  Linuxfx is a Brazilian Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. This can be perfect for the new users shifting to Linux from Windows 10 as it has Windows 10 like interface. Linuxfx ships with an intuitive Cinnamon desktop user interface.
Linuxfx comes up with various tools like Sentinela, a computer vision software with video analytics and software for access control (facial recognition and automatic number plate recognition), object detection, gender, age and mood detection.
Here I listed three easy to understand learning resources to start GNU/Linux for you and your organizations in theories and practices. They are Getgnulinux.org, Trylinux.today, and Flossmanuals.net. They are short, simple, user friendly, but still very informative with everything you need without things you don't, especially when coming from Microsoft or Apple. For teachers, they are good as teaching materials and references in your school. Please help me share this information to your friends. Welcome to Free Software Community!
  Thus far, 2020 has been a stellar year for ultralight Linux laptops. It can be difficult deciding between the System76 Lemur Pro, TUXEDO Infinity Book S 14 or Slimbook Pro X, which only means we’re spoiled for choice. But if you happen to own the recently released Lemur Pro laptop from Linux PC company System76, a notable CPU performance boost should be heading your way soon.
I’m fortunate enough to have all three of those 14-inch Linux laptops in for review, and have been thoroughly benchmarking them using the cross-platform Phoronix Test Suite. Doing so has been fascinating, especially with regards to the InfinityBook S 14 and Lemur Pro, which are “cut from the same cloth” so to speak. Both originate from the same Clevo chassis, although there are important differences that distinguish them.
Price and value are key factors as well. And if your budget tops out at $300 or so, the clear value proposition is with the Lenovo Duet Chromebook. Well, unless you don’t need a keyboard or a kickstand, in which case, the two are neck-and-neck.
Long-time Slashdot reader mrflash818 ("Linux geek since 1999") shared a ZDNet article pointing out that SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket has an onboard operating system that's "a stripped-down Linux running on three ordinary dual-core x86 processors. The flight software itself runs separately on each processor and is written in C/C++."
Canonical this week announced it’s now possible to deploy its lightweight distribution of Kubernetes on both Windows and MacOS platforms.
Alex Chalkias, a product manager for Canonical, says that while the MicroK8s platform was originally intended to be employed as an instance of Kubernetes that developers could easily deploy on their desktops, it has since also morphed into an edge computing platform.
When the cloud was still in its formative years, developers discovered that it was convenient to write applications in small, atomic, minimal Linux images that shared resources with the server they ran on. Technically based on kernel namespaces, these small environment definitions came to be called containers. As containers proliferated, sysadmins quickly realized it was becoming essential to develop a tool that could help them manage not only containers but also the virtualized infrastructure underneath. And that's when Kubernetes was born.
Kubernetes is an extensible open source platform for wrangling containers. It helps administrators and developers manage workloads, services, and processes around containers. It facilitates declarative configuration and easy automation. In its relatively short lifespan, it has fostered a rapidly growing ecosystem with services, support, and tools from many companies and projects.
Despite its name, **gphoto2** is more than just a command to control a camera over USB. It also interfaces with MTP file systems, like the one you might run on your mobile device.
I just got my hands on the new Gazelle laptop! In this video, I'll do a quick unboxing, and then soon I'll have the full review up on my channel. I apologize for the poor lighting and video quality, I'm making some changes in the studio. Those issues will be solved before the final review.
System76 just sent over a Lemur Pro review unit, and in this video, I give it a quick unboxing. I'll have the full review ready to go very soon. I apologize for the poor camera and lighting, I'm making some changes in the studio. These issues will be fixed before the final review.
Adding to the Linux 5.8 changes is the landing of modernization work for the proc special-purpose file-system.
With Linux 5.8, proc is seeing support for being able to support multiple private instances and various other enhancements to this key Linux infrastructure.
Back for Linux 5.7 there was initial code landing for the Kendryte K210 SoC while now for Linux 5.8 this RISC-V SoC actually has operational support. The Kendryte K210 is a dual-core RISC-V 64-bit SoC rated for 0.8 TFLOPS and designed for neural network workloads with having dedicated image recognition hardware. While not too fast, the reported power consumption is said to be less than one Watt for this TSMC 28nm manufactured SoC. The reported base clock is 400MHz but is said to be overclock-friendly. With Linux 5.8 there were more DeviceTree bits needed for the K210 and other changes, but now at least all of the necessary code should be in place.
Following last week's 64-bit ARM architecture updates for Linux 5.8, the Arm SoC/platform changes have now been submitted.
On the Arm device front for the in-development Linux 5.8 some of the highlights include:
- New platform support for the Realtek RTD1195 as a Arm Cortex A7 based solution. DeviceTree additions also enable the RTD1395 and RTD1619 SoCs too, used by Android devices and NAS hardware as well.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.7.1 kernel.
All users of the 5.7 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.7.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.7.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git;a=summary
It was just back in late April that the Panfrost Gallium3D driver began rendering with Arm Mali "Bifrost" graphics processors while now it has most of OpenGL ES 2.0 working, some of the desktop OpenGL 2.1 functionality, and is capable of running software like GNOME on Wayland.
After implementing a lot more opcodes, plenty of testing, and sorting through a mess of compiler/IR matters, the Arm Bifrost graphics micro-architecture is beginning to see working OpenGL/GLES support forming. As a reminder, Mali Bifrost GPUs have been around for a while and a step before the newer Arm Mali "Valhall" architecture. Bifrost graphics IP is found in the likes of the Samsung Exynos 7885/8895, Rockchip RK3326, AmLogic S922X, Kirin 970/980/990, and numerous other SoCs of recent years.
  If you were looking for mailing list managers for Linux, then you are in the right place. Email list managers are handy tools in the world of business and marketing. Not only that, but these tools are also great for email discussions and knowledge sharing. Email marketing is always considered one of the most effective ways to communicate with customers.
If you are an internet user, then you might have subscribed to many services for their regular newsletter. This thing is done by using mailing list managers. When there were not many convenient services like Facebook groups or Quora, people used to have email discussions on certain topics. Nowadays, these are not very common. But you should know that the mailing list management tools are keeping that services running.
While no one would expect this, there are huge efforts from a small team to bring more games into OpenBSD. In fact, now some commercial games works natively now, thanks to Mono or Java. There are no wine or linux emulation layer in OpenBSD.
Here is a small list of most well known games that run on OpenBSD: [...]
Modders rejoice! EA today made the surprise announcement that the .dll files and corresponding source code for RTS classics Command and Conquer Red Alert and Command and Conquer Tiberian Dawn would be released into open source.
KDE Plasma desktop environment version 5.20 is currently is in the development phase and some of the exciting feature highlights announced in the developer blog.
  One of the last big missing pieces in GTK 4 is the infrastructure for new list and grid widgets. It has just been merged and is included in the 3.98.5 release. So it is time to take a closer look.
Since ancient times (ie GTK 2), GtkTreeView has been the go-to data display widget in GTK. It uses a model-view pattern to keep the data separate from the display infrastructure. Over the years, it has grown a grid-display sibling (GtkIconView) and a selection cousin (GtkComboBox), using the same infrastructure (tree models and cell renderers).
Unfortunately, the approach taken for rendering in GtkTreeView with cell renderers left us with a schism: widgets use one set of vfuncs and technologies for size allocation and rendering, and cell renderers use another. One of the unfortunate consequences of this split is that it is very hard to do animations in tree views (since cell renderers don’t keep state). Another is that most of the advances of the GTK CSS rendering machinery are unavailable in cell renderers.
  Linux distribution Peppermint OS took me by surprise when I stumbled across it last year. It transformed my under-powered Asus VivoBook into a laptop worth using, and away from a slow and bloated Windows 10 installation it could barely handle. It’s quirky “Frankenstein” approach to a Linux distro resulted in a beautiful and blazing fast experience. Tragically, in January 2020, Peppermint CEO Mark Greaves passed away.
I decided to write this post after having multiple Peppermint OS users tell me they started seeking out a different flavor of Linux to install after Mark’s death, assuming development would cease. I’m here to tell you that the Peppermint OS will live on, and development of version 11 is underway.
A video walkthrough of Linux Lite 5.0. Have a look.
We are proud to announce the first release candidate of the upcoming version 2020.06, code-named 'Ausgehfuahangl'!
This Grml release provides fresh software packages from Debian testing (AKA bullseye). As usual it also incorporates current hardware support and fixes known bugs from the previous Grml release.
For detailed information about the changes between 2018.12 and 2020.06(-rc1) have a look at the official release announcement.
Please test the ISOs and everything you usually use and rely on, and report back, so we can complete the stable release soon. If no major problems come up, the next iteration will be the stable release, which is scheduled for end of June 2020.
On framebuffer consoles, OpenBSD uses the rasops(9) subsystem, which was imported from NetBSD in March 2001.
The RGB values for the ANSI color palette in rasops have been chosen to match the ones in Open Firmware, and are different from those in the VGA text mode color palette.
The team at Vodafone Greece kept trying to make do with its legacy systems but the need for a nimbler option became impossible to ignore. They had been using a monolithic service architecture that was in place for decades. A newer option emerged when Quarkus came on the scene.
Red Hat’s Tushar Katarki, senior manager for product management, described his top takeaways for OpenShift 4.4 in a detailed blog post. Extends value from Kubernetes Operators. OpenShift’s Kubernetes Operator model has helped improve the installation experience. He explains how OpenShift 4.4 build on prior advantages. “The installation of the complete infrastructure, from operating system (Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS) to end-user services, reduces the overhead required to install OpenShift in the hybrid cloud. With OpenShift 4.4, that self-guided installation experience now includes support for deployment with full-stack automation (IPI) on Red Hat Virtualization (RHV),” he wrote. Tech preview of OpenShift Pipelines. OpenShift Pipelines is a CI/CD add-on to OpenShift which provides a Kubernetes-native way to create CI/CD pipelines that are portable across Kubernetes platforms and run on-demand in containers. As an alternative to Jenkins, OpenShift Pipelines provides a cloud-native CI/CD experience that is built for containers and Kubernetes to streamline and automate application delivery for developers. OpenShift Pipelines is based on the open-source Tekton project. Developer preview of OpenShift Builds. This feature lets developers build what Katarki called “lean images” from application source code and binaries using Kubernetes tools (such as Source-2-Image, Buildah, Cloud Native Buildpacks, etc.) on OpenShift and other Kubernetes platforms. Katarki added, “Our vision for container-native development uses OpenShift Pipelines to provide completed OpenShift Builds into OpenShift Serverless, Kubernetes deployments, Helm charts and other tools, to form a platform that is home to all of your apps, no matter what style app you are building.”
Comments from Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier
“The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.” - Elie Wiesel
I want to say this unambiguously: Red Hat is not indifferent. We stand in solidarity with the Black community - our colleagues, customers, partners and neighbors - and all who are hurting right now in the fight against racism and injustice.
At Red Hat we default to open, and that also applies to how we treat one another. We strive to create an environment rooted in mutual respect where everyone belongs, has a voice and is supported. I have said before, in a different context, that we’re all in this together. That remains true: this is a time for unity and for us to come together for one another and our communities.
Our words are not enough. We will be making a financial contribution in support of equality and justice, to be selected by our Blacks United in Leadership and Diversity (B.U.I.L.D.) community.
In his book How to Win, New York Times senior economic correspondent Neil Irwin championed the role of "glue people" in bringing about better alignment, collaboration, and organizational maturity. "There is particular value in being a 'glue person,'" Irwin writes, "someone who understands how their specialty fits together with other types of technical expertise, who can ensure that teams containing people with diverse skills can work together to create something greater than the sum of its parts."
[...]
The glue people in your organization might also be program managers, or agile coaches, scrum masters, or engineering managers. Some organizations rely on their savviest product managers and engineering managers to provide the glue; in other organizations, the CEO doubles as Chief Glue Officer. In any case, we glue people spend much of our workdays connecting the dots between people, topics, and themes, to paint the whole picture instead of little corners.
  Fully synced with the Debian Testing repositories, where the development of Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” takes place, as of June 5th, 2020, SparkyLinux 2020.06 is here to introduce new tools, a new kernel, and various other improvements.
First, SparkyLinux 2020.06 ships with Linux kernel 5.6.14, which brings better hardware support compared to last month’s SparkyLinux 2020.05 release. Also, it looks like users will also be able to install the latest Linux 5.7 kernel series from SparkyLinux’s unstable repositories.
Second, SparkyLinux’s Advanced Installer received some very nice features, including LVM support, as well as automatic disk partitioning and encryption. However, it looks like these features are currently available in the development version of the installer, so they’re experimental for now.
One of the great things about Tails is that you can create your own Tails USB Stick or DVD and try it for yourself. And since it is free software, all it will cost you is the USB Stick or DVD you install it on.
In the next few sections, we’ll talk about the process of creating and configuring a Tails System using a USB Stick. We won’t walk you through the process step by step, as the details depend on the type of computer you install from and the media you are going to install to.
We do encourage you to create your own Tails System by following the instructions on the Download and Install Tails page that applies to your situation.
Once we’re done, you’ll be able to see for yourself how Tails and its included software work.
A few weeks ago, we talked about how Ubuntu is forcing snap packages on users, even when using apt. Since various distributions are based on Ubuntu, a lot of users of those distributions are wondering if snaps will infect their systems, too. One of the most popular Ubuntu-based distributions, Linux Mint, has a clear answer.
  Do you know that on Focal Fossa today the software center is switched to Snap instead of the traditional Deb we normally used? Do you notice the difference? If you dislike Snap, you can turn back Ubuntu 20.04 free from Snaps and switch the software center into the original one we used on previous releases.
n the diverse GNU/Linux world, Snap is new technology from Ubuntu to deliver software and automate security updates universally to multiple distros. With Snap, one software can be downloaded and got automatically updated by diverse users which before this was impossible. We use it as alternative way to install software aside from the one, APT, we used for years. Snap eases everyone in same way APK eases Android users and developers, that is, everything is bundled inside one file per application. Learn more about Snap in Ubuntu Explanation, Wikipedia, and UbuntuBuzz. In 20.04, Snap becomes the default underlying method replacing the standard Deb in the Software Center and this makes some users uneasy they wish to get back the previous one.
  The biggest news is that LFA (Linux For All) has been totally rebuilt and it’s now based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) long-term supported operating system series. Even more, it now ships with the latest Linux 5.7 kernel series and the Nvidia 440.82 proprietary graphics driver by default.
That right there is already great news for most Linux enthusiasts out there. On top of that, LFA is using the lightweight LXDE desktop environment, which makes it compatible with most computers, even older ones, now that there’s no official Ubuntu flavor based on LXDE.
The server installer for 20.04 supports a new mode of operation: automated installation, autoinstallation for short. You might also know this feature as unattended or handsoff or preseeded installation.
Autoinstallation lets you answer all those configuration questions ahead of time with an autoinstall config and lets the installation process run without any interaction.
With no longer relying upon the Debian Installer for the Ubuntu Server, the Subiquity-based means of automated server installs is no longer using DE pre-seeding but Subiquity consumes a YAML-based install configuration.
This new means of Ubuntu automated server installs is completely unattended and will assume default values for any unconfigured options. Well, the exception of needing an autoinstall option passed as a boot parameter otherwise a prompt will be issued before wiping disks.
With some clever hacks and fast IO work, it’s possible to get your average garden-variety microcontroller to output some form of video. Old analog standards like composite and VGA are just slow enough that it’s possible to bitbash one’s way to success. If you’re serious about video work, however, you’ll want something more capable. For those use cases, [purisame]’s got what you need – an open source HDMI implementation for FPGAs.
Combine Reality as unveiled their new open source augmented reality headset which is based on the Project North Star that utilizes Ultraleap hand-tracking. The AR headset will soon be available via a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign which is expected to launch very soon.
Unfortunately very little is known about the new CR Deck Mk.1 AR headset currently in development by Combine Reality but as soon as more information regarding specifications or a launch date for the Kickstarter campaign our revealed we will keep you up to speed as always.
A 2018 article in the journal HardwareX details “an open source hardware setup to measure locomotor activity in rodents”. It has a simple design. But for developer Victor Kumbol, then a neuroscience master’s student at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, Ghana, that device, called Actifield, has had an outsized impact.
Actifield is an actimeter, a device that quantifies animal activity (V. Wumbor-Apin Kumbol et al. HardwareX http://doi.org/ggb8hw; 2018). “I needed the actimeter to test for potential drug compounds that could modify behaviour in mice. But my department had only one actimeter available, and it was outdated,” Kumbol says. “So I decided to build one for myself.”
The design for a low-cost ventilator created at the University of Minnesota has now been released as open-source, giving manufacturers around the globe a way to help supply care providers during the coronavirus pandemic.
Ventilators serve a crucial role in treating COVID-19—but the surge in patients sickened by the pandemic is outpacing the number of ventilators available. The Coventor was designed by a team of UMN Twin Cities researchers and an alumnus as a compact, first-of-its-kind alternative to traditional ventilators, giving physicians another means to increase the oxygen levels in patients’ blood.
While not the entirety of the problem by any stretch, I figured fixing the swing trajectory was a fine first step that would be mostly independent of any other resolutions. I wanted the swing phase of the leg movement to have a few properties:
Continuous velocity profile (I don’t care about jerk)
When lifting off and touching down, maintain the ground velocity for a brief period of time
For now, I’m not doing whole body control, so the trajectory can be scripted, and it is acceptable to lock in the target position at foot liftoff time
I decided to tackle the problem independently in the Z axis and in the XY plane. In both cases, the approach is based on piecewise cubic bezier curves. In one dimension, these curves have a continuous first and second derivative, but only the position and first derivative are controllable.
My name is Björn Ritzl, and I currently work as the product owner for Defold and as a board member of The Defold Foundation. I have worked as a developer for almost two decades, primarily in the games industry, and even longer as a hobbyist writing my first lines of code on a C64 in the late 80s. I have worked with mobile game development since before the smart phones, and I’m a big fan of old school games from the days of the C64 and Amiga.
The last seven years I’ve worked at King where I joined the Defold team when Defold was acquired by King in 2014.
In mid-May, two important decisions were made. One of them was switching the engine to an open source model. Could you tell us about the reasons for that decision? And also, why now? Why not, for example, four years ago?
5G and its emerging applications are creating the need for a geographically distributed virtualised infrastructure onto which these applications can be hosted. In Open Source, we are seeing and supporting significant innovation in the OpenStack foundation’s StarlingX.io project, where work is ongoing to create a cloud native, but geo-distributed infrastructure that meets these requirements. This is a challenge that legacy open source projects, by themselves, cannot meet the need. Thus, the next generation of open source cloud technology is focused on distributed cloud, and edge cloud type applications.
Open source software (OSS) serves as the foundation of IT infrastructure worldwide, allowing e-commerce platforms and innovative over the top (OTT) players to bring services to market quickly. OSS is gradually driving the innovation agenda for communications service providers (CSPs), and by extension, it is now challenging the dominance of proprietary solutions in the telecoms industry. OSS holds the potential to play a key role in telco cloud deployments, a market that will potentially grow to US$29 billion by 2025, finds global tech market advisory firm ABI Research.
Open-sourcing delivers several benefits that aren’t available in the proprietary world.
ERA, a technology development firm, has launched a new video conferencing and collaboration platform called Meething and landed sponsorship from Mozilla.
Meething aims to be more secure than existing video conferencing tools and run on a decentralized database engine and leverage peer-to-peer networking. Under the Mozilla sponsorship, Meething will compete in Mozilla's Fix the Internet Spring Lab.
Automattic has invested $4.6M in New Vector, a company founded by the creators of Matrix, an open standard that powers decentralized conversations with end-to-end encryption. Matrix.org is home to the open source project that offers HTTP APIs and SDKs, enabling developers to create their own communication clients on top of the Matrix open standard with open federation. This means anyone can communicate with others on the Matrix ecosystem by deploying their own server.
C language does not support inheritance however it does support Structure Compositions which can be tweaked to serve use-cases requiring parent-child relationships. In this article, we find out how Structure Compositions help us emulate inheritance in C and keep our code extensible. We will also find how it powers two of the most important things to have ever been invented in the field of computer science.
[...]
In order to keep things abstract and extensible, Linux Kernel uses Structure Composition at several places. One of the most important places where it uses composition is for managing and maintaining Linked Lists, exactly how we saw things above. The struct definitions and code snippets are taken as-is from the Kernel's source code, and hence the structure and variable names look different than usual.
I tried to compile the Picolibc that uses the Meson build system with CompCert.
The CompCert install I tried uses the GNU/GCC toolchain for preprocessing and linking. That makes the compiler relatively compatible to a GCC, beside that not all command line options are supported.
I was used to CMake projects and there it is normally enough to just set CC=ccomp and you are ready and set (at least if you use the GNU/GCC toolchain). As long as you don’t use special flags in your project, that will just work.
The Picolibc was the first Meson based project I encountered.
It’s a vast subject, but one thing is certain: reviewing other people’s code is hard. Because good mentoring require technical and non-technical skills (such as patience).
I would like to dive directly into a specific detail of code reviews. It’s an iterative process: author submits code for review, reviewer make suggestions, author amends or pushes more code, reviewer make different or more suggestions, and so on.
In Git, €« more code €» takes the form or one or more commits appended to the Pull Request (or Merge Request if you use Gitlab, for simplicity I’ll just use €« Pull Request €» in this piece). And €« amended code €» means overwriting existing commits and force-pushing, which makes the old commits disappear.
As a reviewer, it can be very annoying because what I first look for in an update is whether my suggestions have been implemented or not, and how. That’s why authors are sometimes encouraged to push new commits in their Pull Requests and never overwrite existing ones. It makes the reviewer’s job way easier, because the UI can just show the new commit and they’ll know what’s changed.
Open source is everywhere.
It’s in proprietary apps and your favorite online encyclopedia. It’s happening at huge corporations and also at The Onion. From novel drug discovery to wedding invitations, you can’t avoid open source, so might as well help develop it.
Even better, involvement with open source can supercharge your career.
Transparent (inline) configurable compression is one of OpenZFS’ many compelling features—but it is also one of the more frequently misunderstood features. Although ZFS itself currently defaults to leaving compression off, we believe you should almost always use LZ4 compression on your datasets and zvols. There is such wide acceptance of this idea, that the default compression setting is likely to change in a future release of OpenZFS.
Some time ago Filippo Valsorda wrote yubikey-agent, seamless SSH agent for YubiKeys. I really like YubiKeys and worked on the FreeBSD support for U2F in Chromium and pyu2f, getting yubikey-agent ported looked like an interesting project. It took some hacking to make it work but overall it wasn’t hard. Following is the roadmap on how to get it set up on FreeBSD. The actual details depend on your system (as you will see)
It is a beautiful day outside, so let's make a compiler. You don't need any knowledge of how compilers work to follow along. We are going to use Python to implement our own programming language, Teeny Tiny, that will compile to C code. It will take about 500 lines of code and provide the initial infrastructure needed to customize and extend the compiler into your own billion dollar production-ready compiler.
This tutorial is a series of posts that go step by step in building a working compiler. All of the source code can be found in the GitHub repo. If you follow along with all the posts, I guesstimate that it will take you only a few hours.
The Teeny Tiny language we are going to implement is a dialect of BASIC. The syntax is clean and simple. If you prefer a C-like syntax then it will be trivial to modify the compiler at the end. Here is an example program in our Teeny Tiny language: [...]
It is a rainy day outside, so let's continue working on our Teeny Tiny compiler. Go read part 1 if you haven't already and don't forget that the source code can be found in the GitHub repo. This part of the tutorial does need a bit of upfront explanation, but I hope you stick with it because we are well on our way to completing our compiler!
To recap, we are making a compiler for our own programming language, Teeny Tiny. The compiler will work in three stages: (1) lexing, which breaks the input code up into small pieces called tokens, (2) parsing, which verifies that the tokens are in an order that our language allows, and (3) emitting, which produces the appropriate C code. We finished the lexer in part 1, so now we will be focusing on the parser.
AcceleratXR, Inc. announced the launch of its new open source project; Composer.js. Composer.js is a framework and toolset for rapidly building back-end API services using NodeJS. The project is a fork of the internal tools and technology the company has been steadily building its innovative MMO gaming platform with over the last two years.
The coding period for GSoC officially started on 1st of June. My project aims at adding a 3D based backend to KStars which currently utilizes QPainter to render the realtime night sky in 2D.
Open-source culture is not a new concept for IT companies - from the Firefox web browser to the Linux operating system, the IT landscape has witnessed iconic innovations around the open-source software movement. According to a survey of US CEOs last year, 62% of business leaders believed Artificial Intelligence (AI) will drive company efficiency and competitiveness but on the flip side, nearly half of business decision-makers reported their organization lacked skilled personnel to implement AI. The burning question is, how to bridge the skills gap and accelerate the adoption of AI at the same time?
IBM will integrate Anaconda’s Python-based data science platform into its Watson Studio and Cloud Pak data offerings as a way to advance open source AI development. Watson Studio, IBM’s data prep and model building platform, will in turn be offered on Anaconda’s repository.
Among the goals of the partnership announced on Thursday (June 4) is reducing technical, operational and legal obstacles to enterprise adoption of open source resources needed by data scientists to advance AI development. To that end, the partners said IBM will integrate Anaconda’s “team edition” repository with Watson AI Studio, allowing data scientists to manage AI projects in an “enterprise-grade environment.”
It is a miracle—even if not as great as the natural one it describes—that a song so simple, so welcoming, so resolute, so reassuring, so optimistic as Woody Guthrie’s “Roll on, Columbia” is not dragged down by the ironies that eddy around it.
What does it mean to be resilient? As an individual? As a country? My father lived through the 1918 Spanish flu, the Great Depression and the Second World War, and retired as a successful school principal. The United States, which has had the highest number of coronavirus deaths in the world, is witnessing unemployment rates not seen since the 1930s and is now going through protests and riots across the county resulting from one more police homicide.
While demonstrators have been blamed for potentially endangering the public, the real danger lies elsewhere.
Amid the Trump administration’s calamitous response to the Covid-19 pandemic, media have been looking to other countries for inspiration in responsible leadership during a period of crisis. New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden has been one popular pick, having capably managed to limit the damage to only 1,504 infections and 22 deaths, as of June 5.
When Amira Chowdhury joined a protest in Philadelphia against police violence on Monday, she wore a mask to protect herself and others against the coronavirus. But when officers launched tear gas into the crowd, Chowdhury pulled off her mask as she gasped for air. “I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “I felt like I was choking to death.”
Like its parent company Amazon, Whole Foods, has a track record of suppressing worker organizing and union activity. In April, Business Insider published a report that Whole Foods uses a “heat map” to gauge stores that are at risk of unionization, weighing factors including local union membership, number of NLRB complaints, and local poverty and unemployment rates.
Still, the French would not let this day slip by unnoticed, such is their attachment to some 160,000 soldiers from the United States, Britain, Canada and others who spilled their blood to free foreign beaches and fight on to finally defeat the Nazis almost one year later.
"Whatever happens, on June 6th in Normandy, we can't forget," said Philippe Laillier, the mayor of Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer, where he led the ceremony around the Omaha Beach monument.
The food crisis that could follow in the wake of the various lockdowns that were implemented on the back of the coronavirus may have long-lasting consequences. We are already seeing food shortages in the making. In India, for instance, supply chains have been disrupted, farm input systems for the supply of seeds and fertilisers have almost collapsed in some places and crops are not being harvested. Moreover, cultivation has been adversely affected prior to the monsoon and farm incomes are drying up. Farmers closer to major urban centres are faring a bit better due to shorter supply chains.
Small businesses are "dropping like flies," said the "Mad Money" host.
On April 29, Bolivia’s de facto president, Jeanine ÃÂñez, announced that the country would be moving into a “dynamic quarantine” phase on May 11. This decision was intended to alleviate the social and economic repercussions of the pandemic by loosening lockdown restrictions. However, the most heavily affected areas ââ¬â¢ located primarily in poor communities ââ¬â¢ were ordered to remain in full lockdown. This meant that many of those in greatest need of getting out and earning money were still unable to do so; emergency subsidies were insufficient and unevenly distributed, and many have been left on the verge of starvation, according to on-the-ground accounts. On June 1, the de facto government announced that it had lifted most of the remaining lockdown restrictions, and that it was handing over the responsibility for quarantine management to local authorities. This is a significant move in that it implies that the pandemic no longer constitutes a national emergency.
The nationwide outpouring of protests during the last 10 days has provided a historic moral response to the murder of George Floyd. In one city after another, people braved tear gas, pepper spray, clubs and other weaponry — as well as€ mass arrests€ — to nonviolently challenge racist police violence. Those same people were also risking infection with the coronavirus.
The virus SARS coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the known cause of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). The “spike” or S protein facilitates viral entry into host cells.
Now a group of researchers from Lehigh and Seoul National University in South Korea and the University of Cambridge in the UK have worked together to produce the first open-source all-atom models of a full-length S protein. The researchers say this is of particular importance because the S protein plays a central role in viral entry into cells, making it a main target for vaccine and antiviral drug development.
World number one Novak Djokovic has called the coronavirus safety protocols, planned in order for the US Open to take place, "extreme".
The hard-court Grand Slam tournament is scheduled to start on 31 August at Flushing Meadows in New York.
"We would not have access to Manhattan, we would have to sleep in hotels at the airport, to be tested twice or three times per week," said Djokovic.
The fault does not appear to have been maliciously created. Rather, according to developers following Ice Universe's Twitter thread, the problem lies in the way color space is handled by the Android OS.
The image, a seemingly innocuous sunset (or dawn) sky above placid waters, may be viewed without harm. But if loaded as wallpaper, the phone will crash.
The fault does not appear to have been maliciously created. Rather, according to developers following Ice Universe's Twitter thread, the problem lies in the way color space is handled by the Android OS.
The image was created using the RGB color space to display image hues, while Android 10 uses the sRGB color space protocol, according to 9to5Google contributor Dylan Roussel. When the Android phone cannot properly convert the Adobe RGB image, it crashes.
Ahana, the Presto-based analytics company, announced today it has raised $2.25 million in funding led by GV (formerly Google Ventures) along with participation from Leslie Ventures and other angel investors. Additionally, Ahana has joined the Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation. Ahana will use the funding to expand its technical team and deliver Presto-based analytics products. Founded during the Coronavirus pandemic, Ahana is a remote from the start company.
Co-founded by Steven Mih (formerly Couchbase, Aviatrix, Alluxio) and Dipti Borkar (formerly IBM, Couchbase, Alluxio), Ahana brings together decades of cloud, open source, database and distributed systems experience to be the only commercial company focused on PrestoDB, the project hosted by the Linux Foundation’s Presto Foundation. Presto has become one of the fastest growing open source projects in the data analytics space since Facebook open sourced the technology in 2013.
Back at Build 2020 last month, Microsoft introduced a new Windows Package Manager (Winget) for Windows 10. The new tool allows developers to easily download services to help app development. However, the new open source solution found controversy after the creator of a similar tool argued Microsoft has stolen his idea.
Microsoft has now admitted it should have credited Keivan Beigi for his work in getting WinGet off the ground. However, the company stopped short of apologizing to the Canadian developer.
Windows Package Manager presents a way for developers to access tools that are not available to them from the Microsoft Store. If you want to know how to use WinGet with PowerShell or GUI, check out our tutorial here.
Last week, Beigi, who built the open-source AppGet package manager for Windows, accused Microsoft of copying his work for WinGet without acknowledging his product's influence.
Beigi says Microsoft copied large parts of AppGet to deliver WinGet, the Windows package manager announced at Microsoft Build 2020. Last week, he detailed his discussions with a senior manager at Microsoft named Andrew who approached him in July 2019 with an invitation to meet and discuss "how we can make your life easier building AppGet".
Microsoft has belatedly credited the Canadian developer of AppGet as the inspiration for its WinGet package manager for Windows 10, after mentioning the original app only in passing during a recent launch event.
Microsoft launched a preview of WinGet at the Build developer conference in May, and after saying it had talked with the ” well-known package manager teams” behind Chocolatey, Scoop and Ninite, the company mentioned there were also “many other” apps including “AppGet, Npackd and the PowerShell based OneGet package manager-manager”.
Following the launch, developer Keivan Beigi, of Vancouver, Canada, said he would be discontinuing the development of AppGet, a package manager for Windows he has said he developed in response to frustrations with existing tools such as Chocolatey.
The German-based 9elements Cyber Security has ported Coreboot to another newer Intel server motherboard.
It's not a latest generation board but still quite recent: Coreboot Git master can now run on the Supermicro X11SCH-F. a motherboard for Intel Coffee Lake / Coffee Lake Refresh CPUs.
As part of our work here at 9elements - we brought Open-Source Firmware to the Supermicro X11SCH-F! The platform is the next generation Intel Coffee Lake server platform running the upstream coreboot master. It supports the 8th/9th generation Coffee Lake / Coffee Lake Refresh processors like Intel Xeon E-2186G which we are using in our system.
Many people seem to like the idea of using the command line for more daily and routinely tasks. The command line is an indeed powerful way to do many tasks quickly without having to waste time in dealing with GUIs.
If you are one of those people who like the command line that much, then we’ve prepared a list of good open source password managers that can be launched and used, fully, from the command line.
On the contemporary, if you prefer graphical user interfaces, then you can read our previous list about the 9 graphical open source password managers.
Stealthy Tycoon Ransomware Targets Windows And Linux Systems
At least 26 different open-source code repositories were found to be infected with an unusual attack on the open-source software supply chain.
Twenty-six open-source projects hosted on GitHub repositories were found to be infected with malware and capable of serving up weaponized code to potential developers in a potential supply chain attack, the GitHub Security Lab has disclosed.
An investigation into the incident turned up what GitHub described as a first: “malware designed to enumerate and backdoor NetBeans projects, and which uses the build process and its resulting artifacts to spread itself.” NetBeans is an integrated development environment (IDE) for the Java programming language.
Accounts were removed from both Facebook and Instagram. They were reportedly tied to the Proud Boys and the American Guard, which are considered hate groups under Facebook's user guidelines and are already banned from the social media platform.
Now a pandemic has killed more Americans in four months than died in all the wars in the last half-century — 35 9/11's and counting — while inflicting trillions of dollars in economic damage.
[...]
In a small example of a brewing transformation, the spy world's cutting-edge research agency — known as the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA — last week issued a call for research proposals designed to better predict and react to global pandemics.
Hours before facing court proceedings from openDemocracy over its massive NHS COVID-19 data deal with private tech firms, the UK government has caved to pressure and released all the contracts governing its deals with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and controversial AI firms Faculty and Palantir.
The contracts, released to openDemocracy and tech justice firm Foxglove today, reveal details of what has been described as an ‘unprecedented’ transfer of personal health information of millions of NHS users to these private tech firms.
Hamid Khan has been a community organizer in Los Angeles for over 35 years, with a consistent focus on police violence and human rights. He talked to us on April 3, 2020, for a forthcoming podcast episode about artificial intelligence and policing. As the world turns its attention to police brutality and institutional racism, we thought our conversation with him about how he believes technology enables racism in policing should be published now.
Khan is the founder of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which has won many landmark court cases on behalf of the minority communities it fights for. Its work is perhaps best known for advocacy against predictive policing. On April 21, a few weeks after this interview, the LAPD announced an end to all predictive policing programs.
Khan is a controversial figure who has turned down partnerships with groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) because of its emphasis on reform. He doesn’t believe reform will work. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When whistle-blower Edward Snowden leaked a vast cache of highly sensitive files revealing the National Security Agency’s programme of mass surveillance, the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman was one of his handlers. Seven years on, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner continues to decipher the cryptic cloak-and-dagger world of digital espionage in his new book, Dark Mirror. Here, he exposes the inner workings of America’s intelligence hegemon, its pervasive and perverse culture of toxic masculinity and asks again: who watches the watchmen?
With civil unrest erupting across the U.S., protesters vocalizing their support for the black community are being threatened with military force. America’s streets and skies are being flooded with officers from multiple federal agencies - the Army, FBI, ICE, CBP and DEA to name a few - called in to assist in Trump’s “domination” of dissenting voices.
They come armed with next-generation surveillance technologies, many of them spying from the skies above, hooked up to inconspicuous drones that can autonomously track people. These devices have cost the U.S. government tens of millions of dollars in the last year alone, according to a Forbes review of contract records.
A COP IN EVERY HOUSE: that's the American dream. Maybe they can't enter the home, what with the Fourth Amendment and all, but they can be invited to every online get-together thrown by apps that promise neighborhood unity while asking law enforcement to get in on the action.
Months into the global pandemic, governments, think tanks, and companies have begun releasing comprehensive plans to reopen the economy while the world will have to wait a year or longer for the universal deployment of an effective vaccine.
Nearly a week after the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) released the source code for Aarogya Setu app on code source sharing platform GitHub, software developers and cyber-security experts have alleged that the government was not responding to the changes being suggested by them on the platform. “Till now, developers have not been able to access the code and there have been more than 100 pull requests, which denote that there is huge interest in understanding the working of the app. There is no active engagement from owners of the app,” Kazim Rizvi, founder of policy think-tank The Dialogue, said.
The Times' decision to publish Cotton highlights a neoconservative media network's pipeline into America's paper of record.
Meanwhile, in Delaware County, another police leader is under investigation after a social media post Wednesday night.
The post read: "If you choose to speak out against the police or our members, we will do everything in our power to not support your business. 1st Vice President Robert "Skippy" Carroll"
County FOP Lodge No. 27 vice president Sgt. Carroll, who serves with the Media Borough Police Department, has been removed from active duty, officials say.
Carroll had reposted the message to his personal page with the caption: "Try us. We'll destroy you."
That’s an important point: many of those modern presidential decisions to override our multilayered system of government occurred in order to enforce constitutional rights and protect Americans’ civil liberties against state and local governments that were abrogating those rights and liberties. Those were good, laudable, and justifiable decisions by the federal government to be the final, last-resort defender of the most elemental democratic rights.
By contrast, if Trump invoked these same Insurrection Act powers, he would not be sending in federal troops to protect democratic rights and/or to halt police violence against peaceful protesters. He would not be Dwight Eisenhower sending federal troops to override Arkansas’ state government and make sure African-American kids can go to a desegregated school.
Trump would instead be intervening to — in his own words — “dominate” our communities, which he refers to as a “battlespace.” Specifically, he would be aiming to weaken the constitutional right to protest, to help local police continue to undermine Americans’ civil liberties, and to consolidate his personal authority to direct that political repression for the long haul.
Somali atheists in the diaspora are running a Facebook group to challenge their community's Islamic beliefs, but they often receive death threats, writes journalist Layla Mahmood.
Central Mali has been ravaged in recent years by ethnic reprisal killings, as recriminations between herding and farming communities over jihadist violence compound longstanding grievances.
Local officials told Reuters they believed the three attacks, between Tuesday night and Wednesday evening, were carried out by jihadists, who often say they are defending Fulani herders against rival Dogon farmers.
Accelerationism—a decades old, hyper-violent doctrine among the far right that seeks to hasten the collapse of society through terrorist acts—has enjoyed a recent resurgence in popularity among neo-Nazi paramilitary types, who have propagated its teachings on far-right social media platforms during the pandemic. In April, one man in Missouri, who was under investigation by the FBI for his links to a neo-Nazi terror group, died during a gunfight with police. They had intercepted him before he attempted to bomb his local hospital, which was struggling with the coronavirus outbreak.
German neo-Nazis are conducting paramilitary training with a Russian ultranationalist group at a camp near St. Petersburg, German magazine Focus reported on June 5.
Citing German security sources, Focus said members of the far-right National Democratic Party’s (NDP) youth wing and neo-Nazi The Third Path completed training at the camp run by the Russian Imperial Movement.
James Mattis is not a friend of the people protesting in the streets. He is the same murdering general he always was. People who think otherwise are only fooling themselves. He still thinks shooting people is “sometimes fun.” He still supports the ongoing presence of US military around the globe. He still believes the US has not just a right but an obligation to civilize the natives. However, he respects the chain of command when doing so.
A good place to start would be at the very top of American society.€
We were warned about an imminent threat on Pearl Harbor before the attack. We were certainly warned about an imminent bin Laden-led attack before 9/11. Sadly, we were clearly alerted to the likelihood of a pandemic costing millions of lives, years before Covid-19. We’ve been told to expect a Pearl Harbor attack on the Internet, the global communication system gifted to the world by the Department of Defense. No conspiracy, no paranoia. Just the facts, ma’am, as Joe Friday used to say on Dragnet.
"So is 57 officers resigning at once just a few bad apples?"
"We won't stop fighting until justice is served."
President Donald Trump has characterized those clashing with law enforcement after George Floyd's death after being restrained by Minneapolis police as organized, radical-left thugs engaging in domestic terrorism, an assertion repeated by Attorney General William Barr. Some Democrats, including Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, initially tried to blame out-of-state far-right infiltrators for the unrest before walking back those statements.
There is scant evidence either is true.
The Associated Press analyzed court records, employment histories, social media posts and other sources of information for 217 people arrested last weekend in Minneapolis and the District of Columbia, two cities at the epicenter of the protests across the United States.
The fallout from the pandemic has exacerbated the ecological degradation set in motion by government policies under Mr. Bolsonaro, who favors expanding commercial development in the Amazon and views environmental regulations as a hindrance to economic growth. But some career civil servants are still working to enforce environmental protections.
An estimated 464 square miles of Amazon tree cover was slashed from January to April, a 55 percent increase from the same period last year and an area roughly 20 times the size of Manhattan, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, a government agency that tracks deforestation with satellite images.
Already last year, deforestation in the Amazon had reached levels not seen since 2008.
In 2002, Rukam villagers sold their land to a palm oil company. Since then, they've seen their peatlands, forests and fish stocks vanish. Now they're weighing up the environmental cost of their decision and future hopes.
U.N. chief António Guterres, Fridays for Future strikers, and other activists and experts demand bolder environmental action globally.
Message for World Environment Day, 5th June 2020.€
The Earth just experienced its hottest May on record, scientists said Friday — just a day after it was announced that atmospheric CO2 levels hit a new high.
"This is unquestionably an alarming sign."
The pandemic has also inspired a bicycle boom that has caused Detroit Bikes to sell seven times the volume it sold in the same period last year. “People are going back to touchstones that are comforting,” says company founder Zak Pashak. “There’s something that feels almost nurturing about being on a bicycle.”
Russia has managed to contain a massive diesel spill into a river in the Arctic, a spokeswoman for the emergencies ministry told AFP on Friday.
The German government coalition has decided to reboot Europe's largest economy with a 130 billion euros stimulus package that contains steps to further the country's landmark energy transition. Aside from comprehensive actions such as reducing the value-added tax to boost domestic demand, the programme agreed by Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives (CDU/CSU) and the Social Democrats (SPD) will lower levies on power prices for households and small businesses, provide additional funding for public transport, and establish a 50 billion euro “future package” for investments in fields such as future mobility and hydrogen technologies. The coalition resisted industry calls for a buyers' premium for all types of cars, and instead opted to double subsidies for electric cars. Economists and researchers welcomed the focus on climate-friendly technologies but, like NGOs, criticised that the government missed the opportunity to fully align the programme with climate targets.
Following a 20,000 ton fuel spill at a power plant in the Russian Arctic, the plant’s owner, aluminum giant “Nornickel,” is planning to pay for the cleanup in full, said company President Vladimir Potanin during a video conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"Ancient and slow-growing deep sea corals, endangered large whales and sea turtles, and an incredible array of fish, seabirds, sharks, dolphins and other wildlife—these are the species and habitats that will pay the price."
This rise in childlessness hasn’t showed up yet in the headline data used to measure ultimate family size, and so much of the public commentary on the question remains fairly blithe and unconcerned. Major research organizations like Pew continue to point to the fact that women in their forties have had relatively high “completed fertility,” which is a term for how many children they have ever had. In a recent article in Rolling Stone, sociologist Philip Cohen is even quoted as saying “we shouldn’t care that much” about declining births. However, there is reason for concern. Figure 1 below shows the long-run history of fertility in America, both in terms of the current total fertility rate (a naïve extrapolation of how many children women will have if birth rates in that year are stable over time) and also how many children women who were 25 in that year ended up actually having by the time they were 50.
The sun is shining bright as it sits high in the clear blue sky. Its warmth comforts the skin as a light breeze blows. The view of the beach is breathtaking. Everyone there has a bright smile, and at first glance, one would think this was a snapshot of the perfect moment in time.
"Long story short, BLS is telling us that we're at 16 percent unemployment."
"This stock transfer sales tax, bringing in an estimated 13 to 16 billion dollars a year, would reduce forthcoming budget cuts in health, education, transportation, and other safety nets."
It is time for power to the people!€
Until recently, when Amazon customers typed “melatonin” into the site’s search bar, a variety of sleep supplements would appear in the most coveted real estate on the listings results — top left on the first page.
One of consultant Jason Boyce’s clients, a seller of natural supplements, often sought to outbid competitors for the best spots by promising Amazon about $6 each time someone clicked on the product. While the brand never attained the top left slot, it regularly landed in the top row. But in late March, Boyce noticed that Amazon’s own brand, Solimo, had taken over the top left, while his client’s product had been bumped to a lower row. Then Boyce typed “ground coffee” in the search bar, only to find AmazonFresh Colombia ground coffee in the top left, pushing down another client.
Promotion from TFA, shade from local organizers
"This is exactly backwards, like stopping an antibiotic prematurely because you start to feel better."
June rent is due this week, and for millions of tenants, the options for relief are running out. After a brief pause, about half of US states are now allowing evictions again. The number of people paying rent with their credit cards has risen sharply, available data suggests, and hundreds of thousands have joined rent strikes since March 2020, according to a national coalition coordinating rent strikes by those who can’t or won’t pay this month.
BlackRock, the international investment management firm run by billionaire Larry Fink, has played an outsized role in Federal Reserve bailouts of Wall Street. As it turns out, it’s also been quietly managing hundreds of billions of dollars for more than five million federal government employees in their retirement plan, known as the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP).
State and local elected officials in Ohio are reassessing one of the state’s marquee economic development programs and calling for tougher regulation of corporate tax breaks after a Business Journal and ProPublica investigation raised questions about the effectiveness of so-called enterprise zones.
Under the program, struggling communities like Youngstown are empowered to award property tax breaks to companies that agree to invest a certain amount of money and create a targeted number of new jobs.
In the 17 years Irma Corado has run her international package delivery service, she had never asked any government agency for help. When her youngest son told her about a small-business county loan to help those affected by the coronavirus, she reluctantly agreed to apply.
“I was leery,” she said in Spanish, but decided to leave it “in God’s hands.” She hadn’t worked in more than two months, and her business rent and utilities were due.
I’m terrified of going back to work.
In the summer of 1995, when I was 18, I started visiting Tent City, a temporary encampment in an abandoned lot in northeast Philadelphia. About 40 families had taken up residence in tents, shacks, and other makeshift structures. Among them were people of various races, ages, and sexual orientations, all homeless and fighting for the right to live.
In a turbulent week across the nation, the wealth of U.S. billionaires surged past half a trillion dollars since the beginning of the pandemic unemployment.
The man in the White House has taken all the necessary steps toward achieving the despot's dream of dominance.
"The United States would normally condemn this tactic if used by dictators of other countries, and its use here directly threatens our democracy."
Corporate media headlines revised as though they were journalism.
The United States is paying the price for denying people what Malcolm X called "the right to be a human being."
On today’s episode, Nicholas Baham II (Dr. Dreadlocks), Janice Domingo, and Nolan Higdon explore George Floyd protests with € the Blacktivist€ Des Mims; Rev. Wanika K. Stephens and Kulwa Apara,
The scientists said in the letter that allowing President Trump to use Facebook “to spread both misinformation and incendiary statements” was not only a violation of Facebook’s policies but “directly antithetical” to CZI’s goal of building a “more inclusive, just and healthy future for everyone.”
“We were disconcerted to see that Facebook has not followed their own policies in regards to President Trump,” the letter states. “For example, his statement ‘when the looting starts, the shooting starts’ is a clear statement of inciting violence.”
The scientists who signed the letter include professors from Stanford, Harvard, and a Nobel laureate, among others.
In Saturday’s letter, the scientists pressured Zuckerberg to act: “We urge you to consider stricter policies on misinformation and incendiary language that harms people or groups of people, especially in our current climate that is grappling with racial injustice.”
The Washington Post earlier obtained the letter.
The popular investment expert also noted that President Tsai Ing-wen (èâ¡èâ¹Â±Ã¦ââ¡) in her May 20 inaugural speech had named cybersecurity, to be integrated with 5G and digital transformation, as one of six strategic sectors.
“The memory is vanishing, and the coronavirus is accelerating this process,” said Rita Magnani, who worked with Mr. Negri, at the local chapter of the National Association of Italian Partisans. “We are losing the people who can tell us in first person what happened. And it’s a shame, because when we lose the historical memory we lose ourselves.”
Facebook says it soon will begin labeling posts from state-controlled media outlets, an update praised by some disinformation researchers that comes after other social media firms have taken more aggressive steps to root out incendiary activity.
Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, announced Thursday that the company will include notes on pages of media organizations that are “wholly or partially under the editorial control” of a government, as well as the outlets’ Ad Library Page and the Page Transparency section. Facebook also will apply labels to advertisements from state-controlled media outlets, a process that will not begin until U.S. election season accelerates.
Where Trump succeeds is in presenting himself as a Christian nationalist, much as Putin and Modi style themselves as the stout defenders of their countries’ dominant religions.
As protests and riots spread like wildfire across the nation in response to the death of George Floyd and other black people at the hands of white police officers, I cannot help but recall an old African Proverb:
Ubu Roi€ (Ubu the King€ or€ King Ubu) is a€ play€ by€ Alfred Jarry.€ The title is sometimes translated as€ King Turd; however, the word “Ubu” is actually merely a nonsense word. The 1896 play resounds again in our own time of nonsense, when an Orange king turns the world upside down.
President Trump is fond of non-disclosure agreements. He's been this way for far longer than he's been president, but his insistence on foisting them on anyone who has worked for him has become problematic now that he's the ultimate public figure.
Growing up on the mean streets of East Los Angeles—Ramona Gardens public housing project or Big Hazard projects—I witnessed/experienced police abuse. For myself, along with childhood homeboys and siblings, it occurred so frequently, where I naively thought that all Americans feared the cops. It first starts as fear; it then morphs into hate. “Hands up.” “Hands behind your back.” “Get against the wall.” “Get on your knees.” In the projects and other racialized communities, in contrast to lily white suburbs, the cops represented (to the present) military occupation forces. Hence, why should we cooperate with them? Why should we inform or snitch on our brown neighbors? This is why we create our own street code—our own mores or morality to survive. Trust and respect must be earned!
The Czech Republic has declared two Russian embassy employees persona non grata, reports RFE/RL citing a statement from Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš.
Barr is Cheney 2.0. He is CIA from way back. His father was OSS. His father hired Jeffrey Epstein to be a math teacher at the Dalton School. Barr was Attorney€ General when Bush I gave Christmas eve pardons to Elliott Abrams and others after Bush I was voted out of office in 1992.
77 days into the NYS Pandemic Pause that included Upstate NY where we live, I’m beginning to suspect once the crisis has passed I’ll be genuinely, even tearfully grateful for the social layer of life of which I’m so deprived. In fact – only a slight exaggeration! – I fear I’m losing my ability to remember the reality of other people! This indicates to me that I need other people in ways I have never imagined, that I cannot be fully me without these people-to-people interactions. So out of this terrible deprivation, perhaps I will gain the sense of profound gratitude I want so to feel. That is, like many people, I express thanks frequently – in pre-pandemic days, frequently, in all kids of instances. But that other social gratitude – like the Haudenausanee practice of opening ceremonies and tribal gatherings with very long, very inclusive thanksgiving – that places one’s immediate group inside of a larger, interdependent and eternal reality – mostly eludes me.
A new Trump appointee to the United States’ foreign aid agency has a history of online posts denouncing liberal democracy and has said that the country is in the clutches of a “homo-empire” that pushes a “tyrannical LGBT agenda.”
In one post, Merritt Corrigan, who recently took up a position as deputy White House liaison at the U.S. Agency for International Development, wrote: “Liberal democracy is little more than a front for the war being waged against us by those who fundamentally despise not only our way of life, but life itself.”
We have an overweight pretend Third World macho president who won’t wear a mask because he’s afraid he will come across weak to his followers, some of whom are armed with military style assault weapons that shouldn’t be wielded by civilians among civilians.
"We cannot allow President Trump to weaponize our military and use active duty troops to violate the constitutional rights of peaceful protesters working to bring about the change our nation desperately needs."
The MeToo Movement died last month. It bled out slowly as it limped to the barn. It’s hard to say who the triggerman was behind the coup de grace, but it wasn’t Joe Biden. That derelict beast is anything but a feminist and this wound was clearly self-inflicted. My guess is the artery was severed by Nancy Pelosi during a press conference when she uttered the appalling epitaph, “Joe Biden is Joe Biden.”, officially declaring the unspoken hypocrisy that certain rapists are above the law by divine right of political convenience.
Law Enforcement Files Discredit Brian Kemp’s Accusation That Democrats Tried to Hack the Georgia Election
Kemp’s explosive allegation, just days before the closely contested 2018 election, drew wide attention. But newly released documents show that there was no such hack. Read the story.
Will the riots that swept the country following the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police enable Donald Trump’s reelection?
People in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia will remember Marc Petitpierre as the political activist who would ride his Segway all over town.
On January 22, 2020, a federal judge struck down the nation’s oldest “ag-gag” law, the latest in a series of victories against these laws and in favor of the First Amendment right to seek the truth about how animal agribusinesses treat the animals in their care. Kansas’s Farm Animal and Field Crop and Research Facilities Protection Act, passed in 1990, criminalized a wide range of conduct related to animal facilities, most importantly, entering an animal facility not open to the public with the intent to take photographs or recordings.
This was the case when a Somali Christian woman in Kenya used her publicly accessible identity to leave a comment on the TSFP. Her identity was quickly discovered and a video of her being dragged out of a taxi in Kenya was widely shared on Somali internet channels. The attackers threatened to expose her because of her criticisms of the Prophet Muhammad on the page. The TSFP arranged for her to be moved to a different country, where she has now found safety in a Christian community. …
That said, Indonesia’s constitution, in theory, guarantees religious freedom for adherents of six officially recognized religions, with Islam and Christianity among them. In practice, that guarantee does not always translate to equal rights for all believers.
In this case, such is perhaps evident by the Communications and Information Ministry’s failure to outright reject West Sumatra’s request.
Mark Zuckerberg has addressed Facebook employees who were disappointed in the CEO’s decision to not flag or take down Donald Trump’s post that suggested the Minneapolis protesters be shot at.
In the memo shared publicly on Friday, Zuckerberg acknowledged the backlash and listed seven specific policies that he would be reviewing more carefully, one of them related to how Trump’s post was handled.
India is TikTok’s largest base, with 36.7 million average monthly downloads, and 158.2 million monthly active users, 48.16% of whom open the app daily, according to app analytics platform SimilarWeb. So what does it mean for them?
TikTok has time and again faced the heat for what is called a “shadow ban”. A user who uploads the content is not notified but other users never get to see it because it does not come up on anyone’s feed. That shows up as “0 views” next to hashtags which exist but link to no video.
Political activists adapt existing TikTok memes and trends. Dances and lipsyncs are set to political speeches, and challenges used to make political points. Producers of political content on TikTok skew younger than those on other social media, which matches the creator base and audience profiles.
On top of the problematic implications of the move, in the abstract, it’s worth considering what it might mean more specifically. It might be best understood as Barr deploying all the investigative tools he finds so inexcusable when used against Trump associates being cultivated by a hostile foreign government, using them against Americans exercising their Freedom of Speech and Assembly.
Using the DEA to surveil protestors gives Barr a number of things (in addition to more bodies to throw at the problem). While the DOJ IG Report on Carter Page revealed the FBI has a source with tentacles into all branches of society, the DEA’s informant network is understood to be even more extensive, and often more easily leveraged because of steep war on drug sentences
Attorney General William Barr issued a statement Saturday following a night of widespread and at times violent protests in which he blamed, without providing evidence, “anarchistic and far left extremists, using Antifa-like tactics,” for the unrest. He said the FBI, DEA, US Marshals, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives would be “deployed to support local efforts to enforce federal law.”
Barr did not say what those agencies would do.
Buckle up, because this one is going to be quite the long road trip, and I hope you won't rush to the comments without joining me on the entire journey first. But if you want a sense of where we're heading, here's the route map: the New York Times published an insane warmongering Senator's push to turn our own soldiers on protesting Americans, people (including many Times journalists) complained, the Times tried to defend the decision, and then admitted "mistakes were made," and a bunch of very silly people who pretend to be "serious thinkers" whined nonsensically about free speech and the "unwillingness to listen to opposing ideas," all while refusing to listen to opposing ideas. And all of it's nonsense: because editorial discretion is not a free speech issue and calling out a terrible paean to fascism is not an unwillingness to listen to "opposing ideas."
Donald Trump threatened to close Twitter down a day after the social media giant marked his tweets with a fact-check warning label for the first time. The president followed this threat up with an executive order that would encourage federal regulators to allow tech companies to be held liable for the comments, videos, and other content posted by users on their platforms. As is often the case with this president, his impetuous actions were more than a touch self-serving and legally dubious absent a congressionally legislated regulatory framework.
Yemeni Information Minister Najib Ghallab called Quaety’s killing “an organised and planned assassination.” He added that the killing was “an attack on the press in Yemen, and it reflects the failures and mistakes of all the warring parties. We condemn this crime against Quaety, whose work was to cover events and facts in pictures. It seems that his work has caused outrage among some extremist parties.”
Cameroon's army on Friday confirmed anglophone journalist Samuel Wazizi died in detention last year, accusing him of associating with terrorists but denying allegations he had been tortured.
The army said Wazizi died "as a result of severe sepsis" on August 17, 2019, 15 days after the press watchdog group RSF says he was arrested.
The military's statement -- 10 months after the fact -- came after Cameroon's journalist union reported that Wazizi died and said the army had tortured him.
Since protests have spread to all 50 states in response to the police murders of George Floyd and countless other Black people, law enforcement has responded with a violent show of force against protestors as well as journalists, street medics, and legal support. Multiple National Lawyers Guild (NLG) Legal Observers (LOs) have been arrested or injured while monitoring demonstrations against racialized police brutality. The NLG strongly condemns this attack on Legal Observers, who attend protests to document police activity and ensure demonstrators’ legal rights. Guild LO’s wear neon green hats and other paraphernalia with the label “NLG Legal Observer” to identify their role, but this visibility has also made them a target for police.
In the past week, police have arrested, attacked, and tear gassed LOs in a least a dozen cities. In Sacramento, LO Danny Garza was shot in the face with a rubber bullet while covering local demonstrations, and hospitalized due to a concussion. A Bay Area LO was shot with high speed impact munition by police in Oakland, and a San Jose LO suffered multiple contusions from rubber bullets. While legal observing in Chicago, Guild member Michael Drake was knocked to the ground and beaten with batons by at least five officers simultaneously before being arrested. Several LOs in Detroit were beaten with batons, punched, tear gassed and then arrested while trying to take names from arrested protesters. Multiple LOs in various cities have been detained or arrested for monitoring protests after the start of arguably illegal curfews, including Washington D.C. and New York City. Most charges against LOs include disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and breaking curfew.
One of Germany’s largest dailies ran the headline “This killer cop set America ablaze,” with a photo of the Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd. Protests in the United States, the article reported, looked like “scenes out of a civil war.”
"Citizens should never have to fear peaceful protest on the basis of police retaliation, especially not when protesting that very same police violence."
A few years ago, Marie Sakar moved to the village of Chuathbaluk in Western Alaska to teach at the tiny village school.
It meant returning to the place she’d been running away from for her entire adult life.
"The AFL-CIO cannot stand for criminal justice reform, while at the same time allowing police unions to use your power to impede reform."
The executive board of MLK Labor, the central body of labor groups which represents more than 150 unions and 100,000 workers in the Seattle, Washington, area approved a resolution Thursday giving an ultimatum to the Seattle Police Officers Guild: Address Seattle Police Department’s systemic racism or face potential expulsion.
"It feels like it's more than just a moment. Finally, finally it's more than just a moment."
On today’s episode, we’ll hear from five guests about race and injustice in Russia and the Soviet Union, including from the activist behind a new initiative against police brutality in Russia built around the slogan “Russian Lives Matter.” As you may have guessed, this adapts the better known phrase “Black Lives Matter,” which is the rallying cry for an enormous social movement that is sweeping the United States. Both of these slogans are ostensibly about opposition to police brutality, but they embody very different perspectives on injustice.
In Somalia and the breakaway state of Somaliland, blasphemy is a jailable offence, and the TSFP has set out to challenge this.
It campaigned and raised money for the academic Mahmoud Jama Ahmed-Hamdi. He was a university lecturer who was arrested for writing a Facebook post that questioned the validity of praying to God as a means of relieving the drought in 2019.
He served 10 months in prison before receiving a presidential pardon, but is still at risk from vigilante attacks. One prominent imam called for his execution.
The case demonstrates the complexity of how power operates in Somalia and Somaliland, with the line between religious leaders and government being significantly blurred.
Determining what lies behind the persistent wealth gap is essential to fixing it. The thinking ascendant on the left blames both present-day discrimination and the long history of racist public policies, such as redlining, an official practice that made it harder for blacks to get mortgages, and so permanently disrupted the transmission of wealth between generations. One cure for this state of affairs is reparations, a one-off cash transfer to compensate for the lasting effects of slavery and discrimination. The idea, long popular on the political fringe, has emerged as a faultline among the Democratic presidential primary contenders. Julián Castro, Barack Obama’s former housing secretary, criticised Senator Bernie Sanders for dismissing the idea. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts senator, says she is on board, and suggested that Native Americans should be “part of the conversation” too.
Many of the global protests are inspired by the unrest in the United States to call for an end to racism and police brutality in their own countries. In Australia, anger has grown for years over the deaths of Aboriginal Australians in police custody. There have been more than 400 such deaths since 1991, without a single officer having been convicted.
The incident has reignited a discussion over the exploitation of minors and child labour laws in Pakistan.
Minister for Human Rights Shireen Mazari said the ministry had taken notice of the incident and was in contact with the police. She added that the human rights ministry's lawyer was following the case as well.
There are about 200 forced marriages at least every year in Austria. In the meantime, 15-year-old or even 13-year-old girls are also affected – and some of them are already living in Austria in the second or third generation.
While calls for body cameras and racial-sensitivity training for police officers were common after the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, efforts to end cash bail—and to support people held in detention in the meantime—are different. Freeing individual people doesn’t contribute funding to law-enforcement agencies, which requires trusting them to modify their procedures enough to approximate justice. As Weiss told me, “The pure fact that many people are making a donation to organizations that free people from jail because of police violence—and making those connections between police violence and mass incarceration and all of the violence of the prison-industrial complex—that gives us some hope.”
I returned a couple of days ago from three days camping at the Rio Chama in Rio Arriba County to a burning country and images of the Orange Beach Ball in Washington DC holding a bible in the middle of tear gas, stun grenades, and rubber bullets fired by federal troops at peaceful protesters. The man is absolutely bat shit bonkers, nauseatingly cynical, and an utterly villainous coward, making a disgustingly transparent play to his Christian fascist base. A bible! As Kevin Costner said in€ JFK, “Now we’re through the looking glass here, people…” And indeed we are, into a surreal realm where no one has any idea what will happen next, only that it will be ugly, violent, and dystopian, spinning off crazily in all directions without a center to grasp for understanding, orientation, or direction.
"A truly stunning level of tone-deafness."
America has sunk into a crisis for which Trump and his party have no answers.
Here is one thing I can write with an unusual degree of certainty and confidence: Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin would not have been€ charged€ with the (third-degree) murder of George Floyd had the United States not been teetering on a knife edge of open revolt.
Twenty years later, on the streets of Minneapolis, the song once again rings true.€
The history of the United States is the history of exploited black labor, beginning with slavery and continuing today in the form of endemic structural racism.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the regional authorities in the Perm Krai, as well as in the Belgorod and Oryol regions, have decided not to hold parades on June 24 to mark the 75th anniversary of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany.
In the summer of 1995, when I was 18, I started visiting Tent City, a temporary encampment in an abandoned lot in Northeast Philadelphia. About 40 families had taken up residence in tents, shacks, and other makeshift structures. Among them were people of various races, ages, and sexual orientations, all homeless and fighting for the right to live.
This week I started joining right-wing militias again. It’s easy to find a variety of far-right “patriot” groups on Facebook, and most don’t screen their membership. I joined as many pages as I could, and monitored them for one thing: Was anyone planning to show up armed to Black Lives Matter protests? I also tracked several chats on Discord, a chatting app with text and audio capabilities, focused around “Boogaloo” ideology—the loose, mostly white supremacist movement whose most ardent desire is to spark a race war. (“Boogaloo” is derived from the 1984 breakdance movie sequel Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, and the movement is similarly focused around a sequel—a second civil war.) My goal there was the same: find out about specific plans and record the gear people said they had. One Discord group, for example, featured users boasting about their ARs, gunsights, SIG Sauers, and Glocks. And if any useful information cropped up, I could get in touch with people who would pass it on to activists on the ground.
A week ago in Minneapolis, for all the world to see, a black man, George Floyd, was murdered by a policeman, Derek Chauvin.€ Protests broke out in nearly 100 American cities, and even worldwide, and have continued now for more than a week.
The churches needs to send the racist president, the Republican party, the One Percent, the warmakers and all racist supporters of the unjust status quo the holy message that Christians across the board reject their violence.
Last night, around maybe 11 pm, I got to taste some especially nasty tear gas along with 500 or so people one-third my age (and less). This taste-test came courtesy of maybe 100 or so state and/or county police in full riot gear just south of I-80 on Dubuque St. in Iowa City. The police state drew the line at the Interstate, which is, after all, the “Main Street of America.”
The riot police continued to shoot off canisters and flash bombs even with a young Black man on the ground having a seizure (an ambulance got him out of there as tear gas swirled overhead).
I had attempted to have a conversation with the assembled riot police about race, class, mass incarceration, militarized policing, and democracy with them but they wouldn’t utter a single word. These cop guys (all male and white) are just no fun at parties :).
Their violence was unprovoked. There had been no violence from or by the protesters. Anyone who dares call it a riot needs to be clear: it was strictly a police riot.
With storefronts shuttered, new buildings abandoned before they’re completed, and the whole economy imploding in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, the topic of gentrification may seem less urgent than it was a few months ago. Yet as the composer Ted Hearne brings home in Place, an extraordinary work of genre-collapsing music written with the poet Saul Williams, gentrification is not just a potent symbol of the tyranny of late capitalism; it’s part of a complex of problems more profound and more destructive than gouging rents, artisanal boutiques, and empty luxury developments.
Protest! No Justice No Peace. Sunday May 31st. Location: Stop & Shop.
Pressing your knee against the neck of a handcuffed human for almost nine minutes as he pleads, “I can’t breathe” is sadism, pure and evil.
"We're at the point of saturation. The question is, when is it enough?"
"We are going to dramatically rethink€ how we approach public safety and emergency response," said council member Jeremiah Ellison. "It's really past€ due."
We had planned to write this week’s newsletter about a story we published examining a sharp increase in opioid overdoses in Cook County at the same time the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic continues to rise here. But the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and subsequent civil unrest have us thinking about what those seemingly separate crises have in common.
"This is suspension of habeas corpus, it is unconstitutional," said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
On Tuesday, when he decided to protest, William Smith, 27, used a red marker to write a message on the back of a flattened cardboard box: “Kill Racism, Not Me.”
As he stood alone, somber, he thought about George Floyd, a fellow black man whom he’d watched die on video as a Minneapolis cop kneeled on his neck eight days earlier. “Seeing the life leave his body was finally the last straw that broke the camel’s back for me,” he said.
He said we better get our shit together, he is losing his fucking patience.
The grocery store across from my old house in La Mesa, California (just outside of San Diego) has been vandalized and looted. Two nearby banks were burned to the ground.
Apple has never looked too kindly upon users actually repairing their own devices. The company's ham-fisted efforts to shut down, sue, or otherwise imperil third-party repair shops are legendary. As are the company's efforts to force recycling shops to shred Apple products (so they can't be refurbished and re-used). As is Apple's often comical attacks on essential right to repair legislation, which only sprung up after companies like Apple, Microsoft, Sony, John Deere, and others created a grass-roots "right to repair" counter movement via their attempts to monopolize repair.
What’s happening at all the George Floyd protests around the country? How many people are showing up? What are the demographics? How many cops are there? Which community organizations are involved? Are local elected officials helping or hurting? Who really broke that window or set that fire? What about these reports of incitement by white supremacists?
J A Kemp will be offering a webinar entitled "Strategies for Speeding up or Slowing Down Patent Prosecution" on June 17, 2020 from 16:30 to 17:30 pm GMT (Greenwich Mean Time). Ravi Srinivasan and Mark Roberts of J A Kemp will look at the procedural options that the EPO offers to streamline prosecution as well as initiatives to increase speed of processing and ways for avoiding fast grant, and explore practical tactics for achieving both outcomes.
In order to enforce copyright protection, US copyright law imposes a registration requirement for US works; in some cases, several works can be grouped together in a single registration to reduce the costs imposed upon the registrant. What happens when the works in such a registration were not published on the same day? Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals clarified the rule for treating several works as a "single unit of publication" for registration purposes in Unicolors, Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz, L.P.; the Court ruled that the works comprising such a registration must have first been made available to the public as a "singular, bundled collection."
[...]
As far as this Kat is concerned, the 9th Circuit provided a more appropriate standard for the "single unit of publication" designation. Although the statute requires "concurrent" publication, concurrence is more aptly applied to the nature of publication than simply to the date of publication. First, the term "single unit" indicates the unification of independent works, rather than mere temporal concurrence of the works. Second, the Copyright Office criteria require that "[a]ll of the works claimed in the application are first published as a single unit on the same date." Were the statutory intent to create a mechanism to register works that were merely published on the same date, the mechanism would stand alone, rather than arise as one criteria of many for "single unit of publication" registrations.
The Authors Guild believes that online services should do more to prevent book piracy. In a testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property, the group is particularly critical of Google. It accuses the search engine of hurting authors by facilitating piracy, including the prominent promotion of pirate book stores through its shopping ads.
Torrent site BitTorrent Database has lost control over its BTDB.io domain after the .io domain registry marked it with a serverHold status code. The suspension was put into place without any warning, leaving the site to fall back on a previously-registered .eu domain.
Uberchips has responded to the piracy lawsuit filed by Nintendo last month. The store and its operator deny pretty much all allegations and is asking the court to dismiss the case. The lawsuit revolves around an upcoming jailbreak hack for Nintendo's Switch Core and Lite consoles, which will soon be released by Team Xecuter.
Japan's parliament has passed amendments to copyright law that aim to prevent illegal downloading of manga, magazines and other texts. Set to be implemented in two phases, the new framework also outlaws so-called 'leech sites' that provide links to copyrighted content hosted elsewhere.
