got to know GNU/Linux at university about 25 years ago; it attracted my attention, and I used it for several months. For whatever reason—maybe I wasn't sufficiently prepared, maybe the distribution, Slackware, was too much for me—I decided to abandon it when I started working. However, it stuck in my memory.
About 10 years ago, I was tired of bringing office work home, and I decided to come up with a solution. At that moment, some recollection of that GNU/Linux operating system came back to me, and I thought using a different operating system might be the solution. The incompatibility between the two would make it hard to bring work home, I thought.
I chose Ubuntu as my platform, and this distribution has stayed with me until today, a distribution that showed me my mistake: With Ubuntu, or really any other distro, I can still do office work at home!
Yes, in the beginning, I had some difficulties. And these difficulties were what led to the birth of Atareao.es, because that was where I posted the lessons I learned from this incredible operating system.
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that YJFX, Inc., a financial subsidiary of Yahoo Group focused on foreign exchange services, has adopted Red Hat OpenStack Platform to build out the company’s private cloud infrastructure. Red Hat’s massively scalable Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering, Red Hat OpenStack Platform offers YJFX extensive scalability, helping it deliver new infrastructure more quickly as it seeks to bring differentiating applications and services to end users.
Topics covered in this episode:
Coreboot Version 4.11 Firefox Sweetens The Pot HPLIP Gets A New Release YouTube vs FTC: Family-Friendly Content at Risk? Linux 5.4 out and 5.5 Kernel Coming Half Life 3 Confirmed Sort Of Google Stadia Launches
We explore the rapid adoption of machine learning, its impact on computer architecture, and how to avoid AI snake oil.
Plus so-so SSD security, and a new wireless protocol that works best where the Wi-Fi sucks.
Even with all the light shed on Spectre over the past nearly two years, with the Spectre RSB (Return Stack Buffer) disclosure that did affect IBM POWER processors it turns out the mitigations applied didn't cover all of the CPUs that should have been in place until this week.
LaTeX is a document preparation system and document markup language for high-quality typesetting. The system was originally developed by Leslie Lamport in the early 1980s. LaTeX is based on Donald E. Knuth’s TeX typesetting language. Lamport says that LaTeX “represents a balance between functionality and ease of use”.
LaTeX is often used for technical or scientific documentation, particularly because it generates well formatted papers with beautifully crafted formulae, but the system can be used for any form of publishing. It employs beautifully crafted typesetting algorithms. Academic journals will often accept submission in this format.
Using the LaTeX system leads the author to concentrate on the structure of the document rather than its appearance. The author therefore focuses on what he/she wants to say, instead of fretting over page borders, font attributes, or formatting. Moreover, the author will be guided in the organization, structure, and flow within the document.
The recommended LaTeX distribution is the one that comes with TeX Live, the replacement of its counterpart teTeX. This is a general TeX distribution that is actively maintained by the TeX Users Group.
Almost any editor or wordprocessor can be used to write LaTeX documents, but many users of the system prefer to use software specially designed for LaTeX.
It’s not very hard to manage web servers for most Linux powers users. However, it’s certainly not a child’s play, and new site owners often find it extremely difficult to manage their servers properly. Thankfully, there’s a huge list of robust control panels that makes server management hassle-free even for beginners. It can also be useful for experienced server owners who’re looking for convenient hosting panel management solutions. That’s why our editors have curated this guide outlining the 20 best admin panel for modern web servers.
Techland continue to improve their 2015 game, Dying Light. Another patch went out this week and it's a nice one for Linux owners of Dying Light too.
For some people, an issue that has plagued Dying Light on Linux is a crash when using the Drop Attack ability. Techland said with Patch 1.22, that's actually been finally fixed. Additionally they said the overall stability of the game has been improved.
Freebird Games are finally starting to give us a little more information on the upcoming narrative-driven adventure Impostor Factory.
If you've not been following Freebird Games previously made To the Moon, A Bird Story and most recently Finding Paradise. All of which support Linux and it seems their next game, Impostor Factory, will as well. Details have been extremely light on it, at least until now. Still not exactly clear what's going on and their updated description of it doesn't exactly help "Impostor Factory is a narrative-driven adventure game that is categorically out of its mind."—okay then.
Cold and lonely survival game The Long Dark is getting a huge update to the survival mode next month, it sounds great too with some of the details Hinterland Studio have teased.
The Long Dark is certainly an interesting one, especially since it has a Story Mode and a Survival Mode to give the best of both worlds. It hasn't been long since the release of Episode 3 for the story back in October, so Hinterland have certainly been busy.
For people who purchased the Founders Edition, it came with a Buddy Pass system enabling you to gift a three month Stadia Pro subscription to a friend. That's now actually live. If you have it, you can find the option to do so in the Stadia mobile application (the little ticket button in the top left corner).
Also announced recently is the next set of games available to those with Stadia Pro, which everyone has right now since Stadia Base doesn't launch until next year.
Since the last part of this series got a lot of positive reactions, I am publishing this second one and will make sure to publish the last part before this weekend hopefully so stay tuned!
(want to jump and see the final outcome of this lesson? feel free to visit the original repo or jump to the end of this)
So, without further due, lets pickup from where we left last time.
Combine and convert ordinary industrial chemicals into a variety of small molecules with various pharmacological effects in MOLEK-SYNTEZ, the latest puzzle sim from Zachtronics. Recently, the team at Zachtronics announced that GOG have accepted their game onto their store!
No store will miss an opportunity to run a big sale now of course, we already have Steam and Humble Store running their own and now the DRM-free store GOG has a massive sale too.
The W3C put out an interesting status update this week on web games technologies and the various standardization efforts at play.
The updated included that the core WebAssembly specifications are "imminent" for publishing, the web gamepad specification continues being moved along, WebCodecs continue to be explored, and on the WebGPU front they are exploring the choice of shading language to use for next-generation web graphics.
The report from the Workshop on Web Games, held in June 2019, recommended next standardization steps for individual topics discussed at the workshop to enrich the open Web platform for games. Now, less than 6 months after the workshop, thanks to the efforts of workshop participants and a few others, most of these topics have already made significant progress. This seemed to warrant a status update. The creation of a games activity at W3C, to gather continuous feedback on Web technologies from the games community, track identified needs and steer standardization efforts, is still being investigated. If you’re interested, please reach out to François Daoust.
This new release allows users to use a BTRFS filesystem for the root partition. What is great about this is that it allows users to very easily roll back to older versions after a system upgrade.
Also, pentesters (while learning or even otherwise) tend to use a lot of VMs. Users often need to take a snapshot of their stable system state, so that if it gets messed up, they can quickly revert. This had become somewhat difficult in the bare metal versions of Kali. Now with BTRFS as an option for the root partition, this becomes much easier.
The title above is one of the questions that once existed in my mind, maybe also the readers. I am currently a Xubuntu user, but many of my community partners use different distributions. Some use Linux Mint, Arch, Ubuntu, Kali and many others.
Each linux user have their own preferences. We as users also cannot force other Users to use the same Linux distribution that we use. The point is need. The needs of every linux user are definitely different. Some people use Linux distributions for the purposes of programming, design, or network security and others.
From these various needs, there are many Linux distributions that can be chosen by users based on their needs. There are thousands of Linux distributions listed in Distrowatch. In fact, almost every week we will get information about new releases that are listed on this site.
In this video, we are looking at KDE Plasma 5.18 Pre-Beta, as of 28 November 2019.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Pop!_OS 19.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Toolbox allows you to sort and manage your development environments in containers without requiring root privileges or manually attaching volumes. It creates a container where you can install your own CLI tools, without installing them on the base system itself. You can also utilize it when you do not have root access or cannot install programs directly. This article gives you an introduction to toolbox and what it does.
Thanks to thorough feedback from our community, we now have a reasonably comprehensive answer to the question of what 32-bit compatibility library packages are needed on x86 for Ubuntu 20.04.
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/community-process-for-32-bit-compatibility/12598/46
Some developers will have noticed changes this week to the behavior of focal builds in Launchpad. Out of 30,000 source packages in focal, there is now a whitelist of about 1,700 source packages which will trigger builds on i386 in Launchpad. This means that other packages which previously built on i386 will need to have the binaries from the old version of the package removed before they will be migratable from focal-proposed to focal.
As a side note, the implementation of this also affects PPA builds, because the whitelist applies to the focal series as a whole. In general, you should not expect to need i386 builds of third-party packages in PPAs for focal either, given that i386 in focal exists solely for compatibility with legacy binary software. However, if you have a third-party package that you believe it's important to continue producing i386 binary builds of in Launchpad for Ubuntu 20.04, please contact the Ubuntu archive admins (ubuntu-release at lists.ubuntu.com, or #ubuntu-devel on freenode.net for best results), and we can evaluate including your PPA package in the whitelist.
At the moment, I am doing some manual removals of the i386 binaries as I see them show up as blockers on https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/proposed-migration/update_excuses.html and as I'm able to determine that the removals aren't going to cause near-term knock-on problems. But if some i386 binaries aren't being removed fast enough and this is blocking your work, feel free to reach out to an archive admin to ask for their removal.
In the slightly less near term, the plan is to do a mass binary removal of all of the i386 binary packages in focal built from sources other than those in the whitelist. However, before pulling the trigger on this mass removal, there are some changes that should be landed to our autopkgtest infrastructure, so that we can continue to run autopkgtests for those remaining 1700 packages. In summary: the plan is not to retain the test dependencies of those 1700 packages on i386, but instead to cross-test the i386 libraries on an amd64 host, which ultimately means testing them in an environment that better models the expected real-world usage. The work is in progress for this change and I'm currently anticipating landing it next week.
In the meantime, if you need any help getting packages migrating to the focal release from -proposed, please reach out on #ubuntu-release on IRC.
Canonical's Ubuntu engineers in cooperation with community members have figured out their 32-bit support adjustments for the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release.
After dropping their original proposal of clearing out 32-bit packages entirely, Ubuntu 19.10 shipped with a trimmed down set of 32-bit packages (32-bit x86) available to x86_64 users. Those 32-bit packages on Ubuntu 19.10 were based on popularity with what 32-bit packages might still be in prevalent use today on modern Intel/AMD systems. For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, some minor adjustments are being made.
This is part of a series of post on the design and technical steps of creating Himblick, a digital signage box based on the Raspberry Pi 4.
Rapsbian is designed to be an interactive system, but we want to build a noninteractive black box out of it, which should never ever get a keyboard plug into it. See the "Museum ceiling" use case.
Ideally we should use a plain Debian as a base, but the Raspberry Pi model 4 is not supported yet for that.
Instead, we start from Raspbian Lite, and remove the bits that get in the way.
Google “Raspberry Pi projects,” and you’ll get a diverse set of results: Home automation systems, weather data stations, time-lapse cameras, retro video game systems, a staircase that plays music as you climb.
The accessibility and versatility that make the Pi a must-have for hackers and makers also render it indispensable for educators seeking to bring science and technology to life.
Launched in 2012 by the United Kingdom-based Raspberry Pi Foundation, the Pi is a single-board computer that retails for about US$35. It was designed to make computer science more accessible to students, according to Matt Richardson, Executive Director, Raspberry Pi Foundation North America.
Raspberry Pi 4 just got a lot cooler! The last four months of firmware updates have taken over half a watt out of idle power and nearly a watt out of fully loaded power. For The MagPi magazine, Gareth Halfacree gets testing.
The bug was flagged on various forums that chat about the Raspberry Pi, but has left a few people scratching their noggins.
"The WiFi problem looks like a bug. If I start with low resolution, the 2.4GHz network works nicely. If I go to 1920x1080 wlan0 either shows ‘not available' or so, or it shortly shows a neighbouring network labelled with a red ‘5G', depending on what I click at the top of the screen, but my 2.4GHz network is not recognized. With my router set to 5GHz (+2.4) it works," said one forum user.
It’s no secret that two operating systems hold the lion’s share of the mobile market — Android and iOS. This current duopoly doesn’t give users much choice in the way of OS offerings, even though there is no shortage of hardware. In the past, Microsoft tried to break into the market to no avail, and Huawei will release its own offering soon enough.
But what if there was another alternative, one that’s more privacy-respecting and encourages tinkering? Enter the PinePhone by Pine64. This device isn’t quite ready for the mass market yet, but if you are looking for a unique alternative to Android and iOS devices, you’ll want to keep an eye on this one.
The much-discussed hope to unify the OpenZFS code bases across the supported operating systems went from dialog to action item with the bold declaration by OpenZFS co-founder Matt Ahrens that the ZFS on Linux repo will be renamed simply “OpenZFS” and that the next milestone release will be “OpenZFS 2.0”. “As far as I’m concerned, this can’t come too soon,” said one attendee. Remarkably, there has been zero public objection to this effort. OpenZFS developer on macOS and Windows Jörgen Lundman supported this point with Michael Dexter in their talk “OpenZFS Everywhere”, in which they reported on the status of OpenZFS on the obvious platforms: Illumos, FreeBSD, and GNU/Linux, but also macOS, NetBSD, and Windows.
This is to inform you about a Mini-DebCamp happening right before FOSDEM 2020, in Brussels, which is a city in Belgium in Europe on planet earth.
The Mini-DebCamp will take place at the Hackerspace Brussels (HSBXL) from Wednesday, the 29th of January 2020 until Friday, the 31st, as part of Byteweek and you should all come around if you can!
Not so much more information can be found at the event wiki page.
In this post, I will relate my experience at Lakademy 2019. For who doesn’t know what it is, it’s the Latin American meeting of KDE community, it happens every year and this year it was hosted on Salvador – Bahia. It exists since 2012 and this year I had my first participation and my first experience in person with KDE community.
I arrived on November 14th, in the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t know what to expect because it was my first experience, but I actually felt welcomed and comfortable. I spent the rest of this day with Caio (my GSoC mentor) trying to prepare the laptop to work, because I don’t have a laptop then they lent me one.
My purpose on Lakademy was to continue my GSoC work, what means: work on Khipu bugs and on what is missing. Then on the next day I actually focused on fix the search bug on Khipu. When I searched on the search bar to find the spaces by their names, it was returning the correct spaces, but if I edit any of these results, the change was happening on the wrong index. I was stuck on this bug for months, because I knew that I needed to use mapToSource to fix it, but I didn’t know how to use it. I spent the day thinking and thinking and in the end of the day I could solve the most of this problem.
Mozilla supports the Contract for the Web and the vision of the world it seeks to create. We participated in helping develop the content of the principles in the Contract. The result is language very much aligned with Mozilla, and including words that in many cases echo our Manifesto. Mozilla works to build momentum behind these ideas, as well as building products and programs that help make them real.
In the last 12 months, we have achieved a lot with the help of our volunteers, through their donations and hard work. Thanks to their support, we were able to successfully continue our PMPC campaign, simplify licensing practices through our REUSE initiative, and stand up for router freedom in Europe. We will be back in 2020 with even more vigour towards our work. Please help us with a donation so that we can continue our successful commitment to Free Software.
Racket has been updated and is being released under a new, less-restrictive license: either the Apache 2.0 license or the MIT license. The new release also adds a standard JSON MIME type for the Web Server.
Racket is described as a “full-spectrum programming language” that goes beyond Lisp and Scheme with dialects that support objects, types and laziness. When coding in it, you can link components written in different dialects, and write your own project-specific dialect if you want. The Racket libraries support applications from web servers and databases to GUIs and charts.
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Chez Scheme is both a programming language and an implementation of that language, with supporting tools and documentation. It is a superset of the language described in the Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (R6RS). Chez Scheme supports all standard features of Scheme, including first-class procedures, proper treatment of tail calls, continuations, user-defined records, libraries, exceptions, and hygienic macro expansion. The Racket team says they expect that Racket CS will be ready for production use by the next release.
Elsewhere in this release, the Web Server now provides a standard JSON MIME type, including a response/jsexpr form for HTTP responses bearing JSON; and GNU MPFR operations run about three times faster.
Why does it matter? This Recommendation is an official UNESCO instrument that gives national governments a specific list of recommendations to support open education in their countries and to collaborate with other nations.
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL), the awesome cross-platform development library used by Valve, Feral Interactive, Unity, MonoGame, FNA, DOSBox and so many more is expanding.
How quickly can we use brute force to guess a 64-bit number? The short answer is, it all depends on what resources are available. So we’re going to examine this problem starting with the most naive approach and then expand to other techniques involving parallelization.
We’ll discuss parallelization at the CPU level with SIMD instructions, then via multiple cores, GPUs, and cloud computing. Along the way we’ll touch on a variety of topics about microprocessors and some interesting discoveries, e.g., adding more cores isn’t always an improvement, and not all cloud vCPUs are equivalent.
In this post, I will talk about how to use Python library Pandas iloc, loc and ix functions to select rows and columns from csv and excel files
Last week and the week before, we looked at some of the code navigation features in Wing, including goto-definition, find uses, and project-wide search, code index menus, and the Source Browser.
This week we'll finish up this mini-series by looking at how to quickly and easily find and open files or visit symbols in Python code by typing a name fragment.
Doing some research, it seemed that gspread python library was the easiest one to get the access to the spread sheet and then be able to process it.
Access requires setting up a credentials.json that is created using the google developers console (we should create a new project, create new credentials, etc). Please, read gspread documentation on requisites and steps for obtaining this file.
I never thought about learning python. However, once I got into machine learning it was a no-brainer. Everything was python and I just had to know it. So when I did the AI Nanodegree course at Udacity, I learned all the python I needed.
[...]
Python is super fun and you can prototype stuff so fast it's insane. If you are just a little skilled, you can write scripts to scrape the web, shuffle and move your data around, develop a UI etc. in less than half an hour. It just doesn't get in your way in any shape or form.
A CSV (Comma Separated Values) format is one of the most simple and common ways to store tabular data. To represent a CSV file, it must be saved with the .csv file extension.
Spyder 4 will be released very soon with lots of interesting new features that you'll want to check out, reflecting years of effort by the team to improve the user experience. In this post, we will be talking about the improvements made to the Variable Explorer.
These include the brand new Object Explorer for inspecting arbitrary Python variables, full support for MultiIndex dataframes with multiple dimensions, and the ability to filter and search for variables by name and type, and much more.
It is important to mention that several of the above improvements were made possible through integrating the work of two other projects. Code from gtabview was used to implement the multi-dimensional Pandas indexes, while objbrowser was the foundation of the new Object Explorer.
[...]
As can be seen above, this viewer will also allow users to browse extra metadata about the inspected object, such as its documentation, source code and the file that holds it. It is very important to note that this work was accomplished thanks to the generosity of Pepijn, who kindly changed the license of objbrowser to allow us to integrate it with Spyder. To expose this new functionality, we decided to set the option to hide arbitrary Python objects in the Variable Explorer to disabled by default, and introduced a new one called Exclude callables and modules. With this enabled by default, Spyder will now display a much larger fraction of objects that can be inspected, while still excluding most "uninteresting" variables.
The best way to clean a data table? Clean the data before it gets entered.
A straightforward method is to build and check a stand-alone lookup list, then enforce the use of that lookup list for data entry. It may not be possible to do this for every field in the data table, but for a field with only a limited number of potential entries, a lookup list can save a lot of data cleaning work in future.
Songwriter James McMurtry released a song several years ago that told the story of many working people in the United States. Titled “We Can’t Make It Here Anymore,” McMurtry’s lyrics described broken lives in a broken town in a nation broken by an economic disaster engendered by the greed of the capitalist class. Describing broken people and broken homes bedeviled by addiction and poverty, disability and despair, this tune is an angry cry virtually bereft of hope even while its characters refuse to give up. McMurtry points his acerbic pen and accomplished guitar at those whom he holds responsible...
Apple's response to the Congressional committee investigating monopolistic behavior by tech giants contains a chapter on Right to Repair, whose greatest enemy is Apple -- the company led successful campaigns to kill 20 state level Right to Repair bills last year.
Apple's response was parsimonious with the truth.
iFixit and US PIRG both contest some of Apple’s responses, particularly around the ways in which Apple may or may not advise against non-authorized repairs. Another point they take issue with is Apple’s use of the phrase “same unit repair,” which is worth unpacking. Many key components within an iPhone or Mac can be repaired, Apple says in its response, but “same unit repairs” aren’t possible for all products because of the challenges around disassembling and reassembling devices.
In other words, a customer might go into the Apple Store or other authorized repair shop for a fix, and the repair might be so complex that the product is effectively replaced. The topic of “repairs” not only becomes one of semantics but also raises the question of whether Apple (and other electronics makers) could be slotting full replacement devices into a definition of repairs. Proctor, of US PIRG, says in his blog post that this is Apple attempting to “create a new category of repair.”
"Turkey, mashed potatoes, and arguing politics with your family: the holidays are just around the corner! But talking about politics doesn't have to get heated. The vast majority of people are unhappy with our hugely expensive, profit-driven health care system and are ready for a change."
Family, friends, and fellow patriots,I have Multiple Sclerosis. Every morning, the first thought I have in the first millisecond that I am awake, is that I can’t do it—I can’t go to work, for a walk, to the gallery, to my studio, I can’t get out of bed. And almost every morning, I do anyway. Imagine that you have the flu every day. That is not so far off from how I feel.
There is only one question that really matters about the origin of the document leak:
Is the leaker a private individual, or an organisation (in particular, a state intelligence agency)?
Creating a matrix for an Alternate Competing Hypothesis analysis is pretty easy when there are only two options.
Two data points, it is often said, do not make a trend. Researchers studying America’s dismal life expectancy now have three. After climbing gradually over the past half century, life expectancy in America reached a plateau in 2010 and then fell for three consecutive years from 2015 to 2017, the latest for which data are available. An American baby born today can expect to live 78.6 years, on average, down from 78.9 in 2014. A new paper by researchers at Virginia Commonwealth University, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, attempts to explain why.
Apple will be a client of Ive’s new design company, LoveFrom, which the designer started in collaboration with his long-time friend and collaborator Marc Newson. “Apple will continue to benefit from Jony’s talents by working directly with him on exclusive projects, and through the ongoing work of the brilliant and passionate design team he has built,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook at the time. Software and hardware design is now the responsibility of COO Jeff Williams.
Reuters is reporting that ByteDance, which is the parent of TikTok, is stepping up attempts to separate the app from its Chinese operations in the wake of a U.S. government investigation of its data handling policies.
This article describes a minor security flaw in the SSH authentication protocol that can lead to unexpected private infrastructure disclosure. It also provides a PoC written in Python.
One of the most common questions users have when it comes to privacy is about messaging services. It seems almost all of them mention some level of privacy or encryption to entice the user to sign up for their service, but how can you be sure you’re using the most secure, privacy respecting platform?
The answer actually lies in one’s threat model, which is often an ignored step in choosing all privacy related apps and services, meaning a lot of users limit their internet and communication experience because they believe they need Edward Snowden level privacy settings.
The CJEU’s judgment in the Schrems II case, which is not expected before early 2020, could cause a real earthquake in the EU data protection landscape as it may result in the invalidation of the SCC, the mechanism that is most commonly used in practice to legitimize transfers of personal data from the EU to non-EU countries. There is also a risk that the CJEU’s decision on the broad questions that were referred to it may impact the validity of other transfer mechanisms, such as the EU- U.S. Privacy Shield, potentially leaving companies with limited alternatives to legitimize international data flows that are crucial for their business. For now, these mechanisms remain valid, but organizations should take steps to identify potentially impacted data flows, and consider whether alternative data transfer mechanisms are available. This issue should be kept under close review.
The European Commission recently released its highly anticipated Third Annual Report on the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield. Unlike prior reports, however, the Commission did not confirm that the U.S. continues to ensure an adequate level of protection for personal data transferred under the Privacy Shield Framework. That omission is highly significant for companies that currently rely on the Privacy Shield; it signals the need to explore other data transfer mechanisms should the Privacy Shield fall.
Here are some mildly terrifying things I learned when I recently did an online privacy checkup: Google was sharing my creditworthiness with third parties. If you want Target to stop sharing your information with marketers, you have to call them. And, my favorite: If you would like Hearst, the publishing giant, to stop sharing your physical mailing address with third parties, you have to mail a physical letter with your request to the company’s lawyers.
In San Francisco on Thursday night, U.S. District Judge William Alsup said neither credit monitoring costs nor the reduced value of stolen personal information was a “cognizable injury” that supported a class action for damages.
A federal judge said up to 29 million Facebook Inc (FB.O) users whose personal information was stolen in a September 2018 data breach cannot sue as a group for damages, but can seek better security at the social media company after a series of privacy lapses.
The Indian government is planning to gain unrestricted access to non-personal data of people in India, according to a report by Tech2. Non-personal data is anonymized data which can’t be traced back to identify a person. For example, weather sensors without a specific location or e-Commerce data without personal identification.
This comes on the heel of the data privacy bill, which is listed to be tabled in the winter session of parliament. Apart from access to non-personal data, the bill will also tackle topics such as intermittent liability of social media platforms, and data localization and storage issues.
U.S. President Donald Trump sacked his Navy secretary on Twitter. The main reason is that the Navy secretary did not follow Trump’s advice regarding Navy Special Warfare Operator Edward Gallagher. Trump wanted Gallagher to retain his position as a Navy Seal. Gallagher was accused of stabbing to death a wounded fighter of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) in 2017; he was also accused of other incidents of murder (of a schoolgirl and an elderly man), and then of obstruction of justice. In July 2019, a military court acquitted Gallagher of most of the charges but found him guilty of posing with the body of the fighter who had been stabbed to death.
The program's editor had earlier said Johnson "sent his two wing men" -- Gove and Johnson's father, Stanley -- to attempt to "argue their way into" a program intended only for leaders.
Johnson and fellow no-show Nigel Farage, the leader of the Brexit Party, were ultimately replaced with ice sculptures bearing their parties' logos, which Channel 4 said was intended to "represent the emergency on planet earth."
Here we summarize evidence on the threat of exceeding tipping points, identify knowledge gaps and suggest how these should be plugged. We explore the effects of such large-scale changes, how quickly they might unfold and whether we still have any control over them.
More than half of the climate tipping points identified a decade ago are now "active," a group of leading scientists have warned.
This threatens the loss of the Amazon rainforest and the great ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, which are currently undergoing measurable and unprecedented changes much earlier than expected.
This "cascade" of changes sparked by global warming could threaten the existence of human civilisations.
Evidence is mounting that these events are more likely and more interconnected than was previously thought, leading to a possible domino effect.
Ms Elver said the Zimbabweans she spoke to "explained that even if food is generally available in supermarkets, the erosion of their incomes combined with an inflation skyrocketing to more than 490%, made them food insecure".
One day in late August 2018, Greta Thunberg took up position outside Sweden's Parliament for the first time. She held a simple sign, black letters on a white board, that said "School Strike for Climate."
Citing an “existential threat to civilization,” a group of top climate scientists have put out a new paper warning that the latest evidence related to climate tipping points—when natural systems reach their breaking point and cascading feedback loops accelerate collapse—could mean such dynamics are “more likely than was thought” and could come sooner as well.
"Our house is on fire. The European Parliament has seen the blaze, but it's not enough to stand by and watch."
As you sit down to eat a holiday dinner with family or friends this year, the Earth’s climate may be the farthest thing from your mind. But if you are looking for a good New Year’s resolution in a few weeks, you can’t go wrong with climate-friendly eating. The links between food and climate are significant but fairly simple to understand.
It's time to talk turkey!No, not the Butterball sitting in the Oval Office. I'm talking about the real thing, the big bird, 46 million of which we Americans will devour on this Thanksgiving Day. It was the Aztecs who first domesticated the gallopavo , but leave it to the Spanish explorers to "foul up" the bird's origins. They declared it to be related to the peacock — wrong!
Changes afoot now in at least nine areas could drastically alter the Earth’s climate. There’s no time left to act on these tipping points.
"I don't think people realize how little time we have left," said one co-author of a new paper warning that the systems of the natural world could cascade out of control sooner than was previously thought.
As the Democratic Party prepared for its first presidential primary debates in June, climate activists pushed the DNC to schedule a single-issue debate on the climate crisis, given the urgency of the problem and the lack of attention given to it in previous debates.
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In New Mexico, there are some places where oil and gas development makes sense. But there are others, like in the Greater Chaco area, where the risks of additional development are far too great. That is why I was so excited to see that the U.S. House of Representatives recently passed the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act with bipartisan support (“House vote on Chaco a huge win for sacred sites,” My View, Nov. 1).
The Senate now must do its part and take action as soon as possible, because the clock is winding down on the one-year moratorium on oil and gas leasing within 10 miles of Chaco Culture National Historical Park announced by Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt in May.
It is our responsibility — as ranchers and stewards of our public lands — to continue to work to preserve places like the Greater Chaco Landscape for future generations. Passage of this bill is a great first step toward doing just that.
As the owner of a ranch in northwest New Mexico, I’ve had my fair share of run-ins with the oil and gas industry. My family has been running cattle since the 1870s, and while we’ve never minded producers as long as they drill responsibly, the concentration of oil and gas wells has grown so great that the federal public lands surrounding our property can no longer support an operating ranch.
I am not opposed to oil and gas development.
It is time to take Donald Trump’s disregard for climate crisis seriously. As Commander in Chief, Trump is abdicating his duties to protect his people, instead actively aiding and abetting the corporate polluters who are causing the climate chaos. Trump is wasting irreplaceable time that we need to prevent a worsening climate crisis. l
"We expect governments to come to these climate talks to live up to the moral urgency at hand."
It’s Thanksgiving here in America, a day of infamy for turkeys. At my place in Humboldt County, northern California, turkeys learned their lesson a few years ago, when five fine specimens of€ Meleagris gallopavo—wild turkey to you—wandered onto my property. I assume they forgot to check the calendar. Under California fish and game regulations, you can shoot them legally for two weeks around Thanksgiving.
A researcher in California is collecting seeds of sugar pine that appear to have resistant to bark beetles. Her goal is to capture and propagate trees that can withstand beetle attacks. According to the article, past logging of sugar pine has dramatically reduced the genetic diversity of the sugar pine population.
Loss of genetic diversity is one consequence of the Industrial Forestry Paradigm that dominates the timber industry and all public agencies from the state forestry agencies to the federal agencies like the Forest Service.
For example, on a recent field trip, the foresters in the group told us they were going to log some fir trees that had “root rot” as well as adjacent fir trees that “might” get the pathogen. No one in our group, which included several so-called “conservation groups”, questioned the starting assumption that it was desirable to eliminate root rot. When I asked the lead forester, why he felt it was necessary to log the trees, he responded by saying the trees were likely to die.
So I inquired further. “So, you want to kill the trees by logging, so they don’t die from root rot?” And then I went on and said: “Isn’t that kind of like our policy in Vietnam where we had to dest
"I see decisions made every day that cost the American public billions of dollars a year for bogus reasons and nobody asks how we pay for it."
Ready, shoppers? Your long-awaited holidays are afoot — so are the countless deals up for grabs.But as millions of Americans gear up to flood€ drop-in shops and online stores for Black Friday sales, some of the top retail giants are pouring big bucks into the political sphere.
In 1961, I left Greece for the United States. The reason for that life-changing decision was education. The University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin welcomed me and gave me a free education. I earned my Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Illinois and my doctorate from Wisconsin.
This is one in the “whose is bigger?” category; which country has added the most to their GDP over the last three years. There is not any particular reason anyone should care about this, except that Donald Trump has made a big point of touting something about how no one says China will soon be the world’s largest economy anymore.
Ruja Ignatova called herself the Cryptoqueen. She told people she had invented a cryptocurrency to rival Bitcoin, and persuaded them to invest billions. Then, two years ago, she disappeared. Jamie Bartlett spent months investigating how she did it for the Missing Cryptoqueen podcast, and trying to figure out where she's hiding.
It has become an odd tradition in America to effectively “battle shop” on the Friday following the Thanksgiving holiday. It is already weird that we even have the Thanksgiving holiday here as it is something that pretty much only Canada and the USA have.
[...]
As for me, I am going to be avoiding the stores Friday if at all possible. Going out in the craziness is just not worth it at this time…
There are a number of issues pertaining to UK foreign policy which campaigners and activists have long believed will forever reside at the margins. Never to be taught in schools or discussed on panel shows, these sidelined issues affecting the ‘unpeople’ wordlessly trampled by consecutive British governments were assumed to remain hidden in little-reported legal cases, written about only in dusty volumes undisturbed on library shelves. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party manifesto, unveiled last week, changes this considerably. Vowing to end the ‘bomb first, talk later’ approach to ‘security’ (a term of propaganda referrring typically to state-corporate interests, not the welfare of the UK public), Labour intends to place human rights, international law and tackling climate change at the forefront of international policies.
The impeachment proceedings to investigate allegations of impropriety in the Donald Trump presidency will impact many American households this Thanksgiving. Families will be confronted by political tensions of a profound nature this year. There is no sugar coating it, there is a base of people who believe Trump’s lies and the absurd defenses offered for his corrupt acts.
One of the hallmarks of a democratic political system is that voters change their minds. In North Korea, 100 percent of voters support the ruling party coalition in election after election. In South Korea since 1998, voters backed 10 years of progressive candidates followed by 10 years of conservative candidates. Then, after a dramatic turnaround in public opinion, South Koreans rallied to impeach the previous president, Park Geun-hye.
"We all let him know how we felt about him putting refugee immigrant kids in cages."
One year ago this week, as families across the country were preparing to sit down together for a Thanksgiving (or Day of Mourning) meal, families at the U.S.-Mexico border were facing a potentially deadly threat...
As the House Judiciary Committee opens the final round of hearings next week in the impeachment investigation of Donald Trump, there are, once again, reports of wavering among centrists and moderates in the Democratic Party. Although conservative news outlets have taken the lead on such reporting, there is little reason to believe the coverage is fake or exaggerated.
We remember Seattle 1999 in a moment when the world is exploding with people’s uprisings.
When he is not ranting at rallies or speaking off the cuff to reporters, Trump has offered up rather more traditional fare with the Thanksgiving proclamations he has issued since assuming the presidency. But he doesn’t go much beyond the predictable recitation of a first Thanksgiving story and rumination on “the virtue of gratitude.”
Contrast that with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who mastered the art of giving thanks.
It’s become something of a cliché: Many people dread Thanksgiving in part because they have to break bread with friends — and especially relatives — who they adamantly disagree with politically.
TikTok executives are on a mission to refute evidence that the Chinese-owned social media app censors content.
South Sudan: Free Arbitrarily Detained Journalist €
Few figures on the American left have elicited more antipathy than Rabbi Michael Lerner, and, at the same time, few figures have elicited more admiration and even adoration. Over the past half-century, and ever since the protest against the Vietnam War, no one has been a more polarizing figure among radicals and progressives than he. In part, that’s because he’s defended Palestinians and Muslims and criticized Zionists and the State of Israel. He can be awfully blunt. His own personality and big ego have contributed to the syndrome that attracts people and repels them.
In November, an Israeli-led assassination effort targeted senior Islamic Jihad leader Bahaa Abu el-Atta and his wife, reporting that it killed them both as they were sleeping in their home in Gaza. Armed factions of Islamic Jihad retaliated by launching homemade rockets and mortars toward southern Israel.
Jordanian authorities are seeking to limit protests over austerity policies throughout 2019 by targeting protest leaders, participants, and other critics for harassment and arrest, Human Rights Watch said today. At least seven activists have been detained since September.
On Wednesday, presidential hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Massachusetts, and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Oregon, released the Senate companion to the Remove the Stain Act.
In the wake of The Fader firing its head of content Eric Sundermann as a result of sexual misconduct allegations, the site has further fired publisher Andy Cohen after working there for 16 years.
This month, police in Moscow launched an€ audit of Theater Doc, an independent theater in Moscow known for productions focusing on pressing societal issues in contemporary Russia. Authorities say they are looking for signs of promotion of terrorism, drugs, and “gay-propaganda” in three Theater Doc productions.€
A court in Moscow found€ Roman Udot, an election rights activist, guilty on November 28, 2019 of threatening the life of two broadcast journalists in a politically motivated prosecution, Human Rights Watch said today. The court sentenced Udot to€ 320 hours of correctional labor.
Thanksgiving is a colonial holiday meant to erase the ruthlessness of English settlers. In a way, Thanksgiving is the perfect American holiday: It is based on the erasure of Indigenous peoples, promotes a false vision of peaceful cooperation between nations, and has now become an excuse to indulge in the spectacles of hyper-consumption and football.
Once upon a time, in a land far far away, There lived a group of magical white Christians called the Pilgrims. After growing weary of their King’s discrimination against witch trials and buckle-hats, they climbed aboard a magic ship called the Mayflower and sailed the deadly Atlantic on a quest for religious freedom and laissez-faire capitalism. They found a wild, mysterious and sparsely populated New World and quickly busied themselves building the foundation of the exceptional American Dream. When they came face to face with pestilence, they graciously excepted agricultural advice from an unwashed horde of noble savages, who were intern thanked with an invite to a grand feast of Thanksgiving.
Thirteen of us squeezed into Congressman Jim McGovern’s small office in Northampton, Massachusetts, far outnumbering the number of chairs available. At the head of the table sat Koby€ Gardner-Levine, the congressman’s Northampton district representative. Outside, a couple dozen more stood in the near-freezing temperature chanting, “Evo, amigo, el pueblo está contigo” (Evo, brother, the people are with you), holding signs that read “Say no to the coup!” and “Hands off Bolivia.”
The recent U.S.-supported overthrow of Bolivia’s Indigenous president, Evo Morales, is but one example of how endemic anti-Indigenous sentiment is within neoliberal movements. This includes many of us who are influenced by their hegemonic strategies and media, including the Organization of American States, which accepted the legitimacy of right-wing Morales replacement Sen. Jeanine ÃÂñez. In 2013, ÃÂñez tweeted: “I dream of a Bolivia free of satanic indigenous rites” and recently disregarded the comments of Christian right-wing minister Luis Fernando Camacho, who stood next to her when she announced her acceptance of the presidency and said, “Pachamama will never return. Today Christ is returning to the Government Palace. Bolivia is for Christ.”
As often happens when an elite-driven coup leads to US-endorsed regime change, there are powerful attempts to disguise its real character. A recurrent method is to blame the coup on its victim. Of this, the November 10, 2019 coup in Bolivia is a textbook example. The narrative went as follows. Bolivian president Evo Morales, eager to perpetuate himself in power, orchestrated a fraudulent election. His people saw this as deceitful and authoritarian. A popular uprising ensued, eventually leading to Morales’s resignation and exile.
I was 12 years old when I first heard about the forced sterilization of my people. A close friend of my family — the kind of person you call “auntie,” even though you’re not related — who was Menominee, like me, told me and my sister that she worried about Native girls who were registered tribal members. Even though we didn’t live on a reservation, our “auntie” feared the reach of the government and the violence it had so often disguised as “health care.” She came of age during the 1970s, at the height of the government’s forced sterilizations of Native women. Close friends of hers had been sterilized without their knowledge. I was too young to fully understand the trauma she carried, knowing that such violence had been perpetrated against people she loved, and knowing that any Native person, like her, who was capable of giving birth, was under threat. Looking back, I understand why she remained frightened, in spite of public health victories that had caused forced sterilizations to ebb in the U.S., and in spite of the fact that we didn’t receive our medical care through the Indian Health Service. My “auntie” had lived through a massive genocidal onslaught. Her sense of dread was permanent.
The bill slaps levies on individuals who commit human rights violations in Hong Kong and prevents them from entering the U.S. It also requires the State Department to give an annual report to lawmakers on whether Hong Kong remains "sufficiently autonomous" from mainland China.
Poverty, hardship and a sense of hopelessness are driving protesters into the streets in Iran, where they have been met with brutality by the Revolutionary Guard. Witnesses describe the dramatic events unfolding in the country.
The survey, conducted by independent anti-corruption advocates Transparency International India (TII) and social media platform LocalCircles, found that bribery had actually reduced by 10% over the past year. But it remains rampant, with 51% of respondents admitting they had paid bribes.
A British lawyer is accusing the German government of violating the country's constitution by refusing to restore the citizenship of thousands of people descended from victims of the Nazis. He argues that the law began to be misapplied under the lingering influence of former Nazis in the 1950s and 60s, and that it's still being misapplied today.
That’s telling me I received 1.8 times as much traffic via IPv6 over the past month as I did over IPv4. Even discounting my backups (the 2 v6 peaks), which could account for up to half of that, that means IPv6 and IPv4 are about equal. That’s with all internal networks doing both and no attempt at traffic shaping between them - everything’s free to pick their preference.
I don’t have a breakdown of what went where, but if you run a network and you’re not v6 enabled, why not? From my usage at least you’re getting towards being in the minority.
Hi, I'm Richard. I've been around the Internet for a while. I work for Cisco now, and used to lead security for Firefox. I've published a few RFCs and served on the Internet Engineering Steering Group (the board of the IETF). I was a co-founder of Let's Encrypt and I currently serve on its board. I care about the Internet, and I care about nonprofits. I'm also a member of the Board of the Internet Society, and in that role, I joined the board's unanimous decision to sell the Public Interest Registry (PIR), the registry for the .org top-level domain, to Ethos Capital. Since this transaction has gotten some attention, I'd like to speak a little about why, in my estimation, this deal is a good one for the Internet.
The General Offices of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the Chinese State Council issued a joint directive designed to strengthen controls around Chinese IP [sic] rights (IPR).
While the directive itself was not made public, the Chinese State Council announcement quotes from it, saying that “strengthening IPR [sic] protection is the most important content of improving the IPR [sic] protection system and also the biggest incentive to boost China's economic competitiveness.”
In October, U.S. President Donald Trump said during a press conference with Chinese vice premier Liu He that he expected to quickly dive into a second phase of talks once “phase one” had been completed. The second phase would focus on a key U.S. complaint that China effectively steals U.S. intellectual property [sic] by forcing U.S. companies to transfer their technology to Chinese rivals, he said at the time.
If you live outside the Czech Republic, you’ve probably never heard of the search engine Seznam. But for many Czechs, as the company likes to say, “Seznam.cz is synonymous with the internet.”
Seznam is an internet search company whose algorithms are built on the Czech language. It launched in 1996 in Prague, with about 50,000 Czech koruna (about $2,200) in funding. Early versions of Seznam.cz displayed a list of popular Czech sites—seznam means “list” in Czech—as well as a summary of Czech news.
That was two years before Larry Page and Sergey Brin started Google in Palo Alto. As Google gobbled up most of the global search market over the next decade, Seznam’s unique Czech identity made it the rare local player that held its ground in search. Seznam also expanded into other free services like maps, email, and price comparison.
In a very welcome and significant development, on July 11 this year, a Division Bench of the Delhi High Court set aside two interim injunction orders granted by a Single Judge against Natco, for having been passed without the Court forming an opinion on the three elements of the well-settled test for interim injunctions i.e. prima facie case, balance of convenience and irreparable harm.
The Court noted that an order in an interim injunction application must necessarily indicate that the court has considered these three elements in arriving at the conclusion as to the grant or non-grant of the injunction. It further emphasised that in case of patent infringement suits, particularly those involving pharma patents, the court must also consider the additional elements that have been discussed in various cases. It accordingly directed the Single Judge to decide both the interim injunction applications afresh, without being affected by the order in Sterlite Technologies case (discussed below) which had been blindly relied upon to grant the injunctions straight away.
Many years ago, in a junior high school English exam, this Kat wrote a phrase she had encountered several times in English magazines and American movies, etc.: ‘Long time no see’. To her surprise, her favourite English teacher – at the time – circled the ‘mistake’ with harsh red ink and sharply criticised this apparently ungrammatical turn of phrase.
The red circle has remained fresh until today... and it prompted this Kat to realise the co-existence of, at least, two categories of the English language: the one that is considered correct by, well, the ministry of education at that time and the other, which embodies the rest, which apparently includes some widely-used expressions that are not entirely grammatically correct.
For instance, ‘long time no see’ (the metaphrase of ‘好ä¹â¦Ã¤Â¸Â角, meaning: ‘(I) Have not seen you for a long time.’), functions as a pidgin, which facilitates communication instead of obstructing it. Consequently, it has long been used as a fixed expression in Hard to Kill (movie, 1990), Rabbit Rest (book, 1990), Cider House (book, 1992) and Mask (movie, 1994) - so, it’s not so ‘wrong’, is it?
Recently, a case in China raised a similar question: when it comes to assessing the similarities between two verbal signs – one in Chinese and the other in English - does the ungrammatical metaphrase of the Chinese sign count?
WIPO has announced that the European Union has become the fifth member of the Geneva Act of the Lisbon Agreement on Appellations of Origin and Geographical Indications. As the EU is the fifth member to join, the Act can now enter into force.
The U.S. District Court of Tacoma, Washington has dismissed an instance of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a man who had accused rapper Rick Ross and Universal Music Group (UMG) of copyright infringement because he felt Ross’ “Billionaire” was similar to a song that he wrote.
New research published by the European Union Intellectual Property Office shows that, in the EU, pirate IPTV services generate close to a billion euros in annual revenue. Illegal IPTV services are most popular in the Netherlands and Sweden, while UK subscribers bring in the most money.
Warner Music Group has reported its financial results for both its fiscal fourth-quarter and the year ending September 30, 2019, and the news is good.
Last week, the founder of pirate IPTV service Gears Reloaded, known on YouTube as OMI IN A HELLCAT claimed that he'd been raided by the FBI and the IRS who "took everything". Until now, however, we've only had his word for it. That changed during the past few hours when a OMI's neighbors appeared on local TV revealing that they saw the drama unfold.
YouTube concert listings have expanded to the U.K. and Ireland through new partnerships. Ticketmaster, See Tickets, and Eventbrite event info is now displayed on artist pages.
In response to a copyright infringement lawsuit brought against them by Nirvana over its iconic smiley face design, designer Marc Jacobs is countersuing the band.
It is being reported that the producers of America’s Got Talent (AGT) decided not to renew the contract of judge Gabrielle Union after she and fellow judge Julianne Hough complained about what they considered to be a toxic culture at the show.
