Useless use of GNU, Meet the 2021 FreeBSD GSoC Students, historical note on Unix portability, vm86-based venix emulator, ZFS Mysteriously Eating CPU, traceroute gets speed boost, and more
Linus Torvalds released 5.15-rc1 and closed the merge window for this release on September 12; at that point, 10,471 non-merge changesets had found their way into the mainline repository. Those changesets contain a lot of significant changes and improvements. Read on for a summary of what came into the mainline in the roughly 7,000 changesets pulled since our first-half summary was written.
When we last caught up with the page folio patch set, it appeared to be on track to be pulled into the mainline during the 5.15 merge window. Matthew Wilcox duly sent a pull request in August to make that happen. While it is possible that folios could still end up in 5.15, that has not happened as of this writing and appears increasingly unlikely. What we got instead was a lengthy discussion on the merits of the folio approach.
The kernel's memory-management subsystem deals with memory in pages, a fundamental unit that is generally set by the hardware (and is usually 4KB in size). These "base" pages are small, though, so the kernel often needs to deal with memory in larger units. To do so, it groups sets of physically contiguous pages together into compound pages, which are made up of a head page (the first base page of many in the compound page) and some number of tail pages. That leads to a situation where kernel code that is passed a struct page pointer often does not know if it is dealing with a head or a tail page without explicitly checking.
It turns out that the "make sure this is a head page" checks add up to a certain amount of expense in a running kernel. The use of struct page everywhere also makes kernel APIs unclear — it can be difficult to know if a given function can cope with tail pages or not. To address this problem, Wilcox created the concept of a "folio", which is like a struct page but which is known not to be a tail page. By changing internal functions to use folios, Wilcox is able to speed up the kernel and clean up the API at the same time. The patch set is huge and intrusive, but it appeared to have overcome most resistance and be ready to head into the mainline kernel.
The Linux extended-attribute mechanism allows the attachment of metadata to files within a filesystem. It tends to be little used — at least, in the absence of a security module like SELinux. There is interest in how these attributes work, though, as evidenced by the discussions that have followed the posting of revisions of this patch by Vivek Goyal, which seeks to make a seemingly small change to the rules regarding extended attributes and special files.
Specifically, extended attributes (often referred to as "xattrs") are name-value pairs that can be attached to a file. The name of an extended attribute is divided into a namespace and an identifier within the namespace. The namespace is currently one of security, system, user, or trusted; each namespace has its own special rules. As a general rule, system and trusted see little use. The security namespace, instead, is used by a number of Linux security modules. An example of a security attribute can be seen by running getfattr on a system that is set up for SELinux
Systemd-oomd as the out-of-memory daemon originally developed by Facebook has been maturing nicely since being merged last year and then its most notable deployment to date has been with Fedora 34's debut earlier this year. Anita Zhang of Facebook provided an update today on the systemd-oomd effort.
After a nine year hiatus, a new version of the X Input Protocol is out. Credit for the work goes to Povilas Kanapickas, who also implemented support for XI 2.4 in the various pieces of the stack [0]. So let's have a look.
X has had touch events since XI 2.2 (2012) but those were only really useful for direct touch devices (read: touchscreens). There were accommodations for indirect touch devices like touchpads but they were never used. The synaptics driver set the required bits for a while but it was dropped in 2015 because ... it was complicated to make use of and no-one seemed to actually use it anyway. Meanwhile, the rest of the world moved on and touchpad gestures are now prevalent. They've been standard in MacOS for ages, in Windows for almost ages and - with recent GNOME releases - now feature prominently on the Linux desktop as well. They have been part of libinput and the Wayland protocol for years (and even recently gained a new set of "hold" gestures). Meanwhile, X was left behind in the dust or mud, depending on your local climate.
XI 2.4 fixes this, it adds pinch and swipe gestures to the XI2 protocol and makes those available to supporting clients [2]. Notably here is that the interpretation of gestures is left to the driver [1]. The server takes the gestures and does the required state handling but otherwise has no decision into what constitutes a gesture. This is of course no different to e.g. 2-finger scrolling on a touchpad where the server just receives scroll events and passes them on accordingly.
The Roundup Issue Tracker is a flexible tool for managing issues via the web or email. However, Roundup is useful for more than web-based bug tracking or help-desk ticketing; it can be used as a simple wiki or to manage tasks with the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. The 20th-anniversary edition of Roundup, version 2.1.0, was released in July; it is a maintenance release, but there have been a number of larger improvements in the last year or so. Here we introduce Roundup's features along with the recent developments that have helped make Roundup even more useful for tracking issues to their resolution.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PostgreSQL on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, PostgreSQL is a powerful, open-source object-relational database system that uses and extends the SQL language combined with many features that safely store and scale the most complicated data workloads. With over 30 years of active development, PostgreSQL is widely used as a database for numerous mobile and web applications.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of PostgreSQL 13 on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
The windows-based Microsoft Excel application is known for its indisputable open XML spreadsheet files support. This same support also extends to XLSX file formats.
As you adapt or migrate to the Linux operating system environment, you will find the use of CSV or Comma-Separated file format a lot more convenient due to some of the following prime reasons...
Nextcloud is open-source software for creating public and private file storage. It allows you to create your self-hosted services like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Mega.nz. Originally, it's created by the original owncloud developer Frank Karlitschek. In 2016, he forks the Owncloud project and creates a new project with the new name "Nextcloud"
By this time, the Nextcloud project growing rapidly and becoming more than file hosting software, it's more like a file sync and content collaboration platform. Backed with a lot of plugins, Nextcloud becomes such a powerful collaboration software. You can install plugins for project management, video conferencing, collaborative editing, note-taking, email client, etc.
In this guide, you will learn how to install Nextcloud on the latest Debian 11 Bullseye. You will be installing Nextcloud under the LAMP Stack (Linux, Apache2/httpd, MySQL/MariaDB, and PHP).
Imagine a box in which you can put all of your files, and it will maintain integrity. This is what Docker does, providing an easy way to manage containers for any application on-premise or cloud-hosted with ease.
What’s even better about this tool: It comes free (yes, really) as well as being open source so that everyone benefits from its use–not just those who have paid subscriptions like most big companies do these days.
Docker allows you to put your application in a container, ship it and preserve the environment, as well as make sure that all of those pesky updates don’t break it. You can access much smaller servers and reduce bandwidth since everything is self-contained.
The Docker team has been working very hard on this tool for a while now–and they have succeeded in making a very excellent and useful product. Those who have been working on or with Linux for a time can appreciate how amazing this is–finally an IT tool that works.
Spring cleaning is not only necessary for homes, Your Linux Mint 20 file system also needs to be decluttered regularly. An organized file system will save you or the system administrator a lot of headaches in the long run.
In this article, you will learn how to remove your directories to organize your file system.
Bash "here documents" are a useful way to create uncomplicated YAML and HTML documents, inventory files, and emails.
Updated – Ubuntu logs system events into the log files in order to help administrators maintain, analyze and diagnose system related issues and applications problems.
Log files contain messages related to kernel, services and applications events that are kept on a centralized repository of log files under /var/log directory.
There are various log files in Linux Ubuntu for different informations. For instance, there is a default log file dedicated to the system, another for security messages another for cron tasks. These log files are actually plain text (ASCII) written in a standardized log file format. Many of these log files are generated by the so called system log daemon, syslogd while some other applications generate their proper logs by writing to files under the directory /var/log.
The log files generated can therefore be classified into four categories: event Logs, application Logs , system Logs and service Logs.
In this article, we will provide an overview of Ubuntu log files, and show how to configure and use syslogd. You will also learn how log rotation works and how to view and read the log files. A brief introduction to systemd will be provided at the end .
After gathering questions from pretty much everyone, Valve has put up a new official FAQ page for the Steam Deck that answers some pretty important questions and it's good news.
One really important questions was answered on anti-cheat support too. There were concerns that with Valve working to get the likes of Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye to support Proton that it might somehow be locked to the Steam Deck. Thankfully, that is simply not the case. Valve has said very clearly that the improvements will "will make it to all systems using Proton".
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Sounds like it's pretty much all good news. Being able to boot multiple systems clearly shows how it really is just a small-form factor PC, that will come with SteamOS (based on Arch Linux) by default. Users will be able to do whatever they want with it.
Disney is one of the most popular and one of the largest global media companies. From movies to video games, Disney makes a variety of stuff with a long and detailed history. The history of Disney’s video games goes back overdecades when they were made for multiple game console platforms. However, Disney did not make a mark on the mobile platform until recently.
In recent times, Disney has launched some decent games, both new and old, which are worth playing. That being said, Disney games are known for their simplicity and easy gameplay. The media house has some famous games under its name, which includes Star Wars and Marvel components. The best part about these games is the fact that they are generally free to play.
Staxel, created by developer Plukit (the founder is a former Starbound developer) and publisher Humble Games is a popular and highly rated creative farming and village life game. As of today along with a Nintendo Switch release it's also now available official on Linux.
"In Staxel you build your world block by block from the ground up, so everything is customizable - whether it’s your own farmhouse or a redesign of the village shop to fit your desired aesthetic. Experience the world from a first-person perspective to really immerse yourself in your ideal country life. Whether you want a cozy overgrown cottage or your own wizard tower, you can build it!"
Games seem to be getting bigger all the time taking up vast amounts of drive space but what can be done with very little resources? Quite a lot actually as the Quake homage Q1K3 has shown.
Developed for the js13kGames competition, where developers are given one month to create a game with HTML5 / JavaScript and possibly get a prize. The main constraint is that the file size limit for submissions is 13 kilobytes. It doesn't sound like a lot and not much bigger than a blank LibreOffice document.
One clever developer named Dominic Szablewski announced Q1K3 as their entry, which is a first-person Quake inspired shooter and it's actually quite amazing considering just how tiny it is.
Valve today published a "Steam Deck FAQ" page sharing some additional information on this forthcoming Arch Linux powered handheld game system that will begin shipping at the end of Q4.
After my unexpected luck in getting a new GPU (the AMD 6700XT), it was finally time to build a new computer. While my previous desktop was still ticking, at 6 and a half years old (an Intel i5-4690K, Nvidia GTX 970; see details in our gaming rigs article) it was certainly not up to 4K gaming and VR. The GPU was by far the hardest thing to get, but by this summer most everything else was available and at more regular prices.
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Overall, the main components follow a pretty typical mid-range to enthusiast gaming build for 2021. These are all solid, well recommended choices, at a good price to performance ratio. I’ll discuss my choice to move to all AMD below, but overall there wasn’t anything I had to worry about being Linux compatible. These days I’d mostly be concerned about Wi-Fi, along with any specialty hardware. I opted out of Wi-Fi since my desktop is right next to my router for a wired connection, though the Bluetooth would be handy for things like controlling the Valve Index’s base stations. That and Wi-Fi can be handled with a cheap USB adapter if I want it. (Honestly, the motherboard I wanted in white also didn’t have Wi-Fi, so that made the choice easier, too.) The only thing for me was wondering about controlling all that RGB, but open source comes through again, as I’ll detail later.
In terms of specifics the 5600X is a great performer with the latest Zen 3 architecture and good single core performance to go with the 6 cores and 12 threads. This has become easily available, at least in the US, at or below MSRP. There are some great Zen 2 CPUs to pick from, but in my case I wanted the latest (I tend not to upgrade frequently, obviously) as well as plenty of power for photo editing and compiling as I’ve been contributing patches and packages to Guix.
GNOME 41 is now officially available for the public use and is available for download from the website of GNOME. GNOME 41 is loaded with tons of new features, improvements and tweaks. GNOME 41 is the second release to use GNOME’s new version numbering scheme. The next release, version 42, is planned for March 2022. GNOME 41 is available in 38 languages. You can also see the number of smaller enhancements.
GNOME 41 Desktop Environment Released, Download Now, After six months of development represented by the release of desktop environments GNOME 41 . For a quick assessment of the capabilities of GNOME 41, specialized live builds based on openSUSE and an installation image prepared as part of the GNOME OS initiative are offered . GNOME 41 is also included in the experimental build of Fedora 35 builds .
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A new Multitasking panel has been added to the configurator (GNOME Control Center) for customizing window and desktop management. In particular, in the Multitasking section, options are provided for disabling the call of the overview mode by touching the upper left corner of the screen, resizing the window when dragging it to the edge of the screen, selecting the number of virtual desktops, showing desktops on additionally connected monitors and switching between applications only for the current one. desktop by pressing the combination Super + Tab.
My internship of 3 months with Fedora has come to an end. From submitting the form 2 times and finally making it the 3’rd time, the journey has been quite challenging. My project “Improve Fedora QA dashboard” motive was to make the dashboard more impactful so that it will be simplified for the newcomers and they can easily understand and contribute without any complexity.
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The journey of Outreachy was very great. I learned lots of things, no more a noob now. My mentors were Lukas and Josef. Whenever I got stuck into something they always sought to help me. I didn’t even have the confidence in myself that I would be able to complete the tasks, but eventually, I did. I knew JavaScript, basic ReactJS, and Vanilla Js, however, the project was not about all this, I have implemented the things for the first time like react-i18n, docker, etc, the beginning of the internship was very smooth and easy going but as I came to the second task it was a bit challenging for me as I had to implement the same page twice with two different approaches so that mentors can choose the better one but what matters here was my learning, I feel the more complicating the tasks are, the more you build up yourself while making it easy, learned how to google finally, more about ReactJs and flourished my skills.
When deploying applications on Kubernetes, certain platform characteristics strongly influence the application's architecture. In a greenfield setting, it's all about harnessing the ephemeral nature of stateless applications. Applications are built to run in scenarios where there is an expectation of high availability via horizontal scaling. Not only can the application scale out, but Kubernetes' orchestration characteristics emphasize that no individual pod is safe from destruction. Kubernetes is the epitome of the old U.S. Navy Seal saying: "Two is one, and one is none."
Workloads on Kubernetes don't always fit this model, however. Some workloads are singular in nature, and parallelization isn't an option. For example, suppose an application connects out to an external service and receives information asynchronously via a TCP socket or websocket. As part of this process, the application receives data, transforms the structure, and publishes that data into an Apache Kafka topic. In this case, only a single connection can be active at one time because of the possibility of publishing duplicate data (see Figure 1).
Do you have some anxiety about Artificial Intelligence (AI) bias or related issues? You’re not alone. Nearly all business leaders surveyed for Deloitte’s third State of AI in the Enterprise report expressed concerns around the ethical risks of their AI initiatives.
There is certainly some cause for uneasiness. Nine out of ten respondents to a late 2020 Capgemini Research Institute survey were aware of at least one instance where an AI system had resulted in ethical issues for their businesses. Nearly two-thirds have experienced the issue of discriminatory bias with AI systems, six out of ten indicated their organizations had attracted legal scrutiny as a result of AI applications, and 22 percent have said they suffered customer backlash because of these decisions reached by AI systems.
As Capgemini leaders pointed out in their recent blog post: “Enterprises exploring the potential of AI need to ensure they apply AI the right way and for the right purposes. They need to master Ethical AI.”
Linux has been supporting Full Disk Encryption (FDE) and technologies such as UEFI SecureBoot and TPMs for a long time. However, the way they are set up by most distributions is not as secure as they should be, and in some ways quite frankly weird. In fact, right now, your data is probably more secure if stored on current ChromeOS, Android, Windows or MacOS devices, than it is on typical Linux distributions.
Generic Linux distributions (i.e. Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, …) adopted Full Disk Encryption (FDE) more than 15 years ago, with the LUKS/cryptsetup infrastructure. It was a big step forward to a more secure environment. Almost ten years ago the big distributions started adding UEFI SecureBoot to their boot process. Support for Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs) has been added to the distributions a long time ago as well — but even though many PCs/laptops these days have TPM chips on-board it's generally not used in the default setup of generic Linux distributions.
How these technologies currently fit together on generic Linux distributions doesn't really make too much sense to me — and falls short of what they could actually deliver. In this story I'd like to have a closer look at why I think that, and what I propose to do about it.
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Many of the mechanisms explained above taken individually do not require UEFI. But of course the chain of trust suggested above requires something like UEFI SecureBoot. If your system lacks UEFI it's probably best to find work-alikes to the technologies suggested above, but I doubt I'll be able to help you there.
Most Linux distributions are currently coming up short from offering adequate security around full disk encryption and authenticated boot. Prominent Linux developer Lennart Poettering even argues that your data is "probably more secure if stored on current ChromeOS, Android, Windows or macOS devices."
Lead systemd developer Lennart Poettering wrote a lengthy blog post today around the state of authenticated boot and disk encryption on Linux. While many Linux distributions offer full-disk encryption, offer UEFI SecureBoot, and begun embracing TPMs, many of the technologies aren't being used to their best potential yet especially now by default / out-of-the-box.
The Register speaks to Canonical about running the OS in the cloud
Developers targeting Android are spoiled for choice with their platforms.
There are a variety of options available for running Android application development environments these days. Even Microsoft has promised that its upcoming Windows 11 will eventually be able to run the apps on the desktop and has long since supported the mobile OS via its Your Phone app, even while smothering its ailing Windows Phone with a cuddly Android pillow.
For Canonical, however, Anbox remains a cloud product, according to Simon Fels, engineering manager and is therefore unlikely to feature in any desktop version of the company's Ubuntu distribution any time soon, although with September's announcement it will now cheerfully scale from the heights of the cloud down to a single Virtual Machine via the Appliance version.
Gateworks GW16146 is an 802.11ah WiFi HaLow Mini PCIe card designed to provide long-range wireless to IoT applications utilizing the company’s Venice and Newport single board computers.
We first noticed 802.11ah WiFI LPWAN standard operating at 900 MHz for the Internet of Things in 2014, followed by Newracom NRC6101 chip in 2015, and the following year the Wi-Fi Alliance decided to call the new standard “Wi-Fi HaLow“. I was expecting it to compete with the likes of LoRa and NB-IoT, but I have not heard much about it, and when I asked a WiFi module and board supplier earlier this year, they seemed surprised I would even be interested in this type of hardware and, obviously, did not have any… So it’s good to see some new hardware coming out.
Mozilla Firefox was one of the applications that opened my eyes to open source. It wasn't by any means the tipping point, but it was part of a larger cumulative effect of several open source applications grabbing my attention, which ultimately resulted in me switching to Linux, and never looking back. Since switching to Firefox, which occurred well before I consciously changed to open source, I've been an avid Firefox user. My mobile phone was a Firefox OS mobile phone, and it was until the project was abandoned. Interestingly, though, I didn't necessarily consider myself a Firefox fan. I used it then and continue to use it today because it continues to be the best browser available in many different ways. Here are five reasons you should switch to Firefox right now.
The key idea of prrd is simple, and described in some more detail on its webpage and its GitHub repo. Reverse dependency checks are an important part of package development that is easily done in a (serial) loop. But these checks are also generally embarassingly parallel as there is no or little interdependency between them (besides maybe shared build depedencies). See the (dated) screenshot (running six parallel workers, arranged in a split byobu session).
This release brings some new features I used of late when testing and re-testing reverse dependencies for Rcpp. Enqueuing jobs can now consider the most recent prior job queue file. This allows us to find new packages that were not part of the previous runs. We added a second toggle to also add those packages who failed in the previous run. Finally, the dequeue interface allows to specify a date (rather than defaulting to the current date, useful for long-running jobs or restarts).
Back in January 2020, we looked at some oddities in Python's handling of Not a Number (NaN) values in its statistics module. The conversation went quiet after that, but it has been revived recently with an eye toward fixing the problems that were reported. As detailed in that earlier article, NaNs are rather strange beasts in the floating-point universe, so figuring out how best to deal with their presence is less straightforward than it might seem.
What role did white women play in the story of Donald Trump? In the months after his election, pink-pussyhat-clad white women positioned themselves as the paradigmatic victims of a misogynistic president, even as commentators pointed out that 47 percent of them (or, I should say, 47 percent of us) voted for him. By the end of his term, news-making “Karens” showed that white women not only voted for Trump in large numbers but were often active participants in the racist state violence he championed. Pink pussyhats recalled the moment when Trump was caught on tape bragging about his ability to assault women with impunity; now white women were caught on video, bragging about their ability to deploy the police against people of color.1
There are definitely romantic aspects to space exploration, with moments like Neil Armstrong’s first walk on the moon seared into the public consciousness.
But one oft-neglected part of space travel is in the inevitable accumulation of garbage. Abandoned satellites, launch vehicle rockets, debris, heat shields, and dozens of other types of discarded space junk remain in orbit. NASA estimated that 6000 tons of waste are tumbling around Earth’s low orbit. Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin left trash on the moon. All told, there are about 400,000 pounds of man-made waste on the lunar surface.
Infants have an average of 10 times the concentration of a type of microplastic in their poop than adults, a pilot study released Wednesday found.
The research, published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology Letters, follows previous studies reflecting the ubiquity of microplastics—small fibers less than 5 mm in size originating from everyday objects like plastic bottles and polyester clothing and that end up in the planet's waterways and human guts.
Bolstering arguments for rapidly phasing out fossil fuels to not only combat the climate emergency but also potentially save millions of lives annually, the World Health Organization on Wednesday updated its guidelines on air quality for the first time in over 15 years.
"The science is unequivocal... but these targets for clean air are meaningless if they aren't addressed with government action."—Aidan Farrow, Greenpeace International
As part of President Biden's plan to address the global Covid-19 pandemic and inequitable distribution of vaccines, medicines, and tests to many parts of the world, he convened a global summit held virtually on Wednesday.
President Joe Biden has the authority to compel U.S. pharmaceutical companies to share their coronavirus vaccine formulas and technological know-how with pandemic-ravaged developing countries, a fact that experts and public health campaigners amplified with urgency on Wednesday as world leaders convened for a virtual Covid-19 summit.
According to the New York Times, Biden has privately pushed both Pfizer and Moderna—the makers of the two available mRNA vaccines—to "enter into joint ventures where they would license their technology to contract manufacturers with the aim of providing vaccines to low- and middle-income countries."
Security researchers warn that a design issue in how the Microsoft Exchange Autodiscover feature works can cause Outlook and other third-party Exchange client applications to leak plaintext Windows domain credentials to external servers. The risk is significantly higher for devices that are used outside of corporate networks, a common scenario during the pandemic.
The goal of Microsoft’s Autodiscover protocol for Exchange is to help client applications to configure their connection to Exchange automatically. To do this, they rely on a remote configuration file hosted on what is intended to be a company domain. However, because of a design issue that has been highlighted in the past as well, the protocol can end up searching for the configuration on external domains that are or can be registered by anyone.
Apple's macOS Finder application is currently vulnerable to a remote code execution bug, despite an apparent attempt to fix the problem.
A security advisory published Tuesday by the SSD Secure Disclosure program, on behalf of researcher Park Minchan, explains that macOS Finder – which provides a visual interface for interacting with files – is vulnerable to documents with the .inetloc extension.
"[T]hese files can be embedded inside emails which if the user clicks on them will execute the commands embedded inside them without providing a prompt or warning to the user," the advisory says.
“Vengeance is mine,” saith the Lord, and for this reason there is a peculiar perversity to the spectacle of fanatical Christians embracing vigilantism and de facto bounty hunting to “save the children,” punish the women, avenge the fetuses consigned by law to limbo ever since Roe v. Wade allowed women a measure of bodily autonomy in 1973. The Lord, after all, did not say, “Vengeance is yours; go get ’em!”
The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, after 20€ years of brutal occupation, should just be the beginning. The United States must also end the disastrous "War on Terror," including the bombing campaigns targeting Somalia and Yemen. And it must also put a€ stop to the brutal sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and other countries in the Global€ South.€
Members of Congress must "stem the tide of exorbitant military spending" by backing two amendments to the annual defense bill that would cut the Pentagon budget.
That was the message delivered to lawmakers Tuesday in a letter (pdf) from a diverse collection of 49 organizations including Demand Progress, Greenpeace USA, Public Citizen, and Veterans for Peace.
I was eight years old when the United States invaded Afghanistan in October of 2001. By that time, politicians and the media had used every trick in the book to justify invading an entire country that had nothing to do with the September 11 terrorist attacks.
In a chilling reminder of the war crimes committed during the 20-year Afghanistan War, former inmates of a notorious prison at the largest U.S. military base in the country recently returned there to recount the torture and other horrors they endured during their captivity.
"They used to tie us to this chair, our hands and feet, and then applied electric shocks."—Hajimumin Hamza, former prisoner
As the last U.S. troops left Afghanistan, the military establishment and the contractors who have raked in the profits as Afghanistan’s civilians suffered immeasurably had already turned their attention to the next war they could use to justify allocating nearly half of the United States’ total discretionary spending on the Military-Industrial Congressional Complex. The process of constructing America’s next “great threat” to justify militarism began with President Obama’s “Pivot to Asia,” which started the current U.S. military buildup in the Asia-Pacific region and initiated an era of anti-China legislation that continues to this day. One of the more recent and alarming anti-China initiatives is the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), which would allocate $5.1 billion to the Department of Defense’s $66 billion Indo-Pacific budget for fiscal year 2022.€
We look at a new Reuters special report examining corruption and the drug trade in Honduras, which human rights groups say are pushing tens of thousands of people to flee the Central American country for the United States. “People really describe feeling that their life has become unlivable in Honduras,” Reuters correspondent Laura Gottesdiener says. This comes less than six months after a federal court in New York sentenced Tony Hernández, the brother of Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, to life in prison for drug trafficking and listed the president as a co-conspirator. We also speak with Adriana Beltrán, executive director of the Seattle International Foundation, who says the instability in Honduras today is directly linked to the U.S.-backed coup of 2009 that deposed President Manuel Zelaya. “To a large extent, the crisis that you continue to see in Honduras and its democracy has its roots in the coup,” Beltrán says. “Honduras has been struggling to build representative democracy, to fight corruption and crime.”
"Our climate-imperiled species—plants and animals alike—do not have time for political gamesmanship that questions unambiguous science."—Jennifer Schwartz, WildEarth Guardians
President Biden addressed the UN General Assembly on September 21 with a warning that the climate crisis is fast approaching a “point of no return,” and a promise that the United States would rally the world to action. “We will lead not just with the example of our power but, God willing, with the power of our example,” he said.
The Service disregarded overwhelming scientific evidence showing that climate change poses a major threat to the Joshua tree’s survival when the agency denied listing the species as threatened under the Act. The decision stems from a€ 2019 lawsuit€ filed by WildEarth Guardians, challenging the Service’s decision that the desert icon did not warrant federal protection, despite all the available scientific evidence pointing to the same conclusion: Joshua trees will be in danger of extinction throughout most of their current range by century’s end from climate change driven habitat loss, invasive grass fueled wildfire, and other stressors.
“The Court’s decision represents a monumental step forward for the Joshua tree, but also for all climate-imperiled species whose fate relies upon the Service following the law and evaluating the best scientific data available with respect to forecasting future climate change impacts,” said Jennifer Schwartz, staff attorney for WildEarth Guardians and lead attorney on the case. “The Court’s unequivocal holding—that the Service cannot summarily dismiss scientific evidence that runs counter to its conclusions—will force the federal government to confront the reality of climate change and begin focusing on how to help species adapt.”
"China's pledge to scale up support to green energy is also a show of great commitment that will inject much needed momentum in the pursuit of a just transition in developing nations mostly vulnerable to the climate crisis."—Landry Ninteretse, 350Africa.org
"This move will scale down fossil fuels in the continent, and limit harmful impacts of coal that are already being felt in parts of the continent," said Landry Ninteretse of 350Africa.org. "China is paving the way for other governments that continue to venture into deadly fossil fuel projects to stop them and instead accelerate plans to phase out coal, end public finance for oil and gas and implement a just transition based on renewable energy for the continent."
While the transition to electric vehicles is "inevitable," the consequences for U.S. workers depend on how policymakers manage the shift. With "smart policy," lawmakers can turn the coming auto industry "upheaval" into an opportunity to create up to 150,000 "good jobs" by 2030.
"We can ensure the shift to electric vehicles creates jobs and benefits workers—if policymakers act."—Jim Barrett, Economist
A new report released Wednesday identifies $86 billion worth of offshore tax loopholes that a dozen U.S.-based oil and gas companies exploit each year as part of a "tax bonanza," a finding that comes as climate justice advocates push Congress to eliminate subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.
"Our government cannot continue to bankroll climate destruction," Friends of the Earth tweeted Wednesday.
The Forest Service claimed that utter destruction, pictured above, in the Helena National Forest would be “forest restoration” supposedly intended to “protect Helena’s municipal water supply” from wildfire just like they are claiming that clear-cutting 8.6 square miles will restore the forest on the border of Yellowstone National Park and make it more resilient. But a picture is worth a thousand words: clear-cuts are not restoration.
It is also well-documented that wildfires burn right through clear-cuts in Montana and across the West. Clear-cuts are full of highly flammable weeds, logs they didn’t want, and kindling-like slash, and the removal of the large fire-resistant trees and moisture-retaining, shade-creating forest canopy during logging leaves a landscape that is dramatically hotter, drier, and windier — precisely the type of conditions that increase the risk of wildfire ignition and spread.
Bukele came to power in 2019, riding on a wave of anti-establishment sentiment. Exhausted and frustrated by the inability of the traditional parties on the right and the left (ARENA and FMLN) to deliver on their promises of security and shared economic growth, the country turned to a young, charismatic politician whose primary qualification was that he was not aligned with either traditional party. Early in what is supposed to be a five-year term in office, Bukele had to deal with the COVID-19 crisis and he took a hard line, imposing a toque de queda, a stay at home order, with only limited exceptions. Though the order faced opposition, it arguably did succeed in saving the country from the harms experienced by countries whose leaders did not take the virus seriously. His success was rewarded in the midterm elections, with his party winning a supermajority of seats and both ARENA and FLMN reduced to shells of their former selves.
With the legislative branch fully in his pocket after the midterms, Bukele moved to neutralize the only remaining the check on his ambitions, the country’s high court. Using their supermajority, Bukele’s party sacked the sitting judges of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court as well as Attorney General Raul Melara in early May of this year. Earlier this month, the reconstituted Supreme Court did the master’s bidding, signing off on the President seeking reelection and serving a non-consecutive second term. For a country that passed through a lengthy civil war, a long series of coups, and that continues to suffer from deeply entrenched insecurity and violence, the current move towards authoritarianism should be deeply troubling.
The most common mistake people make in trying to understand neoliberalism is to think that it is simply a resurgence of traditional anti-tax, anti-regulation, anti-union free-market liberalism (also called market conservatism). There’s something different about neoliberalism, which explains the “neo”. What is it?
Basically, neoliberalism is strong-government market liberalism. Traditional market liberals (Adam Smith) believed in freedom in general. Their freedom began with market freedom, in which business and trade are only minimally impacted by the multitude of assigned monopolies, licensing rules, required permissions, regulations, prohibitions, taxes, and fees which cramped the economy under earlier feudal and absolutist states. But classic liberalism also was (up to a point) egalitarian and libertarian, doing away with the enforced social categories (noble, bourgeois, clergy, and commoner, and serf) which prescribed who could participate in which activity. Finally, classic liberals usually supported increased personal freedoms in non-economic, including such rights as religious freedom, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms,€ habeas corpus,€ the right to a fair trial, the prohibition of arbitrary punishment, the right to political participation, and so on.
A pair of advocates for higher taxes on the rich sent a letter Wednesday urging members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to keep up their fight against "Wall Street Democrats" who are attempting to water down—or even kill entirely—a centerpiece of their party's domestic policy agenda.
"As a matter of national policy, the United States does not negotiate with terrorists. It's time for the Congressional Progressive Caucus to extend that principle to the legislative process," Morris Pearl and Erica Payne of the Patriotic Millionaires wrote in their letter (pdf) to Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the CPC.
We need to pass the PRO Act to better represent all workers, especially those most vulnerable to discrimination and employer abuse.
The Democratic Party's sweeping domestic policy agenda—from sizable climate investments to drug-pricing reforms to Medicare expansion—is under growing threat from the inside as right-wing members backed by corporate cash aim to tank or pare back central components of a multitrillion-dollar reconciliation plan.
"Big Pharma, Big Oil, Wall Street, and their foot soldiers in Congress are doing everything in their power to kill President Biden's agenda."
For Haitians and anyone else appalled by their fate, there was one last indignity: the racist, hysterical fear-mongering swiftly taken up by a right-wing eager for blood, from the reptillian Greg Abbott - we need to "stop these caravans from overrunning our state" - to GOP Texans decrying an "invasion" of migrants who could "take over our country without firing a shot." On Fox, a Del Rio woman ominously reported, "We’ve had footprints€ from illegals, in the middle of€ night, underneath our daughters’€ bedroom windows"; Red State blasted a "national security disaster" overseen by "a mental invalid" who's "on the beach again for a long weekend." Leading the slimy charge was Ted Cruz, never one to miss a performative photo op while spreading hate and lies and pretending to be outraged by something. "I am on the ground in Del Rio," he intoned in a bumptious, Monty-Python-like video, gesturing to huddled black bodies behind him. "As of this moment, there are 10,503 illegal aliens...This man-made crisis was caused by Joe Biden." Bullshit, said America, which noted the GOP runs Texas so maybe some of this is on them: "You're right, Haiti's earthquake, hurricane and collapse of the government probably had nothing to do with it....Mother of God!...I hope they come to my neighborhood - welcome, friends... I assume Cancun Cruz headed directly to his office to work on legislation to double funding to process refugees and sent staff to make sure they are properly fed (as) their processing continues. Or he went out for a lobbyist-paid steak." Finally, you smug, racist, self-righteous, opportunistic son of a Cuban migrant: They're not illegal aliens. They're human beings.
If November’s election for control of the state House of Delegates is anything like Tuesday night’s candidate forum in this coastal, military swing district, it could be a tough night for Democrats. Which could also foreshadow a bad 2022 midterm cycle.
The fact that such diplomacy had never gone away seemed to escape him.€ In the simpleton’s view of politics, his predecessor had abandoned the jaw jaw approach to international relations for muscular and mindless US unilateralism.€ Allies had been belittled, ignored and mocked.€ Strongmen had been feted, admired and praised.€ It was now incumbent upon the United States, urged Biden, that “American leadership” confront “this new moment of advancing authoritarianism, including the growing ambitions of China to rival the United States and the determination of Russia to damage and disrupt our democracy.”
It would have been more accurate to say that President Donald Trump’s coarse, business board room model was simply too much of a shock for those familiarly comfortable with guile, deception and dissimulation.€ But Biden’s return to acceptable hypocrisy did not mask the “America First” note in his temper.€ Since then, that temper has seen a dramatic, ahead-of-schedule exit from Afghanistan, building on Trump’s undertakings to conclude open-ended wars and commitments.€ US allies began to wonder whether the Biden model was that different from Trump’s cruder original.
With rising uncertainty about the fate of a U.S. Senate-approved bipartisan infrastructure bill and the broader reconciliation package Democrats are crafting, 11 senators on Wednesday expressed support for House progressives fighting to pass both simultaneously.
"We strongly support the Congressional Progressive Caucus and other members in the House who have said they intend to vote for the bipartisan infrastructure bill only once the Build Back Better Act is passed."—11 senators
The saga of Devin Nunes' family's lawsuit against reporter Ryan Lizza and Esquire Magazine got even more bizarre last week. Back in June, we had written about some heavily redacted documents in the case that suggested that Nunes' lawyer, Steven Biss, was playing some very dangerous games in order to try to keep the employees of the NuStar Farms (owned by Nunes' relatives) from testifying as to their immigration status. As you may recall, the only part of the lawsuit that was still going on were defamation claims regarding the implication that the farm might employ undocumented workers, which would be noteworthy, considering Devin Nunes hardline stance on immigration.
Summary:€ On the 32nd anniversary of the€ Tiananmen Square protests, internet users noticed Microsoft's Bing search engine was producing some interesting results. Or, rather, it wasn't producing expected search results for some possibly interesting reasons.
Today we're launching our latest Techdirt Tech Policy Greenhouse discussion in which we bring in a bunch of actual experts to discuss and debate complex and nuanced subjects regarding tech policy -- this time about content moderation at the infrastructure layer. We're excited that we're doing it in partnership with our friends over at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)! Also, we're going to conclude this new series of posts on Techdirt with two virtual events. On October 6th from 9am to noon PT, we'll have many of this series' authors discussing and debating their pieces in front of a live (though virtual!) audience (register to attend here). The following day, on October 7th, EFF and Techdirt will be hosting a smaller workshop event to take some of what we learned and discussed the previous day, and see if we can come up with more concrete steps and approaches to make sure providers, policymakers, and others understand the risks and challenges of infrastructure moderation, and how to respond to those risks.
Last week's news about Justice Barrett fretting about the Supreme Court being seen as partisan calls to mind the old joke about a defendant on trial for murdering his parents and begging the court for mercy because he's an orphan. If you've created the mess you find yourself in, you have no one to blame but yourself.
The Chinese government's national security law -- adopted/acquiesced to by Hong Kong politicians apparently handpicked to serve the country that agreed not to interfere in Hong Kong's government business until 2047 -- is still paying off for the region's impatient overseers.
Chinese state media outlets are railing against groups they claim are involved in money laundering, inciting riots, and supporting gangsters. They warn against “a chronic poison of society” and “a malignant tumor that must be destroyed.” The situation is so bad, the newspapers say, that it is time for the Hong Kong government to crack down.
"This is an embarrassingly bad decision. Do better."
That's how U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) responded Wednesday to reporting that the Biden administration, already under fire this week for its immigration policies, "is seeking a private contractor to operate a migrant detention facility at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with a requirement that some of the guards speak Spanish and Haitian Creole."
Apple has never looked too kindly upon users actually repairing their own devices. The company's ham-fisted efforts to shut down, sue, or otherwise imperil third-party repair shops are well established. As are the company's efforts to force recycling shops to shred Apple products (so they can't be refurbished and re-used), and Apple's often comical attacks on essential right to repair legislation, which only sprung up after companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sony, John Deere, and others created a grass-roots counter-movement via their attempts to monopolize repair.
Google has been spotted testing a web technology that a former staffer fears will further undermine the already often ignored choices people make about their browsers.
Alex Russell, who joined Microsoft in June as partner program manager on Edge after more than 12 years as a senior engineer at Google, noted on Twitter the appearance of WebLayer.
WebLayer, as Google describes it, is "a high level embedding API to support building a browser." It's sort of like WebView on steroids. WebView is an API in Android and iOS for presenting web content within a native app and is the basis for WebView in-app browsers (IAB) implemented in apps like Facebook, Microsoft Bing Search, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat.
BioArctic AB has announced that the European Patent Office (EPO) has issued a decision to grant European patent EP 2 448 968 B1 for novel antibodies that could be developed into a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease. The patent comes into force on 27 January 2021 and expires in 2030.
Innovation is a critical factor for the advancement of society. Problem-solving inventions, especially technological ones, enhance society’s capacity to act and drive economic growth. That said, countries across the globe have varying levels of innovativeness, which can be gauged by global innovation ranking. As per the Global Innovation Index (GII) rankings 2020, India holds the 48th rank in 131 countries. Since a vast majority of companies in India include startups and MSMEs, this data essentially shows the status of their innovations. The following article covers how India can witness a new wave of IP savvy startups and MSMEs. Let’s start by exploring the global rankings data.
Are Global Rankings on IP Filings Reliable?
Intellectual property is a reasonable pointer to gauge the innovativeness of a country. That’s because if a company is innovative and wants to hold a dominant position in the market based on it, it would protect its intellectual asset via IP rights such as patents and trademarks.
India stands at the 8th position in terms of patent filings. While the country does make it to 8th rank, the margin between India and other top-performing countries is huge.
One more country will still be required to ratify the PAP protocol before the next phase of the UPC can begin
In June, Senior Party ToolGen filed its Substantive Preliminary Motion No. 2 to deny Junior Party the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Vienna; and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") priority benefit to its U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/757,640, filed January 28, 2013 ("Provisional 3"), pursuant to 37 C.F.R. ۤۤ 41.121(a)(1)(ii) and 41.208(a)(3) and Standing Order ۦ 208.4.1. CVC filed its Opposition to this Motion. On August 26th, ToolGen filed its Reply.
