Linux is, without a doubt, the most customizable OS on the planet. Unlike the alternatives, where you can customize the desktop experience with a wallpaper and maybe a set of icons on Linux, you can replace the whole desktop environment if it doesn’t look and function as you’d like.
That’s why, as you’ll see, the following desktops use different desktop environments on various distributions. They’re equipped with different apps, wallpapers, icons, and docks. Each looks radically different, tailor-made for their owners, who truly made them their personal desktop.
The common factor between them? They all look fantastic and can act as an inspiration, nudging you to replicate them or go on your own adventure to construct your own original desktop, unlike any other.
Linux is almost like the boogey monster of operating systems. People consider it an OS for hackers and users with advanced computing skills. However, this is not true, most simple operations in Linux are as easy to perform as they are in Windows or MacOS. It should be noted that all Linux distributions are not created equal and it might be best to choose something that is well supported and easy to use.
Why switch? There are two big reasons to switch to Linux, the first being it works excellently with older hardware, giving it an extension of life. The second is, it is free, which makes it an excellent alternative to all the paid operating systems out there. Programs on Linux are also free and they are good enough to be used professionally. Now that you are convinced here are six of the best Linux distributions out right now.
Since we started eagerly watching the Reform a couple years ago the hardware world has kept turning, and the Reform has improved accordingly. The i.MX6 series CPU is looking a little peaky now that it’s approaching end of life, and the device has switched to a considerably more capable – but no less free – i.MX8M paired with 4 GB of DDR4 on a SODIMM-shaped System-On-Module. This particular SOM is notable because the manufacturer freely provides the module schematics, making it easy to upgrade or replace in the future. The screen has been bumped up to a 12.5ââ¬Â³ 1080p panel and steps have been taken to make sure it can be driven without blobs in the graphics pipeline.
If you’re worried that the chassis of the laptop may have been left to wither while the goodies inside got all the attention, there’s no reason for concern. Both have seen substantial improvement. The keyboard now uses the Kailh Choc ultra low profile mechanical switches for great feel in a small package, while the body itself is milled out of aluminum in five pieces. It’s printable as well, if you want to go that route. All in all, the Reform represents a heroic amount of work and we’re extremely impressed with how far the design has come.
Bing is known as the default search engine for Windows, and not much else. Microsoft’s solution? To forcibly install a Bing search extension in Chrome for Office 365 ProPlus users.
The company says that this is designed for enterprise and business users to find relevant workplace information directly from the browser address bar, but we all know Microsoft is desperate to get more people using its search engine. It sounds harmless, but here’s why forcing people to use Bing won’t help Microsoft in the long run.
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Fast forward to today, Bing still has a few problems that need to be addressed, and where Microsoft should put some extra attention towards, instead of forcing Bing down people’s throats. These include both search relevance and design — the two core areas of any search engine.
First of all, there is a search relevance. In our testing, searching for Digital Trends on Google and Bing provide two different results. On Bing, we get a look at some older Digital Trends articles, which at the time of this writing, were older stories from 4, 6, and 3 hours ago. Compared that to Google, and articles are more relevant pulled from a most recent time frame.
Octarine, the continuous Kubernetes security company that simplifies DevSecOps, today announced the release of two new open source projects: the Kubernetes Common Configuration Scoring System (KCCSS), a new framework for rating security risks associated with misconfigurations, and kube-scan, a workload and assessment tool that scans Kubernetes configurations and settings to identify and rank potential vulnerabilities in applications within minutes.
Octarine, a startup that helps automate security of Kubernetes workloads, released an open-source scanning tool today. The tool, which is called Kube-scan, is designed to help developers understand the level of security risk in their Kubernetes clusters.
The company is also open-sourcing a second tool called The Kubernetes Common Configuration Scoring System, or KCCSS for short, which is the underlying configuration framework used in Kube-scan.
As Ocatrine’s head of product Julien Sobrier points out, there are 30 security settings in Kubernetes, and Kube-scan can help you see where you might be vulnerable on any one of them, measured on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being extremely vulnerable.
About a week and a half ago, I mentioned that I'd been working on making SReview, my AGPLv3 video review and transcode system work from inside a Kubernetes cluster. I noted at the time that while I'd made it work inside minikube, it couldn't actually be run from within a real Kubernetes cluster yet, mostly because I misunderstood how Kubernetes works, and assumed you could just mount the same Kubernetes volume from multiple pods, and share data that way (answer: no you can't).
The way to fix that is to share the data not through volumes, but through something else. That would require that the individual job containers download and upload files somehow.
I had a look at how the Net::Amazon::S3 perl module works (answer: it's very simple really) and whether it would be doable to add a transparent file access layer to SReview which would access files either on the local file system, or an S3 service (answer: yes).
OpenShift provides an internal container image registry that can be deployed in an OpenShift environment to locally manage images.
IBM’s shares rose by around 5% on January 21 after it said its fourth-quarter revenues had increased by 0.1%, to $21.8 billion, after five quarters in a row of year-over-year sales declines.
Big Blue’s fortunes were boosted by a new mainframe product line and revenues from open-source software giant Red Hat, which it acquired in July 2019 for around $34 billion. Adjusted net income for the quarter fell about 5%, to $4.2 billion, while the company reported earnings per share of $4.71 compared with analysts’ consensus estimates of $4.69. IBM saw its full-year 2019 revenue fall 3.1%, to $77.1 billion, and its net income drop by 10%, to $11.4 billion.
International Business Machines Corp. is expected to report fourth-quarter earnings after the market closes Tuesday. The technology giant may be heading for its sixth successive quarter of year-over-year revenue decline—but has been trying to reverse that slide, in part, through the $33 billion purchase of open source software giant Red Hat Inc.
International Business Machines Corp. reported a slight increase in quarterly revenue, ending a streak of falling sales and providing a first indication Chief Executive Ginni Rometty’s roughly $33 billion acquisition of open-source software giant Red Hat may help turn around Big Blue’s fortunes.
Fred Araujo, a research scientist in the Cognitive Cybersecurity Intelligence Group at IBM Research, said IBM developed lightweight SysFlow agent software and monitoring tools as a way to provide more context around the telemetry data being collected while simultaneously reducing the amount of data that needs to be stored.
SysFlow encodes a representation of system activities into a compact format that records how applications interact with their environment, Araujo said, noting that level of context provides deeper visibility in everything from container workloads to cybersecurity forensics. However, unlike existing monitoring platforms, SysFlow doesn’t require IT organizations to collect a massive amount of data to achieve that goal—it is intended to provide for a superset of the NetFlow framework used to analyze network traffic patterns to capture system events, he said.
Araujo noted IBM doesn’t envision SysFlow eliminating the need for legacy log analytics platforms, as they provide a way to analyze log data. However, SysFlow does enable IT organizations to apply analytics via a graph-like visualization to surface patterns that goes beyond a comparative simple rules-based approach, said Araujo. For example, SysFlow’s approach will make it easier to uncover the relationship between various events that make up a cybersecurity attack and subsequently to identify what countermeasures to employ to create the appropriate kill chain response. It also should substantially reduce the amount of fatigue cybersecurity teams experience from chasing down false-positive alerts, he said.
The book outlines how open source principles can be used to build a better business by powering the transformation of not only technology, but also culture and business practices.
However, there is no single understanding of exactly what digital transformation is. Most people recognise that the world has changed with digital devices and services connecting everything and everyone, and customers have more choice than ever before.
As a result, every industry faces disruption and businesses have to change – transform – if they are to meet new consumer demands and stay ahead of the competition.
The killer feature of the Plasma Desktop has been the KDE Personal Information Manager, Kontact. I have been using it since 2004 time frame and although we have had a tenuous relationship over the years, specifically the switch to the Akonadi and the pain that came with it in the early years. I actively use Kontact on multiple machines for the feature richness of it and haven’t found anything in existence that I like better. I also exclusively use Kontact on openSUSE Tumbleweed with the Plasma Desktop Environment.
I have decided to publish my reference concerning the maintenance it requires. I could be an edge case since I have five mail accounts and multiple calendar accounts as well. Historically, I have had issues where losing network connection, regaining it, suspending and resuming my machine over a period of time would cause the thing to have fits. So, here are my fixes, whenever the need arises.
You know those stories of people that have these crazy habit ts that don’t make sense, things they do that don’t really help or solve a problem like making sure the spoons are organized in just the right fashion? Yeah, well that could be what this whole post is and my obsessive-compulsive tenancies are in full expression. So, take all that into account should you choose to use any of these references.
Linux 5.5 is likely to be released later today and with that are many new features. But as soon as 5.5 is released it marks the opening of the Linux 5.6 merge window and this next kernel has us particularly exciting... It's certainly shaping up to be one of the most exciting kernel cycles in recent times with many blockbuster features and improvements.
Earlier this month I wrote about Intel SST Core-Power patches as part of Intel's Speed Select's functionality for more control over per-core power/frequency behavior based upon the software running on each core. The "core-power" profile support appears ready now for Linux 5.6.
While Intel Speed Select Technology support was added to Linux last year as one of the new features with Cascade Lake, the "Core-Power" (or SST-CP) profile hadn't been wired up in full to this point. Intel SST-CP allows for dealing with per-core priorities when encountering power constraints.
When it comes to virtualization - mostly semi-pro or casual usage you'd find in a typical nerd setting, VirtualBox offers an excellent bundle of goodies; a friendly UI, lots of features, reasonable performance, simple and advanced options to suit every skill and mood. I've written about VirtualBox many times in the past, reviewing a whole range of topics, from the Guest Additions configuration to sharing & port-forwarding and then some. Several dozen articles to be more precise. Including major release reviews among them, of course.
Recently, VirtualBox 6.X has been released, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to take a look at what's new, check some of the improvements and fixes, and see whether you should move off the 5.X branch onto the latest edition. Come along, let's see what gives.
Today we are pleased to announce another significant update, MuseScore 3.4. In addition to dozens of bug fixes, it introduces UX improvements when working with score elements and telemetry.
Right-click on the Appimage, then go to Properties -> Permissions, check the box ‘Allow executing file as program’. Finally run the Appimage to launch MuseScore 3.4 and enjoy!
MuseScore also available as Snap (runs in sandbox), which can be installed directly from Ubuntu Software, though it’s still v3.3.4 at the moment.
Also the flathub repository contains MuseScore flatpak package....
Who doesn’t love following their favorite celebrities, shows, or people they like, in general, or even FOSSLinux? One social platform that has been helping people and organizations a lot is Twitter.
Now, if you want to use Twitter on your Linux system, there’s the web browser, but here, installing a dedicated desktop client have their advantages. In this article, we showcase you a native Twitter client for the Linux platform Cawbird.
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Compared to the browser web interface, which looks slightly puffy and bloated, and consumes a lot more resources than it is supposed to, Cawbird has a pretty minimal and efficient interface. It is also a very lightweight client and doesn’t make your system work too hard.
The Zombie Panic! Team put out another update on the progress towards version 3.1, what's turned into a massive overhaul to many parts of the game as Linux support also comes in.
Not long to go though, with version 3.1 Beta Update 5 being released yesterday which should be the last major update as they move onto focusing on the smaller things to get a "public release as soon as possible". This still could be months away, depending on how many issues come up.
After an impressive tech demo, then an expanded demo, the physics-enhanced 'clothformer' Lazr is now on Kickstarter to help it cross the development finishing line.
The developer, Garrick Campsey, didn't originally plan this to be a full game. Being made as a result of a challenge from another game developer adding dynamic motion simulation into a platformer. A video of the prototype then went somewhat viral on Twitter and they decided to continue it into a proper game.
DoomEd was a program written by Carmack and Romero on 1993, to directly build the levels from the original Doom. Seventeen years later, the developers behind Twilight Edge Software are releasing a free and independent port based on that program, appropriately called ReDoomEd, which is based on DoomEd's source code, publicly released by John Romero himself on 2015.
Plague Inc: Evolved, a strategy/simulation mix that supports Linux, has seen a sudden surge in popularity recently as China has a real-life Coronavirus outbreak people are testing it out in the game.
In the last 24 hours, it's hit a new all-time high peak-player count of over fifteen thousand people all trying to cover the world in something terrible. This is thanks to the modding support the game has with the Steam Workshop, there's multiple packs that add in some form of the new Chinese Coronavirus.
As shown yesterday the new video BIOS of the Radeon RX 5600 XT paired with the corrected SMC firmware on Linux yields impressive performance improvements that -- similar to Windows -- allows the card to compete better with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 2060. For Linux users, activating the Valve-funded ACO compiler back-end for the Radeon "RADV" Vulkan driver helps turn up the competition even more.
This somewhat bizarre but at the same time completely original game, sponsored by the Victoria State Government and Film Victoria Australia, has been out since July 2016 with Linux support, but it was overlooked by almost everyone. Also, it didn't help the fact that several months ago I requested the developer to send a copy for the GOL staff to check, but they said they were no longer handing review keys. Although it barely has Steam user reviews, it has received a number of awards and the few people who wrote reviews for it seemed to like it.
Although most of the courses were paid, a couple of weeks ago the site had to shut down, following the ramifications of one of its founders' tragic death by cancer in 2017 (memorial and portfolio page); however, they decided to release absolutely all the content (about 200 GB of videos) for free to download, out of appreciation for all the community's support across the years.
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In my personal case, I didn't check any course due to lack of time, so I can't tell you about their general quality, but if you want to get a glimpse, they have a YouTube account with dozens of old videos to see if their style of teaching suits you.
This unfortunate event shows another facet of such an horrific disease; sometimes it's not only about the extreme torment of the affected person and the psychological devastation that causes on relatives and friends, but also the catastrophic financial consequences that worsen an already grisly situation. However, an excellent gesture like this at least helps to keep the person's legacy alive, and opens the slight possibility that somebody uses this (now free) content to release a masterpiece in a couple of years. One can only hope...
Over the past few months, the devs have made some really cool additions to the game, but have also made choices that have angered the players. The community is still reeling from the decision to end the loot system and switch to a blueprints system for upgrades, which many of the players detested once they realized how much they lost in the transfer. We’ll see how the community reacts in the longterm to this decision, but if you’ve been a loyal player on Mac or Linux this entire time, it has to be a little heartbreaking.
Open Surge, a fun 2D retro platformer inspired by Sonic games, available to install in Ubuntu Software easily via Snap package.
Open Surge is also a game creation system that lets you unleash your creativity! It’s free, open-source, and written from the ground up in C language, using the Allegro game programming library.
You can play the using a keyboard or a joystick.
For years, Kate had a very generic icon. Unlike most other editors, that have very distinctive ones, we went with an icon that represented the use case of the program but provided no branding.
In 2014, we tried to improve our branding by introducing a mascot - Kate the Woodpecker. Thought we used that in some places, like on the web site and in the about dialog, overall, the only thing most people did see was the generic icon (that even differs a lot between different icon themes).
I was not very happy with this and reached out last year to Tyson Tan to improve on this, given he already provided our mascot design. I wanted to have some distinct icon that matches a bit the idea we had with the mascot.
After some iterations this process has lead to a new icon for our lovely text editor as can be seen below.
Plasma has gained its first user of the new notification inline reply feature in 5.18: Telegram Desktop!
Big thanks to Kai Uwe Broulik for venturing forth to contribute a patch to Telegram that made this possible.
Next up, we have a winner for the Plasma 5.18 wallpaper competition: the elegant and soothing Volna, by Nikita Babin!
KDE developers were busy as always this week working to polish up the forthcoming KDE Plasma 5.18 and other areas of their open-source desktop stack.
I spent a week in Delhi on a trip to be part of conf.kde.org. During the event I twitted a whole bunch, for each of the talks, but here’s a bit of a (short) write-up. First of several, because I want to get the general “I traveled” out of the way, and focus on other people’s work later.
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I gave four talks (Calamares, Transifex, Frameworks, and more Frameworks) and also some impromptu stuff during a technical break (about Rick Astley). I’ll put them up on my site eventually, when I figure out how to do that effectively (they’re generated out of Markdown). There might be pictures of those talks; I took pictures of most of the other talks.
Other talks were about translation, and Open Source migrations, and Plasma deployments, and GCompris, and Plasma Mobule, and .. well, and lots of stuff. I really enjoyed hearing from all the students and other KDE contributors how they work. New student attendees were treated to a show of “here’s how we work, this is how welcome you are”, which I think is a good way to start.
We’re currently finishing up the cycle towards GNOME 3.36, which means it’s almost time to start branching and thinking about what we want to land early in the 3.37 development cycle. My goal is to branch gtksourceview-4-6 which will be our long-term stable branch for gtksourceview-4.x (similar to how the gnome-3-24 branch is our long-term stable for the gtksourceview-3.x series. After that, master will move to GTK 4 as we start to close in on GTK 4 development. The miss-alignment in version numbers is an unfortunate reality, but a reality I inherited so we’ll keep on keepin’ on.
That means if you are not setting a branch in your flatpak manifests, you will want to start doing that when we branch (probably in the next couple of weeks) or your builds will start to fail. Presumably, this only will affect your Nightly builds, because who targets upstream master in production builds, not you surely!
Manjaro is an Arch-based Linux distribution that is perceived in the community to be better than Arch for those who are less experienced in the Linux world. The distribution combines a lot of hard work and effort to offer an excellent user experience out-of-the-box. It is a very active distro nowadays.
In today’s article, we’ll give you 5 possible reasons for why you may consider using Manjaro as your daily driver OS.
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Manjaro is an excellent introduction to the Arch world for those who don’t want to be fully invested in the technicalities of Arch. So much care and effort was put into it to make suitable for a lot of people out-of-the-box.
Dracut that is used for generating the initramfs image on Linux distributions like Fedora / RHEL, Debian, openSUSE, and many other distributions could be much faster.
Former Debian developer Michael Stapelberg recently demonstrated that Dracut is quite slow and could be much faster. Stapelberg was researching the initramfs generation speed by Dracut as part of his work on Distri, the experimental Linux distribution project researching fast package management. Distri remains just a research project for constructing a simple and fast package management system for constructing a Linux distribution built off Stapelberg's frustrations with Debian.
What's your favorite Linux distribution? Take our 7th annual poll. Some have come and gone, but there are hundreds of Linux distributions alive and well today. The combination of distribution, package manager, and desktop creates an endless amount of customized environments for Linux users.
We asked the community of writers what their favorite is and why. While there were some commonalities (Fedora and Ubuntu were popular choices for a variety of reasons), we heard a few surprises as well. Here are a few of their responses:
"I use the Fedora distro! I love the community of people who work together to make an awesome operating system that showcases the greatest innovations in the free and open source software world." — Matthew Miller
"I use Arch at home. As a gamer, I want easy access to the latest Wine versions and GFX drivers, as well as large amounts of control over my OS. Give me a rolling-release distro with every package at bleeding-edge." —Aimi Hobson
"NixOS, with nothing coming close in the hobbyist niche." —Alexander Sosedkin
"I have used every Fedora version as my primary work OS. Meaning, I started with the first one. Early on, I asked myself if there would ever come a time when I couldn't remember which number I was on. That time has arrived. What year is it, anyway?" —Hugh Brock
We are proud to announce the immediate availability of Solus 4.1 Fortitude, a new Solus 4 series release. This release delivers a brand new desktop experience, updated software stacks, and hardware enablement.
It's already been over nine months since the release of Solus 4 while now this popular Linux desktop distribution has been succeeded by Solus 4.1
In this video, we are looking at Manjaro KDE 19.0 pre3.
Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora this week.
I will not hold office hours next week due to travel, but if you’ll be at FOSDEM, you can catch me in person.
Fedora IoT already uses swap-on-ZRAM by default given IoT devices are often running with limited amounts of RAM, but for Fedora Workstation 33 the developers are looking at enabling SWAP-on-ZRAM by default for all new installations.
SWAP-on-ZRAM is for compressing the swap space in RAM leading to lower memory utilization / more RAM left for the applications/services themselves. This isn't the first time that Fedora Workstation has pursued swap-on-ZRAM but they hope Fedora 33 will be the charm where it happens. Currently developers are debating on which implementation path to pursue.
The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:
Louis-Philippe Véronneau (pollo) Olek Wojnar (olek) Sven Eckelmann (ecsv) Utkarsh Gupta (utkarsh) Robert Haist (rha)
The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:
Denis Danilov Joachim Falk Thomas Perret Richard Laager
Congratulations!
The misconception concerns the openness of the PinePhone. On numerous occasions I’ve seen the PinePhone being refereed to as closed-source on one level or another. I don’t know the origin of this misconception nor do I understand the reason why it has become propagated throughout the internet. What I do know, however, is that it has been repeatedly quoted in online articles covering the PinePhone or other Linux devices for over a year now.
So let’s set the record straight: the PinePhone is not ‘full of closed-source firmware’ and, moreover, is one of the most open devices out there.
arduino-copilot, released today, makes it easy to use Haskell to program an Arduino. It's a FRP style system, and uses the Copilot DSL to generate embedded C code.
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Copilot is quite an impressive embedding of C in Haskell. It was developed for NASA by Galois and is intended for safety-critical applications. So it's neat to be able to repurpose it into hobbyist microcontrollers. (I do hope to get more type safety added to Copilot though, currently it seems rather easy to confuse eg miles with kilometers when using it.)
I'm not the first person to use Copilot to program an Arduino. Anthony Cowley showed how to do it in Abstractions for the Functional Roboticist back in 2013. But he had to write a skeleton of C code around the C generated by Copilot. Amoung other features, arduino-copilot automates generating that C skeleton. So you don't need to remember to enable GPIO pin 13 for output in the setup function; arduino-copilot sees you're using the LED and does that for you.
frp-arduino was a big inspiration too, especially how easy it makes it to generate an Arduino sketch withough writing any C. The "=:" operator in copilot-arduino is copied from it. But ftp-arduino contains its own DSL, which seems less capable than Copilot. And when I looked at using frp-arduino for some real world sensing and control, it didn't seem to be possible to integrate it with existing Arduino libraries written in C. While I've not done that with arduino-copilot yet, I did design it so it should be reasonably easy to integrate it with any Arduino library.
FOSDEM 2020 will take place next week, and there will be several interesting talks about open-source hardware and software development.
Dream team for classrooms worldwide: Arduino Uno WiFi Rev2 for CTC GO! joins Open Roberta Lab, the biggest open source coding platform made in Europe.
The Arduino Uno WiFi Rev2 is the fourth Arduino board to be integrated into the Open Roberta Lab, which is currently supporting a total of 13 robots and microcontrollers to enable children worldwide to adopt a playful approach to coding. By “dragging and dropping” the colorful programming blocks called “NEPO” hundreds of thousands of users worldwide from more than 100 countries per year create their own programs to make their hardware come to life.
We've already looked at open-source alternatives to several major Google apps and services in this series, but there are still a few categories left to go over. Now it's time to check out the open-source equivalents to Google Drive, the company's cloud storage product.
Thankfully, the feature gap between Google Drive and the alternatives isn't massive — all of them have clients for desktop and mobile, easy file sharing, and other features. Depending on what hardware you have on hand, these options might not even cost you anything.
ProtonVPN is the Swiss-based VPN run by the people behind the highly regarded ProtonMail encrypted email service.
It has been a welcome addition to the VPN marketplace since launching in 2017 and despite its relative youth, it has hit the ground running in a way not too many other start-up VPNs have managed.
Now, the guys behind ProtonVPN have taken two big steps which are likely to cement their reputation as one of the most dependable providers on the market. They have gone fully open source and submitted to a full independent security review.
ProtonVPN has always been one of the most respected and trustworthy VPN services. As noted in our hands-on review, you can count on having your privacy protected in the most secure way possible. In addition, this is a no-logs VPN service, which means that connection and usage logs are never collected. However, to further cement its position, this VPN service has now decided to open-source its software. We also have the results of the VPN’s latest independent audit, showing that ProtonVPN is a highly secure solution.
When it comes to making its software open source, ProtonVPN counts on making its code as transparent as possible. This is a bold move as it can show potential weaknesses, considering that just about anyone can inspect the way this VPN functions. In other words, this move is showing us ProtonVPN’s confidence in its software, which is going to have positive long-term effects.
The code for ProtonVPN apps on all supported platforms - Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows - is now open source, the maker announces today, a move that follows a security audit from an independent party.
The decision distances the service from all the other options on the market and is in line with the company's belief in ethics, transparency, and security as core values for a trusted VPN (virtual private network) provider.
In a blog post, ProtonVPN just announced that it is open-sourcing its source code and has released the security audit reports as well.
With this step, ProtonVPN aims to become the most transparent and accountable VPN provider in the VPN market. The company has also conducted an independent security audit, which will become a crucial factor for users in trusting their VPN service.
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ProtonVPN has operated as a free service as well as a premium one. It is currently used by millions around the world and serves as an important tool for Internet freedom in places like Iran, China, and Russia. While there are currently open-source VPN clients available, ProtonVPB is “the first to open source all their apps and publish a security audit of them all.”
In a statement issued to Fossbytes, ProtonVPN said that its app differs quite significantly from other open-source VPN clients such as OpenVPN as they provide a complete VPN service and “include additional functionality such as kill switch, always-on VPN, IKEv2 protocol support, split tunneling, etc.”
Boston Dynamics‘ robot dog Spot has gone through extensive updates in order to become the finished product it is today, and now the Softbank-owned company will make the bot’s SDK available to everyone via GitHub. The release will allow developers and robotics alike to “develop custom applications that enable Spot to do useful tasks across a wide range of industries,” according to Boston Dynamics VP Michael Perry.
The access was previously only open to early adopters, but now it’s available as open-source code. However, fellow developers will have to join Boston Dynamics’ early adopter program in order to lease a robot. The company says its to “create custom methods of controlling the robot, integrate sensor information into data analysis tools and design custom payloads which expand the capabilities of the base robot platform,” according to the company.
Open-source software (OSS) is built upon code that's free and available to anyone who needs it. It adheres to the Debian (Linux) free software guidelines. The only type of certification comes from the Open Source Initiative, which makes sure that coding listed as "open source" meets their criteria by a) Being available for distribution to anyone without any restrictions, b) Making sure the source code is available, and c) Including a license that stipulates that any modifications or improvements are released with a new name or version number.
Unlike closed, proprietary code, open-source requires no licensing fees or permission as long as you adhere to the terms of service outlined by the developer. Although tech support is hit-or-miss and depends on the developer, it has a large and active community of developers who are happy to help you work out any issues. You'll also find dozens of digital libraries on the internet that contain base code, modules, and fully formed apps that you can use, alter, and share. There are many reasons why working with open source code is preferable, and these are especially applicable to network monitoring apps and tools.
2020 is the year in which open source will become even more fundamental to the success of companies as they move to become fully-fledged, digitally-led businesses; proprietary software will lose relevance; companies will increasingly turn to the cloud to deliver value and capitalise on growth opportunities; and containers will finally become mainstream.
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He also believes that the new decade will herald unprecedented growth when it comes to companies not only becoming container-led but also cloud-native - ready to benefit even more from a cloud-centric (and open) landscape.
“South African businesses are having more serious discussions around multi-cloud and hybrid cloud implementations. Throughout this, an open approach, relying on an agile approach through containers, gives organisations the impetus they need to be digital-first,” he says.
As these names suggest, open source references a mindset popular in the Silicon Valley tech industry. Artificial intelligence and machine learning operate on computer coding and incredibly refined hardware components.
The open-source mindset believes that making these batches of code and hardware blueprints available to the public does more for humanity than does keeping it all close to the chest.
In contrast, Rodney Don Holder explains that a closed source approach seeks to protect code and hardware from the public eye. Their concern is more proprietary than it is collaborative. One example of closed source software is Apple as they work hard to maintain control of their software.
What is Apache Tomcat? Essentially it’s an open-source Java servlet and Java Server Page container that lets developers implement an array of enterprise Java applications. Tomcat also runs a HTTP web server environment in which Java code can run.
Three years after the original release of Java in 1995, Sun Microsystems architect James Duncan Davidson developed an open-source servlet reference implementation for the first Java Servlet API. Java servlets are small Java programs that define how responses and requests are handled by the server. A developer would write their servlet or JSP and let Tomcat conduct all of the routing and backend work.
Teledyne LeCroy, a worldwide leader in electronic test and measurement solutions and a business unit of Teledyne Technologies Incorporated, announces today the availability of an open-source software tool, SignalIntegrity, offering free solutions to signal integrity problems for design and test engineers. In order to avoid signal integrity issues in today's world of gigabit-per-second transfer rates, engineers must have superior tools for the necessary combination of simulation, modeling and measurement. The goal of this software is to provide free tools for solving real-time signal integrity problems. More than 1,500 users have downloaded the Python-based software since it has been made available.
Variety is the spice of life, and now there is another DevOps platform to choose from. OneDev is a new, all-in-one, open source Git server with a simple to use UI, customizable issue states and fields, and auto-refreshing issue boards. Browse some of its features and see how it compares to other popular tools. Who knows, maybe OneDev is the platform that you have been searching for.
It also empowers the next generation of developers so that they can build a new breed of tamper-proof enterprise software systems and open internet services. They aim at democratizing software development.
He also added that the Bronze release of the Internet Computer would provide the developers and enterprises with infinite possibilities of building on the Internet Computer. All of this is a reflection of the strength of the Dfinity team that they have made so far.
Dfinity has also said that its Internet Computer Protocol enables a new type of software that goes by the name autonomous software. This software guarantees permanent APIs which cannot be revoked.
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Their second major milestone is of demoing a decentralized web app called LinkedUp on the Internet Computer, which can run on an independent data center in Switzerland.
Google has made ALBERT (A Lite BERT) available in an open source version. ALBERT is a deep-learning natural language processing model that the developers say uses far fewer parameters than BERT without sacrificing accuracy.
Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, or BERT, is the self-supervised method released by Google in 2018. It has become known for the impressive results the technique has achieved on a range of NLP tasks while relying on un-annotated text drawn from the web. Most similar NLP systems are based on text that has been labeled specifically for a given task.
Google and its partners at the Janelia Research Campus today released the largest, most detailed set of brain scans ever published. The project encompasses nearly one-third of the brain of a fruit fly and includes detailed mappings for more than 25 thousand neurons featuring more than 20 million synapses. The best part: it’s all been released open-source to the public. This is a great day for science.
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Luckily for organizations and individuals who can’t afford the resources it would take to build this particular project, Google and the scientists at the Janelia Research Campus have published the entire project open-source. Even better, the team painstakingly formatted the data, images, videos, and other information in a way that makes it easily accessible to everyday people and usable by world-class researchers.
In fact, Rust has been voted the most-loved language for the past four years in Stack Overflow's annual developer surveys, even though 97% of respondents haven't used it. So how has it become the most-loved programming language?
"The short answer is that Rust solves pain points present in many other languages, providing a solid step forward with a limited number of downsides," explains Jake Goulding on Stack Overflow's blog.
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Mozilla Research describes Rust as a "systems programming language that focuses on speed, memory safety, and parallelism".
It's often seen as an alternative to systems programming languages like C and C++ that developers use to create game engines, operating systems, file systems, browser components, and VR simulation engines. Mozilla, which continues to sponsor the project, says programmers can use Rust to make software that's less prone to bugs and attacks.
I have been in an on-and-off relationship with Mozilla Firefox for the past five years. Every time I’d get ecstatic over a major new Firefox update — hoping to, at long last, break free from the hegemony of Google Chrome — my hopes would be crushed as soon as I began browsing the web like I normally do.
Firefox’s performance would fall noticeably short and struggle to keep up with my workflow, sending me scurrying back to Google Chrome after a few minutes of poking around. No matter how compelling the rest of Mozilla’s offerings were, they could never convince me to hit that “Yes” button whenever Firefox asked whether I’d like to set it as my default browser. Catching up to Chrome almost started to seem like a far-fetched goal for Firefox — until recently.
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Today, in addition to being fast, Firefox is resource-efficient, unlike most of its peers. I don’t have to think twice before firing up yet another tab. It’s rare that I’m forced to close an existing tab to make room for a new one. On Firefox, my 2015 MacBook Pro’s fans don’t blast past my noise-canceling headphones, which happened fairly regularly on Chrome as it pushed my laptop’s fans to their helicopter-like limits to keep things running.
This rare balance of efficiency and performance is the result of the countless under-the-hood upgrades Firefox has rolled out in the last couple of years. One of the recent major performance updates arrived in May when Mozilla natively integrated a handful of clever optimizations for which users previously had to rely on third-party extensions.
Cakes are a long standing weapon in the browser wars. Whenever a major browser hits a new milestone or makes an important release, cakes are rapidly exchanged.
The legacy_file_format pragma is deactivated. It is now a no-op. In its place, the SQLITE_DBCONFIG_LEGACY_FILE_FORMAT option to sqlite3_db_config() is provided. The legacy_file_format pragma is deactivated because (1) it is rarely useful and (2) it is incompatible with VACUUM in schemas that have tables with both generated columns and descending indexes.
This first big release of 2020 is SQLite 3.31. One of the major features of SQLite 3.31 is support for generated/computed columns. With generated columns, the columns of a table are values returned by a function of other columns in the same row. These auto-generated columns are read-only and have other limitations but are open to a variety of interesting use-cases.
Elastic N.V. (ESTC) is a provider of opensource software which is used in applications like real time search and analytics. Elastic’s rapid growth is being driven by a rapid growth in the volume of data being generated globally and the need for improved search tools. Elastic potentially has a bright future even as cloud computing vendors introduce the same technology, provided the company continues to offer customers a compelling value proposition.
There's a new version of MariaDB that is designed to make it easier to develop apps using smart transactions and cloud-native data storage.
MariaDB began life as an alternative to MySQL when Oracle took over the original MySQL. The new release, MariaDB X4, was announced by MariaDB Corp, which develops and sells an enterprise version of the open source MariaDB database management system. MariaDB has a SQL interface for accessing data, alongside GIS and JSON features.
LibreOffice 6.4 RC3 is available for downloading now. There are builds for all main OS for 64 bit. There is a 32 bit build for Windows also. These builds are only for testing.
You’ve probably heard that WordPress is open-source software, and may know that it’s created and run by volunteers. WordPress enthusiasts share many examples of how WordPress changed people’s lives for the better. This monthly series shares some of those lesser-known, amazing stories.
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Robert first came into contact with WordPress in 2014 when he and a friend started a local tech blog. Before that, all he knew was basic, outdated HTML from high school and some knowledge of Adobe Dreamweaver. They decided to use WordPress, and their new blog looked like it came from the future. They used a theme from the repo and got such positive feedback from the blog they decided to open a content and media publishing agency.
While they got a few web redesign jobs thanks to the exposure the blog brought, they lacked the administrative and business skills needed and ended up going their separate ways. Then in his first real job after college Robert finally took it upon himself to learn the ins and outs of WordPress. He learned how to install WordPress on a server and did some research on customizing themes.
With that knowledge alone he got his first web design clients and started earning nearly as much as he did at his job. Robert soon realized that free WordPress themes would only take him so far, especially with his limited code skills.
Because in Malawi only people who travel abroad have access to credit cards, paying for premium themes was impossible. Like many WordPress designers in developing countries, Robert turned to using pirated themes instead. He knew that was both unsafe and unethical, and decided to learn how to code. Knowing how to build themes from scratch would surely help him rise above the competition.
The Free Software Foundation this week announced that it has established a petition demanding that Microsoft release its proprietary Windows 7 code as free software.
The foundation aims to get 7,777 signatures to that effect. By "free," the organization means that "the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software," according to its definition. The organization claims that free software is different from open source software in terms of "values."
Windows 7 reached its end-of-life stage on Jan. 14, meaning that Microsoft no longer distributes free software patches for it, although a paid Extended Security Updates program is available. The operating system is considered to be "unsupported" software by Microsoft, and it's thought to be potentially insecure to use it, since Microsoft won't patch software vulnerabilities, even if they are publicly known.
After all, Microsoft is huge on everything open source these days, right? It’s all about open source, listening to user feedback, and acting on it.
The feedback from FSF might raise a few hackles at Microsoft, though, as the wording of the petition is, shall we say, on the strong and blunt side.
It reads: “On January 14th, Windows 7 reached its official ‘end-of-life,’ bringing an end to its updates as well as its ten years of poisoning education, invading privacy, and threatening user security. The end of Windows 7’s lifecycle gives Microsoft the perfect opportunity to undo past wrongs, and to upcycle it instead.
“We call on them to release it as free software, and give it to the community to study and improve. As there is already a precedent for releasing some core Windows utilities as free software, Microsoft has nothing to lose by liberating a version of their operating system that they themselves say has ‘reached its end.’”
And FSF further directly addresses Microsoft executives to “demand that Windows 7 be released as free software”, and urges them “to respect the freedom and privacy of your users – not simply strongarm them into the newest Windows version.”
WTF?! The Free Software Foundation (FSF), the same group behind the 2009-era Windows 7 "sins" campaign that encouraged users to throw Windows 7 in the trash, has now started another initiative -- one that demands Windows 7 be opened up as free software.
The FSF has launched the "Upcycle Windows 7" petition, and if the opening paragraph doesn't persuade Microsoft to open source Windows 7, then I don't know what will.
"On January 14th, Windows 7 reached its official 'end-of-life,' bringing an end to its updates as well as its ten years of poisoning education, invading privacy, and threatening user security. The end of Windows 7's lifecycle gives Microsoft the perfect opportunity to undo past wrongs, and to upcycle it instead," the petition reads.
Yikes. At any rate, most users probably agree that Windows 7 already undid Microsoft's past wrongs, being absolved for the sins of Windows Vista. Hey, maybe the FSF should ask for Windows Vista instead. You know, shoot for the moon and land in the stars kind of thing. Something's better than nothing.
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Then there's the not insignificant fact that much of the codebase in Windows 7 lives on in Windows 10. In other words, the chance of seeing Windows 7 in a GitHub repo anytime soon is unlikely, to say the least.
Windows 7 reached its “end-of-life” on January 14, 2020, as Microsoft stopped releasing any free security updates for the operating system. However, on January 23, 2020, the Free Software Foundation filed a petition urging Microsoft to open-source Windows 7 and upcycle the OS.
“Microsoft’s support of Windows 7 is over, but its life doesn’t have to end. We call on Microsoft to upcycle it instead,” said the foundation.
The representatives of the Free Software Foundation, an organization promoting the idea of free software was published online petition in support of the proposal to enable independent programmers to improve Windows 7. For the implementation of this idea requires access to the OS code. Fund SPO offers Microsoft to allow third-party developers to modify and distribute the software to respect the users, not to force them to move to other operating systems because of the lack of choice. In the organization plan to receive from the Corporation of evidence of user support. The Fund SPO 7777 intend to collect signatures to petition Upcycle Windows 7 and he set the example of the production of utilities of the OS in the form of freely available programs, which is practiced now.
The Wikimedia Foundation selected multidisciplinary firm Snøhetta to develop the new brand identity for Wikipedia, its free open platform. Aiming to create visuals that push forward Wikimedia’s international commitment to “setting knowledge free”, the process will be entirely documented.
One of the gatherings I attended last year featured a young man asking if anyone felt comfortable doing git rebase “without adult supervision”, as he put it. He seemed as surprised to see anyone answer in the affirmative as I was to see only a very few people so answer. This seems to me to be a suboptimal state of affairs, and thus this post describes how you, too, can learn to become comfortable doing git rebase “without adult supervision”.
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Fortunately, one of my colleagues pointed me at tig, which provides a dynamic ASCII-art display of the selected commits. This is again not as good as gitk, but it is probably as good as it gets in a text-only environment.
These tools do have their limits, and other techniques are required if you are actively rearranging more than a few hundred commits. If you are in that situation, you should look into the workflows used by high-level maintainers or by the -stable maintainer, who commonly wrangle many hundreds or even thousands of commits. Extreme numbers of commits will of course require significant automation, and many large-scale maintainers do in fact support their workflows with elaborate scripting.
Doing advanced git work without being able to see what you are doing is about as much a recipe for success as chopping wood in the dark. So do yourself a favor and use tools that allow you to see what you are doing!
We can populate each place “between digits” with one of three possible values: a plus sign, minus sign, or nothing. To check all the possible permutations, we’ll use an indicator function similarly to The Knapsack Problem. In this case, though, there are three possible values, so we need to loop over numbers in the ternary numeral system.
The only operation we’ll need will be the increment, so we don’t need the full support for arithmetic in base 3. We can implement the increment ourselves: we start from the right of the number, change any 2 into 0 and move left. Once we find 0 or 1, we increment it and we’re done.
To create the expression, we just need to intersperse the digits with the operators. See the apply subroutine below.
To evaluate the expression, we won’t use eval, as we don’t want to introduce security problems into our code. As the operations are just addition and subtraction, we can transform the expression into a large sum of positive and negative numbers (the latter correspond to the numbers being subtracted). We’ll use a regexp match to split the expression.
Python 3.9 is still in development. This releasee, 3.9.0a3 is the third of six planned alpha releases. Alpha releases are intended to make it easier to test the current state of new features and bug fixes and to test the release process. During the alpha phase, features may be added up until the start of the beta phase (2020-05-18) and, if necessary, may be modified or deleted up until the release candidate phase (2020-08-10). Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.
There are a few things going on here. Important fields are rendered in their own column to make it easier to scan. To reduce visual clutter, the time field is only rendered if it changes and I've set the date format to time only, which is fine for local development (if you forget what day it is you need a vacation). The message column has some syntax highlighting applied to it, tuned for web development, but more importantly it is word-wrapped. Finally there is a column for the python file and line that called the log method.
This would be my ideal logging for web-development, your mileage may vary and you may want to tune it for your domain.
We are glad to announce the release of Relatorio version 0.9.1.
Relatorio is a templating library mainly for OpenDocument using also OpenDocument as source format.
As I progress with my journey as a computer coder, I have realized that for one to master the art of writing scripts and applications, hours of practice matter more than months of study being spent on How To Program books. Reading theory about computer programming matters, but it does not make one a code writer. Based on such conclusion, I have decided to share real world scenarios materialized in computer code, mostly Python.
Through this article you're going to learn how to put in practice basic concepts in Python with the main purpose of pushing your skills to the next level as a doer, instead of just a thinker.
Although once finished you will end up with a simple calculator which supports basic maths, at least you will know how to properly make use of builtin utilities such as input, def statements and the while True loop.
Being a blogger, I have needs on tools which can ease my job as a content producer. Having knowledge on the Python programming language I have discovered an open source package which fits my needs when it comes to generating images with text.
As an 'advanced' terminal user, I truly like automating stuff on the console. Before launching a fresh command prompt on your own computer, make sure you meet the requirements shown below in order to follow me through the rest of this blog post.
Most of the computer geeks are familiar with the Internet Download Manager tool. Although it is one of the best among download managers; being a soldier of open source software, I decided to share pyIDM as an alternative for anyone who is passionate about computer programming.
According to the official documentation shared on the Github platform, pyIDM supports multi-connections at a high speed due to its download engine which relies entirely on LibCurl.
Dijkxhoorn said one security precaution his company had not taken with their domain prior to the fraudulent transfer was a “registry lock,” a more stringent, manual (and sometimes offline) process that effectively neutralizes any attempts by fraudsters to social engineer your domain registrar.
With a registry lock in place, your registrar cannot move your domain to another registrar on its own. Doing so requires manual contact verification by the appropriate domain registry, such as Verisign — which is the authoritative registry for all domains ending in .com, .net, .name, .cc, .tv, .edu, .gov and .jobs. Other registries handle locks for specific top-level or country-code domains, including Nominet (for .co.uk or .uk domains), EURID (for .eu domains), CNNIC for (for .cn) domains, and so on.
Acrobat, musician, composer, clown, mime, movie star, director and producer, Academy Award winner for lifetime achievement, but still driven from the United States for his backing of the Soviet Union, Charlie Chaplin should need little introduction, except perhaps for Millennials and other late alphabet generations. He was the global star in the crossover from silent films to talkies, making an astonishing $10,000 a week during the Depression, with $150,000 in signing bonuses. Knighted by the Queen, Charlot was universally loved and admired.
In a research course during a graduate program in counseling, students were given a choice between completing a traditional research project, with rigorous statistical standards, or completing what was then called “action research.” I chose the latter being delinquent in mathematics.
A case before the US Supreme Court this week, Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue, has far-reaching implications.
Teachers around the country have been schooling us all with their strike wave. But schools depend on more than just classroom teachers. Recently paraeducators, a vital—and criminally underpaid—part of the public school workforce, are starting to rise up too.
The happy expectations for the week-long Chinese New Year holidays has been dampened by a new viral infection that is spreading rapidly in China (cases have been confirmed in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangdong province) and other countries. Since late 2019, people from Wuhan had been infected with a viral pneumonia whose cause was unknown. Now the virus has been identified as a new type of coronavirus.
Federal lobbying spending surpassed $3.47 billion last year.
California is known for progressive everything, including its health care policies, and, just a few weeks into 2020, state leaders aren’t disappointing.
"Any agricultural platform that does not adequately address the worsening factory farm crisis we're facing across the country, is half baked and majorly flawed."
The Trump administration is reportedly planning to intensify its assault on Medicaid by granting certain states permission to convert federal funding for the program into block grants, a move critics slammed as a cruel and likely illegal attack on vulnerable people.
Ben Hagenbuck calls himself a full-time banker and a part-time farmer. But working with his father and uncle on the family’s 1,100-acre corn and soybean farm in north-central Illinois has become much more than a hobby: Hagenbuch is part of a network of American farmers hoping to save the world. This is a grandiose goal to be sure, but it has its roots in science. Growing evidence points to chemically driven industrialized food production as a key culprit behind a broad range of both environmental and human health problems. To reverse the damage requires a focus on enriching soil health and perfecting farming practices that are free from synthetic chemicals. It’s not an easy undertaking, these farmers are finding. But it is urgent.
China’s leader on Saturday called the accelerating spread of a new virus a grave situation, as cities from the outbreak’s epicenter in central China to Hong Kong scrambled to contain an illness that has infected more than 1,200 people and killed 41.
If the Trump administration’s own scientific advisory board, a host of biological societies, and scores of former government agency officials are disappointed, the rest of America should be fearful and angry.
"We've long suspected he would try to gut Medicare in a second term."
There have been two confirmed cases of the disease in the U.S. so far, and a number of further samples are being tested.
"We didn't need any more confirmation that the sitting president of the United States is dead-set on doing all he can to end access to safe, legal abortion in this country."
President Donald Trump called it his “profound honor” on Friday to be the first president to attend the annual anti-abortion gathering in Washington called the March for Life.
State and local governments have been leading the legal fight against the opioid industry, seeking payouts to help them deal with the fallout from the nation’s addiction crisis. Average Americans are about to get their shot.
The flaw exists in the web-based management interface of the Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC), which is its platform for managing Cisco network security solutions, like firewalls or its advanced malware protection service. Cisco has released patches for the vulnerability (CVE-2019-16028), which has a score of 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scale, making it critical in severity.
Source code, internal user names and passwords, and private keys, for the website and online account systems of Canadian telecoms giant Rogers have been found sitting on the open internet.
The leaked software, seemingly uploaded to GitHub by a Rogers engineer before they left the telco, is written in Java and powered various components of Rogers.com. The materials are marked "closed source" and copyright Rogers, yet can be found on the web if you know where to look. Details of and credentials for services and systems on the ISP's internal networks are included.
This kind of information, along with source code to skim for security bugs, is a boon for miscreants casing the telco to compromise it. These details may have already been exploited by criminals, or may prove useful for future attacks. It's also a reminder that engineers and management must take all precautions to avoid pushing private company code to public repositories.
It should be noted that no customer information nor account details – beyond the names, passwords, and email addresses of some members of the ISP's web development team – are present in the public code repository. The web app blueprints date back to 2015, so just how much of this code remains in production is unclear. One hopes the passwords and keys have been replaced over the past five years, at least.
With any luck, this may well be more of an embarrassment to one of Canada's biggest broadband'n'telly telcos than anything else.
Sensitive data of another major Canadian firm has been found sitting open on the GitHub developers platform.
Security researcher Jason Coulls said he recently discovered two open accounts with application source code, internal user names and passwords, and private keys for Rogers Communications. No customer data was found.
He suspects the code belonged to a developer who has left the telco.
Coulls, who works in the IT department of a Toronto firm and has his own security consultancy, initially told The Register of the discovery, after which the news site contacted Rogers.
One problem is the code he saw describes data payloads and how it goes between databases and web services.
“You can use that to get to the stuff that people [thieves] would go after,” he explained.
Some of that controversy has been from outside the Ethereum community, pointing to Consensys and Ethereum Foundation support as an example of centralization. Some of the controversy has come from within, as debates rage about what is or isn’t an acceptable use of “public” resources.
Software development has changed drastically over the past decade. Take a 22-year-old graduate with a degree in computer science. At one time, they would start off testing code, then start to write code line-by-line. Today, 80% of applications are developed using open source software. Instead of laboriously worrying over each caret and comma, code is grabbed and assembled. This can make for quick iterations and rapid project completion.
The modern map -- in fact, any map since the Age of Sail -- serves an important purpose in navigation. Exploration feats, such as Magellan's circumnavigation of the globe, Lewis and Clark's American expedition, or more recent excursions to the Earth's polar regions, would not have been possible without mapping knowledge and ability.
A cursory look at ancient or medieval history shows that early maps, prior to their use for navigation, served a different purpose entirely. The map in the 15th century manuscript La Fleur des Histoires was by no means intended to be geographically accurate. Instead, it was designed to convey a concept or idea -- in this case, the separation of ruling powers by region. However, the real power of mapmaking -- that is, for navigation -- would not be realized for generations.
vChain, the leading trust and integrity company, announces the close of a $7M Series A investment round. Elaia, a leading European tech venture fund, led the new investment round which includes also other notable investors such as Swiss-based Bluwat and Acequia Capital (Seattle, USA). vChain was founded in late 2018 and released its first product in April 2019.
Ideally, open source software should be, well, free and open.
Recently, the Cryptographic Autonomy License (CAL) was submitted for OSI consideration. As Holo’s co-founder Arthur Brock explains in his blog post, his goal is to protect end-user privacy and autonomy. Restrictions in this case focus not on whom, but how the software should be used.
While many on the OSI board seem to support the licence, Bruce Perens, OSI co-founder and the person who drafted the original Open Source Definition (OSD), resigned from OSI saying, “… it seems to me that the organisation is rather enthusiastically headed toward accepting a licence that isn’t freedom-respecting. Fine, do it without me, please.”
Today we hear the term “open source” more and more. It is a term that is most commonly identified with software and firmware development out of the Silicon Valley. However, the term is becoming common in the plant industry.
There’s no scheduling system nor (surprisingly) a logging system built into Garadget, but it does support Alexa, Google Assistant, SmartThings, IFTTT, and a whole host of lesser-known third-party tools, but all of that will invariably force you into the system’s forums again. For example, there are two Garadget Alexa skills, one for if you want to say “smart garage” and one for if you want to say “Garadget” to invoke the skill. Setting up a connection to SmartThings requires using Samsung’s developer tools.
CHIPS Alliance, the leading consortium advancing common and open hardware for interfaces, processors and systems, today announced industry leading chipmaker Intel as its newest member. Intel is contributing the Advanced Interface Bus (AIB) to CHIPS Alliance to foster broad adoption.
Intel this week became a member of CHIPS Alliance, an industry consortium that is working to accelerate the development of open source SoCs (and SiPs) for various applications. As part of their membership, Intel has also contributed its Advanced Interface Bus to the group, giving developers access to the bus and thus the means to interoperate with Intel (and other) chips that will be using it.
Designed for use with system-in-packages (SiPs) devices, Intel’s AIB is a high-bandwidth, low-power, die-to-die PHY level standard that uses a clock forwarded parallel data transfer mechanism (akin that used by modern DDR DRAM interfaces). The technology is agnostic to manufacturing processes and packaging technology, so it can be used to connect a wide variety of chips/chiplets using different types of packages, including Intel’s own EMIB, TSMC’s CoWoS, or other 2.5D technologies from numerous vendors.
Intel’s AIB has been available to third parties on a royalty-free basis for a while now, so contributing the technology to CHIPS Alliance is the next step for Intel in increasing its adoption. By making AIB available to a very broad group of chip designers, Intel is encouraging development of an ecosystem of chiplets that can later be used with its own CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, and other components to build special-purpose multi-die SiPs.
Cloud Foundry Foundation, home to open source projects helping build the future of cloud applications, today announced Cloud Foundry Summits for North America and Europe, now co-located with the Linux Foundation's Open Source Summits. Cloud Foundry NA Summit will take place on Thursday, June 25, 2020, in Austin, Texas and Cloud Foundry EU Summit will take place on Thursday, October 29, 2020, in Dublin, Ireland. Early bird registration for Cloud Foundry NA Summit is now open.
This is the most recent leap forward in natural language for Microsoft, but not its first attempt to make Google’s BERT better. About a year ago, Microsoft AI researchers also released MT-DNN, a Transformer-based model that set new high performance standards for the GLUE language model performance benchmark.
AVSystem is pleased to announce that an open-source version of Anjay 2.2.1 has just been released on GitHub.
KeePassXC is a community fork of KeePassX, a native cross-platform port of KeePass Password Safe, with the goal to extend and improve it with new features and bugfixes to provide a feature-rich, fully cross-platform and modern open-source password manager.
KeePassXC currently uses the KeePass 2.x (.kdbx) password database format as its native file format in versions 3.1 and 4. Database files in version 2 can be opened, but will be upgraded to a newer format. KeePass 1.x (.kdb) databases can be imported into a .kdbx file, but this process is one-way.
Having many accounts on different social media networks, I have to keep trace of different usernames and passwords. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and chat applications; different login credentials for each one of them. Not to mention the local accounts.
Due to the struggle that comes with remembering all usernames and passwords, and of course due to loss of many important accounts in the past, I have decided to store my entire login credentials in a database which can be accessed through a single master key.
Having needs on secure personal data management, KeePassX is the software which I have chosen to solve my own problem. Being open source, many developers have written their own libraries from scratch to fully interact with KeePassX from the command line.
After many hours of research on Github, and a lot of tests on my local environment, pykeepass ended in my toolset. Fully open source and free of charge, this python tool supports interaction with the entire features being integrated on KeePassX; directly from the command line.
Software vulnerabilities are a fact of life. Researchers -- if not hackers -- constantly discover new ways to compromise popular software libraries. It's up to enterprises to quickly deploy patches to secure software before hackers get in.
Consider the Equifax breach, in which a hacker exposed the data of more than 145 million users, resulting in $575 million in fines for the credit rating agency. A U.S. Senate investigation identified a backlog of over 8,500 unpatched vulnerabilities at Equifax -- the hacker gained access through just one of those unpatched systems.
Vulnerability backlogs are especially prevalent within enterprises that rely on open source components. Nearly all applications make use of some open source components that take the place of either mundane or arcane coding tasks. An open source project often has an active community to maintain and augment it, but that's not always the case. Ultimately, open source software requires a leap of faith from the user that what they're adopting is secure and effective.
"This decision represents an enormous expansion of the surveillance state and a serious threat to civil liberties in the U.K."€
Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance is back on his anti-encryption bullshit. A Fast Company profile of his "$10 million cyber lab" for decrypting phones contains some really choice quotes from the DA -- quotes that show he's about as on top of all things "cyber" as former NYC mayor/alleged tweet hackee Rudy Giuliani.
Under the bill, businesses that refuse cash face fines of $1,000 for a first violation and $1,500 for each subsequent offense. Businesses with devices that convert cash to cards, like those found in many laundromats, are exempt under certain conditions, including a provision that there be no fee for such cards.
So, how did police track him to that intersection? Avondale police issued a "Geo-fence" warrant to Google "requesting information on any wireless communication devices that passed through the same geographical locations as the suspect vehicle did," according to Molina's arrest report.
Cortana recordings are now transcribed in “secure facilities,” according to Microsoft. But the transcription program is still in place, which means someone, somewhere still might be listening to everything you say to your voice assistant.
Bans of facial recognition tech are popping up across the United States. Facial recognition tech use by law enforcement is currently banned in the state of California and a few cities in Massachusetts have blocked local government agencies from deploying the tech.
The use of the encrypted messaging applications Signal and Wickr by the 82nd Airborne’s Task Force Devil underscores the complexity of security and operations for U.S. forces deployed to war zones where adversaries can exploit American communications systems, cell phones and the electromagnetic spectrum.
But it also raises questions as to whether the Department of Defense is scrambling to fill gaps in potential security vulnerabilities for American forces operating overseas by relying on encrypted messaging apps available for anyone to download in the civilian marketplace.
"We want to see Iraq with full sovereignty."
International parents and students are neither stupid nor gullible. Among their key concerns about study in the United States are gun violence, a broken visa system, monitoring of social media information, the uncertain status of the H-1B and OPT (Optional Practical Training) programmes and the widespread perception that the US is not as open, friendly and hospitable as it once was.
As the dust settles on Donald Trump’s latest high octane game of chicken with the Islamic Republic, an eerie calm seems to have risen like fog from Soleimani’s grave to take its place. But while the whole world exhales, war nerds like myself struggle like David Carradine to find the loop to loosen the belt around our throats. That’s because deep down in our wonky ill-nourished guts we know that this shit is far from over.
On the brink of war with Iran the Trump administration presented to the American public and to the world the following stated or implied theses:
A historical turning point is a moment, perhaps small, perhaps larger, that becomes uniquely causative of events that follow. Obvious examples might include the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand that set off World War One, the U.S. Supreme Court handing the election to George W. Bush instead of Al Gore, or 9-11.
The South is arguably the engine of the U.S. war machine—but also a center for anti-war activism.
Today, people around the world are taking to the streets for an International Day of Action against war with Iran. The protests are in response to the Trump administration’s dangerous warmongering with Iran and offer an opportunity for the U.S. left to revive antiwar organizing. As we do so, we cannot overlook the renewed wave of uprisings that have spread across the Middle East and North Africa. We must build solidarity with these movements and connect their struggles to ours.
A meme circulating on social media shows the distraught gaze of Venezuela’s opposition member Juan Guaidó with a caption that says in part, “he is not a head of State, he has no army, he has no ministers, he never participated in presidential elections, he was a ‘guarimbero’ [violent rioter] and he is called interim president.” None of that can be argued. But as of January 5 Guaidó is also no longer the president of the National Assembly. Despite a theatrical take over of the NA chamber and proclaiming to still be the president – well documented on video – in reality he lost that position to a rival opposition leader. We have already described that as the most public display of the split between competing opposition groups.
It was a curious exchange. Frustrated by the attacks on his party—the Movement for Socialism (MAS)—former president of Bolivia Evo Morales made an audio recording in which he called upon his supporters to form militias. Maximilian Heath of Reuters went to Argentina to speak with Morales about this leaked recording; Morales said, “In Bolivia, if the armed forces are shooting the people, killing the people, the people have the right to organize their security.”
Presidential contender Joe Biden has come under fire for his support for the 2003 Iraq War, but continues to tout his foreign policy experience as a key selling point for his candidacy.
Billions of US tax-payers’ money will continue to be funneled into Israel in the next fiscal year, and for many years in the foreseeable future. Republican and Democratic Senators have recently achieved just that, passing a bill aimed at providing Israel with $3.3 billion in annual aid.
The death toll from a strong earthquake that rocked eastern Turkey climbed to 29 on Saturday night as rescue crews searched for people who remained trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings, officials said.
Along the Line, is a member of the Demcast network, brought to you by the Media Freedom Foundation. On today’s episode€ hosts Nicholas Baham III (Dr. Dreadlocks), Janice Domingo,€ and Nolan Higdon explore the Afghanistan Papers,€ ATL’s€ Creative Director is Dylan Lazaga.€ Mickey Huff is ATL’s producer. ATL’s engineer is Janice Domingo. Adam Armstrong is ATL’s webmaster.
Former students' union president of Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Faizul Hasan who earlier said Muslims can destroy anything if they wish to do and the community has constantly been tested since 1947, has now refused to apologise for his remarks.
A case is being registered against Faizul under Section 153(A) of CRPC over his remarks.
According a report in ANI, Faizul has said that he is from a community that can destroy anything 'if it resolves to do the same'.
Just like civilians, he said, modern militaries understand that as soon as new capabilities are introduced, new risks also appear. “But no one can roll back modernization,” he said. “Therefore, we must make the required adaptations.”
He compared the evolution of the threat to the way households have gone from using cash only to relying full on digital banking services, despite the common awareness of ongoing cyber attacks on banks.
[...]
“We set out to simulate a number of scenarios that are relevant to both militaries. This is similar to the intimate, strategic ties in place between the U.S. and Israel across a wide number of areas. In the area of cyber cooperation, the same thing is taking place,” said Lt. Col. O.
Mohiussunnath Chowdhury, 28, was unwittingly caught on tape stressing the importance of an "ambush", claiming "they shouldn't know what's hit them", jurors at Woolwich Crown Court were told.
They also heard he felt "so much peace" before slashing police with a sword outside Buckingham Palace because he was "guaranteed paradise", the court heard.
Prosecutors allege Chowdhury was planning to kill members of the public at tourist attractions including London's Madame Tussauds and the Gay Pride parade last year, but did not realise he was confiding in undercover officers who had him under surveillance.
Rome will be conquered by Islam in the near future, Palestinian preacher Nidhal Siam told an enthusiastic crowd last week at an event in Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque marking the anniversary of the 1453 C.E. capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire.
In a video uploaded to the Internet on Jan. 17, Siam can be seen telling a crowd that three prophecies will soon be fulfilled and expressing his hope that his audience will be the ones to fulfill them.
ABOARD THE USS BATAAN — Over the past eight months, the United States has poured more than 20,000 additional troops into the Middle East to counter the escalating threat from Iran that peaked with the recent missile attack€ on€ American forces€ in Iraq.
Here are a few illuminating and emotionally resonant pieces by real Iranians on life under sanctions, the brutality of war, and the recent crisis.
The Pentagon said Friday that 34 U.S. troops were diagnosed with traumatic brain injuries suffered in this month’s Iranian missile strike€ on an Iraqi air base, and that half of the troops have returned to their military duties.
The letter, from activist group CodePink, comes ahead of peace demonstrations scheduled Saturday in 200 cities around the world.
Citing the worsening nuclear threat and inaction on the climate crisis, scientists issue a historic warning about the risk of global catastrophe.
The Middle East has always been a difficult region for the West, especially for the United States. During the Cold War era, America’s efforts to establish its hold over the region’s key oil-producing countries backfired, resulting in anger and resentment in those countries. Be it the CIA-backed coup to overthrow the Mossadegh government in Iran for nationalizing the oil industry in 1953 or Charlie Wilson’s war to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan in the 1980s, the results have been devastating for the U.S. The repercussions from these American campaigns continue to resonate even today in Afghanistan and Iran. Are the two connected in any way?
American Herald Tribune bills itself as a "genuinely independent online media outlet." Set up in 2015, it publishes in English and pays Americans to write articles. But multiple investigations by American tech companies, details of which have not previously been reported, point to the site originating in Iran.
A Facebook spokesperson told CNN Business that company staff who looked into the website's Facebook page say it was linked to Iranian state media. Facebook removed the page in 2018. FireEye, a top cybersecurity company, says it assessed with "moderate confidence" that the website originates in Iran and is part of a much larger influence operation.
If there comes a point when people will decide not to fly, the issue may well be less to do with any moral or ethical issue with climate change than the fact that commercial flights have become atrocious. They are naked money-making concerns with diminishing returns on quality. The key factor that plays out here is what economists like to term inelastic demand. Prices can be raised; service quality can be reduced, but customers will keep coming. The demand remains, even if the supply leaves much to be desired.
"It doesn't take a college degree in economics to realize that our remaining 1.5€° carbon budget and ongoing fossil fuel subsidies and investments don't add up."
Four decades after release of iconic children's song—and as we run out of time to respond to the existential climate emergency our world faces—I've run out of patience. We have just ten years to secure the future.
"We've opened up a Pandora's box with climate change."
"It is time to get out of our comfort zones."
This is our time to step up to the challenge of our age and to create a future consistent with our reality as living beings born of and nurtured by a living Earth.
Thwaites, in West Antarctica, is the world’s most dangerous glacier. As of January 15th, scientists have labeled it: “A Climate Time Bomb.”
A sharply divided panel of three federal judges on Jan. 17 dismissed a high-profile climate lawsuit brought on behalf of 21 young people against the federal government.
Amy Klobuchar, along with Elizabeth Warren was recently endorsed by the New York Times. Their opinion piece published Jan. 20 said “nearly any of them (presidential candidates) would be the most progressive president in decades on issues like health care, the economy and government’s allocations of resources.” Notice they didn’t mention environment in that sentence. Then they went on to say that “Ms. Klobuchar speaks about issues like climate change.” Keyword there is “speaks.”
New York’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA) targets 100 percent carbon-free electricity by 2040 and net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. To meet those goals, any new gas infrastructure constructed now and in the future would have to be retired well before the end of its useful life,€ becoming stranded assets.
As 2020 begins, the impacts of climate change have become increasingly clear around the world. The new year started amid devastating wildfires, tied to the worst droughts Australia has experienced in hundreds of years, which encircled much of the continent. So far, 29 people have been reported dead. A University of Sydney professor estimated the number of animals killed likely tops one billion.
NAFTA 2.0 cleared another hurdle on January 16 as the U.S. Senate approved the trade deal with bipartisan support.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed Thursday that his country would start exploring for gas in the eastern Mediterranean “as soon as possible” this year, after signing a maritime deal with Libya.
The Association of Indigenous Peoples filed a lawsuit against the president after he claimed tribes are "evolving" and vowing to "integrate" them.
I grew up in Michigan — a place with many deer and very few wolves to keep their populations in-check.
The Delta smelt, once the most abundant species on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, continues its steep slide towards extinction. For the second year in a row, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife€ in its annual fall midwater trawl survey in 2019 found zero Delta smelt during the months of September, October, November and December.
We have tens of millions of cattle in America but we only have about 700 grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.€ € € Yet an October 2019 decision by the Bridger-Teton National Forest’s Pinedale District authorizes continued cattle grazing on 267 square miles of public lands that will result in the deaths of an estimated 72 grizzly bears in the Upper Green River and Gros Ventre River drainages on the southern border of Yellowstone National Park.€ € In response, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, Yellowstone-to-Uintas Connection, and Western Watershed Project recently sent a 60-day Notice of Intent to Sue to the Forest Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service unless the agency protects the bears as required by the Endangered Species Act.
The climate and mass extinction crises are interwoven—but we are equipped with the solutions.
On January 15, the US President Donald Trump and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He signed a “phase one” trade agreement to de-escalate an 18-month trade war between the world’s two biggest economies. After months of tough negotiations and retaliatory trade actions, both countries agreed to proceed ahead with the “phase one” trade agreement. The core elements of the “phase one” trade agreement include intellectual property, technology transfer, agriculture, financial services, currency, and exchange rate policies. Besides, the deal establishes a bilateral dispute resolution arrangement to resolve any disputes on matters listed in the agreement.
With Greta Gerwig’s new take on Luisa May Alcott’s classic 19th century novel, Little Women, in theaters, I decided to reread the book.
[...]
When any of the sisters are overtaken by vanity or greed for finer things than they can afford, they learn their lessons. Love and hard work are enough to sustain a family, the story goes, and more important for one’s happiness than money.
What intrigues me is the double standard Alcott — and Americans — have for charity. Helping others is portrayed as virtuous. Receiving help, on the other hand, is not.
That poses quite a dilemma: How can any of us practice charity while others practice refusing it?
Alcott’s answer seems to be that only the “truly” destitute may accept help. In the book, the March sisters often help a family even poorer than they are. While the March sisters can stretch what they have to make due, the other family is starving.
This is more or less how means-tested government programs work today. To qualify for the Supplement Nutrition Assistance Program, better known as food stamps, in 2019, a family of four could earn no more than $33,475 — a pitiful sum — and could only have a small amount of assets in savings.
When others want to help the March sisters, Alcott does not always approve. She’s comfortable with them receiving help from a wealthy aunt, but usually not from anyone outside the family. After one of the sisters, Amy, marries well, her husband disguises his charity to his sister-in-law Jo, so she doesn’t recognize it as such.
Again, giving is noble, but receiving is not.
This ties into Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, which describes a value system in which financial success is considered a mark of moral goodness. If one is rich, that shows they worked hard and practiced virtue. The flipside, by that logic, is the poor are lazy and morally suspect.
At this point in history, two things are clear. First, Marx was right that capitalism is torn by too many “contradictions” to be sustainable indefinitely as a global economic system. In its terminal period, which we’re entering now (and which we can predict will last generations, because a global economic order doesn’t vanish in a decade or two), it will be afflicted by so many popular uprisings—on the left and the right—so many economic, political, and ecological crises causing so much turmoil and dislocation, that only a permanent and worldwide fascism would be able to save it. But fascism, by its murderous and ultra-nationalistic nature, can be neither permanent nor continuously enforced worldwide. Even just in the United States, the governmental structure is too vast and federated, there are too many thousands of relatively independent political jurisdictions, for a truly fascist regime to be consolidated nationwide, in every nook and cranny of the country. Fascism, or neo-fascism, is only a temporary and partial solution for the ruling class.
Until 1968, the minimum wage not only kept pace with inflation, it rose in step with productivity growth. The logic is straightforward; we expect that wages in general will rise in step with productivity growth. For workers at the bottom to share in the overall improvement in society’s living standards, the minimum wage should also rise with productivity.
Coming from the south on Avenue d’Italie on foot or bike things were obviously out of the ordinary, impossible as it may be to define ordinary in France at this moment. Long lines of cars pressed together, red and white tape strung everywhere it wasn’t five minutes before, sidewalks lined with gargantuan tour buses, their windows dark, no riders, no one at the wheel, enormous docile circus animals their eyes pitch black. Something was up. I stopped to talk to two RATP workers lounging in a small electric bus half on the sidewalk.
Student debt in the United States is estimated to hover at over 1.5 trillion dollars which makes student debt the second-highest consumer debt after mortgage debt.€ According to the Federal Reserve, 43% of college graduates are burdened by student loan debt with the average debtor still owing between $20,000 to $25,000 on their balance since 2018. Unlike the United Kingdom where student debt is payable upon earning a minimum income and where student debt is wiped away after 30 years, in the US student debt is harshly controlled, it is not dischargeable under Chapter 7 (bankruptcy). That is until earlier this month when Kevin Rosenberg’s $221,385 student debt was actually wiped away by a New York State judge after Rosenberg filed for bankruptcy, a case that is still viewed as an anomaly.
Ten years ago, on a narrow 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court of the United States issued a decision that has reshaped our country’s democracy.
Elites have ruled over people and commanded the surplus produced by their labor for many millennia. It is this long history we have to contend with in today’s crisis of capitalism that has produced endless wars and environmental catastrophes as corporate billionaire rulers continue to promote business as usual while preparing to fight each other with armed forces and nuclear weapons. This has all been “normalized.” Concentrated elite power ends up massively distorting people’s understanding of the nature of big business rule. Their highly paid spokes people even shamelessly deploy concepts like “freedom” and “liberty” to rationalize the enslaving and killing of millions for profits in resource wars. But we also need to understand that despite this long reign of (t)error, human beings lived for most of their evolutionary history (a much longer period of time than that during which elites have ruled) in nomadic hunter-gatherer societies where life conditions produced a rough equality among the Paleolithic family groups. If there was anything that could be called freedom here, it was a consequence of a primitive subsistence level that demanded participation from all in obtaining the means of survival while providing minimal incentives for large-scale social conflicts. Cooperation was primary; it is what made human societies — not competition. These conditions also kept the human populations low and in balance with available resources, while as some anthropologists speculate (see Marshall Sahlins), providing significant amounts of free time for cultivating social ties.
On Wednesday evening, a fight broke out in Seattle’s Pike Place Market that escalated into a shooting, killing one woman and leaving seven injured, according to officials. Bystanders, realizing what was happening, began to flee, some turning to Uber and Lyft for a quick getaway. Yet many were caught off-guard when they realized that the rideshare companies’ algorithmic pricing schemes had detected high demand, resulting in hefty “surge” pricing — the companies’ friendly term for price-gouging.
The global economy is polarized on multiple dimensions. Even as the gap widens between the extremely poor and ultra-rich, a chronic economic divide persists between men and women. Millions of people subsist on an income of a few dollars a day, and billions of women work for nothing at all.
President Donald Trump this week addressed the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, exaggerating the successes of the U.S. economy to such a great extent that it was as though he hoped to match reality to his fantastical claims by sheer force of will. The WEF — a yearly meeting that he chose to skip last year — is a gathering of global elites that this year convened at the same time his Senate impeachment trial began in earnest. Trump’s attendance was perhaps a deliberate attempt to distract from the proceedings that could lay bare his corrupt dealings. He seemed to be saying, “Ignore the scheming corruption I was engaged in, and look at the riches I have brought Americans.”
A new super PAC that says it will spend $75 million to support Democrats in 2020 is funded in large part by billionaires who run hedge funds, including some with a history of supporting Republicans, according to recent filings with the Federal Election Commission.
Following Labour’s disastrous election results last month and Jeremy Corbyn’s decision to stand down as leader, the party’s Blairite wing, backed by their mates in the Tory press, is doing everything in its power to impress their own interpretation onto the loss in order to put a pro-capitalist back in the driving seat.
Well, the circus has arrived in the United States capital, and the media is all agog at the show! In the Big Tent, sometimes referred to as the White House, announcements about forthcoming performances are being tweeted at a breath-taking rate. Many of them are coming directly from the star clown himself, none other than the orange-complected and bewigged Donald Trump! Oh, the excitement.
Who’s speaking, writing, texting, posting, messaging, emailing, and tweeting?
[...]
What we have done, or technology has done to us, is democratize mind, intellect, thought, brought what was selective and hierarchical to an “all minds equally speaking” status Anyone would have a difficult time in authorizing his or her own voice as more equal than other voices. We can no longer recognize any superiority of one speaker over another which means that we can no longer recognize any quality of mind and its knowing as better than any other, certainly not our own.
In a way we haven’t so much democratized our voices as privatized them, brought them into a melee out of which no voice representing common understanding is authorized. All voices from the Tower of Babel attract their own audiences. Thus, privatization here refers to a turning from “promoting the General welfare” to promoting personal expressions of personal welfare, the “General welfare” conflated into personal welfare.
This is disastrous, hardly any sort of advance except for enterprises that seek to avoid any prosecution by a public tribunal that applies commonly acknowledged standards of judgment. Those standards are now blithely challenged by their inverse without public outcry. That public outcry now lost in a whirlwind of personal authorizations of truth and reality.
The drama of that disaster is now visible in the Senate trial of President Trump.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has her reasons for limiting her impeachment articles to offenses stemming from the abuses and violations related to Ukraine. Unfortunately, she declined to pursue a broader impeachment approach that recognizes multiple provable, serious violations of the Constitution. Speaker Pelosi overruled Chairs of Committees, including the Judiciary Committee, and other senior lawmakers who wanted to forward to the Senate a broader array of impeachable offenses.
The secretary of state's statement was framed as "a shameful assault on press freedom."
As of this writing (Thursday afternoon), the outcome of the Trump Removal trial currently underway is not entirely fixed in concrete, but the Party of Execrables, formerly known as the GOP, is hanging tight; its servile resolve to do Donald Trump’s bidding seems secure as ever.
Just over 24 hours after threatening to cut Social Security at the World Economic Forum’s annual gathering of global elites in Davos, President Donald Trump on Thursday vowed to “save” the New Deal-era program from supposed Democratic efforts to “destroy” it — prompting Sen. Bernie Sanders to accuse the president of peddling “more lies.”
The legendary Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (BAS), which tracks issues related to technology and global security, has issued a terrifying warning: We are less than two minutes to midnight on the Doomsday clock. It’s very bad news, representing “the most dangerous situation that humanity has ever faced.”
A man is known by the company he keeps.€ The make-up of Team Trump is known, and as this is written, the trial is under way and by the time it sees the light of day, € may already be over. Nonetheless, is not too late to admire one of the almost members of the trump defense team, two of the well-known members and draw attention to one member who has been sadly overlooked.€ It is not that she has not had as illustrious a career as her colleagues.€ It is just that it is slightly less newsworthy.
Leaked 2018 audio recording of president was released by legal team of Lev Parnas, close associate of Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani. "You know, [Sanders] basically says we're getting screwed on trade," said Trump. "And he's right."
The new Times poll showed Sanders with 25 percent of the Iowa vote and 40 percent of support from those under 30 in the state.
The New York Democrat's accusation came a day after he said Trump's behavior "puts even President Nixon to shame."
The tired cliché that ‘this election is the most important ever’ is given weight this go-around by the seeming inability of American governance to solve problems with potentially catastrophic consequences. Marketers for the establishment parties claim the same old same old, that their alleged opponents are the problem and that they are the solution. But an increasingly disaffected polity isn’t buying it. As argued below, a self-perpetuating oligarchy is inviting political instability through its unwillingness to even feign a public interest.
President Donald Trump’s lawyers plunged into his impeachment trial defense Saturday by accusing Democrats of striving to overturn the 2016 election, arguing that investigations of Trump’s dealings with Ukraine have not been a fact-finding mission but a politically motivated effort to drive him from the White House.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo lashed out in anger Saturday at an NPR reporter who accused him of shouting expletives at her after she asked him in an interview about Ukraine. In a direct and personal attack, America’s chief diplomat said the journalist had “lied” to him and he called her conduct “shameful.”
Tarring Sanders with the same brush as Trump on any grounds is a tactic clearly intended to discredit Sanders among the anti-Trump public.
"You know you can't trust this president to do what's right for this country. You can trust he will do what's right for Donald Trump. He'll do it now. He's done it before."
Pressing through a second day of impeachment arguments, House Democrats scoffed at President Donald Trump’s claims that he had good reasons for pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political foes.
As the 2020 presidential election approaches the Green Party faces the challenge of settling on a platform, choosing a candidate for president, and deciding its campaign strategy. In that context, Howie Hawkins, a contender for Green Party presidential candidate, recently published a clear and cogent essay titled “The Green Party Is Not the Democrats’ Problem.” It represents a precedent Green Party stance which may guide Green campaign policy. We agree with much, but find some ideas very troubling.
What follows is a conversation between the Working Family Party’s Maurice Mitchell, activist Jennifer Epps-Addison and Jaisal Noor of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.
In recent years, we've witnessed a strange convergence of Russian and American conspiratorial thinking. They're talking about each other again in Moscow and Washington, often spinning stories that aren't exactly rooted in facts. Whether it's Russiagate in the United States or color revolution in Russia and countries across the former Soviet Union, diabolical plots are afoot.
“Sanders is a Threat”
"The Democratic managers, the House managers, have laid out a meticulous case for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress."
None of the potential witnesses identified by Democrats could offer evidence as relevant as the President on his motives in dealing with Zelensky and ordering a hold on American aid.
"Why is POTUS, who has the power to remove ambassadors, conspiring with goons to do so?"
Are you free to express your opinions? The First Amendment says yes, but 8 US Code ۤ 1324 says no. A case currently before the US Supreme Court, United States v. Sineneng-Smith, will presumably clarify the matter, hopefully in favor of free speech.
It's kind of incredible that Devin Nunes' first frivolous, censorial lawsuit is still going on -- but it is. This is the one against two satirical Twitter accounts that made fun of Nunes, as well as political strategist Liz Mair and Twitter the company itself. Twitter had tried to get the case dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, saying the case belonged in California, but that failed. Now Twitter has played the next obvious card: saying that Section 230 of the CDA prevents Nunes from suing it over the satirical accounts. Tragically, the Fresno Bee has not posted the actual legal filings, and they're in a state court that does not make them easily accessible to the public, so I don't have the full filing yet. Update: The filing is here and embedded below. However, from the Fresno Bee's account, it appears that Twitter is making a pretty typical CDA 230 argument...
The 16-year-old has been advised to stay away from her lycée (sixth-form college) in southeast France after calls on the internet for her to be killed, raped or attacked.
Tabrizian who lives in Qom, the city of seminaries and the religious capital of Iran, has written several books on the so-called Islamic medicine and runs an Islamic Medicine Center. Herbal and natural medicine, as well as other products such as "Islamic toothbrush", "Islamic soap", Sormeh (eyeliner made from natural products), and even "Islamic ink" in various colors, are on offer for sale on the website of the Islamic Medicine Center.
In its statement the seminary management body said Iranian seminaries condemn the "obscene and ignorant" act of burning [Harrison's Textbook of Medicine which is] one of the major medical texts.
Public libraries and universities were initially seen in a different light. The Handbook for Military Government, issued in December 1944, had ruled that books in these libraries “not be removed, impounded, or destroyed.” Education and Religious Affairs in particular favored unrestricted access to any library material, drawing a distinction between adult reading and re€quired school textbooks. Through the spring, however, the policy hardened. Local army commanders closed libraries and ordered librarians to halt the circulation of objectionable works, although this effort was haphazard. New guidelines hammered out in June made clear that public libraries were to be brought into line with publishers and booksellers. They required that all forbidden materials be removed from open shelves and placed in secure rooms, available only with the express permission of the military government. Staff members filled out Fragebogen, detailed questionnaires in€tended to reveal Nazi affiliation or beliefs. Library directors were required to sign a certificate stating, “I fully understand that it is my responsibility to see that the library is completely denazified.” Applications to reopen a library certified that “no ardent Nazi will be employed” and no literature circulated that supported Nazi doctrines, militarism, or discrimination on the basis of race, nationality, creed or political opinion. Once approved, military government officers had the authority to reopen noncommercial libraries. Similar rules applied to university libraries. Academic librarians segregated objectionable volumes in rooms that could be used only by au€thorized researchers. Into the fall of 1945, these materials were largely works by prominent Nazi authors or those with explicit militaristic ide€ology, such as Clausewitz’s On War or biographies of Bismarck.
The bill would ban libraries that receive state funding from allowing minors access to "age-inappropriate sexual material." To identify what that content is, the bill would include the creation of "parental library review boards" made up of five locally elected community members. The boards would then review what content it considers appropriate.
The bill — the Parental Oversight of Public Libraries Act or House Bill 2044 — aims to add several provisions to the state’s funding law for public libraries. These new provisions establish “parental library review boards” that would evaluate whether any library materials constitute “age-inappropriate sexual material.” Members of these five-member boards, who would be elected at a town meeting by a simple majority of voters, are empowered to determine whether material is appropriate, including by evaluating its literary merit. Public librarians are explicitly barred by the statute from serving on such review boards, even if they are from the community.
“This is a shockingly transparent attempt to legalize book banning in the state of Missouri,” said James Tager, deputy director of Free Expression Research and Policy at PEN America. “This act is clearly aimed at empowering small groups of parents to appoint themselves as censors over their state’s public libraries. Books wrestling with sexual themes, books uplifting LGBTQIA+ characters, books addressing issues such as sexual assault—all of these books are potentially on the chopping block if this bill is passed.”
The New York Times has noticed a company with the word "smile" in its name really isn't all that friendly. Nearly 2 years ago, SmileDirectClub sent legal threats to Gizmodo after a post discussing the potential drawbacks of getting your teeth fixed over the internet was published under the title "You Could Fuck Up Your Mouth With SmileDirectClub."
SAN FRANCISCO–A lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of FOSTA, a federal law that has driven marginalized communities and speech about sex and sex work offline, was reinstated today in a court ruling that recognizes the statute poses a substantial threat to free speech.The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that two plaintiffs in the lawsuit—brought by Woodhull Freedom Foundation, Human Rights Watch, Alex Andrews, the Internet Archive, and Eric Koszyk to block enforcement of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA)—had “standing” to pursue their constitutional challenge to the statute. The lawsuit argues that the act expansively criminalizes online speech related to sex work and removes important protections for online intermediaries in violation of their First Amendment rights. The plaintiffs are represented by EFF, Davis, Wright Tremaine LLP, Walters Law Group, and Daphne Keller.“We are pleased the court recognized that the law’s undefined and vague terms can sweep up constitutionally protected speech and potentially lead to federal, state, and local criminal prosecution, as well as civil liability,” said EFF Staff Attorney Aaron Mackey. “The court’s ruling recognizes that plaintiffs face a substantial threat of broad criminal and civil liability merely for speaking online or hosting forums that support sex workers.”FOSTA makes it a felony to use or operate an online service with the intent to “promote or facilitate the prostitution of another person,” vague terms with wide-ranging meanings that can include speech that makes sex work easier in any way. FOSTA also expanded the scope of other federal laws on sex trafficking to include online speech, and reduced statutory immunities previously provided under € Section 230 (47 U.S.C. €§ 230).
This is the most important press freedom case of the 21st century.
More than 155 writers, academics, and free speech advocates have signed a letter from PEN America urging Babson College to immediately reinstate Asheen Phansey. Babson officials suspended and then terminated Phansey over two weeks ago for a satirical Facebook post. The letter says Phansey, who was an adjunct professor and administrator at Babson, was fired over protected speech, and that the incident is deeply disturbing.
"If these tactics are allowed to stand, it would jeopardize all Brazilians' freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom to participate in democracy."
This week, prosecutors in Brazil filed a criminal complaint against Glenn Greenwald, an internationally lauded journalist best known for publishing leaked documents detailing the NSA’s mass surveillance. Greenwald’s prosecution is an attempt to use computer crime law to silence an investigative reporter who exposed deep-seated government corruption. Sadly, this isn’t the first such effort and, unless we stop this drift to criminalizing journalism, it likely won’t be the last.
Legal prosecution and character attacks are familiar tools used to silence investigative journalists who expose corruption. The use of cybercrime laws to do so, however, is relatively new.
Ask 100 New Jersey residents who is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and more than 90 will quickly reply, a civil rights leader.
Charlene Liberty, a woman with a history of childhood trauma and mental health diagnoses, has cycled in and out of Rhode Island Adult Corrections Institute (ACI) for several years. The Rhode Island Department of Corrections (RIDOC) has repeatedly subjected her to solitary confinement, a practice that consists of sensory deprivation, social isolation, and eating, sleeping, urinating and defecating in a concrete cell for 22 to 24 hours a day. During solitary “recreation” time in Rhode Island and many other states, people may spend an hour in outdoor cages that resemble oversized dog crates.
Activists from South Asian caste and religious minority communities are coming together to organize against Indian American businesses that support India’s move to strip its 200 million Muslims of their citizenship.
It doesn’t take massive expenditures of imagination to see—and hear—the Star Wars trilogies as an allegory of American movie might, that crucial branch of the imperial project. Clandestine operations have their place, but sometimes the Watchdog of Democracy just wants to be watched—by millions on screens big and small.
Thirty years ago, I was part of a Tecnica delegation that visited the African National Congress headquarters in Lusaka, Zambia. We were there to discuss the feasibility of a technical aid project for the ANC and the frontline states with Thabo Mbeki, the future president of post-apartheid South Africa. Back then, the term frontline referred to a group of other sub-Saharan nations that were also fighting for liberation.
Nothing like trying to rewrite history.
More and more, we are seeing examples of this freedom of expression being criminalized.
The Japanese-Americans, both citizens and immigrants, living in Hood River, Oregon were given seven days’ notice that they were going to be “evacuated” from their homes. They were told to pack their belongings into one bag and assemble at the Union Pacific train station on the morning of May 13, 1942. They had no idea where they were going, how long they would be detained or what would happen to their property and businesses while they were imprisoned.
A man who has repeatedly romanticized dictatorship and advocated the use of torture seems like an odd choice for guest of honor at the annual celebration of the constitution in the biggest democracy in the world. However, it makes perfect sense that Brazil’s notorious President, Jair Bolsonaro, has been invited to India’s Republic Day parade by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
"If you think this won't be used to blatantly discriminate against immigrants based on gender and age, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you."
It is natural to think there is something deeply unfree about work in the contemporary United States. Describing her job in an Amazon warehouse, journalist Emily Guendelsberger writes, “I walked up to sixteen miles a day to keep up with the rate at which I was supposed to pick orders. A GPS-enabled scanner tracked my movements and constantly informed me how many seconds I had left to complete my task.” A man employed at a different facility said he found pervasive surveillance and inhuman speed “so soul-sucking I found myself nearly crying in my car right before I was supposed to walk in.”
On Sunday, the Stand News journalist in question was being searched by officers in Admiralty ahead of a protest rally in Chater Garden. During the search, an officer displayed the identity card in front of a camera for around a minute as the reporter live-streamed.
The journalist then used his phone to conduct a second live stream. Another officer took his phone and broke the device’s screen.
“During the course of this unconstitutional assault, not one single jail guard or official attempted to stop the attack, intercede to prevent further abuse or offer medical assistance to Ms. Rathmann after she was obviously seriously injured or dead,” reads the lawsuit.
United Nations agencies warned the bill would generate a landscape of impunity for child abuse and leave victims vulnerable to experiencing additional mistreatment and distress from their assailants.
Stating that no religion prescribes the use of loudspeakers for worshipping, the Allahabad High Court declined the permission sought by two mosques to install loudspeakers, for the purposes of Azaan.
"No religion prescribes or preaches that prayers are required to be performed through voice amplifiers or by beating of drums and if there is such practice, it should not adversely affect the rights of the others including that of not being disturbed," division bench of Justice Pankaj Mithal and Justice Vipin Chandra Dixit held.
Andimi was not the only Christian leader reported to have been killed in Adamawa state this week.
The Anzhi Arena spa-complex near Makhachkala, the capital of the internal Russian republic of Dagestan, announced its policy change on the Instagram social media platform on Monday.
“From Jan. 20 onwards attendance of the pool is open only to men,” it said.
"Democracy at work should be a right, not a fight."
Five hours into the dark, rainy drive, Ana Hernandez and Edwin Loredo laugh about how they’ve never seen the sun in Georgia. It’s their third trip in as many months, and every time, it storms the whole way — nearly nine hours — from their home in Rocky Mount, North Carolina.
If we look to history for direction in these difficult times of hyper-partisan divisions, we might take comfort in the admonition of James Madison, who wrote during the Constitutional Convention that the Senate should serve as “a necessary fence” to protect “the people against their rulers.”
While Madison and Paine directed their words toward the tyranny of the English monarchy — and the depredations and sufferings it leveled upon its colony in the new world — it’s impossible to ignore their applicability to Trump’s wildly authoritarian excesses and disdain for the laws, institutions, and the system of checks and balances upon which our nation was founded.
Those who have been following the progress of only the third presidential impeachment in 232 years would be absolutely correct to point out that the Senate’s Republican Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, has already foolishly blurted out that under his dubious “leadership” the Republican majority in the Senate would be acting in concert with the White House.
In essence, McConnell has already broken his oath to render “impartial justice” which was administered by Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John G. Roberts, and signed by every senator. How, one might credibly ask, can someone who says they will coordinate their actions with the accused sit as an impartial jury during Trump’s impeachment trial?
Make no mistake, the eyes of history are upon the nation’s capital and will remain there for weeks to come. When Rep. Adam Schiff delivered the articles of impeachment last week he read them aloud on the Senate floor, saying: “President Trump warrants impeachment and trial, removal from office and disqualification to hold and enjoy any office of honor, trust or profit under the United States.” Schiff, who has been repeatedly insulted by Trump, added the president has “demonstrated he will remain a threat to national security and the constitution if he is allowed to remain in office.”
"This proposal by a group of infamously anti-woman, anti-choice Congress members is egregious to say the least."
The Trump administration on Thursday published new visa rules aimed at restricting “birth tourism,” in which women travel to the United States to give birth so their children can have U.S. citizenship.
Cord cutting continued to set records in 2019 despite years of cable and broadcast executives trying to claim the trend wasn't actually happening. Now that they're finally acknowledging the threat is real, many of these same executives are doubling down on the kind of behavior that brought them to this point in the first place.
This week, Sonos launched — after which therefore retracted — that it would perhaps perchance ruin-of-life a assortment of popular audio streaming products made by the corporate at some level of its first 10 years in alternate.
Sonos had made up our minds to complete improve on yarn of these first-skills products lack sufficient processing vitality and storage to accommodate contemporary aspects.
Regardless that there delight in been many enhancements in presents, miniaturization, and general efficiency, loudspeaker skills has no longer fundamentally changed since its introduction in the 1920s. Offered that they’re no longer inclined outside their efficiency specifications, the drivers and cones can closing a long time. Diverse elements inner speakers encompass magnets constituted of ferrous and uncommon earth presents that attain no longer expire.
Sonos had decided to end support because these first-generation products lack sufficient processing power and storage to accommodate new features.
Although there have been many improvements in materials, miniaturization, and overall performance, loudspeaker technology has not fundamentally changed since its introduction in the 1920s. Provided that they aren't used outside their performance specifications, the drivers and cones can last decades. Other components inside speakers include magnets made out of ferrous and rare earth materials that do not expire.
In addition to solid-state MOSFET-based signal amplifiers, self-powered speakers also contain transformers, which are made of solid cores of metal wound with fine conductive wire. Updates to transformer technology in recent years include Gallium Nitride (GaN), which reduces heat and overall footprint. These components, particularly MOSFETs do not "go bad" unless they are abused, such as being subjected to high temperatures, very high voltages, or transient power spikes, which can be mitigated by a simple surge suppressor or power conditioner.
This latest volume is edited by Prof. Josef Drexl (Max Planck Institute for Innovation and Competition) and Prof. Anselm Kamperman Sanders (Maastricht University).
The title of the book was chosen as the theme of the two EIPIN conferences in 2015 (one in Maastricht and the other one in Munich).
McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP will be offering a live webinar entitled "Patent Eligibility and Section 101 Update" on February 18, 2020 from 10:00 am to 11:15 am (CT). In this presentation, MBHB attorney and Patent Docs author Michael Borella will provide an update on all fronts, and synthesize disparate threads into a cohesive set of best practices for handling 101 issues in patent prosecution in particular. The webinar will focus on software, business methods, and other technologies that relate to the "abstract idea" exception, though the issues and recommendations do cross over into the life sciences fields as well.
Here's a quick reminder that we're running a Gaming Like It's 1924 game jam, asking people to come up with both digital and analog games using newly public domain works from 1924. While the US spent decades not allowing any new works into the public domain, that changed last year (finally!), and now we're slowly getting works into the public domain drip by drip. But what good is a public domain if it's not used to inspire new creative works? So, as we did last year, we're running this contest for the month of January. All the rules are at the link above, but there are lots of great tools and templates out there for anyone wanting to try their hand at creating something.
We're taking part in Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of copyright law and policy, addressing what's at stake and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation.
The United States is the world’s chief exporter of copyright law. With recent news that President Trump is expected to sign the US Mexico-Canada (USMCA) trade agreement next week, we’re one step closer to Canada being forced to align with the US copyright duration to life of the author plus 70 years, keeping important works from being able to enter the public domain for another 20 years.
EU member states are getting ready to implement Article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive, which will more or less force every platform that hosts any user-generated content, to either license every damn thing (impossible) or to put in place a tool like ContentID, that automatically spots and takes down "infringing" content. Despite the fact that Google spent over $100 million on its ContentID and competitive offerings (mainly Audible Magic) are quite expensive, defenders of this plan kept insisting that those filters work. Plenty of people have pointed out that they don't work very well at all, and it's even worse than just leading to legitimate content being taken down. Having such a tool, means that it will be abused.
Sweden's Patent and Market Court has ruled that Internet provider Telia must block access to several large pirate sites. The order, which targets The Pirate Bay, Dreamfilm, FMovies, and NyaFilmer, was requested by several Hollywood studios. It is the first dynamic blocking order in Sweden, allowing the rightsholders to expand the blocklist when new URLs pop up.
The ground-breaking anti-piracy deal signed by Russia-based content and Internet platforms in 2018 will not be written into local law any time soon. The agreement, which sees search engines voluntarily delete allegedly-infringing links, was supposed to be formalized in recent months but in the face of complexities and parliament being tied up with other things, will now be extended until 2021.
US-based Internet provider RCN has asked a New Jersey federal court to drop the piracy liability lawsuit several major music companies filed against it last year. The ISP stresses that it's not responsible for copyright infringements allegedly committed by its customers. Among other things, RCN argues that the underlying piracy notifications lack credibility.
This week anti-piracy company Rivendell made history by reporting its 500 millionth infringing URL to Google. Speaking with TorrentFreak, the founder of Rivendell and sister company LeakID says that his team works closely with Google and finds the search giant very cooperative and helpful. He credits pirates for being resourceful but loves finding ways to "outsmart" them.
We've long had discussions about how wide open for abuse and error YouTube's copyright and demonetization practices are. Between the hamfisted method by which the accused is treated as guilty from the get go, to the impossibility of doing large-scale policing like this in a way that's even moderately good, to the avenue for abuse that all of this creates, the fact is that YouTube's stance on copyright is a mess. The end result of all of this is that creators on YouTube operate in constant peril of having their accounts suspended or video revenues taken by others with the recourse for fraud and error being convoluted and lengthy. For a site that is in the business of content creation, that's a real problem.
