Chrome OS from Google is widely popular among students and casual PC users due to its simplicity and lightweight nature. You don’t need to bother about maintenance, antivirus or BSOD – just get the work done with the familiar interface of Google Chrome. [...] Well, there are some convoluted terminologies regarding the Linux compatibility. In short, Crostini is the unified term used by Google to describe the container based Linux app support layer. [...] The root cause is actually hidden underneath this commit, which is responsible to break hardware virtualization support, which results in the disappearance of Crostini (Linux apps) altogether from the affected Chromebooks/Chromeboxes. The team is discussing the aftereffects of the bug, while internally pushing code commits to fix the disaster. The proper patch is already submitted to the v77 branch, and the Platform version 12239.20.0 of v76 now contains the fix as well.
People are talking about Linux more and more in the mainstream these days, and even Windows users are starting to take an interest in the platform. However, trying out a new type of operating system can be scary if you’ve never used it before. Since Linux has a perception of being difficult to install, we’ve compiled a list of 3 easy ways you can try out Linux, while keeping your Microsoft Windows PC intact.
Ubuntu is a free, libre, easy to use, secure, popular desktop operating system capable to replace Windows 7. As many people anticipated, soon Windows 7 will cease away just like XP, and this is the time for them to consider switching to GNU/Linux operating system. This article is the first part of my migration guide to Ubuntu for Windows 7 users anywhere. You will find here intro to Ubuntu and its goodness, its user interface, difference to Windows, and its terminology. I'm trying my best to make every part short and easy enough to understand for everybody. Finally, enjoy Ubuntu! [...] Ubuntu is a popular computer operating system developed by Canonical Ltd., that is free and libre, easy to use, modern and complete with worldwide community and commercial support. Its name comes from ancient African word meaning humanity to others. Ubuntu is capable to replace Windows or macOS in everybody's computing life. Ubuntu first released in 2004 as version 4.10 and reached version 18.04 in 2018. Everybody can obtain Ubuntu gratis at its website www.ubuntu.com.
Interviews with several of the people at the center of the government’s case against the company, as well as antitrust experts, suggest that tech executives will need to be careful and flexible in navigating their turn in the cross hairs.
Here are five lessons that today’s executives might want to take away from the Microsoft experience, according to the people who lived through it.
The European Commission has approved unconditionally, under the EU Merger Regulation, the proposed acquisition of Red Hat by IBM, both information technology companies based in the US. The Commission concluded that the transaction would raise no competition concerns. Red Hat and IBM both sell information technology (“IT”) solutions to enterprise customers. Red Hat's main activities relate to open-source software and support services, while IBM is active in a wide variety of IT solutions, namely enterprise IT software, hardware and services.
It's Sunday afternoon _somewhere_ in the world right now. In particular, in the middle of nowhere on a boat.
I didn't expect to have any internet this week, and honestly, I haven't had much, and not fast. But enough to keep up with critical pull requests, and enough to push out an rc.
But credit for the internet goes to Disk Hohndel and vmware, because I'm mooching off his phone hotspot WiFi to do this.
Anyway, It's been _fairly_ calm. Would I have hoped for even calmer with my crappy internet? Sure. But hey, it's a lot smaller than rc6 was and I'm not really complaining.
Linus Torvalds is off in "the middle of nowhere" on one of his well known scuba diving adventures but that didn't stop him from being able to release Linux 5.2-rc7 today like clock-work thanks to tethering of a smartphone. Torvalds initially wasn't sure about his ability to issue 5.2-rc7 but he managed to deliver. Of Linux 5.2-rc7 he says it's been a fairly calm week leading up to today's release. Additionally, 5.2-rc7 is smaller than the previous release candidate.
There have been Linux reports of problems pertaining to "8254 Clock Gating" going back a while but more so recently. This problem is some newer Intel Skylake~Apollolake derived systems particularly with Intel SoCs where certain systems ship with the 8254 PIT to be gated via a special register and up until now that has caused Linux to fail to boot.
The Open Mobility Foundation aims to evolve how cities better manage transportation today and in the future and develop and deploy digital mobility tools.
This morning, a host of U.S. cities and organizations — including Austin, Chicago, Los Angeles, Louisville, Miami-Dade County, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City DOT, New York City Taxi and Limo Commission, Philadelphia, Portland, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Monica, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. — announced their participation in the newly formed Open Mobility Foundation (OMF), a nonprofit coalition that seeks to improve intercity transportation infrastructure with open source software tools. Escooter startup Bird also said it’ll join as a founding member.
In this competitive world, running a business is an expensive endeavor, and none of the entrepreneurs can afford to take risks. But by thinking like a small business and taking the critical decisions and getting the things done can be a smart move. Thus, to help in this situation, GoodFirms.co has come up with ten blogs for entrepreneurs. In these blogs, you can find the various free business software that has been briefly introduced along with features to streamline your work and increase productivity.
ADTRAN€®, Inc., (ADTN), a leading provider of next-generation open networking and subscriber experience solutions, today announced it has joined the prpl Foundation—an open-source, community-driven, collaborative non-profit foundation that strives to enable the security and interoperability of embedded devices.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China – The Cloud Native Computing Foundation€® (CNCF€®), which sustains and integrates open source technologies like Kubernetes€® and Prometheusââ¢, today announced that DiDi, the world's leading multi-modal transportation platform, has won the CNCF End User Award in recognition of its contributions to the cloud native ecosystem.
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon + Open Source Summit China 2019 -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), which sustains and integrates open source technologies like Kubernetes€® and Prometheusââ¢, today announced that Ant Financial has joined the Foundation as a Gold Member.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced at the KubeCon + Cloud Native + Open Source China Summit today that it is expanding the number of special interest groups (SIGs) surrounding Kubernetes, as part of an effort to accelerate development of critical complementary technologies. Dan Kohn, executive director for the CNCF, says it’s become apparent that the nine members of the technical oversight committee (TOC) for Kubernetes needs to be supported with expertise in specific areas. The first two SIGs to be formed will be focused on security and storage, followed by SIGs addressing network traffic, observability, governance, application delivery, core and applied architectures. [...] Kohn says as part of this initiative, one of the goals of the CNCF is to entice more developers to contribute to an increasing number of open source projects. Kohn estimates that well more than half the developers who leverage open source software don’t contribute to any project. Many of those developers are already creating forks to open source code every time they patch open source software on their own. Every time that software is updated—otherwise known as carrying your own patch—those developers have to reconstruct that patch. That issue would go away if the developers contributed their patches to the open source project, which would then ensure the issue is addressed as part of the life cycle of the project, he notes.
Wind River€®, a leader in delivering software for critical infrastructure, today announced that it is certified on OpenChain version 2.0. It was also the first company to become OpenChain conformant. Hosted by the Linux Foundation, the OpenChain Project aims to build trust in open source by making open source license compliance simpler and more consistent. By working through the OpenChain Specification conformance process and curriculum, open source license compliance becomes more predictable, understandable and efficient for all participants in the software supply chain.
The rate of additions to the code has started to slow, because waypipe already has most of the features it would ever need. The most significant change for the preceding week was making most build dependencies optional: only a core of libffi, libwayland, and wayland-protocols are required. (librt and pthreads are already dependencies of libwayland.) There has been a slight speedup to the damage merging algorithm, but on further reflection the whole "extended interval" construction may limit the performance of the buffer diff construction and application procedures. Instead, the horizontally banded damage tracking data structure underlying pixman may make it easier to ensure that buffers are scanned monotonically -- or it may prove to be unavoidably slow to construct, in the worst case. The next most notable change was the introduction of a headless test, checking that when run with "headless" weston that applications do not crash when run indirectly using waypipe. All the remaining changes are essentially bug fixes and small expansions of the previous multithreading and video encoding work.
I've taken a short break from primarily working on waypipe development, instead focusing on more general experimentation. One of the results is a small test client for copy-paste operations, which has uncovered a rather interesting issue that applies to sway and a few other compositors. The core Wayland protocol uses a server-global serial counter to assign a number to each input event. When a client makes a copy selection request, it provides the serial number of the event which caused the request. When an application is delayed a few hundred milliseconds, the provided serial number can be used to reject its copy selection request if another application has made a request in response to a more recent input event. It's also possible that a badly written application (like my test client) sends a request to set the copy selection with a serial number that is far too large, making selection requests from other applications fail. Currently, wlroots and Weston do not check that the serial numbers in requests were ever sent to the client. Unfortunately, tracking the set of all, or even just the most recent, serial numbers given to a client would require a modification of libwayland-server, as the wl_display::sync request lets clients know what the current serial number is. In practice, just checking that the serial numbers in selection requests aren't any larger than the current server serial suffices to avoid any problems. I also have written a small prototype for a code generator for Wayland protocol method calls. It precomputes data needed to quickly verify that messages are well formed, and generates small wrapper functions that can call an event handler directly from the wire format.
It's been just one week since the release of Vulkan 1.1.112 but it's now been succeeded by Vulkan 1.1.113 and two new extensions are in tow. Vulkan 1.1.113 comes with its usual assortment of specification corrections and clarifications to the massive Vulkan API. Additionally, Vulkan 1.1.113 has two new extensions for EXT_texel_buffer_alignment and EXT_shader_demote_to_helper_invocation.
There are a lot of excellent USB imaging apps for the Linux platform, and that’s great because the concept of choice is one of the fundamentals of Linux. However, some would argue that there are so many USB imaging tools available that beginner Linux users may not know what application to use. So, in this list, we’re going to go over some of the best USB imaging applications to use on Linux.
Lots of Linux users don’t know it, but the Grub2 bootloader can be customized. Just like every other aspect of the Linux platform, there are dozens of themes to look through, which means there’s something for everyone! In this list, we’ll go over some of the best Grub2 bootloader themes you can get your hands on. Here are the 5 best Grub2 bootloader themes to use on Linux.
Adobe Illustrator is considered to be the best when it comes to illustration and design on Windows and Mac, but the app isn’t available on Linux. So, if you’ve recently switched to an open source, Linux operating system, you’ll need to find a suitable alternative to use. Here are the best Adobe Illustrator alternatives for Linux.
On Monday, Gregory Szorc, a Developer Productivity Engineer at Airbnb, introduced PyOxidizer, a Python application packaging and distribution tool written in Rust. This tool is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems.
Note taking apps are handy and can be used for simple tasks like jotting down lists, to storing important information. The primary use of such an app, at least for me, is that you can pull up the data that you require quickly. Joplin is an open source and cross platform app that is available for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Linux. It's also available as a terminal app for macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD, if that is your cup of tea.
As well as enjoying the weighted feel of quality manufacturing in my hand — cheap USB controller with itchy hollow plastic you will not be missed — I also get to sample 8BitDo’s Linux support, courtesy of the terrific LVFS. See, despite writing about 8bitdo controllers a few times in the past I’ve never actually owned one until now. It’s a gap plugged due, in large part, to your recommendations on Twitter and in the comments to an earlier post — so thanks!
As well as enjoying the weighted feel of quality manufacturing in my hand — cheap USB controller with itchy hollow plastic you will not be missed — I also get to sample 8BitDo’s Linux support, courtesy of the terrific LVFS. See, despite writing about 8bitdo controllers a few times in the past I’ve never actually owned one until now. It’s a gap plugged due, in large part, to your recommendations on Twitter and in the comments to an earlier post — so thanks!
There's been a lot of chatter in the Linux gaming community recently, centred around Paradox Interactive and future Linux support. It's not all doom and gloom.
Toontown Rewritten, a fan-made recreation of Disney’s closed MMORPG Toontown Online, now is available to install via Snap package in Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, and higher. Toontown Rewritten (TTR) is free to play and open to anybody. The TTR snap package contains a slightly modified version of the official Toontown Rewritten launcher, including python 3 support. Due to the fact that this launcher is modified, the TTR team will not provide support if anything goes wrong with the launcher.
Another week is behind us, let's take a look at some seriously good deals that are going on right now across different stores.
Total War: THREE KINGDOMS was released in its all-caps glory about a month ago and saw a same-day Linux release thanks to porters Feral Interactive. The action this time around is centered in China during its fractious Three Kingdoms period of history that saw the end of the Han dynasty and warlords and coalitions battle it out for supremacy. More specifically, this Total War title also takes inspiration from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms novel and its larger-than-life heroes and villains. Developer Creative Assembly has put in plenty of time and effort to capture the feeling of both novel and the historical conflict.
While the original Supraland isn't on Linux (yet), Supraland 2 is coming and it's currently crowdfunding to make a bigger sequel to the very highly rated first-person metroidvania. The campaign doesn't really give the best idea of the actual gameplay, as it seems it's largely assuming you already know the first game. It's basically a big play area, full of puzzles, things to combat and this is going to be more of the same with a brand new area and improved combat.
We’re up to week 77 in KDE’s Usability & Productivity initiative! This week’s report encompasses the latter half of the Usability & Productivity sprint. Quite a lot of great work got done, and two features I’m particularly excited about are in progress with patches submitted and under review: image annotation support in Spectacle, and customizable sort ordering for wallpaper slideshows.
KDE developer Nate Graham has posted another one of his usability/productivity summaries of the KDE improvements over the past week. There's been another busy week of work on KDE Plasma 5.17, KDE Applications 19.08, and KDE Frameworks 5.60.
KDE Partition Manager runs all the authentication or authorization protocols over KAuth (KDE Authentication), which is a tier 2 library from KDE Frameworks. In the current implementation of KDE Partition Manager, all the privileged tasks such as executing some external program like btrfs, sfdisk etc. Or copying a block of data from one partition to the other, which requires escalated permissions to execute are executed by a helper non GUI application. So, instead of running whole GUI application (KDE Partition Manager) as root or superuser, a helper non GUI application is spawned which runs as root and executes privileged tasks. This helper program communicates with KDE Partition Manager over simple DBus protocol. The current implementation may seem a good idea, but is not, the reason being that KAuth is an extra layer added over Polkit-qt which causes extra overhead. So, the proposal for this project is to port all the authentication/authorization code from KAuth to Polkit-qt without effecting the original behaviour of KDE Partition Manager.
Around calendaring, most work has been related to the effort of making KCalCore part of KDE Frameworks 5, something that particularly benefits developers using KCalCore outside of KDE PIM. The changes to KCalCore also aimed at making it easier to use from QML, by turning more data types into implicitly shared value types with Q_GADGET annotations. This work should come to a conclusion soon, so we can continue the KF5 review process.
With the first phase of Google Summer of Code over it’s high time some substantial progress on achieving the main goal of the project was presented. Since the last post, there’s two things that have been done. First, Plasma is now going to be following upstream advice on config file location, which means the location has been changed from /etc/sddm.conf to etc/sddm.conf.d/kde_settings.conf. Since the former file takes preference, duplicate keys will be deleted from it when saving to the latter.
Sound the ‘long-requested-feature-finally-materalises-in-reality‘ alarm because it looks like GNOME Shell is FINALLY adding drag and drop folder creation to the Applications Overview. Long time coming, right? Code contributed by GNOME dev Georges Basile Stavracas Neto (aka Feaneron), and already proposed for merging, is said to “…implement drag n’ drop as a way to way manage folders in GNOME Shell.” GNOME Shell does support app folders natively, you just can’t create app folders directly from the apps grid by using drag and drop. In fact, the process is really rather hidden, obtusely tucked away in GNOME Software (of all places). There are third-party extensions which make it easier to create app folders in GNOME Shell, having the functionality native, blessed, and included out-of-the-box is always preferable, isn’t it? And that’s precisely what Georges’ promising code proposal purports to provide.
A new version of the Cinnamon desktop is tagged for release, but Linux Mint fans who favour major changes won’t be too excited by this update. Cinnamon 4.2.0 is squarely a bug fix release that does not bring any shiny new things to the fore. Instead, the update focuses on improving the features and functions that are already present in the popular desktop environment. Such updates may be short on excitement, but they’re always big on fit and finish. Among the many bug fixes and resolved issues shipping as part of Cinnamon 4.2.0 is a patch that allows auto-hidden desktop panels to ‘peek’ in to view for 1.5 seconds when highlighted or selected in the panel or applet settings. Other changes include window animation tweaks, layout adjustments, and the addition of tooltips to the workspace switcher applet.
4MLinux 30.0 BETA is ready for testing. Basically, at this stage of development, 4MLinux BETA has the same features as 4MLinux STABLE, but it provides a huge number of updated packages. Road map: June 2019 -> BETA September 2019 -> STABLE December 2019 -> OLD STABLE March 2020 -> EOL
Released two years ago, on July 26th, 2017, the OpenSuSE Leap 42.3 operating system was the third maintenance update to the openSUSE Leap 42 series, which is also the last to be based on the SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) 12 operating system series. openSUSE Leap 42.3 was based on the packages from SUSE Linux Enterprise 12 Service Pack 3 and was powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series. It was initially supposed to be supported until January 2019, but the openSUSE and SUSE projects decided to give users more time to upgrade to the major openSUSE Leap 15 series.
In this interview, Jochen Breuer, an engineer in the SUSE Manager Team, talks about SUSE Manager, Uyuni and Yomi.
In this clip, Jochen Breuer, an engineer in the SUSE Manager Team, explains what is SUSE Manager. Watch the full interview of Breuer on TFIR where he goes in depth to explain the open source project, Uyuni, which is the foundation and upstream of SUSE Manager. We also talked about another openSUSE project called Yomi which is being developed as the installer for openSUSE and SUSE family of distributions. The interview was conducted at openSUSE Conference. SUSE/openSUSE Sponsored the travel and lodging of TFIR team for this interview.
Once we are done with [their Wayland improvements] we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is."
Apparently coding experience doesn’t translate into interview experience, as I found out when I did my first. In the stress of the moment, I completely bombed one of the low-level skill questions, painting myself, I’m sure, as a first-class idiot. The interviewer was very gracious, but the interview ended shortly afterwards and I got my official rejection a few minutes later. It was only afterwards that I realized that, at age 37, this had been the very first interview I had ever done in my life. I applied for positions in companies around Ireland, and one thing I found interesting is that a majority of the interviews I got were as a result of connections I’d made, mostly through Fedora. In the tech world, as much as any other field, it seems that our ability to build and foster relationships is still essential to our professional growth. It’s not a substitute for competence, but skill can’t replace it either. One thing that paints a compelling picture of a company is how it handles rejections. Most companies did well enough, having the courtesy to send out an email when they had decided against me. A number ghosted me, which still puts a sour taste in the mouth when thinking about them. And then there was Red Hat. Now, to be fair, my interviews at Red Hat were different anyway, but a Red Hat rep personally called me and let me know that they were passing on me because they’d found a more qualified applicant. While I was obviously disappointed, I felt that this set a really high bar for other companies. In November, I got hired on by a local automated phone number testing company called Spearline. They test phone call quality using in-country servers around the world, and I quickly settled in, getting the opportunity to move their web applications over to a micro-services architecture. The company gave me a lot of responsibility, was a great place to work, and I built a lot of good friendships there.
Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) project, which extends the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor. In June, the monthly sponsored hours were split evenly among contributors depending on their max availability - I declared max 30h and got 17h.
Whilst anyone can inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws almost all software is distributed pre-compiled to end users. The motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure no flaws have been introduced during this compilation process by promising identical results are always generated from a given source, thus allowing multiple third-parties to come to a consensus on whether a build was compromised.
I was assigned 17 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and worked all those hours this month. I applied a number of security fixes to Linux 3.16, including those for the TCP denial-of-service vulnerabilities. I uploaded the updated package to jessie and issued DLA-1823. I backported the corresponding security update for Linux 4.9 from stretch to jessie and issued DLA-1824.
New images of Sparky 5.8 RC2 for RaspberryPi are ready to go. Sparky 5.8 RC is a release candidate and is based on upcoming Debian stable Buster.
The 6th monthly report of 2019 of the Sparky project: ● Sparky 5.8 RC based on Debian testing Buster has been released ● Linux kernel updated up to version 5.1.15 & 5.2-rc7 ● added to repos: Baka-MPlayer, Atom editor ● preparations to next Sparky stable 5 “Nibiru” are on the way ● Sparky 5.8 RC2 ARMHF for RaspberryPi is out and ready for testing
Last week, Canonical released Linux kernel updates for all supported Ubuntu releases to address several security vulnerabilities discovered by Jonathan Looney in Linux kernel's TCP retransmission queue implementation when handling some specific TCP Selective Acknowledgment (SACKs). Known as SACK Panic, these security vulnerabilities affect Ubuntu 19.04, Ubuntu 18.10, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS systems and could allow a remote attacker to crash the affected systems by causing a denial of service by constructing an ongoing sequence of requests.
Lubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo feels ... raw. Unfinished. Half-baked. It has some perfectly decent functionality, like networking, media and phone support, but then it also comes with rudimentary package management, a jumbled arsenal of programs, a desktop that is too difficult to manage and tame, plus identity crisis. The truly redeeming factors are performance and battery life. This is a promise, and one well kept, and indeed, if there's one reason (or rather two reasons) to sample Lubuntu, there you have it. I struggled with the overall purpose, though. As impressive as the speed and lightness are, they are only small improvements over what Plasma offers. But then, Plasma is much easier to customize and tweak, it offers a coherent, consistent experience, and it feels modern and relevant. With Lubuntu, I had no connection, and using the distro felt like a chore. I had to fight the weird defaults to try to create an efficient setup, and I wasn't able to do achieve that. So I always go back to the question of investment versus benefit. Lubuntu feels too pricey for what it gives. For example, MX Linux delivers wonderfully on my eeePC, and it's quite simple to handle. With Lubuntu, there needs to be more order, more consistency in how it works. At the moment, it's just a collection of ideas mashed together. While perfectly functional, it's not really fun. 6/10. You should test, especially if you have old hardware.
The new Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is out today, and sees the low-cost computer transformed into a far more capable machine. Based around a new hardware platform, the new board packs in up to 4GB memory, USB 3.0, dual 4K display support, and a faster and newer CPU and GPU. If you're interested in what the new board can do and how it compares to earlier Raspberry Pi computers, check out our review and benchmarks or our guided tour of the new board . The Pi 4 has been three years in the making and arrives one year earlier than anyone expected. We spoke to Eben Upton, co-creator of the Raspberry Pi and Raspberry Pi Trading CEO, about the decisions that shaped the Raspberry Pi 4 and what new uses it opens up for the Pi.
Purism, the hardware manufacturer known for its secure Linux-powered laptops and the upcoming Librem 5 security-focused Linux smartphone, announced the upcoming release of the second version of its Librem Key security key. Launched last year in September, Librem Key is the first and only OpenPGP-based security key designed to offer a Heads-firmware-integrated tamper-evident boot process for laptops. It has the ultimate goal of protecting users' digital lives by storing security keys on the devices, encrypted with the highest cryptographic algorithms. Next month, Purism wants to launch the second generation of Librem Key, which promises even more protection for users by securely generating security keys directly on the device, while being able to store up to 4096-bit RSA keys and up to 512-bit ECC keys. Best of all, Purism has moved the production of the Librem Key to the U.S.. "Having a secure supply chain is critical for hardware that holds your most sensitive secrets," said Kyle Rankin, Chief Security Officer of Purism. "By making the Librem Key in the USA, we've removed even more links in the supply chain and can directly oversee the complete process from Librem Key production to shipping to the customer."
LG Electronics has partnered up with The Qt Company to expand the application of its open source webOS platform. The South Korean electronics giant and Finnish software developer said they will be teaming up to embed webOS into future automotive, robotics, and smart home devices. LG's webOS will also officially become a reference operating system of Qt, the companies added, which means LG will get the latest version of Qt software faster so it can be used for the development of webOS.
D-Wave Hybrid is designed to simplify and accelerate developers’ ability to build and run algorithms across classical and quantum systems, continuing D-Wave’s work to help customers with their real-world application development.
D-Wave today announced the general availability of D-Wave Hybrid, its open source hybrid workflow platform for building and running quantum-classical hybrid applications. You can download D-Wave Hybrid, which is part of the company’s Ocean SDK, from GitHub.
Since its 2017 launch, VCV Rack has helped newbies step into modular synthesis, presenting a free, open-source software that simulates Eurorack on your desktop. VCV Rack has now been updated to version 1.0, which adds powerful features such as 16-voice polyphony, MIDI mapping and more. Important to note is that the software retains its intuitive module-patching feature, letting you add and connect both free and purchased modules creatively. What’s neat about v1.0, however, is support for polyphony of up to 16 voices, giving you the ability to produce thicker textures.
To celebrate 15 years in business, GoInvo, a digital health design consultancy headquartered in Arlington, Massachusetts, today announced the release of two new open source health projects, "Who Uses My Health Data?", and "Precision Medicine Timeline", both of which are available to all for use or modification, under a Creative Commons Attribution v3 license or MIT license.
A “no loss” lottery built atop Ethereum — PoolTogether — quickly generated buzz in cryptocurrency circles this week in being the newest DeFi project on the block. Yet the lotto’s hype was met with an initial wave of skepticism, too, as some cryptoverse stakeholders cautioned against using the dapp while its code remained closed-source. That caution was fair, and it got the PoolTogether team’s attention in short order.
Qwant, the French search engine that respects users privacy, has launched a beta version of Qwant Maps, a, you guessed it, privacy respecting mapping service. Qwant Maps is an open source project that anyone may contribute to. The data is hosted on GitHub and developers may run their own version by following the instructions on the project website. The beta version of the mapping service supports desktop and mobile access, and it works similarly to how other mapping services such as Google Maps, Bing Maps, or OpenStreetMap work.
What this ultimately means is that there is a playable free open-source version of Super Mario Bros Royale, known as Mario Royale, available now to play.
Besides using a slew of open source software, DBS Bank is looking to contribute some of its own projects to the open source community in future
Open source software is a driver of the democratization of technology, opening doors, and leveling the playing field for many industries. However, financial services has been a rare exception: financial institutions have tended to rely on their own technology development and operation. In a sector that has traditionally served the few and not the many, open source could be the key to make financial services more inclusive for the 2 billion people and 200 million small businesses around the world lacking access to basic services such as banking and lending. In a report published by Gartner, global enterprise IT spending in the banking and securities market was estimated to have grown by 4.6% in 2018 in constant US dollars. Banking and securities firms remain steadfast as they continue to prioritize digital transformation. But it has largely been major global banks that have the resources and ability to throw their hats into the ring of technology development—smaller regional banks have tended to stay on the sidelines.
Banks see open source as a hotbed of innovation – and a governance nightmare. Do the rewards outweigh the risks? Open source software used to be treated almost as a joke in the financial services sector. If you wanted to build a new system, you bought tried and tested, enterprise-grade software from a large, reputable vendor. You didn’t gamble with your customers’ trust by adopting tools written by small groups of independent programmers. Especially with no formal support contracts and no guarantees that they would continue to be maintained in the future. Fast-forward to today, and the received wisdom seems to have turned on its head. Why invest in expensive proprietary software when you can use an open source equivalent for free? Why wait months for the official release of a new feature when you can edit the source code and add it yourself? And why lock yourself into a vendor relationship when you can create your own version of the tool and control your own destiny?
Algorand, a permission-less, proof-of-stake blockchain and technology company, announced that their node repository is now open source. Part of Algorand’s ongoing mission to develop and promote a decentralized blockchain, the company has made several of its projects open source over the past year, including a Verifiable Random Function and their Developer SDKs. The blockchain’s nodes are run by diverse entities — businesses, individuals, and consortiums — spread across many countries, according to the company website. The decentralized voting mechanism pools and randomly selects these users to develop a unique committee to approve every block.
It is unfortunate that for some time the Open Source Initiative deprecated Richard Stallman and Free Software, and that some people still consider Open Source and Free Software to be different things today. I never meant it to be that way. Open Source was meant to be a way of promoting the concept of Free Software to business people, who I have always hoped would thus come to appreciate Richard and his Free Software campaign. And many have. Open Source licenses and Free Software licenses are effectively the same thing.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering has published an article on company contributions to community open source projects authored by partners in the LIM-IT project. "On Company Contributions to Community OSS Projects" reports an investigation of how practitioners working for businesses interact with eight community OSS projects of various sizes in diverse domains, including cloud computing and the internet of things. The article also investigates why contributors working for companies use particular ways of working to achieve the strategic aims of the businesses that commission their work. Through analysis of interviews with practitioners, the article provides insights into how individuals working on behalf of companies can and do interact with projects, and the motivations for their actions arising from business and technical pressures. Factors influencing contributor work practices can be complex and are often dynamic and include considerations such as company and project structure, as well as technical concerns and business strategies. For example, interviewees reported the value of using mailing list questions to send signals to multiple audiences, including the core developers and their own clients. Other interviewees described the challenges of delivering business products and services that depend on software from the OSS projects investigated, and how those challenges can motivate approaches to the company's software development process that may involve additional work in the short term, but are expected to bring long-term benefits to the business.
Kubernetes is an open source tool used for automating and managing container operations. Ever since its launch as an open source platform in 2014, Kubernetes has grown to become the preferred choice for container orchestration. It has the support of tech majors and is the most popular open source project after Linux among the open source community of developers. Container technology enables packaging of an application together with all its dependencies, such as OS, SSL libraries, and configuration files, into a single container. This technology is not new; it has been a part of Linux operations for years.
Platform9 announced this week it is adding support for a range of complementary technologies to the managed Kubernetes service it already provides. Company CEO Sirish Raghuram says now that Kubernetes adoption is achieving critical mass, organizations are looking to invoke additional services. Platform9 now supports the open source Prometheus monitoring tools and an instance of the open source MySQL database to support stateful containerized applications running on Kubernetes that need access to persistent sources of data.
Over the past five years, Kubernetes has grown from a project inside of Google to an open source powerhouse with an ecosystem of products and services, attracting billions of dollars in venture investment. In fact, we’ve already seen some successful exits, including one from one of our panelists. On September 5th at TC Sessions: Enterprise, we’re going to be discussing the rise of Kubernetes with two industry veterans. For starters we have Aparna Sinha, director of product management for Kubernetes and the newly announced Anthos product. Sinha was in charge of several early Kubernetes releases and has worked on the Kubernetes team at Google since 2016. Prior to joining Google, she had 15 years experience in enterprise software settings.
It's also very possible that it oversteps the mark. As James Urquhart put it, "Google is the Sun Microsystems of this decade. Engineering for engineering to engineer by engineering. A phenomenal approach for discovering innovative solutions, but not necessarily a great one for product-market fit." Is Google too Googley for its own good?
We pay for Google Drive, Google Fi, and Google Play Movies so I was hoping there would be some level of customer service for paying customers. There are no phone numbers available for customers who pay for services or those who only use free services. Google prides itself on collecting my information and using it to help with search results. Thus, it has all sorts of information on how I conduct my daily life, including tracking my every movement, tracking my business trips, seeing who I contact daily, and much more. You would think it would be smart enough to see when some stranger appears and completely changes my account information.
According to Gmail, my Google account has now been deleted so I'm no longer trying to just reset the password, but instead I am trying to recover my account. I have countless PR folks, friends, family, and others who are in my long Gmail history and am currently unable to access any of that information. I also have thousands of photos that may be lost forever if Google won't work with me to get my account back.
One risk that is often underestimated is that the security of IT outsourced to a cloud provider has a single point of failure, the security of the account at the cloud provider. Brian Wilson of Backblaze pointed to the risk that the account suffers a billing problem: [...]
When you hear "No one needs big data", look over the CV of the speaker. An African telecoms carrier going through amazing levels of growth is not going to reach out to a greenfield JavaScript Web Developer and ask them if they could help architect their data platform and optimise their billing calculations. You might find a lot of internally-hosted web applications in an Airline's headquarters but when it comes to analysing PBs of aircraft telemetry for predictive maintenance there might not be any PHP developers on that project.
The above projects often aren't advertised in a way that web developers would be exposed to them. This is why someone could spend years working on new projects that are at the bottom of their S-curve in terms of both growth and data accumulated and largely never see a need for data processing outside of what could fit in RAM on a single machine.
Acquia, a US-based open source digital experience company, has announced the opening of an office in Pune, expanding its presence in the Asia-Pacific region. Taking this next step in its global growth strategy, Acquia looks to bolster its partner network and expand its global customer footprint.
EPAM Systems, Inc. (EPAM), a leading global provider of digital platform engineering and software development services, today announced that it has achieved Global Select status in Acquia's Partner Program. Acquia, an open source digital experience company, provides software and services built around Drupal. As one of only a few elite Global Select partners, EPAM leverages its Acquia and Drupal expertise to help its clients design, build and deliver engaging and intelligent customer experiences.
This is the most complete and up-to-date directory of free and open source content management platforms available on the web.
OpenCms has been around since 1999, and it's been an open source Java CMS platform since 2001. Not only is it one of the oldest Java-based CMS platforms, it's one of the oldest CMS tools, predating the popular PHP-based WordPress, which debuted in 2003. From a developer's perspective, OpenCms is simple to set up and maintain. It runs as a Java servlet, which makes installation easy. It works with most major databases; whether you prefer MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, MariaDB or another popular database, you can likely run OpenCms without much hassle. OpenCms probably won't win awards as the most elegant or attractive Java-based CMS. The interface was overhauled in 2019, but OpenCms doesn't exactly feel modern. It works, but it's a little clunky. However, OpenCms does enjoy the distinction as a truly cost-free open source Java CMS. There is no freemium pricing model for the product, and there are no licensing fees.
A public enterprise grade energy blockchain has powered up with the promise to accelerate a low-carbon, distributed electricity future. For the first time, energy sector companies are hosting validator nodes on a decentralized network as they seek to adapt to a more digitalized and decentralized energy system.
The security token issuance platform, Securitize raised eyebrows amongst the cryptocommunity this week after releasing its DS Token code to the public. The move goes along with the crypto sectors long-held stance of open-source projects. Now, programmers from across the globe have a chance to test and advance the platform’s core coding.
Developing a storage standard has always been a long, arduous and contentious process. It is the same for most standards. However, with the speed that technology is changing, that approach is no longer sustainable, and not just for storage. To understand what change means for the storage industry, Enterprise Times talked with Richelle Ahlvers. Ahlvers is a board member at the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA). She is also the Chair of the Scalable Storage Management Technical Workgroup. That workgroup is responsible for the Swordfish Storage Management API. Already providing support for block and file storage, it will release support for object storage soon. [...] Another example that Ahlvers gave is the SNIA work on the CDMI (Cloud Data Management Interface). That spec is now entirely in Open Source. All the bug fixes and changes are done through the Open Source community which, Ahlvers says, makes it faster.
TV technology outfit Norigin Media has open-sourced parts of its technology framework for building TV apps in an initiative the company said was aimed at increasing the quality of software across the streaming industry, and encouraging broadcasters to work together by reusing common code.
Software is at the heart of the digital revolution and, ultimately, it is what determines the success, agility and competitiveness of businesses looking to succeed in today’s fast paced, digital world. Open source is changing the way organisations build software, offering a strong and critical foundation for digital transformation, while bringing teams and departments together. As the approach to in-house software development evolves, organisations understand that their success is determined by the way they participate in Open Source Software (OSS). This offers a realm of opportunities that do not just benefit the IT department, but the business at large.
This report was written by Naveen Narayanan as part of Google Summer of Code 2019. I have been working on porting Wine to amd64 on NetBSD as a GSoC 2019 project. Wine is a compatibility layer which allows running Microsoft Windows applications on POSIX-complaint operating systems. This report provides an overview of the progress of the project during the first coding period.
One of the interesting Google Summer of Code projects on the BSD front this year is porting Wine to run on AMD64 (x86_64) under NetBSD. NetBSD has been running Wine to some extent on i386 but this effort has been about getting a Wine 64-bit port running nicely with 32-bit Windows program compatibility.
Here are some of the more essential configuration options to get you going with FreeNAS.
We are pleased to announce the release of GNUnet 0.11.5. This is a bugfix release for 0.11.4, mostly fixing a few minor bugs and improving performance, in particular for identity management with a large number of egos. In the wake of this release, we also launched the REST API documentation. In terms of usability, users should be aware that there are still a large number of known open issues in particular with respect to ease of use, but also some critical privacy issues especially for mobile users. Also, the nascent network is tiny (about 200 peers) and thus unlikely to provide good anonymity or extensive amounts of interesting information. As a result, the 0.11.5 release is still only suitable for early adopters with some reasonable pain tolerance.
The New Zealand Transport Agency is open sourcing a security assurance tool it is developing with Wellington company Catalyst. Catalyst has been working with NZTA to open source the tool that automates aspects of the security assurance process and embeds security requirements earlier in the product development life-cycle. The Security Development Lifecycle Tool (SDLT), aligns with common government security classifications and risk assessment practices to deliver "security by design" across the agency's tech teams. NZTA opted to open source the tool so other government agencies can similarly reduce their compliance overheads and focus on core delivery.
There are two versions of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The terms of the latest iteration, GPL version 3, are clear and readable overall; it allows open copy, redistribution and modification. Developers who use open source code covered by GPL version 3 can choose to charge a fee for their open source software. However, the GPL imposes several important restrictions on developers and users. The GPL emphasizes copyleft behaviors for activities such as including linking, distribution, modification and re- or sub-licensing. Generally, copyleft clauses require that uses of the work observe the same terms and conditions to which the original code adheres. Thus, open source software obtained under GPL version 3 retains those rights indefinitely. In addition, developers must include a copy of the GNU GPL with the software as it's redistributed and within the software itself. Other restrictions exist for source and binary software distributions under the GPL. The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) provides a slightly more permissive option than version 3. The agreement, for instance, allows linking the LGPL code with code under non-GPL licenses -- a practice prohibited under GPL version 3. Consequently, developers often use LGPL when they want to allow for the use of non-GPL open source libraries, but preserve other copyleft restrictions.
Open source processors are rapidly gaining mindshare, fueled in part by early successes of RISC-V, but that interest frequently is accompanied by misinformation based on wishful thinking and a lack of understanding about what exactly open source entails. Nearly every recent conference has some mention of RISC-V in particular, and open source processors in general, whether that includes keynote speeches, technical sessions, and panels. What’s less obvious is that open ISAs are not a new phenomenon, and neither are free, open processor implementations.
Open-source EDA is back on the semiconductor industry’s agenda, spurred by growing interest in open-source hardware. But whether the industry embraces the idea with enough enthusiasm to make it successful is not clear yet. One of the key sponsors of this effort is the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is spearheading a number of programs to lower the cost of chip design, including one for advanced packaging and another for security. The idea behind all of them is to utilize knowledge extracted from millions of existing chip designs to make chip engineering more affordable and predictable.
There's a growing trend of autonomous vehicle developers open-sourcing their software tools and hardware, even for applications outside of automotive.
ACEINNA offers the new OpenIMU300RI. The device is a rugged, open-source, sealed-package, 9-DOF IMU for autonomous off-road, construction, agricultural and automotive vehicle applications. This new open-source IMU enables engineers to simply optimise an attitude, navigation or other algorithm for their vehicle/application and run it in on the IMU. [...] “Different vehicle platforms have different dynamics,” explains James Fennelly, product manager at ACEINNA. “To get the best performance, the attitude, navigation or other algorithm needs to be tailored for each vehicle platform and application. The ACEINNA OpenIMU300RI open-source platform gives designers a flexible and simple-to-integrate IMU solution that can be easily optimized for a wide range of vehicles and applications.”
Now that digital imaging sensors are starting to become more freely available to the masses, all kinds of open source projects have been popping up that use them. Most of them are typically fairly limited to things like the Raspberry Pi or development boards like the Arduino and ESP32. But now, there is a new and pretty serious looking open source camera out there. It’s called the Octopus, it has interchangeable sensors that go up to 5K full frame, it’s fully programmable and runs on the open source operating system, Linux.
ScopeFun has launched a new project via Crowd Supply for their open source all-in-one instrumentation hardware aptly named the ScopeFun. ScopeFun Has been created to provide an affordable platform that offers the following tools : Oscilloscope, Arbitrary waveform generator, Spectrum analyzer, Logic analyzer and Digital pattern generator . The hardware supports any accompanying software runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac and also provides a Server Mode that supports remote connections over an IP network. “A Xilinx Artix-7 FPGA and a Cypress EZ-USB FX3 controller allow the board to interface with a PC while maintaining fast data rates. Samples are buffered using 512 Megabytes of DDR3 SDRAM.
Call it modular, call it DIY, call it I-have-control-over-my-interiors; the purpose of the Bloom Chair is to let you customize your chair, just the way you like it to be. It’s a collaborative effort between you and the manufacturer, where you get to download the modular design, cut it yourself and finally assemble it. While you make your piece, you have the liberty of modifying the pattern and making the end-shape define your vision. Haffun!
Today Dirk Eddelbuettel, James Balamuta and Ivan Pavlov are happy to announce the first release of a reworked R interface to the Vowpal Wabbit machine learning system. Started as a GSoC 2018 project, the new rvw package was built to give R users easier access to a variety of efficient machine learning algorithms.
This tutorial outlines how to perform plotting and data visualization in python using Matplotlib library. The objective of this post is to get you familiar with the basics and advanced plotting functions of the library. It contains several examples which will give you hands-on experience in generating plots in python.
The tutorial for today is about Pythonic tool. Named Pythonic is a graphical programming tool that makes it easy for users to create Python applications using ready-made function modules. This tool providing the consistent features and characteristics of a trading bot with just a few clicks. The Pythonic tool is currently available in four languages: English, German, Spanish, and Chinese. The tool comes with basic functions such as a scheduler, if-branches, connectivity, and logging functions are available out of the box and can be parameterized using a corresponding GUI. Each graphical element is functionally processed individually. The base idea is: A unique graphical input mask to carry out the
I had a great conversation with Jerod Santo on the Changelog podcast: The Changelog 351: Maintainer spotlight! Ned Batchelder. We talked about Open edX, and coverage.py, and maintaining open source software.
This package started as only a documentation generator, but my goal for some time has been to gather together all of the tools and random scripts I use to maintain my web site and free software releases. This release does a bunch of internal restructuring to make it easier to add new commands, and then starts that process by adding a docknot dist command. This performs some (although not all) of the actions I currently use my release script for, and provides a platform for ensuring that the full package test suite is run as part of generating a distribution tarball.
This post explains the data structures used in Python. It is essential to understand the data structures in a programming language. In python, there are many data structures available.
After the keynotes and talks on Thursday, July 11th, we’ve organized a social event at the workshop venue, the FHNW Muttenz. Starting at 19:00 CEST, you can join us for an evening party with finger food, drinks and music.
Switzerland is often not included in European cell provider’s roaming packages and also not covered by the EU roaming regulation, so you can potentially incur significant charges when going online with your mobile or notebook.
Glyph’s post about a “kernel python” from the 13th based on Amber’s presentation at PyCon made me start thinking about how minimal standard library could really be. Christian had previously started by nibbling around the edges, considering which modules are not frequently used, and could be removed. I started thinking about a more extreme change, of leaving in only enough code to successfully download and install other packages. The ensurepip module seemed like a necessary component for that, so I looked at its dependencies, with an eye to cutting everything else.
Stripe is open sourcing its Ruby type checker in the hopes to help and collaborate with the Ruby community.
Yesterday, a new statically-typed programming language named V was open sourced. It is described as a simple, fast, and compiled language for creating maintainable software. Its creator, Alex Medvednikov, says that it is very similar to Go and is inspired by Oberon, Rust, and Swift.
The language is very similar to Go and its domain is very similar to that of Rust, the team explained. It has a ui module that uses native GUI toolkits, allowing developers to build native apps with native controls without the need to embed a browser to develop cross-platform apps quickly, according to the language’s website.
Kotlin is continuing its "meteoric" rise in the software development world, with recent research providing new insights into its increasing popularity.
QCON NYC – Azul Systems (Azul), the award-winning leader in Java runtime solutions, today announced the general availability of Zulu Mission Control v7.0. Based on the OpenJDK Mission Control project, Zulu Mission Control is a powerful Java performance management and application profiling tool that works with Azul’s Zing and Zulu JDKs/JVMs and supports both Java SE 8 and 11.
There’s probably never been a time since the dawn of programming when there has been more opportunity for developers—individuals and teams—to imagine, create and be successful. Developers are able to do a lot more (and do things a lot faster) with more tools, a better development ecosystem and a tighter connection with the rest of the enterprise than was possible even a few years ago. [...] A major factor in enabling this approach is the widespread use of open source code. Open source has democratized access to powerful tools and platforms that can greatly accelerate work for any developer. Open source projects are mature, stable and growing, which provides equal access for citizen and enterprise developers alike. The size of your IT operation no longer matters: Developers everywhere can call up on their laptops the same tools that once were available only to web-scale unicorns. It removes limits to a developer’s imagination and the ability to create something new. Finally, the ever-expanding realm of cloud-native computing is putting incredible resources and computing ability within reach of every developer. Tools such as Kubernetes, which let you create and orchestrate applications in containers that can then be deployed and run in the cloud; serverless technologies; and other new ways of using distributed computing power remove barriers. Where a developer once might have been reluctant to create apps that required high levels of computing power, that’s not the case now with the cloud. What once may have taken access to a Cray supercomputer is now at a developer’s fingertips.
A new release 0.4.14 of RProtoBuf is arriving at CRAN. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers (“ProtoBuf”) data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol. This release contains two very helpful pull requests by Jarod Meng that solidify behaviour in two corner cases of message translation. Jeroen also updated the Windows build settings which will help with the upcoming transition to a new Rtools version.
Besides the QObject ownerships there is another, more subtle problem that one should be aware of when injecting objects into the QQmlEngine. When using QtQuick in an application, often there is the need to inject objects into the engine (I will not go into detail here, but for further reading see https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtqml-cppintegration-topic.html). The important important fact one should be aware of is that at this point there is a heuristic that decides whether the QML engine and its garbage collector assumes ownership of the injected objects or if the ownership is assumed to be on C++ side (thus managed by you and your smart pointers). The general rule for the heuristic is named in the QObjectOwnership enum. Here, make sure that you note the difference between QObjects returned via a Q_PROPERTY property and via a call of a Q_INVOKABLE methods. Moreover, note that the description there misses the special case of when an Object has a QObject parent, then also the CppOwnership is assumed. For a detailed discussion of the issues there (which might show you a surprisingly hard to understand stack trace coming from the depths of the QML engine), I suggest reading this blog post. Summing up the QML part: When you are using a smart pointer, you will hopefully not set any QObject parent (which automatically would have told the QML engine not to take ownership…). Thus, when making the object available in the QML engine, you must be very much aware about the way you are using to put the object into the engine and if needed, you must call the QQmlEngine::setObjectOwnership() static method to mark your objects specifically that they are handled by you (otherwise, bad things will happen).
Learn to use the Bash case statement to conditionally execute commands based on pattern matching, it's different clause terminators and explore examples.
Hello friend, we will start a new Python project in the next chapter but before that let us solve another Python problem first in this article. This is one of the questions in codewars which I have solved today : Given a string and an end string, compare the end string part with the end part of the given string, if they match each other, then return true, otherwise return false. For example, if the given string is “Hello” and the end string is “ello” then the function will return true. If the given string is “World” and the end string is “rld!” the the function will return false.
In conversation with Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer, Herzog emphasizes how the “variousness of our human mind” is one of the reasons for optimism about our species, yet the eradication of languages by dominant powers imposes monolithic conformity on us all, pushing us to speak 30 dominant languages, and, primarily, English. The dangers of this erasure, Scheer and Herzog agree, are immense. We don’t have to go far to see the results of this, as Scheer explains.
On full display, however, was a major rift in the Democratic party: Two roads diverged in a blue wood between progressive values and a more moderate sense of “electability.” During what was perhaps the most highly anticipated political spectacle of the 2020 campaign yet, solutions to domestic crises like immigration and health care accentuated candidates’ ideological viability in an overcrowded, contentious primary field. Undergirding every issue, though, was arguably the most potent litmus test of them all for young voters: exactly where each candidate stands on higher education policy.
The vast majority of Apple products are manufactured in China, so it’s not entirely surprising to see Apple shift its production overseas. But it comes at a fraught time, as the tech industry faces the prospect of 25 percent tariffs on imports from China, which could have political implications for a company that President Trump has regularly called out for not making products in the US.
It would be the first of many changes. The last year has seen the factory shrink, get canceled, reappear, and undergo other shifts chronicled below. Even now, as concrete is finally being poured, it’s unclear what exactly Foxconn is building in Mount Pleasant. Industry experts shown Foxconn’s building plans say it does not appear to even be the scaled-down Gen6 LCD factory. If the last year is any guide, the whipsawing is far from over.
Leading into the busiest hardware launch week of our careers, we talk about Intel's internal competitive analysis document leaking, DisplayPort 2.0 specifications being detailed, and Ubuntu dropping and re-adding 32-bit support. We also follow-up on Huawei news (and how Microsoft and Intel are still supporting it) and trade tensions. [...] An internal Intel document has leaked onto Reddit that outlines the competitive profile of AMD, according to Intel. The letter, titled “AMD competitive profile: Where we go-toe-toe, why they are resurgent, which chips of ours beat theirs," analyzes AMD’s rise to competitiveness, with no shortage of Intel bias. However, in the letter, AMD’s competitive threat to Intel is acknowledged as “the greatest it has been in years.”
At a June 20 House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs hearing, legislators considered H.R. 3083, sponsored by ranking member Phil Roe (R-TN). One of the architects of the VA MISSION Act of 2018, Roe is an ardent supporter of shifting the care of veterans from the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) to the private sector.
H.R. 3083 will accelerate privatization of the VHA by changing the launch date of one of the most problematic parts of the VA MISSION Act—the Asset and Infrastructure Review Commission.
Michigan's environmental and health departments launched a new website Wednesday to show communities' lead and copper data results and give residents information on protecting themselves from lead. They will hold three online town hall-style events July 9-11.
This unique honey is typically labeled and sold as acacia honey in Europe but is commonly found as American acacia or locust honey in the United States. Compared with traditional honey, it’s often much lighter in color, appearing almost transparent. It has a flower-like aroma and sweet, delicate flavor.
SHINN: Yeah. So you know, my colleagues in the open source community may have their own sort of different definitions about what they think open source is. But for me, open source has always been about the fact that if there’s something that I wanted to change in the software, I could do it. And that’s really the core. There are lots of other benefits of open source. It might be free, there might be a lot of people working on it, maybe there’s a community. But for me, it always started with the fact that I had a piece of software that I’m using, and I can make enhancements, changes and fixes
ABERMAN: True hacker culture.
SHINN: That’s right. And in cybersecurity, that’s really important. There’s lots of really smart people out there. It’s not possible for any cybersecurity vendor to understand every possible situation in which their product might be used. The people who are going to understand that are the people who are closest to the problem. And it’s great if you can make it possible for them to enhance your software, and hopefully contribute that back to you. All boats rise together. So in the security world, we see some of the more interesting or powerful cybersecurity technologies, like snort, it blew away all of the other network based IDS’s that were out there, all the proprietary ones.
Neither theory was correct. While some experts still disagree, most now believe that Conficker was the work of Ukrainian cybercriminals building a platform for global theft who succeeded beyond all expectation, or desire. The last thing a thief wants is to draw attention to himself. Conficker’s unprecedented growth drew the alarmed attention of cybersecurity experts worldwide. It became, simply, too hot to use.
This explanation was detailed in an article published in December 2015 by The Journal of Sensitive Cyber Research and Engineering, a classified, peer-reviewed publication issued by a federal interagency cybersecurity working group including the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security and N.S.A. — and distributed to a small number of experts with the appropriate security clearances. The article itself was not classified, but reached only a small readership. I obtained a copy this year.
The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” Rabin said. Frequently, he recalled, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly.”
We've noted for a long time that the wireless industry is prone to being fairly lax on security and consumer privacy. One example is the recent rabbit hole of a scandal related to the industry's treatment of user location data, which carriers have long sold to a wide array of middlemen without much thought as to how this data could be (and routinely is) abused. Another example is the industry's refusal to address the longstanding flaws in Signaling System 7 (SS7, or Common Channel Signalling System 7 in the US), a series of protocols hackers can exploit to track user location, dodge encryption, and even record private conversations. This week, carriers were once again exposed for not being the shining beacons of security they tend to advertise themselves as. A new report emerged this week showcasing how, for years, hackers have been exploiting substandard security at more than 10 global wireless carriers to obtain massive troves of data on specific targets of interest. Researchers at Boston-based Cybereason, who first discovered the operation, say the hackers exploited a vulnerability on an internet-connected web server to gain a foothold into each cell providers internal network.
It's unclear what the final decision was, but if it was to back such a law, we'll know about it soon enough. There are some sensible folks on this issue -- including some from the intelligence communities who actually understand the security value of encryption. The State Department and Commerce Departments are both also said to support keeping encryption legal. It's mostly the law enforcement folks who are against encryption: including parts of the DOJ and FBI, ICE and the Secret Service. As if any of those need any more power. Homeland Security (of which ICE is a part) is apparently "internally divided." It's been said before, but this is not a debate. There is no debate. There is no "on the one hand, on the other hand." There is no "privacy v. security." This is "no privacy and weakened security v. actual privacy and actual security." There's literally no debate to be had here. If you understand the issues, encryption is essential, and any effort to take away end-to-end encryption is outlawing technology that keeps everyone safe. While Senators Feinstein and Burr released a truly dangerous bill a few years back to outlaw encryption, who knows what sort of nonsense would come out of this and whether or not it could actually get enough support in Congress. Hopefully not.
Medtronic is recalling some models of insulin pumps that are open to hacks, and the Food and Drug Administration warned consumers on Thursday that they cannot be patched to fix the holes. It’s a rare example of a medical device recall over a cybersecurity issue, although security professionals and the FDA have raised numerous concerns over the vulnerability of these devices for years. The insulin pumps subject to the recall connect wirelessly to other insulin equipment, including glucose meters, a monitoring system and controls that pump insulin. “The FDA is concerned that, due to cybersecurity vulnerabilities identified in the device, someone other than a patient, caregiver or health care provider could potentially connect wirelessly to a nearby MiniMed insulin pump and change the pump’s settings. This could allow a person to over deliver insulin to a patient, leading to low blood sugar ... or to stop insulin delivery, leading to high blood sugar and diabetic ketoacidosis,” the FDA notice says.
Hybrid threats can be based on a wide variety of strategies, ranging from the spread of fake news to undermining trust and cyberattacks on energy or communication systems. Russia has often been blamed for using such tactics.
In historical terms, this is a shocking turnaround. Americans invented the telephone business and until recently dominated production and research. But in the last 20 years, every single American producer of key telecommunication equipment sectors is gone. Today, only two European makers—Ericsson and Nokia—are left to compete with Huawei and another Chinese competitor, ZTE.
This story of lost American leadership and production is not unique. In fact, the destruction of America’s once vibrant military and commercial industrial capacity in many sectors has become the single biggest unacknowledged threat to our national security. Because of public policies focused on finance instead of production, the United States increasingly cannot produce or maintain vital systems upon which our economy, our military, and our allies rely. Huawei is just a particularly prominent example.
The world's most popular open source media player, VLC, has issued the biggest single set of security fixes in the program's history.
Researchers have shown that it's technically possible for hackers to target the US presidential alerts system to send fake messages on a localised basis.
The popularity of open source software has skyrocketed in recent years as developers are expected to churn out more fresh tech in less time. In its fifth annual State of the Software Supply Chain report, researchers at Sonatype said the number of weekly downloads of the popular open source software package Java nearly tripled in 2018, from 3.5 billion to 10 billion.
People keep asking me which smart bulbs they should buy. It's a great question! As someone who has, for some reason, ended up spending a bunch of time reverse engineering various types of lightbulb, I'm probably a reasonable person to ask. So. There are four primary communications mechanisms for bulbs: wifi, bluetooth, zigbee and zwave. There's basically zero compelling reasons to care about zwave, so I'm not going to.
America boasts of its "all volunteer" military (conveniently ignoring how much of that "all-volunteer" force is composed of people who face economic privation, or who hope for an increasingly unlikely path to citizenship through military service), but the volunteer force is dwindling: just getting the bodies to send to Iraq and Afghanistan required that the forces double their felony waivers for new recruits from 2003-2006.
The Pentagon stated last year that 71% of Americans between the ages of 17 and 24 are ineligible to serve in the U.S. military, most for reasons of health, physical fitness, education, or criminality. The propensity of this age group to serve is even lower. The likely demands and casualties of a war in Iran would spell the end of the All-Volunteer Force, requiring the conscription of Americans for the first time since 1973.
The Gulf of Guinea, on west Africa’s southern coast, is the world’s most pirate-infested sea. The International Maritime Bureau (IMB) reports 72 attacks last year on vessels at sea between Ivory Coast and Cameroon—up from 28 in 2014. This year so far it has recorded 30. Although some of the rise may reflect more complete reporting, Max Williams of Africa Risk Compliance (ARC), a security consultancy, says piracy remains chronically under-recorded. Ship-owners fear their vessels will be held up at port during an investigation. His firm estimates the real number of attacks last year was double the IMB’s figure.
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Unlike the Somalis, west African pirates never keep the vessels, as they have nowhere to hide them. Instead, armed with AK-47s and knives, they storm a ship, round up some of the crew and return to land, where they hide their hostages. Last year, says Mr Williams, they kidnapped 193 people. The pirates have struck across the region, but are primarily a Nigerian problem. They mostly operate out of the labyrinthine waterways in the Niger delta, near which most of west Africa’s attacks occur.
Researchers from FGI noticed unusual power variations in GPS signal on 20 - 21 June. These events were first observed at the Metsähovi geodetic research station. This meant that the GPS precision signals were stronger. Such signals are used by military and geodetic applications.
America’s coal-burning power plants are shutting down at a rapid pace, forcing electric utilities to face the next big climate question: Embrace natural gas, or shift aggressively to renewable energy?
Earlier this month, a study found that the U.S. had more capacity installed for renewable energy than coal for the first time. That potential is now being realized. The U.S. generated more electricity from renewable sources than from coal for the first time ever this April, The Guardian reported Wednesday.
Spraying chemicals in the yard is a tempting shortcut for many a home gardener looking to protect a tasty crop or a bed of flowers. But weed killers aren't necessary, and they may be linked to health risks. To embark on a natural plan of weed suppression, start by deciphering your yard's condition: Is it ablaze with dandelions? Taken over by crabgrass? You'll need to customize your approach depending on the specific intruder. And don't lose patience; finding the perfect solution for your particular weed specimen will take some tinkering. A local organic landscaping company may help you develop an effective weed-fighting plan, and the nonprofit Beyond Pesticides offers a directory of companies that can improve your lawn in a safe manner. Here are some strategies to help stretch your green thumb.
A 2017 study found that around 90% of all the plastic in the world's oceans flows there through just 10 rivers. Eight of those rivers were in Asia, and two in Africa. They all run through highly populated areas, which also lack effective waste collection, meaning trash often ends up in the river.
The researchers concluded: "The more waste there is in a catchment area that is not disposed of properly, the more plastic ultimately ends up in the river and takes this route to the sea."
But plastic is getting into rivers all over the world.
Check the Arctic. It’s warming most rapidly. It’s losing ice and permafrost today. It will be losing polar bears soon. All that ice will raise the levels of the oceans. Turning off the Earth’s air-conditioner will raise havoc with weather all over. The seas are warming too and oxygenation, storms, and vulnerable species are already in chaos. WAKE UP, SENATORS! Do your jobs. Save the planet if you can. There are no do-overs.
With the way the climate crisis is progressing, it doesn't look like Gen Z is going to have much of a future to study for. As temperatures increase all over the world, the oceans acidify, ice caps melt, habitats get destroyed, storms become more frequent and deadlier, and species go extinct, it’s scary thinking about what our world might look like in 10 or 20 years.
According to the United Nations, we have only about 11 years to intervene in order to save life as we know it on earth. In the span of 11 years, we will need to have completely transformed our entire society and the way we get our energy. So lately, I’ve been wondering what exactly it is that I’m preparing myself for with my collegiate aspirations.
Keiek said he decided to share photos of the animal on social media in an effort to “help spread awareness about the importance not littering, especially in coastal areas, where animals can mistake trash as food.”
The decision could pose a challenge for PM Justin Trudeau as he heads into an election season likely to be fought in part over climate issues.
A variety of bee species have been managed by humans over thousands of years to provide a ready supply of honey and, much later, pollination services for a diversity of food crops. But the most common and widespread of these are honey bees, Apis mellifera. The American Beekeeping Federation estimates that honey bee pollination services are worth as much as $20 billion to US food crop production alone, and the National Honey Board valued the 2013 honey crop at over $300 million. Obviously, honey bees are economically important, but unlike domesticated animals, honey bees are not solely dependent upon people to survive. Even today, honey bees are quite capable of living in the wild, free from human interference.
Bee colony death continues to rise. According to the Bee Informed Partnership's latest survey, released this week, U.S. beekeepers lost nearly 40% of their honeybee colonies last winter — the greatest reported winter hive loss since the partnership started its surveys 13 years ago. The total annual loss was slightly above average.
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Beekeeping has thus become an essential cog in the machine of American industrial farming. But it's a tough industry. Commercial beekeepers are so migratory that it's difficult to track how many live in each state, and all that moving around is expensive and stressful. Beekeepers have to monitor thousands of hives for sickness and pests.
The shortage in India's sixth largest city is symbolic of a crisis that is being felt across a country battling with one of its longest heatwaves, which has killed at least 137 people.
India has been inching closer to a debilitating water crisis for months. With poor water management and unsupervised groundwater extraction, experts said that 600 million of India's 1.3 billion people are facing acute water shortage.
According to a report released by Niti Aayog -- a government-run think tank -- 21 major cities including New Delhi will run out of groundwater by 2020.
"This crisis is further driven by a poorly defined legal framework for groundwater that rests ownership with landowners and leads to unchecked extraction. This crisis is most acute in the Indian agriculture sector, where groundwater accounts for 63% of all irrigation water," states the report.
All four reservoirs that supply Chennai, known as the Detroit of south Asia for its flourishing automobile industry, have run dry this summer, largely because of poor monsoon rains last year.
Chennai is one of 21 cities that a government think-tank warned last year could run out of ground water by 2020. This year's monsoon is delayed, further compounding problems across a swath of western and central India.
India also heavily relies on groundwater for its water needs, but decades of drilling into the earth to reach water has led to severe ground water depletion.
It's one thing to hear about global warming — it's a far more powerful experience to suddenly see the changes firsthand. For almost the entire journey, the sea — even next to the shore and hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle in the middle of winter — was ice-free. Even as recently as last year, the Sarfaq Ittuk could get stuck in ice for days at a time.
In 2017, the Norwegian government issued the new policy in response to mounting concern that palm oil production is having a disastrous impact on forests in the countries in which it is produced.
“India's edible oil imports will continue to rise because the consumption is rising at a pace of about 3.5 per cent per annum, but the production isn't rising at the same pace. The government is making efforts to boost oilseed cultivation but the result is taking long,” said Patel.
Palm oil imports totalled 818,149 tonnes last month, including 371,060 tonnes of refined palm oil, the Solvent Extractors' Association (SEA) said in a statement
India, the world's biggest importer of edible oils, had imported 157,832 tonnes of refined palm oil in the year-ago period.
Indofood’s controversial palm oil practices have driven away 15 business partners over the past 2 years, including Nestlé, Wilmar, Musim Mas, Cargill, Fuji Oil, Hershey’s, Kellogg’s, General Mills, Unilever, and Mars. Indofood’s CEO, Anthoni Salim, has also received scrutiny for his other palm oil businesses that are operating in the shadows and illegally clearing substantial areas of peatlands in Borneo or embroiled in serious land conflicts in West Papua.
The city, which, according to the 2011 census, is India's sixth largest, has been in the grip of a severe water shortage for weeks now.
As the reservoirs started to run dry, many hotels and restaurants shut down temporarily. The Chennai metro has turned off air conditioning in the stations, while offices have asked staff to work from home in a bid to conserve water.
Despite the growing push to reach "zero carbon," there are big questions around whether these goals are possible and how much they would actually slow climate change. Here's an attempt to answer some of them.
It cost the city about 2 lakh rupees to bring the dead whale in. It was taken away by a truck to a dump site where it will be buried. The octopus fishery does not even pay for this retrieval even though it is entirely their fault that the whale died.
There are very strict rules in place when it comes to whale interaction. People are not allowed to swim or kayak up to them. You cannot take a boat up to them either. Only someone with specific licenses, which are difficult to get, are allowed to do any of that. This is done in order to stop people from bothering the animals who come into the South African waters to rest and raise their young.
If you are caught harassing a whale, you can be fined up to 18 lakh rupees. However, it seems if you kill them with a fishery, it costs you nothing.
But more than six months after the state began asking residents for blood samples that could one day guide Jack’s medical care, just more than half of residents whose wells were contaminated in northern Kent County have made the trip to the local health department to participate in a study on the health effects of per- and polyfluoroalkyl chemicals.
“We only have one Earth, which is in a state of emergency. We have to make decisions and take action to preserve the planet for future generations. Nothing less will do. Young people must be able to trust that we’ll tackle climate change today rather than tomorrow. Climate change must be tackled in a way that everyone can keep up. I want to build a Finland where the social safety net works,” she stated.
The ice atop Greenland holds enough water to raise global sea levels by more than seven metres, should it all melt and run off into the oceans. For this reason, climate scientists closely monitor its seasonal trends, and in particular how quickly it melts in the spring leading up to the late summer “ice minimum”, after which it starts to grow again.
The agency made an emergency exception for 11 states to use sulfoxaflor on cotton and sorghum crops.
"As it gets warmer, as it gets more acidic and also - in some areas - as it runs out of breath.
"Because the Atlantic, like many ocean basins in the world, is being deoxygenated - it's losing the oxygen that is vital to life."
The cause is climate change, 90% of the world's global warming has been absorbed by the oceans.
The notorious pesticide was created to attack the nervous system of insects, but it has been found to damage the nervous system of humans. It has also been linked to affecting the brains of foetuses and infants, as well as being suspected of causing ADHD, autism and lower IQ in children.
It is found in Danish supermarkets because it is legal in other countries that Denmark imports food goods from, including China, Thailand and Spain.
Global anxiety about climate change could turn into a political tidal wave. It may or may not arrive on our shores in time for the 2020 elections, but, when it does, it could hit with catastrophic force.
It's already cresting in Europe. A speech at the UN's climate conference in Poland last year by Swedish teenager Greta Thurberg electrified audiences and spurred students all across the world to protest climate change inaction by repeatedly boycotting school on Fridays. Barricades erected by Extinction Rebellion create massive traffic jams in London. Climate activists are queuing up at the polls. The Green Party made major gains in the recent elections for the European Parliament, particularly in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.
That means that customers will still run into juice bottles with no pant after November 1, but that’s because shops are being allowed to sell off their stock to avoid food waste.
The first reversal of environmental policies by a major European city comes despite soaring global environmental concerns and is a fresh sign of growing divisions in Spain after a series of inconclusive elections in April and May.
Last November Madrid’s then far-left government banned most petrol and diesel cars from its center to tackle high levels of nitrogen dioxide. The policy was known as “Madrid central” and it was intended to bring Madrid into line with EU clean air rules which it had been violating since 2010.
"Pollution is one of the most important health problems now," he said.
"We have to save [the planet] starting at the local and small level, the first thing is Madrid's centre," actress Laura Martin, 39, told Reuters news agency.
But the defensiveness also goes beyond the bottom line. Belchatow is proud of its industry. Coalmining began there only in the 1970s and many residents moved to the town from other places, but they venerate St Barbara, the miners’ saint, like residents of older Polish mining regions such as Silesia. The city’s logo is an electrical “on” button and its slogan is: “Belchatow: always a good reaction”. Law and Justice, the nationalist party that rules Poland and dominates local politics in Belchatow, has made the quality of Polish coal a patriotic cause (one critic refuses to give a quote for fear of reprisals). The party condemns western EU states for refusing Poland the chance to catch up with their living standards. Even those in Belchatow who accept the need to cut emissions, like Mr Nowak, say Poland is unfairly treated: “You can’t expect Poland to leap to zero carbon in 30 years.”
Wehrum is the latest Trump administration official to leave the environmental agency under a cloud of scrutiny. Former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt who resigned after reports that he misused his power and spent far more taxpayer money than his predecessors had on travel and security expenses.
With Wehrum's exit, his deputy, Anne Idsal, will take over his responsibilities.
Just last week, Wehrum helped unveil a signature achievement of that deregulatory drive—the repeal of the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan and its replacement with a set of weak rules that will do little to curb carbon emissions.
But Europe isn’t the only part of the world dealing with dangerous heat levels. India and Pakistan have been suffering since mid-May under one of the longest-lasting heat waves in its recent history. In June, temperatures in New Delhi soared to 48€° C (118.4€° F), the highest ever recorded for the month in the Indian capital. By June 21, at least 180 people reportedly had died from heat-related causes.
Science News spoke with Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford in England who is affiliated with the consortium, about what’s behind these deadly events and how scientists determine in real time whether a particular heat wave can be attributed to climate change. His comments have been edited for clarity and brevity.
When 19th century whalers jotted down weather and temperature measurements at sea, few might have imagined that their logbooks would become records of a warming planet more than 150 years later.
But that’s exactly the kind of value that climate scientists such as Caroline Ummenhofer of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution see in whaling logbooks. Packed with daily local observations, they can be used to corroborate climate change trends revealed in standardized temperature readings and geological records.
"Japan leaving the IWC and defying international law to pursue its commercial whaling ambitions is renegade, retrograde and myopic," Block said.
But it was one Democratic holdout with an energy-hungry industry in her district who ultimately killed the bill, according to local media.
Here’s some background on the Democrats whose stances appear to have led Senate President Peter Courtney to announce the lack of necessary votes for the bill in hopes he could persuade Senate Republicans to move forward with other legislation before Sunday night’s end-of-session deadline.
That bite didn’t make its victim sick. But that it occurred at all is causing scientists to realize how little they know about the insect involved, known as the Asian longhorned tick: what diseases it transmits, where it prefers to live, and how it manages to move across long distances. Behind those unanswered questions looms a larger problem: We haven’t paid as much attention to ticks as we have to other insects that carry diseases. We have a long way to go to catch up—just as changes in weather patterns have ticks on the move too.
Until recently, the Asian longhorned tick’s home range was understood to be eastern China and Russia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, and a few Pacific islands. In those countries, it harbors an array of bacterial and viral diseases that infect humans, including a potentially deadly hemorrhagic fever. It’s even more feared for the way it attacks livestock. This tick reproduces asexually, laying thousands of eggs at a time and producing waves of offspring that extract so much blood that grown cattle grow weak and calves die.
When Bjorn Quenemoen was a student at Bard College, he would host monthly popcorn parties. He would put up posters around campus, inviting everyone to his parties. At 10 p.m., on the appointed date, he would turn the lights down and put on some music. Quenemoen would sell a handful of items, including Claussen pickles, Lucky Strike cigarettes and beer, but the real draw was his popcorn. He would pop it live, wearing a uniform (orange pants that his sister bought in Thailand, a maroon muscle shirt and a yellow headband). The recipe, heavy on nutritional yeast, comes from his family, who grew corn, among other crops, in Minnesota. Quenemoen, now 38, never stopped making popcorn. “Before I graduated, I got the idea that I could turn this recipe into a business,” he says. And he did. The business — no longer a live event — is BjornQorn. The idea is so simple, it makes you kick yourself for not launching it first: non-GMO popcorn, solar popped and seasoned. Nothing more.
French riot police tear-gassed climate protesters in Paris on Friday as the county sweltered under record heat. Activists with Extinction Rebellion (XR) were occupying a bridge over the Seine to demand the French government declare a climate emergency and take necessary action to avert planetary catastrophe. "We need to civilly disrupt because, otherwise, nothing is going to be done," a British woman who took part in the protest told Euronews. Video shows the police teargassing the protesters at a close range and then forcibly trying to remove them from the scene.
The plastic contamination of the natural world flows from three main sources: complacency, apathy and ignorance, a poisonous trinity that is itself the result of a narrow and destructive approach to living. While there are signs of a shift in attitudes among many people, resistance to changing the lifestyle habits that feed the environmental crisis, is strong. This apathy is partly fueled by a lack of knowledge about what products contain plastic and the impact it has; feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis and ignorance about the interrelated nature of the Environmental Emergency more broadly. Underpinning these is the corrosive core of the issue: deep complacency within governments and businesses. Reducing plastic use is essential if we are to clean up the seas and rivers, safeguard marine life and sea birds, and start to decontaminate the air we breathe. Unseen by the naked eye, tiny plastic fibers are all around us. According to research carried out by King’s College London and featured in the excellent BBC series, War on Plastic with Hugh and Anita, in the square mile of the City of London – home to St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Stock Exchange – the air is filled with an estimated two billion plastic fibers. And that’s just one area in one city, in one country, and of course, as it’s airborne pollution it cannot be contained, it moves where the wind takes it; there is no such thing as national air pollution or national water pollution.
Recent polls have shown that the number of US citizens who believe in climate change is rising (see here, here, and here). These numbers have been hailed as positive—even as “a new era of public concern about climate change”—and they are positive, as far as such things go (with US Americans ranking 3rd in the world for climate change denial). They reflect media coverage of extreme climate events all over the world and the well-publicized predictions of respected organizations that are projecting disaster within thirty, twelve, or even five years. However, it’s also true that these percentages go up and down over time and that once current storylines run their course—and summer is over in the northern hemisphere—the rise in numbers will prove to be soft. But “soft” is also how we could describe belief in climate change in the US in general. Regardless of claims made to pollsters, virtually all of us—both socially (which is increasingly online) and to ourselves (more importantly)—are actually climate change deniers when the rubber hits the road. An apt expression, we might say, since we all need to stop driving. That wasn’t intentional, but yes, let’s start there.
That is partly a function of size. One in five Americans calls Texas or California home. By 2050 one in four will. Over the past 20 years the two states have created a third of new jobs in America. Their economic heft rivals whole countries’. Were they nations, Texas would be the tenth-largest, ahead of Canada by GDP. California would be fifth, right behind Germany.
After lots and lots of speculation, Facebook finally officially announced its cryptocurrency project last week, with a big event and a white paper that loosely describes the plans for the cryptocurrency called Libra. There was a lot to discuss, so in the spirit of slow news, I wanted to take some time to actually digest the plans before opining on it more thoroughly. Nearly all of the immediate reaction to the plan that I saw was not just negative, but mockingly so. Lots of jokes about "ZuckBucks" and the most common line of all: "who would actually trust Facebook with your money." Having spent time actually reading the white paper, as well as much of the commentary around it, as well as talking to a bunch of different people -- some who are supportive of the program, some who are not at all supportive, and one very knowledgeable friend who basically rated the whole program as a big "meh" -- my initial take is that the effort is in many ways a lot more interesting than I expected, but a lot less interesting than I hoped, and I don't think anyone can really have much of a sense of what will become of it until we learn more.
Ms Kaftancioglu could face up to 17 years in prison.
Hundreds showed up to court to support Ms Kaftancioglu on Friday. Her trial has now been adjourned until 18 July.
Canan Kaftancioglu, who heads the secular Republican People's Party (CHP)'s Istanbul branch, is accused of "insulting" President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Turkish state in tweets posted between 2012 and 2017.
Ãâ¡iftçi’s trial found extensive coverage in the foreign media, prompting Oscar-winning “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson to issue a statement saying the images posted by Ãâ¡iftçi were actually of Sméagol, Gollum’s benign alter ego.
The bill, known as Securing America’s Federal Elections, or SAFE, Act, is the first of several proposed by Democrats to boost election security as Congress belatedly moves to respond to Russian interference in the presidential election more than 2€½ years ago. But it isn’t yet clear if the GOP-led Senate will vote on it.
Thursday night was the conclusion of the first Democratic primary debate, and, like everybody else, we’re trying to make sense of what we watched. Some candidates had breakout moments while others were pushed to the sidelines. But did these moments really make a difference to viewers?
In an attempt to answer this question, we are trying to sum up the first debate in five charts, including: our poll with Morning Consult, which is tracking the same group of voters’ feelings about the candidates and how they change after the debates; a look at which candidates gained the most followers on Twitter; and of course, how much each of the candidates spoke, including whether they mentioned President Trump.
On Tuesday, June 18th presidential candidate Joe Biden paid an unannounced visit to the Stonewall Inn. He smiled, took selfies with the staff, and spoke about his support for LGBTQ+ rights. This very public visit, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, seems meant to shore up Biden’s liberal bonafides and follows closely the recent apology by the NYPD police chief for the police brutality executed that night. Biden talked specifically about the need for workplace protections for LGBTQ+ workers and his on-going support for the struggle for same-sex civil rights. This visit was covered favorably in the press with a focus on a charming story that Biden told about seeing a queer couple with his father and his father telling him “Joey, it’s simple. They love one another.” One may wonder, however, if this story is true, sinceBiden’s voting record paints a ver different picture. Indeed, even the slightest interrogation of Biden’s previous stances on queer rights shows that he has no business being at Stonewall and that his presence there is an insult both to the brave individuals who fought the police 50 years ago and to all of those who are fighting for liberation now. In 2012, Joe Biden — and the Democratic Party as a whole — began to rebrand as an ally of the LGBT community. Biden even preceded Obama in publicly supporting gay marriage, causing something of a stir. But, prior to 2012, Biden was anything but a supporter of LGBTQ+ people. Biden voted for both Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), “defending” heterosexual marriage and barring LGBTQ+ people from the military. Both of these discriminatory measures were signed by then President Bill Clinton and voted for by a plurality of Democrats. Mind you, that doesn’t mean I support the US imperialist machine that is the military, but we can’t doubt that a law actively barring LGBT people from coming out on the job furthered a homophobic and transphobic precedent. Even recently Biden has made statements that caused outrage within the queer community, most notably calling Mike Pence — a man who literally supports the torture of queer youth through ‘conversion therapy’ — “a decent man.” The few times where Joe Biden actually voted for nominally pro-LGBTQ+ bills typically involved hate crime legislation which is in-keeping with Biden’s consistent belief that you can solve social problems (domestic violence, bigotry, drug abuse) with the Prison-Industrial Complex. This prison industrial complex is used as a weapon against people of color, and particularly queer people of color. In fact, Layleen Polanco (a 27 year old Afro-Latina transgender woman) died in solitary confinement in Rikers just two weeks ago.
I would like to congratulate the 2016 presidential platform of Bernie Sanders for winning both halves of this week’s twin-bill Democratic presidential debate in a rout. Even without being in the room on Wednesday night, Sanders’ then-outlandish 2016 policy ideas on health care and income inequality dominated the discourse. His positions have not changed in three years, but the elemental nature of the Democratic Party — at least in the guise of most of the other people who took the debate stage this week — has clearly come around to several of Sanders’ premier points of view. By being present in the flesh last night, Sanders was able to say for himself what the others have been parroting since the race began. It appears 2016 was a better year than many of us thought. Joe “Well Guess What” Biden had a bad night, full stop. His long record on the economy, the Iraq war and so much else got dragged from one end of the room to the other. Specifically, Biden’s entire reason for being a presidential candidate — I’m the guy who can fight Donald Trump and win — got taken for a long walk off a short pier by Kamala Harris. Harris, the only Black person on Thursday’s debate stage, cleaned the ceiling with Biden’s toothpaste-ad veneers over his praise for white supremacists and his fight against busing as a means of desegregating schools. “It was hurtful to hear you talk about the reputations of two United States senators who built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country,” said Harris during the exchange. “And it was not only that, but you also worked with them to oppose busing. And, you know, there was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day. And that little girl was me.” Wham and splatter, as Stephen King once wrote. Biden had little response for Harris, which begs the question of how he will handle a knife-fighter like Trump. The evening’s events did not bode well on that score.
Former vice president Joe Biden took credit for withdrawing 150,000 United States troops from Iraq during the Democratic presidential debate. But the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq was part of a status of forces agreement (SOFA) President George W. Bush established with the Iraqi government. As the Washington Post reported in November 2008, “The Bush administration agreed to a total withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.” The agreement also placed “additional restrictions on how U.S. troops conducted missions,” and required a “pullout from Iraqi urban areas by July 2009.” In fact, in early 2011, Obama and his advisers planned to keep a residual force in Iraq, but they didn’t tell Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki or the American people. According to James F. Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq, “Washington had to determine the size of a residual force. That dragged on, with the military pushing for a larger force, and the White House for a small presence at or below 10,000, due to costs and the president’s prior ‘all troops out’ position. In June, the president decided on the force level (eventually 5,000) and obtained Mr. Maliki’s assent to new SOFA talks.”
Over two nights in Miami, the Democratic National Committee will host the first presidential debate of the 2020 primary on June 26 and 27. There are multiple swing states the Democratic nominee must win in 2020 to prevent a repeat of what happened with President Donald Trump in 2016. So, it is telling that the establishment of the party is primarily focused on Florida. A strategy built around winning Florida gives liberal centrists the ability to invoke the purple nature of the state to justify resisting a transformation, which continues to escalate among the party’s base of voters. Democrats can say they are not for Medicare for All because support for “government entitlements” will alienate voters. They can say they do not want to pursue proposals that “distract” from a focus on Republican attacks on what President Barack Obama supposedly accomplished. Being in Miami gives these Democrats populations from Cuba, Venezuela, and various other Latin American countries, which they can say fled countries with left-wing governments in order to warn against going too far with government programs to address basic human needs. It is particularly why Democratic candidates will feel pressure to support Trump’s regime change efforts in Venezuela.
Democratic divisions over race, age and ideology surged into public view in Thursday night’s presidential debate, a prime-time clash punctuated by a heated exchange between former Vice President Joe Biden and California Sen. Kamala Harris. It was one of several moments that left the 76-year-old Biden, who entered the night as his party’s fragile front-runner, on the defensive as he worked to convince voters across America that he’s still in touch with the Democratic Party of 2020 — and best-positioned to deny President Donald Trump a second term.
The stories provided a striking contrast, a portrait of the Democratic Party’s past and a glimpse of its possible future. Just after midnight on Wednesday, 31-year-old Tiffany Cabán claimed victory in her race for Queens district attorney, an announcement that ignited chants of “DSA” during her campaign’s watch party at the La Boom nightclub in Woodside, N.Y. (Members of the Democratic Socialists of America were among her most active volunteers and canvassers.) Cabán, a self-identified queer Latina from Richmond Hill, N.Y., who received endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has vowed a wholesale decriminalization of poverty. Mere hours before, The New York Times reminded readers precisely what she and her fellow progressives are up against, both nationally and within their own party. In a new report tracing his long and ignominious career in the Senate, journalists Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Astead W. Herndon present the case that former Vice President and 2020 hopeful Joe Biden was not merely a foot solider in a decades-long war on crime but one of its chief architects—and that his work with segregationists in the Senate was far more extensive than he has led voters to believe.
The Supreme Court hands down two major decisions. The first is a victory for Republicans, allowing extreme partisan gerrymandering to continue. The other temporarily blocks the Trump administration from adding a citizenship question on the 2020 census. We get response from Ari Berman, senior writer at Mother Jones, a reporting fellow at the Type Media Center and author of “Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America.” He says the ruling that federal courts can’t resolve claims of partisan gerrymandering is “almost guaranteed to facilitate massive election rigging in the future.”
New York Times reporter Sydney Ember has a problem with Bernie Sanders—which may be why the paper has her cover him. Ember is supposed to write reported articles, not op-eds, but she consistently paints a negative picture of Sanders’ temperament, history, policies and/or political prospects in the over two dozen pieces she’s done on him. This makes sense, given the New York Times’ documented anti-Sanders bias, which can be found among both editors and reporters alike. The paper was caught making significant changes, without acknowledging them, to a 2016 article on Sanders hours after it went up: It changed the headline (from “Bernie Sanders Scored Victories for Years via Legislative Side Doors,” to “Via Legislative Side Doors, Bernie Sanders Won Modest Victories”); deleted a positive quote from a campaign advisor; and added two negative paragraphs. Even after the paper’s public editor chastised the Times for the practice known as stealth editing, the editors defended the changes because they “thought [the article] should say more about his realistic chances.” In its original form, the article didn’t cast enough doubt on Sanders’ viability and ability to govern, in other words.
For a number of years, the International Socialists Organization, once the largest Marxist group in the USA, held educational conferences either in Chicago or in various American cities. In 2004, I attended a plenary session of a regional conference at City College in New York, mostly to hear my old friend Peter Camejo who was the featured speaker alongside Ahmed Shawki, the disgraced former leader whose cover-up of multiple rapes in the ISO led to its dissolution this year. If Peter had lived, I am not sure what he would make of its demise. Although he was a sharp critic of “Leninism”, he had high regard for the ISO, as did the late Sol Dollinger, a member of Bert Cochran and Harry Braverman’s Socialist Union. The Socialist Union was the first attempt to break with sectarianism in the USA but dissolved in 1959 because of unfavorable political conditions not all that different from what we face today. Those conditions played a large role in the ISO’s demise. If being a Marxist today is like swimming against the current (the aptly named magazine of Solidarity, another left group following in the Socialist Union tradition), the current period has left most socialist groups gasping for air like spawning salmons. The ISO was formed in 1977, just at the point when the Socialist Workers Party, the sect I belonged to, had begun a “colonization of industry” strategy that would eventually reduce its membership by 90 percent. The Maoist groups of the late 60s and early 70s had also begun to sputter out and die, their story recorded in Max Elbaum’s essential “Revolution in the Air”. If Leninist groups have a shelf life, the 21-year history of the ISO is about par for the course. Except for Kshama Sawant’s Socialist Alternative, there is no self-avowed Leninist group that amounts to anything in 2019. Those that still exist tend to be hermetically sealed sects like the Spartacist League or the Socialist Equality Party that have never sought to have an impact on the mass movement, seeing themselves instead as its high priesthood critics.
Does it matter that Bernie Sanders says that he is a socialist while Elizabeth Warren insists that she is not? The short answer is: No. A slightly more nuanced, but still short, answer would be: “maybe just a tad, but not necessarily in a way that redounds in Sanders’ favor, even for those of us who think that, in the long run, a turn to socialism is America’s and the world’s best, perhaps only, hope. At this point in the nomination process for the 2016 election, it mattered more than it now does. Sanders had just decided to run –making him automatically the top, indeed the only, “progressive” in the field. Had Warren been running too, we would then have been in much the situation we are now. She decided to sit it out. I would venture that among her reasons at the time was that the party establishment and their corporate backers had a candidate in the race, Hillary Clinton. She probably realized that the fix was in. Or she decided not to do anything that could be perceived as an effort to divide the “the smash through the glass ceiling” vote; or both. Or she had something else on her mind altogether, like thinking that she wasn’t yet ready. Clinton’s functional equivalent now is Joe Biden, the Great Moderate Hope. In almost every respect, his politics is as bad or worse than hers. The main difference between those two is that he is more pathetic; almost as much as Donald Trump, he is his own worst enemy.
To avoid being divided and conquered in 2020, progressive voters must choose between Warren and Sanders, their two leading, if not only, alternatives to the Democrats’ establishment candidate. Are there strategic differences between them relevant to making that choice that are accessible now? This question was raised directly in a recent article by Elizabeth Bruenig, an opinion columnist at The Washington Post. Plutocrat Jeff Bezos’ WaPo offered an establishment answer to “one of the key questions in the race: What is the difference between Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)?” WaPo argued that the difference is one between Revolution and Reform/Regulation. This answer is strategically irrelevant because it pits two undefined and artificially opposed abstractions against each other in a manner designed to divide the bell curve of opinion rhetorically, according to progressive voters’ subjective reactions to variable qualitative notions of these two perspectives. At most this distinction would seem to reflect either some subjective sense of urgency or a weakness for hyperbole.
Same stage. Same rules. But the Democrats’ second back-to back debate is fueled by star power. Debate night No. 2 marks the first time top-tier presidential candidates will confront one another in person over who is best fit to lead the Democratic effort to oust President Donald Trump in 2020.
Sen. Kamala Harris directly confronted Joe Biden over his civil rights record during Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate, highlighting the former vice president’s opposition to school busing as a senator in the 1970s and his fond recollection of the “civility” of notorious segregationists. After saying it was “hurtful” to hear Biden offer kind words earlier this month about two senators who “built their reputations and career on the segregation of race in this country”—James O. Eastland and Herman Talmadge—Harris invoked “a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day.”
Democrats, liberals, progressives—call them what you will—don’t really do foreign policy. Sure, if cornered, they’ll spout a few choice talking points, and probably find a way to make them all about bashing President Donald Trump—ignoring the uncomfortable fact that their very own Barack Obama led and expanded America’s countless wars for eight long years. This was ever so apparent in the first two nights of Democratic primary debates this week. Foreign policy hardly registered for these candidates with one noteworthy exception: Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard—herself an (anti-war) combat veteran and army officer. Now primary debates are more show than substance; this has long been the case. Still, to watch the first night’s Democratic primary debates, it was possible to forget that the United States remains mired in several air and ground wars from West Africa to Central Asia. In a two-hour long debate, with 10 would-be nominees plus the moderators, the word Afghanistan was uttered just nine times—you know, once for every two years American troops have been killing and dying there. Iraq was uttered just twice—both times by Gabbard. Syria, where Americans have died and still fight, was mentioned not once. Yemen, the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, courtesy of a U.S.-supported Saudi terror campaign didn’t get mentioned a single time, either.
Before attempting to parse the various exhibitions of affected candor on display during last night’s Democratic “debate,” the first of this long election season with many more to follow, let me be obvious for a moment: This is no way to pick a president. Even in the milled perfection of a machine world, 10 robot candidates in a two-hour debate would only have 12 minutes each to explain why they should be president of these wildly complex and dangerous United States. As we are flesh, however, viewers were required to endure several commercial breaks, candidates talking beyond their 45-second time allotments, moderator Chuck Todd being a clown, and an elongated microphone malfunction that ate 10 percent of the event. At best, candidates each averaged maybe eight minutes of combined time to make their points and try to stand out. They were required in this scant window to race through answers on health care, the gender pay gap, economic inequality, the ongoing immigration crisis, Iran, reproductive freedom, gun violence, the Supreme Court, LGBTQ rights, racial justice, military interventions to end atrocities, the eternal war in Afghanistan, the merits of impeaching Donald Trump, and more. Unless a candidate pulled a live duck out of their pants in the middle of a rushed discourse on raising the minimum wage after a different candidate spent their 45 seconds quick-splaining the Iran crisis, they were all going to be subsumed to one degree or another by the very nature of the affair. It was speed dating writ large, and a comprehensive disservice to the country given what is at stake.
In early April I published two columns opposing Joe Biden’s entry into the Democratic presidential race, arguing that “he is looking backward at a time when we need to move forward,” and “he offers too little, beyond nostalgia, at a time when much is called for.” Everything that has happened since his entry has confirmed this judgment. On the one hand, Biden has tripped over a series of hot-button issues — #MeToo, the Hyde Amendment, and now racially coded language — with his unique combination of tone deafness and stubborn self-righteousness. On the other hand, he has said and done nothing that adds anything new to policy debate or enhances the Democratic Party’s ability to mobilize new voters and to reinvigorate itself. In this regard, his entry into the race represents a profound regression in the face of the party’s real mobilizations, and victories, in November 2018. Biden’s “claim” to the nomination is a simple one: “I’ve been around forever, you know me, I’m decent, I was with Barack, I am not an idiot, and I am not Trump.” His current cluelessness about the racial and broader identity politics of today’s Democratic Party, to which I will return in a moment, has painfully exposed the thinness of this claim. But perhaps equally telling is his performance at the South Carolina Democratic Party Convention this past weekend. Trying to keep to the seven minutes of time allotted to each Democratic presidential candidate, Biden rushed through a terrible, uninspired speech in which he basically listed a bunch of policy ideas, each of which has been advanced with more vigor by one or more of his competitors. His message was tame, and lame.
The television footage of White House acting Chief-of-Staff Mick Mulvaney being kicked out of the Oval Office by Donald Trump for coughing during a television shoot with ABC’s George Stephonopolous was chilling. “Let’s do that over, he’s coughing in the middle of my answer,” Trump said. “I don’t like that, you know. I don’t like that….If you’re going to cough, please leave the room,” Trump said to Mulvaney while shaking his tangerine-tinted head. “You just can’t, you just can’t cough.” Jackie Alemany, a former Trump campaign staffer, found the incident unsurprising. “I was told by multiple people when I came aboard,” Alemany tweeted, “to never cough or sneeze while in the presence of Trump. He thinks it’s a sign of weakness and lack of control.” As one wag quipped, “Never Cough or Sneeze” sounds like a good name for Trump’s health care plan if he ever comes up with one. I was reminded of the time Trump made some of his top underlings (including serial Hatch Act-violator Kellyanne Conway and Trump’s chief economic advisor Larry Kudlow) cringingly testify as to his “calm demeanor” during his last White House meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer. The way this president degrades his own staff ought to be setting off anti-authoritarian alarm bells. Instead it just sparks wry amusement and resignation. In this as in so many other ways, the Madness of Wannabe King Don is eerily normalized.
The Democrats’ first debate was held in Miami, Florida. The venue was less than an hour away from Homestead, Florida, where more than 2,000 unaccompanied minors are incarcerated in a for-profit detention center run by Caliburn. Trump’s former Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly sits on its board. Prior to the debate, Senators Warren and Klobuchar visited the facility. During the debate, Julián Castro, the former secretary of housing and urban development, criticized the immigration policies of fellow Texan, former Congressmember Beto O’Rourke. We air part of the debate and speak to Ana María Archila of the Center for Popular Democracy.
Ten Democrats railed against a national economy and Republican administration they said exists only for the rich as presidential candidates debated onstage for the first time in the young 2020 season, embracing class warfare as a defining theme in their fight to deny President Donald Trump a second term in office. Health care, more than any other issue, led the debate. And Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, more than anyone else, stood out — on her own at times — in calling for “fundamental change” across the nation’s economy and government to address persistent issues of inequality. “I think of it this way. Who is this economy really working for? It’s doing great for a thinner and thinner slice at the top,” Warren declared shortly before raising her hand as one of the only Democrats on stage willing to abolish her own private health insurance in favor of a government-run plan. “Health care is a basic human right and I will fight for basic human rights.”
On the first night of the first Democratic debates, Elizabeth Warren gave a master class in when to speak and when to keep one’s mouth shut. This is a lesson former Vice President Joe Biden could learn a ton from. When Waren did speak, it was clear, passionate, on point, and richly factual. On health care, she even surprised a bit by committing to eliminating private insurance where she has previously hedged her betting. The performance earned her a spot in the top three, a cut above the rest, with Julián Castro and Cory Booker. On March 16, Warren was in the doldrums in terms of net favorability rating, according to my charting that tracks polling in the field in the previous month. Viewing her favorably or very favorably, on average, were 34.5% of respondents while 42.9% viewed her unfavorably or very unfavorably for a net -8.4% average. Warren had just introduced her well-received plan to break-up big technology firms like Amazon, but she languished a whopping 28% behind Joe Biden’s mid-March average of 20.8% net favorability. Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Beto O’Rourke hovered together between -2.5 and -3.0%. Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden were the only candidates in positive territory, but there was a massive difference between the two.
How do we make sense of 20 candidates and four hours of debate? Some key take-aways, then a report card. First, the format is crazy, making it difficult for any candidate to say much, but some candidates made the most of a bad situation. Second, it is really, really early. We’re eight months away from the first primaries. Perhaps half the candidates are likely to drop out before that, which would be good to eliminate lots of the clutter of going-nowhere candidates. Third, the Democrats have moved significantly to the left since the 2016 election, on health care, criminal justice reform, the environment, gun control, the minimum wage, and other issues. But it turns out that, according to polls, a majority of Americans agree with them. Ideas that once seemed radical now sound like common sense. For that we can thank Bernie, Trump, and the amazing resistance movement, including Planned Parenthood, the Fight for 15, Indivisible, Black Lives Matter, and the impressive mosaic of grassroots activists who protested in the streets in 2017 and knocked on doors registering and bringing out voters in 2018. One of the real winners of the debates were the activist students from Parkland, Florida, who helped change the political climate on gun control. I'm a professor, so I have a responsibility to assign grades. Here's my debate report card in terms of their performance this week, not who I want to win the nomination. I support Warren, and could see Castro, Harris, or Mayor Pete as her VP running mate (although Harris would be more effective staying in the Senate).
a However, Trump did not mention about the Khashoggi murder case during his meeting with the Saudi Prince.
The United Nations has called for an international investigation into the alleged killing, adding that the Saudi probe into the matter has failed to examine who may have ordered it. But, Saudi officials have denied that the crown prince had any involvement in the killing.
The Washington Post has reported the Central Intelligence Agency concluded the crown prince ordered the execution.
Khashoggi was a Saudi citizen who had grown increasingly critical of the Saudi government; fearing for his safety, he moved to the U.S. and became a permanent resident. He went to the Saudi consulate in Turkey on Oct. 2 to get some routine documents he needed to marry his fiancee and never emerged. His body has yet to be found.
A top U.N. human rights expert released a report last week detailing "credible evidence" that high-level officials in Saudi Arabia — including Bin Salman, the kingdom's crown prince and de facto ruler — were involved in the death of Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist.
The tweets of prominent politicians such as President Trump will now be governed by a separate set of rules than average users, Twitter announced on Thursday.
The platform is rolling out new criteria for government officials who violate Twitter’s guidelines, which formalizes a process for preserving tweets that are deemed to be of “public interest.”
Preliminary restraining orders targeting speech are almost always unconstitutional. It's not just the First Amendment getting the shaft when judges do this, but the adversarial court process which is supposed to allow defendants to present a rebuttal before the judge starts handing out remedies. Waiting until the facts are in is a good rule of thumb just about anywhere, but especially in this case where a judge handed out a preliminary injunction after having seen nothing more than a super-vague complaint. The defendant -- accused of libel per se and various forms of secondhand harassment -- now has the ACLU on his side.
The Russian government sure loves its registration. If anyone wants to do anything involving the written (and/or broadcasted) word in Russia, the government wants to know who you are. That makes it easier to find you should you displease the Russian government and/or its bear-riding autocrat. It's so great to be part of the new New World Order. Gone are the days of the Soviet Union and its direct control of the nation's press outlets. We're living in a new era of quasi-, mostly-mob-fueled-capitalism in Russia. And with it comes… the direct control of the nation's press outlets. The Russian government has demanded all bloggers register with the government in order to continue blogging. The government has also demanded all Wi-Fi networks be registered with the government. So it goes without saying all domestic press is registered with the government, but we'll say it anyway since unregistered press outfits are being hit with hefty fines for not playing ball with their overlords.
I don't often mention it here, because it's way off-topic, but I'm a bit obsessed with baseball -- and only rarely does that cross over into a Techdirt related topic, such as when MLB tried to claim it owned stats (spoiler alert: it does not). Anyway, a month or two ago I came across a wonderful Twitter feed called @Jomboy_ who mostly tweets out (funny and clever) stuff about the NY Yankees, but also every day or so puts out really amazing and hilarious "breakdown" videos about events throughout baseball. These vignettes are usually less than two minutes long, and frequently feature what appear to be his amazingly accurate lip-reading skills (not to mention capturing little things happening in the background) and also a bit of well-placed profanity (if you happen to be listening in a workplace that might not appreciate that). I usually watch them on Twitter, but for embedding purposes, it's easier to use YouTube (where he also posts the videos), so I'll use some examples from there (and intersperse a few, because if you like baseball, they're wonderful).
Recently Wired had a pretty amazing cover article on the inside story on the DOJ's legal war against Backpage that is superbly well-written and quite interesting. Wired found the perfect reporter for this in Christine Biederman, who was once a staff reporter at one of the many alt weeklies owned by Michael Lacey and James Larkin -- the two owners of Backpage who are still facing federal charges over the site -- as well as a former assistant US attorney at the DOJ. Biederman understands all of the issues here deeply and does a great job laying them all out. I highly recommend you set aside some time to read the whole article, which gives a great backgrounder on Lacey and Larkin, how they built up an alt-weekly empire, only to see it fizzle, while then building out Backpage as a massive success -- and who now face criminal charges that raise all sorts of legal questions. For this post, however, I did want to focus on some of the legal issues. We've discussed Backpage a lot over the years, including questioning whether what it did was truly illegal. No one denies that the site was absolutely used for some fairly horrible things -- including sex trafficking. The questions, though, surround whether or not that's Backpage's responsibility -- and whether or not in shutting down the site, law enforcement actually shut down a useful tool in tracking down actual traffickers, making the trafficking problem worse. Biederman's piece also shows some of the moral panic around FOSTA, and raises questions about just how big the sex trafficking issue truly is and whether or not the government is abusing the civil asset forfeiture process to make it impossible for Lacey and Larkin to mount a defense. These are all topics that we've long covered on Techdirt.
At least four Twitter handles were suspended over the weekend but restored following an outcry.
With growing concerns over online privacy and securing personal data, more people than ever are considering alternatives to Google products. After all, Google’s business model essentially revolves around data collection and advertisements, both of which infringe on your privacy. More data means better (targeted) ads and more revenue. The company pulled in over $116 billion in ad revenue last year alone – and that number continues to grow.
The NSA may have extremely belatedly decided to give up its bulk phone records collection, but that's only after years of dysfunction, abuse, and escalating uselessness. The problems with the NSA's collection of phone records dates back to at least 2004 -- a 14-year streak of violations that may only now be coming to an end because of the NSA's voluntary sunsetting. For years, the NSA treated the phone records collection as essential to national security. Not much was said about it until Ed Snowden leaked a court order showing the NSA was sweeping up every record possessed by Verizon's business services wing. Then things got heated and the NSA was unable to justify its continued existence. Once the program was modified, the NSA had even more trouble collecting records lawfully. It may have been limited to performing targeted searches, but it was still somehow able to over-collect. Whether this was due to the NSA's filtering of returned search results or errors on the telco side when providing records, the NSA hasn't definitively said. But it did destroy millions of records it never should have had in the first place, strongly suggesting the agency was still collecting in bulk, despite legislative changes.
Just as the Trump administration has signaled its interest in a permanent “clean” reauthorization of the Patriot Act’s phone surveillance provision, the NSA proves once again that it is not to be trusted with these tools. New documents obtained by the ACLU and reported in the Wall Street Journal have revealed that last year the NSA once again collected phone records of Americans that it was not authorized to obtain. The NSA collected Information, including who phone-users were calling and for how long, after a telecommunications firm began sending the information to the NSA—despite the fact that it had received no orders that would have authorized them to do so. Although the name of the company is redacted, for years it has been widely reported that large telecommunication firms like AT&T and Verizon have worked with the NSA as part of BLARNEY, an NSA project that leverages “commercial partnerships” in order to gather intelligence. This “anomalous” unauthorized collection of American’s private information comes only a few months after a separate incident in which “technical irregularities” resulted in the NSA getting access to many more records than it should have. In response, the NSA erased three years of all of its collected metadata, which amounted to records of hundreds of millions of phone calls. The documents released today include an assessment by the NSA that the overcollection had a “significant impact on civil liberties and privacy,” which is putting it mildly.
Between October and November of 2018, [attackers] planted a strain of malware called Regin, which is said to be popular with Five Eyes. That's the intelligence-sharing alliance between America, Britain, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, rather than the burger chain. You're thinking of Five Guys.
The sources who described the attack to Reuters said the [attackers] appeared to be searching for technical information that could explain how Yandex authenticates user accounts. Such information could help a spy agency impersonate a Yandex user and access their private messages.
Blighty's biometrics commissioner Paul Wiles sounded the alarms about the "chaotic" way in which police forces have been using facial recognition.
In his annual report [PDF], Wiles also voiced concern over the lack of clear rules for government use of biometric databases, which poses "clear risks of abuse" and risks to civil liberties.
It cracked open the Snohomish County case when investigators worked with a private company to trace semen left at one of the crime scenes to Talbott through two cousins who had uploaded their own genetic information to a public database called GEDMatch. Such sites help people build family trees and trace their ancestral roots through shared DNA, a practice known as genetic genealogy. Recently, police departments and the FBI have begun using the method to dig up suspects. Genetic genealogy has already been used to advance dozens of cold cases since it very publicly resulted in the arrest of the suspected Golden State Killer last April. But until Talbott’s case went to trial at the beginning of this month, the technique had never been tested in court.
The guideline changes, announced on June 27, are largely cosmetic. The updates don’t change Facebook’s underlying policies.
In a major embarrassment for Uber, the Mumbai police, who were tracking a missing person who had last taken an Uber, had to tweet to them saying that their helpline number was not working. Twitterati who had faced similar experiences delightedly jumped aboard the bandwagon, heaping criticism on the cab aggregator.
Which is to say, if a cop starts shouting "gun!" during an interaction with you, that cop intends to kill you.
And if the cop is poking his gun at you sideways like a cartoon gangster? You better get lucky fast.
Hong Kong police this month fired rubber bullets and tear gas at people taking part in the protests—the largest since crowds demonstrated against the bloody suppression of pro-democracy activists in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989.
Sri Lanka has recruited two hangmen as it prepares to carry out four executions - the first in 43 years.
Al Ahmad has produced documentaries for the BBC and PBS about uprisings in the Middle East, particularly in Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Her 2014 BBC documentary, “Saudi’s Secret Uprising,” brought attention to government suppression of unreported popular demonstrations in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province.
[...]
Wallenberg graduated from U-M’s College of Architecture in 1935. In 1944, at the request of Jewish organizations and the American War Refugee Board, the Swedish Foreign Ministry sent Wallenberg on a rescue mission to Budapest.
In a moving ceremony that took place at the Chapel of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedachtniskirche, Bundestag Member, Cem Ozdemir was awarded the Raoul Wallenberg Medal in recognition of his role in building bridges between Armenians and Turks and his pivotal contribution as a driving force behind the Bill passed by the Bundestag in June 2, 2016, which recognized the massive killings of Armenians from 1915, as a Genocide.
As an ER physician, I see patients like these every day. They work hard. They play by the rules. Yet they’re struggling to get by because of prescription drugs and medical procedures that get more expensive every year. I see patients who worry about losing their healthcare because of cuts to Medicaid. I see patients who have so many chronic conditions when they walk through the doors that treating them requires an entire team of healthcare professionals.
These are just a few of the people who will be most affected by what happens in our nation’s healthcare debate. In Michigan, one out of every two people has a preexisting condition. Medical debt is the number one reason for personal bankruptcies in the United States.
The report from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation finds that millions of people with what’s considered solid coverage from large employers are nonetheless exposed to “out-of-network” charges that can amount to thousands of dollars. It comes as congressional lawmakers of both parties and the Trump administration move to close the loophole, with a Senate panel scheduled to vote on legislation next week.
Not every hospital sues over unpaid bills, but a few sue a lot. In Virginia, 36% of hospitals sued patients and garnished their wages in 2017, according to a study published Tuesday in the American Medical Association's journal, JAMA. Five hospitals accounted for over half of all lawsuits — and all but one of those were nonprofits. Mary Washington sued the most patients, according to the researchers.
[...]
"Hospitals were built — mostly by churches — to be a safe haven for people regardless of one's race, creed or ability to pay. Hospitals have a nonprofit status — most of them — for a reason," says Martin Makary, one of the JAMA study's authors and a surgeon and researcher at Johns Hopkins Medicine. "They're supposed to be community institutions."
Many people in Pakistan are suspicious of the polio vaccine, despite the fact it saves lives. But tensions were running even higher than usual.
The day before their visit, a mass vaccination at a village school in the suburbs of Peshawar had ended in violence and arson.
The headmaster of the school, in Mashokhel village, had previously refused to allow the polio vaccine. This time he had bowed to government pressure and the inoculations had gone ahead. But shortly afterwards he rang parents to tell them their children were fainting and vomiting.
Dozens of students from the school were taken to hospital. All were found to have no symptoms and were discharged. But it was too late to contain the panic, which had spread quickly via social media.
Furious parents gathered outside a local government health facility, broke down its boundary wall with hammers and sticks, kicked down the front gate, and barged inside to burn it down. All of this was shown live on local TV, which sparked even greater alarm in Peshawar.
Suicide rates among people 15 to 64 increased significantly during that period, rising from 10.5 per 100,000 people in 1999 to 14 per 100,000 in 2017, the most recent year with available data, according to annual research published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics on Thursday.
We've covered the increasing reliance on tech to replace human judgment in the criminal justice system, and the news just keeps getting worse. The job of sentencing is being turned over to software owned by private contractors, which puts a non-governmental party between defendants and challenges to sentence length. The systems being used haven't been rigorously tested and are as prone to bias as the humans they're replacing. The system used by Washington, DC courts to sentence juvenile defendants hasn't been examined ever, and yet it's still being used to determine how long a person's freedom should be taken away. This system had been in place for 14 years before anyone challenged it. Defense lawyers found nothing that explained the court's confidence in using it to sentence juveniles.
Liberty is the second of the three inalienable rights laid out in the Declaration of Independence, its exercise requiring the first (Life) and leading to the third (the Pursuit of Happiness). Liberty is not mentioned in the American national anthem, Francis Scott Key concentrating his meager poetical talents on images of war and destruction rather than on the ideals on which his country was supposedly founded. Indeed, some liberty-seekers received only Key’s condemnation: the British invaders of the War of 1812 freed the slaves they encountered, enlisting some to fight against their former masters. Key scoffed at these freedom fighters in his third verse, claiming that “no refuge could save them.” In “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” penned by the nineteenth-century Baptist Minister Samuel Francis Smith, the word comes as the first of any significance, the cleric rhyming closing the first rhyme with: “Sweet Land of Liberty.” Liberty and Freedom appear several times across the hymn’s seven verses.
CIA Director Gina Haspel made a rare public appearance on April 18 when she spoke at Auburn University. Haspel reflected on her 34-year career with the agency, but failed to mention the years she spent involved in its extraordinary rendition program. She was quickly interrupted by a member of the audience: “Do you remember the thrill of the CIA black sites you tortured people in and the evidence you destroyed? Tell these young children, tell them who you tortured. You know their names: They’re still in Guantánamo Bay.” Haspel paused until the man was removed and then continued as though nothing had happened. Such has been the approach to her involvement in CIA torture since she became the agency’s deputy director in 2017. Following Haspel’s nomination as director and in the run-up to her confirmation hearing in May 2018, questions were raised about the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and what she knew about the program; nonetheless, the mainstream media has since been actively engaged in whitewashing Haspel’s record. The situation is, as always, one of business as usual. In 2005, Haspel helped to destroy 92 videotapes of evidence of CIA torture of two detainees: Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, both currently held at Guantánamo, where al-Nashiri awaits trial in a capital case on the basis of evidence obtained by torture. Still, that did not turn the trail cold. If the mainstream media were more diligent, they could discover a lot about Haspel’s career by taking a closer look at the cases of her victims: A footnote in the redacted version of the 2014 Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report led to the successful Freedom of Information Act disclosure in October 2018 of declassified cables in which Haspel “described graphic acts of deliberate physical torture including the waterboarding of a suspected Al-Qa’ida terrorist under her supervision when she was chief of base at a CIA black site in Thailand in 2002”: His name is Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In January, much of the media failed to pick up on the redacted transcript of a November 2018 closed hearing in the 9/11 case at Guantánamo, in which a lawyer for defendant Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told the judge that Haspel had run a black site at Guantánamo Bay. Author and blogger Jeffrey Kaye revealed that the same transcript implicates Haspel as being present at a third CIA black site, a torture facility in Poland.
Lind-Guzik -- who is Jewish -- points out that the term "concentration camp" predates the Holocaust, and that the US refered to the internment camps where it illegally imprisoned Japanese Americans during WWII as concentration camps. There's no question that as a matter of linguistics, "concentration camp" is the right word for what the US is doing on its border.
The investigation also revealed suspicions that the alleged culprit may in fact be over 20 years old. In this case, the penalty will be longer.
Towards the end of the video, Rafi and his Indonesian and Filipino counterparts are seen standing over three men whom they beheaded for purportedly being murtad (apostates).
Salkicevic, aka Medy Ummuluna and Bosna Mexico, espoused the ISIS philosophy that infidels should be killed and once said that unbelievers should be buried alive.
A strip club in an industrial area of Ãârebro in central Sweden was gutted in a blaze after a suspected explosion at the venue in the early hours of Wednesday.
While the number of extremists in Sweden is estimated to have grown from hundreds to thousands, the men suspected of spreading radical Islam and supporting terrorism were allowed to run mosques and even worked with schools and pre-schools.
Ãâstberga is located south of the city centre and is one of several neighbourhoods classified by Swedish police as 'vulnerable'...
For the women at the march, they were protesting not so much for each story that made the headlines but for the many hundreds that had gone unheard. Stories like those captured by the viral hashtag #WhyIMarch, where women shared their stories of sexual harassment, domestic violence, and forced marriage. For many, this was the first time the statisticsââ¬Å —ââ¬Å that there are an estimated 1,000 honor killings per year, that 21% of girls in Pakistan are married off before the age of 18, and that the current gender pay gap stands at 39%ââ¬Å —ââ¬Å had been brought to light.
Globally, the Trump administration’s policy is contributing to a backlash against women’s and girl’s rights, according to women’s rights advocates, including Royo, and political leaders from around the world who attended Women Deliver, the world’s largest conference on gender equality, in Vancouver in early June.
Authorities in the Sudanese capital are trying to erase any sign of the horrors of June 3, when troops, spearheaded by a paramilitary unit called the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), opened fire on a pro-democracy sit-in, killing at least 118 people, according to the Central Committee of Sudan Doctors.
Yet that’s exactly what just happened. Nor is Marshae Jones the first woman to face criminal charges for the unintentional loss of a pregnancy. Women have been prosecuted for the deaths of fetuses as the byproduct of car accidents, attempted suicide, drug overdoses, and more. Most of those women have been poor and in various sorts of trouble; the kind of people who don’t usually get a lot of understanding from the public. The way their stories are told amplifies our lack of empathy: They are portrayed as careless (you were pregnant and not wearing your seatbelt?), selfish (why couldn’t you wait till you gave birth to kill yourself?), and out of control. Legal abortion has always been the exception to fetal homicide laws, which is not very logical but was mandated by Roe v. Wade. Now, with Roe threatened as never before, we see that the people who warned the laws were a stalking horse to criminalize abortion and had nothing to do with the safety of pregnant women were right.
Seven men, including a local government official, barged into the women’s home late on Wednesday in northeastern Bihar with the intent of raping the teenage daughter, senior police officer Sanjay Kumar said.
“When the mother and daughter protested, the men got angry and called a local barber, who shaved their heads,” Kumar told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by telephone.
Narrating her ordeal, the victims said they were mercilessly beaten by the men leading to injuries. "We have been beaten very badly. I have injuries all over my body and my daughter too has some injuries, " the woman said.
Detailing the incident, the girl said, "I was alone with my mother around 6:30 in the evening when five men from the neighborhood forcefully entered the house and tried to molest me. When my mother and I protested, they started beating us with a stick and took us outside of the house."
An case has been registered at the Bhagwanpur Police Station and further investigation is underway.
Washington hands billions over to corporations profiting off of inhumane detention and incarceration policies while ignoring the families that are destroyed in the process. We need to call that out for what it is: corruption. Incarcerating and detaining millions for profit doesn’t keep us safe. It’s time to do better.
The number of young individuals admitted to hospital with wounds inflicted by knives or sharp objects in England has soared by more than half in the past five years, the NHS has said.
The bill, which would have allowed extradition to mainland China, prompted hundreds of thousands to demonstrate in the past week.
Hong Kong's Chief Executive Carrie Lam said on Saturday that the plans had been "suspended" for the time being.
Protest leaders, however, are demanding it be permanently scrapped.
The roots of the crisis lay not with Lam—nor even in Hong Kong—but more than 1,200 miles away, in Beijing. Hong Kong’s turmoil represented residents’ deep distrust of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s autocratic regime, which Hong Kongers fear is encroaching more and more on the “one country, two systems” autonomy that Beijing committed to for 50 years when China reclaimed Hong Kong from Britain in 1997. They see Beijing’s judicial system as opaque and politicized, and they fear the bill will allow people in Hong Kong to be extradited and tried in mainland China’s notorious courts for any reason, even political dissent. Right now, Hong Kong does not have extradition agreements with mainland China, Taiwan, Macau, and other places.
While the timing of the crisis took Beijing by surprise, there are signs that China’s leaders are looking to exploit it for their advantage. [...]
A 15-year-old girl in Uttar Pradesh's Shahjahanpur has accused her father and brother of trying to kill her because she did not want to get married as per their wishes and instead wanted to continue her studies.
An early warning tool that tracks water supplies worldwide and mixes in social, economic and demographic data to flag up potential crises is being developed by the Netherlands-based Water, Peace and Security partnership (WPS).
During tests, the system predicted more than three-quarters of water-related conflicts in Mali’s Inner Niger Delta, said WPS, which plans to launch it globally later this year.
The officer was the only person who fired shots in the store, the department said.
Gallego, the Phoenix mayor, said that in response to the incident, the city will be speeding up its implementation of police body-worn cameras across the entire police department. She has also scheduled a public meeting with the police chief for the community to air its thoughts about the troubling footage of the police interaction.
If such violence had occurred in Nashville rather than Nigeria, it would dominate nightly news broadcasts and saturate social media feeds. American churches would be launching fundraising campaigns for victims’ families and addressing it in their weekly gatherings. In this case, however, the American church has barely acknowledged it. Unfortunately, when violence occurs somewhere “over there” instead of in our backyard, it is often dismissed as just another story. American churches must do better.
I constantly bear witness to this sort of violence and the corresponding malaise by the nature of the organization I lead, Open Doors USA. We track such incidents of Christian persecution around the world through our annual World Watch List, a comprehensive ranking of countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian. To us, this is more than just “another story"; it is another data point in a global crisis of persecution. One of every nine Christians experience high levels of persecution and suffer for their faith, and it’s picking up pace.
It’s not just in Nigeria.
In 2017, FCC head Ajit Pai came under fire for filling a new "Broadband Deployment Advisory Council" (BDAC) task force with oodles of industry representatives, but few if any consumer representatives or local town or city officials. Not too surprisingly the panel saw a significant amount of controversy, several protest resignations, and the arrest of a one-time panel chair for fraud, but the panel itself never actually accomplished much of anything to address the problem it was created for. This week more data emerged on the details behind the arrest of Pai's former council head Elizabeth Ann Pierce. Pierce, the former CEO of Alaskan telecom provider Quintillion, is headed to jail after a pretty elaborate fraud scheme that bilked numerous investors out of some significant cash.
Fifth-generation wireless (5G) will be a good thing when it finally arrives at scale in a few years, in that faster, more reliable networks are always good. But at the same time, 5G's capabilities have been comically over-hyped by cellular carriers and network hardware vendors looking to sell more cell phones and network hardware. Cellular carriers appear to be in a race to to broadly misrepresent not only what 5G is capable of--but where and when it will actually be available to the public at large.
It's a good, fun, readable vision of the world we're currently heading for based on EU regulations and some of the nonsense being suggested regarding Section 230 today. The really annoying part is how little those who are pushing these regulations seem to realize what they're doing. Everyone is so focused on Section 230 these days as if it's the only "lever" they have to pull in regards to their complaints (some of which are totally reasonable) about the big internet companies. Very few of them bother to consider how all of this plays out -- which is why it's great that Cory is doing so. Of course, those who don't want to recognize what will happen don't seem to care. I've seen a few people dismissing the story as "fiction," which kind of misses the point. Hilariously, they're doing so on social media platforms enabled by the laws that these people are now trying to kill.
While many appointments of the Trump administration lack even marginal competence to complete the duties for which they're assigned, the same can't be said of FCC boss Ajit Pai. While Pai's industry-cozy policies may be historically unpopular, the efficiency with which Pai has dismantled telecom consumer protections (and FCC authority in general) can't be denied. Having been a vanilla commissioner for years before being appointed agency head, Pai knows precisely which rules to demolish--and how to obtain the maximum benefit for his core constituents: AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Charter Spectrum. Gutting net neutrality, killing efforts to bring competition to the cable box, even weakening the definition of competition to aid industry incumbents are but a taste of what Pai has been up to the last few years. Many of these efforts are subtle enough to fall under the radar, even if the impact of the decisions are profoundly negative. Case in point: last week, the FCC announced that the agency would soon vote on whether to preempt a San Francisco city ordinance designed to promote broadband competition in apartments, condos, and other multi-unit buildings.
I’ve poked just a bit about what Solid can do. Don’t have many time to do now. It’s nice to check how it’s based on linked data, so the potential applications are infinite. And they have a forum too (running Discourse, ââ¢Â¥). My IT personal strategy requires to implement my own services as much as I can. Solid has a server implementation available I would like to use somewhere in the future. Love to see the Semantic Web coming back.
Lexmark gave its customers the choice of paying extra for their cartridges (by buying refillable cartridges at a $50 premium), or paying extra for their toner (saving $50 on a cartridge whose "lock-out" chip prevented refilling, so that they would have to buy a whole cartridge when the non-refillable one ran dry). Customers, however, had a counteroffer for Lexmark: they wanted to save $50 on a "non-refillable" cartridge and then go ahead and refill it. After all, carbon is relatively abundant throughout the universe, and more locally, Earth has more carbon that it knows what to do with. Various competitors of Lexmark stepped up to help its customers with their counteroffer. One such company was Static Control Components, which reverse-engineered Lexmark's lock-out chip and found that its 55-byte program performed a relatively straightforward function that would be easy to duplicate: when a cartridge was newly filled, this chip signaled to the printer that the cartridge had available toner. Once the cartridge ran out, the chip would tell the printer that it had an empty cartridge. Refilling the cartridge did no good because the chip would still tell the printer that there was no toner available. After Static Control performed this bit of reverse engineering, it was able to manufacture its own chips, which it sold to remanufacturers, who would pour in fresh carbon, swap out the chip, and sell the cartridges. Lexmark had a strong objection to this. But like every business, Lexmark’s products should be subject to market pressures, including the possibility that customers will make uses (and re-uses) of your product that aren’t exactly what the manufacturer intended. Lexmark was in a position to create its own refilling business to compete with Static Control, of course. But it didn’t want to. Instead, it wanted to trap purchasers into the lucrative two-tier market it had dreamed up.
Microsoft is no stranger to the use of "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt" in the pursuit of monopolistic goals; the company perfected the tactic in the early 1990s as a way of scaring enterprise customers away from GNU/Linux; today, the company shows off its mastery of FUD in its filings to the Federal Trade Commission condemning proposals for Right-to-Repair rules. In its comments, Microsoft argues that allowing third-party repairs of Microsoft products could compromise its DRM systems, including dual-purpose security systems like the "Trusted Platform Module" (TPM) that are used to lock out rival operating systems as well as malicious actors. Luckily, we have Securepairs, a coalition of security experts devoted to debunking claims from repair monopolists who claim that opening repair markets will pose a security threat. Microsoft submitted its comments ahead of the FTC's "Nixing the Fix" workshop on Right to Repair, arguing that "If the TPM or other hardware or software protections were compromised by a malicious or unqualified repair vendor, those security protections would be rendered ineffective and consumers’ data and control of the device would be at risk. Moreover, a security breach of one device can potentially compromise the security of a platform or other devices connected to the network."
There is something about the beer and liquor industries that seems to attract unfortunate trademark disputes. The craft beer industry in particular has been recently plagued with these disputes, in large part due to the growth that industry has undergone coupled with once-small craft breweries going corporate and retaining aggressive legal teams. Many of the disputes are intra-industry, with one brewery attacking another over a perceived trademark issue. But that's not always the case. Occasionally we also see a trademark dispute needlessly erupt from a source outside the beer industry. That is most certainly the case with the University of Idaho, which has the mascot name "The Vandals", for some reason sending a cease and desist notice to an alumnus looking to open his Vandal Beer company.
I’m a Kat who likes coffee more than milk; I was surprised to see a company, well-known among third-wave coffee fans, facing trademark opposition from Caterpillar, Inc. One is a heavy machinery company, while the other consists of three coffee shops in central California; Cat & Cloud has portrayed this proceeding as a “Big Business Bullying [a] Small Business” and they may just have a large public at their back.
When it comes to matters of flags and intellectual property rights, the use of flags in trade marks may come to mind initially. However, a number of cases involving flags and copyright seem to have arisen in recent months, and on a worldwide basis too. One such instance arose in the U.S, where Tommy Hilfiger tried to register its flag as a 2-D artwork copyright claim, only to be rejected by the US Copyright Office Review Board in March.
The topic of flags and copyright has resurfaced once more in Australia with regards to the Aboriginal flag. This was brought to light in the media recently when it emerged that cease-and-desist notices had been sent by non-Aboriginal company ‘WAM Clothing’ to several other companies for use of the Aboriginal flag on their clothing. Companies notified included the Australian Football League, which uses the flag on football jerseys in its Indigenous rounds, as well as ‘Spark Health’, an Aboriginal-owned and run social enterprise company which produces shirts bearing the flag.
If you are interested in copyright, then the book Copyright in the Information Society: a guide to national implementation of the European Directive is the book for you! The book, part of the Elgar Intellectual Property Law and Practice series, is edited by Brigitte Lindner, Rechtsanwältin, Member of the Bar of Berlin, Germany, Registered European Lawyer, Lincoln's Inn, London, UK; and Ted Shapiro, Member of the Massachusetts and Brussels Bar, Solicitor, England and Wales, Wiggin LLP, Brussels, Belgium. The main idea behind this project, started in 2013 with the first edition of the book, is to describe how Directive 2001/29/EC, the "Copyright Directive", has been implemented by the various national legislatures and how they have dealt with the consequences of said implementation. The added value of this publication is the in-depth contributors' insights into their respective national systems.
For some time now, we've been discussing gaming company Epic's entry into the gaming platform wars. Epic made waves shortly after the launch of the Epic Store when it began gobbling up exclusivity deals for games, whereas the PC gaming industry has mostly been free from the kind of exclusivity wars that have plagued the console gaming industry. Steam, the enormous competitor in the market, responded to Epic getting some AAA game exclusive deals for the first 6 months after launch by complaining that its new rival's strategy was hurting gamers more than anything else. In response, Epic's Tim Sweeney jumped on Twitter and promised to end the exclusive game strategy if Valve's Steam platform would offer gamemakers the same more generous split on revenue that Epic is offering. See, Steam offers game publishers roughly 70% of game revenue back to the publisher to be on its platform, whereas Epic offers a flat 88%. This initial stance from Sweeney was laid out as altruism, with claims that what Epic was really after was a better gaming marketplace to allow more reinvestment in games, more games for the public, and thereby a happier gaming public. Much of the gaming community met this argument with narrow eyes. Epic, after all, is a business and businesses are designed to make money. Sweeney has since followed up on Epic's stance in a recent tweetstorm responding to public complaints about exclusive games. There's a lot in the 9 tweets from Sweeney, but let's start with the rationale for exclusive games on the Epic Store.
I've often made the point before that Nintendo hates you, dear Nintendo fan and general gamer. Between taking down fan-made levels, fan-made games, and going to war with all the ROMs everywhere, Nintendo values an overwhelmingly tight grip on its intellectual property rights far more than the natural desire by its own fans to express their fandom. The speed and reliability of Nintendo's lawyerly involvement has become something of a legend on the internet, with folks that make these expressions of fandom often joking upon release that it's only a matter of time before the suits come calling. This held true with Mario Royale, a delightfully simple little web game created by a fan that allowed players to play through Mario Bros. levels alongside up to 74 other simultaneous players. The classic game had never been used for this sort of thing and it was quite interesting to watch how it all worked. It's also worth noting that the game was playable for free, meaning there was no commercial aspect to it. Despite that, you all know what happened next.
Last fall we were happy to see the 11th Circuit rule that, obviously, a state's official laws couldn't be covered by copyright. As you may recall, the case involved the state of Georgia and Carl Malamud's Public.Resource.Org. Malamud has spent years helping to make the law more readily available to the public -- and has been on the receiving end of a bunch of lawsuits for his troubles. The case in Georgia had some slightly odd facts in that the state said that its laws were freely available, but it contracted out to a private company, LexisNexis, to produce an "annotated" version of the law. LexisNexis then got a copyright on the annotations, which it then assigned to the state. Then -- and this is the important part -- the state released the "Official Code of Georgia Annotated" (OCGA) as the only "official" version of the laws. When new laws were passed, they were specifically written to be included in the OCGA. While the lower court said that the annotations could be covered by copyright, and thus Malamud publishing a free online version was infringing, the 11th Circuit easily reversed. It didn't even say something more narrow, like arguing that the republishing was fair use. It said you can't copyright the law at all. Period. Full stop.
The greatest myth the RIAA and its friends ever pulled was convincing people -- including the press and some gullible musicians -- that it represented the best interests of artists and musicians. You would think musicians would have learned not to trust the RIAA long ago, especially given that its current CEO, Mitch Glazier, got his original job at the RIAA just months after he literally secretly inserted four words into an unrelated bill that literally stole the copyright from millions of musicians. Uproar from actual musicians finally got the RIAA to back down and Congress "corrected" Glazier's dirty work. Glazier's been at the RIAA ever since, and if you think the RIAA has artist's interests in mind, you've not been paying attention. A bunch of musicians are now suing the RIAA's largest member, Universal Music, for yet another way it profited off their works and didn't share the windfall. The story is kind of crazy all around. Last week, the NY Times Magazine had an incredible long read about a massive fire at Universal Studios in 2008 that literally wiped out hundreds of thousands of master recordings. Even though Universal Studios and Universal Music Group are two totally separate companies these days, apparently UMG stored its archives on the Universal Studios lot, even years after the two had been split apart.
A federal judge has ruled that litigation can go forward to determine whether Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act violates the First Amendment as applied. EFF brought this litigation on behalf of security researcher Matt Green, technologist bunnie Huang, and bunnie's company Alphamax, in order to vindicate the right to speak, learn, and innovate despite this overly-broad and harmful law. Originally passed to combat infringement, the sweeping language of Section 1201 allowed courts to interpret its provisions to leave out critical speech protections such as the fair use doctrine. This has interfered with educational uses of copyrighted works, accessibility, security research, remix art, and even your ability to repair your own car or tractor.
One of the things about copyright that copyright supporters really hate to discuss is just how problematic the whole idea of getting copyrights on photographs can be.
Simply-TV, a recently-defunct 'pirate' IPTV service, is being sued in the United States by broadcaster provider DISH Network. In a recent response to the complaint, the alleged operators of the service - which bears a close resemblance to the also defunct SETTV - accept some but not all of the allegations filed against them.
Data from a new survey released by Ampere Analysis shows that video piracy rates are dropping in the United States and several European countries. The research firm links the decrease to a wider availability of legal services, but warns that people may revert back to pirate sites, if the legal landscape continues to fragment.
China-based video-sharing site Bilibili has taken to the US courts in an effort to identify individuals who leaked its source code, usernames and passwords online. NASDAQ-listed Bilibili, which has more than 90 million monthly users, is using the DMCA to force Github to hand over the identities of several people who published the data on the platform.
Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne slammed President Donald Trump for playing the song “Crazy Train” in a video he tweeted Thursday following the 2020 democratic debates.
In a statement to Rolling Stone, the Osbournes said, “Based on this morning’s unauthorized use of Ozzy Osbourne’s ‘Crazy Train,’ we are sending notice to the Trump campaign (or any other campaigns) that they are forbidden from using any of Ozzy Osbourne’s music in political ads or in any political campaigns. Ozzy’s music cannot be used for any means without approvals.”
"In the meantime, we have a suggestion for Mr. Trump: perhaps he should reach out to some of his musician friends. Maybe Kayne West ('Gold Digger'), Kid Rock ('I Am the Bullgod') or Ted Nugent ('Stranglehold') will allow use of their music."
Osbourne isn’t alone to banning the US President from using his music to promote his political views - some of the biggest names in pop and rock, including The Rolling Stones, Queen, Neil Young, Aerosmith, REM, Adele and Rihanna, have already taken a similar stand.
