  We rarely think about or even use serial communications these days, but it is still useful. Data center people still need to be familiar with it.
Data centers can be remote, and once inside, you'll want to make sure you have all the proper tools. Besides a good Linux laptop, of course, I recommend the items above for managing those serial-enabled devices when necessary.
In this video, I will break down all the components of systemd, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
We're blown away by the Enlightenment desktop, and its little known features, and we share a quick way for you to try it out yourself.
Plus our experience with Pop!OS 20.04, Telegram's recent embarrassment, and some feedback.
In our Innards section, we talk about the versions of Ubuntu 20.04 we’re playing with.
I submitted a project proposal to participate in this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC). As I am curious about the DRM subsystem and have already started to work in contributing to it, I was looking for an organization that supports this subsystem. So, I applied to the X.Org foundation and proposed a project to Improve VKMS using IGT GPU Tools. Luckily, in May 4th, I received a e-mail from GSoC announcing that I was accepted! Happy happy happy!
Observing a conversation in #dri-devel channel, I realized that my project was the only one accepted on X.Org. WoW! I have no idea why the organization has only one intern this year, and even more, that this is me! Imediately after I received the result, Trevor Woerner congratulated me and kindly announced my project on his Twitter profile! It was fun to know that he enjoyed the things that I randomly posted in my blog, and was so nice to see that he read what I wrote!
Developer Sichem Zhou characterizes this compositor as "I created this project aiming for a compact but yet versatile wayland window manager, like a swiss army knife. It offers a built-in shell for providing wallpaper, panel, widgets and locker. A launcher for launching applications, running commands and finding files. Today, the compositor is configurable through lua script. It exposes some interfaces of the compositor so you can extend and change its behavior through the lua configuration. It also implements a flexible keybinding system on top of libweston. You can bind functions with a key sequence like in Emacs."
While many hoped that with the adoption of Vulkan it would lead to avoiding driver-specific checks/workarounds, that's still not been the case to workaround various driver bugs and other issues. The RADV ACO compiler back-end has resorted to altering its version string in order to obtain 2~5% higher performance in Feral's latest Linux game release.
While RADV+ACO doesn't make use of LLVM, they are now appending "LLVM 9.0.1" to the version string when enabled via a new DRI option (radv_report_llvm9_version_string). Reporting LLVM 9.0.1 even though LLVM isn't being used was added as a workaround for Shadow of the Tomb Raider to achieve 2~5% higher performance with ACO.
A lot is building up for Linux 5.8 and there already being a few rounds of AMDGPU feature improvements. Another batch of feature material for the AMD Radeon graphics driver was sent in this week to DRM-Next destined for Linux 5.8.
With it getting late in the cycle and the shiny new work mostly already being queued, this latest pull request has RAS fixes, DisplayPort 1.4 compliance fixes, clock-gating fixes, run-time power management cleanups, PSP code clean-ups, and other low-level fixes/maintenance work but also some feature activity still.
  FSGSBASE patches for the Linux kernel have been available for years albeit not mainlined to date. However, thankfully, a Microsoft Linux developer has taken up the cause to get them upstreamed given the performance benefits they are even seeing. Here are some benchmarks of the Linux kernel patches for FSGSBASE on both Intel and AMD CPUs.
The last time I benchmarked the FSGSBASE patches were last summer on Intel hardware and looking at the FSGSBASE patches at the time as well as the Linux kernel state at that point. For this round of testing is using the FSGSBASE v11 patches against the Linux 5.7 Git kernel as of last week while testing on both an Intel Core i9 and AMD Ryzen Threadripper systems for seeing the benefit of this instruction set extension when wired up into the Linux kernel.
Sword of the Necromancer is a dungeon crawling action RPG from JanduSoft and it just recently finished a Kickstarter campaign, which thankfully was a big success. It sounds like it's going to be pretty fun with the necromancy feature, as you will revive your dead enemies to fight alongside you.
Against their €15,000 funding goal they managed to hit way over it at €201,526. Mentioned here on GOL previously, they confirmed Linux support after the launch of the campaign. In their FAQ, they clearly mention that if it's not a simultaneous release it will be shortly after.
Halo 2 is out on Steam now and much like Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary and Halo: Reach, the single-player works nicely on Linux thanks to the Proton compatibility layer for Steam Play.
Another title that has a personal place in my heart, from my younger days of playing on an Xbox console and enjoying far too many hours with curtains closed and volume up blasting through enemies in Halo 2. Once again it's amazing that playing a Microsoft and Xbox Game Studios title on Linux has become so ridiculously easy.
Radio General, a strategy game that puts you in a tent with a radio and a map and has you direct troops around released recently with Linux support. Highlighted briefly here on GOL previously, it had a promising idea. Using a microphone, you would issue commands to troops and have it correctly detect what you're saying. Just like a real radio operator back during WWII.
KnotBot replaces programming lines with a drag and drop interface to solve puzzles, it's not a unique idea but KnotBot has a wonderful style and setting that make it worth a play.
GDevelop is a free and open source game engine that uses an event-sheet style of making games, dragging and dropping instead of programming line after line. I'm a big fan of such things, as they're a great entry point for people interested in making games and other software.
With GDevelop, they've just recent published version 5.0.0-beta93 which includes a much needed pass over the user interface. It's not so big and in your face, with extra padding everywhere now. Not only that, the UI is more persistent with your changes being saved and restored when opening a scene, extensions or the debugger.
Greetings to all. I hope everyone is safe in these crucial times when the true spirit of humanity is tested, and we help those who are not as fortunate as us.
I am grateful to be safe at home, however, this is not the case for many who are stranded in these difficult times.
After its first release in 2020, Kali Linux has finally arrived with its second release v2020.2. The new version does not include a major feature like non-root user policy, instead, it mainly focuses on refreshing and improving desktop environments, icons, installer, Kali NetHunter. So, let’s dive in to find out more about the latest Kali Linux 2020.2.
In a post to tech@, Matt Dunwoodie announced the availability of a WireGuard [VPN] patchset for OpenBSD: [...]
From the WireGuard point-of-view, this is an official patchset.
See the full thread on tech@ for more detail.
  If you are missing Unity then you might like this as Unity is back in Ubuntu with Ubuntu Unity Remix 20.04. Sadly, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu abandoned Unity in favor of the GNOME 3 desktop. Since then UBPorts community has continued development.
There is an interesting story behind Ubuntu Unity Remix 20.04 LTS as its developer is 10 years old. This Ubuntu Unity Remix sounds more interesting and is definitely bring joy back to the Unity community. Ubuntu Unity Remix is based on the stock base rather than a customized OS.
Packed with stability and performance for both public and private clouds, OpenStack Ussuri brings great improvements to the OVN (Open Virtual Networking) driver, which is now stable and provides a fully functional open source SDN solution.
The OVN driver now supports virtual network abstraction and improved segregation of the control from the data plane. Also, OVN is now one of the in-tree Neutron modular layer 2 (ML2) drivers.
  Canonical today announced the general availability of OpenStack Ussuri on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. The most notable enhancements of today’s OpenStack upstream release are stabilisation efforts around the Open Virtual Networking (OVN) driver and the Masakari project which allow organisations to run highly available workloads on the top of an open source software-defined networking (SDN) platform. Full commercial support for OpenStack Ussuri in Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack distribution will come with the OpenStack Charms 20.05 release on May 20th.
“It’s great to see members of the open infrastructure community bringing the features and capabilities of new releases to their users so quickly,” said Mark Collier, COO of the OpenStack Foundation. “Thanks to the hard work of the upstream community, upgrades are faster and easier than ever before and the ecosystem is making the most of these capabilities in their product roadmaps. The OpenStack Ussuri release brings an unprecedented level of stability and performance for public and private clouds that need to deliver VMs, containers and bare metal instances. The ongoing contributions of our community make it possible for vendors and service providers like Canonical to keep making OpenStack a great choice for users across industries and use cases in almost every country around the world.”
  Last year, I reviewed BalenaOS and BalenaCloud on Raspberry Pi CM3L based BalenaFin hardware. The solution generates OS images with docker support in order to easily manage and update a fleet of devices remotely over a web interface or client program.
Balena.io supports over 60 boards either officially, or thanks to the work of the community, but Pavel Burgr is developing an alternative with DEVICE.FARM supporting close to 100 Arm SBC’s including Raspberry Pi boards, and most Armbian supported Arm SBC’s.
  This is a weekly blog about the Raspberry Pi 4 (“RPI4”), the latest product in the popular Raspberry Pi range of computers.
Like last week’s blog, I’m focusing on a single application. I’ve received a few requests from readers of this blog to share my experiences with digiKam on the RPI4. This is billed as an advanced digital photo management program.
digiKam is free and open source software.
There’s a convenient package available in Raspbian. As the image to the left shows, installing the package in the usual way pulls in a ton of other programs. In total, installation uses 336MB of space on my system. That might be an issue if you’re running the RPI4 from a small microSD card, and you’re already running low on space. I recommend using an SSD over USB3. Much better performance all round.
 Seeed has launched a $59.90 “Seeed Studio BeagleBone Green Gateway” SBC that runs Linux on TI’s Sitara AM3358 and combines the Ethernet port of the BeagleBone Green with the WiFi/BLE function of the BB Green Wireless.
Seeed has launched a new model in its line of BeagleBone compatibles that balances the feature sets of the $44 Seeed Studio BeagleBone Green and the $52.90 Seeed Studio BeagleBone Green Wireless. The $59.90 Seeed Studio BeagleBone Green Gateway provides the 10/100 Ethernet port of the BB Green along with the BB Green Wireless’ TI Wilink8 module with 2.4GHz 802.11b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.1 LE. The open spec board is equipped with 2x USB 2.0 ports instead of one port on the BB Green and 4x ports on the Wireless.
  After Beelink GT-King and GT-King Pro, it appears the company is working on another Amlogic S922X(-H) TV box with Beelink GS-King X providing an internal 3.5ââ¬Â³ SATA Bay.
Beelink GS-King X is said to run Android 9.0 with Google Assistant and Widevine L1 DRM. It will apparently ship with an air mouse supporting voice commands.
  After several months in the works, LibreOffice 7.0 is now finally ready for public testing. The Document Foundation released the first alpha build for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems.
Development kicked off in early June 2019 and more than 1200 bugs were squashed and 6200 commits have been submitted to the code repository during all this time.
This means that we should expect LibreOffice 7.0 to be a massive release with numerous new features, optimizations, and improvements all over the place.
Among the highlights, there will be new spreadsheet functions, improved support for XLSX files that include many images, a padded numbering in Writer’s lists, glow effect on objects, and native 2013/2016/2019 saving of DOCX files.
The Board of Directors (or “BoD”) is the Foundation’s Board of Directors, the main administration of the Foundation’s projects and teams. Directors are directly elected by Community Members. The Board of Directors consists of seven (7) members and two (2) deputies. The Board of Directors may launch any other teams or committees ad hoc if necessary. In December, an election was held for a new Board.
[...]
The Document Foundation relies on its Advisory Board Members in order to receive advice and support. The Advisory Board’s primary function is to represent The Document Foundation’s supporters and to provide the Board of Directors with advice, guidance and proposals. Members are the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE), Software in the Public Interest (SPI), UK Government Digital Services (joined in 2019), City of Munich (Landeshaupstadt München), BPM-Conseil, Kopano b.v., GNOME, Google, Adfinis SyGroup (joined in 2019), RPA RusBITech, KDE e.V., the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Collabora, CIB Software and Red Hat.
Throughout the year, TDF had regular calls with representatives of the Advisory Board. Staff and Board members at TDF provided updates on the foundation, software and community, and described plans for the future. Advisory Board members were invited to provide valuable feedback on TDF’s activities, and various ideas and proposals were discussed. TDF would like to express its thanks to all Advisory Board members for their help.
The following month, Realme published the Android 10 kernel source code for the device as part of its GNU GPL obligations. Either way, if you own a Realme X2 Pro and want to be part of the Android 11 Early Access beta program, you can check out all the details on the official Realme forums.
This really should be a moment of global cooperation to deal with the pandemic on a truly global basis.
In a recent article, I mentioned my 2020 New Year's resolution: no more loops in Java. In that article, I chose a common (and simplified) forest management calculation—determining whether an area is forested, based on a legal definition, by calculating the proportion of ground shaded by tree canopies.
From a data collection point of view, this requires sampling the area and then estimating the proportion covered by tree canopies from that sample. Traditionally, sampling is conducted first by reviewing the area in aerial photographs or satellite images and dividing the area into units that appear to have approximately uniform vegetation characteristics. These units are called strata (plural of stratum). Then a collection of randomly located points is generated within each stratum. At each point is located a sample, typically a circle or rectangle of specific dimensions, and all trees within each sample are measured in the field. Then, back in the office, sample values are totaled, stratum averages are calculated, and these averages are weighted into a total average for the area.
A few weeks back, we went into detail on why Quibi was such a total disaster from Day 1, which can pretty much be summed up by the fact that Hollywood thinks the way you build something people want is to throw tons of money at it (and fudge the books on the back end), while refusing to understand that getting people to actually like what you want -- by making it convenient and building community -- matters. Hollywood overvalues throwing money at big name content makers, and completely ignores the tech, community, and social side of things. And Quibi just makes that whole thing abundantly clear.
The long-term work-from-home policies of these companies stand in stark contrast to much of the rest of the country, where states are slowly easing lockdown restrictions. Governors in several states, including California, where Twitter, Facebook and Google are based, have already started a phased reopening of their economies.
Twitter said most of its workforce will be able to work from home — if they choose to — even after the company reopens offices when conditions permit amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Silicon Valley companies were among the first adopters of work-from-home policies when the coronavirus spread, and they’re in no rush to bring workers back to campus. Facebook and Google told employees last week that they will have the option to work from home until the end of 2020 — with most workers expected to not return to the office until 2021.
In his email, Dorsey said it’s unlikely Twitter would open its offices before September, and that business travel would be canceled until then as well, with very few exceptions. The company will also cancel all in-person events for the rest of the year, and reassess its plan for 2021 later this year. Finally, Twitter upped its allowance for work from home supplies to $1,000 for all employees.
For some parents, it was the gifts from the principal to young girls and their families that gave them pause. A few too many presents that cost a little too much money. Then began the late-night Facebook messages.
Through most of it, the principal of one of the largest elementary schools in rural Alaska remained on the job and in close contact with students. Then, in December, Gladys Jung Elementary Principal Christopher Carmichael was arrested by the FBI’s Child Exploitation Task Force and later charged with possession of child pornography, attempted coercion of a child and sexual abuse of a minor.
Today, all we’re left with is a deafening silence that muffles the sound of so much suffering. The unfolding public health, mental health, and economic crisis of Covid-19 has laid bare the fragility of what was. The institutions charged with caring for and guiding our most valuable assets—our children—were already gutted by half a century of chronic underfunding, misguided curricular policies that prioritized testing over real learning, and social policies that favored austerity over taking care of the most vulnerable members of our society. Now that so many teachers are sequestered and alone or locked away with family, our bonds of proximity broken, we’re forced to stare into that void, scrambling to find and care for our students across an abyss of silence. The system is broken. The empire has no clothes.
A day ahead of NVIDIA's postponed virtual GTC keynote, AMD announced the Radeon Pro VII. The Radeon Pro VII offers 16GB of HBM2 memory, 3840 Stream processors, up to 6.5 FP64 TFLOPS / 13.1 FP32 TFLOPS, and can has six mini-DP display outputs.
The Radeon Pro VII supports AMD Infinity Fabric Link for high-speed GPU-to-GPU communication for multi-GPU setups. The Radeon Pro VII supports PCI Express 4.0 and the card is rated for 1TB/s of memory bandwidth.
We are living in seemingly very dark times. I don’t need to tell you that. You know. We are all living through a pandemic, the likes of which few of us, if any, have ever seen in our lifetimes. The pandemic is being used, moreover, as an occasion for the super-rich and their friends in government to seize what they had yet been unable to steal from the rest of us. The pandemic is hitting African-Americans, Latinos and Native Americans particularly hard, and our rulers seem elated by this fact, and thus willing to let the virus spread as it will. Meanwhile, the threats of nuclear holocaust and global warming continue to threaten our existence. Just to add icing to the cake, we are now being frightened with the prospect of “murder hornets” taking over.
As I write, the United States is approaching 80,000 deaths from COVID-19. Undoubtedly, this number will exceed 100,000 in the next few months. As a consequence of the incompetence and arrogance of the Trump Administration and the denial of scientific evidence by various Republican Governors, the situation will worsen, especially for the most vulnerable. Everyone from the working poor to shuttered populations in prisons, detention campus, and nursing homes to people of color will continue to suffer disproportionately.
On the morning of May 12, Russian officials announced that the country had recorded 10,899 new coronavirus infections in the past day, bringing the nation’s total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases to 232,243 patients.€ According to the latest data, Russia has now overtaken Spain (which has 227,436 cases), to become the country with the second-highest number of COVID-19 cases in the world, after the United States.
"There's a plague outside but the Trump administration is strongly encouraging states to solicit employer tips on workers staying home."
A fire killed five people at St. Georgy’s Hospital in St. Petersburg on the morning of May 12. The blaze broke out on the sixth floor, in the department where coronavirus patients were being treated.
"The need for more equitable, resilient, and sustainable food and health systems has never been more urgent."
"You're telling people, 'Wash your hands for 20 seconds multiple times a day,' and they don't have running water."
In a post on Twitter, the Russian state-funded international TV network RT (formerly known as Russia Today), accused Meduza of spreading false information about Russia’s COVID-19 statistics.
Many argue that the U.S. president has blood on his hands. The question remains: just how much?
"If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to 'Open America Again,' then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country."
"Democratic leadership must get this right," warned one climate group, "because the fate of our habitable planet depends on it."
Even though 1,000 workers at Tyson’s slaughterhouse in Waterloo, IA have tested positive for the coronavirus, it has reopened. Tyson has said last week it would begin slaughtering pigs.
Because grim times call for grim measures, members of the progressive group Indivisible laid body bags overseen by the Grim Reaper at Florida's and Arizona's statehouses and Texas' governor's mansion Tuesday to protest their GOP governors' reckless moves to push ahead with re-opening their states despite grossly inadequate testing and rising COVID-19 cases and deaths - most notably as restrictions begin to be lifted. Indivisible said the coordinated, socially-distanced actions were aimed at urging their states' respective governors to “listen to medical experts and not cave to pressure to (open) too fast” - an especially urgent message after Dr. Anthony Fauci's testimony before Congress that re-opening too soon could cause catastrophic spikes in infections and deaths, which he warned are likely already far greater than the documented, surreal 81,000. The grisly demonstrations at three state capitols, each featuring a Grim Reaper surrounded by black, bulky, County Coroner body bags, came as all three governors mulishly forge ahead with reopening in the name of ungodly capitalism, and mass negligent homicide be damned.
In Miami, Dr. Armen Henderson was outside of his home loading his vehicle full of tents and supplies to distribute to homeless people the week of April 12, something common for the doctor known for working with the homeless population, when he quickly found himself in handcuffs.
A Miami police officer said Armen was stopped for trash in his yard, however the doctor pushes back against this, knowing it was because of his race.€
Some of the protests were organized by well-funded groups linked to the Trump administration.
But Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, agreed with Whitmer's concerns that the protesters risked infecting others by gathering in large groups without masks or social distancing.
There are no definitive answers as to the exact cause of the outbreak among Muslim immigrants. But Swedish authorities knew early on that it was more prevalent among certain immigrant groups and yet did nothing to protect the elderly Swedes living in care homes from a migrant care worker population.
However, Doug Leith and Stephen Farrell at Trinity College Dublin concluded it will be “challenging” to correctly record contacts because Bluetooth signal strength varies so much depending on which way phones are facing, whether a body is between two phones and how much nearby materials reflect and absorb signals.
The pair tested four scenarios – walking around streets, at a meeting table in an office, on a train and in a supermarket – using Android phones and a version of Singapore’s tracing app, TraceTogether. Generally, proximity could be established while walking. But at a meeting table, the signal dropped by 38 per cent if both phones were in pockets rather than placed on the table, making it hard to tell if two people had come into close contact.
Of these, in particular, Microsoft states that nine of the critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-1023, CVE-2020-1024, CVE-2020-1056, CVE-2020-1059, CVE-2020-1069, CVE-2020-1096, CVE-2020-1102, CVE-2020-1117, CVE-2020-1153) enabled hackers to remotely activate code on your computer to assume full control. This is the ultimate end game for any Windows 10 attack, so it’s vital you install these fixes as soon as possible.
Needless to say, such a suggestion will send shivers down the spines of many Windows 10 users. The operating system has been notoriously unreliable for some time and deleting user data, breaking Chrome security and losing user profiles are just some of the recent highlights.
On the flip side, Microsoft has promised important upgrade changes are coming to Windows 10, while the company is also reprioritizing plans to bring Windows 10X, an all-new platform, to laptop and desktop PCs. So yes, change is needed but it is coming.
Texas revealed on Monday that a ransomware attack has forced the shutdown of its judicial branch network, including websites and servers
[...]
“The attack began during the overnight hours and was first discovered in the early morning hours on Friday. The attack is unrelated to the courts’ migration to remote hearings amid the coronavirus pandemic,” the notice reads.
Vinny wanted him to do the work of integrating the other programmer's web injects into their malware, then test the rootkit and maintain it with updates once it launched. Hutchins says he knew instinctively that he should walk away and never communicate with Vinny again. But as Hutchins tells it, Vinny seemed to have been preparing for this conversation, and he laid out an argument: Hutchins had already put in nearly nine months of work. He had already essentially built a banking rootkit that would be sold to customers, whether Hutchins liked it or not.
Besides, Hutchins was still being paid on commission. If he quit now, he'd get nothing. He'd have taken all the risks, enough to be implicated in the crime, but would receive none of the rewards.
As angry as he was at having fallen into Vinny's trap, Hutchins admits that he was also persuaded. So he added one more link to the yearslong chain of bad decisions that had defined his teenage life: He agreed to keep ghostwriting Vinny's banking malware.
Offensive Security has released Kali Linux 2020.2, the latest iteration of the popular open source penetration testing platform. There are several cosmetic changes in this newest Kali Linux release...
A Huawei engineer has decided to contribute a patch to the Linux kernel, trying to help bolster the security of the widely deployed open source project. The patch was called “Huawei kernel self protection” (HKSP), and it allegedly featured various security-hardening options for the Linux kernel. Thinking that this is coming from a controversial entity, the Linux kernel team thoroughly scrutinized the patch and found that it contains a “trivially exploitable vulnerability.” The discovery of that was the work of “GRSecurity,” an entity that has been contributing security hardening patches on Linux kernel for a long time now.
GRSecurity has even provided a proof of concept (PoC) code on how to exploit the vulnerability as an unprivileged user. They called the HKSP patch a risk that creates new attack surface and introduces more problems than those it attempts to solve in the first place. Naturally, this discovery sparked rumors about the intention of the contributor, Huawei’s long-shot goal to try and weaken the security of the Linux kernel, and more. Huawei responded to this by saying that their employee contributed on his own and that the company had no involvement in this action whatsoever.
A new vulnerability (CVE-2020-11501) has been discovered in the Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) implementation in GnuTLS, where clients always send a fixed value (all-zero bytes) instead of random bytes in the first handshake message (ClientHello). The GnuTLS releases from 3.6.3 to 3.6.12 are affected by this vulnerability.
This vulnerability impacts Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and has been rated as having a Moderate impact by Red Hat Product Security. A fix for this issue has been delivered as part of RHSA-2020:1998, shipped on April 30, 2020.
Sudo is one of the most powerful and dangerous tools in the Unix or Linux system administrator's toolbox. With it, an ordinary user can run commands just as if he or she were the superuser or any other user. Now, One Identity, the company behind the utility, has released a new version of sudo, called sudo 1.9, which gives it better auditing, logging, and security than ever before.
We've been pretty critical of federal surveillance powers going back, well, as long as we can remember. And while Trump's biggest supporters like to insist that FISA warrant abuses were some sort of new thing that were just used against his campaign in a politically motivated manner, the reality is that it's just been standard operating procedures for the FBI to abuse the same "backdoor warrants" that were first revealed in 2013, but go back years before that. While, yes, the problems with the Carter Page surveillance were concerning, they were no more concerning than tons of other crap the FBI has done in making use of so-called backdoor warrants to surveil tons of Americans without cause.
Time and time again we've highlighted how in the modern era you don't really own the hardware you buy. 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 Intelligence Community's latest transparency report [PDF] contains even more evidence of the FBI's inability to follow the law when helping itself to the NSA's collections. The infamous "backdoor searches" of the NSA's Section 702 collections -- which sweep up millions of electronic communications every year -- have always been a problem for the FBI. (But it's a problem the FBI likely doesn't mind having.)
Companies and governments across the world are building and deploying a dizzying number of systems and apps to fight COVID-19. Many groups have converged on using Bluetooth-assisted proximity tracking for the purpose of exposure notification. Even so, there are many ways to approach the problem, and dozens of proposals have emerged.
One way to categorize them is based on how much trust each proposal places in a central authority. In more “centralized” models, a single entity—like a health organization, a government, or a company—is given special responsibility for handling and distributing user information. This entity has privileged access to information that regular users and their devices do not. In “decentralized” models, on the other hand, the system doesn’t depend on a central authority with special access. A decentralized app may share data with a server, but that data is made available for everyone to see—not just whoever runs the server.€
Tuesday the social network reported a big jump in the number of items removed for breaching its rules on hate speech. The increase stemmed from better detection by the automated hate-speech sniffers developed by Facebook’s artificial intelligence experts.
The accuracy of those systems remains a mystery. Facebook doesn’t release, and says it can’t estimate, the total volume of hate speech posted by its 1.7 billion daily active users.
Nils Torvalds’ revelation was presented in an episode which started (at 3:06:58) by me pointing out to the Microsoft representative in the panel, that in a system like GNU/Linux, built on open source, you can examine the source code to see that there aren’t any back doors. In Microsoft’s systems, this possibility is absent, since the source code is secret to outsiders.
My question to the Microsoft representative was whether she’d be allowed to disclose if there are deliberate back doors in their systems, in the event that there are. She never responded to that question, but obviously, she didn’t have to. From other sources, we know that the NSA always prohibits the private companies they force into cooperation from disclosing any of it.
While Amazon has touted the cameras as a technological safety measure for its warehouses, doctors and infectious disease experts told Wired that the cameras, even when supplemented with symptom questionnaires, are extremely unlikely to prevent further spread of COVID-19. In fact, they could let up to 50 percent of infected people go undetected.
But the federal government released another memo in March essentially saying it would turn a blind eye to medical providers who want to use popular videoconferencing apps for telehealth during the pandemic. Doctors should feel free, the government said, to use everything from FaceTime to Skype to treat patients. It specified, however, that they may not use TikTok. Seriously.
At a press conference Tuesday (May 12), the Taiwan Association of University Professors lashed out at the government for implementing the policy hastily and recklessly. With the lack of dialogue as well as unresolved issues such as data security and accountability, citizens will be exposed to high risks, the association said.
The Internet of Things is made up of small computing devices with unique IDs connected together through a network and performing specific tasks. In healthcare that can mean monitoring building temperatures, air flow, medical devices or even the health of a patient in or out of a healthcare facility.
Because of their ability to independently communicate data, there’s potential for eliminating direct human interaction with systems equipped with IoT devices and central data respositories, automating processes and increasing efficiency and data accuracy.
It’s clear that the men behind the La Guaira invasion aren’t described as mercenaries because the US government and media alike favor regime change in Venezuela.
Killings of black men by whites are 8.5 times more likely to be ruled "justified."
“Every day is a copy of a copy of a copy.” That meme, from the moment when Edward Norton’s character in Fight Club offers a 1,000-yard stare at an office copy machine, captures this moment perfectly — at least for those of us removed from the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis. Isolated inside a Boston apartment, I typically sought new ways to shake the snow globe, to see the same bubble — the same stuff — differently.
The betrayal of the American soldier.
The bipartisan majority that has come together on this issue should not stop working to enact legislation to reclaim its war powers and block Trump from taking us to war with Iran.
The numbers fleeing to neighbouring Niger have almost tripled from last year when the agency reported the first influx of 20,000 people following an insurgency and banditry in northern Nigeria which killed hundreds and displaced thousands.
Assassinating Whitmer is a common theme among members of the groups. Dozens of people have called for her to be hanged.
In the case of what President Donald Trump has called the “liberate” movement, one major thread tying the groups together is the State Policy Network (SPN). SPN, a network of state-level conservative think tanks advancing pro-corporate agendas, has received money from the likes of the Koch family, the Devos family, the Mercer Family Foundation, and others.
DeSmog traced SPN groups to three states in which protests against stay-at-home orders have ensued.
The two men, aged 22 and 23, had driven from Sweden to the tax agency's main office in Copenhagen last August. They then planted an explosive device and detonated it.
Tillaberi is in the tri-border region of Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali known as Liptako-Gourma, where Islamist militants linked to al Qaeda and Islamic State have strengthened their foothold, making swathes of the arid Sahel area ungovernable.
Britain has up to 1.2 million illegal immigrants, a quarter of all those that have unlawfully entered Europe, according to the Pew Research Center.... The UK's leniency appears to have sparked another wave of illegal immigration. Since the coronavirus lockdown began on March 23, nearly 900 people have illegally crossed the English Channel from France, according to Migration Watch UK.
You might be wondering why this even came up during a press conference about coronavirus testing. The answer appears to be that with the US leading the world in deaths and the number of new cases in the country not yet showing a strong downward trend, Trump believes fresh conspiracy-mongering about Obama is politically useful for him — even if there is no basis for them.
The rest of the press conference proved the point: After repeating misinformation about testing and the state of coronavirus cases, he abruptly ended the event and huffed off the stage when two female reporters asked him pointed questions.
Two government-run newspapers published op-eds on Monday and Tuesday attacking the U.S. response to the pandemic and defending Beijing against allegations of covering up news of the initial outbreak, failing to adequately warn the world, and purposely underreporting the number of infections and deaths in the country.
The Chinese Communist Party is also refusing to allow an international probe into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, despite growing pressure from Western nations and the World Health Organization.
Khan’s activities paint a picture of an individual who presents a clear and present danger to the public if released prematurely.
But his challenge of the current law preventing his release is not unusual.
I have written about how incarcerated terrorists become “jail wise,” and learn to use the legal system to “demand their rights” and challenge their conditions of confinement. The charade that an incarcerated, radical Islamic terrorist has evolved into an advocate for human rights and the sanctity of life is absurd. This absurdity was crystallized when a French judge ruled last year that Islamic terrorist Salah Abdeslam, involved in the 2015 Paris attacks, had a right to privacy while in his prison cell.
Khan’s case may be headed in that direction, as the judge in his case, Neil Garnham, allowed the lawsuit to go forward stating that Khan has an “arguable case” and it should be further examined. How long that will take we do not know.
The same cannot be said of the increased flow into the ocean sink. More dissolved carbon dioxide makes seawater more acidic. How bad this acidification will prove is open to debate. But the process will probably be very damaging to some ecosystems, including reefs already stressed by rising temperatures. Even if fossil-fuel use were not warming the climate, this acidification would in itself count as a frightening global change.
The growth of the two carbon sinks is also, left to itself, unsustainable. Warm water absorbs less carbon dioxide than cold water. So as the oceans warm their ability to offset emissions weakens. As to the land sink, higher temperatures speed up microbial respiration, especially in soils, more reliably than higher carbon-dioxide levels speed up photosynthesis.
Yet as people are dying from this novel disease across the United States, our government officials are putting people like me at even higher risk by loosening environmental restrictions for the fossil fuel industry.
On March 26, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it would allow companies to monitor themselves, for the foreseeable future, due to the COVID-19 crisis. These companies will effectively be able to skirt environmental standards during the pandemic, and won’t be punished or fined for any violations of the EPA’s own regulations. Without enforcement or consequences, environmental groups say we’re almost certain to see an increase in pollution.
From the deep Mediterranean marine mud to the desolate beaches of the Southern Ocean, plastic waste now gets everywhere.
The human body has limits. If “temperature plus humidity” is high enough, even a healthy person seated in the shade with plentiful water to drink will suffer severely or likely die. It’s the Wet-Bulb Temperature WBT effect.
The shadowy figures of well-armed Isis gunmen can be seen making an attack in the plains of northern Iraq on an outpost held by paramilitary fighters loyal to the Iraqi government.
"Our courts have shown time and time again that the law matters."
In fact, in almost all regions of the world, the direct policy cost of exiting coal was nothing compared to the human health and environmental benefits that will be reaped come 2050.
Only sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Japan faced higher costs than benefits, and the authors think that might be because air pollution isn't as much of a problem in these parts.
Under the scenario where nations put a price on carbon to limit a temperature rise to 2 €°C, a somewhat scattered picture emerges. Asia benefits from improved air quality, while Europe, Japan, and the US save on policy costs. The rest of the world, however, falls short of reaping the same direct societal benefits.
But keep in mind, that's only for regional effects. The minute we zoom out and consider climate change on a global level, everyone appears to win.
Recent lobby filings from major oil and gas paint a picture of “disaster capitalism at its€ worst.”
Even as€ experts' understandings of climate science and the costs of carbon pollution have€ strengthened significantly, opponents of climate action are publishing flawed studies in scientific journals to support false claims that align with the fossil fuel industry’s deregulatory€ agenda.€
Over a year before COVID-19 was first detected, biologists at the University of Warsaw published “Bats, Coronaviruses, and Deforestation,” a paper that links the rapid destruction of the natural habitats of bats to the spread of coronaviruses such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV.
In parts of South Africa the impact of organized crime is visible. In early mornings, poachers can be seen flocking to the beaches of Western Cape. From Cape Agulhas to Cape Columbine, the turf is divided up and controlled by a prison-based gang known as the Numbers.
“On certain days, whatever comes out of the sea — abalone, lobster, periwinkle — belongs to them,” wrote South African journalist John Grobler in Vrye Weekblad, an online newspaper. They “descend in broad daylight and in large numbers on the craggy beaches to strip out whatever abalone they can find without the police lifting as much as a finger.”
But the true beneficiaries are the Chinese exporters who control the trade. Ninety percent of abalone exports are destined for Hong Kong. Since Chinese exporters often pay in drugs, addiction rates have skyrocketed. South Africa now has the highest rate of methamphetamine use of any country in the world. Chinese criminal groups also have corrupted some local enforcement officials through bribery, Grobler reported.
"Democratic leadership has had plenty of input from progressive thinkers over the past couple of months. They just care more about the input from corporate lobbyists."
It’s that time of year again — New York City’s budget process is underway. Unfortunately, the proposed budget is $3.4 billion less than last year due to the lost tax revenue from COVID-19, as well as cuts in New York’s state budget, leaving a bigger hole for the city to backfill. What will New York City do to balance its expenses?
According to Sechin, the decision to reduce the investment program’s costs was made “taking into account the dramatic state of the global oil market as a whole,” and in connection with the decision to reduce global oil production.€
Meanwhile, new poll shows majority of Americans believe federal government not doing enough to stop resurgence of outbreak.
Avoiding a dystopian future requires as a first step repairing the elements of fragility in our political economy.
With the stated goal of rooting out “waste and fraud” in the unemployment insurance system, President Donald Trump’s Department of Labor is openly encouraging ongoing state efforts to help employers report workers who refuse to return to their jobs out of fear of contracting the coronavirus.
When the American steel industry collapsed in the late 1970s, few places were hit as hard as Youngstown, Ohio, a manufacturing powerhouse with a bevy of hulking mills. It never really recovered, and today the city’s name is shorthand for postindustrial decline. Desperate for investment, local officials tried a tactic that municipalities around the country have also embraced: awarding millions of dollars in property tax breaks to companies promising new jobs.
But in Youngstown, those efforts have largely failed to deliver, an investigation by The Business Journal and ProPublica has found. The results are instructive for communities across the nation as they try in the coming months to cope with the crushing financial impact of the coronavirus epidemic. Ohio regulators, for instance, warn that so-called enterprise zone agreements should be “a tool of the last resort” for local communities because of the “far-reaching” effects of tax breaks.
Telegram co-founder Pavel Durov has announced that plans for the launch of his $1.7 billion blockchain project TON have been cancelled.
Last August, the nabobs of Corporate America — the nearly 200 top CEOs who make up the prestigious Business Roundtable — sort of asked for forgiveness.
"Polluters fought hard for kickbacks in the first coronavirus stimulus package and they are undoubtedly up to it again."
Bill Boone was a fresh-faced 23-year-old in 1952 when he cast his first ballot for U.S. president, while proudly serving aboard an aircraft carrier off the coast of Korea.
I recently wrote a piece for FAIR (4/25/20) about how I felt more optimistic about media reporting on the economic aspects of the Covid-19 pandemic, despite what I saw as a failure to clearly call out capitalist market reliance. The New York Times was calling for people to remember FDR’s Four Freedoms, and even the Financial Times was encouraging readers to think about Beveridge’s Full Employment in a Free Society.
Temporary layoffs make up 78.3 percent of unemployment.
May 12 marked the end of the “non-working” days in Russia, which were introduced at the end of March in a bid to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Construction workers and industrial companies went back to work, and the capital began operating under a “mask regime” — Moscow’s residents are now required to wear both masks and gloves in stores, on public transport, and at work, or face fines of up to 5,000 rubles (about $68). In a special photo report for Meduza, photographer Evgeny Feldman took a walk around Moscow during rush hour, to see what the capital looks like during its first day back to work.
ProPublica, along with The Washington Post, Bloomberg, The New York Times and Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal, sued the Small Business Administration on Tuesday over its refusal to release detailed information for loans provided through the $659 billion Paycheck Protection Program.
The PPP, which provides forgivable loans to small businesses, was launched by the $2.2 trillion CARES Act as one of the central government programs to respond to the coronavirus crisis.
Here’s the truth: The biggest obstacle to reopening the economy is the pandemic itself. Any rush to reopen without adequate testing and tracing – a massive increase from what we’re doing now – will cause even more deaths and a longer economic crisis.The first responsibility of a president is to keep the public safe. But Donald Trump couldn’t care less. He’s trying to force the economy to reopen to boost his electoral chances, and he’s selling out Americans’ health to seal the deal. No matter the cost, Donald Trump’s chief concern is and will always be himself.
I have been working very hard trying to get a government backed “Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan” for the music festival. It has been like banging my head off a brick wall, with a huge batch of documents and accounts to be in your hands before you are permitted to smash your head. Before the pandemic really took hold, I had written about the challenge of making music festival finances work and the need, given infrastructure costs, to reach a certain scale to become viable. At that stage my main worry was how to maintain the non-commercial, community vibe as we expanded; selling the tickets was not proving problematic.
The 75th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany was May 8. The 70th anniversary of the Schuman declaration, which launched postwar European integration, was May 9. Just days before both, the German constitutional court launched a legal missile into the heart of the EU. Its judgment is extraordinary. It is an attack on basic economics, the central bank’s integrity, its independence and the legal order of the EU.
The court ruled against the ECB’s public sector purchase programme, launched in 2015. It did not argue that the ECB had improperly engaged in monetary financing, but rather that it had failed to apply a “proportionality” analysis, when assessing the impact of its policies, on a litany of conservative concerns: “public debt, personal savings, pension and retirement schemes, real estate prices and the keeping afloat of economically unviable companies”.
For those who may have forgotten, the Presidential election of 2000 was unlike any other.
In case you needed a reminder, the pandemic reveals everything rancid about this presidency.
The world is amidst the COVID-19 crisis and in our corner of the planet a presidential campaign is reduced to a single issue: Trump/not Trump. Pick your poison.
"Congress appears to be on its way to passing a half-assed bill that underachieves on public health, families/workers, state/local governments, businesses," the senior Democratic aide fretted.
On April 23, during the same week that Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state said he was contemplating a “significant expansion” of vote by mail, the Public Interest Legal Foundation emailed one of his employees under the subject line “28 MILLION ballots lost.”
"Congressââ¬Â¯mustââ¬Â¯continue toââ¬Â¯investââ¬Â¯in our democracy this yearââ¬Â¯or else we’ll face potentially catastrophic consequences."
Anthony Fauci, a prominent member of President Donald Trump’s coronavirus task force team and the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, addressed a Senate committee on Tuesday about coronavirus and several states’ plans to “reopen” their economies in the midst of a pandemic, delivering to lawmakers a dire warning about the consequences of doing so.
Fortunately, Canada is not a country that has suffered continuous threats of coup d’etats as Venezuela has these last 21 years.
On April 23, during the same week that Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state said he was contemplating a “significant expansion” of vote by mail, the Public Interest Legal Foundation emailed one of his employees under the subject line “28 MILLION ballots lost.”
“Putting the election in the hands of the United States Postal Service would be a catastrophe,” wrote J. Christian Adams, president of PILF, a conservative organization that has long complained about voter fraud. His missive contended, with scant evidence, that “twice as many” mailed ballots “disappeared” in the 2016 presidential election than made up the margin of votes between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says that he has been hospitalized after being diagnosed with the coronavirus.
The United States Supreme Court heard two different cases on a single matter: who may (or may not) have the legal right to access President Donald Trump’s financial and tax records.
"The American people have the right to know whether the president is abusing power, concealing illegal activities, or dodging his taxes."
Exiles (like the protesters in India, pictured) will see the anniversary as a chance to remind the world of China’s brutality in Tibet and the hollowness of its promises of “autonomy” there. Like every other government in the world, America’s recognises Chinese sovereignty in Tibet. But China has always suspected it of encouraging a separatist movement there, which it sees as led by the Dalai Lama, who fled into exile after the suppression of an anti-China rebellion in 1959. In fact, the Dalai Lama has renounced the claim to independence, and seeks for Tibet only genuine autonomy.
In Tibet itself, this month’s anniversary will pass without notice. The region has emerged from its covid-19 lockdown into the political lockdown that passes for normal life there. The official media are indulging in a propaganda blitz around a new law by the regional assembly that came into effect on May 1st: “Regulations on the Establishment of a Model Area for Ethnic Unity and Progress in the Tibet Autonomous Region”.
The biggest U.S. airlines spent 96% of free cash flow last decade on buying back their own shares. American Airlines Group Inc. -- which is not shown in the chart but is included in overall figures -- led the pack, with negative cumulative free cash flow during the decade while it repurchased more than $12.5 billion of its shares. United Airlines Holdings Inc. used 80% of its free cash flow on buybacks, while the S&P 500 Index as a whole allocated about 50% for the purpose. As the industry reels under the weight of the coronavirus outbreak corporate leaders are seeking federal assistance to ease the burden.
Instead, American blew most of its cash on a stock buyback spree. From 2014 to 2020, in an attempt to increase its earnings per share, American spent more than $15 billion buying back its own stock. It managed, despite the risk of the proverbial rainy day, to shrink its cash reserves. At the same time it was blowing cash on buybacks, American also began to borrow heavily to finance the purchase of new planes and the retrofitting of old planes to pack in more seats. As early as 2017 analysts warned of a risk of default should the economy deteriorate, but American kept borrowing. It has now accumulated a debt of nearly $30 billion, nearly five times the company’s current market value.
But it comes after years of airlines stockpiling debt and spending billions to drive up stock prices through buybacks. American Airlines has spent about $12.4 billion on stock repurchases since 2014. Southwest has spent $10.7 billion buying back stock.
“If there is so much as a DIME of corporate bailout money in the next relief package, it should include a reinstated ban on stock buybacks,” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, in a Twitter message.
In a letter to government leaders and lawmakers this week, American CEO Doug Parker and union leaders said that the airline needs aid “with appropriate conditions.”
According to reports, Congressional leaders have been discussing $50 billion in government aid entirely made up of zero or low-interest loans.
It’s also worth noting (and probably worthy of a separate column) that these billionaires and millionaires have zero moral qualms about working with some of the worst white-supremacists or neo-fascists in order to make sure a crowd turns out, which would explain how swastikas and the like turned up at the DeVos-sponsored protest in Lansing. Here in Pennsylvania, the protest planned for Monday in Harrisburg by a rapidly growing Facebook group called Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine is led, curiously, by (ahem) a gun activist from (double ahem) Ohio. And just last August, that so-called gun activist, Chris Dorr, was investigated in Ohio after a Facebook rant in which he vowed that, after any effort to restrict the right to bear firearms, “there will be political bodies laying all over the ground ... we gun owners will pull the trigger, and leave the corpses for the buzzards.”
Dorr’s alarming words speak to one of the real risks here — the kind that experts call stochastic terrorism, in which a movement leader’s incitements, such as the president of the United States urging gun activists to “LIBERATE” Virginia, are translated into specific acts of violence by low-level and possible unhinged followers. If it sounds familiar, we’ve already seen it play out from El Paso to Germany, and now the danger in this time of coronavirus is very, very real.
For years rank-and-file Democrats have been giving the true Butcher of Baghdad a majority approval rating, running with the common narrative that while Bush perhaps made some “mistakes,” Trump is spectacularly worse. Here are five things that are highlighted by that common perspective: [...]
Alphabet Inc’s Google disclosed in a quarterly filing on Tuesday that it spent a company-record $21.2 million on lobbying the U.S. government in 2018, topping its previous high of $18.22 million in 2012, as the search engine operator fights wide-ranging scrutiny into its practices.
In its filing to Congress on Tuesday, Facebook Inc disclosed that it also spent more on government lobbying in 2018 than it ever had before at $12.62 million. That was up from $11.51 million a year ago, according to tracking by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
The guidance, which is marked “For Official Use Only” and is not public, cites a theoretical “man-in-the-middle” attack, in which a [cr]acker intercepts and alters data, as one risk to voters who return ballots electronically. Other federal agencies involved in election security — the Election Assistance Commission, the FBI, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology — signed off on the document.
The DHS has come out against internet voting. Sort of.
The smart epidemic prevention system has three main components, including automatic temperature sensing, facial recognition, and contact tracing history. The system was designed using AI technology developed jointly by professors and students in Taiwan and India, according to the ministry’s press release.
WeChat censors content server-side, meaning that all the rules to perform censorship are on a remote server. When a message is sent from one WeChat user to another, it passes through a server managed by Tencent (WeChat’s parent company) that detects if the message includes blacklisted keywords before a message is sent to the recipient.
If a message is censored there is no notification given to the user sending or receiving the message. The screenshot below shows a conversation between two China-registered accounts. One user tries to send the keyword “æ³â¢Ã¨Â½Â®Ã¥Å Ÿ” (falun gong) and is censored. No notification is given to either user that the message was blocked.
Paul Manafort, Donald Trump’s onetime presidential campaign chairman who was convicted as part of the special counsel’s Russia investigation, has been released from federal prison to serve the rest of his sentence in home confinement due to concerns about the coronavirus, his lawyer said Wednesday.
Manafort, 71, was released Wednesday morning from FCI Loretto, a low-security prison in Pennsylvania, according to his attorney, Todd Blanche. Manafort had been serving more than seven years in prison following his conviction.
His lawyers had asked the Bureau of Prisons to release him to home confinement, arguing that he was at high risk for coronavirus because of his age and preexisting medical conditions. Manafort was hospitalized in December with a heart-related condition, two people familiar with the matter told The Associated Press at the time. They were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
Manafort was among the first people to be charged in special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, which examined possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election campaign.
The old adage that “the more things change the more they stay the same” seems particularly appropriate to media coverage in the Covid-19 crisis.€ Old patterns of media bias have continued, albeit in an intensified form, as pandemic’s effects have intensified over time. Of particular concern are longstanding problems€ with mass media€ reporting, as related to the marginalization of inequality coverage€ during a time of rising economic instability and collapse.
Neither the official notice nor The Citizen identified which April 13 report sparked the suspension. However, two journalists and an activist familiar with the matter, all of whom spoke to CPJ anonymously, citing fear for their safety and their jobs, said that the suspension was connected to a video posted online by the newspaper showing President John Magufuli in a fish market.
All three people said that the video was construed as implying that Magufuli was acting imprudently amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Facebook named the first 20 members of a new oversight board Wednesday. The oversight board has been called a "Supreme Court" for users of the giant social network and its Instagram app to appeal content moderation decisions made by Facebook.
The board’s decisions will be binding “unless implementation could violate the law,” Facebook said. The decisions will also apply to Facebook-owned Instagram but not initially to WhatsApp, where content is generally encrypted. Membership on the board is part-time. The board isn’t disclosing its compensation.
While the European Union is about to start the process leading to the adoption of the Digital Services Act, a.k.a. the future Internet regulation, France—as one of the most powerful countries in the Council—proceeds with its own legislation. On May 13, the French Avia law governing platforms conduct regarding hate speech on-line, shall get adopted in the final reading. The text has been voted previously in the Assemblée Nationale.
A Number Ten spokesperson said this morning that Boris Johnson would avoid questions from journalists today after announcing changes to the Government’s coronavirus strategy.
Instead, they said, he would only take questions from the public.
However two hours later, shortly after 1pm, Press Gazette was told by the Number Ten press office that they had given us incorrect information earlier on and that tonight’s Covid-19 briefing will have a mixture of questions from journalists and the public. The briefing will be held at the later than normal time of 7pm.
But the possible links between Hussain’s death, his years of reporting on the unrest in Balochistan, and his ties to nationalist factions have now frightened exiled Baluch activists in Europe. Many say they no longer feel safe years after fleeing Balochistan.
Since 2000, international and Pakistani rights watchdogs have documented hundreds of cases of illegal killings and forced disappearances in Balochistan. The region has seen thousands of civilians, soldiers, and guerillas killed in attacks by Baluch separatists, Pakistani forces, and Islamist militants.
Husain had escaped Pakistan to save his life from the infamous kill and dump policy of the Pakistan army. He had fearlessly written about enforced disappearances in Balochistan. That, coupled with his expose on drug lynchpin named Imam Bheel, who works for the ISI in Balochistan, forced him to flee Pakistan. Traversing through a couple of countries he finally reached Sweden. He applied for asylum which was granted to him.
Circumstantial evidence points out that Husain was killed at the behest of the notorious ISI. According to the News International, the attack on the blogger, Ahmad Waqass Goraya, was carried out by two men in Rotterdam, Holland, on February 2– exactly one month before Husain’s disappearance. “I was on the phone when a man appeared and began punching me in the face while I saw another man with him filming the attack,” he told Reporters San Frontiers (RSF). The ISI attackers told Goraya, a fierce critic of the Pakistan army, that they knew exactly where he lived.
In the long and still unfinished search for justice, two agencies have been outstanding. The Victorian Police performed dogged investigatory work, and the Royal Commission over five years compiled damning evidence. On 12 November 2012, Detective Chief Inspector Peter Fox called for the establishment of a Royal Commission. He was a 30-year veteran in Newcastle, and wrote an open letter to the NSW Premier: “I can testify from my own experience that the church covers-up, silencing victims, hinders police investigations, alerts offenders, destroys evidence and moves priests.” None of that stops at the Victorian border. “The whole system needs to be exposed; the clergy covering up these crimes must be brought to justice and the network protecting paedophile priests dismantled” (quoted in David Marr, The Prince). Backed by many Labour party backbenchers, and federal centrist politicians, PM Julia Gillard, the country’s first woman leader, moved to establish a Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. Gillard faced constant misogynist attack from conservative figures, but did not flinch (Tony Abbott was ready to be photographed beside a huge poster, ‘Ditch the Bitch’). It was perhaps her ‘most lasting legacy’ (Louise Milligan, Cardinal). “It will change the nation”, Gillard claimed, as she left office.
Tyson Timbs went all the way to the US Supreme Court to get his forfeited Land Rover returned to him. Represented by the Institute for Justice, Timbs took his case through every level of the Indiana court system before finding relief in the nation's top court. Seven years after his vehicle was seized during his arrest for heroin dealing, he's still waiting for the cops to return his car.
Amidst the coronavirus devastation, it’s important€ not€ to overlook the fact that, at the end of April, two federal appellate judges€ called out€ the U.S. government for continuing to dishonor the Navajo Nation – the second largest Indigenous tribe in America – through its pursuit of the death penalty for Lezmond Mitchell.
Image Credit: Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Law Enforcement
We look at the coronavirus pandemic’s disproportionate toll on African Americans through the story of Chicago’s first 100 recorded deaths. A report by ProPublica found that 70 of the first 100 people to die were African American. Black people account for 30% of Chicago’s population and 72% of COVID-19 deaths. We speak with ProPublica reporter Adriana Gallardo, who contributed to the report “COVID-19 Took Black Lives First. It Didn’t Have To.” She says the story paints a picture of “sophisticated structural racism” in Chicago.
President Donald Trump made a questionable remark on Monday during a press briefing at the White House, telling an Asian American reporter to “ask China” in response to a question she asked.
Are we being conditioned to willingly restrict — in the name of security — the rights guaranteed to us under the Bill of Rights?
Have we compromised our rights against unreasonable searches, abridging freedom of speech and prohibiting the free exercise of religion or the right of the people peaceably to assemble?
I recall walking up to an airline counter at JFK Airport many years ago, buying a ticket for a flight, then taking the ticket to the counter at the gate where a ticket agent exchanged it for a boarding pass with a label for my seat assignment. Entering the door to the jetway, you could hug your family or friends goodbye while the ticket agent tore off your boarding pass receipt as you then proceeded down the jetway to the plane — no magnetometer to walk through, no x-ray of your carry-on items, no x-ray of your luggage. No search at all was conducted. Not only could you leave your shoes on, people dressed up for the trip!
"If he was a good Samaritan, he would have honked his horn," Merritt said. "It's worth noting that on the video, he doesn't even flinch. He doesn't gasp. Shot after shot. He simply takes it all in."
A black woman was asleep in her Louisville, Kentucky, home when three police officers forced their way inside, "blindly fired" and killed her, according to a lawsuit filed by the woman's family.
Breonna Taylor, an EMT worker, died on March 13 after officers with the Louisville Metro Police Department executed a search warrant at the wrong home, the suit states.
During the catastrophic 2018 wildfires in California, Verizon made a painful and memorable gaffe: It throttled the Santa Clara Fire Department’s supposedly “unlimited” broadband data, causing the department to have to pay twice as much as usual to restore internet speeds that allowed it to deploy critical wildfire response.
The over 1,800-page HEROES Act would bolster the health care system and the economy with $3 trillion in additional funding, with around $5.5 billion of that going toward closing the digital divide at least until the pandemic is over. If approved, the bill would “immediately” provide $1.5 billion through the Federal Communication Commission’s E-Rate Program for schools and libraries to purchase hot spots and “connected devices” to help facilitate distance learning throughout the length of the emergency.
Additionally, the stimulus would create a pool of $4 billion to provide up to $50-a-month subsidies to low-income families or laid-off and furloughed workers in order to help pay their internet service bills throughout the end of the pandemic.
In rankings of the world's fastest internet speeds, the United States lags badly, coming in 20th for average speed and 22nd for average peak connection speed. Bruce Kushnick, author of "The Book of Broken Promises," denounces the continuing transfer of taxpayer money to telecom giants that have repeatedly reneged on promises to build out and update infrastructure.
The United States has "paid over and over and over again for upgrades that were never done, including the wiring of schools. We collectively paid about $400 billion to have the phone networks upgraded to fiber optics, and the cablecos' collected over $50 billion extra since 2000 under something called the 'Social Contract,' which was supposed to wire the schools," Kushnick writes.
The RIPE NCC has been working remotely since mid-March. In this article we take a look at how we are maintaining our operations as we adapt to a world that has changed completely.
On 18 March 2020, our staff in Amsterdam left the familiar surrounds of the office and began life working remotely, followed shortly afterwards by our Dubai office. By now, this is not news – just change the date, city and company name and this basic story would probably apply to most of you reading this article. Many of us are in the same boat, adapting to a new situation while trying to maintain or even improve the services we offer. And the services we offer are now more essential than ever, at a time when staying connected over the Internet is widely recognised as being important to people’s well-being.
In this article, we wanted to give you a look into how the RIPE NCC is managing its work and adapting, and especially some of the changes we’ve had to take make to continue dealing with all the old challenges in addition to some new ones.
n a landmark acknowledgment of the toll that content moderation takes on its workforce, Facebook has agreed to pay $52 million to current and former moderators to compensate them for mental health issues developed on the job. In a preliminary settlement filed on Friday in San Mateo Superior Court, the social network agreed to pay damages to American moderators and provide more counseling to them while they work.
Each moderator will receive a minimum of $1,000 and will be eligible for additional compensation if they are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or related conditions. The settlement covers 11,250 moderators, and lawyers in the case believe that as many as half of them may be eligible for extra pay related to mental health issues associated with their time working for Facebook, including depression and addiction.
In a blog post, Twitter’s head of site integrity, Yoel Roth, and director of public policy strategy, Nick Pickles, said that depending on the severity of the erroneous information, tweets will be accompanied by a link encouraging readers to “Get the facts about COVID-19.” More obvious examples of wrong information will be hidden entirely behind a note saying “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet conflicts with guidance from public health experts regarding COVID-19.”
In the leaked video, Ruffin Chevaleau, the head of Uber's Phoenix Center of Excellence in Scottsdale, Arizona, is seen telling viewers that Uber's business is down by more than half. "With trip volume down, the difficult and unfortunate reality is there is not enough work for many front-line customer support employees," she said. "As a result we are eliminating 3,500 front-line customer support roles. Your role is impacted and today will be your last working day with Uber."
Viewers would remain on payroll until a date in their severance package, she said. Overall, the 3,700 employees worked in 46 countries; with offices closed due to the pandemic, the decision was made to notify employees via Zoom.
The new rule is the latest in a wave of stricter policies that tech companies are rolling out to confront an outbreak of virus-related misinformation on their sites. Facebook and Google, which owns YouTube, have already put similar systems in place.
The announcement signals that Twitter is taking its role in amplifying misinformation more seriously. But how the platform enforces its new policy will be the real test, with company leaders already tamping down expectations.
Facebook’s poor track record on human rights in international markets has been a black mark on the company for years. As it expanded rapidly, it staffed local operations in far-off countries with skeleton crews or not at all, making it unresponsive to the specific forms of local manipulation, according to the reports. Facebook’s decision to design algorithms that encourage more engagement also made it vulnerable to disinformation and incitement to violence. Human rights advocates have pushed the company to release assessments like the ones it shared Tuesday.
The antiviral drug remdesivir, developed by California-based biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences in collaboration with government scientists, has emerged as the new standard of care for COVID-19 patients. The drug has also been beset by controversy, from Gilead’s withdrawn orphan drug application to conflicting reports of clinical trial results to an opaque and haphazard distribution process. We examine the role of legal institutions in the remdesivir rollout in two posts focused on the two (separable) parts of innovation policy. This week focuses on the innovation incentives for producing information about remdesivir and other COVID-19 treatments, including the FDA’s role in deciding whether and under what conditions a new drug can reach the market. Next week we will turn to pharmaceutical allocation mechanisms, including payment and distribution.
While I've done a fair share of posts here on the topic of trademarks and the alcohol industries, one of the most frustrating sub-types for those posts is the sort where the dispute exists between one wine maker and one brewery. There appears to be some misconception that alcohol is one big market or industry for the purposes of trademark. While it is true that far too few countries explicitly recognize that wine and beer are different markets in their trademark laws, most of the countries do still have customer confusion as a key test for infringement. And, I feel it's safe to say, the general public can tell the difference between beer and wine, and typically know enough about each's crafters to tell their branding apart.
Todd Bank’s effort to save the dignity of goats has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. The respondent in the case is Al Johnson’s Swedish Restaurant — a Door County Wisconsin mainstay. “Al Johnson’s is an authentic Swedish family owned restaurant where you can find goats grazing the sod roof.”
Al Johnson’s registered trade dress “consists of goats on a roof of grass.” When Bank petitioned the USPTO to cancel the mark, the TTAB refused — holding that Bank did not have standing to file the petition. On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed. Unlike the no-injury-required approach an AIA-review petitioner on the patent-side, the trademark law requires that a cancellation petitioner “believe[] that he is or will be damaged” by the mark’s registration. Here, Bank was not particularly injured, although he does claim to be disparaged by the mark...
After rocketing into the mainstream, highly-polished pirate streaming site Nites.tv went offline in April after its domain was taken over by the MPA and the Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment. Now, however, the site appears to be back under a new domain, raising questions over who is responsible for this almost identical resurrection.
Enjoying a video with friends can be a challenge in the midst of a pandemic. However, with the torrent-powered service "Come Over," anyone can turn a web browser into a streaming platform. Just select a video, share the URL with friends, and enjoy it together with the option to chat as well. Totally free and without any technical skill required.
