The independent developer Bernardo Rodrigues was selected by the IOTA Foundation for funding by the Ecosystem Development Fund. The project of an OpenEmbedded Layer for IOTA projects – Meta-iota – is designed to enable an easy and fast integration of IOTA projects into Yocto-based Embedded Linux distributions. As Rodrigues explained in a Medium post, the Yocto project and OpenEmbedded are focused on Internet of Things (IoT) devices, as is the IOTA project, which aims to drive a machine-to-machine economy.
Yocto project is an open source collaboration project that helps developers create custom Linux-based systems independent of hardware architecture. OpenEmbedded is a build automation framework and cross compile environment used to build Linux distributions for embedded devices. Together, both projects (YP/OE) provide a set of tools for developing Linux-based embedded and IoT devices. Concerning the integration for IOTA, Rodriguesv writes...
Not all of the latest Chromebook news is happening at CES 2020, although the latest Chromebooks are appearing there. In fact, there’s some great news for Chromebooks that first launched in 2015: All nine Chrome OS devices running on the Intel Broadwell chipset are getting the ability to run Linux via Project Crostini.
The standout device here, at least to me, is the Google Chromebook Pixel 2015 as many folks still own and run that 2-in-1. In fact, that was the first of the Broadwell-based Chrome OS devices to get experimental Crostini support back on Chrome OS 77 as part of the “kernelnext” software effort. The eight other devices should be following suit soon.
This is great news. When it comes to seriously beating on your machine, nothing beats having more RAM. For storage, it starts with a 256GB SSD, and it appears to go all the way up to a 2TB drive.
Of course, having a powerhouse processor is also a real win. It appears, based on its XPS 13 Windows twin brother, it will come in six different base configurations These start with the 10th-generation Ice Lake Core i3-1005G1 and goes all the way up to the Core i7-1065G7. This is none-too-shabby.
For ports, it includes include two Thunderbolt USB-C ports, one microSD card reader, and a 3.5mm headphone/microphone jack. It will also include a handy Type-C to USB-A 3.0 adapter.
For network connectivity, the new XPS 13 uses the Killer AX1650, which is built on Intel WiFi 6 chipset. With160 MHz channels and Bluetooth 5.0 support, this chipset can deliver up to 2.4Gbps of throughput. Good luck finding a Wi-Fi connection that can keep up with this machine! Still, it's nice to know that, as Wi-Fi speeds go up, the new Dell will be able to deliver the high-speed goods.
For a screen, Dell now supports a 13.4-inch screen with virtually no bezel. It supports both Full High Definition+ (1920 x 1200) and 4K (3840 x 2400) displays. The laptop also features a 16:10 aspect ratio. According to Dell's leading Linux laptop pro, Barton George, "while this may seem like a small detail, the extra screen space is noticeable." This is all backed up by Intel Iris Plus Graphics.
Voice over IP (VoIP) is a technology that allows phone calls to traverse regular IP-based networks (such as the internet). You might associate phone systems with arcane, difficult to use technology. For many years, this was certainly the case. However, building a modern VoIP system doesn’t have to be difficult. While telephony is a complex discipline, building a simple phone network to place inbound and outbound calls is within the reach of anyone who takes the time to understand VoIP technology. With the foundation that you will build in this article, you can approach your next voice project with confidence in your knowledge of the basic protocols that make VoIP networks run.
Most people practicing DevOps are familiar with the work of Gene Kim. You might have been introduced to DevOps and "The Three Ways" through The Phoenix Project, or you might rely on The DevOps Handbook as a guide to change your team’s culture and increase their productivity. Kim is back with a new volume from the perspective of a lead developer and architect in The Unicorn Project.
The book is described as "a novel about developers, digital disruption, and thriving in the age of data." I was hooked on the storyline from the beginning when the lead character, Maxine, was exiled from a great engineering position in the fictional company Parts Unlimited because of a mistake that was made in production.
Maxine took on her new role in the "Phoenix Project" with a smile (and a fair bit of skepticism). Her first challenge was to get the developer build environment up and running on her laptop. This proved to be no easy task as she ran into issue after issue and kept creating tickets with the internal help desk requesting access to certain share folders or license keys. She was getting nowhere fast, but she was determined.
Maxine’s persistence got the attention of others. While instructed to "lay low" by management, that was not her style. She had quite the adventure throughout the rest of the story as she was invited to join "The Rebellion"—a group of the best and brightest engineers in the company training in secret to become a learning organization.
The people who make free and open source software often come together in time and space to collaborate on projects that matter to them. These gatherings, both large and small, are very important to the ongoing growth and success of open source communities.
Open Source events can include regular local meetups and large international conventions, but they serve the same purpose. They give members of these communities an opportunity to meet, collaborate, and form lasting friendships.
Most development and collaboration in open source software projects happens online, in mailing lists, chat channels, and issue trackers. It can be easy to misinterpret the written word, and misunderstandings lead to unnecessary conflict. The relationships formed at open source events go a long way toward mitigating this kind of friction.
Biella Coleman is an anthropologist who studied the world of hackers. She wrote about the "lifeworld" of hacker conferences and documented the celebration of community that goes on there, and this also applies to most open source community events.
Given that the OpenShift Container Platform leverages container images as the packaging model, a layered file system is in use which allows for a common base to be used regardless of the number of applications. Since images are atomic in nature, there is a guarantee that the same base can be replicated across all of the applications. In addition, a container delivery pipeline can be created that allows for applications to be rebuilt automatically whenever the base is updated, such as when updates are installed or a security vulnerability is discovered.
Collecting debugging information from a large set of nodes (such as when creating SOS reports) can be a time consuming task to perform manually. Additionally, in the context of Red Hat OpenShift 4.x and Kubernetes, it is considered a bad practice to ssh into a node and perform debugging actions. To better accomplish this type of operation in OpenShift Container Platform 4, there is a new command: oc adm must-gather, which will collect debugging information across the entire cluster (nodes and control plane). More detailed information on the must-gather command can be found in the platform documentation.
While using the must-gather command is fairly straightforward, the full end-to-end process to facilitate all of the available tasks can be time consuming. This process involves issuing the command, waiting for the associated tasks to complete, and then upload the resulting information to the Red Hat case management system.
A way to further streamline the process is to automate these actions.
First developed by Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers of Red Hat, systemd began as a replacement for init, the first process started during bootup. However, it quickly developed into an overall manager for system resources and services, acting as an intermediary between applications and the kernel and providing a common administrative utility for major distributions. Objections to systemd ranged from the claim that it was overly complex, that is was contrary to the Unix tradition of tinkering, to the conspiracy theory that systemd was part of Red Hat’s long range plans to seize control of Linux. In the years since, most developers and users grew to accept systemd, but the objections have never wholly gone away. DistroWatch’s search function reveals that 98 of 277 active distributions are built without systemd, a figure that indicates that a significant minority resistance continues to this day.
According to a posting by Debian Project Leader Sam Hartman, the reconsideration of systemd was brought about by the proposal to include a fork in Debian elogind of the systemd-logind daemon that provides support for systemd’s D-Bus-based login system, but runs without the whole of systemd. This setup opened the possibility of offering Debian builds with alternatives like init and SysVinit. With no consensus among elogind developers emerging after a lengthy discussion, Hartman concluded, “we’ve reached a point where in order to respect the people trying to get the work done, we need to figure out where we are as a project. We can either decide that this is work we want to facilitate, or work that we as a project decide is not important.” Although Hartman did not say, one reason for revisiting the issue was that in 2014 Debian specifically declined to take an official position on init alternatives.
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Whether any other distribution might re-evaluate systemd five years later is uncertain. Perhaps only such a famously diverse distribution like Debian would even even consider doing so. Ubuntu, for example, tends not to poll contributors about technical directions. Neither does Fedora. But considering the lingering controversies, perhaps Debian’s re-evaluation should be copied by other distros -- if only to confirm that systemd is here to stay.
It’s officially the future so we look back at our predictions from last year and make some new ones for 2020.
Why a free software pioneer has walked away from the Open Source Initiative, Telegram’s cryptocurrency surprise, and China’s new CentOS competitor.
Brent sits down with Joe Ressington, Jupiter Broadcasting Podcast Content Director, Late Night Linux host, and musician, for an exploration of his journey in podcasting, a behind-the-scenes of User Error and Linux Action News, how music led to Linux, the origins of Brunch with Brent's theme music, and more.
Adding to the many changes on the way with Linux 5.6 is the Rockchip DRM display driver supporting the PX30 SoC.
The Rockchip PX30 is similar to the RK3326 quad-core A35 SoC with Mali G31 GPU, but the PX30 model has two VOPs (Video Output Processors) and designed for the IoT market. The PX30 can drive two independent displays and has required some extra bits to the Rockchip Direct Rendering Manager driver to support. This DRM driver is, of course, just about driving the display heads and not fiddling with 3D via the Mali G31.
This weekend I posted some fresh benchmarks of the Liquorix kernel against upstream Linux 5.4 and found the gaming performance to be rather disappointing for that kernel flavor derived from the "Zen" patches and more. Fortunately, the Zen kernel patches now include a fix that should make their gaming performance more competitive.
A Phoronix reader pointed out to us this commit made shortly after our article went live. The patch corrects the MuQSS scheduler's __read_mostly tunable and should help restore/improve the Linux gaming competitiveness compared to upstream.
As we enter a new decade, it is worthwhile to look back at the last year and decade to glance into the crystal ball for what 2020 and beyond may have in store for the Xen Project.
A good starting point is the retrospective we put together for the project’s 15th birthday which gives an overview of the project’s wide use in many different market segments that goes far beyond server virtualization and cloud computing, which the Xen Project hypervisor was originally created for. Personally, I have accompanied the project for most of that decade (9 years) seeing the project evolve in many directions. Some successful, such as the creation of Virtual Machine Introspection, some less so, such as trying to bring virtualization to mobile devices. However, almost all of the work that was performed laid the groundwork for new ideas and innovation.
Back in early 2018, Bootlin started a crowd-funding campaign to fund the development of an upstream Linux kernel driver for the VPU found in Allwinner processors. Thanks to the support from over 400 contributors, companies and individuals, we have been able to bring support for hardware-accelerated video decoding in the mainline Linux kernel for Allwinner platforms.
From April 2018 to end of 2019, Paul Kocialkowski and Maxime Ripard at Bootlin worked hard on developing the driver and getting it accepted upstream, as well as developing the corresponding user-space components. We regularly published the progress of our work on this blog.
As of the end of 2019, we can say that all the goals defined in the Kickstarter have been completed:
There is a tool called idle3ctl which can disable, get or set the idle3 timer on Western Digital hard drives. Idle3ctl can be used as an alternative to the official wdidle3.exe proprietary utility, without the need to reboot in a DOS environement. Idle3ctl is an independant project, unrelated in any way to Western Digital Corp.
Announced just now during CES 2020, AMD have revealed their Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics cards aimed at being the "ultimate 1080p gaming experience". During the event, AMD showed some 1080p benchmarks across a bunch Windows games at "max settings", where it showed the Radeon RX 5600 XT beating an NVIDIA 1660Ti. Additionally, there will be a lower Radeon RX 5600 (no XT) model.
Bandwhich, formerly known as “what”, is a terminal utility written in Rust programming language, which is used for monitoring current network bandwidth utilization by the process, connection, and remote IP/hostname. It sniffs a specified network interface and tracks IP packet size, cross-referencing it with the /proc filesystem on Linux and lsof on macOS.
Recommended Read: 16 Useful Bandwidth Monitoring Tools to Analyze Network Usage in Linux
Bandwhich is responsive to the terminal window size, shows lesser information if there isn’t much room for it. Also, it will strive to resolve IP addresses to their hostname in the background using reverse DNS.
One could say that the Flathub team is working silently behind the scenes most of the time and it wouldn't be far from the truth. Unless changes are substantial, they are rarely announced elsewhere than under a pull request or issue on GitHub. Let's change it a bit and try to summarize what was going on with Flathub over the last year.
Beta branch and test builds
2019 started off strong. In February, several improvements to general workflow but also how things under the hood work landed. Maintainers gained the ability to sign-in to buildbot to manage the builds and start new ones without having to push new commits. A delay has been introduced between finishing the build and publishing it to the stable repository to the possibility to test new build locally and also publish it faster or scrap it altogether. The initial delay was 24 hours but as it was too confusing, it was shortened to 3 hours.
Perhaps most importantly, the changes made it possible to publish test builds of pull requests and completely new applications. Additionally, Flathub gained support for publishing applications to separate beta remote.
Alex wrote more about the changes on his blog.
We definitely need various applications to makes our things better while using Linux operating systems. These days there are thousands of best and useful Linux applications available on the internet.
In this blog, we decided to write about the list of best useful Linux applications for 2020. These are also one of the most used Linux applications in day to day life. We believe this list will be helpful to all Linux users no matter what their expertise is.
One of the easiest ways to generate a list of numbers in Linux is to use the seq (sequence) command. In its simplest form, seq will take a single number and then list all the numbers from 1 to that number.
HomeBank is a free software (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") that will assist you to manage your personal accounting. It is designed to easy to use and be able to analyse your personal finance and budget in detail using powerful filtering tools and beautiful charts. If you are looking for a completely free and easy application to manage your personal accounting, budget, finance then HomeBank should be the software of choice.
I just released staticsite version 1.4, dedicated to creating a blog.
After reorganising the documentation, I decided to write a simple tutorial showing how to get a new blog started.
ShotX Studio (Kontrakt, Riskers) recently released Danger Gazers, a very stylish rogue-lite shooter with a lot to like about it.
It's a little like Nuclear Throne, that comparison is hard not to make but still manages to come across unique not only in the style of it (which is great) but the way you progress through it is different too. The map layout, levels given, events, loot and so on is all random so each play through is different.
Today the porting studio Feral Interactive have managed to get The Shadow & The Blade DLC for Total War: WARHAMMER II out for the Linux version. Bit of a delay there with it releasing back in early December, likely due to the holiday season.
Lightspeed Studios and NVIDIA continue advancing Quake II RTX, which seems to be turning into an FPS playground of new features built on the classic game.
Yesterday, patch 1.3.0 went live adding in a fancy Photo Mode. Whenever you pause the game, you get this new mode and it gives you free camera control too. Additionally, they added support for Depth of Field in this mode, support for campaign video cut-scenes is in, a new feature to select the full-screen display was added and more.
With a style that reminds me of a game I played on the Amiga (a name I've long forgotten), Primal Light actually looks really good.
Currently in development and planned to be released across Linux, macOS and Windows. You take on the role of Krog, "a mysterious blue creature in a red loincloth, as he traverses a labyrinth of ladders, levers, traps, and monsters. Explore the nooks and crannies of a bizarre and evocative world as you hack and slash your way to victory, leaving a graveyard of grotesque bosses in your wake".
Godot Engine isn't just good for making games, you can also build applications with it. That's exactly what Orama Interactive are doing with their pixel art sprite editor, Pixelorama.
Mentioned here on GOL back in December, a new release just went up yesterday further enhancing what's possible with this FOSS art tool. Pixelorama 0.6 adds in Palettes support with a bunch of defaults, or you can make your own. It also adds support for UI themes, a new Image menu was added which contains brand new effects like Invert Colour and Desaturation, new translations, a layer opacity slider, importing/exporting matrix spritesheets is now possible and so on.
Pixelorama, a free and open source 2D sprite editor, has been updated to version 0.6. In this release, the application got support for color palettes, multiple themes, image editing tools like color invert or desaturation, and more.
Pixelorama is a fairly new sprite editor made with the Godot Engine (a cross-platform, free and open source 2D and 3D game engine) using GDScript, ideal for creating pixel art. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.
It had its first public release in September 2019, but its development advances quite rapidly, already offering tools like a pencil, eraser, fill bucket, color picker, etc., an animation timeline (with Onion Skinning), rulers, layers, image import and export, and more.
We today provide a bugfix and localization update release with version 5.4.6. This release introduces no new features and as such is a safe and recommended update for everyone currently using a previous version of KDevelop 5.4.
You can find the updated Linux AppImage as well as the source code archives on our download page.
There’s no default desktop environment, so you can choose or create one that’s best suited to your personal tastes and the power of your PC. The minimum requirements of Arch Linux are a modest 512MB RAM and an x64 CPU.
It’s not the simplest of Linux distros to get your head around, given how much it leaves in the user’s hands to figure, but the documentation is very good, and the sporadic nature of new releases means your custom-tweaked desktop environment won’t deprecate quickly.
For more in-depth details on this great distro, check out our Arch Linux review.
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Describing itself as a “midweight” Linux distro, MX Linux runs like a dream even on lower-end PCs, and its fairly minimal starting setup makes it a favorite among developers. Yes, its default XFCE desktop environment may look a little dated next to more renowned distros like Ubuntu, but there’s something to be said for keeping things simple.
The important stuff is never more than a couple of clicks away in MX Linux. The taskbar brings up a menu of MX Tools, which includes crucial things like PC maintenance and setup options for your system sound and keyboard.
The base installation of MX Linux includes a solid bunch of packages that include Firefox, VLC, LibreOffice and GIMP, and you can of course get more through the Synaptic Package Manager, which will point you to the package repositories for MX Linux.
If you want to know more about what we think of this great distro, check out our MX Linux review.
You already know what a fantastic platform openSUSE is for doing just about anything with Linux. So what’s behind that easy-to-use and super powerful distribution that we know and love, and have come to rely on. In many minds there is a perception that its simply SUSE with the proprietary code stripped out. It’s true that a lot of the development work does flow down from SUSE but there is also an active community of dedicated volunteers who drive and make the project work, adding the goodies we have come to take for granted for the myriad of uses we have come to rely on it for.
It’s election time at openSUSE and the election board asked an existing board member Gertjan who has agreed to step up again and run for re-election of what it is like to be on the board. Below is a transcript of an offline interview between fellow election committee member Edwin and Gertjan highlighting what it’s like to be on the board of openSUSE.
Edwin: Would you like to tell us about your daily schedule and how does being an openSUSE Board member impacts on that?
Gertjan: To be fair, my daily schedule varies a lot, depending on what is on my table. Most of the time this leaves me with enough spare time to do board related things. But before I was on board, I spent that time in openSUSE too, i.e. forums, IRC etc., so the main impact on my daily schedule were the bi-weekly video conference calls. For the rest I just spread the spare time a bit differently. It does take a couple of hours though, on an average week.
Edwin: Do you still remember what motivated you to step up for Board candidacy the first time? And then why a second time?
As you might have noticed on our status page, our etherpad instance at https://etherpad.opensuse.org/ was updated to the latest version 3 days ago.
But this time,we did not only upgrade the package (which lives, btw, in our openSUSE:infrastructure project), we also migrated the underlying database.
As often, the initial deployment was done with a "just for testing" mindset by someone, who afterward left his little project. And - also as often - these kind of deployments suddenly became productive. This means - in turn - that our openSUSE heroes team suddenly gets tickets for services we originally did neither set up, nor maintain.
Operating System | openSUSE Tumbleweed
There really wasn’t any other choice. I need long term reliability and I am not interested in reinstalling the operating system. I know, through personal experience, that Tumbleweed works well with server applications, is very tolerant to delayed updates and will just keep chugging away.
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This was an area that took me several months of research and reading. My criteria was that I had to have Storage Array BTRFS Raid 10. This afforded me a lot of redundancy but also a lot of flexibility. This will allow me to slowly upgrade my dries capacity as they begin to fail.
When deciding the file system, I did a lot of research into my options. I talked to a lot of people. ZFS lost consideration due to the lack of support in Linux. I am perfectly aware that the development is done primarily within Linux now but it is not part of the mainline kernel and I do not want to risk the module breaking when the kernel updates. So, that was a non-starter.
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Although this computer has only been up and running for about two months, I am slowly adding more services and functions to it. For now, it is pretty light, but in a few short months, that will most certainly start growing. I am very happy happy with the sub-$700 build for a computer system that has met or exceeded my expectations. It was a fun first complete, from ground up, scrap-together assembly that really was a gamble. I am pleased with how well openSUSE Tumbleweed runs on it and that I have had no disturbances with any operating system updates.
Often, after a project, you will review it, have an “After Action Review” and ask yourself, “What would I do differently if I were doing this again.” I can honestly say, there is nothing I would change. I like everything about this machine. I would, perhaps, like more storage space as I have already gobbled up 2.5 TiB of my 5.5 TiB of storage space. Reviewing what I spent and the additional cost of the larger storage, I would have still made the same decision. So, back to would I change anything? No, I think I made the right decision. I do have upgrades planned for the future but that is a project for the fall. This machine truly fits my needs, even if much of the hardware is yester-years retired bits.
As always you can choose what to install. Either you install intel-ucode or amd-ucode or you do not. We point you to the Arch wiki and let you decide what to do.
In Calamares you are given the option. It is up to you to choose.
But remember that if you intend to dual-boot you will have to fix the grub manually IF you installed intel-ucode or amd-ucode.
We assume now that you have installed two ArcoLinux systems on one harddisk/ssd.
A late change proposal for Fedora 32 would jump the shipped Mono package from version 5.20 to version 6.6.
Mono 6.6 could make it into this next Fedora Linux release for delivering the latest Microsoft .NET capabilities on Linux. With Mono 6 originally introduced in July 2019 the C# compiler version defaulted to 8.0, the Mono Interpreter was deemed feature complete, debugger improvements, and other enhancements. Mono 6.6 was released in December with continued work on their WebAssembly support, better CoreFX compatibility, and other work.
Hands on Linux Mint 19.3 was completed late last year and is a long-term support release with support until 2023, so we decided to put it through its paces.
Linux Mint is a distribution based on Ubuntu (there is also a Debian edition) and version 19.3 uses the Ubuntu 18.04 base packages – also a Long Term Support version.
Mint 19.3 “Tricia” comes in three flavours, each using a different desktop environment. The options are Cinnamon, which is the closest thing to a native Mint desktop; Mate; and Xfce. The existence of both Cinnamon and Mate stems from dissatisfaction with GNOME 3 when it was released in 2011.
Canonical’s Snap packaging format throws up some retro treats from time to time — and the ancient NCSA Mosaic web browser is the latest.
Now, I won’t pretend that the Mosaic browser was something I used personally. I am just about on the cusp of being old enough to have potentially seen it, but I can’t say I ever did. Rather, Internet Explorer provided by first gawp at the world wide web.
But for hot-shot computer users of the day, Mosaic was the shi… Ahem, er, shift in web browsing technology many had been longing for.
When a robot is not up-to-date, it becomes about as useful as an expensive paperweight. Companies have to burn money to get them back online. Yet when mobile apps need updating it only takes a few clicks and a minute or two before it’s back up and running. This blog will discuss how ROS robots utilising snaps, can be kept up-to-date for their entire life, from anywhere in the world.
Staying up to date and secure with snaps
Snaps allow for bug fixes as they arise. If there is a day 0 issue or day 1000 issue, each robot can receive the fix quickly and if it breaks, they will roll back to their last stable state. Snaps are containerised software applications that are able to receive updates from anywhere. Either from the public snapstore or privately, for total control.
Take our Cyberdyne case study for example. A Japanese robotics company that looked to solve the problem of labour shortages with robots. They built an autonomous robot, the CLO2, that uses artificial intelligence and 3-D mapping. With the CLO2 deployed in airports and malls across Japan, they deployed their software as snaps to eliminate the cost of getting engineers on site.
While Linux support on Chromebook is a welcome development, it hardly means anything for general consumers. One of the reasons is no graphical user interface (GUI) for Linux App Store which prevents people from discovering and using Linux apps on Chromebook. However, there is a way to install a GUI App Store on Linux and here I am going to show you how to get it. In this article, we bring you an in-depth guide on how to install Flatpak and Snap App Store in Linux on Chromebook. Both these app stores are quite popular in the Linux ecosystem so you will be able to access a legion of popular Linux apps on Chrome OS. With all that said, let’s go ahead and learn how to install a GUI app store in Linux on Chromebook.
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So that was our look into the two most popular app stores and how to install Flatpak and Snap App Store in Linux on Chromebook. While both the app stores are great and reliable, I think Flatpak works better on Chromebook. It installed the apps without any error and we were able to run them right from the App Drawer. So go ahead and install whichever app store you find interesting and reliable. Anyway, that is all from us. If you liked the article, do comment down below and let us know. Also, you can now enable GPU acceleration which will make Linux apps much smoother and faster to use on a Chromebook.
Another example that has received little notice is a new model using a multi-core X86-based Ubuntu Linux server and associated NIC card. Aside from being small enough to disguise as an Ethernet access switch, the main advantage of this software model is that it offers unparalleled simplicity, low-latency and programmability. Providing a direct 20G connection to the switch fabric through an Ubuntu Linux server, this software is easily able to run multiple VMs or containers.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 612 for the week of December 29, 2019 – January 4, 2020. The full version of this issue is available here.
MYIR, the Chinese based company that has developed several ARM-based hardware solutions, has introduced a new SoM powered by the ST’s STM32MP1 microprocessor called the MYC-YA157C CPU Module...
MYIR’s 45 x 43mm “MYC-YA157C” module runs Ubuntu 18.04 or a Yocto 2.6 based “MEasy” IoT stack on ST’s STM32MP1. A MYD-YA157C carrier adds WiFi/BT, GbE, HDMI, DSI, RGB, CAN, and multiple USB and serial ports.
MYIR has launched a $29 MYC-YA157C CPU Module powered by ST’s STM32MP1 SoC that can be paired with a $65 MYD-YA157C carrier board. The MYC-YA157C is MYIR’s first module based on STMicroelectronics’ 650MHz dual-core, Cortex-A7 STM32MP1 SoC, which includes a tightly integrated, 209MHz Cortex-M4 MCU with FPU, MPU, and DSP instructions.
Aaeon’s “COM-WHUC6” Compact Type 6 module features Intel’s 8th Gen Whiskey Lake UE with up to 8GB DDR4, up to 64GB eMMC, 3x SATA III, up to 5x PCIe, and 12x USB, including 4x USB 3.2 Gen2.
Aaeon announced a 95 x 95mm COM Express Compact Type 6 module based on an Intel 8th Gen chips. Whereas Aaeon’s recent COM-CFHB6 Basic Type 6 integrates 8th Gen Coffee Lake chips, this time it’s the more power efficient 8th Gen Whiskey Lake Core and Celeron ULT processors that get the nod. As with the COM-CFHB6, no OS support was listed, but Linux should run with no problem.
Pollen Robotics is launching a modular, open source “Reachy” robot that runs Raspbian and Luos on a Raspberry Pi 4 with Google’s Coral AI Accelerator. The torso-like bot has one or two articulated, 7-DoF arms with pincers and a ball-joint head with dual cams.
French robotics firm Pollen Robotics has opened limited pre-orders for an open-spec robot for R&D, public hospitality and service, and basic manipulation duties. The human torso sized Reachy is built from modular, MCU-driven parts that communicate with each other using the Luos distributed OS (see farther below). Reachy is touted as “the only humanoid service robot that is open source and can manipulate objects.”
Eventually, we all expect robots to do chores and other manual tasks performed by humans such as preparing and serving food at restaurants...
Piwheels automates building Python wheels (pre-compiled Python packages) for all of the projects on PyPI, the Python Package Index, using Raspberry Pi hardware to ensure compatibility. This means that when a Raspberry Pi user wants to install a Python library using pip, they get a ready-made compiled version that's guaranteed to work on the Raspberry Pi. This makes it much easier for Raspberry Pi users to dive in and get started with their projects.
When I wrote piwheels: Speedy Python package installation for the Raspberry Pi in October 2018, the piwheels project was in its first year and already proving its purpose of saving Raspberry Pi users considerable time and effort. But the project, which makes pre-compiled Python packages available for Raspberry Pi, has come a long way in its second year.
In our latest video for the newly rebranded Raspberry Pi Press YouTube channel, Custom PC’s Edward Chester explains what mechanical keyboards are, and why they’re so clicky.
Though Raspbian is the official operating system for Raspberry Pi, the platform has a number of OSes available for it, including Windows 10 IoT Core, Ubuntu Core and OpenElec. Very soon, we'll be able to add a new name to this list: Endless OS. Here at CES 2020, Endless Inc. showed its operating system running on a Raspberry Pi 4 B with 4GB of RAM, and company founder Matt Dalio said that a public beta should be available within the next few weeks.
Endless OS is a simplified version of Linux with a very user-friendly interface that makes it easy to find and install apps. The operating system has been available for years as a free download for PC users and comes preloaded on a few laptops, including some Acer models, but it has never run on Raspberry Pi before.
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Endless Inc. company reps said that, when it's available for download, the Raspberry Pi version of the operating system will require a Pi 4 B, but it remains unclear whether you'll need a Pi 4B with 4GB of RAM or if a 2GB or 1GB model will work. The demo unit we saw at CES had 4GB.
Reps also told us that the Raspberry Pi version of Endless OS is likely to include some Raspberry Pi-specific apps preloaded. No word on what apps these could be, but Minecraft: Pi Edition would be one obvious choice.
It’s been my privilege to do teardowns on both the Formlabs Form 1 and Form 2. With the recent release of the Form 3, I was asked by Formlabs if I wanted to do another teardown, and of course I jumped on the opportunity. I always learn an immense amount while taking apart their machines, and it’s also been very satisfying to watch their engineering team grow and mature over the years.
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Well, that’s it for the Form 3 teardown – from the exterior shell down to the lone galvanometer. I’ve had the privilege of court-side seats to observe the growth of Formlabs. There’s a saying along the lines of “the last 20% takes 80% of the effort”. Based on what I’ve seen of the Form series, that should be amended to “the last 20% takes 80% of the effort – and then you get to start on the product you meant to make in the first place”. It dovetails nicely into the observation that products don’t hit their stride until the third version (remember Windows 3.x?). From three grad students fresh out of the MIT Media Lab to a billion-dollar company, Formlabs and the Form series of printers have come a long way. I’d count myself as one of the bigger skeptics of 3D printing as a mass-production technology, but I hadn’t considered an approach like the LPU. I feel like the LPU embodies an audacious vision of the future of 3D printing that was not obvious to me as an observer about nine years ago. I’m excited to see where this all goes from here!
libhandy had several releases and got support for stick-to-finger gestures (and widgets that make use of it) as can be seen on the shell’s lockscreen. That support was in large parts contributed by a community member (exalm).
The list of adaptive GNOME apps is steadily growing.
We’re running pretty close to a mainline kernel, which several folks doubted would be possible, for several revisions. There’s good support for the devkit upstream and initial patches for the phone already made it back into mainline too. There’s some fun stuff like camera left for 2020. Most of the DSI display stack is upstream now with one driver missing but hopefully not too far away.
We can run mainline mesa as well, another thing that’s not common in the embedded world, which will give us support for games from flatpaks in the near future ðŸâ¢â
The kernel team managed to bring up the phone hardware in almost no time.
We’re now basing off of PureOS and build images for both Debian and PureOS on a daily basis. We have a CI system that builds everything on commit and a release system that ships updates to the phones by simply creating a signed git tag. About everything we ship is Debian packaged (notable exception atm is u-boot). We are proud and excited to ship updates sometimes multiple times a week to existing Birch and Chestnut users.
Open source storage is a solution that solves vertical and pain point challenges.
There are many scenarios where it is not necessary. Organisations might just want to hold onto the data they have. In this instance, an S3 bucket or Blobstore API will cover them.
But, implementing an open source storage solution makes sense for targeted use cases. Lustre is a good example if your organisation needs to do some aggressive high performance computing. “For those sorts of workloads, Lustre is extremely mature,” said Stephen Manley, chief technologist at Druva. “It’s extremely well integrated into the ecosystem.”
And, in general, in terms of the maturity curve, the open source storage system itself is quite robust.
Firefox 72 is now available from Mozilla's FTP server as their first release of 2020 and ahead of their more aggressive release cycle moving forward.
With Firefox 71 came a "picture in picture" mode that allows videos to play above different tabs, but the initial implementation was limited to Microsoft Windows. Now this picture-in-picture mode is working for Linux as well as macOS in Firefox 72. This handy feature should be all ready to go for the Linux desktop!
Firefox 72 also now blocks fingerprinting scripts by default, better handling of notification request prompts, CSS Shadow Parts and CSS Motion Path support, support for the JavaScript nullish coalescing operator (the ??), and various other additions.
In development since early December 2019, the Firefox 72 web browser promises to bring Picture-in-Picture (PiP) video controls for GNU/Linux and macOS platforms as Windows users already received PiP support in the Firefox 71 release.
Picture-in-Picture is enabled by default, so after upgrading to Firefox 72, Linux and macOS users can finally watch videos from various websites in a floating window while working in other tabs by selecting the blue icon from the right edge of a video.
Mozilla today launched Firefox 72 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Firefox 72 includes fingerprinting scripts blocked by default, fewer annoying notifications, and Picture-in-Picture video on macOS and Linux. There isn’t too much else here, as Mozilla has now transitioned Firefox releases to a four-week cadence (from six to eight weeks).
You can download Firefox 72 for desktop now from Firefox.com, and all existing users should be able to upgrade to it automatically. The Android version is trickling out slowly on Google Play. According to Mozilla, Firefox has about 250 million active users, making it a major platform for web developers to consider.
Mozilla Firefox 72.0 was released today. Picture-in-picture video now is available for Linux and Mac OS.
“Picture-in-picture” feature allows web video to be played in a “pop out” window. Simply select the blue icon from the right edge of a web video to pop open a floating window so you can keep watching while working in other tabs.
The headline change in Firefox 72 for Linux and macOS users is out-of-the-box support for picture-in-picture video support on sites like YouTube and Netflix.
We showed you how to manually enable this nifty new feature last month but, with the arrival of release, that guide is obsolete. Picture-in-picture (PIP) video support is enabled by default in Firefox 72 across all desktop operating systems, not just Windows.
Privacy is a human right, and is core to Mozilla’s mission. However many companies on the web erode privacy when they collect a significant amount of personal information. Companies record our browsing history and the actions we take across websites. This practice is known as cross-site tracking, and its harms include unwanted targeted advertising and divisive political messaging.
Last year we launched Enhanced Tracking Protection (ETP) to protect our users from cross-site tracking. In Firefox 72, we are expanding that protection to include a particularly invasive form of cross-site tracking: browser fingerprinting. This is the practice of identifying a user by the unique characteristics of their browser and device. A fingerprinting script might collect the user’s screen size, browser and operating system type, the fonts the user has installed, and other device properties—all to build a unique “fingerprint” that differentiates one user’s browser from another.
Fingerprinting is bad for the web. It allows companies to track users for months, even after users clear their browser storage or use private browsing mode. Despite a near complete agreement between standards bodies and browser vendors that fingerprinting is harmful, its use on the web has steadily increased over the past decade.
Life is full of interruptions and distractions. Like getting robocalls during dinner or any meal time. It’s inevitable that when you’re trying to get things done, something else demands your attention. You shouldn’t have to deal with that on the web.
And yet, it has become more common to find yourself on a site, in a groove finding everything you need, when suddenly an alert pops up saying that the website wants to send you notifications? Seriously? You have to stop what you’re doing and (most likely) hit that notification request with a No thanks, which it turns out, most people do. Last year, we discovered during testing that about 99% of notification prompts go unaccepted, with 48% being actively denied by the user.
As of today, you can block most of those* pesky notification prompts in Firefox automatically, so you can keep cruising the web without interruptions. Here’s what to expect.
First: When you visit a site that wants to send you notifications, a speech bubble (the kind you see in a comic strip) will appear in the URL bar. The bubble replaces the old larger pop-up window. The bubble will wiggle very briefly letting you know that a notification message has been blocked by Firefox.
Some days there’s something extra interesting to watch online — the big game, congressional testimony, a certain show is leaving Netflix so you gotta binge — but you’ve got work to do. The Picture-in-Picture feature in Firefox makes multitasking with video content smooth and easy, no window shuffling necessary.
Picture-in-Picture allows a video to be played in a separate, small window, and still be viewable when you switch tabs or away from the Firefox browser.
Thanks to contributions from Alex Peshkov and Tony Whyman in Firebird 3.0.4
SHA-256 message digest may be used instead of SHA-1 for generating the client proof:
In the final weeks of 2019, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) welcomed nearly 300 new associate members. That is a strong achievement, but we to boost our numbers further in order to continue our work to educate others about free software and defend copyleft.
Every day, millions of new people globally are gaining access to software, and are integrating it into their lives. We need to continue to spread the message of software freedom far and wide to reach these newcomers, and the millions of longtime software users who are unaware of how proprietary software is being used to exploit and abuse them. It’s a big challenge.
At the beginning of this new decade, we're inspired to dream up a freer future. To help turn this dream into reality, we're extending our membership drive and our offer for exclusive associate membership gifts as an extra incentive for people to join the movement until January 17th. To assist us further, our friends at Technoethical are offering a 5% discount for FSF members until this date as well.
Will you start out the new decade with an FSF associate membership?
Pascal is an imperative and procedural programming language designed in the late 1960s by Niklaus Wirth to teach structured programming using subprograms called procedures and functions. The language is a direct descendant from ALGOL 60, and takes programming components from ALGOL 68 and ALGOL-W. Pascal was named in honour after the French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher Blaise Pascal who helped to pioneer computer development.
Pascal is a popular teaching language to introduce structured programming techniques to students. There are many benefits from this type of programming such as code reusability, partitioning code into readable modules and procedures, and help programmers work together on code simultaneously. The language also lends itself to teaching with its easy syntax. Pascal is a strongly typed language, procedural, case insensitive, with extensive error checking. It has built in data types such as arrays, records, files and sets. There are also user defined data types. Pascal supports object oriented programming.
We have already learned about the class. A class is a way of defining how an object would look and behave. A class contains variables and methods. Variables define how an object looks and feels. Methods inside a class define how an object behaves.
An interface is a special type of class. We need to understand what makes an interface special. An interface is a way of defining that the object that will be made using this interface will have to have the methods with its implementation declared in the interface. The interfaces do not accept the implementation of the methods. That means when a class implements this interface, that class will have to provide the implementation for all the methods already declared in the interface. Below is an example of an Interface.
It’s the time of the decade to be looking forward! 2020 will be the first full year of the Raku Programming Language. Yours truly predicts that more people will be using Raku in the twenties than ever before! That Raku will become faster and will have quite a number of features added. Please insert your own predictions here
The new _modern function variants in Time::Local have come up a few times lately. I have some thoughts on them, but presenting my position dispassionately enough to be persuasive demands an essay of unfortunate length… so let’s get on with it.
Let me lead with the positive: it is a problem with the traditional functions that they would sometimes add 1900 to the year and sometimes a different value and sometimes nothing. This heuristic in the interface is bad. Doing something about it is a good idea.
Let me also lay out some simple statements of fact: Perl ships with gmtime and localtime functions which return a datetime represented as a list of numbers. Time::Local supplies inverse functions which take such a list and return the Unix epoch time that corresponds to that datetime. The Perl functions, among other things, return the year as the number of years since 1900. A correct inverse of the core functions would therefore simply add 1900 to the year passed.
The traditional Time::Local functions do not do this: they only do it if the year number is just big enough but not too big.
In this post, we will learn how to use Pandas drop_duplicates() to remove duplicate records and combinations of columns from a Pandas dataframe. That is, we will delete duplicate data and only keep the unique values.
This Pandas tutorial will cover the following; what’s needed to follow the tutorial, importing Pandas, and how to create a dataframe fro a dictionary. After this, we will get into how to use Pandas drop_duplicates() to drop duplicate rows and duplicate columns.
Note, that we will drop duplicates using Pandas and Pyjanitor, which is a Python package that extends Pandas with an API based on verbs. It’s much like working with the Tidyverse packages in R. See this post on more about working with Pyjanitor. However, we will only use Pyjanitor to drop duplicate columns from a Pandas dataframe.
I spent a short time @Qt, but a fruitful one. I was lucky to work with the great Qt for Python team that made me feel very welcomed. I was also lucky to have had a great mentor, Cristián Maureira-Fredes, that was super supportive and cool to work with.
Besides helping to spread the word about Qt for Python in the Open Source community by going to conferences and events, during my time in Qt I added a few features to the Qt ecosystem to make Qt for Python more visible and interesting to beginners like adding new templates and the example tab in QtCreator, I also wrote a translation tool to convert Qt code for Qt for Python and translate our docs, wrote a tutorial and an example to present at the Qt World Summit 2019: a voice assistant using open source technologies. This blog post will explain a little bit about this example and it's going to show you a thing or two about this it in case you want to experiment with it.
2019 was a good year for my blog. While we didn?t end up getting a lot of new readers, we did receive a small bump. There has also been a lot more interest in the books that are available on this site.
After writing about "How I built a Python script to read e-mails from an Exchange Server" and “How I access Microsoft SharePoint in my Python scripts” and getting great feedback on the articles, I decided to write a little more about accessing business software data from Python. This time I moved out of the Microsoft world and explored the Salesforce and Python combination.
Hi, and welcome to 2020! The last year (2019) was quite a whirlwind for me and my work — and I thus wanted to take a few minutes to summarize what I’ve done over the past year. But the coming year looks like it’ll be just as exciting, if not more so, and I wanted to fill you in on what you can expect.
Let me start off by saying that I’m extremely grateful to have the opportunity to teach Python to so many people around the world, both in person and online. Thanks so much for your interest in my writing and work, and (for so many of you) for taking the time to e-mail me with corrections and suggestions. It means a lot to me.
I first heard about Bluetooth LE (Low Energy)- part of Bluetooth 4.0- in 2013 with RFDuino board, and it came to prominence once Android 4.3 added support later this year.
The feature that will likely affect the most people is the new “Low Complexity Communication Codec,” or LC3. LC3 simultaneously reduces power consumption while increasing audio quality. Right now, the lowest common denominator for Bluetooth audio is the relatively old and relatively bad SBC codec, though many phones support Qualcomm’s proprietary codec, AptX.
In order to get SBC to sound good, you have to increase the bitrate, which increases power consumption. The Bluetooth SIG claims that, in its testing, users preferred the new LC3 codec, even at significantly lower bitrates.
Today at CES, the Bluetooth Special Interest Group announced that a few new capabilities will be coming to its namesake technology. These enhancements will be rolled into Bluetooth as a set of features known as LE Audio. That LE stands for “low energy,” and the goal for the update is to allow a standard Bluetooth signal to better manage and share wireless audio streams between devices without overworking the batteries in your phone, your smartwatch, or your headphones.
On January 5, Russia lost to Canada in the final of the 2020 World Junior Ice Hockey Championships. The score was 3:4 in the end, but that’s not the game many saw in Russia, thanks to some scheduling confusion that resulted in the television network Match TV airing another game between these two teams that took place nine years ago, when Russia last won the tournament.
Lora DiCarlo initially won its innovation award in 2019 within the drones and robotics category. Then, just as the convention was starting, the company publicized that the Consumer Technology Association, which puts on the convention, took the award back after allegedly citing a rule that said products that are “immoral, obscene, indecent, profane or not in keeping with CTA’s image will be disqualified.” The CTA later backtracked on that excuse and said the product simply didn’t fit in the robotics and drones category.
We applaud Ronald J. Daniels’ Washington Post op-ed (December 31, 2019) on the shortcomings of American tertiary education. As professionals with a deep commitment to educating next-generation citizens and leaders, we concur with his critique of American education and join his call to universities to enable young people to “participate in the daily business of our democracy” and redress our educational system’s longstanding failures.
Benz decided to make her classroom “gradeless” two years ago. Instead of “slapping a letter or number at the top of an assessment,” she now focuses on providing her students with high-quality feedback instead. Her students test ideas, make discoveries and embrace failure in an environment where learning is “transformational, not transactional.” Although she is technically required to give a final grade at the end of the semester, that number is based on cumulative evidence of her students’ progress, not a grade average. Benz says her students’ AP test scores haven’t dropped because of the change, and that parents have embraced it. Students tell her they have more “joy for learning” and better emotional health.
The herbicide Roundup has been a topic of discussion around the U.S. following large jury awards to several people who claim their cancer was caused by long-term exposure to the product. A community listserv I’m on recently included a volley of questions and updated-by-the-second responses among suburban residents about how to address the town’s use of Roundup in parks. Who to contact — mayor? Alders? Parks head? What to say and how — emails, letters, attend a meeting?
On January 5, 2020, one of Russia’s most successful oncologic surgeons died at the age of 41. His name was Andrey Pavlenko, and in the spring of 2018, he was diagnosed with third-stage stomach cancer. Following his diagnosis, the cancer expert began publishing a multimedia project called “A Human Life” on the news site and charitable project Takie Dela, offering cancer patients and their families his own perspective on the disease, both as a doctor and as a patient. Pavlenko also founded and led a charity called Cancer Fund whose aim is to improve the quality of oncologic care in Russia.
Parking meters, cash registers and a professional wrestling video game have fallen foul of a computer glitch related to the Y2K bug.
The Y2020 bug, which has taken many payment and computer systems offline, is a long-lingering side effect of attempts to fix the Y2K, or millennium bug.
Both stem from the way computers store dates. Many older systems express years using two numbers – 98, for instance, for 1998 – in an effort to save memory. The Y2K bug was a fear that computers would treat 00 as 1900, rather than 2000.
Programmers wanting to avoid the Y2K bug had two broad options: entirely rewrite their code, or adopt a quick fix called “windowing”, which would treat all dates from 00 to 20, as from the 2000s, rather than the 1900s. An estimated 80 per cent of computers fixed in 1999 used the quicker, cheaper option.
“Windowing, even during Y2K, was the worst of all possible solutions because it kicked the problem down the road,” says Dylan Mulvin at the London School of Economics.
Splashtop Inc., the worldwide leader in remote access, collaboration, and remote support solutions, now officially supports remote access to Linux computers through Splashtop’s award-winning remote desktop solutions.
Subscribers of Splashtop’s core business products can now remotely access and control their Linux computers from any other Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Chromebook device. Through the Splashtop Business App, users can initiate a remote session to their desired Linux computer with just a few clicks.
Going through the history of our posts on Intuit and TurboTax will give you an incredibly frustrating recent history of Intuit's bullshit actions regarding its free tax filing program for low-income households. This all stems from a deal the IRS cut with several major tax preparation companies, which amounted essentially to the IRS promising not to offer its own free file program so long as these companies, Intuit being the largest, provided free tax filing programs to the public themselves. The outcome of this naive deal cut by the IRS was to have companies like Intuit do everything possible to hide its free file sites from the public internet by delisting it from searches, then lying to customers to avoid refunding money when they complained that they could have filed for free, and finally Intuit similarly fooling veterans into paying for services that would otherwise be free all while wrapping itself in the American flag.
Following AMD's keynote with announcing the Ryzen 4000 series + RX 5600 XT + Threadripper 3990X, Intel now has up their address from the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Here are all the highlights from the perspective of a Linux user.
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- 25 new Athena laptop designs, including two Project Athena Google Chromebooks.
The BusKill USB system was designed by Michael Altfield and while not yet for sale, he has kindly posted the instructions on how to make one and modify what it does here. Physically it is a USB drive with a sturdy hole for a key chain to secure it to yourself, connected to a USB extension cord which runs from aforementioned USB drive to your computer. To make sure you get a clean disconnect if someone were to snag your laptop off of a table that cord is connected to a magnetic breakaway adapter which connects the assembly to a USB port on your machine.
If the cord is cut, or disconnected physically by a wannabe thief, it triggers a udev file which can then lock your machine, delete certain files and folders or even wipe it, the limit of contingencies is defined by your programming level. The parts to make this are rather inexpensive and can save you quite a bit of headache in the long term. It would be an interesting project to see if this could be replicated for Windows machines.
The FBI and DOJ like to complain everything is "going dark." It isn't. The only thing that's still dark here is the FBI's FISA powers and the true number of encrypted devices in the FBI's possession.
The transfer of personal data lies at the heart of much of online activity. Since many of the leading online companies were founded and have their headquarters in the US, that typically means that huge quantities of personal data cross the Atlantic every day. If information concerns EU citizens, those data flows are governed by a variety of privacy laws, most notably the GDPR. Under EU law, for data transfers outside the region to be legal, they must be to locations that offer “adequate” privacy protection. “Adequacy” is decided by the European Commission, which tends to take a fairly lenient view of things in order to facilitate international data transfers.
Facebook, the social media platform used by billions, had banned cryptocurrency related ads for a year and a half starting in January of 2018. During this time period, Facebook’s ad approval algorithms and moderators were so sensitive to potentially cryptocurrency tangential ads that even ads for physical events that had cryptocurrency sponsors weren’t allowed. An ad could have a simple image of the Bitcoin logo or feature a URL that had a cryptocurrency in the blurry background and that would trigger Facebook’s anti cryptocurrency ad policy and cause a takedown. Facebook’s anti cryptocurrency policy in 2018 also extended to Instagram and ads placed on third party sites through their Audience Network, Facebook’s ad network.
In 2003 the U.S. committed the crime of the century, invading, destroying and occupying the modern state of Iraq, ushering in an era of misery, terror and chaos in the region. Or one could say that the invasion continued an era launched by the ill-fated invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, justified by the 9/11 attacks, which—have you noticed?—is ending in abject failure and humiliating retreat.
"That letter is a draft, it was a mistake, it was unsigned, it should not have been released," said Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley.
"Last month Iran was protesting their government—now millions are united against the United States. Thanks to Donald Trump."
"I'm not a very good American because I like to form my own opinions," said the famous standup comic in 1992 following the first Gulf War. "I don't just roll over when I'm told to. Sad to say, most Americans just roll over on command—not me."
Democratic leaders are feigning outrage, but they’ve supported the precursors to war.
"Trump's reckless military actions, without Congressional approval or authorization, have caused this crisis," said Rep. Barbara Lee. "We have been down this dangerous path before in Iraq, and we cannot afford another ill-advised, destructive, and costly war in the Middle East."
Iraqis have a well-honed instinct about approaching danger which stems from their grim experience during 40 years of crisis and war. Three months ago, I asked a friend in Baghdad how she and her friends viewed the future, adding Iraq seemed to me to be more peaceful than at any time since the US and British invaded in 2003.
You can’t kill the national hero of a third country and get away with it. Especially not of an ancient and powerful country like Iran that threatens no one. Not only did the US strike kill the second most powerful man of Iran, beloved General Qassem Soleimani, chief of the Revolutionay Guards-Quds Force on the road to the Baghdad Airport. The US helicopter killed also Abu-Mahdi al-Muhandi, Deputy Head of Iraq’s PMU, Popular Mobilization Units and seven others. Clearly an unprovoked act of state terrorism.
"The Constitution doesn't allow presidents to declare war over social media."
The warning comes as President Donald Trump continued to assert the U.S. has a right to attack culturally significant sites.
In survey after international survey, the United States is perennially voted the world’s greatest threat to peace in most of the world’s nations.
With so much on the line—both for the United States and the world—the time for silence is over. Public resistance is the only tool we the people have left.
Last October Yossi Cohen, head of Israel’s Mossad, spoke openly about assassinating Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, the head of the elite Quds Force in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Top Democrats are “stunned” that Trump impulsively ordered the killing of “the commanding general of a sovereign government” (New York Times) – Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassim Soliemani –on the sovereign territory of Iraq without the permission of Iraq’s government. The imperial assassination of Soliemani is a criminal act of war guaranteed to provoke a reaction that could produce a regional war involving U.S. forces in the Middle East.
Instead of initiating a war with the assassination of General Soleimani, rationale leaders would have pursued diplomacy to reverse the spiraling dynamic of military escalation, not thoughtlessly and murderously fueling it.
As long as the top executives of our privatized war economy can reap unlimited rewards, the profit motive for war in Iran—or anywhere—will persist.
A preemptive strike, that’s what white people call terrorism, and that’s apparently what transpired this Thursday on the tarmac of the Baghdad International Airport. A preemptive drone strike, ordered by our president, murdered General Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most important military figure, alongside six others including the commander of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Unit, a legally recognized part of Iraq’s military. This was not an attack on a military operation. These men were meeting to attend a funeral for victims of another American terrorist attack earlier in the week. This was an act of extreme cowardice. This was a war crime. But most importantly, this was indeed a calculated act of war against two sovereign nations, a week in the making.
On February 4, 2002, a Predator drone circled over Afghanistan’s Paktia province, near the city of Khost. Below was al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden — or at least someone in the CIA thought so — and he was marked for death. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld put it later, both awkwardly and passively: “A decision was made to fire the Hellfire missile. It was fired.” That air-to-ground, laser-guided missile — designed to obliterate tanks, bunkers, helicopters, and people — did exactly what it was meant to do.
We look at the Trump administration’s assassination of Iran’s top military commander Qassem Soleimani with Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired United States Army colonel who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff from 2002 to 2005. On February 5, 2003, he watched as Powell made the case for war in a speech to the United Nations. He has since become an outspoken critic of U.S. intervention in the Middle East. In 2018, Wilkerson wrote an article for The New York Times titled “I Helped Sell the False Choice of War Once. It’s Happening Again.”
Over the weekend, Democracy Now! spoke with New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and asked her response to the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani. “We need to be tactical about how we can actively resist further escalation on already an unprecedented level of escalation and aggression by the president, and therefore by the United States,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “He did this on behalf of our entire country. And that’s what makes the potential illegality of his action so flagrant, because he did not consult Congress and this was not done with the support of the United States.”
Trump has already committed the crime of aggression against Iran, and he is now threatening to commit a war crime if he carries through on his January 4 promise to target Iran’s cultural sites. The United States has violated the United Nations Charter’s prohibition on the use of military force. This is the time to raise our voices and demand that our congressional representatives put a halt to Trump’s illegal war-making.
Rapper Dave East performed for U.S. troops stationed in the Middle East for New Year’s Eve. The rapper’s show in Qatar at the Al Udeid Air Base was just one stop before finishing his latest tour.
"It's not that surprising if you look closely: Rep. Cuellar is bought and paid for by the military industrial complex."
On February 4, 2002, a€ Predator drone€ circled over Afghanistan’s Paktia province, near the city of Khost. Below was al-Qaeda’s founder Osama bin Laden — or at least someone in the CIA thought so — and he was marked for death. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld€ put it€ later, both awkwardly and passively: “A decision was made to fire the Hellfire missile. It was fired.” € That air-to-ground, laser-guided missile — designed to obliterate€ tanks, bunkers, helicopters, and people — did exactly what it was meant to do.
Iran’s supreme leader wept Monday over the casket of a top general killed in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, his prayers joining the wails of mourners who flooded the streets of Tehran demanding retaliation against America for a slaying that’s drastically raised tensions across the Middle East.
"First we invade you, then we break you, and then sanction you."
The US invaded Iraq illegally in 2003 and essentially stole its oil income for years to pay for its military occupation of the country.
Progressive anti-war voices expressed fresh condemnation of President Donald Trump overnight after he told reporters late Sunday that the people of Iraq would be sanctioned “like they’ve never seen before ever” if they follow through with an effort to force all U.S. military forces out of the country.
For all the talk about Donald Trump wanting to end the “forever wars,” I think we knew what he was really talking about, don’t we? He wanted to end the “Bush-Obama” wars because his only real foreign policy has been to reverse anything his predecessors did. That includes all of them going back to at least Franklin D. Roosevelt, and maybe Abe Lincoln.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif requested a visa a “few weeks ago” to enter the United States to attend a Jan. 9 Security Council meeting on the importance of upholding the U.N. Charter, according to a diplomatic source familiar with the matter. The Thursday meeting was to provide Tehran’s top diplomat with his first opportunity to directly address the world community since U.S. President Donald Trump ordered the Jan. 3 drone strike that killed Maj. Gen. Qassem Suleimani, a top Iraqi militia leader, among others.
The Iranian government was awaiting word on the visa Monday when a Trump administration official phoned U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to inform him that the United States would not allow Zarif into the country, according to the Washington-based diplomatic source.
Israel is widely believed to have an atomic arsenal but has never confirmed or denied that it has nuclear weapons, maintaining a so-called policy of ambiguity on the issue for decades.
Mr Vanunu, a low-level technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear plant, first hit the headlines in 1986 when he leaked details with photographs he took surreptitiously to the British Sunday Times.
The revelations marked the first concrete proof that Israel had the capacity to manufacture nuclear bombs.
Since his release in 2004, Vanunu has been under restrictions to ensure he does not further harm Israeli security by revealing more state secrets. Restrictions against him include a prohibition on leaving the country, a duty to report to police before changing residence and a prohibition on contacting foreign nationals or residents.
"The history of the American military of protecting cultural sites when possible, goes back over 150 years. The military and the United States, more broadly, is rightly proud of that," according to Depaul University Law Professor Patty Gerstenblith, director of the school's Center for Art, Museum and Cultural Heritage Law.
"Both at the U.S. national level and internationally, the thought of using an attack on cultural heritage as a form of retaliation and reprisal — which is what this would be — is really abhorrent," Gerstenblith, a former chair of the President's Cultural Property Advisory Committee in the Obama administration, told VOA.
Iran has been around for millennia and isn’t going to go away or change any time soon. What should we do about Iran? How about leaving it alone? How about not trying to get Iran to copy our mistakes? How about getting rid of Trump?
[...]
Now we have Trump assassinating the second in command in Iran in the hope it will make Iranians love him. Another lie. This lie is more serious than others pushing us to war. I can think of a hundred responses by Iran and a thousand counter-responses by Trump and they all lead downhill into the pit of war.
The problem here is not Iran but Trump. His short-sighted transactional view of the world is making war inevitable. Better to impeach him for making war without approval of Congress as soon as possible, perhaps tomorrow, then bring back the nuclear treaty and get rid of some sanctions and …
It's become almost "common knowledge" that various social media recommendation engines "lead to radicalization." Just recently in giving a talk to telecom execs, I was told, point blank, that social media was clearly evil and clearly driving people into radicalization because "that's how you sell more ads" and that nothing I could say could convince them otherwise. Thankfully, though, there's a new study that throws some cold water on those claims, by showing that YouTube's algorithm -- at least in late 2019 -- appears to be doing the opposite.
Forensic News can, however, confirm that at least some of Trump’s loans were issued by a bank subsidiary with business ties to VTB. That subsidiary owed more than $48 million to VTB in 2013 and documents suggest the subsidiary continued doing business with VTB even after the bank was sanctioned in 2014.
One federal agent working on the Deutsche Bank investigation indicated that VTB is under scrutiny in the FBI criminal probe. “We know VTB very well,” the investigator said on background. That person did not comment directly on the Trump loans.
Researchers have been catching Australia’s fires in the act of producing pyrocumulonimbus clouds, or pyroCbs. These ominous phenomena take two ingredients: a mass of hot air that produces an updraft, in this case columns of smoke-filled air, and an unstable atmospheric environment that allows the updraft to continue rising higher than it otherwise would, says Scott Bachmeier, a research meteorologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. As the mass climbs higher, the smoky air cools and forms into a pyrocumulonimbus cloud, a soup of water and smoke particles towering miles into the sky. (Though to be clear, the cloud itself isn't on fire.)
Australian media are this morning piling onto the Federal Member for Hughes, Craig Kelly after a train-wreck interview in the UK overnight in which Kelly tried to downplay the realities of climate change. But is he the worst offender? Chris Graham reports.
Last month, Robby Wirramanda Knight and his family were labelled ‘government bludgers’ and ‘not real Aboriginals’ by their racist white neighbours. Now the family and Robby – who works three jobs, and owns several properties – have opened up one of them to victims of the bushfires that have torn through the nation. Chris Graham reports.
Expect the climate, but prepare for the weather? Not any more. The statistics spell it out: global heating is causing daily weather change.
Legendary rock singer Meat Loaf has found himself in a war of words with famed teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg over the merits of climate change.
As 2020 approached, the sense that the barbarians were not only at the gates but had breached the walls of indifference had come to the fore. But these were not conventional human forms; rather, they were the agents of conflagration, driving people to the sea, forcing them from homes and consuming territories the size of small countries. Australia was burning.
"'Whatever it takes' needs to include serious and ambitious action to reduce Australia's and global emissions."
The reported plan targets the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), which has been called the Magna Carta of environmental legislation, and could hasten approval of pipelines like the Keystone XL.
The mainstream media are carefully sidestepping the method behind America’s seeming madness in assassinating Islamic Revolutionary Guard general Qassim Suleimani to start the New Year. The logic behind the assassination was a long-standing application of U.S. global policy, not just a personality quirk of Donald Trump’s impulsive action. His assassination of Iranian military leader Suleimani was indeed a unilateral act of war in violation of international law, but it was a logical step in a long-standing U.S. strategy. It was explicitly authorized by the Senate in the funding bill for the Pentagon that it passed last year.
The immediate "no-regret" measures they propose include aggressively curbing planet-heating emissions and the use of synthetic pesticides.
As we enter a new year, the running battle between the world’s governments and the world-changing technology known as “cryptocurrency” continues. As 2019 drew to an end, Swiss president Ueli Maurer asserted that Facebook’s digital currency (not a real cryptocurrency), Libra, has failed “because central banks will not accept the basket of currencies underpinning it.”
Mike Elrod voted for Donald Trump in 2016, hoping for a break from tight government oversight that his business had endured for years, which he often found unreasonable.
“There was a time when every day I dreaded opening the mail,” said Elrod, who founded a small firm in South Carolina called Eccotemp that makes energy-efficient, tankless water heaters. “The Department of Energy would put in an arbitrary rule and then come back the next day and say, ‘You’re not in compliance.’ We had no input into what was changing and when the change was taking place.”
I lost everything during the financial crisis. The government decided that the perpetrators of the crisis were “too big to fail” and bailed them out with our money. I was not bailed out.
Republicans repeatedly promised in 2017 that their proposed tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would increase jobs, pay for themselves, give every family a big raise and would really hurt rich people like Donald Trump.
Bernie Sanders is surging in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary polls, and, as CNN analyst Harry Enten wrote Sunday, “It’s becoming more apparent” that the Vermont senator and former Vice President Joe Biden “are the candidates to beat.” Sanders, according to Enten, has an extra advantage: “Biden’s fundraising is not anywhere near as strong as Sanders’.” As a recent Politico story observed, Sanders’ campaign is “being taken seriously” among Democratic party insiders.
“Purity test”? “Pragmatic progressive”? “Free stuff”? What are these politicians talking about?
I have seen millions of people, in the United States and around the globe, turn the tide against fascism when, some eight decades ago, it threatened to engulf the world. Let’s hope they can do it again.€
Over the past year, former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign has been consistently elevated by the electability narrative. Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders, currently polling in second, has been repeatedly written off by the mainstream media as unelectable. “Electability” has been the most frequently made argument in favor of nominating Biden over his competitors, and it has probably been the biggest booster — apart from the Obama aura — keeping his exhausted presidential campaign alive.
Former White House national security adviser John Bolton said Monday that he is “prepared to testify” if he is subpoenaed by the Senate in its impeachment trial€ of President Donald Trump, a surprise statement that bolstered Democrats in their push for new witnesses.
Will GOP "hold a fair trial that airs the evidence against Trump, or will they enable Trump's cover-up?"
Facing impeachment in 1998 for lying about having oral sex with a White House intern, then-President Bill Clinton responded by launching cruise missiles against Sudan targeting a pharmaceutical plant that allegedly manufactured nerve gas used by terrorists, and by bombing Afghanistan and Iraq.
In a recent€ New Yorker€ profile of Pete Buttigieg, one sentence stands out: “Watch Buttigieg long enough and you notice that he uses abstraction as an escape hatch.” Evasive platitudes are also routine for Joe Biden, the other major Democratic presidential candidate running in what mainstream journalists call “the center lane.”
"If you are not guilty of corruption and abuse of power, you should welcome the testimony of your former national security advisor and other witnesses."
Following is my response to Robert Hunziker’s article “Kill GDP to Help Save the Planet,” published in Counterpunch on 2 January 2020. [1]
"It is critical that national security matters of such import be shared with the American people in a timely manner."
Major General Hossein Salami, the chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran, said on January 4 that his country would take “strategic revenge” against the United States for the assassination of Lieutenant General Qassem Soleimani. The assassination of Soleimani, Salami said, will be later seen as a “turning point” in U.S. interference in West Asia.
Haaretz has reported that Israel, but not the United States Congress, was briefed on the proposed drone strike days before it took place. Its purpose was to eliminate a senior foreign official the Trump administration had designated as an enemy. The killing of the commander of an Iraqi militia hostile to the United States was a bonus. The assassinations were an act of war that will inevitably evoke reprisal. Iran has already promised that it will exact “savage” retribution for the murder of a senior official of its government by the United States.
Assaulting someone with a tweet can be a criminal act. It takes a whole lot of specifics to make it a crime, but some asshole named John Rivello managed to do just that when he sent strobe gifs to Kurt Eichenwald and apparently sent him into a seizure.
The increasing economic, political, and military power of China is evident. Less obvious is how China and its citizens are starting to impose their views and rules on other nations in more subtle ways. For example, in February last year, Techdirt wrote about how China is actively censoring books written by Australian authors for Australian readers. The Norway Today site reports on the latest attempt by Chinese citizens to censor material in other countries. It involves a delegation of more than 40 Chinese cross-country skiers, along with 15 coaches and managers, who are in the Norwegian municipality of MerÃÂ¥ker to train for the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics...
We've talked a bunch about how Rep. Devin Nunes' ongoing series of SLAPP lawsuits, nearly all of which are in Virginia, have really served to highlight the nature of libel tourism in the US today, and in particular how plaintiffs and lawyers go hunting for jurisdictions with weak or non-existent anti-SLAPP laws. We already mentioned that Nunes's series of lawsuits has convinced at least some Virginia legislators that it's time to beef up Virginia's anti-SLAPP law, but as the Washington Post recently noted, it's also driving home how the rich and powerful engage in libel tourism by picking venues like Virginia to cause more trouble for those they sue.
Chelsea Manning is being tortured for her refusal to€ testify before€ a federal grand jury. She already has told a military court as a whistleblower while in the Army about documents pertaining to alleged war crimes that were committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. She has already been tortured and imprisoned for releasing that information once (“Collateral Murder”€ video, for example), but here in the US, the land of the free and the home of the brave, readers must be protected from reading and viewing documents about the horrors of the endless wars the US fights. Some journalists and publishers must be brought into line when disclosing information to the public about our endless wars.
Alexey Kovalev, who leads€ Meduza’s investigative desk, took a look back at his favorite genre of journalism and chose a single bombshell story from a Russian-language outlet for every year. The resulting list is certainly not comprehensive: It excludes a number of outstanding investigative pieces as well as stories that most would say belong to other genres (for example, social investigations like Olesya Gerasimenko’s€ Kommersant Vlast€ report€ on credit slavery in Russia and€ Mediazona’s€ monologue€ from a young U.S. citizen who was trapped for 15 years by her Old Believer relatives in rural Russia). Instead of providing an exhaustive look at Russian investigative journalism, this list attempts to span all of the field’s central trends in the past decade, from traditional long reads in established media sources to the very first anti-corruption bloggers and new media that have made a big splash in recent years.
First I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts, agents of digital dysphoria that were turning me and countless others into crazy people. But I didn’t stop there. I cancelled all my newspaper and periodical subscriptions, including the Wall Street Journal, a once but no longer trusted news source I had read every morning for more than 30 years. Then I gave up writing opinion columns. I stopped listening to NPR. I deleted all the browser bookmarks I had accumulated for news and commentary sites that kept me “informed,” including inflammatory volcanoes of vituperation like Zero Hedge. Banishing the loathsome CNN/Fox two-headed beast was not an issue because I stopped watching TV back in the 1980s when Diane left Cheers. I did everything I could to decouple from the 24-hour news cycle, including relegating directly to the trash all of the “Have you seen this outrage? Pass it on!” emails that used to fill my inbox. I unsubscribed from all the echo chambers I’d come to frequent. I did all of this cold turkey over the space of a few days.
"This trial is critical to show that predators everywhere will be held accountable and that speaking up can bring about real change."
Los Angeles prosecutors charged Harvey Weinstein on Monday with sexually assaulting two women on successive nights during Oscar week in 2013, bringing the new case against the disgraced Hollywood mogul on the eve of jury selection for his New York trial.
Nearly a decade after California overhauled its prison and jail system, policymakers are considering reforms to the state’s landmark criminal justice transformation, calling for more oversight of county sheriffs and higher standards for inmate care.
Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he is crafting plans focused on local lockups, where homicides have surged, and exploring how to give the state more power to oversee the sheriffs who run them. More details are expected this week when the governor unveils his state budget proposal.
I was proud to march against anti-Semitism with tens of thousands of New Yorkers on Sunday in the wake of the heartbreaking attacks on Orthodox Jewish communities from Monsey to Jersey City to Brooklyn. While Sunday’s march displayed powerful unity in our rejection of anti-Semitism, it also underscored a central tension in our Jewish communities: Are we fighting for justice, or just us?ââ¬Â¯
By all accounts cord cutting continued to set records in 2019, a trend that (despite some baseless claims to the contrary by industry executives) is only expected to accelerate this year. Customers continue to grow tired of paying their local cable TV provider hundreds of dollars per month for giant bundles of channels they don't watch, paired with some of the worst customer service of any industry in the States (a continued, impressive claim given the banking, airline, and insurance industries exist).
Apple has unleashed their legal juggernaut on an innovative iOS security company, and if they win their lawsuit, the damage will reverberate beyond the security community and into the world of repair and maintenance.
Corellium’s software creates virtual iPhones in a web browser, so that app developers and security researchers can tinker without needing a physical device. It’s nerdy stuff that most people will never need, but it’s genuinely useful. So useful, in fact, that Apple tried to buy the company. When the founders refused, Apple decided to sue them into oblivion.
Cellmid (CDY) has received notice of allowance for the improved antibody patent from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
Additionally, following a Notification of Intention to Grant from the European Patent Office (EPO) for the Improved midkine antibody patent, the EPO has now issued a decision to grant.
The simultaneous granting of these patents in the U.S. and key European areas represents a major milestone in the midkine therapeutic program.
The humanised therapeutic antibody covered by both the patents is one of the lead drugs in the midkine program and adds significant commercial value to the comprehensive intellectual property portfolio around midkine.
This newly granted midkine antibody patents and allied patent families underpin Cellmid's dominant intellectual property position over the use of midkine therapeutic antibodies for the treatment of diseases arising from cancer and chronic inflammation.
Midkine is a growth factor that is highly expressed during embryonic development and it modulates many important biological interactions such as cell growth, cell migration and cellular adherence.
Creative Commons (CC) is working towards providing easy access to CC-licensed and public domain works. One significant step towards achieving that goal was the release of CC Search in 2019. Through this search and indexing tool, we’re making a plethora of CC-licensed images accessible in one place. As CC Search expands to include more than just images, CC is also developing a suite of applications and interfaces to help users across the world interact, consume, and reuse open access content.
The operator of YTS recently 'settled' a lawsuit that was filed by the US. movie company Wicked Nevada. Soon after, the same movie company joined other filmmakers to sue several users of the notorious torrent site. According to the complaint, the rightsholders know the email addresses that the defendants used to register with at YTS, as well as the VPN IP-address of one user. This raises some questions.
After several days of downtime, manga scanlation giant MangaDex has reappeared online. In addition to confirming the existence of a DMCA subpoena first reported here on TF last week, MangaDex says it has legal issues that have resulted in the temporary loss of its .org domain and removal from Cloudflare. It is now operating under a new domain while the problems are dealt with.
A judge has sentenced Rich Mendez, who is the CEO of Rich Music, to five years in federal prison for wire fraud.
Despite a unanimous jury decision against Katy Perry last year, lawyers for the pop superstar are reiterating their demands for a retrial to correct a ‘travesty of justice’.
