Although in recent months, the news published about Huawei has not been about how good their products are or how good their sales are, but about Trump’s decision to ban the company from using future versions of American products, like Android. Today we bring you a very positive one. Huawei has started selling computers with Linux operating system.
For now, Huawei is selling its Linux computers only for the Asian market, that is, in China, the manufacturer’s country of origin. but it is likely to expand worldwide.
of 1999, which is when IBM got onboard with Linux on the mainframe (IBM Z).
These patches weren't part of the mainline Linux kernel yet, but they did get Linux running on z/VM (Virtual Machine for IBM Z), for anyone who was interested. Several efforts followed, including the first Linux distro—put together out of Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Think Blue Linux by Millenux in Germany. The first real commercial distribution came from SUSE on October 31, 2000; this is notable in SUSE history because the first edition of what is now known as SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLES) is that S/390 port. Drawing again from Wikipedia, the SUSE Enterprise Linux page explains...
Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) were introduced into upstream Kubernetes by Red Hat engineers in version 1.7. From the beginning, they were designed as a future-proof implementation of what was previously prototyped as ThirdPartyResources. The road of CRDs has focused on the original goal of making custom resources production ready, bringing it to be a generally available feature in Kubernetes, highlighted with the promotion of the API to v1 in 1.16.
CRDs have become a cornerstone of API extensions in the Kubernetes ecosystem, and is the basis of innovation and a core building block of OpenShift 4. Red Hat has continued pushing CRDs forward ever since, as one of the main drivers in the community behind the features and stability improvements, which finally lead to the v1 API. This progress made OpenShift 4 possible.
Let’s take a deeper look at what will change in the v1 API of Custom Resource Definitions (in the apiextensions.k8s.io/v1 API group). The main theme is around consistency of data stored in CustomResources:
We’re pleased to announce the delivery of Kubernetes 1.16, our third release of 2019! Kubernetes 1.16 consists of 31 enhancements: 8 enhancements moving to stable, 8 enhancements in beta, and 15 enhancements in alpha.
At the recent Cloud Foundry Summit EU in the Netherlands, Vlad Iovanov of SUSE gave a keynote demo of Project Quarks, the project that integrates Cloud Foundry and Kubernetes, by packaging the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime as containers instead of virtual machines. Vlad explains the current capabilities of Quarks, with a look at its future as a Kubernetes Operator. It’s a fairly technical topic, but Vlad uses creative diagrams and an understandable demo to show the power of Quarks.
Cloud Foundry Foundation has posted all recorded talks from CF Summit EU on YouTube. Check them out if you want to learn more about what is happening in the Cloud Foundry world! I’ll be posting more SUSE Cloud Application Platform talks here over the coming days. Watch Vlad’s talk below:
Kubernetes 1.16 is expected to arrive this week, and with it comes a host of new changes that help ease management for users of this container orchestration platform. For users of Kubernetes, and of Red Hat OpenShift, this release signals the arrival of the general availability for Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs).
When building open source software, duties and tasks must be distributed among large numbers of contributors, some of whom may even be in direct competition with one another. While this may sound like a risky, Machiavellian scenario, in practice, there’s far less rivalry. Instead, the whole project becomes a collaborative board game with individual high scores.
Those high scores ebb and flow as teams take charge of features, lead them to completion and exchange leadership roles over the course of the development of the project. We say all that to say this: Kubernetes 1.16 saw a great deal of work and guidance across the ecosystem, as well as from Red Hat and Google (top upstream corporate contributors). All vendors and the community at large can benefit from the updates made in this release, especially with the prime time for CRDs, which are a main extension point for building cloud native applications on Kubernetes.
Today I’m starting to talk about my new project - Kanidm. Kanidm is an IDM project designed to be correct, simple and scalable. As an IDM project we should be able to store the identities and groups of people, authenticate them securely to various other infrastructure components and services, and much more.
You can find the source for kanidm on github.
For more details about what the project is planning to achieve, and what we have already implemented please see the github.
While the project is still working on the CentOS 8.x series, which will be based on the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 operating system series and will be released next month, the CentOS 7.x series has been updated to version 1908, an incremental update based on the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.7.
Highlights of the CentOS Linux 7.7 (1908) release include the Python 3.6 interpreter by default, BIND 9.11 as default Domain Name System software, and Chrony 3.4 as default Network Time Protocol implementation, improved security profiles in Anaconda, improved bug reporting, as well as all the important security and package updates from upstream.
Marked by the Red Hat Product Security team as having a security impact of "Important," the new Linux kernel security update is here to patch a memory corruption (CVE-2018-9568) that occurred due to incorrect socket cloning and a NULL pointer dereference (CVE-2019-11810) discovered in drivers/scsi/megaraid/megaraid_sas_base.c, which could lead to a denial of service.
Also fixed in this update are two bugs affecting the performance of the Linux kernel on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and CentOS Linux 6 systems, namely a fragmented packets timing out issue and the backport TCP follow-up for small buffers. These two bugs can be corrected if you install the new kernel versions for your operating system.
Google's Stadia good news, VM encryption comes to an OpenStack near you, and details on Ubuntu 19.10's 32-bit support.
Plus significant changes for Chef's certification program, and more.
This week, in our Innards section, we interview Toyam Cox, maintainer for Void Linux.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, we got the 5.3 release of the Linux Kernel. GNOME recently released their latest version of the GNOME Shell with GNOME 3.34. Manjaro is leveling up by creating a new business around their distro.
Richard Stallman has resigned as president and director of the Free Software Foundation, and that's just one of the major shifts this week.
Also what makes Manjaro unique? We chat with one of the founders and find out why it's much more than a desktop environment.
Special Guests: Alex Kretzschmar, Bernhard Landauer, Brent Gervais, and Neal Gompa.
OggCamp is an unconference celebrating Free Culture, Free and Open Source Software, hardware hacking, digital rights, and all manner of collaborative cultural activities and is committed to creating a conference that is as inclusive as possible.
You've often heard me talk about Python as a superpower. It can amplify whatever you're interested in or what you have specialized in for your career. This episode is an amazing example of this. You'll meet Cornelis van Lit. He is a scholar of medieval Islamic philosophy and woks at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. What he is doing with Python is pretty amazing.
The Python community in Argentina is large and active, thanks largely to the motivated individuals who manage and organize it. In this episode Facundo Batista explains how he helped to found the Python user group for Argentina and the work that he does to make it accessible and welcoming. He discusses the challenges of encompassing such a large and distributed group, the types of events, resources, and projects that they build, and his own efforts to make information free and available. He is an impressive individual with a substantial list of accomplishments, as well as exhibiting the best of what the global Python community has to offer.
The mission of the computer. Similar to the Commodore 64 but made with off the shelf components. As far as the architecture goes, it is actually closer to the VIC-20 on board design but far, far more capable. I am rarely excited about new things, I like my old computers and really existing technology. I tend to drag my heels at the very thought of getting something new. This, for whatever reason gets me excited and I can’t exactly put my finger on it.
This all started out as a kind of pondering in 2018 and in February 2019 with a video from David Murray, the 8-bit Guy’s Dream Computer. the discussion started by the 8-bit Guy
The initial design started with the Gameduino for the video chip which had some technical hurdles and was based on an obsolete, as in, no longer supported, chip that doesn’t have a large pool of developers and hackers working on it.
After some discussions and planning, it was decided to base it largely off of the VIC-20 as most of the chips are still available today and it is a known working design. Some of the changes would be a faster processor, better video and better sound components.
Two days ago, Linus Torvalds, the principal developer of the Linux kernel announced the release of Linux 5.3 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (lkml). This major release brings new support for AMD Navi GPUs, the umwait x86 instructions, and Intel speed select. Linux 5.3 also presents a new pidfd_open(2) system call and 16 millions new IPv4 addresses in the 0.0.0.0/8 range. There are also many new drivers and improvements in this release.
The previous version, Linux 5.2 was released more than two months ago. It included Sound Open Firmware project, new mount API, improved pressure stall information and more.
The Linux 5.4 power management changes have been submitted for this next version of the Linux kernel.
This time around the power management work isn't particularly exciting with no breakthroughs for the Intel P-State driver, no major changes to the other prominent CPUFreq drivers/governors, and no AMD CPPC support for their new processors.
The Linux 5.4 x86/cpu changes are as busy as always on the Intel side.
The Linux 5.4 x86/cpu code changes include cleaning up the Intel CPU naming conventions within definitions in the code. The changes now provide a standardized convention for dealing with Intel CPU core names and their variations within the kernel code rather than the naming convention mess that had come about over the years. This doesn't impact end-users, but cleans up the kernel code to be less confusing.
Greg Kroah-Hartman began volleying his Linux 5.4 kernel pull requests today of the subsystems he oversees. The most significant of this morning's pull requests are the staging area changes that include the Microsoft exFAT file-system support.
As we've been expecting, Linux 5.4 is bringing exFAT support after last month's surprise announcement by Microsoft publishing the exFAT specification and giving it an open-source blessing for integrating the file-system support at long last into the Linux kernel.
In addition to submitting the FS-VERITY file authentication code for Linux 5.4, Google's Eric Biggers has sent out his big update to the fscrypt file encryption framework for this next kernel revision.
Fscrypt as a reminder is a kernel framework providing native file encryption support to file-systems. Currently Fscrypt is used by EXT4, F2FS, and UBIFS while being used by Google for at least new Android use-cases. Fscrypt has been around for several kernel cycles now but for Linux 5.4 is seeing its first big update.
On day two of the 2019 Linux Plumbers Conference, two of the principals behind the Open Printing project led the very first Open Printing microconference. Project leader Till Kamppeter and program manager Aveek Basu described the current state of printing on Linux and some of the plans for the future, including supporting scanning for multi-function devices. The picture they painted was rosy, at least for printing, which may not quite match the experience of many Linux users. As with many projects, though, Open Printing is starved for contributors—something that was reflected in the sparse attendance at the microconference.
Basu began by pointing out that some attendees had likely printed their boarding passes from Linux, which highlights the importance of printing for Linux. People use it for bank documents, transport tickets, and more. He has been at Lexmark for 11 years, working on printing for Linux, macOS, and other Unix-based systems. Kamppeter said that he has been the Open Printing leader since 2001. The idea of the project is to do everything possible to make printing "just work" with Linux and other operating systems; the goal is "plug and print".
The staging tree was added to the kernel in 2008 for the 2.6.28 development cycle as a way to ease the process of getting substandard device drivers into shape and merged into the mainline. It has been followed by controversy for just about as long. The recent disagreements over the EROFS and exFAT filesystems have reignited many of the arguments over whether the staging tree is beneficial to the kernel community or not. LWN cannot answer that question, but we can look into what has transpired in the staging tree in its first eleven years to see if there are any conclusions to be drawn there.
The core idea behind the staging tree is that it is open to code that does not live up to the normal standards for inclusion into the kernel. Once a driver is added there, it is available to anybody who is brave enough to try to make use of it, but the real purpose is to allow developers to improve the code to the point that it is ready to go into the kernel proper. It serves as an easy place for new developers to try out simple changes and, when it works well, it helps the kernel to gain hardware support that might otherwise languish out-of-tree indefinitely.
At the 2019 Embedded Linux Conference North America, which was held in San Diego in August, Krzysztof Opasiak gave a presentation on demystifying the ways to monitor—and even change—USB traffic on a Linux system. He started with the basics of the USB protocol and worked up into software and hardware tools to observe, modify, and fuzz the messages that get sent. Those tools are part of the arsenal that is available to those interested in looking deeply into USB.
Opasiak works in Poland for what he called a "small Korean company" (Samsung). He noted that it is not that easy to sniff USB traffic and that the ways to do so are not well known. But "there are no dragons"; nothing bad will happen if you do so. In some ways, USB is like the internet and some of the same tools can be used for both.
It's that time of the development cycle again: work on the 5.3 kernel is winding down with an expected final release date of September 15. Read on for LWN's traditional look at where the code in 5.3 came from in this relatively busy development cycle. As of this writing, 14,435 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for 5.3; these changes were contributed by 1,846 developers
As businesses embark on their digital transformation journey, developers are driving innovation across cloud native environments for building into the future. According to a recently released report by Cloud Foundry Foundation, 45 percent of user respondents describe their Cloud Foundry use as “broad” compared to 30 percent in 2018 and 24 percent in 2017. The report also revealed that 39 percent of developers are deploying applications in less than one day.
What points out towards a healthy and growing community of developers is the fact that almost one in five respondents started using Cloud Foundry in just the last 12 months.
The Linux Foundation today announced it will host the InterUSS Platform Open Source Project to enable trusted, secure and scalable interoperability between UAS Service Suppliers (USSs) that advances safe, equitable and efficient drone operations. Initial contributors include both industry and regulatory organizations Wing, AirMap, Uber and the Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA).
Similar to the evolution of cities, our skies are becoming busier with traffic. In an effort to unleash innovation and ensure safety, aviation regulators around the world are implementing UAS Traffic Management (UTM, also referred to as U-Space) to support rapidly increasing and highly diverse drone operations. Under UTM, a set of USSs (also known as U-Space Service Providers orUSPs) assist drone operators to conduct safe and compliant operations. USSs can provide service in overlapping airspace and share data when required to support services such as a strategic deconfliction of flight plans and remote identification and industry is developing standards for this data sharing through organizations such as ASTM International. The InterUSS Project provides a forum for collaboration and development of standards-compliant, open source implementations that facilitate communication in the UTM/U-Space environment.
From Rome, Italy this afternoon AMD not only announced more than 100 world records have been broken with their new EPYC "Rome" processors, but there is also a new SKU! Meet the EPYC 7H12.
The EPYC 7H12 doesn't quite follow the naming convention of the rest of the EPYC Rome line-up announced back in August as it's a special part. The EPYC 7H12 is more akin to Intel's Cascadelake-AP line-up but with more broad availability and just a higher clocked / higher power part as opposed to tacking on extra dies. But it carries the same focus on delivering maximum HPC performance.
System architects and software teams now have the complete source for the fully open software and hardware inference platform.
While NVIDIA doesn't contribute much open-source Linux driver code as it concerns their desktop GPUs (though they have been ramping up documentation), when it comes to Tegra/embedded is where they have contributed improvements and new hardware support to Nouveau and associated driver code in the past several years. NVIDIA's open-source Tegra/embedded contributions come as a result of customer demand/requirements. Their latest work is preparing to finally bring-up the "GV11B" Volta graphics found within last year's Tegra Xavier SoC.
The RADV "ACO" shader compiler announced by Valve back in July for the fastest compilation speeds and best possible code generation may soon be hitting mainline Mesa for the open-source AMD Linux graphics stack.
The ACO shader compiler as an alternative to the existing AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler back-end has shown quite promising results for Linux games. ACO has become more featureful over time and is now largely at feature parity to the existing shader compilation support while generally offering some performance advantages, thanks to the effort and funding by Valve.
For those wondering how well FreeBSD and DragonFlyBSD are handling AMD's new Ryzen 3000 series desktop processors, here are some benchmarks on a Ryzen 7 3700X with MSI MEG X570 GODLIKE where both of these popular BSD operating systems were working out-of-the-box. For some fun mid-week benchmarking, here are those results of FreeBSD 12.0 and DragonFlyBSD 5.6.2 up against openSUSE Tumbleweed and Ubuntu 19.04.
Back in July I looked at FreeBSD 12 on the Ryzen 9 3900X but at that time at least DragonFlyBSD had troubles booting on that system. When trying out the Ryzen 7 3700X + MSI GODLIKE X570 motherboard on the latest BIOS, everything "just worked" without any compatibility issues for either of these BSDs.
You might be a beginner looking to explore Linux and you are at a loss of what Apps you should essentially be using. So what are the best essential Apps for Linux? In this guide, we have put together a list of what we would consider as the most necessary applications that you should have in your Linux system to have a wholesome experience.
Samba 4.11 has changed how the AD database is stored on disk. AD users should not really be affected by this change when upgrading to 4.11. However, AD users should be extremely careful if they need to downgrade from Samba 4.11 to an older release.
Samba 4.11 maintains database compatibility with older Samba releases. The database will automatically get rewritten in the new 4.11 format when you first start the upgraded samba executable.
However, when downgrading from 4.11 you will need to manually downgrade the AD database yourself. Note that you will need to do this step before you install the downgraded Samba packages. For more details, see: https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Downgrading_an_Active_Directory_DC
When either upgrading or downgrading, users should also avoid making any database modifications between installing the new Samba packages and starting the samba executable.
Samba 4.11 is out as the latest big feature update to this SMB/CIFS/AD implementation for offering better Windows interoperability with Linux and other platforms. The changes in Samba 4.11 are aplenty that we are a bit surprised it wasn't called Samba 5.0.
Perhaps most exciting is Samba 4.11 having big scalability improvements to the point that it should be able to scale to 100,000+ users.
A while ago, we wrote about ExplainShell, a web-based tool to learn what each part of a Linux command does. It divides the complex and lengthy Linux commands into multiple parts and gives explanation for each part. Using this tool, a Linux newbie can learn about various command line parameters and options without having to refer man pages. However, It will only help you to learn Linux commands. But what if you want to learn other CLI commands, for example Python? You won’t find explanation of Python commands in ExplainShell. No worries! Today, I stumbled upon a similar tool named Kmdr that provides CLI commands explanation for hundreds of programs. It helps you to easily learn CLI commands without leaving the terminal and without having to go through lengthy man pages. Not just Linux commands, Kmdr provides explanation for a lot of CLI commands including ansible, conda, docker, git, go, kubectl, mongo, mysql, npm, ruby gems, vagrant and hundreds of other programs such as those built into bash.
Sadly not currently queued as a fix for the Linux 5.4 kernel, re-enabling the LRU bulk moves functionality can be a significant boost for helping with the Radeon graphics driver performance for Linux gaming.
As written about last week, there's been some signs of soon re-enabling the performance-boosting "bulk moves" functionality. The LRU bulk moves functionality was disabled in the AMDGPU driver back during Linux 4.20 but since Linux 5.1 it's believed all the bugs have been ironed out for this functionality to migrate PD/PT buffers to the least recently used list in a bulk operation.
Focusing exclusively on the turn-based combat found in This Is the Police 2, the new spin-off game Rebel Cops is officially out now with Linux support. Note: Copy provided by GOG.
A new criminal power which has set foot in town and the community leaders, politicians and local police have basically surrendered and so it seemed like all hope was lost. That was, until you and you crew stepped in. You lead a rough and ready group of renegade cops who refuse to give in.
Crytivo continue expanding their city-builder The Universim, with the Pitchfork Patch now out and it's quite a big one.
Added in this patch is a new Riots feature. If you fail them, they will respond. So if global happiness drops too low or there's too much crime you might see your nuggets run around rioting. Fires might be caused, damage to structures and more. They can be dealt with a few ways like letting them burn out, arresting them or using some god powers.
The Stone Age Town Hall has been added in, allowing a little more automation. This building allows Elders to sort out the essential needs of your nuggets (like food and water), it will also auto-assign workers to buildings and more allowing you to sit back and appreciate watching everything grow.
Unless a new processor is out, we don’t cover most TV boxes as they mostly provide the same features with little differentiation between products.
Area 86 takes the idea of an escape room game and turns it into a physics-based puzzler and it's coming to Linux next month.
Linux support is already in and live, as the developer actually sent a preview copy to our GamingOnLinux Curator on Steam. Inspired by the likes of Human: Fall Flat, Overcooked and Portal it tasks you with helping a little robot escape a series of rooms and it's actually quite amusing.
Now that Paradox own the rights to Prison Architect and Double Eleven are in charge of development, they're continuing the free updates.
The Slammer update was released yesterday and one of the major changes is an overhaul to Deployment. The presentation of visuals of the interface were improved so you can see your prison, you can assign Armed Guards and Dog Handlers to patrols and zones, you can have 2 different intersecting patrol routes plus routes and zones can be prioritized.
Paradox Development Studio have released another big free content update to the empire building game Europa Universalis IV.
Receiver is a name I've not heard in a long time, the indie FPS released back in 2013 by Wolfire Games and it's just seen a big update.
There's no new enemies or levels in this update, instead Wolfire focused on the tech that runs the game. In this case it's the Unity game engine and they gave it quite a big update. It also adds in some graphical prettiness and other bits like that.
RNG Party Games recently put out a freshly baked demo version of the typing dungeon crawler Backspace Bouken. It's a really sweet idea and thoroughly flips classic dungeon crawling on its head.
Might and Delight (Meadow, Shelter) announced something very interesting just recently called Book of Travels. It's what they say is a TMO (Tiny Multiplayer Online) game and it looks pretty awesome.
It sounds like nothing else, this could be one of the most unique RPGs I've seen in a very long time. With an art style that looks like it has been painted, with a land that's inspired by old-world fairytales, Eastern mythologies and early industrial eras. I'm most curious to see how they're handling the online side though. Their current explanation doesn't help much, just that "other players are few, but your paths will cross - it’s up to you to choose to travel together or go it alone". There's no Guilds or other social stuff, to make "your temporary fellowships unique and memorable".
ENCODYA is a very impressive sci-fi point and click adventure with a fantastic style and the good news is the recent Kickstarter campaign was very much a success.
Ending yesterday with €46,543 from 603 backers. Curiously, for that amount of funding that's quite a small amount of supporters. Looking at the tiers, they had three people sign up to the €5,000 level to be classed as a "co-producer" giving them a few bonuses like a logo during the start and end screen. Pretty amazing really to see a few people give such a huge amount of support to an indie game.
From the creator of Fran Bow and sharing the same world comes another strange creepy adventure with Little Misfortune, out today with Linux support.
Barely a week since the release of Proton 4.11-4, Valve's stellar Linux crew in cooperation with CodeWeavers have issued Proton 4.11-5 as the latest update to this Wine 4.11 downstream that powers Steam Play for running Windows games on Linux.
Fixes in Proton 4.11-5 include a crash with certain input devices and a regression of the previous release and a fix for games running in virtual desktops as well as for games with semi-transparent windows.
CodeWeavers and Valve have updated Steam Play once again, this time it's quite a small release to fix up some issues.
At KDAB we invest a significant amount of efforts in research and development. We are always looking for new tooling, libraries and utilities that can make our job easier and improve the C++ and Qt ecosystems. Ultimately, the gained knowledge and skills make our customers happier.
As part of this process we develop lots of code, usually starting as small experiments and/or proof-of-concept. Some of those experiments mature and become fully fledged solutions, such as our famous GammaRay, the introspection tool for Qt applications; hotspot, the GUI to Linux perf; and heaptrack, a heap memory profiler.
Let's continue where we left off in the first post. We saw an example of a Qt Quick application running on Linux on top of OpenGL and Vulkan. We also saw a Vulkan frame capture in RenderDoc, which is not just an invaluable tool during Qt development work, but can also be useful to anyone who wants to dig deeper and understand better how Qt Quick renders a frame (or for that matter troubleshoot problems in an application's rendering). Now in this post we are going to focus on what Qt 5.14 offers for macOS and Windows.
Epiphany Technology Preview has moved from https://sdk.gnome.org to https://nightly.gnome.org. The old Epiphany Technology Preview is now end-of-life. Action is required to update. If you installed Epiphany Technology Preview prior to a couple minutes ago, uninstall it using GNOME Software and then reinstall using this new flatpakref.
There are currently nearly 300 active Linux distributions, which makes choosing just one somewhat difficult, especially if you would rather make your own informed decision instead of relying on the recommendation of someone else. The good news is that the number of major Linux distributions, which stand out in a significant way and are more than simple reskins of existing distributions, is much smaller. If we were to represent the world of Linux distribution as a map, the 10 distributions listed in this article would be the continents of the world, while other distributions would be islands of various sizes. Just like there is no “best” continent in the real world, the same holds true in the world of Linux distributions.
Each Linux distribution is designed with a different use case in mind, and the same distribution can be perfect for one user and unusable for another one. That’s why the distributions in this article aren’t listed in any particular order and are numbered just for the sake of convenience.
Developers should not waste their time in plumbing or maintaining their Linux systems.
At the Oracle OpenWorld event, we sat down with Wim Coekaerts - Senior Vice President, Software Development at Oracle - who has been leading Linux work at Oracle.
Applications Manager helps IT admins gain a 360-degree view into the performance of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle VM.
Oracle has announced its world’s first autonomous operating system which provisions itself, scales itself, tunes itself and patches itself while running. Autonomous Linux powers Oracle Cloud and Oracle Engineered Systems as it is based on Oracle Linux.
“Autonomy is the defining technology of a second-generation cloud,” Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison contended in his keynote while addressing at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. He further added any Red Hat application would run unchanged on Oracle Autonomous Linux.
Automation is the growing trend in the IT industry. The aim is to remove the manual interference from the repetitive tasks. Oracle has taken another step into the automation world by launching Oracle Autonomous Linux that is surely going to benefit the IoT and CLoud Computing industry.
[...]
The biggest feature that Oracle Autonomous Linux is reduced maintenance costs. According to Oracle’s site, Autonomous Linux “uses advanced machine learning and autonomous capabilities to deliver unprecedented cost savings, security, and availability and frees up critical IT resources to tackle more strategic initiatives”.
Autonomous Linux can install updates and patches without human interference. These automatic updates include patches for the “Linux kernel and key user space libraries”. “This requires no downtime along with protection from both external attacks and malicious internal users.” They can also take place while the system is running to reduce downtime. Autonomous Linux also handles scaling automatically to ensure that all computing needs are handled.
Ellison highlighted how the new autonomous would improve security. He mentioned in particular how Capitol One data breach occurred because of a bad configuration. He said “One simple rule to prevent data theft: Put your data in an autonomous system. No human error, no data loss. That’s the big difference between us and AWS.”
The ISO contains:
Linux kernel 5.2.14 Mesa 19.1.6 Systemd 243.0 Firefox 69 (Quantum) Arc-x-icons, a more complete and updated version than the Arc icon set used previously. The new EndeavourOS welcome launcher on both the live environment as on the installed system. It’s a one-click menu to the wiki for the basic system commands and setting up your hardware. Our Nvidia-installer is now installed by default which now also installs the dkms drivers. Gtop system monitor, a nice terminal-based system load monitor that launches from the panel.
In this video, we are looking at Fedora 31 Beta. Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at Manjaro 18.1.0 with XFCE 4.14. Enjoy!
Fedora 31 has been in development since early this summer and the beta version is now available to download for those who want to get an early taste of what's coming in the final release later this fall. The most important change in the Fedora 31 release is the fact that there won't be any 32-bit (i386) ISO images released, nor software repositories.
"We recognize that this means newer Fedora releases will no longer work on some older hardware, but the fact is there just hasn’t been enough contributor interest in maintaining i686, and we can provide greater benefit for the majority of our users by focusing on modern architectures," said Matthew Miller, Fedora Project Leader.
Now that Modularity is available for all Fedora variants, it’s time to address issues discovered and improve the experience for packagers and users. The Modularity team identified a number of projects that will improve the usefulness of Modularity and the experience of creating modules for packagers. We are proposing a renewed objective to the Fedora Council.
Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman has shared his August 2019 notes where he outlines the frustrations and issues that have come up as a result of init system diversity with some developers still aiming to viably support systemd alternatives within Debian.
Stemming from elogind being blocked from transitioning to testing and the lack of clarity into that, Hartman was pulled in to try to help mediate the matter and get to the bottom of the situation with a lack of cooperation between the elogind and systemd maintainers for Debian as well as the release team. Elogind is used by some distributions as an implementation of systemd's logind, well, outside of systemd as a standalone daemon. Elogind is one of the pieces to the puzzle for trying to maintain a modern, systemd-free Linux distribution.
Canonical announces full enterprise support for Kubernetes 1.16, with support covering Charmed Kubernetes, MicroK8s and kubeadm.
MicroK8s will be updated with Kubernetes 1.16 enabling users access to the latest upstream release with a single-line command in under 60 seconds. In addition, MicroK8s gets new add-ons with one line installs of Helm and Cilium as well as enhancements, upgrades and bug fixes. Cilium adds enhanced networking features including Kubernetes Network Policy support. With MicroK8s 1.16, users can develop and deploy enterprise grade Kubernetes on any Linux desktop, server or VM across 42 Linux distros.
Canonical’s Charmed Kubernetes 1.16 will come with exciting changes like support for Kata Containers, AWS IAM, SSL passthrough and more. Using Kata Containers, insecure or untrusted pods can be run safely in isolation without disrupting trusted pods in deployments. Identity Access Management on AWS can be used to login to your Charmed Kubernetes cluster. Users get more control over their deployments while benefitting from reduced complexity due to improved LXD support and enhanced Prometheus and OpenStack integration.
“At Canonical, we enable enterprises by reducing the complexity of their Kubernetes deployments. We are actively involved in the Kubernetes community to ensure we listen to, and support our users’ and partners’ needs. Staying on top of security flaws, community issues and features to improve Kubernetes is critical to us. We keep the Ubuntu ecosystem updated with the latest Kubernetes, as soon as it becomes available upstream,” commented Ammar Naqvi, Product Manager at Canonical.
This is a continually updated article to inform you about Ubuntu 19.10 release date, features and other important things associated with it.
The development for Ubuntu 19.10 is nearing its end and it’s time to look at what new features and improvement this new release brings.
Ubuntu 19.10 is an important release because it will set the course of development for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (long term support). I have always felt that the LTS version release takes a lot of features from its predecessor.
In other words, Ubuntu 19.10 will be a glimpse of the features you would be getting in Ubuntu 20.04.
Enterprises today need the most secure, and flexible system to support their initiatives, and for that system to grow and evolve for tomorrow. The latest LinuxONE system was designed to support mission-critical initiatives and allow enterprises to be innovative as they design and scale their environment. LinuxONE III provides features for advanced data protection and privacy, enterprise resiliency and scalability, and cloud enablement and integration.
Reliability and continuity are critical to the success of any business. With this release, they’ll benefit from up to 10:1 consolidation for key workloads, and up to 190 cores and 40TB of memory. And with 99.999%* availability and up to 7.4x better resilience, enterprises can confidently run and scale their business-critical workloads. The new LinuxONE III provides the highest levels of availability and scalability, so business-critical workloads run flawlessly, recover quickly, and grow seamlessly.
Boardcon’s “Idea3399” SBC integrates a CM3399 module with 4GB LPDDR4 that runs Android 7.1.2 on a Rockchip RK3399. The SBC offers optional M.2-based NVMe and mini-PCIe-based 4G. Boardcon also recently unveiled a MediaTek-based CM-MT6737 module.
Boardcon announced a compute module and an SBC based on it equipped with a hexa-core Rockchip RK3399 SoC. As noted by the CNXSoft story that picked up the announcement from Embedded Computing Design, the Idea3399 is the company’s second sandwich-style implementation of the RK3399, following its EM3399 from 2017.
Copperhill’s third-gen, $65 “PiCAN3” HAT features Raspberry Pi 4 support and a SocketCAN-ready CAN-Bus 2.0B port. The HAT has an RTC and is powered by a 3A, 6-20V Switch Mode Power Supply that can also power the Pi.
Copperhill Technologies has launched a CAN-Bus HAT for the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B designed for industrial and automotive applications. Like the PiCAN2. which we briefly covered last year as part of our report on Network Sorcery’s UCAN software for CAN-equipped Raspberry Pi boards, the HAT is equipped with a Microchip MCP2515 CAN controller and MCP2551 CAN transceiver.
Axiomtek’s “IPC974-519-FL” industrial PC for AI edge applications runs on Xeon E3 or 6th or 7th Gen Core CPUs and offers 4x PCIe/PCI slots for up to 300W Nvidia graphics plus 2x SATA, 2x GbE, and modular I/O expansion.
Axiomtek announced the latest member in its line of IPC (industrial PC) computers with full-sized PCIe/PCI expansion slots. The new IPC974-519-FL computer is very similar to the IPC962-511-FL we reported on last February, which similarly supports Intel Xeon E3 or 6th Gen (Skylake) or 7th Gen (Kaby Lake) Core CPUs. However, the new model has four PCIe/PCI expansion slots instead of two.
Back in 2017, Boardcon introduced EM3399 single board computer powered by a Rockchip RK3399 processor through the company’s PICO3399 SO-DIMM system-on-module.
Learn how to assemble your NeuG USB True Random Number Generator Assembly from https://shop.fsf.org/
Open source technology is no longer an outlier in the modern world, it's the foundation for development and collaboration.
Sitting at the base of the open source movement is the Linux Foundation, which despite having the name Linux in its title, is about much more than just Linux and today is comprised of multiple foundations, each seeking to advance open source technology and development processes. At the recent Open Source Summit North America event held in San Diego, the width and breadth of open source was discussed ranging from gaming to networking, to the movie business ,to initiatives that can literally help save humanity.
"The cool thing is that no matter whether it's networking, Linux kernel projects, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation projects like Kubernetes, or the film industry with the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), you know open source is really pushing innovation beyond software and into all sorts of different areas," Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation said during his keynote address.
At the recent Cloud Foundry Summit EU in the Netherlands, Jeff Hobbs of SUSE participated in a re-named “Will it Blend?” panel discussion, talking about whether Kubernetes is the future of Cloud Foundry and how other technologies could potentially be integrated. It seems that Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry did indeed blend and the future is looking bright!
Cloud Foundry Foundation has posted all recorded talks from CF Summit EU on YouTube. Check them out if you want to learn more about what is happening in the Cloud Foundry world! I’ll be posting more SUSE Cloud Application Platform talks here over the coming days. Watch Vlad’s talk below...
You can see the white hdmi cable running from the lime2 hdmi out to the monitor. This old monitor is my test "projector", the fact that it is 4:3 makes it a good test subject.
You can also see a black cable from the capture board to another blue board with a red led. This is a banana-pi M1 as this is the current SBC being used in the FOSDEM video boxes, and i had one lying around anyway, doing nothing. It spews out a test image.
What you are seeing here is live captured data at 1280x720@60Hz, displayed on the monitor, and in the background of the status LCD, with a 1 to 2 frame delay.
It is now 3 weeks before Ubucon starts, and what better way to remind everyone that we are ready to go by showing our full schedule!
Don’t forget to register to our pre-ubucon cultural events if you want to know a little bit more of Sintra, and don’t forget as well to register for the event if you would like to receive some swag!
All of this would not be possible without the support of our sponsors and the participation of volunteers and speakers for which we are very grateful.
The Qt Contributors' Summit is an annual event open to anyone who has contributed toward the Qt project in the past year. Contributions can include code, helping on the forum, maintaining the wiki, or any other form of moving the Qt project forward.
After visiting beautiful Oslo in June last year, we invite you this year to the premises of The Qt Company in Berlin-Adlershof. And because of Qt 6 on the horizon, we have extended the event to three days! The first day will be all about sharing a common vision, while the following two days will be organized as an Unconference. We will have plenty of space to allow you to meet, collaborate, and get stuff done.
This event also brings together creators of open source technologies and leaders in cloud to discuss the latest solutions to today’s biggest data problems.
On September 30th breaking changes will be deployed to the docs.rs build environment. docs.rs is a free service building and hosting documentation for all the crates published on crates.io. It's open source, maintained by the Rustdoc team and operated by the Infrastructure team.
The recording of my Rust Conf talk on algorithmic art and pen plotters is up on YouTube!
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I really enjoyed giving this talk, and I think it went well. I want more creative coding, joy, surprise, and silliness in the Rust community. This talk is a small attempt at contributing to that, and I hope folks left inspired.
Mozilla will turn the Firefox crank faster in 2020, releasing a new version of its web browser every four weeks instead of every six. If you're using the browser, the change should deliver new features to you faster since there will be less waiting between when developers build them and when they arrive.
"In recent quarters, we've had many requests to take features to market sooner. Feature teams are increasingly working in sprints that align better with shorter release cycles. Considering these factors, it is time we changed our release cadence," Firefox team members Ritu Kothari and Yan Or said in a blog post Tuesday. "Shorter release cycles provide greater flexibility to support product planning and priority changes due to business or market requirements."
Google has a long and interesting history contributing to the upstream Linux kernel. With Chrome OS, Google has tried to learn from some of the mistakes of its past and is now working with the upstream Linux kernel as much as it can. In a session at the 2019 Open Source Summit North America, Google software engineer Doug Anderson detailed how and why Chrome OS developers work upstream. It is an effort intended to help the Linux community as well as Google.
The Chrome OS kernel is at the core of Google's Chromebook devices, and is based on a Linux long-term support (LTS) kernel. Anderson explained that Google picks an LTS kernel every year and all devices produced in that year will use the selected kernel. At least once during a device's lifetime, Google expects to be able to "uprev" (switch to a newer kernel version). Anderson emphasized that if Google didn't upstream its own patches from the Chrome OS kernel, it would make the uprev process substantially more difficult.
Simply saying that you'll work upstream and actually working upstream can be two different things. The process by which Chrome OS developers get their patches upstream is similar to how any other patches land in the mainline Linux kernel. What is a bit interesting is the organizational structure and process of how Google has tasked Chrome OS developers to work with upstream. Anderson explained that developers need to submit patches to the kernel mailing list and then be a little patient, giving some time for upstream to respond. A key challenge, however, is when there is no response from upstream. "When developing an upstream-first culture, the biggest problem anyone can face is silence," Anderson said.
Anderson emphasized that when submitting a patch to the mailing list, what a developer is looking for is some kind of feedback; whether it's good or bad doesn't matter, but it does matter that someone cares enough to review it. What the Chrome OS team does in the event that there is no community review is it will have other Chrome OS engineers publicly review the patch. The risk and worry of having Chrome OS engineers comment on Chrome OS patches is that the whole process might look a little scripted and there could be the perception of some bias as well. Anderson noted that it is important that only honest feedback and review is given for a patch.
Karyl Fowler is co-founder and CEO of Transmute, a company that’s building open source and decentralized identity management. We sat down with Fowler at the Oracle OpenWorld conference to talk about the work Transmute is doing.
Rob Hirschfeld, Founder, and CEO of RackN breaks Infrastructure As Code (IaC) into six core concepts so users have a better understanding of it.
At the Oracle OpenWorld conference, we sat down with Kyle Davis – Head of Developer Advocacy at Redis Labs – to better understand what the company does.
GitLab raised a substantial $268 million in a Series E funding round that was more than doubled what the firm had raised across all of its previous funding rounds and pushed its valuation to $2.75 billion. It also bolsters the company’s coffers as it battles in an increasingly competitive DevOps space.
GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij said in an email to SDxCentral that the new Series E funds will help the company continue to move on its goal of providing a single application to support quicker delivery of software. It claims more than 100,000 organizations use its platform.
“These funds will help us to keep up with that pace and add to that with our company engineers,” Sijbrandij explained. “We need to make sure every part of GitLab is great and that CIOs and CTOs who supply the tools for their teams know that if they bet on GitLab that we’ll stand up to their expectations.”
In this video, I am going to show an overview of GhostBSD 19.09 and some of the applications pre-installed.
The free software movement draws strength from an environment that is collaborative, inclusive and respectful. Diverse groups of people from all walks of life and nationalities come together and use their strengths and life experiences to contribute, share ideas, challenge the status quo, and improve technology for all. Everyone, including those who have been underrepresented and marginalized in technology, should be able to freely participate to produce useful software including in open source communities.
Red Hat urges the FSF board to seize the opportunity during its current leadership succession by appointing a president and members of its board that are more diverse, including from a national, racial and gender perspective.
GNU lightning is a library to aid in making portable programs that compile assembly code at run time. Development: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/lightning.git Download release: ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/lightning/lightning-2.1.3.tar.gz 2.1.3 main features are the new RISC-V port, currently supporting only Linux 64 bit, and a major rewrite of the register live and unknown state logic, so that a long standing issue with a live register not accessed for several consecutive blocks could be incorrectly assumed dead. The matrix of built and tested environments is: aarch64 Linux (Linaro, Foundation_v8pkg) alpha Linux (QEMU) armv7l Linux (QEMU) armv7hl Linux (QEMU) hppa Linux (32 bit, QEMU) i686 Linux and Cygwin ia64 Linux mips Linux (32 bit) powerpc32 Linux powerpc64 Linux and AIX powerpc64le Linux riscv Linux (64 bit, QEMU) s390 Linux (Hercules) s390x Linux (Hercules) sparc Linux (QEMU) sparc64 Linux (QEMU) x32 Linux (QEMU) x86_64 Linux and Cygwin
Computer scientist and GNU creator, Richard Stallman, has resigned from his position at MIT over comments he made about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
On his personal website, Stallman said that he was resigning “due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterisations”.
Stallman also stepped down as president of the Free Software Foundation, an organisation he founded in 1985.
The sudden resignation was on the back of remarks Stallman made about sexual assault allegations involving the late artificial intelligence researcher, Marvin Minsky.
Minsky had been embroiled in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal after a woman alleged that, at the age of 17, Epstein ordered her to have sex with various men, including Minsky.
In a leaked email chain, Stallman defended Minsky.
Stallman, a visiting professor in Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s esteemed computer science and artificial intelligence laboratory, or CSAIL, announced in a brief post to his website this week that he’s stepping down immediately “due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.” He wrote in a slightly longer email to CSAIL that has since been circulated online that “misleading media" coverage "totally mischaracterized my statements.” Headlines say “that I defended Epstein,” Stallman wrote, but “nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve called him a ‘serial rapist’ and said he deserved to be imprisoned.” Yet many who read Stallman’s recent comments about the case on the CSAIL Listserv said he came across loud and clear, and that was the problem.
Famed computer scientist and activist Richard Stallman has resigned from his positions at Free Software Foundation and Massachusetts Institute of Technology over the recent comments he made concerning Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. Stallman, also the founder of free and open-source software movement and Free Software Foundation, resigned as the president of the FSF as well as from its board of directors.He is best known for initiation of the GNU operating system in 1983, as well as for his work campaigning for the use of free software. Last week it emerged that Stallman had cast doubt upon the reports that Artificial Intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky had sexually assaulted one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. In an email dump sent to the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, CSAIL, mailing list that was published by Motherboard, Stallman said that ‘the most plausible scenario’ was that Epstein’s victim ‘presented herself to Marvin Minsky as entirely willing.’
Free software pioneer and renowned computer scientist Richard Stallman resigned from his post at MIT following recent comments about one of Jeffrey Epstein.
A prominent computer scientist at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has resigned following recent remarks he made debating a former professor’s alleged involvement in Jeffrey Epstein’s sex ring.
Richard Stallman, a MacArthur genius grant recipient and Internet Hall of Fame inductee, wrote in an email to the MIT community Monday that he was “resigning effective immediately” from his position as visiting scientist at CSAIL.
“I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations,” Stallman said.
In an email, Stallman argued that Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s trafficking victims, consented to sex with the late MIT Professor Marvin Minsky. She “presented herself to him as entirely willing,” Stallman wrote, “I’ve concluded from various examples of accusation inflation that it is absolutely wrong to use the term ‘sexual assault’ in an accusation.”
The founder and president of the Free Software Foundation Richard Stallman has resigned in the wake of comments he made about accused sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his victims. He is also removing himself from the foundation’s board of directors effective immediately.
In addition, Stallman will no longer be a visiting scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).
Stallman wrote on his website: “I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT. I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.”
Stallman’s remarks were written after he saw an MIT event protesting Epstein on Facebook.
In an email published by MIT alum Selam Jie Gano, Stallman wrote: “We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing. Assuming she was being coerced by Epstein, he would have had every reason to tell her to conceal that from most of his associates.”
“To the MIT community, I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT. I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations.”
“I am resigning effective immediately from my position in CSAIL at MIT. I am doing this due to pressure on MIT and me over a series of misunderstandings and mischaracterizations,” he wrote in the email and then signed off with his name.
In the leaked emails published last week by Vice, Stallman suggested that mathematician Marvin Minsky was wrongly accused of sexual assault by Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre.
“The word ‘assaulting’ presumes that he applied force or violence, in some unspecified way, but the article itself says no such thing. Only that they had sex,” Stallman allegedly wrote, referring to an article about Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre’s testimony that she was forced to have sex with Minsky.
Virginia Giuffre previously accused Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier, of directing her to have sex with AI pioneer and MIT professor Marvin Minsky. In Stallman’s original email, he wrote, “All I know she [Giuffre] said about Minsky is that Epstein directed her to have sex with Minsky. That does not say whether Minsky knew that she was coerced.“
Stallman continued, “We can imagine many scenarios, but the most plausible scenario is that she presented herself to him as entirely willing.” Stallman also questioned whether or not Minsky’s behavior should be characterized as “sexual assault,” which he described as a “slippery” term.
Following this email, Selam Jie Gano ’18 called for Stallman’s removal in a blog post published Sept. 12. “I know, now, that if prominent technology institutions won’t start firing their problematic men left right and center, we will do nothing. Ever,” Gano wrote. “Long before this incident, Stallman was contributing to an uncomfortable environment for women at MIT in a very real and visceral way.”
So Richard Stallman has resigned from his guest position at MIT and as President of the Free Software Foundation. You can easily find out all you need to know about the background from a web search and some news articles. I recommend in particular Selam G’s original articles on this topic for background, and for an excellent institutional version, the statement from the Software Freedom Conservancy. But I’ll give you a personal take. By my reckoning, I worked for RMS longer than any other programmer. 1) There has been some bad reporting, and that’s a problem. While I have not waded through the entire email thread Selam G. has posted, my reaction was that RMS did not defend Epstein, and did not say that the victim in this case was acting voluntarily. But it’s not the most important problem. It’s not remotely close to being the most important problem. 2) This was an own-goal for RMS. He has had plenty of opportunities to learn how to stfu when that’s necessary. He’s responsible for relying too much on people’s careful reading of his note, but even that’s not the problem. He thought that Marvin Minsky was being unfairly accused. Minsky was his friend for many many years, and I think he carries a lot of affection and loyalty for his memory. But Minsky is also dead, and there’s plenty of time to discuss at leisure whatever questions there may be about his culpability.
This changed everything, and it led to the birth of ever greater backgammon neural networks that could provide world-class competition as well as world-class analysis. The first great program to follow and raise the standard was Jellyfish, after which came Snowie, and even a magnificent open-source project: GNU Backgammon, which to this day is the second strongest backgammon software available. It too can be found at its source site. For documentation, refer to my online manual, “All About GNU”.
Oracle – the software giant has released Java SE and JDK 13 along with the promise to introduce more new features in the future within the six-month cycle.
The Java 13’s binaries are now available for download with improvements in security, performance, stability, and two new additional preview features ‘Switch Expressions’ and ‘Text Blocks’, specifically designed to boost developers’ productivity level. This gives the hope that the battle of Java vs Python will be won by the former.
Remarking on the new release, Oracle said: “Oracle JDK 13 increases developer productivity by improving the performance, stability and security of the Java SE Platform and the JDK,”.
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Speaking of the Java 13 release, it is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 along with the Classpath Exception (GPLv2+CPE).
The director of Oracle’s Java SE Product Management, Sharat Chander stated “Oracle offers Java 13 for enterprises and developers. JDK 13 will receive a minimum of two updates, per the Oracle CPU schedule, before being followed by Oracle JDK 14, which is due out in March 2020, with early access builds already available.”
Let’s look into the new features that JDK 13 comes packed with.
Graphical User Interfaces make human-machine interactions easier as well as intuitive. It plays a crucial role as the world is shifting.
In the older days of open source software, major projects tended to have their Benevolent Dictators For Life who made all the final decisions, and some mature projects still operate that way. Guido van Rossum famously called his language “Python” because he liked the British comics of the same name. That’s the sort of thing that only a single developer can get away with.
However, in these modern times of GitHub, GitLab, and other collaboration platforms, community-driven decision making has become a more and more common phenomenon, shifting software development towards democracy. People begin to think of themselves as “Python programmers” or “GIMP users” and the name of the project fuses irrevocably with their identity.
What happens when software projects fork, develop apart, or otherwise change significantly? Obviously, to prevent confusion, they get a new name, and all of those “Perl Monks” need to become “Raku Monks”. Needless to say, what should be a trivial detail — what we’ve all decided to call this pile of ones and zeros or language constructs — can become a big deal. Don’t believe us? Here are the stories of renaming Python, Perl, and the GIMP.
Many fellow students are likely in the same boat, the only difference being that the vast majority not only that don’t list computer science as one of their passions (but more as one of their reasons for not wanting to live anymore), but they get a very distorted view of what computer science and programming actually is.
Said CS classes tend to be kind of a joke, not only because of the curriculum. The main reason why they are bad and boring is the way they are taught. I am going to address my main frustrations on this matter together with proposed solutions and a guide for those who want to start learning alone.
You heard me. Freedom is the word here with Perl.
When I’m coding freely at home on my fun data science project, I rely on it to clean up my data.
In the real world, data is often collected with loads of variations. Unless you are using someone’s “clean” dataset, you better learn to clean that data real fast.
Yes, Perl is fast. It’s lightening fast.
Deploying a Python app to a server is surprisingly hard. Without blinking, you’ll be dealing with virtual environments and a host of other complications.
The landscape of deployment methods is huge. What if I told you that there is a way to build your app into a single file and it isn’t a Docker container?
In this article, we’re going to look at common ways of deploying Python apps. We’ll explore the touted benefits of Docker containers to understand why containers are so popular for web apps. Finally, we’ll look at an alternative to Docker that may be a lot simpler for your Python web app and compare and contrast this alternative against Docker.
Integers are whole numbers. In other words, they have no fractional component. Two data types you can use to store an integer in Python are int and str. These types offer flexibility for working with integers in different circumstances. In this tutorial, you’ll learn how you can convert a Python string to an int. You’ll also learn how to convert an int to a string.
I help organize PyGotham, NYC’s annual conference about the Python programming language. For the third year in a row, we’re giving our speakers free sessions with a professional speaking coach, opera singer Melissa Collom. In the past we’ve limited coaching to first-time speakers, but we’re now able to coach everyone.
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.
Natural language processing (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.
"It is cruel and outrageous that GM has cut off the healthcare benefits from their employees in a blatant attempt to force the union into submission," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
"Look a dying man in the eyes and tell me how we fix this country."
Among many recent troubling headlines was this one: “Families Go Deep in Debt to Stay in the Middle Class.” That story came on the heels of a report that consumer debt in the United States hit $14 trillion in the first quarter of the year, a level not seen since just before the financial crash of 2008.
There’s an old joke about a lawyer who is questioning a doctor on an autopsy they had done on someone who was allegedly a murder victim.
Canonical released today a new Linux kernel security update for all supported Ubuntu releases to address three vulnerabilities across all supported architectures.
The new Linux kernel security update addresses three vulnerabilities affecting the Ubuntu 19.04 (Disco Dingo), Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver), Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Ubuntu 14.04 ESM (Trusty Tahr), and Ubuntu 12.04 ESM (Precise Pangolin) operating systems.
The first security issue addressed in this update is a a buffer overflow (CVE-2019-14835) discovered by Peter Pi in Linux kernel's virtio network backend (vhost_net) implementation, which could allow an attacker in the guest system to either execute arbitrary code in the host OS or crash the host operating system by causing a denial of service.
pair of newly disclosed security flaws could allow malicious virtual machine guests to break out of their hypervisor's walled gardens and execute malicious code on the host box.
Both CVE-2019-14835 and CVE-2019-5049 are not particularly easy to exploit as they require specific types of hardware or events to occur. However, if successful, either could allow a miscreant to run malware on the host from a VM instance.
CVE-2019-14835 was discovered and reported by Peter Pi, a member of the Tencent Blade Team. It is found in the Linux kernel versions 2.6.34 up to version 5.3, where it is patched.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (firefox and kernel), Debian (thunderbird), Fedora (curl), openSUSE (curl and python-Werkzeug), Oracle (kernel and thunderbird), Red Hat (rh-nginx114-nginx), SUSE (curl, ibus, MozillaFirefox, firefox-glib2, firefox-gtk3, openldap2, openssl, openssl1, python-urllib3, and util-linux and shadow), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-lts-trusty, linux-lts-xenial, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, and wpa).
Software Guard Extensions (SGX) is a set of security-related instructions for Intel processors; it allows the creation of private regions of memory, called "enclaves". The aim of this feature is to work like an inverted sandbox: instead of protecting the system from malicious code, it protects an application from a compromised kernel hypervisor, or other application. Linux support for SGX has existed out-of-tree for years, and the effort of upstreaming it has reached an impressive version 22 of the patch set. During the upstreaming discussion, the kernel developers discovered that the proposed SGX API did not play nicely with existing security mechanisms, including Linux security modules (LSMs).
Software hosting service GitHub has acquired Semmle, a code analysis platform that helps developers discover security vulnerabilities in large codebases.
GitHub, the Microsoft-owned open-source code repository, has acquired a startup called Semmle that specializes in helping developers analyze code for vulnerabilities.
Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub, announced the acquisition in a Wednesday blog post, calling it a "big step in securing the open-source supply chain."
Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.
Benyamin Netanyahu appears to have fallen short in his quest for a majority of 61 in the 120-seat Israeli parliament or Knesset. As I write, his far-right Likud Party is tied 32 to 32 with its center-right rival, Blue and White.
A line from the trailer for€ Jack Ryan, an Amazon TV drama whose second season streams on November 1, is: “A nuclear Venezuela…. You will not hear about it on the news, ’cause we’ll already be dead.”
Dormant routes have been used by the Pakistani army to infiltrate nearly 60 terrorists since the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir's special status, officials said on Tuesday.
This assessment comes amid intelligence inputs that there has been a surge in infiltration from across the border through higher reaches north Kashmir and Poonch and Rajouri of Jammu region, they said.
The idea that Saudi Arabia, which is not even a treaty ally of the United States, would set the terms for military retaliation was bizarre. Suddenly “America First” had given way to “Saudi Arabia First.”
Worlds end. Every day. We all die sooner or later. When you get to my age, it's a subject that can't help but be on your mind.€ €
There’s no point in dredging up that old slogan, No Blood for Oil. It had no impact the last time. Don’t bomb Iraq, we said in 2002 and 2003, to no avail. George W. Bush and his friends had it in mind to destroy that country, which they did.
"We urgently need sensible action to reduce and eliminate nuclear risk."
Joe Biden’s recent efforts to deny his record of support for invading Iraq are marvels of evasion, with€ falsehoods€ that have been refuted by€ one€ well-documented appraisal after€ another after another. This month, Biden claimed that his vote for war on the Senate floor was somehow not a vote for war. Ironically, while he was spinning anew to deny the undeniable, theaters nationwide began screening a movie that exposes the deceptive approach to the Iraq war that Biden exemplifies.
"Congress has the constitutional right to declare war. The president doesn't have it. The secretary of state doesn't have it. And Saudi Arabia certainly doesn't have it."
Liberian President George Weah took a major step to bring justice for atrocities committed during Liberia’s civil wars by endorsing a war crimes court, nine Liberian and international groups said today.€
The Trump administration tried to balance diplomacy with fresh talk of military action Tuesday in response to the fiery missile and drone attack on the heart of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry — a strike marking the most explosive consequence yet of the “maximum pressure” U.S. economic campaign against Iran.
Guinean President Alpha Condé is visiting the United States this month to attend the United Nations General Assembly. And amid€ uncertainty about€ Condé's political future, a key question is whether€ will rights abuses are set to continue in Guinea.€
The media industry continued to execute cuts in August and September as Spin, ThinkProgress, Rooster Teeth, Disney, and others reduced headcounts.
The cuts followed large rounds of layoffs earlier in the year from companies including BuzzFeed, Verizon, and Vice Media.
The massive cuts this year represent a recent trend in media that has seen upstart companies and newspapers alike shrinking and disappearing.
Here are the media jobs that have been lost so far in 2019.
Well. This is awkward. Congressional oversight of our intelligence agencies is actually being performed by the overseers. The House Intelligence Committee -- or at least Rep. Adam Schiff -- wants to know what's being withheld by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
This story originally appeared in Yale Climate Connections. It is republished here as part of the Climate News Network’s partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
Sylvia remembers the first time a government official came to speak to her community in Lephalale, in the Limpopo province, about the construction of a new coal power plant. Like many other community members, she hoped that the plant would bring much-needed jobs and prosperity to her family.€ €
Eating less meat can help to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But if everyone tries it, starvation will continue to climb.
Naomi Klein’s new book,€ On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal,€ has one crippling flaw—it’s inspiring. At this moment in history, inspiring talk about solutions to multiple, cascading ecological crises is dangerous.
"Seattle Public Schools should stand with the global climate justice movement and excuse students so they can participate in the global climate strike."
"How do we earn the hope that we could actually do this?" asks author of new book. "That's the only discussion that matters."
Wildfires raging across Brazil, Northern Europe and sub-Saharan Africa have focused attention on the importance of forests in capturing carbon emissions and preserving biodiversity. However, a flawed plan set for consideration later this month by the California Air Resources Board (CARB), would only increase the threat to these precious forests.
"Global greenhouse gas emissions need to decline today rather than tomorrow, and global CO2 emissions should be brought to net zero."
Canadian author, social activist and filmmaker Naomi Klein is done with “tinkering and denial” as solutions to climate change. As she explains in her new book, “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal,” America, and the world, is way past the point where a single policy, or even market-based solutions, can cut carbon emissions, increase production of renewable energy, repair broken ecosystems and generally prevent the kinds of climate catastrophe that€ will hurt the earth and the humans on it.
"The momentum is growing to make the Democratic Party fight for solutions as big as the problems we face and create a party for voters, not corporate donors."
"What I'm telling you to do now is to act. Because no one is too small to make a difference. I'm urging all of you to take part in the global climate strikes on September 20th and September 27th."
Naomi Klein’s new book, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, has one crippling flaw—it’s inspiring. At this moment in history, inspiring talk about solutions to multiple, cascading ecological crises is dangerous.
It won’t stay pristine for long. The government wants to move fast, starting construction within two years and — in about five years —roughly 1.5 million bureaucrats will move to the new capital, making it far and away the island’s most populated city.
President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that his administration is revoking California's authority to set auto mileage standards stricter than those issued by federal regulators, a move critics said would result in more planet-warming pollution.
During Obama's tenure, he pledged to reduce the US' greenhouse gas emissions by 26% to 28% by 2025 under the Paris Climate Accord, and his administration put in place several climate regulations including curbs on coal and a 2013 plan to cut carbon pollution and encourage clean energy. President Trump has since withdrawn from the Paris agreement and revoked Obama's plan via executive order in March 2017.
Thunberg also met with lawmakers on Capitol Hill, and told the Senate Climate Change Task Force on Tuesday that congress was not doing enough to help combat climate change.
The state that made smog famous is losing its half-century-old authority to set air pollution rules.
President Donald Trump announced Wednesday on Twitter that the Environmental Protection Agency was withdrawing California's authority to issue stricter vehicle efficiency rules than the federal government.
The move was the latest in the administration's efforts to loosen regulations aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Thirteen states and the District of Columbia follow California's standards. Together, they account for a third of auto sales in the United States.
Since 2009, public health researchers at West Virginia University and elsewhere have published over a dozen studies showing significantly higher rates of cardiovascular disease, lung and other types of cancer, birth defects, and overall mortality in counties with mountaintop removal compared to other Appalachian counties, even after they controlled for factors such as poverty, smoking, obesity, education, race, and rural disadvantages.
Soon after throwing out the Steam Protection rule, the Trump administration quashed further study into mountaintop removal mining's health risks by abruptly canceling funding for a National Academy of Sciences study that had already been halfway completed.
We found that hundreds of families living near such mines found toxic metals such as lead and arsenic in their tap water, consistent with mining pollution. One family we visited showed us the brown stinking water that began to run from her faucet after the mining began. "I'm worried about my babies," the mother said. "Is it safe to bathe them?"
However, the battle against climate change cannot be fought with ideas and targets alone. It also requires an attitudinal shift among the leadership and the public. While there needs to be a consensus on a robust and updated policy on climate change, it will eventually be the behaviour and habits of the people — across all economic groups — that will play a critical role in fighting to reverse the impacts of climate change. This responsibility towards the environment has been termed ‘eco-consciousness’ — behaviour or attitude showing concern for the environment.
On September 20th and 27th, millions of people will take to the streets worldwide to demand urgent climate action. Our staff and volunteers who attend the Climate Strikes will have Tor's full support. Different groups in different parts of the world are mobilising on September 20th or 27th (or both). The Climate Strike website has a list of local strike dates and locations.
Tor will also be joining the Digital Climate Strike. From today until September 27th, we will raise awareness of the strikes by displaying a Climate Strike banner on our website.
But Thunberg was not interested in being called a "superhero"—instead, she called for more action, telling lawmakers they need to listen to the science.
"Please save your praise, we don't want it," she said. "Don't invite us here to just tell us how inspiring we are without actually doing anything about it because it doesn't lead to anything.
"If you want advice for what you should do, invite scientists, ask scientists for their expertise. We don't want to be heard. We want the science to be heard," [...]
Eating less meat is not the way everyone should aim to tackle the climate crisis, a new study says. It is an essential step for many of us, the researchers argue, but in a world racked by malnutrition and hunger it can be only part of the answer to rising temperatures.
Canadian author, social activist and filmmaker Naomi Klein is done with “tinkering and denial” as solutions to climate change. As she explains in her new book, “On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal,” America, and the world, is way past the point where a single policy, or even market-based solutions, can cut carbon emissions, increase production of renewable energy, repair broken ecosystems and generally prevent the kinds of climate catastrophe that€ will hurt the earth and the humans on it.
Days after the heart-stopping Notre-Dame Cathedral fire€ in April, Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg trained her eyes on the United Kingdom’s parliament and chastised its meager response to climate change. “I want you to panic,” the baby-faced sixteen-year-old quietly instructed the adults in the room. “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.” For those who don’t get the reference, Notre-Dame’s cornerstone was laid in 1163. The magnificent Gothic structure was not completed until 1345, a work of cross-generational faith, common purpose, and, undoubtedly, obedience. This was, after all, the Middle Ages.
Scientists using new climate models say a bigger heat rise than expected is possible by the end of the century.
This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate€ story.€ €
DALLAS — The price of gasoline crept higher after a weekend drone attack devastated Saudi Arabian oil output, but if the disruption to global supplies is short-lived, the impact on the U.S. economy will probably be modest.
In 2019, I think it's safe to say that humans are capable of wreaking great and terrible changes upon Earth's systems. To name a few:€ acid rain, deforestation, and climate change. Reversing such problems is, on its face, quite simple. Stop releasing smog-forming pollution. Stop cutting down forests. Stop burning fossil€ fuels.
Public relations experts keep a careful eye on the multitude of ways that PR can go wrong: tracking the year’s biggest “PR blunders,” assessing flopped ads for lessons learned, and noting when to remain silent and when to circulate a particular point of€ view.
Rep. Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.), the grandson of former attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, has filed paperwork to challenge Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), one of the Senate’s most progressive members and the chief sponsor of the Senate version of the Green New Deal€ resolution.
The fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day of 1970 will be in 2020. As environmentalism has gone mainstream during that half a century, it has forgotten its early focus and shifted toward green capitalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than abandonment of the slogan popular during the early Earth Days: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”
The California Assembly passed Senate Bill 1, legislation blocking Trump administration rollbacks of environmental regulations, on Friday, September 13, on a 43-21 party-line vote.
In a week such as this you can’t help but think that famous cultural theorist Stuart Hall was on to something when he remarked that “the disorderly thrust of political events disturbs the symmetry of political analysis.”
"He's apparently more concerned with the doorways and streets than with the people who are homeless and sleeping on them."
The American media world—both social media and "news" media—is afire with the news that actor Felicity Huffman is going to jail for spending $15,000 to bribe her daughter’s way into college.
A new analysis finds that the billionaire could provide annual coverage slashed last week with just a fraction of what he makes personally each day.
President Donald Trump rarely passes up the chance to throw a sharp elbow at left-leaning California but he’s more than happy to cash in there with a lunch-dinner-breakfast-lunch fundraising blitz expected to scoop up $15 million from wealthy Republicans in two days.
The corrupt and Quisling leadership of the United Auto Workers Union has sent its 50,000 General Motors worker-members out on strike–a strike the labor bosses probably never wanted, as with the wildcat school workers’ strikes of recent months.
Letter to the secretary references "troubling questions about whether you are using office to benefit yourself and your family."
The “Trump, Inc.” podcast by ProPublica and WNYC is back. And we’ll be bringing you new episodes every two weeks.
When we started all the way back in early 2018, we laid out how we’d be digging into the mysteries around President Donald Trump’s business. After all, by keeping ownership of that business, Trump has had dueling interests: the country and his pocketbook.
On September 8, Moscow held an experimental round of online voting as part of its citywide legislative elections. Almost 10,000 voters submitted their ballots online. Artyom Kostyrko, the deputy head of Moscow City Hall’s IT Department, organized the online voting process, and on September 18, he released new data about voter demographics in the new system’s first official run.
Consider them dispatches from a present with no future.
After dozens of Russian Orthodox clergy released an open letter on September 17 criticizing the prosecution of Moscow election protesters, members of several other professions have also gathered together to demand that defendants in the so-called “Moscow case” be released or acquitted.
Pray that we make it through the next 14 months. Then, do everything in your power to remove this man from office.
Worlds end. Every day. We all die sooner or later. When you get to€ my age, it’s a subject that can’t help but be on your mind.
Armies of online loyalists defend cult figures like Elon Musk. Is a corporate autocrat in our future?
"We can't choose a candidate we don't believe in just because we're too scared to do anything else," Warren told the crowd. "And Democrats can't win if we're scared and looking backward."
"The president would have us believe that he can willfully engage in criminal activity and prevent witnesses from testifying before Congress."
"We must demand justice for survivors and hold Kavanaugh accountable for his actions."
In typically subtle fashion, Politico reported on a recent conference of political psychologists on the present state of democratic systems. Its arresting headline: € “The Shocking Paper Predicting the End of Democracy.”
Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan should immediately cease attacks on political rallies and other election-related activities, Human Rights Watch said today. In recent weeks, Taliban attacks seemingly aimed at deterring people from participating in the presidential election scheduled for September 28, 2019 have killed and injured scores of civilians.
One of the principal concerns of privacy is to prevent others – typically governments or companies – from monitoring what we think. They have to do that indirectly, by spying on what we say or write, and inferring what is going through our minds from that data. We assume that our actual thoughts are immune from surveillance. That is true today, but may not be tomorrow. Work is underway in research and corporate laboratories to come up with ways of reading directly what we are thinking. The question is: what happens to privacy once that is possible?
A report by ZDNet, with help from vpnMentor’s Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, have uncovered what’s likely the largest data leak in the history of Ecuador. This leak contains roughly 20.8 million user records. Ecuador has a population of 16.6 million so it’s safe to say this leak has impacted a vast majority of the Ecuadorian population. The number of user records is larger than the number of Ecuadorians because it includes records of those that have passed away. ZDNet confirmed the presence of Ecuador’s President’s as well as Julian Assange’s records in the leak. The leak came from a company called Novaestrat by way of a mis-configured Elastisearch server.
PT Lion Mentari Airlines, Indonesia’s biggest private carrier, is investigating a breach that led to personal data of its Malaysian unit’s passengers being leaked online.
Malindo Airways’s passenger information, which is hosted on cloud-based services, may have been compromised, the carrier said in a statement. Malindo is working with its data service provider Amazon Web Services Inc. and e-commerce partner GoQuo to look into the breach.
A study published Tuesday found that foreign entities have been targeting American veterans, service members and their families through social media disinformation campaigns and identity theft with the goal of “disrupting American democracy.”
US veterans, current service members and their families are being targeted online with malware and by foreign entities and influence campaigns, and the government isn't doing enough to stop it, a new report says.
The study by Vietnam Veterans of America, a non-profit that advocates for and serves the needs of all veterans, documents a myriad number of ways veterans are impersonated and targeted online -- particularly on Facebook. In at least one instance, they've been targeted by influence campaigns from foreign governments.
Many of the first 2,000 or so nights of my life ended in civil disobedience: crying, begging, bargaining, until—on night 2,193, the night I turned six years old—I discovered direct action. The authorities weren’t interested in calls for reform, and I wasn’t born yesterday. I had just had one of the best days of my young life, complete with friends, a party, and even gifts, and I wasn’t about to let it end just because everyone else had to go home. So I went about covertly resetting all the clocks in the house by several hours. The microwave’s clock was easier than the stove’s to roll back, if only because it was easier to reach.
When the authorities—in their unlimited ignorance—failed to notice, I was mad with power, galloping laps around the living room. I, the master of time, would never again be sent to bed, was free. And so it was that I fell asleep on the floor, having finally seen the sunset on June 21, the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. When I awoke, the clocks in the house once again matched my father’s watch.
Eighteen years ago today, the Eritrean government began its chilling clampdown on those it perceived as critics, decimating the country’s budding independent press in the process. Eighteen years later, as Eritrea ends its diplomatic isolation, little has changed for its citizens.
In one of the first Justice Department cases of its kind, Maryland political consultant Kelley Rogers pleaded guilty to wire fraud on Tuesday for operating multiple fraudulent political action committees that raised money from donors for conservative causes but kept much of the funds for Rogers and his associates.
Rogers’ arrest and indictment took place shortly after Politico and ProPublica investigated one of Rogers’ PACs, Conservative Majority Fund, which since 2012 has raised close to $10 million — mostly from small-dollar donors, many of them elderly — while giving out just $48,400 to politicians.
Lebanese judicial authorities failed to investigate serious torture allegations made by Hassan al-Dika prior to his death in custody, Human Rights Watch said today, on the two-year anniversary of the passage of an anti-torture law.
Cameroonian lawyers are on strike this week, protesting law enforcement agencies’ interference in their work and violations of defendants’ rights.
Tajikistan’s government takes little action to investigate or prosecute domestic violence cases and is doing far too little to help survivor. Despite progress in some areas, Tajik law does not criminalize domestic violence, and women who experience abuse lack adequate protection and access to shelter and other services.
On July 27, three hours before protesters swept Moscow’s Tverskaya Street to demand fair elections, Constantine Konovalov was going on a run when he was unexpectedly arrested. Police officers knocked the professional designer onto the curb of a sidewalk, and one officer stepped onto his calves in such a way that Konovalov broke his right leg. At Moscow’s Hospital Number 67, the young man was diagnosed with a “closed internal tibial spine fracture.”
Researchers haven’t found a comprehensive explanation for why the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans has increased over the past few years — the shift is too large and too complex. But a recent swell of social science research suggests that even if politics wasn’t the sole culprit, it was an important contributor. “Politics can drive whether you identify with a faith, how strongly you identify with that faith, and how religious you are,” said Michele Margolis, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “From Politics to the Pews: How Partisanship and the Political Environment Shape Religious Identity.” “And some people on the left are falling away from religion because they see it as so wrapped up with Republican politics.”
Last year was the deadliest year for school shootings on record, with the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, 10 people killed by gunfire at a Santa Fe, Texas, high school, and too many other school shootings that have already been forgotten. This fall, students returned to school under a shadow of anxiety and fear. To address this new normal, Sandy Hook Promise (SHP) — a nonprofit organization founded and led by family members whose loved ones were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012 — released a “back-to-school school shootings prevention” PSA.
In Wednesday, September 4th, Judge Anthony Trenga of the U.S District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the Terrorist Screening Database —colloquially referred to as the "Watchlist"—was unconstitutional. The case was brought forward by the Council on American Islamic Relations on behalf of 23 Muslim American plaintiffs. | By Maha Hilal
Dozens of Russian Orthodox Church clergy have released an open letter defending election protesters who have been arrested or sentenced to prison time in the so-called “Moscow case.” The letter, which was published on the outlet Pravoslavie i mir (Orthodoxy and the World), had 42 signatories at the time of this writing.
Moscow’s Meshchansky Court has begun hearing the case against 26-year-old computer programmer Aidar Gubaidulin. He stands accused of attempted violence against a police officer: During Moscow’s July 27 protest, the programmer threw a plastic water bottle in the direction of a group of officers and National Guard troops who were beating other demonstrators. The bottle missed the officers, but Gubaidullin is nonetheless being held in a pretrial detention center, and he may receive a lengthy prison sentence. Meduza spoke with Aidar Gubaidullin’s brother, Ildar, about the case.
Jordanian authorities have forced about 200 people to leave their home governorate because of their extended family ties to an accused murderer, Human Rights Watch said today.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres should join the growing number of those speaking out publicly against€ China’s€ mass detention of over one million Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, FIDH – International Federation for Human Rights, International Commission of Jurists, and World Uyghur Congress, said in a€ letter€ to the secretary-general released on September 17, 2019.
A Trump administration final regulation announced on September 17, 2019 to allow increased slaughter line speeds in hog processing plants in the United States threatens to put workers in grave danger of serious injuries, Human Rights Watch said today.
The United Nations Human Rights Council should use the upcoming review of Egypt’s human rights records to address unprecedented levels of repression, 17 organizations including Human Rights Watch said today in an€ open letter to the council’s member countries.
A new community broadband network went live in Fort Collins, Colorado recently offering locals there gigabit fiber speeds for $60 a month with no caps, restrictions, or hidden fees. The network launch comes years after telecom giants like Comcast worked tirelessly to crush the effort. Voters approved the effort as part of a November 2017 ballot initiative, despite the telecom industry spending nearly $1 million on misleading ads to try and derail the effort. A study (pdf) by the Institute for Local Reliance estimated that actual competition in the town was likely to cost Comcast between $5.4 million and $22.8 million each year.
Could Space X finally give the busted US telecom sector a much needed kick in the ass? Since 2017, Musk's Space X has been promising that it would launch 800 low orbit satellites capable of delivering cheaper, lower latency broadband to large swaths of the United States by 2020 or 2021. By and large Musk and company appear to have been successful sticking to that promise, insisting recently that this proposed timeline was "pretty much on target." That said, Musk had to fire some folks to ensure that the project was meeting its goals, which itself suggests they may not have been.
The NY Times recently had a piece by Rob Walker noting that there is no tech backlash, despite many people believing there is one. Unfortunately, I think the article overstates its case, and misses the more important, more nuanced point. I do think that the public narrative -- driven by many in the media and many politicians and bureaucrats -- is that there's a giant "techlash" out there as people are fed up with how various tech companies act. I think that Walker's point is correct that the public is still using the big internet companies in larger and larger numbers. But I'm not sure it quite says what he seems to suggest it means.
The 19-country euro zone bloc is united in pursuing a tough regulatory approach should Libra seek authorizations to operate in Europe, officials said at the meeting.
It is also considering a common set of rules for virtual currencies, which are currently largely unregulated.
At least 26 Lyft users have sued Lyft since August 1 for failing to protect them against sexual violence on the platform, and “stone walling” law enforcement from investigating cases. The women say Lyft ignored their pleas for help and does not inform passengers whether drivers who harm them remain on the app.
"As already expressed during the meeting of G7 Finance Ministers and Central Bank's Governors in Chantilly in July, France and Germany consider that the Libra project, as set out in Facebook's blueprint, fails to convince that those risks will be properly addressed," the joint statement read. "We believe that no private entity can claim monetary power, which is inherent to the sovereignty of Nations."
At the G7 meeting, the 19-country euro zone bloc indicated it is united in pursuing a tough regulatory approach should Libra seek authorizations to operate in Europe.
Monster Energy. The company's name is enough to set the average Techdirt reader's eyes rolling. The company that makes sugar-heavy energy drinks has become essentially a caricature of an overly aggressive trademark enforcer. This habit is somewhat surprising, given just how often the company loses lawsuits and oppositions, which one would think would be a deterrent for future behavior. Instead, it almost seems as though every loss only spurs Monster Energy on.
Police in Italy have announced a huge anti-piracy operation against the company operating popular IPTV service management system Xtream Codes. Searches are reportedly underway in several countries including Italy, the Netherlands, France and Bulgaria, in a claimed effort to dismantle the company's entire infrastructure.
A German law firm has threatened to file a criminal complaint against domain name registrar easyDNS. The Canadian registrar refuses to hand over personal details of an allegedly copyright infringing customer without a valid court order, nor is it planning to pay the proposed €1,481 in damages and fees demanded by the law firm.
Millennium Films is utilizing the US court system to put pressure on sites, services and apps that are linked to piracy. After the shutdown of the popular CotoMovies app, the company has now switched its attention to several sites that were 'linked' to the app, including Verystream and Streamango.
One of the longer-running sagas here on Techdirt concerns the disgraceful situation regarding the flag of Australia's Aboriginal peoples. Mike first wrote about this in 2010, and again in June of this year. The problem is that what is now widely regarded as the flag of Australia's First Nations was designed fairly recently by a private individual, not a group representing those peoples, or some official Australian government body. The designer, Harold Thomas, signed a licensing deal with a clothing company, Wam Clothing, which imposes hefty fees for the use of the design, even on non-profit health organizations giving away items that bear the flag:
