There aren’t that many companies shipping Linux laptops, and often it’s either at the entry-level of the market with Arm-based Pine64 PineBook or PineBook Pro, or at the higher-end with products such as Dell XPS 13 developer edition or System76 Linux laptops.
If you’d like something in between, you could install Ubuntu on a laptop yourself, but drivers are not always working, and sometimes when the laptop is confirmed to work, the manufacturer may decide to completely redesign the hardware.
Saron Yitbarek and Clive Thompson start the season by exploring some ways coders start their tech careers—some common, many unexpected. You might be surprised who answers the call to code, where they come from, and how much they’ve already accomplished.
This week we’ve been filling in forms and doing kitchen renovations. We discuss popularity contest being removed from Ubuntu, 19.10 going EOL, KDEs cross-platform storefront and Linux adopting inclusive language. We also round up our picks from the wider tech news and share an event; remember those!
It’s Season 13 Episode 17 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.7.9 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-s...
QEMU 5.1-rc0 is available as the first step towards this next feature release of this important component to the Linux virtualization stack.
The QEMU 5.1-rc0 release marks the hard feature freeze for this next release. Weekly release candidates will continue until QEMU 5.1 is ready to ship around the middle of August.
When support for classic BPF was added to the kernel many years ago, there was no question of whether BPF programs could block in their execution. Their functionality was limited to examining a packet's contents and deciding whether the packet should be forwarded or not; there was nothing such a program could do to block. Since then, BPF has changed a lot, but the assumption that BPF programs cannot sleep has been built deeply into the BPF machinery. More recently, classic BPF has been pushed aside by the extended BPF dialect; the wider applicability of extended BPF is now forcing a rethink of some basic assumptions. BPF programs can now do many things that were not possible for classic BPF programs, including calling helper functions in the kernel, accessing data structures ("maps") shared with the kernel or user space, and synchronizing with spinlocks. The core assumption that BPF programs are atomic has not changed, though. Once the kernel jumps into a BPF program, that program must complete without doing anything that might put the thread it is running in to sleep. BPF programs themselves have no way of invoking any sort of blocking action, and the helper functions exported to BPF programs by the kernel are required to be atomic.
As BPF gains functionality and grows toward some sort of sentient singularity moment, though, the inability to block is increasingly getting in the way. There has, thus, been interest in making BPF programs sleepable for some time now, and that interest has recently expressed itself as code in the form of this patch set from Alexei Starovoitov.
The patch adds a new flag, BPF_F_SLEEPABLE, that can be used when loading BPF programs into the kernel; it marks programs that may sleep during their execution. That, in turn, informs the BPF verifier about the nature of the program, and brings a number of new restrictions into effect. Most of these restrictions are the result of the simple fact that the BPF subsystem was never designed with sleepable programs in mind. Parts of that subsystem have been updated to handle sleeping programs correctly, but many other parts have not. That is likely to change over time but, until then, the functionality implemented by any part of the BPF subsystem that still expects atomicity is off-limits to sleepable programs.
For example, of the many types of BPF programs supported by the kernel, only two are allowed to block: those run from the Linux security module subsystem and tracing programs (BPF_PROG_TYPE_LSM and BPF_PROG_TYPE_TRACING). Even then, tracing programs can only sleep if they are attached to security hooks or are attached to functions that have been set up for error injection. Other types of programs are likely to be added in the future, but the coverage will never be universal. Many types of BPF programs are invoked from within contexts that, themselves, do not allow sleeping — deep within the network packet-processing code or attached to atomic functions, for example — so making those programs sleepable is just not going to happen.
The Btrfs filesystem has had a long and sometimes turbulent history; LWN first wrote about it in 2007. It offers features not found in any other mainline Linux filesystem, but reliability and performance problems have prevented its widespread adoption. There is at least one company that is using Btrfs on a massive scale, though: Facebook. At the 2020 Open Source Summit North America virtual event, Btrfs developer Josef Bacik described why and how Facebook has invested deeply in Btrfs and where the remaining challenges are.
Every Facebook service, Bacik began, runs within a container; among other things, that makes it easy to migrate services between machines (or even between data centers). Facebook has a huge number of machines, so it is impossible to manage them in any sort of unique way; the company wants all of these machines to be as consistent as possible. It should be possible to move any service to any machine at any time. The company will, on occasion, bring down entire data centers to test how well its disaster-recovery mechanisms work.
It is with great pleasure that we announce the availability of WirePlumber - the PipeWire session manager - version 0.3.0, which was made available a few weeks ago.
This release brings support for desktop use cases and is a working drop-in replacement for PipeWire's pipewire-media-session example session manager. At the same time, it introduces configurability and other features that pipewire-media-session lacks, such as the use of session, endpoint and endpoint-stream objects to orchestrate the graph. If you are curious about what this means, my previous blog post is a good starting point to read about endpoints.
[...]
Finally, another noteworthy feature in this release is the use of the org.freedesktop.ReserveDevice1 D-Bus API to arbitrate the capture of audio devices between PipeWire and JACK. If a JACK server is started while PipeWire running or is found already running when PipeWire is started, WirePlumber releases the audio device that JACK wants to control and sets up the PipeWire JACK source & sink nodes so that audio in PipeWire is routed through JACK to access that audio device.
Announced earlier this year was WirePlumber as a new session manager for PipeWire with its role in managing of audio/video streams to/from hardware/software components as well as handling security/permissions, device monitoring, and other session management functionality.
While only a few months have passed since the WirePlumber announcement, today's v0.3 release announces that it's "now ready for the desktop."
With the Intel 2nd Gen Xeon Scalable (Cascade Lake) processors having turned a year old in April and next month marking one year since the launch of the AMD EPYC 7002 (Rome) series, here are fresh benchmarks of the dual Xeon Platinum 8280 versus the AMD EPYC 7742 when testing the Linux software stack from early 2019 and then again using a bleeding-edge Linux software stack as of this month. This shows how the Linux software performance has evolved over the past year for both Intel and AMD on the server front as well as how the current top-end SKUs are competing right now.
Eight years ago I wrote _Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud_ (aka the "sysperf" book) on the performance of computing systems, and this year I'm excited to be releasing the second edition. The first edition was successful, selling over 10k copies and becoming required or recommended reading at many companies (and even mentioned in [job descriptions]). Thanks to everyone for their support. I've received feedback that it is useful, not just for learning performance, but also for showing how computers work internally: essential knowledge for all engineers. The second edition adds content on BPF, BCC, bpftrace, perf, and Ftrace, mostly removes Solaris, makes numerous updates to Linux and cloud computing, and includes general improvements and additions. It is written by a more experienced version of myself than I was for the first edition, including my six years of experience as a senior performance engineer at Netfilx. This edition has also been improved by a new technical review team of over 30 engineers.
It’s fair to say that most of us lose essential data in our computers either through accidental deletion, virus attacks, permanent removal of files, etc. at some point. Some of these files contain critical information that cannot be assumed and needs recovery. In this post, we will discuss some of the best data recovery available for Linux systems. The fantastic part is that most of them are opensource and freely available for use.
It’s been almost two weeks since the release of Calibre 4.20 and the new version is here just in time for the launch of Kobo’s Nia e-reader, which targets newcomers and sells for only $99.99 USD. Calibre 4.21 is the first release of the popular e-book manager to add support for Kobo Nia.
On top of Kobo Nia support, Calibre 4.21 adds support to vertically center e-book covers in the cover grid for those smaller than the available space, and implements a new checkbox that lets users easily apply virtual libraries in the Quickview panel.
It looks like the syscall user redirection support could soon be mainlined to the kernel for this new Linux feature that was originally motivated by helping Windows games running on Wine.
The syscall user redirection support is needed for newer Windows games on Wine that are executing system call instructions without going through the Windows API. Due to avoiding the traditional API calls, Wine has an issue intercepting and emulating those system calls and thus this user redirection support will allow Wine to properly intercept them. In particular it appears to be the DRM / copy protection systems of modern games where this syscall user redirection support will help out the most.
Drive-in esports arenas may soon be the latest attraction.
Real estate investment company Horizon Group Properties has partnered with esports analytics company Harena Data L.L.C., which operates the brand USA Drive-Ins, to develop esports arenas and drive-in movie theaters in four major U.S. cities.
On the esports side, the idea is for consumers to watch tournaments and compete in events from the safety of their vehicles. Initially, the arenas will be located in Horizon-owned malls in Louisville, Kentucky, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and El Paso and Laredo in Texas.
For golf fans such as myself, one of the great joys over the past few weeks has been the return of live golf to the television screen. As one of the sports that is most naturally aligned with the need for social distancing and crowdless events, it was also one of the first to come back. Still, with COVID-19 running rampant throughout the world and America in particular, not every last thing is coming back. For instance, the pandemic has led organizers for the R&A's signature gold event, The Open in the U.K., to at least delay it from its July 16th start, or possibly cancel it altogether.
Whateverland, an upcoming point and click adventure from Caligari Games just recently finished a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign and it's fully funded. It's also sounding pretty bizarre.
The game follows Vincent, an engineer by profession and a thief by trade who attempts to steal a necklace from a lonely old woman. As it turns out, she's some sort of witch and banishes Vincent to a parallel world where people are compelled to languish indefinitely, reflecting on their life choices—Whateverland.
Beyond a Steel Sky, the big 3D sequel to the much loved classic Beneath a Steel Sky is out now with Linux support. A long awaited sequel too, since the original was from way back in 1994. A long time between them of course, with Beyond a Steel Sky being a much prettier game in full 3D with nice WASD controls and an absolutely fantastic style to it.
What is it? From Charles Cecil, creator of the Broken Sword series, with art direction by Dave Gibbons, legendary comic book artist behind 'Watchmen' it's an adventure set within a dynamic world, populated by wilful characters driven by motivations that the player can subvert. In combination with a unique hacking tool, multiple solutions to puzzles emerge from player choices. Playing as Robert Foster, you attempt to track down an abducted child that leads you back to Union City, one of the last remaining mega-cities in a world ravaged by shattering wars and political meltdown.
SUPERHOT: MIND CONTROL DELETE, a full length standalone first-person shooter where time doesn't really move much until you do is out now and it's pretty magnificent.
The feeling of being able to duck and weave through bullets, like something out of the Matrix is what truly makes SUPERHOT MCD so fine. Being able to throw a bottle at an enemy resulting in them dropping their weapon, so you can run in and grab it mid-air is just so ridiculous and enjoyable.
Kitsune Games, developer of the rather fantastic roguelike MidBoss (see Scaine's review) just released one of their older titles Ultra Hat Dimension on Steam with a bunch of upgrades and added Linux support.
It's a very sweet puzzle game about fancy hats and people getting punched for wearing them. Although, reading that back, saying it's sweet and then talking about throwing punches probably sounds quite strange. You, the player, are actually unable to do any punching yourself. Instead you get bounced around various levels while constantly hearing these little Spluff creatures go "POW" as they send you flying in each direction. It's like they're just mocking me.
When it comes to party games, some attempt to do a little too much and some not enough. Aeolis Tournament seems to fit pretty much perfectly in between. With an extremely accessible control scheme that only needs movement and a single button, it's seriously easy to pick up and enjoy for a few hours at a time. Up to 8 players total can join various game modes with or without bots and there's online play too.
Konsole is having a resurge in the moment, it’s the terminal emulator of choice for the power user that wants to break the 4th wall in *nix systems. Right now it can do almost all the things I want it to do, and a few more.
Since last year you can use splits in Konsole, with full drag & drop support between tabs and windows.
In recent months KDE's Konsole terminal emulator has been seeing a lot of new features while even more are in the works.
Konsole over the past year picked up support for splits, support for showing image thumbnails when hovering over filenames, easy support for capturing a full file path to the clipboard, "open with" from the context menu for files, and other improvements.
Looking ahead though there are more Konsole features coming like the ability to dim unfocused terminals, improved broadcast support, and support for URL escape codes.
Just don’t expect much of a deviation on what’s gone before. What’s that saying again? Ah yes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.
Jakub Steiner’s GNOME 3.38 wallpaper sits in vogue with previous background designs. It is predominately blue, it features a variety of geometric shapes, and uses fractal lighting for texture and effect.
As with the GNOME 3.36 wallpaper and earlier there are 3 distinct variations of the main design: morning, day, and night. You can use each of these on their own, or use them as part of a dynamic wallpaper slideshow that subtly transitions between then over the course of the day...
Many distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora have different flavors (mainly different desktop environments) of the same Linux core. ArcoLinux, on the other hand, has three different versions – ArcoLinux, ArcoLinuxB and ArcoLinuxD – which serve different needs. The main ArcoLinux comes with all the GUI and niceties, while both ArcoLinuxB and ArcoLinux D are minimal distributions that either come with one desktop or none. They are more similar to Arch Linux and are designed to help users learn more about Linux so that they’re able to handle a more command-line based experience in Arch Linux.
[...]
ArcoLinux’s aim of “educating users about Linux” is mainly about installation of software and packages, not the usage of the desktop. I would appreciate it more if they would provide on-screen tutorials on how to use Xfce, Openbox or i3. While the ability to select (tons of) applications during installation is good, it can be overwhelming for beginners.
AutoTux is a fully automated Linux distribution that is literally a hands-off event from start to finish. It goes a long way to adopting Linux a no-brainer for Windows and macOS converts.
AutoTux’s self-installing approach is also the kind of Linux operating system that makes you wonder why more distribution developers do not use similar strategies to make their Linux offerings such a foolproof proposition.
After all, installing an operating system as a newcomer is scary and fraught with missteps and frustration. Some other Linux distro families have scripted installation routines that somewhat semi-automate the installation process. This is one of the hallmarks found with Arch Linux distro varieties.
But Arch and other Linux families are not intended for Linux newcomers. Plus, the scripted installations are more like a patchwork of segmented batch commands initiated with command line interactions in a terminal window.
This is not very user friendly. AutoTux, on the other hand, fully automates an installation of the Debian 10 Linux system. What else could any newcomer to the Linux operating system want or need?
How about out-of-the-box performance and a fully-stocked software inventory? Well, AutoTux has that covered too!
Longtime FreeBSD/Linux network stack developer and former Qualcomm Atheros engineer Adrian Chadd is back to working on FreeBSD wireless networking improvements.
Adrian Chadd has announced his return to working on FreeBSD's wireless networking stack with a particular focus on the 802.11ac support (or there the largely lack of at the moment) and the porting of the Ath10k driver from Linux to FreeBSD.
pot is a great and relatively new jail management tool. It offers DevOps style provisioning and can even be used to provide Docker-like, scalable cloud services together with nomad and consul (more about this in Orchestrating jails with nomad and pot).
When using FreeBSD on your desktop, you can also use it simply to easily create “throw away” browser jails. That way, the browser environment is reliably and completely erased and reset each time you re-create it with one single, simple command.
Comparing-apples-to-BSDs asks: I was reading one of the old articles from the archive. One of the things mentioned was how the BSDs have a distinct approach in terms of packaging the base system relative to userland apps, and that the Linux distros at the time were not following the same practice. Are there Linux distros that have adopted the same approach in modern times? If not, are there technical limitations that are preventing them from doing so, such as some distros supporting multiple kernel versions maybe? [...]
The desktops had a big week of updates in openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots this week.
Among the packages updated for the desktops this week were GNOME’s 3.36.4 version and the July 7 release of KDE’s Plasma 5.19.3, Applications 20.04.3 and the July 4 release of Frameworks 5.72.0.
Tumbleweed snapshots are trending stable this week and snapshot 20200714 is trending at a 99 rating, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer. Both Frameworks and Applications were in the most recent snapshot. Applications had updates for the open-source video editing software Kdenlive. Fixes were made to new clips that could possibly crash and/or make clips disappear. The Akonadi storage framework had a server fix for the fetching of attributes with empty data; the topic need to be revisited, according to the commit. Frameworks 5.72.0 added a new DAV protocol implementation with KJobs. KDE’s input/output system library KIO and the user interface builder Kirigami had multiple updates. The Kirigami update provided better collapsing handling for UI and better presentation for list header items. The virtualization package Xen had a small update for its 4.13.1 version to fix incorrect error handling in event channel port allocation; A few patches were added and a handful of Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures were addressed. The hxtools collection of tools and scripts updated to 20200712 and added a new utility for arpeggio/polyphonic mixing of bsvplay/qplay outputs. Rubygem also had several different packages updated in the snapshot.
The openSUSE release team is would like feedback from users, developers and stakeholders about the release of the of community-developed openSUSE Leap 15.2 through a survey.
The survey is available at https://survey.opensuse.org.
openSUSE Leap 15.2 was released on July 2. Two weeks of people installing the release and using it is a good timeframe to capture fresh ideas and thoughts about how people felt about the release. The survey centers on these two questions: what went well and what didn’t go well?
That is the question the release team is asking of those who installed and used openSUSE Leap 15.2.
The team hopes the feedback will provide enough information to help improve the release processes and other elements people found important.
The survey will close on August 4.
Edge computing continues to gain force as ever more companies increase their investments in edge, even if they’re only dipping their toes in with small-scale pilot deployments. Emerging use cases like Internet-of-Things (IoT), augmented reality, and virtual reality (AR/VR), robotics, and telecommunications-network functions are often cited as key drivers for companies moving computing to the edge. Traditional enterprises are also looking at edge computing to better support their remote offices, retail locations, manufacturing plants, and more. At the network edge, service providers can deploy an entirely new class of services to take advantage of their proximity to customers.
In this article, we consider edge computing from the perspective of application developers. The developer perspective is vital because the applications being developed today—leveraging emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML)—reveal new opportunities to deliver services and optimize costs.
The new Red Hat OpenShift 4.5 release includes a more streamlined and customizable navigation experience in the web console’s Developer perspective. In this article, we quickly share the highlights of the new navigation features that we added based on user feedback.
Each new release of Red Hat OpenShift includes usability improvements and features to help developers meet their goals. In OpenShift 4.5, we’ve improved navigation and added a mechanism for customizing navigation and accessing frequently used resources from the Developer perspective.
IBM and SAP just announced a collaboration to deliver accelerated digital transformation, leverage the SAP intelligent suite as well as SAP Cloud and on-premise solutions and decrease time to S/4HANA migration, all while extending and enhancing SAP solutions. Red Hat Integration is at the heart of the side-by-side extensibility solutions from SAP, specifically Red Hat Fuse and Red Hat 3scale API Management.
June was my first month as a GSOC student, and I must say is has been a tough but fun ride! I’ve been working at improving the Linux System Roles Network Role. My main focus for this summer is being able to improve the testing systems. In order to achieve that, I will introduce Pytest as a tool for the integration tests.
About Me
I’m a 23 years old student based in Spain. I discovered the world of free software just two years ago, while finishing my degree. After that, I decided to study a master in Computation and joined SUGUS/GNU Linux, the free software group of my University. Thanks to their support I was able to discover Fedora and other cool software, too.
Can you believe that tomorrow on the 17th it’s officially half way through my summer internship?! I can’t :O
Let’s see what have I been up to?
Over the weekend I finished creating a really low key zine for my 11 year old neighbor.
Fedora 33 is easily shaping up to be one of the biggest releases ever for this long-time Linux distribution formerly known as Fedora Core. It's just not a few big features like Fedora desktop variants defaulting to Btrfs but even just on feature count alone it's looking by far to be one of the biggest at least in a number of years if not ever.
Fedora 33 has seen 40 system-wide changes submitted and 18 self-contained changes. For the broad system-wide changes, at 43 it's nearly double that of usual Fedora releases with the likes of F32 seeing only 23 changes or 21 for F31. The second highest release for number of system wide changes was 31 for Fedora 28... Seeing above 40 is rather historic as outlined by this mailing list post via Zbigniew JÃâ¢drzejewski-Szmek.
DebConf20 starts in about 5 weeks, and as always, the DebConf Videoteam is working hard to make sure it'll be a success. As such, we held a sprint from July 9th to 13th to work on our new infrastructure.
[...]
For DebConf20, we strongly encourage presenters to record their talks in advance and send us the resulting video. We understand this is more work, but we think it'll make for a more agreeable conference for everyone. Video conferencing is still pretty wonky and there is nothing worse than a talk ruined by a flaky internet connection or hardware failures.
As such, if you are giving a talk at DebConf this year, we are asking you to read and follow our guide on how to record your presentation.
Fear not: we are not getting rid of the Q&A period at the end of talks. Attendees will ask their questions — either on IRC or on a collaborative pad — and the Talkmeister will relay them to the speaker once the pre-recorded video has finished playing.
Recently I’ve seen lot of people sharing about their home office setup. I thought why don’t I do something similar. Not to beat FOMO, but in future when I revisit this blog, it will be lovely to understand that I had some cool stuffs.
There are people who went deep down in the ocean to lay cables for me to have a remote job and I am thankful to them.
Being remote my home is my office. On my work table I have a Samsung R439 laptop. I’ve blogged about it earlier. New addition is that it have another 4GB RAM, a total of 6GB and 120GB SSD. I run Debian testing on it. Laptop is placed on a stand. Dell MS116 as external mouse always connected to it. I also use an external keyboard from fingers. The keys are very stiff so I don’t recommend this to anyone. The only reason I took this keyboard that it is in my budget and have a backlit, which I needed most.
I have explained Ubuntu release cycle and end of life in detail earlier. I’ll reiterate what it means to you and your system if continue using Ubuntu 19.10 beyond this point.
Software usually have a predefined life cycle and once a software version reaches end of life, it stops getting updates and support.
Beyond the end of life, Ubuntu 19.10 won’t get system updates, security updates or application updates from Ubuntu anymore.
Ubuntu 19.10 “Eoan Ermine” was released nine months ago, on October 17th, 2019. Highlights included the GNOME 3.34 desktop environment series, the Linux 5.3 kernel series, as well as initial support for ZFS as the root file system, an implementation available via the Ubiquity graphical installer.
Other highlights included WPA3 support, DLNA sharing support, LZ4 as default compression algorithm for the Linux kernel and initramfs on all supported architectures for improved boot speed, as well as additional default hardening options enabled in GCC for stronger security.
Google and Canonical have joined forces to bring Flutter to the Linux desktop.
Google’s open-source UI framework for building Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows has added another platform...Linux. And with over 500,000 developers working with Flutter (and over 80,000 apps built with the framework), this could mean a boon for apps on Linux.
But that’s not all. Canonical (the creators and maintainers of Ubuntu) have dedicated developers to the task. In fact, Ken VanDine, Canonical engineering manager, said this of the move:
Canonical is making a significant investment in Flutter by dedicating a team of developers to work alongside Google’s developers to bring the best Flutter experience to the majority of Linux distributions. Canonical will continue to collaborate with Google to further improve Linux support and maintain feature parity with the other supported platforms.
Eventually, PopCon’s statistics help Ubuntu developers determine which packages should be included by default in Ubuntu ISO and which package bugs need to be fixed first.
Since PopCon is broken and no longer works, Ubuntu will remove the package from the default installation. For the end-users, it’s neither a loss nor an advantage from the removal of PopCon.
[...]
If you uninstall the Popularity Contest package, it will also remove the ubuntu-standard package, which is not recommended. Hence, I would say you don’t have to do anything as the package doesn’t compromise your privacy and security.
New installs of Ubuntu desktops will be without any “Popularity Contest” package. Popularity Contest Or PopCon will be removed from the standard seed as mentioned by the Ubuntu. Ubuntu will remove the package from the default installation.
[...]
PopCon or Ubuntu Popularity Contest is a pre-installed package in Ubuntu. It has been installed by default Linux since 2006 (Ubuntu 6.10). You can vote on your popular and most-used application every week.
The Linux Mint distribution has always shipped with a classical desktop layout through its history all the way since 2007; A panel on the bottom having a menu, launchers and opened windows on the left side, with system tray icons on the right side.
The consistency of the desktop design and the general workflow in Mint is an invaluable comfort for most average PC users and even advanced users who do not want to bother with their desktop environment’s philosophy, and instead, prefer to use a practical one throughout the ages to just do their work on their PCs. It is more important especially these days where other Linux desktops/distributions typically destroy the entire UX consistency in each few releases.
Effective communication between customers, engineers, and project managers is the most critical element of successful cloud delivery. This has always been the case, but it is doubly important in the absence of regular, face-to-face contact.
For remote teams, instant messaging is an invaluable tool. Internally, we use instant messaging both to keep in touch with one another and to coordinate on projects. However, it’s important to keep these two purposes separate. Maintaining one social channel and one business-focused channel prevents casual conversation from disrupting work.
For communication with customers, the use of email is the standard tool. Indeed, official design decisions should not be made lightly and need to be documented. In order to avoid delays and have everyone stick to action points, we make sure to chase up through phone or message, but always need to communicate through email. This helps ensure that both parties stay up-to-date on a project’s status and that we have written confirmations.
An enhanced partner program from Canonical, publisher of the Ubuntu open-source operating system, will enable global systems integrators to resell and integrate the company’s entire portfolio of products and services for data centers, multicloud environments, the edge, and the Internet of Things (IoT).
Hardkernel has upgraded its Odroid-N2 SBC to an Odroid-N2-Plus with a new version of the hexa-core Amlogic S922X that boosts the 2x -A53 cores to 2.0GHz and the 4x -A73 cores to 2.2GHz, with overclocking up to 2.4GHz.
Hardkernel has updated its high-end Odroid-N2 SBC with an Odroid-N2-Plus model that is likely the fastest community-backed Arm board on the planet. The Odroid-N2-Plus will probably beat out the more expensive Khadas Vim3 on all but AI benchmarks. The Linux-driven Odroid-N2-Plus moves to a faster RevC version of Amlogic’s S922X with improved CPU core power rail budget and higher clock frequencies.
The European Union’s antitrust watchdog is investigating whether Apple, Google, Amazon, or other companies are building monopolies with their digital assistants and smart home products. EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager announced a probe into the Internet of Things sector, aimed at making sure users aren’t locked into a single ecosystem. “When big companies abuse their power, they can very quickly push markets beyond the tipping point, where competition turns to monopoly,” said Vestager in a statement.
Vestager raised concerns about products like Amazon’s Alexa assistant, which ties together the company’s vast retail, hardware, and data collection operations. “Voice assistants and smart devices can collect a vast amount of data about our habits. And there’s a risk that big companies could misuse the data collected through such devices,” she said. While the biggest targets appear to be Silicon Valley tech companies, Vestager also mentioned Deutsche Telekom’s Magenta voice assistant.
Advantech’s IP65- and IP54-protected “POC-624” point-of-care terminal runs Linux or Win 10 on an 8th Gen UE-series CPU and offers a 24-inch HD touchscreen, 2x M.2 for NVMe and WiFi, PCIe x4, mini-PCIe, and iDoor expansion.
Advantech has launched a fanless, 24-inch panel PC and medical point-of-care terminal equipped with an Intel 8th Gen Whiskey Lake CPU. The POC-624, which follows Advantech’s 7-inch, Apollo Lake based HIT-507 medical panel PC, is designed for hospitals, clinics, and care homes, according to an announcement on News Medical.
For a class project, University of Stuttgart students Ekin Sila Sahin, Lior Skoury, and Simon Treml came up with a unique painting robot named the Physical Twin.
The Physical Twin travels on a three-wheeled chassis and mounts a four-axis arm with a brush. An operator controls the arm to dip the brush into an onboard paint container, and can then manipulate it for application.
Firmware is a set of programs inside most electronic equipment responsible for performing its basic functions. It’s similar to the parts of the brain in charge of involuntary functions, which tell your lungs when to breathe and your heart when to beat.
When you turn on your computer, for example, your firmware directs power to every component, and then works in conjunction with your software kernel to boot into your operating system. Firmware is generally accompanied by a firmware menu, where you can change settings for these basic functions, choose boot drives, and more.
Almost everything here at System76 is under the GNU GPL, or GNU General Public License, including our firmware. This means you can adapt it, modify it, learn from it, and redistribute it with the condition that the benefits are also offered to the original developer (in this case, us). There is an inherent shared collective progress built into the license. Powerful thrust lifts all rockets. (As a note, when something we create isn’t under the GNU GPL, that just means it’s under an even more permissive license that allows the code to be used in any way without contributing changes upstream.)
Yesterday, Pine64 announced the end of the PinePhone UBPorts Community Edition campaign—but more importantly, the company declared the beginning of the postmarketOS Community Edition campaign. The base version of the new run of PinePhones shares the same $149 price point and the same basic technical specs as the original developer edition—but there's also a new, upgraded "Convergence Package" available at $199.
The Home Assistant project has released version 0.112 of the open-source home automation hub we have previously covered, which is the eighth release of the project this year. While previous releases have largely focused on new integrations and enhancements to the front-end interface, in this release the focus has shifted more toward improving the performance of the database. It is important to be aware that there are significant database changes and multiple potential backward compatibility breaks to understand before attempting an upgrade to take advantage of the improvements.
According to the release notes written by contributor Franck Nijhof, better performance has been a major goal of this release with a focus on both the logbook and history components. This builds on the work of the previous release (v0.111) from a performance perspective, which focused on reducing the time it takes to initialize the hub at startup.
One of the many qualities that makes Linux so attractive is that the user decides how their desktop functions.
Desktop environments like GNOME, KDE, etc appeal to many users. They provide their own window manager, system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system. They also provide a file manager which organizes, lists, and locates files and directories. Other aspects include a background provider, a panel to provide a menu and display information, as well as a setting/configuration manager to customize the environment.
Over the last six months, I have been working on GoDBLedger, an open source accounting system that I feel addresses some of the issues that plague current accounting software solutions. Even in my first year as a graduate accountant, the software frustrated me because I have seen what good software can be like and how much it can improve your productivity.
A great example of "good software" is a software developer's Editor/IDE. Developers love their editors, and there is a huge range that is highly customizable and allows for seamless coding experience. One of the major influencing factors for the existence of great software in this area is because developers are themselves the end users—they scratch their own itches and have immediate feedback on their designs.
The good news is that no one seems to be waiting around on the "avoiding lock-in" argument.
A year ago this past April, remember, Google announced Anthos. Anthos was interesting not because it was a Kubernetes-based platform for hosting applications – there were many such then and there are more today. What differentiated the platform was that it was a cloud-independent piece of middleware offered by one of the cloud vendors themselves. Historically, a core approach of cloud vendors to the market has been attracting workloads to their platforms via proprietary offerings.
With Anthos, Google inverted that model, taking the proprietary software platform and decoupling it from the underlying cloud. This is notable because it represented a change of strategy, as noted, but also because it’s a heavy lift technically. It’s much easier to get a platform stack operating in one environment than it is in multiple.
Now with BigQuery, Google is doubling down on this approach, extending it beyond its GCP roots into other environments. This may weaken the argument for GCP compute at the margins, but it inarguably expands BigQuery’s addressable market dramatically.
It is also suggestive of a broader shift in strategy from Google. It is possible, of course, that the Anthos-enabled cross platform BigQuery is merely a tactical announcement, one that opportunistically seeks to capitalize on Google’s database prowess but is not more broadly representative.
Zulip, the open source threaded team chat app, today announced the release of Zulip Server 3.0, with new features to help distributed and remote teams stay productive and focused.
Thunderbird 78 is our newest ESR (extended-support release), which comes out yearly and is considered the latest stable release. Right now you can download the newest version from our website, and existing users will be automatically updated in the near future. We encourage those who rely on the popular add-on Enigmail to wait to update until the automatic update rolls out to them to ensure their encrypted email settings are properly imported into Thunderbird’s new built-in OpenPGP encrypted email feature.
Last year’s release focused on ensuring Thunderbird has a stable foundation on which to build. The new Thunderbird 78 aims to improve the experience of using Thunderbird, adding many quality-of-life features to the application and making it easier to use.
The Thunderbird 78 mail client redesigns the message compose window, the dark mode is much improved and is now in good shape, the calendar and tasks components are now properly integrated in Thunderbird itself, the account setup area has seen improvements, end-to-end encrypted email support is now easy to setup, and a wide range of other improvements.
The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.45.0. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
[...]
There are two big changes to be aware of in Rust 1.45.0: a fix for some long-standing unsoundness when casting between integers and floats, and the stabilization of the final feature needed for one of the more popular web frameworks to work on stable Rust.
In the last year or so, there’s been a significant shift in the way we (Data Engineering) think about application-submitted data @ Mozilla, but although we have a new application-based SDK based on these principles (the Glean SDK), most of our data tools and documentation have not yet been updated to reflect this new state of affairs.
Much of this story is known inside Mozilla Data Engineering, but I thought it might be worth jotting them down into a blog post as a point of reference for people outside the immediate team. Knowing this may provide some context for some our activities and efforts over the next year or two, at least until our tools, documentation, and tribal knowledge evolve.
[...]
The only type of low-level object that was hard to keep track of was the list of probes: Firefox is a complex piece of software and there are many aspects of it we wanted to instrument to validate performance and quality of the product - especially on the more-experimental Nightly and Beta channels. To solve this problem, a probe dictionary was created to help developers find measures that corresponded to the product area that they were interested in.
On a higher-level, accessing this type of data using the python API quickly became slow and frustrating: the aggregation of years of Firefox ping data was hundreds of terabytes big, and even taking advantage of PySpark’s impressive capabilities, querying the data across any reasonably large timescale was slow and expensive. Here, the solution was to create derived datasets which enabled fast(er) access to pings and other derived measures, document them on docs.telemetry.mozilla.org, and then allow access to them through tools like sql.telemetry.mozilla.org or the Measurement Dashboard.
The companies that do most to develop and evolve the LibreOffice productivity suite, both for desktop and cloud, say the project's business model is "beyond utterly broken" and that The Document Foundation (TDF), the charity that hosts the project, has to change its approach.
The matter is a subject of intense debate within the board of the foundation, set up in 2010 to oversee LibreOffice, a fork of Oracle's OpenOffice. It touches on a question that crops up repeatedly in various contexts: as usage of open-source software continues to grow, what is the right business model to fund its development?
The TDF's manifesto promises "to eliminate the digital divide in society by giving everyone access to office productivity tools free of charge." The document adds that "we encourage corporate participation" but there is nothing about providing an incentive for such companies.
Michael Meeks, managing director at Cambridge-based Collabora, the company that contributes most full-time developers to LibreOffice, has set out the situation in (opinionated) detail here and here. "Words fail me to express how beyond-utterly-broken the existing TDF / desktop model is for the ecosystem around selling desktop LibreOffice," he wrote.
Meeks is an open-source veteran, having worked on GNOME, OpenOffice, and other prominent projects. Everything was fine at LibreOffice to begin with, and he calls 2012-2014 "the flourishing years."
Alongside Collabora, there were 15 developers from SUSE, five from Red Hat, one from Canonical, seven from the city of Munich (part of its embrace of open source), and some 40 others from various companies. Many of those have now dropped out, or reduced their commitment, leaving around 40 paid developers in total – of whom Collabora provides 25 and CIB, a Munich-based specialist in document management, seven.
Veteran free software and open source developer Michael Meeks has expanded on the issues faced by the LibreOffice project which were briefly touched on by iTWire recently, drawing from a post on the popular Linux Weekly News website.
The essential issue is that money which is supposed to be paid to companies that provide support for LibreOffice is not being paid. And since that makes up most of the funds that enable development, The Document Foundation, the agency that manages LibreOffice development, has had to put together a plan for raising funds.
Meeks, who works as general manager at Collabora Productivity, a company that sells LibreOffice support, told iTWire: "I think the community reaction in summary is 'go slower', there are a lot of moving pieces that intersect here - the board has been talking about them for a long time, but the community have come fresh to them, and need time to digest them, to interact and ask questions before coming up with proposals.
"That's very positive, I think. At the core of the situation currently we have the problem of the perception that LibreOffice either creates itself (via the magic of volunteers), or that TDF creates it (by unknown means or by donations)."
This spring, as the time for planning our biannual appeal came around, we discussed the difficult time all of us are experiencing: charities like us, the free software community, and every individual. And it led us to consider why people from all walks of life cherish user freedom.
The socially distant, digital way in which we are carrying on our work and private lives is affecting our software freedom. Globally, decisions to transition to an online and remote life were made with less consideration than we normally put into them, giving proprietary corporations access to parts of our lives we normally protect. Lately, we have been pointing to grim examples of bulk surveillance and privacy violations in the realms of education and communication to help everyone understand why this fight is so important.
But we shouldn't forget that free software is an inherently positive story. It celebrates the creativity and skill that come from collaboration, and the freedom that you have if you understand a program or can freely choose to rely on information about it from someone you trust. Having the right to read, modify, contribute to, and share software we use has changed our lives, and countless others. There are so many people who continue to motivate us to fight for free software with their work, so we decided to ask them to share their stories on why they love free software, and what user freedom means to them or their business.
Good news, this wasn’t a regression due to the recent upgrade and this was easy to sort out. Blocked Internet Explorer and sent a notice to the 5000 developers that Internet Explorer is no longer supported. Problem solved!
[For reference: It’s best to hard block IE for user experience, IE users are used to retrying in another browser. Maybe one third of internal apps developed in the last years don’t work at all outside of Chrome, the page remains blank or has broken widgets all over the place.]
The upgrade continued as planned.
Hello from the Swiss Alps, where we have been working from home and avoiding all but essential trips out like so many others over the last few months.
The current situation has led to the cancellation of several community events, including this year's main Raku and Perl conferences in North American and Europe. We have been following the situation closely in Switzerland, and have also decided not to go ahead with our event this year.
This article presents a freebie dashboard coded in Flask, on top of iconic AdminLTE, a well-known design actively supported by 150+ contributors and 35k Github stars.
[...]
Flask is a lightweight WSGI web application framework. It is designed to make getting started quick and easy, with the ability to scale up to complex applications. Classified as a microframework, Flask is written in Python and it does not require particular tools or libraries. It has no database abstraction layer, form validation, or any other components where pre-existing third-party libraries provide common functions.
A great resume is key to landing a great software job. There's no surprise there. But so many people make mistakes on their resume that can very easily be fixed.
Randall Kanna is on the show today to help us understand how to improve our resumes, and in turn, help us have better careers.
In this video, you will get an introduction to ReportLab’s Canvas object. You use ReportLab to create PDFs using Python and this tutorial will show you one way to accomplish that
The last PyCharm EAP build before the release candidate is ready and comes with a lot of new functionalities! Let’s take a look into three UX-related improvements that will make your development experience smoother.
I researched for the HTML Report design that is good looking and more feature rich. I have been working on and developing it. The new HTML Report will have support for Triage stuff. So that the user can quickly navigate to CVEs with specified remarks. I have also added a footer with useful links like our github, community IRC, and instructions on how to raise an issue.
This week I added checkers for avahi and bind libraries. Also there were some changes that had to be made in the out of tree checker, so I completed work on that too.
As developers, we don’t always consider test migration when we think about adopting a new framework. Tests are important, however, because they ensure that our code meets its requirements and works as desired, especially when we add new features and functionality.
Test migration is an essential part of migrating to a new application development framework. This article is for developers who are migrating a Spring Boot application to Quarkus. I will use three sample tests to demonstrate a test migration from Spring Boot to Quarkus. While Quarkus is compatible with Spring Boot Web, not all of Spring Boot’s test functionalities map to Quarkus. I will introduce you to other test dependencies and Quarkus capabilities that you can use in these cases.
“Is it blue enough?” he growled in affectionate inquiry, referring to the rib eye steak with pepper sauce. Suitably well, came the reply to Mario Corniola. The dish was a specialty that, till the coronavirus struck, made Il Cantuccio on Melbourne’s Lygon Street the most darling of places, a jewel on a stretch of restaurants famed for matters Italian. Mario, the proprietor, had been the chief of the kitchen, the garrulous owner who managed to charm patrons for decades. Aided by his formidable wife, Lori, and other members of the family clan, the restaurant became a Calabrian sanctuary on an island continent.
So this is a message to myself, and a reminder to you, that this is the path I am becoming increasingly drawn to.
Please, don’t let me ignore the call for too long.
Internet culture has evolved in numerous ways over the years, from its chaotic roots on Usenet and bulletin boards into the modern social networks that have become key to our digital interactions. But one thing that’s been lost along the way is design—not the design of the platforms, themselves, but the freedom to take a piece of internet land and make it your own. Sites like Geocities and MySpace get mocked today because of their often ugly looks, but these sites were some of the most important and fundamental for digital creativity, that encouraged people to experiment and try things. And our modern social networks have moved away from this. To me, that’s sad. I want that back. Today’s Tedium ponders social media, customization, and design (or lack thereof). — Ernie @ Tedium
Back when there were rumors of Google building an operating system, I thought “Lol.”
Then I watched then-PM Sundar Pichai announce Chrome OS. My heart raced. It was perfect.
I got my email through Gmail, I wrote documents on Docs, I listened to Pandora, I viewed photos on TheFacebook. Why did I need all of Windows Vista?
In 2010, I predicted that by 2020 Chrome OS would be the most popular desktop OS in the world. It was fast, lightweight, and $0.
“Every Windows and OS X app will be re-built for the browser!” I thought. Outlook->Gmail. Excel->Sheets. Finder->Dropbox. Photoshop->Figma. Terminal->Repl.it.
All of your files would be accessible by whoever you wanted, wherever you wanted, all the time. It was obvious. Revolutionary.
I haven’t installed MSFT Office on a machine since 2009. Sheets and Docs have been good enough for me. The theoretical unlimited computing power and collaboration features meant Google Docs was better than Office (and free!).
Then something happened at Google. I’m not sure what. But they stopped innovating on cloud software.
Microsoft has been working to ensure that Android itself is able to support the dual-screened devices, offering code back to the open source project with additions including those to the browser and to the base Android Open Source Project. These support the non-standard display tech that Microsot is relying on to help the Surface Duo stand out.
Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet scientist born in 1898. Lysenko didn’t believe in evolution or modern genetics. In a story for The Atlantic in 2017, Sam Kean described how Lysenko believed that the environment “shaped” animals and plants and thought that he could “educate” Soviet crops to germinate at different times of the year by subjecting them to extreme conditions; soaking plants in freezing water was supposed to confer a resistance to cold in future generations. These ideas, as preposterous as growing orange trees in Siberia, caught the attention of a powerful politician, none other than Joseph Stalin himself, who put Lysenko in charge of Soviet agricultural policies. To the millions killed deliberately in the Holodomor—Stalin’s man-made famine in Ukraine—Lysenko added millions more who perished when the imposition of his policies led to widespread crop failure. When bad science meets politicians looking for easy answers, you can get a whole lot of trouble.
After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, President Barack Obama delivered what I have always believed to be the best speech of his presidency. He talked about what it’s like to be a parent, and the critical realization, experienced by most parents, that you can’t keep your children safe or teach them well without the help of your friends and neighbors. Then he expanded that idea to include the whole of society. He said, “This is our first task—caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.”
The US safety net is made up of an interlocking network of means-tested programs (like Medicaid or food stamps) and government entitlements (like Social Security). It guarantees the welfare of folks rendered vulnerable—by deprivation, devastation, or deterioration. Yet this vital state function is chronically defunded and nearly defunct. As a result, inequality is extreme and growing in the United States.
In conjunction with the global uprising against white supremacy and the ongoing murder of Black people by police, academics and educators are mobilizing to bring awareness to deep educational disparities around science and math education for Black students and other students of color — a dynamic that perpetuates structural inequalities along racial lines.
If the violence or discrimination doesn't seem as spectacular as the recent ICE directive to the U.S. liberal taste, it too often gets normalized and remains ignored.
Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday argued that schools should ignore Centers for Disease Control guidance on reopening.€
"It's hard to see how this step won't further sideline public health experts and obscure the severity of this crisis."
The organizers of Russia’s “Immortal Regiment” parade, an annual march commemorating World War II veterans, have decided to cancel their event on July 26, due to€ the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.
I know you've heard this before, but just so we're all clear: wear a fucking mask, people. It's truly not that big of a deal. I wear one at work any time I am not seated in my office. It's crazy easy and you can even get a little fun out of it by wearing a personalized one like our Techdirt masks.
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp signed an executive order on Wednesday night declaring that any local government’s rules or regulations mandating masks or facial coverings were null and void.
There's seems to be no other good explanation for how the Republican Party views voting in the midst of a deadly pandemic.
As President Donald Trump came under criticism that his administration had failed to manage the coronavirus pandemic, he cited one area of success: his plan to donate thousands of ventilators to other countries.
"Governor Kemp does not give a damn about us."
Lawmakers and public health experts are demanding that the Trump administration answer for its abrupt decision this week to cut the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention out of the coronavirus data-collection process, a move critics warned could impede state efforts to combat the pandemic and leave crucial information open to politically motivated spin.
Hospitalizations for COVID-19 have been seen as a key metric of both the coronavirus’s toll and the health care system’s ability to deal with it. Recent federal actions may strike a blow to the public’s ability to track them.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed from its website, and then restored, data on hospital capacity across the country to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. But in a note, the agency indicated that the data may no longer be updated because of a change in federal reporting requirements to hospitals.
Vimal Thackeray is washing clothes in the tiny bathroom of her two-room house in Vangani town,€ struggling, with weakened hands, to apply soap to a pile of sarees, shirts and other garments, pouring water over them from a green plastic mug.
The economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic has strained municipal budgets, even as cities have been on the frontlines of the public health emergency and the rising eviction crisis. The federal government is balking at approving aid to states and municipalities, sparking calls for cutbacks in vital public services. Instead, local elected officials should explore options for generating new revenue in ways that help reduce the inequalities that have worsened the effects of the crisis.
The novel SARS-CoV-2 has roared through the American landscape leaving physical, emotional, and economic devastation in its wake. By early July, known infections in this country exceeded three million, while deaths topped 135,000. Home to just over 4% of the global population, the United States accounts for more than a quarter of all fatalities from Covid-19, the disease produced by the coronavirus. Amid a recent surge of infections, especially across the Sun Belt, which Vice President Mike Pence typically denied was even occurring, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that the daily total of infections had reached a record 60,000. Arizona’s seven-day average alone approached that of the European Union, which has 60 times as many people.
The network, said an MMFA researcher, "downplays the threat of the virus, dismisses the recommendations of public health officials, and misrepresents the scientific consensus on the disease."
Data that was once made available to the general public is no longer accessible on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website.
In Minneapolis, newly released police body camera footage reveals devastating new details of George Floyd’s killing on Memorial Day, showing that officers pulled a gun, swore at George Floyd to “get out of the f—ing car,” as he wept and pleaded, “Please don’t shoot me.” The video also showed that medics did not appear to rush to Floyd’s aid after they arrived on the scene. We discuss the latest developments in the case that sparked an ongoing national uprising against racism and police violence, with Marc Lamont Hill, author of “Nobody: Casualties of America’s War on the Vulnerable, from Ferguson to Flint and Beyond.” Lamont Hill also discusses how he has tested positive for COVID-19.
As health experts warn the coronavirus is on the rise in 41 states, many governors are reimposing restrictions after attempts at opening up the economy, but President Trump wants schools open. We speak with public health historian John Barry, who warns “The Pandemic Could Get Much, Much Worse” if we don’t take bolder action now. Barry is a professor at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine and author of “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History.”
While the Trump administration has bungled its own response to the pandemic at home, it has made sure to inject its anti-abortion goals into the international response to the pandemic. USAID has ramped up its campaign to pressure the U.N. to eliminate any language in international agreements and documents promoting “sexual and reproductive health,” a phrase religious conservatives contend is code for abortions but which U.N. officials and most Western governments say represents a broad panoply of services designed to keep impoverished mothers and children healthy—including abortions in countries where they are legal.
Back in February, $130 "smart" pet feeders from a company named Petnet simply stopped working. When customers reached out to the company to complain, they hit a complete and total brick wall in terms of functioning customer service. Emails and phone calls weren't returned (or wound up undeliverable), and the company simply refused to answer annoyed customer inquiries on Twitter or Facebook.
The case is WhatsApp Inc. v. NSO Group Technologies Limited, 19-cv-07123, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (Oakland).
Sarandos, who joined Netflix in 1999 and has been with the company for more than 20 years, has long served as chief content officer, a role that has involved overseeing Netflix’s massively successfully originals program starting with series like Orange is the New Black and House of Cards. Since then, Sarandos has transformed the company into one of the biggest power players in Hollywood. As part of the move, Sarandos has also been elected to the board of directors.
Microsoft just can’t catch a break with all its updates that seem to cause more problems. The company rolled out a Windows 10 update yesterday which fixed a major DNS security flaw (and a few other things), but in the process might have removed Notepad, Paint, or WordPad for some users if they were updating to version 2004 at the same time.
Over the last month, there have been several Windows 10 user reports on the Microsoft forms of those apps disappearing after updating to version 2004, so it seems like yesterday’s update isn’t actually the root cause of the problem. Gizmodo has reached out to Microsoft for more clarification, and we’ll update this article if/when we hear back.
Earlier this year, Netflix developed and released a new Apache-licensed project named Dispatch. It is designed to coordinate the response to and the resolution of security-related incidents, but the project aims for more than just that. Rather, it hopes to be valuable for any type of one-off incident that needs coordination across an organization, such as a service outage.
The idea behind Dispatch is to serve as a central clearinghouse for incidents, specifically focusing on four areas: resource management (Netflix's phrase describing both the data about the incident and the data about the response), individual engagement, incident life-cycle, and what Netflix calls "incident learning" — the ability to build off past incidents to inform future ones. Under the hood, the project runs on Python 3.7+ with FastAPI for the server, a PostgreSQL database, and VueJS for the web-based UI.
End users configure and interact with Dispatch primarily through a web interface, and the provided user documentation explains day-to-day use of the tool. For lower-level administrative and development needs, multiple tools are accessible via the command-line.
Fundamentally, Dispatch is a dispatcher and coordinator of data across many pre-existing tools within an organization. Rather than taking the approach of creating a "batteries included" solution, Dispatch takes advantage of the existing APIs provided by common tools used in an organization, such as Google's office suite (GSuite), Jira, and Slack. Unfortunately, the project does not currently support any open-source alternatives to these tools out-of-box.
“The Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist exam will help grow the pool of qualified talent, while also providing employers with confidence that their teams are able to handle the challenges of securing these technologies.”
“As the use of Kubernetes in production soars, it is critical that those who are managing it understand how to do so securely,” said Priyanka Sharma, general manager, Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (evolution-data-server and webkit2gtk), Fedora (kernel, snapd, and xen), openSUSE (thunderbird and xen), Oracle (dbus and thunderbird), Red Hat (java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-11-openjdk, jbig2dec, sane-backends, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (kernel), SUSE (cairo, containerd, docker, docker-runc, golang-github-docker-libnetwork, google-compute-engine, mailman, mercurial, openconnect, openexr, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (libvpx and snapd).
Enterprises are increasingly running applications in cloud-native environments using containers, along with orchestration tools such as Kubernetes, to facilitate scalability and resilience. If your organization falls into this category (and the chances are good that it does today, or plans to soon), you must make securing the deployment a top priority.
If you're uncertain about your current security posture, begin by answering these five key questions that address security requirements across the entire container lifecycle, from the point where you're building container images to where they are running live.
We’re pleased to announce that the Center for Internet Security (CIS) has publicly released the ROS Security Benchmark for community discussion. When published, this benchmark will document community best-practice configuration settings to properly secure ROS Melodic running on Ubuntu Bionic. Hopefully this is just the beginning of an ongoing effort to define different security profiles for all ROS LTS distributions. Please join the community and help define the right security settings that both protect and enable ROS!
The Russian authorities organized unprecedented, large-scale surveillance over the country’s citizens during the coronavirus pandemic, says a new report titled “Surveillance Pandemic” from the human rights organization “Agora.” In many cases, this was carried out not only in violation of personal data laws, but also by organizations that cannot and should not be responsible for monitoring.€
This one sounds boring, but stick with it because it's important. Because the US and the EU have vastly different privacy regulation regimes, there has always been some conflict over how (mainly) US internet companies handle data from the EU. For years, this was "settled" by a weird and mostly useless "EU-US data protection safe harbor" agreement, in which US companies would have to get "certified" that they kept EU-originated data protected at an "equivalent" level to how it would be protected in the EU when transferring it across the Atlantic to US-based data centers. It was a bit of a nuisance as a company (we went through the process ourselves), but in 2015 the entire safe harbor agreement was invalidated by the EU Court of Justice because of the NSA's ongoing snooping on data from those internet companies, as revealed by Ed Snowden.
"U.S. surveillance violates fundamental privacy rights and continues to be a massive financial liability for U.S. companies trying to compete in a global market."
The European Union’s highest court today made clear—once again—that the US government’s mass surveillance programs are incompatible with the privacy rights of EU citizens. The judgment was made in the latest case involving Austrian privacy advocate and EFF Pioneer Award winner Max Schrems. It invalidated the “Privacy Shield,” the data protection deal that secured the transatlantic data flow, and narrowed the ability of companies to transfer data using individual agreements (Standard Contractual Clauses, or SCCs).
Despite the many “we are disappointed” statements by the EU Commission, U.S. government officials, and businesses, it should come as no surprise, since it follows the reasoning the court made in Schrems’ previous case, in 2015.
Amazon, Google parent Alphabet and Microsoft used people's photos to train their facial recognition technologies without obtaining the subjects' permission, in violation of an Illinois biometric privacy statute, a trio of federal lawsuits filed Tuesday allege.
The photos in question were part of IBM's Diversity in Faces database, which is designed to advance the study of fairness and accuracy in facial recognition by looking at more than just skin tone, age and gender. The data includes 1 million images of human faces, annotated with tags such as face symmetry, nose length and forehead height.
The two Illinois residents who brought the lawsuits, Steven Vance and Tim Janecyk, say their images were included in that data set without their permission, despite clearly identifying themselves as residents of Illinois. Collection, storage and use of biometric information is illegal in the state without written consent under the Biometric Information Privacy Act, passed by the Illinois legislature in 2008.
The social-media company has long offered three versions of its API, or application programming interface, which allows outside developers to access large numbers of public tweets for activities such as research and customer service. Twitter plans to create more free and paid versions of those offerings as a way to entice more customers to use them, including a special set of APIs specifically for researchers, the company said Thursday in a statement.
An updated version of the “standard” API, which is free for all developers, was supposed to launch Thursday with new data from some of Twitter’s features, like poll results and threaded conversations. But the company delayed the rollout until next week after Wednesday’s security breach in which [cr]ackers took over many of the service’s most popular accounts, including those of former President Barack Obama and Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk, in a scam to gain Bitcoin.
Facebook and similar companies may also not use "SCCs" to transfer data as DPC must stop transfers under this instrument. Schrems: “We need US surveillance reform. The Court has clarified that there cannot be any transfer of data in violation of EU law.”
Max Schrems’ (chair of noyb.eu and party to the case) first reaction to the judgment:
Schrems: “I am very happy about the judgment. It seems the Court has followed us in all aspects. This is a total blow to the Irish DPC and Facebook. It is clear that the US will have to seriously change their surveillance laws, if US companies want to continue to play a major role on the EU market.”
In other words, the deal's principal flaws rest not so much with its member companies' practices, as with the U.S. government itself. Justices found that federal laws such as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act "cannot be regarded as limited to what is strictly necessary" and fail to meet "minimum safeguards" guaranteed by the EU.
"The requirements of US national security, public interest and law enforcement have primacy, thus condoning interference with the fundamental rights of persons whose data are transferred," the court wrote in a press release explaining the decision.
Europe’s top court has declared an arrangement under which companies transfer personal data from the European Union to the United States invalid due to concerns about US surveillance powers.
The ruling in the long-running battle between Facebook, Ireland’s Data Protection Commissioner, and the Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems found that the so-called Privacy Shield agreement does not offer sufficient protection of EU citizens’ personal data.
Today, in a landmark decision, the Court of Justice of the European Union struck down the EU-US Privacy Shield as it fails to protect people’s rights to privacy, data protection and access to remedy.
The decision comes as part of the ruling on the “Schrems II” case, which deals with larger EU-US data transfer questions, and led to the invalidation of this deal under which companies can self-certify to move data from the EU to the US.
Since the adoption of the Privacy Shield in 2016, Access Now has repeatedly called for the suspension of this deal due to its failures. Each year since, we have provided extensive comments to the European Commission on the annual review of the functioning of the deal. We have repeatedly highlighted legal and policy developments that called into question the validity of the arrangement, including enhanced US surveillance that show disregard for human rights globally.
The latest case, dubbed “Schrems II” – Case C-311/18 — was in fact brought by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner against both Facebook Ireland Limited and Maximillian Schrems. Facebook’s European headquarters is in Ireland making the Irish DPC the relevant authority.
There is a provision in EU law – so-called Article 4 – that allows individual data protection authorities to suspend data transfers to other countries if there is evidence of data protection rights being breached. Schrems says the onus was on the Irish DPC to do this, and it was negligent in failing to act. Hence the case by the Irish Data Protection Commission was referred to the ECJ via the Irish High Court.
[...]
Whatever the outcome, it may not be the final word on the matter of EU-U.S. data transfers and the Privacy Shield – a forthcoming case, T-738/16, La Quadrature Du Net and Others v Commission, will rule directly on the validity of Privacy Shield.
Therefore, as a potentially useful aide-mémoire, see as follows for a timeline of the key events (with links to relevant documents provided for any ardent individuals wishing to squeeze in some last-minute reading!) leading up to tomorrow's judgment – [...]
In the EU, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), introduced in 2018, seeks to increase individuals' control over their personal information. Companies that fail to comply are liable to fines of up to 4% of global annual turnover.
The failures of the atomic age were clear from the very start—as w. And the burden remains.
If you still follow the mainstream media, you’re probably part of the 38% of registered voters who knew something about the op-ed Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) published in the New York Times early in June, exhorting the president to use the Insurrection Act to “restore order to our streets.” This was in response to what he called “anarchy” but others saw as peaceful Black Lives Matter protests. And yet that op-ed was actually less incendiary than an earlier tweet of Cotton’s demanding “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters” or his Fox News call to send the 101st Airborne onto the streets of America.
"Proceeding with Purkey's execution now, despite the grave questions and factual findings regarding his mental competency, casts a shroud of constitutional doubt over the most irrevocable of injuries."
Tanks and ships can’t save us from our greatest dangers, so let’s pay for the things that can.
2020 has indisputably been a chaotic year. From the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent disruption of daily life, to the killing of George Floyd and the passionate resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement that followed, to the looming general election: there has been plenty occupying the minds and newsfeeds of Americans. But in between all the headline-grabbing stories, another movement has been gaining traction: the effort to end the United States’ enablement of Israeli apartheid and finally bring peace and justice to the Palestinian people.
"It is past time for the Party to reaffirm the position of Democratic voters and support human rights and self-determination for Palestinians."
The intelligence report, dated June 1, 2020, and marked “For Official Use Only,” was provided by a federal law enforcement official on condition of anonymity to avoid professional reprisal. The DHS did not respond to a request for comment.
The Boogaloo movement has been implicated in a string of horrific murders in the past several months, so it’s not surprising that federal agencies would be monitoring them. The report does not disclose which agencies produced the intelligence, but the Intelligence Community isn’t a typical organization—it includes within it top-tier intelligence bodies like the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI.
The USS Bonhomme Richard is a Wasp-_class amphibious assault ship. _Wasp_-class ships look like miniature aircraft carriers, and though aircraft launch from them, they’re primarily used to make amphibious assaults. A ship like the _USS Bonhomme Richard can come right up to shore and deploy Marines and ground vehicles.
The ship has a crew size of around 1,000, but only 160 Sailors were present when the fire started. According to the Navy, 36 Sailors and 23 civilians have been injured in the fire but no one has died. Most of the injuries are due to heat exhaustion and smoke inhalation. Most have recovered after brief stays in a local hospital. As of this writing, the Navy has said that 17 sailors and four civilians are still recovering from non-life threatening injuries related to the fire.
The Navy is hopeful that the ship is salvageable, but as the hours tick by and the fire continues, that’s looking like a distant possibility. The ship’s forward mast has collapsed and Navy officials are describing an inferno inside where temperatures are reaching as high as 1,000 degrees fahrenheit.
On September 18, 2017, the category-5 Hurricane Maria ravaged the shores of Dominica, € damaging or destroying 90 percent of its buildings and causing damage equivalent to 200 percent of the small Caribbean island nation’s GDP.
The coldest place on Earth, the South Pole, is mysteriously heating a lot faster than the rest of the planet.
As global temperatures rise, more intense humidity is likely as well which means more people will be exposed to more days with that hazardous combination of heat and moisture.
Prof Richard Betts of the UK Met Office has run computer models which suggest that the number of days with a WBGT above 32C are set to increase, depending on whether greenhouse gas emissions are cut.
And he spells out the risks for millions of people already having to work in the challenging combination of extreme heat and high humidity.
"We humans evolved to live in a particular range of temperatures, so it's clear that if we continue to cause temperatures to rise worldwide, sooner or later the hottest parts of the world could start to see conditions that are simply too hot for us."
Another study, published earlier this year, warned that heat stress could affect as many as 1.2bn people around the world by 2100, four times more than now.
"We need to face the full picture. We are facing an existential crisis, and this is a crisis that we can not buy, build, or invest our way out of."
"The judge basically rejected every attempt by the Trump administration to gut these common-sense waste prevention measures on behalf of their oil and gas industry cronies."
The global movement to end racism must turn its attention to the world’s most vulnerable cultures—the indigenous people of Planet Earth—who are still enduring the forces of colonial genocide.
Planetary heat is turning skeptics into climate change worrywarts with record temperatures galore!
The potential disaster would "directly affect millions of people in a country that is already enduring the world's largest humanitarian emergency."
However, green groups and renewable advocates also expressed concern that another new FERC decision will hamper clean energy expansion.
When you’re in the business of selling something whose value suddenly collapses, as U.S. oil producers were earlier this year in the global slowdown around the coronavirus pandemic, it’s helpful to have someone in power to cut your tax rate to near zero and press pause on your leases.
Although most Indian cities are not bicycle-friendly, there has been a sharp increase in recreational cycling during the pandemic as people try to beat cabin fever during lockdowns, get exercise, or avoid commutes on stuffed public transport.
Charlie Russell had a magical way with grizzly bears.€ In his presence, wild grizzlies seemed to shed their wariness of humans, some even napping beside him or leaving their offspring with him to tend. In the latest Grizzly Times podcast€ Dr. Gay Bradshaw, author of Talking with Bears: Conversations with Charlie Russell, reminded me why bears had so much faith in Charlie. He spoke bear, and I think he was part bear himself. Perhaps too he had a tad of Saint Francis of Assisi thrown in.
Certain patterns of thought seem typically human, especially when it comes to language learning. But are they really? A new study has shown that with the right training, even monkeys can learn grammar.
The world's population will increase from the current 7.8 billion to a peak of 9.7 billion by 2064, before dropping back to 8.8 billion by the century's end — 2 billion fewer than current UN predictions — a major study published on Wednesday said.
According to the researchers, by 2100, 183 of 195 countries — barring an influx of immigrants — will have fallen below the replacement threshold needed to maintain population levels. The populations of 23 countries will be half their current levels, with another 34 countries facing falls of 25 to 50%.
The United Nations in 2019 projected the world population could reach 10.9 billion by 2100.
A $360 billion stimulus program that offers disaster relief to small businesses has been hobbled by delays and confusion, leaving millions of applicants harmed by the coronavirus pandemic waiting months for grants and loans — if the funds ever came at all.
The Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, or EIDL (pronounced “idle”), was supposed to give small businesses grants and low-cost loans to help with the economic fallout from COVID-19. Though EIDL has gotten less attention than the $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program, 8 million small businesses have applied since it was opened to coronavirus-related applications in March. Unlike PPP, the EIDL loans come directly from the government and small businesses can use them for six months’ worth of general operating expenses, not just payroll.
The school districts for the cities of Los Angeles, San Diego, Houston, San Francisco and Atlanta have announced that all fall classes will be held online because of the current eruption of new COVID-19 cases across the South and West. Last night, however, Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp issued an order nullifying all locally declared mask mandates in the state, including in Atlanta.
Author of UNESCOs ‘Philosophy and World Problems’, Professor John McMurtry is questioned on the planetary life-system crisis by media critic Dr. Jeffery Klaehn.
"Shocker: Working people spend money when they have it."
The millions who will remain jobless after the extra $600 is cut off will have no choice but to drastically cut their spending, causing a sharp decline in their living standards, an increase in poverty, and completely unnecessary suffering.€
With youth unemployment and student debt skyrocketing, young people need free higher education.
When the unemployment rate goes up, a standard theme in the media is that workers don’t have the right skills. We saw that yesterday in the New York Times when an article told us “The Pandemic Has Accelerated Demands for a More Skilled Workforce.” It tells us how the growth of telecommuting in response to the pandemic has led to more demand for skilled labor and less demand for less-skilled workers.
President Donald Trump’s newly confirmed U.S. postmaster general ordered the endangered public service Monday to make major cost-cutting changes, which could slow mail delivery.
On June 11, Laos (Lao People’s Democratic Republic)—a country of 7 million in Southeast Asia—said it had temporarily prevailed over COVID-19. Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith said that his country had “gained an important victory in the first campaign against this vicious enemy.” The first cases of COVID-19 detected in Laos were registered on March 24; a total of 19 people had been infected with the virus by April 12, and—after 58 days of no new cases—the last patient was discharged on June 9. There were no new cases of COVID-19 in Laos since April 12 (93 days of no new cases as of July 14). There have been no deaths from COVID-19 in Laos.
While Sanders continues to be the preeminent and most effective progressive voice in the country, the future—now that his presidential hopes are over—is truly up to us.
"Trump and Gorka are spreading fear and division that leads to violence and harassment targeting Jews, Muslims, immigrants, Asian American Pacific Islanders, and all people of color."
Murderous forever wars and a pandemic and president from hell.
If Democrats' response to the reckoning against systemic racism is simply to nominate a black woman for vice president, no matter her politics, they will affirm the skepticism of young and progressive voters and rob this country of another opportunity to enact the sweeping changes we need.
You can bet plenty of eyebrows shot up in Republican Party headquarters and campaign offices when€ Bob Brown’s outstanding column€ announcing his “independence from the Republican Party” hit the Missoulian last week.
"This Court's order prevents thousands of otherwise eligible voters from participating in Florida's primary election simply because they are poor," said Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent.
"For so long we've been bailing out corporations. Covid has shown us that the most vulnerable people in our community, they too deserve to be bailed out."
"It's important to say this clearly and out loud: there is no crisis of Covid-19 litigation. It's made-up, it doesn't exist, it's a ploy to get businesses out of paying for compliance."
ALEC’s decision to align itself with a racist and divisive president marks a dramatic return to the organization’s earlier support for racist policies, and comes at a time when 90 percent of Black Americans disapprove of Trump’s response to the murder of George Floyd.
On April 3, Terrence K. Williams, a politically conservative actor and comedian who’s been praised by President Donald Trump, assured his nearly 3 million followers on Facebook that Democrats would light ballots on fire or throw them away. Wearing a red “Keep America Great” hat, Williams declared, “If you mail in your vote, your vote will be in Barack Obama’s fireplace.” The video has been viewed more than 350,000 times.
On May 8, Peggy Hubbard, a Navy veteran and police officer who this year sought the Republican nomination for a U.S. Senate seat from Illinois, warned on Facebook that the country was heading toward civil war. “Your democracy, your freedom is being stripped away from you, and if you allow that then everything this country stood for, fought for, bled for is all in vain.” The cause? California’s recent expansion of voting by mail: “The only way you will be able to vote in the upcoming election in November is by mail only,” Hubbard said. The video has attracted more than 209,000 views.
Vladimir Putin sees Russia largely through the eyes of sociological work conducted by the country’s Secret Service, the Federal Protective Service (FSO). The Kremlin bases its most important policy decisions on FSO surveys and analysis. Meduza special correspondents Andrey Pertsev and Maxim Solopov explain how this system works.€
"This is getting really dark. The White House and Senate GOP now want to blackmail states and localities into full reopening of schools."
I'm not concerned about myself but about the progressive community's capacity for critical thinking and respectful debate.
Sudanese Justice Minister Nasredeen Abdulbari revealed during a televised interview on 11 July, 2020 that the government is currently working to drop all discriminatory provisions in its constitution. Al-Bashir pushed for the Sharia law after he took power in 1989.
“We cancelled the Article 126 of the Sudanese Criminal Law and have ensured religious freedom and the equality in citizenship and rule of law,” he said.
In recent weeks, YouTube has censored several podcasts of Tamil-language WSWS articles uploaded to the Tamil WSWS Facebook page via YouTube. The administrators of the Tamil WSWS Facebook page challenged each of these acts of censorship, and each video has been made publicly available again, but after several days’ delay. Even though YouTube’s decision to re-post each video after censoring it makes clear that the Tamil WSWS is not violating YouTube’s Community Guidelines, this censorship is continuing.
The Moscow City Court has refused to void the arrest of former journalist and Roscosmos communications advisor Ivan Safronov, RIA Novosti reports.
In Birmingham, Plymouth, and Newcastle trades councils have voted to join the campaign to halt the extradition of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to the United States where he could face 175 years in jail.
Nationwide demonstrations, mobilized around the Black Lives Matter movement’s response to the killing of George Floyd, were held in all fifty states and in 5,000 cities. Rallies were held in public squares and larger cities saw their freeways and bridges blocked. Only a few cities ( Richmond, Va.; Philadelphia; Oakland, CA, and New York City ) experienced occupations of a public space. None of them were sustained for long, except Seattle, which went on for a month.
The Michigan Supreme Court said Thursday it is reviewing the circumstances of a case involving a 15-year-old girl who has been in detention since mid-May after a judge determined she violated her probation by not doing her online schoolwork during the pandemic.
That news came the same day attorneys for the teenager filed a motion in court seeking an emergency review and reconsideration of her case and more than 200 people formed a car caravan to protest on her behalf outside the Oakland County Courthouse.
Moscow police have begun arresting protesters for carrying out single-person demonstrations outside of the Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters on Lubyanka square. At least six people have been detained, including literary critic Anna Narinskaya.
Yes, people, I know. The concept of universal human rights is a time-bound, culture-bound idol, hammered out by the European bourgeoisie in a forge of hypocrisy. I will not bend the knee. But as a student of Marx, I also know that nothing useful ever comes into our world unless somebody invents it. Each day, in a purely secular spirit, I remember to thank the European bourgeoisie and Eleanor Roosevelt for having developed the idea behind the idol: the proposition that there ought to be enforceable limits to authority’s sway over every person, no matter where.
The inspiring rise of a new generation protesting against racial injustice is driving a new era of change in America, like the generation that emerged 60 years ago to build the civil rights movement of that time.
Law enforcement "gang databases" are a joke. And definitely not a funny one. Officers can convert innocent citizens into gang members just because they live in the same neighborhood or attend the same schools as gang members. Wearing the "wrong" clothes can get people "nominated" for extra law enforcement harassment. So can simply talking to gang members, like volunteers of outreach programs often do.
In Louisville, Kentucky, civil rights groups are calling on prosecutors to drop felony charges against 87 people who held a peaceful sit-in protest Tuesday outside the home of Attorney General Daniel Cameron. The demonstrators were demanding the arrest and prosecution of the officers who killed Breonna Taylor, a Black Louisville resident who was shot inside her own home in March. Among those arrested: the president of the Minneapolis NAACP, Houston Texans wide receiver Kenny Stills and Women’s March co-founder Linda Sarsour. If convicted on felony charges, they could face up to five years in prison. “What they’re attempting to do is intimidate protesters,” says Marc Lamont Hill. “They’re attempting to send a message that nobody should be out here investigating something that clearly needs investigation.”
In Louisville, Kentucky, civil rights groups are calling on prosecutors to drop felony charges against 87 people who held a peaceful sit-in protest Tuesday outside the home of Attorney General Daniel Cameron. The demonstrators were demanding the arrest and prosecution of the officers who killed Breonna Taylor, a Black Louisville resident who was shot inside her own home in March. Among those arrested: the president of the Minneapolis NAACP, Houston Texans wide receiver Kenny Stills and Women’s March co-founder Linda Sarsour. If convicted on felony charges, they could face up to five years in prison. “What they’re attempting to do is intimidate protesters,” says Marc Lamont Hill. “They’re attempting to send a message that nobody should be out here investigating something that clearly needs investigation.”
The last time the CBP delivered a Privacy Impact Assessment of its automated license plate readers, it informed Americans as far as 100 miles inland that there's really no privacy being impacted by the deployment of tech capable of capturing millions of plate images every year. If you don't want to be on the CBP ALPR radar (which is shared with the DEA and other law enforcement agencies), don't drive around in a properly licensed vehicle.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit civil rights organization that documents the activities of hate groups across the U.S., added a new entry to its database of extremists: White House senior adviser Stephen Miller.
When a country’s main union for journalists polices the Overton window, you are in a society well on the way to authoritarianism. For four months I have been excluded from the National Union of Journalists and, despite repeated requests, the NUJ even refuses to tell me the nature of the objection.
I’ve waited a week to write about this, a lifetime in our sports-hot-take universe. But I wanted my feelings as a Jewish writer to settle, in order to achieve some kind of clarity amid an altogether ugly situation.
On July 12, a hairdresser named Violeta Sharipkulova wrote on Twitter about her experience in an abusive relationship. The tweet touched off a firestorm of revelations on social media that has continued for three days now. Internet users responded to Sharipkulova’s account with their own stories about sexual, physical, and psychological abuse, most often naming current and former journalists in Moscow (for more details, click here). For a scholarly perspective on this new wave of #MeToo activism, Meduza asked three social scientists about what sets the latest movement apart.
“On day one, we will end the prosecution of low-level drug offenses here in Travis County,” announced district attorney candidate José Garza, at a February forum on criminal justice reform in Austin. “We will end the prosecution of possession and sale offenses of a gram or less.”
Iranian officials appear to have only one solution for all problems from drug trafficking to social protests: Execution. The Islamic Republic has been using execution as a solution and a preventive measure.
All of these disabilities affect interactions with digital products and services in different ways. People need to consider accessibility any time they communicate information digitally. Accessibility is not just a concern for websites, apps, and social media. It needs to be front and center for all digital products, whether they are PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, or even virtual events. For virtual meetings and webcasts, it is important to choose a platform that supports accessibility for people that have mobility, vision, hearing, and cognitive disabilities.
The FBI is concerned that the coordinated attack and the vulnerabilities it exposed in Twitter’s systems may pose serious security risks, due to the widespread compromising of sensitive accounts, including those of President Barack Obama and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden. President Donald Trump’s account was not affected, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany tells the WSJ, but it’s unclear if Trump’s account has special protections. Twitter tells The Verge it is in communication with the FBI regarding its investigation and intends to fully cooperate.
The city discovered that the windshield from the Vallejo Police vehicle involved in the June 2 killing of Monterrosa was destroyed and the unmarked vehicle placed back into service "without prior consultation with the Police Chief or City Attorney's Office."
Officials have said they have asked the FBI or another agency to take over the investigation into the officer-involved shooting and that destruction of evidence now form part of the criminal inquiry.
An attorney for Sean Monterrosa's family said examining the windshield was necessary for an accurate scene recreation in his June 2 death in the city of Vallejo.
White supremacy culture is alive, in excellent shape, and is the prevailing stance in international aid and development. And it’s more resilient than the patriarchy. Here’s how you can tell.
After a very public outing of allegations of racism, the fomenting of a toxic work culture, and the mistreatment of Black women staff at Women Deliver hit Twitter, CEO Katja Iversen made what appeared to be a heartfelt apology: “I was and am shaken, heartbroken, and tremendously angry with myself. I am in charge of this organisation, and I apologise and take full responsibility for these experiences and for my role in it.”
Women Deliver is a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for gender equality and women’s health; its work “drives investment – political, programmatic and financial”, according to its website. Iversen “offered” to take a “leave of absence” until a third-party investigation commissioned by the NGO’s board was complete. She did not resign. The board has, however, accepted her leave offer, appointed an interim CEO, and announced other steps. Iversen has been accorded all the rights and privileges of someone “accused” but not really viewed as culpable – despite her mea culpa. (In case you were wondering, Iversen – the Danish-born CEO, who rose by way of media and communications work at several UN agencies – is not a Black woman.)
We've talked a lot about how while fifth-generation (5G) wireless is a good thing (in that faster, more reliable networks are always good), it's been comically over-hyped by cellular carriers that have taken every opportunity to misrepresent what the technology is capable of, the kind of real world speeds users will actually see, and where the technology is actually available.
When corporations threaten to economically punish a region for raising taxes or tightening regulation, capitulation leads to “nothing but a race to the bottom for the working class in cities around the country and around the world.” Sawant views the Fight for $15 movement as an illustration of the principle in reverse.
Twitter is continuing to look into the incident, and the FBI has launched its own investigation, so there’s sure to be more news about the unprecedented attack on the social media platform. Follow along with all of the latest updates in our StoryStream below.
The accounts were taken over using an internal tool at Twitter, according to the sources, as well as screenshots of the tool obtained by Motherboard. One of the screenshots shows the panel and the account of Binance; Binance is one of the accounts that [attackers] took over today. According to screenshots seen by Motherboard, at least some of the accounts appear to have been compromised by changing the email address associated with them using the tool.
In all, four sources close to or inside the underground [cr]acking community provided Motherboard with screenshots of the user tool. Two sources said the Twitter panel was also used to change ownership of some so-called OG accounts—accounts that have a handle consisting of only one or two characters—as well as facilitating the tweeting of the cryptocurrency scams from the high profile accounts.
Twitter has been deleting some screenshots of the panel and has suspended users who have tweeted them, claiming that the tweets violate its rules.
Mighty Mug owns U.S. Patent 8,028,850 — a self-anchoring mug (suction). Back in 2017, the company petitioned the ITC to investigate competing imports and the ITC eventually issued a General Exclusion Order (GEO) “barring importation of infringing goods by any party.” The ITC’s preferred practice is to issue “limited exclusion orders” only against the parties actually investigated. However, here the agency found a pattern of violations and difficulty in identifying the source of infringing products.
[...]
Standing to Appeal: Mayborn is actually still importing its allegedly infringing product. Apparently, Customs & Border Patrol is waiting for additional information from the patentee before moving forward with enforcing the exclusion order. Because of continued imports, the ITC challenged Mayborn’s standing to bring the appeal to the Federal Circuit.
On appeal, the Federal Circuit found sufficient injury-in-fact to allow the appeal to move forward. “Mayborn imports products that potentially infringe the ’850 patent and therefore violate the GEO. . . . [And] CBP may at any moment determine that Mayborn’s products violate the GEO and halt their importation. €§ 1337(d)(1).” Mayborn has also alleged lost-sales and business relationships due to the exclusion order (Mighty Mug sent letters to Target + Amazon). Collectively this was enough injury to allow the appeal to move forward under the Constitutional standing requirement.
ShoppersChoice moved that the claim was invalid under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101, and the District Court granted this judgment on the pleadings. ECT appealed.
In Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int'l, the Supreme Court set forth a two-part test to determine whether claims are directed to patent-eligible subject matter under ۤ 101. One must first decide whether the claim at hand involves a judicially-excluded law of nature, a natural phenomenon, or an abstract idea. If so, then one must further decide whether any element or combination of elements in the claim is sufficient to ensure that the claim amounts to significantly more than the judicial exclusion. But elements or combinations of elements that are well-understood, routine, and conventional will not lift the claim over the ۤ 101 hurdle. While this inquiry is generally carried out as a matter of law, factual issues can come into play when determining whether something is well-understood, routine, and conventional.
Notably, procedure for the proper application of this test with the abstract idea exception has been inconsistently defined and is confusing in practice. A potentially more workable definition of patent eligibility is that a claim is directed to an abstract idea if all of its elements are either non-specific, address a non-technical problem, or known in the art. Thus, a claim is more likely to survive a ۤ 101 challenge if it has three qualities: specificity, a technical problem that it solves, and some degree of novelty.
Applying part one of Alice, the Court rapidly determined that the claim is directed to the abstract idea of "providing advance notification of the pickup or delivery of a mobile thing." Particularly, the Court agreed with the District Court judge that "business practices designed to advise customers of the status of delivery of their goods have existed at least for several decades, if not longer." And as we know from Alice, claims to longstanding business practices are given a dim view under ۤ 101.
Platforms such as YouTube and Uploaded are not directly liable for the copyright-infringing uploads of their users. That's according to an opinion from Advocate General Saugmandsgaard ÃËe published by the EU Court of Justice today. Importantly, however, the advice relates only to current EU law, which will change next year with a new liability regime under Article 17.
It's no secret that legal options are key in decreasing a country's piracy rates. This is confirmed by a new academic study, which finds that Netflix’s failure to launch in Indonesia in 2016 lead to a 20% increase in piracy-related searches compared to other countries. This boost doesn't only apply to Netflix exclusives.
YouTube rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com are requesting a full rehearing of the jurisdiction matter, which relates to the ongoing piracy lawsuit filed by several major record labels. The Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit concluded that the district court dismissed the case in error but the operator of the two sites disagrees and warns of a dangerous precedent.
