The past couple of years have been a wild ride. Thanks to your support, we were able to transition from cozy office space to roomy warehouse to take our computers to the next level. And while we have more amazing projects in the works, we wanted to take a moment to appreciate the hard work and popcorn-fueled energy that’s gone into manufacturing our desktops.
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One of our first challenges in iterating Thelio’s design was to prevent shipping damages. Components would shake loose during shipping, and heavy GPUs sometimes sustained damage from the journey. In redesigning the GPU brace, we were able to support more of the GPU’s weight and keep it from jostling around inside the chassis. Shrinking the drive cage, meanwhile, secured the 2.5” storage drives against Thelio’s lid. These improvements have gone a long way towards reinforcing Thelio in transit from our planet to yours.
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Each day at System76 presents new challenges to overcome and new opportunities to dive headfirst into open source innovation. Despite the aversion among U.S. companies to manufacture domestically, it’s actually really fun. We’re excited to delve deeper into manufacturing computers, and we can’t wait to show you where our adventures take us.
Before you get too excited and try to install and run it, I must tell you that it’s not your regular Linux distribution like Ubuntu, Fedora or Debian. What is it then?
Amazon Web Services has begun previewing Bottlerocket, a new open-source Linux distribution designed for running containers.
There are two main ideas behind Bottlerocket. The first is to make it easier to automate OS updates by applying them in a single step, rather than package by package. According to AWS, this will also improve uptime "by minimizing update failures and enabling easy update rollbacks."
The second part of the rationale is to strip down the OS so it only contains what is needed to run containers.
AWS has launched its own open-source operating system for running containers on both virtual machines and bare metal hosts. Bottlerocket, as the new OS is called, is basically a stripped-down Linux distribution that’s akin to projects like CoreOS’s now-defunct Container Linux and Google’s container-optimized OS. The OS is currently in its developer preview phase, but you can test it as an Amazon Machine Image for EC2 (and by extension, under Amazon EKS, too).
The footprints of Linux are increasing day by day and the latest addition to this is the Bottlerocket. It is a Linux-based operating system built by Amazon Web Services. This open-source OS targets to host and run the containers on virtual machines or bare metal hosts.
According to the Nucleus Research survey, Amazon is already a dominant platform with over 80% of the cloud-based containers running on AWS. Hence, Bottlerocket is a new and free addition that supports both the Kubernetes and Docker’s images.
Introduced recently, Bottlerocket is a new Linux-based operating system built by Amazon Web Services (AWS) that is specifically catered to running containers on virtual machines or bare metal hosts. It has a number of features that can help ease the automation of OS updates, improve security, and help with the integration and deployment of containers.
First, unlike most operating systems today that update on a package-by-package basis, updates to Bottlerocket are applied in a single step. Also, the OS uses an image-based model. This ensures that updates can also be rolled back in their entirety, if necessary. This results in increased uptime for container applications, seamless fleet-wide updates, and lower error rates.
AWS open-sourced Bottlerocket today as an open-source operating system for container hostings. Bottlerocket is a stripped-down Linux OS that supports Docker images and other OCI-supported platforms. Bottlerocket relies upon an image model rather than a package update system. Bottlerocket also makes some other interesting design choices like using DM-VERITY with a predominantly read-only file-system. They also disable SSH and shell support to the OS itself in the name of security, among other measures.
AWS has pulled the covers off Bottlerocket, a new Linux-based operating system for hosting and running containers on virtual machines or bare metal hosts.
According to AWS chief evangelist Jeff Barr, the project “reflects much of what we have learned over the years” and supports Docker images and others conforming to the Open Container Initiative image format.
AWS’s new offering apparently applies updates in a single step which contrasts with the usual package-wise approach and lends itself better to automation via the container orchestrators it also integrates with. Should an update fail, leaving the system unable to reboot to the new image, Bottlerocket is said to automatically roll back, while workload failures can trigger workflows for manual rollbacks.
Amazon Web Services Inc. today announced the debut of a new, open-source operating system for software containers that runs on bare metal servers or virtual machines.
AWS Bottlerocket is currently available in preview, and is a stripped down operating system comprised of only the components that are absolutely essential to get containers up and running. It supports both Docker images and others that conform to the Open Container Initiative or OCI image format.
Hello and welcome to Episode 331 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, we bring listeners on to talk with us and field questions from the chat. We discuss Hamvention and COVID-19, FT-8, antenna designs, amateur radio exams, new acquisitions and much, much more. Thank you to all who participated and thank you to all our supporters, Patreons and benefactors. We couldn't do this without you.
Docker, VMware, and Amazon all have big announcements, a new organization is launched to shepherd the open source microservices ecosystem, and more.
Randal Schwartz and Jonathan Bennett talk about current news within the world of open-source software and technology.
Linux Phone and Desktop | Why You Should Use Them Does Windows or your iPhone really work for you? Are you waiting on updates? Emptying your wallet just to run into problems down the road with them? Well, I've seen pretty much it all in the 20+ years in IT support and want to share why I use Linux and think you should at least know about it and try to use it.
The Test Anything Protocol, or TAP, is a way to record test results in a language agnostic way, predates XML by about 10 years, and is still alive and kicking.
Matt Layman has contributed to Python in many ways, including his educational newsletter, and his Django podcast, Django Riffs.
Matt is also the maintainer of tap.py and pytest-tap, two tools that bring the Test Anything Protocol to Python.
In this episode, Matt and I discuss TAP, it's history, his involvement, and some cool use cases for it.
First up, in our Wanderings, Leo tries out LMDE, Bo keeps things to himself, Tony Hughes returns with ALT Linux adventures, Moss boogies from Budgie, and Joe tries out scrcpy (screen copy).
Then, our news we have plenty of Linux Mint and LMDE news, Raspberry Pi fixes its USB, apt upgrades, and more.
A new series of patches for Intel’s Linux P-state driver improves the efficiency of the integrated graphics by up to 43% and performance by up to 15%, as tested on an Ice Lake system.
Intel’s open source driver team sent out a series of patches on Tuesday for the Intel P-State driver meant to improve efficiency of the GPU for I/O-bound workloads, according to Phoronix. The P-state was tuned for better CPU efficiency in TDP-limited scenarios. This would give more power to the GPU.
For those who are interested in the details of graphics synchronization: Jason Ekstrand describes in detail the value of explicit synchronization, the reason why we can't have it now, and a proposal for eventually making it possible to go explicit. "Explicit synchronization is the future of graphics and media. At least, that seems to be the consensus among all the graphics people I've talked to. I had a chat with one of the lead Android graphics engineers recently who told me that doing explicit sync from the start was one of the best engineering decisions Android ever made. It's also the direction being taken by more modern APIs such as Vulkan."
Linux very nearly wasn't called Linux. Did you know what Linus wanted to call his kernel initially?
Will 2020 be the year of Linux Desktop? Well, within the past three months, various news regarding the support for Linux has already witnessed it at some level. For instance, Microsoft’s previewed antivirus for Linux and the Linux-based Azure Sphere for IoT solutions or the latest Zen 3 code push by AMD for its 19h family graphic driver.
The open-source community is moving swiftly along with propriety stakeholders. And the recent job posting by AMD for Lead Linux kernel developer is cherry on the cake. AMD plans to grasp the market of open-source graphics drivers for Linux.
Prolific ACO shader compiler back-end developer Timur Kristóf has managed to land his latest improvements in Mesa 20.1-devel for this alternative to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end supported so far by the RADV Vulkan driver.
This latest addition to ACO is support for compiling tessellation control/evaluation shaders. This expanded support around tessellation shaders required a fair amount of reworking but ultimately appears to be in order and now all shader stages with ACO in RADV are enabled.
APT 2.0 includes several new features, along with some performance and hardening improvements. Also, the size of the APT library is significantly smaller now since Debian developers have removed "a lot of code" in APT 2.0.
Here is Mint Cinnamon with Ubuntu's Yaru and Humanity icons. They are high quality and artistic icon theme popular among GNU/Linux users I believe many will love to use it on their Mint computers. I explain here where and what files to download, how to install it, and to enable the icon theme. Enjoy beautiful icons!
A Google researcher has been developing "LoadLibrary" as a means of being able to load Windows Dynamic Link Libraries (DLLs) that in turn can be used by native Linux code.
LoadLibrary isn't a replacement for Wine or the like but is intended to allow Windows DLL libraries to be loaded that can then be accessed by native Linux code, not trying to run Windows programs and the like on Linux but simply loading the libraries.
Amoeba Battle: Microscopic RTS Action, a title that's somewhat a mouthful and it was a surprise when it released on Steam earlier this month coming out of nowhere. Note: The developer, Grab Games, sent a key.
Unlike many other RTS titles, you don't build up a base in Amoeba Battle and you're not controlling humans either. Instead, you take charge of and direct around microscopic life competing for dominance. It's weirdly cute and ridiculously inviting, with a quite beautiful watercolour style to everything that captured my heart instantly as a big RTS fan.
Releasing on March 18, Two Point Hospital: Off The Grid from Two Point Studios and SEGA will take your hospital building to somewhere quite different.
Much like previous DLC releases there will be new maps to building through and some new illnesses. They said it will have a total of 35 new illnesses, although only 9 of these will have new visuals and you will also be using brand new treatment rooms too. The weird and wonderful ailments people catch in Two Point Hospital is definitely one of the highlights, so more is welcome.
Currently in Early Access, Caffeine: Victoria's Legacy is a fantasy Visual Novel with a Steampunk theme and it's going to be releasing in full on March 20 with Linux support.
Gravity? What gravity? Flat Earths! is a free local multiplayer (plus support for Remote Play Together) game of absolute pure chaos and it's really good fun too.
"Are you one of those ROUND-EARTHERS? Do you think the sun isn't hung from a bale of twine cast down from the star-heavens? Well then, don't bother trying this couch-multiplaying, trident-hurling, death-o-gasm of an aquatic mammal simulation."
Flat Earths! was originally made for the Ludem Dare 38 Game Jam back in 2017, which had "A Small World" as the theme and it's a bit of a joke at people who think the Earth is flat. This is the "Flat Earths Deluxe!" version upgraded and re-written to improve it based on the original. Pretty sweet to see a developer go back to an old game like that, and keep it free.
Deserted looks pretty awesome. With an atmosphere and visual style inspired by Another World (or 'Out of This World' to some), it will be releasing in Early Access later this year.
Another new release of Steam Play's Proton software is up and while small in number of changes, it's quite a mighty update overall.
Looking to get started with Steam Play on Linux? Have no idea what it is? Be sure to check our previous beginners guide for some tips and explanations. We'll be keeping that up to date with any major changes.
Proton 5.0-4 is out as Valve's Wine-based layer for running Windows games on Linux via Steam Play.
This latest update to the Proton 5.0 series, which in turn is based on the Wine 5.0 stable code-base, has continued performance enhancements, work around the Denuvo digital rights management, and also pulling in the latest DXVK. DXVK 1.5.5 was released at the end of February with Direct3D 9 additions, various D3D10/D3D11 fixes benefiting an assortment of games, and other corrections for this Direct3D-over-Vulkan implementation.
Neon Noodles released into Early Access a few months ago and since then, I've been directing my robotic chefs around madly trying to improve on their speed and it's quite engrossing. Note: Key from the dev.
The developer, Vivid Helix, is aiming for a Zachtronics-like experience with games like Opus Magnum (a personal favourite) and so far it does seem like they're succeeding with their aim. Your design and build your own automated kitchen, placing down various logic blocks in a stylish top-down style where you see everything happening.
StarCrossed, an action-arcade game with a magical girl aesthetic and a cooperative twist has now officially released for Linux shortly after the Windows version became available last month.
It plays something a little like a classic arcade shooter, except your only weapon is a bright star that you need to bounce between you and your partner to keep the momentum going. A very fun and sweet twist, something like a ridiculously action-packed co-op pong with bright and inviting visuals.
No GOG Galaxy? Not so much of a problem right now with handy open source apps like Minigalaxy and a big new release is up.
The application has a simple purpose allowing you to login to your GOG account, download and install your games without hassle. It's getting closer towards that goal now with this latest release cleaning it up nicely and adding some useful features.
Lazr is a cyberpunk platform that's quickly shaping up to be like nothing else, where parts of the level and enemies are made from simulated cloth and a massive demo update is out.
This comes after the recent Kickstarter funding, which only just managed to scrape past the finishing line due to a bunch of cancellations right at the end. Pleasing to see such a unique take on the action-platformer progressing onward.
What's new? There's a new boss and boss level, a bunch of major art upgrades, the Hovertank boss got a big upgrade, an adaptive camera is in, laser will cut through cloth more "consistently", lots of new NPCs, a redesign of most levels, grenades are easier to see and hear too.
SDL 2 (Simple DirectMedia Layer) is the go-to solution for many developers doing cross-platform work, providing an API to hook into audio, keyboard, mouse, joystick, and graphics hardware across various platforms and a big new release is out.
Lots more gamepads are now supported including: 8BitDo FC30 Pro, 8BitDo M30 GamePad, BDA PS4 Fightpad, HORI Fighting Commander, Hyperkin Duke, Hyperkin X91, MOGA XP5-A Plus, NACON GC-400ES, NVIDIA Controller v01.04, PDP Versus Fighting Pad, Razer Raion Fightpad for PS4, Razer Serval, Stadia Controller, SteelSeries Stratus Duo, Victrix Pro Fight Stick for PS4 and the Xbox One Elite Series 2.
That is part of why SDL is so awesome, it can make gamepad input so much less of a hassle for developers because it just supports so many of them. If you want a peek into the vast array of input bindings, have a look at this database file.
With this new release there's also the new functions "SDL_GameControllerTypeForIndex" and "SDL_GameControllerGetType" which allow for developers to easily get the type of gamepad being used and you can override it with "SDL_HINT_GAMECONTROLLERTYPE". Lots more gamepad improvements as well, like functions to get the player index for each pad.
SDL 2.0.12 is now available as the latest stable update to the Simple DirectMedia Layer that is the library commonly used by cross-platform games as a hardware/software abstraction layer.
Last week we outlined that SDL 2.0.12 was on the way with initial RISC OS bits, support for the Google Stadia controller and other game controllers, a new video driver for offscreen rendering, ARM NEON optimizations, many bug fixes, and other improvements. On Tuesday night, that stable release happened.
As you probably knows if you follow my blog, I'm using exclusively a GNU/Linux operating system for my workstation. I produce everything I do with it (webcomic, website, book, freelance, videos, etc...) and all of that since more than ten years now. Along the way, I tried so many existing solution for my workstation!.. And that's not a little journey because on this type of systems the options are numerous as you can see by yourself on this graph representing the development of various Linux distributions..
From April 2018 to end 2019, I used the same distro: Kubuntu 18.04 LTS and I was happy with it. It's even the first time I stick 1,5 year with the same operating system. I updated it recently to the latest version of Kubuntu 19.10 and this version made me even happier!
So, I decided to take notes on the way while reinstalling everything as I did over the last ten years when I wrote my previous five long install guide. Then the notes transformed into a draft, and now you'll find on this article two parts. First, my reasons to use it and why I advice it for a digital painting workstation. In a second and last part, I'll detail my tips, command-lines and methods to adapt the base Kubuntu install into an operating system similar to the one I use.
Chromebooks with the right stuff inside now are able to install and run a complete Linux experience with the KDE desktop without giving up the Chrome OS on the same device. It is not yet flawless, but it does create a hybrid computing platform that lets Linux and Android apps coexist on top of the Chrome OS.
I do not mean flashing the Galium OS distribution as a replacement for Chrome OS. I have done that on an end-of-life early Chromebook with usable results. However, I mean running a complete Linux graphical environment with the KDE desktop. This adds to the existing use of Android apps all in separate containers on top of Chrome OS on a single Chromebook.
Since Google first released a Chrome OS version with the Linux apps feature a few years ago, I have been using the Crostini project to run Linux apps on a Chromebook. "Crostini" is Google's umbrella term for making Linux application support easy to use for integrating Linux with Chrome OS. That method installs a command line version of the Linux OS to run Debian Linux apps on supported Chromebooks.
This is another short update on the activities for the upcoming 2.8 release. While we are currently busy finalizing the last new feature (we’ll blog about this soon), stabilizing the new code of the new release and fixing bugs, there is still some time left for new small features requested by our users on a short notice.
In LabPlot the user specifies the sizes and distances in different units. For fine granular settings related to the appearance of the visualized data (like the width of the curve line, the size of the data symbol, the size of the font used for axis labels, etc.), the typographic point is used. In other cases where we deal with positioning of the objects on the worksheet and with their sizes, the values are specified in centimeters. For users who are more comfortable working with inches, there was no way to switch to the imperial units in LabPlot… Until now.
As those of you who read our recent feature roundup will know GNOME 3.36 is a pretty big update with a wealth of improvements and several new user-facing features in tow.
The new release even manages to sneak in a couple of unexpected, but very welcome, changes too, like a new GNOME Extensions app.
GNOME 3.36 will be released today after its regular 6-month development cycle. Read on to find out what new features and improvements are included with this release.
GNOME 3.36 is slated to be released today so here is a look back at much of the prominent work being introduced in this six month update to the GNOME desktop.
Among the many changes coming with GNOME 3.36 that have been on our radar include:
- Many performance improvements like batching clipping rectangles and other performance tuning. Many performance improvements throughout, continuing the trend in recent years of performance optimizations for the desktop. Intermediate ShadowFB support is another one of the performance additions for helping the GNOME Shell when running on software rasterizers like LLVMpipe. There is also ongoing improvements for GNOME on secondary GPUs driven by DisplayLink adapters.
Red Hat's Matthias Clasen had the honor of announcing GNOME 3.36 as the latest half-year update to the GNOME 3 desktop environment.
This morning we published our GNOME 3.36 feature overview outlining all of the fascinating work that caught our eye from continued (X)Wayland enhancements to performance improvements to other items. Clasen in the mailing list announcement called out attention to...
Dubbed “Gresik” after the GNOME Asia Summit 2019 conference that took place in Gresik, Indonesia, GNOME 3.36 is a major release that promises many great additions to the open-source desktop environment used by numerous GNU/Linux distributions.
Highlights of the GNOME 3.36 release include updated login and unlock screens with a much-improved and modern design for a smoother and faster logging in and unlocking experience, and a more polished GNOME Shell that makes it easier to create app folders using drag and drop in the app grid, and offers a smoother workspace switch experience.
The latest version GNOME 3.36 also codenamed as “Gresik” has finally landed after 6 months of GNOME 3.34 release.
Not just limited to the feature additions, but GNOME 3.36 improves on a lot of things that we needed.
Looks like since the release of GNOME 3.34.0 in September 2019 I made exactly 500 commits in GNOME Git. :)
One of the best features that a system offers is customization. Almost everything ranging from multiple desktop environments to the system configuration, you can set it according to your own looks and feel.
The latest version release of GNOME 3.36 promises to enhance and smoothens the user experience with its highly polished desktop environment. With over 24,434 changes in the last six months, the GNOME team brings new features with improved performance and more.
GNOME 3.36 is the latest version of GNOME 3, and is the result of 6 months’ hard work by the GNOME community. It contains major new features, as well as many smaller improvements and bug fixes. In total, the release incorporates 24434 changes, made by approximately 780 contributors.
3.36 has been named “Gresik” in recognition of the team behind GNOME.Asia 2019. GNOME.Asia is GNOME’s official annual summit in Asia, which is only possible thanks to the hard work of local volunteers. This year’s event was held in Gresik, Indonesia, and we’d like to thank everyone who contributed to its success. Thank you, Team Gresik!
One of the best things about Linux is having access to all the wonderful desktop environments (DEs). With Linux, you can often customize things to your heart's content, switching environments entirely if you prefer. Conversely, with Windows 10, for example, there is essentially just one user interface. Don't like it? Sucks to be you! If you run Windows, it is Microsoft's way or the highway. True, there is value in having all users sharing one experience, but ultimately, choice will always reign supreme.
Despite there being many great desktop environments available on Linux, only one can be the best. Consistently, for many years now, GNOME has been the greatest DE, and that is still true now. What makes it so wonderful? Well, GNOME 3.x is ideal for productivity, allowing the user to focus on the task at hand. Not to mention, it is beautiful and simple -- it is a no-nonsense computing experience. There's a reason both Ubuntu and Fedora use GNOME as their default environment.
Looks like since the release of GNOME 3.34.0 in September 2019 I made exactly 500 commits in GNOME Git.
The popular Linux desktop environment GNOME brings another milestone update with its release 3.36 version. This version undoubtedly the “performance improvement” release as per user feedback for the past couple of weeks when people tried the beta.
The GNOME desktop environment levels up in a big way with the GNOME 3.36 "Gresik" release with some massive improvements all over and it's looking awesome.
Another six months of development went into this release and it includes many improvements, performance enhancements, and new features. One such improvement I'm quite happy to see is for NVIDIA users: if you have NVIDIA with Optimus, GNOME now includes an option to launch something with your dedicated GPU which is incredibly handy too.
GNOME 3.36 Released After Its Regular 6 Month Development Cycle
Gnome 3.38 has been released with tons of new improvements and features. GNOME foundation announces the official release of GNOME 3.36: “Gresik”.
So, what’s new in Epiphany 3.36?
Once upon a time, beginning with GNOME 3.14, Epiphany had supported displaying PDF documents via the Evince NPAPI browser plugin developed by Carlos Garcia Campos. Unfortunately, because NPAPI plugins have to use X11-specific APIs to draw web content, this didn’t suffice for very long. When GNOME switched to Wayland by default in GNOME 3.24 (yes, that was three years ago!), this functionality was left behind. Using an NPAPI plugin also meant the code was inherently unsandboxable and tied to a deprecated technology. Epiphany disabled support for NPAPI plugins by default in Epiphany 3.30, hiding the functionality behind a hidden setting, which has now finally been removed for Epiphany 3.36, killing off NPAPI for good.
If you love the look of tiling window managers but don’t fancy giving up your creature comforts, keep an eye on Pop Shell — it’s a new GNOME extension in development and it’s left me seriously impressed.
Pop Shell pitches itself as a “keyboard-driven layer for GNOME Shell which allows for quick and sensible navigation and management of windows”.
Or to put it another way it’s i3-gap, but in GNOME Shell, natively, with all the raw power that comes from having fine-grained keyboard control PLUS all the niceties that come from having a full-bodied desktop environment too.
Continuing my previous review, Zorin Education is a computer operating system designed for use in school. Aside from giving complete applications built-in for normal computing, it specifically includes applications for study fields especially math and science. Not only that, today it is perhaps the only OS in the world that include a game making application which is capable to create games for both phone and desktop games. This will make schooling and teaching more fun. For people with prior knowledge, if you are looking for Edubuntu OS continuation, I would love to say you are better to look at Zorin Education more closely. I tried to expose it briefly here by summarizing the school purpose first and game making then. For all teachers and lecturers everywhere, I recommend you to try out this OS. Enjoy!
LibreELEC 9.2.1 is the first major update in the Leia series based on the Kodi 18 “Leia” open-source media centre software. It’s based on the latest Kodi 18.6 release, which adds numerous bug fixes, and adds support for the WireGuard VPN protocol in settings.
Support for Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computers has been slightly improved in this release as well. Among the changes, users can now use the hdmi_enable_4kp60=1 parameter for enabling 4K video playback support. The hdmi_enable_4k=1 option is no longer supported.
Back in the end of 2019, the 4MLinux Beta version was released. Following the development roadmap, a new stable version 4MLinux 32.0 is finally out. After two minor updates in 31 series, v32.0 is here with major updates and new features.
4MLinux is a small and independent Linux variant to serve the general purpose activities. This distribution features the applications mainly for the maintenance, multimedia, mini server, and classic games.
EuroBSDcon is the European technical conference for users and developers of BSD-based systems. The conference will take place September 17-20 2020 in Vienna, Austria. The tutorials will be held on Thursday and Friday to registered participants and the talks are presented to conference attendees on Saturday and Sunday.
The Call for Talk and Presentation proposals period will close on May 24th, 2020. Prospective speakers will be notified of accepteance or otherwise by June 2nd, 2020.
My machines are hosted in 3 different places. First is at Exoscale, second is Vultr and the third is... my flat.
All of them run either OpenBSD on its -current branch, or the latest version of Ubuntu. At this time, that's Ubuntu 19.10. After a couple of years working on OpenBSD ports (i.e. packaging), I believe fresh software is better, security-wise.
They're managed with Ansible. I began my Ansible repository 4 years ago and it has about 1500 commits in it. I wrote the Ansible to fit my needs rather than making generic (and therefore reusable) roles, so it's not public.
I update the OpenBSD machines regularly to a newer OpenBSD snapshot (so of course the process has been automated). For Ubuntu, I prefer to reinstall them, since they're managed by Ansible and they don't have any data on them. Reinstalling machines regularly helps spot missing pieces in Ansible. :P
All the three sites are as standalone as possible. This is both so that in the case that one gets pwned it won't help the attacker to move laterally, and so that if one is unavailable it shouldn't impact anything else.
s is a command to show files in Linux and Unix-like operating systems. A ls command first appeared in a version of AT&T UNIX as well as in Multics. BSD and GNU Coreutils package provides the ls command with minor syntax changes. There is now third alternative named exa. It is a modern replacement for ls command.
After my last article covering the ls command and its options, I was thinking about the shelf life of some commands and the improvements that you would have expected to see over the years. This kicked off a memory in my brain from All Things Open (ATO) 209 where IBM’s Chris Waldon hosted a talk on Terminal Velocity: Moving fast in your shell. If that title sounds familiar, it's because he wrote an article based on this talk. Anyway, during the ATO presentation, he featured a tool called exa that's a replacement for ls and I was pretty impressed with it. It turns out that some commands have been improved upon via well-executed, modern replacements. The exa utility is one of them.
Arch Linux is a Linux distribution largely based on the binary packages which targets x86-64 microprocessors computers.
Arch Linux uses rolling release model wherein the updates are frequently delivered over to applications.
It has package manager called pacman which allows to install, remove and update software packages.
Newbies are advised to step in after gaining hand on experience with other Linux flavors since Arch Linux is built for experienced users.
From Linux containers and Kubernetes to edge computing and 5G, modern computing advancements have spread far and wide across the hybrid cloud. But at the center of almost all IT deployments, whether in a core datacenter, at the network’s edge or in the public, is the operating system and, frequently, that operating system is Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) remains the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform, and Red Hat is committed to continuing to deliver our flagship operating system as a more secure platform for even the most sensitive workloads.
Remote work is not easy. While there are perks to being remote, it is a mind-shift and takes some getting used to. Talk to anybody that works remotely, and they will likely tell you some of the biggest challenges of remote work are feeling disconnected and a loss of regime. Here are my tips gathered from 10 years as a remote worker on how to set yourself and your team up to work remotely successfully.
LoopBack is a Node.js and TypeScript framework that you can use to build APIs and microservices. IBMers are active maintainers of the LoopBack project, which integrates with our API Connect product offering. In this blog post, we look back at a few highlights from 2019 and talk about what we have planned for 2020—and how you can get involved!
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In 2020, we have three major goals to make the LoopBack project more accessible and promote a greater adoption of the project.
Back in September in Milan, with more than 350 very attentive people, the first Italian edition of the OpenShift Commons Gathering event took place. The event, which brings together experts from all over the world to discuss open source projects that support the OpenShift and Kubernetes ecosystem, as well as analyzing best practices on native cloud applications and deepening container technologies, brought together developers, DevOps experts and system administrators, to explore the evolution of container technologies in order to make them effective and safe on a large scale. A day full of ideas and reflections, thanks also to the presence of Red Hat experts and above all of the users who brought their testimonies.
Bullet journaling is an organizational style that uses bullets, or bulleted lists, to focus your productivity requirements into intentions. In other words, this type of journaling helps you organize your thoughts and your tasks into easy to handle task "chunks" as bulleted items. This method allows you to prioritize and organize your tasks so that requirements and milestones don't get missed.
The bottom line is that, as system administrators, our lives are generally dealt with by interrupts. We set off on a task, someone calls with a problem (an interrupt), and we're off on a tangent to fix it. By the time we get back to the task at hand, we can lose our impetus. These lists will help you to refocus after an inevitable interrupt, to avoid losing your momentum.
The cost of maintaining existing IT means that organizations are often not able to dedicate as much money to innovation as they would like. Startups without this barrier are able to spend the majority of their budgets on innovation. Organizations looking to compete with startups and new market entrants need to shift the balance of their budgets to transformation. An open hybrid cloud platform needs to allow organizations to transfer more of their IT budgets to transformation.
In Sam Hartman's latest attack on a volunteer, he makes a series of arguments intended to lead us to the conclusion that a single Debian Developer woke up one day and decided to pursue a new career as an Internet troll.
Hartman's claim is bizarre for various reasons.
When you look at Hartman's arguments, they are wafer-thin. Consider this claim...
Sparky live/install media of the ‘oldstable’ line updated up to version 4.12. Sparky 4 “Tyche” is based on the Debian 9 oldstable “Stretch”.
Changes: ● all packages updated as of March 11, 2020 ● reconfigured Sparky repositoy to the present one ● added a new Sparky public key
Included in Tails 4.4 are the newest Tor Browser 9.0.6 anonymous web browser, which is based on Mozilla Firefox 68.6.0 ESR, Mozilla Thunderbird 68.5.0 email and news client, as well as the Linux 5.4.19 LTS kernel with better support for newer hardware.
Just like we did for Debian 7 Wheezy, some of the paid Debian LTS contributors will continue to maintain Debian 8 Jessie after its 5 years of support as part of Freexian’s Extended LTS service.
Much of the functionality of MAAS is contained in controllers. There are two basic types: a region controller and a rack controller. It’s useful to pull back and take a quick look at how these controllers work and interact. This will help you get a better picture of how MAAS operates.
Electrolama (@omerk and friends) has been working on two open-source hardware 802.15.4/Zigbee projects with “zig-a-zig-ah” (aka “zzh”) USB stick based on Texas Instruments CC2652R SimpleLink multi-standard wireless MCU and Zoe (Zigbee + Poe) development board based on Raspberry Pi HAT form factor and powered by TI CC2530 SimpleLink 2.4 GHz SoC alongside CC2592 range extender.
Both boards are released under an Apache-based Solderpad Hardware License 2.0, and target users of the Zigbee2MQTT project. The boards could soon also get native support in Home Assistant via the “zigpy-cc” library which adds support in ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation) integration component.
This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers.
To date, this blog has focused on software that’s available in the Raspbian repositories. As this mirrors Debian stable, I’ve often grumbled that most of the packages lag behind software’s latest releases. Sometimes the software present in the Raspbian repositories is so old it’s unusable, putting the RPI4 in a bad light and giving a totally false impression of the capabilities of the tiny device.
In many instances it’s worth compiling software for yourself. At least that way you can use the latest version, even if compiling is not always straightforward.
Aaeon’s compact, rugged “FWS-2275” is an Apollo Lake based networking appliance and edge computer with 3x GbE, USB, serial, DIO, WiFi/BT, and mini-PCIe.
Aaeon announced a fanless, industrial net appliance and embedded PC with a compact, 115 x 115 x 44mm footprint and ruggedization features. The FWS-2275 is a slightly smaller and more rugged variation on the similarly Apollo Lake based FWS-2276, which has 4x GbE ports compared to 3x GbE here.
The FWS-2275 supports 0 to 50€°C temperatures compared to 0 to 40€°C on the FWS-2276 and earlier, almost identical FWS-2272. Like these earlier models, it provides vibration and shock resistance of 0.5Grms at 5 to 500Hz and 10G peak acceleration (11m/sec), respectively.
Newark has launched a $77 Raspberry Pi 4 Starter Kit with 4GB RAM, a power supply, 16GB microSD, dual micro-HDMI cables, and a case. Meanwhile, Gumstix is celebrating Pi Day by waiving its $2K Geppetto manufacturing fees for custom RPi designs through April 30.
We haven’t seen much news about community-backed hacker boards this year, due in part to the impact of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic. (SDXCentral just posted a summary of tech trade show closures, delays, or virtual event plans.) So far, the big SBC news for 2020 has been the price reduction for the 2GB RAM version of the Raspberry Pi 4 to $35. Now there’s more good Pi news: Newark has launched a Raspberry Pi 4 Starter Kit and Gumstix is celebrating the Mar. 14 Pi Day celebration by launching free prototype manufacturing for Raspberry Pi customizations (see farther below).
Electrolama (@omerk and friends) has been working on two open-source hardware 802.15.4/Zigbee projects with “zig-a-zig-ah” (aka “zzh”) USB stick based on Texas Instruments CC2652R SimpleLink multi-standard wireless MCU and Zoe (Zigbee + Poe) development board based on Raspberry Pi HAT form factor and powered by TI CC2530 SimpleLink 2.4 GHz SoC alongside CC2592 range extender.
Both boards are released under an Apache-based Solderpad Hardware License 2.0, and target users of the Zigbee2MQTT project. The boards could soon also get native support in Home Assistant via the “zigpy-cc” library which adds support in ZHA (Zigbee Home Automation) integration component.
The Edwards Lab at the University of Reading has developed a flexible, low-cost, open source lab robot for capturing images of microbiology samples with a Raspberry Pi camera module. It’s called POLIR, for Raspberry Pi camera Open-source Laboratory Imaging Robot. Here’s a timelapse video of them assembling it.
Part of our work in the consortium behind the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE) is to produce free classroom resources for teachers to deliver the Computing curriculum to students aged 5–16 in England. Our Director of Educator Support Carrie Anne Philbin describes how we define and represent progression in these resources.
Usually on It’s FOSS we talk about Linux and open source software with occasional open science stuff.
However, when I stumbled upon a post on Hackaday, I learned about an initiative (OpenCovid19) that tries to promote or develop open-source methodologies to safely test the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Eric S Raymond, one of the founders of the Open Source Initiative and its president for the first six years, has been banned from two OSI mailing lists following messages whose tone violated the code of conduct. In today's socio-political climate it's not only who you are or what your opinions are that matters, it's also how you express yourself. One absolute sticking point is that you must not make threatening, disparaging or belittling remarks about another person - and this it seems is what has led to Eric Raymond (ESR) being disbarred from posting.
Unfortunately, good code won't speak for itself. Even the most elegantly designed and well-written codebase that solves the most pressing problem in the world won't just get adopted on its own. You, the open source creator, need to speak for your code and breathe life into your creation. That's where technical writing and documentation come in.
A project's documentation gets the most amount of traffic, by far. It's the place where people decide whether to continue learning about your project or move on. Thus, spending time and energy on documentation and technical writing, focusing on the most important section, "Getting Started," will do wonders for your project's traction.
Writing may feel uncomfortable, even daunting, to many of you. As engineers, we are trained more to write code than to write about code. Many people also speak English as a second or even third language and may feel insecure or intimidated about writing in English. (I learned English as a second language, and my mother tongue is Mandarin Chinese, so I feel your pain.)
Kubernetes and Docker are two of the most commonly heard buzzwords in modern DevOps conversations. Docker is a tool that enables you to containerize and run your applications, and Kubernetes provides you with a platform to orchestrate or manage these containers—since managing thousands of containers manually using the Docker CLI would be a practical nightmare.
Google's open-source developers have released a new tool for Linux machines to help fend off stealthy USB keystroke injection attacks.
[...]
Just glancing away from the screen is enough time for the keystroke injection attack to occur, unnoticed by a person sitting in front of a computer.
USB-delivered keystroke attacks were initially devised to ease system administrator tasks, but attackers repurposed the technology for malicious goals, explains Sebastian Neuner from the Google Information Security Engineering Team.
When you think of open source, your mind likely jumps to projects such as Linux, Firefox, and other now-mainstream software. The ideals of the movement are applicable to other areas, too, however – and a group have come together to pool resources to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.
The group has formed around Just One Giant Lab, a non-profit organisation operating out of Paris, France. They aim to create an open platform for scientific collaboration on a broad range of issues facing humanity. The current project aims to create an open-source method for safely testing for COVID-19 infection, in an attempt to help better manage cases popping up around the world.
With the release of Firefox 74.0 yesterday and that also pushing Firefox 75.0 to beta, here are some fresh benchmarks on Ubuntu Linux of Firefox 73 vs. 74 vs. 75 Beta, both out-of-the-box and when force enabling WebRender.
Using the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X with Radeon RX 5600 XT graphics card, fresh benchmarks of Mozilla Firefox were done off Ubuntu 19.10 paired with Linux 5.5 and Mesa 20.1-devel.
Released earlier this week, the Firefox 74 web browser introduces a new sandboxing technology for Linux systems to keep users safer than before when surfing the Web, rolls out DNS over HTTPS by default for users in the US, and deprecates the TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 cryptographic protocols.
Only TLS 1.2 is now used by Firefox starting with version 74. Websites that do not support this protocol will show an error page.
Mozilla Firefox 74.0 was released a day ago. Now it’s available to install in Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 19.10 via the security & updates repositories.
After already being available as a Snap app in the Snap Store, the Mozilla Firefox web browser is now also installable as a Flatpak app from Flathub.
Senior software engineer Mihai Tabara announced earlier this week that his team over at Mozilla managed to successfully build Flatpaks of the upcoming Firefox 75 release.
Early builds have been published in the Flathub store into the beta channel for early adopters who want to install the web browser on their favorite GNU/Linux distribution using this universal binary format.
Even given the opportunity, I probably wouldn't go back to working in an office. For the kind of work that I do, quiet time is more important than high bandwidth human interaction.
Yet, being able to talk to my colleagues and exchanges ideas or solve problems is critical to being productive. That's where the video-conferencing bit comes in. At Mozilla, we use Vidyo Zoom primarily, sometimes Hangout and more rarely Skype. We spend hours every week talking to each other via webcams and microphones, so it's important to do it well.
Having a good video setup is probably the most important and yet least regarded aspect of working remotely. When you start at Mozilla, you're given a laptop and a Zoom account. No one teaches you how to use it. Should I have an external webcam or use the one on your laptop? Do I need headphones, earbuds, a headset with a microphone? What kind of bandwidth does it use? Those things are important to good telepresence, yet most of us only learn them after months of remote work.
[...]
In many ways, we're the first generation of remote workers, and people are learning how to do it right. I believe video-conferencing is an important part of that process, and I think everyone should take a bit of time and improve their setup. Ultimately, we're all a lot more productive when communication flows easily, so spread the word, and do tell your coworkers when they setup is getting in the way of good conferencing.
Our Czech LibreOffice community attends events around the country, spreading the word about LibreOffice, free software and open standards. Today, Petr Valach reports back from InstallFest, which took place on 29 February and 1 March. InstallFest focuses on GNU/Linux, helping new users to install the operating system, but also has lectures and stands for many other free and open source software projects…
For the first time this year, the LibreOffice community attended the InstallFest conference. The following is a summary of the knowledge and insights we gained there…
The vast majority of visitors were from younger generations – often high school or even elementary school pupils. The new mobile application from Collabora, released just a few days before – and surprisingly, almost no one knew about it – aroused great interest. Collabora Office Mobile has proven to be a highly featureful and functional alternative for the desktop version – although it has a limited range of features, but its capabilities are surprising.
The FSFE is looking for an executive assistant
We are looking for an executive assistant to support our work to empower people to control technology. The person will work 25-35 hours per week with our team in the Berlin office and will be in charge of the FSFE's Berlin office operations.
About the FSFE
Free Software Foundation Europe is a charity that empowers users to control technology. Software is deeply involved in all aspects of our lives and it is important that technology empowers rather than restricts us. Free Software gives everybody the rights to use, understand, adapt and share software. These rights help support other fundamental freedoms like freedom of speech, press and privacy.
The FSFE helps individuals and organisations to understand how Free Software contributes to freedom, transparency, and self-determination. It enhances users' rights by abolishing barriers to Free Software adoption, encourages people to use and develop Free Software, and provides resources to enable everyone to further promote Free Software in Europe.
Someone tried using rr to debug gdb and reported an rr issue because it didn't work. With some effort I was able to fix a couple of bugs and get it working for simple cases. Using improved debuggers to improve debuggers feels good!
The main problem when running gdb under rr is the need to emulate ptrace. We had the same problem when we wanted to debug rr replay under rr. In Linux a process can only have a single ptracer. rr needs to ptrace all the processes it's recording — in this case gdb and the process(es) it's debugging. Gdb needs to ptrace the process(es) it's debugging, but they can't be ptraced by both gdb and rr. rr circumvents the problem by emulating ptrace: gdb doesn't really ptrace its debuggees, as far as the kernel is concerned, but instead rr emulates gdb's ptrace calls. (I think in principle any ptrace user, e.g. gdb or strace, could support nested ptracing in this way, although it's a lot of work so I'm not surprised they don't.)
Most of the ptrace machinery that gdb needs already worked in rr, and we have quite a few ptrace tests to prove it. All I had to do to get gdb working for simple cases was to fix a couple of corner-case bugs. rr has to synthesize SIGCHLD signals sent to the emulated ptracer; these signals weren't interacting properly with sigsuspend. For some reason gdb spawns a ptraced process, then kills it with SIGKILL and waits for it to exit; that wait has to be emulated by rr because in Linux regular "wait" syscalls can only wait for a non-child process if the waiter is ptracing the target process, and under rr gdb is not really the ptracer, so the native wait doesn't work. We already had logic for that, but it wasn't working for process exits triggered by signals, so I had to rework that, which was actually pretty hard (see the rr issue for horrible details).
Yesterday the Load Value Injection (LVI) vulnerability was disclosed by Intel and researchers and affecting newer Intel CPUs with SGX and requiring mitigations outside of all the speculative execution mitigations the past two years. The GNU Assembler patches adding new options for mitigation have now been merged to Git master.
As outlined yesterday, the LVI mitigations noted by the researchers would be inserting LFENCE barriers before every vulnerable load instruction. That amounts to what has been merged today for the GNU Assembler (Gas), but it's not enabled by default and there is control over where the lfence barriers should be inserted.
If you're new to Emacs, visit Sacha Chua's excellent list of resources for Emacs beginners. This article assumes you're familiar with common Emacs terminology and that you know how to read and evaluate basic snippets of Elisp code. Ideally, you should also have heard of variable scope and how it works in another programming language. The examples also assume you use a fairly recent Emacs version (v.25 or later).
The Elisp manual includes everything there is to know, but it is written for people who already know what they are looking for (and it is really great for that). But many people want resources that explain Elisp concepts at a higher level and reduce the amount of information to the most useful bits. This article is my attempt to respond to that—to give readers a good grasp of the basics so they can use them for their configuration and make it easier for people to look up some detail in the manual.
Writing code has never been an easy task. Most of the applications in the market have hundreds of lines of code. An example is one of the most popular games, Minecraft, which has at least 4,815,162,342 lines of code.
Maintaining this code and ensuring that it is sustainable is not an easy task. Luckily, we have several tools available to help you manage your source code. One of these tools is PMD.
PMD is an opensource code analyzer that checks for errors in your code and generates a report. It scans your source code and checks for issues and bugs like; dead code, empty statements, open curly braces, declared and unused variables, duplicated code, and naming issues. These are but a few examples.
In the last few posts we have looked at compiling LibreOffice from scratch using Meson. Contrary to what one might expect it was not particularly difficult, just laborious. The codegen bits (yes, there are several) required some deciphering, but other than that it was fairly straightforward. Unfortunately just compiling source code is not sufficient, as usually one also wants to run the result. Further you'd want the new binaries to behave in the same way as the old ones. This is where things get interesting.
Trying to run the main LibreOffice application is not particularly useful because it will almost certainly not work. Fortunately LO provides a bunch of sample and test applications one can use. One of these is a demo app that starts, initialises the LO runtime and opens up a GUI window. Perfect. After a build (which takes an hour) and install the binary is ready to run and produces a … segfault. More annoyingly it produces a segfault without any useful information that would aid in debugging.
Time to take out strace. Several attempts later we discover that LO tries to be dynamic and smart. LO consists of >150 shared libraries. Rather than link all of them together, what seems to be happening is that the code tries to determine where the main executable is, then looks up shared libraries relative to that binary, dlopens them and then goes on its merry way. If this fails it crashes somewhere for some reason I chose not to dig into. This debugging brought up an interesting discovery about naming. One of the libraries is called SAL, so naturally you would expect the actual file to be called libsal.so. This is also what the Makefile defining the library calls it. But that is not its actual name. Instead it is is libsallo.so. Somewhere within the bowels of the 150 000 lines of Make that make (ha) up the system, some (but not all) library names get an lo appended to them. There does not seem to be any logic to which ones, but fine, they can at least be fixed with manual work.
Programming or coding has been occupying the practical world for a long period of time now. Our modern world offers a huge opportunity for those with a computer science background. In fact, people from other sectors, as well, train themselves additionally to enter this world of opportunity. Hence, candidates expecting a decent job of programming should definitely prepare themselves for the upcoming programming interview questions. Here, every interview question requires a smart answer to the board’s smart inquiry. Programming Interview Questions usually include questions of three categories – Data structure, algorithms, and logical questions as well.
Let’s do a quick recap:
1. Logging does not make much sense in monitoring and error tracking. Use better tools instead: like error and business monitorings with alerts
2. Logging adds significant complexity to your architecture. And it requires more testing. Use architecture patterns that will make logging an explicit part of your contracts
3. Logging is a whole infrastructure subsystem on its own. And quite a complex one. You will have to maintain it or to outsource this job to existing logging services
4. Logging should be done right. And it is hard. You will have to use a lot of tooling. And you will have to mentor developers that are unaware of the problems we have just discussed
Let’s recap the main points about EOF with added details for more clarity:
EOF in ANSI C is not a character. It’s a constant defined in and its value is usually -1
EOF is not a character in the ASCII or Unicode character set
EOF is not a character that you find at the end of a file on Unix/Linux systems
There is no explicit “EOF character” at the end of a file on Unix/Linux systems
EOF(end-of-file) is a condition provided by the kernel that can be detected by an application when a read operation reaches the end of a file (if k is the current file position and m is the size of a file, performing a read when k >= m triggers the condition)
In this Wing Tip we'll take a quick look at a lesser-known but often useful feature in Wing Pro: Jumping from symbols in the integrated shells to their point of definition in source code. This makes it a snap to bridge from runtime symbols to the source code where they are actually defined and used.
A common problem that you can face when working with Python dictionaries is to try to access or modify keys that don’t exist in the dictionary. This will raise a KeyError and break up your code execution. To handle these kinds of situations, the standard library provides the Python defaultdict type, a dictionary-like class that’s available for you in collections.
The Python defaultdict type behaves almost exactly like a regular Python dictionary, but if you try to access or modify a missing key, then defaultdict will automatically create the key and generate a default value for it. This makes defaultdict a valuable option for handling missing keys in dictionaries.
Let me preface this article by emphasizing that understanding object-oriented programming (OOP) is crucial if you want to learn Python.
One aspect of OOP is to learn how to define and use private methods.
In this article, I will teach you how to create private methods, when to use them, and why they are necessary.
A lot of behind the scenes work has been taking place on PyData/Sparse. Not so much in terms of code, more in terms of research and community/team building. I've more-or-less decided to use the structure and the research behind the Tensor Algebra Compiler, the work of Fredrik Kjolstad and his collaborators at MIT.
This page summarizes the important changes for the Unicode Standard, Version 13.0.0. This version supersedes all previous versions of the Unicode Standard.
Unicode 13 is now officially available with standardizing 143,859 different characters.
Unicode 13.0 brings with it dozens of new emojis including new gender and skin tone sequences. The new emojis range from different objects like a thong sandal to lungs to a toilet plunger. Besides the new emojis, there is also new character and script additions for Yezidi, Chorasmian, and other languages.
Prodigal tech bro stories skip straight from the past, when they were part of something that—surprise!—turned out to be bad, to the present, where they are now a moral authority on how to do good, but without the transitional moments of revelation and remorse. But the bit where you say you got things wrong and people were hurt? That’s the most important part. It’s why these corporatized reinventions feel so slick and tinny, and why so many of the comments on Lajeunesse’s train wreck post on Medium were critical. The journey feels fake. These ‘I was lost but now I’m found, please come to my TED talk’ accounts typically miss most of the actual journey, yet claim the moral authority of one who’s ‘been there’ but came back. It’s a teleportation machine, but for ethics.
(While we’re thinking about the neatly elided parts of the prodigal tech bro story, let’s dwell for one moment on the deletion of the entire stories of so many women and people of color barely given a first chance in Silicon Valley, let alone multiple reinventions.)
The only thing more fungible than cold, hard cash is privilege. The prodigal tech bro doesn’t so much take an off-ramp from the relatively high status and well-paid job he left when the scales fell from his eyes, as zoom up an on-ramp into a new sector that accepts the reputational currency he has accumulated. He’s not joining the resistance. He’s launching a new kind of start-up using his industry contacts for seed-funding in return for some reputation-laundering.
Currently the big news issue is all about how to respond to Coronavirus. The summary of the medical situation is that it’s going to spread exponentially (as diseases do) and that it has a period of up to 6 days of someone being infectious without having symptoms. So you can get a lot of infected people in an area without anyone knowing about it. Therefore preventative action needs to be taken before there’s widespread known infection.
Governments seem disinterested in doing anything about the disease before they have proof of widespread infection. They won’t do anything until it’s too late.
I finished my last 9-5 job late last year and hadn’t got a new one since then. Now I’m thinking of just not taking any work that requires much time spend outside home. If you don’t go to a workplace there isn’t a lot you have to do that involves leaving home.
The buzzer-beaters, upsets and all the other shining moments of this year’s NCAA basketball tournaments will be played in mostly empty arenas.
"Let's be clear: progressive ideas are winning regardless of who the nominee is," said Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
"By eliminating insurance premiums and out-of-pocket expenses, and lowering overall healthcare costs, Medicare for All will result in enormous savings for almost all households, all except the richest households who will pay more in taxes."
It isn’t un-American for voters to do some homework before voting. Here’s a “concise guide” for the voter with limited time who might want more information.
Reading up on the new coronavirus can feel like a rabbit hole of conflicting reports.
Many of the 73% of workers with access to paid sick days will not have enough days banked to be able to take off for the course of the illness to take care of themselves or a family member.
Look, I totally understand the very valid concerns that many people have about the spreading of false or misleading information regarding Covid-19. There are plenty of reports about misinformation spreading, especially via social media. Indeed, there are reports on the lengths to which various social media platforms are trying to crack down on all that misinformation -- a noble goal, though plenty will inevitably get through. This is the very nature of content moderation.
Americans are getting mixed messages on what to do if they have been exposed to coronavirus. ProPublica is collecting and fact-checking the instructions you receive from your state and local health departments, as well as any other advice you receive.
If you’ve been in touch with your local authorities, please let us know what they said by passing along any documentation. If you plan to call your local authorities, we hope you’ll document what you hear and share it with us.
After a forty-year waged on both science and government, the dangers that face us now are no surprise at all.
"The oppressive and illegal American sanctions have affected public welfare and health in Iran."
"We will see more cases and things will get worse than they are right now."
Without naming specific countries, the World Health Organization's director general slammed the "alarming levels of inaction" from some governments in the face of the coronavirus outbreak.
The next time the country’s largest banks become insolvent, rather than bailing banks out, Congress should nationalize them.
Expressing alarm both about mounting infections and inadequate government responses, the World Health Organization declared Wednesday that the global coronavirus crisis is now a pandemic but added that it’s not too late for countries to act.
Oil prices collapsed on Monday amid falling energy demand and the global response to the novel coronavirus outbreak, as the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases worldwide reached over 113,000. On Friday, talks disintegrated inside the so-called OPEC+ alliance, which includes Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) as well as non-OPEC members like Russia.
"Classifying deliberations makes it harder for health experts in government without security clearances to be in key meetings. This is a disaster."
Instead of payroll tax cuts, groups call for measures including boosted investment in safety net programs and guaranteed paid sick leave.
Italy is not the only government to protect its community from a growing health crisis by imposing travel restrictions. Tribal nations are doing the same things too.
I think it’s been pretty clear from the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak that President Trump’s top concern has been American business, rather than public health. He has pinned his re-election hopes on an argument that his leadership has produced the greatest economy in world history, and 2,000-point plunges in the stock market are very off-brand.
The Russian airlines “Aeroflot” has announced that it will halt nearly all flights to Spain, France, and Germany between March 13 and April 30, as a precaution against the spread of coronavirus, according to the news agency TASS. “Rossiya Airlines,” meanwhile, has halted all flights from St. Petersburg to Nice, Dusseldorf, and Hamburg between March 13 and April 30.
People who have been exposed to the coronavirus are being given incomplete or misleading information about whether they should quarantine themselves, exposing major gaps in the public health response to the pandemic and illuminating disagreement among officials about how useful the tactic even is at this point in the disease’s spread.
Travelers disembarking a plane from Rome to John F. Kennedy Airport in New York City on Tuesday said they were not told that they needed to stay home for two weeks, despite a clear policy by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saying they should. A woman exposed to the coronavirus at a New York wedding was told by state officials she didn’t need to go into quarantine, even though county officials said she did. In fact, they thought the venue had already called and told her.
"Every last one of them should lose their jobs."
Critics lambasted Senate Republicans on Wednesday after Sen. Lamar Alexander blocked a vote on an emergency paid sick leave bill hours after the World Health Organization officially declared the global coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.
A critical factor accelerating the spread of coronavirus in the United States is our lack of universal health care.
The number of coronavirus cases in the United States has passed 1,000 Tuesday, with the rate of infections likely increasing. Despite this, the U.S. continues to lag on testing, and healthcare workers say they lack adequate protection and protocols to allow them to safely care for infected patients. They also say the country’s hospitals are woefully unprepared to handle the crisis. Nurses in the hot zones of California and Washington had already reported having to beg for face masks and lacking guidance on how to address the virus. We are joined by Jean Ross, president of National Nurses United (NNU), the largest organization of registered nurses in the United States, which says Centers for Disease Control actually weakened its guidelines on responding to the pandemic by rolling back requirements for protective gear, not requiring infected patients to be in negative pressure isolation rooms at all times, and decreasing healthcare worker protections. In response, nurses with the NNU are holding a national day of action today to demand better protections for healthcare workers and the public. We are also joined by Alicia Garza with the National Domestic Workers Alliance and Black Futures Lab, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, and Naomi Klein, senior correspondent at The Intercept and the inaugural Gloria Steinem chair of media, culture and feminist studies at Rutgers University.
Economists and progressive advocacy groups are warning that President Donald Trump’s proposal to cut or temporarily suspend the payroll tax in an effort to mitigate the economic impact of the coronavirus is “a Trojan Horse attack on our Social Security system” that will do little to help most U.S. households.
In an effort to curb the spread of coronavirus, Russia is imposing restrictions on commercial aviation with Italy, Germany, France, and Spain, according to a federal task force. The new policy cancels all scheduled flights to these countries, except for flights from Moscow Sheremetyevo Airport to Rome, Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, Madrid, Barcelona, and Paris.
On March 10, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin issued an order cancelling all large public events in the Russian capital due to the escalating coronavirus outbreak. The order dictates that, at least until April 10, all “athletic, spectator, public, and other mass events” involving more than 5,000 people will not take place. For example, the Crimean Spring Festival celebrating Russia’s annexation of the peninsula has been shut down. In the period between now and April 10, Egor Kreed and Till Lindemann (among others) were set to perform in Moscow, protesters were preparing to march against Vladimir Putin’s proposed constitutional changes, and a number of major sports events were scheduled to take place. Meduza surveyed all the coronavirus FOMO Muscovites will be forced to feel in the coming month.
Over the course of one week, around 400 kids will be outfitted with accelerometer devices attached to their legs in order to record how much they move around - as well as the time they spend sitting or being inactive.
The study is led by researchers from Xamk, South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences and funded by the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture.
The university’s Arto Pesola, who according to his Linkedin page has a PhD in the physiology of sitting less, said the study is unique on a global scale.
The senator cited one specific incident last week when Trump said that Americans who suspected they had the coronavirus should continue going to work, and another incident in February when Trump said cases of the coronavirus in the U.S. were decreasing and “close to zero.”
“Such remarks stoke and legitimize already widespread online misinformation concerning the virus,” Warner emphasized to Pence. “There are indications that at least some of the misinformation is derived from, or at least amplified by, malicious foreign actors. Additional misleading statements from members of the Administration, combined with intentional falsehoods pushed by these malicious actors, will only make matters worse.”
Social media platforms and other major tech groups have struggled to address the rapid spread of misinformation around the coronavirus in recent weeks.
Warner’s letter was sent the same day top executives from groups including Twitter, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple participated in a White House summit in order to discuss ways to get accurate information out to the public about the coronavirus, but also stem the spread of misinformation.
On 30 March last year, a man suffering from severe mental illness walked out of his flat in north London and stabbed a woman in the back with a knife, inflicting injuries that left her paralysed for life. She was a complete stranger to him, as were the four other people whom he met by chance in the street over the next three days and stabbed in the back.
Many studies project that providing health insurance to currently uninsured and underinsured people will substantially boost demand for health care services, which in turn will boost demand for health care workers.
The vast majority of the nation could benefit from single-payer reform—and that fact makes it winnable.
At a dinner party in mid-February, an architect told me that he was having a problem finishing his building projects. It was the carpets.
A longstanding weapon that cranks like to wield against defenders of science is the dishonest Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. At the federal lever, the FOIA was intended to make it possible for citizens to hold their government accountable by being able to obtain documents, with relatively few restrictions. Indeed, most states now have a version of FOIA covering state government documents. Unfortunately, FOIA requests have been weaponized against scientists working for federal institutions and state universities. I myself have been at the receiving end of such abusive FOIA requests myself. Last year, Gary Null’s lawyer demanded my emails with Dorit Reiss, Dr. Steve Novella, Stephen Barrett, Jon Entine, Dr. Paul Offit, and others, as I documented. He got the emails a while back but to my knowledge hasn’t published any of them. (I did publicly warn him that there was nothing interesting, nefarious, or even particularly embarrassing there. I’m guessing he’s very disappointed.) I’m not alone, either. Quite a few pro-science advocates have been targeted, be it by antivaxxers, climate science denialists, or others.
If the world can do this for one virus, it can begin to do this for the even more catastrophic—and predictable—danger of climate change.
If the coronavirus becomes very widespread, we could see enormous economic impacts.
"We can actually go to war and not ask one question, but to prevent this kind of a disease, we have to say, 'How can we pay for it?'"
"Perhaps the wall is to protect Mexico?"
"This is a Trojan Horse attack on our Social Security system."
The most vulnerable among us simply do not have the same options as the most privileged.
The Latest on the coronavirus outbreak sweeping the globe...
"Using a worldwide public health crisis to bail out the fracking industry now would be a disgraceful waste of taxpayer dollars, and would spell further climate calamity."
Congress must immediately enact an emergency $400 billion.€
Citing public health concerns about the spread of coronavirus, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin has banned all mass demonstrations of more than 5,000 people until April 10. According to the news agency RIA Novosti, the mayor issued these orders on March 10.
A year after Trump took office, “Saturday Night Live” did a sketch called “What Even Matters Anymore?”
Opponents of nationalized health care argue that a government-run health system would lead to health care rationing, forcing patients to go without critical care because the government can’t afford it. Rationing, however, is exactly what American hospitals in our private health care system are now facing with the advent of the new coronavirus.
"Almost 1 in 3 Americans—more than 100 million people—have deficient health coverage, with copays and deductibles that effectively prevent them from seeking or receiving needed care in a timely manner."
Fears of imminent apocalypse tend to be midwives to absurdity.€ The stockpiling fever that has gripped various populaces in response to the Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak has taken various forms.€ “Pandemic pantries” are becoming the norm, suggesting that hoarding in the crisis tends to be a precursor to petty crime.
The coronavirus will eventually pass, but the same cannot be said for the Panglossian phenomenon known as “globalization.” Stripped of the romantic notion of a global village, the ugly process we’ve experienced over the past 40 years has been a case of governmental institutions being eclipsed by multinational corporations, acting to maximize profit in support of shareholders. To billions of us, it has resembled a looting process, of our social wealth, and political meaning. Governments that wanted to stay on top would have to learn to master soft power to learn to be relevant in a globalized world, mostly acting to smooth transactions and otherwise stay out of the way.
Wage growth slowed further in February to just 3.0 percent over the last year.
As the U.S. battles to limit the spread of the highly contagious new coronavirus, the number of health care workers ordered to self-quarantine because of potential exposure to an infected patient is rising at an exponential pace. In Vacaville, California, alone, one case — the first documented instance of community transmission in the U.S. — left more than 200 hospital workers under quarantine and unable to work for weeks.
As Italy went on lockdown, nearly 30 prisons across the country broke into riots Sunday and Monday after visitation rights were suspended in response to the outbreak. In a prison in southern Italy, a riot left at least six incarcerated people dead and caused 50 people to escape. Prisoners have reportedly lit fires, charged guards and even escaped at multiple facilities. This comes as the United Nations confirmed that coronavirus had reached Iran’s prisons, as the number of cases there continues to soar. Iran has temporarily freed some 70,000 prisoners in response to the coronavirus. And concerns are growing about the health of the at least 1 million Uyghur Muslims jailed in prison camps in western China, where at least 13 cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in the region of Xinjiang. In the U.S., New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is facing backlash after announcing Monday that New York state would respond to the growing coronavirus outbreak here by producing its own hand sanitizer made by prisoners for less than a dollar an hour. Not only will prisoners be making the 75% alcohol hand sanitizer for an average of 65 cents an hour, it’s unclear if they will even be allowed to use it to protect themselves from infection. Items with alcohol are typically considered prisoner contraband. From Houston, we speak to Keri Blakinger, a reporter with The Marshall Project.
I keep trying to point out that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well for a whole variety of reasons, including the fact that sooner or later some people -- or some large groups of people -- may try to game the system in totally unexpected ways. Witness this amusing example from the London Review of Books, reporting on the situation in Wuhan, China, which was ground zero for the Covid-19 coronavirus outbreak. With everything shut down in and around Wuhan, schools have moved to online learning -- and some naughty kids seem to have worked out a way to try to get out of having to do schoolwork: getting the app the schools rely on pulled from the app store via fake negative ratings.
Across the world, public health authorities are working to contain the spread of COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease 2019). In pursuit of this urgent and necessary task, many government agencies are collecting and analyzing personal information about large numbers of identifiable people, including their health, travel, and personal relationships. As our society struggles with how best to minimize the spread of this disease, we must carefully consider the way that “big data” containment tools impact our digital liberties.
Special efforts by public health agencies to combat the spread of COVID-19 are warranted. In the digital world as in the physical world, public policy must reflect a balance between collective good and civil liberties in order to protect the health and safety of our society from communicable disease outbreaks. It is important, however, that any extraordinary measures used to manage a specific crisis must not become permanent fixtures in the landscape of government intrusions into daily life. There is historical precedent for life-saving programs such as these, and their intrusions on digital liberties, to outlive their urgency.
If you’re like, well, much of the population of the planet right now, you’re doing little other than obsessively reading news sites for the latest on the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, maybe taking an occasional break to check whether you’re really developing a dry cough or just imagining it. Between coverage of Italian quarantine riots and stranded cruise ships, and the latest Trump fictions, there’s plenty to absorb anyone’s attention, even without the added distraction of concern over the health of yourself and your loved ones.
As the world responds to the COVID-19 outbreak, we look at how the Trump administration’s immigration policies may put everyone at risk. We go to Seattle, Washington, not far from the Life Care Center in the suburb of Kirkland, which was the epicenter of the U.S. coronavirus outbreak. In nearby Tacoma, Washington, our guest says she saw posters in English only when she went to visit immigrants held in the Northwest Detention Center, which is run by private prison company GEO Group. We speak with Maru Mora Villalpando, an activist and undocumented immigrant with the groups La Resistencia and Mijente, who issued a call for public health inspections of the Northwest Detention Center, due to the danger of coronavirus within the facility, along with other demands for how ICE should respond to the epidemic.
As of early March, there were fewer than 200 confirmed cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus in the United States. Nonetheless Congress passed, and US president Donald Trump signed, an $8.3 billion “emergency funding” bill theoretically related to containing the disease.
"There is every reason to question whether American detention facilities, as a whole, are up to this challenge."
President Donald Trump’s proposed payroll tax break met with bipartisan resistance Tuesday on Capitol Hill as pressure mounts on the administration and Congress to work more vigorously to contain the coronavirus outbreak and respond to the financial fallout.
Fauci used hockey great Wayne Grtetzky as a metaphor for how to deal with an infectious disease -- Gretzky doesn't go where the puck is going, he goes where the puck is going to be.
"We want to be where the infection is going to be as well as where it is," Fauci said.
He said it is "no surprise" that the coronavirus outbreak appears to be subsiding in Asia while it grows in the United States and Europe, saying this has been the history of outbreaks of infectious diseases.
Public awareness: they are a minority now, but not enough people have already understood the seriousness and NATURE of the situation. Specifically, they don’t get that everybody should do their best to “flatten the curve” to spare from implosion the public healthcare system (which sucks… while still being one of the best worldwide, which I wouldn’t change with any other one). They keep staying too close in lines, continuing to go downtown for a walk, that kind of things. But hopefully they’ll get the message in the next days.
Basic needs: Grocery stores are open, supplies should be regular, but they have extra personnel making sure only a few patrons are inside in any given moment, as far from each other as possible. So waiting lines outside, and also at the cash counters. Before approaching them, you must wait until the previous customer has left with all her stuff, and then for the cashier to sanitize the desk. Some stores demand you wear throwaway gloves inside.
Education: school and universities closed until April 3. Each is struggling to keep lessons going via web or whatsapp, in many ways. Students half happy, half bored, half concerned for their final exams: will be they delayed, or happen as planned but with simplified formulas and programs?
CORSIA is not a novel virus, but "Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation". In a nutshell, the aviation industry says they will freeze their co2 emissions from growing. Actually, aviation emissions are still going to grow. The airlines will just pay someone else to reduce emissions with the same amount aviation emissions rise - the "Offsetting" word in CORSIA. If that sounds like greenwashing, well it pretty much is. But that was expected. Getting every country and airline abroad CORSIA would not have been possible if the scheme would actually bite. So it's pretty much a joke.
The UK is expected to switch to tactics aimed at delaying its spread, rather than containing the disease, when the government's emergency committee meets.
With stock markets crashing, Democratic candidates cancelling events and politicians scrambling to come up with a response, the coronavirus outbreak is casting a long shadow over US politics. But some Trump supporters say the growing crisis is largely the work of a familiar villain - the US media. Conservative radio host and three-time congressional candidate Dan Bongino had a message for the almost 2,000 Donald Trump supporters gathered in an airport hotel convention room in the toney town of Palm Beach, Florida, on Tuesday night. The president, he said, had made stopping the spread of the coronavirus his highest priority. He had the "finest minds" in the world working on it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Vice-President Mike Pence, charged with heading the virus task force, was focused "like I've never seen him before in my life".
The Linux Foundation announced Tuesday that it was hosting the open source IoT device firmware for Project OWL (organization, whereabouts and logistics), the winner of IBM's "Call for Code" global challenge. The foundation is inviting developers worldwide to build mesh network nodes for global emergency communications networks for the challenge.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (qemu-kvm and sudo), Debian (chromium), Mageia (gpac, libseccomp, and tomcat), openSUSE (gd and postgresql10), Oracle (qemu-kvm), Red Hat (chromium-browser), Scientific Linux (qemu-kvm), Slackware (firefox), and SUSE (ipmitool, java-1_7_0-openjdk, librsvg, and tomcat).
No less than 98 per cent of traffic sent by internet-of-things (IoT) devices is unencrypted, exposing huge quantities of personal and confidential data to potential attackers, fresh analysis has revealed.
What’s more, most networks mix IoT devices with more traditional IT assets like laptops, desktops and mobile devices, exposing those networks to malware from both ends: a vulnerable IoT device can infect PCs; and an unpatched laptop could give an attacker access to IoT devices - and vast quantities of saleable data.
Those are the big conclusions from a real-world test of 1.2 million IoT devices across thousands of physical locations in the United States, carried out by Palo Alto Networks.
Microsoft Corp. today released updates to plug more than 100 security holes in its various Windows operating systems and associated software. If you (ab)use Windows, please take a moment to read this post, backup your system(s), and patch your PCs.
Apple described the impact of the kr00k vulnerability as such when they patched this vulnerability in October 2019...
Quite obviously this release was not shipped aligned with our standard 8-week cycle. The reason is that we had too many semi-serious or at least annoying bugs that were reported early on after the 7.69.0 release last week. They made me think our users will appreciate a quick follow-up that addresses them. See below for more details on some of those flaws.
How can this happen in a project that soon is 22 years old, that has thousands of tests, dozens of developers and 70+ CI jobs for every single commit?
The short answer is that we don’t have enough tests that cover enough use cases and transfer scenarios, or put another way: curl and libcurl are very capable tools that can deal with a nearly infinite number of different combinations of protocols, transfers and bytes over the wire. It is really hard to cover all cases.
[...]
This was an out-of-schedule release but the plan is to stick to the established release schedule, which will have the effect that the coming release window will be one week shorter than usual and the full cycle will complete in 7 weeks instead of 8.
Critical bug in Microsoft's SMBv3 implementation published under mysterious circumstances.
For the second time in a little over 30 days, odious facial recognition tech supplier Clearview is being sued. Unlike the first lawsuit, which is a proposed class action over violations of Illinois' biometric privacy law, this one [PDF] is being filed by a government agency. The Attorney General of Vermont is seeking to permanently ban Clearview from collecting info about state residents or sell access to the info it's already collected.
"That such a law is even being considered by Congress," says whistleblower Edward Snowden, "is a national disgrace."
If opponents forced him to file cloture, a procedural move that eats up days of floor time, that means the earliest an initial vote could take place is Saturday morning. The bill would then still face up to an additional 30 hours of debate.
[...]
But opponents argue the House bill, which passed Wednesday in a 278-136 vote, does not go far enough to provide more transparency and privacy protections for those targeted.
On behalf of the European Commission, the Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (EASME) is conducting the study 'Big Data and B2B platforms: the next big opportunity for Europe'. The study started in December 2018 to analyse how to accelerate the growth of the data-based economy and to support the development of B2B platforms in Europe. It focuses on 2 sectors: (i) cooperative, connected and automated mobility and (ii) high-impact healthcare.
The study will be completed by December 2020 and will deliver 2 pilots, 'Fair and equal data sharing for cooperative, connected and automated mobility' and 'Piloting a high-quality, diabetes-related data repository by using the latest technologies and big data breakthroughs'. It will be conducted in consultation with stakeholders such as policy-makers, business and industry representatives, SMEs and large companies, as well as academia and researchers.
Now that HTTPS encrypts over 80% of web connections, powerful actors are targeting root certificate stores to compromise our security and surveil us. In the past year alone, that’s included a “market research” company secretly owned by Facebook and the government of Kazakhstan.
Forcing users to install a root certificate enables the certificate owner to decrypt almost all their Internet traffic. This capability is allowed primarily for enterprise network monitoring, and is becoming disturbingly popular in schools as well.
We're hiring a new Director of Technology Projects. That's the team at EFF that develops and maintains Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, the Certbot client for Let's Encrypt, and Panopticlick, as well as housing our Threat Lab research group. On top of building and coding, the team also includes EFF's public interest technologists, who use their deep understanding of technology to weigh in on policy, law, and regulatory fights in defense of users.
Since we published the job description, we have had many people reach out with questions about the role. We decided to publish our answers publicly, so that everyone who is potentially interested could have access to this information.
Axon says it won't do it. Ring, less believably, says it won't do it. Some federal agencies want everyone to do it. But here's an actual tech company willing to do it: toss facial recognition tech into its cameras.
These "secure" chat tools are supposed to allow you to send encrypted messages. Most of them work as expected, even if they have some quirks. However, Telegram appears to receive, store, and cache the unencrypted messages on their servers. They access confidential URLs and cache URL results. Moreover, they store "encrypted" files on the local device that are readily decipherable.
Then again, what do you expect from a "secure" chat platform that is funded by a Russian oligarch and a former Russian cabinet minister? Seriously: Don't use Telegram.
The app, while far from as popular as it was in the few years after its release in 2012, is still used by more than 30 million people a month, some of whom are under the age of 18 and share confessions about teenage sexual encounters and information related to sexual orientation. According to The Post, which was actively able to query the database in real time before Whisper took it down, a search for users who listed themselves as 15 years of age returned as many as 1.3 million results.
The database did not include real names, as Whisper was designed to protect users’ identities and allow them to share secrets anonymously. But the records left unprotected online included information like age, location, ethnicity, residence, in-app nickname, and membership in any of the app’s groups.
I was slow to start using twitter, but found it a lot of fun. Often it would be useful at times when websites were slow; I'd hop to the website and search "edinburgh network", "github down", or "helsinki outage" and find live updates as people disclosed problems before the appropriate companies updated their status pages.
I've found a lot of useful information, in near real-time, over the past few years. For example I remember hearing a loud explosion a few years back and had no idea what it was. Turns out it was an electrical substation catching fire nearby.
It seemed an unlikely prospect. The International Criminal Court has tended to find itself accused of chasing up the inhumane rogues of Africa rather than those from any other continent. It has also been accused of having an overly burdensome machinery and lethargy more caught up with procedure than substance. Critics fearing a behemoth snatching soldiers from the armed forces of various states could rest easy, at least in part.
One of these days, national security policy will get a few minutes of campaign debate time. And when that day occurs, perhaps—just perhaps—attention will turn to a matter of some urgency: the continuing threat posed by nuclear weapons. As both the US and Russia pursue MADness (mutually assured destruction) with steep investments in nuclear weapons, they use the same distorted logic to justify them that has been used throughout the nuclear age.
In April 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. powerfully condemned U.S. militarism and the war in Indochina. His speech, “Beyond Vietnam,” defied his closest advisers, who feared it would alienate war supporters within the white liberal establishment. I recommend it to all Americans whether they support or oppose the recent assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
Terror attacks claimed by Islamist militants against civilians and military targets have particularly risen in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.
The Sahel is a semiarid region that encompasses an area south of the Sahara Desert, spanning 10 countries from Senegal in the west to Eritrea in the east. In 2019, violence in the area left more than 2,000 civilians dead.
Since the beginning of 2020, in Burkina Faso alone, violence has displaced 4,000 people a day, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said.
As the editor of Nonviolence News, I collect 30-50 stories of nonviolence in action€ each week.€ Each story offers us a take-away lesson for our own work for change. These lessons offer us best practices and pro-tips from our fellow human beings who are working for change around the world. We can learn from their successes€ and€ their set-backs.€ € We can let their brilliance inspire us and we can stand on their giant shoulders as we strive to make a difference in our own way.
The nature of the military that fights America’s forever wars.
Bizarrely enough, the spate of phone calls from recruiters began a couple of years ago. The first ones came from the Army, next the Marines, and then other branches of the military. I’m decades past enlistment age. I’ve been publicly antiwar for most of that time and come from a family that was last involved with a military when my grandfather ran out the back door to avoid Russian army recruiters at the front door and kept running until he reached America.
Forensic experts have confirmed that the human remains recently discovered in a forest outside Ryazan belong to Ekaterina Levchenko, a young woman who went missing in 2017 and has ties to several Penza Network case suspects. Levchenko’s mother, Tatyana, confirmed the results to Meduza.
When a U.S. company wants to export firearms, the sale requires authorization from the federal government, and for decades the State Department has been responsible for issuing approvals for most types of weapons, once it has assessed any impact on national security or foreign policy.
Now, after years of debate, the Commerce Department is set to take over export controls for a significant share of the smaller arms that U.S. companies sell to foreign buyers. The change is intended to allow the State Department to focus its efforts and expertise on arms that are considered most critical to U.S. national security, like missiles and tanks. Other weapons that have little or no stated military value will be left to the Commerce Department, which already regulates export of a vast range of goods, including shotguns and other “sporting” weapons.
After the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) found a reasonable basis to believe that U.S. military and CIA leaders committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Afghanistan, Team Trump threatened to ban ICC judges and prosecutors from the U.S. and warned it would impose economic sanctions on the Court if it launched an investigation.
A resident from Ouahigouya, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of his safety, told the AP that the attacks occurred after jihadists sought shelter in the town of Dinguila. Local defense groups followed the extremists to the town and massacred people, he said.
The White House has ordered federal health officials to treat top-level coronavirus meetings as classified, an unusual step that has restricted information and hampered the U.S. government’s response to the contagion, according to four Trump administration officials.
The officials said that dozens of classified discussions about such topics as the scope of infections, quarantines and travel restrictions have been held since mid-January in a high-security meeting room at the Department of Health & Human Services (HHS), a key player in the fight against the coronavirus.
Staffers without security clearances, including government experts, were excluded from the interagency meetings, which included video conference calls, the sources said.
Congressional investigators wanted to talk.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the freshman Democrat from Michigan, faced allegations that she improperly paid herself a salary from her campaign account, including a bulk payment of $15,500 after the election was over.
It's all part of what one green group is calling the most ambitious and comprehensive proposal ever put forward to reduce the environmental and climate impact of the things we use and wear.
Proposals aim at making environmentally-friendly products the norm. It could mean manufacturers using screws to hold parts in place, rather than glue.
The rules will also fight what is known as "premature obsolescence", the syndrome in which manufacturers make goods with deliberately low lifespan to force consumers into buying a newer model.
Global warming is not waiting around for the signatories to the Paris climate accord ‘15 to go to net zero emissions 2030/50. Sorry, those bold plans are way too little way too late. Already, across the board, the planet is on a hot streak that defies all projections. It’s starting to look downright scary!
"Let us have no illusions: the climate crisis is already causing calamity and more is to come," said U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres. "This is a battle we can—and must—win."
"Keep your numbers low but your spirits high and let's take one week at the time."
In a Washington Post opinion piece last month, Robert Frank sought to instruct us in how peer pressure can “help stop climate change.” He wasn’t very convincing on that point; he did help, however, to inadvertently make the case that collective efforts, ones much more sweeping than individual role-modeling, are necessary to staving off climate catastrophe.
It’s time for BP and all oil companies to stop hiding behind net-zero rhetoric and commit to immediate action on the scale of the crisis we’re in.
Today, the challenges facing the gas industry here have only worsened, even for LNG exports, its much-vaunted€ savior.
Long a darling of Wall Street, that day the oil major’s share price had fallen to a 15-year low. Battered by a volatile oil market and increasing scrutiny over the climate crisis, investors wanted answers on how Exxon planned on dealing with the shifting€ landscape.
My own people, the Oceti Sakowin (Great Sioux Nation), have been fighting the construction of pipelines (Keystone 1, Dakota Access and Keystone XL) through our ancestral lands for over a decade, by any means necessary. Since 2008, we’ve protested, pleaded with elected officials, taken fossil fuel giants to federal court, and ultimately at Standing Rock, laid our bodies in the path of bulldozers and stood unarmed in front of militarized police to stop them from destroying our ancient burial sites and exposing our main source of freshwater to toxic crude without our consent.
A new oil and gas industry ad pushes back against growing calls to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the climate crisis — by making the bold statement that it would be criminal not to produce oil and gas.
Still, drivers in 2019 overall spent more time stuck in traffic than in previous years, according to a Monday study by transportation analytics firm INRIX Inc, ranking congestion in more than 900 cities worldwide.
In the United States, drivers on average lost 99 hours last year due to congestion, the report calculated, two hours more than in 2017. Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City and Washington led the ranking as the most severely congested U.S. cities.
Overall, time lost in traffic cost the U.S. economy an estimated $88 billion last year, INRIX calculated using labor market and wage statistics.
The world’s climate is changing, and so must Australia’s preparedness for disaster, writes Ian Bray, Secretary of the Maritime Union of Australia.
The€ 2020 federal grazing fee€ was recently announced and, to no real surprise, the agencies that are charged with protecting our public lands are instead, protecting ranchers.
The U.S. embargo on Cuba has been in effect for 60 years. It’s time to end it.
Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s fact checker, has a tough job. He tries to sort of what is true and what is false in the various claims made by public figures. I don’t always agree with his calls, but I know he tries to be fair in his approach.
The Trump Organization paid bribes, through middlemen, to New York City tax assessors to lower its property tax bills for several Manhattan buildings in the 1980s and 1990s, according to five former tax assessors and city employees as well as a former Trump Organization employee.
Two of the five city employees said they personally took bribes to lower the assessment on a Trump property; the other three said they had indirect knowledge of the payments.
The 2020 presidential campaign is well underway, and it’s noisy. Candidates make promises, break promises, offer assurances, and spin the news constantly.
For more than a decade, the US government has been taking over ever larger portions of the financial system to prop up shaky markets. It hasn’t worked. We need a real socialization of finance — for the majority, not the banks.
Elon Musk, the head of Tesla, wants to build an electric car factory in Brazil. He was supposed to meet Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, in Miami in early March, but he was too busy; instead, Musk will go to Brazil sometime this year. All eyes are on the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina, whose Secretary of International Affairs Derian Campos is in direct contact with Musk. Two automobile manufacturers—BMW and GM—already have factories in Santa Catarina. Marcos Pontes (Minister of Science, Technology, Innovation, and Communications) held a video conference with Anderson Ricardo Pacheco, a senior Tesla official. They were joined by Daniel Freitas, a congressman, and Claiton Pacheco Galdino, who is the business development director for Criciúma, a city in Santa Catarina. They are eager for Tesla to open a Gigafactory—Tesla’s name for a big factory—in South America’s largest economy.
The Dow is now more than 20% below its recent high, a threshold that often accompanies a recession.
On March 11, both houses of the Russian Parliament passed legislation proposing major constitutional reforms. The second and third articles of this draft law specify the mechanisms by which the constitutional amendments would be adopted. The procedure laid out here is highly unusual and involves an assessment by the Constitutional Court and a nationwide vote, neither of which has been done before or codified in any previous law. Meanwhile, Russia’s Central Election Commission is already moving forward with preparations for the nationwide vote. Meduza asked legal scholar and “Golos” council member Arkady Lyubarev to weigh this bizarre legislation’s compliance with Russia’s Constitution and put it in the context of generally accepted democratic standards.
The failure to see the need to manage change, and instead adhere to a traditional and increasingly unresponsive status quo, is a formula for failure. Still, recognizing the need, and then managing it can be a difficult. Here we will define managing change, admittedly rather vaguely, as addressing disaffection in a timely and enlightened way. The recent history of the Republican Party shows what happens when an institution fails to respond to discord in such a way. It may now be that the Democratic Party is following the same self-destructive path.
The Federation Council (the upper house of Russia’s Parliament) adopted sweeping constitutional reform legislation on Wednesday, voting just a few hours after the State Duma passed the momentous draft law.
As President Donald Trump grapples with criticism from federal prosecutors nationwide, lawyers and law firms are donating heavily to Democratic candidates and liberal causes.
"Truthdig has long provided an essential voice for the progressive movement. Together, we're calling on it to live up to its own values."
[...]
The letter, posted briefly on the site before being taken down, follows:
This letter is to announce that the undersigned members of Truthdig’s editorial team: Executive Editor Kasia Anderson, Managing Editor Jacob Sugarman, Foreign Editor Natasha Hakimi Zapata, Book Editor Eunice Wong, and blogger Ilana Novick, along with columnists Chris Hedges, Lee Camp, and Paul Street and cartoonist Mr. Fish will begin a work stoppage, effective immediately.
In recent months, as has been publicly reported, Truthdig Publisher Zuade Kaufman and Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer have evidently been engaged in an ongoing dispute. That dispute is approaching its nadir as we are concerned Ms. Kaufman is attempting to take control of Truthdig, thus effectively removing Mr. Scheer from the website he co-owns and co-founded. This is unacceptable to us.
Since the website’s launch in 2005, Robert has helped guide Truthdig’s editorial voice, fearlessly exposing the corruption of Republican and Democratic administrations alike—an exception that proves the rule in progressive media. While liberals have largely turned their back on Julian Assange in recent years, Robert has remained one of his greatest champions. And as the mainstream media has resorted to the most cynical form of red-baiting against Sen. Bernie Sanders this election cycle, he has pushed back against it at every turn.
Robert is the rare editor who urges readers to examine the legitimate alienation and rage of those pushed aside by globalization and de-industrialization, rather than allow the election of Donald Trump to be blamed on Vladimir Putin and Russia. Under his guidance, Truthdig has stood beside Occupy Wall Street, Wikileaks, the indigenous people of Standing Rock, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and countless other protest movements that have challenged entrenched power. We believe that he is irreplaceable.
Senior editors and contributors at Truthdig, including Executive Editor Kasia Anderson, Managing Editor, Jacob Sugarman, Foreign Editor Natasha Hakimi Zapata and Book Editor Eunice Wong, along with columnists Chris Hedges, Lee Camp and Paul Street and the cartoonist Dwayne Booth, aka Mr. Fish, as well as€ blogger Ilana Novick,€ announced in a joint letter today they were beginning a work stoppage today to protest what they describe as unfair labor conditions and the effort by the publisher, Zuade Kaufman, to remove the site’s founding Editor-in-Chief and co-owner Robert Scheer.
Despite suffering another round of defeats in multiple primary voting states on Tuesday to former Vice President Joe Biden, supporters of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential run are not about to give up the fight just yet and political observers are noting that even if the delegate lead Biden has amassed ultimately proves insurmountable the Democratic Party will have to win over voters inspired by Sanders if President Donald Trump is to be vanquished in the general election.
Now that the Michigan Democratic primary is over and Joe Biden has been declared the winner, it’s time to read the handwriting on the political wall: Biden will be the Democratic nominee for president, and Bernie Sanders will be the runner-up once again come the party’s convention in July. Sanders might influence the party’s platform, but platforms are never binding for the nominee. Sanders has lost, and so have his many progressive supporters, myself included.
The March 10 primaries were not a complete wipeout for Bernie Sanders and his presidential campaign. He secured a win in North Dakota and clings to a slim lead in Washington State. For the Vermont senator, the good news ends there.
"We have won the ideological debate, but we are losing the debate over electability," Sanders said Wednesday.
They don’t hate him because their corporate masters tell them to. They hate him because he is a walking, breathing, sometimes yelling reproof of the sacrifices they have had to make to succeed in their chosen profession.
Joe Biden decisively won Michigan’s Democratic presidential primary, seizing a key battleground state that helped propel Bernie Sanders’ insurgent candidacy four years ago. The former vice president’s victory there, as well as in Missouri, Mississippi and Idaho, dealt a serious blow to Sanders and substantially widened Biden’s path to the nomination.
Joe Biden’s manifold and manifest vulnerabilities in a contest with the obviously addled but still media-savvy Donald Trump are often offered by supporters of Bernie Sanders as a reason to back their man as the more likely winner.€ “Biden will lose,” they say; “if you really want to defeat Trump, then Sanders is the only one who can do it.”
In this interview, Noam Chomsky speaks at a moment when socialists across the world are looking to the United States and the Bernie Sanders campaign for inspiration. He discusses the barriers facing a potential Sanders presidency, the importance of the labor movement to any prospect of meaningful change — and why the US business class will bitterly resist any attempt at social-democratic reform.
The presidential order suspends the entry of most foreign nationals who have been in certain European countries at any point during the 14 days before their scheduled arrival to the United States.
The countries include Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, according to the Department of Homeland Security, which clarified this “does not apply to legal permanent residents, (generally) immediate family members of U.S. citizens, and other individuals who are identified in the proclamation.”
The latest act in the comedy began Friday, just before voting opened in the Nevada Democratic caucus. The Washington Post ran a story — sourced, I’m not joking, to “people familiar with the matter” — explaining that Bernie Sanders had been briefed that “Russia is attempting to help his presidential campaign as part of an effort to interfere with the Democratic contest.”
Sanders was quick to see through the gambit. “I’ll let you guess about one day before the Nevada caucus,” he said. “Why do you think it came out?” He pointed to a Post reporter: “It was The Washington Post? Good friends.” The Post, after all, has spent years dumping on Sanders, a fervent critic of the paper’s billionaire creep of an owner, Jeff Bezos.
Intelligence officials and pundits have been screeching for years that patriotism demands voters reject the foreign agent Donald Trump and the Russian asset Bernie Sanders, and support a conventional establishment politician. Voters responded by moving toward Trump in national approval surveys and speeding Sanders to the top of the Democratic Party ticket. A more thorough disavowal of official propaganda would be difficult to imagine.
Let’s get this straight, progressives want to get rid of Trump just as bad as anyone. Progressives hate Trump. Trump, the Republican Party and all that they represent is the antithesis of everything that progressives fight for and they are fighting now to get him out. The Democratic Party failed to keep him out and now they are heading right towards that same cliff. Progressives think they know why the Democrats lost to Trump, not because of Russians or third party voters but Democrats have closed their ears and minds to their allies, the progressives, and to any self-realization. Democrats are proving themselves to be the greatest obstacle in the fight against Trump. And it’s not just the Trump thing, progressives are out front fighting for most everything you claim, as Democrats to want, justice, equity, fair-play, environmental stewardship, peace. Yet Democrats have made progressives their enemy, I’ve heard enough from them to know.
Western journalists covering the Euromaidan riots and murders in Kiev in late February of 2014 encountered a historical figure few recognized. The black-and-white image of pasty-faced Stepan Bandera was plastered everywhere in the Ukraine capital— on barricades, over the entrance to Kiev’s city hall, and on the placards held by demonstrators calling for the overthrow of the Russian-friendly president, Viktor Yanukovych. Now who in the hell is that? Bandera, the journalists likely thought, had simply been a nationalist … even though controversial. But so what? The Russians said he was a Nazi and an anti-Semite but according to Western media that was just more Moscow propaganda. So foreign journalists hedged in their reports from Maidan. The Washington Post reported that Bandera had had only a “tactical relationship’ with Nazi Germany and that his followers “were only accused of committing atrocities against Poles and Jews.”€ According to the New York Times he had been vilified by Moscow as a pro-Nazi traitor.€ Foreign Policy simply dismissed Bandera as “Moscow’s favorite bogeyman and metonym for all bad Ukrainian things.” Whoever Bandera was, he couldn’t have been as nasty as Putin claimed.
The 2020 census is off and running for much of America now.
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 preview the second Super Tuesday of the€ 2020€ Democratic€ Party Primary with Emil Marmol.€ 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.
Experts at MIT recently concluded that there is no statistical evidence of fraud in the results of the Bolivian presidential elections last October. These findings debunk an earlier report by the Organization of American States (OAS), which were used to justify a right-wing coup d’etat in the Andean nation.
Today’s primary elections in Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Idaho, North Dakota and Washington State represent a whole series of bellwether gut-checks for Bernie Sanders. If he fares poorly in Michigan, Idaho, Washington State and North Dakota in particular — four states he won handily in 2016 — he will have a difficult time justifying a continuation of his campaign.
We had to live in such a society before we could believe that it was possible. Here's what we discovered.
This is the campaign to fix the hole in the soul of America.
Sanders will beat Trump by summoning America to a new day, not by calling for a return to yesterday
During a Fox News town hall Monday night in Dearborn, Michigan on the eve of the state’s crucial Democratic presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders made the case that — far from being “radical” or “extreme” — progressive ideas like raising the minimum wage, guaranteeing healthcare to all as a right, and boldly fighting the climate crisis have broad appeal across the U.S. electorate.
"These are the ideas we need to bring to the general election to defeat Trump."
Washington Post Columnist Fareed Zakaria in an€ op-ed€ accused Bernie Sanders’s repeated exultation of the Northern Europe countries of Denmark, Sweden and Norway as examples of the kind of economic system he wants to bring to the United States as being an unrealistic fantasy; Sanders either ignores or misunderstands their policies.
If you fall into the category of voters who generally agree with Sanders on the issues but fear that he can’t be elected, then please, at the least, stop acting as an echo chamber for the supposed irrational fears of your peers.
Many are urging Warren to endorse Sanders because his platform is feminist and because he has the best chance to defeat Trump.
Following Super Tuesday, the 2020 Democratic presidential primary is down to three candidates: former Vice President Joe Biden, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii. It remains to be seen whether Biden or Sanders will receive the nomination (Gabbard has only picked up two pledged delegates), but whoever it is, that person will be going up against President Donald Trump — who, journalists Danny Hakim and Glenn Thrush stress in a New York Times article, has a massive Republican operation behind him. Meanwhile, an article by journalist Peter Stone for The Guardian outlines the ways in which the Trump Organization has been profiting from his 2020 campaign.
Like a cat with nine lives, Joe Biden keeps returning to the presidential race with a consistency akin to his votes for war — hard to find a war Joe did not like.
As the primaries heat up, some of the states most severely impacted by opioid overdose deaths — West Virginia, Ohio, Maryland, Michigan, Kentucky, Connecticut and Rhode Island — will be heading to the ballot box. At first glance, both Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders appear to advocate a compassionate response to the overdose crisis, which is the leading cause of death for adults under 55. In reality, however, Biden’s plans contain provisions that would endanger people who use drugs and perpetuate their criminalization.
One of corporate Democrats’ most common talking points against Medicare for All is that such a proposal would never make it through Congress. But Joe Biden, in an interview that aired Monday night, admitted that even if one did — with the approval of his own party — he would not necessarily jump at the historic chance to sign it into law.
"Joe Biden is not safe. Not safe for the planet. Not safe for our health. Not safe to run against Trump."
"If Democrats passed a Medicare for All bill through the House and Senate, it would be one of the greatest legislative accomplishments in American history. It would realign American politics for a generation or more... and Joe Biden suggested that he might veto it."
Former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic presidential candidate, told MSNBC viewers that he would veto Medicare For All if he was elected to the White House.
In every state primary or caucus, around fifty percent or more have indicated they support replacing private health insurance with a single-payer universal health care system.
As voters awake in anticipation of Tuesday’s primaries in six states, including Michigan, “Intercepted” podcast host and journalist Jeremy Scahill takes a deep dive into Joe Biden’s appalling record on everything from civil rights to women’s rights. In the first half of the more than hour-long episode, Scahill speaks with Current Affairs Editor in Chief Nathan Robinson, who predicted early in 2016 that Hillary Clinton would not be able to beat Donald Trump in a general election.
Activists from various groups interrupted the campaign event to highlight the Democratic frontrunner's record on trade and climate.
“This is no time to take a risk. We need our strongest candidate. So let’s nominate the Democrat Trump fears the most.”
Not bowing to the idea that Bernie's fight is over, supporters and campaign staff dismissed those treating his disappointing night—losing in Mississippi, Missouri, Michigan, and Idaho—as the end of the line.
The auto-worker accused Biden of plotting to take his guns away.
"I'm not going to go at that level in attacking him. That's for the people to decide."
The State Duma convenes to vote on the second reading of constitutional reform legislation. Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of LDPR and a long-time political blowhard, proposes adding a last-minute amendment that would initiate snap parliamentary elections. Next, deputy Valentina Tereshkova (yes, the first woman in space) floats another idea: eliminate all presidential term limits or at least zero the incumbent president’s term clock. Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin says this latter idea is a biggie and announces the need for additional consultations with party faction leaders and President Putin himself. He announces an immediate recess, so he can telephone the president. Within an hour, Putin arrives in person at the State Duma and delivers a speech, arguing that snap elections are unnecessary and eliminating term limits is unwise. He says zeroing his own term clock, however, is possible, so long as Russia’s Constitutional Court upholds the idea as constitutional. Lawmakers applaud and Putin leaves. The amendment calling for snap elections is withdrawn and deputies pass the amendment zeroing all presidential term clocks. If the Constitutional Court doesn’t object, Putin will be able to run for two more terms, keeping him in power until 2036.
Russians could be forgiven for feeling confused. On March 6th Mr Putin told them that he would not repeat the experience of the Soviet leaders who died in office. “I like my job, but to retain the power I have, [I would have] to agree to some scheme that would be unacceptable for the country or...destroy it.” But four days later he did the opposite, telling the Duma (parliament) that he is willing to reset the clock on presidential term-limits and may stand again in 2024. Two more six-year terms could thus keep Mr Putin—if he stands and wins re-election—in the presidency until 2036, when he will be 83.
State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin has informed Vladimir Putin about last-minute amendments to constitutional reform legislation, including a proposal that would allow Putin to run for two more presidential terms, potentially extending his administration to 2036.€
What happened? On March 10, 2020, Russia's State Duma is reviewing the second reading of constitutional reform legislation. During Tuesday's parliamentary session, United Russia deputy Valentina Tereshkova proposed an amendment that would either zero out the incumbent president's term clock (allowing Putin to run for another two terms) or eliminate presidential term limits altogether. United Russia's faction leader in the State Duma, Sergey Neverov, immediately signaled his party members' support for Tereshkova's proposal. Vladimir Putin will personally visit the State Duma to discuss the new initiative after 3 p.m., Moscow time. What else happened? LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky proposed snap parliamentary elections on September 20, 2020. The proposal has already been added to Russia's constitutional reform legislation as a formal amendment. Then what happened? Vladimir Putin made a rare visit to the State Duma and gave a speech rejecting the proposals for snap elections and eliminated term limits, while supporting an amendment that would zero his term clock, if Russia's Constitutional Court upholds the idea.
Russian federal lawmakers have adopted the second reading of legislation that would introduce sweeping reforms to the nation's Constitution. There were roughly 390 amendments to the second reading of the draft law, according to State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin. Most of these amendments were prepared by a special working group that included State Duma deputies, senators, and public figures. The Putin administration also introduced several amendments directly.
State Duma deputy Valentina Tereshkova has proposed an amendment to Russia’s constitutional reform legislation that would reset the term clock to zero for all future presidential candidates. In other words, Vladimir Putin would be able to win another two elected terms in office, extending his presidency to 2036.
On Tuesday, during parliamentary discussions on the second reading of legislation that will significantly change Russia’s Constitution, lawmaker Vladimir Zhirinovsky advocated snap elections for the State Duma on September 20, 2020. Sergey Mironov, the leader of another nominally opposition party, also recently expressed his group’s eagerness for early elections.€
Anyone who's read Techdirt for any length of time knows that I've spent years fighting for better anti-SLAPP laws at both the state and federal level. You may remember my public talk about the importance of anti-SLAPP's using the lawsuit against myself as an example, though my fighting for better anti-SLAPP laws dates back way before that event. Or, if you want a more humorous take on SLAPP lawsuits and the need for anti-SLAPP laws, you can check out John Oliver's clever take on the issue....
Ever since the DOJ started attacking Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, it was obvious that it was simply a ploy to attack big tech companies that are (unfairly) seen as being "anti-conservative." Remember, that Section 230 explicitly exempts federal crimes -- the kind of law enforcement the DOJ is engaged in. That is, there is literally nothing in Section 230 stopping the DOJ from doing its job. But as Barr and the DOJ continued to attack 230, it also became clear that this was going to be a wedge issue he could use to undermine encryption -- encryption that keeps us all safe.
Last month we were happy to report that both houses of the Virginia legislature had passed anti-SLAPP laws (partially in response to Rep. Devin Nunes' use of the state for a bunch of SLAPPy libel-tourism lawsuits. As we noted at the time, the two versions that passed through each part of the legislature were somewhat different, so they needed to be reconciled.
Members of Congress have mounted a major threat to your freedom of speech and privacy online. Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) recently introduced a bill that would undermine key protections for Internet speech in U.S. law. It would also expose providers of the private messaging services we all rely on to serious legal risk, potentially forcing them to undermine their tools’ security.
The so-called EARN IT Act (S. 3398) is an attack on speech, security, and innovation. Congress must reject it.
Anxious that Xi might see a repeat of the hostile reception by Wuhan residents, Hubei authorities appeared to have taken measures to restrain them. On Tuesday morning, just before Xi's visit, photos began to surface on WeChat showing Wuhan police officers fanning out across the community and apparently even entering homes.
According to screenshots of conversations obtained by CNA, police from multiple precincts in Wuhan dressed in hazmat suits entered private residences in the community for "security inspections" and stayed inside the homes for about an hour. In addition, some residents wrote that the community management dolled out special supplies of white rice, pork, and salads just before Xi's visit.
Some residents also said that they were told by police officers to stand on their balconies and give a warm wave to Xi as he walked by, reported Apple Daily. Other netizens posted videos of the surrounding streets cleared of traffic and snipers posted on many of the buildings.
In my case, I believe my students were right to be angry about Heart of Darkness. But they were wrong, I also believe, to ignore the overarching sense of moral despair and existential unease it evokes. While Conrad’s language was of its time, argued the post-colonial critic Edward Said, the novelist was ahead of his time in understanding that “darkness has an autonomy of its own”.
The trick for a teacher, of course, is to bring that darkness to light, such that students and teachers can see the text – and one another – with a clarity that binds rather than blinds in our modern cultural hothouse. Clearly, I am still finding my way through that particular thicket. But it seems no less clear that both students and professors should agree that we are in this thicket together.
Australian journalist Julian Assange remains locked up in a UK prison facing no British charges, having endured years of arbitrary detention and psychological torture. His extradition hearing to the United States is more of the same, writes psychologist Dr Lissa Johnson.
The DOJ has taken an open-and-shut espionage case and managed to somehow misplace the back cover. Does this say something about the unintended consequences of charge-stacking? Maybe. Whatever it is, it isn't pretty.
In a letter to Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, Chris Yeung Kin-hing, who heads the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA), complained that officers pepper-sprayed journalists who were at the protest scene in Tai Po on purpose, the Hong Kong Economic Journal reports.
The police had used violence against protesters and had obstructed journalists from covering news for months but the chief executive only tried to defend the force instead of endeavoring to correct such errors, Yeung said.
Sometimes all it takes is a lawsuit and little bad press to make the federal government at least temporarily regret its thieving ways.
On March 4th the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in€ June Medical Services v. Russo (formerly June Medical Services v. Gee), a case challenging Louisiana’s Act 620, a law requiring abortion providers to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. It is an effort to restrict a women’s right to terminate an unwanted pregnancy.
"Claiming one emergency after another, the government has recently sought stays in an unprecedented number of cases."
It comes as no surprise that Greeks and Turks don’t like each other. They have been enemies for more than a thousand years. The Turks are Mongols who appeared for the first time in Asia Minor in the eleventh century when Asia Minor or Anatolia was the home of the Greeks.
The “alt-right” celebrated when audio was released of former Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg openly justifying his stop-and-frisk policing policy in starkly racial terms. In the audio, former New York City Mayor Bloomberg says clearly that he flooded Black and Brown neighborhoods with police because “that’s where the crime is,” playing on white nationalist talking points connecting race and crime.
Corporate media and corporate Democrats want the Bernie 2020 campaign—and the grassroots energy behind it—to melt away. That's not going to happen.
“No Trump, No KKK, No Fascist USA!” has been a popular protest chant since the New York real-estate mogul and former reality TV star became the 45th president of the United States. This was no mere rhetorical flourish. We saw a surge in the ranks of white nationalists and the “alt-right,” an escalation of domestic terrorist attacks on Black and Brown people, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and the LGBTQ community. The road to a “Fascist USA” took a deadly turn after Trump indirectly condoned the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which an assembly of Klansmen, “alt Knights,” neo-Nazis, and white nationalist militias inspired one of their number to mow down anti-racist protesters with his car.
"He is going to jail—but no amount of jail time will repair the lives he ruined."
Harvey Weinstein was sentenced Wednesday to 23 years in prison for rape and sexual assault, a sight the disgraced Hollywood mogul’s multitude of accusers thought they would never see.
How can the world’s leaders pretend that it is acceptable to meet in a country that imprisons and tortures peaceful women activists and bombs civilians in Yemen?
Across the country, child welfare officials have sent thousands of foster children to mental health institutions in distant states, including facilities where children reported being beaten and sexually assaulted by other residents or mistreated by workers.
The journeys of these children resemble an airline flight map: California to Virginia, Florida to Utah, Hawaii to Arkansas. Illinois officials have transported children as young as 7 to facilities in more than a dozen states.
Millcreek Behavioral Health in Fordyce, Arkansas, has become a common destination for foster children from other states who are sent away for mental health treatment. But dozens of children from Arkansas also have cycled through Millcreek, and they, too, reported mistreatment and violence.
Millcreek and its parent company, the for-profit Acadia Healthcare, declined to comment on specific facilities or individuals but said the company delivers superior outcomes for troubled children. The company said its facilities had never been decertified by any government health program or lost a license.
This week, we filed an€ amicus brief in a South Dakota case arguing that the Fourth Amendment prohibits the police from surreptitiously collecting our DNA without a warrant. This case is one of the first to challenge the collection of DNA from a free person after results of a genetic genealogy database search linked her to a crime.
In the case, prosecutors have charged Teresa Bentaas, a lifelong Sioux Falls resident, with first degree murder for abandoning a newborn 39 years ago. To link Ms. Bentaas to the baby, police secretly collected her DNA from items they found in her trash, extracted and sequenced it, and then compared it to the baby’s. Ms. Bentaas was not under arrest or in police custody at the time they collected and searched her DNA, so, unlike an arrestee, there can be no argument her Fourth Amendment rights were in any way “diminished.”
"In Mexico it's like we're in a state of war; we're in a humanitarian crisis because of the quantity of women that have disappeared or been killed."
The Michigan State Police recently informed Twitter users that it's engaged in stealing money from drivers. I don't know what it expected from this announcement, but I'm sure spending a few days being ratioed wasn't what the agency had in mind.
Rochester NY pastor Katie Jo Suddaby was recently on the Southern border and witnessed first-hand the horrors the US is perpetrating on Central American migrants there. She reported about this at€ The Historic Calvary at Andrews Church; what follows is my writeup of her talk.
Beyond Prisons podcast host Kim Wilson sits down with Amani Sawari of the Right2Vote campaign to talk about her work on a nationwide effort that grew out of the 2018 prison strike demand to extend voting rights for all justice-involved people.
Amani and Kim talk about what it was like for her to teach poetry inside a youth prison and she shares a couple of poems written by her former students.
My efforts to accredit to cover the Alex Salmond trial continue to be stonewalled. I therefore cannot gain access to the court which is closed to the public while the anonymous accusers give their evidence. Media only are able to watch via CCTV from a media room, which is where I am trying to get. The established media are of course overwhelmingly hostile to Alex Salmond.
A jury member is only allowed to consider certain facts in a case. The judge has ruled rigorously on what both prosecution and defence counsel may present as relevant fact. The judge will have excluded certain facts from being presented for various reasons. One of these reasons is Scotland’s idiosyncratic and very strict law on collateral evidence.
TSA Footprints MatWhen doing pat-downs, the TSA has little mats with footprints painted on to indicate to the passenger how to stand. But, the screener told Michele to spread her legs far wider than the mat — an order that seems common for TSA screeners about to inflict abuse. She then proceeded to rub her hand on Michele’s vulva, pressing firmly enough to penetrate her labia with her finger through her leggings, and then continuing to rub her vulva until Michele, in shock, finally recoiled and told the screener to stop.
In one email, Mr. Weinstein suggested that the actress Jennifer Aniston — who he believed had complained about him — should be killed. And even as he endeavored to repair his reputation and excuse his behavior, his communications on the matter were often self-centered, unapologetic, and at times, patronizing.
Two weeks ago a jury in Manhattan found Mr. Weinstein, 67, guilty of third-degree rape and of first-degree criminal sexual act. The newly released records were not presented to the jury as evidence at trial.
“Jen Aniston should be killed,” Weinstein wrote in an email on Oct. 31, 2017, in response to a reporter seeking comment about an untrue allegation that Weinstein had groped Aniston.
The email was reviewed by Variety on Tuesday afternoon at the New York City criminal courthouse, where roughly 1,000 pages of documents were unsealed, ahead of Weinstein’s sentencing on Wednesday.
Streaming video providers like HBO and Netflix have traditionally taken a lax approach to password sharing. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has gone so far as to say he "loves" password sharing, and sees it as little more than free advertising. Execs at HBO have similarly viewed password sharing in such a fashion, saying it doesn't hurt their business. If anything, it results in folks signing up for their own accounts after they get hooked on your product, something you'll often see with kids who leave home, or leave college and college friends behind.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently joined several California-based ISPs, tech companies, non-profits, and local governments to commend Governor Newsom for adopting a “Broadband for All” vision. But simply saying “broadband” without a clear eye towards the future risks having government policies adopt infrastructure plans that work in the short run, but fall woefully behind as the demand for data continues to increase. In order to ensure California’s Broadband for All plan is future-proofed, the coalition asked the Governor to focus on fiber infrastructure and adopt open access provisions that ensures state-funded infrastructure can be used to its maximum potential.
EFF has conducted extensive research into the future capabilities of various broadband access technologies that connect to our homes and businesses. These “last-mile” connections come in many forms such as copper line DSL, coaxial cable, fiber optics, and wireless options—including upcoming 5G networks. The evidence is conclusive that fiber is the superior medium for the transmission of data, thanks to its low latency, long lifespan, and its cost-efficient means to upgrade. These attributes mean it’s effectively future-proofed infrastructure. When it comes to speed, the divide amongst last-mile technologies is so great that it should be referred to as the “speed chasm.”
Last June you might recall that the Trump FCC unveiled a new robocall plan that it claimed would finally put the annoying problem to bed. And while the tech press tripped over itself to suggest the plan was a dramatic departure from FCC robocall policies of the past, the reality is there was little to nothing in the plan that was actually new. As is often the case with this FCC, a coagulation of half-measures, already existing efforts, and empty nonsense were just kind of thrown together in a pile and deemed to be something new and revolutionary.
One of the common themes here at Techdirt over the last decade is how in the digital and internet-connected era, the very meaning of "ownership" and "property" has changed -- often for the worse. In the broadband-connected era, firmware updates can often eliminate functionality promised to you at launch, as we saw with the Sony Playstation 3. And with everything now relying on internet-connectivity, companies can often give up on supporting devices entirely, often leaving users with very expensive paperweights as we saw after Google acquired Revolv.
The government of Japan has approved a new bill aimed at reducing the downloading of pirated content from the Internet. The new law, which is targeted for Jan 1, 2021, will criminalize the downloading of manga, magazines and academic material with prison sentences of up to two years. Operators of pirate linking sites will also face up to five years behind bars.
Roughly a year and a half ago, we discussed a proposed amendment to Japanese copyright law that would seek to criminalize copyright infringement. The general consensus is that the chief impetus for this new addition to Japanese copyright law centered on the manga industry, which is a multi-billion dollar industry, despite that particular media being pirated alongside all other media. Whereas Japan's copyright laws were generally in line with American laws, specifically in that copyright infringement is treated as a civil matter, this new law changed that up to make it a criminal offense. The problem with that, as many people pointed out, is that Japan's constitution is quite clear that anything akin to censorship cannot be done except for the following circumstance:
Unfortunately, finding high-quality and diverse openly licensed images, particularly those of women, is a difficult task for activists and nonprofit organizations. Either they don’t exist or they’re behind expensive paywalls. Thankfully, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation—one of Creative Commons’ institutional supporters—is making that task easier with Images of Empowerment, a CC-licensed stock photography collection that shares women’s stories from across the world.
UK music industry group BPI has reached a new milestone after the group reported its 500 millionth infringing link to Google. Combined with Bing and Yahoo!, the group is now nearing a billion reported URLs in total. While BPI is glad that search engines are actively helping to address the piracy problem, the battle is far from over.
I will admit to being worried, when the 9th Circuit originally agreed to reopen the long running copyright dispute between the estate of Randy Wolfe (aka Randy California) of the band Spirit, and Led Zeppelin. At issue was whether or not the classic Zepplin song "Stairway to Heaven" infringed on the Spirit song Taurus. As we noted, there are some similarities between the two songs... but they also have similarities to other songs in history, including Dido's Lament from the 17th century and Bach's Bourree from the 18th century and a bunch of other songs.
The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property held a hearing yesterday on how other countries are handling online piracy. While the US is often critical of foreign jurisdictions, in this case the goal is to learn from successes abroad. According to several key movie industry players, international experience shows that pirate site blocking is the most effective tool available.
