Chrome OS, you see, was originally little more than the Google Chrome browser, with a minimal operating system wrapped around it to make the browser go.
[...]
(I should add here that, at the time of writing, the Linux feature was still in "beta", and exhibited a couple of bugs. Though, as I will get into in a moment, those bugs may well be hardware-related, rather than a problem with Chrome OS itself.)
2020 is not just the year of further technical advancement if anything, 2020 seems to be more business-centric than anything else regardless of the subject area or nature. The technological progress of businesses can only be ensured if the in-house IT infrastructures are up to date. For cloud computing though, Linux is proving to be an unparalleled fit and rather an inexpensive fit for businesses.
You will also find that the integration of Linux systems is quite simple depending on the specific Linux distribution – distro – you select in coordination with your computing requirement.
The best still is the fact that you don’t have to discard your standing infrastructure to appropriate the flexibility that open-source software and cost-effective functionality of Linux provides. It is literally a free replacement for other OSs, which businesses find more than a little hard to comprehend.
Linux does not require purchase prizes even for the applications unless you are a kind of business that needs expert help from paid tech support. Even that can be worked away, given the variety of Linux system administrator training programs available today which effectively ticks an overhead off the list of businesses’ overall cost.
It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.
Syncthing is a fantastic utility that allows you to easily synchronize all your files and data across all of your computers. In this in-depth tutorial, I'll show you everything you need in order to get started using Syncthing.
I keep getting this question asked: "Why do all tiling window managers look the same and function the same?" It's a fair question, especially if all you know is the big, traditional desktop environments.
The ACPI CPPC (Collaborative Processor Performance Control) Linux CPUFreq driver continues to be improved upon.
CPPC is the ACPI specification around OS management of describing abstract performance scales and a means of being able to request higher/lower performance levels and measuring per-CPU performance. The Linux kernel for a while has offered the ACPI CPPC CPUFreq driver for making use of this standard on supported systems for frequency scaling. So far mostly Arm Linux systems have leveraged ACPI CPPC CPUFreq while last year AMD proposed their own CPPC driver albeit at the moment appears stalled.
The Intel Media Driver Q2'2020 release continues evolving the Gen12/Xe Graphics support for forthcoming Tiger Lake systems as well as for the likes of Rocket Lake and DG1. New on the Gen12/TGL front is HEVC SCC encoding, 16-bit format support, better performance via utilizing the media BLT engine for surface hardware copies, engine-to-engine (E2E) compression support, and surface sharing.
For those looking for an RGB lighting and fan speed controller system that works under Linux, the Corsair Commander PRO is slated to see support with the upcoming Linux 5.9 kernel cycle.
A new driver for the Corsair Commander Pro was queued up on Thursday into hwmon-next as material for the Linux 5.9 merge window in August. The Corsair Commander PRO supports commanding up to six cooling fans, two LED channels, and sports four temperature sensors while interfacing with the system via USB.
Hi all,
A long time ago [1], I suggested that we move weston-info out of the Weston source tree because this is a very useful tool which gives important information about any Wayland compositor, not just Weston.
The general consensus was it was a good idea, unfortunately other more important things happened, people (including me) eventually forgot about that and it never actually came to fruition…
But the need remains, I think we should have a compositor agnostic tool that gives the general information about the running compositor. And we should not need to install Weston for that alone.
So I took the liberty to uproot weston-info, rename it as wayland-info and put it on its own repo:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/ofourdan/wayland-info
As you can see, I took great care to preserve the git history of weston-info in the process.
In the meantime, Peter has already submitted patches to wayland-info (thanks Peter!) so the tip of wayland-info is different from weston-info (basically, we have diverged already).
Eventually, if nobody has objections, we could move that repo to the wayland domain…
Cheers, Olivier.
Wayland's Weston compositor has provided a weston-info utility to display information on supported Wayland extensions and versioning along with other details of the Wayland compositor environment. That utility is now being spun out as wayland-info as a Wayland compositor-agnostic utility for displaying this information.
Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat has been working on spinning out weston-info as wayland-info for serving as its own standalone utility while some other common Wayland utilities/examples may end up being added to its source tree as well, akin to mesa-utils.
Shortly after giving us a brand new stable mainline driver, the NVIDIA driver team have released a new developer-focused Vulkan Beta Driver.
The last remaining feature for GL 3.1 was primitive restart, which allows an indexed draw command to end the current primitive when a specified index is processed, beginning a new one of the same type with the next index.
Following the 130+ benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 3000XT series earlier in the week looking at the CPU/system performance on Ubuntu Linux, here is our first look at the Linux gaming performance with putting the Ryzen 9 3900XT up head-to-head against the Intel Core i9 10900K.
This Linux gaming bout is looking at the Core i9 10900K vs. Ryzen 9 3900XT for Linux gaming while also looking at the CPU power consumption and performance-per-Watt.
Having total control over your network is essential to prevent programs from overusing your network resources and slowing down the overall performance. This is why you should install a network monitoring tool on your system, giving you a visual overview of everything that’s happening on your network.
To help you out, we have put together a list of the ten best Linux network monitoring tools. All the tools mentioned here are open-source and follows an easy and intuitive UI (mostly command-line based) to help you monitor the bandwidth usage on your network.
If you are running Linux Mint 19.3 "Tara", here are the steps you need to perform to upgrade to the latest Linux Mint 20.
Here's one for serious Valve enthusiasts and people wanting to get juice details on their cancelled projects, and everything that led up to Half-Life: Alyx.
Half-Life: Alyx - Final Hours is an interactive storybook, written by Geoff Keighley, that takes fans inside Valve Software to chronicle the company’s past decade of game development, including the return of Half-Life. There's so much detail in there it's crazy, it's also pretty amazing to learn it all with this new Valve Software that doesn't seem to mind talking a bit more. If you're curious, that does include a cancelled Half-Life 3. Yes, it really actually was a thing (as if there was any doubt) but it along with a lot more didn't make the cut.
With the current in-progress community development effort to get Easy Anti-Cheat working in the Wine / Proton compatibility layers, they continually hit new milestones.
Starting off getting one game to progress at low performance back in late June, they shared another big update recently. Going by what they said on Twitter it appears multiple titles have become playable on Linux including: Apex Legends, For Honor, Paladins, Cuisine Royale, Halo: The Master Chief Collection (single-player already works fine though), Rust and Dead By Daylight.
I’d like to share a brief update regarding the state of high DPI support. Since getting a laptop with a 4K screen, I’ve found all sorts of subtle papercuts and have been doing my best to fix them or at least file bug reports.
Last month, I wrote about adding EteSync address books to Kontact. Since then, I have been working on extending this functionality to calendars and tasks as well. I am happy to report that fetching and modifying EteSync contacts, calendars and tasks is now possible in Kontact. If you want to test it out, skip to ”Testing the resource” section below.
Editor’s note: In this ongoing series for IT job hunters, we'll explore in-demand roles, necessary skills, and how to stand out in an interview. Here, Pete Sosnowski, co-founder and VP people at Zety, shares insights on getting a DevOps role.
In a normal year, we’d be getting ready for my favorite event: Flock to Fedora. But as we’re all aware, this is anything but a normal year. Despite this—or perhaps because of this—we still want to bring the community together to share ideas, make plans, and form the bonds that put the Friends in Fedora. Instead of Flocking to Fedora, we’re going to Nest With Fedora. I’m happy to announce that the Call for Participation is now open.
Nest With Fedora features five tracks. I included a few examples for each one, but don’t limit yourself. What do you want to share with the Fedora community?
Red Hat CodeReady Workspaces 2.2 is now available. For the improvements in this release, we focused on performance and configuration, plus updating CodeReady Workspaces 2.2 to use newer versions of the most popular runtimes and stacks. We also added the ability to allocate only the CPU that you need for IDE plugins, and we introduced a new diagnostic feature that lets you start up a workspace in debug mode.
CodeReady Workspaces 2.2 is available on OpenShift 3.11 and OpenShift 4.3 and higher, including tech-preview support for OpenShift 4.5.
That being said, edge computing is still in its infancy and not quite ready for primetime yet. Gartner’s report admitted as much, noting that just 10 percent of enterprise data was generated and processed at the edge in 2018.
For “the edge” to become as ubiquitous as “the cloud” in the tech industry, a myriad of technical challenges will need to be tackled. These include the development of compact devices with outsized processing power, the creation of software that enables companies to remotely monitor and update a limitless number of edge devices from across the world and new security technology and protocols to keep everything safe.
Many companies are actively working to solve these problems, including Red Hat, Nutanix and Cloudera, all of which have developed their own edge technology. We recently spoke with senior leaders at each to learn what the future holds for edge computing — and what it will take to realize it.
The ability for companies to immediately respond to the need to support a work-from-home environment depended, in large part, upon where those firms were already in terms of their digitization journeys. For some, the shift was relatively easy, thanks to an existing embrace of cloud-based platforms and systems.
For others, not so much: Continued reliance on legacy infrastructure, which itself often depends on manual intervention to function properly, created a panic for some companies unable to make the move to remote working without major roadblocks.
Speaking with PYMNTS, Tim Hooley, chief technologist, EMEA, FSI at Red Hat, explained why organizations continue to delay their cloud migrations, and offered a guide to overcoming the sense of being overwhelmed and making progress in the journey toward fully automated back offices.
2020 is the year of the Linux phone. Sort of… At least, we now have smartphones that ships with Linux thanks to PinePhone and Librem 5, and several Linux mobile operating systems with Ubuntu Touch based UBPorts, postmarketOS, and others.
Mobian is another Linux distribution which as its name implies is based on Debian and targets mobile devices. Interestingly, the project relies on Purism Phosh phone shell/user interface used in Librem 5, but the first Mobian image has been released for PinePhone with plans for PineTab and Librem 5 support coming later.
On June 30, 2020, the long-term Debian 8 “Jessie” reached its end-of-life (EOL). Subsequently, the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) Team has officially announced that it will no longer provide further security patches or any other updates to Debian 8.
Hence, if you’re using Debian 8, you should upgrade your system to the next long-term Debian 9 “Stretch.” However, you can still extend the lifetime of Debian 8 for a further five years under the Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) by paying some money.
Since the inception of Android, Google has always supported app development with its open-source Android Studio and also developed Flutter, more recently. Flutter is an application framework for the development of cross-platform applications that are compatible with Android, iOS, and macOS too.
Flutter is being used by many developers these days because of its simplicity and the ease of coding only once to support on all platforms. There are so many applications developed using this framework but now, Google is now partnering with Ubuntu Linux aiming to bring Flutter apps to Linux OS. As we know Linux is not an application rich platform but if Flutter apps come to Linux then we may have a richer Linux experience.
If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I can confidently say that an Ubuntu-based Linux OS called “WindowsFx” really admires the appearance of Microsoft’s Windows 10. In fact, this distribution goes to such painstakingly detailed lengths to emulate the look and feel of Windows 10, I’m surprised Microsoft hasn’t called in the army of lawyers to shut it down. But is WindowsFx a comfortable gateway into Linux for Windows users, or merely an Ubuntu clone with a clever Windows skin?
Google has announced that it is partnering with open source software operating system Ubuntu maker Canonical to bring its open-source UI software development kit Flutter to Linux desktop operating system.
Google''s goal for Flutter has always been to provide a portable framework for building beautiful user interfaces (UIs) that run at native speeds no matter what platform.
"To validate this capability, we started by focusing on the mobile platforms, Android and iOS, where we''ve seen more than 80,000 fast, beautiful Flutter apps published to Google Play," said Google''s Chris Sells and Canonical''s Ken VanDine.
CutiePi: Ultra-Portable, Open-Source Raspberry Pi Tablet
CutiePi, the world’s thinnest Raspberry Pi-based tablet by the Taiwanese startup CutiePi is creating enough buzz in the market. 100% open source, CutiePi is just 12mm thick.
One of the advantages of the new ESP32-S2 processor is that it offers a USB OTG interface. So far few boards took advantage of the extra interface, and one of the rare ones is Cucumber ESP32-S2 board with a USB-C OTG port.
There’s another option with a slightly unusual form factor thanks to Stetel Things’ Maia ESP32-S2 development board with the typical USB-C port for power and debugging, plus a micro USB OTG port, and a small prototyping area.
If you want to understand how a system works and especially if you want to change how a system works, look to the incentives. Human behavior is driven by a series of rewards and punishments, carrots and sticks, and the same holds true for business. While you can certainly look to regulations or user education to change behavior, ultimately those measures just factor in to the risk/reward calculations a business or user takes.
For instance, delivery drivers in big cities routinely flout parking regulations. Why would they do that when it’s against the law and can cause a fine? Enforcement isn’t guaranteed (you only get fined if you get caught) and the added cost of complying with the law is much greater than the cost of the occasional ticket.
This means if you want to change how businesses treat privacy, you have to change the incentives that drive them. Applied to the mobile app ecosystem, even with privacy regulation, privacy settings, and user prompts, companies will weigh the risks and costs of getting caught against the reward of capturing and selling user data and as long as the reward is enough, many will take the risk.
[...]
Of course these SDKs also make spying on users the path of least resistance, as it’s much easier to just request full permissions for your app on a user’s phone than it is to start with no permissions and figure out which ones you truly need. Why does a flashlight app need access to your location and contact list? Since so many applications are designed with selling user data in mind, even a well-meaning, ethical, privacy-conscious developer might find it hard to identify and remove all third party tracking if they base their application on existing examples and popular SDKs.
Users also find laziness to be a powerful incentive. Many application developers take advantage of this by requiring users to opt-out of tracking, often via hard-to-find settings buried deep within the application. Many if not most users don’t bother to tweak their privacy settings, and many companies share your data without your consent.
Humanity depends upon the energy furnished by our environment. Without powerful energy sources, we would not be able to digitally communicate with people from anywhere and feel as if we're in the same room.
According to the 2019 edition of the BP Statistical Review of World Energy, we are still heavily relying on non-renewable energy sources such as coal, gas, and oil (by a share of 85%) to maintain our lifestyle. The slight 8% share renewable resources represent is obviously not sufficient to match today's queries. With that knowledge, at what price are we leading this lifestyle? We're meeting the needs of the present, but are we compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs?
No, we will not be teaching people to conjure lightbulbs from iPads.
We have new stable releases today. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.3.6 on the website. Packages should be available within the next several weeks, with a new Tor Browser by the end of the month.
There are also updated versions for older supported series. You can download 0.3.5.11 and 0.4.2.8 at https://dist.torproject.org/.
There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.4.2-alpha from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release around the end of the month.
Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual.
Static web-site generators take page content written in a markup language and render it into fully baked HTML, making it easy for developers to upload the result and serve a web site simply and securely. This article looks at Hugo, a static-site generator written in Go and optimized for speed. It is a flexible tool that can be configured for a variety of use cases: simple blogs, project documentation, larger news sites, and even government services.
Landing in the GNU Compiler Collection 11 (GCC 11) codebase this morning is the Sapphire Rapids and Alder Lake enablement.
GCC 11 is bringing the compiler support for these 2021 Xeon and desktop CPUs succeeding Ice Lake Xeon and Rocket Lake, respectively. This is exposed via new -march=sapphirerapids and -march=alderlake compiler switches for generating binaries optimized for these CPU families.
The power of Call for Code€® is in the global community that’s been built around this major tech-for-good initiative. Whether it’s the deployments that are underway across pivotal projects, developers leveraging the starter kits in the cloud, or ecosystem partners joining the fight, everyone has a story to tell. Call for Code Daily highlights all of the amazing #TechForGood stories taking place around the world. Every day, you can count on us to share these stories with you. Check out the stories from the week of July 6, 2020.
Len Wanger works on industrial 3D printers. And I was pleased to find out that there's a bunch of Python in those printers as well.
With issue 9453, the web client does not escape the HTML tags from user data in translated richtext widgets. This allows cross-site scripting attacks which can result in session hijacking, persistent phishing attacks, and persistent external redirects to a malicious source.
This python package can help you to writing single-threaded concurrent code using coroutines, multiplexing I/O access over sockets and other resources, running network clients and servers, and other related primitives, see the official documentation.
Earlier this year, police on the northern outskirts of #MexicoCity encountered a grisly scene: A 46-year-old man, Francisco Robledo, was covered in blood, with the mutilated body of Ingrid Escamilla, a 25-year-old woman, laid out before him.
Sometimes I get a creative kick when writing a reply on some forum, and then I feel a little sorry to think that this "gem" will soon be forgotten and unfindable.
So I decided to copy-paste some of these outbursts to a dedicated page.
It's a little narcissistic.
MIT and Harvard are suing to have ICE's latest attack on (legal) foreign visitors to this country blocked. A few days ago, ICE retracted an exception it had previously issued in response to the COVID pandemic. This exemption was issued back in March to allow students here on visas to continue their studies, even if all of their classes were now online.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos reportedly told U.S. governors in a Tuesday conference call that the health risks surrounding the coronavirus pandemic should not deter them from reopening schools, because other activities like riding a bike or attaining enough velocity to escape the Earth’s atmosphere also involve taking risks.
It all looked like it was going so well for Australia and Victoria, in particular. They could point to the mishandling of the Ruby Princess, a cruise ship that docked in Sydney and whose passengers disembarked chocked with coronavirus, precipitating 700 cases and some 21 deaths across the country. It had, till now, been the single most contagious incident in the COVID-19 annals of the antipodes. Victorians could hold their heads hubristically high.
The White House pressure campaign presents a false choice between the health of our students and the health of our economy. It's appallingly reckless.
The detention in Egypt of nine doctors and paramedical personnel is only the latest attack on doctors dealing with the corona virus pandemic. The doctors were denouncing the deaths of front-line health care workers, as the country is struggling to control the pandemic and energize the economy with limited resources.
The U.S. has bought up almost all of the stock of remdesivir from Gilead, making it nearly impossible for this COVID-19 drug to be available anywhere else in the world. After making America sick again, Trump is trying to compensate for his administration’s failure by buying Gilead’s production for the next three months for the U.S., leaving nothing for the rest of the world.
Following complaints from President Donald Trump about recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on how schools across the country should reopen in the fall while the coronavirus pandemic rages on, Vice President Mike Pence suggested on Wednesday that the agency would be issuing out new protocols in line with the president’s thinking.
"Meanwhile, those at the top are continuing to make a profit."
Let’s face it. We’re on a Covid-19 Republican death march heading into the rest of the summer and fall. We cannot wait for January 2021 to shift course. Our lives depend on disruption now. Indeed, our survival hinges on making it impossible for our leaders to ignore us: We have to shift the political
Covid-19 spread is accelerating across the country. In states as politically divergent as Texas, Oregon, Florida, California, and Arizona, daily case counts are soaring and test positivity rates are up—indicators that portend the grave possibility of an ensuing increase in Covid-19-related deaths.
Workers in the U.S. are staring down the precipice as lawmakers fail to address the economic ravages of the pandemic. Even as some 21 million people remain unemployed, the $600 per week in additional unemployment insurance created by Congress’s coronavirus relief package, the CARES Act, is set to expire on July 31. Student debt payments will resume on October 1 for the 34 million federal student loan borrowers whose loans were suspended by CARES. But perhaps no cliff is as steep as the early care and education sector, which may be cut in half by the time the pandemic is over. To save it, the sector will need an infusion of at least $50 billion. But so far, despite how essential child care is to restarting the economy, Congress has been unwilling to meet the crisis with the resources required to stave off a crisis.
"May this stand as wakeup call against future mass gatherings/rallies, especially without masks."
That’s Duleshwar Tandi’s singing. “I expressed my anguish and anger through my rap,” he says, about why he wrote and sang ‘Sarkar, tui jabab de’.
Biden must go further, said advocacy group Health GAP, by releasing a concrete plan to dismantle Trump's "misguided, dangerous current policy of 'America first, everyone else to the back of the queue.'"
Trump, Tulsa, and the rise of military dissent.
A public health official in Tulsa, Oklahoma, suggested this week that President Donald Trump’s campaign rally in the city last month likely caused a spike in new cases of coronavirus seen in the jurisdiction.
The Supreme Court dealt a major blow to reproductive rights when it sided with the Trump administration in letting employers deny people access to free birth control based on religious or moral grounds, hollowing out a mandate under the Affordable Care Act that requires most private health insurance plans to provide cost-free birth control. “It’s a really deeply disappointing ruling,” says Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. “These individuals are effectively on their own to find and pay for their contraception.”
Commenting on if Zoom plans to file a legal lawsuit against JioMeet, Raje hinted that there have been a lot of internal discussions by the Zoom team, and said, "I would not like to comment on this because it is a matter for my legal team to look into it. I will leave it to them."
Realizing the need to introduce itself to the Indian market, Zoom said it is a US-based company publicly traded on the NASDAQ, founded and headquartered in San Jose, California. Raje added, "We have two data centers in India; people tend to forget that."
Torvalds said he was more interested in an eventual Apple ARM desktop system over a laptop; he sees laptops as primarily something to use when travelling. The main selling point for ARM thus far has been low power, not performance, making the laptop space the more natural fit, Torvalds said. But ARM has the potential to grow beyond the low-power realm, a direction he expects Apple to take.
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 151.
A new law being proposed in Germany would see all 19 federal state intelligence agencies in Germany granted the power to spy on German citizens through the use of trojans. The new law would force internet service providers (ISPs) to install government hardware at their data centers which would reroute data to law enforcement, and then on to its intended destination so the target is blissfully unaware that their communications and even software updates are being proxied. Specifically, Netzpolitik pointed out that the law calls for the following:
When you send an email or browse the web, your Internet Service Provider (ISP) may track what sites you visit and when, as well as any unencrypted information you read or send. So Maine requires ISPs to get their customers’ opt-in consent before using or disclosing this and other personal information. ISPs would rather harvest and monetize your data without restraint, so they filed a poorly conceived First Amendment lawsuit against this Maine law. EFF filed an amicus brief in support of the privacy law, along with ACLU, ACLU of Maine, and CDT.
This week, a federal judge rejected the ISPs’ initial legal attack, denying their motion for judgment on the pleadings. This is great news for internet users in Maine. For now, the Maine law, and its important privacy protections, will stand, even as the case moves on to its next stage.
The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Facebook Inc.’s bid to stop a lawsuit that accuses the social-media giant of sending unwanted text messages in violation of federal law.
To better understand what to expect from Facebook now, in the months leading up to the election and beyond, Rolling Stone spoke with Claire Wardle, executive director of First Draft, a nonprofit organization specializing in misinformation (First Draft has received funding from the Facebook Journalism Project). Though Wardle believes social media platforms have the capacity to allow for more transparency and better regulate hate speech and misinformation, she isn’t very optimistic they’re going to do play ball as long as their primary focus is making maximizing profits. “Ultimately, you’ve got shareholders, and you just want to make as much money as possible,” she says. “You don’t care.”
Yet the damage to Facebook is likely to be small. After a brief boycott-induced dip its share price is back up near its all-time high. Its $70bn ad business is built on 8m advertisers, most of them tiny companies with marketing budgets in the hundreds or thousands of dollars and often reliant on Facebook as an essential digital storefront. The 100 largest advertisers on the site account for less than 20% of total revenue, compared with 71% for the 100 largest advertisers on American network television (see chart 1). And so far only a handful of Facebook’s top 50 ad-buyers have joined the boycott (see chart 2).
This is no accident. Yaël Eisenstat, Facebook’s former head of global elections integrity, explained in The Washington Post that the company “profits partly by amplifying lies and selling dangerous targeting tools that allow political operatives to engage in a new level of information warfare. Its business model exploits our data to let advertisers custom-target people, show us each a different version of the truth and manipulate us with hyper-customized ads.”
Ask yourself: [...]
TikTok recent streak of bad news continued on Thursday after elite gamer and YouTuber Tyler "Ninja" Blevins tweeted that he had deleted the China-made app over privacy concerns.
"I have deleted the TikTok app off all my devices. Hopefully a less intrusive company (data farming) that isn’t owned by China can recreate the concept legally, such funny and amazing content on the app from influencers,” Ninja tweeted to his 6 million followers.
The FTC enforces the 1998 Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires websites and apps to get parental permission to collect data on kids under age 13, and calls on online services to prevent such data from entering the hands of third parties. Early last year, Tiktok paid a $5.7 million civil penalty for collecting childrens’ names, phone numbers, email addresses and photos.
The Center for Digital Democracy, Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and others in May asked the FTC look into their allegations TikTok failed to delete videos and personal information about users age 13 and younger as it had agreed to do, among other violations.
The auditors for the most part took a dim view of Facebook’s efforts to tackle civil rights issues, such a dim view that the auditors said it was “heartbreaking.”
“Unfortunately, in our view Facebook’s approach to civil rights remains too reactive and piecemeal,” said the report. “Many in the civil rights community have become disheartened, frustrated and angry after years of engagement where they implored the company to do more to advance equality and fight discrimination, while also safeguarding free expression.”
As for the fixes, recommendations were aplenty. The report said Facebook first needed civil rights experts working in-house. It also needs to work on preventing voter suppression and hate, the report said.
U.S. officials and lawmakers are warning Americans against using Tiktok, a popular video-sharing application owned by Chinese parent company ByteDance, citing privacy and security concerns.
While ETags serve a useful purpose when used for caching, the feature can also be hijacked and intentionally misused for user tracking.
In 2018 we closed our original forum and started using Linux Questions due to GDPR legal concerns. Bodhi Team member Gareth ‘hippytaff’ Williams has been gracious enough to set up a new forum for us, much like the old one. The forum is hosted by ProBoards and the GDPR compliance is not a concern, as they are compliant. LQ has served us well, and we will continue to offer support there. However, I would like to encourage all current and past forum users to join the new forum. Let us rebuild our community!
Some companies are selling government agencies access to data stolen from websites in the hope that it can generate investigative leads, with the data including passwords, email addresses, IP addresses, and more.
Motherboard obtained webinar slides by a company called SpyCloud presented to prospective customers. In that webinar, the company claimed to "empower investigators from law enforcement agencies and enterprises around the world to more quickly and efficiently bring malicious actors to justice." The slides were shared by a source who was concerned about law enforcement agencies buying access to [cr]acked data. SpyCloud confirmed the slides were authentic to Motherboard.
Lock it down: Several Internet Society chapters across the globe have written about the importance of encryption in recent weeks. The Namibia Chapter wrote about the way encryption can improve privacy and fight against the big business of criminal hacking. “Cybercrime is a global business, often run by multinational outfits,” the Chapter wrote. The Hong Kong Chapter, meanwhile, wrote that “encryption matters to all of us.” Internet users need to work together to protect encryption, the Chapter added. “No party can stand alone to persuade governments to stop creating laws or policies that harm encryption and digital security.”
The latest Foreign Affairs features a piece by former Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, “Pinning Down Putin: How a Confidant America Should Deal With Russia.” A protege of former secretaries of state Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton, she is a notorious “liberal interventionist,” married to neocon pundit Robert Kagan. She is perhaps best known for aiding the neofascist putsch in Ukraine in February 2014 that produced regime change, a revolt in Ukraine’s east, the Russian seizure of Crimea, and Hunter Biden getting offered a seat on the board of Ukraine’s largest gas company making $ 50,000 a month for three years.
The truth is that Israel rarely behaves as an 'Occupying Power', but as a sovereign in a country where racial discrimination and apartheid are not only tolerated or acceptable but are, in fact, 'legal' as well.
If there has been one overarching silver lining to Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, it is that it has sparked a broader discussion of U.S. intervention abroad. In his new book, Rigged: America, Russia, and 100 Years of Covert Electoral Interference, David Shimer, a New York Times correspondent, pursues the ambitious agenda of examining the last century of U.S. and Soviet/Russian electoral interference. In doing so, Shimer conducted dozens of interviews with high-ranking U.S. foreign policy elites, including CIA members and individuals who served in recent U.S. presidential administrations. In the end, though, he offers up a highly naïve and suspiciously uninformed portrait of U.S. foreign policy, particularly as it involves U.S. state activities in the post-Cold War world.
Should there be a Second Cold War an alleged US concern for human rights would indeed become another ongoing tool of propaganda. In this interview, International Relations scholar Richard Falk breaks down the grave dangers and prospects for a New Cold with China. Falk worries that tensions and rivalries both regionally and economically could result in a series of hot war conflicts set off by nuclear complacent countries that fail to recognize the catastrophic risks at stake.
A recent Biden campaign event demonstrated that when it comes to Venezuela, policies of regime change, sanctions and a refusal to engage in dialogue, VenezolanosConBiden and MAGAzuela are two sides of the same coin.
On July 2, 2020, the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), backed by Qatar and Turkey, and other Islamic organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood issued a statement calling on Muslims to wage jihad and self-sacrifice in order to foil the plan of the Israeli government to annex parts of the West Bank. The statement, issued following a Zoom conference on this topic, includes many quotes from the Quran and the Hadith calling on Muslims to perform jihad for the sake of Allah by sacrificing their lives, giving of their wealth, holding demonstrations or in any other way.
[...]
The following are translated excerpts from the IUMS statement:[2]
Swiss prosecutors are currently conducting some 70 criminal proceedings linked to “jihadist-motivated terrorism,” mostly involving propaganda, recruitment and financing of radical groups, the office said. Switzerland did not face any major violent extremist attacks like those other parts of Europe during the heyday of IS in the mid-2010s.
Pastor Joel Billi, head of the Church of the Brethren in Nigeria (EYN), said that more than 700,000 EYN members had been displaced, over 8,370 church members and eight pastors had been killed and countless abducted during the insurgency, “with the numbers increasing on a daily basis”.
A town in northern Burkina Faso has been turned into a “killing field,” with bodies dumped on roadsides, under bridges, and strewn in fields, according to Human Rights Watch – which points the finger at government security forces in a report this week. The bodies of at least 180 men have been found in the town of Djibo since November. The majority of the men were from the Fulani ethnic group, which is regularly stigmatised for allegedly collaborating with extremists. US Africa envoy, Tibor Nagy, called the report “very troubling” and threatened to withdraw security assistance to the country. Extrajudicial killings by Sahelian security forces are becoming increasingly common as jihadist attacks surge in the region. In neighbouring Mali, soldiers conducted 101 executions in the first three months of the year, according to the UN’s peacekeeping mission in the country, while more than 100 people were reportedly killed by Nigerien soldiers between March and April. Meanwhile, the number of internally displaced Burkinabe is approaching almost one million – up from 90,000 in early 2019 – with children facing particularly severe hardships, as our latest on the ground reporting explores.
Freedman and Samenow report that on Wednesday, July 1, Gustafson sent a memo to Ross expressing "deep concern" that the Commerce Department is infringing on her office's independence by preventing the release of a final report on an investigation of a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration statement about Dorian last year.
It’s difficult to boil an entire administration’s worth of economic policy down to a few words, but for a working definition of Reaganomics, let’s look at a few key features of Reagan’s policies: cutting taxes (especially for the rich) for trickle-down economics, cutting social welfare spending, increasing military spending, and deregulating economic activity in the name of “free” markets. Reagan’s path to American greatness meant making rich people pay less in taxes, giving poor people less help, building the imperial forces he used in foreign policy, and making life easier for the capitalist class.
As the unprecedented global health emergency continues to unfold, a new United Nations report says humans must lower stress on the natural environment to prevent the next pandemic. COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has a zoonotic origin, meaning it jumped from animals to humans, and the U.N. report finds that such diseases are spreading with greater frequency due to human activity, including industrial farming and the climate crisis. “Rather than focusing on the symptoms, we were looking at the causes,” says Delia Grace, lead author of the report, veterinary epidemiologist at the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya and professor of food safety at the U.K. Natural Resources Institute.
As the unprecedented global health emergency continues to unfold, a new United Nations report says humans must lower stress on the natural environment to prevent the next pandemic. COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has a zoonotic origin, meaning it jumped from animals to humans, and the U.N. report finds that such diseases are spreading with greater frequency due to human activity, including industrial farming and the climate crisis. “Rather than focusing on the symptoms, we were looking at the causes,” says Delia Grace, lead author of the report, veterinary epidemiologist at the International Livestock Research Institute in Kenya and professor of food safety at the U.K. Natural Resources Institute.
When the moment to mate arrives, fish like to play it cool. So warming oceans create special problems for the generation game.
The rapid and early spread suggest that remnants of last summer’s Arctic wildfires, which were also far-reaching and intense, may have survived underground over winter and reignited with the spring thaw, a phenomenon known as “zombie fires.”
Frigid Arctic winters normally extinguish these smouldering embers, but Siberia has been experiencing alarmingly hot weather in 2020.
From January to May, the region logged temperatures that are about 8€°C (14€°F) higher than average, according to the Associated Press. At the summer solstice in June, the Arctic community of Verkhoyansk topped 38€°C (100€°F) for the first time in recorded history. These new peaks follow a broader global trend of warmer temperatures with each passing year, though the consequences of the climate crisis are particularly pronounced in the Arctic.
June temperatures across all of Siberia were more than five degrees Celsius (nine degrees Fahrenheit) higher than average and more than one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than the same month in 2018 and 2019, the two previous warmest Junes.
CS3 estimated that eastern Siberia hit a maximum hourly Arctic temperature of 37 degrees Celsius (100.4 degrees Fahrenheit) on June 20. That's a new high for the Arctic, being one to two degrees Celsius warmer than earlier records set in Alaska in 1969 and in eastern Siberia in 1973.
May more and more of us join this so-desperately-needed political and cultural revolution and keep the victories coming. Let’s seize the time!
"It's still not too late to avoid the worst effects of the #ClimateEmergency. But governments need to act NOW," tweeted Greenpeace.
When exactly I began putting plastic items in a special tub for recycling I don’t remember. Probably in the 1980s when I moved to Princeton. Then my wife and I separated plastic items, tin cans and newspapers from the regular garbage and put them in a special can to be recycled. Then too certain plastic bottles were separated from all of the other plastic items and joined with aluminum cans in a large leaf bag—plastic of course—because we took those to the supermarket where they earned us a nickel a piece. And all of this continued in Rochester after we moved there and bought a house where I live now—by myself since my wife and I parted ways. I continued to separate the plastic bottles from the rest of the plastic items, mostly food containers and plastic bags from the supermarket which I put in the blue plastic tub that on garbage day I set on the curb beside the garbage can. All of this recycling I continued to do without ever giving it any more thought than I did the garbage until one garbage day the wind blew the recycle tub into the street where a vehicle hit it. It did not completely shatter it—the well-known durability of plastic is why it finds so many uses. I tried to salvage the tub with duct tape—whose top layer I might add in passing is made of a plastic called polythene. Polythene, polystyrene—there are more kinds of plastic than you can shake a stick at.
"To continue to throw money at an industry that is not only causing environmental destruction but also facing economic decline is as imprudent as it is indefensible."
However, Energy Transfer, the pipeline's parent company, later revealed that the company was continuing to offer deals to oil companies€ to ship their product on DAPL during times when the pipeline is slated to be shut down. Today, the legal battle moved towards the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, after the judge denied a request to freeze the shutdown€ order.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling today on the litigation over the 2018 de-listing of the Yellowstone grizzly bear population under the Endangered Species Act, affirming a District Court order that blocked the de-listing of the great bears and kept them listed as a ‘threatened species’ under the Endangered Species Act. Yesterday’s ruling keeps grizzly bears under federal management and blocks sport hunting of the bears in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming.
More than one in four of the 120,372 plant and animal species assessed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature are at risk of extinction.
Under the cover of night, Chinese vessels are illegally cleaning out fish resources in the Persian Gulf, a pro-reform Iranian daily, Sharq (Orient) disclosed on Wednesday, July 8.
Meanwhile, Iranian fishermen are forced to pay ten thousand dollars in bribes to Somalian pirates to let them fish on the African shores, Sharq reported.
Citing a farmers’ representative, Khalilollah Derakhshan, the daily says, "Since the Chinese vessels are equipped with 'fish-detecting' machines, they identify schools of fish at night and catch them all."
"The richest 1% is responsible for 70% of all unpaid taxes... Congress is leaving hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes uncollected from the wealthy."
A cornerstone of orthodox economics is the idea that capitalists’ decisions about investing and producing are inherently “efficient.” This means that capitalists select among all alternative courses of action those whose costs are minimal and whose benefits are maximal. Keeping costs to the lowest possible level while producing goods and services that yield the most possible revenue is what maximizes profit, the difference between costs and revenues. Capitalism, we are told, is the best system because it drives all those in charge of production (the owners and top executives of enterprises) to maximize profits and thus economic efficiency. Capitalists get profits, and the rest of us benefit from the efficiency of production within a capitalist system.
The builder of a privately funded border wall along the shores of the Rio Grande agreed to an engineering inspection of his controversial structure, which experts say is showing signs of erosion that threatens its stability just months after the $42 million project was finished.
Tommy Fisher, president of North Dakota-based Fisher Industries, had bragged he could build faster and smarter than the federal government, calling his wall design method a “Lamborghini,” compared with the government’s “horse and buggy.”
A Congressional Budget Office report commissioned by Sen. Bernie Sanders and published Wednesday found the amount of unpaid taxes from 2011 to 2013 averaged around $381 billion per year, a revenue shortfall the Vermont senator called an “absolute outrage” that is largely the result of big corporations and “wealthy tax cheats” dodging their obligations.
With the 2020 tax deadline pushed to July 15th because of the coronavirus outbreak, American taxpayers were given three extra months to finish filing their taxes. The IRS has been busy sending out stimulus checks, while paid tax services like TurboTax have used it as an opportunity to recruit new users.
For those who haven’t filed yet, we recommend checking out our guide to filing your state and federal taxes completely for free, looking to see if you qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) or learning how to track your refund. Though the IRS offers the option of paper filing, with the current COVID-19 state of affairs — and a backlog of 11 million paper returns and documents — the agency is encouraging taxpayers to file electronically to ensure prompt payment of refunds and avoid filing errors. Most paid and free tax prep services will tell you which forms you need to file, but if you’re still confused, see below for a list of the most commonly used tax forms.
The Russian State Duma’s commission on foreign interference believes that YouTube manipulated public opinion about voting on amendments to the constitution, the Duma’s website says.
During Russia’s recent nationwide plebiscite, more than a million residents of the Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod regions cast their ballots online. Now, Meduza has discovered that passport data belonging to these voters are very easy to obtain; basically, this information has been left publicly accessible. What’s more, it turns out that some online voters were registered in the system twice, while others were able to vote even though their passports are officially considered invalid.
Two deputies from the Khabarovsk Territory’s Legislative Duma, Dmitry Kozlov and Sergey Kuznetsov, have been arrested on suspicion of fraud, reports RIA Novosti. Both deputies are members of the nominally opposition party LDPR.€
Sen. Bernie Sanders said the policy recommendations would move the U.S. in a "much-needed progressive direction and substantially improve the lives of working families throughout our country."
We've moved the needle a lot, especially on environmental justice and upping Biden's overall ambition. But there's still more work to do to push Democrats to understand and embrace€ the scale of the climate crisis, and towards the promise of a truly just society we envision through a Green New Deal. Let's keep building.
Biden’s policies are the same policies and exact rhetoric used by the Trump administration.
On June 29 the European Union (EU) slapped new sanctions against 11 Venezuelan individuals. Immediately President Nicolas Maduro responded by ordering the expulsion of the EU ambassador to the country. EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell warned that Brussels would retaliate against Caracas over its decision and€ announces that it will summon Maduro’s ambassador to the European institutions. That never happened. Instead Josep Borrell called on Venezuela to reverse its decision. On July 1 the Venezuelan government decided to rescind its decision to expel the head of the EU mission in Caracas following a phone conversation between Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza and the high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, and issuing a joint communiqué.
Today, Donald Trump lost his claim of blanket presidential immunity from grand jury or congressional investigations. In Trump v. Vance and Trump v. Mazars USA, the president lost, 7-2, in front of the Supreme Court. Trump’s two handpicked justices, Neil Gorsuch and alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh, ruled against him. President Trump, whose administration is setting some sort of record for losing in court, lost yet again.
The arrest of Khabarovsk Governor Sergey Furgal on charges of organizing multiple contract killings has provoked a wave of support from local residents. On social media, locals have started circulating images in the colors of the region’s coat of arms with the phrase “I/we = Sergey Furgal.” In just a few hours, a petition supporting the governor attracted more than 30,000 signatures. Individuals are already picketing in his defense and there’s even talk online of staging an unpermitted protest against Furgal’s arrest. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev, who’s reported extensively on Khabarovsk’s regional situation, explains why Governor Furgal inspires a level of public sympathy rarely found in Russian politics.
Refusing to wear a mask, or to get a vaccine, doesn’t make you patriotic—it makes you an asshole.
An un-American asshole.
"We had a window of opportunity, and Neal blew it."
A split decision on two separate cases pertaining to the president's taxes will likely leave the documents out of public view until after the election.€
If you’re confused by the news about the Supreme Court’s decisions in the two Trump tax return cases this morning, you’re not alone. The cases are a perfect Rorschach test, not only for your politics, but also your general life disposition. Tweets, headlines, Facebook posts, and cable news chryons are probably giving you whiplash about what happened. Did Trump lose and finally have to turn over his taxes? Or did he win and keep his taxes from ever seeing the light of day?
What the Court did today was complex, and no headline or tweet can really capture it. So here’s a clear breakdown of the Court’s decisions for you.
Facebook said it has taken down a network of “coordinated, inauthentic” Ukrainian social-media pages tied to a digital advertising agency in the nation’s capital as it seeks to combat the spread of disinformation.
The U.S.-based social-media giant said in a July 8 statement that the Ukrainian network aimed its work at a domestic audience and was “particularly active” during the nation’s 2019 presidential and parliamentary elections.
In response to the wrong actions of the US, China decided to impose visa restrictions on US personnel who “behaved badly” on Tibet-related issues, he said.
No one agrees on how tech companies should perform the impossible job of moderating their platforms. But almost everyone agrees platforms are doing it wrong.
It seems like every other day we see yet another proposal to dismantle, revoke, or otherwise undermine Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. But doing so might actually create massive international problems. That's because, as you may recall, despite some last minute attempts to remove it, the final USMCA retained language that suggests that any signatory to USMCA must have Section 230-like laws in place to protect intermediary liability. And, while it got surprisingly little attention, the USMCA went into effect last week. And thus, any change to Section 230 may raise at least some questions about whether or not they violate the agreement.
As the European Union is gearing up for a major reform of the current backbone of the EU’s Internet regulation—the e-Commerce Directive will be replaced by the Digital Services Act (DSA)—there are choices to be made. Rather than following in the footsteps of recent disastrous Internet legislation (such as the Copyright Directive), the EU should focus on how to put users back in control of their online experiences. Rather than giving more executive power to large platforms that have monopolized the digital space, the EU should protect the public interest Internet by focusing on users’ rights to self-determination and measures on transparency, anonymity, and interoperability.
We are hopeful that the EU will move in the right direction on Internet policy, especially given that member countries have championed Internet bills that seek to create€ a more restrictive European Internet. In a recent victory for free speech and the Internet, EFF helped to strike down core provisions of a French bill meant to curb hate speech, arguing that it would unconstitutionally catch legal speech in its net. Meanwhile, the infamous German law NetzDG, which requires companies to respond to reports of illegal speech within 24 hours, has been toughened to make platforms not only delete suspected criminal content, but also send reports to the federal police, including information about the user.
Graham amended the bill just before the Judiciary Committee hearing, changing the language to call for the use of state-by-state laws and removing the clause that tech platforms would need to undergo a certification process to avoid penalties. But the bill still has the potential to be seriously damaging to free speech and directly harmful to anyone who uses encryption-based communication services, experts say—including sex workers and any already-marginalized internet users who are dependent on encrypted messaging to stay safe.
The fallout: Effectively, this brings Hong Kong into China’s Great Firewall, a tightly controlled and censored version of the internet that blocks most foreign internet tools and mobile apps. Foreign companies are permitted to operate only if they comply.
On the morning of July 9, law enforcement raided the homes of staff at MBK Media and Open Russia. Around 6 a.m., Moscow police showed up at the homes of MBK Media chief editor Sergey Prostakov, Open Russia coordinators Tatyana Usmanova and Olga Gorelik, and municipal deputy Yulia Galyamina. In Tomsk, meanwhile, officials searched the apartment of “Open Russia Human Rights” project coordinator Alexey Pryanishnikov. According to MBK Media, the authorities threatened to break down the front doors when individuals asked to delay any searches until the arrival of their lawyers. When the attorneys finally did come, the police reportedly kept them waiting outside for extended periods of time.
Dozens of foreign nationals working as journalists in the U.S. for Voice of America, the federal government's international broadcaster, will not have their visas extended once they expire, according to three people with knowledge of the decision.
Those people — each with current or past ties to the agency — said the new CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, Michael Pack, signaled he will not approve the visa extensions.
It was the notice of an online meeting of a local chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace that made me think of my long and troubled relationship with organized religion.
We just celebrated the founding of this nation in which truly great leaders took up arms against the overwhelming power of the British Empire, fought a bloody war of independence, and at a huge cost in lives, homes and businesses, somehow prevailed.
Black and brown lives are under attack by law enforcement.
As soon as we pull the trigger, we’ve dehumanized the enemy and gone to war.
While the US government often makes a lot of noise about their efforts to crack down on robocalls, the reality is they never actually do all that much. While the FCC often goes out of its way to advertise "record" fines levied against smaller companies and scammers, the vast, vast majority of those fines are never actually collected. The Pai FCC has claimed to have made great strides fighting the menace, despite the fact that most of its recent and well-hyped countermeasures are neither new nor effective.
If you were hoping to see Donald Trump’s financial records before the 2020 election, today was not your day. If you were hoping to go to bed tonight in a nation with a president and not a sovereign, sleep tight, because you won.
The American project was founded on rank hypocrisies. On the one hand, President Thomas Jefferson, who wrote the stirring words in the Declaration of Independence which upheld “these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal”, did not free his own slaves (not even Sally Hemings, who bore him six children).
In a speech at the State Duma, LDPR party head Vladimir Zhirinovsky condemned the arrest of fellow party member Khabarovsk Governor Sergey Furgal, who’s accused of organizing multiple contract killings more than a decade ago. Zhirinovsky even threatened to stage mass resignations by all LDPR members in response to what he says is the unjust case against Furgal.
In recent weeks, as protests against police violence and systemic racism have swept across the nation, a key federal civil rights agency — an agency created to bridge racial divides — has been largely absent.
Dubbed “America’s Peacemaker,” the Community Relations Service was established in 1964 as civil rights protesters across the South came under attack. The service, which is part of the Justice Department, is credited with helping to avert bloodshed during some of the most contentious demonstrations of the 1960s.
Throughout its history the U.S. has had two very different ruling elites, motivated by very different definitions of liberty. Let’s call them the New England Yankees vs. the Old South Planters. Their radically different definitions of “liberty” still divide liberals and conservatives today.
As millions took to the streets in all 50 states last month to protest against systemic racism and police brutality, several organizations that are considered hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) were enjoying new six- or seven-figure Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans from the federal government.
Protecting frontline workers and their families is a matter of both economic justice and racial justice.€
Lead the Way: a Call to Youth
ICE has joined Customs and Border Protection as a full-fledged security agency. ICE, like the CBP, has been hoping to upgrade from customs enforcement to NatSec machinery for several years now, possibly with an eye on backdoor-searching all the communications and data the NSA hoovers up.
Since qualified immunity isn't actually a law -- but rather a Supreme Court construct -- states are under no obligation to adopt this doctrine and apply it to lawsuits against law enforcement officers. But most states have, with Iowa's top court being the latest to inflict this atrocity on the populace.
Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S. have sparked a reckoning about racism and colonialism across the world, including in Belgium, where a growing movement is demanding the country address systemic racism and make amends for its violent colonial legacy. King Philippe issued an unprecedented statement “expressing regret” for Belgium’s brutal colonial rule in Congo under Leopold II, who ran the country as his personal fiefdom and under whose command millions of Congolese were enslaved and killed. “It’s an erased history,” says Belgo-Congolese journalist and activist Gia Abrassart. We also speak with Princess Esméralda, a member of the Belgian royal family and great-grandniece of Leopold II, who says the country has taken an important first step, but adds that “we have to go much farther.”
On Friday, July 10, 1990, the Electronic Frontier Foundation was officially born. It's safe to say that on that day, co-founders Mitch Kapor, John Perry Barlow, and John Gilmore, with critical help from Steve Wozniak, were ahead of their time in imagining that there needed to be an organization that fought to protect€ ordinary people's access to new€ technology that could instantly erase distance, create connection, and access much of the world’s knowledge. Today—thirty years later—that technology affects and is affected by most everything we do.€
Throughout those thirty years, EFF has€ been on the frontlines, fighting thousands of battles in courts, in Congress, on the streets, and across the globe to ensure that when you go online, your rights go with you. We're excited to celebrate our victories. and the lessons we've learned, during our 30th Anniversary Party on Friday—and you're invited!
Over the weekend, a group of nine women and a man went for a bike ride around the Indonesian city of Banda Aceh, shooting—as one does—some group photos and videos to memorialize the carefree jaunt.
Little did they know, however, that those ostensibly harmless mementos would go viral, cause a public outcry, and result in their being tracked down by religious police and compelled to issue a public apology for what authorities characterized as their “revealing” and “sexy” attire.
All 10, it should be noted, appeared to be wearing long-sleeved shirts and pants.
This includes different forms of inequality, from those originating in the country’s inception as a colonial enterprise to extreme disparities of wealth and income. Though public opinion surveys suggest many Canadians are at least somewhat aware of these realities, they also suggest that quite a few continue to underestimate just how unequal Canadian society really is.
The data certainly lends weight to this conclusion, at least as far as disparities of wealth are concerned. A 2014 report, for example, identified strong public support for redistributive policies designed to rectify the country’s economic divides, while also noting widespread misperceptions about just how serious they really are.
In a letter to the head of the Islamic Republic's Judiciary on Monday, July 6, Amnesty International (AI) called for the immediate and unconditional release of a civil rights and a women’s rights activist.
Saba Kordafshari, an activist who took part in s campaign against compulsory hijab was arrested in Tehran in August 2018 and transferred to Qarchak Prison a few days later. According to civil society activists, in the early days of her arrest, she was under intense pressure for a "television confession."
Mauritanian anti-slavery activist Maryam Bint Al-Sheikh of the Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement (IRA) said in a June 18, 2020 interview on BBC Arabic (U.K.) that there is still slavery in Mauritania, and that ownership of other people can even be passed from generation to generation. She said that 20% of people in Mauritania still suffer from slavery, and she named the Beydanes cast, which she said constitutes 10 percent of the Mauritanian population, as the caste of "masters" that controls Mauritania, its economy, and its people. Explaining that the Beydanes caste arrests and tortures people who speak out against it, Al-Sheikh said that in the past, she herself had been arrested, tortured, and forcibly separated from her child and her family. In addition, Al-Sheikh listed the Haratins, the Fulanis, the Wolofs, and Soninkes, the Bambaras, and Lamalmins, and the Igaouen as the persecuted ethnic groups in Mauritania. Furthermore, she said that the IRA has created awareness surrounding slavery in Mauritania, and that it gives people the courage to protest slavery and racism. She added that slavery and racism can only be abolished through protest. For more about slavery in Mauritania see MEMRI TV clip no. 3429.
"The big news€ at the Supreme Court today will be Trump's taxes," said Cherokee writer Rebecca Nagle. "But for Indians in€ Oklahoma, we'll be talking about today for decades."
The United States Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that nearly half the entire state of Oklahoma, as far as federal criminal law is concerned, is still under the jurisdiction of Native American tribes.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that about half of the land in Oklahoma is within a Native American reservation, a decision that will have major consequences for both past and future criminal and civil cases.
The court's decision hinged on the question of whether the Creek reservation continued to exist after Oklahoma became a state.
"Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of fed€eral criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in the majority opinion.
The decision was 5-4, with Justices Gorsuch, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer in the majority, while Justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
The ruling will have significant legal implications for eastern Oklahoma. Much of Tulsa, the state's second-largest city, is located on Muscogee (Creek) land. The Muscogee (Creek) Nation cheered the court's decision.
In years past, incumbent broadband and television giants like Comcast and AT&T enjoyed life from a comfortable position of dominance. If you want to subscribe to broadband, such companies are often your only option. If you wanted to subscribe to television service, you were required to rent a locked down, highly proprietary cable box courtesy of the industry's cable hardware monopoly. Want to have your cable channel in a conspicuous position in the lineup? You could also expect headaches.
The PIRG report surveyed 222 biomedical professionals, many of whom work at hospitals. Nearly half said they’d been denied access to necessary repair parts and information during the pandemic. And nearly all said that removing restrictions on repairs was “critical” or “very important” to their work.
According to the survey, manufacturers frequently restrict third-party repairs. Around 92 percent of the respondents said they’d been denied service information about equipment like ventilators and defibrillators, with around half of those people saying it happened “somewhat frequently.” Around 89 percent said manufacturers had refused to sell spare parts.
Sony has made a $250 million investment to acquire a minority stake in Epic Games, the developer of Fortnite and the Unreal Engine used increasingly in Hollywood production.
The PlayStation maker and Fortnite proprietor didn’t disclose the new value of the games company. Bloomberg News first reported last month that Epic was close to securing funding at a valuation of about $17 billion.
The Unreal Engine is used to create many popular game franchises, such as Borderlands and Gears of War, along with Epic’s own Fortnite. The fifth iteration, Unreal Engine 5, made its debut this summer and was demonstrated on PlayStation 5 hardware, signaling the close collaboration between Epic and Sony.
On Oct. 31, Mark Russinovich broke the story in his blog: Sony BMG Music Entertainment distributed a copy-protection scheme with music CDs that secretly installed a rootkit on computers. This software tool is run without your knowledge or consent -- if it's loaded on your computer with a CD, a hacker can gain and maintain access to your system and you wouldn't know it.
The Sony code modifies Windows so you can't tell it's there, a process called "cloaking" in the hacker world. It acts as spyware, surreptitiously sending information about you to Sony. And it can't be removed; trying to get rid of it damages Windows.
Apparently, at the New York Times, the answer is no. Elisabeth Rosenthal, who is a very insightful writer on health care issues, had a column this morning warning that we may face very high prices for a coronavirus vaccine. She points out that this is in spite of the fact that the government is paying for much of the cost of the research. Rosenthal then argues we should adopt a system of price controls or negotiations, as is done in every other wealthy country.
In-house counsel from Sisvel, Nokia and a German carmaker explain how the Federal Court of Justice’s decision changes the rules of the FRAND negotiation game
Sometimes I wonder whether the S in "SEP" stands for "scam" rather than "standard."
Everyone who deals with patents professionally knows that, at least with respect to information and communications technologies, the system is broken beyond repair. Patent offices issue far too many patents and treat mass filers as "key accounts" whose "demand" for weapons of extortion they seek to satisfy. Unlike its U.S. counterpart, the European Patent Office isn't run by a trolls' lawyer, but it's also part of the problem.
But standard-essential patents take the issues facing the patent system to an even higher level. Companies overdeclare (though some have higher "hit rates" than others). No scrutiny is performed. And besides countless patents that aren't essential from an infringement point of view, the vast majority of those who may claim a standard-essential technique are simply invalid as granted.
Nokia failed to deliver a great smartphone user experience, then increasingly resorted to patent monetization. But it concluded license deals without a lot of patents actually coming to judgment. They monetize a portfolio that contains a huge amount of hot or even not-so-hot air. Where's the substance?
For a while, everything appeared to be working out according to plan for Nokia with respect to the Daimler dispute. They knew they were facing a 19th-century company that they hoped would cave at some point. Daimler certainly failed to put the necessary pressure behind its EU antitrust complaint, while Nokia found political opportunists of the worst kind in Brussels who were--and potentially still are--perfectly prepared to do lasting damage to the European Commission's reputation as a competition watchdog. After so many years of having been accused of protectionism, the Commission couldn't vindicate its critics more effectively and convincingly than by condoning Nokia's conduct.
This outcome--a dismissal, but with a chance for Apple and Intel to amend the pleadings--is consistent with what Law360 expected to happen based on a mid-June hearing.
Short of knowing what exactly the order says, I can't elaborate, but the decision per se warranted a post. It's a safe assumption that Apple and Intel will give it a new try, and Fortress will likely argue that even the amended pleadings are lacking and wanting. They may get support once again from Antitrust Assistant Attorney General Makan "Macomm" Delrahim, whose primary objective it is to strengthen the owners of weak patents--never mind if it involves siding with foreign and foreign-owned entities against some of America's most innovative and iconic companies (Make America Great Again, anyone?). However, "Macomm" won't have too many more months in office, judging by the polls (which I find very disappointing, though I can relate to many voters' disenfranchisement with the Trump Administration given what went wrong this year in a couple of extremely important contexts).
Most notable of the construed claim terms was “limiting shaft.” Plaintiff and patent owner Unicorn conclusorily asserted that the term should be given its plain and ordinary meaning. Defendant and alleged infringer Golab argued that “limiting shaft” was means a plus-function term and could not be defined. The court started by stating that the term “sounds like a structural element” and was presumed not to be means-plus-function because there was no specific recitation of “means.” However, the court determined that the presumption was rebutted because “limiting shaft” clearly described a function, i.e., limiting relative rotation between two objects connected by the shaft, and further because Unicorn failed to provide evidence that described a structure of the “limiting shaft” or what a person skilled in the art would understand as a plain and ordinary meaning of the term. After construing “limiting shaft” as means-plus-function recitation, the court found the term was indefinite under section 112 because Unicorn failed to identify structure.
Golab also argued that “rotating mechanism” was means-plus-function. Both Golab and Unicorn provided their own expert testimony regarding whether the term would connotate particular structure to a person skilled in the art. Ultimately the court found Unicorn’s expert more persuasive, highlighting portions of Unicorn’s expert testimony that included portions of the patents and prior art describing structure that a person of ordinary skill would recognize as a “rotating mechanism. The court also pointed to claim differentiation and other court cases construing “mechanism” as not a nonce word that invokes means-plus-function construction and concluded that “rotating mechanism” is not a means-plus-function recitation.
Under Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 of the Constitution, Congress has the authority to vest power in the President or in the Heads of Departments to appoint inferior officers, but must retain its power for principal officers. The Supreme Court considers certain hallmark factors of inferior officer status, including removability by a principal officer. In Arthrex, in the context of IPR proceedings, the Federal Circuit severed a portion of Title 35 to give the PTO Director, a principal officer, the power to fire APJs without cause, explaining that such authority would create the necessary oversight to consider APJs inferior officers. The Court denied petitions for rehearing en banc in March.
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The Board's judgment in Boloro issued before the date that the Federal Circuit in Arthrex severed a portion of the AIA to remedy the Appointments Clause violation. It is unlikely that the Federal Circuit would apply Arthrex to Board judgments in ex parte appeals that issued after Arthrex was decided because the Court in Arthrex ruled that it corrected the appointments issue at that time. The Court has also held that normal rules of waiver and forfeiture apply to Appointment Clause challenges in IPRs and is likely to do so as well for ex parte appeals.
Nevertheless, patent applicants should still carefully consider the impact of Arthrex and Boloro to their ex parte appeals in the event that the Supreme Court grants certiorari on whether APJs were properly appointed. If the Supreme Court concludes that there is a violation of the Appointments Clause and affirms the Federal Circuit in that respect, the Court could conclude that the remedy for that violation is different than what the Federal Circuit did in Arthrex putting into question all actions by the Board.
Claims directed to authenticating users for a transaction are not patent-eligible under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101 and the Alice/Mayo patent-eligibility test, and therefore the court granted a Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss in Universal Secure Registry LLC v. Apple Inc., Civ. No. 17-585-CFC-SRF (D. Del. June 30, 2020). The court overruled a Magistrate Judge’s report and recommendation that the motion be denied, and came just a week after another decision by the same judge (Colm Connolly) in another case holding patent claims directed to authenticating users to transactions ineligible.
Conclusory legal statements that attempt to invoke a factual allegation do not sufficiently allege an inventive concept to satisfy patent eligibility under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101. Dropbox Inc., Orcinus Holdings, LLC v. Synchronoss Techs. Inc, 2019-1765, 2019-1767, 2019-1823 (Fed. Cir. June 19, 2020) (nonprecedential).
Plaintiff Dropbox asserted infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. 6,178,505, 6,058,399, and 7,567,541 against Defendant Synchronoss. The patents are directed to data security and data uploading to websites and networks. The district court granted Defendant’s motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6), holding that all three patents as ineligible under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101. In particular, the district court held that Plaintiff failed to allege an inventive concept to satisfy the second part of the two-part Alice test.
A Rule 12 motion to dismiss was granted where patent claims directed to “authenticating a user to a transaction at a terminal” failed the 35 U.S.C. €§ 101 and Alice/Mayo patent-eligibility test. Money and Data Protection Lizenz GMPH & Co. KG v. Duo Security, Inc., Civil Action No. 18-1477-CFC (D. Del. June 24, 2020). Notably, the plaintiff attempted to rely on a purported improvement to computing technology that the court discounted because the purported improvement to network authentication processes, the court said, could be performed mentally.
The plaintiff Palomar sued defendant MRSI for infringement of Palomar’s U.S. Patent No. 6,776,327. MRSI petitioned the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) for inter partes review (IPR) of the patent. The PTAB upheld validity of claims 1-47 and held claim 48 invalid. Following the IPR, MRSI moved for summary judgement on the basis of patent-ineligibility under 35 U.S.C. €§101.
The ’327 patent discloses a method which utilizes “double pick and place” wherein a first workpiece is first moved to an intermediate location close to a target attach location on a second workpiece, and then, moved to the final attach location.
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held that the claims of the ‘327 patent were directed to the abstract idea of placing an item at a final location more accurately by first moving it to an intermediate location. Per the court, examples of this in daily life abound: in golf you first hit the ball to the green and then putt it into the hole; when you put a nut on a bolt, you first move it close to the bolt, and then line it up; etc.
Plaintiff Palomar argued that the claimed invention improved a process for accomplishing a known technical problem, similar to claims found to be patent eligible in McRO, Inc. v. Bandai Namco Games AM. Inc., 837 F.3d 1299 (Fed. Cir. 2 and Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. 175 (1981). For example, in McRO, the court found claims relating to a “specific asserted improvement in computer animation” and were not directed towards a patent-ineligible abstract idea. (McRO at 1314). The court found the claims of the ‘327 patent accomplish a much broader goal in a much less specific way than the disclosures of Diehr and McRO, and that Ultramercial, Inc. v. Hulu LLC, 772 F.3d 709 (Fed. Cir. 214) is more analogous. In Ultramercial, an 11-step process was directed to the abstract idea of “displaying an advertisement in exchange for access to copyrighted media.” Ultramercial at 714. A process or method patent may nonetheless be directed toward an abstract idea if “the majority of the limitations” are “devoid of a concrete tangible application.” Id. at 715.
The District Court for the Northern District of California recently issued a claim construction order in Zoho Corporation v. Sentius International, LLC, finding that the claim limitation “means for compiling the source material image from at least the plurality of discrete pieces” was indefinite. The present action arose from a declaratory judgement action brought about by Zoho alleging that it did not infringe Reissued Patent No. RE43,633.
While both parties agreed that 35 U.S.C. €¶ 6 (means-plus-function) applied, the parties diverged on the question of whether the specification disclosed sufficient structure for the compile function. During a means-plus-function analysis, the court engages in a two-step inquiry to construe the claim limitations at issue as set forth in Williamson v. Citrix Online, LLC. First, the court identifies the claimed function, and, second, the court determines “what structure, if any, disclosed in the specification corresponds to the claimed function.” The Federal Circuit, in Noah Sys., Inc. v. Intuit, Inc., has stated that a structure corresponds to the claimed function if “the specification or the prosecution history clearly links or associates the structure to the function recited in the claim.”
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....the court stated that a “computer … programmed to compile” was insufficient structure, and that, if the Patent Owner wanted to rely on a specially programmed computer, the Patent Owner had to specify an algorithm the computer is programmed...
The Northern District of California dismissed a complaint of patent infringement for failing to adequately plead direct or joint infringement. Sentius Int’l LLC v. Apple Inc., No. 4:20-cv-00477 (N.D. Cal. June 2, 2020). The Court held that merely selling software did not constitute direct infringement and that Sentius did not adequately allege the requisite direction or control required for joint infringement.
Plaintiff Sentius alleged infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. RE43633 and 7,672,985 by Defendant Apple. Defendant filed a motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6), alleging that Plaintiff failed to sufficiently plead direct and joint infringement of the asserted patents. Claim 62 of the ‘633 patent is too long to recite in full, but the relevant part to consider is “a computer-implemented method for linking textual source material to external reference materials for display….” Of note is that a “computer-implemented method” has specific requirements for direct and joint infringement, as the Court discussed in the decision.
Braver, which forked from Brave back in June, is now named Bold Browser after a member of the project’s team was threatened with financial harm, the team behind the browser said in a tweet today. The dispute stemmed from the fact that “Braver” looks and sounds a little too much like “Brave.”
In a tweet of his own, Brave CEO Brendan Eich appeared to confirm that Brave indeed took legal action against the browser formerly known as Braver over trademark infringement.
Catherine has been a champion for openness as both a legislator and practitioner for more than 20 years. She currently serves as CEO of the Open Knowledge Foundation, an organization whose work is fully aligned with the values and mission of Creative Commons. During her tenure, she has successfully redefined OKF’s vision and mission, reengaged its global chapters, and increased its international profile.
Libtorrent has bridged the gap between WebTorrent and traditional torrent clients. The open-source BitTorrent library, used by clients including Deluge, qBittorrent, rTorrent and Tribler, will help to widely expand the reach of browser-based WebTorrent tools and services.
A judgment handed down by the EU Court of Justice this morning has found that online platforms, including YouTube, do not have to hand over the email addresses, IP addresses, or telephone numbers of alleged pirates following a request from copyright holders. The 'address' referenced in the Copyright Directive relates to postal addresses only.
For a few years I've limited my commentary on the Oracle v. Google Android-Java copyright case to procedural matters, without reiterating the reasons for which I believe the thousands of lines of Java API code asserted in that case are protected by copyright, and their use by Google was unfair. While I agree with Oracle on substance, I did publicly support Google's successful cert petition because I care about the key issues far more than about specific cases.
I'm going to continue to steer clear of arguing the issues. But I am still following the proceedings, and I have bad news for those who hated the Federal Circuit's copyrightability holding: with respect to copyrightability, it looks like Google is more likely than not to lose.
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If the Supreme Court answered the "fair use" question in Google's favor on the basis of jury deference, it might or might not discuss the standard for software copyrightability in detail. Whether the Federal Circuit's copyrightability holding would be affirmed explicitly or (by reaching "fair use") mostly implicitly, the copyrightability of API code would continue to be a reality in the United States.
In the same scenario (and I'm not suggesting that it's likely--the fact that the SCOTUS requests additional briefing doesn't mean it will necessarily agree with Google on jury deference), those opposing the protection of API code under copyright law wouldn't really make headway beyond this particular case (and even in that one, there'd simply be a remand to the Federal Circuit). It would be a procedural decision, centered around the standard of review, far short of agreeing with Google's "fair use" defense in its own right--and next time a different jury, ideally instructed by a different (more balanced) judge, might simply find otherwise. It wouldn't be precedential with respect to the substantive issue.
After Oracle won the first of two rounds in the Federal Circuit (with Orrick Herrington Sutcliffe's Joshua Rosenkranz as lead counsel), Google already requested certiorari, but the Supreme Court declined. That fact, combined with the May 4, 2020 order that implies copyrightability, suggests quite strongly that Google is facing an uphill battle in that regard.
Back in 2019, we wrote about a lawsuit filed against Disney by two writers that pitched a piratey movie to the company. The writers' screenplay about Davey Jones, they said, was so similar to Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean movies so as to constitute copyright infringement. Much of this appeared to stem from the fact that the two writers had pitched the screenplay to Disney a few years before the Pirates franchise began, but the similarities laid out in the lawsuit were classic idea/expression dichotomy stuff.
