ââ¬Å As far as I can tell, there’s currently no way of providing documentation for specific containers that we could fairly call canonical, “best practice,” or even all that widely used. This blog post suggests some currently available (but sadly not-great) workarounds but also points to what I think could be a fundamentally better path.
was hoping that a post from when I got my first laptop, an ASUS U30JC, would provide a template for how to review my new, second laptop. Sadly, that post was from over 8 years ago, when this blog was just a year old, I had not yet started college, and my writing was much worse. With that in mind, I now provide a review of my new laptop; this review will be by no means a thorough review of hardware, but will be more of a summary of my experiences installing Linux on it and using it for around a month.
A few months ago, I noticed that part of the plastic frame around the screen of my old laptop, along with the hinge below it, had partially detached. A little over a month ago, that detachment had become much more noticeable, to the point of becoming a liability for me: the laptop would no longer close properly (without me risking breaking it altogether), so I would not be able to take it anywhere outside. Up until that point, I had experienced no major hardware issues with that laptop, and only minor issues such as the optical drive occasionally being unresponsive; I could tell that it was struggling a little more with newer software, but on the whole, it was performing quite well, so while I had from time to time over the last couple of years been looking casually into replacing it, this sudden development forced the issue. Given my disability, I wanted something a bit more lightweight, because my old laptop was 4.5 pounds, which was a bit heavy for me; that said, I still wanted something that would offer a reasonable amount of computational power, and while I didn't anticipate requiring a high-performance graphics card for gaming as I am not a serious gamer, I figured there may be some casual games as well as the possibility of getting into GPU programming for my work for which I may want a reasonable dedicated graphics card. Luckily, I found the ASUS ZenBook UX331UN, which seemed on paper to fit the bill on all counts, and I found only a few left in stock online for a reasonable price (just over $1000), so I went ahead and bought one. Follow the jump to read more.
Microsoft’s October 2018 update for Windows 10 has been like none other this time – full of issues and problems. It has caused it to gain notoriety for all the wrong reasons. The software giant has unfortunately failed to call it a day. Yet another issue has been discovered in the update. Windows 10 version 1809 has encountered yet another problem which has also been added to the list of known problems on the update history page. The issue that has sprung up this time relates to anti-malware solution Morphisec. The update history page states that this not only includes Morphisec but also involves other products that have been built on that SDK:
“Microsoft and Morphisec have identified an issue on devices that have installed Morphisec Protector or another application that uses the Morphisec Software Development Kit (SDK) including: Cisco AMP for Endpoints. These applications may impact customers’ ability to save Microsoft Office documents.”
We are pleased to announce the general availability of CentOS Linux 7 (1810) for the x86_64 architecture. Effectively immediately, this is the current release for CentOS Linux 7 and is tagged as 1810, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 Source Code.
As always, read through the Release Notes at : http://wiki.centos.org/Manuals/ReleaseNotes/CentOS7 - these notes contain important information about the release and details about some of the content inside the release from the CentOS QA team. These notes are updated constantly to include issues and incorporate feedback from the users.
Brent Schroeder, SUSE chief technology officer, Americas, recently spoke on this topic at Fujitsu Forum and provided some sound advice that organizations need to think about when considering how AI can be used to drive tangible business outcomes and the findings may surprise you.
Has “serverless” surpassed containers? Will Kubernetes be the center of the universe for developers? Regardless of the technical benefits, your personal investment in the technologies impact your point of view.
Kubernetes 1.13 has been one of the shortest releases to date at 10 weeks. This release continues to focus on stability and extensibility of Kubernetes with three major features graduating to general availability this cycle in the areas of Storage and Cluster Lifecycle. Notable features graduating in this release include: simplified cluster management with kubeadm, Container Storage Interface (CSI), and CoreDNS as the default DNS.
These stable graduations are an important milestone for users and operators in terms of setting support expectations. In addition, there’s a continual and steady stream of internal improvements and new alpha features that are made available to the community in this release. These features are discussed in the “additional notable features” section below.
The keepers of Kubernetes, the rather popular software container orchestration system, have pushed out three new releases that patch a critical flaw.
In a post to the Kubernetes announcement list on Monday, Google senior staff engineer Jordan Liggitt says Kubernetes version v1.10.11, v1.11.5, and v1.12.3 have been made available to fix CVE-2018-1002105, a privilege escalation vulnerability.
The code error in the open source project has been designated severity 9.8 out of 10 because it can be executed remotely, the attack is not complex and no user interaction or special privileges are required .
As 2019 approaches, IT leaders are reading the tea leaves on today’s tech trends to determine where to place their bets in the year ahead. Will blockchain have its break-out moment? Will our cars all be self-driving? Will bots take our jobs, or just make them easier?
We asked IT leaders and tech experts what they see on the horizon for the future of technology. We intentionally left the question open-ended, and as a result, the answers represent a broad range of what IT professionals may expect to face in the new year. Let's dig in:
Welcome to Episode #261 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this, our 20th Weekender edition, we give you information on upcoming amateur radio contests and special event stations, upcoming open-source conferences and events, personal challenges, Linux distributions to try and a whole bunch of hedonism. It's the perfect intro to your next two weekends. Thank you for listening.
Last month at the Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC 2018) was a presentation by Red Hat's open-source graphics driver developer David Airlie on creating a vendor-neutral compute stack that theoretically could take on NVIDIA's CUDA dominance.
This hypothetical stack would be based upon Khronos standards like SYCL, make use of LLVM and Mesa, and all-around sounds quite interesting for those looking towards CUDA alternatives. While work has yet to commence on this effort besides all of the other Mesa and LLVM groundwork that helps in this direction, the LPC video recording of Airlie's presentation is now available that adds much more context than what is available just from the slide deck.
I spoke at Linux Plumbers Conference 2018 in Vancouver a few weeks ago, about CUDA and the state of open source compute stacks.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, we follow up on the Kernel Performance issues we discussed last week. There may be a new contender in the Mobile market using Plasma Mobile. We’ll also check out some distro news from Fedora, BlackArch and Intel’s Clear Linux. A lot of exciting App News was released this week for upcoming releases to Blender, Kodi., and more. Later in the show, we’ll check out a new game from Valve and some Security News. All that and much more!
Clear Linux doubles down on the desktop, Fedora 31 is likely canceled or delayed, and why Firecracker is being called the new “Docker killer”.
Linux has lots of creative apps, but how do they all fit together? That's obviously a big question with lots of different answers, but in this episode, Klaatu provides a real world example of the different applications involved in publishing a tabletop card game.
The ARM Linux developers continue working on Energy Aware Scheduling (EAS) for the mainline Linux kernel to better handle systems with asymmetric CPU topologies, namely SoCs like those with ARM big.LITTLE cores.
Energy Aware Scheduling is designed to take into account information from the ARM Energy Model framework for making better scheduling decisions based upon the topology of the CPU cores with the performance and power characteristics. On ARM big.LITTLE systems EAS not only helped reduce energy usage by up to a few percent but also the performance in some workloads did improve by a percent or two.
The patches are intended to "comply" with Linux developers' recently adopted Code of Conduct, which requires developers, maintainers, and especially Linus Torvalds to treat all contributors with respect and dignity when working together.
As spotted by Phoronix, the patch set issued by Intel software engineer Jarkko Sakkinen addresses 15 components where 'fuck' or 'fucking' appeared in code comments, which have now been swapped out for a 'hugload of hugs'.
For example, "* IOC3 is fucking fucked beyond belief ..." is now "* IOC3 is hugging hugged beyond belief ...".
Another now reads: "Only Sun can take such nice parts and hug up the programming interface* like this. Good job guys...".
Elsewhere, comments have been amended to "Hug, we are miserable poor guys...".
A misguided attempt to remove swearwords from comments embedded in Linux kernel code has itself been greeted with a torrent of comment. It has to be noted that most of the discussion on the Linux mailing list is remarkably moderate in tone and comes to an acceptable conclusion.
Overstreet is now focussed on persistent allocation information. This will then allow him to focus on ‘reflink’ which in turn will be useful to the company that’s funding bcachefs development. This is because the reflinked extent refcounts will be much too big to keep in memory and hence will l have to be kept in a btree and updated whenever doing extent updates. The infrastructure needed to make that happen also depends on making disk space accounting persistent.
After all of these updates, he claims bcachefs will have fast mounts (including after unclean shutdown). He is also working on some improvements to disk space accounting for multi-device filesystems which will lead up to fast mounts after clean Shutdowns. To know if a user can safely mount in degraded mode, they will have to store a list of all the combinations of disks that have data replicated across them (or are in an erasure coded stripe) – without any kind of fixed layout, like regular RAID does.
There is still four weeks or so until the Linux 4.20 kernel will be officially christened, but there are already some changes we are excited for that should be on the table with Linux 4.21.
The past several years Red Hat developer Jerome Glisse has been working on Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) for the Linux kernel to handle the mirroring of process address spaces, system memory that can be transparently used by any device process, and similar functionality around today's GPU computing needs and other devices. Jerome today published the next step as part of his low-level memory device management work and that is the Heterogeneous Memory System for exposing complex memory topologies of today's systems.
Linus Torvalds has stuck to his “no swearing” resolution with his regular Sunday night Linux kernel release candidate announcement.
Probably the most important aspect of the weekend's release candidate is that it, in a way, improves the performance of STIBP, which is a mitigation that stops malware exploiting a Spectre security vulnerability variant in Intel processors.
In November, it emerged that STIBP (Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictors), which counters Spectre Variant 2 attacks, caused nightmare slowdowns in some cases. The mitigation didn't play well with simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) aka Intel's Hyper Threading, and software would take up to a 50 per cent performance hit when the security measure was enabled.
The Linux Foundation and RISC-V Foundation announced a collaboration project to promote open source development and commercial adoption of the RISC-V instruction set architecture (ISA).
The move is part of a cunning plan to offer more robust support and educational tools for the active RISC-V community, and enable operating systems, hardware implementations and development tools to scale faster.
Rick O'Connor, executive director of the RISC-V Foundation, in a press release that RISC-V is hardware equivalent to the open source principles that guide the Linux project,
NVIDIA PhysX, the most popular physics simulation engine on the planet, is going open source.
We’re doing this because physics simulation — long key to immersive games and entertainment — turns out to be more important than we ever thought.
Physics simulation dovetails with AI, robotics and computer vision, self-driving vehicles, and high-performance computing.
What just happened? Starting today, Nvidia has chosen to offer the PhysX engine under an open-source license. It believes that fields other than video games, such as AI and robotics, can benefit from its use. Version 4.0, which releases later this month includes improvements geared for industrial-grade simulations.
If you play video games at all, even occasionally, you are probably familiar with or have at least seen the logo for Nvidia’s PhysX engine. The software is used in a multitude of titles from Call of Duty to The Witcher to realistically simulate objects that react naturally to forces in a 3D-rendered environment.
NVIDIA PhysX is going open source. NVIDIA is doing this because physics simulation - long key to immersive games and entertainment - turns out to be more important than we ever thought. Physics simulation dovetails with AI, robotics and computer vision, self-driving vehicles, and high-performance computing.
It’s foundational for so many different things we’ve decided to provide it to the world in an open source fashion. Meanwhile, we’re building on more than a decade of continuous investment in this area to simulate the world with ever greater fidelity, with on-going research and development to meet the needs of those working in robotics and with autonomous vehicles. PhysX will now be the only free, open-source physics solution that takes advantage of GPU acceleration and can handle large virtual environments.
Popping up a little while ago on Twitter, NVIDIA has announced that they've now put PhysX under an open source license.
Something I am sure many game developers and the open source community will approve of. Writing about it on their official blog, NVIDIA said "We’re doing this because physics simulation — long key to immersive games and entertainment — turns out to be more important than we ever thought.".
As a very big surprise bundled alongside the announcement today of the $2,499 USD TITAN RTX graphics card is word that NVIDIA's PhysX software is going open-source!
It was a decade ago that NVIDIA acquired PhysX from their acquisition of AGEIA Technologies who at the time was working on Physics Processing Units. Since then, PhysX has become tightly coupled with NVIDIA GPUs and CUDA, but now the company is deciding to open-source it.
NVIDIA is open-sourcing its PhysX physics simulation engine. According to Phoronix, NVIDIA says ""We're doing this because physics simulation—long key to immersive games and entertainment—turns out to be more important than we ever thought. Physics simulation dovetails with AI, robotics and computer vision, self-driving vehicles, and high-performance computing." See also the NVIDIA blog for more details.
Besides the mysterious EXT4 issue on Linux 4.19 that is still being sorted out, another known issue but with a fix pending that is hopefully not far out pertains to running newer Radeon graphics cards with older motherboards.
An issue that has been known for weeks and with a patch available but not yet back-ported is about using PCI Express 3.0 capable Radeon graphics cards in older PCI Express 1.0 motherboards. A small patch to the kernel's PCI code is needed to correct the function for returning the PCI Express speed capabilities. On problematic kernel builds, when a PCI Express 3.0 card is in a PCI Express 1.0 motherboard slot, it will be reported as PCIe 3.0 and that can cause issues.
Last month when the AMD Radeon RX 590 launched, it wasn't working on Linux to much surprise considering it's another Polaris refresh. Today there are new AMDGPU DRM kernel patches and firmware/microcode files that do allow the RX 590 now to work properly under Linux.
Considering there aren't many changes from the RX 580 to RX 590, it was a surprising failure after having to purchase the card and only to find it not working. It also caught the AMD Linux developers by surprise as well since the support was working on their pre-production hardware as well. AMD developers began exploring the RX 590 Linux problem and quickly figured out it was due to some video BIOS changes albeit it took some time to get the problem rectified.
In V3D land, I built kernel support for the Texture Formatting Unit (TFU) and started using it for glGenerateMipmaps() support. This unit will be also be important for reformatting linear dmabufs (such as from X11 with a linear-only scanout engine) or media decode output in SAND format into the UIF format that V3D can render from. The kernel side is in drm-misc-next, and I'll land the Mesa side once it hits drm-next. I also rewrote the V3D cache invalidation in the kernel thanks to feedback from Dave Emett on the hardware team. In the process, this fixed a 3ms(!) CPU-side wait on every job submission, which improved throughput by 4-10x.
Complementing our many recent bare-metal Linux distribution comparison benchmarks, here is a fresh look at how the various high profile Linux distributions are running on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). For this round of testing on their current-generation M5 instance type, Amazon Linux 2, Clear Linux 26600, Debian 9.6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15, and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS were benchmarked.
For providing some fresh Linux cloud benchmarks, these six Linux distributions were tested over the weekend using an Amazon m5.4xlarge as a medium-tier, general purpose instance with 16 vCPUs, 64GB of memory, and EBS storage. The m5.4xlarge instance types are currently running on Intel Xeon Platinum 8175M processors with KVM. All of the distributions were tested out-of-the-box with their standard Spectre/Meltdown mitigations, default compiler toolchains, etc. Below are the prominent details for these Amazon, Clear Linux, Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu releases benchmarked for this EOY2018 comparison.
What’s Momo? you may ask. Momo is a Bash shell script for importing and organizing photos and RAW files. It is also an essential part of my Linux-based photography workflow.
While the previous version of Momo did the job, it had some limitations. For starters, the script needed a city name in order to geotag photos as well as acquire weather conditions. It was possible to omit the city name, but then the script wouldn’t write any metadata to photos.
Since the release candidate 0.1.0 RC2 three weeks ago, no critical bugs were reported, so we decided to finally publish the stable release 0.1.0.
Last week, the team at LibrePCB released LibrePCB 0.1.0., a free EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software used for developing printed circuit boards. Just three weeks ago, LibrePCB 0.1.0 RC2 was released with major changes in library manager, control panel, library editor, schematic editor and more.
The key features of LibrePCB include, cross-platform (Unix/ Linux, Mac OS X, Windows), all-in-one (project management, library/schematic/board editors) and intuitive, modern and easy-to-use graphical user interface. It also features powerful library designs and human-readable file formats.
Developers are beginning to firm up the Darktable 2.6 release as the next feature update to this amazing, cross-platform open-source RAW photography software.
This open-source photography workflow software continues getting better and with Darktable 2.6 there are more features coming as outlined by yesterday's 2.6-RC0 tag.
Lychee is a free, open source, elegant and easy-to-use photo-management system, which comes with all the necessary features you need for securely managing and sharing photos on your server. It allows you to easily manage (upload, move, rename, describe, delete or search) your photos in seconds from a simple web application.
We're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 6.3! This is a medium severity security update that includes new versions of Django and Patternfly, new database migrations, lots of improvements, bug fixes and internal refactoring. This version also introduces integration with GitLab issue tracker!
Welcome to the fourth day of the Linux command-line toys advent calendar. If this is your first visit to the series, you might be asking yourself, what’s a command-line toy. We’re figuring that out as we go, but generally, it could be a game, or any simple diversion that helps you have fun at the terminal.
Some of you will have seen various selections from our calendar before, but we hope there’s at least one new thing for everyone. Because just about everyone who I’ve mentioned this series to has asked me about it already, today’s selection is an obligatory one.
Here are some practical and essential scp command example to show how to securely copy files between remote Linux systems.
Chances are many of you are thinking about what to get others for the upcoming holiday season as well as what to add to your own wishlist. Regardless of the reason or the season, though, these eight books are ones our writer community recommends to give and receive for any occasion or time of the year.
Valve’s Steam Link is a great way for PC gamers to stream games onto their TV. While the Steam Link hardware is no more, it’s easy to get going with the Steam Link app on Android!
The Steam Link app is available now on the Google Play Store, and you can install it on Android phones, Chromebooks with Android app support, and televisions or set-top boxes running Android TV. For now, Steam Link isn’t available on iOS, and there’s no telling if it ever will be. The Steam Link app is also available on Samsung Smart TVs made after 2016.
Valve have today announced a Beta version of the Steam Link app for the Raspberry Pi which could prove to be interesting.
Since Valve are seemingly discontinuing their own Steam Link device, along with Steam Link applications for mobile devices, one for the Raspberry Pi does make a lot of sense. I imagine quite a number of people already own the device, so being able to stream your favourite Steam games to it is probably quite appealing.
THQ Nordic have announced that they've swallowed up another IP, this time it's Carmageddon from Stainless Games. It's interesting, since we were supposed to get Carmageddon: Reincarnation on Linux.
CHKN is hard to describe, it's a really odd open-world sandbox adventure game where you create your own creatures.
It's in Early Access, so it's not a finished game. Even so, it's pretty amusing. Amusing enough for me to jump into here and there and for my son to love it rather a lot. Honestly, I'm finding it difficult to express into words just how weird and wonderful CHKN is.
2018 have been a terrible year for computer security, and playing games on a computer isn’t all fun and games any more. In this article I’ll look at some of the security challenges of downloading and installing games from developers you have no reason to trust through the Steam Store. I’ll then explore how recent advancements for security on the Linux desktop now have made it it a more secure environment to run untrusted software and games than more the popular macOS and Windows 10 operating systems.
Steam is a online games store and game-library-as-service vendor popular among millions of customers worldwide. The nature of the service means that Steam is selling and distributing executable programs that may be malicious. We can only assume that Steam takes great care not to allow malicious code onto their platform. However, this is almost impossible to achieve on relatively open-platforms like macOS, Windows, and indeed the Linux desktop.
While the long-term prospects of the project have yet to be determined, longtime Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat has hacked together "GGKBDD" as the generic gaming keyboard daemon for Linux systems.
When hearing of gaming keyboards that provide a macro key to send out pre-recorded key sequences when pressed, Peter decided to prototype GGKBDD as a daemon offering similar functionality that would work with any USB keyboard.
Last week while reviewing a patch I read that some gaming keyboards have two modes - keyboard mode and gaming mode. When in gaming mode, the keys send out pre-recorded macros when pressed. Presumably (I am not a gamer) this is to record keyboard shortcuts to have quicker access to various functionalities. The macros are stored in the hardware and are thus relatively independent of the host system. Pprovided you have access to the custom protocol, which you probably don't when you're on Linux. But I digress.
I reckoned this could be done in software and work with any 5 dollar USB keyboard. A few hours later, I have this working now: ggkbdd. It sits directly above the kernel and waits for key events. Once the 'mode key' is hit, the keyboard will send pre-configured key sequences for the respective keys. Hitting the mode key again (or ESC) switches back to normal mode.
In this article we will create a pop up win scene when the player has won all the levels which it will then ask the player whether he wants to start the game all over again or not? We will also create a framework for the level manager class which we will further add in more features in the next chapter. First of all, we will modify the start scene class again to include in a win scene graphic.
For those who appreciated To the Moon (Freebird Games), The Mirror Lied is a pretty short adventure and it now has Linux support. What's really good to see, is that all their games on Steam now have Linux support.
Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Master from Goblinz Studio is what they're calling a mix between a 'Dungeon Defender and a Roguelite' and it does look good. It will support Linux too!
The indie RTS game Rusted Warfare is an impressive effort, one that feels a lot like some of the classics and this new release is huge.
Plenty of new units to try out, including an aircraft carrier, a light gunship, a tesla mech and more. There's quite a bit of variety in the different types of units now. Since you can wage war across land, sea and air it's quite impressive.
Not exactly surprising, Intel have stated that for their new discrete GPU that Linux gaming will have a focus for them.
With a base goal of $10K, the Linux (and Mac) version was placed into a $12K stretch-goal, so that Kitsune Games can account for any extra time needed to ensure the porting process is smooth. This includes hiring game porter Ethan Lee if they require it, as the game is using his FNA project. They explained it a little more here.
Our article “Best Linux Desktop Environments: Strong and Stable” surveyed 9 strong and stable Linux desktop environments (DEs). Due to popular demand, this article extends that survey with 3 other desktops: Pantheon, Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE), and LXDE. We examine their features, user experience, resources footprint, extensibility, and documentation, and compare them to the 9 desktops covered in the original article.
Let’s start with considering the features of Pantheon, LXDE, and TDE.
The three DEs provide the core functionality we’d expect from this type of software. They are stable environments that have been in development for years.
Once in a while someone comes around and ask hey, I love Xfce and would like to contribute, but where do I start? How can I be of use? How can I implement a fancy new feature?, I have no doubt the answer is 42. Unfortunately, we don’t have a supercomputer (and millions of years) to distill a meaning from that one-size-fits-all answer, therefore to offer proper guidance, some questions should be asked first, e.g. What exactly do you want to improve? Do you have any programming skills? Besides programming, how else would you like to help? It’s been a long time since I’ve been planning to write a comprehensive guide, I hope this to be helpful to hitchhikers and new contributors. As any open source project, there are several ways to collaborate, everyone is welcome to help in any or many ways they are able, in this guide I’m going to explain and give hints for all contribution forms I can think of.
The world of smartphones is largely divided by two OS: Android and iOS. But now, open source enthusiasts who are unhappy with those two choices will soon get a third option with the upcoming GNU/Linux-based phone.
Necuno has unveiled its plans of releasing an open-source alternative to iOS and Android phones. The company has teamed up with KDE, maker of the Plasma desktop for Linux and Plasma Mobile interface, to make the Linux based smartphone.
The KDE developers haven't slowed down at all due to the winter holidays approaching but rather there is a ton of great improvements and new features with their next round of software releases.
On your next system upgrade you will receive the latest versions of KDE’s Plasma, Applications and Frameworks, together with the regular package updates.
Over past month I’ve been sponsored by Purism to work on improving the message view in Fractal. This post will highlight the biggest and most interesting changes.
The first thing I improved was how older messages are added to the message view when scrolling back. Before, there was a jarring cut when new messages were loaded, but now you can just scroll upward and older messages are loaded continuously. This makes it much easier to search for a message in the history, because there are no sudden jumps when messages are added to the list. In the video you can see the how the smooth history loading works.
The latest updates from debian 9.6 (stretch), antiX and MX repos.
GIMP 2.10 MESA 18.2.6 updated firmware 4.19.5 kernel Updated packages (sample) Browser: Firefox 63.0.3 Video Player: VLC 3.0.3 Music Manager/Player: Clementine 1.3.1 Email client: Thunderbird 52.9.1 Office suite: LibreOffice 6.0.1
Fedora 27 has officially reached the End of Life (EOL) status on November 30, so no further updates and security patches would be released beyond this date.
Officially shipped on November 14, 2017, Fedora 27 has received approximately 9,500 updates according to official data.
However, with Fedora 28 and Fedora 29 already up for grabs, it makes sense for this old version to be retired, and now all users are recommended to update their devices as soon as possible to the latest releases.
This month I accepted 486 packages, which is twice as much as last month. On the other side I was a bit reluctant and rejected only 38 uploads. The overall number of packages that got accepted this month was 556.
In November 2018, I have worked on the Debian LTS project for nine hours as a paid contributor. Of the originally planned twelve hours (four of them carried over from October) I gave two hours back to the pool of available work hours and carry one hour over to December.
For November, I also signed up for four hours of ELTS work, but had to realize that at the end of the month, I hadn't even set up a test environment for Debian wheezy ELTS, so I gave these four hours back to the "pool". I have started getting an overview of the ELTS workflow now and will start fixing packages in December.
Here’s are some of the bugs against the Debian Policy Manual. Please consider getting involved.
Being able to run Docker containers inside of LXC containers comes in quite handy due to them solving slightly different issues.
The architecture is a bit of container matroska, but what we're trying to achieve is running Docker privileged inside of a LXC container on a baremetal host.
Collaborative robots, or cobots, work side by side with humans to enhance human worker’s ability to perform their job safer, with less monotony and repetitive tasks. Most of us are familiar with industrial robots and it should be no surprise that people and machines are working together collaboratively more often. Cobots can also help with the shortage of skilled trades workers by extending the reach of human hands via cyber-physical software. Cobotic systems, such as software-controlled spray-painting drones, are becoming more and more common. These software-controlled robots take on repetitive, physical, stressful, or dangerous tasks working side by side with people. Spray painting is the largest category of cobots after welding. In part because trades such as industrial painting have a labour problem. One trade association states; “The average age of a painter is 50 years or more and like other crafts, industrial painting is not attracting enough new workers to replace those who are retiring.” A recent survey of industrial coating companies found that 82% are having difficulty finding workers and only 1 in 10 new hires stay for more than a year. With more work, fewer employees, and an ageing workforce, cobots are a promising avenue for companies to pursue.
HPLIP, HP developed Linux drivers for HP inkjet and laser based printers, released version 3.18.12 a few hours ago with new devices and Linux Distros support.
According to the release note, HPLIP 3.18.12 adds support for 64-bit Ubuntu 18.10 and Debian 9.6.
Tesla’s "people’s car." the Model 3, was thought to be harder to crack into than the Model S and Model X that proved to be a field day for hackers. However, we’re now seeing a Model 3 owner on Reddit showcase his ability to run YouTube and Ubuntu on his car.
Ubuntu 17.10 stopped producing 32-bit x86 ISOs and many other *buntu derivatives followed suit earlier this year. One of them still producing i386 images was Xubuntu, but now they have decided to abandon them as well.
Xubuntu with its lightweight Xfce desktop environment had continued offering 32-bit ISOs for those wanting to install this Linux distribution on older hardware. However, the Xubuntu development team has now decided to go ahead and eliminate their 32-bit builds moving forward. This change will affect Xubuntu 19.04 and beyond, but not the current Xubuntu 18.04 LTS series.
Freshly pressed and ready for testing: the Linux Mint 19.1 beta release is now available to download.
Launching ahead of a planned stable release before Christmas, the Linux Mint 19.1 “Tessa” beta features a slate of updated software, usability and user interface refinements, and a classy new look.
Over on the project blog Mint lead Clement Lefebvre says of the beta: “We’re counting on you to help us find bugs and to help us fix them”, adding that “this is an exciting time for all of us and we hope you enjoy it and have fun with the new release.’
When stable, Linux Mint 19.1 will be the 29th named version of Linux Mint and the the first point release in the 19.x series based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS Bionic Beaver.
The board has slots to add five Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3s to bring 'extreme edge compute capacity' to cramped spaces, industrial IoT applications, and remote villages.
The other way to use it is on the desktop for learning about compute clustering, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, or development using Python, Arm, and Linux.
The cluster or 'carrier' board is available on pre-order from miniNodes for $259 and was unveiled at the recent Arm TechCon 2018 conference, according to CNX-Software.
The printed-circuit board features a gigabit Ethernet port, power barrel, and five slots to house the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3s. The board delivers power and connectivity to the Pi.
Microchip’s Microsemi unit unveiled a low power, real-time deterministic “PolarFire SoC” architecture for Linux edge devices that combines its PolarFire FPGA with 4x RISC-V CPU cores supplied by SiFive.
At today’s RISC-V Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., Microchip’s Microsemi subsidiary announced a PolarFire SoC architecture developed in collaboration with SiFive. This “fully customizable, programmable RISC-V platform” will “bring real-time deterministic asymmetric multiprocessing (AMP) capability to Linux platforms in a multi-core CPU cluster,” says Chandler, Ariz. based Microchip.
For those utilizing OpenBLAS as the linear algebra library for your application(s), OpenBLAS 0.3.4 was released on Sunday with the latest features and CPU optimizations for multiple architectures.
Are you someone who writes documentation with the Sphinx tool chain? Do you want to encourage more people to write documentation in a distributed organization, but worry about maintaining compatible workflows? Introducing sphinx-docs-opinionated-quickstart, a template repository with an opinionated configuration of ReStructuredText documentation with Travis CI testing and readthedocs.org publishing.
I created this for the RIT Linux User’s Group (a.k.a. RITlug). RITlug welcomes student-led projects for members to work on together. RITlug executive board members want to better encourage students to share and join projects for collaboration with the community (in the spirit of FOSS). To do this, the executive board members will create and offer both a template website and template documentation tools to introduce students to project development process. Then, students are better able to sustain a more diverse community around their projects.
Why open source was actually invented in 1665.
When did open source begin? In February 1998, when the term was coined by Christine Peterson? Or in 1989, when Richard Stallman drew up the "subroutinized" GNU GPL? Or perhaps a little earlier, in 1985, when he created the GNU Emacs license? How about on March 6, 1665? On that day, the following paragraph appeared...
Those words are to be found in the very first issue of the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, the oldest scientific journal in continuous publication in the world, which published key results by Newton and others. Just as important is the fact that it established key principles of science that we take for granted today, including the routine public sharing of techniques and results so that others can build on them—open source, in other words.
Doug Cutting stands head-and-shoulders above most developers I've met—figuratively, as well as literally.
Shaun Bierweiler, president of Hortonworks’ federal business, told Emergency Management in an interview published Wednesday that developers have come up with enterprise open source tools such as Hadoop and Apache NiFi designed to process and generate actionable intelligence from data.
“The beauty of using an enterprise open source platform in a disaster response setting is that government agencies are supported throughout the entirety of the emergency management life cycle,” he noted.
The federal IT procurement safety net may be developing some holes. Many federal developers are forgoing traditional software purchasing in favor of going directly to the source and downloading code from tens of millions of open source repositories and libraries. While this can certainly expedite innovation, it also has the potential to expose agencies to security risks if they’re not careful.
This backdoor approach to code procurement can let in some unwanted visitors through that door: unknown and dangerous vulnerabilities that may have gone undetected in the code. Without the checks and balances of procurement, how can they be sure that the code they are downloading does not contain some form of malware or another bad actor? How can they stay agile while keeping their applications and networks safe?
David Egts, chief technologist for Red Hat’s North American public sector, has said federal agencies should assess open source code for cyber vulnerabilities prior to adoption.
Egts wrote in a Nextgov piece published Monday that agencies should monitor open-source libraries and repositories that developers use to download the code and deploy a code analyzer to detect memory corruptions, resources leaks and other issues that could be leveraged by adversaries.
“Agencies can also participate in crowdsourced security initiatives designed to test the efficacy of their defenses and reinforce the notion that security must be taken seriously by everyone, including developers,” he noted.
2019 looks set to be a pivotal year for the telecoms industry. 5G edges ever closer to a full launch, while new use cases in cloud computing and IoT are coming to light and driving greater-than-ever demand for high capacity, low latency connectivity.
As we reach 2019, it’s important look at how these new demands are shaping the telecoms industry. There has been a distinct move away from just providing faster network speeds to consumers, and towards enabling a whole host of new technologies on mobile networks, meaning it’s vital for companies to assess which are simply hype, and which will lead to fruition in 2019.
As of press time, Lowe has listed auctions for the first two Leisure Suit Larry games' source code, with bids already climbing (both well above the $400 mark after they went live). Lowe indicated to Lindsey that more games' code will follow on eBay, and this will likely include a stunning treasure trove: Lowe's other Leisure Suit Larry games, King's Quest III, Police Quest I, and Lowe's games based on Disney franchises Winnie The Pooh and Black Cauldron.
Having attended and spoken at numerous conferences over the years, I thought it would be helpful to share some advice on how to make the most of the 2019 conference season. Open source contributors have limited time to spare, so let’s make the most of our time together to learn, grow, and expand our open source communities.
Microsoft's Edge web browser has seen little success since its debut on Windows 10 back in 2015. Built from the ground up with a new rendering engine known as EdgeHTML, Microsoft Edge was designed to be fast, lightweight, and secure, but launched with a plethora of issues which resulted in users rejecting it early on. Edge has since struggled to gain any traction, thanks to its continued instability and lack of mindshare, from users and web developers.
Microsoft Edge, despite its features and improvements in recent years, has failed to perform well in the market — Google Chrome is one of the biggest reasons behind it. According to rumors, Microsoft is planning to tackle the issue by developing a Chromium-based web browser that would replace Edge.
Windows Central has reported that Microsoft is working on a project codenamed as ‘Anaheim‘ for building a browser based on Chromium, which is an open source web browser project initiated by Google.
I used to think that WebKit would eat the world, but later on I realized it was Blink. In retrospect this should have been obvious when the mobile version of Microsoft Edge was announced to use Chromium (and not Microsoft's own rendering engine EdgeHTML), but now rumour has it that Edge on its own home turf -- Windows 10 -- will be Chromium too. Microsoft engineers have already been spotted committing to the Chromium codebase, apparently for the ARM version. No word on whether this next browser, codenamed Anaheim, will still be called Edge.
Whether you’re using Google Chrome, Opera, or Brave to browse the web, under the hood, it’s all based on Chromium. Chrome’s Blink engine has become more-or-less the de facto way to render the web. Microsoft has long tried to avoid that fact by constantly working on Internet Explorer then Edge, but it seems no more. Microsoft is reportedly embracing Chrome’s dominance with a new replacement browser for Windows 10.
Windows Central is reporting that Microsoft is in the early stages of a project, codenamed “Anaheim”, that is currently slated to replace Microsoft Edge for Windows 10. Instead of continuing to use the company’s EdgeHTML engine, Anaheim will reportedly be built upon Chrome’s open source Blink engine.
Today, we’re making available an early developer preview of a browser for the Magic Leap One device. This browser is built on top of our Servo engine technology and shows off high quality 2D graphics and font rendering through our WebRender web rendering library. And will soon add more features.
While we only support basic 2D pages today and have not yet built the full Firefox Reality browser experience and published this into the Magic Leap store, we look forward to working alongside our partners and community to do that early in 2019! Please try out the builds, provide feedback, and get involved if you’re interested in the future of mixed reality on the web in a cutting-edge standalone headset. And for those looking at Magic Leap for the first time, we also have an article on how the work was done.
encoding_rs is a high-decode-performance, low-legacy-encode-footprint and high-correctness implementation of the WHATWG Encoding Standard written in Rust. In Firefox 56, encoding_rs replaced uconv as the character encoding library used in Firefox. This wasn’t an addition of a component but an actual replacement: uconv was removed when encoding_rs landed. This writeup covers the motivation and design of encoding_rs, as well as some benchmark results.
Additionally, encoding_rs contains a submodule called encoding_rs::mem that’s meant for efficient encoding-related operations on UTF-16, UTF-8, and Latin1 in-memory strings—i.e., the kind of strings that are used in Gecko C++ code. This module is discussed separately after describing encoding_rs proper.
The C++ integration of encoding_rs is not covered here and is covered in another write-up instead.
A month or so ago I gave a presentation on the inner workings of wasm-bindgen to the WebAssembly Community Group. A particular focus was the way that wasm-bindgen is forward-compatible with, and acts as a sort of polyfill for, the host bindings proposal. A lot of this material was originally supposed to appear in my SFHTML5 presentation, but time constraints forced me to cut it out.
Unfortunately, the presentation was not recorded, but you can view the slide deck below, or open it in a new window. Navigate between slides with arrow keys or space bar.
In a few days the 2018 edition is going to roll out, and that will include some new framing around Rust's tooling. We've got a core set of developer tools which are stable and ready for widespread use. We're going to have a blog post all about that, but for now I wanted to address the status of the RLS, since when I last blogged about a 1.0 pre-release there was a significant sentiment that it was not ready (and given the expectations that a lot of people have, we agree).
encoding_rs::mem is a Rust module for performing conversions between different in-RAM text representations that are relevant to Gecko. Specifically, it converts between potentially invalid UTF-16, Latin1 (in the sense that unsigned byte value equals the Unicode scalar value), potentially invalid UTF-8, and guaranteed-valid UTF-8, and provides some operations on buffers in these encodings, such as checking if a UTF-16 or UTF-8 buffer only has code points in the ASCII range or only has code points in the Latin1 range. (You can read more about encoding_rs::mem in a write-up about encoding_rs as a whole.)
Since version 56, Firefox has had a new character encoding conversion library called encoding_rs. It is written in Rust and replaced the old C++ character encoding conversion library called uconv that dated from early 1999. Initially, all the callers of the character encoding conversion library were C++ code, so the new library, despite being written in Rust, needed to feel usable when used from C++ code. In fact, the library appears to C++ callers as a modern C++ library. Here are the patterns that I used to accomplish that.
A strange problem befell one of my computers running Windows, with Firefox being the default browser, utilizing a profile that goes back a good decade or more. One blue Monday, I opened the browser, went to one of the sites I frequently visit and use, and noticed that I'd been logged out. Another site, same thing. It would appear all my login sessions were gone.
Since I keep multiple backups of everything, I restored the Firefox cookies database - cookies.sqlite file into the Firefox profile, and I was back to normal. Several days later, the issue happened again. Intrigued, I started exploring this somewhat obscure and not-well-documented problem. I believe I know why, and I have a solution.
The SQLite 3.26 release features an optimization around updates on tables with indexes on expressions, a new SQLITE_DBCONFIG_DEFENSIVE option to disable the ability to create corrupt database files with basic SQL, support for read-only shadow tables in the new defensive mode, a table_xinfo PRAGMA that can show hidden columns on virtual tables, enhanced triggers, improvements to the SQLite Geopoly extension, additions to the SQLite Session extension, and various other changes.
This is the best Month of LibreOffice we’ve ever had, reflecting our lively and growing community.
Just a few days after it turned six, Guix received a great birthday present: the Handshake project, which works on the design and implementation of a decentralized naming protocol compatible with the Domain Name System (DNS), made a large donation to the GNU Project via the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Of this donation, 100,000 USD go to GNU Guix.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced it has received several earmarked charitable donations from Handshake, an organization developing an experimental peer-to-peer root domain naming system, totaling $1 million. These gifts will support the FSF's organizational capacity, including its advocacy, education, and licensing initiatives, as well as specific projects fiscally sponsored by the FSF.
John Sullivan, FSF's executive director, said, "Building on the $1 million Bitcoin gift from the Pineapple Fund earlier this year, and our record high number of individual associate members, it is clear that software freedom is more important than ever to the world. We are now at a pivotal moment in our history, on the cusp of making free software the 'kitchen table issue' it must be. Thanks to Handshake and our members, the Free Software Foundation looks forward to scaling to the next level of free software activism, development, and community."
Days ahead of the FreeBSD 12.0 release, the long-ago-forked DragonFlyBSD is out with its very exciting 5.4 six-month feature update.
DragonFlyBSD 5.4 is easily this BSD operating system's most exciting feature release in a while. DragonFlyBSD 5.4 now ships with GCC 8 as its default compiler as a big upgrade over the previous GCC5 default, there is much better support for asymmetric NUMA configurations particularly Zen / Threadripper 2 hardware in particular, various performance improvements (including in the area of SMP), updates to DPorts, and a lot of other kernel tuning and performance work.
I was tentatively optimistic going into my experiment with GhostBSD. The shift from a stable FreeBSD base to a rolling TrueOS base was one which I had hoped would bring new features and hardware support, but I was also concerned the result might be rough around the edges. For the most part I was pleased with what GhostBSD 18.10 provided. In my opinion the MATE desktop performs well and looks good. One minor glitch aside, I had no complaints with the desktop experience.
I was very happy to find that GhostBSD would work with my desktop computer, a rare event for me when using FreeBSD or TrueOS. I'm hopeful this means future versions of FreeBSD will also work with this hardware. The only issue I ran into concerning hardware was GhostBSD was unable to work with a wireless network card I plugged into the machine during my trial.
I liked the default applications GhostBSD shipped with. The software included is mostly similar to what we would find in a mainstream Linux distribution and most of the extra applications I wanted could be found through the package manager. Speaking of package management, I think OctoPkg is capable, but not particularly user friendly. Even as a low level package manager, it takes some getting used to, compared to Muon or Synaptic. OctoPkg works, but I'm hoping future versions of GhostBSD are able to adopt a more beginner friendly software manager.
Unlike past versions of GhostBSD (and FreeBSD), this release unites managing the core operating system and third-party packages under one package manager. This is likely to be convenient for users as they no longer need to switch between pkg and freebsd-update to get all their security fixes. However, I think it is too soon to tell if this change brings any problems with it. I am curious to see how well upgrading end user applications mixes with core system security fixes. I am also curious to see how GhostBSD will handle future versions based on TrueOS's rolling release platform.
On the whole, I think GhostBSD is about as easy as it gets when setting up a BSD-based desktop system. Its installer is easy to use, the desktop is pre-configured, there are a small amount of useful applications available out of the box. It's a very positive experience, in my opinion. One of the few problems I think Linux users may face when trying GhostBSD is the lack of certain closed-source applications such as Steam and the Chrome web browser. These are not available on GhostBSD. For people who stick with open source applications, GhostBSD will probably provide everything they need, but people who want to watch Netflix or play big name games, this system may not be able to deliver those experiences. These restrictions aside, I'm very pleased with GhostBSD's latest offering and think it is a pleasant way to get the FreeBSD experience with a quick and easy set up process.
FreeBSD 12.0-RC3 is out as likely the last test release before the official FreeBSD 12.0 debut in the next week.
Approaching the finish line, FreeBSD 12.0-RC3 is understandably light on changes besides some fixes. FreeBSD 12.0-RC3 has fixes for vulnerabilities within the NFS server code, various bug fixes, and also various memory leak fixes have also been addressed. That's about it for RC3.
We are excited to announce the release of pfSense€® software version 2.4.4-p1, now available for upgrades!
pfSense software version 2.4.4-p1 is a maintenance release, bringing security patches and stability fixes for issues present in the 2.4.4 release.
Mycophiles have long made the case that mushrooms can be popular, powerful, and lucrative. Now that others are taking notice, they're concerned about the culture that's emerging around them.
I guess in the past everyone used CGIs to achieve something similar, it just seemed like a nice detour to use the nginx Lua module instead. Don't expect to read something magic. I'm currently looking into different CDN providers and how they behave regarding cache-control header, and what additional header they sent by default and when you activate certain feature. So I setup two locations inside the nginx configuration using a content_by_lua_block {} for testing purpose.
Keeping up with the work being done in the Python community can be a full time job, which is why Dan Bader has made it his! In this episode he discusses how he went from working as a software engineer, to offering training, to now managing both the Real Python and PyCoders properties. He also explains his strategies for tracking and curating the content that he produces and discovers, how he thinks about building products, and what he has learned in the process of running his businesses.
As described in a previous post, Google is still click-wrapping all Android developer binaries with a non-free EULA.
That system runs what? IT leaders face a quandary as Boomers vanish, but the need for COBOL, mainframe, and legacy storage skills does not
This week we welcome Erika Fille Legara (@eflegara) as our PyDev of the Week. Erika is a professor and program director at the Asian Institute of Management. She has spoken at PyCon Philippines. You can check out her website to see what else she has been up to or watch her talk below:
It was nothing short of epic. I had followed the development of Processing since I was an undergrad. I remember stumbling into the aesthetics + computation group website at MIT in my first year, and becoming aware of the work of Ben Fry, John Maeda, Casey Reas and others. I was smitten. As a student studying both humanities and CS, I didn't know anyone else who loved computers and art, and here was an entire lab devoted to it. For many years thereafter, I followed along from afar, always amazed at the work people there were doing.
Then, in the fall of 2009, as part of my work with Mozilla, Chris Blizzard approached me about helping Al MacDonald (f1lt3r) to work on getting Processing.js to 1.0, and adding the missing 3D API via WebGL. In the lead-up to Firefox 3.7, Mozilla was interested in getting more canvas based tech on the web, and in finding performance and other bugs in canvas and WebGL. Processing.js, they thought, would help to bring a community of artists, designers, educators, and other visual coders to the web.
Like every year, here is the opportunity once again to learn coding in Computer Science Education Week and the Hour of Code conducted by Google.
Students from all over the world can take part in a variety of programming challenges through super cool activities and learn how to code without having any experience in computer science subjects.
[...]
All the activities are self-guided, empowering students to learn at their own pace. Students across the world have already spent over 100 million hours of code during Computer Science Education Week, and you can join this movement from 3rd to 7th December.
All the activities are self-guided, empowering students to learn at their own pace. Students across the world have already spent over 100 million hours of code during Computer Science Education Week, and you can join this movement from 3rd to 7th December.
The first thing you should know is that 1.1 will have new features including new modes, new capabilities and new ways to configure Mu. Some of the new modes have been kindly written by new contributors. The new capabilities and ways to configure Mu are based upon valuable feedback from folks in the community. Thank you to everyone who has contributed so far.
The second thing you should know is that 1.1 will have many bug fixes. Since Mu 1.0 was released a huge number of people have started to use it and, inevitably, found and reported bugs. Thank you for all the valuable feedback, please keep it coming! We hope to address as many of the problems as possible.
The final thing you should know about is the release schedule for Mu 1.1. Very soon, a version 1.1.0.alpha.1 will be released: this will contain some of the new features and updates and will definitely contain bugs. It will be followed with a number of further alpha releases as new features are created and/or contributed to this version of Mu. When we’re happy we have all the features we want, we’ll release a version 1.1.0.beta.1. The focus of the various beta releases will be to test and fix any bugs we may encounter. However, the beta releases will be “feature complete” and represent a good preview of what version 1.1 will look like. Once there are no more known bugs, or those bugs that remain are “edge cases” that can be documented, we’ll release the final 1.1.0 version which will be available for official download. The old 1.0.* version of Mu will still be on the website, but no longer officially supported.
Qt 5.11.3 is released today. As a patch release it does not add any new functionality, but provides important bug fixes, security updates and other improvements.
Compared to Qt 5.11.2, the Qt 5.11.3 release provides fixes for over 100 bugs and it contains around 300 changes in total. For details of the most important changes, please check the Change files of Qt 5.11.3.
On November 12th and 13th, ten of the thirteen PSF board members convened in Chicago, IL. Those who could not make it to the in-person meeting, joined via phone conferencing when possible.
In attendance were Naomi Ceder, Jacqueline Kazil, Thomas Wouters, Van Lindberg, Ewa Jodlowska, Lorena Mesa, Eric Holscher, Anna Ossowski, Christopher Neugebauer, and Jeff Triplett. Kushal Das and Marlene Mhangami connected remotely.
Ongoing LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg has laid out plans for releasing LLVM 8.0 and related sub-projects like Clang 8.0 in early March.
Under a proposal drafted on Monday and so far okay by other upstream developers, the LLVM 8.0.0 release would ship in the early days of March.
Well, no, that’s not true. I basically never actually want to deploy Swift as such. What I generally want to do is to debug some bit of production service deployment machinery that relies on Swift for getting build artifacts into the right place, or maybe the parts of the Launchpad librarian (our blob storage service) that use Swift. I could find an existing private or public cloud that offers the right API and test with that, but sometimes I need to test with particular versions, and in any case I have a terribly slow internet connection and shuffling large build artifacts back and forward over the relevant bit of wet string makes it painfully slow to test things.
Today we've issued the 2.1.4 and 1.11.17 bugfix releases.
The release package and checksums are available from our downloads page, as well as from the Python Package Index. The PGP key ID used for this release is Carlton Gibson: E17DF5C82B4F9D00.
In my previous post, I provided an overview of the myriad Python data visualization tools currently available, how they relate to each other, and their many differences. In this post we’ll take a look at an important theme that emerged from SciPy 2018: convergence, i.e., Python libraries becoming more similar in capability as they mature over time and share ideas and approaches. These trends of convergence have started to erase some of what were previous clear distinctions between each library. This is great for users, though it does make it more difficult to make blanket recommendations. As in the first post, we’ll generally separate the SciVis projects (typically 3D plotting situated in real-world space) from InfoVis projects (typically 2D plotting situated on the page or screen surface with arbitrary coordinate axes).
Lots has been written about undefined behavior in C, but not much about the reasons why it exists.
Adding to NVIDIA's busy Monday morning of announcing the TITAN RTX and open-sourcing PhysX, they also shipped their latest Vulkan beta driver support for Windows and Linux.
It was just last week that the NVIDIA 415.18.02 driver debuted with the latest beta-quality Vulkan support. Today's NVIDIA 415.18.04 driver for Linux systems has just a few more changes on top.
The Khronos Group's Vulkan working group is kicking off the start of a new week with a new specification update. The Vulkan 1.1.95 release brings with it two new floating point extensions.
The days of Google Hangouts for consumers may be coming to an end in 2020, according to a report from 9to5Google today. Hangouts has been suffering from an identity crisis since Google launched it as a replacement for Gchat in 2013, and it’s actually been losing features in recent years as the company stopped updating the app and took away SMS messaging. That change was part of Google’s new focus for Hangouts, which will stay safe for now as a workplace communication tool in the form of G Suite’s Hangouts Chat, as well as video conferencing platform Hangouts Meet.
Update 12/1: Google’s Scott Johnston has chimed in and denies that any decisions have been made about the timeline of legacy Hangouts’ shutdown. Confusingly, however, he says that users of consumer Hangouts users will be somehow “upgraded” to Hangouts Chat and Hangouts Meet, both being enterprise-focused products that fill different needs.
Scott also explicitly confirms for the first time that Hangouts Classic, the subject of this report, will be shutting down “eventually.”
Google has denied rumors associated with the shutdown of Hangouts, according to a tweet by Google’s Scot Johnson. Additionally, it is suggested. that users will be upgraded to Hangout Chats and Meet.
Hangout is an app debuted in 2013 used for business purpose meetings. The conference calls made in hangouts were secured and simplified for which it was widely used by different organizations.
Recently an update posted on 9to5Google stated that Google Hangouts was shutting down. According to the article, some sources confirmed the shutdown of Google Hangouts by 2020. This news created a wave of articles in just a few hours. But it was never going to happen. In a tweet responding to this article, product lead for Google Hangouts, Scot Johnston denied it calling “Shoddy Reporting“.
It's hardly news any more, but it seems I have not blogged about my involvement last year with an interesting cryptanalysis project, which resulted in the publication Sliding right into disaster: Left-to-right sliding windows leak by Daniel J. Bernstein, me, Daniel Genkin, Leon Groot Bruinderink, Nadia Heninger, Tanja Lange, Christine van Vredendaal and Yuval Yarom, which was published at CHES 2017 and on ePrint (ePrint is the cryptographer’s version of arXiv).
This project nicely touched upon many fields of computer science: First we need systems expertise to mount a side-channel attack that uses cache timing difference to observe which line of a square-and-multiply algorithm the target process is executing. Then we need algorithm analysis required to learn from these observations partial information about the bits of the private key. This part includes nice PLy concepts like rewrite rules (see Section 3.2). Oncee we know enough about the secret keys, we can use fancy cryptography to recover the whole secret key (Section 3.4). And finally, some theoretical questions arise, such as: “How much information do we need for the attack to succeed?” and “Do we obtain this much information”, and we need some nice math and information theory to answer these.
Newly released emails about the three Trump associates who secretly steered the Department of Veterans Affairs show how deeply the trio was involved in some of the agency’s most consequential matters, most notably a multibillion-dollar effort to overhaul electronic health records for millions of veterans.
Marvel Entertainment chairman Ike Perlmutter, West Palm Beach physician Bruce Moskowitz and lawyer Marc Sherman — part of the president’s circle at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida — reviewed a confidential draft of a $10 billion government contract for the electronic-records project, even though they lack any relevant expertise.
In preparing the contract, the agency consulted more than 40 outside experts, such as hospital executives, according to the records, which were released under the Freedom of Information Act. The Mar-a-Lago trio were listed among those experts. Perlmutter, a comic book tycoon, appears on the list between representatives from the University of Washington Medical Center, Intermountain Healthcare and Johns Hopkins University.
But none of the three men has served in the U.S. military or elsewhere in government, and none of them has expertise in health information technology or federal contracting.
The list is one of hundreds of newly released documents about the so-called Mar-a-Lago Crowd’s sway over VA policy and personnel decisions. The records show them editing the budget for a government program, weighing in on job candidates and being treated as having decision-making authority on policy initiatives.
In a June 2017 email, a VA official identified Perlmutter alongside then-VA Secretary David Shulkin as “top principles [sic].” In another message, Moskowitz named himself, Perlmutter and Sherman to an “executive committee.”
Debates on economic policy are often far removed from reality. Nowhere is this truer than in the case of prescription drug prices.
In the United States, we pay high drug prices because the government gives pharmaceutical companies patent monopolies, where it threatens to arrest anyone that sells a drug in competition with the patent holder. As a result, drugs often sell for prices that are several thousand percent above their free market price.
Incredibly, in debates on drug prices, these monopoly prices are routinely described as being the result of the free market, turning reality completely on its head. The people who want to lower drug prices are then said to be trying to interfere with the free market, which we are all supposed to think is a bad thing to do.
This is one of the reasons why a new bill to lower drug prices by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna is so brilliant. The bill is actually lowering drug prices by using the power of the market, making it clear that the proponents of high drug prices are the ones who want the government to interfere with the market to keep drug company profits high.
George H.W. Bush died on the eve of World AIDS Day, an irony not lost on many HIV/AIDS activists who remember the 41st president of the United States for his lack of action in the 1990s as the HIV/AIDS crisis raged on. Bush said little about the crisis during his years as vice president under Ronald Reagan, who didn’t even mention AIDS until the penultimate year of his presidency. Despite promises to do more after he was elected president, George H.W. Bush refused to address and fund programs around HIV/AIDS education and prevention, as well as drug treatment. We speak with Steven Thrasher, journalist and doctoral candidate in American studies at New York University. He was recently appointed Daniel H. Renberg chair of media coverage in sexual and gender minorities at Northwestern University. His recent article for The Nation is titled “It’s a Disgrace to Celebrate George H.W. Bush on World AIDS Day.”
Ohio’s extremely conservative legislature is on a tear: Within days of the election, the House pushed though an anti-abortion bill so onerous that it would effectively ban abortion.
And the state didn’t stop there. Legislators scheduled hearings on another bill that would criminalize abortion, potentially threatening patients and providers with the death penalty.
Here’s where things get extra bizarre: Ohio’s new legislature sits in January, but these aren’t your average lame duck bills being rammed through in the hopes of pushing a policy agenda before new lawmakers take office. The 2019 legislature will be working under a governor more conservative than outgoing leader John Kasich, who’s already vetoed an abortion bill similar to the one the house just passed.
U.S. factory farms, where an estimated 99 percent of farmed animals are kept, are almost as inaccessible to the public as they are inescapable for the animals locked inside. When I started getting more involved in discussions about animal farming, I knew I had to see the inside of one of these facilities for myself. I finally got my opportunity with a rescue team from a California farmed animal sanctuary.
In 2001, a 29-year-old Cree woman, nicknamed S.A.T. in legal documents, went to the Royal University Hospital in Saskatchewan, Canada, to give birth to her sixth child. After she gave birth, she says, she was wheeled into an operating room to be sterilized. She says she desperately protested, but no one listened. To this day, she remembers “the smell of burning flesh” as her fallopian tubes were cauterized against her will in an irreversible birth control procedure.
This claim is laid out in a new class action lawsuit alleging widespread abuse of power by Saskatchewan health professionals and the violation of many indigenous women when they were at their most vulnerable.
If successful, the women in the lawsuit will each be entitled to millions of dollars of reparations from the Saskatchewan and Canadian governments and their health systems. While these women may only represent a fraction of the people negatively affected by forced sterilization in Canada, their lawsuit is recognition of the ubiquity of the practice—and its consequences.
Attorney Alisa Lombard is directing the lawsuit. She’s an associate at Maurice Law, Canada’s only indigenous-owned national law firm. Since news broke of the legal action last month, over 60 more women have contacted Lombard’s office, saying they were sterilized without their consent. In the seven days after CBC’s November 13 article about the lawsuit, 29 women called or emailed her.
Josh and Kurt talk about how open source deals with malicious events. It's probably impossible to stop these from happening, but the open source universe deals with it in its own unique way. We start to discuss what you can do, since everyone is using open source everywhere now. There will be a second part to this episode where we discuss what the future holds for these sort of problems.
GitHub user dominictarr launched the repo in question, Event-Stream, as a “fun” side project: “I created it for fun. I was learning, and learning is fun. I gave it away because it was easy to do so, and because sharing helps learning too. I think most of the small modules on npm were created for reasons like this.”
But as dominictarr points out, maintaining an open-source repository yields you nothing tangible: “You get literally nothing from maintaining a popular package.” Later in their screed, they strongly suggest paying open-source repo maintainers for their work.
A battle for who owns the YouTube crown for top channel has been waged over the past few months between fans of Swedish video game commentary celebrity Felix “PewDiePie” Kjellberg and of the Bollywood label T-Series.
This is getting serious: It’s one thing when a fan launches a PewDiePie “Bro Army,” structured to recruit members’ friends and family in order to keep PewDiePie at the top, replete with “Privates” and “Corporals.”
On this point, as with many others related to Internet security and privacy, I found it hard to argue with the opinion of my home state Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.), who observed:
“It seems like every other day we learn about a new mega-breach affecting the personal data of millions of Americans. Rather than accepting this trend as the new normal, this latest incident should strengthen Congress’ resolve. We must pass laws that require data minimization, ensuring companies do not keep sensitive data that they no longer need. And it is past time we enact data security laws that ensure companies account for security costs rather than making their consumers shoulder the burden and harms resulting from these lapses.”
Lines of succession vary from company to company, but new research showed a spread of opinions about who is best qualified to become the next CEO (hint: CIOs are pretty ambitious). But do CISOs have what it takes? The UK’s GCHQ shared information about how it decides whether to report a security bug or keep it secret.
One security expert was advising that there isn’t much difference between internal and external threats – and that we should stop trying to defend against them as though they are completely separate things.
Some digital oscilloscopes that can communicate over the network fail to provide a minimum of security protections and allow unfettered access to unauthorized users.
Oscilloscopes are laboratory instruments that can measure how an electrical signal changes over time by showing a waveform representation. They are widely considered the center of an electronic lab bench since they are useful to any professional doing repairs on electronic gear. So tampering with the values it measures can do a lot of damage, especially in production environments.
Only recently and on November 11, 2018, French President Emmanuelle Macron hosted sixty poppy-clad world leaders attending the one-hundred year commemoration of World War I, an ignoble war that set the stage for a century beset by the bloodiest wars in recorded history. These dastardly wars continue to plague humanity even into the nascent 21st century.
At “the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” of 1918 the combatants embroiled in World War I, The War to End All Wars, convened to sign the Armistice of Compiègne; Compiègne is a French commune some 82 kilometers north of Paris, France. And on June 28, 1919, the treaty of Versailles was signed, and ever since, the new appellation for this commemoration goes by the moniker Armistice Day Commemoration. Appallingly, The “I am a genius” Donald Trump does not know the difference between a commemoration and a celebration.
Nationalism, militarism, ethnocentrism, nativism, an arms race, demagoguery, self-interest, exploitation and colonial competition for natural resources across Asia and Africa were the major causes that helped launch World War I. The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was but the metaphorical straw that broke the camel’s back of a European continent ready to explode at the seams.
While authors, poets, and playwrights have written works that recount the horrors of World War I, visual artists have perhaps best captured the depravities of war and their dehumanizing impact on humanity.
Consider a conversation between long-time Middle East reporter Reese Erlich and former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, Jr. on the people currently directing the Trump administration’s policy toward Iran. Commenting on National Security Advisor John Bolton’s defense of the invasion of Iraq, Freeman says “The neoconservative group think their good ideas were poorly implemented in Iraq,” and that the lesson of the 2003 invasion that killed upwards of 500,000 people and destabilized an entire region is, “If at first you don’t succeed, do the same thing again somewhere else.”
That “somewhere else” is Iran, and Bolton is one of the leading voices calling for confronting the Teheran regime and squeezing Iran through draconian sanctions “until the pips squeak.” Since sanctions are unlikely to have much effect—they didn’t work on North Korea, have had little effect on Russia and failed to produce regime change in Cuba—the next logical step, Erlich suggests in his new book The Iran Agenda Today: The Real Story Inside Iran And What’s Wrong with U.S. Policy, is a military attack on Iran.
Such an attack would be a leap into darkness, since most Americans—and their government in particular—are virtually clueless about the country we seem bound to go to war with. Throwing a little light on that darkness is a major reason Erlich wrote the book. For over 18 years he has reported on Iran, talking with important government figures and everyday people and writing articles on the country that increasingly looks to be our next little war. Except it will be anything but “little.”
Nowhere in the so-called print/online major media was there any hint that the late George H.W. Bush was a bit of a public predator. The New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Guardian lauded the late president as a man who guided the U.S. through a difficult transition of becoming the world’s sole superpower with the demise of the former Soviet Union. What was missing was any critique of how Bush set the stage for unbridled U.S. militarism and jettisoning the Vietnam Syndrome, something that his predecessor, The Great Communicator Reagan, had chipped away at with his low-intensity wars in Central America and his massive nuclear arms buildup that culminated in the insane pursuit of Star Wars space weapons and nuclear shields.
Bush began the endless wars with his attack against Iraq in 1990-1991, for Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Operation Desert Storm… the Gulf War… (Aren’t the names of ruthless wars comforting?) was yet another in the long line of wars to support repressive regimes in nations like Kuwait that the U.S. has little strategic interest in, save its spot in the oil rich Middle East. Bush oversaw what would be called a “turkey shoot” by a U.S. flyer: the mass targeting of Iraqi troops from the air as they fled Kuwait. In any case, Bush gave his former ally Saddam Hussein a diplomatic wink and a nod, later reversed, to begin Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait, where Iraq claimed ownership of oil fields. The story of Iraqi soldiers throwing infants from incubators onto the floor of a hospital in Kuwait proved to be completely unfounded. Indeed, while there is absolute proof that Bush grabbed women’s asses publicly on several occasions over the years, there is no proof that Iraqi soldiers ever threw babies on the ground.
The Watson Institute at Brown University recently published a report that U.S. wars in the so-called War on Terror have cost U.S. taxpayers $5.9 trillion dollars. That’s a hell of a lot of programs of social uplift left in the dust by the penchant for wars and war profiteering that began under Reagan, but was made acceptable in Iraq by Bush. And then there was the attack on Panama that left an untold number of civilians dead in another bogus U.S. war, the failed war on drugs.
In the summer of 1960, a former FBI and sometime CIA man named Robert Maheu was handed an important mission by the latter agency — engaging the Mafia to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
Maheu knew exactly whom to call. The new book “Handsome Johnny: The Life and Death of Johnny Rosselli — Gentleman Gangster, Hollywood Producer, CIA Assassin,” by Lee Server (St. Martin’s Press), provides the most detailed description of the plot against Castro to date, and introduces Rosselli as the link between the mob, Hollywood and the CIA.
Rosselli had been friends and associates with the likes of Al Capone, Charlie Chaplin and Columbia Pictures co-founder and President Harry Cohn.
He was one of the most powerful gangsters in Los Angeles, and the right person for Maheu to enlist.
Glenn Greenwald has described Washington Post columnist David Ignatius as an “all-but-official CIA media spokesman”; Adam Johnson of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) criticizes Ignatius for “breathlessly updating US readers on the token, meaningless public relations gestures that the Saudi regime – and, by extension, Ignatius – refer to as ‘reforms.’”
So Ignatius’ fascinating tale of intrigue, “The Khashoggi killing had roots in a cutthroat Saudi feud,” published on Tuesday in the Post, is especially revelatory. Far from whitewashing the Saudi regime, Ignatius depicts the royal court as a cockpit of rage, corruption, and respectable gangsterism. If Ignatius’ reporting reflects the thinking of the US Central Intelligence Agency, his latest piece suggests the CIA has turned on Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) in a significant way.
The obsequious praise of the life and legacy of the now deceased mad-dog killer George H. W. Bush (1924-2018) on the supposedly liberal and left cable networks CNN and MSNBC this last weekend was really something.
Some of this historical ass-kissing was practically comedic. I heard the power-worshipping “presidential historian” and occasional plagiarist Doris Kearns-Goodwin fondly recall getting stuck in the Bush’s Kennebunkport toilet. Daddy Bush graciously broke the bathroom lock with a hammer and then told Kearns-Goodwin, “well, at least you write well.” A special memory!
Kearns-Goodwin also lovingly remembered that both Bush and her husband enjoyed “wearing socks.” On their feet? Who knew?
We saw a clip from the junior mad-dog killer George W. Bush43 remembering that the senior Bush41 reached out and touched his hand after Dubya gave a speech at a memorial service in the wake of the 9/11 jetliner attacks. It was an act of “fatherly love” that Bush Junior could never forget.
[...]
As if Bush senior wasn’t a blood-soaked, died-in-the-wool imperialist descended from the ruling-class heights of the military-industrial complex who offered this Mafia Don-like commentary on the meaning of the United States’ slaughter of tens of thousands of defenseless Iraqi troops- a veritable “turkey shoot” by the accounts of direct participants – in the opening months of 1991: “The U.S. has a new credibility. What we say goes” (NBC News, February 2, 1991).
“What we say goes.” How was that for faith in multilateral global democracy?
Israeli police over the weekend urged that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sarah, be indicted for corruption. The decision lies with attorney general Avichai Mandelblit.
The Israeli police and justice system have shown a willingness to punish corruption in high places. Former prime minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to 27 months in 2014, but was released early.
According to BBC Monitoring, the police issued a statement saying,
“Between the years 2012 and 2017 the prime minister and his aides intervened blatantly and continuously, and sometimes even daily, in the content published by the Walla news website. The intervention of the prime minister and his aides in the content and appointments [of editors and reporters] at the Walla website was meant to advance his personal interests, through publication of flattering articles and photos, removal of content critical of the prime minister and his family members, and so on.” The case concerns the giant media company, Bezeq and the favors and tax breaks thrown to it by Netanyahu, who kept the Communications portfolio in his cabinet for himself.
[...]
Avigdor Lieberman of the (mostly Russian) “Israeli is our Home” party, recently resigned from the cabinet over Netanyahu’s unwillingness to go to war immediately against the Palestinians in Gaza.
Hence, a change in government could accelerate the Israeli dispossession of the Palestinians and result in further warfare and bloodshed.
The media has been filled today with tributes to the late President George H.W. Bush. He is portrayed as a smart, pragmatic leader, who chose wise counsellors like James Baker—very different from his wilful son, George W. Bush, who led the U.S. into a disastrous attack on Iraq in 2013, the most fateful foreign policy blunder ever made by an American leader.
The fact, however, is that it was the blundering of George H. W. Bush and Baker in 1990 that set the stage for George W. Bush’s calamitous move thirteen years later.
It was Papa Bush, after all, who sent American troops half way around the world to launch the First Gulf War—an error of tragic proportions; responsible in its own way for much of the horror that afflicts the Greater Middle East (and America) to this day.
Ironically, it happened just as the U.S. seemed about to become king of the global roost—the greatest military power the planet had ever known. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no power around to challenge U.S. hegemony. It was left to America to blight its own future.
George H.W. Bush died in Houston on Friday night at the age of 94. Bush was elected the 41st president of the United States in 1988, becoming the first and only former CIA director to lead the country. He served as Ronald Reagan’s vice president from 1981 to 1989. Since Bush’s death, the media has honored the former president by focusing on his years of service and his call as president for a kinder, gentler America. But the headlines have largely glossed over and ignored other parts of Bush’s legacy. We look at the 1991 Gulf War, Bush’s pardoning of six Reagan officials involved in the Iran-Contra scandal and how a racist election ad helped him become president. We speak with Intercept columnist Mehdi Hasan. His latest piece is titled “The Ignored Legacy of George H.W. Bush: War Crimes, Racism, and Obstruction of Justice.”
1. Nuclear weapons were created to kill indiscriminately. That means women, men, children – everyone. Even during war, under the rules of international law, that kind of mass killing is illegal. It is also immoral.
2. The nuclear weapons that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II were small by comparison with today’s far more powerful nuclear weapons.
3. There are currently about 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world. The use of just a tiny fraction of these is more than enough to kill most, if not all, humans on the planet. Nuclear weapons make human beings an endangered species.
4. The U.S. and Russia have more than 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. The other seven countries that have them are: the UK, France, China, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea.
The “blockbuster” smoking gun story posted by The Guardian earlier this week was widely cited as proof the President’s campaign was directly involved with Wikileaks and therefore indirectly coordinating with Russia to release damaging emails hacked from the DNC and John Podesta during the 2016 election.
Just about every major news outlet jumped on the story. MSNBC called it a “collusion bombshell.” The Week called it “a disaster for Trump.” Rolling Stone said Manafort’s story is “unraveling before our eyes.”
It was a classic knee-jerk reaction by mainstream media to anything negative about President Trump. There were enough inconsistencies and concerns in the original story to make the lucid in media instantly question it, but the unhinged elements jumped on it like a pack of lions stumbling across an injured gazelle.
As the Washington Times reported, certain things simply didn’t match up.
It’s now six and a half years since Julian Assange walked into the Ecuador embassy in London to claim asylum. Yet his life continues to surprise.
In recent months the WikiLeaks founder has been offered Ecuadorian citizenship and found himself in a “romantic struggle” with former Baywatch star Pamela Anderson.
He then discussed what he called the highlight of his time as an editor — his conversations with Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, and Edward Snowden and the difficulties he encountered when deciding where the public interest lay in the story. WikiLeaks is a website that publishes obtained secret or classified information and news leaks. “It’s hard,” he said. “People become whistleblowers for all kinds of reasons, so it is really helpful to start from concrete information, focus on what the documents tell you.”
He mentioned his suspicions behind Assange’s motives for getting the information out in the open, so he made sure to carefully work through all of the documents before publishing the story.
A former consul and first secretary at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London has spoken out against a “fake story” from the Guardian. Speaking to The Canary, Fidel Narváez insisted that the claim that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is entirely false.
The Canary has also seen a copy of correspondence to the Guardian from the same diplomat. In these, he makes a formal complaint, accusing the newspaper of fabricating an earlier story about a Russian plot to smuggle Assange to Russia.
[...]
Prior to the Guardian publishing the article, however, WikiLeaks did deny that the visits took place. It did that via a tweet in response to an email to Assange’s lawyers from one of the journalists who authored the article, saying how the Guardian was planning to run the story. The first published version of the article did not contain this WikiLeaks denial.
[...]
On 21 September 2018, the Guardian claimed there was a plan to smuggle Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy via a diplomatic vehicle, and from there to Russia. But according to the article, the plan was called off after UK authorities refused to recognise that Assange was due diplomatic protection. The Guardian also referred to an alternative plan that would have seen Assange transported to Ecuador.
But in a letter seen by The Canary and dated 9 October, Narváez told the Guardian he denies claims made about him in that article. And that includes the claim he was a ‘point of contact’ with Russia, which he regards as defamatory.
Moreover, Narváez is demanding the Guardian issue a public apology, considering in particular:
In what has been described as potentially the biggest story of the year, the Guardian’s Luke Harding (11/27/18) reported last week that Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, held a series of secret talks with WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange. These meetings were said to have occurred inside the Ecuadorian embassy between 2013 and 2016. The report also mentions that unspecified “Russians” were also among Assange’s visitors. The scoop, according to the newspaper, could “shed new light” on the role of WikiLeaks’ release of Democratic Party emails in the 2016 presidential election.
The story was picked up across the US, including by USA Today (11/27/18), the Washington Post (11/27/18), Bloomberg (11/27/18), Yahoo! News (27/11/18), The Hill (11/27/18) and Rolling Stone (11/27/18). One CNN analyst (11/27/18) analyst excitedly commented that the news was “hugely significant” and “could be one of the two missing links to show real interference and knowledge of Russian involvement” in the election.
However, there were serious problems with the report. Firstly, the entire story was based upon anonymous intelligence sources, sources that could not tell the newspaper exactly when the meetings took place.
Furthermore, the Ecuadorian embassy is one of the most surveilled buildings in the most surveilled city in the world, and was under 24-hour police guard and monitoring, costing the UK government over €£11 million between 2012 and 2015. The embassy also had very tight internal security, with all visitors thoroughly vetted, required to sign in and leave all their electronic devices with security. Is it really possible any figure, let alone Donald Trump’s campaign manager, could walk in for a series of secret meetings without leaving record with Ecuador, or being seen by the media or police?
Regular followers of WikiLeaks-related news are at this point familiar with the multiple serious infractions of journalistic ethics by Luke Harding and the Guardian, especially (though not exclusively) when it comes to Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. However, another individual at the heart of this matter is far less familiar to the public. That man is Fernando Villavicencio, a prominent Ecuadorian political activist and journalist, director of the USAID-funded NGO Fundamedios and editor of online publication FocusEcuador.
Most readers are also aware of the Guardian’s recent publication of claims that Julian Assange met with former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort on three occasions. This has now been definitively debunked by Felix Narvaez, the former Consul at Ecuador’s London embassy between 2010 and 2018, who says Paul Manafort has never visited the embassy during the time he was in charge there. But this was hardly the first time the outlet published a dishonest smear authored by Luke Harding against Assange. The paper is also no stranger to publishing stories based on fabricated documents.
In May, Disobedient Media reported on the Guardian’s hatchet-job relating to ‘Operation Hotel,’ or rather, the normal security operations of the embassy under former Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa. That hit-piece, co-authored by Harding and Dan Collyns, asserted among other things that (according to an anonymous source) Assange hacked the embassy’s security system. The allegation was promptly refuted by Correa as “absurd” in an interview with The Intercept, and also by WikiLeaks as an “anonymous libel” with which the Guardian had “gone too far this time. We’re suing.”
A shared element of The Guardian’s ‘Operation Hotel’ fabrications and the latest libel attempting to link Julian Assange to Paul Manafort is none other than Fernando Villavicencio of FocusEcuador. In 2014 Villavicencio was caught passing a forged document to the Guardian, which published it without verifying it. When the forgery was revealed, the Guardian hurriedly took the document down but then tried to cover up that it had been tampered with by Villavicencio when it re-posted it a few days later.
In mid-May 2017, Paul Manafort, facing intensifying pressure to settle debts and pay mounting legal bills, flew to Ecuador to offer his services to a potentially lucrative new client — the country’s incoming president, Lenín Moreno.
Mr. Manafort made the trip mainly to see if he could broker a deal under which China would invest in Ecuador’s power system, possibly yielding a fat commission for Mr. Manafort.
But the talks turned to a diplomatic sticking point between the United States and Ecuador: the fate of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
In at least two meetings with Mr. Manafort, Mr. Moreno and his aides discussed their desire to rid themselves of Mr. Assange, who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, in exchange for concessions like debt relief from the United States, according to three people familiar with the talks, the details of which have not been previously reported.
We’ve already been covering the strange way in which it may or may not have been revealed that there’s a secret warrant out for Julian Assange. Personally, I find it implausible, based on the government’s responses thus far, that there isn’t a warrant. If this was just some sort of typo and there is no warrant, the requests being made of the prosecutors involved could be dismissed with a simple answer of, “we have no documents matching what you are requesting.”
But with the fact that the story is out there and the probability that a warrant exists, a debate has already begun over whether or not our government could actually go after Assange without running into First Amendment, Freedom of the Press issues. Attorney Doug Mataconis takes up this aspect of the tale at Outside the Beltway this week. In the minds of some of the more libertarian observers, there appear to be three main questions to settle.
Manafort flew to Ecuador primarily to see if he could potentially land a large commission by brokering a deal where China would invest in Ecuador's power system, the Times reports. Manafort was facing mounting debt and needed to pay off legal bills, according to the Times. CNN's Carl Bernstein reported that last week special counsel Robert Mueller's team has been investigating a meeting between Manafort and Moreno in Quito in 2017 and has asked if WikiLeaks or Assange was discussed in the meeting, according to a source with personal knowledge of the matter.
Details: Manafort, who served as President Trump's campaign chairman during the summer of 2016, reportedly met two times with Moreno to try and make the deal, which could have resulted in a large commission for Manafort who was under mounting pressure to pay off debts and legal bills at the time.
Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno and his aides discussed the ways they could get rid of Julian Assange with Donald Trump’s campaign chief Paul Manafort in 2017, The New York Times reports, citing three people familiar with the talks. According to the outlet, Trump’s former manager, who is reported to have presented himself as a liaison for the new US administration, travelled to Quito to facilitate a deal between Chinese investors and the Latin American country’s power sector. However, during the meeting, the topic of the WikiLeaks’ founder’s extradition came up.
Moreno and his officials reportedly voiced their readiness to assist Assange’s removal from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, whose asylum has been a point of contention for the new administration in Quito, in exchange for concessions from the US. According to the NYT, Manafort suggested he could broker the deal.
The outlet cites Manafort’s spokesman, Jason Maloni as saying that Moreno brought up the Assange issue and expressed 'his desire to remove Julian Assange from Ecuador’s embassy', while Manafort 'listened but made no promises as this was ancillary to the purpose of the meeting'.
A former senior diplomat at Ecuador’s London embassy has said that the source-based ‘bombshell’ by The Guardian, about alleged meetings between the former Trump campaign manager and the WikiLeaks founder, is a work of fiction. Fidel Narváez, who had worked at his country’s embassy in London from 2010 to July 2018, said that he was completely unaware of the alleged meetings between Julian Assange and Trump's disgraced former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, that had supposedly taken place on his watch.
[...]
“It is impossible for any visitor to enter the embassy without going through very strict protocols and leaving a clear record: obtaining written approval from the ambassador, registering with security personnel, and leaving a copy of ID,” Narváez stressed.
It’s inconceivable that someone could have sneaked into the embassy unnoticed considering it is “the most surveilled on Earth,” he pointed out, noting that “not only are there cameras positioned on neighboring buildings recording every visitor, but inside the building every movement is recorded with CCTV cameras, 24/7.”
Narváez also took aim at other ‘explosive reports’ on WikiLeaks run by the renowned British paper, including its September story detailing an alleged “plan” by Ecuador to smuggle Assange out of the embassy and into Russia.
Julian Assange, the embattled Wikileaks founder who has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since 2012 for fear he could be extradited to the U.S. for publishing classified material, is in deep trouble. Court documents mistakenly released appear to suggest that he is facing unspecified, sealed charges in the U.S. that could either be espionage—a move that could be very ominous for other journalists who have published government secrets—or other theoretical charges regarding alleged relationships with hackers that went beyond protected journalistic activity.
As it turns out, his Ecuadorean hosts seem to have been even more eager to get rid of their troublesome guest than has previously been reported. A report in the New York Times on Monday alleges that Paul Manafort, the prison-bound former chair of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, tried to strike a deal with inbound Ecuadorean President Lenín Moreno in May 2017 to turn Assange over to U.S. authorities.
Former Ecuadorian diplomat Fidel Narváez spoke out on Monday to slam reports published last week that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort met with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at the embassy in London ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Narváez, who worked at the embassy in which WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange resides in, described the claims as a “fake story.” Navarez was at the embassy from 2010-18, first as consul then as first secretary,
The article, published in the Guardian, claimed that Manafort met with Assange on three occasions—2013, 2015, and in March 2016. These meetings, the article claimed, took place at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where the WikiLeaks founder has resided since 2012 to avoid extradition.
Months later, in the run-up to Election Day, the transparency organization published emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign.
If there's an exemption that can be used, it will be used. Up until recently, the state had the worst public records laws in the nation. And it looks like they're still the worst. This has allowed a state agency to claim a 63-year-old murder case investigation was still ongoing, despite the lead suspect having died years ago. In another case, the State Police took $180 from a requester and then refused to hand over the records requested.
The recently instituted public records law reforms don't seem to be having much of an effect on state agency responsiveness. MuckRock is reporting law enforcement agencies continue to be the main offenders, upholding the proud police tradition of ignoring laws officers and officials don't like.
This leads to insane, if not illegal, responses to records requests. Todd Wallack of the Boston Globe requested a photo of an officer and detective employed by the Boston Police Department. It rejected his request citing public records exemption f, which claimed the staff photos were "investigatory materials." When Wallack challenged this determination, the BPD responded with €¯\_(ãÆâ)_/€¯.
[...]
I'm sure O'Malley means well and is probably accurately portraying the near-farcical situation. But the government shouldn't be pushing citizens into lawsuits over public records. The presumption is supposed to be openness, not schoolyard taunts of "make me." But that's where the state remains, even after public records reform: a drain on taxpayers both ways, whether screwing them out of records or paying legal fees with taxpayer funds at the end of the apparently inevitable lawsuits.
It was an iconic moment: Young people occupy Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s office demanding a Green New Deal to put millions of people to work making a climate-safe economy — when suddenly newly-elected Congressional representative and overnight media star Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joins them with a resolutionin hand to establish a Select Committee for a Green New Deal. But those who actually read her resolution closely may have been puzzled – or stunned – by its call for “a jobs guarantee program to assure a living wage job to every person who wants one.” What is a “jobs guarantee program” and what does it have to do with protecting the climate?
The message from 'The People's Seat' at the United Nation's COP24 climate summit in Katowice, Poland on Monday—presented by the octogenarian British naturalist Sir David Attenborough—was as succinct and simple as it was profound and terrifying: "If we don't take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon."
Attenborough, most recently known for his work on the BBC's 'Planet Earth' documentary series, was chosen to deliver a speech on behalf of the 'People's Seat,' and the effort was backed from people from across the world who shared in a video compilation about just how urgent and perilous the current moment in human history has become.
"The world's people have spoken," Attenborough told the crowd, which included leaders and diplomats from around the world. "Their message is clear. Time is running out. They want you, the decision makers, to act now. They're behind you, along with civil society represented here today."
Researching and writing about the impacts of runaway climate change, as I’ve been doing now for too many years, I’ve watched several patterns recur.
One of these is evident in a recent warning from the UN. Biodiversity chief of the UN Cristiana PaÃâ¢ca Palmer warned that if governments around the globe don’t work to bring a halt to the loss of biodiversity and succeed in implementing a plan to do so within two years, humans could face our own extinction.
Palmer said, according to The Guardian, “People in all countries need to put pressure on their governments to draw up ambitious global targets by 2020 to protect the insects, birds, plants and mammals that are vital for global food production, clean water and carbon sequestration.”
People in all countries are already working to pressure their governments to do just that. Yet, with few possible exceptions, we know all too well how wedded most governments are to the current power structure and the economics that drive it to believe radical policy change like this will actually occur (without overthrowing said governments).
Then the pattern will repeat: After some time passes, and things are even worse, another dire warning or results of a study that serves as one is released, and again, nothing will change.
Once again demonstrating her ability to use social media to simultaneously expose the lies of right-wing critics and clearly articulate a bold progressive agenda, Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) quickly disposed of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee's false claim that she compared her election victory to the moon landing, noting that she was actually referring to the "level of ambition" and "innovation" that will be necessary to implement a Green New Deal and confront the global climate crisis.
"Leave the false statements to Sarah Huckabee," Ocasio-Cortez wrote, referring to President Donald Trump's press secretary and the former governor's daughter. "She's much better at it."
Expressing disappointment that the high court won't take up the case, Brian Segee, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Reuters, "Trump has abused his power to wreak havoc along the border to score political points."
The president, he added, is "illegally sweeping aside bedrock environmental and public-health laws. We'll continue to fight Trump's dangerous wall in the courts and in Congress."
Roughly four years ago, Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) filed a federal application to build a 1,172 mile oil pipeline from North Dakota’s Bakken shale across the U.S. to Illinois at a projected cost of $3.8 billion.
Before that application was filed, on September 30, 2014, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe met with ETP to express concerns about the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL) and fears of water contamination. Though the company, now known as Energy Transfer, had re-routed a river crossing to protect the state capital of Bismarck against oil spills, it apparently turned a deaf ear to the Tribe’s objections.
Following that approach proved to be a very costly decision, a new analysis concludes, with ETP, banks, and investors taking billions in losses as a result.
As momentum for a Green New Deal continues to grow at the grassroots and in Congress amid dire scientific warnings that immediate and ambitious action is necessary to avert climate catastrophe, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are hosting a town hall alongside prominent environmentalists on Monday evening to discuss the global threat of the climate crisis and highlight bold solutions that the corporate media systematically ignores.
The logic of neoliberal reason gives us liberal leaders who lie to our faces telling us we can extract and pump out tarsand bitumen and still make a safe energy transition.
What do you do when the political/economic consensus in no way reflects the scientific consensus and all its policy implications? Well, people have a choice: to resist the political consensus and try to create a new one, or to ignore the policy implications of the IPCC reports findings and to distract themselves with other things.
Such is the state of global capitalism today that despite many liberal political and business leaders claiming to believe in global warming, they seem to believe in free market fundamentalism and the public subsidy of the fossil fuel industry even more. (An odd ideological contradiction in and of itself.) The truth is, in dealing with any major social crisis where uncertainty or losing is not an option, state planning, public investment, and tight control of markets is needed on a major scale.
A cross-party alliance of MPs wrote to Speaker John Bercow calling on him to launch contempt proceedings against the government for failing to publish Brexit legal advice in full
So now that most of the sales are over, we decided to ask you if you ended up buying anything for Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Here are the results.
Over the years, the incendiary term “scab,” when used in the context of Labor-Management relations, has come to be carelessly and egregiously misapplied. Even people who should, by rights, be familiar with its definition, seem to be confused by it. Bless their hearts, while their sentiments and ideology are in the right place, their terminology is in error.
Consider: Saying that the vehemently anti-union Walmart Corporation hires only “scab labor,” or that outside contractors being used for piece-work in the manufacturing sector—the bane of unionized mechanics and electricians everywhere—are “scabs” is both inaccurate and misleading. The proper nomenclature for the aforementioned employees is simply “non-union workers.”
A scab is an entirely different creature. A scab is a person who crosses a union picket line and takes over the job of a striking union worker. Scabs come in two varieties, both of them insidious and foul. You have your unaffiliated scab—which is a non-union person who hires on as a “replacement” for striking workers—and you have your affiliated scab, which is a union member who willingly and traitorously crosses his own union’s picket line.
As for the term “replacement worker,” one cannot imagine a more misleading or potentially destructive job title. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously said, “Labor cannot, on any terms, surrender the right to strike,” and he couldn’t have been more accurate. For the working class, the right to strike is everything. It’s the sole “weapon” they have in their arsenal in the on-going, eternal conflict between Labor and Management.
As Washington’s leadership fades more quickly than anyone could have imagined and a new global order struggles to take shape, a generation of leaders has crowded onto the world stage with their own bold geopolitical visions for winning international influence. Xi Xinping has launched his trillion-dollar “Belt and Road Initiative” to dominate Eurasia and thereby the world beyond. To recover the Soviet Union’s lost influence, Vladimir Putin seeks to shatter the Western alliance with cyberwar, while threatening to dominate a nationalizing, fragmenting Eastern Europe through raw military power. The Trump White House, in turn, is wielding tariffs as weapons to try to beat recalcitrant allies back into line and cripple the planet’s rising power, China. However bizarrely different these approaches may seem, they all share one strikingly similar feature: a reliance on the concept of “geopolitics” to guide their bids for global power.
Over the past century, countless scholars, columnists, and commentators have employed the term “geopolitics” (or the study of global control) to lend gravitas to their arguments. Few, though, have grasped the true significance of this elusive concept. However else the term might be used, geopolitics is essentially a methodology for the management (or mismanagement) of empire. Unlike conventional nations whose peoples are, in normal times, readily and efficiently mobilized for self-defense, empires, thanks to their global reach, are a surprisingly fragile form of government. They seem to yearn for strategic visionaries who can merge land, peoples, and resources into a sustainable global system.
The practice of geopolitics, even if once conducted from horseback, is as old as empire itself, dating back some 4,000 years. Until the dawn of the twentieth century, it was the conquerors themselves -- from Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar to Napoleon Bonaparte -- whose geopolitical visions guided the relentless expansion of their imperial domains. The ancient Greek historian Plutarch tried to capture (or perhaps exaggerate) the enormity of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul -- a territory that comprises all of modern France and Belgium -- by enumerating the nine years of war that “took by storm more than eight hundred cities, subdued three hundred tribes, and fought pitched battles... with three million men, of whom he slew one million... and took as many more prisoners.”
It will go down in cryptocurrency history that November 15 is the date of Bitcoin Cash (BCH) hard fork. This upcoming division will lead to a price increase of the coin. Reports have already indicated that within the past 24 hours Bitcoin Cash has increased by 4.21% thereby costing $564. Consequently, the two biggest exchanges in the cryptocurrency ecosystem – Coinbase and Binance have released statements as regard this latest incident.
At the blockchain conferences and blockchain industry discussions over the last two years I had many chances to listen to talks about crypto regulation...
Walmart announced Monday it will have 360 floor-cleaning robots in its stores by the end of January.
In a joint statement with developer Brain Corp, the retail giant said a Walmart worker would first ride the Zamboni-like machine to teach it the route; after that a push of the button would allow machine to take off on the route by itself.
"You see what happens when you all keep complaining about a living wage!?" commented one social media user. Another tweeted sarcastically, "Looks like Trump's corporate tax cuts are helping create jobs and increase wages!"
“As it's currently written, Trump's deal won't stop the serious and ongoing harm NAFTA causes for American workers,” she said. “It won't stop outsourcing, it won't raise wages, and it won't create jobs. It's NAFTA 2.0.”
The measure would establish a new line for reporting about information technology within the federal government, now instructing the federal chief information officer (CIO) — who oversees information technology throughout the administration — to report to the director of the Office of Management and Budget instead of the office’s deputy director.
Israeli police on Sunday recommended indicting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on bribery charges, adding to a growing collection of legal troubles that have clouded the longtime leader’s prospects for pursuing re-election next year.
Netanyahu denied the latest allegations. But his fate now lies in the hands of his attorney general, who will decide in the coming months whether the prime minister should stand trial on a host of corruption allegations that could play a central role in next year’s election campaign.
In a scathing attack on police investigators in a speech on Sunday, Netanyahu called the investigation a “witch hunt” that was “tainted from the start.”
“The Lobby,” the four-part Al-Jazeera documentary that was blocked under heavy Israeli pressure shortly before its release, has been leaked online by the Chicago-based website Electronic Intifada, the French website Orient XXI and the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar.
The series is an inside look over five months by an undercover reporter, armed with a hidden camera, at how the government and intelligence agencies of Israel work with U.S. domestic Jewish groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), The Israel Project and StandWithUs to spy on, smear and attack critics, especially American university students who support the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. It shows how the Israel lobby uses huge cash donations, often far above the U.S. legal limit, and flies hundreds of members of Congress to Israel for lavish and unpaid vacations at Israeli seaside resorts, bribing the American lawmakers to do Israel’s bidding, including providing military aid such as the $38 billion (over 10 years) that was approved by Congress in 2016. It uncovers Israel’s sleazy character assassination of academics, activists and journalists, its well-funded fake grassroots activism, its manipulation of press coverage, and its ham-fisted attempts to destroy marriages, personal relationships and careers. The film highlights the efforts to discredit liberal Jews and Jewish organizations as tools of radical jihadists, referring, for example, to Jewish Voice for Peace as “Jewish Voice for Hamas” and claiming that many members of the organization are not actually Jewish. Israel recruits black South Africans into an Israeli front group called Stop Stealing My Apartheid, in a desperate effort to counter the reality of the apartheid state that Israel has constructed. The series documents Israel’s repeated and multifaceted interference in the internal affairs of the United States, including elections; efforts to discredit progressive groups such as Black Lives Matter that express sympathy for the Palestinians; and routine employment of Americans to spy on other Americans. Israel’s behavior is unethical and perhaps illegal. But don’t expect anyone in the establishment or either of the two ruling political parties to do anything about it. It is abundantly clear by the end of the series that they have been intimidated, discredited or bought off.
For those who fear that Donald Trump is about to lower the boom on special counsel Robert Mueller, take a deep breath and slowly exhale. Despite all you’ve heard from Trump himself, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and law professor Alan Dershowitz about the commander-in-chief’s unfettered authority to discharge any member of the executive branch with impunity, Mueller isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
[...]
Although Trump can’t fire Mueller directly, he can order the attorney general to do his bidding. According to conventional wisdom, Whitaker will be only too eager to oblige. Indeed, in the view of many of the president’s foes, that’s the reason Trump elevated Whitaker to the position of acting attorney general after he forced the resignation of Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from overseeing the Mueller inquiry. With Sessions out of the way, Whitaker has replaced Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein as Mueller’s boss.
Since Mueller’s appointment, Whitaker has been among the foremost critics of the special counsel’s work, often echoing Trump’s own unhinged rants. Before he became Sessions’ chief of staff, Whitaker was a right-wing blogger and a regular talking head on cable news. In that capacity, he not only argued that the attorney general could defund the Mueller probe, but also that the probe would devolve into a “witch hunt” if it crossed a “red line” into an examination of Trump’s finances.
Last week, the line was breached when former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about the extent of his erstwhile client’s efforts during the 2016 election campaign to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
You’re probably hearing a lot about subpoenas. Or you will very soon, once Democrats take control of the House.
A subpoena is a legal command from a court or from one or both houses of Congress to do something – like testify or present information. The term “subpoena” literally means “under penalty.” Someone who receives a subpoena but doesn’t comply with it may be subject to civil or criminal penalties.
Here’s how it works.
Apparently, so I have read, pop/rock band Coldplay are due to release fresh new music under a fresh new name. The venture will be undertaken in collaboration with the singer Pharrell, who recently revealed himself as a shameless supporter of the Israeli ‘Defense’ Forces; but that is neither here nor there, for now. The terrifying reappearance of Coldplay reminded me of some wise words once uttered by fictional character Superhans, a comical drug-taking party fiend from Channel 4’s Peep Show, which aired between 2003 and 2015.
In a back-and-forth with one of the other chief protagonists of the show, Jeremy, on the subject of setting up a pub somewhere in London and what food and beverages ought to be stocked in it, it is put to Superhans that the old dependables of lager and nuts should be considered, as ‘people like larger and nuts’. Superhans’s response is almost apoplectic; ‘people like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis! You can’t trust people Jeremy!’
As Wisconsin's GOP-controlled legislature and outgoing Republican Gov. Scott Walker seek to thwart the will of voters by ramming through a sweeping slate of legislation that would drastically curtail Democratic governor-elect Tony Evers' authority and ability to implement his agenda, progressive advocacy groups announced emergency rallies on Monday to fight back against the GOP's latest "shocking and naked power grab."
Pilger, who has made 62 documentaries since 1970, is one of a handful of journalists internationally who vigorously defends WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. On June 17, he addressed a rally in Sydney organised by the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) to demand Assange’s immediate release. Some of the early Pilger films to be screened include: The Quiet Mutiny, his first documentary for British television; The Outsiders, which features interviews with war correspondents, such as Wilfred Burchett and Martha Gellhorn, and other individuals in 1983; and The Last Dream: Other People’s Wars (1988), about the history of Australian military involvement in British and American imperialist interventions.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman greeted each other with a high five when they met in Argentina for the Group of 20 summit on Friday.
The founders of “scientific socialism,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, assumed it was quite possible, even historically inevitable, for working people to democratically govern an industrial society. However, they never went into detail about how this would work. Even today, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, many orthodox Marxists persist in believing that vast, complex, globalized, industrial economies can be run by and for the workers who operate the machinery of production. In fact, doctrinaire Marxists still cling to the fantasy that worker-run industrial socialism is not only possible, it is the historically destined, superior replacement for industrial capitalism.
This Marxist conviction is dubious for two reasons. First, history has demonstrated that after many attempts, and despite their best intentions, the leaders of “socialist” revolutions have never succeeded in building an industrial society run by and for working people. Second, the primary underlying reason for this failure flows from the structural requirements of industrial society. Fossil-fueled industrial economies exert a powerful influence over their social structure. The extensive, intricate, hierarchical configuration of carbon-powered industrialism appears structurally unsuited and deeply resistant to bottom-up, democratic management.
When socialist-led revolutions seized political power in Russia, China, and elsewhere, Marxists were quick to label these countries “socialist.” They were convinced that their ruling communist parties would industrialize these countries and bring them under democratic, working class control. Meanwhile, in Western Europe, reform-minded Marxists believed working people could gain power over their industrial economies through the ballot instead of the bullet. But whether socialist parties were elected or seized power through revolution, they were never able to bring an industrial economy under the democratic management of working people.
The candidate pool in the 2018 midterm elections was more diverse, female and full of first-time candidates than ever. Democrats nominated 180 women, 60 more than the previous record of 120, according to data from Rutgers University Center for American Women in Politics, Politico reports. They also nominated 133 people of color and 158 first-time candidates. But while Congress may look a little more like America in January, amid the celebrations of all these firsts is a harsher truth: Many of the midterm candidates, whether they won or lost, could barely afford to run.
The odds are stacked against less wealthy candidates before they decide to run. As Amanda Terkel explains in HuffPost, “Many of the lawmakers walking the gilded halls of Congress are, financially, far better off than the constituents they represent. Millionaires comprise nearly 40 percent of Congress, compared to being just 4 percent of the U.S. population.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representative-elect from New York’s 14th District, has been the subject of constant media attention. She was a bartender before running and has $7,000 in her bank account, and some conservative writers accuse her of dressing too well, considering how little money she claims to have.
The value of Tumblr for NSFW creators and fans was in the autonomy to curate something original, and the freedom to express and share what they’re into—something that can’t be replaced by algorithmically-suggested porn on the rest of the internet.
Tumblr is giving users until the start date of the ban later this month to appeal, but the inaccuracies are causing concern that blanket bans on such content could sweep up inoffensive posts and continue to drive a wedge between creators and the Tumblr platform. The algorithms were originally a part of Safe Mode, which is now being replaced with a full-site ban on adult content.
Tumblr will ban 'female-presenting nipples' and other content beginning December 17, 2018. Photographer and writer Nate 'Igor' Smith is a longtime Tumblr user whose work straddles the boundaries of art, editorial, and adult. Here, Nate explains why Tumblr's decision to censor is devastating for the Tumblr's longtime users, and the rest of us. — XJ
Oath, the Verizon subsidiary that owns the Yahoo and AOL digital media brands, has announced that as of December 17, all adult content will be banned from the Tumblr blogging site. Any still or moving images displaying real-life human genitals or female nipples and any content—even drawn or computer-generated artwork—depicting any sexual acts will be prohibited.
New community guidelines state users cannot upload "real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples" - including anything "so photorealistic" it could be thought to be genuine.
We've discussed a few times the big NY Times article on Facebook employing smear merchants against its critics, discussing how disappointing, if common this tactic is, and also talking about how it's a sign of a company losing its way. This has become even more pronounced as, following Facebook COO's Sheryl Sandberg's original denial of knowledge specifically around the question of smears directed at George Soros, it's now been revealed that she both was cc'd on some of the emails from the PR company, and that she had directly asked for research on Soros' views on Facebook.
But I wanted to dig in a bit more on a specific point mentioned briefly in that NY Times report, concerning FOSTA. As we've detailed for many, many months FOSTA was a disastrous bill that has made sex trafficking worse while simultaneously creating huge problems for free speech and for internet companies -- including Facebook, which has already been sued under FOSTA.
What was notable, was that FOSTA was not going to move forward... until Facebook suddenly changed its position on the bill. Specifically, Sandberg suddenly became a vocal supporter of the bill, even as multiple policy experts at her own company had worked hard to stop the bill. At the time, it wasn't entirely clear to me if this was purely a Sandberg thing, or if it was a decision by the wider Facebook executive team that they had to support FOSTA as a fruitless attempt to appear willing to compromise on something after getting beat up from all sides over its role in Russian disinformation campaigns.
44 NGOs, professionals, hosting services and non profit Internet access providers ask Emmanuel Macron to renounce to its European Regulation project to censor the whole Web for dubious security reasons.
European governments will meet on the 6th of December to find a common position on this text. This Regulation will use the fear of terrorism to silence all of the Internet. It will do nothing but reinforce Google and Facebook (read our article) and threaten the confidentiality of our exchanges online (read our article).
I have been honored to be invited as a co-chair (together with Vasilis Ververis and Mario Isaakidis) for a Special Track called €«Topics on Internet Censorship and Surveillance€» (TICS), at the The Eighteenth International Conference on Networks, which will be held in Valencia, Spain, 2018.03.24–2018.03.28, and organized under IARIA's name and umbrella.
Human rights group Liberty has won the right for a judicial review into the Investigatory Powers Act 2016 in the latest legal challenge to the UK’s surveillance laws.
The high court held in a ruling released on 29 November that Liberty has the right to a judicial review of the government’s bulk surveillance powers.
The judicial review will rule on part 4 of the Investigatory Powers Act,which gives a wide range of government agencies powers to collect electronic communications and records of internet use, in bulk, without reason for suspicion.
Government agencies also have legal powers for bulk hacking of mobile phones and computer equipment, and to collate large databases, known as bulk personal datasets, that include data on people who are not suspected of any crime.
The Sacramento County’s Department of Human Assistance (DHA) is terminating its invasive automated license plate reader (ALPR) program, following an EFF investigation that found the agency was accessing driver data to investigate welfare recipients without enacting the basic civil liberties safeguards required by California law.
Over the last two years, DHA spent $10,000 to access a massive database of information about people’s driving patterns. Vigilant Solution’s LEARN system includes billions of license plate scans, with time stamps and geolocation, collected by law enforcement agencies and private contractors using high-speed ALPR cameras. In addition to serving as a cloud storage service, LEARN also functions as an analytical tool that can be used to track vehicle owners in near real-time, reveal their travel history (such as where they park their cars), and identify cars that visit targeted locations. DHA does not own its own ALPR cameras, but instead has relied upon data shared by other entities to conduct benefits fraud investigations.
EFF exposed this location surveillance of low-income people in July, and the Sacramento Bee followed up with a report about it. Meanwhile, the Coalition of California Welfare Rights Organizations (CCWRO) demanded accountability from the county through a direct meeting and a formal letter.
As of Nov. 1 the agency cut off investigators from accessing the LEARN system. A single DHA staff member will have access to the system for auditing purposes until the contract with Vigilant Solutions expires in May 2019. The DHA director disclosed this good news in a letter to the CCWRO executive director, Kevin Aslanian.
[...]
In the letter to Aslanian, DHA says that although it is ending the program, it still believes the “use of this data is legal and legitimate,” and they “reserve the right to resume use of this data.” However, they pledged not to re-initiate the program without giving CCWRO prior notice.
EFF will continue to monitor how DHA and other government agencies use ALPRs. To learn about 200 agencies across the United States that are collecting and accessing ALPR data, check out EFF and Muckrock’s new project Data Driven: Explore How Cops Are Collecting and Sharing Our Travel Patterns Using Automated License Plate Readers.
We’re telling a federal appeals court that democracy has no room for secret law on surveillance of Americans. A federal appeals court in New York will hear oral argument on Tuesday in our lawsuit fighting for the public’s right to know the legal justifications for government spying.
The Freedom of Information Act suit seeks the release of secret memos written by government lawyers that provided the foundation for the warrantless surveillance of Americans’ international communications. In essence, these memos serve as the law that governs the executive branch. By withholding them, the government is flouting a core principle of democratic society: The law must be public.
The memos cover the government’s legal interpretations of Executive Order 12333, which was issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. It’s the primary authority under which the NSA conducts surveillance, and it encompasses an array of warrantless, high-tech spying programs. While much of this spying occurs outside the United States and is ostensibly directed at foreigners, it nonetheless vacuums up vast quantities of Americans’ communications. That’s because in today’s interconnected world, communications are frequently sent, routed, or stored abroad — where they may be collected, often in bulk, in the course of the NSA’s spying activities.
For example, the NSA has relied on EO 12333 to collect nearly 5 billion records per day on the locations of cell phones, as well as hundreds of millions of contact lists and address books from email and messaging accounts. It also intercepted private data from Google and Yahoo user accounts as that information traveled between those companies’ data centers located abroad.
Are we "going dark?" The FBI certainly seems to believe so, although its estimation of the size of the problem was based on extremely inflated numbers. Other government agencies haven't expressed nearly as much concern, even as default encryption has spread to cover devices and communications platforms.
There are solutions out there, if it is as much of a problem as certain people believe. (It really isn't… at least not yet.) But most of these solutions ignore workarounds like accessing cloud storage or consensual searches in favor of demanding across-the-board weakening/breaking of encryption.
A few more suggestions have surfaced over at Lawfare. The caveat is that both authors, Ian Levy and Crispin Robinson, work for GCHQ. So that should give you some idea of which shareholders are being represented in this addition to the encryption debate.
The idea (there's really only one presented here) isn't as horrible as others suggested by law enforcement and intelligence officials. But that doesn't mean it's a good one. And there's simply no way to plunge into this without addressing an assertion made without supporting evidence towards the beginning of this Lawfare piece.
How "Willie Horton" went from shorthand for black depravity to shorthand for a certain brand of political racism.
The anniversary of the sinking of two great capital ships off Singapore, one of the great British defeats of the Second World War, falls unnoticed between the proposed May-Corbyn debate on 9 December and the House of Commons vote on the Brexit agreement with the EU on 11 December. This is a pity because the miscalculations that go into producing first rate disasters, both political and military, have a lot in common.
Seventy-seven years ago, on 10 December 1941, Japanese planes found and sank the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulsewhen they unwisely sailed north of Singapore without air cover in a bid to attack the Japanese forces invading Malaya. Describing his reaction to the sinking, in which 840 sailors died, Churchill said: “In all the war, I never received a more direct shock.”
The ingredients that led to this naval calamity were similar in general terms to those producing most disasters: inadequate resources for the task in hand, over-optimistic assessment of the risks, and self-destructive ignorance of the obstacles to be faced. The two ships went to their doom because the British had no more forces to send and underestimated the threat of Japanese air attack.
Supporters of Britain leaving the EU will bristle and say that it is far too apocalyptic to draw any parallel between a military reverse in the last century and Brexit today. They will say that this is one more exaggerated example of “Project Fear” and “Project Hysteria”, and all that is needed is to keep our nerve and exercise greater willpower until those EU leaders and negotiators come running, because they know that their countries would lose out, though not as much as the UK, from a failure to reach an agreement.
There are only about 100 Sentinelese-Jarawa people left. They are fiercely independent, rejecting contact with outsiders and culturally remaining intact. Jarawa are small-statured and ebony-complexioned and thought to be remnants of people who originally migrated thousands of years ago from Africa and settled in the Andaman Islands east of India and west of Myanmar. For the most part, the Indian government has been successful in preventing interlopers from accessing their island. Chau paid some local fishermen to reach these remote Jarawa people.
As these tribal people have managed to remain isolated, they are also highly susceptible to viral contagion, even from the common cold and flu.
As an anthropologist who writes about indigenous issues, I am aware how much European colonialism is an ever-present issue in the minds and memories of many indigenous peoples because of the horrifying genocide wreaked upon them.
Indeed, there are very few “uncontacted” indigenous peoples remaining in our globalized planet. The majority of uncontacted natives may be found in the Amazon region in the borderland areas of Bolivia, Brazil, and Peru. Anthropologists are continually worried about the safety of such vulnerable people because of their lacking immunity to Western-borne illnesses and threats from outsiders as tourists, illegal loggers, and gold miners encroaching upon their territories.
In assessing the situation of isolated people like the Sentinelese-Jarawa of the Andaman Islands as well as the isolated Amerindians in the Amazon, we need to return to the history of Western thought and Western civilization for explaining the problems associated with contact in relation to indigenous peoples and Europeans.
On December 3, we, the members of the “Anti-ICE Nine,” are headed to a pre-trial hearing. We are each facing two misdemeanor charges — which could result in up to one year of jail time and a $5,000 fine apiece — for blocking traffic outside Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) downtown offices in Seattle, Washington, this past June. We were arrested for exposing the existence of ICE’s regional headquarters in downtown Seattle, and for opposing the Trump regime’s horrific treatment of immigrants.
When the Trump regime’s practice of separating migrant families and children was revealed in the weeks following our arrest, millions of people across the country joined the movement calling for the abolition of ICE. Now, following City Attorney Pete Holmes’s public threat to prosecute human rights defenders like us, we face criminal prosecution for our political stance.
Given ICE’s well-documented deportation terror, it is Holmes who is prosecuting recklessly by using his discretion to attempt to convict those who oppose ICE. In doing so, he is aligning himself with the Trump administration.
While Holmes may claim he is “neutrally” applying the law in prosecuting us, we believe that his purportedly “impartial” version of justice is a racist version of justice. As people who will not sit idly by while President Trump stokes the resentments of white supremacists and organizes an ever-expanding army of ICE agents, we demand that Holmes reverse course and direct his office’s energies toward protecting immigrant communities and ridding our city and state of ICE.
Some of them have brought gifts for the roughly 2,300 children inside, only to be turned away by guards.
Months after the government erected a tent city in the desert, most of what happens inside the encampment remains hidden, even from curious neighbors in the nearby town of 1,600 residents. The only images of the minors in the camp, standing outside in an orderly line or playing soccer, have been released by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Canadian campaigners have gathered tens of thousands of signatures from critics of the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), whose increased investments in a for-profit prison corporation became clear in new reporting by the Guardian Monday.
The CPPIB, one of the largest funds in the world, drew outrage last month after it was first revealed that it held stock in the U.S.-based Geo Group—making the 20 million Canadian retirees it represents unwittingly complicit in the company's private prisons and involvement in the long-term imprisonment of immigrant families under the Trump administration.
My headline is provocative, so let me quickly explain, starting with a huge claim about what’s unique about our world in this moment. Then I ask, What, right now, is most required of our species?
Our era has been dubbed the Anthropocene because for the first time we humans are making our mark on the entire planet. Isn’t it high time we nail down the most basic traits of this master species—traits that will determine how it might handle responsibility of such magnitude…a whole planet?
Let’s start with a common observation that humans are self-absorbed, too self-absorbed…and challenge it: Maybe we got that one wrong, very wrong. Humans are pack animals. Just like wolves and elephants, we’re social. Anthropologists make the case that we are the most social of primates. We are, above all, obsessed with staying inside the pack. We know our preservation depends on its preservation.
A colleague was lamenting recently that working on tech policy these days feels a lot like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. What does something as arcane as copyright law have to do with anything when governments are giving way to fascists, people are being killed because of their race or ethnicity, and children are being wrested from their parents and kept in cages?
Well, a lot. It has to do with why we got involved in these policy debates in the first place. If we want these bad things to stop we can't afford for there to be obstacles preventing us from exchanging the ideas and innovating the solutions needed to make them stop. The more trouble we find ourselves mired in the more we need to be able to think our way out.
Tech policy directly bears on that ability, which is why we work on it, even on aspects as seemingly irrelevant to the state of humanity as copyright. Because they aren't irrelevant. Copyright, for instance, has become a barrier to innovation as well as a vehicle for outright censorship. These are exactly the sorts of chilling effects we need to guard against if we are going to be able to overcome these challenges to our democracy. The worse things are, the more important it is to have the unfettered freedom to do something about it.
Cops love cheap field drug tests because they're cheap and as likely to generate "probable cause" for an arrest/search as their much more expensive drug dogs. No law enforcement agency has ever expressed concerns about these fields tests returning false positives at an alarming rate. They just book people and send them before a judge based on a $2 test that can find anything from drywall powder to doughnut crumbs to be controlled substances. This void in accountability has occasionally been filled by prosecutors, a few of which will not offer or accept plea deals based on nothing more than a field test.
A faulty drug test is at the center of a recently-filed lawsuit. Georgia resident Dasha Fincher is suing Monroe County and two sheriff's deputies over a field drug test that turned cotton candy into methamphetamines and upended her life. (via the Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Democrats, led by Sen. Chuck Schumer, are playing word games when it comes to funding Trump’s border wall. Sometime between now and Dec. 7, when the current appropriation for the Department of Homeland Security will expire, Congress needs to provide the agency with another’s year’s funds. A single word has become a sticking point for the politicians who will vote on that funding: “wall,” as in President Trump’s border wall.
Trump and his Republican allies are demanding billions of dollars for walls along the U.S.-Mexico border. Democrats, wanting to be seen as opposing Trump, say that they won’t vote for border walls. But they, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, are willing to vote for “fences.”
The current Senate iteration of the DHS appropriations bill contains $1.6 billion for 65 miles of either border walls or border fences — depending on one’s party affiliation — in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas. This is an area that received 54 miles of either border wall or border fence in between 2009 and 2010. I live in the Rio Grande Valley, a few miles north of the 2009 border wall and in the vicinity of the new ones: No one here has ever called it a fence.
Sen. Schumer recently took to the floor to split the fence/wall hair, saying that, “It’s just what we’ve done in previous years — funding for fencing on the border where experts say it makes the most sense. It would protect our border far more effectively and far more quickly than any wall.”
Peter Brown’s illegal arrest shows why sheriffs have no business enforcing immigration law. Peter Sean Brown is a U.S. citizen who lives in the Florida Keys. He was born in Philadelphia and has lived in Florida for 10 years. Before this year, he had never heard of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
That changed abruptly in April, when the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office held him in jail so that ICE could try to deport him — even though he’s a U.S. citizen. The ACLU, the ACLU of Florida, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP filed a lawsuit today against the sheriff’s office for violating Peter’s Fourth Amendment rights. His experience — being locked in jail away from his family, friends, and job to facilitate an illegal deportation — is a stark example of what can go wrong when local law enforcement does ICE’s bidding.
The saga began when Peter reported to the Monroe County Sheriff’s office for violating probation with a low-level, marijuana-related offense. Instead of quickly releasing him, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office told Peter that they were keeping him locked up to facilitate his deportation. ICE had faxed a request, known as a “detainer,” asking the sheriff to lock Peter up, so it could deport him to Jamaica.
The FIRST STEP Act is a modest piece of legislation that tackles harsh sentencing while failing, for the most part, to apply its reforms retroactively It’s not often that you’ll find the ACLU on the same side of an issue as President Donald Trump.
But in the waning days of the 115th Congress, lawmakers have the rare opportunity to show bipartisanship isn’t completely dead. For months, advocates and lawmakers have worked together to craft a criminal justice reform bill, known as the FIRST STEP Act, that enjoys broad support from the White House and members of Congress in both parties.
Only one thing stands in the way of this piece of genuine bipartisan reform: Mitch McConnell. The Senate majority leader has complete and absolute power to bring the FIRST STEP Act to the floor for a vote. Thus far, he has chosen to stand in the way of essential reforms that will help ensure incarcerated people who have served their time have a second chance at life.
So how did we get here?
To some extent, we've dealt with this issue in the US as well, where some believe the 1st Amendment should already protect reporters and media orgs from giving up information on sources, but where the government still has gone to court -- such as in the case of James Risen -- to try to force journalists to reveal sources.
And while there have been some attempts at creating so-called "shield laws" against these sorts of things, unfortunately, nearly every attempt to do so would require the government to define who counts as a journalist, which would also be a huge 1st Amendment problem. (And, of course, over in Europe there's an issue where Romania has been trying to use the GDPR to force a reporter to cough up sources).
I know that some people don't think this is that big of a deal, but it is a huge deal if you want journalists to be free to investigate and report on things like government corruption and abuse. To do that, journalists rely on sources providing them information -- and to get sources to provide you information, journalists frequently need to guarantee them anonymity for fairly obvious reasons. But when governments can force away that anonymity, it creates a huge mess. Sources will be much less willing to come forward, as they know that even if a journalist promises protection, they can't guarantee it against a demand from the government. This will lead to significantly less whistleblowing, especially in important cases.
A church in The Hague is going to extreme measures to show its intolerance for the anti-immigrant sentiment that has spread across Europe in recent years, as it enters its 38th day holding continuous services in order to protect an asylum-seeking Armenian family from deportation.
The Tamrazyan family was given sanctuary by Bethel Church on October 26 after they learned the Dutch government planned to deport them. They have lived in the country since 2010, after reportedly fleeing death threats in Armenia due to their political activism.
Why should we not compare Nazi officials with the leaders of the Republican Party, most of whom denounced and derided Donald Trump when he was running for office, but now seem eager to join his wrecking-ball attacks on America’s most hallowed democratic principles?
[...]
Born in Cracow in 1939, Niklas Frank was too young to fully comprehend his father’s role in the Holocaust. As he matured however, and became a reporter, his initial embarrassment at being the son of a war criminal turned into what he called a “burning hatred-- ” an obsessive need to research the dark corners of his parents’ life. The result was a searing book denouncing his father for his horrific acts—"The Father: A Settling of Accounts.”
What was so remarkable, was that, according to Niklas, Hans Frank did not particularly dislike Jews. Indeed, Niklas claimed to have no memory of ever hearing his father spout anti-Semitic venom at home, even as his day job involved sending millions to the gas chambers.
Nor, according to Niklas, was his father a fervid Nazi ideologue. Ideals had nothing to do with Hans Frank’s eagerness to enable Hitler. It was purely a question of building a career, reigning as the “Governor General” of Occupied Poland--of an obsession with position, prestige, and wealth, of having great (stolen) renaissance masterpieces hanging in his palatial home.
So, tell me: why should we not compare Niklas Frank’s blindly ambitious father with top Trump officials and the leaders of the Republican Party, most of whom denounced and derided Donald Trump when he was running for office, but now not only remain silent in the face of his increasingly outrageous acts, but actually seem eager to join his wrecking-ball attacks on America’s most hallowed democratic principles.
This is not to compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. But Trump’s depredations don’t have to meet Hitlerian extremes for them to be heinous and a threat to all Americans.
Clearly, Donald Trump is getting things done with these lies that no amount of ‘exposure’ can frustrate. He pays no price for having them exposed, and he rather seems to enjoy watching responsible journalists scramble to expose them.
What journalists routinely get wrong about the President’s lies is to assume that he tells them in order to deceive. But these lies are of a radically different kind. No ‘pants on fire’ rating on a PolitiFact ‘Truth-O-Meter’ can discredit them because they are drawn from an anti-democratic playbook, where deception is a side-effect of lying rather than the principal aim. Donald Trump does not object to having his most ludicrous assertions exposed as lies. He objects to their not being accepted as lies. This sounds odd, I realize, but anyone who has studied the inner workings of fascism knows that the most outrageous lies of any given imperator, ‘father of the fatherland’or il duce are not about deception; they are about demonstrating the leader’s power to impose deceptions.
I come at this not as a journalist, but as a scholar of ancient Rome. Consider, for example, the ‘founding lie’ that was told by emperor Tiberius at a meeting of the Roman Senate on September 17, 14 AD. Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, had recently passed away. Tiberius, the deceased emperor’s adopted ‘son,’ stood before the Senate and read out Augustus’s will. In it he was named Augustus’s heir. This was new territory for the Roman Senate. Technically speaking, emperors should not exist: they were anathema to Rome’s ‘republican’ constitution. For those gathered in the Senate that day, Augustus was not only their first emperor, he was their first dead one. So what were they to do? Could a dead emperor just name someone in his will to make that someone the next emperor? Were they, as senators, to have no say in the matter? Or perhaps they did not really need an emperor, especially one as unlikeable as Tiberius.
At least three members of Elkhart, Indiana’s city council say they would support paying for an independent review of the city’s police force if the U.S. Department of Justice declines to investigate.
Last month, Mayor Tim Neese asked the Indiana State Police to conduct a “thorough and far-reaching” investigation hours before the South Bend Tribune and ProPublica detailed misconduct by many top officers in the department.
The state police declined to investigate, saying it would be beyond their purview. They referred the mayor to the U.S. Department of Justice. But the Justice Department has retreated from oversight over local police departments.
Without help from the state or federal government, some city council members say they would support Elkhart hiring a private firm to do the investigation. The city took a similar approach in 1994, when it commissioned a study of the police department after five officers were held liable for civil rights violations.
Black Thought, the MC of The Roots, recently released the EP “Stream of Thought Vol. 2,” his follow-up to the second volume released earlier in the year.
Because many now associate Black Thought by his birth name Tariq Trotter, as part of the house band on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon,” it is easy to lose sight of his influence as a socially conscious rapper. With The Roots, his lyrics often provided poignant social commentary.
Both volumes of “Stream of Thought” fully display his abilities to skillfully offer deep insights into real world issues.
“Fentanyl,” off “Vol. 2,” tackles the opioid crisis. It addresses the dangers of addiction, mentioning how both Tom Petty and Prince died from fentanyl overdoses. It also sheds light on unscrupulous individuals and institutions that profit from addiction.
“Over-dosage is a marketing scheme, that’s just as dark as it seem when it’s a part of your team” speaks to how Big Pharma spends millions to promote drugs with potentially deadly side effects.
This idea is further explored with the lyric, “While the wolves pull the wool on and prey on vices.” The wolves represent the marketers that target addicts. They don’t care that “another destroyed life was meant to be more righteous in the face of this full-on opioid crisis.”
A sweet, small, symbolic bit of schadenfreude this weekend when Nashville officials booted foul-mouthed, hard-drinking, has-been redneck and Trump supporter Kid Rock from his position as Grand Marshall of the city's annual Christmas parade, replacing him with James Shaw Jr., who saved lives last year when he confronted a shooter at a local Waffle House, instantly became a real-life hero to many, and obviously should have had the gig in the first place. Rock, who's actually rich-kid-who-never-grew-up Robert Richie from Detroit, was disinvited after he mouthed off during an interview at his Nashville bar with Fox's Steve Doocy, urging people to lighten up and forget all the political correctness nonsense: "God forbid you say something a little bit wrong, you're racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, this that and another," he said. "I would say, 'love everybody,' except screw that Joy Behar bitch.” Behar is a comedian, co-host of ABC's "The View," and fierce critic of Trump.
Doocy rushed to apologize for the profanity, which was striking given that most of what they air is profane - "unholy, heathen...characterized by irreverence or contempt for God or sacred principles." Still, city officials were unhappy: the mayor said he would be "inclined not to participate" if Rock was there and a councilman said he “evokes neither the spirit of Christmas nor the inclusivity (of) the best of Nashville.” When organizers yanked him, Rock's response was as classy as ever: He doubled down on his right to be no-talent douchebag who once gleefully besmirched the White House with low-life pals Ted Nugent and Sarah Palin, and his bar co-owner, who donated a chunk of cash to the parade, threatened to sue to get it back. In the end, a smiling James Shaw led the parade, riding in a horse-drawn carriage with relatives of Akilah Dasilva, one of the shooting victims, and declaring, "It warms the heart to be here." He was widely celebrated on social media as a role model, an inspiration and "the best of America," which might even be starting to raise the bar a bit.
But the breakaway protesters appeared to not know where they were going. They ran past the road that leads to the United States, into a dead end on Calle José María Larroque, a street just a block away from the border wall. There, a group of Mexican police officers cornered them. For a moment, I found myself in the middle of a standoff between a group desperate to make it to the land of the free, and police dressed in full riot gear, determined to stand in their way. I thought the police were going to arrest the men, but they were vastly outnumbered and the men escaped by running down an alley that led back to the main road.
To block their way, the police rolled in a 15-foot-high rusted door and formed a blockade in the middle of the street, sealing the road from the United States into Mexico. The migrants ran back to the canal adjacent to the border fence, rejoining the protesters they had broken away from. One of the protesters yelled, “Estan haciendo el trabajo de Trump! Odia a los Mexicanos también!”—“You’re doing Trump’s work! He hates Mexicans, too!”
The protesters started a scattered march along the outer edges of the canal, some waving Honduran flags, some American. One woman had a sign that said, “El respeto a los derechos ajenos es la paz”—“The rights of foreigners means peace.”
Despite their anger, despite their frustrations, I never once saw anyone being violent or destructive, or behaving as people did in the video the Trump administration shared during the midterm elections campaign. I felt completely safe.
As it was already offered in the G-standard, price erosion was an imminent danger for which a provisional injunction was warranted, and the SPC appeared to be valid having been held so in the parallell procedure before the UK court.
As you will by now know, trademark bullying ticks me off. In particular, trademark bullying built on ideological grounds rather than any real concern over customer confusion gets my fur up. But when all of the above occurs against a brewery, makers of sweet, sweet beer? Well, that is a bridge too far.
Which is why it is with great pleasure that I can inform you that the greater Schlafly family, famous for its matriarch and puritanical icon Phyllis Schlafly, has lost a trademark opposition against another family member's brewery. This all started when the now late Phyllis Schlafly and her son Bruce Schlafly opposed her nephew Tom Schlafly from trademarking the name of his beer, Schlafly Beer. The opposition itself made zero sense, since Phyllis and Bruce chiefly objected to having their surname associated with the beer, given that Phyllis' reputation was particularly well cultivated with the Mormon and Baptist populations that don't look kindly on alcohol, generally. Successfully opposing the mark, however, wouldn't keep Tom from keeping that name for his beer. Instead, it simply meant that essentially everyone could call their beer Schlafly Beer, compounding the problem. Regardless, the Trademark Office took one look at the opposition and tossed it on obvious grounds, namely that Schlafly is Tom's surname too, and nobody is necessarily going to see Schlafly beer and suddenly think Phyllis took to boozing late in life.
Well, the Schlafly's appealed that decision, even after Phyllis passed away, and now the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has unanimously ruled in favor of the brewery's right to produce Schlafly Beer.
With just a week left for this Congress, one of the weirdest bad copyright bills is back on the calendar. The “Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act” would make the Register of Copyrights a presidential appointee, politicizing a role that should not be made a presidential pawn.
On Tuesday, December 4, the Senate Committee on Rules and Administration is scheduled to vote on S. 1010, the Senate version of the “Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act” already passed by the House of Representatives as H.R. 1695. If it passes out of the committee, the whole Senate will be able to vote on it with only days left in the 2018 session.
Currently, the Register of Copyrights is appointed by the Librarian of Congress, as the Copyright Office is part of the Library. This bill would take the appointment out of the hands of the Librarian and put it in the hands of the President.
The Register of Copyrights does a number of important, nonpartisan, non-political jobs. As the name implies, they register copyrightable material. But they are also charged with providing advice to Congress and “information and assistance” to others in the federal government on copyright. It’s important to note that, except in rare, narrow circumstances, the Register of Copyrights does not make copyright policy. Congress does.
The EU Copyright Directive currently working its way through the legislative process is surely one of the worst draft laws ever considered in the EU. Not just in the sense that it will cause serious damage to the Internet in the EU, but also because it is of an almost unprecedentedly poor quality in terms of its detailed framing.
Lawmakers generally recognise that the texts they produce must be clear about what they are trying to achieve, and how that will be implemented. Bad laws inevitably lead to conflicting decisions in the courts, and legal challenges that may even result in laws being struck down. Uncertainty about what new legislation means is not only a waste of time, effort and money, but has a corrosive effect on people’s respect for the law itself. If the fundamental rule of medicine is “first, do no harm”, the corresponding responsibility for lawmakers is “first, don’t be vague”.
Take Article 11, for example, which introduces an ancillary copyright for snippets of news articles. We don’t know how much of a quotation will require a licence – some copyright maximalists have even called for single words to be protected. Even more seriously, we don’t know whether simply using hyperlinks would require a licence. That would clearly cause immense problems for businesses, and for people’s creativity and rights. But the texts currently being considered still do not make it absolutely certain that hyperlinks are excluded from the licensing requirement.
You can't take your eyes off Congress for a second or they might do something awful. As you may recall, over the past few years, there's been a huge fight going on concerning who controls the US Copyright Office. Historically, the Copyright Office has been a part of the Library of Congress. In early 2017, I wrote a very long, detailed article for the Verge detailing why the Copyright Office is in the Library of Congress, and why it should stay there. If you're confused about this, I suggest reading that article. However, for years, many both within the Copyright Office itself, and (more importantly) in the legacy movie and recording industries, have been pushing to get the Copyright Office out of the Library and set up as its own agency (or possibly merged into the Patent and Trademark Office). This would give those special interests a lot more power over the organization, especially as it would make the head of the Copryight Office, the Register of Copyrights, now a Presidentially appointed position, rather than what it is today, where the Register is appointed by the Librarian of Congress.
The previous Register, Maria Pallante, advocated strongly for independence from the Library, and all sorts of rumors started to swirl after Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden (herself only recently appointed) fired Pallante. There was a ridiculous set of conspiracy theories pushed out about this falsely accusing "Google" of engineering the firing of Pallante. This entire narrative was debunked when it later came out that Pallante was almost certainly fired over an astoundingly botched computer system upgrade in which a new computer system that the Office had promised would cost $1.1 million had ballooned (through questionable means) to $11.6 million, and never actually worked and had to be scrapped. On top of that, an Inspector's General Report suggested that Pallante lied to both Congress and the Library of Congress about the status of that computer system upgrade, claiming that it was going great. Those are fireable offenses. Meanwhile, under Hayden's leadership, the Copyright Office has actually done a good job upgrading its computer systems.
As the debate around the draft Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market continues to unfold [Katposts here], The IPKat is happy to publish the following contribution by Ansgar Ohly and Matthias Leistner (both LMU München) concerning their proposal – which will be hosted in full on the Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (JIPLP) – concerning Article 13, that is the value gap (or transfer of value) proposal.
We love movies and we love them even more if they are for free. Right? If you open your web browser and type free movie download websites, you’ll be presented with a long list of illegal websites promising to grab your favorite blockbuster in a matter of seconds. Even Google keeps recommending such collections of websites at the top.
Another popular way of grabbing free movies online is torrent sites. However, downloading movies and TV shows from an illegal source like torrent can often get you in trouble. Google also keeps deleting the pirate links from its search results to make the internet a better and safer place. Instead of becoming a victim of illegal movie streaming websites or torrent sites that host all kinds pirated content, there are many legal sources that provide free movies and TV shows (you can check out our list of sites for free and legal music as well).
Online piracy is generally seen as a major source of losses by the entertainment industries, with many studies backing the claim. However, the effects of piracy are quite diverse. New research reveals that DVD-sales are more impacted than box office sales, for example. At the same time, it shows that piracy has a promotional effect which brings in additional revenue.
The major Hollywood studios hate to see their movies ending up on torrent sites. A small production company from Utah has a different view though. Lee Gardner, director and co-writer of "Adopting Trouble," sees torrents as a promotional tool. He reached out to RARBG to coordinate an official torrent release, which came out before the film made its debut on Amazon this week.
The developer of a Kodi add-on that provided access to a streaming service as long as users had a fully-legitimate account has had his PayPal account limited following a copyright complaint. Anti-piracy outfit Irdeto previously filed DMCA notices against developer Matt Huisman, taking his software down from Github, but Huisman never charged a penny for his add-on so is bewildered by this action.