Containers have taken the world by storm. Whether you think of Kubernetes, Docker, CoreOS, Silverblue, or Flatpak when you hear the term, it's clear that modern applications are running in containers for convenience, security, and scalability.
Containers can be confusing to understand, though. What does it mean to run in a container? How can processes in a container interact with the rest of the computer they're running on? Open source dislikes mystery, so this article explains the backend of container technology, just as my article on Flatpak explained a common frontend.
As containerized applications go through an accelerated pace of adoption, Day 2 services have become a here and now problem.
Jeff Dike, one of the contributors to Linux, had developed a technology called User-mode Linux. UML, as it was known, allowed developers to create virtual Linux machines within a Linux computer. This Matrix-like technology was groundbreaking and opened the door for the virtualized cloud we know today.
One of the developers Dike’s technology enabled was a young technologist named Christopher Aker. He saw an opportunity to use this technology not to build the next Salesforce or Amazon, but to make cloud computing less complicated, less expensive, and more accessible to every developer regardless of where they were located, what their financial resources were or who they worked for. The company he built — Linode — helped pioneer modern cloud computing.
At Red Hat, performance and scale are treated as first class citizens and a lot of time and effort are put into making sure our products scale. We have a dedicated team of performance and scale engineers that work closely with product management, developers, and quality engineering to identify performance regressions, provide product performance data and guidance to customers, come up with tuning and test Red Hat OpenStack Platform deployments at scale. As much as possible, we test our products to match real-world use cases and scale.
In the past, we had scale tested director-based Red Hat OpenStack Platform deployments to about 300 bare metal overcloud nodes in external labs with the help of customers/partners. While the tests helped surface issues, we were more often than not limited by hardware availability than product scale when trying to go past the 300 count.
Change is the brutal truth for global enterprises. True business transformation requires fundamental shifts in behaviors. Software, systems, networking and storage all need to be aligned with the people working on these technologies and the associated processes, in order to increase the number of strategic opportunities an organization is capable of effectively responding to. To help drive this evolution, today we’re pleased to announce the launch of the Global Transformation Office, which will be focused on accelerating our customers digital visions while bringing holistic change across their technological AND social systems.
Market conditions, competitive pressures, the technology landscape and even customer requirements change on a weekly, if not daily, basis. Since the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux more than 15 years ago, Red Hat has provided the technologies and expertise helping to fuel the next generation of business innovation, from the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform to the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform in Red Hat OpenShift. The Global Transformation Office formalizes and matures our commitment to delivering the software, the skills and the expertise required to serve as a change catalyst for global IT organizations, founded on the success and demand for our regional Transformation practices.
Let me begin by saying that I was neither hired nor trained to be a sysadmin. But I was interested in the systems side of things such as virtualization, cloud, and other technologies, even before I started working at Red Hat. I am a Senior Software Engineer in Test (Software Quality Engineering), but Red Hat, being positioned so uniquely because its products are something primarily used by sysadmins (or people with job responsibilities along similar lines) and also most of Red Hat’s products are primarily focused on backend systems-level instead of user application level. Our testing efforts include routine interaction with Red Hat’s Virtualization, OpenStack, Ansible Tower, and Hyperconverged Infrastructure.
When I was hired, I was purely focused on testing Red Hat CloudForms, which is management software for the aforementioned environments. But as one of our previous senior software engineers departed to take on another role within Red Hat, I saw an opportunity that interested me. I was already helping him and learning sysadmin tasks by then, so after looking at my progress and interest, I was a natural successor for the work in my team’s perspective. And hence, I ended up becoming a sysadmin who is working partly as a software engineer in testing.
We’re delighted to welcome Jae-Hyung Jin to Red Hat as a general manager for Korea. In the new role, he will be responsible for Red Hat’s business operations in Korea. Prior to joining Red Hat, Jae-Hyung Jin served as head of the enterprise sales and marketing group as a vice president at Samsung Electronics. He has held several key leadership positions in the past at leading technology and trading companies, including Cisco Systems, LG Electronics and Daewoo International. Jae-Hyung brings in nearly 25 years of experience in various industries, including telecommunications, manufacturing, finance and public.
As part of my role as a senior product marketing manager at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are five of my and their favorite articles from that update.
Tor sets its sights on 2020, the KernelCI project moves to its new home, Microsoft finalizes their Linux powered IoT plans and great news for video playback on older Linux systems.
Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable Linux kernel maintainer, could have prefaced his Open Source Summit Europe keynote speech, MDS, Fallout, Zombieland, and Linux, by paraphrasing Winston Churchill: I have nothing to offer but blood sweat and tears for dealing with Intel CPU's security problems.
Or as a Chinese developer told him recently about these problems: "This is a sad talk." The sadness is that the same Intel CPU speculative execution problems, which led to Meltdown and Spectre security issues, are alive and well and causing more trouble.
The problem with how Intel designed speculative execution is that, while anticipating the next action for the CPU to take does indeed speed things up, it also exposes data along the way. That's bad enough on your own server, but when it breaks down the barriers between virtual machines (VM)s in cloud computing environments, it's a security nightmare.
Canonical's Chris Halse Rogers has shared a road-map for Mir (or terrain map as he prefers calling it) about their future plans for this open-source display server that remains focused now on providing Wayland support.
Zink is the effort led by Collabora's Erik Faye-Lund for offering a generic OpenGL/GLES implementation that runs atop Vulkan. While it's exciting prospects and well into the future could allow hardware vendors to avoid having to maintain OpenGL drivers with instead focusing on Vulkan, for now there is still a long road ahead for performance and features. Right now Zink supports just OpenGL 2.1 / OpenGL ES 2.0. With time though there are plans for supporting OpenGL 3.x/4.x and OpenGL ES 3.x functionality. At least with Zink, the existing OpenGL code inside Mesa/Gallium3D is doing much of the heavy lifting.
While we have seen a lot of open-source AMD Linux graphics driver patches for Renoir and that initial support within the 5.4 kernel, support for this 2020 APU platform is still maturing. The newest work on the Linux upbringing for Renoir is enabling the "DMCUB" support.
In addition to this month bringing the release of the Ubuntu 19.10 "Eoan Ermine", Apple also shipped macOS 10.15 "Catalina" as the sixteenth major release of their macOS operating system. So with that it makes for an interesting time seeing how macOS 10.15 competes against both Ubuntu 19.10 and Windows 10 on an Apple MacBook Pro. Here are those results from dozens of benchmarks.
Using an Apple MacBook Pro with Core i7-6700HQ Skylake CPU, 2 x 8GB RAM, 250GB Apple SSD, and Radeon Pro 450 graphics, macOS 10.15, Windows 10, and Ubuntu 19.10 were all benchmarked off this same system. All three operating systems were tested with their latest software updates as of testing.
With Google not providing an official one, there’s no shortage of unofficial Google Drive clients for Linux.
Some, like InSync 3, are paid software, others, like ODrive, are open source and free to use.
But all of them more or less do the same thing: sync files to and from your Google Drive on your Linux machine, with as little fuss as possible.
Reader Jena mailed in to tell me about a (somewhat) new Google Drive client for Linux desktop built in Vala.
The developers of VeraCrypt have released a hotfix for the recently released VeraCrypt 1.24 which we reviewed earlier this month. The hotfix addresses several issues in the client and improves certain functionality next to that.
VeraCrypt 1.24 was the first stable release of the encryption software in 2019. It added new functionality, updated libraries and fixed several issues in the client.
When GNU/Linux was introduced in 1991, people used to compile their own software by themselves from the source code. You would simply download each component you want (or have it in a CD) and then take a few hours or even days to finish the compilation process. Of course, the compilation process is hard, as each component will require you to compile additional dependencies for the software to run, which will take extra few hours or days.
In 1994, however, the first package manager was introduced, which was PMS (Package Manager System) of the Bogus Linux distribution. Dpkg (Debian package system) was also introduced in 1994. And later on in 1995, the RPM (Red hat Package Manager) came to light.
A package is a pre-compiled piece of software that can be installed automatically on any host that is using the same architecture and has the needed dependencies. Packages solved the dependencies hell issue, and saved users a lot of time, and enabled non-technical people to have any software they needed. Packages & Package managers are still dominating till this day.
Adobe Acrobat is the standard for PDF viewing on Mac OS, and Windows 10. Unfortunately, this program is unavailable for Linux, as Adobe does not support the platform. If you’ve recently switched to Linux and need Adobe Acrobat, you must find an alternative. Here’s a list of the 4 best Adobe Acrobat alternatives for Linux.
Do you need to convert some music files on your Linux PC to a different audio format? Unsure of what tool to use to do the job? We can help! Here are 4 of the best audio converter tools for Linux!
Earlier this month, Adobe announced that it would be forced to delete all user accounts for customers in Venezuela by October 28 to comply with President Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13884. Adobe said at the time that users wouldn’t even receive refunds, which the company said would be against U.S. law. But Adobe has been granted a special waiver, perhaps because it’s not clear how a ban on Adobe products in the country would advance U.S. interests.
“After discussions with the US government, we’ve been granted a license to provide all of our Digital Media products and services in Venezuela,” Chris Hall, vice president and general manager of customer experience at Adobe, said in a statement published early this morning.
About 10 years ago, Michael Gillespie and several classmates at Pekin Community High School in central Illinois were clicking on links on the school’s website when they discovered a weakness that exposed sensitive information such as students’ Social Security numbers. They quickly alerted their computer repair and networking teacher, Eric McCann.
“It was a vulnerability that nobody even knew about,” McCann said. “They did a quick search on passwords and student accounts, and lo and behold, that file is sitting out there.”
The letter itself reveals the mysterious depth of this growing problem: Congress and the agencies tasked with protecting American’s security are basically clueless when it comes to even understanding the scope of the problem.
In the glare of the hotly contested 2018 elections, things did not go ideally for ES&S, the nation’s largest manufacturer of voting technology.
In Georgia, where the race for governor had drawn national interest amid concerns about election integrity, ES&S-owned technology was in use when more than 150,000 voters inexplicably did not cast a vote for lieutenant governor. In part because the aged ES&S-managed machines did not produce paper backups, it wasn’t clear whether mechanical or human errors were to blame. Litigation surrounding the vote endures to this day.
I hope this article proved to you that sudo is a lot more than just a simple prefix. There are tons of possibilities to fine-tune permissions on your system. You cannot just fine-tune permissions, but also improve security by checking digests. Session recordings enable you to check what is happening on your systems. You can also extend the functionality of sudo using plugins, either using something already available or writing your own. Finally, given the list of upcoming features you can see that even if sudo is decades old, it is a living project that is constantly evolving.
Building off yesterday's DXVK 1.4.4 release, D9VK 0.30 is out as the similar project that implements the Direct3D 9 API atop Vulkan.
D9VK 0.30 re-bases its code atop DXCVK 1.4.4 and has performance improvements via locking changes, avoiding the throwing out of D3DUSAGE_DYNAMIC buffers, supporting discard on non-dynamic resources, other locking changes, and other work.
Joshua Ashton has pushed out a large update to D9VK, the DXVK-based layer that translates Direct3D9 to Vulkan for use with Wine.
D9VK is now based on the recently released DXVK 1.4.4, there's multiple changes to improve performance in games, new DirectX 9 feature support, experimental shader predication and so on. Lots of new bits that should enable even more older Windows titles to run with Wine (and eventually Steam Play when it updates D9VK) to allow you to enjoy even more on Linux.
Masses of bug fixes also made it into this release. You should get a better experience with Halo 2, Halo CE, Battlefield 2, Psychonauts, The Sims 2, Manhunt, Anno 1404 and likely plenty more but those were specifically named.
Steam, GOG, itch.io and everywhere else have all started their spooky Halloween sales. Let's dive in and see what's cooking in the cauldron. As always, Steam died at the start of the sale from overwhelming demand which caused us a delay in actually being able to see what they have.
Xeno Crisis was originally funded on Kickstarter to create a brand new action-packed Sega Mega Drive game, today it released on PC with Linux support right away. Interestingly, the Linux release (along with Windows/macOS) was actually a stretch goal that was hit. We've seen stretch goals for just Linux or Linux/macOS together but an entire PC port in a stretch goal doesn't happen often.
The gameplay in Xeno Crisis involves running from room to room as one or two players, smashing through all the aliens that appear and then running onto the next room. The room layout is randomly generated and when you reach the end of an area, you're in for a big boss fight. Since GOG sent over a copy, I've been playing it today and it's a huge amount of fun.
With Ubuntu 19.10 it's the first time we have seen the Radeon gaming performance under a GNOME Wayland session match or exceed the performance found under the default GNOME X.Org session.
Paradox Interactive and Paradox Development Studio recently released the Stellaris: Lithoids Species Pack, allowing you to become a civilization of sentient crystals and rocks.
This new pack includes unique game mechanics for Lithoid Empires (you eat Minerals, not Food), a bunch of new empire portraits, Mineral-based shop models and a new voice pack with some great rock puns. Something that feels a bit missed here though, is that there's no preset empire to play with them. It's not exactly a negative against it, I just found it odd to release a species pack without one setup ready for you.
Slovakian developer Mad Sheep Studios just recently released Urtuk: The Desolation, a stylishly dark, low-fantasy, survival RPG with tactical turn-based battles.
Currently in "First Access" (the itch.io form of Early Access), it takes place on a completely destroyed Earth-like planet. Your mail goal is to find a cure for the main character, Urtuk, who has a lethal disease. As you travel across a procedurally generated world-map using a node-based travel system like found in FTL you will need to manage your party, gather new equipment, extract "mutators" from fallen enemies and use them to upgrade your own characters.
Released back in October 2017, In The Shadows is an incredibly pretty puzzle platformer with a very sweet idea and it's very much worth a look.
It's all about the dark and monsters, however they're scared of the light. You use lights to scare them, forcing them to transform into various objects you can then use to progress through each level. It's absolutely delightful and the two year anniversary update is a great excuse to go and check it out.
Kraken Unleashed and Klabater just recently released Crossroads Inn, a mix of a real-time management sim with RPG elements according to their official description.
Today, the Debian Project pledges to donate $5,000 to the GNOME Foundation in support of their ongoing patent defense. On October 23, we wrote to express our support for GNOME in an issue that affects the entire free software community. Today we make that support tangible.
"This is bigger than GNOME," said Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman. "By banding together and demonstrating that the entire free software community is behind GNOME, we can send a strong message to non-practicing entities (patent trolls). When you target anyone in the free software community, you target all of us. We will fight, and we will fight to invalidate your patent. For us, this is more than money. This is about our freedom to build and distribute our software."
Rothschild Patent Imaging (RPI) is suing the GNOME Foundation for violating its "wireless image distribution system and method patent" (US Patent No. 9,936,086)." It's just another day at the office for Rothschild, a Non-Practicing Entity (aka a patent troll), which has filed 714 lawsuits over the past six years. But for the non-profit GNOME Foundation, this lawsuit is a real threat. Fortunately, GNOME has friends. One of them, the Open Invention Network (OIN), a pro-Linux patent non-aggression consortium, is coming to GNOME's defense.
In a surprise announcement at Open Source Summit Europe in Lyon, France, Keith Bergelt, OIN's CEO, announced that OIN has sicced its legal team in finding prior art that can be used to show that RPI's patent should be ruled invalid.
GNOME 3.36 will be the next major release of the popular and open-source desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions, slated for release next spring on March 11th. It will supersede the current version, GNOME 3.34, which has recently hit the stable software repositories of the most popular distros.
GNOME 3.36 will be dubbed "Gresik," after the host city of the GNOME Asia Summit 2019 conference, which took place three weeks ago, between October 11th and October 13th, in Gresik, Indonesia, with the main focus on the GNOME desktop, applications, and platform development tools.
LibreELEC is a lightweight Linux distro that is designed to run Kodi, the hugely popular open source home theater software. It is ideal for installing and using on a Raspberry Pi, although it runs on other hardware too.
LibreELEC (Leia) 9.2 Beta 2 is now available to download, with a complete overhaul of the underlying OS core to improve stability, as well as a number of refinements to the user experience.
It's the Gujarati new year and to the entire Debian community, best wishes for good health and great prosperity in Vikram Samvat 2076 (named Virodhakrt.)
Last week I found myself in the uncomfortable position of many users strongly disagreeing with a decision I had made about git-annex. It felt much like a pile-on of them vs me, strong language was being deployed, and it was starting to get mentioned in multiple places on the website, in ways I felt would lead to fear, uncertainty, and doubt when other users saw it.
It did not help that I had dental implant surgery recently, and was still more in recovery than I knew when I finally tackled looking at this long thread. So it hit hard.
I've been involved in software projects that have a sometimes adversarial relationship with their users. At times, Debian has been one. I don't know if it is today, but I remember being on #debian and #debian-devel, or debian-user@lists and debian-devel@lists, and seeing two almost entirely diverged communities who were interacting only begrudgingly and with friction.
I don't want that in any of my projects now. My perspective on the history of git-annex is that most of the best developments have come after I made a not great decision or a mistake and got user feedback, and we talked it over and found a way to improve things, leading to a better result than would have been possible without the original mistake, much how a broken bone heals stronger. So this felt wrong, wrong, wrong.
Part of the problem with this discussion was that, though I'd tried to explain the constraints that led to the design decision -- which I'd made well over three years ago -- not everyone was able to follow that or engage with it constructively. Largely, I think because git-annex has a lot more users now, with a wider set of viewpoints. (Which is generally why Debian has to split off user discussions of course.) The users are more fearful of change than earlier adopters tended to be, and have more to lose if git-annex stops meeting their use case. They're invested in it, and so defensive of how they want it to work.
Canonical Ltd., the privately-held UK-based computer software company, yesterday officially opened the development cycle of their upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (codenamed Focal Fossa) Linux Operating System. It’s expected that Canonical will officially release Focal Fossa next spring.
Slated for release on April 23rd, 2020, “Focal Fossa” is the next long-term supported version of the worlds’ most popular Linux distribution.
Daily ISO builds have been available on Canonical’s servers since last week. However, Canonical did not officially start the development cycle until October 24th and did not announce it until today.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS will be the next long-term supported version of the world's most popular GNU/Linux distribution, slated for release on April 23rd, 2020. It's dubbed "Focal Fossa" to keep it in tone with the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) movement, and will most probably ship with well-tested components.
While the daily ISO builds have appeared on Canonical's download servers since last week, the development cycle started on October 24th with the toolchain upload, which consists of some upgraded components, such as Python 3.8 (the goal is to offer Python 3.8 as the only Python3 version), Perl 5.30, and support for IBM z13 systems on s390x builds.
CVE-2019-11043 is a buffer overflow in php-fpm that under certain conditions, can lead to remote execution. There is an exploit at PHuiP-FPizdaM that targets certain nginx and php-fpm configurations. On their page, the describe how to use Docker to test this exploit. In this post, we use LXD to test the exploit and verify whether it actually works.
Note that php-fpm is vulnerable when nginx is configured to handle php-fpm by a specific way. Apparently, the configuration instructions for Nextcloud suggest to use this bad way. In this post, we try to achieve this bad configuration without installing Nextcloud but rather using what is minimally required for the demonstration.
In the following we create two system containers, vulnerable and hacker. In the first container, we setup nginx and php-fpm (latest version, buffer overflow still present) and configure as required at the exploit page. In the other container, we run the exploit code, targeting the first container.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 602 for the week of October 20 – 26, 2019.
Comprised primarily of engineers and developers, the group convened at the NVIDIA campus in Santa Clara, CA, on October 8th to listen to speakers from Netflix, Adobe, Roblox, NVIDIA, and Canonical. The event was a unique opportunity for attendees to ask questions, share their own experiences, and network, while hearing about specific use cases from the keynote speakers.
The gathering took place as Ubuntu approaches a milestone - the 15th anniversary of the first Ubuntu release this month. Stephan Fabel, Director of Product at Canonical, said Ubuntu has become one of the most powerful and flexible platforms available today for a wide range of modern applications in the data center and cloud, including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), robotics, the Internet of Things, edge computing and more.
We recently got an interesting question from a customer, and I think the answer might be helpful to a wider audience. Python 2 will reach end of life in two months. This shouldn’t be news to anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock, and plans are in place to use Python 3 in Noetic (whereas ROS 2 has always used Python 3). However, the question from our customer was this: What does that mean for existing ROS 1 distributions (Kinetic and Melodic)? They are still using (and will continue to use) Python 2.
The answer really depends on where you’re getting Python 2. Tl;dr: If you’re using Ubuntu Xenial (16.04) or Bionic (18.04), please know that Python 2 from the Ubuntu repositories will continue to be supported for the lifetime of the Ubuntu release, regardless of Python 2’s upstream support status.
Intel formally unveiled its 10nm Tremont core and Lakefield SoC with claims for up to 50 percent faster graphics than Gemini Lake and a tenth of the standby power. Lakefield combines 4x Tremont cores with a 10nm Ice Lake core, Gen11 GPU, and VPU plus a 14nm PCH.
At the Linley Fall Processor Conference in Santa Clara, Calif. last week, Intel released more details on its previously revealed Tremont architecture and Lakefield SoCs. These are the successors to the low-power, Atom-class Goldmont Plus and Gemini Lake, respectively. Intel also announced strong Q3 earnings of $19.2 billion in revenues, beating market expectations by $1.2 billion, and claimed to have boosted production of 14nm wafers by 25 percent in 2019 with a similar increase expected in 2020.
Axiomtek’s rugged, Linux-ready, “ICO320-83C” DIN-rail gateway is equipped with a Celeron N3350, 4x GbE ports with optional PoE, plus SATA, 2x USB 3.0, 2x mini-PCIe, and 2x serial with optional CAN and DIO.
Power-over-Ethernet equipped embedded computers have grown increasingly common over the last few years, and recently we’ve seen more systems with multiple PoE-enabled Ethernet ports. Axiomtek’s rugged new Celeron N3350-based ICO320-83C offers an option to equip all four of its Gigabit Ethernet ports with 802.3at compliant PoE to power external cameras and other devices.
We’ve already seen how to assemble NanoPi M4V2 metal case kit which offers an Arm mini PC solution with support for NVMe SSD.
SiFive unveiled a RISC-V based “U8-Series” Core IP that is roughly equivalent to Arm’s Cortex-A72. The power-efficient, up to 2.6GHz U84 and higher-end U87 both offer a superscalar out-of-order pipeline and support heterogeneous SoC designs.
RISC-V market leader SiFive has announced a U8-Series core IP ased on the open source RISC-V architecture that it claims is the “highest performance RISC-V ISA based Core IP available today.” The IP design features a superscalar out-of-order (OoO) pipeline with configurable pipeline depth and issue queue width. The U8-Series targets “performance- and latency-sensitive” applications in automotive, datacenter attach, and edge or end-point deep learning SoCs.
SiFive also announced a SiFive Shield technology for its RISC-V processors, which is similar to Arm’s TrustZone (see farther below).
Today I'm going to tell you a sad tale of a device called the Librem 5 and the company behind it, Purism. As of right now, this story does not have a happy ending. I am writing this series of articles as a protest against the behavior of Purism, a company which claims that transparency and openness are their core values. If they won't tell the world the truth about the Librem 5, then I'm willing to at least give it a go.
First thing's first: Last month I promised to blog about about low powered computing and my progress in trying to adapt my small server approach for laptops. Though I did receive my Pinebook Pro, as a wise man once said, "The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry." This project was no exception. Getting to a point where I can post a worthwhile update on the Pinebook Pro and how it ultimately relates to my low powered computing initiative is going to take a bit longer than I had originally hoped. Sometime soon I'll circle back around to this topic, count on it.
Now a lot of you probably don't know who Purism is. Purism is essentially a technology company that produces FOSS compliant hardware powered by FOSS compliant software. That along with other relevant information can be found here. Regular readers will know that I own one of their laptops, a Librem 15 v3 and that I've been pretty pleased with it over the last two years. Regulars will also know that I backed their Librem 5 FOSS Linux Powered Smartphone crowd funding campaign a couple years ago. If you've read the linked posts, then you know that at some point I was pretty enthusiastic about this company and their products. I'm typing this on a $2000 laptop I purchased from them two years ago for crying out loud. So what went wrong?
This methodology and philosophy works best for those I would call “organized chaos warriors”. Stay tuned for the next two blog posts this Wednesday and Friday, which will present my “typology of workers” (where I define the chaos warriors) and my favorite Free and Open-Source tool for Getting Things Done.
The miniDebConf19 Vaumarcus was this week-end in Vaumarcus. Some 35 attendees gathered together in LeCamp, which provided for accomodation, food and all the hacking and talk spaces.
The view is really fantastic from here! Thanks for all the fish!
A dozen of talks and BoFs ranging from ZFS to keyboard firmwares were presented, and, thanks to the awesome DebConf Video Team volunteers, a live video feed was provided covering most talks for remote attendees. Most talk videos are available already on the Meetings Archive.
Following last week's release of Firefox 70 and Chrome 78 I posted some fresh Linux web browser benchmarks where the Mozilla browser continued to get beat severely by Google on Linux. But is the situation any better with Firefox 71 in beta? Not really.
The Firefox 71 beta released last week brings a new kiosk mode, a picture-in-picture mode for video playback on Windows, a redesigned about:config, a new certificate viewer, and other changes. But, unfortunately, nothing major in terms of performance.
Prototyping with HTML and CSS grid is really helpful for understanding flexibility models. I was able to understand how my design works in a way that was completely different than doing it in a static design program.
As part of our ongoing work to make add-ons safer for Firefox users, we are updating our Add-on Policies to add clarification and guidance for developers regarding data collection. The following is a summary of the changes, which will go into effect on December 2, 2019.
The motivation behind switching build systems was twofold. The first motivation was that build times are one of the most visible developer-facing aspects of the build system and everybody appreciates faster builds. What’s less obvious, but equally important, is that making builds faster improves automation: less time waiting for try builds, more flexibility to adjust infrastructure spending, and less turnaround time with automated reviews on patches submitted for review. The second motivation was that our build system is used by exactly one project (ok, two projects), so there’s a lot of onboarding cost both in terms of developers who use the build system and in terms of developers who need to develop the build system. If we could switch to something more off-the-shelf, we could improve the onboarding experience and benefit from work that other parties do with our chosen build system.
You may have several candidates that we should have evaluated instead. We did look at other candidates (although perhaps none so deeply as Bazel), and all of them have various issues that make them unsuitable for a switch. The reasons for rejecting other possibilities fall into two broad categories: not enough platform support (read: Windows support) and unlikely to deliver on making builds faster and/or improving the onboarding/development experience. I’ll cover the projects we looked at in a separate post.
On Friday 2019-10-25 I participated in Redecentralize Conference 2019, a one-day unconference in London, England on the topics of decentralisation, privacy, autonomy, and digital infrastructure.
After giving a 3 minute lightning talk, I helped Kevin Marks run a session in the first time slot of the “unconference” portion of the day. I participated in two more sessions, and gave a closing statement in the end of day circle. This post is from the Etherpad session notes and my own memory recall from three days ago.
Kevin Marks started the session by having me bring up the tabs that I’d shown in my lightning talk earlier, digging into the specifications, tools, and services linked therein. Participants asked questions and Kevin & I answered, demonstrating additional resources as necessary.
Open Source Summit Europe -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the KernelCI testing platform is becoming a Linux Foundation project underwritten by BayLibre, Civil Infrastructure Platform, Collabora, Foundries.io, Google, Microsoft, Red Hat. As a Linux Foundation project, KernelCI will accelerate its work to test Linux on the largest variety of hardware platforms.
A long-anticipated move has finally been made official: the KernelCI continuous-integration project has found a new home under the Linux Foundation umbrella.
Its new status was revealed at the Open Source Summit under way in Lyon, France, and it's a significant move, according to Kroah-Hartman.
KernelCI had previously been supported by BayLibre and Collabora, but those two companies are now joined by Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, Civil Infrastructure Platform and Foundries.io.
What is KernelCI? "It is a project for testing the kernel," co-founder Kevin Hilman told the Summit crowd. "It started six or seven years ago among a few kernel maintainers that were recognising that Linux runs on so many pieces of hardware, but the testing on that hardware is very minimal. That's how it began: just collecting a bunch of hardware and running on as much of this hardware as possible.
Given the huge scale at which the Linux kernel is being used, achieving comprehensive test coverage for it is an incredibly challenging goal. Based on the open source philosophy principles, KernelCI's distributed architecture makes this possible by enabling the whole kernel community to collaborate around a single upstream CI system. Becoming part of the Linux Foundation will let the project flourish and become in turn integral part of the Linux kernel development workflow.
Some actual results of this move can already be seen with the new common database for storing test results from KernelCI and other related projects that share a common goal such as Red Hat's CKI and Linaro's LKFT. It is an experimental step towards expanding KernelCI in a modular way to interact with other existing systems. There are as many different ways to test the kernel as there are use-cases for it, and many types of specialised systems to cover: a CPU architecture such as 0-day, a Linux distribution such as CKI, a range of reference platforms such as LKFT..
At the recent Linux Kernel Plumbers get-together in Lisbon, Portugal, one of the hottest topics was how to bring better and automated testing to the Linux kernel. There, the top Linux developers united their efforts behind one testing framework: KernelCI. Now, at Open Source Summit Europe in Lyon, France, to help give KernelCI the resources it needs to be successful, it became a Linux Foundation project.
Here's how it works: As you probably know the Linux kernel is developed by a large, collaborative open-source community, which works through the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). You can't argue with the method. But Linux kernel testing is fragmented -- since it is largely done in private silos without enough collaboration on the testing software or methodologies.
Distributed ledger technology provider Iota, Dell Technologies and the Linux Foundation are collaborating on Project Alvarium. In an Oct. 28 press release, the nonprofit Linux Foundation announced it was forming a new project with support from several major industry giants such as Dell, the Iota Foundation and IBM. Other partners to the project include edge resource marketplace MobiledgeX and global IT firm Unisys. The project, based on code from Dell Technologies, aims to build on the concept of a Data Confidence Fabric, which establishes measurable trust and confidence in data coming from multiple sources. The system would score data based on its trustworthiness and reliability.
IOT Solutions World Congress -- The Linux Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and collaborative development among sustainable open source ecosystems, today announced the intent to form Project Alvarium. Project Alvarium will focus on building the concept of a Data Confidence Fabric (DCF) to facilitate measurable trust and confidence in data and applications spanning heterogeneous systems. The project will be seeded by code from Dell Technologies, with support from industry leaders including Arm, IBM, IOTA Foundation, MobiledgeX, OSIsoft, Unisys, and more.
[...]
The project will be seeded in the coming quarter with work from Dell Technologies which also seeded the EdgeX Foundry project in April 2017. Now part of the LF Edge Umbrella, EdgeX is adopted globally for device- to- application interoperability at the IoT Edge, recently hitting one million total microservice downloads with half of those over the prior two months. The EdgeX framework is a default component within the DCF seed for open data ingestion, but as with any other ingredients, it can be replaced with a preferred alternative.
I was born in Brno, but for nearly 30 years I’ve been living in Prague. I work for a software company where I am member of a mobile applications project. But IT isn’t my only hobby. I do lots of things – personally, astronomy and physics are the most important for me. There is nothing quite so interesting. And I am happy when astronomical or astronautical institutions (for example, the International Space Station) use free and open-source software.
I was member of the scout movement, so scouting is one of my “hobbies” too (it’s not a hobby, but lifestyle). In the Czech Republic, there is something special, a mixture of pure scouting with the education system of our boys’ book author, Jaroslav Foglar. He lead his scout group called The Boys from Beaver River for 60 years and wrote over 20 books, which are bestsellers. Indeed, Jaroslav Foglar is the most successful author in the Czech Republic, who directly or indirectly influenced literally everybody here. I am a member of the community associated around him, and member of Foglar’s association. Recently we’ve had meetings in the Foglar group clubhouse every month.
I am a member of the editors of OpenOffice.cz (focused on LibreOffice and OpenOffice.cz) and LinuxEXPRES (focused on free and open-source software generally). I am lead editor at ExoSpace.cz, which supports these magazines and websites, the Czech community around LibreOffice, other astronomical and astronautical magazines and more.
When discussions took place in the FSFE community about the decision to abolish elections, approximately 15 people participated, with about 10 people against democracy and only about 5 people speaking up in favour.
Looking at those numbers is deceptive: of the 10 people speaking against elections, all were in what other people perceive as the cabal, a group of 27 people who have full membership, over and above the fellows. Cabal people hadn't lost anything in the constitutional change. The 5 people speaking in favour of democracy where not members of the cabal, they were ordinary members of the 1500-strong fellowship. In such circumstances, is it fair to extrapolate the voice of those 5 people and consider it to be representative of the majority of 1500 fellows? Or do we accept the more simplistic 10 against 5? The more simplistic case, where it is not obvious to outsiders that the 10 people are cabal members, is one of those fake community situations.
Imagine if every participant in that conversation had to state in their email signature whether they were cabal or fellow, or even better, if the emails could be colour-coded by membership class. Would it be easier to see the correlation between the vested interests and the opinions?
In any case, the more outspoken members of the cabal tried to intimidate the fellows, trying to discredit them with personal attacks and calling some of them sock puppets. As fellowship representative, I simply emailed some of these people personally asking "can you please tell me if you are a sock-puppet or a fellow?"
What I found was surprising: not only were they real people, one of them lives just around the corner from my home in Dublin. Stefan and I met for burgers late in 2018 and helped put things into motion to reboot the IFSO.
One fellow told me he (or she?) was not using their real name because the FSFE cabal censors discussions about governance issues, blocking people from the mailing lists or moderating their posts. But they are still a real person making real contributions to the organization. Another fellow observed that one member of the cabal, Cryptie, doesn't use her real name and asked why should anybody else?
In 2002, just one year after the founding of CC, designer Ryan Junell accomplished the difficult task of designing a logo that is distinctive, yet teaches through its design. Over time, the CC logo has become a recognizable symbol of the open movement, even accepted by the Museum of Modern Art in New York as a permanent addition in 2015.
It is an underlying fact that Arduino changed or better still evolved the makers, electronics, DIY, open-source, or whatever ecosystem you can think of.
I'm very excited to unveil Operon, a high performance replacement for Ansible€® Engine, tailored for large installations and offered by subscription. Operon runs your existing playbooks, modules, plug-ins and third party tools without modification using an upgraded engine, dramatically increasing the practical number of nodes addressable in a single run, and potentially saving hours on every invocation.
Operon can be installed independently or side-by-side with Ansible Engine, enabling it to be gradually introduced to your existing projects or employed on a per-run basis.
Replication is a long-awaited feature that allows the creating of reliable high-performance database replicas without user-defined triggers and with full DDL support. This talk presents the replication subsystem architecture, possible replication modes, their impact on performance and available tuning options. We'll demonstrate how to set up a simple standby configuration and use it in practice.
This talk done at Firebird Conference 2019 describes the current state of the v4 development and reviews its key features (new data types, Batch API, timezones). Dimitry Yemanov spoke about the future of Firebird development, including the updated release plan and expected post-v4 features. Review of upcoming features for Firebird 5
The other day, I was using pandas to clean some messy Excel data that included several thousand rows of inconsistently formatted currency values. When I tried to clean it up, I realized that it was a little more complicated than I first thought. Coincidentally, a couple of days later, I followed a twitter thread which shed some light on the issue I was experiencing. This article summarizes my experience and describes how to clean up messy currency fields and convert them into a numeric value for further analysis. The concepts illustrated here can also apply to other types of pandas data cleanup tasks.
This week, I’m joined by Al Sweigart, a familiar name in the Python community. Al is an accomplished developer, conference speaker, teacher, and origamist. (Yes, you read that correctly!) But some may know him best as the author of many Python programming books, including the bestselling book Automate the Boring Stuff with Python and our top pick, Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python. So, without any further ado, let’s get into it!
[...]
I didn’t learn that much knowledge-wise, but I did pick up the idea that programming was just a thing you could learn to do like anything else. It didn’t require super smarts or Olympic-level training to do.
My first programming language was BASIC and soon after Qbasic, but I also picked up a little C, Visual Basic, Perl, Java, PHP, and JavaScript. It seems like a lot, but I never really mastered any of them. I just learned enough to complete whatever project I was working on in those languages at the time.
I got into Python around 2005, and sort of stopped learning new languages after that. I keep feeling the urge to explore new ones (Kotlin, Rust, and Dart have been in my sights for a while), but Python is just so easy to use for so many areas that I haven’t had a strong enough pull away from it yet.
In this post, we will explain how you can calculate your monthly loan instalments the way bank calculates using R and Python. In financial world, analysts generally use MS Excel software for calculating principal and interest portion of instalment using PPMT, IPMT functions. As data science is growing and trending these days, it is important to know how you can do the same using popular data science programming languages such as R and Python.
One of the critical pieces in a build system is the ability to view build and test output. Not only does it track progress as the build transitions through the various phases, it’s also an instrument for debugging.
This chapter in the continuous builds series covers how to build a simple log viewer. You’ll find details on retrieving log entries from Docker containers, serving them through Python, linking from a GitHub pull request, and highlighting the data for easy reading.
Creating a log viewer is not as complicated as you might think. You’ll need permanent storage for the logs, a REST API to retrieve them, and some web code to help highlight areas of interest and offer a “live reload” function.
Why Python is considered the top programming language ahead of JavaScript and C++
As web applications evolve and their usage increases, the use cases also diversify. We are now building and using websites for more complex tasks than ever before. Some of these tasks can be processed and feedback relayed to the users instantly, while others require further processing and relaying of results later. The increased adoption of internet access and internet-capable devices has led to increased end-user traffic.
In a bid to handle increased traffic or increased complexity of functionality, sometimes we may choose to defer the work and have the results relayed at a later time. This way, we do not get to keep the user waiting for an unknown time on our web application, and instead send the results at a later time. We can achieve this by utilizing background tasks to process work when there is low traffic or process work in batches.
AWS, which the Rust project has used for years, is sponsoring the project in the form of "promotional credits".
Welcome to the first issue of the Rakudo Weekly, formerly known as the Perl 6 Weekly. It continues the tradition of weekly news about the development of Rakudo, an implementation of the Raku Programming Language. Please see About for more background on this incarnation of this weekly blog.
I went to the London Perl Workshop 2019 this weekend. I've been attending the London Perl Workshop several times in the past, and it has always been a great workshop. This year the workshop had a brand new team of organisers, and they did a great job of following up on the legacy that is the London Perl Workshop (LPW).
Kontron’s Linux-friendly “COMe-cDV7” appears to be the first COM Express Compact Type 7 module. The 95 x 95mm module ships with an Atom C3000 and supports GbE, 4x 10GbE, 2x SATA, and 14x PCIe 3.0.
When Kontron announced the COMe-cDV7 as a smaller, “entry level” alternative to the Atom C3000-based COMe-bDV7 COM Express Basic Type 7 module, we were confused by the “smaller” claim. Although Kontron does not celebrate it, this appears to be the first 95 x 95mm Compact Type 7 module on the market. The module supports network intensive applications including real-time Industry 4.0 edge servers, micro servers, network appliances, robotics, and energy systems.
A review of health care systems already in place across the world found just 13 countries had the resources to put up a fight against an "inevitable" pandemic.
A project of the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, with research by The Economist Intelligence Unit, the GHS Index is the first comprehensive assessment of epidemic and pandemic threats globally. Built around a framework of 140 detailed questions, the Index assesses each country’s capacity to prevent, detect and respond to health emergencies, as well as the effectiveness of their health systems, their commitment to global norms, and the political, socioeconomic and environmental risk factors that can limit response. The average overall index score is just over 40 out of a possible score of 100, pointing to substantial weaknesses in preparedness. Even among the 60 high-income countries assessed, the average score is barely over 50.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium, firefox, php, and thunderbird), Debian (file, golang-1.11, libarchive, libxslt, mosquitto, php5, and proftpd-dfsg), Fedora (apache-commons-compress, chromium, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, jss, kernel, kernel-headers, kernel-tools, libpcap, mod_auth_openidc, tcpdump, and xpdf), openSUSE (kernel, openconnect, procps, python, sysstat, and zziplib), and SUSE (binutils, docker-runc, ImageMagick, nfs-utils, and xen).
Almost 60% of sysadmins said they "preferred" GUIs over CLIs, and 70% said they "used" GUIs on a daily basis.
A key internet infrastructure organization is undercutting efforts to make the internet more secure by insisting ISPs accept a legal agreement before using a security framework, critics charge.
The org in question – US-based regional internet registry ARIN – argues that under American law, it has to have people consciously accept its terms and conditions for them to be legally binding. ARIN is worried that the kerfuffle could end up at the end of countless lawsuits if ISPs rely too heavily on this security framework and end up cutting off subscribers if its service goes down or awry.
At the heart of the issue is a relatively new system, known as Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI), which was developed by the global regional internet registries (RIRs) that are responsible for overseeing and allocating IP addresses.
[...]
The end result of ARIN’s stance is that adoption of RPKI in North America is lower than other regions, and that has created a knock-on impact where ISPs are not signing up to the framework because others haven’t. Of the roughly 50,000 ISPs worldwide, only around 2,000 are currently signed up to the framework.
Yet for me, of all those proffering a seer-stone to secret knowledge today, Q is the most interesting. Most of the media labels it a conspiracy theory, but that doesn’t quite cut it for me. It is too intentionally dismissive and ignores the tangible, real-world effect of Q. From its start, I watched as an anonymous poster on the chans created a digital guerrilla army. Just as The Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord stockpiled guns and ammo, the Q folks stockpile rare Pepes, dank memes and elaborate link-analysis charts for when the cause needs them. If Illuminati and Christian Identity sermon tapes were enough to radicalize the clustered CSA flock in the 1980s—imbuing their day-to-day life struggles with divine meaning—what could a similar Manichean narrative do today when unleashed in a carefully calibrated cyber campaign? How long could such a narrative survive? How many people could it radicalize?
Despite — or because of — Trump’s apparent criminal behavior and obvious inclinations toward fascism he has a cement-like hold on his supporters. Trumpism can be understood as right-wing political extremism transformed into a cult. This is not just a metaphor. Trump’s lies, his assault on reality, his threats of violence, his cruelty, his demand of absolute loyalty, his manipulation of willing subjects who choose to escape empirical reality, and his shared state of collective narcissism with his followers all fit the definition of a cult. From that realization follows another: Trump’s removal from the White House, by electoral defeat or any other means, remains unlikely — unless his opponents can fully mobilize to overwhelm and defeat Trump’s zealots.
Is it possible to deprogram Trump’s political cult members and return them to normal society? Should good Americans isolate Trump supporters and refuse to interact with them? In what ways does Trump fit the profile of a cult leader? How is his apparent and lengthy history of sexually predatory behavior typical of a cult leader? If Trump is removed from office, will his supporters respond with violence?
In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Steven Hassan, one of the world's foremost experts on mind control and cults. Hassan is the author of several bestselling books, including "Combating Cult Mind Control" and "Freedom of Mind: Helping Loved Ones Leave Controlling People, Cults, and Beliefs." His new book is “The Cult of Trump: A Leading Cult Expert Explains How the President Uses Mind Control.”
He said the attacks on truckers and damage to power transmission towers in Shopian district by militants were to disrupt horticulture and tourism that provide livelihood to many people in Kashmir.
The army says the region's security is at stake as only the Chinese network is available on the Indian side. "NTRO was informed about the spillover. They explained that the higher the quality of the network, the more secure they are. They also suggested that microwave towers which can project network to areas such as Walong (about 25 km from Kibithu) can be installed," the report quoted an unidentified official as saying.
Since only Chinese network is available on the Indian side, the security of mobile network in the area is in question. “NTRO was informed about the spill over. They explained that higher the quality of the network, the more secure they are. They also suggested that microwave towers which can project network to areas such as Walong (about 25 km from Kibithu) can be installed,” an official explained.
The move is expected to largely benefit the army. While military communication is said to be strong, widening the mobile network will ensure faster means of sharing and passing instructions during emergencies. It will also provide soldiers an opportunity to connect with their families; they often stay out of touch for months, resorting to hand-written letters.
When did Russia start to become an enemy of the US? The Soviet Union had thousands of nuclear missiles aimed at us as we had the same towards them. That Cold War did constitute enemy status. But when was the last time Russia, or even the Soviet Union, ever purposely kill an American, civilian or military personnel? Isn’t that a basic criteria for enemy status? Al Queda is our enemy because they killed thousands in 2001. But in all likelihood, they were backed by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. KSA also killed an American citizen, Jamal Khashoggi, but the only ‘punishment’ is more military aide from Washington. In 1967 the Israelis killed 34 US sailors aboard the USS Liberty and injured 171, with the intention of killing them all, and knew it was an American ship. In 2010 Israel point blank executed an American citizen aboard the Mavi Marmara in international waters in the Mediterranean. Why is Israel not considered our enemy?
So what does appropriately unfair coverage of the 2020 presidential campaign look like?
The right storyline isn’t even that a widely hated and failing president is running for re-election and has little to no chance of winning — although that’s all true.
The right storyline is that this is a crisis, caused by a terrible error, and it has to be fixed.
In a special comment written for Consortium News, John Pilger describes the disturbing scene inside a London courtroom last week when the WikiLeaks publisher, Julian Assange, appeared at the start of a landmark extradition case that will define the future of free journalism.
The worst moment was one of a number of 'worst' moments. I have sat in many courtrooms and seen judges abuse their positions. This judge, Vanessa Baraitser - actually she isn't a judge at all; she's a magistrate - shocked all of us who were there.
Her face was a progression of sneers and imperious indifference; she addressed Julian with an arrogance that reminded me of a magistrate presiding over apartheid South Africa's Race Classification Board. When Julian struggled to speak, he couldn't get words out, even stumbling over his name and date of birth.
When he spoke truth and when his barrister spoke, Baraister contrived boredom; when the prosecuting barrister spoke, she was attentive. She had nothing to do; it was demonstrably preordained. In the table in front of us were a handful of American officials, whose directions to the prosecutor were carried by his junior; back and forth this young woman went, delivering instructions.
The judge watched this outrage without a comment. It reminded me of a newsreel of a show trial in Stalin's Moscow; the difference was that Soviet show trials were broadcast. Here, the state broadcaster, the BBC, blacked it out, as did the other mainstream channels.
These two cases elaborate the "two-level games" in water negotiations that the Indian government has been subjected to, at the international transboundary level between nations and at domestic level between the states or between the Centre and the state. These processes are characteristic of federal structures. While the two successive Modi governments have made conscious efforts to promote "competitive federalism" and "cooperative federalism" between states and Centre, water has increasingly and organically become a subject of "conflictual federalism". Meanwhile, there is the widespread perception that China, the upstream "hydro-hegemon" over the Brahmaputra (or Yarlung-Tsangpo), has been diverting its waters to India's detriment. This perception became widespread since the publication of Water: Asia's New Battleground by Brahma Chellaney, in 2011.
However, this has been challenged by me and my colleagues using more realistic hydrological and meteorological data which reveals that around 75 per cent to 85 per cent of the water flows, and the precipitation feeding the flow over the Brahmaputra, occur downstream much after the river gets formed by the flows of Dihang, Dibang and Lohit near Sadiya in Assam. Further, potentially utilisable water of the Brahmaputra is a fraction of the total renewable water resources. Largely, sediment formation happens after flow transcends the Himalayan crest-line and moves into the southern aspects.
“This is serious …. but this is only the beginning. This is only a taste of the horror and the terror that will occur in [the coming] decades,” former California Gov. Jerry Brown told Politico Monday, of the fires that continue to engulf both northern and southern areas of the state. Brown recently inaugurated a new University of California, Berkeley, think tank focused on tackling climate change, in partnership with Tsinghua University in China.
It never had to come to this. Native peoples in California maintained a healthy relationship with fire—they, of course, didn’t have a capacity to fight natural fires, whereas today we quickly extinguish those blazes to save lives, leading to a buildup of brush that forms one giant tinder box. They also intentionally set fires, harnessing the restorative power of flames to reset ecosystems to feed themselves. Today California isn’t doing nearly as many controlled burns as it should: In 2017, the southeastern US burned 100 times the amount of land as California, even though the region is only five times bigger than the state. The consequence is a state built to burn, and burn explosively.
California authorities ordered more than 180,000 people to evacuate and declared a state of emergency in response to raging wildfires. More than two million people have been left without electricity across the US state.
Wildfires are nothing new to the West Coast. They have two seasons in which they are expected to occur each year: the summer season, when hot temperatures dry out vegetation providing fuel, and the fall fire season, when hot, dry winds blow over dried out vegetation. Research shows both seasons have become more frequent and more intense over the last 50 years. The past decade has seen some of the state’s largest and most destructive fires. As the trend continues, the implications for human health, infrastructure, and ecosystem management worsen too. While the effects, at the surface, appear to be isolated to the state of California, the impact of more tense wildfires could extend beyond the golden state, too.
Hydraulic fracturing, savior or sin? That depends on who you ask.
However, when the birds started straying into foreign climes, the GPS trackers on their collars began to run up huge roaming charges as data was transmitted back to base.
Animal telemetry is a powerful scientific tool. Consider an elephant seal equipped with a satellite tag, which allows scientists to passively gather data on its movements, biorhythms, and the temperature and salinity of the water it moves through. When the seal surfaces, the tag transmits the stored data either to the Argos satellite system or underwater acoustic receivers, which in turn transmit the data to researchers.
Telemetry data helps us understand marine life better. The information gleaned from the elephant seal, for instance, may be used for implementing the Endangered Species Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act and the Fur Seal Act; performing National Environmental Policy Act analyses; providing Incidental Harassment Authorizations; and conducting Environmental Impact Assessments.
But he notes population control alone "won't solve" climate change.
"It's one of a number of things that needs to be considered as we try to address or respond to this incredibly difficult problem that the world is facing. There's no one thing that's going to do it."
In the predigital days, advertising agencies were ruled by swaggering creative directors who gorged on lavish client contracts and sometimes created campaigns that set the cultural agenda and captivated the public.
Nearly every piece of that equation has changed. Agencies are better informed than ever before about consumers, having amassed huge stores of their data. But many of those consumers, especially the affluent young people prized by advertisers, hate ads so much that they are paying to avoid them.
At the same time, companies that hire ad agencies are demanding more from marketing campaigns — while paying less for them.
As a result, the advertising industry faces an “existential need for change,” according to a blunt report published on Monday by the research firm Forrester. Now the agencies must “disassemble what remains of their outmoded model” or risk “falling further into irrelevance,” the report concludes.
President Donald Trump was greeted with loud and sustained boos, a large “Impeach Trump” banner, and chants of “Lock Him Up!” Sunday night as he attended Game 5 of the World Series in Washington, D.C.
"He's pulling back that curtain and just telling you the truth."
Footage posted by USA Today sports reporter Gabe Lacques from inside the stadium captured the crowd cheering loudly for a display of military service people (a third-inning tradition, according to Lacques), but their reaction quickly shifted when Trump appeared onscreen.
After showing several service members waving to the crowd, the shot changed to show the box where Trump was seated, and the announcer said, “Tonight, we are joined by the president and the first lady of the United States.” Before that first sentence could even be finished, boos rang out through the stadium.
Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R) on Friday signed into law legislation that will increase cyber protections for election systems and enhance the overall cybersecurity posture of the state.
The legislation, which had bipartisan support, requires post-election audits by county boards of elections to ensure the accuracy of the vote count, while also creating a “civilian cyber security reserve” that can be called into duty to protect state and local government entities against cyberattacks, including those involving elections and those against critical infrastructure
Visiting Chicago for the first time as president, Donald Trump disparaged the city Monday as a haven for criminals that is “embarrassing to us as a nation.” The city’s top cop sat out Trump’s speech to protest the president’s immigration policies and frequently divisive rhetoric.
The impeachment of Donald John Trump by the House of Representatives is all but inevitable.€ The House is slated to hold a€ formal vote€ on Thursday to authorize the impeachment inquiry,€ and in the coming weeks, it is expected to shift from closed-door investigatory sessions to€ public hearings€ designed to reveal the “high crimes and misdemeanors” committed by our 45th€ commander in chief.
Hill said those involved in the “coordinated campaign” that gave her husband a platform to perpetuate his abuse will be held accountable.
Katie Hill, a US Congress member elected to the House of Representatives less than a year ago, has just resigned, days after nude photos of her – which she€ says€ were released without her consent – were posted online by media outlets.
The single biggest threat to academic freedom today is the decline of full-time, tenured faculty positions at colleges and universities, says the historian who will deliver the U-M Faculty Senate’s annual academic freedom lecture this week.
[...]
Reichman, professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay, said that around the country colleges and universities are providing tenure protections to an ever-shrinking segment of faculty. Only about a quarter of people who teach in higher education today are included in the tenure system, a much smaller percentage than a few decades ago.
Reichman said research has shown that an overreliance on short-term or part-time adjunct faculty negatively impacts student retention, graduation and learning. It has also weakened tenured faculty’s voice in shared governance, he said.
Eighteen months ago I created a Twitter account with the handle @eugrandparents to add my support to the Remain campaign. Since then I have tweeted and retweeted often and, in particular, used the platform to direct people to my blogs on leftyoldman. Earlier this month, without any prior notice, my account was suspended by Twiitter. No reason was given and I appealed. The account was reinstated and I was informed that the action was taken 'for posting multiple unrelated updates to a trending or popular topic'. My attempts to clarify exactly what this meant, and what I can and cannot do, have so far received no acknowledgement from Twitter let alone a reply.
The whistleblower report implicating President Trump in a quid pro quo exchange of US military aid for promises to investigate a political rival has been very illustrative of the dangers of whistleblowing. Laws and policies mean next to nothing when the proper channels are willing to bury reports and possibly the reporter.
This week, department chief Jørgen Bergen Skov told Berlingske that it would be “a huge advantage” and a “priceless tool” if they could employ facial recognition technology, adding that it would be especially helpful in the hunt for suspected terrorists.
And it would appear that the surveillance-friendly government is keen to oblige.
"Facebook's own employees are rising up against the company's dangerous decision to help politicians lie to U.S. voters."
In a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, obtained by The New York Times, the employees wrote they "strongly object" to Facebook's decision not to fact-check political ads paid for by elected officials or political candidates.
"Misinformation affects us all," they wrote, according to a copy published by the Times. "Our current policies on fact checking people in political office, or those running for office, are a threat to what FB stands for."
China is amplifying its surveillance capabilities to unprecedented levels and it is now trying to gain access to apps that have end-to-end encryption. The country has now passed a law that will allow it to regulate cryptography in both government and private use data starting January 1, 2020.
Chinese officials have refused to comment on the matter, but have told Xinhua Net that the law is necessary for utilisation, regulation and development of cryptography. They also believe that it will be necessary in ensuring the "security of cyberspace and information."
India, the world’s second-biggest wireless market by users, will hold an airwaves auction for 5G services before March, according to the country’s Telecoms Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.
It has yet to begin 5G trials and has not taken a decision on allowing or banning Huawei from the test runs amid a US-led push to shut out the Chinese tech and telecoms group, saying its gear contained “back doors” that would enable China to spy on other countries. Beijing denies such a plan.
Journalist Max Blumenthal was arrested on October 25 and charged with “assault” in a political case that he says is “completely false” and “manufactured” by Venezuela opposition supporters.
From April to May, supporters of Juan Guaido’s attempted coup in Venezuela surrounded the Venezuela embassy in Washington, D.C. They engaged in verbal and physical assaults that authorities largely permitted.
Asylum seekers with disabilities waiting in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, for their United States asylum applications to be processed face obstacles to getting basic services. Mexico’s government should identify and ensure services for people with disabilities and chronic health conditions.
In the first nine months of 2019, Amnesty International has documented at least 12 murders of people working to protect the environment in Mexico.
The demonstrations in Hong Kong have been led mostly by young people protesting the way China governs the territory. It's easy to make a historical comparison to 1989 when young people in Beijing's Tiananmen Square also protested.
Han Dongfang was among those in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago.
After the bloody crackdown, he spent a couple of years in prison. He later fled to Hong Kong.
Dongfang spoke to The World's Marco Werman about his view of the protests that have taken over Hong Kong.
The European Parliament should use its 2019 Sakharov Prize, awarded to the unjustly detained Uyghur scholar Ilham Tohti, to significantly increase pressure on China to release him.
Greece’s parliament should scrap provisions in a new bill that threaten to limit asylum seekers’ access to protection, Human Rights Watch said today. The draft law, to be debated in parliament this week, would reduce safeguards for asylum seekers from countries like Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq in an effort to block the arrival of migrants and refugees in Greece, per a 2016 European Union (EU) migration deal with Turkey.
The Trump administration’s broad sanctions on€ Iran€ have drastically constrained the ability of the country to finance humanitarian imports, including medicines, causing serious hardships for ordinary Iranians and threatening their right to health, Human Right Watch said in a report released today.€
On October 24, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs)€ took aim€ at Egypt’s brutal€ crackdown on human rights, calling out the European Union and its member states for their feeble response to the escalating crisis, and urging “a profound and comprehensive review” of the EU’s relationship with€ Egypt.
Tanzanian authorities unlawfully coerced more than 200 unregistered asylum seekers into returning to Burundi on October 15, 2019 by threatening to withhold their legal status in Tanzania, Human Rights Watch said today. The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) facilitated the returns by registering the asylum seekers under its voluntarily repatriation program, despite threats from Tanzanian officials that they could risk arrest if they stayed in Tanzania.
Repeal Repressive Laws; Investigate Abuses of Activists, Critics, Opponents
Despite industry claims, US wireless is painfully mediocre. US consumers pay some of the highest prices for mobile data in the developed world, thanks to regulatory capture and wireless competitors who embrace "competition theater" more than actual price competition. Also contrary to industry claims, these high prices don't necessarily reflect quality; US LTE (4G) speeds are not only among the slowest in the developed world, arbitrary throttling, caps, and other usage restrictions reduce the value of these connections even further.
Benioff and Weiss recently signed a $200 million multi-year deal with Netflix to produce exclusive content. The decision to walk away from the Star Wars universe means that the pair’s output will be solely under Netflix’s umbrella for the foreseeable future. The first of their Star Wars movies was due to hit theaters in 2022.
Firefox had a brief flirt with a company called LaserLike in 2018. The two companies created Firefox Advance: an experimental content-recommendation system that would appear inside the Firefox browser. Advance would show a sidebar filled with recommendations based on the page you currently had open in the browser.
The Firefox Advance experiment disappeared shortly before LaserLike was acquired by Apple.
I tested Advanced while it was available. I found several interesting things to read and I was generally impressed with the recommendations I received. Advance even suggested relevant and interesting articles even for some of the more obscure topics I cover here on Ctrl blog.
Although Regulation (2100/94/EC) on Plant Variety Rights (“PVR Regulation”) is one of the oldest pieces of EU IP law still in force, it has not been often explored by the Court of Justice. This may help explain why a question of a rather fundamental nature is currently before the Court, some 25 years after the introduction of the Regulation. The case in which AG Saugmandsgaard Oe recently handed down his Opinion (not available in English at the time of writing) revolves around the distinction between “variety constituents” and “harvested material” (a distinction this Kat thought was rather self-evident – until reading this Opinion) pursuant to Art. 13 of the PVR Regulation. It also relates to the intricate question of how much (if any) protection the PVR Regulation affords to a right holder in the period between the publication of the application for a PVR and grant (a period that lasted over ten years in the case at hand).
It’s been just over one year since he was sworn in at the Western District of Texas, but has it become the patent hotbed he hoped, and what else makes him tick?
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Patent Trial and Appeal Board recently issued a decision indicating that certain claims of a patent directed to the popular PopSockets are invalid.
[...]
The Patent Owner argued that the issue is not whether Grinfas' securing structures would adhere the conduit to the back of a phone, but rather was whether Grinfas discloses attaching the conduit to the back of a phone. Therefore, Patent Owner's argument was not about whether Grinfas' securing structures are capable of attaching a conduit to the back of a phone, but rather was about whether Grinfas discloses the function of attaching to the back of a phone. The Patent Owner argued that an expert declaration failed to provide evidence that the claimed function is necessarily present in Grinfas, and that expert testimony, without (additional) evidence is insufficient to establish inherency.
The Board disagreed that the Petitioner failed to establish inherency. In particular, the Board disagreed that the Petitioner is required to show that the claimed function is actually performed or must be performed when the full structure is described.
Thus, despite the cited art failing to describe the full use of the structure, as recited in the claim, and also being directed to a clearly different use altogether, it was found to anticipate the claim because the structure in Grinfas was capable of performing the recited use.
As a result, because Grinfas discloses a securing element inherently capable of being attached to the back of a portable media player, the Board found that Grinfas discloses the securing element limitation. Thus, the Board determined that Petitioner demonstrated, by a preponderance of the evidence, that claim 9 is anticipated by Grinfas.
Earlier this Fall, the Swedish Patents and Market Court of Appeal asked the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to clarify the concept of “public” within the meaning of Article 3 and 4 of InfoSoc Directive [see here].
The background to this reference concerns two parties that operate their own respective websites. In separate proceedings, one of the parties (MA) submitted to the concerned court a copy of a text page containing a photograph that was taken from the other party’s (JJ) website. In turn, JJ claimed copyright infringement and damages from MA for making such photograph available (in Sweden court documents are public).
