Linux has a cult following and for good reason. From powerful functionality to robust services, it is hard to beat a Linux laptop when it comes to day-in, day-out use. Preferred by everyone from programmers to hacking communities, Linux laptops are some of the best hardware out there for someone just learning to code or who has done it for years. They’re just a superior option to a Windows or Mac machine in many, many ways.
But you already know that, right? That’s why you’re here to find out about the best Linux laptops out on the market right now. And we’ve got you covered. In this article we will discuss the 10 best Linux laptops currently available on the market and why you should consider adding them to your arsenal. There’s a device at every price point and budget consideration so you should be able to find something that hits that sweet spot for you.
The Chrome OS team is rapidly working to brings more capabilities and stability to Linux apps on Chromebooks. Full GPU support is just beyond the horizon and while there is still much work to be done, developers are already working on bringing Crostini to some key older devices.
At inception, it was made clear that Chromebooks running the older 3.14 Linux kernel would never receive official support for Crostini. Additionally, 32-bit ARM Chromebooks are excluded from this feature for various reasons. As were BayTrail devices due to lack of Intel’s virtualization technology required to run the Crostini containers.
Open source has become the de facto standard for building the software that underpins the complex infrastructure that runs everything from your favorite mobile apps to your company’s barely usable expense tool. Over the course of the last few years, a lot of new software is being deployed on top of Kubernetes, the tool for managing large server clusters running containers that Google open-sourced five years ago.
Today, Kubernetes is the fastest growing open-source project, and earlier this month, the bi-annual KubeCon+CloudNativeCon conference attracted almost 8,000 developers to sunny Barcelona, Spain, making the event the largest open-source conference in Europe yet.
First released by three senior engineers at Google five years ago, Kubernetes has been one of the few open-source projects to make an outsized impact on distributed computing with a minimum of drama between users, maintainers, and vendors. There’s a lot of people who would argue the hype around Kubernetes raced well ahead of real-world usage, but there’s no question that companies modernizing their applications around containers are paying close attention to the potential of Kubernetes to serve as a bridge across multiple cloud providers.
During its fifth birthday celebration last week, we were thrilled to host a discussion between the three co-creators of Kubernetes — Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie of VMware, and Brendan Burns of Microsoft — at the 2019 GeekWire Cloud Summit. We talked about the history of the project, the current state of open-source software, and the unsolved problems that are holding back the future of cloud computing.
Over at the NVIDIA blog, Pramod Ramarao writes that NVIDIA and Red Hat have worked closely to improve the user experience when installing and updating NVIDIA software on RHEL, including GPU drivers and CUDA.
Josh and Kurt have a chat with Michael Coates from Altitude Networks. We cover what Altitude is up to as well as general trends we're seeing around data security in the cloud. Michael lays out his vision for "data first security".
Mozilla's master strategy becomes clear, CockroachDB surrenders to the software as a service reality, while Microsoft and Oracle link up.
Plus Google argues that keeping Huawei on their Android is better for all, and Chris gets sucked into Stadia.
The knowledge and effort required for building a fully functional web application has grown at an accelerated rate over the past several years. This introduces a barrier to entry that excludes large numbers of people who could otherwise be producing valuable and interesting services. To make the onramp easier Meredydd Luff and Ian Davies created Anvil, a platform for full stack web development in pure Python. In this episode Meredydd explains how the Anvil platform is built and how you can use it to build and deploy your own projects. He also shares some examples of people who were able to create profitable businesses themselves because of the reduced complexity. It was interesting to get Meredydd's perspective on the state of the industry for web development and hear his vision of how Anvil is working to make it available for everyone.
Summary
The knowledge and effort required for building a fully functional web application has grown at an accelerated rate over the past several years. This introduces a barrier to entry that excludes large numbers of people who could otherwise be producing valuable and interesting services. To make the onramp easier Meredydd Luff and Ian Davies created Anvil, a platform for full stack web development in pure Python. In this episode Meredydd explains how the Anvil platform is built and how you can use it to build and deploy your own projects. He also shares some examples of people who were able to create profitable businesses themselves because of the reduced complexity. It was interesting to get Meredydd’s perspective on the state of the industry for web development and hear his vision of how Anvil is working to make it available for everyone.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.1.8 kernel.
All users of the 5.1 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.1.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.1.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
Using the Zstd compression algorithm to compress the Linux kernel image has been brought up again with new patches expected in the coming weeks.
It's been brought up multiple times before to allow Zstd compression for the Linux kernel image. But to date the patches have been rejected from mainline on the basis of almost yearly there being some hot new trend in compression algorithms and the desire to add them immediately to the mainline kernel. It's been brought up that if Zstd were to be added or some other compression algorithm, an existing alternative should at least be deprecated or removed.
We all know that Linux is “free and open source”. Meaning, one can download it from the internet without any hassle and also, redistribute it under GNU licenses. One can make any changes to the source and modify as per user convenience.
Talking about Unix, it has several derivatives, and not every derivative is free and open source. For example, MacOS is one of the derivatives and it is neither free nor open sourced. However, it is fast changing, and many Unix derivatives are emerging as open source.
Fact: When Unix was first introduced, it was not open source —the Unix source code was licensable via agreements with AT&T. Also, the first Unix license was sold to the University of Illinois in 1975.
LF Edge, an umbrella organization within the Linux Foundation that aims to establish an open, interoperable framework for edge computing independent of hardware, silicon, cloud, or operating system, today announced the availability of Akraino Edge Stack Release 1 (“Akraino R1”).
Created via broad community collaboration, Akraino’s premiere release unlocks the power of intelligent edge with deployable, self-certified blueprints for a diverse set of edge use cases.
Hyperledger is a permissioned system, meaning unlike other blockchains, Hyperledger can be set up to only show data and information to the user who has access to it. This allows for privacy and trust between companies.
The project also runs chaincode, meaning users can put whichever and whatever business logic they like into their smart contracts. It is also incredibly fast compared to other blockchains.
Hyperledger Fabric allows companies to get started with blockchain quickly and easy. It lets companies program smart contracts in the language the team works in. This avoids users having to learn custom languages and architectures which in turn speeds up workflows.
Why not start off your morning with a waffle? Waffle 1.6 was just released as this long-running but recently silent project providing a library that allows deferring OpenGL and windowing system selection until run-time for making software more portable across today's mobile systems and desktops and supporting both X11 and Wayland, among other possible options.
GL_MESA_EGL_sync is a new OpenGL extension for extending EGL's KHR_fence_sync synchronization behavior into the desktop OpenGL space.
EGL_KHR_fence_sync adds the concept of synchronization objects to EGL as sync primitives and similar to GL_ARB_sync. But with GL_MESA_EGL_sync, the desire is to be more like EGL_KHR_fence_sync rather than the ARB_sync extension due to some platform extensions in turn relying on the EGL extension.
While waiting on a flight delay yesterday, I was trawling through GitHub checking out different open-source projects, in this case Vulkan projects, and pleased to see that Chamferwm still exists. For those that missed our earlier coverage of Chamferwm months ago, it's a Vulkan-powered X11 compositor / window manager.
The AMDVLK 2019.Q2.5 driver was released this morning as the newest open-source Radeon Vulkan driver for Linux systems wishing to use this official driver as an alternative to the Mesa RADV driver.
AMDVLK 2019.Q2.5 is the latest routine update for the driver. AMDVLK 2019.Q2.5 updates against the Vulkan SDK 1.1.109 headers, enables scratch bounds checking for GFX9/Vega, attachment image memory type support for VK_MEMORY_OVERALLOCATION_BEHAVIOR_ALLOWED_AMD, and optimizations for the acquire-release barrier.
Released for E3 week is Vulkan 1.1.111, but it's not particularly exciting.
Vulkan 1.1.110 was released last week and brought with it two new extensions while Vulkan 1.1.111 is a more mundane update focused on documentation corrections/clarifications.
Continuing on from the story a few days ago about R300 Gallium3D seeing a big performance fix after being regressed in recent years, another potential bonus is in store.
Potentially helping out performance or at least smoothing out frame-rates is a tentative patch wiring up Mesa's on-disk GLSL shader cache to the R300g driver. The GLSL shader cache is shared among the Mesa drivers so it actually took just a few dozen lines of code extending it to R300g. But with no upstream Mesa developers actively advancing R300g, this shader cache functionality hadn't come until an independent contributor stepped up to the plate.
Graviton is a free & open source, cross-platform code editor in development. Check out the features of this promising application.
The VideoLAN organization is proudly announced the new release of VLC 3.0.7 on 07 June, 2019.
VLC 3.0.7 is the second version of the “Vetinari” branch of VLC media player
A brand new version of the VLC media player is now available, padded out with a bunch of bug fixes and welcome feature enhancements.
VLC 3.0.7 is the seventh stable release in the VLC 3.x series and feature a number of improvement, including improved MP4 support and better handling of BluRay menus.
Fixes specifically aimed at Android, macOS and Windows also feature, such as UPNP service discovery on MacBook’s with TouchBar and a fix for pass-through on Android.
This is a new series highlighting best-of-breed utilities. We’ll be covering a wide range of utilities including tools that boost your productivity, help you manage your workflow, and lots more besides.
I recently spotlighted Abricotine, an open source, cross-platform Markdown editor built for the desktop with inline preview functionality. Continuing the Markdown theme, this article focuses on mdless, a CLI that provides a formatted and highlighted view of Markdown files in a terminal.
If you want to view Markdown files quickly and without cruft, mdless is designed with you in mind.
Have you ever thought about trying Dungeons & Dragons but didn't know how to start? Did you play Traveller in your youth and have been thinking about returning to the hobby? Are you curious about role-playing games (RPGs) but not sure whether you want to play one? Are you completely new to the concept of tabletop gaming and have never heard of RPGs until now? It doesn't matter which of these profiles suits you, because Free RPG Day is for everyone!
The first Free RPG Day event happened in 2007 at hobby game stores all over the world. The idea was to bring new and exclusive RPG quickstart rules and adventures to both new and experienced gamers for $0. For one day, you could walk into your local game store and get a booklet containing simple, beginner-level rules for a tabletop RPG, which you could play with people there in the store or with friends back home. The booklet was yours to keep forever.
The event was such a smash hit that the tradition has continued ever since. This year, Free RPG Day is scheduled for Saturday, June 15.
QUICKTEQUILA and tinyBuild have teamed up once again, with Lovely Planet 2: April Skies looking just as colourful and unusual as the first.
CARRION, developed by Phobia Game Studio and Devolver Digital, it's a reverse-horror with you playing as the monster. It's looking pretty crazy!
Sometimes crowdfunding campaigns for fun looking games slip past me, such is the case with XO. It's a strategic fleet defence game blending real-time with pause, with retro visuals and it looks pretty good.
After a successful crowdfunding campaign back in April, developer Akabaka has revamped the demo for the incredibly stylish RPG/Visual Novel hybrid.
As a little refresher, even if you don't traditionally like anything close to a Visual Novel this game might change things for you. Taking some style inspiration from "Catherine (ATLUS), Persona 3 (ATLUS), and the Monogatari (Nisio Isin) anime series" it really does have quite an amazing style to it.
Using the increasingly popular card-based unit system, Cardlings offers a fresh take on the turn-based tactics gameplay and it's now out with Linux support.
We know that Valve are slowly working on an overhaul to parts of the Steam Client and we have more shots of it according to a leak.
The leak source comes from SteamDB, who noted on Twitter "A work in progress version of the new Steam client interface leaked through an update to the Chinese CSGO launcher. We're currently digging through the changes, we'll post more if we find anything noteworthy.". T
Games currently allows the user to resume most retro games from the exact state the game was left in last time it was quit. To do this Games saves several files required to restore the state of the emulator core and resume it’s execution. These files grouped together are called a “savestate”. Currently Games has only one savestate per game which is overwritten everytime the user exits the game.
The purpose of my GSoC project is to allow the user to store and manage more than one savestate. These past days I have been writing code that makes Games create a brand new savestate everytime the user exits the game.
Welcome to the Linux gaming news punch episode 16, your weekly round-up to help you keep up to date.
As always, it's hopefully something that's useful for those who just don't have the time to read our news every day.
Hey look, even more news for you tonight from E3! Thunder Lotus Games (Jotun, Sundered) just announced Spiritfarer, what they're saying is a cozy management game about dying. Okay then, that sounds—odd. I like odd though!
Wasteland 3 currently in development by inXile Entertainment, a game that was confirmed for Linux on the original Fig campaign has a new chilly trailer out.
As teased when it was accidentally leaked by Steam, Borderlands 2: Commander Lilith & the Fight for Sanctuary is out and it's temporarily free, although the Linux version is currently left behind. They did add Mac support to this new DLC a few minutes later, so perhaps it will be soon.
Dying Light 2, the massive new open-world game from Techland is looking awesome and going by SteamDB, it may actually come to Linux.
Get your heavy dose of salt ready, treat this as completely speculative until we get something harder. On SteamDB, earlier today Techland began adding more details. The interesting update is this, which specifically mentions "Added oslist – windows,linux" which seems to indicate it will support Linux. That is, unless it was done by accident…although you would think these things would be checked more than once before submitting, but you never can be too sure on such things.
News just coming out of E3, Double Fine Productions founded by Tim Schafer has been acquired by Microsoft. Specifically, they're now part of Xbox Game Studios.
I'm sure most of you know Double Fine Productions, who are responsible for developing games like: Psychonauts, the upcoming Psychonauts 2 (which is supposed to release for Linux), The Cave, Broken Age, Costume Quest, Day of the Tentacle Remastered, Grim Fandango Remastered and plenty more.
We know that Valve are slowly working on an overhaul to parts of the Steam Client and we have more shots of it according to a leak.
The leak source comes from SteamDB, who noted on Twitter "A work in progress version of the new Steam client interface leaked through an update to the Chinese CSGO launcher. We're currently digging through the changes, we'll post more if we find anything noteworthy.".
With KDE Plasma 5.16 soon to be released, development is heating up for KDE Plasma 5.17. As such, it's been another busy work in KDE development land.
With KDE Plasma 5.17, the Breeze theme is continuing to evolve and the most recent change is disabling by default the KWin-generated window borders. Plasma 5.17 will also better handle external keyboards being plugged in where sometimes the keyboard layouts list would be reset, improved full-screen maximized window handling on multi-monitor setups, redesigned System Settings SDDM log-in page's advanced tab, and other early changes.
In 2017 we discussed what goals the KDE community should focus on in order to get closer to our vision of a world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy. We went through a process of submitting and discussing proposals and then voting on them. The result were 3 clear goals that KDE focused on over the past 1.5 years: top-notch usability and productivity for basic software, streamlined onboarding of new contributors and privacy. The focus the goals gave us have led to significant progress in all 3 areas. Check out Nate’s and Neofytos’ summary! But not only that. We got fantastic new people on board and our larger community and users understood that we care about and make progress in areas that matter to them. Thank you to everyone who has and continues to put work into these. Your contributions make KDE better every single day.
Following KDE's 2017 goals, they are now looking to revise their goals or double-down on their current goals, so they could use your help in determining their road-map moving forward.
Their 2017 goals were to provide top-notch usability/productivity software for basic software, privacy software, and streamlined onboarding of new contributors.
The most powerful visual media – video can deliver what texts can’t. Since watching video is how one-third of online users spend time on, videos, however, editing could be more powerful, attention-grabbing, and inspiring.
Now, creating and professionally editing videos on Linux has become surprisingly complicated. It may be because choices for such software are not visible. To that end, I decided to discuss an outstanding video editor for Linux platforms.
As part of GSoC 2019, I am working on KDE ISO Image Writer which is a tool to write ISO images to USB flash drives.
When I got my PC and my Huion 191 tablet as a Christmas gift, Krita was installed on the PC.
Alex Diavatis is the person behind the WOGUE account on YouTube. For a while he’s been posting videos about GNOME. I think the latest idea is that he’s trying to “shame” developers into working harder. From the person who’s again on the other end of his rants it’s having the opposite effect.
I got selected as a Google Summer of Code 2019 student with GNOME. It has been almost two weeks since the coding period started and I've been working with two awesome mentors Fabiano Fidencio and Felipe Borges.
Currently GNOME Boxes is able to do either express-installations on a downloaded ISO or to download an ISO and offer the option to express-install it. My project aims to add the support for express-installations using the OSes’ network trees. This would reduce the download size and mainly benefit the users with not so good internet connection.
I first tried few express-installations(unattended installations) on boxes from a downloaded media and compared the command line generated with that of the one generated in virt-install while installing a virtual machine from the network.
IPFire 2.23 Core Update 132 is more like an emergency release that ships with an updated Linux kernel, version 4.14.120, which is patched against the recently disclosed Intel MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling) security vulnerabilities known as RIDL, Fallout, and ZombieLoad, as well as an updated intel-microcode firmware, version 20190514.
"Additionally, to mitigate this bug which cannot be fixed at all, SMT is disabled by default on all affected processors which has significant performance impacts," said Michael Tremer in the release announcement. "Please note, that Intel unfortunately is not releasing microcode for all processors any more and so you might still be vulnerable. To apply the fixes, please reboot your system."
IPFire 2.23 - Core Update 132 was released recently. This update includes security fixes and improvements to help secure systems vulnerable to some recent problems with Intel processors, specifically RIDL, Fallout and ZombieLoad. From the release announcement: "Two new types of vulnerabilities have been found in Intel processors. They cannot be fixed unless the hardware is changed, but can be somewhat mitigated through some changes in the Linux kernel (4.14.120) and an update microcode (version 20190514). Both is shipped in this release. Additionally, to mitigate this bug which cannot be fixed at all, SMT is disabled by default on all affected processors which has significant performance impacts." In addition, this release includes a new GUI that shows you which attacks your hardware may be vulnerable to and whether mitigations are in place. Go here to download.
Before you attempt these alternative Arch installation methods, I highly recommend installing Arch the traditional way: from the command line, step-by-step, using the classic Arch ISO. Why? Because you'll gain a deeper understanding of your hardware and what goes into installing a desktop Linux operating system. As a result, you'll appreciate these relatively unattended methods even more, and have a stronger grasp of what they're actually doing.
A classic Arch install isn't as crazy difficult as you think. There's an official, exhaustive guide on the Arch Linux Wiki, and our challenge community has created this excellent document full of tips and tricks. Give it a spin inside a Virtual Machine first, then try it for real!
Before we jump in, one quick word of warning: The Arch Linux Wiki's Installation Guide is the only officially supported method for installing Arch. Move forward at your own risk, and don't rely on the developers of these projects for help.
openSUSE is one of those distros I have always been interested in but which I had never used for more than a few hours. Recently the project released Leap 15.1, which was a good enough reason to give the distro a proper spin.
The distro hardly needs an introduction. It is a community project sponsored by SUSE, one of the larger commercial Linux vendors. openSUSE maintains two distros: Tumbleweed is a rolling release distro and upstream to SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE). Leap is a stable (non-rolling) distro that is downstream to SLE. A new version of Leap is released roughly once a year, and each version is supported for 18 months. The Leap 15.x series as a whole is supported for three years.
openSUSE is probably best known for the Btrfs file system, Snapper and YaST. As Leap 15.1 is a relatively small, conservative upgrade from 15.0 I will mainly focus on these features. I will also have a look at where things may be heading.
The Chromium 75 sources were released last week by Google, and this new major release contains 42 fixes for security issues. A couple of them are serious enough that you are encouraged to update to the new 75 release ASAP.
In terms of functionality, not much changed in Chromium 75, but there is one interesting addition that you may want to try if you read a lot of content online. It’s called “Reader Mode” and is still disabled by default, You can enable it through the Chrome flag “chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode“. The reader mode strips away page clutter like buttons, background images and changes the page layout for better readability.
Markdown is a lightweight markup language that is useful for adding formatting while still maintaining readability when viewing as plain text. Markdown (and Markdown derivatives) are used extensively as the priumary form of markup of documents on services like GitHub and pagure. By design, Markdown is easily created and edited in a text editor, however, there are a multitude of editors available that provide a formatted preview of Markdown markup, and / or provide a text editor that highlights the markdown syntax.
This article covers 3 desktop applications for Fedora Workstation that help out when editing Markdown.
About two years ago the Fedora Engineering team merged with the CentOS Engineering team to form what is now called the Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team. For the team members, the day to day work did not change much.
The members working on Fedora are still fully dedicated to work on the Fedora project on those working on CentOS are still fully dedicated to CentOS. On both projects its members are involved in infrastructure, release engineering, and design. However, it brought the two infrastructures and teams closer to each other, allowing for more collaboration between them.
There are 20 people on this consolidated team.
The Ansible Hardening role from the OpenStack project is a great way to secure Linux boxes in a reliable, repeatable and customisable manner.
It was created by former colleague of mine Major Hayden and while it was spun out of OpenStack, it can be applied generally to a number of the major Linux distros (including Fedora, RHEL, CentOS, Debian, SUSE).
The role is based on the Secure Technical Implementation Guide (STIG) out of the Unites States for RHEL, which provides recommendations on how best to secure a host and the services it runs (category one for highly sensitive systems, two for medium and three for low). This is similar to the Information Security Manual (ISM) we have in Australia, although the STIG is more explicit.
Debian supports (either officially or unofficially) a lot of architectures, which is of course a nice thing. Sometimes you want to play with some exotic architecture you are not familiar with, or you want to debug a problem with that architecture, but you do not have a computer implementing that architecture. Fortunately QEMU is able to emulate most of the architectures supported by Debian (ia64 being an exception), however it can be difficult to install it or to find ready-to-use images on the Internet (there are some, but usually they are quite a few years old). Let's also say that for some reason you cannot or do not want to use the Debian porterboxes (maybe you are not a DD, or you want to mess up with the network, or you want to be root). What do you do?
Mostly for the fun of hacking on some exotic architectures, I tried to brew together a little script, the Debian Quick Image Baker (DQIB). It is basically a wrapper that calls qemu-debootstrap with the right options (where "right" means "those that I have experimentally found to work"), with some thin icing layer on top. qemu-debootstrap is basically another wrapper on top of debootstrap, which of course does the heavy lifting, and qemu-user-static, that allows debootstrap to run executables for foreign architectures.
Some readers complained that stable operating systems should not take updates from upstream, because they could introduce new bugs. Well, I certainly don’t expect stable operating systems to upgrade to new major release versions. For instance, I wouldn’t expect Ubuntu 18.04, which released with GNOME 3.28, to upgrade packages to GNOME 3.32. That would indeed defeat the goal of providing a stable system to users. We are only talking about micro version updates here, from 3.28.0 to 3.28.1, or 3.28.2, or 3.28.3, etc. These updates generally contain only bugfixes, so the risk of regressions is relatively low. (In exceptional circumstances, new features may be added in point releases, but such occurrences are very rare and carefully-considered; the only one I can think of recently was Media Source Extensions.) That doesn’t mean there are never any regressions, but the number of regressions introduced relative to the number of other bugs fixed should be very small. Sometimes the bugs fixed are quite serious, so stable release updates are essential to providing a quality user experience. Epiphany stable releases usually contain (a) fixes for regressions introduced by the previous major release, and (b) fixes for crashes.
Other readers complained that it’s my fault for releasing software with bugs in the first place, so I shouldn’t expect operating system updates to fix the bugs. Well, the first point is clearly true, but the second doesn’t follow at all. Expecting free software to be perfect and never make any bad releases is simply unreasonable. The only way to fix problems when they occur is with a software update. GNOME developers try to ensure stable branches remain stable and reliable, so operating systems packaging GNOME can have high confidence in our micro-point releases, even though we are not perfect and cannot expect to never make a mistake. This process works very well in other Linux-based operating systems, like Fedora Workstation.
Canonical has released Linux kernel security updates for all supported Ubuntu Versions.
This release fixes 4 vulnerabilities against varies Linux Kernel packages.
When your thermostat comes with Linux running on it, that’s not a hack. When it doesn’t, and you get Linux on there yourself, it most definitely is. This is exactly what [cz7asm] has done. In a recent video, he shows the Honeywell thermostat booting Linux and running a wide range of software.
While the hardware inside the thermostat doesn’t afford all the luxuries of a typical modern embedded Linux, it’s got enough room for the basics. The system runs from a 1 MB rootfs in RAM, and has a 2.5 MB kernel image, leaving a spare 12 MB for everything else. With just these meager resources, [cz7asm] shows how the system can use a USB network adapter, connecting to telehack.com for some command-line retro fun, and host a web server, although no browser runs yet. There’s also framebuffer support for displaying graphics and animations, and the usual Linux terminal goodness.
With the focus given to Huawei’s US ban, there has also been some discussion about Android, Google’s hold on the platform, and truly free (as in freedom) alternatives to the world’s biggest mobile OS. There has never been a shortage of alternative mobile platforms, many of them revolving around Linux, but there has been a dearth of companies making devices that run and support such platforms. Pine64 is one of those few and it is now sharing some development in its quest to make a privacy-respecting open source smartphone.
Android is dominating the mobile and there are no doubts regarding this. According to statistics, Android has a share of 75%, iOS has a share of 22% and remaining operating systems share the rest. We want to talk about these “remaining operating systems” which you probably have never heard of and you will perhaps want to have on your next phone.
US crackdown on Huawei has forced the Chinese technology company to develop its own alternative to Android called 'Oak OS'. In a tweet, Global Times said that Huawei has begun testing its own OS. The report suggested that Huawei is testing two variants of its operating system - one for the Chinese market called "HongMeng OS" and the other for the global market called, "Oak OS". It was earlier reported that the international version of the Huawei's mobile OS will be called ArkOS.
Google, meanwhile, has warned the US government of potential security risks regarding the blacklisting of Huawei. Apparently, the web giant is worried that Huawei will roll out an OS that would be less secure than Android. Huawei’s system is likely to have more bugs in it than Android, making its phones more susceptible to hacks. “Our focus is protecting the security of Google users on the millions of existing Huawei handsets in the US and around the world,” Financial Times quoted Google as saying.
The Oak OS will be an Android-based system (via the Android Open Source Project). While most of the existing Android apps should be compatible with the new OS, it won’t have the access to Google Play Store. Of course Huawei have its own app store, but can it bring all apps from the Play Store to its store is something to look forward to. Reportedly, Facebook is stopping Huawei from pre-installing its apps on the company’s upcoming phones, further compounding its problems.
Elastic (the company known for the Elasticsearch open source text search and analytics engine and the Elastic Stack data analysis and visualition toolset) will now acquire Endgame.
Endgame is a security company focused on endpoint prevention, detection and response.
Elastic wants to add Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) to its stack, so Endgame is a logical enough purchase.
The instant clustering aficionados at Instaclustr have created an anomaly detection application capable of processing and vetting real-time events at a uniquely massive scale – 19 billion events per day.
They did it by using open source Apache Cassandra and Apache Kafka and Kubernetes container orchestration technologies.
Why would you build an open source community? David Sommerseth, Team Lead of Core Development at OpenVPN, has his own war stories about his experiences as an open source developer and the important role of open source communities.
Sommerseth joined Red Hat in 2008, (“the definition of an open source company,” he said). He found it inspiring to work there. As part of his development efforts, he was working with OpenVPN. He needed some features it didn’t have, so he developed them. He sent the changes to OpenVPN and asked Red Hat if he could spend some of his time working on OpenVPN code. In 2016, Sommerseth joined OpenVPN as a developer.
A key player in the OpenVPN community, Sommerseth is the “gatekeeper” of changes to the OpenVPN codebase. Sommerseth reviews all code changes and is responsible for putting them out to others. The community slowly grew from two to three active participants to ten to fifteen regular contributors and another 30-40 occasional contributors.
Today, the popularity of these systems has reached such a level that there are companies that are providing open-source software as service recommender systems. One of the major benefits of using an open-source SaaS Recommender system is that you can make any modification. Also, you don’t have to put it a lot of capital to build one in-house.
Samourai Wallet, the privacy-enhanced bitcoin wallet app, today announced the release and open sourcing of Samourai Dojo, the back end software infrastructure that sits on top of and augments a Bitcoin Core full node to power the privacy-focused bitcoin wallet.
The privacy-enhanced cryptotech infrastructure maker ‘Samourai Wallet’, has just announced that it has made its back end infrastructure open source. Samourai Dojo is the new privacy focused wallet that usually runs a Bitcoin Core aimed at offering all the users some enhanced sovereignty while making the crypto transactions. Before this, the servers needed all users to entrust their cryptocurrency public keys. With the new changes, it means that you can actually run or host your own Dojo server completely without having to go through Samourai.
Bitcoin app Samourai Wallet has managed to raise $100,000 in its first round of venture funding.
The privacy-focused crypto wallet, which puts emphasis on privacy and dealing with bitcoin surveillance, bagged the investment from Cypherpunk Holdings.
Decentralized database platform Fluree has raised a $4.7 million seed round led by 4490 Ventures, with additional participation from Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund. The round, the largest tech infrastructure seed funding ever in North Carolina, will be leveraged to accelerate enterprise client acquisition, enhance the core product, and hire.
Orbs is a hybrid blockchain stack designed to help businesses create apps on decentralized networks that run on their own virtual blockchain. According to the company, it allows developers to build solutions on a blockchain through the use of virtual chains, intelligent sharding and randomised proof of stake (RPoS) algorithm that enables the high performance and scalability.
TD Ameritrade is making "a powerful and scalable Python library," called STUMPY, available to the greater programming community.
TD Ameritrade1 today announced its first creation of an open source project: STUMPY, a python library to identify patterns and anomalies in time series data. Having benefited from open source as a means to shorten development roadmaps since the early 2000’s, STUMPY represents a new opportunity for the company to give back to the developer community.
Searching for data visualization software can be a painstaking (and even expensive) process, one that requires lots of research and in some cases, a lofty budget. Thankfully, there are a number of free and open source data visualization tools out there. While the most popular enterprise data visualization tools often provide more than what’s necessary for non-enterprise organizations, with advanced features relevant to only the most technically savvy users. While a number of these solutions are offered by providers hoping to eventually sell you on their commercial products, others are maintained and operated by a community of developers looking to democratize the process of insight generation.
Searching for backup software can be a daunting (and expensive) process, one that requires long hours of research and deep pockets. The most popular enterprise backup tools often provide more than what’s necessary for non-enterprise organizations, with advanced functionality relevant to only the most technically savvy users. Thankfully, there are a number of free and open source backup tools out there. Some of these solutions are offered by vendors looking to eventually sell you on their enterprise product, and others are maintained and operated by a community of developers looking to democratize backup.
In this article we will examine free and open source backup software, first by providing a brief overview of what to expect and also with short blurbs about each of the currently available options in the space. This is the most complete and up-to-date directory on the web.
Trading technology specialists Neueda have this week open sourced software designed to help investment institutions and trading firms connect to all of the European equity markets.
Neueda, with its team of electronic trading specialists, helps trading firms and fintech vendors develop and maintain solutions for the global markets.
Google is reportedly pushing for an exemption from the U.S. government’s Huawei trade ban, arguing that an Android-based operating system developed by the Chinese tech titan could pose a significant security threat. According to a report in the Financial Times, which cites “three people briefed” on the matter, Google is arguing that forcing it to stop working with Huawei “risks creating two kinds of Android operating system: the genuine version, and a hybrid one.”
The claims state that the hybrid OS will likely have more bugs and could make Huawei phones more susceptible to being hacked. “Our focus is protecting the security of Google users on the millions of existing Huawei handsets in the U.S. and around the world,” the company told the Financial Times.
MicroG is one of several projects working to keep the promise of free and open source software alive on Android. Users can opt for F-Droid instead of the Google Play store, an open source implementation of Google’s app store that, you guessed it, only offers open source applications. For web browsing, Mozilla Firefox provides a robust alternative to Chrome; in lieu of Google Drive, there are programs like NextCloud. But as those who have embarked on the great open source-only Android experiment can tell you, open source applications leave much to be desired in form, functionality, and stability.
The amount of data in today’s digital world has exploded to unheard levels, with nearly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data churned daily. With advances in the Internet of Things and mobile technology, harnessing insights from data has become a gold mine for organisations. So how do organisations harness the big data that is coming from different sources, here is our pick for the Top 10 Open Source Big Data Tools for 2019.
A machine learning model can have many dependencies and to store all the components to make sure all features available both offline and online for deployment, all the information is stored in a central repository.
[...]
Researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed an interactive tool that, for the first time, lets users see and control how increasingly popular automated machine-learning (AutoML) systems work.
"Since the days of comp.sources.unix and comp.sources.games on Usenet, in the mid-1980s. I learned a lot trying to port various games and utilities from whatever they were written for to Ultrix on our VAX." —Ethan Dicks
"My first memory of exposure to open source is learning how to use GNU Emacs in the late 80s and then quickly the GNU compiler toolchain. My operating systems professor had us modify the Minix process scheduler since it was one of the few source distributions of an operating system that would run on the hardware available to us, the AT&T 3B. It wasn't until I left school and began working that I became interested in Linux. I built a 586 class PC and installed the Yggdrasil distribution and learned how to download, build and install Linux kernels and device drivers. Checking Wikipedia, Yggdrasil hasn't been updated since 1995 :)" —Erik O'Shaughnessy
The 3rd Northern Ireland Developer Conference was held yesterday, once again in Riddel Hall at QUB. It’s a good venue for a great conference and as usual it was a thoroughly enjoyable day, with talks from the usual NI suspects as well as some people who were new to me. I finally submitted a talk this year, and ended up speaking about my home automation setup - basically stringing together a bunch of the information I’ve blogged about here over the past year or so. It seemed to go well other than having a bit too much content for the allocated time, but I got the main arc covered and mostly just had to skim through the additional information. I’ve had a similar talk accepted for DebConf19 this Summer, with a longer time slot that will allow me to go into a bit more detail about how Debian has enable each of the pieces.
Red Hat Day Ireland will bring the latest and greatest in open source cloud computing, platform, virtualization, middleware, storage, and systems management technologies.
Attendees will be allowed to ask questions, learn from those leading digital transformation and discover industry trends.
A record 65 nominations were received for the UK’s open source awards, which take place next week in Edinburgh. Now winnowed down to a shortlist of 16, the awards –founded by open source customer relationship management (CRM) supplier SalesAgility – are in their tenth year. Here’s who’s in contention.
Mozilla Corporation, which maintains the popular web browser Firefox, is looking for more ways to make money from its product. In an interview with T3N, Mozilla’s CEO Chris Beard gave little insight into the company’s future plans.
Until now, Firefox has been offered for free to the customers. The web browser received a major refresh back in 2017 with the release of Firefox Quantum. Ever since, it has competed with the likes of Google Chrome.
Modern workloads require modern data protection measures. Previous systems – such as replication – are not suitable for big data or open source databases, and do not ensure they are secure.
While many big data and open source databases offer some form of protection – including snapshots and built-in recovery tools – they lack the point-in-time backup and recovery capabilities needed to achieve enterprise-grade data protection. The stakes are too high to let a workload go down, so organisations must cover all the bases from backup and recovery to analysis and data management.
Information is king. That has been the way of the world since people first began trading securities or investing in assets and, despite the best efforts of regulators, it remains the case. One investor, or group of investors, will always enjoy access to superior knowledge about a certain security or asset than the rest of the market.
Drupal has completely changed the way large organisations think about and build their digital estate.
The open source content management system (CMS), which was founded in the year 2000, is now used by some of the world’s biggest brands like Warner Music, Virgin Sport, Princess Cruises and Wilson because of its ability to handle huge spikes of web traffic and because of how it enables marketers to manage their brand digitally on a global level.
TechRadar Pro recently had the opportunity to interview the creator of Drupal, Dries Buytaert who told us how he came to create the CMS and gave us insight into what's in store for future versions...
Acquia, an open source digital experience software vendor, announced a new version of Acquia Lightning, a Drupal 8 distribution with pre-selected modules and configurations to help developers launch Drupal 8 sites faster.
This newest version of Acquia’s Drupal 8 distribution offers new capabilities for developers, site builders, site managers and marketers to build sites faster and deliver the rich digital experiences today’s users want.
Officials from the California Government Operations Agency and the city of San Rafael discussed how themes of transparency, collaboration and inclusion permeate tech-infused initiatives in open source and disaster response.
A new open source framework that aims to make building machine learning pipelines easier for data scientists was released today by QuantumBlack, the data analytics outfit snapped up by McKinsey in 2015 and that has its roots in data work for Formula 1 racing teams. The firm hopes that the fully open source development workflow, called Kedro, will become an industry standard for production-ready code in machine learning and data science.
“It represents a big step for the firm,” notes Jeremy Palmer, CEO of QuantumBlack, “as we continue to balance the value of proprietary assets with opportunities to engage as part of the developer community, and accelerate as well as share our learning.”
About a dozen members of the Google Brain team today open-sourced Google Research Football Environment, a 3D reinforcement learning simulator for training AI to master soccer. The environment can simulate soccer matches, including particular scenarios like corner and penalty kicks, goals, and offsides. The news comes today at the start of the Women’s World Cup starts in France and a day after Google introduced pricing and games for its Stadia cloud gaming service.
Stack, a global SaaS ad tech company by the team behind Appodeal, is making its programmatic ad exchange, BidMachine, available as open-source. Powered by in-app header bidding, BidMachine now enables mobile app publishers to connect directly with ad demand sources with unprecedented access, efficiency and transparency.
Appodeal‘s Stack is making its programmatic ad exchange, BidMachine, available as an open source resource for mobile app publishers.
Powered by in-app header bidding, BidMachine now enables mobile app publishers to connect directly with ad demand sources with access, efficiency, and transparency.
San Francisco-based Stack is a software-as-a-service ad tech company created by Appodeal, an ad mediation company.
In this weekly segment, ExchangeWire sums up key industry updates on ad tech from around the European region – in this edition: Stack makes its ad exchange, BidMachine, available as open-source; Firefox makes Enhanced Tracking Protection available by default; FreeWheel’s Blockgraph outlines new path for building the future of data-driven TV; Sublime announces acquisition of global measurement company Adledge; and IAS builds first-ever connected TV verification solution directly with leading video publishers including NBCUniversal and CBS Interactive.
Cockroach Labs has announced that it is switching CockroachDB away from the Apache License version 2 (APL).
According to Cockroach Labs, its business model has long relied on the assumption that “companies could build a business around a strong open source core product without a much larger technology platform company coming along and offering the same product as a service.” But this is no longer the case, the company explained.
Cockroach Labs, the New York-based database company behind the open-source CockroachDB database, will change the terms of the license agreement in the next version of the open-source project to prohibit cloud providers like Amazon Web Services from offering a commercial version of that project as a service.
Cockroach Labs has become the latest open source vendor to run for cover from AWS and other cloud vendors, by relicensing its CockroachDB under the Business Source License.
In a post explaining the move, the companies’ founders wrote “We’re witnessing the rise of highly-integrated providers take advantage of their unique position to offer “as-a-service” versions of OSS products, and offer a superior user experience as a consequence of their integrations.” They cited AWS’ forked version of ElasticSearch.
If you've ever felt confused about open source licensing you are not alone. The good news is that the Free Software Foundation has a highly informative and well-maintained list of licenses, not only for software but also for documentation and for other works, drawing a distinction between free and non-free.
The fact that that the Personal Public Licence Version 3a and the Anti-996 Licence have both been added to the non-free list isn't really the important bit of this news item. It is that the existence of the Various Licences and Comments about Them that deserves being better known.
Open hardware could not exist without the prior success of FOSS. It has been twenty years since the Dot.com era, when FOSS was an untried idea. Since then, other groups based on the ideals and practices of FOSS, have grown into successful semi-independent communities of their own, such as OpenAccess and OpenStack. FOSS ideals no longer have to be proved, so open hardware does not need to be defended, either.
If anything, open hardware has gone on to have its own successes. Like FOSS before it, open hardware has an affinity with academia, where the exchange of ideas is a norm analogous to copyleft licenses. When academics venture into manufacturing, they are likely to organize under the same principles.
FOSS-based ideals are especially common in non-profits. Probably one of the biggest successes for open hardware is in the field of aesthetics. A traditionally constructed artificial hand costs upwards of $30,000. That price is beyond the reach of many families in a developing nation like India, where the average family income is about $21,000. By contrast, a custom-made artificial hand is sold by an open-hardware company like Open Bionics for $400. Although the cost of an open hardware hand is still high by the standards of developing nations, it is at least within reach, especially with charity. It also means, of course, that seventy-five open hardware hands can be made for the price of one proprietary one. Building on FOSS, open hardware has gone on to prove its own practicality.
Access to an RF signal generator can sometimes be a little tricky for electronic enthusiasts and developers due to the cost implications. ERA Instruments is hoping to change this with the launch of their affordable open source RF signal generator in the form of the ERASynth Micro. RF signal generators are normally expensive pieces of test equipment mainly used by professional engineers. The ERASynth Micro has been specifically designed for makers to remove the cost implications and provide a quality RF signal synthesis accessible to everyone.
Electronic enthusiasts searching for a new compact open source Smart PCB reflow machine may be interested in a new device created by the team at MagicBox, called the REFLO Air. Watch the demonstration video below to learn more about the heater system housed in a compact enclosure and now available to back via the Crowd Supply website with earlybird pledges available from $199 and worldwide shipping expected to take place towards the end of next month during July 2019.
Consumer gadgets such as smart speakers, smartwatches, and smartphones generally use processors based on Intel’s x86 and Arm’s instruction sets. However, the open-source RISC-V instruction set is gaining prominence too, and industry bigwig Qualcomm has backed a company dealing with the technology.
According to The Information (paywall), chip design company SiFive has raised $65.4 million as part of its latest funding round. This funding round includes an investment from Qualcomm, and sees the San Diego giant join the likes of Intel and Samsung as investors in the firm. So what makes SiFive and RISC-V so special?
ARM’s been in the news more and more lately. They are after all one of the leaders when it comes to processor instruction sets. Outside of Intel’s x86, we haven’t really seen any real competitor to ARM, at least until now. Sifive is a plucky startup that utilizes the open source RISC-V instruction set for their processors.
A new not-for-profit global organization aims to boost the adoption of open-source processors by providing a platform for collaboration, creating a focal point for ecosystem development, and offering open-source IP for processor cores.
Andes Technology Corporation, a founding member of the RISC-V Foundation and leading supplier of small, low-power, high performance 32/64-bit embedded CPU and next generation RISC-V cores, today announced that Senior VP, Andes Technology USA Corp., Emerson Hsiao will participate on the panel “Open Source ISAs – Will the IP Industry Find Commercial Success?” at DAC 2019 in Las Vegas.
Source Parts has taken to Kickstarter this week to launch two new open source mini PC computers in the form of the Original Popcorn and Super Popcorn. Super Popcorn and Super ‘8’ Popcorn share many of the same specifications. They only differ in the main processor.
Open-source projects to develop smart prosthetics for the upper body, such as hands, are well-established parts of the bionic landscape. Now, legs get to join the party, thanks to the efforts of scientists Levi Hargrove and Elliott Rouse at the University of Michigan and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab.
An open-source, artificially intelligent prosthetic leg was unveiled at Amazon’s Re:MARS conference in Las Vegas this afternoon (June 5) ahead of its release to the wider scientific community. It’s hoped that researchers and patients will work collaboratively to improve the leg, via its free-to-copy design and programming. (The current price to build it as specified is $28,500, including the Raspberry Pi that powers its AI; patients are not advised to see it as a “build-at-home solution.”)
A new open-source, artificially intelligent prosthetic leg designed by researchers at the University of Michigan and Shirley Ryan AbilityLab is now available to the scientific community.
The leg’s free-to-copy design and programming are intended to improve the quality of life of patients and accelerate scientific advances by offering a unified platform to fragmented research efforts across the field of bionics.
“Our Open-Source Bionic Leg will enable investigators to efficiently solve challenges associated with controlling bionic legs across a range of activities in the lab and out in the community,” said lead designer Elliott Rouse, core faculty at U-M’s Robotics Institute and assistant professor of mechanical engineering. “In addition, we hope our bionic leg will unite researchers with a common hardware platform and enable new investigators from related fields to develop innovative control strategies.”
The nineth release of littler as a CRAN package is now available, following in the thirteen-ish year history as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.
littler is the first command-line interface for R and predates Rscript. And it is (in my very biased eyes) better as it allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript converted to only more recently.
littler lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems as a default where a good idea?) and simply does not exist on Windows (yet – the build system could be extended – see RInside for an existence proof, and volunteers are welcome!). See the FAQ vignette on how to add it to your PATH.
sphinxcontrib.datatemplates is an extension for Sphinx to render parts of reStructuredText pages from data files in formats like JSON, YAML, XML and CSV.
This tutorial outlines various string (character) functions used in Python. To manipulate strings and character values, python has several in-built functions. It means you don't need to import or have dependency on any external package to deal with string data type in Python. It's one of the advantage of using Python over other data science tools. Dealing with string values is very common in real-world. Suppose you have customers' full name and you were asked by your manager to extract first and last name of customer. Or you want to fetch information of all the products that have code starting with 'QT'.
I added the writer and calc commands as a start and I think it will be enough for now to start with this 2 applications and in the future we can add other applications and also we can add more features for the logger in this application easily.
We’re now in the second week of GSoC. Since I had been finishing my thesis and doing exams right up until the coding period, I really needed the undivided attention and some more time last week to get a better understanding of the code and what I’ll be doing with it.
As a result, I now realize that SDDM is actually really well-designed and prepped for utilizing customization. As some of you know, SDDM is run as a special user called sddm. This user has its own home directory which can be found in /var/lib/sddm. That in turn also means it has a .config folder where customizations can reside in. Consequently, we can push relevant user customization files such as kdeglobals or plasmashellrc there. What’s crucial is to then simply have the SDDM user become the owner of these files. One thing that’s, of course, the issue with this approach is: what happens if you’re using some locally installed themes, such as those obtained through the Get Hot New Stuff dialogs? Those unfortunately cannot be accessed by SDDM; it will only pick up on the globally installed files.
I've released version 1.0 of Snek today.
“Trusting our own history” means relying on what happened in the past to tell us what will happen in the future. That’s a recipe for getting it wrong. When forecasting the future, perhaps the only thing that can be trusted is the emergence of unprecedented, unpredictable events that violate past trends. On the eve of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, none of the models used to forecast house prices accounted for the possibility of a price collapse—for the simple reason that no such collapse had ever happened. Price data was historical, and extrapolating that history into the future rendered us blind to the possibility that something ahistorical might happen. Or as Pessimists Archive unwittingly put it: the possibility that “this time it’s different.”
But techno-optimists take the exercise a step further, by using data about one thing to forecast the future of an entirely different thing. This moves us from the flawed to the absurd. For instance, when techno-optimists compare anxiety over driverless cars to the protests of the horse-and-buggy industry over the automobile, they ignore the ways that driverless cars implicate fundamentally different problems than did automobiles. Driverless cars stand ready to collect immense amounts of personal data about the habits of their passengers, and their networked structure creates serious national security risks. What could the successful debut of the automobile in the early 20th century possibly tell us about that?
NASA leadership has made it clear that the space agency wants to eventually transition control of the International Space Station and its region of space, low Earth orbit, to the private sector someday. It costs NASA $3 to $4 billion a year to operate the ISS, and by handing over control of the station, NASA could have more money to pursue much more ambitious missions, like the agency’s goals of building a new space station around the Moon and sending humans back to the lunar surface. In 2018, the president’s budget request called on ending direct funding for the ISS by 2025 and ceding operations of the orbiting lab to private companies. The White House is no longer pursuing that deadline of 2025 due to pushback from lawmakers, but NASA is still looking to jump-start the private space industry’s takeover of low Earth orbit.
We saw this big outpouring of support from folks all around the country and internationally — people with donations, and people being outraged.
We also saw a mass panic. Usually we get five to seven calls a day, but the very next day we had 20 to 30 calls because people were scared that abortion was illegal. And if it wasn’t already illegal, they had questions about when it was going to be illegal.
They needed information about where they could go out of state to get their abortion — if we could fund their abortion — because they didn’t want to run out of time. And then we had people calling wondering if they were still going to be able to go to their appointments at the clinic.
Sixty percent of adults the United States are now living with one or more chronic diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, and type 2 diabetes. That’s 150 million people—not counting millions of children and young adults—whose daily lives are disrupted by poor health. These chronic conditions are the leading causes of death and disability, and they’re also the leading drivers of the $3.5 trillion we spend on health care each year.
I’m not quick to call something a “crisis,” but the current trajectory of population health renders possible a future in which the vast majority of us are simply too sick to thrive. If we don’t make some changes, that future may come sooner than we think.
Luckily, we’re far from exhausting our options. One of the most powerful pathways to better health is through better nutrition. A recent study estimated that nearly half of all deaths from heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes in the US could be attributed to poor diets. This and other research suggest that there is vast untapped potential to improve our health and wellbeing with the food we put on our plates.
That’s why, in a new report, we examined just how many lives might be saved and medical costs might be spared if adults in the US made key dietary changes to eat less processed meat, less added sugar, and more fruits and vegetables. We looked at these changes through the lens of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, the leading set of science-based dietary recommendations in the US, currently in the process of being updated. The results make an overwhelming case for the federal government to take a fresh look at its food policy.
Nurses, doctors, and medical students on Saturday afternoon gathered outside the Hyatt Regency hotel in Chicago, where the largest professional association for physicians was holding their annual meeting, to demand that the group "do no harm" and stop standing in the way of real, meaningful healthcare reform.
National Nurses United (NNU) and Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP) were among the groups that gathered to call on the American Medical Association (AMA) to support a Medicare for All program, which would replace the for-profit health insurance industry with government-funded healthcare for everyone in the United States.
On social media, the groups used the hashtag #AMAGetOutTheWay to rally support for the protest.
But according to Joe Stewart, a seasoned malware analyst now consulting with security firm Armor, the malicious software used in the Baltimore attack does not contain any Eternal Blue exploit code. Stewart said he obtained a sample of the malware that he was able to confirm was connected to the Baltimore incident.
The National Development and Reform Commission has been tasked with setting up the list system which aims to “more effectively forestall and defuse national security risks,” Xinhua reported on Saturday. Details on the measures will be provided in the near future, according to the news agency.
The incident started around 9:43am UTC on Thursday (2:43am California time). That's when AS21217, the autonomous system belonging to Switzerland-based data center colocation company Safe Host, improperly updated its routers to advertise it was the proper path to reach what eventually would become more than 70,000 Internet routes comprising an estimated 368 million IP addresses. China Telecom's AS4134, which struck a network peering arrangement with Safe Host in 2017, almost immediately echoed those routes rather than dropping them, as proper BGP filtering practices dictate. In short order, a large number of big networks that connect to China Telecom began following the route.
The result: much of the traffic destined for telecommunications providers using the affected IP addresses passed through China Telecom equipment before either being sent to their final stop or being dropped during long waits caused by the roundabout paths. [...]
While the card numbers were obfuscated, the data wasn't encrypted, and it's possible there's more than this: going through an entire 264GB file is somewhat time-consuming, after all. The site did say the sample its reporters saw contained "tens of thousands of customers," and it was a fraction of the larger database.
This data was kept on a server for support agents to look at for troubleshooting purposes, but the company had neglected to put a password on it - meaning anybody with access to a web browser could look at the logs at will.
The mitigation of phishing is a top priority for Idaho, said ITS Administrator Jeff Weak. Phishing is the practice of sending emails that appear to be from a reputable source but hide malware links or try to convince users to reveal personal or system information.
“Phishing, in general, that’s our biggest threat because we can stop a lot of the payload of most malware coming through. We have multiple layers of detection going through our email system so it will strip out virtually anything that looks out of place,” Weak said. “Where that gets tricky is in hyperlinks and things of that nature that look natural to an email or if it’s embedded into another link inside of a Word document, for example.”
Idaho is currently in its second year of mandated cybersecurity training for state employees, he said. The learning modules, provided by KnowBe4, include a phishing course. One goal is to educate personnel on differentiating emails that make it past current cyberdefenses and into their inboxes.
Examples of these open source and freely available components include a tool that leverages MSBuild to execute a PowerShell command, another GitHub hosted project called Fruityc2 that is used to build stagers, the “PowerShell Empire”, and an article to help the attackers detect whether their software is running in a virtual machine or not. The reason for using open source tools is not only because they are free and readily available, but also because they feature higher operational security and make the malicious activities and the group behind them harder to detect. Custom tools on the other side leave unique traces, as they are developed by specific groups of hackers.
Cryptocurrency users narrowly escaped losing all their funds last week after an attacker poisoned a digital wallet with malicious code that stole their blockchain access details.
The attacker injected malicious code into Agama, a cryptocurrency wallet created by Komodo. If successful, they could have stolen around $13m of Komodo’s KMD cryptocurrency, which is a privacy-centric coin. Luckily, they were thwarted by quick action from both Komodo and software repository npm.
Are you running the latest version (4.9.2) of Exim on your Linux box? If so, you can go ahead and skip down to the next item, because you're already clear of danger.
Everyone else may want to consider updating, because older versions of the Linux mail server have been found to contain a command execution vulnerability that has now been confirmed to be remotely exploitable.
The bug, initially thought only to be locally exploitable, was first addressed in February of this year when the latest Exim build was released. At the time, it was not considered to be a major security issue, but rather a minor bug that wouldn't need to be addressed in older versions.
Following the May 4, 1970 massacre of students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio by members of the Ohio National Guard, colleges and universities across the U.S. were in an uproar that ended in the closing of hundreds of campuses for the academic year and the outrage of millions of students and others across the U.S. Nixon had launched an attack against Cambodia, which had been going on secretly for some time, so his betrayal of his own “secret plan” for peace was a joke as most already knew. Much of the war in Southeast Asia had morphed into a concentrated air war, but thousands of ground troops would still die. Millions in Southeast Asia would die.
Recently, a tempest took place on and off the campus of Kent State after a popular professor and former CIA employee, Professor Stephanie Smith (Common Dreams,“Facing Growing Backlash CIA Veteran Stephanie Smith Steps Down As Chair of Kent State 50th May 4 Commemoration Advisory Committee,” May 23, 2019), was appointed as the chairperson of the university’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the massacre. On its face, the appointment seems more ludicrous than can be imagined, a binding of George Orwell and Lewis Carroll, but a swift reaction headed by Laurel Krause (co-founder of The Kent State Truth Tribunal), the sister of Kent State martyr Allison Krause, included an email campaign that led to the resignation of Smith.
Mike Alewitz, Kent State massacre witness quoted in CounterPunch said that “This appointment is a travesty and an insult to all those that seek social justice,” (CounterPunch, “CIS Veteran to Chair Kent State 50th May 4 Commemoration Advisory Committee,” May 19, 2019).
Every empire is a dictatorship. No nation can be a democracy that’s either heading an empire, or a vassal-state of one. Obviously, in order to be a vassal-state within an empire, that nation is dictated-to by the nation of which it is a colony.
However, even the domestic inhabitants of the colonizing nation cannot be free and living in a democracy, because their services are needed abroad in order to impose the occupying force upon the colony or vassal-nation. This is an important burden upon the ‘citizens’ or actually the subjects of the imperial nation.
Furthermore, they need to finance, via their taxes, this occupying force abroad, to a sufficient extent so as to subdue any resistance by the residents in any colony.
Every empire is imposed, none is really voluntary. Conquest creates an empire, and the constant application of force maintains it.
Every empire is a dictatorship, not only upon its foreign populations (which goes without saying, because otherwise there can’t be any empire), but upon its domestic ones too, upon its own subjects.
In August 2015, President Michel Martelly inaugurated the Delmas viaduct, a four-lane overpass designed to ease the capital’s grid-locked streets. “This viaduct proves once again that together we can achieve great and beautiful things,” Martelly told the large crowd that had assembled. “More than a dream, more than a project, this viaduct is now one of the symbols of Port-au-Prince.”
Underneath the overpass, bands provided live entertainment throughout the hours-long inauguration ceremony which eventually turned into a political rally. Martelly’s term as president was coming to an end, and presidential elections were set to take place in a few months.
“This is the man I have picked to succeed me for my party,” Martelly said from the stage, calling up the man next to him for all to see. “His name is Jovenel Moïse.”
Nearly four years later, on May 31, 2019, Haiti’s Superior Court of Auditors (CSCCA) released a 600-page investigation into more than $2.3 billion in Petrocaribe-related expenditures between 2008 and 2016, when Moïse eventually secured the presidency. The report identified nearly $2 million in questionable payments made to Moïse in late 2014 and early 2015. The largest came just days after he registered as the governing party’s presidential candidate.
As for the viaduct, Martelly was right. It has become a symbol of Port-au-Prince. A concrete symbol of government waste. And a rallying point for Haiti’s growing anticorruption movement.
The famous inventor Edwin Land said, “It’s not that we need new ideas, but we need to stop having old ideas.” He seemed to be telling us that solutions lie just beyond our old habits of thinking.
Cities, states and countries around the world are committing to clean energy economies that run on very high levels — even 100 percent — of renewable energy. In New York state alone, four competing bills target 50 percent to 100 percent renewables by or before 2040.
Realistically, only two renewable energy resources are large enough to meet these very high-penetration objectives on the supply side in the U.S. — solar (by far) and wind.
In a new paper, researchers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, performed a life cycle assessment for training several common large AI models. They found that the process can emit more than 626,000 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent—nearly five times the lifetime emissions of the average American car (and that includes manufacture of the car itself).
The Trump administration issued one of its most blatant attacks on climate science this past week when it tried to stop a State Department employee from testifying on the climate crisis, reports showed on Saturday.
As the Washington Post reported, intelligence analyst Rod Schoonover's testimony was submitted to the White House for approval ahead of his planned appearance before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. His remarks focused on the national security risks posed by the climate crisis.
The Trump administration refused to approve the testimony for entry into the congressional record, noting that the data Schoonover planned to present—drawing from top government scientists' research and peer-reviewed scientific reports—did not align with the executive branch's views.
Three Greenpeace campaigners halted a British Petroleum oil rig off the coast of Scotland on Sunday as it prepared to leave for the North Sea to drill oil wells.
Carrying enough provisions to last several days aboard the rig, the climate action advocates pulled up to the 27,000-ton vessel in small boats as it attempted to leave Cromarty Firth, bound for the Vorlich oil field where BP plans to access up to 30 million barrels of oil.
The campaigners unfurled a banner reading "Climate Emergency" after climbing the rig.
ZEMBLA discovers that WWF promotes birth control programs that include contraception and even sterilization for men and women. The fight against poachers is getting grimmer all the time. ZEMBLA travels to India, where local inhabitants are wrongly accused of poaching, are being tortured and sometimes even killed. On camera, guards from Kaziranga National Park state that they are allowed to shoot unwanted people.
"A lot of young people say we should have a single debate focused on climate change," Perez told activists after delivering a speech at the gala. But, the DNC chairman added, "once you have one single issue debate, then every debate leads to become a single issue debate in order to address the concerns."
"So these debates, and we will have issue areas in debates, including but not limited to climate," Perez said, "but it's just not practical for us to have one debate on democracy reform, one debate on voting."
Perez's remarks provoked further outrage from grassroots groups that have been demanding a climate-specific debate, particularly given that past presidential debates have largely ignored the crisis—even in the face of scientific evidence showing that immediate and drastic action must be taken to avert catastrophic warming.
"What's actually unrealistic: the Democratic establishment saying we'll stop climate change when they aren't even willing to have a debate on it," the youth-led Sunrise Movement tweeted in response to Perez's comments, which came just days after he announced that the DNC would not host a climate-specific debate and would punish candidates who attend a debate hosted by a different organization.
I was talking yesterday with a woman at HealthGuard, a water testing firm we’ve used in the past to test the water in our artesian well for contaminants. We hadn’t done it in five years because the last test showed it to be free of anything nasty, from coliform bacteria to pesticide traces and heavy metals — so pure in fact we could bottle it and sell it.
We decided to test the well again because although we live on 2.3 wooded acres and don’t use chemicals on the property ourselves, we are surrounded by suburban homes that, as evidenced by most of their lawns being totally lacking in dandelions, clearly use gallons glyphosate-laced Roundup.property
I turns out the test we had done before tested for everything but herbicides, so we are testing now for glyphosate too. The woman at HealthGuard said it was becoming a popular test, and that, as I know, the chemical is showing up everywhere.
I don’t know what the test results will be. Our well is 160 feet deep, so we may be lucky. I’m sure that any glyphosate will be minimal compared to what’s in the public water supply in our town, which had to shut down several of its system’s wells because of contamination with PFAs from a now closed Naval air station two miles from us. Fingers crossed.
But the situation with our well and the paucity of dandelions in our neighborhood got me thinking about how crazy our society is.
How much of a threat is climate meltdown? Should we treat it as the biggest danger to life in the 21st century, or as one of many problems âËâ serious, but manageable?
A new study says human civilisation itself could pass the point of no return by 2050. The Australian climate think-tank Breakthrough: National Centre for Climate Restoration says that unless humanity takes drastic and immediate action to save the climate, a combination of unstable food production, water shortages and extreme weather could lead to the breakdown of global society.
One renowned US climate scientist, Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, says that Breakthrough is exaggerating and its report could be counter-productive.
In the UK, though, Mark Maslin of University College London says the report underlines the deep concerns expressed by some security experts.
Act together
Chris Barrie, a retired Royal Australian Navy admiral and former Chief of the Australian Defence Force, is now an honorary professor at the Australian National University, Canberra.
In a foreword to the Breakthrough study he writes: “We must act collectively. We need strong, determined leadership in government, in business and in our communities to ensure a sustainable future for humankind.”
David Spratt, Breakthrough’s research director and a co-author of the study, says that “much knowledge produced for policymakers is too conservative,” but that the new paper, by showing the extreme end of what could happen in just the next three decades, aims to make the stakes clear. “The report speaks, in our opinion, a harsh but necessary truth,” he says.
In the early 2000s, residents of a small, Rust Belt city called Tonawanda, New York, began noticing something strange: Over the years, it seemed, an increasing number of people were getting sick — primarily with cancer.
Tonawanda’s a highly industrial city with more than 50 polluting facilities situated within a three-mile radius. It was common for the air to feel dense and to smell like gasoline. Residents wondered what toxic chemicals might be in the air and if they were making them sick.
Seeking to answer that question, in 2005 a small group of concerned residents took to their streets armed with five-gallon buckets, plastic baggies, plastic hoses and a handheld vacuum to suck out samples from the heavy, foul-smelling air.
Lab testing confirmed their fears: Air samples they’d taken near a plant called Tonawanda Coke, which produced a high-carbon form of coal, contained extremely high levels of industrial toxins, including benzene — a hydrocarbon linked to cancers, infertility, growth problems and an array of blood diseases. It was present in the air at a rate of 25 times what the federal government estimates an average American is exposed to in a lifetime.
Permafrost covers 25% of the Northern Hemisphere. It is the world’s largest icebox, and its landmass is 4.5xs larger than Antarctica, 6.5xs larger than the United States. It is stuffed full of carbon locked in frozen ground accumulated over eons, which, by way of contrast, makes coal power plant emissions look bush-league.
Most notably, permafrost has an image of permanence and slow/gradual change, “the sloth of the north.” But, that slothful image is now out-of-date. Global warming has changed the equation. Nowadays, permafrost disintegration is officially hot news.
Scientists that have long studied the gradual thawing of permafrost are now experiencing a dramatic switch from their former “eyes wide shut” viewpoint, i.e., refusing to see something that’s in plain view because of preconceived notions. That slothful image of yesteryear has been shattered via numerous studies, as for example: Merritt Turetsky, Canadian Research Chair in Integrative Ecology, University of Guelph, “Rapid Permafrost Thaw Unrecognized Threat to Landscape, Global Warming Researcher Warns,” Nature d/d May 1, 2019.
Gradual permafrost thaw is now passé: “Turetsky and an international team of researchers are looking at something very different: Rapid collapse of permafrost that can transform the landscape in mere months through subsidence, flooding and landslides,” Ibid.
Bird migration is a wondrous and majestic phenomenon. In North America, one may witness flocks of colorful songbirds sweeping the skies, geese gliding in a V-shape of beautiful symmetry, or a great hawk soaring above and diving for prey at 120 miles per hour.
About half of all birds in the world migrate, and even the smallest may travel remarkably long distances. Incredibly, the tiny hummingbird can fly nonstop 600 miles over the Gulf of Mexico. Some round-trip migrations can wind their way for as long as 44,000 miles.
Most songbirds migrate at night, and nocturnal travel makes their journey particularly perilous in light of human development. Birds face many obstacles along the way, including extreme weather events and lack of habitat. Yet, one particularly tragic and preventable peril stands out: human-made structures.
Scientists estimate an astounding upper-level figure of 1 billion birds that die in the U.S. each year from building collisions. Making matters worse, 40 percent of the world’s bird species are already in decline. In the last decade alone, four bird species became extinct and four more are “on the verge of extinction.” In the U.S., the Fish and Wildlife Service classifies 101 bird species as threatened or endangered as of 2019.
Artificial light from buildings draws migratory birds like a beckoning siren, luring them toward lit cities where skyscraper glass reflections are plentiful and deadly. What appear to be skies and trees turn out to be deceptive reflections, and as the birds glide toward the images, they slam into the glass. Many are killed instantly, while some are seriously wounded.
One result of all this is growing “resistance, anger, grumpiness, and eventually backlash” to the proliferation of diversity officials, says Alexandra Kalev of Tel Aviv University, one of the authors of the study on diversity training at American universities. Many white male professors, she found, now limit campus interaction with minorities and women, lest an unintentional slight get them in trouble. High spending on diversity officials also leads to fewer classes, as well as higher tuition fees, which make it harder for minorities, who are disproportionately poor, to attend college. Might students rebel? It looks unlikely. The era of Donald Trump seems to have strengthened the diversity bureaucracy’s belief that students’ feelings must be protected.
Now, Propublica reports from the second annual payday lending convention to be held at the Trump Doral resort (the industry had never held an event at a Trump property prior to Trump's election), which have pumped at least $1m into Trump's personal coffers. The investigation reveals the suite of measures that Trump has put in place to benefit the predatory lending industry, and describe how Warren and Obama's plan to Republican-proof the CFPB by giving it an untouchable executive who wouldn't be subject to executive or congressional meddling backfired spectacularly when their chairman, Richard Cordray, quit to run unsuccessfully for the governorship of Ohio, leaving his position vacant for Trump to fill with a series of deplorable swamp creatures who have gutted the bureau.
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have co-sponsored extensive anti-loan-sharking legislation that would restore many of the protections that Trump has removed.
The initial train with 91 passengers aboard left St. Petersburg on June 5 for an 11-day "test journey," passing through Petrozavodsk, the historic town of Kem, and Murmansk.
Benita reportedly downloaded Uber's app in January while her mother was asleep before hailing a car and riding to the closed parking garage, apparently completing the trip without question from the driver.
As part of the reorganisation, which was detailed in the memo seen by several news outlets, Mr Khosrowshahi said he had eliminated the position of COO, which Barney Harford had held since January 2018.
Mr Khosrowshahi said the role "no longer makes sense", and Uber's Rides and Eats teams would now directly report to him in order to help "problem-solve in real time".
Rebecca Messina - who joined as head of marketing nine months ago - has also stepped aside, with marketing operations set to be combined with Uber's policy and communications and policy team, led by Jill Hazelbaker.
After a tumultuous stock debut, Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi is parting ways with two top lieutenants in a major leadership overhaul. Barney Harford, the chief operating officer, and Rebecca Messina, the chief marketing officer, are both leaving the company, Uber said.
Before he managed to kick his gambling habit in 2014, Chris — a 62-year-old lawyer and grandfather — saw a good chunk of his retirement account disappear at the craps tables of Rivers Casino in Des Plaines.
“I estimated that I lost somewhere between $600,000 and $700,000,” he said last week in the living room of his house in Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood.
With help from his gambling-addiction counselor, Chris says he hasn’t gambled in five years and is confident he will resist the temptation of all the new opportunities to bet that Illinois lawmakers approved this month.
But Chris and other recovering gambling addicts say they fear the impact the expansion will have on others who are still hooked. And they say more gambling opportunities inevitably create new addicts.
A review of Springfield’s 816-page gambling bill by ProPublica Illinois and WBEZ found that the number of state-sponsored gambling “positions” — seats to place a bet inside a casino, bar or racetrack — will jump from almost 44,000 to nearly 80,000.
The first thing to acknowledge is that “socialism” is not merely a set of ideas or a policy framework or anything like that. Socialism is a political movement, a general way of referring to a situation where the workers gain the upper hand in the class struggle and put in place institutions, policies and social networks that advantage the workers. When the political movement is weak and the workers are on the weaker side of the class struggle, it is impossible to speak confidently of “socialism.” So, we need to study carefully how and why workers — the immense majority of humanity — began to see the reservoirs of their strength get depleted. To my mind, the core issue here is globalization — a set of structural and subjective developments that weakened worker power. Let’s take the developments in turn.
There were three structural developments that are essential. First, major technological changes in the world of communications, database management and transportation that allowed firms to have a global reach. The global commodity chain of this period enabled firms to disarticulate production — break up factories into their constituent units and place them around the world. Second, the third world debt crisis debilitated the power of national liberation states and states that — even weakly — had tried to create development pathways for their populations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The debt crisis led to [International Monetary Fund] IMF-driven structural adjustment programs that released hundreds of millions of workers to international capital and for the workforce of the new global commodity chain. Third, the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern bloc, as well as the changes in China provided international capital with hundreds of millions of more workers. What we saw is in this period of globalization was the break-up of the factory form, which weakened trade unions; the impossibility of nationalization of firms, which weakened national liberation states; and the use of the concept of arbitrage to force a race to the bottom for workers. These structural developments, from which workers have not recovered, deeply weakened the workers’ movement.
Rallying McDonald's workers in the same way he worked alongside Disney and Amazon employees in their fight for fair wages and union representation, Sen. Bernie Sanders marched alongside workers at a rally Sunday in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
The 2020 Democratic presidential candidate addressed workers outside a local McDonald's store before marching with them to the DoubleTree hotel and convention center where 19 primary candidates were gathered for the Iowa Democratic Party Hall of Fame Celebration.
Urban planners are either praised or criticized for designing our cities. Planner Samuel Stein’s Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State, falls in the second camp, accusing planners of being unwitting advocates for capitalism. Even though planners see themselves as protectors of the common good, Stein says they hurt most people by “turning everyone’s space into someone’s profit.”
According to Stein government planning is tied to private real estate interests; we are at that point in history where the bulk of private capital flows from investing in manufacturing to land. The result is a “Real Estate State” that facilitates this transition, not only in the United States but throughout the world. He documents how real estate now “makes up 60% of the world’s assets, and the vast majority of that wealth – roughly 75 percent – is in housing.”
This trend did not begin overnight. Surprisingly, he blames President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation establishing the Federal Housing Administration to standardize, regulate and insure home mortgages. Although it attempted to be progressive, the FHA adopted real estate industry “best practices” that made segregation and suburbanization the US de facto housing policy; over time he says, “Black, immigrant and racially mixed neighborhoods were shut out of the finance system.”
Last year, Florida attorney and philanthropist Hugh Culverhouse, Jr. donated $26.5 million to the University of Alabama. The university, grateful for its largest private contribution ever, reciprocated by naming its law school after him. Hugh and UA, sittin’ in a tree …
On June 7, the UA’s board of trustees voted to return his donation (and presumably rename the school). Love-hate relationship, I guess.
Why? They claim it’s over an argument as to how they spend the money, but he says they’re lying and the reason he offers is more a lot more believable given the timing.
His discussions with the school over the uses his donation are put to are ongoing. But last week, he said something they didn’t like. Specifically, he publicly urged students to boycott the school in protest of Alabama’s new abortion law.
Agree with him or not — on abortion, on the specific law, or on how students should respond to that law — Hugh Culverhouse, Jr. is a private citizen with a right to say anything he pleases.
The Wall Street Journal yesterday trolled he Palestinians with a breathless head line that “some” Palestinians are giving up on having their own state.
Anyone who has been following the Palestine issue knows that for some time a plurality of Palestinians has swung behind a one-state solution and now want Isaeli citizenship.
This result does not come from the dimming of nationalist aspirations but from the weary realism of a colonized people facing the best-armed army in the Middle East, which is backed by the world’s sole superpower.
News outlets are reporting that you’re determined to prevent your campaign from turning into an “apology tour” this summer. But your only other option is a campaign of denial — sinking deeper into a quagmire of unsustainable pretense.
After your flip-flop late last week that finally renounced your 40 years of support for the Hyde Amendment’s discriminatory limits on reproductive rights for low-income women, the New York Times reported that your campaign’s “larger concern” has been “the implications of Mr. Biden spending too much time reversing or expressing remorse for his past policy stances.”
Those implications are easy to understand. Your “past policy stances” have done so much harm — to so many people for so long — that if you start “expressing remorse,” there might be no end in sight.
“Before entering the race,” the Times reported, “Mr. Biden and his inner circle resolved that while he would have to take steps to assuage liberal reservations about his record, he could not afford to make the first few months of the campaign an extended apology tour.”
But an extended apology tour would be entirely appropriate. Pretending that you don’t have much to apologize for is not viable.
President Donald Trump says it’s “case closed.” But Democrats are just getting started with Robert Mueller.
House Democrats have scheduled a series of hearings this coming week on the special counsel’s report as they intensify their focus on the Russia probe and pick up the pace on an investigative “path” — in the words of Speaker Nancy Pelosi — that some of them hope leads to impeachment of the president. In doing so, they are trying to draw the public’s attention on the allegations that Trump sought to obstruct a federal investigation and they want to highlight his campaign’s contacts with Russia in the 2016 election.And they will lay the groundwork for an appearance from Mueller himself, despite his stated desire to avoid the spotlight.
The hearings will focus on the two main topics of Mueller’s report, obstruction of justice and Russian election interference.
The House Judiciary Committee plans to cover the first topic at a Monday hearing on “presidential obstruction and other crimes.” The House Intelligence Committee on Wednesday intends to review the counterintelligence implications of the Russian meddling. Mueller said there was not enough evidence to establish a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, but he said he could not exonerate Trump on obstruction.
On Tuesday, the House has scheduled a vote to authorize contempt cases against Attorney General William Barr and former White House counsel Donald McGahn for failing to comply with subpoenas from the Democratic-controlled House.
If there exists a major social movement in America that has established a clear long-term goal and then, over a period of decades, developed a multi-pronged strategy and achieved it, I can think of no better example than the successful push for marriage equality.
Poor little fragile Donnie. Seems the Sociopathic Snowflake who spends his days and nights trash-talking... everyone... is so afraid of mean Democrats saying anything bad about him at Monday's House hearing on his multifarious obstructions of justice the ranking Republican has demanded scary uppity Dems maintain “minimum standards of decency and decorum” and not say any nasty words about said snowflake. In a letter to chairman Jerry Nadler, Doug Collins (GA) cited the House manual of decorum, reiterated that “personal abuse, innuendo, or ridicule of the president is not permitted,” and argued it would be "unparliamentary" to ridicule, attack or accuse Trump of lying or, perish the thought, committing a crime.
As one who voted for Eisenhower in 1956 and Nixon in 1972 and endorsed many policies of George H. W. Bush, I write to you in sorrow as well as alarm. You owe it to the Republican Party, the American people, and—indeed—all humanity, to help remove Donald Trump from the presidency without delay. The man is a danger to all living things. We have a record of his actions, many of which already set back the prospects of peace, prosperity, democracy, human rights, freedom, clean air and water, and truth. But the deepest threat lies in his erratic decision-making. No one can be sure what he will choose to do next–impelled by his own whims or those of advisers such as John Bolton or buddies at Fox News. The greater the embarrassments ensuing from the Mueller report and other investigations, the more likely he is to initiate a dangerous action, if only to muster his supposed base.
Republicans are not all-knowing. They must acknowledge their party’s role in America’s greatest foreign policy blunder–the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The war was conceived by a cabal close to President George W. Bush, but it was backed by most Republicans (and many Democrats afraid to challenge the public mood). Even today, a large majority of Republican voters still accept the rationale that Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons that Bush aimed to destroy. It turned out that Donald Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe” campaign sprang open a Pandora’s Box of horrors that have ravaged the Middle East and wasted the region’s and America’s blood and treasure for nearly two decades. The results have been far more destructive than the LBJ-Nixon Indochina wars, because the stakes are much higher than in Southeast Asia.
That Pandora’s Box will explode if Americans fight Iran. Obsessed with Iran, President Trump and some advisers have sought to isolate and destroy its regime. Therefore the president withdrew the United States from the multilateral accord that turned back the clock on Iran’s nuclear programs in exchange for trade that would help Iran raise living standards and rejoin the world. Tightened sanctions by the Trump administration now worsen conditions for most Iranians (though not its black-marketing elites). But if US sanctions have not destroyed Fidelismo in nearby Cuba, a speck in the Caribbean, they are unlikely to effect system change in one of the most powerful states in the erstwhile cradle of civilization.
Two years into his presidency, Donald Trump continues to make money from properties and licensing deals in nearly two dozen countries around the world, fanning the flames of concerns that the Trump administration is subject to unprecedented levels of foreign influence.
Trump continued to hold more than $130 million in foreign assets in a revocable trust as his second year in office came to a close, according to OpenSecrets’ analysis of the president’s most recent annual personal financial disclosure released by the Office of Government Ethics last month.
Trump’s business entanglements continue to leave him with positions, assets, trademarks and other business interests in more than 30 countries.
Annual disclosure forms only require assets held at the end of the reporting period to be disclosed and require only minimal documentation of transactions. Income and property values are also often listed in wide ranges so the total amount may, in actuality, be much higher or lower.When it comes to foreign properties, the Trump Organization often charges a licensing fee to put the Trump name on the building and in some cases agrees to manage the property in exchange for a cut of the profits. This business model allows Trump to put his name on as many hotels and golf courses as possible while mitigating risk.Trump transferred control of the family-owned company to his adult children, who he said would pursue “no new deals” during his time in the Oval Office. Although the Trump Organization ended some proposed deals around the world, it has opened several new properties since 2017, with several providing direct income to Trump.
Trump’s sprawling web of foreign properties and investments, which includes some projects completed during his presidency or still under development, reveals a litany of apparent efforts by foreign business leaders and governments to gain influence with the leader of the free world. Some of the developers behind Trump-branded projects are under scrutiny for exploitative business practices. In many of these countries, developers work in close proximity to political power and wealthy businessmen have outsized influence with the government.
Our leaders know how to bang the war drums and, by and large, we go along with them. The US threatens Iran with war – so will Iran close the Strait of Hormuz and attack American warships in the Gulf? Israel strikes Iranian targets in Syria after rockets fall on Golan – so does an Arab-Israeli conflict loom closer than at any time since the 1973 conflict? Jared Kushner plans to reveal Trump’s “deal of the century” for peace in the Middle East – but is it dead in the water?
Meanwhile the real stories get pushed down the page – or “to the back of the book”, as we journalists used to say.
Take Donald Trump’s desire to furnish Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates with billions of dollars of extra weapons so that they can increase the ferocity of their war in Yemen against the Houthis – whose support from Iran, such as it is, prompts much of the international abuse against the Islamic Republic. French intelligence officers in Washington have apparently discovered that this is no routine request from Riyadh but a desperate appeal to Washington, because so promiscuous has been the Saudis’ use of US munitions against Houthi rebels (and civilians, hospitals, aid centres, schools and wedding parties) that they are running out of bombs, guided and unguided missiles, drone parts and other “precision” arms to be used on one of the poorest countries in the world.
If you're a country artist who dares to have a political opinion in the cautious world of Nashville, you're certain to hear a familiar refrain. "Be careful," you'll be warned. "You don't want to get Dixie Chicked."
What this has come to mean, almost two decades later, is that speaking out about one's political beliefs is a surefire way to have your songs expunged from the radio, as was the case with the Dixie Chicks when they made anti-George W. Bush comments on stage in England in 2003. But what's often left out of the Dixie Chicks' mythology is that their "cancellation" wasn't caused by the independent minds of programmers across America rebelling on their own free will – it was a direct product of consolidation, of many bullhorns being held by the same hand, and the power that bestows.
In a bid to commemorate the Tiananmen Square protests, a Taiwanese artist has set up a mock tank display recreating the famous "Tank Man" scene from the demonstrations in 1989.
Mr Golunov’s editors at Meduza, an independent news site, believe his journalism is the reason for his arrest. “We know that Ivan has received threats in recent months, and we think we know from whom,” they wrote. Colleagues and friends describe Mr Golunov as a virtual teetotaller who obeyed the law scrupulously, to avoid giving the authorities excuses to harass him.
Back in March, ten major VPN providers including NordVPN, ExpressVPN, IPVanish and HideMyAss were ordered by Russian authorities to begin blocking sites present in the country's national blacklist. Following almost total non-compliance, the country's telecoms watchdog says that blocking nine of the services is now imminent.
The news outlet Baza and the nonprofit Transparency International — Russia have reported that Police Colonel Andrey Shchirov, whose subordinates arrested Meduza correspondent Ivan Golunov, owns land in the Moscow suburbs that is worth between 50 million and 70 million rubles ($772,000 – $1.1 million).
Olga Dinze, an attorney for Meduza correspondent Ivan Golunov, has submitted a statement to Russia’s Investigative Committee detailing the actions of the police officers who arrested Golunov on June 6.
The document, published by leading human rights advocate Pavel Chikov, describes the physical harm caused to Golunov during his arrest and demands an investigation into the actions of the officers involved as well as criminal charges under Articles 285 and 286 of Russia’s Criminal Codex. Those statutes carry fines of up to 80,000 rubles ($1,235) or up to 4 years in prison.
The state-owned television channel Rossiya-24 claimed falsely in its initial coverage of Meduza correspondent Ivan Golunov’s arrest that medical staff found signs of intoxication when they examined the journalist. Simultaneously, the channel displayed an official form in which the word “not” was clearly inserted among the words “clinical evidence was found.” The channel’s editor-in-chief promised to correct the error.
The independent news outlet RBC is preparing a lawsuit against the Federal News Agency (FAN), which has reported ties to “Putin’s chef” Yevgeny Prigozhin and his so-called troll factory in St. Petersburg. According to RBC co-director Yelizaveta Golikova, the outlet objected to a brief FAN published under the headline “RBK editor-in-chief says Golunov, arrested on drug charges, should be legally answerable.”
On June 8, the day of the court hearing that decided whether Meduza correspondent Ivan Golunov would be jailed or placed under house arrest to await trial, Golunov became the most mentioned individual on Russian social media networks. According to Brand Analytics’s Mediatrends service, Golunov outpaced Russian President Vladimir Putin by almost 30,000 mentions. Meanwhile, in Russian media outlets, Golunov (5,032 articles) trailed Putin (5,623) only slightly.
Late at night on June 8, Moscow’s Nikulinsky District Court placed Meduza correspondent Ivan Golunov under house arrest. Prosecutors argued that Golunov “attempted to distribute narcotic substances in large amounts.” The journalist himself has insisted that he is innocent and that drugs were planted in his backpack and his apartment. He believes the criminal case against him is a response to his investigative journalism about corruption in Russia’s funeral business. Throughout the day, several hundred people stood outside the courthouse. Many were journalists who had come out to support their colleague. They were joined by solidarity pickets around Russia and in cities from Stockholm to Tel Aviv.
While English subtitles are not available for the celebrity support videos, Meduza has compiled them into a single playlist, and they can be viewed in Russian below. The videos include many public figures who have gained prominence outside Russia, including media personality and former presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak, rapper Oxxxymiron, TV host Vladimir Pozner, DDT bandleader Yuri Shevchuk, prose writer Ludmila Ulitskaya (The Big Green Tent; Daniel Stein, Interpreter), rock critic and producer Mikhail Kozyrev, rock musician Boris Grebenshikov, film director Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan, Loveless), and others.
Huawei, the second-largest maker of smartphones worldwide according to IDC, is still allowed to use the freely available, open source version of the Android operating system on its new phones. Users of those phones should still be able to access Facebook through the web and install WhatsApp by downloading the app directly from the WhatsApp website. Installers for other apps, such as Facebook Messenger and Instagram, are also available from third parties on the web. But without official support from companies like Google and Facebook, it's possible that some apps might not work as expected.
New Huawei owners would still be able to download Facebook-owned apps from the Google Play Store, but whether Huawei phones will retain access to the Play Store once its license is up is uncertain. That's because Google is cutting Huawei off from the Android operating system.
Facebook Inc is no longer allowing pre-installation of its apps on Huawei phones, the latest blow for the Chinese tech giant as it struggles to keep its business afloat in the face of a U.S. ban on its purchase of American parts and software.
Customers who already have Huawei phones will still be able to use its apps and receive updates, Facebook told Reuters. But new Huawei phones will no longer be able to have Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram apps pre-installed.
Microsoft Corp and Oracle Corp on Wednesday said they reached an agreement to make their two cloud computing services work together with high-speed links between their data centers, targeting big business users and uniting against cloud computing leader Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services.
Microsoft has previously inked a deal with German software maker SAP and Adobe to make their services work better together.
Microsoft, along with Oracle’s help, will be developing and installing direct, high speed links to interface between its Azure data centers and Oracle Cloud data centers. A customer will be able to evenly distribute enterprise workloads across the two services seamlessly.
This kind of alliance is relatively unusual between what are essentially competing clouds, but while Oracle wants to be seen as a major player in this space, it also realizes that it isn’t likely to get to the size of an AWS, Azure or Google Cloud anytime soon. For Oracle, this alliance means that its users can run services like the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle JD Edwards on Azure while still using an Oracle database in the Oracle cloud, for example. With that, Microsoft still gets to run the workloads and Oracle gets to do what it does best (though Azure users will also continue be able to run their Oracle databases in the Azure cloud, too).
During a Q&A with reporters, Limp also recalled that Amazon early on envisioned Alexa to be an assistant with personality, and not just a transactional voice engine. “It started with the wake word,” he said, explaining that it would have been a lot easier for the company to use a phrase like “Okay Amazon” to activate the assistant on an Echo smart speaker — a not-so-subtle jab at Google.
There is one other important criticism of the GDPR. As Politico says, there is evidence that the very largest Internet companies are learning to live with, or even game, the GDPR system, while smaller companies struggle with the bureaucracy.
Complaints about the latter don’t have much weight – all regulations lead to some bureaucracy, and naturally companies don’t like it. But that’s just the price they pay for operating in these markets. The issue of the bigger players is more serious. But the problem is not the GDPR, but the microtargeted advertising that Facebook and Google routinely use on a massive scale. That’s something this blog has warned about before. Fortunately, it, too, is the subject of a GDPR complaint that asks the authorities to rule that real-time bidding is itself an infraction of the GDPR.
In other words, it’s likely the problems that many see as showing the GDPR as something of a failure can all be solved. But it takes time for the authorities and courts to rule on these matters – rightly so, since the rulings could well re-shape just about every aspect of today’s online business ecosystem. Nobody wants that rushed, so perhaps people should be more patient.
Nineteen-Eighty Four, whose first publication took place 70 years ago today, is itself a sort of anti-novel, one that undermines its own dramatic tension in a way that might now be described as postmodern. At every juncture, Winston reminds us that his story will have no happy ending, that all will end in anguish and betrayal. Even O’Brien—the party enforcer and spy who would seem to have every reason to fill Winston’s head with false hope—tells him: “You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die…There is no possibility that any perceptible change will happen within our own lifetime. We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters and bone.”
At the small migrant Juventud 2000 shelter near the border, a Honduran expressed disappointment Sunday over the agreement between Mexico and the United States to more aggressively curtail migration from Central America.
But Edwin Sabillon Orellana of Honduras said he and his family will stick with their effort to seek asylum in the U.S.
Sabillon said some migrants might decide that waiting in Mexico for the lengthy processing of asylum requests isn’t worth it, but he said he cannot take his family back to their home near San Pedro Sula, a crime-ridden metropolis that is Honduras’ second biggest city.
Posit: You and some friends want your town to change a public policy and the city government is ignoring you, so you decide to make some fuss to try to initiate a shift in policy.
If you want to make change, think outside the protest box. It’s easy to get hung up on demonstrations. We’ve heard about them, they’re highly visible, and they’re relatively easy to pull off. The problem with protests is that – all too often – they’re easily ignored. Creativity is key to making your actions meaningful and memorable. Paired with a sound strategy, creative actions can be unstoppable.
Strategy for nonviolent change is relatively straightforward: we have to remove tangible support from the problem (think: boycott the business, go on strike, walk-out of schools and workplaces) while putting resources into the solution (think: worker-owned cooperatives, restorative justice, solar panels, local food). Nonviolent struggle offers hundreds of methods of action. Instead of relying on the same-old protests, perhaps it’s time to unleash creativity and strategy by thinking outside the protest box.
Here are three campaigns that combined creativity and strategy to make powerful change.
Cult leaders arise from decayed communities and societies in which people have been shorn of political, social and economic power. The disempowered, infantilized by a world they cannot control, gravitate to cult leaders who appear omnipotent and promise a return to a mythical golden age. The cult leaders vow to crush the forces, embodied in demonized groups and individuals, that are blamed for their misery. The more outrageous the cult leaders become, the more they flout law and social conventions, the more they gain in popularity. Cult leaders are immune to the norms of established society. This is their appeal. Cult leaders demand a God-like power. Those who follow them grant them this power in the hope that the cult leaders will save them.
Donald Trump has transformed the decayed carcass of the Republican Party into a cult. All cults are personality cults. They are extensions of the cult leaders. The cult reflects the leader’s prejudices, worldview, personal style and ideas. Trump did not create the yearning for a cult leader. Huge segments of the population, betrayed by the established elites, were conditioned for a cult leader. They were desperately looking for someone to rescue them and solve their problems. They found their cult leader in the New York real estate developer and reality television show star. Only when we recognize Trump as a cult leader, and many of those who support him as cult followers, will we understand where we are headed and how we must resist.
It was 40 years ago next month that a messianic preacher named Jim Jones convinced or forced more than 900 of his followers, including roughly 280 children, to die by ingesting a cyanide-laced drink. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge and address the impending crisis of ecocide and the massive mismanagement of the economy by kleptocrats, his bellicosity, his threats against Iran and China and the withdrawal from nuclear arms treaties, along with his demonization of all who oppose him, ensure our cultural and, if left unchecked, physical extinction. Cult leaders are driven, at their core, by the death instinct, the instinct to annihilate and destroy rather than nurture and create. Trump shares many of the characteristics of Jones as well as other cult leaders including Marshall Herff Applewhite and Bonnie Lu Nettles, the founders of the Heaven’s Gate cult; the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, who led the Unification Church; Credonia Mwerinde, who led the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God in Uganda; Li Hongzhi, the founder of Falun Gong; and David Koresh, who led the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. Cult leaders are narcissists. They demand obsequious fawning and total obedience. They prize loyalty above competence. They wield absolute control. They do not tolerate criticism. They are deeply insecure, a trait they attempt to cover up with bombastic grandiosity. They are amoral and emotionally and physically abusive. They see those around them as objects to be manipulated for their own empowerment, enjoyment and often sadistic entertainment. All those outside the cult are branded as forces of evil, prompting an epic battle whose natural expression is violence.
Hundreds of thousands of protesters marched through Hong Kong on Sunday to voice their opposition to government-sponsored legislation that would allow people to be extradited to mainland China to face charges.
The massive demonstration took place three days before the semi-autonomous Chinese territory’s government plans to bring the highly contentious bill to the full legislature, bypassing the committee process, in a bid to win approval by the end of the month.
Police estimated the crowd at 240,000, but organizers said more than 1 million took part.
The protest was one of the largest in recent Hong Kong history. It appeared to be even bigger than a massive pro-democracy demonstration in 2003 against a proposed national security law, according to Associated Press journalists who covered both events.
Green Party member Samir Jeraj, who moved the motion, said:
“We completely oppose trade union victimisation and call on Sandwell College to reverse their decision.
“Prevent is a racist endeavour and we stand in solidarity with Dave in calling this out.”
The Green Party conference motion called for Mr Muritu’s immediate reinstatement.
In 2016, a girl came forward to say she had been raped by a staff member of More Than Me, an American charity that sought to rescue Liberian girls from sexual exploitation. He was the second employee to be accused of violating girls in the charity’s care; the first had AIDS and died in jail just months earlier, after a trial in which 10 of the charity’s students testified he raped them.
With the Liberian government having just signed on to allow the charity to run a number of its public schools, More Than Me president and onetime board member Saul Garlick raised what he called a “critical question” in an email to its U.S.-based board:
“We are going to be operating … 6-9 schools starting this Fall and these issues will arise again,” he said. “Is it something that [the] board wants to know about every time? Is it appropriate for whenever there are charges being pressed? It’s a tough balance and there is the reality on the ground in Liberia.”
The email was one of many previously unseen documents cited in a damning and wide-ranging 108-page report published by a panel appointed by the charity’s Liberian advisory board. The panel was created after a ProPublica investigation last year found that the charity’s leaders missed opportunities to prevent the rapes of girls in its care. It follows an independent audit released last month, launched by the charity’s American board, which identified deficits in the charity’s child protection practices and sharply criticized founder Katie Meyler, who resigned from her position as CEO in April.
Facebook continues to put users at risk of being duped into spending money on games.
In January, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting showed how the company knowingly made millions of dollars between 2010 and 2014 from parents who didn’t realize their kids were being charged to play games such as Angry Birds, Ninja Saga and Barn Buddy.
Those details surfaced in January after a California court unsealed more than 150 pages of Facebook records. But the records did not answer a big question: Has Facebook changed its policy, or are users still bamboozled into spending money while playing its games?
Now, a Reveal review has found that despite widespread criticism from U.S. senators, advocacy groups and its own users, Facebook has not changed a key policy that got it into trouble.
J. Edgar Hoover is laughing in his grave today. After wielding the power of the FBI in a systematic effort to destroy Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Hoover died knowing that every reputable newspaper and magazine reporter and editor in America had refused to publish the manufactured garbage he and his agents peddled in files, memos and audiotapes that were collected in a ruthless domestic surveillance program that is one of the most shameful episodes of 20th century American history. The journalists refused to publish stories based on the so-called evidence surreptitiously provided to them by FBI agents because they understood full well that the files and tapes circulated by Hoover’s FBI failed to meet the most basic, minimal standards of evidence; that any such “evidence” had been fatally tainted by bias, racism, and “dirty tricks” that were akin to those utilized by the secret police of an authoritarian state; and that Hoover was attempting use them for political purposes.
The journalists and editors who refused to publish hit jobs on Dr. King based on the FBI “information” were entirely correct in their analysis. The 1979 Report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations determined that the FBI’s campaign against Dr. King “grossly abused and exceeded its legal authority and failed to consider the possibility that actions threatening bodily harm to Dr. King might be encouraged by the program,” that the FBI investigation violated the constitutional rights of Dr. King and colleagues associated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and was “very probably felonious.”
Today, a British magazine called Standpoint published an article by David Garrow in which he gathers all of the dirt he could find from FBI files newly released by order of President Trump and presents them without even the most minimally necessary historical context, evidentiary scrutiny, or critical assessment of the biased nature of the sources. Nothing is new in this article except one incendiary claim: that Dr. King witnessed an alleged rape, and that that Dr. King allegedly “looked on, laughed and offered advice.” This claim is based entirely on a handwritten note scribbled in the margins of a document, in an obvious effort to embellish the salacious nature of what had been typed. Garrow had offered the article to a number of reputable media platforms in the United States, each of which turned him down. They refused to publish Garrow’s article for exactly the same reason that all reputable journalists in the United States refused to take the bait offered to them by Hoover and his agents during the 1960s: because the so-called evidence assembled to put forth claims fails to meet even minimal journalistic standards.
Russia's largest network provider signed a deal with Huawei to build 5G internet in the country, creating a further divide in the tech cold war rocking the US and China.
The agreement, signed Wednesday between Russia's MTS and Huawei will "promote 5G technology and launch pilot 5G networks in Russia in 2019-2020," Huawei said in a statement sent to Business Insider.
And almost all this future growth will be in developing countries. The 81% of the developed world—a billion people—online is unlikely to increase its number by much. China, at 58%—800m people—has more room for growth. But internet users elsewhere, who already handily outnumber those in the developed world and China put together, make up only 39% of their countries’ populations. Those are the countries where most of the next billion will come from, and the billion after that, and the billion after that (see chart 1). And as they swell the internet’s numbers, they will change its character.
The second half of the internet will for the most part speak languages other than English and Mandarin. It will have little to no experience with other digital media. [...]
IF YOU'RE PART of the two per cent of the country that can't get a decent broadband connection, then good news. You can start downloading Celebration by Kool and the Gang, and hopefully it'll have finished by the time Ofcom's speed guarantees come into force in March 2020.
The Universal Service Obligation (USO) will guarantee consumers and businesses connection speeds of at least 10Mbps with upload speeds of 1Mbps priced at €£45 per month or lower. These figures are just a starting point, with Ofcom stating that they can be adjusted "as the amount of data people use changes."
In most countries the law strictly forbids people from sharing copyrighted material without permission. However, not everyone necessarily agrees with this position. New research reveals that many lawyers studying at Harvard view casual forms of piracy as ethically acceptable. Does this mean that the law should change?
A wave of DMCA notices sent from a company without an obvious web presence have targeted, among other things, the homepages of dozens of adult-focused sites. Google appears to have responded by delisting the main pages of several affected platforms. Larger ones, such as YouPorn and xHamster, seem to have got a free pass.
In 1971, the Australian indigenous artist Harold Thomas created the iconic Australian Aboriginal Flag which has since been named one of the "official flags of Australia," which resulted in Thomas successfully suing to assert copyright over the design.
Thomas subsequently sold the "exclusive, worldwide copyright license" to a business called WAM Clothing. WAM is using its copyright to target the aboriginal-owned social enterprise Spark Health whose registered social purpose is "health promotion and Aboriginal Community engagement" and who manufacture promotional clothing bearing Thomas's flag.