If you’re into open-source computing and would like to buy a Raspberry Pi-based laptop that also doubles as a STEM education platform, you might want to take a look at CrowPi2 device that will ship this month.
CrowPi2 follows on the success of the first-generation CrowPi device and promises a more powerful education computer based on the next-generation Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with up to 8GB RAM.
Designed as an all-in-one device for everyday computing and learning about STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education, the CrowPi2 comes with no less than 72 course resources, more than 22 different onboard sensors and modules, multiple open-source games, over 20 projects show, and an independently developed software that makes it easier to learn to code in Python, Scratch, AI, and Minecraft.
DistroTest is a web service that allows you to test Linux and Unix operating systems online for free, without having to install them locally. You can try 300+ Linux and Unix operating systems online without having to install them locally. Just visit the website, choose the Linux/Unix distro of your choice and run it!
The creators of DistroTest have hosted this web service on Debian using Qemu. There is no restrictions to use the distros listed here. You can use all functions of the system as the way you do in your local system.
I’d like to say something interesting about the number 17, it’s a prime number, the last year you are a minor in the United States, perhaps other places… Team 17 was a great video game house in the 90s that made the game Worms, that was cool. Played that quite a lot some years back…
The Korn shell. shasum -a256=2e667ae8289eb0d704b5953d95d24b9036bf52ad72b33f30669913f35b063ede
Primarily driven currently by Arm big.LITTLE use-cases like high-end smartphones where you may be running on battery and not want to boost the CPU performance too high for real-time (RT) tasks, Linux 5.9 is adding new capabilities around setting the default boost value.
Contributed by Arm, Linux 5.9's sched/uclamp code is setting the capability to control the RT default boost value. This can be used for lowering the default boost value to in turn conserve energy consumption of real-time tasks. It's assumed that vendors will tune this value for the best performance/power for RT tasks depending upon the device and potentially differ depending upon the AC/battery power source.
We are pleased to announce that the You, Me, and IoT Microconference has been accepted into the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference!
As everyday devices start to become more connected to the internet, the infrastructure around it constantly needs to be developed. The Internet of Things (IoT) in the Linux ecosystem is looking brighter every day. The development rate of the Zephyr RTOS in particular is accelerating dramatically and we are now up to 2 commits per hour[1]! LoRa WAN made it into Zephyr release 2.2 as well.
Samsung engineers responsible for the modern exFAT file-system driver for Linux have updated the adjoining "exfatprogs" user-space programs around this file-system. Notable to exfatprogs-1.0.4 is much faster "fsck" file-system checking support.
Namjae Jeon of Samsung announced the 1.0.4 exfatprogs release today and noted that "the performance of fsck have been much improved". This now leads to the FSCK performance being close to Windows' own FSCK performance and much better than the former exfat-fuse FSCK checking. Both exfatprogs and the Windows fsck take around 11 seconds while the former exfat-fuse FSCK implementation takes more than one minute to complete in tests on microSDXC storage.
The MoltenVK update against the Vulkan SDK 1.2.148 now allows tvOS platform support alongside iOS and macOS. Apple's tvOS is the operating system found on the Apple TV hardware over the past decade. Apple tvOS is in turn derived from iOS. For the past several years, tvOS has offered App Store integration for third-party software while now these apps can decide to make use of Vulkan.
This is first release of wayland-utils which only contains (for now) wayland-info, a utility for displaying information about the Wayland protocols supported by a Wayland compositor.
wayland-info is basically a standalone version of weston-info as found in weston repository.
In addition to the Weston 9.0 Alpha compositor, this week also brought Wayland-Utils 1.0 as the inaugural release for this collection of Wayland utilities/tools.
Wayland-Utils was started in July after the wayland-info tool was spun out of Weston code for offering a generic Wayland tool. The wayland-info program prints various Wayland protocol details and other compositor-agnostic information. Previously there was the weston-info utility that has now been superseded by the more generic wayland-info tool and also as a standalone package separate from Weston.
I’ve talked in the past about XFB, and I’ve talked about queries, but I’ve never spent much time talking about XFB queries.
That’s going to change.
XFB is not great, and queries aren’t something I’m too fond of at this point after rewriting the handling so many times, but it was only the other day, while handling streams for XFB3/ARB_gpu_shader5 (humblebrag) that I realized I had been in the infant area of the playground until this moment.
If you have ever used two-factor authentication before, then you have probably heard of tools like Google Authenticator. To make use of many of these services, you’ll have to have your phone near you. Luckily, there are desktop authenticator apps that can provide you with the secret key you need to log in to your account. Below are the best authenticator apps for the Linux desktop.
[...]
Yubico works with a hardware security token known as the Yubikey. You can store your credentials on this as opposed to on your device. This hardware security token can even be further secured by choosing to unlock it with either FaceID or TouchID.
With Yubico, you will also be able to easily transition between devices, even after upgrading. The Yubico app lets you generate multiple secrets across devices, making it simple for you to switch.
I have to admit that the security offered by a physical token like the Yubikey is great. However, users must bear in mind that they must have the key with them if they wish to use two-factor authentication. I know you may argue and say this is no better than having to carry a phone with you. However, you can’t put your phone on a keychain! Additionally, it’s tough to crack a hardware token. Someone would have to steal it from you if they wanted to access your data. Even after doing that, they still won’t know any of your passwords or anything else of the sort.
With Yubico Authenticator, you first have to insert your key before you can add services to the app. After inserting your key, you can then add a security token from a service you want to enable two-factor authentication for. This is an app more for a power user due to the steps that must be taken to get it set up.
Here’s a recap for the week in the form of weekly roundup, curated for you from the Linux and opensource world on application updates, new releases, distribution updates, major news, and upcoming trends.
Prying eyes have always threatened user privacy. Whether it is your average computer user or a highly skilled IT professional, no one wants their activities to be viewed and logged. Incognito browsing is a popular user preference. Solutions like Tor have helped with that a lot, but what if you want all your traffic going through a Tor tunnel? ParrotSec has provided the answer to the question in the form of a program called Anonsurf – “Dance like no one’s watching.”
Anonsurf is a script made by the development team at ParrotSec, which included Lorenzo Faletra (@palinuro), Lisetta Ferrero (@sheireen) and Francesco Bonanno (@mibofra), and that is maintained by Nong Hoang Tu (@dmknght). This script was made to provide users with system-wide anonymization. In simpler words, anything you do while you have Anonsurf started on your system would be nearly untraceable. Anonsurf not only routes all your traffic through Tor, but it also lets you start i2p services and clear any traces left on the user disk. Anonsurf also kills away all dangerous applications by virtue of the Pandora bomb, so you do not need to worry about having a Tor browser and other scripts running to hide your system. The best part is that all this is contained in a simple start/stop function.
Anonsurf uses Tor IPTables for the configuration of IP packet filter rules. While Tor provides a browser solution, Anonsurf is capable of much more.
If the above paragraphs do not make sense to you yet, do not panic. It is very easy to use Anonsurf and we are here to guide you through to anonymity.
The Wine development release 5.14 is now available.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - More restructuration of the console support. - Initial version of the Webdings font. - Beginnings of PE conversion of the MSVCRT libraries. - Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/5.x/wine-5.14.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/5.x/wine-5.14.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
Wine 5.14 debuted late on Friday night as the newest bi-weekly development release with being less than a half-year to go now until the debut of Wine 6.0 stable.
The Wine team today announced the released of Wine 5.14, the next development release on the long road to Wine 6.0.
If you're curious on what Wine is: it's the constantly improving compatibility layer that allows the running of Windows-only applications and games on Linux and other operating systems. It's one of the driving forces behind Steam Play Proton. Helping you to get whatever you need done on Linux, or perhaps so you don't have to give up that favourite game.
Looks like Valve did a bit of a woopsie. With the recent updates to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive they implemented a new anti-cheat tool with Trusted Mode but it appears at some point they forgot to enable it.
What is Trusted Mode? It's supposed to be the new default for all CS:GO players, which prevents a bunch of outside applications from interfering with it and hopefully prevent more cheating. It's only a small barrier by itself, just another in the list of ways Valve are trying to clean up CS:GO online play.
Linux game porter Ethan Lee who also develops FNA-XNA today released FAudio 20.08 as the open-source XAudio re-implementation.
FAudio as the XAudio(2)/X3DAudio/XAPO/XACT3 open-source re-implementation under the FNA-XNA project continues getting in better shape in helping bring Windows games built off the XNA run-time running on Linux and similar platforms. With FAudio 20.08 one of the big changes is the FFmpeg back-end has been replaced by GStreamer for handling the WMA audio decoding.
The Unigine Engine appears to be having great success in the engineering and simulation space more so than for the competitive game engine space, but in any case Unigine 2.12 is now out with this visually stunning engine delivering even more life-like visuals while continuing to be Linux-friendly.
Unigine 2.12 rolls out with improvements to its particle system, a roughly two fold physics performance optimization, cloud and atmosphere improvements, new content add-ons, animation improvements, specular anti-aliasing, and numerous other engine improvements.
Now you’ve got full control over various particles parameters, enabling you to control their values during the whole lifetime of your particles. The changes affected the Particle System object (ObjectParticles) itself along with the particles_base material. We’ve added a new visual Curve Editor to simplify adjustment of parameter’s behavior making the process more intuitive and flexible.
A window manager is software that manages the windows that applications bring up. For example, when you start an application, there will be a window manager running in the background, responsible for the placement and appearance of windows.
It is important not to confuse a window manager with a desktop environment. A desktop environment typically consists of icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. They provide a collection of libraries and applications made to operate cohesively together. A desktop environment contains its own window manager.
We are pleased to announce the launch of Nitrux 1.3.1. This new version brings together the latest software updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and ready-to-use hardware support.
Nitrux 1.3.1 is available for immediate download.
As expected, Nitrux 1.3.1 is an updated media of the distribution that ships with the latest and greatest software. It includes the recently released KDE Plasma 5.19.4 desktop environment, along with the KDE Applications 20.04.03 and KDE Frameworks 5.72.0 open-source software suites.
If you’re a fan of the KDE Plasma desktop environment, these components mentioned above are the only reason you should download the latest Nitrux release and install it on your personal computer. If you already have Nitrux installed, congratulations, you’re already running the newest KDE technologies.
Also updated in the Nitrux 1.3.1 is the Linux kernel, which means better support for newer hardware, though I was expecting to see Nitrux already using the Linux 5.7 kernel series by now, but there must be a reason the developers are still sticking with Linux kernel 5.6.
Ahead of the current Nitrux 1.3.0, its founder Uri Herrera has released a new point version — Nitrux 1.3.1. The latest v1.3.1 comes with several software updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and new hardware support.
Nitrux is one of the unique Linux distributions not only because of its beautiful KDE Plasma desktop but also for using a portable universal application format, AppImage, in addition to a package manager like APT and DPKG. So, let’s see what more Nitrux 1.3.1 offers.
New Plasma5 packages for Slackware-current are ready for download & installation. I skipped July (holiday season) and so here is KDE-5_20.08 aka my August 2020 release. Be sure to read the upgrade instructions very carefully to prevent breakage, because starting with my June batch the goal is to remove Slackware’s ConsoleKit2 and replace it with elogind!.
It would not harm if you (re-)read my previous blog article about Plasma5, “Replacing ConsoleKit2 with elogind – first steps“. It has a lot more detail about the reasons for this move as well as guidance on using the Wayland Window Manager (as a test) instead of regular X.Org. Note that Wayland sessions still need a lot of maturing and X.Org will remain Slackware’s default choice.
A repeat from that article: with elogind as the session/seat manager instead of ConsoleKit2, you’ll see some new behaviour. A quite obvious change: if you run ‘startx’ or ‘startkwayland’ at the console, you won’t see a VT (virtual terminal) switch. In the past, your console TTY would usually be tty1 but your graphical session would start on tty7 and you would automatically be switched from tty1 to tty7. This is no longer true – the graphical session will re-use your console TTY.
I have to confess: I don't give KDE a fair shake. It's not because I don't believe it to be a strong take on the Linux desktop, it's just that I prefer a much more minimal desktop. Also, I was never a big fan of the old taskbar/start menu/system tray combo. I leaned more toward the GNOME way of thinking and doing things.
Recently, a reader called me out on my lack of KDE coverage, so I thought it was time to offer up my take on where KDE Plasma stands, and who might be best suited to use this open source desktop. Comparing Plasma to my usual GNOME desktop is really quite challenging, given these two desktops are night and day. It's like comparing the works of Clive Barker to that of William Gibson--they're both incredibly good at what they do, they're using the same tools to tell stories, but in very different genres.
This week we got a big improvement in how the Task Manager handles grouped tasks: by default, it activates the last-used task and then cycles through other tasks if you continue to click on it. There are also some more welcome improvements for the “Get New [Thing]” system, as well as a nice smallering of miscellany. Take a look:
New Features
MP4 video files now show the embedded cover art image when it’s available and previews are enabled (Heiko Schaefer, Dolphin 20.12.0)
The Task Manager now defaults to cycling through child tasks when clicking on a grouped task, and always display the most-recently-used one when switching to a task from an app that’s different from the current one. All of this may sound awfully complicated, but hopefully it’s exactly what you wanted it to do all along.
Even with everything going on in the world around the coronavirus and warm summer temperatures, KDE developers continue making improvements on their desktop stack, including around Wayland support.
This past week in the KDE world wasn't one of the busiest, but they still are making steadfast work on Plasma 5.20.
The last bi-monthly report about the development of KDE Itinerary ended with a teaser for indoor map support for train stations and airports. This also dominated the work in the past weeks, and has made considerable progress so that the first features based on that have been integrated.
In the eighth week of GSoC, I continued on init and update calls to skymapcompsite and subsequent classes derived from skycomponent.
I recently setup a GNOME development environment (after about seven years!). That meant starting from scratch since my old notes and scripts were completely useless.
My goal for this setup was once again to have the bare minimum jhbuild modules on top of a solid base system provided by my distro. The Linux desktop stack has changed a bit, specially around activation, dbus, and systemd, so I was a bit lost on how to do things properly.
I’ve been working with Karen Sandler over the past few months on the first draft of the Declaration of Digital Autonomy. Feedback welcome, please be constructive. It’s a pretty big deal for me, and feels like the culmination of a lifetime of experiences and the start of something new.
We talked about it at GUADEC and HOPE. We don’t have any other talks scheduled yet, but are available for events, meetups, dinner parties, and b’nai mitzvahs.
Customization plays a big part when it comes to Linux. Users around the world are using different kind of distribution and most of them really like to make their desktop look just amazing. In this monthly article, you will get to know about the new trending themes for Linux.
So without further let’s get down to the business.
Note: All the themes are GTK based so they shall apply on most of the desktop environments.
Since the last update, we have progressed a lot in achieving a significant milestone; that is handling multiple rows in our widget. For me working through this implementation involved understanding the GtkGrid implementation, then developing an idea around it to add the adaptive factor to our brand new widget.
One issue that has been lingering for a while was to find a way for accepting column weights through XML layouts.
The issue persists in the latest code, but for the time being, this is our workaround: currently, we have a weight property for every child widget (which defaults to 0) and then the column’s weight is derived from the widgets belonging to that column. So if widgets belonging to the same column have different weights defined in XML (or assigned programmatically), its unpredictable what weight the column will end up having. So, it is to be taken care that every widget belonging to the same column don’t have different weights.
That does not sound good, but thankfully, Adrien recently came up with a suggestion of keeping a property which accepts comma-separated values. We will be implementing this in the coming days. This will remove the unpredictable weight issue with our current approach (Yay!).
Linux kernel 5.4.0-42-generic Add speedtest for commandline Add mpg123, sometimes it is needed for the TTS project WPS Office 2019 For Linux(11.1.0.9615) Speed up droidcam Lightworks 2020.1(122068) Remove.bg (1.3.0-1)
Manjaro or Arch Linux? If Manjaro is based on Arch, how come is it different from Arch? Read how Arch and Manjaro are different in this comparison article.
Few weeks after becoming available for macOS, iOS, and Android, the IBM Fully Homomorphic Encryption Toolkit can be now installed on various Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS for x86 platforms, and Ubuntu for IBM's own Z architecture.
IBM's Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) Toolkit aims to make it easier for developers to use FHE in their solutions. According to IBM, FHE can have a dramatic impact on data security and privacy in highly regulated industries by enabling computing directly on encrypted data. FHE makes away with a major debility of traditional encrypted systems, where data must be decrypted before being processed and becomes thus vulnerable to theft or tampering.
Besides the code itself to Intel's oneAPI being open-source, the company is being surprisingly open about its support even for areas of usage outside of x86_64 CPUs.
In addition to the likes of getting Intel oneAPI / Data Parallel C++ on NVIDIA GPUs and other "open" efforts around APIs, they have shown willingness to see different oneAPI components working on non-x86_64 architectures.
Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora this week. The mass rebuild is underway.
The Debian project is pleased to announce the fifth update of its stable distribution Debian 10 (codename "buster"). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.
This point release also addresses Debian Security Advisory: DSA-4735-1 grub2 -- security update which covers multiple CVE issues regarding the GRUB2 UEFI SecureBoot 'BootHole' vulnerability.
Please note that the point release does not constitute a new version of Debian 10 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away old "buster" media. After installation, packages can be upgraded to the current versions using an up-to-date Debian mirror.
Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won't have to update many packages, and most such updates are included in the point release.
New installation images will be available soon at the regular locations.
We've more or less finished testing on the Debian install images. Now moving on to the debian-live images. Bugs found and being triaged live as I type. Lots of typing and noises in the background of the video conference. Now at about 12-14 hours in on this for some of the participants. Lots of good work still going on, as ever.
I was assigned 20 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative, but only worked 5 hours this month and returned the remainder to the pool.
Now that Debian 9 'stretch' has entered LTS, the stretch-backports suite will be closed and no longer updated. However, some stretch users rely on the newer kernel version provided there. I prepared to add Linux 4.19 to the stretch-security suite, alongside the standard package of Linux 4.9. I also prepared to update the firmware-nonfree package so that firmware needed by drivers in Linux 4.19 will also be available in stretch's non-free section. Both these updates will be based on the packages in stretch-backports, but needed some changes to avoid conflicts or regressions for users that continue using Linux 4.9 or older non-Debian kernel versions. I will upload these after the Debian 10 'buster' point release.
As part of being on the board of directors of the Open Source Initiative and Software in the Public Interest I attended their respective monthly meetings and participated in various licensing and other discussions occurring on the internet, as well as the usual internal discussions regarding logistics and policy etc. This month, it was SPI's Annual General Meeting and the OSI has been running a number of remote strategy sessions for the board.
Here are my uploads for the month of July, which is just a part of my free software activities, I’ll try to catch up on the rest in upcoming posts. I haven’t indulged in online conferences much over the last few months, but this month I attended the virtual editions of Guadec 2020 and HOPE 2020. HOPE isn’t something I knew about before and I enjoyed it a lot, you can find their videos on archive.org.
This month I didn't have any particular focus. I just worked on issues in my info bubble.
This was my 17th month of contributing to Debian. I became a DM in late March last year and a DD last Christmas! \o/
Well, this month I didn’t do a lot of Debian stuff, like I usually do, however, I did a lot of things related to Debian (indirectly via GSoC)!
This tshirt is 17 years old and from DebConf3. I should probably wash it at 60 celcius for once...
DebConf3 was my first DebConf and took place in Oslo, Norway, in 2003. I was very happy to be invited, like any Debian contributor at that time, and that Debian would provide food and accomodation for everyone. Accomodation was sleeping on the floor in some classrooms of an empty school and I remember having tasted grasshoppers provided by a friendly Gunnar Wolf there, standing in line on the first day with the SSH maintainer (OMG!1 (and it wasn't Colin back then!)) and meeting the one Debian person I had actually worked with before: Thomas Lange or MrFAI. In Oslo I also was exposed to Skolelinux / Debian Edu for the first time, saw a certain presentation from the FTP masters and also noticed some people recording the talks, though as I learned later these videos were never released to the public. And there was this fiveteen year old called Toresbe, who powered on the PDP's which were double his age. And then actually made use of them. And and and.
The 7th monthly report of 2020 of the Sparky project:
● Linux kernel updated up to version 5.7.11 & 5.8-rc7 ● added new desktop: NsCDE ● added to repo: Shutter-Encoder, Lite Editor, Sparky APTus AppCenter ● Sparky 5.12 Nibiru of the stable line released ● riot-desktop package changed its name to element-desktop
In June, Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana” came in three editions: Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce, along with many new features. Subsequently, it received a lot of feedback, including both good and bad.
You can check out our review of Linux Mint 20 with features scoring good ratings. Nonetheless, according to the latest popularity statistics revealed in the July month blog, Linux Mint 19.3 “Tricia” is currently the most popular point release compared to any other Mint version.
As you can see in the graph, more than 50% of Linux Mint users use Linux Mint 19.x series. This is even more than combining both the old Mint 18.x and the brand new Mint 20, which represents about 20% of the user base.
Xilinx Zynq-7010/-7020 powered iotSDR board by EmbedINN enables the development of IoT gateways with support for LoRa, SigFox, WeightLess, Bluetooth, BLE, 802.15.4, ZigBee, as well as custom IoT protocols.
The board also supports GPS, Galileo, Beidou, and GLONASS navigation systems thanks to a Maxim Integrated MAX2769 GNSS chip.
We are pleased to announce that the RISC-V Microconference has been accepted into the 2020 Linux Plumbers Conference!
The RISC-V ecosystem is gaining momentum at such an astounding speed that it wouldn’t be unfair to compare it to the early days of the Linux ecosystem’s growth. There are a plethora of Linux kernel features that have been added to RISC-V and many more are waiting to be reviewed in the mailing list. Some of them resulted from direct discussions during last year’s RISC-V microconference. For example, RISC-V has a standard boot process along with a well-defined supervisor binary specification (SBI) and cpu hotplug feature. KVM support is very close to being merged and just waiting for official ratification of the H extension. NoMMU support for Linux kernel has already been merged.
While many of us take playing tunes for granted, whether via MP3s, CDs, or streaming services, for others — such as many that are very young or old — actually figuring out the interface can be a challenge. To make it easier for the elderly (and children) to enjoy music, Ananords and his girlfriend created the Juuke box.
The Juuke features an RC522 RFID reader to trigger specific songs stored on an SD card via a DFPlayer Mini, using a stereo jack and external powered speakers. The device is controlled by an Arduino Uno, and includes a volume potentiometer along with two light-up buttons — red to play/pause tracks, green for random playback.
Hackathons are events where developers, product managers, designers, and others come together to tackle problems over a short time period. They have become increasingly popular over the last 15 years after OpenBSD ran the first hackathon in June 1999.
These events provide several benefits—greater engagement across the community, innovation and new ideas, awareness for the organizers, and networking opportunities for participants.
Mattermost, an open source messaging platform for DevOps teams, has also run and participated in several hackathons to engage with the open source community. So far, in 2020, we participated in a hackathon to overcome the challenges of COVID-19 and ran a hackfest to create open source chatbots for developer workflows. Both had thousands of participants and were run completely virtually.
We want to extend our deep appreciation to everyone who answered, supported, and championed the 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge. From building solutions to take on the impacts of climate change, to swiftly responding to the surge of the COVID-19 pandemic, we applaud you for your unwavering commitment to fighting back against these difficult times. This year has been unprecedented on many levels, but what we have seen from the Call for Code community is that when the chips are down, your innovation and problem-solving prowess rises up.
As of July 31, submissions for the 2020 Call for Code Global Challenge are closed, but another chapter awaits — and it needs your help. Whether you are looking to take on COVID-19, climate change, natural disasters, or other pressing social issues, your code has a vital role to play. Brush up on your cloud skills while making a real difference and get involved with Call for Code open source projects supported by The Linux Foundation. Through your contributions, you could be recognized as a community champion. Visit Call for Code on Monday, August 3, and we’ll have details for you on how you can get involved and start making an impact in these projects. I would also encourage you to continue development on your own projects and to share your progress and any help needed in the Slack channel. Your contributions can have global impact well beyond the lifecycle of a single challenge.
Malloc is a built-in function declared in the header file . Malloc is the short name for ‘memory allocation’ and is used to dynamically allocate a single large block of contiguous memory according to the size specified. There are two types of memory allocation static and dynamic. Static memory allocation is done at compilation time, and it doesn’t change at runtime. Dynamic memory allocation is allocating memory at runtime for this; we use malloc. Now the point is where from this memory is coming, so all dynamic requirements in C are fulfilled from the heap memory.
A pipe is a medium for communication between processes. One process writes data to the pipe, and another process reads the data from the pipe. In this article, we will see how the pipe() function is used to implement the concept using C language.
But we don’t live an ideal world - your request needs to reach the data store, which then needs to process the request and finally send back a response to you. All these actions take time and are not instantaneous: [...]
Before reading this, you should watch this video where Bryan Cantrill explains a value-conflict between Joyent and Node.js, I believe we have a similar problem.
Python is one of the most popular and widely known programming languages that has replaced many programming languages in the industry. It is one of the most loved programming languages that data science professionals use more because it is an ocean of libraries.
Python is known as the beginner’s level programming language because of its simplicity and easiness, its programming syntax is simple to learn and is of high level compared to C, Java, and C++.
For more accurate algorithms and coding, Analytics Insight compiles the top 10 Python libraries, here is the list-
See https://towardsdatascience.com/why-python-is-not-the-programming-language-of-the-future-30ddc5339b66.
This is an interesting article with some important points. And. It has some points that I disagree with.
Speed. This is a narrow perspective. numpy and pandas are fast, dask is fast. A great many Python ecosystem packages are fast. This complaint seems to be unsupported by evidence.
Dynamic Scoping Rules. This actually isn't the problem. The problem is something about not being able to change containing scopes. First, I'm not sure changing nesting scopes is of any value at all. Second, the complaint ignores the global and nonlocal statements. The vague "leads to a lot of confusion" seems unsupported by any evidence.
Lambdas. The distinction between expressions and statements isn't really a distinction in Python in general, only in the bodies of lambdas. I'm not sure what the real problem is, since a lambda with statements seems like a syntactic nightmare better solved with an ordinary, named function.
Whitespace. Sigh. I've worked with many people who get the whitespace right but the {}'s wrong in C++. The code looks great but doesn't work. Python gets it right. The code looks great and works.
The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) is a language and text processing module for Python. NLTK can analyze, process, and tokenize text available in many different languages using its built-in library of corpora and large pool of lexical data. Python is one of the most popular programming languages used in data science and language processing, mainly due to the versatility of the language and the availability of useful modules like NLTK. This article will explain how to extract sentences from text paragraphs using NLTK. The code in this guide has been tested with Python 3.8.2 and NLTK 3.4.5 on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
I’m an escape room enthusiast, some may say addict, and for the past few months I’ve been missing it. A friend of mine, a true addict with over 500 rooms to his name, started organizing online competitions. After playing a few of the online games, I thought, “I want to build my own.”
So for that past couple of months I’ve been writing an online escape game — which you could say is a web puzzle game, but with the exciting flare of escape! It’s suitably called “Prototype”. I assumed that name would let me get away with some rough edges. This will be an evolving project, but the first installment is a success.
I’m proud of my game. I want to tell you how I made it.
This month we kept refining existing features to improve the user experience, smooth workflows and empower users.
This post will illustrate two things: the amount of time astronauts have spent on the moon, and how to process dates and times in Python.
I was curious how long each Apollo mission spent on the lunar surface, so I looked up the timelines for each mission from NASA. Here’s the timeline for Apollo 11, and you can find the timelines for the other missions by making the obvious change to the URL.
The constructor tool is a very important and useful method used for object-oriented programming. It is not mandatory to declare a constructor for any class, and this tool is mainly used to initialize the object of the class at the time of object creation. The constructor does not work like other normal methods. Rather, the constructor tool is called automatically when an object is declared, and it allocates the memory location for the object. This tutorial will show you how different types of user-defined constructors can be implemented and used in Java class programming.
The use of a control flow statement is a very common requirement for solving any programming problem. It is mainly used to generate a particular output based on the particular condition. This statement makes the decision based on the Boolean value return by the statement. The declaration of the if-else-if statement is quite similar to other programming languages like C, C++, etc. The uses of different ‘if’ statements in Java are explained in this tutorial.
The array object is used to store multiple data in Java. This tool allocates particular memory locations serially based on the array size. An array object in Java can store any one type of primitive or non-primitive data. That means that it can store a list of integers, strings, objects, etc. So, all the values of an array can be data of a particular datatype. The index value of an array starts from 0, as in other programming languages. Both single- and multi-dimensional arrays can be declared in Java. A list of data can be organized and sorted very easily by using an array. The major limitation of arrays is that the size of the array is fixed and it cannot be changed at the run-time. This tutorial will show how array objects can be declared, initialized, accesses, and modified.
Sometimes, it requires to execute some statements repeatedly for getting any particular output to solve a problem, and this type of task can be done easily by using any type of loop. Generally, three types of loops are supported by most of the programming languages. The ‘for’ loop is one of them. This loop is very useful for doing different types of programming tasks. How ‘for’ loop can be used in Java for multiple purposes is explained in this tutorial.
The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) celebrated its 30th birthday this July. Three decades ago, the ADA represented a huge step forward for the rights of people with disabilities. In 2020, I think it’s time to advance even further.
Simply because it is so hard to find this resource by googling it.
Better late than never, I suppose.
This past May 18th marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the death Elisha Cook, Jr. at the age of 91. In the two-and-a-half months, I’ve been revisiting some of Cook’s films. Here’s my 1995 obituary as a tribute of renewed admiration for his achievement.
As a long-time fan of Nordic Noir detective stories, I never expected to see a home-grown version. You might call Michael Elias’s “You Can Go Home Now” Queens Noir since it is set mostly in that dreary stretch of two-story houses and strip malls that will be familiar to anybody who has left Manhattan on their way to the airport. I confess never having stepped foot in this wasteland and only know it as the place that Archie Bunker personified in the 1960s and 70s. I even wonder if Elias knows this area except as a background for his breakthrough novel. To render it accurately might have taken the same kind of dedication that would go into a story about a serial killer in the French Riviera, except with a lot less opportunity to savor local restaurants. For some of the characters in “You Can Go Home Now”, McDonald’s is a night on the town.
This seemed fairly inevitable, after it became quite clear that the Twitter hack from a few weeks ago was done by teen hackers who didn't seem to do much to cover their tracks, but officials in Florida announced the arrest of a Florida teenager for participating in the hack, followed by the DOJ announcing two others as well -- a 19 year old in the UK and a 22 year old in Florida.
A Florida teenager and two others have been arrested for allegedly being behind a major Twitter hack earlier this month that resulted in several prominent accounts posting messages for a bitcoin scam.
The Department of Justice announced that U.K. resident Mason Shepard, 19, and Orlando resident Nima Fazeli, 22, who go by the hacking aliases "Chaewon" and "Rolex" respectively, were charged with helping carry out the hack. A third person, a 17-year-old who lives in Tampa, has also been charged.
A 17-year-old and 22-year-old from Florida and a 19-year-old from the U.K. are allegedly behind the scam last month involving tweets that offered to send $2,000 for every $1,000 sent to an anonymous Bitcoin address.
State authorities in Florida say 17-year-old Graham Ivan Clark "was the mastermind" of the attack. He now faces 30 state felony charges, and federal charges may also be filed.
And the United States really is a global laggard when it comes to financial transparency—and not just in the U.S. offshore jurisdictions already included in the European Union’s money laundering blacklist. The United Kingdom has a beneficial ownership register, while an EU anti-money-laundering directive requires all member states to set up their own centralized registers.
“The U.S. is supposed to be the leader in fighting corruption,” said Debra LaPrevotte, a former supervisory special agent with the FBI’s International Corruption Unit. “We talk abroad, and I say, ‘You don’t have any transparency in your corporate ownership,’ and they say, ‘Well, neither do you.’”
But according to an affidavit released late Friday, authorities have probable cause to believe Clark, the Tampa teen, was the one who got access to Twitter’s internal tools and directly carried out the scam. Specifically, he allegedly convinced a Twitter employee that he worked in the Twitter IT department and tricked that employee into giving him the credentials.
The order is the latest in a string of opinions overruling lower court orders to relax state election procedures due to Covid-19
I’d previously seen bad fakes online – usually, there are very obvious physical tells that the product isn’t genuine such as size, OEM-style packaging or markings. In this case, almost everything superficially appeared right until you look closer. I’d purchased from a seller on eBay (I know, I know…) with lots of positive feedback and assurances in the listing that it was genuine for €£6. The price was the most obvious warning sign – a genuine part is €£10. For more and more products these days I’d stick to buying from big-box retailers where there is more stringent sourcing, or straight from the manufacturer.
Back in April, when we were talking with Nvidia co-founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang about the datacenter being the new unit of compute, we explained that we were always disappointed with the fact that Nvidia did not bring its “Denver” hybrid Arm CPU and Nvidia GPU, previewed way back in January 2011, to market, and said further we really wanted Nvidia to redefine what a CPU is by breaking its memory and I/O truly free from its compute.
What we didn’t say in all of this that Nvidia should try to buy Arm Holdings, the company the creates and licenses the Arm embedded, client, and server chip instruction set, architectures, and reference designs. But if the rumor mill is right, then Nvidia is pondering just that.
This opportunity is only coming about because SoftBank Group, the Japanese conglomerate founded by and for the moment controlled by Masayoshi Son, is being hammered by some bad investments – particularly the We Work office renting boondoggle – at the same time that the coronavirus pandemic hit. In March of this year, SoftBank announced it was selling of $41 billion in assets to clean up its balance sheet and to fund share buybacks to keep its investors from revolting. Softbank has a 24 percent stake in T-Mobile, a 29.5 percent stake in Alibaba, and a 48.2 percent stake in Yahoo Japan that it probably wants to keep, and letting go of Arm Holdings, which it paid a whopping $32 billion to take control of four years ago this month, is probably not something that Son, who wants us all to join The Singularity with him and create the technologies to do it, relishes. But, for those of us who want no part of such nonsense, hooray! Make Son’s licensing very expensive, please.
In mid-July, the Trump administration instructed hospitals to change the way they reported data on their coronavirus patients, promising the new approach would provide better, more up-to-the-minute information about the virus’s toll and allow resources and supplies to be quickly dispatched across the country.
Instead, the move has created widespread confusion, leaving some states in the dark about their hospitals’ remaining bed and intensive care capacity and, at least temporarily, removing this information from public view. As a result, it has been unclear how many people are in hospitals being treated for COVID-19 at a time when the number of infected patients nationally has been soaring.
The contrasting statements about the risk of Covid-19 to children came as the U.S. president continued to push for a full reopening of schools.
As an international public health consultant, I have carried out several public health missions for the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the regional office of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Latin America and the Caribbean. I am aware of WHO’s shortcomings, but also of its contribution to world health. President Donald Trump’s remarks and actions regarding WHO are counterproductive, and a barrier to people’s health, particularly during the coronavirus pandemic.
On July 30, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare and Medicaid into law. This crowning achievement was both the culmination of a decades-long effort to attain guaranteed universal health insurance and the first step in the quest for Medicare for All.
"We stand with the grassroots activists who understand that the party must stand for extending Medicare to everyone."
In his fifth State of the Nation (SONA) address on July 27, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte tried to live up to his old form: by turns menacing, double-talking, cursing, dripping with cynical humor, digressing, and irreverent.
Some generics companies are beginning to review which products can benefit from the SPC waiver, a year after it came into force
Camp officials had required anyone at the camp to provide proof of a negative coronavirus test conducted within 12 days of arriving. Campers also participated in activities like singing in clusters — made up of kids staying in the same cabin. Although all trainees and staff were required to wear cloth masks, campers were not. Staff also did not keep windows and doors open to ensure buildings were well-ventilated.
Police have released surveillance video from the incident that occurred at about 3:19 p.m. Wednesday at a Staples in Hackensack.
Margot Kagan, of Teaneck, told police she was using a fax machine at the store when a woman with a mask pulled down below her mouth approached a machine next to her. Kagan, who, according to police, had a liver transplant four months ago and was walking with a cane, told the woman to put her mask on.
BootHole is a newly discovered security vulnerability that affects Linux systems using UEFI Secure Boot feature. The vulnerability allows full root access once exploited in the host system.
This might be the final stretch for his failed policy of 'maximum pressure.'
On the sweltering morning of August 2, 1980, a powerful explosion blew apart the central train station in Bologna, Italy, killing 85 people and wounding 200 more. To this day, it is uncertain exactly who is behind the deadliest terrorist attack in modern Italian history. It is clear that right-wing extremists including neo-fascists, Italian secret service agents and rogue outlaw Freemasons carried out the attack. What is less clear is whether, or to what extent, the bombing was part of a clandestine, Europe-wide right-wing state terror operation.
On August 3, 2019, a man who had driven hundreds of miles across Texas to the city of El Paso carried out his plan to kill as many Mexicans as possible. Armed with an assault rifle, the killer opened fire at the Cielo Vista Walmart, slaughtering mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. Grandparents, cousins and aunts and uncles died on a typical Saturday shopping day.
This is the part of the horror movie where the plot collapses beneath the weight of one too many clichés. Having already gruesomely dispatched all the more promiscuous teens, the knife wielding masked psychopath has cornered the chaste final girl in an old dilapidated farmhouse. The backdoor is seemingly wide open, but instead of making an easy and sensible, if anticlimactic, escape, the bookish antagonist takes the fucking stairs to the attic, leaving her no place left to hide from the monster stalking her. You, the audience, is left beside yourself. Your mind boggles at the hackneyed rational of a supposedly sensible heroine. You’re left with no other plausible response than to yell out at the silver screen, “Get the fuck out of the house!” In 2020, this is the analogy where we as Americans find ourselves. Only we are all the final girls, the masked psychopath is a seemingly unkillable war of our own creation, and the farmhouse that we refuse to escape from is the imperial crypt called Afghanistan. If you are one of the few remaining committed anti-imperialists in this country, you find yourself on the outside of this colossal mess looking in, practically begging, “Get the fuck out of Afghanistan!”
This week on CounterSpin:€ US corporate media were in vocal support of last year’s coup against Bolivia’s Evo Morales. But they’re rather quiet now that Jeanine Añez—who, in a legislative session without a quorum, due to the fact that many lawmakers were in hiding, jumped the line of succession and declared herself president—is putting off holding elections, again; and has said she is running, despite previous promises to the contrary.€ US media were frictionless transmitters for assertions of fraud in Morales’ re-election coming from the Organization of American States, assertions that, some now quietly acknowledge, were groundless. But as Camila Escalante wrote recently for FAIR.org (7/8/20), the fact that the supposed basis for the bloody authoritarian coup against Bolivia’s first indigenous leader was itself meritless hasn’t led US media to reexamine their own role in promoting the charges or the coup itself. To the extent the story’s being told, it’s being told too late. But CounterSpin listeners learned in real time; in November 2019, we heard from Alex Main of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. We’ll hear some of that conversation this week.
Joe Emersberger interviewed Justin Podur regarding his new book about a conflict few understand thanks to, among other things, “Africanist” scholars.
As US denuclearization talks with North Korea have hopelessly stalled and inter-Korea tensions are rising fast, citizen groups on both sides of the Pacific hope to convince the United States to embrace a peace treaty to formally end the Korean War. The campaigns to resuscitate US-Korean diplomacy kicked off on July 27, 67 years after US and North Korean generals signed the armistice that ended the fighting but left the country with an uneasy truce.
In war-torn Yemen, the crimes pile up. Children who bear no responsibility for governance or warfare endure the punishment. In 2018, UNICEF said the war made Yemen a living hell for children. By the year’s end, Save the Children reported 85,000 children under age five had already died from starvation since the war escalated in 2015. By the end of 2020, it is expected that 23,500 children with severe acute malnutrition will be at immediate risk of death.
Their camouflage is MultiCam, an all-terrain pattern used by the US Army. The helmets they’re wearing are AirFrame-style, lightweight and lacking the ear guards of older-model helmets to make better room for hearing protection and communications gear. Their combat shirts are cotton, and their body armor is slim and low-profile, to allow for maximum maneuverability.
Recent months have seen a rapid deterioration in the US-China relationship, which many are calling a new Cold War. In part this is an attempt by Donald Trump and the GOP to use China-bashing to save themselves from a rout in the November elections despite their catastrophic mishandling of the pandemic. But Trump’s anti-China strategy has also been driven by extreme military hawks and economic nationalists. The recently released 2020 Democratic Party Platform suggests that rather than repudiating these toxic forces, Democrats are incorporating much of their basic worldview. If this does not change, then the United States and China will remain on a path to confrontation even if Biden and the Democrats win in November.
"Once again, the House has voted to put the interests of weapons manufacturers and war hawks over the wellbeing of people here and abroad."
Cops in an unmarked van allegedly stop a driver and invasively search him in the middle of a Staten Island street.
Officers, guns drawn, ransack a Brooklyn apartment — and even eat residents’ food, according to a complaint.
What happened to Stone should be a wake-up call to anyone who thought police violence would confine itself to Black, brown, and poor communities. That she was snatched from a dense throng of protesters shows the sophistication of NYPD surveillance. This was an intentional act meant to send a message to protesters: Speak out, and you too can be disappeared. If this happened in another country, we’d be condemning the regime responsible, as we frequently do when foreign regimes that aren’t allies use their police forces to brutally suppress dissenting speech.
This falsified content has been referenced as source material in articles and op-eds authored by at least 14 inauthentic personas posing as locals, journalists and analysts within those countries. These articles and op-eds, primarily written in English, have been consistently published to a core set of third-party websites that appear to accept user-submitted content, most notably OpEdNews.com, BalticWord.com, and the pro-Russian site TheDuran.com, among others, as well as to suspected Ghostwriter-affiliated blogs.
Baghdad recorded its highest and second highest temperatures this week. Towns across the south of the country have topped 50C (122F) — something that used to be a rarity — every day.
Iraqis rarely have electricity for 24 hours of the day, making air conditioning a rarity even if they can afford it, and many are struggling to keep vital equipment such as refrigerators running, on small, expensive supplementary generators.
The decision is only the second time a country’s highest court has required a national government to reform€ its climate policy in order to meet legal€ obligations.
The only good thing to say about covid is that it caused carbon emissions to drop. Not enough to save humanity from catastrophic climate change, but significantly. At the height of the global lockdown, carbon emissions fell 17 percent – when the whole world basically stopped driving and flying. According to Eric Holthaus’ new book, “The Future Earth,” by 2035 the United States must have a carbon neutral economy or face utter disaster. That, folks, pretty much means the end of capitalism as we know it.
The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) is America’s environmental charter. Signed into law by Richard Nixon, it has three central tenets. First, federal agencies must look before they leap and examine the full environmental impacts of most major actions that receive federal funding, including the direct, indirect, and cumulative effects those actions will have. Second, agencies must involve the public by taking public comment and responding in a meaningful way. And finally, the agencies must examine a range of alternatives, including environmentally-friendly ones. The Trump regulations are a direct attack on all three principles.
What the industry denied for years, that its assets have become liabilities, has become a reality.
Uranium mining costs humans dearly. The nuclear industry prefers not to discuss the price paid by miners and their families.
While Trump pumps his private gestapo into cities like Portland and Seattle, Ohio’s homegrown fascist legions launched a blitzkrieg of their own.
According to this new report from the National Whistleblower Center (NWC) published July 23, fossil fuel executives’ deception on the financial risks of climate change—to their business and the economy at large—is widespread and is likely actionable fraud, meaning that further securities fraud lawsuits against companies like ExxonMobil should be expected particularly if whistleblowers come forward to work with financial regulators and€ prosecutors.
According to Cirium, another consultancy, around 35% of the global fleet of around 25,000 aircraft is still parked—less than the two-thirds at the height of the crisis in April but still terrible. Even if traffic recovers to 80% of last year’s levels in 2021, as some optimists expect, plenty of aeroplanes will remain on the ground. Citigroup, a bank, forecasts excess capacity of 4,000 aircraft in 18 months’ time.
Boeing and major U.S. airline companies, having spent more than $90 billion buying shares in the past decade, now need a government bailout of at least $110 billion to survive a recession triggered by the coronavirus pandemic, and probably much more.
Dean Kuipers’ 2019 book, The Deer Camp: A Memoir of a Father, a Family and the Land that Healed Them, is a book about Michigan. Its unique forests, its lakes and rivers, its settler population descended from Calvinist Dutch men and women, and that population’s stubbornness. Like a Jim Harrison novel featuring a hopelessly ornery and usually weathered man afraid to be wrong, the protagonists of Kuipers’ memoir are mostly male and stubborn almost to the point of insanity. The forests and fauna come across as equally stubborn—defying the ravages of industrialization and the will of men intent on dominion. Trees grow through sands wasted by neglect and industrial endeavors long gone in the name of progress; abandoned farmlands begin a return to their Edenic state; and wounded humans restore both the wild and themselves.
The parents of Mikhail Degtyarev — the former State Duma deputy from the Liberal Democratic Party who was recently appointed acting governor of Russia’s Khabarovsk Territory — own a large house and an apartment in Moscow with a combined market value of at least 125 million rubles (approximately $1.68 million), says a new investigation from opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK).
Coupled with a possible shift to Democratic governance, major public support, and a fired up progressive movement, our moment to win is upon us.
"Tens of millions of Americans on the brink of eviction and food insecurity and the Senate just left for yet another 3-day weekend."
The Republican-controlled U.S. Senate has adjourned for a three-day weekend as enhanced unemployment payments are officially set to lapse on Friday, guaranteeing that tens of millions of Americans will see their incomes drop by 50-75% with another rent payment due in 24 hours.
As mourners gathered at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to honor the life of Georgia Congressmember John Lewis, among those who spoke was civil rights icon Rev. James Lawson, who helped to train John Lewis in nonviolence when Lewis was a student in Nashville. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once described Rev. Lawson as “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.” Lawson invoked John Lewis’s life as a call to action. “We will not be quiet as long as our nation continues to be the most violent culture in the history of humankind,” Lawson said. We feature his extended remarks.
The elders, the Old Ones, always believed that in the end, there would be justice for those who cared for and who had not forgotten the original teachings, rooted in a relationship with the land…Justice is sometime seven generations away. And it is inevitable.
Sberbank has opted not to fire its projects manager, Sergey Minenko, following an internal investigation into the sexual harassment allegations made against him last month, The Bell reports, citing the bank’s press service.€
I just finished reading Zachary Carter’s book, The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, and I will agree with the general assessment. It is an outstanding book that brings together much useful material on the life and influence of Keynes.
Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” is a play featuring two characters waiting for a character, Godot, who never arrives. As such, it is a useful metaphor for the goings-on of the European Union (EU). Observers of the EU’s evolution in the capital of Brussels have witnessed a Godot-like experience of the promised arrival of the long-awaited resolution of the group’s dysfunction and economic malaise that never happens. The pattern is virtually always the same: the countries meet, they squabble, and then they emerge with a “landmark” or “historic” compromise that deals the lowest common denominator in terms of economic impact.
The British government, regulators and global agrochemical corporations are colluding with each other and are thus engaging in criminal behaviour. That’s the message put forward in a new report written by environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason and sent to the UK Environment Agency. It follows her January 2019 open letter to Werner Baumann, CEO of€ Bayer CropScience, where she made it clear to him that she considers Bayer CropScience and Monsanto criminal corporations.
Our landlord doesn’t read my letters, as far as we know, but it feels like it’s only fair to write a letter each month, if we’re not going to be paying the rent.
Sarah Caisley, who lives in Harlow, says she's noticed her mental health has "improved substantially" since she's been working from home.
In May 2016, Don Tapscott published Blockchain Revolution, his 16th book, this one co-written with son Alex. Don, whom I’ve known for over 25 years, has an uncanny knack for identifying The Next Big Thing and explaining it to everybody else through his books, articles, and speeches. Don and Alex have each developed a follow-on blockchain book. Earlier this year, Alex published Financial Services Revolution, while a few weeks ago Don published Supply Chain Revolution, which I will now discuss.
Supply Chain Revolution consists of nine chapters, edited with a foreword by Don. He opens his foreword by noting, “When we first started working on this book, the coronavirus (COVID-19) hadn’t yet made headlines… As I’ve become fond of saying, ‘If you’ve got it, a supply chain brought it to you.’ I suppose that, during these times, I could add, ‘If you can’t get it, a supply chain let you down.’”
Each chapter details how blockchain is revolutionizing a different supply chain, from general use cases like global trade to more specific ones like food traceability and manufacturing. Each was written by some of the world’s top experts on these blockchain applications.
For a few years now, I have argued that supply chain applications will likely emerge as the earliest blockchain killer apps. Given that blockchain first came to light in 2008 as the architecture underpinning bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, many thought that its killer-apps would be in the financial services industry. That might well be the case in the future, but given its underlying complexity, transforming the global financial ecosystem will take considerable time and investment. Supply chain infrastructures and processes are significantly less complex than those in financial services, healthcare, and other industries, which is why several supply chain use cases have already been brought to market over the past few years.
Donald Trump’s 2016 Wisconsin win was a shock to the Democratic Party — but then, the Democratic Party is always shocked — because Wisconsin was supposed to be a safe state for Hillary Clinton.
"I'm actually terrified to see election season under the new procedure," said one New York mail carrier.
The political success of Russiagate lies in the vanishing of American history in favor of a façade of liberal virtue. Posed as a response to the election of Donald Trump, a straight line can be drawn from efforts to undermine the decommissioning of the American war economy in 1946 to the CIA’s alliance with Ukrainian fascists in 2014. In 1945 the NSC (National Security Council) issued a series of directives that gave logic and direction to the CIA’s actions during the Cold War. That these persist despite the ‘fall of communism’ suggests that it was always just a placeholder in the pursuit of other objectives.
As the American left forces itself to reckon with its neglect of the minority underclass in its central planning of democratic socialism, a similar reckoning should be happening in relation to China and its treatment of the Muslim minority population and its increasing reach in Africa. Under the guise of economic empowerment for the upper and middle-class China has in many ways followed the United States route to economic and military power that relied upon labor exploitation, incarceration, surveillance, control of women’s reproductive rights and environmental destruction.
For the past two years, several major state news organizations in Russia have been working with China’s biggest media conglomerate to trade publicity about each nation’s greatest achievements. Beijing’s efforts have fallen mostly flat in Russia, however, thanks to shortages of trained personnel and shortcomings in China’s grasp of the Russian mediasphere. Moscow, meanwhile, has struggled as the propaganda pact’s junior partner.
Losing badly to the Coronavirus—now topping 150,000 deaths in America— Herr Drumpf, the “winner” who “hates to lose,” unleashes unmarked Federal stormtroopers to storm the streets of Portland, injuring and kidnapping peaceful protestors, distracting the media, exciting his base and horrifying the rest of us.
For the last five weekends, I and my dozen BLM sign-waving, curbside cohorts—mine now has an addenda (“Trump’s Latest Crime: Secret Police in PDX”)—do hour-long shifts on a traffic-heavy corner of Portland’s Holgate/Caesar Chavez Boulevards. We’re one of several groups dotting the city with our post located nearly five miles East from Trump’s notorious secret- police attack of “PDX.”
Opposition politician and Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) founder Alexey Navalny has an uneasy relationship with journalists; not only with reporters from pro-Kremlin outlets, but also with those working for independent media. Navalny regularly criticizes the press for its alleged unwillingness to cover FBK investigations — and is also critical of reporters for refusing to take the opposition’s side in its fight against the Russian authorities. In turn, journalists have reproached Navalny for his handling of conversations with critical reporters, as well as for inaccuracies in the FBK’s investigations. Throughout 2020, Navalny has made increasingly rude statements about editors and journalists, including Meduza correspondents, with his commentary often coming across as more personal than professional. Arguably, Navalny’s relationship with the Russian media industry has never been more strained. To better understand why this is happening and find out how Navalny perceives this breakdown, Meduza special correspondent Svetlana Reyter spoke to Kira Yarmysh — spokeswoman for both Alexey Navalny and the Anti-Corruption Foundation (the following is a summary of their conversation — the full Q&A is available in Russian here.)
At breakneck speed Brooke Pinto has gone from virtually unknown to one of only 13 DC councilmembers, who, along with the mayor, oversee the city’s $8.5 billion budget. As the dust settles on Pinto’s stunning win, questions about the 28-year-old are growing.
"Holy hell. Jared Kushner reportedly abandoned a national testing plan because it was *politically advantageous* to sit back and let blue states be eviscerated by the virus."
"You can't have a contractor supervising government officials."
In his stirring eulogy at the funeral service for Congressmember John Lewis, President Barack Obama said expanded voting rights would be the greatest way to honor the civil rights icon’s legacy. In a speech that condemned the status of American democracy without ever naming the sitting president, Obama called for election day to be declared a national holiday, full Congressional representation for Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and the end of the filibuster, which he called a “Jim Crow relic.” “You want to honor John? Let’s honor him by revitalizing the law he was willing to die for,” Obama said in reference to the Voting Rights Act. We feature an extended excerpt from Obama’s remarks at Ebenezer Baptist Church.
"In his first month on the job, the postmaster general has already taken steps that could undermine efficient voting by mail in November."
We are calling for a VP candidate with a history of demonstrated fortitude in the face of entrenched power, not someone skilled at just-found-religion rhetoric.
Our nation is in a perilous place when federal agencies refuse to comply with federal court orders. Yet, that’s just what Trump’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) did in its rush to destroy sagebrush, juniper, and limber pine habitat in the Iron Mask area of Montana’s federally-designated Elkhorn Wildlife Management Area.€ I’m glad to announce the Court just issued a Preliminary Injunction to stop the rogue agency in its tracks.
Herewith the questions of the week for savvy readers to ponder and, perhaps, answer.
"We denounce this desperate attack on our democracy."
Polls€ in swing states show 12% of Sanders supporters do not plan to vote for Biden.
With the help of riot police, officers from the Belarusian security services arrested 33 suspected mercenaries from the Russian private military company (PMC) “Wagner” outside of Minsk on July 29, on suspicion of organizing terrorist acts. The arrests took place approximately 10 days before the upcoming Belarusian presidential elections. The campaign season has been marked by massive rallies in support of opposition candidates, as the authorities moved to ban President Alexander Lukashenko’s (Alyaksandr Lukashenka) rivals from the race. After the story about the mercenaries broke, Belarusian media were quick to point out its resemblance to the “White Legion” terrorism case that the authorities launched at the height of major protests back in 2017. It also bears similarity to a number of “threats” that the Belarusian security services claim to have thwarted ahead of past presidential elections. Meduza breaks down how the Belarusian authorities and state media have used alleged security threats to scare citizens during times of political instability.
Less than two weeks before Belarus holds presidential elections, the country’s intelligence services arrested nearly three dozen Russian nationals supposedly acting as mercenaries. Belarusian police also recently arrested popular opposition presidential candidate Viktor Babariko (Viktar Babaryka), whom incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko has directly accused of working for the Russian energy giant “Gazprom.” So far, the Kremlin’s response has been circumspect, despite the alarming allegations and a sometimes rocky relationship with Minsk over the past 18 months, during which time integration with Russia has stalled and Lukashenko has made efforts to repair ties with the West. Meduza spoke to a handful of political experts in Belarus and Russia about Moscow’s expectations going forward. (The remarks below are paraphrased except where quotation marks appear.)
We will continue to push Democrats to recognize reality and oppose Israel’s occupation.
Vice President Mike Pence made another desperate campaign swing through the battleground state of Wisconsin in July, hoping to revive the flagging fortunes of the Republican Party that he and President Trump have turned into a vehicle for racism, xenophobia, economic inequality, and a rejection of science that currently endangers all Americans.
When will the organized Bernie Sanders base lose patience with the Democrats and strike out on its own? That question has captivated the independent left in the US since the 2016 election. Now, in the wake of Bernie Sanders’s second presidential primary loss, and as hopes of progressives taking over a largely impervious Democratic Party have dimmed accordingly, the long awaited moment may finally be approaching. In recent months, three chapters of Our Revolution (OR) and one local pro-Bernie group—based in Los Angeles, Oregon, central Connecticut, and Worcester, Massachusetts, respectively—have effectively broken with the Democrats. They all have affiliated with the Movement for a People’s Party (MPP), a national organization (est. in 2017) that aims to create a new, true progressive party. As a result, other OR chapters and separate Bernie-inspired groups may contemplate following suit. Hopefully before making that pivotal choice, they will get to know the MPP well and fully consider if it is the best vehicle for building a viable new party on the left.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued an historic opinion in B.L. v. Mahanoy Area School District, upholding the free speech rights of public school students. The court adopted the position EFF urged in our amicus brief that the First Amendment prohibits disciplining public school students for off-campus social media speech.
B.L. was a high school student who had failed to make the varsity cheerleading squad and was placed on junior varsity instead. Out of frustration, she posted—over the weekend and off school grounds—a Snapchat selfie with text that said, among other things, “fuck cheer.” One of her Snapchat connections took a screen shot of the “snap” and shared it with the cheerleading coaches, who suspended B.L. from the J.V. squad for one year. She and her parents sought administrative relief to no avail, and eventually sued the school district with the help of the ACLU of Pennsylvania.
You can't always pick your fighter for Constitutional challenges. Sometimes you're handed an unsympathetic challenger, which makes defending everyone's rights a bit more difficult because a lot of people wouldn't mind too much if this particular person's rights are limited. But that's not how rights work.
Summary: With news breaking so rapidly, it’s possible that even major newspapers or official sources may get information wrong. Social media sites, like Twitter, need to determine how to deal with “news” tweets that later turn out to be misleading -- even when coming from major news organizations, citing official government organizations.
But even without passage of Ocasio-Cortez’s amendment, the military’s online recruitment efforts have been curtailed. A day after our article’s publication, Twitch told the Army that it must immediately stop using deceptive giveaways to collect personal information. After the Army booted me from its Twitch channel for mentioning US war crimes, First Amendment lawyers also started speaking out, arguing that banning me constituted a violation of free speech rights. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University even sent a letter to the Army and Navy demanding an end to speech prohibitions in military Twitch channels.
The book of hours on Julian Assange is now being written. But the scribes are far from original. Repeated rituals of administrative hearings that have no common purpose other than to string things out before the axe are being enacted. Of late, the man most commonly associated with WikiLeaks’ publication project cannot participate in any meaningful way, largely because of his frail health and the dangers posed to him by the coronavirus. Having already made an effort to attend court proceedings in person, Assange has come across as judicial exotica, freak show fodder for Judge Vanessa Baraitser’s harsh version of Judge Judy. He was refused an application to escape his glass commode when he could still attend in person, as permitting him to descend and consult his defence team in a court room would constitute a bail application of some risk. This reading by the judicial head was so innovative it even puzzled the prosecutors.
History, ancient and modern, is littered with corpses, intolerance and hatred of others. One of my most shocking discoveries was reading about Roman Catholics in sixteenth century Europe who went on a rampage against Calvinist Protestants to rip their tongues out for singing the Psalms. We are a blood-thirsty and often cruel species. The words of Jesus to “love your enemies” have seldom been taken seriously, certainly not in “Christian Europe” where men slid out of the trenches to murder someone who may well have been of the same denomination. In our historical moment of febrile facing up to systemic racism woven into the fabric of our societies, it might help if we considered what is demanded of us if we are to mutually respect others. Habermas can assist us.
As family, friends and dignitaries paid their final respects at the Atlanta funeral of John Lewis, the civil rights leader and 17-term Georgia Congressmember was remembered as a singular force for equality and justice. The funeral took place at the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, once led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., where senior pastor Rev. Raphael Warnock contrasted Lewis’ legacy with “some in high office who are much better at division than vision,” and described the late politician as “a true American patriot who risked his life and bled for the hope and promise of democracy.”
Bill Clinton has a penchant for overstepping, for going too far and for being too cocky, especially when it comes to Black people. He assumes a kind of insider posture that is, quite frankly, offensive.
The DOJ's Civil Rights Division has wrapped up an Obama-era probe into the Alabama prison system. Initiated in 2016, the investigation covers 13 prisons in the state, containing nearly 17,000 prisoners. What the DOJ found was widespread deployment of excessive force and a resolute lack of concern for inmates' well-being. (via Huffington Post)
State investigators have launched a criminal case against Moscow City Duma deputy Yulia Galyamina for “repeated violations of the rules on conducting public events.”
Historic 33% economic crash, 1,500 Covid-19 deaths per day, and tens of millions out of work and on verge of losing their homes.
President Trump christened the activist authority behind the recent protests in his 4th of July Mount Rushmore speech: “We are now in the process of defeating the radical left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the agitators, the looters, and people who in many instances have absolutely no clue what they are doing” (Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Updates ‘American Carnage’ Message for 2020,” New York Times, 7/7/20).
Relics of America’s harrowing past are facing new scrutiny, and rightfully so. Statues are falling. NFL teams are renamingthemselves. Even syrup brands are being discontinued.
As violent crime continued to climb in Chicago and other cities across the country, Attorney General William P. Barr announced that the U.S. Department of Justice was mobilizing to help: Dozens of federal agents would be sent to work with local police to combat gangs and illegal guns.
“Our message to gangs, gang leaders and gang members is this: When we throw the federal book at you, it will be a knockout blow,” Barr said.
Hi, readers. It’s been a week since the city of Chicago removed two statues of Christopher Columbus in the middle of the night without warning. In a statement afterward, the city said the statues were moved “in response to demonstrations that became unsafe for both protesters and police,” and it added that Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s order to remove the statues came after receiving intelligence “of great concern.” The city didn’t offer any details about the intelligence.
As the mayor’s team works on a plan to reassess monuments, memorials and murals throughout the city, I thought it’d be worth hearing from some of the people who had a stake in the removal of the statues. Their answers have been edited for clarity.
It pinched my nose from the inside, burning deep in my nasal cavity. My throat slammed shut as my body tried to block out the fumes. My eyes burned, oozed tears, and clamped closed.
Most Americans do not believe the aggressive tactics which President Donald Trump has employed to quell uprisings in cities across the country are making the situation better, a new poll has found.
The police killing of George Floyd on May 25 provoked demonstrations worldwide. The United Nations Human Rights Council on June 17 debated a draft resolution introduced by the “African Group” of nations that condemned “structural racism endemic to the criminal justice system in the United States.” The African nations were responding to a letter from the families of murder victims George Floyd, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and Michael Brown; 600 human rights organizations had endorsed it..
A Michigan teenager who has been detained since mid-May after not doing her online schoolwork was set free on Friday, after the Michigan Court of Appeals ordered her immediate release from a juvenile facility in suburban Detroit.
Grace, a high school sophomore, spent 78 days at the Children’s Village after an Oakland County family court judge found she had violated her probation on earlier charges of assault and theft. Friday’s decision comes a week after that judge denied her lawyer’s request to set her free. The lawyer then asked the appellate court to release her.
As a regular commentator for PressTV (Iran) I am asked to give my perspective of American government, culture, and foreign policy. I am always identified as a former Green Party candidate for Congress. For the record, I have never praised their government, as I oppose all theocracies, whether they be Iran, Israel, or the state of Utah! If the country does something right or good, I acknowledge that. I have even acknowledged when Trump did/does something good, yet always for the wrong reason. Example: his not wanting to go to war with Russia and his opposition to NATO. Iran is also, along with the US, horrible when it comes to human rights and I have mentioned that. The death penalty being a major concern as well as Iran’s persecution of the LGBT community. I even throw a bit of Yiddishisms in, just to be snarky.
+ They came for Portland and Portland didn’t back down in the face of extreme state-sponsored violence. Instead, the resistance grew every night. The Feds got their asses kicked, here and in Seattle. Let’s hope it provides a model for the people of Cleveland, Chicago, Kansas City, and ABQ.
On today’s episode, Nicholas Baham II (Dr. Dreadlocks), Janice Domingo, and Nolan Higdon host Professor of Anthropology at California State University, Los Angeles, Beth Baker.
In 1967, Chester Himes wrote, “Police brutality toward black people in the United States is of such common usage and longstanding to have attained acceptance as proper behavior.” On the one hand, not much has changed. Every day we see the virulent and repressive state violence against Black Lives Matter protestors marching, occupying space, and demanding change in the name of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, among countless others. While the tactics may have shifted, the overall strategy of anti-blackness and settler-colonial repression remains the same (consider the actions against protestors at Standing Rock, which Adrienne Keene claims served as “training” for future state violence, such as that against protestors in Portland, OR). The police serve to protect and uphold whiteness and the system of racial capitalism. This imbrication of police, policing, and policy (both economic and political) can be understood as what Achille Mbembe calls necropolitical power, which names “contemporary forms of subjugating life to the power of death.”
On Thursday, supporters of a hardline Islamist group held a protest rally in Peshawar calling for the release of the suspected shooter, saying he had defended his religion.
According to the unaffiliated news outlet, officers involved in fatal shootings marked those incidents with backyard barbecues and were initiated into a "secretive clique" that included curving one of the tips of their seven-point sterling silver badge. The outlet said it spoke with more than 20 current and former government officials and reviewed records and hundreds of photographs taken before and after fatal shootings. Two officers named in the report denied having bent badges, with one telling Open Vallejo it was a "lie."
2019 saw a record number of consumers ditch traditional cable television. 2020 was already poised to be even worse, and that was before a pandemic came to town. The pandemic not only sidelined live sports (one of the last reasons many subscribe to traditional cable in the first place), it put an additional strain on many folks' wallets, resulting cord cutting spiking even higher.
So, I made the silly move to rely on my hardware supplier to provide me with a dynamic DNS service. Naturally, this offer expired, and I could no longer reach my home server. Because of Murphy, this naturally took place when I was away from home with no access to anything.
So – how does one find the way back home?
Luckily, I have a VPS that I log in to now and then. After a quick duck-ing (duckduckgo is my friend), I found the last command which was the first piece of the puzzle. Now I had a list of potential IPs.
Did I mention that I travel a lot?
There were quite a few IPs there. Pre-COVID-19, it would have been worse. Still, I found a few likely candidates based on frequency of use. Then I found this handy list of IP blocks in Sweden. Now I could tell my mobile data provider (Telenor) from my fibre data provider (Bahnhof).
Update: Sooo... we already have a bunch of updates on this story. Trump has said he's banning TikTok entirely and is "against" allowing a US company to buy TikTok. Below is the original post, with only a slight clarification regarding Ben Thompson's thoughts on TikTok, which I didn't present very clearly in the original. Then, beneath the post I'll have more thoughts on Trump's comments.
Reports in both The New York Times and Bloomberg confirmed an earlier Fox Business story that the Washington-based tech giant was in talks to buy TikTok, which with over 2 billion global downloads has become one of the fastest-growing social media platforms.
Another scenario, first reported by The Information, would involve the U.S. investors in TikTok's owner, ByteDance, acquiring the app.
It’s unclear how advanced TikTok’s talks to sell itself to Microsoft and other companies are, but changing ownership is crucial for the app. The United States is one of TikTok’s major markets, so continued operations in the country are a priority.
TikTok has discussed other scenarios to alleviate concerns by U.S. officials. In one scenario, non-Chinese investors like Sequoia Capital, SoftBank and General Atlantic could purchase a majority stake in the app from ByteDance, people familiar with the discussions have said.
The New York Times cited an anonymous source who said the purchase could come later in the day Friday. Microsoft did not respond to The Hill’s request for comment on the potential purchase.
Venture investors in ByteDance have approached Chief Executive Officer Zhang Yiming with a range of proposals to address U.S. concerns that the app, especially popular with teens, is a security threat, people familiar with the matter have said. Any solution would likely have to pass scrutiny from U.S. regulators in the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, as well as U.S. antitrust regulators.
Spokespeople for Microsoft and TikTok declined to comment on any potential talks. The software company’s interest in the app was reported earlier by Fox Business Network.
EPO
**By way of an update, on 29 July 2020 the EPO has decided to postpone all oral proceedings in examination and opposition proceedings scheduled until 31 December 2020 (previous date was 14 September 2020) unless they have already been confirmed to take place by means of videoconferencing or are converted into oral proceedings by videoconference with the applicant's consent. It is important to note that the EPO will not allow mixed proceedings where one party attends in person and the other party attends by videoconference. Thus, both parties need to agree to the videoconference.
**The Boards of Appeal have resumed the holding of oral proceedings, to a limited extent, at their premises in Haar from Monday, 18 May 2020. Contrary to the previous practice where parties were contacted to confirm that they expect to be able to attend in person and that they do not anticipate being affected by travel restrictions, the parties now have to indicate on their own motion if they are not able to attend the oral proceedings. The maximum attendance is 2 (!) persons per party. Parties and representatives will be asked to complete a simple screening questionnaire upon arrival. Any person replying to one of the questions in the affirmative will be denied access to the Boards of Appeal premises. The competent board will be informed accordingly and will decide whether the oral proceedings can be held without that person or whether they will need to be postponed. Access of the public will be allowed but only for a limited number of people.
In a decision dated April 01, 2020, the EPO has further decided that all oral proceedings before Examining Divisions are to be held by videoconference, unless - either at the request of the applicant or at the instigation of the examining division - there are serious reasons against holding the oral proceedings by videoconference such as, in particular, the need to take evidence directly.
During interviews and oral proceedings held by videoconference, submissions are to be made by email or, exceptionally, by fax. The chairperson or, in the case of an interview, the first examiner will provide the applicant or representative with the email address to be used at the beginning of the oral proceedings.
From FTC v Qualcomm to Continental v Avanci, Managing IP speaks to academics and in-house and private practice counsel to unpack the most important cases
On July 31, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $1,500 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 8,001,465. This patent is owned by Arden Innovations, an NPE and subsidiary of Endpoint IP. The '465 patent generally relates to computer implemented methods for accommodating elements of an information array within the physical constraints of a predetermined two dimensional display space. This patent has been asserted in district court against Discount Tire and Marinemax.
Last month, we wrote about the big publishers suing the Internet Archive over its Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program, as well as its National Emergency Library (NEL). As we've explained over and over again, the Internet Archive is doing exactly what libraries have always done: lending books. The CDL program was structured to mimic exactly how a traditional library works, with a 1-to-1 relationship between physical books owned by the library and digital copies that can be lent out.
On July 28, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary held another in its year-long series of hearings on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The topic of this hearing was “How Does the DMCA Contemplate Limitations and Exceptions Like Fair Use?”
We’re glad Congress is asking the question. Without fair use, much of our common culture would be inaccessible, cordoned off by copyright. Fair use creates breathing space for innovation and new creativity by allowing us to re-use and comment on existing works. As Sherwin Siy, lead public policy manager for the Wikimedia Foundation, said in his testimony: “That fair uses aren’t rare exceptions to the exclusive rights of copyright law but a pervasive, constantly operating aspect of the law. Fair use not only promotes journalism, criticism, and education, it also ensures that our everyday activities aren’t constantly infringing copyrights. Especially now that so much of our lives are conducted on camera and online.”
Agnes Chu, who helped to lead the launch of Disney+, is leaving the company for a new role running Condé Nast Entertainment.
As president of the publishing company's entertainment arm, she will oversee video content across digital, social and streaming platforms and will also lead efforts to adapt its IP [sic] into film and TV projects.
When you need some royalty-free images, it can be hard to find a website that lets you use their images for free. Fortunately, there are some websites that let you use their images without paying, either with credit or without.
Steam has implemented new measures to prevent VPN users from spoofing their locations to buy games at cheaper prices available in other regions. While that's Steam's choice, it's an anti-consumer move that has the potential to increase piracy - or worse.
Several movie companies, including the makers of "The Hitman's Bodyguard" and "London Has Fallen," have scored a significant victory in a Hawaii court. The order, which was issued against the initial recommendation of a magistrate judge, requires the foreign operator of an APK download site to pay $150,000 in piracy damages.
