favorite among many webmasters and technology enthusiasts around the world, LINUX is known for its incredible power and flexibility as a platform. An operating system that rules the IT industry with just a snap of a finger, LINUX has stood tall since the year it was introduced into the developer community almost three decades ago. The community has recently outdone itself by releasing to the public a bite-sized computer with a full-feature display for a price you would not believe until you’ve since it for yourself. The VoCore2 Mini Linux Computer Bundle lets you take Linux power with you wherever you go, and is currently available at over 10% off for only $69. Read on to find out everything this table-sized computer can do to make your life easier one click at a time.
There is one question that's dominating my interactions with Linux users on social media lately: "I want to buy a new laptop to run Linux, but do I have to purchase one from a company like Dell, Purism or System76? Aren't we at a point where Linux 'just works' on anything?" The answer isn't black and white, but I'll do my best to give you a sensible response and explain the advantages of buying a computer that's purpose-built for Linux, as well as what you can expect when snatching up any modern laptop from HP, Acer, Asus, Lenovo and other OEMs that ship with Windows by default.
Linux uses less of your computer's resources than Windows, so the hardware requirements for running a Linux distro may not be as steep as Windows 10. But the specs you're looking for will vary depending on your needs. So here are some basic scenarios alongside the minimum CPU, RAM and space requirements you should look for...
Incumbent banks should know they have to modernize their organization to compete in a world where customers want better and more personalized digital experiences. Eager to realize the cost-savings and increased revenue that can result from micro-targeting products and services, they can adopt next-generation technologies to transform their businesses to lead their market.
Digital leaders are focused on end-to-end customer experiences. Processes, policies, and procedures defined for branch networks are being reimagined to support new digital customer engagement. By modernizing the back office and business processes, banks have an opportunity to streamline, codify, and thereby automate - which, in turn, can reduce friction caused by manual checks and inconsistent policies. This can enable more seamless customer experiences and speedier customer service, with transparency into servicing while reducing operational costs.
You might have read about the architectural changes and enhancements in Red Hat OpenShift 4 that resulted in operational and installation benefits. Or maybe you read about how OpenShift 4 assists with developer innovation and hybrid cloud deployments. I want to draw attention to another part of OpenShift 4 that we haven’t exposed to you yet…until today.
When Red Hat acquired CoreOS, and had the opportunity to blend Container Linux with RHEL and Tectonic with OpenShift, the innovation did not remain only in the products we brought to market.
An exciting part about working on new cloud-native technology is the ability to redefine how you work. Redefine how you hammer that nail with your hammer. These Red Hat engineers were building a house, and sometimes the tools they needed simply did not exist.
IBM has open sourced the POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), which is used in its Power Series chips and in many embedded devices by other manufacturers. In addition, the OpenPOWER Foundation will become part of The Linux Foundation to further open governance.
IBM created the OpenPOWER Foundation in 2013 with the aim to make it easier for server vendors to build customized servers based on IBM Power architecture. By joining the OpenPOWER Foundation, vendors had access to processor specifications, firmware, and software and were allowed to manufacture POWER processors or related chips under a liberal license. With IBM latest announcement, vendors can create chips using the POWER ISA without paying any royalties and have full access to the ISA definition. As IBM OpenPOWER general manager Ken King highlights, open sourcing the POWER ISA enables the creation of computers that are completely open source, from the foundation of the hardware, including the processor instruction set, firmware, boot code, and so on up to the software stack.
Safely host your own password database using totally open source software. We cover BitWarden, our top choice to solve this problem.
Plus we announce a new show we're super proud of, and chat with Dan Lynch from OggCamp.
Special Guests: Alan Pope, Alex Kretzschmar, Brent Gervais, Dan Lynch, and Ell Marquez.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got a couple birthdays to celebrate with one being the Linux kernel itself and Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) project.
Intel open-source developer Kenneth Graunke who is the lead developer on their "Iris" Gallium3D driver has landed a new performance optimization in Mesa to help their Gen11/Icelake graphics performance.
Ken managed another 1~3% performance boost for Gen11/Icelake. The optimization is using headerless RT writes for MRT cases and is an optimization made to their common compiler code used by i965/Iris/ANV drivers, but Ken's testing is focused on their new Iris OpenGL driver.
SwiftShader. Google's CPU-based implementation that originally was focused on OpenGL ES and Direct3D 9, now has Vulkan 1.1 support in tow.
Google engineers have been maintaining SwiftShader as open-source the past few years and is akin to Gallium3D's LLVMpipe but focused as well on just not OpenGL ES but also Direct3D 9 and Vulkan. SwiftShader is used by Google Chrome and other software for CPU-based 3D graphics when necessary.
he FFmpeg library up to this point has supported AMD's Advanced Media Framework (AMF) library just on Windows for H.264/HEVC encoding on GPUs. The Windows code-path makes use of DirectX while now AMD AMF support for Linux via Vulkan is now exposed by the latest FFmpeg code.
AMD does offer the Advanced Media Framework for Linux but it's through their Radeon Software / AMDGPU-PRO packages and thus not seeing as much adoption as the likes of VDPAU/VA-API. And even then when using the packaged AMD Linux driver, the user needs to manually install the amf-amdgpu-pro package as it doesn't get installed by default.
In the field of mathematical software packages, applications such as Wolfram Research’s Mathematica, and Maplesoft’s Maple system instantly spring to mind. These are both highly popular, proprietary, commercial, integrated mathematical software environments. Other types of mathematical software packages generally receive much less publicity.
One such area is interactive geometry software, which combines three branches of mathematics: geometry, calculus and algebra. This type of software allows users to create and modify constructions, which are generally in plane geometry. Construction involves building mathematical shapes out of points, lines, conic sections, hyperbola, ellipses, and circles. These diagrams can then be altered and the effects of the mathematical properties of the shapes can be observed.
SNMP monitoring is by far the most common type of network monitoring technology. It allows administrators of networks of any size to be kept informed of the status of the networks they manage as well as their utilization. Likewise, Linus is also a very common platform that many network administrators have turned to. Although it is not yet as common in the desktop world as the commercial offerings from some mega-vendors, it is very common in the server world. Even IBM has made it its OS of choice on many of its higher-range systems.
Rclone, a free and open source command line cloud storage hub, was updated to version 1.49 with major additions like 4 new backends, including for the much requested Google Photos, and a new experimental web UI. There's also a new logo (picture above).
Rclone is a command line cloud storage synchronization program. It allows accessing and synchronizing files between your filesystem and cloud storage services, or between multiple cloud storage services. It features one way sync to make a directory identical, it has encryption, cache and union backends, supports FUSE mounts, and can serve local or remote files over HTTP, WebDav, FTP, SFTP or dlna.
Every object on your Linux system has a permission mode that describes what actions a user can perform on it. There are three types of permissions: read (r), write (w), and execute (x).
To read a file is to view its contents. For example, a text file must have read permission for someone to read the text within. If the user wants to add a sentence to that file, it needs write permission. The execute permission enables someone to run a file, such as a shell script or a binary program file.
Trese Brothers just recently put out a massive update to their impressive and engrossing space RPG Star Traders: Frontiers, along with a nice sale to go along with it.
This incredibly deep space sim just got bigger with a lot more story content added, along with a pistol-blade wielding "Bodyguard" Job. The developer said this major expansion to the story of Star Traders: Frontiers "includes a major arc that moves forward the political story of the galaxy, brings new powerful characters to the fore and threatens to upend some of the order you may have helped establish".
Voidpoint, what are you doing? I am so confused at this point. After releasing a statement we posted last week in our Ion Fury post, the team at Voidpoint now seem to be doing something of a ridiculous U-turn.
Their original statement seemed reasonable and a good way to put an end to the situation. It sounded genuine enough anyway.
A few days later, they posted an announcement on Steam that's a joint statement from both developer Voidpoint and publisher 3D Realms. In this statement they say they "will absolutely NOT be censoring Ion Fury or any of our other games" and that they will not be "removing gags such as gaming’s most controversial facial wash". The facial wash in question has the homophobic slur "ogay" on the bottle, to which the statement mentions that they "regret our initial decision to alter a sprite in the game instead of trusting our instincts".
The team over at Unity continue advancing the game engine with some impressive work going on and the first Unity 2019.3 beta is now available.
With this beta release it includes some needed enhancements to the Editor UI with uniform icons and high-DPI support along with other changes to improve usability and make the UI more responsive overall.
Bloody Rally Show, the very promising top-down racer from Game Hero Interactive now actually has a release date set. This game is one we briefly talked about here earlier this month, after being impressed by the early Linux support available in the beta.
Announcing the set date on Steam, the developer has put it down to February 20th, 2020 to ensure they have enough time to fix bugs and make it a polished release.
Prepare yourself for another retro-inspired action adventure with Cathedral, developed by the Swedish team at Decemberborn Interactive.
Cathedral is leaning heavily into the NES style here with both the colour palette and the audio work, although they do some they're not fully restricting themselves so it has elements taken from both the 8-bit and 16-bit era.
The library will be doing the heavy lifting by rendering QML templates to QImage frames using QQuickRenderControl in the new MLT QML producer. Parameters that can be manipulated are:
FPS Duration DPI Image Format The library can be tested using QmlRender (a CLI executable).
GNOME Firmware Updater was designed in the style of a GNOME Control Center panel, and all the code is written in a way to make a port very simple indeed if that’s what we actually want. At the moment it’s a seporate project and binary, as we’re still prototyping the UI and working out what kind of UX we want from a power user tool. It’s mostly complete and a few weeks away from it’s first release. When it does get an official release, I’ll be sure to upload it to Flathub to make it easy for the world to install. If this sounds interesting to you the code is here. I don’t have a huge amount of time to dedicate to this power user tool, but please open pull requests or issues if there’s something you’d like to see fixed.
After mentoring a Dell student intern over the summer, Red Hat's Richard Hughes has announced their work today on the GNOME Firmware Updater.
The GNOME Firmware Updater is a more powerful GTK application for viewing device firmware information on Linux built off the existing Fwupd+LVFS infrastructure.
The GNOME Foundation, with support from Endless, has announced the Coding Education Challenge, a competition aimed to attract projects that offer educators and students new and innovative ideas to teach coding with free and open source software. The $500,000 in funding will support the prizes, which will be awarded to the teams who advance through the three stages of the competition.
Both the GNOME Foundation and Endless share a deep commitment to a vibrant free and open source software ecosystem.
“We’re very grateful that Endless has come forward to provide more opportunities for individuals to learn about free and open source software,” said Neil McGovern, Executive Director, GNOME Foundation. “We’re excited to see what can be achieved when we empower the creativity and imagination of our global community. We hope to make powerful partnerships between students and educators to explore the possibilities of our rich and diverse software ecosystem. Reaching the next generation of developers is crucial to ensuring that free software continues for many years in the future.”
The GNOME Foundation has kicked off their Coding Education Challenge for promoting programming around free/open-source software and with Endless Computers providing the $500,000 USD for prize money.
Lars and I have been working on an acceptance testing tool recently. You may have seen the soft launch announcement on Lars' blog. Sadly since that time we've discovered that Fable is an overloaded name in the domain of software quality assurance and we do not want to try and compete with Fable since (a) they were there first, and (b) accessibility is super-important and we don't want to detract from the work they're doing.
Debian 10 “Buster” operating system, a major release of debian Linux distribution that brings many new features and enhancements. ships with a variety of desktop environments, running with Gnome Desktop (3.30) with Wayland display server by default (but it also incorporates Cinnamon 3.8, KDE Plasma 5.14, Mate 1.20, Xfce 4.12 and more), including support for the latest LTS (Long Term Support) Linux kernel series, support for new devices, improved support for existing hardware, as well as up-to-date packages and latest security patches.
The AppArmor open-source access control framework is now installed and enabled by default in Debian 10 “Buster” to add a new layer of security to the operating system. Also, the seccomp-BPF sandboxing method is now being used by APT for better security, along with UEFI Secure Boot support.
The project will increase security in machines essentially by placing a machine’s firmware in a container to isolate it from would-be attackers. A layer of protection is being added to the System Management Interrupt (SMI) handler — code that allows a machine to make adjustments on the hardware level — as part of the open source firmware platform Coreboot.
Eugene Myers, who works in the National Security Agency’s Laboratory for Advanced Cybersecurity, told CyberScoop that the end product — known as an SMI Transfer Monitor with protected execution (STM-PE) — will work with x86 processors that run Coreboot. Attackers are increasingly targeting firmware in order to run malicious attacks. Just last year, the first-ever documented UEFI rootkit was deployed in the wild, according to ESET researchers.
Rather than track sales of this book forever, I’ve rounded up the amount I donated to $250. I expect this will cover the lifetime sales of this particular edition. Tilted Windmill Press is now a proud sponsor of SIGP’s Stop Traffic 5K Walk/Run on 21 September.
Here I outline the shortcuts I actually use every day. When people see me use them they often ask me “what the hell did you do there!?”, conferring God-like status on me with minimal effort or intelligence required.
Recently, Tamarind Tree, a collective from India that works towards social justice, open knowledge and open technology, shared a beautiful story of how a class of students in their School is using group messaging within their Moodle site. Because one of their classmates cannot attend school currently due to family circumstances, the students are using group messaging to update their friend about what’s happening in class and encouraging her to come back to school as soon as possible.
Unsurprisingly, software developers are very passionate about both and very attached to their choices. One of the features offered by the newly Product Hunt award-winning note-taking app Boostnote – the support for both Vim and Emacs keybindings – shows the degree to which it caters specifically to the niche market made up of programmers, as it facilitates the workflow they are used to in their full-fledged editors.
Boostnote, which recently rolled out a new version, doesn't stop there when it comes to being programmer-friendly: it allows users to make both Markdown and code snippets notes in a fairly clean and easy to use interface. Markdown notes are previewed in a split pane in the same window, while code snippets support over 100 programming languages with syntax highlighting.
Other features include Markdown auto-formatting and drag-and-drop embedding of images.
These notes are saved automatically and synced between devices. Boostnote is a cross-platform application, written for Linux, Mac, Windows, as well as Android and iOS.
The iconic website that hosted what many consider to be the birthplace of Internet content creation wants to make sure we don’t lose out on history
Anyone who was active on the Internet in the early to mid-2000s will no doubt have heard of Newgrounds, a place where anybody with a passion to create animation, games or full-blown films could come together and share their work with others. Many of these products were created with the use of Adobe Flash, a nifty little piece of design that allowed users to create all kinds of unique interactions, visuals and sound effects.
Hell, before I even knew what “mainstream” gaming I was I would spend hours playing the original browser versions of games that nearly everyone has heard of now like Linerider, Alien Hominid, Super Mario 63 and Realm of the Mad God. Flash games were a quaint little past time for many and a jumping board for creators looking to put their names out there.
Newgrounds announced last Friday plans to preserve Flash content on the web. Used for everything from animations to games, Flash had a considerable presence on the site. Creators across the globe uploaded thousands of passion projects. Many of these projects became cornerstones of Internet culture, from the Numa Numa Dance to Metal Gear Awesome. Despite Flash’s deprecation as a program, sites still run it to this day. Their emulator, currently called Ruffle, seeks to preserve the technology and keep it accessible.
A couple of weeks ago I attended the Wikimania 2019 conference in Stockholm, Sweden. This is the general and global conference for the Wikimedia movement, in which people interested in free knowledge gather together for a few days. The event happens annually, and this was my first time attending such conference. Wikimania 2019 main program ran for 3 days, but we had 2 pre-conference days in which a hackathon was held.
The venue was an amazing building in the Stockholm University, Aula Magna.
The hackathon reunited technical contributors, such as developers, which are interested in a variety of technical challenges in the wiki movement. You can find in the hackathon people interested in wiki edits automation, research, anti harassment tools and also infrastructure engineering and architecture, among other things.
It is now easier than ever to customize avatars for Hubs! Choosing the way that you represent yourself in a 3D space is an important part of interacting in a virtual world, and we want to make it possible for anyone to have creative control over how they choose to show up in their communities. With the new avatar remixing update, members of the Hubs community can publish avatars that they create under a remixable, Creative Commons license, and grant others the ability to derive new works from those avatars. We’ve also added more options for creating custom avatars.
When you change your avatar in Hubs, you will now have the opportunity to browse through 'Featured' avatars and ‘Newest’ avatars. Avatars that are remixable will have an icon on them that allows you to save a version of that avatar to your own ‘My Avatars’ library, where you can customize the textures on the avatar to create your own spin on the original work. The ‘Red Panda’ avatar below is a remix of the original Panda Bot.
As you may already know, Friday August 16th – we held a new Testday event, for Firefox 69 Beta 14.
f you remember well, a couple of years ago, I wrote about Mastering PostgreSQL, a fantastic book written by my friend Dimitri Fontaine.
Dimitri is a long-time PostgreSQL core developer — for example, he wrote the extension support in PostgreSQL — no less. He is featured in my book Serious Python, where he advises on using databases and ORM in Python.
Today, Dimitri comes back with the new version of this book, named The Art of PostgreSQL.
have never surfed before, but I am told it is incredibly exciting and great exercise, which as we all know is very good for you. For some it may sound daunting, because it is so unlike any other sport, but for those prepared to take the challenge it can be hugely rewarding. Stretching yourself – perhaps literally – and taking your body out of its comfort zone is a proven way of staying healthy. I would argue there are similarities for IT departments as they evaluate how to get their database architectures fit to support businesses that want to become more agile and responsive to customers.
Making sure that IT systems are fit-for-purpose, robust and reliable enables companies to embrace new markets, innovative products and re-engineered processes: all are typical of organisations which are looking to survive and thrive in an increasingly fraught business environment.
We covered Gigadevice GD32V general-purpose microcontroller with a RISC-V “Bumblebee” core last week, and I was informed that Andes Technology had recently introduced AndesCore N22 RISC-V...
Powerful, yet simple to use, TinyGo is making a significant mark in the open-hardware sector.
I play 1980s games, mostly Super Mario Bros., on the Nintendo NES console. It would be great to be able to capture live video from the console for recording or maybe even speedrun streaming. Now, how to make the 1985 NES and the 2013 MacBook play together, preferably using hardware that I already have? This project diary documents my search for the answer.
Here's a spoiler – it did work: [...]
One neat result of Rust’s futures and async/await design is that all of the async callers are on the stack below the async callees. In most other languages, only the youngest async callee is on the stack, and none of the async callers. Because the youngest frame is most often not where a bug’s root cause lies, this extra context makes debugging async code easier in Rust.
Facebook's HHVM implementation that started off as a high performance PHP5 implementation but is now just focused on powering their own Hack programming language is beginning to see some of its code rewritten in Rust.
HHVM 4.20 was released on Tuesday and with this release they have been transitioning some of their code from OCaml to Rust.
year ago, I started working full-time at Bloomberg. That’s when I imagined writing this post. I imagined myself to be full of ideas that I could spit out on paper when the time comes. Just one month in, I realised it won’t be that easy: I was already forgetting things I learnt. They either became so internalized that my mind tricked me into believing I always knew them1, or they slipped my mind.
That’s one of the reasons I started keeping a human log. Every day, whenever I came across an interesting situation, I logged it. All thanks to sitting next to a senior software engineer, I could closely observe what they were doing, and how it was different from what I would do. We pair-programmed a lot, which made doing this easier. Further, in my team culture it’s not frowned upon to “snoop behind” people writing code. Whenever I sensed something interesting going on, I’d roll around and watch what was happening. I always had the context, thanks to regular standups.
I sat next to a senior software engineer for a year. Here’s what I learnt.
Finally, there's been a push for a more coordinated effort towards project maintenance and development by core Dask maintainers at Quansight, Anaconda, and NVIDIA. As part of this effort, we spend a portion of our work week on day-to-day project maintenance tasks (e.g. responding on issues, reviewing pull requests, fixing CI systems, etc.) as well as working on contributions that require significant amounts of time or expertise to implement (e.g. large-scale refactoring, adding new features, writing documentation, etc.). Today, Dask users typically get a quicker response from a core maintainer when opening an issue or pull request, in part, because of these efforts. I, and perhaps other core maintainers, hope to write more about this process in the future.
We have shown how a simple “How do I use mmap()?” mentoring project has grown beyond its initial scope and how we have used mmap, Eigen,parallel_for/parallel_reduce, flow graphs [maybe replace these two with Intel Thread Building Blocks] and zlib to nicely make the problem tractable. This has shown a nice set of performance improvements whilst at the same time keeping the disk and RAM usage within feasible limits.
Shaw says the heavily disproportionate incarceration reflects a lack of faith in men, who are then adversely affected by the experience of prison and the social stigma they are forced to carry upon release. And “what leads us to blindly accept that our prisons are full of men?” she asks.
An Oklahoma judge has found Johnson & Johnson and its subsidiaries helped fuel the state’s opioid drug crisis, ordering the consumer products giant to pay $572 million to help address the problem.
Voting rights and election security groups on Monday urged two House and Senate committees to hold hearings on the security of voting machines.
The groups, which include the National Election Defense Coalition, Electronic Privacy Information Center, R Street Institute and Public Citizen, asked the House Administration Committee and the Senate Rules and Administration Committee in a letter to schedule election security hearings that include testimony from voting machine vendors and election security experts.
A recently observed variant of the Asruex backdoor acts as an infector by targeting old vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office and Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.x, Trend Micro reports.
Asruex was initially discovered in 2015 and was previously associated with the spyware DarkHotel. In addition to backdoor capabilities, the malware also appears to be able to inject code into Word and PDF files by targeting two old vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2012-0158 and CVE-2010-2883.
Colombo (News 1st): Our connected world comes with countless risks. Viruses, worms, spyware, ransomware, backdoors, trojans: The language of cybersecurity is relatively new, but we have quickly become fluent. The misuse of technology has become the darkest danger of the digital age. Bad actors, emboldened by our inability to properly secure crucial systems and networks, are launching increasingly sophisticated attacks. No system is safe.
But in the beginning, the very, very beginning computers inspired utopian visions of a better future, a world in which we were all digitally connected to one another and living in harmony.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (dovecot), Fedora (docker and nghttp2), Oracle (pango), SUSE (apache2, fontforge, ghostscript-library, libreoffice, libvirt, podman, slirp4netns and libcontainers-common, postgresql10, and slurm), and Ubuntu (dovecot).
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past few … forever, you may have noticed that open source is
takingtook over the world. If software ate the world, open source is the dessert course. As of late there have been an uptick in stories about backdoors in open source software. These backdoors were put there by what is assumed to be “bad people” which is probably accurate since everyone is a villain in some way.
The reactions I’ve seen to these backdoors range from “who cares I don’t use that” to “we should rewrite everything in house and in assembler and go back to using CVS on a private network”. Of course both of those extremes are silly, it’s far better to land somewhere in the middle. And as much fun as writing assembler can be, the linker is probably an open source project.
This brings us to the question what do all these backdoors really mean for open source? It isn’t going to mean anything in most instances. There’s a lot happening that’s not well understood yet, and no doubt we’ll see more changes in the future as we understand the problem better. I think there’s a tendency to try to overcorrect when something new happens, in this case I’m not sure we can overcorrect even if we want to.
The first and most important point is to understand that a huge number of open source projects are a couple of people who are doing this for fun. They’re not security experts, they will never be security experts. They’re also not going to adopt some complex security process. If they get a nice looking pull request they’ll probably merge it. Security isn’t on the top of their list when working on the project. The whole point of their project is to solve some sort of problem. While I’m sure many would love getting a few donations, it’s a steep climb to being able to work on your open source library full time. The reality is these project will always be hobbies.
A top Iranian official paid an unannounced visit Sunday to the G-7 summit and headed straight toward the heart of the city where leaders of the world’s major democracies have been debating how to handle the country’s nuclear ambitions.
In early 2019, the White House threatened to invade Venezuela, take down the government and replace it with their choice of president and political party.€ Though no missiles have been fired and no bombs dropped on the country, our government is waging a war by other means, namely criminal economic sanctions, to achieve the same end.€ And they are just as lethal.
Around the region, it is not difficult to find examples that echo Hong Kong’s experience, with co-opted politicians, shaping of local media narratives, and massive influxes of investment being the primary methods of influence. I spoke with five experts who have been ringing the alarm over CCP influence in their countries. The resulting snapshot highlights the difficulties of existing in China’s orbit without succumbing to its gravitational pull.
On August 5, 2019, Nigerian police arrested and detained at least four journalists covering protests that took place across Nigeria in connection with the hashtag #RevolutionNow, according to journalists who spoke with CPJ and media reports.
Beijing considered the sale a violation of previous US commitments to China regarding Taiwan, which it considers its own territory to be annexed by force if necessary, said Major-General Chen Rongdi, chief of the Institute of War Studies at the Academy of Military Sciences.
In Jakarta, rights groups and journalists' associations urged the Communication Ministry to end an Internet blackout in Papua that started on Wednesday night.
Papuan activists have long disputed the results of the referendum that led to both provinces becoming part of Indonesia in 1969, during the country's transition to independence from colonial rule. Only 1,000 people from the local Melanesian population were handpicked to vote in what was called the "Act of Free Choice."
Activists also say that Indonesia maintains control of the area by force. "West Papua is a militarized zone. People's everyday life is colored by harassment and intimidation at the hands of security forces," said Benny Wenda, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee in the UK who leads a global push for rights in Papua.
Wenda also criticized the government's decision to block internet access, and called on the UN to investigate.
Police stormed the students’ dorm and used teargas to force them out, while bystanders and officers called them “monkeys”, a derogatory term for ethnically Melanesian Papuans.
West Papuans have long been cast by Indonesians as primitive people from the Stone Age, and this racist treatment continues to this day. West Papuan author Filep Karma described the extent of racism against West Papuans in his 2014 book, As If We Are Half-Animal: Indonesia’s Racism in Papua Land, saying he often heard Indonesians call West Papuans monkeys.
This latest episode of discrimination builds on more than five decades of racism, torture, summary executions, land dispossession and cultural denigration of West Papuans by Indonesian security forces.
[...]
In 1969, seven years after Indonesia invaded West Papua, the United Nations oversaw a referendum in which West Papuans were to decide on independence or official integration with Indonesia. Indonesia handpicked less than 1% of the Papuan population to vote and threatened them with violence should they make the “wrong” decision.
The result has been a lengthy, often brutal colonial occupation of Papuans and their land.
Some protesters over the past two days were seen dressed as monkeys in response to allegations that members of the Indonesian military, police and public yelled, "Monkeys, get out" at a group of West Papuan students who were barricaded inside their dormitory.
[...]
Indonesia's acquisition of West Papua has been the cause of tension and controversy for more than 60 years.
Over the last 50 years, about 20 percent of the rainforest has been burned or cut away, according to The Intercept. As the current fires rage on and the policies that led to them continue to exist, another 20 percent — that’s 300,000 square miles — could soon be gone as well. At that point, scientists warn of a “cascading system collapse,” in which the Amazon begins to completely crumble, and release a planet-devastating amount of stored carbon in the process.
Sanders’s Green New Deal, released on August 22, is full of specifics and numbers. According to the proposal, the $16.3 trillion plan would create 20 million jobs and pay for itself after 15 years. The plan also calls for transitioning to 100% sustainable electricity and transportation by 2030 and 100% decarbonizing the economy by 2050. It calls for massive amounts of investment into a wide variety of sectors in order to radically reshape everything from school buses to how the United States handles climate policy on the global stage.
Wildfires often occur in the dry season in Brazil, but satellite data published by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) has shown an increase of 85% this year.
They say more than 75,000 have been recorded in Brazil so far in 2019, most of them in the Amazon region.
Environmental activists have drawn links between President Bolsonaro's attitudes towards the environment and the recent surge in the number of fires in the famous rainforest.
If a country obtains chemical or biological weapons, the rest of the world tends to react with fury—or at least it did in the not-so-distant past. Sanctions rained down on the proliferators, who were then ostracized from the global community. And in rare ( sometimes disastrously misguided) cases, the world decided that the threat justified a military response. The destruction of the Amazon is arguably far more dangerous than the weapons of mass destruction that have triggered a robust response. The consequences of the unfolding disaster—which will extinguish species and hasten a worst-case climate crisis—extend for eternity. To lose a fifth of the Amazon to deforestation would trigger a process known as “dieback,” releasing what The Intercept calls a “doomsday bomb of stored carbon.”
Fires continue to engulf the Amazon rainforest at record-breaking rates. As Rosana Villar of Greenpeace, who toured the damage with reporters, told CNN, “This is not just a forest that is burning. This is almost a cemetery. Because all you can see is death.” When the Group of Seven countries pledged to send tens of millions of dollars to help fight the fires during their meeting Monday, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro scoffed at the $20 million from G-7, plus $11 million from Canada, and according to the Associated Press, accused the wealthy countries of treating his own like a “colony.”
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s€ Big Story€ newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox as soon as they are published.
PORTO VELHO, Brazil—The Group of Seven nations on Monday pledged tens of millions of dollars to help Amazon countries fight raging wildfires, even as Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro accused rich countries of treating the region like a “colony.”
The Democratic National Committee voted Saturday to strike down a resolution that would have allowed for a multi-candidate climate forum.
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.
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.
An artificial intelligence expert, Mr Peggs founded Square Roots with investor Kimball Musk (Elon's brother) two years ago. They've signed a deal with one of America's big distribution companies, Gordon Food Service, to locate herb-growing containers at some its 200 warehouses.
He says the deal represents everything about indoor farming's potential: locally grown, quick-to-market, fresh produce that can be harvested year-round and is free of pesticides and not affected by harsh weather.
The committee's 8-17 vote on the resolution outraged members of the youth-led Sunrise Movement in attendance, who stood on their seats and sang the union protest song "Which Side Are You On?" before walking out.
Democratic National Committee members on Saturday voted down a resolution that would have resulted in single-issue debates among candidates -- including on the issue of the climate crisis.
The language that was rejected -- inserted at the behest of climate change activists during a contentious Resolutions Committee meeting on Thursday -- said the DNC, "will continue to encourage candidates to participate in multi-candidate issue-specific forums with the candidates appearing on the same stage, engaging one another in discussion."
Democratic presidential candidates are barred from appearing together on stage outside of DNC-sanctioned debates.
Brazil on Monday rejected aid from G7 countries to fight wildfires in the Amazon, with a top official telling French President Emmanuel Macron to take care of "his home and his colonies."
Koch and his legacy are as anti-life as you can possibly get, something no amount of selfishly motivated cancer research funding can cover up. I say “are” rather than “were” because even though Koch himself is gone, the corporatist bulldozer he set into motion will keep going long after he’s dead.
NASA collected new data from their Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument, measuring levels of carbon monoxide at an altitude of 18,000 feet (5,500 meters) from August 8 to 22, according to a press release.
The AIRS, which is aboard NASA's Aqua satellite, measures "atmospheric temperature and humidity, cloud amounts and heights, greenhouse gas concentrations and many other atmospheric phenomena," the press release stated.
So, he skipped it. And then the White House, as they are so often forced to do, scrambled to suggest this was all part of some broader plan -- when provable facts make clear it, well, wasn't.
When asked what message he wanted to deliver at the climate session he would not be attending because it already happened, Trump said that he wants “clean air and clean water” and that the United States is “having the cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet.”
Pope Francis urges protection of "that lung of forests" and French President Macron says G7 nations pledged help at summit
The city dumped an estimated 2 million gallons of untreated sewage into the Flint River Sunday, Aug. 18, just months after officials warned wastewater infrastructure was fast approaching a “critical point.”
Newark, the largest city in New Jersey, is facing a water crisis of historic proportions, caused by a water delivery system that has been leaching lead into the drinking water of both residences and businesses. Blood tests have confirmed that a significant percentage of children in Newark have been exposed to lead, a strong neurotoxin that can cause lasting damage in even small amounts.
The rest of the G-7 leaders were present.
Many of the nearly two million Muslim pilgrims who journey to Saudi Arabia annually will soon be in severe danger of death from the extreme heat in years when the Hajj takes place in mid-summer, scientists say.
For 1.8 billion Muslims, around a quarter of the world’s population, a pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the Hajj, is an obligation to be undertaken once in their lifetime. But the city is in one of the hottest places in the world, where the temperature already tops 45€°C (113€°F) in summer, enough to damage the heart, brain and kidneys.
According to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), when climate change drives temperatures even higher it will threaten the lives of thousands of people who typically spend more than a week on the pilgrimage in unrelenting heat.
Party had been reminded of its platform asserting it will combat the 'global climate emergency'
Self -interest speaks all sorts of tongues, and plays all sorts of roles, even that of disinterestedness. — Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, ReflectionsHe hit a double. It all happened the week of August 11, 2019. That was the week the trump took steps to reduce protections for two endangered species.
Burning fossil fuels boils our planet — that much is generally well known.
In times like this, many of us feel powerless to do anything about the political, social, and environmental injustices we face. But, power is everywhere. Like sunlight and solar panels, it's a question of tapping into it. Accustomed to the top-down power of presidents and CEOs, most of us have no idea where to plug in and connect to the phenomenal people power that exists. |
The guidance appears to encourage high-polluting sectors to take the cheapest route towards limiting global warming, potentially decoupling emissions cuts from the temperature goals outlined in the Paris climate agreement.
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a global industry-driven non-profit group comprising more than 160 member states, has produced new draft guidance on climate action for businesses.
Rather than measuring climate action by the yardstick of emissions reduction, the draft, seen by AFP, concentrates on managing "radiative forcing", which is the amount of excess energy trapped in Earth's atmosphere.
She said when salmon enter a river to travel to their spawning grounds, they stop feeding. They only have their built-up fat stores as energy.
When fish are exposed to warmer temperatures, their metabolism increases and they go through their energy stores much faster. The salmon that died didn't have enough energy to make it to their spawning grounds and their hearts failed, she said.
The proposal, which was tabled by Mexico and requires ratification this week, means that the species can no longer be traded unless it can be proven that their fishing will not impact the possibility of their survival.
More and more land in California is going up in flames. The area in the state burned by wildfires has increased by a factor of five since 1972, according to a recent study, which identified human-caused warming the likely culprit.
So what’s to be done?
The Karuk Tribe wants to fight fire with fire.
This summer the tribe, one of the largest in the state, released a climate-adaptation plan that calls for a return to a more natural fire regime. According to the plan, using prescribed burns at appropriate times of the year in place of the current policy of fire suppression would reduce the possibility of high-severity fires, which have proven deadly and costly for California in recent years and are expected to worsen as the climate warms.
“Climate adaptation is about restoring human responsibilities and appropriate relationships to the natural world,” says Bill Tripp, deputy director of Karuk Natural Resources Department and a co-author of the plan.
Chile has been hit by its worst drought in six decades, forcing officials to declare an agricultural emergency to prevent the collapse of farming.
The country's capital Santiago and its outskirts, as well as Coquimbo, Valparaiso and O'Higgins, are among the worst-hit areas.
Boris Johnson has issued a slapdown to Emmanuel Macron over the French president's threat to veto a EU trade deal with South American states including Brazil, claiming that concern over the Amazon fires was being used as an "excuse" to interfere with free trade.
"We couldn't continue to allow the burden on Jakarta and Java island to increase in terms of population density," Widodo said at a news conference in the presidential palace. "Economic disparities between Java and elsewhere would also increase."
This week, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published a proposed rule that would substantially limit enforcement of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, whose purpose is to provide for fair housing throughout the United States.
Donald Trump loves farmers. We know this because he says so. “Farmers,€ I LOVE YOU!” he declared in December.€ But he’s been “loving” them to death, with policies that are causing farm prices to tumble, miring our ag economy in the ditch and creating a rising tsunami of farm bankruptcies.
The evidence is clear that privately managed charters can get higher test scores by culling, exclusion, and attrition. It’s equally clear that charters drain resources from the public schools that enroll most students. Most public officials seem to understand that it costs more to run parallel systems, one public, one private. But not in Rhode Island, where Governor Gina
If you’re feeling anger the political system being rigged to benefit those at the top, a new poll reveals you’re far from alone.
Argument 1: Localism is inevitable. Globalization was made possible by long-distance transport, communications, and capital flows. It fits with widespread assumptions about progress and economic growth leading to a better future.
More than half of respondents also said race relations are worsening under Trump and that they feel "anxious and uncertain" because of the economy
With the Hacker Noon publication leaving and crypto content being downgraded on Medium, suffice to say that we won’t be reading much about “decentralization” here anymore.
That watchword for a generation of young men interested in building the future as developers, programmers and blockchain and crypto enthusiasts, is well, kind of dead.
EU officials want to set up a €100 billion wealth fund to bolster "European champions" against American and Chinese business rivals like Google, Apple and Alibaba.
The proposal for a so-called European Future Fund appears in an unusually radical raft of plans that European Commission officials want to put onto the agenda of their president-elect, Ursula von der Leyen, whose mandate begins on November 1.
While the Eurocrats’ 173-page wish list — obtained exclusively by POLITICO — ranges from putting beehives on public buildings to greater restrictions on social media, the dominant theme is building a more defensive Europe that can take hard-hitting trade measures against Washington and Beijing, while putting more public money into home-grown business heavyweights.
Apple Inc.’s 13 billion-euro ($14.4 billion) battle with the European Union reaches the bloc’s courts next month in a hearing set to throw the spotlight on antitrust commissioner Margrethe Vestager’s crackdown on tax deals doled out to big companies.
The EU’s General Court, its second-highest tribunal, will hear arguments in the challenges by the iPhone maker and Ireland over two days set for Sept. 17-18. The U.S. last year lost a bid to intervene in the case in support of Apple.
Margrethe VestagerPhotographer: Callaghan O’Hare/Bloomberg The European Commission in August 2016 ordered Ireland to recoup the record sum plus interest, saying the world’s richest company was handed an unfair advantage. The EU decision reverberated across the Atlantic, triggering criticism from the U.S. Treasury that the EU was making itself a "supra-national tax authority" that could threaten global tax reform efforts.
Comments from presidential hopeful came ahead of rallies denouncing corporate power
According to Smithsonian magazine, the 1835 Treaty of New Echota (which the Cherokee Nation referenced in its announcement on Thursday) was used as grounds to remove the Cherokee from their lands along what became known as the Trail of Tears, a grueling journey that killed thousands. But the tribal leadership says that treaty and the 1785 Treaty of Hopewell granted the right to representation in Congress, a guarantee they now want to make good on.
Ezra Rosser, a law professor at American University, told CNN that the US government has long made it difficult for tribes to exercise rights afforded to them in treaties. But now, tribes are asserting themselves in a way that demands the attention of non-Native Americans.
This August, over 1,000 people gathered near the Alsatian town of Kingersheim, France to participate in the third edition of a two-week-long training camp put together by three environmental groups, Alternatiba, Friends of the Earth and ANV-COP21.
Its climax was an elaborate exercise designed to simulate the disruption of a climate summit, attended by mock presidents Emmanuel Patron and Mickey Trump. A working lunch was organized for the faux-leaders and both had their own Twitter accounts (@Manuel_Patron_ and @MickeyTrump3).
Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were forced to shut down pages, accounts and channels after Chinese nationalist trolls took to the social media sites to herald Liu as their communist mascot, and scores of state-backed accounts began spamming pages with the hashtag #SupportMulan. Variety previously reported that Twitter shuttered 200,000 Chinese accounts, Facebook removed seven pages, three groups, and five accounts, and YouTube yanked 210 channels.
Jonathan Bartley, Green Party co-leader, commenting on the announcement from Boris Johnson this morning of plans to prorogue parliament, said:
“This is an outrage, a cynical attempt to subvert the will of parliament.
“It is clear there is already a huge public reaction against this, with signatures flooding in on petitions and plans being made for peaceful demonstrations at Westminster, which the Green Party will be supporting.”
Internet access in West Papua was initially slowed down and then disconnected altogether on 21 August in what the information ministry called a “temporary” measure designed “to accelerate the process of restoring the security and order situation in Papua and the surrounding areas,” where violent protests have been taking place.
As a result of the blackout, journalists reporting in the field have been finding it extremely difficult to transmit their stories, photos and video, and to contact their news organizations and sources.
According to the Washington-based Human Rights Campaign, Marzban left Iran in 2009 and returned eight years later to see his ailing grandmother before being arrested in September last year.
A new definition of Islamophobia will prevent criticism of the “hateful ideology of theocratic Islam,” say two of Britain’s leading atheists in new book of essays.
Richard Dawkins and Peter Tatchell - and other authors including a former member of extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir - say attempts to define Islamophobia risk curtailing freedom of speech and work to expose extremism.
The government deployed 40,000 additional troops to the region and set up expanded checkpoints that have been used to limit movement. In addition to phones, the [Internet] has been shut down, cutting Kashmiris off from the rest of India and the world. “It’s a nightmare,” a Kashmiri woman said. “We are terrified for our families back home.”
More fundamentally, campaigners for free speech are worried by the rise in the seductive but dangerous notion that people have a right not to be offended. Kenan Malik, a British writer, has argued that in the Western world, secular notions of “offence” and the protection of different communities’ feelings are taking the place of blasphemy laws explicitly based on religion.
In fact, Mr Malik maintains, there is no real contradiction between the formal abolition of blasphemy legislation and the secular world’s ambivalent interpretation of “hate speech” or extremism to encompass meanings that can easily shut down all vigorous religious debate. Blasphemy is not so much being decriminalised as redefined.
Stephen Evans of the National Secular Society, a lobby group, says the British right to robust philosophical debate survived only by the skin of its teeth in 2006, [...]
“They are trying to silence everyone,” said Ada Wong, a 30-year-old accountant at Friday’s march, which was held over the lunch hour. “But if we don’t speak out, I’m afraid that Hong Kong will be no more.”
She said lashing out at major companies in Hong Kong would ultimately be self-defeating for China. “Our financial and business sector is important to them, so if they hurt us, they will be hurting themselves, too,” Ms. Wong said.
Facial recognition technology is spreading fast. Already widespread in China, software that identifies people by comparing images of their faces against a database of records is now being adopted across much of the rest of the world.
Last week, that list included Palantir, too — but in the days since, Palantir has been discreetly removed from that list. The company’s money has been refunded and it no longer has any role in the job fair, which will proceed as if Palantir had never been a sponsor.
Reached by The Verge, Lesbians Who Tech confirmed the dropped sponsorship, saying it was the result of public objection to Palantir’s recent contract work with the US government.
Representatives from the Lands Department and the Office of the Government Chief Information Officer (OGCIO) said that the TickTack component was a Bluetooth Beacon, which was used to signal the lamppost’s location to smartphones.
In July, the government said it would not activate certain functions on its new smart lampposts, following public concerns over privacy. Fifty smart lampposts with sensors, data connectivity and cameras were installed in June, with 350 more set to be rolled out. Features that were disabled included a function to detect vehicle speed using bluetooth device recognition, a function to detect car types using licence plate recognition, and a function to video monitor the dumping of industrial waste at blackspots.
According to a 2017 survey administered by the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, 11% of respondents said they "denied admission based on social media content" and another 7% rescinded offers for the same reason.
A 2018 Kaplan Test Prep survey found that about 25% of college admissions officers review applicants' social media profiles.
The question, Sides says, is whether this indiscriminate and widespread surveillance technology amounts to a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The lawyer says a judge would have to balance the right to be secure against unreasonable search with other considerations, such as public safety and a limited expectation of privacy on public roads.
[...]
The system could potentially learn to identify other cases of distracted driving, such as eating or reading, but Jannink told the conference the company is focused on cellphones. The technology could also measure speeds and identify unregistered vehicles.
Documents seen by the Financial Times say the new legislation will "set a world-standard for AI regulations" with "clear, predictable and uniform rules… which adequately protect individuals."
An exposure draft of the legislation, called the Currency (Restrictions on the Use of Cash) Bill 2019, was quietly introduced by Treasurer Josh Frydenberg last month.
Under the proposed law, all cash transactions between businesses and individuals would be limited to $10,000, and any amount over this would be considered criminal.
The proposed changes were first announced in the 2018-19 budget.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is alarmed by a new wave of arrests and interrogations of women journalists since the start of August in Iran. The Islamic Republic is now the world’s biggest jailer of women journalists, with a total of ten currently held.
Over the last decade, [Internet] access and mobile devices have been cut off several times in Kashmir, a region often wracked by violence since a separatist movement erupted 30 years ago. Landlines were never disconnected, however, making it possible to gather news.
Authorities said Tuesday that most landlines have been restored, but those in the area that is a hub of Kashmir’s media offices still do not appear to be working.
A Mexican journalist was found dead with stab wounds on Saturday, authorities said, adding to a growing list of reporter deaths in one of the world’s most dangerous countries for the press.
The state of Mexico prosecutor said it was investigating the cause of death of Nevith N., 42, whose body was found in the Tejupilco municipality about 75 miles from Mexico City.
A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.
It is the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting. Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.
The group has already released information about journalists at CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times — three outlets that have aggressively investigated Mr. Trump — in response to reporting or commentary that the White House’s allies consider unfair to Mr. Trump and his team or harmful to his re-election prospects.
If something is wrong with children, it must be the school’s fault.Right?If kids can’t read, write and do ‘rithmetic, the teachers must not have taught ’em right.
Panic rippled across our battered national landscape Friday when the Supreme Court revealed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 86, has faced down cancer again, completing three weeks of radiation for a tumor on her pancreas. Given that many deem her all that stands between us and end times, Twitter users rushed to offer best wishes, random organs, their first-born, eternal life.
Four hundred years after the event, the New York Times has published a special project focusing on the first Africans arriving in 1619 at Point Comfort, Virginia, and the legacy of slavery in the U.S.
Movie mogul Harvey Weinstein pleaded not guilty to a new indictment Monday that includes revised charges of predatory sexual assault, a development that caused the judge to delay the start of his trial until early next year.
A few weeks ago, we convened and moderated a “justice and equity” reading group for students, staff, and faculty at a local college. Our inaugural meeting centered on an essay in which the author calls attention to the shortcomings of organizing racial justice interventions in higher education around the sanitized and depoliticized language of “diversity.”
In 2009, North Carolina passed the Racial Justice Act (RJA), which allowed defendants to strike the death penalty from their cases if they could show that racial discrimination was a factor in their prosecution. The law came as a response to a series of exonerations of Black people who were falsely convicted of crimes they did not commit by all-white or nearly all-white
Many of us are deeply concerned about the recent wave of mass shootings and hate crimes that have taken place across the United States. As the Department of Justice reported, in 2018 alone there were 25 race-based terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, each committed by an alleged white supremacist. Immediate action is needed to address this crisis and tragedies like the Aug. 3 shooting in El Paso, Texas.
The most popular statistic regarding the United States’ prison system is that there are 2.5 million people incarcerated. However, this figure significantly under-represents the number of people caged in this country each year.
According to a new analysis released by the Prison Policy Initiative, at least 4.9 million people are arrested and jailed each year. Those individuals are disproportionately poor, Black, and lack access to education and health care.
Emine Bulut was killed by her ex-husband Fedai Baran in broad daylight in a café in Kñrñkkale, a town in Turkey’s Central Anatolia region. People across Turkey have reacted with shock and horror to a video of the fatally injured Bulut that has been circulating online. Now, many are using the hashtag #EmineBulut to call for urgent action to tackle the issue of femicide and violence against women in Turkey, a country where more than 220 women have already been murdered this year.
From the antebellum period to today, Southern white elites are terrified of poor whites and black workers joining hands — because they know it's an existential threat to their power.
Such encomiums are premised on the idea that Koch’s charitable giving was so commendable that questions about where his money came from or the general impact of the super-rich on society would be impertinent. This willful lack of curiosity was sharply critiqued as long ago as 1909 by then-President Theodore Roosevelt, who wasn’t impressed by John D. Rockefeller’s setting up a foundation to help disperse his mountain of money. “No amount of charities in spending such fortunes can compensate in any way for the misconduct in acquiring them,” Roosevelt curtly but accurately noted. In the case of the Koch family, there’s plenty of misconduct to investigate.
“Western democracies are suffering from a toxic mix of arrogance and naiveté that makes them complacent,” said Mohammed, who highlighted this challenge only days after an eruption between Israel and the American Left over a proposed visit to the Jewish state by pro-BDS representatives Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. “They underestimate the power of Islam, they look at what Islamists have done in other countries and they arrogantly think: ‘That won’t happen to us’ – even though it is happening right under their noses.”
A GCSE student was disqualified for "obscene racial comments" after an examiner mistook her vegetarianism for Islamophobia, it has emerged.
108. Jammu and Kashmir continues to face frequent barriers to [Internet] access as the authorities continue to suspend arbitrarily [Internet] services. According to a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), South Asia reported the highest number of shutdowns in the world between April 2017 and May 2018 with India accounting for the highest level of shutdowns in the world. 160 Half of all [Internet] shutdowns in India were reported from the Kashmir Valley. 161 UNESCO said that [Internet] shutdowns “pose a threat to human rights and block the public’s right to know; and have emerged a significant tool of censorship by governments which are increasingly utilizing shutdowns under the guise of security”. 162 A widely followed Indian civil society group that tracks [Internet] shutdowns reports that 65 of the 134 incidents of [Internet] shutdowns recorded in the country in 2018 were in Jammu and Kashmir. 163 In the first 4 months of 2019, Jammu and Kashmir experienced 25 instances of [Internet] shutdown. 164 109. In 2018, several journalists and human rights defenders – mostly based in the Kashmir Valley – reported that social media platforms Twitter and Facebook had taken actions against a number of accounts for various Kashmir - related content, including removing such posts or suspending user accounts. 165
A Florida federal judge rejected a Cape Coral hospital's sanctions bid on Monday in a suit by a patient who alleges she was sexually assaulted by a nurse, rejecting the hospital's claims that the woman acted in bad faith when she deleted her Facebook profile during litigation.
Workers at I Carry It – aged between 16 and 50 – will all be freelancers using their own transport, not salaried employees, so the company will not be offering them insurance.
[...]
The working conditions and workers' rights at many food delivery companies such as Wolt and Foodora have also caused public outrage. How would I Carry It deal with such scrutiny?
One Hong Kong-based worker of a Chinese state-owned enterprise recently bragged in a WeChat chat group that he had been reporting employees who posted pro-democracy comments regarding the protests to human resources.
In extreme cases, some people said they had received calls from Chinese authorities after posting pro-protest comments on Facebook.
A source close to the negotiations told the outlet that the deal made between French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow would have France repay companies the difference between a French tax and a planned mechanism being drawn up by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
France and the United States reached a deal to end a standoff over a French tax on big [Internet] companies, though U.S. President Donald Trump declined to say whether his threat of a retaliatory wine tax was off the table as a result.
The compromise struck between French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Donald Trump’s White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow foresees France repaying companies the difference between the French tax and a planned mechanism being drawn up by the OECD.
We give FCC chair Ajit Pai a lot of grief (to be fair: we've given basically every FCC chair a lot of grief over the years). However, when he does something right we should give him credit. And he's now embraced a plan to give the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline its own 3 digit number, likely to be 988. This is one of those simple plans that just makes sense. Thankfully, there's been a lot greater awareness over the past few years concerning the hotline and suicide prevention in general -- but you still need to remember the phone number. Most people don't (it's 1-800-273-8255 (TALK), in case you don't know). Moving it to a simple three digit number is a good idea that should save lives.
“I think it’s specifically intended to silence dissent,” Irene Knapp, an engineer at Google, said. “This is the end of the important parts of Google’s open culture.”
Uber imposed a $1-per-ride surcharge it called a “Safe Rides Fee” in 2014, but it was a just a play for profit. The money collected by the company from the fee — estimated at around $500 million — was never earmarked specifically for safety and was “devised primarily to add $1 of pure margin to each trip,” according to an excerpt from New York Times reporter Mike Isaac’s new book Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.
Written, co-created and produced in Victoria, Clickbait is an 8-episode character-based thriller which explores the ways in which our most dangerous and uncontrolled impulses are fuelled in the age of social media, and reveals the ever widening fractures we find between our virtual and real life personas.
She and her co-panellists hear around 100 design cases and between 120 and 150 unfair competition disputes every year. In her early days as a judge, however, Brückner-Hofmann would hear no more than five design cases per year – 1,900% less than today’s 100.
The Düsseldorf District Court judge admits being upset when an appeal judgment is badly argued and discusses the 1,900% increase in design cases at her court
In a new precedential decision, the PTAB Percedential Opinion Panel (POP) has reversed a prior institution decision in this case — holding “that service of a pleading asserting a claim alleging infringement triggers the one-year time period for a petitioner to file a petition under 35 U.S.C. €§ 315(b), even where the serving party lacks standing to sue or whether the pleading is otherwise deficient.”
Antitrust law in the United States is regulated by both the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Usually, these two agencies are able to reach a common understanding on antitrust policy and enforcement. Infrequently, they find themselves in disagreement.
Currently, the proper antitrust treatment of standard-essential patents and patent-holder commitments to make these patents available on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms” is such an occasion. The disagreement has come to a head in FTC v. Qualcomm, now on appeal before the Ninth Circuit.
Standard-Essential Patents and “FRAND” First, a brief introduction to standard setting and essential patents.
A technological standard adopted by a standard setting organization (an “SSO”) may sometimes be written in such a way that it is impossible to build a product or provide a service without infringing on one or more patents. When this happens and the patents are owned by a member of the working group creating the standard, the SSO may fear that once a standard is adopted the patent holder will take advantage of its SSO-granted market power and charge an excessive royalty to license the patents – that the patent owner will “hold up” companies that have made an irreversible investment (in a practical sense) in the standard.
This is my first follow-up to yesterday's post, which just served to make Qualcomm's Ninth Circuit opening brief in its appeal of the FTC v. Qualcomm ruling public and to discuss the likely effect of the sheer length of that filing on the further schedule.
While it's imperative to see the forest among all the trees, it simply is a huge case, so this first commentary on Qualcomm's opening brief on appeal will focus on the question of chipset-level licensing (Section I of the brief, which ends on page 70 of the PDF).
In order to analyze what Qualcomm is saying in that incredibly important part, I've re-read a couple dozen other documents, most of which are court decisions cited by Qualcomm or others in this context. On this basis I can provide you with a bird's-eye view on the questions this part of the appeal turns on.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) took a day to digest a series of lawsuits filed against it by GlobalFoundries, a former spin-off of AMD and one of the world's largest semiconductor fabrication companies, and then issued a curt statement saying the allegations of IP infringement are without merit. It also insinuated GlobalFoundries is acting like a patent troll.
"TSMC has established one of the largest semiconductor portfolios with more than 37,000 patents worldwide and a top 10 ranking for US patent grants for 3 consecutive years since 2016. We are disappointed to see a foundry peer resort to meritless lawsuits instead of competing in the marketplace with technology," TSMC said.
While TSMC did not use the words "patent troll," it's easy to come to that conclusion by reading between the lines. Or just by reading the lines as presented.
Continental v. Avanci (Northern Distict of California; Judge Lucy H. Koh; trial date in October 2021) continues to be an extraordinarily interesting FRAND dispute. On Thursday (August 30) I'll attend a hearing that the 21st Civil Chamber of the Munich I Regional Court will hold as a result of Nokia pursuit of an additional anti-antisuit-injunction injunction ("AAII") against Continental AG, the German parent company at the top of the automotive industry supplier's corporate group. The AAII that Nokia obtained last month enjoins Continental Automotive Systems, Inc. ("CAS"; of Auburn Hills, MI), the plaintiff in the U.S. case, once properly served on CAS--which Nokia claims to have occurred already while CAS argues the rigid service requirements of the Hague Convention in conjunction with the rules governing the service of German court injunctions have yet to be fulfilled.
The press office of the Munich court thankfully confirmed to me today that a hearing would be held, and provided the case number 21 O 9512/19, while the case number of the already-ordered injunction against CAS (of which Nokia informed Judge Koh) is 21 O 9333/19. A translation of Nokia's original German motion was attached to Continental's reply (in the form of another letter to Judge Koh).
Another week and another technology patent falls to a patentable subject matter challenge under Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int'l. In this case, the patentee may have effectively shot itself in the foot with its own statements made in the specification. But the Federal Circuit also provides its clearest explanation yet (but one that is still not clear enough) of how it expects the second part of the Alice analysis to be carried out.
Chamberlain sued Techtronic Industries (TTI) and several other parties in the Northern District of Illinois, contending infringement of U.S. Patent No. 7,224,275. TTI moved the District Court for judgment as a matter of law that the '275 patent was invalid under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101. The District Court denied the motion and TTI appealed.
[...]
Accordingly, the Federal Circuit reversed the District Court and held the asserted claims invalid under ۤ 101.
This case is another example of judicial-exception-creep, in line with that of ChargePoint, Inc. v. SemaConnect, Inc. Similar to that decision, an invention that adds particular communication abilities to a physical device is rendered an "abstract idea" because the Court found that the only innovative part of what is claimed was the (allegedly abstract) communication itself. Of course, the specification served to quickly sink the claim by admitting that all claimed elements were known in some fashion or another (even if the combination was not), but under the current patent-eligibility regime even a more carefully-worded application would have likely led to the same outcome.
The invention here (as in ChargePoint) might have been more rationally invalidated on grounds of obviousness, though its 2003 priority date was well before wireless transceivers were being added to all kinds of conventional devices. Nonetheless, ۤ 101 is once again the wrong tool for applying the prior art motivated invalidation. There are other parts of the statute to serve that function.
On appeal, the Federal Circuit agreed with the defendant that “lofty” batting is a term of degree whose boundary is not fully clear. However, it is clear enough for patent law work. In a particular, the court defined “lofty” batting is batting that “shows the properties of of bulk and some resilience.” The specification further explains that “bulk” refers to air between the fibers, and “sufficient resilience” occurs where the batting can be compressed and then substantially spring back to its original bulk. The court also noted that the specification includes more than 20 different examples (some from the prior art) of “lofty” batting that can be used to understand the scope of the term.
The panel rejected Defendants' allegation that they would lose the possibility of the issue preclusion defense "should Sanofi obtain amended claims and assert them against Defendants." This is not sufficient to satisfy the case or controversy requirement, according to the opinion, first because the relevance of the disclaimed claims to a future issue preclusion defense was speculative, and second, the Defendants failed to establish that the District Court judgment pertaining to the disclaimed claims "is material to a possible future suit." And the panel refused Defendants' invitation to provide an advisory opinion on "the claim preclusion arguments that they intend to make . . . should Sanofi secure amended claims at the Board and then assert them against Defendants."
Turning to the District Court's decision that Defendants had not shown by clear and convincing evidence that claims 1 and 2 of the '170 patent were invalid for obviousness, the panel relied on the Court's decision in Takeda Chem. Indus., Ltd. v. Alphapharm Pty., Ltd., that a challenger must "identify some reason that would have led a chemist to modify a known compound in a particular manner to establish prima facie obviousness of a new claimed compound." 492 F.3d 1350, 1357 (Fed. Cir. 2007). The opinion reviewed the District Court's "extensive [factual] findings" based on the testimony of "seven witnesses and seventeen prior art references" in arriving at its conclusion that the District Court had not erred. This analysis centered on the question of the motivation and rationale of the skilled worker to modify prior art docetaxel by simultaneously replacing hydroxyl groups with methoxy compounds at positions C7 and C10. Defendants argued that this modification would be motivated to increase the lipophilicity of docetaxel to interfere with its binding by P-glycoprotein (Pgp), a plasma membrane-associated protein pump that rendered cells resistant to cytotoxic drugs (like docetaxel) by extruding these compounds from the cell. The panel credited the District Court's determination that the prior art cited in support of increased lipophilicity as a way to decrease Pgp extrusion did not disclose taxanes or show any relationship between lipophilicity and Pgp extrusion for taxanes. Concerning Defendants' assertion of prior art related to possible substitution positions in the canonical taxane structure, the panel agreed with the District Court's characterization that Defendant had cherry-picked the data in the cited references to reach the pattern of substituents exhibited by cabazitaxel and thus rejected them. Secondary considerations (commercial success, failure of others) also supported the District Court's decision that Defendants had not established obviousness of claims 1 and 2 of the '170 patent by clear and convincing evidence.
The L.A. bar association is the latest to offer an opinion on what to do if someone, say the opposing party’s former employee, offers you information from the opposing party that looks purloined or seems confidential. In Los Angeles City Bar Ass’n Professional Responsibility & Ethics Committee Opinion No. 531 (July 24, 2019) (here), the committee gave some useful guidance.
First, the committee stated the lawyer had to determine if the person possessed the information unlawfully. If so, the lawyer might need to alert the court or appropriate authorities.
Second, the lawyer had to determine if the information was privileged or otherwise protected. As stated in a prior post, this can trigger obligations to at least notify the opposing party.
The CJEU will consider bad-faith filing, a jurisdictional challenge and digital exhaustion in a busy September when trademark, copyright and design issues will come to the fore
This week the National Coordinator for the Government Agency Intelligence Network linked 'pirate' IPTV resellers with serious crime, claiming that they are often part of larger organizations involved in drugs, weapons, and people trafficking. Several weeks ago, TF had the chance to speak with an IPTV provider in Europe who said that to his knowledge of many providers, none of that is true.
We wanted to make sure that the insights shared by the summit’s seven amazing keynote speakers are accessible to people who couldn’t make it to the event, so we’ve uploaded their talks to YouTube and made them available under a CC Attribution license.
After consulting with us here at Creative Commons, SELF and the AAP chose to release these images under our Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, so that they can be freely used by anyone—including media outlets, hospitals, public health departments, and other organizations creating content about vaccines—as long as credit is given to the photographer.
