Bpftrace is a new open source tracer for Linux for analyzing production performance problems and troubleshooting software. Its users and contributors include Netflix, Facebook, Red Hat, Shopify, and others, and it was created by Alastair Robertson, a talented UK-based developer who has won various coding competitions.
Linux already has many performance tools, but they are often counter-based and have limited visibility. For example, iostat(1) or a monitoring agent may tell you your average disk latency, but not the distribution of this latency. Distributions can reveal multiple modes or outliers, either of which may be the real cause of your performance problems. Bpftrace is suited for this kind of analysis: decomposing metrics into distributions or per-event logs and creating new metrics for visibility into blind spots.
It's a logical approach, and as someone focused on usability and elegantly onboarding all new Linux users, I think a graphical interface for updating firmware just makes sense.
In order to benefit the larger Linux ecosystem, System76 has designed the Firmware Manager to be tookit-agnostic, although any frontend interaction will require Rust. The company also notes that its GTK widget can be implemented into any Ubuntu and Debian-based distributions not using GNOME. Critically, it supports both LVFS updates via fwupd as well as system76-firmware. It's also Wayland-compatible.
You can view the full project notes and source code here.
On a related note, if you're interested in why System76 uses its own firmware update service, I covered that earlier this year when the Asus "Shadowhammer" malware attack was making the rounds. Here's the relevant excerpt, detailing the decidedly Blockchain-inspired approach.
This week, the world of Linux witnessed several new releases, one of which is the latest Oracle Linux 7.7 that comes with new features, significant changes, and bug-fixes.
If you’re unfamiliar with Oracle Linux, let FOSSLinux do the honors of introducing it. This operating system has been made by Oracle itself and is aimed at enterprise workloads. It becomes evident after getting to know that it is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Also, it is perfect for Oracle developers as Oracle experts have done most of the work on this operating system.
[...]
In terms of the Red Hat Compatible Kernel, users will be able to see new features involving the kernel itself, storage, networking, and file systems.
With the new NetworkManager, VLANs can be defined directly on bridge ports, and VLAN filtering can be configured in bridge interfaces. Not to mention that users can now use the GUI for configuring policy routing rules.
Oracle Linux 7.7 offers increased security as it updates a couple of packages, including shadow-utils, scap-security-guide, and NSS (short for Network Security Services). Plus, it is now possible to scan UBI containers and packages against all profiles within the SCAP Security Guide.
The path to reliable salary data sometimes is sometimes paved with frustration. That’s because the honest answer to a reasonable question—what should I be paid for this job?—is usually: "It depends."
Location, experience, skill set, industry, and other factors all impact someone’s actual compensation. For example, there’s rarely a single, agreed-upon salary for a particular job title or role.
All of the above applies to system administrators. It’s a common, long-established IT job that spans many industries, company sizes, and other variables. While sysadmins may share some common fundamentals, it’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all position, and it’s all the truer as some sysadmin roles evolve to take on cloud, DevOps, and other responsibilities.
What salary can you expect to earn as a sysadmin? Yeah, it depends. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t get a clear picture of what sysadmin compensation looks like, including specific numbers. This is information worth having handy if you’re a sysadmin on the job market or seeking a promotion.
Let’s start with some good news from a compensation standpoint. Sysadmins—like other IT pros these days—are in demand.
"In today’s business environment, companies are innovating and moving faster than ever before, and they need systems that can keep up with the pace of their projects and communications, as well as help everything run smoothly," says Robert Sutton, district president for the recruiting firm Robert Half Technology. "That’s why systems administrators are among the IT professionals who can expect to see a growing salary over the next year or so."
When you have multiple distributions, such as Red Hat and SUSE, you can reduce administration complexity and save administration time and resources with a common management tool. Adient had applications running on both SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Adient deployed SUSE Manager to manage their Mixed IT environment involving both distributions.
When I wrote this model, we were trying to unify a few different sorts of packages. Coming from SpaceWalk, part of the team was used to wokring on RPMS with the RPM Database for storage, and Yum as the mechanism for fetching them. The other part of the team was coming from the JBoss side, working with JAR, WAR, EAR and associated files, and the Ivy or Maven building and fetching the files.
We were working within the context of the Red Hat Network (as it was then called) for delivering content to subscribers. Thus, we had the concept of Errata, Channels, and Entitlements which are somewhat different from what other organizations call these things, but the concepts should be general enough to cover a range of systems.
There are many gaps in this diagram. It does not discuss the building of packages, nor the relationship between source and binary packages. It also does not provide a way to distinguish between the package storage system and the package fetch mechanism.
But the bones are solid. I’ve used this diagram for a few years, and it is useful.
Another week, another -rc.
It's been calm, and nothing here stands out, except perhaps some of the VM noise where we un-reverted some changes wrt node-local vs hugepage allocations.
The rest is the usual driver fixes (usb, sound, nvme, habanalabs, rdma..) some arch updates (arm64 and x86) along with some filesystem fixes (afs and btrfs).
But all of it is really quite small.
Intel previously tried auto-enabling GuC and HuC functionality within their Linux kernel graphics driver but ended up reverting the support since the driver didn't gracefully handle the scenarios of missing/corrupt firmware files. The driver should now be more robust in such situations so they will try again for turning on the automatic behavior, possibly for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle.
Intel GuC and HuC have been around since Skylake and used for graphics workload scheduling, some power management bits, and for select media capabilities. For newer hardware is also being used as part of HEVC/H.265 handling.
A small collection of tools for the X Window System. For cool terminal tools, see Kristof Kovacs’ Cool, but obscure Unix tools. All applications have been tested on FreeBSD but should run on other Unix-like operating systems as well. This page is still work in progress …
Now that the new AMD Ryzen 3000 series are running great with the latest Linux distributions following prominent motherboard vendors issuing BIOS updates that correct the "RdRand" issue, we're moving on with looking at the performance of the rest of the Ryzen 3000 series line-up while having freshly re-tested the processors under Ubuntu 19.04. Up for exploration today is the AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, the six-core / 12-thread processor retailing for about $250 USD.
The AMD Ryzen 5 3600X has 6-cores / 12-threads while having a 3.8GHz base frequency and 4.4GHz maximum boost frequency. This CPU has a 95 Watt TDP, 32MB L3 cache, and other features in line with the rest of the Zen 2 family. AMD bundles the Ryzen 5 3600X retail CPU with their Wraith Spire cooler.
Speech is a popular and smart method in modern time to make interaction with electronic devices. As we know, there are many open source speech recognition tools available on different platforms. From the beginning of this technology, it has been improved simultaneously in understanding the human voice. This is the reason; it has now engaged a lot of professionals than before. The technical advancement is strong enough to make it more clear to the common people.
Who loves eye candy? Don’t be shy — you can raise both hands!!
Linux Candy is a new series of articles covering interesting eye candy software. We’re only going to feature open-source software in this series.
I’m not going to harp on about the tired proverb “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. But there’s a certain element of truth here. If you spend all day coding neural networks, mastering a new programming language, sit in meetings feeling bored witless, you’ll need some relief at the end of the day. And what better way by making your desktop environment a bit more memorable.
Let’s start our candy adventure with WallGen. It’s a small command-line utility that generates HQ poly wallpapers with only a few text arguments for inputs. Depending on these arguments, you can create shape-based patterns, randomly filled surfaces, and even image-based patterns.
It appears the entire computer system for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has failed.
Geofencing is the use of GPS or radio-frequency identification technology to create a virtual geographic boundary, enabling software to trigger a response when a mobile device enters or leaves a particular area or, in the case of the Rave Panic Button app, to pinpoint a caller's exact location through a virtual map of the campus.
"When there is an incident on campus and (the authorized user) activates one of the five panic buttons," French said, "it immediately sends a text, email, and an in-app notification providing situational awareness to all the other staff members on campus. It then provides a direct dial into the 911 dispatch center."
The popular VoIP sat unloved, with no stable updates, for six whole months.
Fast forward a few weeks from calling them out and I’m pleased to report that whatever blockage was lodged in the build machine pipe-work has been well and truly flushed out.
Not only is the Skype Snap app once again up to date on the Snapcraft store — hurrah! — but some freshly prepared ‘insider’ builds are available for the more adventurous to play with — double hurrah!
Going back a decade one of the interesting open-source FPS games of its time was Warsow. Development on Warsow has seemingly been tremulous over the past few years (edit: though the core developer has recently released a new beta) for this Qfusion (Quake 2 code base) engine powered game that started in 2005, but now there is Warfork as a fork of Warsow that is being developed and also available via Steam.
Hitting Steam this past week was the release of Warfork for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The game is free to play and with it going up on Steam will hopefully attract new gamers to this shooter title who may not be otherwise following the open-source scene.
The KDE Usability and Productivity Initiative to solve various problems in the KDE software stack to make it easier to use to more individuals and to do so more efficient will be coming to an end. But other KDE goals are being envisioned and the usability and productivity elements will continue to be worked on outside of this initiative.
KDE developer Nate Graham who has been writing the weekly blog posts summarizing the KDE improvements on a weekly basis noted that this formal KDE initiative/goal is coming to an end. At next month's KDE Akademy conference they'll be working on new goals/visions for the project though Nate does continue to providing weekly summaries of the KDE highlights.
Recent releases were KDE Frameworks 5.61 and KDE Applications 19.08. These have both landed in the official FreeBSD ports tree, after Tobias did most of the work and I pushed the big red button.
Your FreeBSD machine will need to be following current ports – not the quarterly release branches, since we don’t backport to those.
All the modern bits have arrived, maintaining the KDE-FreeBSD team’s commitment to up-to-date software for the FreeBSD desktop. The one thing we’re currently lagging on is Qt 5.13. There’s a FreeBSD problem report tracking that update.
It was great to see many new faces at the Plasma sprint. Most of these new contributors were working on the Plasma and KDE Apps Ui and Ux and we definitely need some new blood in these areas. KDE's Visual Design Group, the VDG, thinned out over the last two years because some leading figures left. But now seeing new talented and motivated people joining as designers and Ux experts I am optimistic that there will be a revival of the golden time of the VDG that brought us Breeze and Plasma 5.
In regards to technical topics there is always a wide field of different challenges and technologies to combine at a Plasma sprint. From my side I wanted to discuss current topics in KWin but of course not everyone at the sprint is directly working on KWin and some topics require deeper technical knowledge about it. Still there were some fruitful discussions, of course in particular with David, who was the second KWin core contributor present besides me.
As a direct product of the sprint my work on dma-buf support in KWin and KWayland can be counted. I started work on that at the sprint mostly because it was a feature requested already for quite a long time by Plasma Mobile developers who need it on some of their devices to get them to work. But this should in general improve in our Wayland session the performance and energy consumption on many devices. Like always such larger features need time so I was not able to finish them at the sprint. But last week I landed them.
After six years on the openSUSE Board and five as its Chairperson, I have decided to step down as Chair of the openSUSE Board effective today, August 19.
This has been a very difficult decision for me to make, with reasons that are diverse, interlinked, and personal. Some of the key factors that led me to make this step include the time required to do the job properly, and the length of time I’ve served. Five years is more than twice as long as any of my predecessors. The time required to do the role properly has increased and I now find it impossible to balance the demands of the role with the requirements of my primary role as a developer in SUSE, and with what I wish to achieve outside of work and community. As difficult as it is to step back from something I’ve enjoyed doing for so long, I am looking forward to achieving a better balance between work, community, and life in general.
Serving as member and chair of the openSUSE Board has been an absolute pleasure and highly rewarding. Meeting and communicating with members of the project as well as championing the cause of openSUSE has been a joyous part of my life that I know I will miss going forward.
openSUSE won’t get rid of me entirely. While I do intend to step back from any governance topics, I will still be working at SUSE in the Future Technology Team. Following SUSE’s Open Source policy, we do a lot in openSUSE. I am especially looking forward to being able to focus on Kubic & MicroOS much more than I have been lately.
As I’m sure it’s likely to be a question, I wish to make it crystal clear that my decision has nothing to do with the Board’s ongoing efforts to form an independent openSUSE Foundation.
The Board’s decision to form a Foundation had my complete backing as Chairperson, and will continue to have as a regular openSUSE contributor. I have absolute confidence in the openSUSE Board; Indeed, I don’t think I would be able to make this decision at this time if I wasn’t certain that I was leaving openSUSE in good hands.
On that note, SUSE has appointed Gerald Pfeifer as my replacement as Chair. Gerald is SUSE’s EMEA-based CTO, with a long history as a Tumbleweed user, an active openSUSE Member, and upstream contributor/maintainer in projects like GCC and Wine.
Overall, Manjaro 18.0.4 Illyria Xfce is a decent distro. It has lots of good and unique points. Network, media and phone support is good. You get a colorful repertoire of high-quality programs, the performance and battery life are excellent, and the desktop is fairly pretty. The system was also quite robust and stable.
But then, there were issues - including inconsistent behavior compared to the Plasma crop. The installation can be a bit friendlier (as Plasma one does). The package management remains the Achilles' Heel of this distro. Having too many frontends is confusing, and none of them do a great job. The messages on dependencies, the need for AUR (if you want fancy stuff), and such all create unnecessary confusing. There were also tons of visual papercuts, and I struggled getting things in order. All in all, Manjaro is getting better all the time, but it is still too geeky for the common person, as it breaks the fourth wall of nerdiness too often. 7/10, and I hope it can sort itself out and continue to deliver the unique, fun stuff that gets sidelined by the rough edges.
What sets AcademiX apart from other distributions is the EDU software manager. This package manager provides curated lists of educational software, which are grouped by subject and by age range. This package manager makes finding educational software really easy. There is software for astronomy, biology, geography, foreign languages, and many other subjects. While there are gaps in the availability of applications covering various subjects, that is a gap in the broader open source application ecosystem, not something specific to AcademiX. While some of the rough edges I noted with the installation process and the desktop customization make me a hesitant to recommend AcademiX to new Linux users, Educational Technology professionals should perhaps try out AcademiX just to use the EDU package manager to explore various open source applications.
While installing and updating software was easy and basically the same experience as any other modern, Debian-based distribution, the fact that some of the packages come from servers in Romania means that some package downloads can be much slower than downloading from the world-wide network of Debian mirrors. For individual packages and small collections of packages this is not too noticeable, but it is still an issue. The frustrating part is the fact that the speeds are not consistent. Sometimes I was downloading at only 40kbps, but other times it was much faster. I experienced the same issue when trying to download the ISO. One download took about 20 minutes for the 1.7GB image but some other attempts took 4 hours.
Final thoughts
AcademiX GNU/Linux is an interesting distribution, but it has some rough edges that need to be cleaned up. Honestly, I really, really wanted to like this distribution (good distributions aimed at the educational market are always needed), but found it to be merely okay. AcademiX has a lot of potential, but it is just not there yet. DebianEdu/Skolelinux is far more polished while serving almost the exact same niche. However, if the AcademiX team cleans up some of the issues I noted above, especially the installer issues, I think future versions of AcademiX might turn out to be worthwhile. The EDU software installer is well organized and aids in discovering educational software, so that is one solid advantage AcademiX offers, but overall the distribution needs more work and polish before I could move it from "this distribution is okay" to "you should give this distribution a try".
"Slackware is the longest active Linux distribution project, founded in 1993," writes TheBAFH (Slashdot reader #68,624).
"Today there are many Linux distributions available, but I've remained dedicated to this project as I believe it still holds an important place in the Linux ecosystem," writes Patrick J. Volkerding on a new Patreon page. He adds that Slackware's users "know that Slackware can be trusted not to constantly change the way things work, so that your investment in learning Slackware lasts longer than it would with a system that's a moving target... Your support is greatly appreciated, and will make it possible for me to continue to maintain this project."
The Fedora Respins SIG is pleased to announce the latest release of Updated F30-20190816 Live ISOs, carrying the 5.2.8-200 kernel.
This set of updated isos will save considerable amounts of updates after install. ((for new installs.)(New installs of Workstation have 1.2GB of updates)).
A huge thank you goes out to irc nicks dowdle, satellite,Southern-Gentlem for testing these iso.
Last week I attended “Flock to Fedora” conference in Budapest, Hungary. It was a Fedora contributors conference where I met some developers, project leaders, GSoC interns. Below is a brief report of my attendance.
Knoppix is a live bootable CD, DVD or USB flash drive system that can be used from CD, DVD, or USB flash drive. The OS is built on Debian, and its name comes from its creator, Klaus Knopper.
With a solid foundation in Debian 10 Buster, the new Knoppix 8.6 is here with a variety of improvements and new features. Before getting to know more about this update, it is essential to introduce Knoppix to the people finding it somewhat alien.
Welcome to gambaru.de. Here is my monthly report that covers what I have been doing for Debian. If you’re interested in Java, Games and LTS topics, this might be interesting for you.
I might have written about its availability a few times, but until today I had never actually seen Ubuntu 16.04 LTS running on a Samsung smartphone.
Don’t panic, you haven’t missed any major announcements and Samsung hasn’t started to sell phones with Ubuntu pre-loaded. I’m instead referring to the “Linux on DeX” development experience.
DeX is nifty bit of software tech that lets (select) Samsung devices running Android drive a more traditional “desktop” experience when connected to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse.
“Turn your Galaxy devices into a PC-like experience with a single cable,” Samsung say.
Additionally, ‘Linux on DeX’ is an Android app that’s only available as part of DeX. It lets users download and run a full desktop Linux experience using container technology on any supported Samsung Galaxy smartphone or tablet.
CutiePie is an 8-inch open-source tablet built on top of Raspberry Pi. For now, it is just a working prototype which they announced on Raspberry Pi forums.
In this article, you’ll get to know more details on the specifications, price, and availability of CutiePi.
During the annual Huawei developer conference, the company officially unveiled its custom HarmonyOS intended to create a unified ecosystem for potentially millions of users. Of course, this isn’t going to be as simple as churning out improved and feature-enriched versions of its Kirin chipsets for smartphones and tablets, so Huawei intends on taking its time with what could be a viable Android competitor, even though it hasn’t been marketed as such. Here we explain what is HarmonyOS, its unique feature set, and if it has the potential to somehow squirm its way in the duopoly iOS and Android have created for themselves.
If you need a full sized, full featured persistent terminal that appears and hides at a single keystroke, Tilda is your friend. Like most Free Software, it has too little documentation, and some conflicting documentation out on the web. That's OK, with this document make Tilda do a heck of a lot of what it was designed to do. This document didn't cover multiple Tilda instance or transparency, but I'm sure both will be easy for you to achieve with a little web search and experimentation.
A lot has changed since then. For one thing, I’ve learned the importance of free software in contrast to the “open source” I spoke of at the time. And, as I predicted, my eventual path toward achieving this goal was something I couldn’t imagine at the time.
On August 8, The Document Foundation announced the release of LibreOffice 6.3 with new features, performance boosts and compatibility improvements. A big thanks to our volunteer community and certified developers for making this release happen!
As you know, Qt 5.14 will be branched pretty soon. After that I would expect that most new development work would start to be aimed towards Qt 6. As it looks right now, 5.15 will be a smaller release where we polish what we have in 5.14, and prepare some things for Qt 6.
To reflect that and help us all understand that the development focus is now towards Qt 6, I would like to propose that dev becomes the Qt 6 branch after we branched away 5.14 (and we merge wip/qt6 back into dev). We can then either create a 5.15 branch at the same time, or slightly later, once 5.14 has stabilised a bit more (e.g. after the beta or RC).
Following the feature freeze and code branching for Qt 5.14, the Qt "Dev" branch will likely be shifting immediately to Qt 6 development. A Qt 5.15 release is still expected to happen before Qt 6.0, but that 5.15 milestone will likely just be a polished release derived from Qt 5.14.
Lars Knoll laid out the proposal this week to use their development branch for working on Qt 6 immediately following the Qt 5.14 branching. Qt 5.15 will likely be based on the Qt 5.14 branch directly with it expected to be a smaller release just polishing things up and fixing bugs to close out new Qt 5 releases.
CloudBees is the custodian of Jenkins, the most popular CI/CD tool. While maintaining the open source project, CloudBees has also made a commercial version of Jenkins available to enterprises. The company offers professional services, training and support to deploy and integrate Jenkins with existing DevOps tools.
CloudBees Jenkins X Distribution targets Kubernetes for cloud-native CI/CD. It provides a stable, predictable release for teams building microservices and Kubernetes-based applications.
The combination of Jenkins and Jenkins X covers the entire spectrum of automated software delivery for both traditional, VM-based environments and modern orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes.
Since the announcement at Cloud Next conference, Google has been moving fast in enhancing its hybrid and multi-cloud platform based on Anthos. The expanded partnership with CloudBees makes it easy for enterprise customers to build and deploy contemporary workloads on Anthos.
Google and CloudBees have been working together on interesting initiatives. Both of them are the co-founders of Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) launched by Linux Foundation. A dedicated CI/CD foundation from Linux Foundation underscores the growing importance of agile software delivery.
Forget in-memory computing for the moment because it requires a complete re-architecting of applications and most of the time the underlying hardware, too. What we really want is something more like in-memory storage – something that can be done immediately and provide performance benefits now.
This is what Formulus Black is doing with its Forsa in-memory storage, which is often mistakenly called in-memory computing. But that is not really what it is. Sort of.
Mitogen for Ansible v0.2.8 has been released. This version (finally) supports Ansible 2.8, comes with a supercharged replacement fetch module, and includes roughly 85% of what is needed to implemement fully asynchronous connect.
As usual a huge slew of fixes are included. This is a bumper release, running to over 20k lines of diff. Get it while it's hot, and as always, bug reports are welcome!
The mishap does raise many questions about the protocols surrounding how space-bound payloads are approved. Technically, international guidelines on interplanetary contamination don’t prohibit sending biological matter and organisms to the lunar surface, since most living creatures can’t survive there. But no governing body had a say in the tardigrade matter at all. The tardigrades were added to the lander by a US nonprofit called the Arch Mission Foundation, whose goal is to create a digital and biological “backup of planet Earth” out in space. The team had approval to add a digital library on the lander, but they didn’t inform Israel or the United States about the added water bears.
Nationwide, more than 100 rural hospitals have closed since 2010, and in each instance a community struggles to survive in its own way. In Fort Scott, home to 7,800, the loss of its 132-year-old hospital opened by nuns in the 19th century has wrought profound social, emotional and medical consequences. Kaiser Health News and NPR are following Fort Scott for a year to explore deeper national questions about whether small communities need a traditional hospital at all. If not, what would take its place?
The Europeans probably do not even know about ââ¬Å¾what is going on“ and according to ex finance minister of Greece – finance ministers do not have a lot to say in the ECB – the IMF has – there are no recordings of the meetings of ââ¬Å¾The Eurogroup“ – so transparency over decision making processes is rather bad.
After all just like the (more or less ideal) ââ¬Å¾big brother“ the FED it is not under direct democratic influence – does what it wants – every word the FED CEO says is analyzed and influences financial market decisions.
ââ¬Å¾One of the sites of the European Central Bank (ECB) has been hacked. The attackers gained access to sensitive users ââ¬Å¡ information, however, the internal system of the Bank has not been compromised.
The discovery of a flaw in Bluetooth specification that could enable an attack to spy on your information made news this week; the attacker could be able to weaken the encryption of Bluetooth devices and snoop on communications or send falsified ones to take over a device, said The Verge.
Last weekend, I was at FrOSCon - a great Open Source conference in Sankt Augustin, Germany. We (Sarah, Marcel and I) ran the openSUSE booth, answered lots of questions about openSUSE and gave the visitors some goodies - serious and funny (hi OBS team!) stickers, openSUSE hats, backpacks and magazines featuring openSUSE Leap. We also had a big plush geeko, but instead of doing a boring raffle, we played openSUSE Jeopardy where the candidates had to ask the right questions about Linux and openSUSE for the answers I provided.
Josh and Kurt talk about snakeoil cryptography at Black Hat and the new backdoored cryptography fight. Both of these problems will be with us for a very long time. These are fights worth fighting because it's the right thing to do.
Our analysis found that the problem of insecure drivers is widespread, affecting more than 40 drivers from at least 20 different vendors – including every major BIOS vendor, as well as hardware vendors like ASUS, Toshiba, NVIDIA, and Huawei. However, the widespread nature of these vulnerabilities highlights a more fundamental issue – all the vulnerable drivers we discovered have been certified by Microsoft. Since the presence of a vulnerable driver on a device can provide a user (or attacker) with improperly elevated privileges, we have engaged Microsoft to support solutions to better protect against this class of vulnerabilities, such as blacklisting known bad drivers.
Despite some progress on voting security since 2016, most states in the US aren’t set to require an audit of paper ballots in the November 2020 election, according to a new report out this week from the Brennan Center for Justice.
The report notes that experts and government officials have spent years recommending states adopt verifiable paper ballots for elections, but a handful still use electronic methods potentially vulnerable to cyberattacks. In 2016, 14 states used paperless machines, although the number today is 11, and the report estimates that no more than eight will use them in the 2020 election.
Held with many other girls in one of Boko Haram’s camps, Falmata, now 20, says they all helped each other survive their ordeal. The militants ordered her to marry, forcing her into a total of three consecutive marriages as each of her husbands died while fighting with the group. “After this happens to you about three times, they will strap a suicide bomb to you and send you off for jihad,” she says. After her third husband had been killed, Falmata and some other girls were fixed with explosives and sent on a suicide mission.
It’s always been easier to smear people rather than wrestle with their ideas. It’s a bully who calls names and spreads lies rather than thoroughly reading a brief’s legal arguments or challenging the rationale underlying a policy proposal. The SPLC has chosen to take the easy path — to intimidate and mislead for raw political power and financial benefit.
Interestingly, no one but NPR’s Alison Stewart has asked me to explain why I canceled my subscription. I’ve been credited/blamed with trying to drive a boycott; I was not. Hilariously, the Times sent me a survey to ask how its customer service representative handled my call to cancel; it did not survey to ask why I canceled.
As Mr Aboutaleb makes clear, the rising threat is a result of climate change. Few places are as vulnerable as the Netherlands, 27% of which is below sea level. But many other places also face substantial risk, and almost all of them are far less able to waterproof themselves than the Dutch. It is not just a matter of being able to afford the hardware (the Netherlands has 40,000km of dykes, levees and seawalls, plus innumerable sluices and barriers less mighty than the Maeslant). It is also a matter of social software: a culture of water governance developed over centuries of defending against the waves. The rest of the world cannot afford the centuries it took the Dutch to build that up.
It is also labelled "415 ppm CO2", referring to the record level of carbon dioxide measured in the atmosphere last May.
The plaque is "the first monument to a glacier lost to climate change anywhere in the world", Cymene Howe, associate professor of anthropology at Rice University, said in July.
“Kochland” is important, Davies said, because it makes it clear that “you’d have a carbon tax, or something better, today, if not for the Kochs. They stopped anything from happening back when there was still time.” The book also documents how, in 2010, the company’s lobbyists spent gobs of cash and swarmed Congress as part of a multi-pronged effort to kill the first, and so far the last, serious effort to place a price on carbon pollution—the proposed “cap and trade” bill. Magnifying the Kochs’ power was their network of allied donors, anonymously funded shell groups, think tanks, academic centers, and nonprofit advocacy groups, which Koch insiders referred to as their “echo chamber.” Leonard also reports that the centrist think tank Third Way quietly worked with the Kochs to push back against efforts to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, which could have affected their business importing oil from Canada. Frequently, and by design, the Koch brothers’ involvement was all but invisible.
Where these two forces collide, the results are bizarre: the application of the Kochs' long-term thinking to heading off any kind of long-term planning by states.
Nowhere is this more manifest than in the Kochs' overt and covert campaign against climate science, whose rationalist, empirical conclusion is that urgent, coordinated, non-market action is a hard requirement to avert a catastrophe that could result in the extinction of the human species (which would also result in significant falls in the Kochs' fortunes). There is no rational version of long-range thinking that says that climate denial will produce a good outcome; the majority of climate denial is centered around the kind of short-termism that Koch deplores, where the returns to capital over a couple quarters are more important than the long-term ruination of firms, enterprises (and civilizations).
Arizona will see a cut of 192,000 acre-feet in water deliveries next year, or 6.9% of its total allotment of 2.8 million acre-feet. Nevada’s share will be reduced by 8,000 acre-feet, while Mexico’s will take 41,000 acre-feet less. That water will remain in Lake Mead, and will only be recovered once the reservoir rises above an elevation of 1,100 feet.
The call to stop the production of coal and cars often sounds like a threat to jobs. But German trade unions have realized that the green transition needs to happen — and they’re fighting to make sure it’s bosses, not workers, who pay for climate justice.
My recently released book, Plastic Game Changer, tackles the strategic steps needed to radically reduce plastic waste in organisations of any size; shares how to benchmark current plastic usage so you can measure success; and features insights and best practce from five inspirational real-world Plastic Game Changers. One of these is the brilliant Damer’s First School in Dorset, whose pupils and teachers have taken amazing action over recent years to reduce their plastic footprint and have been recognised by politicians, the media and even Prince Charles for their fantastic work.
To start making a difference to plastic pollution as soon as possible, here are NINE practical steps reduce plastic in your school…
Directive (EU) 2019/904 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 5 June 2019 on the reduction of the impact of certain plastic products on the environment has entered into force on 2nd of July 2019.
Under the current agreement, which was signed in 1973, each country has the right to half of the roughly 100m MWh produced each year by the dam. Paraguay, a country of 7m people with little industry, only uses about a quarter of its share, which fulfils 90% of its electricity needs. It sells the rest to Brazil, which depends on the dam for 15% of its power. But Paraguay is only paid for the cost of producing the power (including debt repayments on the construction), not the market price of electricity. According to the calculations of Miguel Carter, a political scientist at DEMOS, a think tank, had Brazil been made to pay market rates, between 1985 and 2018 it would have paid $75.4bn more, or roughly twice Paraguay’s current annual GDP.
But it seems 8-month-old Marium fell victim to another modern-day phenomenon: the growing presence of plastic in the water. An autopsy performed Saturday found numerous tiny plastic pieces in her intestines, according to Thailand's Department of National Parks, Wildlife and Plant Conservation.
But in recent years, with populations swelling and demands for lighting increasing, the global amount of artificial light at night has been growing by at least 2 percent per year. At this rate the amount of light pollution originating from Earth-based sources alone will double in less than 50 years.
Many homes had plastic roofs, which helped the flames to spread. No deaths have been reported, although several people were injured.
Hard Brexit on October 31st won't be the end, merely the start of an even more chaotic phase.
[...]
Currencies are perhaps the most unforecastable of financial markets. Things like interest rates and growth differentials sometimes work, statistically, as good predictors but as often do not. Over the very long term there is often a link between exchange rates and the relative “strength” of an economy. Germany had a strong deutschemark for decades, roughly corresponding to its well-managed, robust economy. Sterling tended to fall for decades right up until the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community, a drop that coincided with the long-term relative decline of the British economy. The words sterling and crisis were often seen to be a natural pair.
Currencies often elicit irrationality from politicians. Readers of a certain vintage will remember how our own economic establishment fought so bitterly against devaluation in the early 1990s, something that was both inevitable and desirable. To regard the exchange rate as a symbol of national virility is to miss the point: it is a marker, over time, of how much economic potency you have. The exchange rate tells you how much viagra, of the economic kind, you need.
Some days Donald Trump seems to understand this when he welcomes a stronger dollar. But he suddenly flips when he berates the Federal Reserve for supposedly creating a too strong dollar via higher interest rates. He can discern the benefits of a weaker dollar but doesn’t like what that might say about the US economy.
You are not as much of a chump as the giant corporations and the big advertising agencies think you are, at least according to my old pal Gnash.
Following US National Security Adviser John Bolton’s talks with Boris Johnson and his ministers in London last week, FCO officials have been asked to speed up contingency planning for the UK to move its Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, with an eye to an “early announcement” post Brexit.
The UK is currently bound by an EU common foreign policy position not to follow the United States in moving its Embassy to Jerusalem. As things stand, that prohibition will fall on 1 November. FCO officials had previously been asked to produce a contingency plan, but this involved the construction of a €£14 million new Embassy and a four year timescale. They have now been asked to go back and look at a quick fix involving moving the Ambassador and immediate staff to Jerusalem and renaming the Consulate already there as the Embassy. This could be speedily announced, and then implemented in about a year.
Johnson heads the most radically pro-Israel cabinet in UK history and the symbolic gesture of rejection of Palestinian rights is naturally appealing to his major ministers Patel, Javid and Raab. They also see three other political benefits. Firstly, they anticipate that Labour opposition to the move can be used to yet again raise accusations of “anti-semitism” against Jeremy Corbyn. Secondly, it provides good “red meat” to Brexiteer support in marking a clear and, they believe, popular break from EU foreign policy, at no economic cost. Thirdly, it seals the special link between the Trump and Johnson administrations and sets the UK apart from other NATO allies.
Nonetheless, under the conditions in which they find themselves, leaderless organization appears to be the only viable approach. In addition to preventing over-reliance on key individuals by utilizing technology, the protesters do not rely on any single communications platform. When Telegram suffered a denial of service attack originating from Mainland China or when the mobile networks were overloaded, protesters turned to Airdrop to send messages over Bluetooth. They are even using Tinder and Pokemon Go to mobilize protesters.
Most of the protest events on Saturday were peaceful, and reflected the breadth and variety of the movement. The wave of demonstrations began more than two months ago to oppose a now-suspended bill that would allow extraditions to mainland China. But the movement has broadened to include other demands, including universal suffrage and an investigation of the police.
This weekend marked the 11th in a row for the demonstrations. Pouring rain did not deter the protests, which caused roads to shut down and traffic to reroute as the park and streets flooded with people. Organizers estimated that 1.7 million people came out on Sunday. Hong Kong police estimated that 128,000 protesters attended the demonstration in Victoria Park.
The demonstrations began in June, initially in response to a controversial bill that would have allowed for extraditions from Hong Kong to mainland China. The measure sparked a backlash among protesters who saw the bill as a violation of the "one country, two systems" agreement that was formed in 1997 when Hong Kong was returned to China from the British.
The bill has since been suspended indefinitely, but not yet killed completely. Demonstrators continue to demand that the bill be permanently withdrawn. But their demands have also grown to include calls for the direct election of the city's leaders, seats on the Hong Kong legislature and an investigation into police conduct during the demonstrations.
The media used to say Bernie Sanders’s coalition was too white and male. Not that that’s so obviously not true, they should admit why they really hate Bernie — his class politics.
The Communist Party is giving every indication that it really does not want a solution to the unrest but a crushing defeat of the democracy movement.
And now, Donald Trump's presence in the White House hasmade everything even worse. It is unclear if this president, who so admires Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, his autocratic counterparts from China and Russia, is an adherent of this normative project, whether he actually values democracy, the rule of law and human rights. He has undermined NATO, the West's hard-power organization, and now, there is no leading power that will intervene decisively in support of Western values.
Over the past few months, the demonstrations have evolved from millions marching through the streets, to groups of protesters in hard hats storming government headquarters and shutting down the city's international airport for two days. While the majority of protesters have been peaceful, frustration is building on all sides.
Protesters are now demanding greater democracy and an inquiry into alleged police brutality during past demonstrations. Hong Kong's billionaires are calling for order. And as unrest intensifies, Beijing's tone is becoming increasingly heated.
After much discussion here and with people at other news organizations, we’ve decided to focus on other avenues of communication. Next week, we are relaunching the Science News website without a comment section. Instead, you’ll be able to reach us through feedback@sciencenews.org with your questions and comments. We encourage you to join the conversation with us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit. And we still welcome good old physical letters.
The city’s DNA database has grown by nearly 29 percent over the last two years, and now has 82,473 genetic profiles, becoming a potentially potent tool for law enforcement but one that operates with little if any oversight.
The New York Police Department has taken DNA samples from people convicted of crimes, as well as from people who are only arrested or sometimes simply questioned. The practice has exposed the Police Department to scrutiny over how the genetic material is collected and whether privacy rights are being violated, civil liberties lawyers said.
Australia’s consumer watchdog, the ACCC, has finally released its long-awaited final report on the market power of Facebook and Google. Long on rhetoric (all 623 pages of it) and short on recommendations, it’s unlikely to dent the massive market power of these search and social media behemoths. Kim Wingerei reports.
Until the opt-in process is crystal clear, Apple should delete all existing recordings and confirm that it is no longer saving them. I don’t even know where to start with the fact that until this story broke, they were keeping copies with identifying information for six months. This defies everyone’s expectations of privacy for a voice assistant.
The Committee to Protect Journalists today called on the Indian government to immediately stop its harassment of journalists in Jammu and Kashmir and to allow them to work freely. Authorities have detained at least two journalists in the past week amid tensions and the communications blackout in the region.
Authorities in Tehran have released four Iranian women from a detention center after they were arrested for allegedly dressing as men to circumvent a ban against women attending soccer matches in the Islamic republic, a Human Rights Watch researcher (HRW) says.
Bethany, a 32-year-old student and yoga teacher, moved to Saudi Arabia to teach at a university in 2011. She recently divorced her Saudi husband, and sought custody of their four-year-old daughter. But in July, the court concluded that she would not be a good parent.
"The mother is new to Islam, is a foreigner in this country, and continues to definitively embrace the customs and traditions of her upbringing. We must avoid exposing (Zaina) to these customs and traditions, especially at this early age," wrote Judge Abdul-Ellah ibn Mohammed al-Tuwaijri last month, in his ruling denying Vierra custody of her daughter.
Our guest is Philip Mudd, former deputy director of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, who tells us about his new book, "Black Site." It depicts one of the most controversial and unsettling initiatives in American history -- i.e., the post-9/11 counterterrorism effort created and led by the CIA. Just after September 11, 2001, as we learn, the CIA evolved into a war-fighting intelligence service, constructing what was known internally as "the Program" -- a web of top-secret detention facilities intended to help prevent future attacks on American soil and worldwide. As was noted of this book by Kirkus Reviews: "[This is] an insider's view of life inside the CIA following 9/11, when all the old protocols were off. In theory, the CIA is above politics. In fact, writes Mudd...the agency takes its cues from presidential directives, to say nothing of sometimes-veiled remarks by senior administration officials. After 9/11, agency leaders held that it was George W. Bush's 'presidential guidance [that was] one of the pillars that later led them down the path to the Program.' The Program in question was a sweeping set of reforms that provided mandates for capturing suspected al-Qaida members and other terrorists and extracting information from them in various unpleasant ways -- so unpleasant that, given American sensitivities, the work was often done in 'black sites' in other countries and sometimes farmed out to intelligence agents working for other governments...."
When my protests are not ignored I’ve received grotesque answers. For example, an “independent investigator” of the legal department, wiped out all my complaints and evidence saying they were “on a micro-tactical level”, therefore they don’t have to be taken into consideration. The other answers received are those of Intel’s works council (a mandatory institution in German companies) who are legally obliged to answer me. But they decided to deny any evidence, bending over backwards to justify the unjustifiable. They have denied any mobbing, but have refused to explain on what their denial is based.
Unfortunately, in Germany there is no anti-mobbing legislation. I should have taken legal action for every single fact. What is realistically (economically) impossible.
After a year and a half of continuous fake allegations, in a face-to-face meeting, I was accused again of not having done my job. These accusations never come in a team or a project meeting. It is hard to state in front of anyone that a job hasn’t been done when is evident to anyone that the job is delivered and works without any issue. So they keep it for face-to-face meeting. I experienced this as a regular mobbing procedure of Intel Corporation.
From my manager came increasingly ridiculous accusations, until I lose my nerves, I told my manager that it was obviously a provocation meeting. I got nervous, I raised my voice, I banged my hand on the table. My boss, according to the story he gave the court, was afraid of my reaction. He actually giggled because he had managed to make me lose patience. Together with other fanciful details, invented from the ground up by Intel, like that I had pointed to my cell phone and the computer suggesting that I had recorded the discussion.
U.S. wireless carriers have long said they may slow video traffic on their networks to avoid congestion and bottlenecks. But new research shows the throttling happens pretty much everywhere all the time.
Researchers from Northeastern University and University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted more than 650,000 tests in the U.S. and found that from early 2018 to early 2019, AT&T Inc. throttled Netflix Inc. 70% of the time and Google’s YouTube service 74% of the time. But AT&T didn’t slow down Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime Video at all.
MyMail is the holder of U.S. Patent Nos. 8,275,863 and 9,021,070, both directed to "methods of modifying toolbars that are displayed on Internet-connected devices such as personal computers." MyMail initially asserted these patents against ooVoo and IAC Search & Media, Inc. in the Eastern District of Texas. After the Supreme Court's decision in TC Heartland LLC v. Kraft Foods Group Brands LLC came down, the parties agreed to shift venues to the Northern District of California. Judge Lucy Koh was assigned to this case.
[...]
Accordingly, the Federal Circuit remanded the case back to the District Court so that the claim construction dispute and its impact on the ۤ 101 ruling can be reviewed.
Writing in dissent, Judge Lourie (who has been no friend of software patents over the years) opined that "the claims at issue are clearly abstract, regardless of claim construction." Relying on Electric Power Group, LLC v. Alstom S.A. -- which essentially held that "the analysis, transmission, and display of information are, in themselves, abstract ideas" -- Judge Lourie would have found the MyMail claims similarly abstract.
[...]
Whether MyMail's claims are innovative is another story. Maybe they will ultimately fail under ۤ 101 (or ۤ 102 or ۤ 103 for that matter). Nonetheless, the Federal Circuit has correctly determined that invalidating patents on grounds of subject matter requires a clear understanding of the nature of that subject matter.
Proceedings for the preservation of evidence and the subsequent infringement proceedings are two separate proceedings and only the latter is relevant for starting an intervention in opposition proceedings according to Art. 105 EPC.
The Adjudicator dismissed the opposition on both grounds.
Much of the decision focused on the application of the step-by-step approach in assessing the similarities between the marks. In Singapore, the applicable test for assessing whether there is a likelihood of confusion between two marks is the step-by-step approach.
Under the step-by-step approach, the following elements should be determined sequentially:
(a) Whether the compared marks are similar (by comparing the visual, aural and conceptual similarities between the marks); (b) Whether the compared goods are similar; and (c) If steps (a) and (b) are fulfilled, whether there exists a likelihood of confusion on the part of the relevant public.
Under stages (a) and (b), the assessment is made mark-for-mark, without consideration of any external factors, such as consumer perception of the marks and the trade channels used to market the goods. External factors are only to be considered at stage (c).
Elsevier and other academic publishers see 'pirate' site Sci-Hub as a major threat to their billion-dollar industries. Many researchers, however, can't function properly without the notorious site. Since anti-piracy efforts are unlikely to beat the site, perhaps it's time for the publishers to draw a lesson from Sci-Hub instead?
If you don't know, Corellium's business involves creating digital versions of software in the browser for outsiders to tinker with, without burning their way through actual hardware. A security researcher could, for example, request a simulated iPhone running iOS, and then hunt for bugs. If one is found, they could then load up previous versions of the operating system to give them an idea of how long the vulnerability has been open for.
Apple today filed a lawsuit against Corellium, a mobile device virtualization company that supports iOS. Corellium describes itself as the "first and only platform" that offers iOS, Android, and Linux virtualization on ARM.
In the lawsuit, filed today in the Southern District of Florida, Apple accuses Corellium of copyright infringement for illegally replicating the operating system and applications that run on the iPhone and the iPad.
