We sometimes get asked whether we will sell previous Librem models at a discount. The fact is that we normally don’t have a lot of Librem laptops lying around–the current stock sells out quickly and we order new batches. However, we also sometimes offer more than one type of Librem 13 or 15 laptop so customers can pick which hardware appeals most to them. Most recently this happened when we offered you the choice of i5 vs. i7 CPU and the choice of adding on a TPM chip. The demand for the i7 CPU and TPM chips were overwhelming to the point that both the i7 and TPM chip are now standard on our entire product line.
In recent years that there been multiple cyber-attacks that compromised a software developer's network to enable the delivery of malware inside of software updates. That's a situation that Justin Cappos, founder of The Update Framework (TUF) open-source project, has been working hard to help solve.
Cappos, an assistant professor at New York University (NYU), started TUF nearly a decade ago. TUF is now implemented by multiple software projects, including the Docker Notary project for secure container application updates and has implementations that are being purpose-built to help secure automotive software as well.
Companies love containers because they enable them to run more jobs on servers. But businesses also hate containers, because they fear they're less secure than virtual machines (VM)s. IBM thinks it has an answer to that: Nabla containers, which are more secure by design than rival container concepts.
James Bottomley, an IBM Research distinguished engineer and top Linux kernel developer, first outlines that there are two kind of fundamental kinds of container and virtual machine (VM) security problems. These are described as Vertical Attack Profile (VAP) and Horizontal Attack Profile (HAP).
Like clockwork, the Kubernetes community continues to release quarterly updates to the rapidly expanding project. With the 1.11 release, we see a number of new capabilities being added across a number of different domains – infrastructure services, scheduling services, routing services, storage services, and broader CRD versioning capabilities that will improve the ability to not only deploy Operators for the platform and applications. Links for all these new features, as well as in-depth blog posts from Red Hat and the Kubernetes community are included in the show notes.
As always, it’s important to remember that not every new feature being released is considered “General Availability”, so be sure to check the detailed release notes before considering the use of any feature in a production or high-availability environment.
While Docker Inc and its eponymous container engine helped to create the modern container approach, Red Hat has multiple efforts of its own that it is now actively developing.
The core component for containers is the runtime engine, which for Docker is the Docker Engine which is now based on the Docker-led containerd project that is hosted at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Red Hat has built its own container engine called CRI-O, which hit its 1.0 release back in October 2017.
For building images, Red Hat has a project called Buildah, which reached its 1.0 milestone on June 6.
PDS 0.98s is released with the following changes
1. Fix compilation issue on raspberry pi. 2. Minor rework and optimization on balance code path. 3. Fix wrong nr_max_tries in migrate_pending_tasks.
This is mainly a bug fix and minor optimization release for 4.17. The rework of balance code doesn't go well, it actually make more overhead than current implement. Another rework which based on current implement is still on going, hopefully be included in next release.
Alfred Chen announced this week the release of PDS-mq 0.98s, his latest patch-set of this CPU scheduler against the Linux 4.17 upstream code-base and includes minor optimization work and bug fixes.
The PDS scheduler stands for the "Priority and Deadline based Skiplist multiple queue scheduler" that is derived from Con Kolivas' former BFS scheduler with Variable Run Queue (VRQ) support. PDS design principles are to be a simple CPU process scheduler yet efficient and scalable. PDS-mq differs from Con Kolivas' current MuQSS scheduler.
Since the beginning of May 2018, I have been diving into the DRM subsystem. In the beginning, nothing made sense to me, and I had to fight hard to understand how things work. Fortunately, I was not alone, and I had great support from Gustavo Padovan, Daniel Vetter, Haneen Mohammed, and the entire community. Recently, I finally delivered a new feature for VKMS: the infrastructure for Vblank and page flip events.
At this moment, VKMS have regular Vblank events simulated through hrtimers (see drm-misc-next), which is a feature required by VKMS to mimic real hardware [6]. The development approach was entirely driven by the tests provided by IGT, more specifically the kms_flip. I modified IGT to read a module name via command line and force the use of it, instead of using only the modules defined in the code (patch submitted to IGT, see [1]). With this modification in the IGT, my development process to add a Vblank infrastructure to VKMS had three main steps as Figure 1 describes.
One of the exciting additions to look forward to with the upcoming Linux 4.19 kernel cycle is the virtual "VKMS" kernel mode-setting driver. The driver is still a work-in-progress, but multiple developers are working on it.
Just as service providers must reinvent their networks by using open source technologies, network engineers must also reinvent themselves to ensure they are qualified to handle this new world of software-defined networking (SDN).
Engineers that are well-versed in SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) are in hot demand. According to a survey conducted in conjunction with SDxCentral’s 2018 NFV Report Series Part 1: NFV Infrastructure and VIM, 64 percent of respondents said that lack of training and in-house talent was hindering the adoption of NFV.
Longtime Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst who joined Red Hat several months ago has been working on Nouveau NIR support as stepping towards SPIR-V/compute support and this summer the work very much remains an active target.
While the RadeonSI and Intel i965 Mesa drivers have been at OpenGL 4.5 compliance for a while now, the Nouveau "NVC0" Gallium3D driver has been bound to OpenGL 4.3 officially.
This Nouveau Gallium3D driver for NVIDIA "Fermi" graphics hardware and newer has effectively supported all of the OpenGL 4.4/4.5 extensions, but not officially. Originally the NVC0 problem for OpenGL 4.4 and newer was the requirement of passing the OpenGL Conformance Test Suite (CTS), which at first wasn't open-source. But now The Khronos Group has made it available to everyone as open-source. Additionally, the proper legal wrangling is in place so the Nouveau driver could become a conforming Khronos adopter under the X.Org Foundation without any associated costs/fees with Nouveau being purely open-source and primarily considered a community driver.
NVIDIA released today the 390.77 Linux driver, the latest in the 390 "long-lived" driver branch, for those not using the short-lived 396 bleeding-edge driver series.
With the NVIDIA 390.77 Linux driver release it now works with up through the Linux 4.17 stable kernel series. Additionally, there are several pressing bug fixes.
Igalia developers have been very involved with the Intel open-source developers on getting the long-awaited OpenGL 4.6 support into the "i965" Mesa driver. As has been the case for a while, out-of-tree patches can allow this to happen but with the Mesa 18.2 branching soon, it doesn't look like this will materialize ahead of this next release.
The low-latency kernel offering with Ubuntu provides a kernel tuned for low-latency environments using low-latency kernel configuration options. The x86 kernels by default run with the Intel-Pstate CPU scheduler set to run with the powersave scaling governor biased towards power efficiency.
While power efficiency is fine for most use-cases, it can introduce latencies due to the fact that the CPU can be running at a low frequency to save power and also switching from a deep C state when idle to a higher C state when servicing an event can also increase on latencies.
Newsboat is a sleek, open source RSS/Atom feed reader for the text console. It’s a fork of Newsbeuter. RSS and Atom are a number of widely-used XML formats to transmit, publish and syndicate articles, typically news or blog articles.
Newsboat is designed to be used on text terminals on Unix or Unix-like systems. It’s entirely controlled by the keyboard.
The software has an internal commandline to modify configuration variables and to run commands.
FreeFileSync is a free data backup and file synchronization app which is available in Linux systems enables you to seamlessly sync your backup data with the source data.
When you take a backup of your HD, or any other disk drive, you should keep it in sync for the file changes you do from time to time. It is often difficult to remember which file/directories you have changed/deleted/updated since the last backup. FreeFileSync solves that problem and it can determine and sync only those changed/deleted/updated files in your backup.
Corebird, the best native GTK+ Twitter client available for Linux desktops including Ubuntu will stop working on August 2018. This has been recently reported by the Corebird developer in patreon as well as in GitHub. This is mainly due to the policy change from Twitter which will remove UserStream API which is used by Corebird and other third party Twitter clients.
In the patreon post, the developer stated that, the new API by Twitter named Accounts Activity API is too difficult to implement and he may not have much time available for development.
FileZilla is a free and open source FTP client available for Ubuntu, Mint and other Linux systems. FileZilla is the go-to software when you need a FTP client for your need. FileZilla is loaded with supports for FTP, SFTP, FTPS protocols and it is cross platform. It comes with nice user friendly and easy to use GUI.
nomacs is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 and available for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac, and OS/2.
Following the news about VP9 and AV1 having more room to improve particularly for alternative architectures like POWER and ARM, a Phoronix reader pointed out an effort that Mozilla is behind on developing the "rav1e" encoder.
AV1 up to this point for encoding on CPUs has been - unfortunately - extremely slow. But it turns out Mozilla and others are working on RAV1E as what they are billing as the fastest and safest AV1 encoder. RAV1E has been in development for a while now but has seemingly flown under our radar.
Game developers are increasingly taking advantage of the growing market in Linux gaming, but that’s not always been the case, and even now some games aren’t released outside of Windows. Thanks to a clever tool called Wine, though, you can run many Windows games—and other apps, including Office—as though they were native to Linux.
Wine provides a skeletal virtual version of Windows, inside which you install extra components and perform various tweaks (for example, selecting which version of Windows you want to emulate) to get your app working. Sadly, it’s not a silver bullet that will get all your Windows games working in Linux, but it should be able to give you access to at least some of them.
Google’s Chrome OS is designed to be a relatively secure, simple operating system that’s easy to use and hard to mess up. But you can run stable channel, beta channel, or dev channel software on any Chromebook depending on whether you want the safest experience or buggy, bleeding-edge features.
There’s also an option called Developer Mode, which is different from the dev channel. It allows you to access files and settings that are normally protected and use a command shell to explore the system. It’s designed for developers and advanced users only, since it increases the chances that you’ll break your Chromebook. But enabling Developer Mode is also a prerequisite for using one my favorite Chrome OS hacks: a tool called Crouton that allows you to install Ubuntu or another GNU/Linux distribution and run it alongside Chrome OS.
Learn some practical examples of the GNU coreutils csplit command for splitting files in Linux. It’s more useful than the popular split command.
ReactOS 0.4.9 has been working on various kernel improvements, better Win32 compatibility / regression fixes, various DLL enhancements, pulling in some updated DLLs from Wine-Staging, and a variety of other improvements. The extensive technical list of changes for ReactOS 0.4.9 can be found via this Wiki page.
Following criticism of its mediocre internal makeup the Ataris VCS console will now ship with 8GB RAM by default, up from the 4GB proposed during the funding push.
It’s a decent increase in memory that should help the system cope better with more intensive indie games (don’t expect AAA titles to play nicely on the machine with the middling AMD Bristol Ridge APU).
For those of you who love your platformers, regardless of them being 2D, 3D, puzzle or action adventures there's bound to be something for the bored Linux gamer in the Humble Store Pixel Perfect Platformers Sale.
The Ultimate Nerd Game or TUNG for short, is a first-person sandbox game about building intricate machines and it made me feel so very dumb.
If you loved Minecraft's Redstone circuits or anything remotely similar, this is probably a free game you're going to love. For me, it was an exercise in frying my brain like it's in a microwave.
Thanks to a tip from madpinger in our Discord Channel, we were shown Kubifaktorium [Official Site]. It looks like a pretty interesting mix of a city-builder with elements of Factorio.
Developed by Mirko Seithe, the same developer who made BossConstructor which also supports Linux. Kubifaktorium was announced back in May and it seems quite far along, so I'm surprised we've only just heard about it!
Fancy a bit of local co-op action in an open world with a zombie apocalypse setting? Don't Bite Me Bro! [Official Site] is free.
There's actually two versions of the game, the first is the free one which is a full game. However, they also have a "DELUXE" version which includes some extra content.
Mr. Prepper is a game about opposing the government who have apparently started making people disappear who don't obey them, so naturally you have to build some sort of fallout shelter.
Victory At Sea Pacific is sounding like it's going to be a pretty big game in terms of content, as the developer has announced many of the ships and planes that will be in their new naval RTS.
They announced their plan is to have over 120 ship types and planes. Going over the list, it seems they have quite a varied and tasty menu of what the game will have from big battleships to torpedo boats, submarines, aircraft carriers and much more.
MoonQuest is a new procedurally-generated adventure game from developer Wizard Mode, one that looks a little like Terraria and it's coming to Linux.
There's a few games that allow you to run your own company, with City Game Studio [Official Site] allowing you to build up your own video game company.
Originally due for release last month, they've pushed back the release until October this year as they don't wish to cut out any features. It seems like they will run a closed-beta for select people, rather than go to Early Access as they're aiming to put out a finished and polished game.
Scrunk [Steam] is a 2D online team-based building and raiding game that recently release with Linux support, it's surprisingly fun too and we have a few keys to give away.
It’s a great day for fans of the fast and powerful Catfish search utility. With the 1.4.6 release, Catfish now officially joins the Xfce family. Additionally, there’s been some nice improvements to the thumbnailer and a large number of bugs have been squashed.
The Catfish search utility now officially lives under the Xfce umbrella.
Catfish is a GTK3-based and Python 3.x written program for searching for files on the system. Catfish has long been common to Xfce desktop systems and complementary to the Thunar file manager. The Catfish 1.4.6 release was made this weekend and with this version has now officially become part of the Xfce project.
Make sure you commit anything you want to end up in the KDE Applications 18.08 release to them :)
We're already past the dependency freeze.
[...]
August 16: KDE Applications 18.08 Release
Back from GUADEC, held in the beautiful Andalusian city of Almería, Spain, from 6th July through 11th July, 2018, I wanted to share a few notes wrt documentation and localization activities at the conference and during the traditional post-conference hacking days.
At this year’s GUADEC lightning talks I spontaneously announced and arranged a Developer Center BoF (Birds of a Feather) session. We were six attendants who met together Wednesday the 11th September. I think it is important that we communicate our doings to the rest of the community, so I will make a few short blog posts based on our meeting notes and my own thoughts on the subject.
I’m working on librsvg, a GNOME SVG rendering library, to port the SVG filter effects and related infrastructure from C to Rust. Librsvg uses Cairo, a 2D graphics library, for most of its drawing operations. Cairo can draw to a number of different surfaces like XCB and Xlib windows and pixmaps, PDF documents and PostScript files.
Here’s my proposal (feature request for GitLab / irssi? ðŸËâ°): if I feel heated when writing a reply, I will take 5 minutes before hitting the send button. I expect when I come back that I’ll look like the bad guy, some re-wording will happen, and the world will become a little bit less bad than it would have.
The DistroWatch features release announcements of new versions of hundreds of Linux and other distributions. It does host reviews of distros, podcasts, and newsletters. DistroWatch first published by Ladislav Bodnar, the founder, and maintainer, on May 31, 2001.
DistroWatch initially focused on Linux distributions. But later based on user requests, it went on adding different flavors of operating systems like BSD family, Android x86, Oracle Solaris, MINIX, and Haiku etc.
The DistroWatch presents detailed information at one place in a very convenient manner. At the time of writing this article, the DistroWatch hosted information of more than 300 active distributions (referring the list of distros populated under drop-down feature on the first page of the DistroWatch) and more than hundred in queue. It is said that the DistroWatch lives out of advertising and donation. LinuxCD.org is the first to advertise on the DistroWatch site.
The bittersweet result: I may be free of the operating system release cycle, but have spent far more time fussing over my rolling distro than I ever would have fussed to upgrade from point release A to point release B. openSUSE impresses, but I probably should have (sigh …) adopted their point release distro Leap instead, or stood pat with Mint. (Although I’ll likely Tumble from here on in, now that I’ve hacked my way through the worst of the Tumbleweed learning curve.)
If also tempted by the Tumbleweed bleeding edge: Dost thou know how to make and restore a disk image, either via the fabulous free Clonezilla or a commercial equivalent? Canst thou partition a disk, and, perhaps, fix a broken boot loader? I’ll dare to name these skills as entry bars for Tumbleweed adoption, especially the first one. I figured out how to do this stuff, still judge my knowledge as barely adequate to drive Tumbleweed daily. (Although one can install the Tumbleweed ISO in a virtual machine, fiddle to one’s heart’s content.)
For many early Linux users, Slackware was their introduction. One user told me her first Linux install was Slackware—and she had to use a hex editor to fix the partition tables so that Slackware would install. Support for her hardware was added in a later release. Another got his start building the data center that would power one of the first internet-enabled real estate sites. In the mid-1990s, Slackware was one of the easiest distributions to get and didn't require a lot of effort to get IP masquerading to work correctly. A third person mentioned going to sleep while a kernel compile job ran, only to find out it had failed when he woke up.
All of these anecdotes would suggest a hard-to-use operating system. But Slackware fans don't see it that way. The project's website says the two top priorities are "ease of use and stability." For Slackware, "ease of use" means simplicity. Slackware does not include a graphical installer. Its package manager does not perform any dependency resolution. This can be jarring for new users, particularly within the last few years, but it also enables a deeper understanding of the system.
The different take on ease of use isn't the only thing unique about Slackware. It also does not have a public bug tracker, code repository, or well-defined method of community contribution. Volkerding and a small team of contributors maintain the tree in a rolling release called "-current" and publish a release when it meets the feature and stability goals they've set.
For anyone not familiar with NuoDB, can you provide a quick overview of what you do?
Absolutely. NuoDB provides a container-native, distributed SQL database that allows enterprise-grade transactional applications to run completely in OpenShift.
For technical organizations who are undergoing digital transformations and adopting a distributed, cloud-first strategy through hybrid-cloud, container-native, microservice and other modern architectures, NuoDB is the only database solution that allows them to maintain their must-have capabilities that they have become accustomed to from an availability, SQL & performance perspective, in a modern architecture.
With a platform that runs on-premise, agonistically in any public cloud or in Red Hat OpenShift, NuoDB is helping the most digitally advanced enterprise organizations achieve a data management architecture that extends the competitive advantages gained by cloud adoption.
However, the success of open source is closely linked to the wisdom of the crowd where the collective opinion of a group of individuals tends to be smarter than that of a single expert. This is why we believe that partners are fundamental to our business, and we’re committed to providing them with the right support to grow.
One of the most important lessons learned has to see that even Fedora is popular in some places should always try to reach new groups and improve the diffusion of events and even when the how to contribute to the Fedora project was not planned talk (this time at least) it’s a important part of every release party. I really enjoyed organizing this release party and I am really hoping that this event becomes a tradition. See you in the F29 Release party.
There had been plans drafted to finish dropping Yum 3 in Fedora now that DNF is quite mature as the next-generation package manager, but that isn't happening now until at least Fedora 30.
Fedora 29 isn't eliminating Yum since it's a fairly disruptive change at this point in the cycle, there still are some important infrastructure components depending upon Yum like Koji, Pungi, and others, among other logistics to work through.
As of July 2018, Amazon's Linux AMIs (Amazon Machine Images) that are based on either the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) or Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating systems now come pre-installed with the AWS Systems Manager Agent (SSM Agent), an Amazon software designed to run on hybrid or Amazon EC2 instances in public and private clouds on AWS (Amazon Web Services).
"With this new feature release, AWS Systems Manager Agent is installed by default on all instances launched or built from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (2018.07 and later) and 18.04 LTS (all versions) AMIs," said Amazon. "By having the agent pre-installed, you can quickly start using AWS Systems Manager features such as Run Command, State Manager, Inventory and Patch Manager."
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 536 for the week of July 8 – 14, 2018.
Axiomtek’s “eBOX560-900-FL” fanless AI computer runs Ubuntu 16.04 on Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 module, and adds 2x GbE ports and single USB, HDMI 2.0, mini-PCIe, and M.2 with optional NVM. The fanless system offers IP40 protection, vibration resistance, and -10 to 50€°C support.
There have been a lot of carrier boards designed for Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 module, but the eBOX560-900-FL is the first complete Jetson TX2-based embedded computer we’ve covered. Axiomtek’s compact, rugged box computer, which follows earlier Ebox products such as the Intel Haswell based eBOX560-880-FL, is designed for AI computing, machine vision, deep learning, and edge computing.
These last few weeks, the Librem 5 team has been hard at work improving the current software stack as well as making great strides towards finalizing the development kit schematic. Here are the highlights of the exciting progress that has been made.
Purism has offered a status update on their software/hardware efforts around the Librem 5 smart-phone they have been working on that is security-minded, open-source, and that they plan to begin shipping in January of 2019.
Among the highlights from their latest update include:
- The i.MX6 experimental software images now use their Phosh Wayland Shell and are experimenting with the PureOS base rather than Debian Buster testing.
- In terms of the support for the i.MX8 hardware they actually want to use for the finished phone, at this stage they can now get their i.MX8 software image booting "a very basic mainline kernel" over the vendor-supplied kernel.
ââ¬â¹The Raspberry is a Debian based Linux distribution created for the Raspberry Pi. It is worth to mention that the Raspberry is designed to only function with the raspberry, however, to account for the rest of alternatives out there, it is all about competition and making the PI more adaptable and flexible.
After first being unveiled back in June 2018, the Renegade Elite single-board mini PC crowdfunding campaign via Indiegogo is now underway, offering pledges from $99. The Renegade Elite mini PC is a low-profile high-performance 4K capable 64-bit ARM computer with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM capable of running desktop-class Linux based operating systems like Debian, Arch, Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Android 8.1, and more.
Ten years ago this month, when Lehman Brothers was still just about in business and the term NoSQL wasn't even widely known, let alone an irritant, Facebook engineers open-sourced a distributed database system named Cassandra.
Back then, the idea that huge numbers of companies would need a scalable database was almost laughable – and that grip of traditional relational database systems is reflected in the mythical moniker given to what would become one of the first of many databases designed to run on a cluster of machines.
Named after the Greek figure who was cursed to utter the truth but was never believed, Cassandra might seem an odd choice for a system whose raison d'être is believability – but it delivered a nice dig at the stalwarts of the RDBMS world… and their trust in a false Oracle.
Google has released software that could automate the packaging of a Java program so that it can be run in the cloud-native environment.
Jib is an open-source Java “containerizer,” one that handles all the steps of packaging your application into a container image, according to Appu Goundan and Qingyang Chen, two Google engineers who co-wrote a blog post announcing the new technology.
Created over two decades ago at Sun Microsystems, Java was introduced as a “write once, run anywhere” programming language, where all the code would be packaged in a JAR file, and run by a Java Virtual Machine on any platform. The requirements for running code anywhere have expanded with the introduction of containerization, however. Few shops are Java-only these days, and many are turning to containerization for true application portability,
Kodi is one of the most popular media player software which enables you to access videos, music, and pictures via the internet or local storage on a host of platforms. Managed by XBMC foundation, Kodi is an open source software. However, its reputation has been soiled by labeling it as a piracy bearer, and that is why many ask “Is Kodi legal?” You can read more about Kodi and whether it is legal or not here.
To get that done, I have to polish up my smack-openpgp branch which has grown to a size of 7000 loc. There are still some minor quirks, but Florian recommended to focus on the big picture instead of spending too much time on small details and edge cases.
I also have to release pgpainless to maven central and establish some kind of release cycle. It will be a future challenge for me personally to synchronize the releases of smack-openpgp and pgpainless.
Pharmaceutical companies today for the first time have an open source alternative for level 4 serialization with the launch of QU4RTET, a platform that provides them with new flexibility, transparency and affordability as they comply with global drug anti-counterfeiting laws.
Kontron, a company known for its embedded computing technology, is leveraging virtualization and open source to become a direct supplier to large service providers, promising to integrate hardware and operating system software with best-of-breed virtual network functions.
That new sales strategy has evolved to support containers, particularly as they fit at the edge of the network, which for Kontron AG is the cell tower. In May, Kontron announced that its integrated SYMKLOUD open source platform now supports the latest versions of OpenStack for virtual machines and bare metal, as well as Kubernetes v1.10 for Docker and containers, via its distribution partnership with Canonical.
Firefox is available in over 90 languages, giving millions of people around the world access to the web in words they understand. Our community of translators and localizers do this because they believe that the web belongs to everyone, not just those who speak a popular tongue.
You might have noticed that while Firefox supports 90 languages, many extensions and their listings on addons.mozilla.org (AMO) are only available in English.
At present, we don’t have a way to connect extension developers with the translation community at scale, and Pontoon, Mozilla’s tool for localizing products and websites, currently only supports translating the AMO site itself.
What we do have, however, is a desire to make translation resources available, a longstanding and active community of localizers, and friends on Mozilla’s Open Innovation team who specialize in putting the two together. Part of Open Innovation’s work is to explore new ways to connect communities of enthusiastic non-coding contributors to meaningful projects within Mozilla. Together with Rubén Martín, we ran a campaign to localize an initial group of top Firefox extensions into the 7 most popular languages of Firefox users.
As we all know, measuring things is a good way to get concrete information. Now that Firefox CI is fully on Taskcluster this was a good opportunity to measure and see what we can learn about timing in localization tasks.
The code that generated the following charts and data is viewable in my Github repo, though as of this writing the code is rough and was modified manually to help generate the related graphs in various configurations. I’m working on adjusting them to be more general purpose and have better actual testing around logic.
The Reps program is working to prepare the ground for Mission Driven Mozillians and there are different tasks and issues to face for that.
The most important point for the Reps Council is the Roles of Reps inside the communities. We know that in Mozilla there are a lot of international communities, local community and project specific communities, and we need to understand and be ready to support all of them.
The GCC 8 compiler brought the Synopsys ARC CPU target while for the GCC 9 release is going to be support for the company's HS4x processors.
Merged today to mainline GCC is support for the HS4x CPUs within the ARC target. Adding this newer generation of ARC processors to the GNU Compiler Collection code-base was just a few hundred lines of code with building off the existing target code.
Today’s announcement demonstrates the expanded breadth and depth of support for the GPL Cooperation Commitment. Companies adopting the commitment now span geographic regions, include eight Fortune 100 companies, and represent a wide range of industries from enterprise software and hardware to consumer electronics, chip manufacturing to cloud computing, and social networking to automotive. The companies making the commitment represent more than 39 percent of corporate contributions to the Linux kernel, including six of the top 10 corporate contributors.1
Today, Red Hat announced that several leading technology companies, including Arm, are joining a diverse coalition of organizations that have come together to promote greater predictability in open source license enforcement. Alongside Amazon, Canonical, Linaro, Toyota, VMware and many others we have committed to ensure fair opportunity for our licensees to correct errors in compliance with their GPL and LGPL licensed software before taking action to terminate the licenses.
Red Hat announced that 14 additional companies have adopted the GPL Cooperation Commitment, which means that "more than 39 percent of corporate contributions to the Linux kernel, including six of the top 10 contributors" are now represented. According to the Red Hat press release, these commitments "reflect the belief that responsible compliance in open source licensing is important and that license enforcement in the open source ecosystem operates by different norms." Companies joining the growing movement include Amazon, Arm, Canonical, GitLab, Intel Corporation, Liferay, Linaro, MariaDB, NEC, Pivotal, Royal Philips, SAS, Toyota and VMware.
“Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can.”
This was Abraham Lincoln speaking in the mid-1800s but his advice is still relevant today. Litigation is almost always a poor tool for fostering collaboration, whether among neighbors or software developers.
In approaching the topic of open source license enforcement, it is important to consider Lincoln’s advice. Collaboration during open source license enforcement is a key to successful compliance just as it is an important element to success in the software development process. In assessing license enforcement tactics, you need to ask whether they will foster greater collaboration in open source software development. If the ultimate result of excessive or abusive enforcement is that developers and enterprises are turned off from participating in upstream open source communities, the ecosystems will wither and we all suffer as a result.
Red Hat has announced its open source license enforcement initiative is making new strides. As part of the GPL Cooperation Commitment, 14 new companies have joined the effort to promote greater predictability for GPLv2 and LGPLv2.x licenses.
“Through this initiative, we hope ultimately to increase participation in the use and development of open source software by helping to ensure that enforcement, when it takes place, is fair and predictable,” according to the commitment’s website.
He said: “Customers do increasingly care about open source, and if you don’t comply you are at risk of upsetting authors, as well as litigation and injunctions.”
“If you’re just distributing internally, then you’re fine, but as soon as it leaves your company, then you’ve triggered an obligation.”
For those who don’t comply, he warned that either the licensor, or the Free Software Foundation will find out.
How many lives could be saved if there was a way to vastly cut down inefficiency and through bureaucracy, by problem solving at a global scale? Could technology help us reach more individuals in need more meaningfully, substantially helping people affected by disasters – in less time?
The technology is already out there – but not enough people know about it.
In 2017, Hurricane Irma—the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean—made landfall; with widespread, “catastrophic” damage, disaster relief organizations were overwhelmed. “A lot of traditional means of crisis response are very top down, and they didn’t really kick in — we saw headlines about how the Red Cross didn’t show up to shelters,” said Greg Bloom, a community organizer and civic hacker who knew he had to step in to assist.
RSK Labs, formerly known as Rootstock, an Argentinian startup building the first open-source smart contract platform with a 2-way peg to Bitcoin.RSK Labs CEO Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar on Bitcoin Smart Contracts Sidechain and Crypto Industry Challenges.
Even though at this point of time the 2-way peg security of the RSK blockchain is still relying on a group of third parties called ‘Federation’, in the future the developers promise to bring a “trustless” automatic peg. How fast this happens to some degree depends on the overall miners support.
The company says its goal is to add value and functionality to the Bitcoin ecosystem by enabling Ethereum-like smart-contracts, near instant payments and higher-scalability, and this past January after almost two years of development its mainnet dubbed Bamboo was finally launched.
Creality3D, founded in 2014, is a 3D printer manufacturer based in China, offering more than 20 products. Their popular Ender 3 was recently voted “Best 3D Printer Under $200” by All3DP (review here).
Now, the company is making their most popular 3D printer, the Ender 3, completely open source.
This makes it the first Open Source Hardware Association certified 3D printer in China. This means not just a few files have been shared, but all hardware, CAD files, board schematics and firmware files are available. You can find the updated versions on the company’s GitHub page.
Universitätsmedizin Berlin and the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) are pleased to announce that 'The Virtual Brain' neuroinformatics platform has joined the EU's Flagship 'Human Brain Project'. With financial support from the EU's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program, Charité's researchers are now integrating their open-source platform into the 'Human Brain Project'. This will provide participating researchers with a research infrastructure that promotes efficiency and reproducibility. The researchers will focus on refining the theoretical underpinnings of the computer models used, developing efficient simulation technology, and working on neuroinformatics solutions that enhance the reproducibility of studies.
So, Microsoft bought GitHub, and many people are confused or worried. It's not a new phenomenon when any large company buys any smaller company, and people are right to be worried, although I argue that their timing is wrong. Like Microsoft, GitHub has made some useful contributions to free and open-source software, but let's not forget that GitHub's main product is proprietary software. And, it's not just some innocuous web service either; GitHub makes and sells a proprietary software package you can download and run on your own server called GitHub Enterprise (GHE).
Let's remember how we got here. BitMover made a tool called BitKeeper, a proprietary version control system that allowed free-of-charge licenses to free software projects. In 2002, the Linux kernel switched to using BitKeeper for its version control, although some notable developers made the noble choice to refuse to use the proprietary program. Many others did not, and for a number of years, kernel development was hampered by BitKeeper's restrictive noncommercial licenses.
In 2005, Andrew Tridgell, working at OSDL, developed a client that bypassed this restriction, and as a result, BitMover removed licenses to BitKeeper from all OSDL employees—including Linus Torvalds. Eventually, all non-commercial licenses were stopped, and new licenses included clauses preventing the development of alternative version control systems. As a result of this, two new projects were born: Mercurial and Git. Created in a few short weeks in 2005, Git quickly became the version control system for Linux development.
Proprietary version control tools aren't common in free software development, but proprietary collaboration websites have been around for some time. One of the earliest collaboration websites still around today is Sourceforge. Sourceforge was created in the late 1990s by VA Software, and the code behind the project was released in 2000.
A few days ago, Guido van Rossum, creator of the Python programming language and Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL) of the project, announced his intention to step away.
Below is a portion of his message, although the entire email is not terribly long and worth taking the time to read if you’re interested in the circumstances leading to van Rossum’s departure.
I've been programming in Python for almost 20 years on a myriad of open source projects, tools for personal use, and work. I helped out with several PyCon US conferences and attended several others. I met a lot of amazing people who have influenced me as a person and as a programmer.
I started PyVideo in March 2012. At a PyCon US after that (maybe 2015?), I found myself in an elevator with Guido and somehow we got to talking about PyVideo and he asked point-blank, "Why work on that?" I tried to explain what I was trying to do with it: create an index of conference videos across video sites, improve the meta-data, transcriptions, subtitles, feeds, etc. I remember he patiently listened to me and then said something along the lines of how it was a good thing to work on. I really appreciated that moment of validation. I think about it periodically. It was one of the reasons Sheila and I worked hard to transition PyVideo to a new group after we were burned out.
Python is a versatile programming language that can be used for many different programming projects(Web - Mobile - Desktop).
Easy to set up, and written in a relatively straightforward style with immediate feedback on errors, Python is a great choice for beginners and experienced developers alike. Python 3 is the most current version of the language and is considered to be the future of Python.
This article will guide you through installing Python 3 on your local Linux machine and setting up a programming virtual environment via the command line. This article will explicitly cover the installation procedures for Ubuntu 18.04, but the general principles apply to any other distribution of Debian Linux.
Since we have the measurement script, let's use it for something more interesting. Modules are an upcoming C++ feature to increase build times and a ton of other coolness depending on who you ask. The current specification works by having a kind of "module export declaration" at the beginning of source files. The idea is that you first compile those to generate a sort of a module declaration file and then you can start the actual compilation that uses said files.
If you thought "waitaminute, that sounds exactly like how FORTRAN is compiled", you are correct. Because of this it has the same problem that you can't compile source files in an arbitrary order, but instead you must first somehow scan them to find out the interdependencies between source (not header) files. In practice what this means is that instead of single-phase compilation all files must be processed twice. All scan operations must be done before any compilation jobs can start because otherwise you might start to compile a file before its dependencies are fully processed.
The scanning can be done in one of two ways. Either the build system scans the sources meaning it needs to understand the syntax of source files or the compiler can be invoked in a special preprocessing mode. Note that build systems such as Ninja do not do any such operations by themselves but instead always invoke external processes to do their work.
Turkey’s public enemy number one, Islamist preacher Fethullah Gülen, has U.S. politicians on his payroll and a history of cooperation with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, London-based lawyer Robert Amsterdam told Turkish news channel A Haber in a filmed interview on Monday.
Amsterdam, on retainer by the Turkish government to lobby internationally against Gülen, discussed the fruits of his activities, which he said had accelerated legal repercussions against Gülen’s organisation in the United States and raised awareness about the group.
British military personnel could be prosecuted for killing civilians in drone strikes and risk becoming complicit in alleged war crimes committed by the US, an inquiry has found.
A two-year probe by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Drones revealed that the number of operations facilitated by the UK in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia has been growing without any public scrutiny.
As well as launching its own strikes, the Ministry of Defence is assisting operations by the US and other allies that could violate both national and international law, it said.
The failure on the part of establishment media to defend Julian Assange, who has been trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, has been denied communication with the outside world since March and appears to be facing imminent expulsion and arrest, is astonishing. The extradition of the publisher—the maniacal goal of the U.S. government—would set a legal precedent that would criminalize any journalistic oversight or investigation of the corporate state. It would turn leaks and whistleblowing into treason. It would shroud in total secrecy the actions of the ruling global elites. If Assange is extradited to the United States and sentenced, The New York Times, The Washington Post and every other media organization, no matter how tepid their coverage of the corporate state, would be subject to the same draconian censorship. Under the precedent set, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court would enthusiastically uphold the arrest and imprisonment of any publisher, editor or reporter in the name of national security.
There are growing signs that the Ecuadorean government of Lenín Moreno is preparing to evict Assange and turn him over to British police. Moreno and his foreign minister, José Valencia, have confirmed they are in negotiations with the British government to “resolve” the fate of Assange. Moreno, who will visit Britain in a few weeks, calls Assange an “inherited problem” and “a stone in the shoe” and has referred to him as a “hacker.” It appears that under a Moreno government Assange is no longer welcome in Ecuador. His only hope now is safe passage to his native Australia or another country willing to give him asylum.
The Justice Department’s indictment Friday of 12 Russian military intelligence officers undermines those denials. And if the criminal charges are proved, it would show that WikiLeaks (referred to as “Organization 1” in the indictment) received the material from Guccifer 2.0, a persona directly controlled by Russia’s Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff, also known as GRU, and even gave the Russian hackers advice on how to disseminate it.
In an Interview with CBS Evening News, Trump categorized the European Union as a “foe” of the US, appearing to put it on the same footing as Russia and China, which he also characterized as “foes.” The EU strongly overlaps with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the chief US military alliance.
Former CIA director John Brennan suggested that President Donald Trump's insistence on meeting one-on-one with Russian President Vladimir Putin may indicate that Trump is "hiding" something from his own national security team.
Former CIA Director John Brennan on Monday slammed President Trump for meeting alone with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Brennan, a frequent Trump critic, questioned what the president was “hiding” from his own advisers by insisting on meeting one-on-one with Putin at their summit in Helsinki.
Former CIA Director John Brennan on Monday called on members of President Trump's Cabinet to resign in protest following the president's news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin, asking how Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, national security adviser John Bolton and chief of staff John Kelly "can continue in their jobs"
"I thought that there was nothing Donald Trump could say that would shock me, but I was wrong. I was just totally shocked at the performance of Donald Trump in Helsinki at a press conference with Vladimir Putin. I just found that it was outrageous," said Brennan to anchor Brian Williams on MSNBC immediately following Trump's press conference in Helsinki, Finland.
John Brennan, the CIA director under President Obama, didn’t mince words in describing Monday’s press conference with President Donald Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin: Trump’s performance was “nothing short of treasonous.”
Michael Hayden, the former director of the CIA and the National Security Agency, said spy agency leaders have grounds to resign following President Trump's Monday remarks at a press conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"It’s a personal choice, of course, but what more should it take?" Hayden told the Washington Examiner after Trump openly expressed doubt about whether Russia intervened in the 2016 U.S. election.
"At some point very senior officials have to decide when they have stopped being a guard rail and when their presence is now merely an enabler and legitimizer. That is the question they must answer," he said. "To be fair, that is very hard question. But sooner or later one has to ask what message staying on sends to the general American public and to the rest of the world."
Carlos Lozada, the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post, promised “an honest investigation” of whether truth can survive the Trump administration in the lead article in the paper’s Sunday Outlook section. He delivered considerably less.
Most importantly and incredibly, Lozada never considers the possibility that respect for traditional purveyors of “truth” has been badly weakened by the fact that they have failed to do so in many important ways in recent years. Furthermore, they have used their elite status (prized university positions and access to major media outlets) to deride those who challenged them as being unthinking illiterates.
This dynamic is most clear in the trade policy pursued by the United States over the last four decades. This policy had the predicted and actual effect of eliminating the jobs of millions of manufacturing workers and reducing the pay of tens of millions of workers with less than a college education. The people who suffered the negative effects of these policies were treated as stupid know-nothings, and wrongly told that their suffering was due to automation or was an inevitable product of globalization. (Yes, I am once again plugging my [free] book, Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer.)
These claims are what those of us still living in the world of truth know as “lies,” but you will never see anyone allowed to make these points in the Washington Post. After all, its readers can’t be allowed to see such thoughts.
A Russian woman accused of conspiring to infiltrate American political organizations — including the National Rifle Association — at the direction of an unnamed senior Kremlin official has been arrested, federal authorities announced Monday.
Maria Butina, 29, who accompanied Republican activist Paul Erickson to President Trump's inauguration, was arrested Sunday on a charge of conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of the Russian government, according to court papers unsealed in Washington.
The indictments, which are only unproven accusations, formally accused 12 members of the GRU, Russian military intelligence, of stealing Democratic Party emails in a hacking operation and giving the materials to WikiLeaks to publish in order to damage the candidacy of Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Over the weekend Michael Smerconish on CNN actually said the indictments proved that Russia had committed a “terrorist attack” against the United States.
“He is flattering Putin, to a certain degree, complimenting him diplomatically,” he said. “He plays the good cop while his administration people play the bad cop, somewhat, and I think that is appropriate.”
Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) slammed President Donald Trump for being so easily manipulated by Vladimir Putin.
On Monday the two world leaders held a joint press conference during their summit.
After President Trump's shocking press conference alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday, national security experts and lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have sounded the alarm on Trump's apparent choice to believe Putin over America's own intelligence agencies. While acknowledging that Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, among other U.S. security experts, informed him that Russia was responsible for the interference in the 2016 election, Trump sided with Putin, whom he said told him "it's not Russia."
Trump's comments prompted fierce blowback, including a fiery statement from Republican Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), who said — among other jaw-dropping condemnations — that "no prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant." Rep. Will Hurd, a Republican congressman from Texas and former CIA officer, had an explanation for Trump's conduct that was possibly even less flattering: "I never would have thought that the U.S. president would become one of the ones getting played by old KGB hands," Hurd wrote.
Like the anti-SLAPP statute does for unmeritorious litigation Section 1987.2 of the Code of Civil Procedure allows for mandatory recovery of fees for unmeritorious unmasking subpoenas that courts quash. Unfortunately, like robust anti-SLAPP laws, not all states have such a provision, which is another reason why it's important that platforms not be exposed to these other jurisdictions simply because they may have completed the purely ministerial task of registering with the Secretary of State or having some users there and not any more substantive connection. Platforms are in the business of facilitating speech, and they should be able to choose which laws to expose themselves to that will give them the best ability to do it.
On the other hand, both anonymous speech and free press cases affect the interests of third parties and both vindicate important First Amendment rights upon which public discourse depends
Free speech involves both the freedom to communicate and the freedom to receive communications. Yet the Commonwealth restricts what we can read, watch, play and listen to.
This hurts those Australians who would choose to read, watch, play or listen to censored material. It also does nothing for other Australians, who would have a clear option if this censorship was not present: we can choose to not read, watch, play or listen to the material. Free speech involves no obligation to listen.
One of the three free speech bills I recently introduced in the Senate seeks to remove the ban on publications, films and computer games on the grounds that they offend against standards of morality, decency and propriety.
From Confederate memorials to “problematic” literature in schools, communities across the country are wrestling with how to acknowledge the past and its imperfections without offending the sensibilities of modern schoolchildren and their teachers, with most solutions employing one of the three R’s: remove, rename, revise.
But some educators are encouraging another way. They are engaging with children in an exploration of values and culture to better understand the mores of the past and the present.
“Why is Ma so scared of Native Americans? Where does prejudice come from in pioneers? What prejudices do we still have today?” Melissa Scholes Young, an associate professor in the writing studies program at American University, offers as questions to explore the cultural landscape and significance of the “Little House on the Prairie” series of children’s books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.
[...]
Dr. Gilboa said it’s wrong to censor authors for “accurately reflecting their time and history” even when their prose clashes with the ideals of the modern enlightened age. A far better response, she said, is to talk directly to children about the issues in question with the proper values and context.
China's Hainan island has proposed allowing foreign visitors access to censored websites such as YouTube and Facebook, a double standard that has raised cries of indignation from the country's internet users.
The province, known as China's Hawaii thanks to its resorts and tropical beaches, is set to become the country's largest free trade zone and hopes to attract increased investment in hi-tech industries, as well as more tourist dollars.
Part of that effort includes making the island more hospitable to foreign tourists through such steps as instituting visa-free travel and making it easier to use foreign credit cards.
[...]
Chinese internet users wanting to view the proposal will struggle to find it, after the Hainan government quickly removed the document from its website.
Three civil liberties groups sent a letter to the University of Kansas demanding that the school reinstate a piece of artwork, a blackened American flag collage, meant to represent political polarization in the United States, after the Kansas governor ordered its removal last week.
“Censorship won last week, but today, we’re fighting back for the First Amendment,” said Will Creeley, senior vice president for legal and public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, according to a press release Monday. “The law is clear: The government can’t censor artistic expression just because powerful people don’t like it. Artistic freedom is especially important at our public colleges and universities, and we’re proud to stand with the ACLU of Kansas and the National Coalition Against Censorship in its defense.”
NCAC has joined the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Kansas in a letter to the University of Kansas (KU) strongly urging it to take a stand against censorship by restoring a public artwork that the university removed last week. The artwork, “Untitled (Flag 2),” by artist Josephine Meckseper, is part of a nationwide public art program, “Pledges of Allegiance,” organized by Creative Time and featuring 16 artworks that incorporate flags that address a variety of themes and topics by artists around the world.
As regular readers know, I have argued in my academic writing that the Fourth Amendment should be interpreted to impose use restrictions on nonresponsive data seized pursuant to a computer search warrant. In a new decision, State v. Mansor, the Oregon Supreme Court appears to have adopted my approach under Oregon's state equivalent of the Fourth Amendment.
Let me start with some context. Computer warrant searches require the government to find a needle in an enormous electronic haystack. When the police execute a warrant to search for and find the needle of evidence, they usually need to seize the haystack first to search it. I have argued that a warrant to seize the needle should allow the police to seize the haystack to search for the needle. But there's a catch: The government should ordinarily not be allowed to use whatever else they find in the haystack. If the warrant is only to seize a needle, the police can only take away and use the needle, unless there are exigent circumstances exposed by the discovery of other evidence. The nonresponsive data -- other evidence that may exist in the haystack but is not described in the warrant -- ordinarily can't be used. For the details of my view, see this article.
Searching digital things isn't like searching physical things. But a majority of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence relies on making inapt comparisons between houses/papers and devices capable of holding several housefuls of papers, communications, photos, etc.
Guidelines for digital searches are an inexact science. Given the nature of these searches, there's clearly room for abuse. It's almost inevitable. Access must be granted to an entire device (computer, phone, hard drive) to find what's sought as evidence. Files aren't named incriminating.docx so files must be opened to determine their contents. In almost all digital searches, law enforcement gets the haystack and then goes looking for needles.
I've written two installments in this series (part 1 is here and part 2 is here). And while I could probably turn itemizing complaints about social-media companies into a perpetual gig somewhere — because there's always going to be new material — I think it's best to list only just a few more for now. After that, we ought to step back and weigh what reforms or other social responses we really need. The first six classes of complaints are detailed in Parts 1 and 2, so we begin here in Part 3 with Complaint Number 7.
We’ve long known that the FBI is heavily invested in developing face recognition technology as a key component in its criminal investigations. But new records, obtained by EFF through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit, show that’s not the only biometric marker the agency has its eyes on. The FBI’s wish list also includes image recognition technology and mobile devices to attempt to use tattoos to map out people’s relationships and identify their beliefs.
EFF began looking at tattoo recognition technology in 2015, after discovering that the National Institute for Standards & Technology (NIST), in collaboration with the FBI, was promoting experiments using tattoo images gathered involuntarily from prison inmates and arrestees. The agencies had provided a dataset of thousands of prisoner tattoos to some 19 outside groups, including companies and academic institutions, that are developing image recognition and biometric technology. Government officials instructed the groups to demonstrate how the technology could be used to identify people by their tattoos and match tattoos with similar imagery.
Our investigation found that NIST was targeting people who shared common beliefs, with a heavy emphasis on religious imagery. NIST researchers, we discovered, had also bypassed basic oversight measures. Despite rigid requirements designed to protect prisoners who might be used as subjects in government research, the researchers failed to seek sign-off from the in-house watchdog before embarking on the project.
Following our report, NIST stopped responding to EFF’s FOIA requests. The agency also rushed to retroactively alter its documents to downplay the nature of the research. In a statement issued to the press, NIST denied our findings, claiming that its goal was simply to evaluate the effectiveness of tattoo recognition algorithms and “not about the many complex law enforcement policies or approaches that may be related to images of tattoos.”
In January 2006, David M. Winberg wrote a two-page paper lobbying the National Security Agency to build a computing center at Camp Williams.
Winberg, a Utahn with a long history with the NSA, lauded the technical advantages of the site. Then he used the last paragraph to promote Utahns as a whole.
“Utah has long stood as one of our nation’s most patriotic states,” Winberg wrote. “The people of Utah are committed to the principles and practices of maintaining and improving our national security.”
On 20 June, searches were carried out1 at the homes of several board members of the German association "Zwiebelfreunde". All their computers and storage media (hard drives, USB keys) were seized by the German police.
The reason? These three people are supposedly "witnesses" in an ongoing investigation into a blog calling for anti-fascist protests in Augsbourg, in Germany. The Police consider that this blog calls for violent actions.
And the link between this blog and Zwiebelfreunde? Hold onto your hat. The email address associated with the blog is hosted by the American organisation Riseup. And Zwiebelfreunde collects donations on Riseup's account. It's hard to imagine Google's hardware being seized by the Police if the people behind the blog had chosen Gmail.
It's a bit as if La Quadrature du Net's offices, as well as the homes of its leaders, had ben searched because of an account created on mamot.fr, La Quadrature's Mastodon instance. It doesn't make sense.
This is clearly an attack on Zwiebelfreunde, which for years has been promoting and facilitating the use of privacy-protecting tools such as those of the Tor project. It helps collect funds for these projects, in this case Riseup. The money raised by Zwiebelfreunde is used in particular to develop the tools and services provided by Riseup, to reimburse travel expenses and to maintain RiseUp's Tor infrastructure.
The Trump Administration -- much like the administration before it -- has declared war on leakers. The government prefers to selectively leak info using anonymous sources, but only the sort of leaks that serve its political/PR purposes. Everything else -- no matter how much the leaked info serves to better inform the public -- is the target of investigations and prosecutions.
Jeff Sessions claims this administration has opened three times as many leak investigations as Obama's. If so, it will rack up unprecedented numbers. Both the Obama administration and the Trump administration have decided it's OK to target journalists' communications to hunt down leakers, an act that strikes at the very heart of the First Amendment.
An indictment against James Wolfe, a longtime Senate Intelligence Committee advisor, was put together by harvesting emails and other private communications between Wolfe and various reporters. This document confirmed what was already suspected by Ron Wyden, who demanded late last year the DOJ turn over information on its targeting of journalists' communications.
In Massachusetts, rally organizers are burdened by unlawful charges.
A historic level of activism and protest has been seen in our nation’s streets and public parks over the past two years. These protests reflect the profound importance of our constitutional right to peaceful assembly: People come together, voice their dissent, and organize for change. The right to join with neighbors in protest is core to the First Amendment and critical to a healthy and vibrant democracy.
On Jan. 20, 2018, thousands of people gathered on Cambridge Common in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the second Women’s March. As in hundreds of other cities around the world, the Cambridge event was organized in protest of the Trump administration’s attacks on the civil rights of women and other marginalized people. The event was peaceful, with a light police presence.
And yet, Cambridge event organizers were billed for thousands of dollars for police details and emergency medical services. They were also told to expect additional invoices for police from neighboring cities and towns and the local transit system.
Despite successfully completing the permitting process and paying permit application fees before the event, organizers were told less than two weeks before the event that they could be additionally charged for public safety services. That discussion happened after the organizers mentioned to police that there could be counter-protesters present at the event.
Charging rally organizers for public safety services as a condition for granting permits deters political participation — plain and simple. Most event organizers would think twice about coordinating a protest if they thought they might owe $4,000, like the Cambridge Women’s March organizers ultimately owed. In fact, the Cambridge organizers flagged the bills to the ACLU for that very reason. They feared the impact of the city’s practices on the exercise of free speech of all who seek permits for the Cambridge Common and other public parks.
Sendy Karina Ferrera Amaya opened her mouth, and a gloved hand gave each cheek a perfunctory brush with a cotton swab.
Fifteen seconds, and the $429 DNA test she’d paid for was over. “Eso es todo,” the lab technician said last Thursday. That was it. Ferrera, 25, gave a tentative smile and walked out to join her fiancé. Squeezing his hand as they drove away, she allowed herself to hope. To imagine her curly-haired 1-year-old daughter wrapped in her arms, much bigger and more wiggly than last time she held her. Maybe next week, she would finally be reunited with Liah, whose name she wore around her neck like a talisman.
Even though the Trump administration is under a court order to reunite children who were separated from their parents under the “zero tolerance” immigration policy, Ferrera has no idea what that means for her family. Liah had traveled from Honduras with her uncle in mid-April. Ferrera was in the U.S. already, having entered undetected months earlier.
More than 40 years after the notorious MK Ultra program became public knowledge, the CIA’s mind-control program is still shrouded in mystery and unanswered questions. Now, Canadians who became non-consenting test subjects in experiments are seeking closure for the inhumane LSD and electroconvulsive therapy research that left hundreds of psychiatric patients permanently scarred. Despite the well-documented cases of patients who suffered lifelong consequences as a result of the inhumane experiments, the Canadian government has neither accepted responsibility nor apologized for its role in the CIA project.
The fifth anniversary of the founding of Black Lives Matter (BLM) makes me think back 50 years, not five. Shortly before he was killed, Martin Luther King lamented that the gains of the civil rights movement had come at “bargain rates” because it cost America nothing to integrate lunch counters and buses or give Blacks the right to vote.
King knew that the real fight—against systemic forces such as the criminalization of African-Americans—lay ahead. As a 10-year-old growing up in Memphis, Tennessee, I did not understand—I just saw what looked like visible progress until King was killed, and it seemed like the progress not only stopped, it rolled back.
The young activist started at 26 and was dead at 39. Richard Nixon’s nefariously designed “war on drugs” came next, fueling the over-policing and mass incarceration of Black bodies.
Federal court blocks government from deporting any families it separated, lambasts HHS official for ‘exasperating declaration
The federal judge who ordered the Trump administration to reunite the nearly 3,000 children it separated from their parents has temporarily blocked the government from deporting any of the families it reunites until at least July 23.
The ACLU had requested the temporary restraining order due to concerns that families may have been coerced into agreeing to voluntarily return to countries where they may be in danger because they believed that was the only way they could get their children back. We wanted to make sure that parents would have time to consider their options and be fully informed of their rights before making their decision.
The ruling came after a rollercoaster few days in which Judge Dana Sabraw both praised the administration for its good faith and compliance with court orders, then lambasted it for fundamentally misunderstanding what it was being asked to do.
On Friday, July 13, when Judge Dana Sabraw held a status conference on the government’s efforts to reunite the children by the July 26 deadline, he seemed pleased with the progress.
[...]
“It is clear from Mr. Meekins’s Declaration that HHS either does not understand the Court’s orders or is acting in defiance of them,” Judge Sabraw said. He added that Meekins appeared to be providing cover for the government’s “lack of foresight and infrastructure necessary to remedy the harms” caused by separating families and that HHS appeared to be “operating in a vacuum, entirely divorced from the undisputed circumstances of this case.” Judge Sabraw then ordered the government to submit its plan for reunifying the children with their parents, which the government did on Sunday.
It is just a snapshot, but it makes for a plenty ugly picture all the same: The New York City Commission on Human Rights surveyed more than 3,000 Muslim, Jewish and Sikh residents of the city late in 2017 and found striking rates of racially and or religiously motivated assault, harassment and workplace discrimination.
Some 38 percent of those surveyed said they had been verbally harassed or taunted because of their race or faith. Nearly 10 percent said they had been the victim of an actual physical assault. A similar percentage of those surveyed said they had seen their property vandalized or otherwise defaced.
Lurking in those broad numbers are some more specific outrages: 18 percent of Sikhs surveyed said they had been denied service by a local business; roughly 6 percent of those surveyed who said they wore religious garments reported having had someone try and tear those garments off them.
You'll of course recall that during the net neutrality repeal the FCC's public comment process was flooded with bogus comments in support of (and in a few instances in opposition to) the FCC's plan. Many of these comments came from a bot that filled the proceedings with fake comments in perfect alphabetical order, something that should have been pretty easy to prevent (had the FCC actually wanted to). Many of the comments came from people that had their identities lifted to support the repeal (like myself), while other commenters were, well, deceased.
Nobody's been able to yet confirm who was behind the identity fraud and bot attack, in part because the FCC actively blocked a law enforcement investigation attempting to find out. The general consensus is that "somebody" (either ISP-linked outfits or some group of partisans) was hoping to erode trust in the comment process to try and downplay the massive public backlash to the repeal. But it should also be noted that this is a problem that extends beyond the FCC, and has impacted other major policy decisions at major agencies government wide.
Decentralized content creation and IP protection platform, Typerium, has filed two patents for its technology in order to keep competition at bay.
Over the past couple of years, several major NPEs have announced big Chinese portfolio acquisitions. But a new litigation in Beijing shows that this is not the only way foreign assertion entities are affecting the market here - some patents formerly owned by now-defunct NPEs are re-emerging in Chinese lawsuits. Xiaomi’s strong smartphone sales and its IPO in Hong Kong have put a bull’s-eye on its back. It is facing down lawsuits from Ericsson in India and Coolpad in China, having recently beaten an SEP assertion by KPN.
Two US senators have called on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to examine patent settlements involving biologic and biosimilar producers, echoing calls from patient advocacy groups. Raising particular concerns about AbbVie’s recent high-profile Humira agreements, the legislators have cast doubt on the legitimacy of settlements that have otherwise been interpreted as a triumph of the Illinois entity’s patent strategy. But whether or not the FTC decides to inspect the Humira settlements, rights owners should expect an increase in legal, regulatory and public scrutiny of such deals in the future.
In a recent post, this GuestKat explored the possibility for runway models to claim performers’ rights under UK law (here), concluding that runway models could make a reasonable claim for performer’s rights protection under several legal bases. One such basis relies on the definition of "protected performers" under the Rome Convention and WIPO Performance and Phonograms Treaty (WPPT) [as interpreted here]. International treaty or no international treaty, the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (CDPA) in the UK are arguably broad enough to fit runway models within the scope of performers’ rights (see also, Richard Arnold (2016) para 2.17). As such, invoking the Rome Convention and WPPT is most germane in the face of a narrow [conservative?] interpretation of the CDPA.
Joseph Siino, president of patent pool manager Via Licensing, tells Managing IP about his peace plan to end wireless patent wars, the impact of China and the coming challenges of 5G technology
Ten days ago, the European Parliament dealt a major blow to a radical proposal that would force online services to deploy copyright bots to examine everything posted by users and block anything that might be a copyright infringement; the proposal would also ban linking to news articles without paid permission from the news sites.
The July 5 vote means that the European Parliament will debate these clauses in September. In the meantime, there's a lot of behind-the-scenes scurrying around as members of parliament and giant corporations lay out their forces for the fight in September.
Against all the odds, but with the support of nearly a million Europeans, MEPs voted earlier this month to reject the EU's proposed copyright reform—including controversial proposals to create a new "snippet" right for news publishers, and mandatory copyright filters for sites that published user uploaded content.
The change was testimony to how powerful and fast-moving Net activists can be. Four weeks ago, few knew that these crazy provisions were even being considered. By the June 20th vote, Internet experts were weighing in, and wider conversations were starting on sites like Reddit.
The result was a vote on July 5th of all MEPS, which ended in a 318 against 278 victory in favour of withdrawing the Parliament's support for the languages. Now all MEPs will have a chance in September to submit new amendments and vote on a final text—or reject the directive entirely.
While re-opening the text was a surprising set-back for Article 13 and 11, the battle isn't over: the language to be discussed on in September will be based on the original proposal by the European Commission, from two years ago—which included the first versions of the copyright filters, and snippet rights. German MEP Axel Voss's controversial modifications will also be included in the debate, and there may well be a flood of other proposals, good and bad, from the rest of the European Parliament.
There's still sizeable support for the original text: Article 11 and 13's loudest proponents, led by Voss, persuaded many MEPs to support them by arguing that these new powers would restore the balance between American tech giants and Europe's newspaper and creative industries—or "close the value gap", as their arguments have it.
But using mandatory algorithmic censors and new intellectual property rights to restore balance is like Darth Vader bringing balance to the Force: the fight may involve a handful of brawling big players, but it's everybody else who would have to deal with the painful consequences.
Axel Voss is the German MEP responsible for Article 13 of the pending EU Copyright Directive, which says that it's not good enough for companies to remove infringing material posted by users once they're notified of its existence; instead, Voss wants then to spend hundreds of millions of dollars implementing automated filters that prevent anyone from posting copyrighted material in the first place (even if they have the right to do so under fair dealing, and even if that means that a lot of legitimate material gets accidentally blocked).
Voss's explanations for this proposal have been incoherent and technologically illiterate, so maybe it's no surprise that he turns out to be a serial copyright infringer whose social media feeds for the past two years include at least 17 images from major German news agencies, used without permission.
Buzzfeed Germany found the images; then they asked Voss, who had insisted that Article 13 had been proposed to end the posting of copyrighted images where "there is no remuneration of the concerned author" whether he'd paid the photographers whose work he'd used without permission.
There's one person who wields more power than anyone to shape the awful EU Copyright Directive: the MEP Axel Voss. He's the head of the main Legal Affairs Committee (JURI) that is steering the Directive through the European Parliament. Voss took over from the previous MEP leading JURI, Therese Comodini Cachia, after she decided to return to her native Malta as member of the national parliament. Her draft version of the Directive was certainly not perfect, but it did possess the virtue of being broadly acceptable to all sides of the debate. When Voss took over last year, the text took a dramatic turn for the worse thanks to the infamous "snippet tax" (Article 11 of the proposed Directive) and the "upload filter" (Article 13).
As Mike reported a couple of weeks ago, Voss offered a pretty poor defense of his proposals, showing little understanding of the Internet. But he made clear that he thinks respecting copyright law is really important. For example, he said he was particularly concerned that material is being placed online, where "there is no remuneration of the concerned author." Given that background, it will probably come as no surprise to Techdirt readers to learn that questions are now being asked whether Voss himself has paid creators for material that he has used on his social media accounts...