mother Jones has a slightly weird article saying that Facebook is making an "awkward legal argument" in a lawsuit that was filed against the company by Muslim Advocates, arguing that Facebook and its executives lied to Congress when it insisted that the company would remove hate speech. There's a lot to unpack here, though I'd note that there are two things I find awkward here -- and neither of them are Facebook's legal arguments in the case. The real awkwardness is Muslim Advocates trying to argue that Facebook failing to remove certain content violates consumer protection laws. The second awkward bit is Facebook's constant political posturing about its openness to Section 230 reform.
Last June, as anti-police brutality protests were sweeping across the nation following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, some NYPD officers claimed it was the public that was actually violent and abusive.
Another form of evidence used in criminal cases is being called into question. The latest (via CJ Ciaramella) to receive the dubious honor of being designated "dubious" is blood spatter analysis. This brings it in line with a long list of other things long-considered (and, in too many cases, still considered) to be evidence worthy of introducing into a court of law, joining bite mark analysis, hair analysis, um… pair of blue jeans analysis... and even the old standby, DNA analysis.
Police told family members that Olingha confessed killing Bishop Obo, with an officer telling them, “Olingha openly confessed that he can’t regret that he killed the bishop because he did it in the cause of Allah’s word to kill all infidels who mislead Muslims. He added that Allah will be with him in jail, but the kafiri [infidels] deserved the killing,” Christine Obo said.
The Chicago Dyke March, an annual LGBT parade that in 2017 ejected marchers carrying flags with Jewish symbols, promoted its upcoming event with an image showing the burning of Israeli and American flags.
As part of a recent COVID bill, the government announced that folks struggling economically during COVID would be getting some temporary help. Under the EBB (Emergency Broadband Benefit program), U.S. consumers can nab a $50 discount off their broadband bill, or $75 if you live in tribal areas. The program ends when its $3.2 billion in federal funding expires, or six months after the government has declared an end to the pandemic.
I had not been using IRC for quite some time now. The reasons have been multiple issues with Riot (now element) taking the whole space on my desktop. I did get alerted to the whole thing about a week after the whole thing went down. Somebody messaged me DM. I *think* I put up a thread or a mini-thread about IRC or something in response to somebody praising telegram/WhatsApp or one of those apps. That probably triggered the DM.
It took me a couple of minutes to hit upon this. I was angry and depressed, seeing the behavior of the new overlords of freenode. I did see that lot of channels moved over to Libera.
It was also interesting to see that some communities were thinking of moving to some other obscure platform, which again could be held hostage to the same thing. One could argue one way or the other, but that would be tiresome and fact is any network needs lot of help to be grown and nurtured, whether it is online or offline.
I also saw that Libera was also using a software Solanum which is ircv3 compliant. Now having done this initial investigation, it was time to move to an IRC client. The Libera documentation is and was pretty helpful in telling which IRC clients would be good with their network. So I first tried hexchat. I installed it and tried to add Libera server credentials, it didn’t work. Did see that they had fixed the bug in sid/unstable and now it’s in testing. But at the time it was in sid, the bug-fixed and I wanted to have something which just ran the damn thing. I chanced upon quassel. I had played around with quassel quite a number of times before, so I knew I could play/use it. Hence, I installed it and was able to use it on the first try. I did use the encrypted server and just had to tweak some settings before I could use it with some help with their documentation. Although, have to say that even quassel upstream needs to get its documentation in order. It is just all over the place, and they haven’t put any effort into streamlining the documentation, so that finding things becomes easier. But that can be said of many projects upstream.
There is one thing though that all of these IRC clients lack. The lack of a password manager. Now till that isn’t fixed it will suck because you need another secure place to put your password/s. You either put it on your desktop somewhere (insecure) or store it in the cloud somewhere (somewhat secure but again need to remember that password), whatever you do is extra work. I am sure there will be a day when authenticating with Nickserv will be an automated task and people can just get on talking on channels and figuring out how to be part of the various communities. As can be seen, even now there is a bit of a learning curve for both newbies and people who know a bit about systems to get it working.
Now, I know there are a lot of things that need to be fixed in the anonymity, security place if I put that sort of hat. For e.g. wouldn’t it be cool if either the IRC client or one of its add-on gave throwaway usernames and passwords. The passwords would be complex. This would make it easier who are paranoid about security and many do and would have. As an example we can see of Fuchs.
Now if the gentleman or lady is working in a professional capacity and would come to know of their real identity and perceive rightly or wrongly the role of that person, it will affect their career. Now, should it? I am sure a lot of people would be divided on the issue. Personally, as far as I am concerned, I would say no because whether right or wrong, whatever they were doing they were doing on their own time. Not on company time. So it doesn’t concern the company at all. If we were to let companies police the behavior outside the time, individuals would be in a lot of trouble.
Although, have to say that is a trend that has been seen in companies that are firing people either on the left or right. A recent example that comes to mind is Emily Wilder who was fired by Associated Press. Interestingly, she was interviewed by Democracy now, and it did come out that she is a Jew. As can be seen and understood there is a lot of nuance to her story and not the way she was fired. It doesn’t give a good taste in the mouth, but then getting fired nobody does. On few forums, people did share of people getting fired of their job because they were dancing (cops). Again, it all depends, for me again, hats off to anybody who feels like dancing or whatever because there are just so many depressing stories all around.
Washington Democrat Pramila Jayapal has proposed a bill with bipartisan support that would prevent Amazon from luring sellers to use its logistics services in exchange for preferential treatment on its busy web store. Nearly 85% of Amazon’s biggest sellers use its Fulfillment by Amazon service, paying the online retailer fees for warehouse storage, packing and shipping of their products, according to a report last October from Democratic staff on the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel.
Jayapal’s bill was introduced on June 11 and will be considered on Wednesday by the Judiciary Committee along with five other bipartisan antitrust reform bills, with votes to advance the measures to the House floor expected this week. There’s no Senate companion for the legislation, and support in that chamber is unclear, clouding its prospects.
In a rare showing of bipartisanship, the U.S. Senate has passed Senate Bill S.1260, the "Endless Frontier Act." Co-sponsored by senators Schumer, Young, Hassan, Collins, Coons, Portman, Baldwin, Graham, Peters, Blunt, Daines, Van Hollen, Romney, and Kelly, the bill most notably seeks to establish "a new Directorate for Technology and Innovation in the National Science Foundation [and] to establish a regional technology hub program."
The goal of these efforts is to increase U.S. capabilities in key technology areas that are believed to be able to provide the country with a competitive advantage in the global economy. The bill outlines doing so in a way that increases diversity and inclusion in STEM fields while reducing the geographic concentration of R&D and the STEM workforce. If signed into law in its current form, Congress will be able to authorize just short of $250 billion in funding for R&D, education, technology transfer, and intellectual property over the course of five years.
Companies have to review open-source licences to make sure they don’t inadvertently donate their entire inventions to the public
If after 3 months have elapsed since the grant of the patent or 4 months since the filing of the application, the invention has not been exploited, except in cases of force majeure, or if no genuine and effect preparations have been made for the exploitations or where such exploitation has been interrupted for more than 1 year, any person may apply for authorization to use the invention without seeking the permission of the owner thereof.
As established under Article 43, if the time period for an invention has elapsed and the invention has not been exploited (or has an exception), any person may apply to the National Institute of Industrial Property ( e.g. Argentina Patent and Trademark Office) for the grant of a compulsory license. This application can be for the manufacture and sale of the patented product or the use of the patent procedure.
[...]
The compulsory license decision from the National Institute of Industrial Property may be appealed before the Federal Civil and Commercial Courts with ten days of receiving notification of the decision. Once a decision has been made, the National Institute of Industrial Property will order the publication of a notice in the Official Patent Gazette and in a national circulating newspaper informing the public of its decision. Third parties interested in obtaining a compulsory license will then have thirty days to make a request and the National Institute of Industrial Property will decide on whether to grant or deny the license request. Granting a compulsory license is determined by the circumstances of each request.
It's time for another FOSS Patents podcast. I don't do these very often, but from time to time I see great value in letting experts share their views on important developments.
Riti Krishtel’s first case as a legal aid lawyer in India was as tragic as they come. One day in 2004, she recalls a couple walking into her office in Bengaluru with their three children. Unable to afford life-saving medicine to keep their HIV infections in check, the parents were dying of AIDS. With no other options, they wanted Krishtel to draw up guardianship transfer papers: The rambunctious siblings were to be sent to an orphanage before their parents died.
Even though drugs that could save the parents’ lives were available, the cost at the time was out of reach for the couple, who were living in poverty. Krishtel and the collective of lawyers she was working with at the time went on to handle many similar cases. By 2007, she came up with a strategy to slash the cost of HIV drugs in India: On behalf of patients’ rights groups, lawyers with the nonprofit Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK) she had cofounded would challenge specific patent applications on brand-name drugs, opening opportunities for generic manufacturers. Through a combination of patent expirations and legal challenges, price competition in India drove down the cost of the most common HIV therapy by more than 80 percent between 2003 and 2008.
Hoping for a repeat, in 2015 Krishtel turned the organization’s focus to the United States, where skyrocketing drug prices increasingly threaten to drag families into financial ruin. A 2019 Kaiser Family Foundation survey of more than a thousand Americans found that 29 percent did not take their medicines as prescribed at some point during the previous year because of cost; 8 percent reported that the lapse made their illness worse. The reasons for high prescription drug prices in America are complex and varied. But the patent system, Krishtel says, is one culprit.
The European Patent Office (EPO) can schedule hearings (referred to as “oral proceedings”) either before the Examining Divisions during the examination of a patent application, or before the Opposition Divisions during opposition proceedings following the grant of a patent.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, oral proceedings were conventionally held in person at the EPO offices in either Munich or The Hague. The EPO did allow oral proceedings before the Examining Divisions to be held by video conference, although this was relatively rare. However, oral proceedings before the Opposition Divisions, which typically involve several different parties and potentially also simultaneous interpretation, had to be held in person.
On June 17, 2021, 30 days after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the USPTO granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on all challenged claims (claims 1-10) of U.S. Patent 9,390,435, owned by Aeritas LLC, an NPE. The ‘435 patent relates to receiving notifications related to products or services of interest, at a mobile device based on the location of the mobile device and notification criteria, and then receiving additional information about the products or services or a purchase confirmation, at the mobile device in response to an input. The patent has been asserted in 21 litigations, including current assertions against Finnair Oyi, Darden Restaurants, Whataburger Restaurants, Burger King, and WestJet Airlines.
On June 9, 2021, Unified Patents filed an opposition in the EPO against EP 3448035. The EP ‘035 patent is owned by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI). The patent is related to patents that are designated essential to the HEVC Advance patent pool as well as SISVEL’s AV1 patent pool.
Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Preeti Dua, who received a cash prize of $2,000 for her prior art submission for U.S. Patent 8,209,411. The patent is owned by the most prolific NPE assertor in 2020, WSOU Investments, LLC d/b/a/ Brazos Licensing and Development. The '411 patent generally relates to systems and methods of providing content to a terminal and, more particularly, relates to systems and methods of providing content to a terminal having a limited display area for presenting such content. The '411 patent is currently being asserted against Salesforce, in the Western District of Texas.
Music catalogue acquisition refers to the process of enormous deals under which artistes sell their music and its copyrights — either a particular section or their music in its entirety — to a particular company.
Traditionally, the recording rights of music were signed to a label and the performers. The publishing rights usually went to another company and the songwriters.
In the new era of music acquisition, the two have been merged — everything is now bought by another company or a collaborative deal is struck with the recording or publishing company. This tends to include all the other assets, with the artiste’s brand value in tow.
Ever since the giant news organizations, led by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., began pushing the ridiculous idea of forcing Google and Facebook (and often just Google and Facebook) to pay a "link tax," we've been pointing out that while this might be a windfall of free money for the news giants, small news organizations (like, um, us) would likely get totally screwed over. With Australia leading the charge of silliness and passing its link tax, we're discovering that our predictions were exactly correct.
Europe's top court has ruled that so-called copyright trolls can demand cash settlements from alleged BitTorrent pirates. Clarifying that sharing fragments of data associated with BitTorrent transfers still represents a communication to the public, the EU Court of Justice says that cases can be pursued but only when local courts consider them to be non-abusive, justified, and proportionate.
Sony Music has obtained an injunction that requires the freely available DNS-resolver Quad9 to block a popular pirate site. The order, issued by the District Court in Hamburg, Germany, is the first of its kind. The Quad9 foundation has already announced that it will protest the judgment, which could have far-reaching consequences.
