At this year's IFA conference in Berlin, Dell announced a number of new laptops as well as a refresh of the beloved XPS 13.
The updated XPS 13 now includes Intel's 10th Gen Core U series processor in the same familiar form factor to help the device maintain its position as the most powerful 13-inch laptop in its class.
The device will also feature improved connectivity thanks to the new Killer AX1650 (2x2) module built on Intel's WiFi 6 Chipset which will delivery wireless connectivity three times as fast as the previous generation.
For some time now I have gotten a slow but steady volume of requests that I write about UEFI firmware and EFI boot relative to installing and maintaining Linux. As a result of a casual comment I made in a recent post about installing Linux on a new laptop, the volume has gone up considerably.
So in this post I will review and explain some of what I consider to be the most important points about UEFI firmware and Linux systems. I intend for this to be a relatively short post, but once I get started you never know... so you might want to get a cup of coffee before starting to read.
First, the specific aspect of UEFI firmware that I am concerned with here is the boot sequence, and how to use it with Linux. There is a lot more to UEFI (EFI) than that, but I will not be addressing any of that here.
The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, recently announced that it will now host the OpenPOWER Foundation project. The project includes IBM’s open POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) and contributed Source Design Implementations required to support data-driven hardware for intensive workloads like Artificial Intelligence (AI).
It's CPU release season and we get excited about AMD's new line of server chips. Plus our take on AMD's approach to memory encryption, and our struggle to make sense of Intel's Comet Lake line.
Also, a few Windows worms you should know about, the end of the road for EV certs, and an embarrassing new Bluetooth attack.
In Continuous integration testing for the Linux kernel, I wrote about the Continuous Kernel Integration (CKI) project and its mission to change how kernel developers and maintainers work. This article is a deep dive into some of the more technical aspects of the project and how all the pieces fit together.
Every exciting feature, improvement, and bug in the kernel starts with a change proposed by a developer. These changes appear on myriad mailing lists for different kernel repositories. Some repositories focus on certain subsystems in the kernel, such as storage or networking, while others focus on broad aspects of the kernel. The CKI project springs into action when developers propose a change, or patchset, to the kernel or when a maintainer makes changes in the repository itself.
The word innovation gets bandied about in the tech industry almost as much as revolution, so it can be difficult to differentiate hyperbole from something that’s actually exciting. The Linux kernel has been called innovative, but then again it’s also been called the biggest hack in modern computing, a monolith in a micro world.
Setting aside marketing and modeling, Linux is arguably the most popular kernel of the open source world, and it’s introduced some real game-changers over its nearly 30-year life span.
Nearly three decades ago, Linus Torvalds sent the email announcing Linux, a free operating system that was "just a hobby" and not "big and professional like GNU." It's fair to say that Linux has had an enormous influence on technology and the world in general in the 28 years since Torvalds announced it. Most people already know the "origin story" of Linux, though. Here's 28 things about Linux (the kernel and larger ecosystem) you may not already know.
1 - Linux isn't very useful alone, so folks took to creating Linux distributions to bundle user software with it, make it usable and easier to install. The first Linux distribution was Softlanding Linux System (SLS), first released in 1992 and using the .96p4 Linux kernel.
You could buy it on 5.25" or 3.5" floppies, or CD-ROM if you were high-tech. If you wanted a GUI, you needed at least 8MB of RAM.
2 - SLS didn't last, but it influenced Slackware Linux, which was first released in 1993 and is still under development today. Slackware is the oldest surviving Linux distribution and celebrated its 26th birthday on July 17th this year.
3 - Linux has the largest install base of any general purpose operating system. It powers everything from all 500 of the Top 500 Supercomputers to Android phones, Chomebooks, and all manner of embedded devices and things like the Kindle eBook readers and smart televisions. (Also the laptop used to write this post.)
After having been submitting various feature updates to DRM-Next the past few weeks of new graphics driver feature code to introduce in Linux 5.4, a final pull request was sent in today with the remaining feature work slated for this next version of the Linux kernel.
As added earlier to Linux 5.4, the big focus at this stage for the open-source Intel Linux developers is on bringing up the "Gen 12" graphics support for Tiger Lake. With the Icelake / Gen 11 graphics support now in good shape, the developers have already been busy plumbing Gen 12 graphics that are at least a year out from being available through retail channels.
While NVIDIA recently began publishing more hardware documentation, don't expect it to make an immediate difference in the quality of the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver. Today the pull request was sent to DRM-Next of the Nouveau kernel driver changes for the upcoming Linux 5.4 cycle and there isn't much to get excited about.
Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs of Red Hat sent in the pull request this morning, which mostly consists of work that missed out on the current Linux 5.3 cycle when he sent in that earlier pull request too late. This time the pull request is on-time and has the improvements to color management, some code for acknowledging when any PCIe power cables are not connected, and different fixes. But for end-users, nothing to get excited about unless any of the bug fixes had affected problems you experienced.
Currently the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver doesn't automatically adjust the video memory clock speeds when running a multi-monitor setup since it's more complicated to gracefully handle when scanning out to two or more displays. But a set of currently experimental patches will allow memory clock switching support on multi-monitor setups with the AMDGPU DC code.
AMD Raven Ridge APUs were a rough launch particularly on Linux where even with the latest motherboard BIOS updates and Linux kernel I am still hitting occasional stability issues, so when the opportunity arose recently to try out the Ryzen 5 3400G as the successor in the Picasso family, I was interested. Fortunately, AMD Picasso APUs have proven to be in better shape on Linux so here is the initial round of performance tests for those interested in the AMD Linux performance on Ubuntu.
The Ryzen 5 3400G is a $150 USD APU and while launched alongside the new Zen 2 CPUs, the Ryzen 3000 series APUs are in fact based on Zen+ and using Vega graphics. The Ryzen 5 3400G features four cores / eight threads with a 3.7GHz base frequency and 4.2GHz turbo frequency. On the graphics side are Radeon RX Vega 11 graphics that clock up to 1.4GHz as a nice boost over the Ryzen 5 2400G. This AM4 APU has a 65 Watt TDP for this highest-performing Picasso socketed APU.
Before we can talk about log management, let’s define what a log is. Simply defined, a log is the automatically-produced and time-stamped documentation of an event relevant to a particular system. In other words, whenever an event takes place on a system, a log is generated. Systems and devices will generate logs for different types of events and many systems give administrators some degree of control over which event generates a log and which doesn’t.
As for log management, It is simply referring to the processes and policies used to administer and facilitate the generation, transmission, analysis, storage, archiving and eventual disposal of large volumes of log data. Although not clearly stated, log management implies a centralized system where logs from multiple sources are collected. Log management is not just log collection, though. It is the management part which is the most important. And log management systems often have multiple functionalities, collecting logs being just one of them.
Once logs are received by the log management system, they need to be standardized into a common format as different systems format logs differently and include different data. Some start a log with the date and time, some start it with an event number. Some only include an event ID while others include a full-text description of the event. One of the purposes of log management systems is to ensure that all collected log entries are stored in a uniform format. This will event correlation and eventual searching much easier down the line.
Even correlation and searching are two additional major functions of several log management systems. The best of them feature a powerful search engine that allows administrators to zero-in on precisely what they need. Correlation functions will automatically group related events, even if they are from different sources. How—and how successfully—different log management system accomplish that is a major differentiating factor.
For a quick drawing, editing images - MS Paint type applications are essential. Here are three of them which are similar and can be used for quick drawing/editing in Linux and Ubuntu systems. These 3 MS Paint alternative drawing programs are best fit for general users and as well as professionals who needs a quick and fast edit on images or create drawings.
The Wine maintenance release 4.0.2 is now available.
Wine 4.0.2 is out today as the second stable point release to this year's Wine 4.0 cycle.
As is customary for Wine stable point releases, only bug fixes are allowed in while new features come by way of the bi-weekly development releases that will lead up to the Wine 5.0 release in early 2020.
If you prefer to walk on the calmer side of life, the Wine 4.0.2 release has been made available today.
As it's just a "maintenance" release, there's no big new features which are reserved for the current 4.xx series currently at 4.14 released on August 17th.
With that in mind they noted 66 bugs being marked as solved. These bugs include issues with Worms 2, Warframe, Rogue Squadron 3D, Settlers III, Mass Effect, F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin, The Sims and plenty more.
Supergiant Games, the team behind hits like Bastion and Transistor are turning ten years old as a studio and so they're doing a big sale. HADES will also no longer be exclusive to the Epic Store this year.
First up, the sales!
Over on Steam, you can pick up the entire collection of Bastion, Transistor and Pyre plus soundtracks with 78% off together. An absolutely incredible deal!
All their games are also on sale in a bundle and by themselves on itch.io for those who prefer it.
While VKD3D continues to be under heavy development, Valve already appears pleased with it enough that it's now being built as part of their Wine-based Proton software for powering Steam Play on Linux.
VKD3D is the official Wine project being worked on for accelerating Direct3D 12 over Vulkan. This has been Wine's only pursued D3D12 approach with Direct3D 12 not mapping nicely over OpenGL and thus not fitting well into their existing WineD3D code. VKD3D has been able to run a few games, but at last check not many though that may be different these days with it already being included into Proton.
Looking for your next adventure? Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition just got even bigger with a new "premium module" DLC Tyrants of the Moonsea now available.
For this new expansion, Beamdog teamed up with Ossian Studios. For those unfamiliar, Ossian Studios was formed in 2003 to work on new role-playing games with previous releases including Darkness over Daggerford and Mysteries of Westgate.
Tyrants of the Moonsea is based on a previously cancelled expansion from Luke Scull, with the Enhanced Edition release boasting "70% more story and gameplay, as well as a large amount of new art and audio content".
Space Haven from Bugbyte Ltd continues being shaped into something special, with a third Alpha version now available for this unique colony building sim.
The latest update overhauls a bunch of the resources in the game, along with adding in 7 new resource production facilities. They said the purpose of this, is to give them a better foundation to build on and give the game some more depth over time.
While the main focus of this release was on the resources, one other major addition made it in. Players have been asking for a more sandbox-like mode, so they added the ability to create a scenario giving you tons of resources and a crew of 8. This way, you can focus more on building up your fleet of ships right away. Also a good place to test out some ship designs.
The Smach Z team attended this year's Gamescom and is appears they're not done tweaking this gaming handheld.
While all their current units available for pre-order house the AMD Ryzen V1605B and Radeon Vega 8 Graphics, they've taken it a step further to show off a more powerful Smach Z with the AMD Ryzen V1807B with Radeon Vega 11 Graphics. Not just that, it seems the max storage has been boosted up to 480GB and RAM up to 32GB. Overall, it seems like a pretty nice upgrade.
Snapfire is the name and Dota 2 is the game! Valve have teased a new bad-ass female hero in a wild west themed animated short.
Ion Fury (previously Ion Maiden) is true example of how you really don’t need to push graphics ever closer to realism to achieve something ridiculously good.
Developed by Voidpoint and 3D Realms, using the Build game engine which powered some other classics like Duke Nukem 3D, Blood and Shadow Warrior it released recently with same-day Linux support showing others how it’s done. While it’s retro in many ways, there is of course a vast amount of modern touches like improved physics and map interactions, auto-saves, being able to actually do a headshot, higher resolution support and so on.
Here’s the thing, I grew up with games like Duke and I’ve seen gaming progress from the Amiga to where we are now. There came a point, where I grew massively tired of retro-inspired flashbacks and in some ways I am still tired of it. However, Ion Fury is a very different sort of brew. The best thing about Ion Fury is that it might seem like other classics but it has a different and refreshing feel to it.
Ahoy! openSUSE Xfce team is pleased to announce that the long awaited Xfce 4.14 has been released for Tumbleweed.
After a long development cycle (4 years!), all of the core components and applications have been ported to GTK 3.
Among the main new features and improvements, the xfwm4 window manager has finally gained support for VSync, HiDPI, hardware GLX and various compositor improvements.
You can check out the neat new features in the official Xfce 4.14 tour and the official release announcement.
Hello everyone! It's been almost three weeks since my last post and this is going to be my my final post in this blog. So, I want to summarize all my work done in this GSoC project. Just to remember again, the goal of the project was to add the support for Jupiter notebooks to Cantor. This format is widely used in the scientific and education areas, mostly by the application Jupyter, and there is a lot of content available on the internet in this format (for example, here). By adding the support of this format in Cantor we’ll allow Cantor users access this content. This is short description, if you more intersted, you can found more details in my proporsal.
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This is all for the limitations, I think. Let's talk about future plans and perspectives. In my opinion, this project has reached its initial goals, is finished now and will only need maintenance and support in terms of bug fixing and adjustment to potential format changes in future.
When talking more generally, this project is part of the current overall development activities in Cantor to improve the usability and the stability of the application and to extend the feature set in order to enable more workflows and to reach to a bigger audience with this. See 19.08 and 18.12 release announcements to read more about the developments in the recent releases of Cantor. Support of the Jupyter notebook format is a big step into this direction but this not all. We have already many other items in our backlog like for the UX improvements, plots integration improvements going into this direction. Some of this items will be addressed soon. Some of them are something for the next GSoC project next year maybe?
I think, that's all for now. Thank you for reading this blog and thank you for your interest in my project. Working on this project was a very interesting and pleasant period of my life. I am happy that I had this opportunity and was able to contribute to KDE and especially to Cantor with the support of my mentor Alexander Semke.
Not only did GNOME Boxes automatically detect that the ISO contained Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, it offered me an Express Install option (provided I had a working internet connection). The app automatically pulled my username into the account field, and asked that I do nothing more than enter a password to proceed.
And that was truly all that it required, unless I needed to customize the amount of RAM and disk space allocated to the VM.
After hitting the Continue button, GNOME Boxes ran an unattended installation. It pulled regional and language settings from my host machine, handled the partitioning dialogue, and everything else. The installation screens zoomed by, components and updates were downloaded, and within less than 5 minutes I had a perfectly working Ubuntu 18.04 to play with.
GNOME Disk Utility is an awesome tool to maintain hard disk drives that shipped with Ubuntu. It's called simply "Disks" on start menu on 19.04, anyway. It's able to format hard disks and USB sticks, create and remove partitions, rename partitions, and check disk health. Not only that, it also features writing ISO into disk and vice versa, create ISO image of a disk. This tutorial explains in brief how to use it for 8 purposes. Let's go!
With the growing number of AI-based developers, Clear Linux Project shifts its focus towards Deep Learning as it releases Deep Learning Reference Stack 4.0.
The brains behind Clear Linux Project, namely Intel, acknowledges the significance of Artificial Intelligence and how rapidly it has been evolving as of late. Accordingly, the company vows to accelerate enterprise and ecosystem development to take DL (Deep Learning) workloads to the next level. As a part of this mission, Intel introduced an integrated Deep Learning Reference Stack, whose new version arrived earlier this week.
This stack is mainly aimed at the Deep Learning facet of Artificial Intelligence and performs well on the Intel€® Xeon€® Scalable series of processors.
In this video, we are looking at Redcore Linux 1908.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Voyager Live 10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Many people in the technology world have heard, at least in passing, of the Linux distribution Gentoo. Gentoo is one of the most famous distributions to the point of becoming a joke; with it’s complexity and depth, installing Gentoo has been a daunting task for many.
Redcore is one of the latest distributions to attempt to bring the power of Gentoo to the everyday user.
I previously wrote an article in 2017 about Sabayon Linux, another popular Gentoo based system; but Redcore Linux holds its own and pulls its own weight.
Debian is a general-purpose Linux distribution that is widely used on the planet. I am a Debian Developer who works on packages related to Android SDK and the Java ecosystem.
I started a new package in an attempt to build the Android framework android.jar using the upstream build systems involving Ninja, Soong and others. Since the beginning we have been writing our own (very simple) makefiles to build the binaries in AOSP because their build logic tends to be simple and straightforward, until we worked on android.jar. Building it requires digging in so much code that it became incredibly hard to maintain, which is why we still haven’t brought in any newer version since android-framework-23. This is problematic as developers can’t build any apps that target Android 7+.
After a month of work, this package is finally done. After all its dependencies are packaged in the future, it will be good to upload. This is where the students of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) come in!
Ubuntu Phones are ready to get hardware compatibility improvements and bug-fixes with the new update to Ubuntu Touch now available.
For those who aren’t familiar with Ubuntu Touch, it is a mobile-based operating system that users will find similar to Ubuntu. Powered by UBports, Ubuntu Touch focuses on the privacy and freedom of its users, much like the desktop variant of Ubuntu.
would like to completely remove Qt 4 from the Ubuntu archive before the 20.04 release. This includes all of KDE 4 and dependencies.
The Debian Qt/KDE Team (which I am a part of) is raising the status of the Qt 4 removal bugs to RC[1], and since the Qt 6 work is starting upstream in the dev branch in the coming months, now is the time for Qt 4 to go.
My timeline for this is to change all of the bugs filed to ask people to port[2] to removal bugs, and go over the list of Qt 4 reverse dependencies one last time, so the removal can be done at the beginning of the 20.04 cycle before the archive opens. This would make 19.10 the last release with Qt 4.
As per reports, the silicon giant Intel is working on a new Atom SoC which goes by the codename Lightning Mountain. The details of the upcoming chip were spotted in the recently released Linux kernel patch notes by Phoronix (via Tom’s Hardware).
It’s speculated that the new SoC will be a “network processor” much like Snow Ridge. The latter was unveiled earlier this year and built to power 5G base stations.
A few years ago, we came across GigaDevice GD32 microcontroller compatible with STMicro STM32F103, but with a higher 108 MHz clock, and zero wait state internal flash.
The VoCore2 Mini Linux Computer packs a wireless router and 16M of onboard storage into a cube about the size of a coin. Just hook it up to any display monitor through a standard USB2.0 port, and you're ready to put it to work. With 128MB of DDR2 memory and an MT7628AN MIPS processor, it's equally useful as a streaming station, VPN gateway, data storage - you name it.
LibreOffice 6.3 is a powerful, rich office suite, and the fact it comes with no strings attached, the string to your purse included, is a commendable thing. But it is not enough. Simply isn't. Functionality is what matters, and if the program cannot satisfy the necessary needs, it's not really useful. Maybe on the scale of un-value, it's less un-valuable than something that costs a lot of money, but you still don't get what you require.
And in this regard, LibreOffice 6.3 doesn't quite cut it. I mean, you can still use it happily - I know I will, it does an okay job, and you can create files and export to PDF and all that. But then, working with Office files is pretty much a no-go, the style management is inefficient, and the UI layouts are somewhat clunky. I also feel the momentum has slowed, and the great, amazing hope that was there when LibreOffice was born is just a thing of mildly apathetic momentum now. True, this ailment grips the entire open-source world, and Linux in particular, but it doesn't change the fact that the hope is slowly dwindling. All in all, worth testing, but a solution to all office problems, LibreOffice 6.3 ain't.
Natural language processing (NLP) is a set of techniques for using computers to detect in human language the kinds of things that humans detect automatically.
NLP is an exciting field of computer science, artificial intelligence, and computational linguistics concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. It includes word and sentence tokenization, text classification and sentiment analysis, spelling correction, information extraction, parsing, meaning extraction, and question answering.
In our formative years, we master the basics of spoken and written language. However, the vast majority of us do not progress past some basic processing rules when we learn how to handle text in our applications. Yet unstructured software comprises the majority of the data we see. NLP is the technology for dealing with our all-pervasive product: human language, as it appears in social media, emails, web pages, tweets, product descriptions, newspaper stories, and scientific articles, in thousands of languages and variants.
Part 2 in this series looked at the 2-file command structure, where the first part of an AWK command created an array based on the first file, and the second part of the command used the array to filter a second file.
Another way to think about this command structure is that an AWK array is like a lookup table, held in memory. You can use that lookup table for different kinds of data operations on another file. In this post I'll demonstrate reformatting and table joining.
"Doing Math with Python" is part of No Starch Press's Python Humble Bundle.
Now, I think it worked for me. I could focus on writing the actual content of the posts than anything else. The tool has a few flaws, but, none of them had any issue with my blogging requirements. It just worked for me. I could have written it in Python (in much less time), but, learning a new language is always fun.
PyCharm 2019.2.1 is available now!
I’m delighted to announce that Weekly Python Exercise is a gold sponsor of PyCon 2020, to be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. PyCon is the largest Python conference in the world, and is both fun and interesting for Python developers of all experience levels and backgrounds.
The monthly GitLab update has arrived, right on time and with new features and capabilities. Take a look inside and see some of the newest highlights for version 12.2. This month introduces faster, more efficient pipelines, cross project merge request dependencies, performance upgrades, a new Design Management, and a few more goodies. The latest version of GitLab is right on time, with new updates, new features for members, and more. Welcome to version 12.2.
New to GitLab and unsure of how it stacks up against other commonly used tools? Check out the comparison between GitLab and the rest of the DevOps tools landscape to see how it has grown and how it compares to similar tools. Potentially, it could replace certain tool functionalities included in Jenkins, Docker Hub, GitHub, and more.
Following Spectre/Meltdown, the Linux CPU microcode updating was made serial while now a new patch pending for the Linux kernel would restore the behavior to be parallelized in order to speed-up the process for large core count servers.
Handling parallel CPU microcode updates can make a meaningful difference on today's large core count systems. An Oracle engineer has volleyed a patch from an Intel developer in trying to get the code into the mainline kernel.
Another well-known fact about Turing was his conviction for "gross indecency" because of his homosexuality, and the posthumous apology and pardon issued over more a half a decade after Turing’s death.
But beyond all of this, who was Alan Turing?
Here are six books that delve deeply into the life and legacy of Alan Turing. Collectively, these books cover his life, both professional and personal, and work others have done to build upon Turing’s ideas. Individually, or collectively, these works allow the reader to learn who Alan Turing was beyond just a few well-known, broad-stroke themes.
On August 8, at a launch site in Russia’s Arkhangelsk region, a rocket engine exploded. Two days later, state officials acknowledged that the accident resulted in a radiation leak. The victims in the explosion were taken to a hospital in Arkhangelsk, where the radioactive nuclide cesium-137 was later detected in the body of one of the doctors. Sources have confirmed to Meduza that none of the responding rescue workers or physicians were warned that they were treating irradiated patients. Hospital staff were informed about the risk of radiation only several hours after doctors started operating on the victims, and decontamination efforts didn’t begin until the next day. Most of the health workers involved in this incident have been sworn to state secrecy, but Meduza managed to speak to an employee at a rescue service whose staff administered first aid to the victims before they were hospitalized, and we reached a doctor at one of the hospitals where some victims were treated. In the text below, Meduza has changed both individuals’ names to protect their identity.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (cups, nginx, and openjdk-7), Fedora (httpd, mod_md, nghttp2, and patch), and SUSE (rubygem-loofah).
Fifty years ago this fall, a campus upsurge turned opposition to the Vietnam War into a genuine mass movement.
Once upon a time, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard traveled to Syria and met with the strongman President Bashar Assad. She considered her willingness to engage all sides of the country’s bloody civil war to be an important step toward peace. For this bold action, she was widely pilloried at the time and considered by some an authoritarian apologist or outright traitor. The claim was repeated again recently by the ever-so-mainstream California Sen. Kamala Harris, a fellow Democratic presidential hopeful. The attacks on Gabbard’s Syria record have been quite regular among Washington insiders, who considered the congresswoman foolish. But was she? More than two years later, given events in Syria, one must conclude that she certainly was not. Indeed, Gabbard was right all along.
Wikileaks cables reveal Iran presents no threat to Australia and little threat to the US. Instead, clear intelligence from the US, Australia and Iran confirms Iran, although portrayed as aggressive, has pursued a defensive military strategy. Clinton Fernandez reports.
This week, Australia announced it would send military forces to patrol the Persian Gulf alongside Bahrain, Britain and the United States. “Iran’s unprovoked attacks on international shipping,” required nothing less, according to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
The US had previously withdrawn from the so-called “Iran nuclear deal,” known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and imposed sanctions against Iran. Iran went to the International Court of Justice, asking it to rule on the legality of these sanctions. In a unanimous decision, all 15 judges of the International Court of Justice – including American judge ad hoc Charles Brower – ordered the United States to ease some sanctions against Iran.
Calling the global climate crisis both the greatest threat facing the United States and the greatest opportunity for transformative change, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday€ unveiled a comprehensive Green New Deal proposal€ that would transition the U.S. economy to 100 percent renewable energy and create 20 million well-paying union jobs over a decade.
Leaked documents show that Jair Bolsonaro's government intends to use the Brazilian president's hate speech to isolate minorities living in the Amazon region. The PowerPoint slides, which democraciaAbierta has seen, also reveal plans to implement predatory projects that could have a devastating environmental impact.
More and more media are reporting on fires tearing through the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. There has been a marked increase in fires in Brazil concurrent with an increase in illegal—and climate-disrupting—deforestation, concurrent with President Jair Bolsonaro’s efforts to open the Amazon to mining and logging interests. Criticism of media is coming in, too—mostly for being late to cover fires that have been burning for three weeks in a uniquely critical place. But whenever they do it, corporate media addressing modern day crises like the Amazon fires will never do them anything approaching justice.
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More important, given that failure, is the refusal to hand the mic to those who are fighting. Like the Apurinã chief who told the Intercept‘s Alexander Zaitchik (7/6/19) they had seen landgrabs before, but “with Bolsonaro, the invasions are worse and will continue to get worse…. Unless he is stopped, he’ll run over our rights and allow a giant invasion of the forest.” Or the signatories to the Bogota Declaration to the 14th UN Biodiversity Conference, who offered a plan from 400 ethnic groups across the Amazon basin to form a “sacred corridor of life,” to share ancestral knowledge and showcase alternative modes of development and ways of living (Common Dreams, 11/21/18).
Symone Sanders, a senior adviser to Joe Biden, described a grassroots push for a presidential climate debate sponsored by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) as “dangerous territory in the middle of a Democratic primary process.”
The remarks came during a meeting of the DNC Resolutions Committee, which defeated the resolution in an 8-17 vote.
"This is a pivotal moment in the history of America—and really, in the history of humanity."
"We'll miss you in this race, Jay Inslee. Thank you for setting the pace for our elected leaders on the climate crisis, running a historic campaign, and elevating this issue for all of us."
This morning,€ U.S Senator and presidential candidate Bernie Sanders released a campaign climate and energy plan that would, among other things: ban fracking; halt new fossil fuel extraction on federal lands; ban fossil fuel imports and exports; rebuild water infrastructure through the WATER Act; break up corporate factory farming; and require 100 percent clean, renewable
You wouldn’t expect someone who spent his entire life in high-rise penthouses to understand much about the stunning complexity of Earth’s natural environment and the millions of species that depend on what is called the interconnected “web of life.” And sure enough, while the Sixth Great Extinction is ongoing and accelerating, President Trump is changing the Endangered Species Act through administrative rules, not to rise to the challenge of stopping extinctions, but to make it easier for commercial and extractive enterprises such as oil, gas, mining, logging, ranching, road-building and development to actually exacerbate the rate of extinctions.
What follows is a conversation between Amazon Watch’s Christian Poirier and Dharna Noor of The Real News Network.
Climate change has been steadily warming the ocean, which absorbs most of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, for 100 years. This warming is altering marine ecosystems and having a direct impact on fish populations. About half of the world’s population relies on fish as a vital source of protein, and the fishing industry employs more the 56 million people worldwide.
My recent study with colleagues from Rutgers University and the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration found that ocean warming has already impacted global fish populations. We found that some populations benefited from warming, but more of them suffered.
Overall, ocean warming reduced catch potential — the greatest amount of fish that can be caught year after year — by a net 4 percent over the past 80 years. In some regions, the effects of warming have been much larger. The North Sea, which has large commercial fisheries, and the seas of East Asia, which support some of the fastest-growing human populations, experienced losses of 15 percent to 35 percent.
"Executive action should not be used to hurt individuals, families, and communities."
"We've said from day one that any savings employers gain from Medicare for All must be passed on to union workers in the form of higher wages and benefits. We know that because Bernie wrote the damn bill."
Britain’s Boris Johnson is driving his country to the cliff face, along the way mouthing and spouting all manner of populist reassurances. Still fresh in the job, he declared that UK preparations for a no-deal Brexit on October 31, when Britain would leave the European Union, would receive a boost – a “turbocharge”, no less. Michael Gove, now chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, has been charged with the task of handling the haphazard effort, having chaired some dozen meetings of the Brexit war cabinet dubbed XO to date.
Average CEO pay at big corporations topped 14.5 million dollars in 2018. That’s after an increase of 5.2 million dollars per CEO over the past decade, while the average worker’s pay has increased just 7,858 dollars over the decade.
There have been a number of articles recently which have highlighted liberal displeasure over the ways in which major mainstream corporate media outlets are portraying the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders in a negative manner. More of these articles have appeared after Sanders tamely speculated about the possibility that the Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, with his Amazonian corporate freedom from taxation (and this would implicate the various other private corporate owners of media outlets) might perhaps use his power to lessen the freedom of the press. The fact that Bezos has used his money to support republicans and democrats almost equally is a very important aspect of his opportunism and the opportunism of the parties. Bezos has shown a strong preference for helping elect democrat or republican candidates with military experience.
What are we to make of Argentina’s surprise election results on August 11, which jolted pollsters and analysts alike, and roiled the country’s financial markets? In the presidential primary for the country’s October election, the opposition ticket of Alberto Fernández trounced President Mauricio Macri by an unexpected margin of 15.6 percent.
President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade brinksmanship has split the American economy into new castes of winners and losers, with few consistent criteria defining who ends up in which group — as illustrated by the $2 billion in products that won exemptions last week from a new round of China tariffs.
Bibles and other religious texts got a pass after U.S. publishers and Christian groups argued that tariffs would infringe upon the freedom to worship around the globe.
"While city and state officials must respond to the current crisis with urgency, they must also protect their water system from predatory corporate operators."
The will that Jeffrey Epstein signed just two days before his jailhouse suicide puts more than $577 million in assets into a trust fund that could make it more difficult for his dozens of accusers to collect damages.
– By the close of the century, the United States could be more than 10% poorer, thanks to the economic loss that climate change will impose.
There is bad news too for Japan, India and New Zealand, which will also be 10% worse off in a world that could be 3€°C hotter than any temperatures experienced since humans began to build cities, civilisations and complex economies.
And the news is even worse for Canada, a northern and Arctic nation that could reasonably have expected some things to improve as the thermometer rose: under a “business as usual” scenario in which nations go on burning fossil fuels at ever increasing rates, the Canadian economy could shrink by 13%.
A new study by the US National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts warns that overall the global economy will shrink by 7%, unless the world’s nations meet the target they set themselves at an historic meeting in Paris in 2015, when they agreed an ambition to keep global warming to no more than 2€°C above the levels maintained until the Industrial Revolution.
“‘We the people’ has never meant ‘all the people,’” said Independent presidential candidate Mark Charles of the Navajo Nation at the first-ever Native American presidential forum, held August 19 and 20 in Sioux City, Iowa.Charles was enthusiastically received as the only member of a tribe currently running for president, and his remarks echoed a theme of the night: the
Case "could spur additional change and additional movement that would in some ways make a solution like the National Popular Vote stronger," one advocate said
Socrates was the first revolutionary. He opened up with a legendary oracular search the inner space from which the individual, as we understand him today, would eventually emerge. His “daemon” was that which spoke the necessary freedom and autonomy to become what we are. His was the first lesson.
As the Amazon rainforest burns and glaciers melt historically fast, to many Americans, Democrats are failing to rise to the occasion, particularly when they focus on such topics as the Russia investigation, according to Noam Chomsky. “It was obvious from the beginning that they were not going to find very much,” the linguist and activist tells writer David Barsamian in a wide-ranging interview published Wednesday in Truthout.
A new precinct-based voting system being widely acquired by states and counties before 2020 that relies on printed bar codes to record votes, not handmade ink marks, may pose problems for independent efforts seeking to double-check election results.
About 6 in 10 Americans disapprove of President Donald Trump’s overall job performance, according to a new poll released Thursday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, which finds some support for the president’s handling of the U.S. economy but gives him weak marks on other major issues.
I am an investigative journalist who has been researching the Alex Salmond case. I am not alone as there are to my knowledge at least three television programmes doing the same thing. I make no claim to be impartial, partially because of my sympathy towards the independence movement and partially because my previous work has dealt substantially with failings in the criminal justice system. As far as the criminal case against Alex Salmond is concerned I will not be able to publish or comment until it is over. However the expenses settlement last week of Alex Salmond’s successful civil action allows me , without any prejudice, to relate just a few the dramatic and deeply troubling things I have already discovered about the civil case.
This same opportunity for comment was taken up with gusto last week by the mainstream media in Scotland. Their coverage centred on the scale of the legal expenses agreed to be paid by the Scottish Government to Alex Salmond. This was followed up by the Sunday Mail and the Sunday Post last weekend with stories suggesting that Salmond’s lawyers might have been overcharging and blaming the Scottish Government for not having them independently audited.
True to form the unionist press have gloriously and entirely missed the point. The reason that the expenses were an eye watering €£512,000 and change is that they were awarded by the Court largely on an “agent and client” basis. “Agent and client” is a punitive award used by the courts when the losing party to litigation has been causing the other unnecessary expense. It means that the victorious party (ie Salmond) is entitled to full expenses as opposed to the normal 60 per cent or so which accompanies victory. Having the expenses audited (or “taxed” in the legal parlance) is a complete red herring. No such process could set aside the decision of the court for that element of expenses which were awarded on an “agent and client” basis.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a new ruling in U.S. v. Cano [.pdf] that offers greater privacy protection for people crossing the border with their electronic devices, but it doesn’t go as far as we sought in our amicus brief.
Cano had attempted to cross the border near San Diego when cocaine was found in his car. He was arrested at the port of entry and border agents manually and forensically searched his cell phone. He was prosecuted for importing illegal drugs and moved to suppress the evidence found on his phone. The Ninth Circuit held that the searches of his cell phone violated the Fourth Amendment and vacated his conviction.
In U.S. v. Cotterman (2013), the Ninth Circuit had circumscribed the border search exception as it applies to electronic devices. The court held that the Fourth Amendment required border agents to have had reasonable suspicion—a standard between no suspicion and probable cause—before they conducted a forensic search, aided by sophisticated software, of the defendant’s laptop. Unfortunately, the Cotterman court also held that a manual search of a laptop is “routine” and so the border search exception applies: no warrant or any suspicion of wrongdoing is needed.
In Cano, it was disappointing though not surprising that the three-judge panel reaffirmed Cotterman’s en banc rule and held that a manual search of a cell phone requires no suspicion while a forensic search requires reasonable suspicion. We argued in our amicus brief that the Ninth Circuit should revisit this issue and require a probable cause warrant for all border device searches, in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Riley v. California (2014). In that watershed case, the Court acknowledged the extraordinary privacy interests people have in their cell phones, irrespective of how the devices are searched, and held that police must obtain a warrant to search the cell phone of an arrestee.
The BBC News site has one of those heart-warming stories that crop up periodically, about how clever new technology averted a potentially dangerous situation. In this case, it describes how a group of people lost in a forest in England were located by rescue services. The happy ending was thanks to the use of the What3words (W3W) app they managed to download following a suggestion from the police when they phoned for help. W3W's creators have divided the world up into 57 trillion virtual squares, each measuring 3m by 3m (10ft by 10ft), and then assigned each of those squares a unique "address" formed by three randomly-assigned words, such as "mile.crazy.shade". The idea is that it's easier to communicate three words generated by the What3words app from your position, than to read out your exact GPS longitude and latitude as a string of numbers. It's certainly a clever approach, but there are number of problems, many of which were discussed in a fascinating post by Terence Eden from earlier this year.
If you hadn't noticed by now, in the IOT era, sometimes dumb technology is the smarter option. Given that privacy and security are usually afterthoughts for many vendors, we now live in an age where your Barbie can be hacked and used to spy on your kids, your refrigerator can be hacked to gain access to your Gmail account, your smart tea kettle can provide a nice attack vector on your home network, and your "smart" television watches you every bit as often as you watch it. This wasn't the future the Jetsons promised.
Enter the June oven, a "smart" oven that originally launched in 2015 with a $1500 countertop variant that used a camera and "computer vision" to know what was being cooked. The company then launched a $600 version in 2018 that integrates an oven, an air fryer, dehydrator, slow cooker, broiler, toaster, warming drawer, and convection countertop oven.
In her important op-ed for the New York Times on August 13, 2019, a DACA recipient (Dreamer) named Tawheeda Wahabzada, whose Afghan parents had earlier sought refuge in Canada but then came over to the U.S., declares that she is no longer willing to wait for our country’s legislative | By Anis Shivani
"We do not need authorities deciding about who is a 'hero' and who is 'illegal.'"
Last month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Senator Kamala Harris released their€ Climate Equity Act€ – the first draft of a critical component of a Green New Deal. The act aims to protect marginalized communities as Congress attempts to “address” climate change by creating a system that gives environmental legislation an equity score based on its impact on “frontline communities.”
The big black pickup truck plunged into the protesters blocking the parking lot and I cringed, viscerally, as though I could feel it myself — this merciless crush of steel against flesh.
Four hundred years ago this month, the first enslaved people from Africa arrived in Virginia. Slavery is often reduced to a crime of America’s long-ago past. But enslaved labor created the backbone for America’s capitalistic economy, allowing it to grow into — and remain — the world’s leading economy today. The effects of this reliance on unpaid African slave labor is still
I don’t like dealing with police. I picked up this prejudice, which I feel is an intelligent way of dealing with police, from lots of experiences that came out of the decade of protest in the mid to late 1960s and the early 1970s. I saw how police dealt with kids that hung out around the McCarthy for President office in my hometown during the summer of 1968, and I saw it while protesting in Washington, DC, during the May Day demonstrations in 1971. Everyone saw it on their TV sets and read about it in newspapers during the Democratic Convention in 1968. It was called a police riot in 1968.
Trump sent his national security adviser John “Bonkers” Bolton to London, where the neocon Bonkers could hang out with Trump’s pal BoJo Johnson, absolutely relaxed in the knowledge that this was one place in the world where his host would not treat Bonkers on the latter’s proven merits, that is, as a bona fide nut-case.
“Why haven’t we been taught this history before?”€ Students have asked us this question countless times over the past twenty-five years of teaching Latin America Studies and Chicana/o-Latina/o Studies at Cal State Los Angeles, Pomona College and Claremont Graduate University. The emotions triggering this question are usually the same. Students feel lied to and cheated. Some are frustrated and downright angry that ethnic studies has been excluded from their schooling.€ They wonder what else they have been denied and how despite thirteen years in the K-12 educational system they have been taught so little about communities who form the base of the United States and whose presence is integral to California.
Russian scholars working in a range of countries around the world, Russia included, have published a statement demanding that charges of mass rioting against Moscow election protesters be dropped. The scientific and scholarly news portal Troitsky Variant posted the statement on August 22.
Moscow’s subway system has filed a lawsuit against several opposition leaders who are already defendants in other civil cases brought by other public transport companies because of service disruptions allegedly caused by protests on July 27. “Agora” human rights group head Pavel Chikov first reported the case record on the Koptevsky District Court’s website.
"If all the Democratic presidential candidates say to the DNC, 'Let's have a debate or a forum about climate change'—what are they gonna do, kick out every single one of them?"
Among those enraged at the failure of Democratic functionaries to approve a climate debate as the planet burns is Havana Chapman-Edwards, an African-American, 8-year-old powerhouse who argues, "We can’t make our world strong if we leave people behind."
SALT LAKE CITY—Planned Parenthood clinics in several states are charging new fees, tapping financial reserves, intensifying fundraising and warning of more unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases after its decision to quit a $260 million federal family planning program in an abortion dispute with the Trump administration.
On July 19, President Trump hosted Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins and their families, along with the family of their deceased colleague Neil Armstrong, at a White House event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first manned landing on the moon.
Ramon Torres had been a U.S. citizen for nearly ten years when he was detained for four days on an immigration hold –€ despite having a U.S. passport, a Louisiana driver’s license, and a Social Security card, and despite that fact that a court ordered his release.€
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov: I don’t know anything about this. I don’t know which doctors are in question.
"Trump is selling the government to the highest bidder and migrant children are dying in detention—on her watch."
I am an unashamed word nerd, a grammar nazi and what can I say? Words are cool. The English language (which is the only one I know well enough to have an informed opinion on) is a beautiful thing, especially when it makes you think and you can have fun with it.
On that note, I present my second installment of the wordplay that makes me happiest (except for clever puns and really bad ‘Dad jokes’), the palindrome.
As you probably know, a palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same backwards and forwards.
On the issue of patent eligibility, LABOKLIN and the University argued on appeal that the asserted claims are directed to a patent-eligible application of the discovery of the underlying natural phenomenon because the asserted claims claim a man-made laboratory procedure. The Federal Circuit, however, disagreed with Appellants' argument.
[...]
Noting that "the plain language of claim 1 demonstrates that it is directed to nothing more than 'observing or identifying' the natural phenomenon of a mutation in the SUV39H2 gene," the Court determined that "the Asserted Claims are directed to natural phenomenon at Alice step one."
The Federal Circuit also disagreed with Appellants' argument that the claimed methods apply a new discovery of the SUV39H2 gene and develop novel genotyping methods for Labrador Retrievers, finding instead that "[n]othing in claim 1's language suggests the invention of a new method for genotyping." In affirming the District Court's finding of patent ineligibility, the Federal Circuit determined that "the Asserted Claims provide no tangible result save the observation and detection of a mutation in a dog's DNA." So, while such discovery constituted "a positive and valuable contribution," the Federal Circuit found that "these claims fall short of statutory patentable subject matter."
In-house and private practice lawyers in France have offered mixed views of the country’s updated IP box tax relief regime – with one describing the need for a balancing act between publishing information and keeping inventions secret
Nearly a decade ago, we wrote a bunch about an excellent book called Copyfraud, by law professor Jason Mazzone, which went into great detail about how the legacy entertainment industry companies have used copyright in ways that are clearly against copyright's intent -- to the point that they border on fraud. The concept of copyfraud should be referred to more frequently, and here's a perfect example. Just a couple months ago, we wrote about the amazing social media account of Jimmy O'Brien, who goes by @Jomboy_ on Twitter. He's combined his love of baseball, his video editing skills, his ability to read lips incredibly well, and with a sarcastic, dry sense of humor to make a ton of amazing videos about various things happening in baseball. We highlighted a bunch last time around and his profile has only grown a lot since then, including among Major League Baseball players.
