Do you have an old laptop that has gathered layers of dust over time and you don’t exactly what to do with it? A good place to start would be to install a Linux distribution that will perfectly support its low-end hardware specifications without much of a hassle. You could still enjoy performing basic tasks such as web browsing, word processing, and watching videos, listening to your favourite music to mention a few.
In this guide, we feature some of the best Linux distributions that you can install on your old PC and breathe some life into it.
Honestly, it was macOS Catalina. We were having too many problems with people updating OS X and breaking Homebrew packages, to the point where we had to reinstall our custom toolchain every time we updated. The last guy on Mac updated to Catalina recently, and he had to struggle with Excel libraries because Apple moves things between OS versions. It just wasn’t worth it. I’ve been talking about it for about a year with my CTO.
All of our back-end service runs Ubuntu. Most of the client-side work we’re doing is for IOT devices, and that’s all Linux. We ended up basically having an expensive machine so that we could emulate Linux on anything. It didn’t make a lot of sense to keep using Mac, so we switched.
How was the transition from macOS to Linux?
Actually super easy! Once we wrote a few setup scripts and packages we needed for different jobs in our pipeline, we were up and running. We already had a bunch of scripting and automations for the servers we had, and they’re all on Ubuntu, so it’s not a big jump in terms of the command line.
How did you find the overall experience on Pop!_OS 20.04?
I found it pretty intuitive. Learning the keyboard shortcuts took about a week. I really don’t have any issues. I like the tiling, I use that every day. It definitely makes it easier to multitask on a laptop screen.
We now have a closer look at how Parallels will bring Windows to Chrome OS in the coming months but for the general consumer, it simply won’t be an option. In the latest release from Parallels, the company clearly states that this collaboration with Google is meant solely for Chrome Enterprise customers. The means you’ll have to have a managed device that shipped with the Chrome Enterprise upgrade. No biggie. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. It recently surfaced that Chrome OS devices with a certain Linux kernel in the container can now leverage VMs to install and run alternative operating systems locally on your Chromebook. I’m still not 100% positive of which kernel version is required but I do know that 4.19 and newer appears to work. One thing to note is that the kernel version in the container may not be the same as the version in your Chrome operating system. For example, my Comet Lake Acer Chromebook 713 uses the 4.19 kernel but the Linux container is rocking the 5.4 kernel.
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In case that last sentence didn’t give it away, I was able to successfully install Pop!_OS on my Chromebook. What is Pop_!OS? Pop!_OS, like Elementary, is an Unbuntu-based OS developed by System76. The company produces Linux-based laptops with a focus on gaming and productivity. For those reasons, Pop!_OS features full AMD and NVIDIA GPU support and a clean, out of the way interface with a custom GNOME desktop. Pop!_OS comes with a store preinstalled that is called the Pop Shop and in it, you’ll find WINE, Lutris and PlayOnLinux for gamers wanting their Windows titles and more on Linux. Installing Pop!_OS works exactly like the other operating systems I’ve tested out. So, without further ado, let’s walk through setting up this Linux distro on Chrome OS.
As more enterprises move to hybrid cloud, they're relying more and more on provisioning bare metal servers to augment cloud providers' services in order to make their infrastructure cloud neutral.
The pandemic has thrown our global society into a health and economic crisis. It seems like there are conflicts every day from all over the world. Today, I want to remind you that open source is one of the great movements where collaboration, working together, and getting along is the essence of what we do.
Open source is not a zero-sum game, but it has had an incredible impact on us in a net positive way. I like to remind everyone that open source is public goods that will be freely available to everyone worldwide, no matter what wind of political or economic change brings us. The LF is dedicated to all of that.
In spite of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, it appears the development of container applications remains robust. Docker Inc. is reporting more than 11 billion pulls from the Docker Hub in July.
The company also revealed the number of repositories on Docker Hub has grown to 7 million from 6 million in the last year, while the number of Docker Hub users has grown to 7 million from 5 million in the same period.
This is the inaugural episode of the Unfettered Freedom podcast, a show that focuses on news and topics about GNU/Linux, free software and open source software. But more than the software, this podcast will focus on the "movement", the ideology and the freedom of being a part of this community!
Interview with Warner Losh about Unix history, the 2.11-BSD restoration project, the Unix heritage society, proper booting, and what devmatch is.
old games, rpgs, calculators, automation
This week we’ve been building Monster Joysticks and playing Red Alert. We discuss the proliforation of Ubuntu Remixes, bring you some GUI love and go over all your wonderful feedback.
It’s Season 13 Episode 20 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which we take the security advice of international expert Hans Gruber, we find Jono’s lack of middle name preparation disturbing
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates were sent in today for the Linux 5.9 kernel merge window. There are some big additions particularly with AMD Sienna Cichlid and Navy Flounder landing as Navi 2 parts but also a lot of other changes in tow.
The USB and Thunderbolt subsystem changes have already been merged into the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel.
Since preliminary USB4 support was added to Linux 5.6, which is largely based on Intel's existing Thunderbolt code, succeeding kernels have worked towards getting that USB4 code squared away. With Linux 5.9 that work has continued.
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This pull request also has various Thunderbolt updates, the usual assortment of USB gadget driver updates, USB Type-C additions, and other changes. More details with this pull request since merged to mainline.
The Linux perf events changes for the performance monitoring subsystem were already sent in and pulled for the in-development Linux 5.9 kernel.
Longtime Linux kernel developer Pavel Machek has taken over as sole maintainer of the LED subsystem. For this first pull request going into Linux 5.9 is a big addition... The multi-color LED framework code has finally been merged.
This multi-color framework for the Linux kernel has been in the works by Texas Instruments and is about exposing clusters of colored LEDs as an array to user-space that it can then adjust the brightness of said cluster using a single file write. This approach still allows controlling the intensity of individual LEDs as part of the array/cluster and the benefit of the framework is being able to do so in a single write.
NVMe 2.0's Zoned Namespaces (ZNS) functionality is now supported by the mainline Linux kernel.
NVMe ZNS is similar to Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) and Zoned Block Commands (ZBC) for allowing application/software control over the placement of data. With NVMe ZNS, it's over the placement of data obviously on NVMe SSDs within zones, allowing greater control to the OS rather than just the NVMe device for deciding on data placement. The goal of these technologies is to increase drive lifetime, ideally offer lower latency and greater throughput, and similar TCO benefits. ZNS is part of the NVMe 2.0 specification.
If you haven't heard about the current levels of social unrest sweeping across the landscape, you must have been the lone survivor at a long lost, forgotten moon base with no way to communicate back to the "Mother Planet." The world is descending into absolute crazy madness!
Well, not wanting to be left out of the "virtue signaling" mix, Linus Torvalds signed off onto removing "offensive" terms from the Linux kernel, such as slave, master and blacklist. According to an article on The Register, the removal of these terms is supposed to occur immediately, starting with the latest rc5 release of the 5.8 Linux kernel.
Sooooooo ... where does all of this end? What about all of the curse words that are dispersed throughout the kernel code? Won't some puritanical sort of person take offense to the appearance of those "offensive" words?
Gauging by the comments to the article on The Register (and elsewhere across the internet), the changes are not being well received by Linux aficionados. There is, to say the least, a LOT of backlash against the forthcoming changes, and most of it centers around the types of questions I asked in the previous paragraph.
Smoother performance, HiDPI support, new & improved Live Path Effects & native macOS app
After a little over three years in development, the team is excited to launch the long awaited Inkscape 1.0 into the world.
Built with the power of a team of volunteers, this open source vector editor represents the work of many hearts and hands from around the world, ensuring that Inkscape remains available free for everyone to download and enjoy.
In fact, translations for over 20 languages were updated for version 1.0, making the software more accessible to people from all over the world.
A major milestone was achieved in enabling Inkscape to use a more recent version of the software used to build the editor's user interface (namely GTK+3). Users with HiDPI (high resolution) screens can thank teamwork that took place during the 2018 Boston Hackfest for setting the updated-GTK wheels in motion.
"After a little over three years in development, the team is excited to launch the long awaited Inkscape 1.0 into the world.
Built with the power of a team of volunteers, this free and open source vector editor represents the work of many hearts and hands from around the world, ensuring that Inkscape remains available free for everyone to download and enjoy."
Finally! Inkscape 1.0 is out!
Reading the release notes, we can see that there are several new features. I'm going to review just a few.
For Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based Linux distributions, there is an official PPA available. If you are using Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04, you can use this PPA.
Open a terminal and use the following command to add the new repository. You’ll be asked to enter your password. You probably already know that when you type password in terminal, nothing is displayed. Just type the password and press enter.
In this article, you will learn about clipboard managers and what are the different clipboard managers available for Linux.
A clipboard manager keeps track of the things that you have copied in your system. It keeps the history of it just like the history command that has all the commands list that you have executed in the shell so far.
Gscan2pdf is a document scanning tool that allows you to easily post-process and create PDF or DjVu documents from your scanned pages. It has support for Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and also has a number of different image enhancing filters.
Gscan2pdf is pretty straightforward to use. Just hit the little scanner button in the toolbar to open up the Scan Document window. From here, you can select your scanner from the dropdown menu (Scanning in Gscan2pdf is handled via the SANE library). There are some options available for changing the color mode, page size and rotation, double or single sided page mode, number of pages to be scanned, hue, brightness, white level, and numerous other settings.
USB flash drives on Linux have always been problematic. Aside from the nostalgic unetbootin, the bootable USB solutions on Linux are always lame. Either you don't have all the features of the Windows programs, or it's complicated and laborious to make it work.
Just for comparison, Windows has Wubi, Rufus, Yumi, Universal USB Installer, LiLi USB Creator, and the list goes on and on.
On Linux, we had Unetbootin, which was a very good tool, but which did not continue development in the jump from 32 to 64 bits. Really, it did not improve as it should, lagging behind other solutions. So, we who use Linux have been orphaned of some solution that was practical, easy and that effectively worked.
The choice of plotting software may depend on your preferred programming language. For example, if you’re leaning towards Python, matplotlib is an ideal candidate as it’s written in and designed specifically for Python. Whereas if you’re an advocate of the R programming language, you’ll probably prefer ggplot2, which is one of the most popular R packages.
There’s a perception that many plotting software require a fair chunk of programming knowledge and experience even to do the most simplest graphs. We sought to dispel this myth with our legendary introductory training sessions on the use of R in data science and our corresponding Python in data science. These tutorials demonstrate you can be plotting and visualizing data in less than 20 minutes without any programming knowledge.
We’ve also previously reviewed DataExplore which seeks to bridge the gap between graphical interface and command driven or programmatic approaches to data analysis. But what if you’re looking for an even quicker and easier way to visualize data stored in a plain text file. And perhaps you don’t want to leave the comfort of the terminal? You might be interested in Termgraph.
Like DataExplore, Termgraph is written in Python. It’s also free and open source software.
Linux is so flexible that you often can achieve the same results in several different ways. What sets sysadmins apart is how we use this flexibility to achieve the desired outcome. One of the joys we all share is our daily interaction with Linux terminals and the command line. Evidently, terminals and command lines play a significant role in almost every Linux admin’s life.
Commands can get tricky at times and really frustrating when you have the right skills, but your brain starts thinking faster than what your keyboard and mouse can do for you.
Steam is one of the most popular gaming platforms and a very powerful digital distribution service. While Steam officially is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux, what about Chromebooks? It’s possible, though the experience isn’t perfect and there’s a few catches involved in the process.
With impressive visuals and a 4-way contact point traction physics system, DRAG looks awesome and it's going to enter Early Access with Linux PC support on August 11.
Orontes Games have been working on their custom tech for the past few years, to bring us something exciting in the world of racing. It's quite an usual racing game too, merging together an arcade-style with lots of simulation going on resulting in highly dynamic situations. Going by the demo we played during the Summer Festival on Steam, it had a lot of promise and was pretty good fun.
Online games have come this far and gained their place in the world of online streaming. Millions of internet users from all over the world invest their time in playing games online. In fact, numerous online gaming competitions and fests are organized now and then where players can showcase their interest, passion, and awareness towards the game.
There is an endless number of gaming options when it comes to Windows, Android, and macOS however, when it comes to Linux, this gaming list begins to shrink. Well, if you are passionate about gaming and own Linux based machines then this post is just for you.
Death and Taxes, a release from early 2020 that later had the code open sourced is now available to pick up on the DRM-free store GOG.
You play the role of the Grim Reaper, although not in the way you might expect. It's a bit of a weird underworld office job. Using your stamp of doom, you get to pick who lives and who dies and you have a quota to fill. Is your boss a bad guy or is this just how the afterlife really is? That's up to you to find out. Made in the spirit of "Papers, Please", "Reigns", "Beholder" and "Animal Inspector" to name a few.
Inspired by the likes of Portal and The Talos Principle, developer Dragon Slumber are working on and recently announced Aethernaut and it looks slick.
Set in a claustrophobic steampunk world, you must solve puzzle rooms using light, sensors, portals and time travel to gather the aether vials and access the core of the "Construct". With the help of your guide, Doctor Louis Cornell, they explain how this Construct came to be abandoned and why you were chosen to help save it. Is everything as it seems though, is Cornell actually trying to help? The voices creeping in say otherwise and they want your help too.
Fast-paced action-adventure Resolutiion from Monolith of Minds is going to be getting a big free content expansion.
After releasing back in May, this Godot Engine powered game certainly has an impressive Hyper Light Drifter inspired style to it and for me it left quite the lasting impression. Be sure to read our previous thoughts on Resolutiion here.
The Red Plains is the name of the new update which will be coming "Soon. Very soon.". Featuring a brand new combat-heavy biome which will expand upon the lead-up to the finale. Expect to find new enemies, few friends and 'a mysterious host will guide you through the Queen’s Gauntlet right into the Singularity'.
Get yourself a bit of DRM-free comedy, with the release of Guard Duty onto GOG serving as a nice reminder for anyone who missed it originally. This nostalgic experience offers a bit of a wild ride.
A love-letter to classics from the point and click adventure genre, complete with plenty of easter eggs to find. Sick Chicken Studios originally released Guard Duty back in 2019 and it went onto achieve some pretty positive remarks from various users and publications.
Become a cloud and leak all over everything and cause absolute total chaos? Rain on Your Parade is an absolutely brilliant idea for a game.
Rain on Your Parade is a slapstick comedy game where you play as a mischievous cloud determined to ruin everybody's day. You fly high across a wide range of levels while unlocking new abilities and mechanics that get progressively more ridiculous. Some games you just instantly fall in love with the idea and this is one such time, with this silly little cloud with its happy little face that just rains down hell on everyone. Created by Unbound Creations, the same team behind HEADLINER.
After a successful crowdfunding campaign 2018, the monster catching game Monster Crown released into Early Access at the end of July 2020 and it appears to be doing very well.
On their original Kickstarter they had 2,921 backers, which is a pretty reasonable amount for the $45,415 in funding they gathered. The trouble is, with how many thousands of games are releasing all the time on Steam, having a previous crowdfunding campaign doesn't mean that will be replicated there. We've seen many developers struggle but it looks like Studio Aurum will have plenty of funds to keep on improving it. Their publisher, SOEDESCO, emailed us to confirm in the first 72 hours that Monster Crown had "more buyers than it got backers during the entire Kickstarter campaign".
Ready to party? Now that Boneloaf / Coatsink are self-publishing Gang Beasts after splitting off from Double Fine they're starting to get back into major updates.
Originally released back in 2017, Gang Beasts is a local and online multiplayer party game with gelatinous characters, brutal slapstick fight sequences, and absurd hazardous environments, set in the mean streets of Beef City. It can be a serious amount of fun and it's set to get better. Now available in the "public_testing" Beta branch on Steam is a big new build, anyone can try it by going into your Steam Library, Right Click on Gang Beasts and go into Properties and then the Betas tab.
After a successful run in Early Access, Thorium Entertainment have today released their dungeon crawling action-adventure UnderMine. With one of the most annoyingly good gameplay loops I've seen in the past year, UnderMine is an absolute delight to die in over and over.
They've done well in a crowded market too, announcing they've managed to sell well over 120,000 copies now.
UnderMine is at its heart a fast-paced dungeon crawler with persistent progression and a simple loop. You jump down into the mine, grab as much gold as you can while battling various enemy types and a few difficult boss encounters and try to get as far as you can. When you die, that character is well and truly gone and another random character replaces them. However, you do get to keep a percentage of your gold for you to go and unlock more for the next run.
Wooo, summer... Hot weather and a quick computer reinstall right in the middle of the production of the books because my previous Kubuntu 19.10 was obsolete and reached end of life in July. Bad surprise for me this time in the process: no way to install Scribus 1.4.8 stable anymore and all my books are done with that. The package was savagely forced replaced by 1.5.5~Development and no way to reinstall the previous version flagged as stable by the Scribus team.
So, I'll have to move the book project to this development version (it will take hours of adaptation because the text-engine changed between 1.4x and 1.5x). If you are on Windows, Mac, 18.04 or CentOS no worry for you: the package still exists there. Sad to see that no Appimage, Flatpack or Snap are around to rescue this issue... But let's close for now this parenthesis with a taste of bitterness. I'll cope with that, I saw uglier situations of upgrade in my life and this Kubuntu 20.04 is âËâabout all other aspectâËâ a splendid distribution so far.
One secret sauce of GNOME Boxes is libosinfo. It basically is an umbrella for three components: libosinfo, osinfo-db-tools, and osinfo-db.
libosinfo offers programmatic means to query for information about OSes. osinfo-db-tools is a set of tools that help manipulate and extract information from OS images (such as ISO files). osinfo-db is a database of operating system information describing requirements for virtualized installations as well as virtual drivers and devices that work with each OS in the database.
Since my last blog post I have been working on implementing a selection mode for Epiphany’s History Dialog. The selection mode is a pretty common pattern seen throughout GNOME applications. It’s used to easily manipulate a set of selected items from a list or grid. I’ve used the selection mode from GNOME Boxes as a reference when implementing it in Epiphany.
This is how the History Dialog looked like before...
The latest edition comes with new security-oriented features, updated components, and other improvements. Starting with the core component, Kodachi 7.2 is built upon the same Xubuntu 18.04 LTS, but with upgraded Linux Kernel from 5.4.0-33 to 5.4.0-42.
A highlighting feature of Kodachi 7.2 is the new addition of one of the most popular, secure, and private messengers, Session Messenger. Additionally, it has also added another end-to-end encrypted instant messaging application, Threema, to the Kodachi browser bookmarks.
Following the rebranding of Matrix protocol-based messaging client Riot, Kodachi has replaced it with a new Element. To further secure communication, Kodachi now also provides Steghide-GUI, which you can use to hide your text messages encrypted in jpg, wav, or other file formats.
With this commit and several more, Patrick Wildt (patrick@) upgraded -current to version 10.0.0 of LLVM: [...]
I am a professional journalist who has been in the profession since 1993. At the current time I am a freelancer working for media relations firms and open to new clients! My main client is operated by an old colleague of mine, who is hoping to bring me on full-time.
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I have two computers presently running PCLinuxOS as their primary OS. One is a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop that has been completely overhauled; it now runs a 3.06 GHz T9900 CPU, 6 GB of RAM, and has both a 256GB SSD and a 640GB HDD installed. The other is a desktop with an Athlon X4 870K CPU at 3.9 GHz, with 16 GB of RAM and several HDDs and SSDs installed in the case. We have two other Windows machines and an Amazon tablet that Kay uses.
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Honestly, I have no complaints about it. I would like PCLinuxOS to gain more users, but only because it would hopefully get more people to donate. I have no idea how Tex and the community manage to keep it as well maintained as they do. I returned to PCLinuxOS because I preferred the community-based model and the philosophy of this distro over using anything related to Ubuntu.
I have seen what could be accomplished with certain other distributions. The addition of support for FlatPak and AppImage applications is a great start towards the future of the distribution.
I know we all hate systemd, so I won't even suggest the inclusion of this monstrosity. The original intention of systemd was to simplify the system initialization functions found in SysV INIT scripts as well as the scripts contained in the /etc/rc/rc.d directory into one system controlled by one daemon.
Those of us who have worked with Mac OS-X or Windows in the past know what a PITA it is to maintain these operating systems and their startup routines. After having looked at systemd and its documentation, I do not see any reason why we should ever implement such a thing here!!!!!!
But, what if there was another solution. MX-Linux (formerly MEPIS) has a solution in the form of the systemd API replacement package. Such a package would not be easy to implement, and if anyone had the time to do it, it could be done.
But then, if Flatpak can be implemented without systemd, then is there really any reason why technologies such as Docker, Kubernetes, or even QEMU could be implemented without systemd?
(BTW, I got QEMU 5.0 to compile on PCLinuxOS with all emulated processors enabled. It took three hours on my laptop, but it got the job done. I have yet to test it, though.)
Another possibility is to create an ISO with the basics (including the base X.org installation), but without the graphical interface launching at startup. This would be useful for server installations, for low-spec machines, and for those of you who have trouble getting the graphical interface to work at all..
What we commonly call and hold dear as Linux almost had a different name. Torvalds briefly considered "Linux," a play on his first name and Unix, but considered it too egotistical. So, he changed the name to "Freax," combining the words "free," "freak," and "Unix." However, Ari Lemmke, one of the volunteer administrators of the FTP server at the Helsinki University of Technology at the time, thought "Freax" was a dumb name, and took it upon himself to rename it Linux. The name stuck.
Tux, the Linux mascot, didn't come about until five years later. In 1996, when they were about to select the mascot, Torvalds mentioned he was bitten by a little penguin (Eudyptula minor) on a visit to the National Zoo & Aquarium in Canberra, Australia. Larry Ewing provided the original draft of today's well known mascot based on this description. The name Tux was suggested by James Hughes as derivative of Torvalds' UniX, along with being short for tuxedo, a type of suit with color similar to that of a penguin.
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This month's magazine cover was designed by Meemaw. It celebrates the 29th anniversary of the Linux announcement, the announcement of the IBM PC on August 12, 1981, and August being Watermelon Month. During the dog days of summer, there's little else as refreshing as some ice cold watermelon to cool us off.
Until next month, I bid you peace, happiness, prosperity, serenity, and continued good health!
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it is accepting nominations for the 2021 Red Hat Innovation Awards.
Since 2007, the Red Hat Innovation Awards have recognized organizations from around the world and across industries for the transformative projects and outstanding results they have experienced with Red Hat's open source solutions. Open source has helped transform technology from the datacenter to the cloud and the Red Hat Innovation Awards showcase its transformative impact in organizations around the world.
Red Hat today introduced a new version of its virtualization platform, Red Hat Virtualization 4.4, that will help customers more easily manage their applications and give its hybrid cloud strategy a boost in the process.
Red Hat Virtualization is an alternative to VMware Inc.’s vSphere. The platform runs on the IBM Corp. subsidiary’s widely used enterprise Linux distribution, RHEL, and provides features for managing large fleets of virtualized applications.
Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 has been updated with support for the latest release of RHEL that Red Hat launched in April. That release, officially RHEL 8.2, introduced performance improvements as well as monitoring features that make it easier to identify security and reliability issues. Red Hat Virtualization customers can now take advantage of those enhancements by upgrading the operating system installations in their deployments.
With the meteoric rise of microservices and the rush to build more applications more quickly, APIs are being used more than ever to connect services and transfer data. But with a growing number of smaller application "pieces" trying to communicate with each other, APIs (your own and those from third parties) are becoming increasingly challenging to secure.
DevNation Tech Talks are hosted by the Red Hat technologists who create our products. These sessions include real solutions plus code and sample projects to help you get started. In this talk, you’ll learn about Keycloak from Stian Thorgersen and Burr Sutter.
Keycloak is an open source identity and access management solution for modern applications and services. You might already be familiar with it and are curious about its capabilities and features, but if you aren’t, don’t worry. In this video tutorial, we’ll give you a great introduction to Keycloak and go through most of the capabilities and features that help you secure your applications and services. You’ll discover how to easily enable two-factor authentication, integrate with external user stores like LDAP, delegate authentication to other identity providers, and use many more of the other cool and useful features Keycloak brings to the table.
When industry influencers and CIOs talk about the future of computing, they typically aren’t only discussing hardware advancements or cloud-based software. Increasingly, these conversations center on transformation through application innovation, providing new predictive services to customers that are driven by an integrated user experience. This could be something like inspecting customer data patterns to promote new banking services, analyzing health indicators to proactively recommend treatment or an immersive interface for personalized interactions.
Whatever the end product, it’s about gaining a competitive advantage in an ever-evolving, highly-competitive marketplace through technological advancement. Enter containers. Containers enable these applications to evolve faster, increase developer velocity and bring a greater level of portability and consistency regardless of underlying infrastructure.
Gartner predicts that, by 2022, more than 75% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, which is a significant increase from fewer than 30% in 2019.1
While Fedora 33 is slated to default to the Btrfs file-system for desktop spins, for those on Fedora Server 33 or otherwise not using the defaults will have Stratis Storage 2.1 as another option.
Red Hat's Stratis Storage has been their effort to improve the Linux storage stack while building upon LVM, Device Mapper, and XFS for offering ZFS/Btrfs-like features. Stratis continues making great progress and is ultimately committed to by Red Hat as part of their Linux storage play, potentially with it being used by default come Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. Meanwhile the Fedora community has been dabbling with Btrfs on the desktop side for Fedora 33 and thankfully both technologies continue to be fostered by Fedora.
Whether you’re building an application or website, great documentation is crucial to the success of your service. Developers need instructions on how to use your API and they need a way to try it out. Good documentation handles both.
The OpenAPI Specification is an open standard for defining and documenting your API. The OpenAPI Specification enables the generation of great documentation, but creating an OpenAPI spec takes a lot of time and effort to create and keep up-to-date. Often, the OpenAPI spec ends up a large, forgotten, thousandl-ine file.
To help make it as easy as possible to document an API, today we are launching the OpenAPI Comment Parser. The goal of OpenAPI Comment Parser is to give developers a way to generate this OpenAPI spec from comments inline with their code. When the OpenAPI spec lives inside the code, developers are much more likely to keep it up-to-date as their code changes.
It seems like these days, everyone is talking about Containers, Kubernetes, microservices, serverless, cloud-native computing, and the Journey to Cloud or multicloud. These key technologies have many advantages, but you should be aware of some of the hidden costs associated with moving to the cloud so that you can plan in advance and avoid any surprises along the way.
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from Cockpit version 223 and Cockpit Podman version 21.
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When a virtual machine is not running and Cockpit makes a snapshot, only the disk contents will be saved. When a virtual machine is running, Cockpit will snapshot both the disk and memory state.
Today, the first point release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS went live! To celebrate, we wanted to share how Ubuntu has evolved since the first release in 2004 to where we are today with 20.04. Thanks to those in the community and our users for your contributions and joining us on this journey. Upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS now!
The overriding theme of their visual data-dump is “Ubuntu from 2004 to 20.04” (see what they did there?) and, accordingly, comes chockfull of stats, facts, and other trivia about the OS, the project, and its achievements in the years until now.
“Such as,” you ask?
Well, its bangin’ security for one...
Updated CD images are provided with this release, including fixes for some installation bugs. (Many installation problems are hardware-specific; for those, see “Hardware support bugs” below.)
For those that prefer waiting until the first point release of a new Ubuntu Long Term Support series before upgrading, Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS is out with the latest bug and security fixes for the "Focal Fossa" release.
The slightly delayed Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS is now shipping with various bug/security fixes. Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS doesn't bring any major kernel upgrade or hardware enablement stack for that matter but won't come until Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS after Ubuntu 20.10 has already shipped.
Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS the first point release is available now and you can immediately download or upgrade.
Even if it’s not yet an official Ubuntu flavor, Ubuntu Unity wants to stay close to the release cycle of the upstream Ubuntu operating system. This remix uses Canonical’s good old Unity desktop as default environment on top of the stable Ubuntu base.
Ubuntu Unity 20.04 was launched about three months ago, based on the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series. Today, it sees the general availability of the first point release, Ubuntu Unity 20.04.1, based on Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS and packed with various improvements and bug fixes.
The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS (Long-Term Support) for its Desktop, Server, and Cloud products, as well as other flavours of Ubuntu with long-term support.
As usual, this point release includes many updates, and updated installation media has been provided so that fewer updates will need to be downloaded after installation. These include security updates and corrections for other high-impact bugs, with a focus on maintaining stability and compatibility with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
actually didn’t write at all about Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix in the past, so I’m happy to introduce you to it today. It’s an unofficial flavor of the Ubuntu operating system that uses Linux Mint’s popular Cinnamon desktop environment by default.
Just like all the official and unofficial Ubuntu spins, it comes with its own customizations and some in-house built packages. The latest release, Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 20.04.1 LTS is now available for download (links at the end of the article) and comes with a bunch of goodies.
In this article, we are going to list out the best and useful Linux multimedia software for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
zPoint Products has gone to Indiegogo to pitch an open source, cloudless “BaHa Box” smart hub starting at $219 that runs Linux and Home Assistant on an Allwinner H2+ or i.MX6 ULL with 2x USB, 10/100 LAN, WiFi/BT, and optional Zigbee and Z-Wave.
Delta, Canada based zPoint Products, a spin-off of TechSol (Technical Solutions Inc), has informed us of its Indiegogo campaign for a Cortex-A7-powered home automation hub pre-loaded with a Linux BSP and the popular, open source Home Assistant smart hub stack. The 115 x 90 x 451mm BaHa Box is available in a Residential model with an Allwinner H2+ and a pricier Commercial model with an NXP i.MX6ULL.
Most devices on the market are designed with a single brand of processor, but for their BaHa Box smart automation hub, xPoint Products decided to offer either Allwinner H2+ or NXP i.MX 6ULL versions. Why is that? Easy: Allwinner H2+ processor provides a cheaper solution for the residential market, while NXP i.MX 6ULL wide temperature range makes it more suitable for commercial applications.
Both versions of BaHa Box smart hub run Linux on 256MB RAM, and offers Ethernet, WiFi, and Bluetooth connectivity, with options for Zigbee and Z-Wave. The hub supports over 2,000 devices and can work either connected to the cloud, or “offline” without internet.
There is a lot of negativity in the world these days such as the COVID-19 pandemic, record unemployment, and the massive explosion in Beirut, Lebanon. Sometimes it can feel like positive news doesn't exist anymore. The truth is, good news is always happening, but it isn't always reported.
Well, today we are happy to report a feel-good story. Popular company Viewsonic, known for manufacturing high-quality computer displays, is donating 300 Raspberry Pi thin clients to the Los Angeles County Alliance for Boys and Girls Clubs. These little computers are a great tool for teaching kids about Linux.
There's a saying about the cloud, and it goes something like this: The cloud is just somebody else's computer. While the cloud is actually more complex than that (it's a lot of computers), there's a lot of truth to the sentiment. When you move to the cloud, you're moving data and services and computing power to an entity you don't own or fully control. On the one hand, this frees you from having to perform administrative tasks you don't want to do, but, on the other hand, it could mean you no longer control your own computer.
This is why the open source world likes to talk about an open hybrid cloud, a model that allows you to choose your own infrastructure, select your own OS, and orchestrate your workloads as you see fit. However, if you don't happen to have an open hybrid cloud available to you, you can create your own—either to help you learn how the cloud works or to serve your local network.
Building your own cloud requires at least three Raspberry Pi units, an Arm Linux distribution to serve as an OS, and Kubernetes to help you manage the containers your cloud will run. Chris Collins explains every step you need to take to make this happen in our new eBook. If you've ever built an array of distributed computing nodes, you'll probably be surprised at how simple it is.
It may come to you as a surprise that you can run a complete system for hospital and medical facility management with a Raspberry Pi, but you really can do that.
In this article, we will explain to you how this is possible. But first, let's breakdown the big picture for you.
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Raspberry Pi is a single-board box-sized computer that has gained reputation over the years for prototyping and creating real-life applications. In short, Raspberry Pi is a complete computer but in a tiny package which costs $45. It's already being used for education, prototyping, "internet of things" IoT, robotics and much more.
There are several models for Raspberry Pi each having a different CPU/RAM combination. And it has a supportive community that releases dozens of resources, video tutorials, showcases and guides for it to use it for various real-life applications.
Fedora's less talked about "Internet of Things" (IoT) edition is looking to be promoted to an official spin for Fedora 33.
Red Hat's Peter Robinson is pushing along Fedora IoT through Fedora's new Edition Promotion Process in aiming to make it an official Fedora Edition alongside Fedora Workstation and Fedora Server. The hope in this IoT flavor becoming "official" is that it will help in the adoption. The IoT version also relies upon OSTree and the hope is that additional exposure will be of benefit too.
Because most of these boards are based on Intel processors, most all of these boards run the Linux operating system.
Odyssey's quad-core Celeron SoC might not be a powerhouse by desktop standards—but it's more than powerful enough to run a full Windows 10 desktop experience. Add in 8GiB of RAM, 64GB eMMC storage, one SATA-III port, two 1Gbps Ethernet jacks, dual M.2 slots (one B-key and one M-key), Intel 9560 Wi-Fi, Intel UHD 600 graphics and a full-size HDMI port, and it's hard to figure out what this $260 box can't do.
If you're looking to control other hardware on a very low level, Odyssey also has a Raspberry Pi-compatible 40-pin GPIO header and a 28-pin header for its ATSAMD21 Arduino coprocessor. We're not set up to test those functions, but Odyssey maker Seeed is also the manufacturer of the well-reputed Grove sensor system—so when it tells us that the Odyssey's connectors and coprocessor are Grove-compatible, we're inclined to believe them.
When it comes to form factor, the Odyssey in its re_computer case reminds us most of an unusually geeky Chromebox. Like the Chromebox, Odyssey in the re_computer case is just larger than the VESA mounting plate on the back of a monitor—and also like the Chromebox, it has VESA compatible mounting holes on the back. You'll need to provide your own mounting studs if you want to take advantage of that option, though.
The re_computer case was frankly a bit of a pain to assemble—the provided instructions consist of unlabeled diagrams only, and the diagrams aren't all accurate. In particular, we wish that they would have told us up front that the clear top lid of the re_computer was magnetically attached! The box lists the lid in the inventory as a separate part, but it's already snapped into the case itself, and it's not immediately clear that you can pry it loose easily with a spudger or other fine-edged tool.
Once you actually get the re_computer case assembled, it's extremely attractive and functional. Any of the parts you need to mess with can be accessed by removing the magnetically attached clear lid, and the external ports are all easy to get to and unobscured. We also really like the cheerful royal blue that the sides of the case are anodized with.
Both the board and case had to be purchased separately, and Windows 10 was pre-installed on the internal eMMC flash. But now, Seeed Studio has started to offer Odyssey Blue J4105 mini PC with ODYSSEY-X86J4105 SBC pre-installed into Re_Computer case and fitted with a 128GB SSD for increased storage capacity and better performance.
When Geert Wanten’s wife got tired of opening up the chicken coop to let them out in the morning, he decided to automate the situation using an Arduino Nano.
Wanten’s DIY system calculates the sunup/sundown via info from a DS1307 RTC module, pulling the door up with a gearmotor and a spool of fishing line. When it’s time to drop the door and close things up, the motor is reversed, keeping the chickens safe at night.
There's a saying about the cloud, and it goes something like this: The cloud is just somebody else's computer. While the cloud is actually more complex than that (it's a lot of computers), there's a lot of truth to the sentiment. When you move to the cloud, you're moving data and services and computing power to an entity you don't own or fully control. On the one hand, this frees you from having to perform administrative tasks you don't want to do, but, on the other hand, it could mean you no longer control your own computer.
This is why the open source world likes to talk about an open hybrid cloud, a model that allows you to choose your own infrastructure, select your own OS, and orchestrate your workloads as you see fit. However, if you don't happen to have an open hybrid cloud available to you, you can create your own—either to help you learn how the cloud works or to serve your local network.
Open source software is now mainstream; long gone are the days when open source projects attracted developers alone. Nowadays, users across numerous industries are active consumers of open source software, and you can't expect everyone to know how to use the software just by reading the code.
Even for developers (including those with plenty of experience in other open source projects), good documentation serves as a valuable onboarding tool when people join a community. People who are interested in contributing to a project often start by working on documentation to get familiar with the project, the community, and the community workflow.
I am mostly a self-taught programmer. When I was growing up in the late 1970s, our elementary school had a small resource room with an Apple II computer. My brother and I fell into a group of friends that liked computers, and we all helped each other learn the system.
We showed such promise that our parents bought us an Apple II+ clone called the Franklin ACE 1000. My brother and I taught ourselves how to program in AppleSoft BASIC. Our parents bought us books, and we devoured them. I learned every corner of BASIC by reading about something in the book, then writing a practice program. My favorite pastime was writing simulations and games.
I stayed with BASIC for a long time. Our next computer was an IBM PC clone with a version of BASIC on it. Much later, MS-DOS 5 introduced QBasic, which was a modern version of BASIC that finally eliminated line numbers.
Collaborating on an open source software project is inherently an online experience. For me, almost all of my interaction has been via email. I'll send someone a patch, and they'll review it and reply to me. Or a user will file a bug, and I'll respond to it via the bug tracker. More commonly, developers in the open source community will discuss ideas via the email list.
Over the years, I've only interacted on projects electronically, and have only met a few people in person, usually in settings unrelated to the project. Sometimes it's at conferences—we'll recognize each other's names, and realize we're working on the same open source project. I really enjoy those connections, but they're rare.
According to data published Saturday by metrics vendor Net Applications, Chrome's share during July rose eight-tenths of a percentage point, the most since March, to 71%. The browser has been on a seven-month run of gains, adding 4.4 percentage points to its account since January. The only other browsers to enjoy a positive 2020 thus far: Microsoft's – Edge and Internet Explorer (IE) – and that pair increased their combined share by less than a 10th of Chrome's.
Have you ever played a VR game and needed a tip for beating the game... but you didn’t want to take off your headset to find that solution? Or, have you wanted to watch videos while you played your game? Or, how about wanting to immerse yourself in a 360 video on Youtube?
Released today, Firefox Reality PC Preview enables you to do these things and more. This is the newest addition to the Firefox Reality family of products. Built upon the latest version of the well-known and trusted Firefox browser, Firefox Reality PC Preview works with tethered headsets as well as wireless headsets streaming from a PC.
In March 2020, Michelle Thorne and I announced office tours of the Museum of the Fossilized Internet as part of our new Sustainability programme. Then the pandemic hit, and we teamed up with the Mozilla Mixed Reality team to make it more accessible while also demonstrating the capabilities of social VR with Hubs.
We now welcome visitors to explore the museum at home through their browsers.
In 2019 we started looking into our experiences and 2020 saw us release the new responsive redesign, a new AAQ flow, a finalized Firefox Accounts migration, and a few other minor tweaks. We have also performed a Python and Django upgrade carrying on with the foundational work that will allow us to grow and expand our support platform. This was a huge win for our team and the first time we have improved our experience in years! The team is working on tracking the impact and improvement to our overall user experience.
We also know that contributors in Support have had to deal with an old, sometimes very broken, toolset, and so we wanted to work on that this year. You may have already heard the updates from Kiki and Giulia through their monthly strategy updates. The research and opportunity identification the team did was hugely valuable, and the team identified onboarding as an immediate area for improvement. We are currently working through an improved onboarding process and look forward to implementing and launching ongoing work.
Since the initial release of ECSY we have been focusing on API stability and bug fixing as well as providing some features (such as components’ schemas) to improve the developer experience and provide better validation and descriptive errors when working in development mode.
This is the second and final part of a blog post series that explains how Firefox implements Web Security fundamentals, like the Same-Origin Policy and Content-Security-Policy. While the first post explained Firefox security terminology and theoretical foundations, this second post covers how to log internal security information to the console in a human readable format. Ultimately, we hope to inspire new security research in the area of web security checks and to empower participants in our bug bounty program to do better, deeper work.
Generally, we encourage everyone to do their security testing in Firefox Nightly. That being said, the logging mechanisms described in this post, work in all versions of Firefox – from self-build, to versions of Nightly, Beta, Developer Edition, Release and ESR you may have installed locally already.
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An attacker could use a CSP bypass like this and target users on web pages that are susceptible to XSS or content injections. However, this bug was identified in a previous version of Firefox and has been fixed for all of our users since.
To summarize, using the provided logging mechanism allows us to effectively detect security problems by visual inspection. One could take it even further and generate graph structures for nested page loads. Using these graphs to observe where the security context (e.g., the CSP) changes can be a very powerful tool for runtime security analysis.
Going Forward
We have explained how to enable logging mechanisms within Firefox which allows for visual inspection of every web security check performed. We would like to point out that finding security flaws might be eligible for a bug bounty. Finally, we hope the provided instructions foster security research and in turn allow researchers, bug bounty hunters and generally everyone interested in web security to contribute to Mozilla and the Security of the Open Web.
Perfherder is one of the primary tools used by our performance sheriffs to triage and investigate regression (and improvement) alerts. It’s also a key part of the workflow any Firefox engineer may experience when working on performance, either responding to a regression, or proactively measuring the impact of their changes. This post will cover the various improvements that have been made to Perfherder so far in 2020.
For the past year or so, the Firefox Desktop Front-End Performance team has been concentrating on making improvements to browser startup performance.
The launching of an application like Firefox is quite complex. Meticulous profiling of Firefox startup in various conditions has, thankfully, helped reveal a number of opportunities where we can make improvements. We’ve been evaluating and addressing these opportunities, and several have made it into the past few Firefox releases.
This blog post is about one of those improvements that is currently in the later stages of development. I’m going to describe the improvement, and how we went about integrating it.
In a default installation of Firefox, the first (and only) tab that loads is about:home. (Note: this is only true if the user hasn’t just restarted after applying an update, and if they haven’t set a custom home page or configured Firefox to restore their previous session on start.)
I just set up Mozilla Central with a git wrapper so I can contribute to the main Gecko codebase using Git. It works great, but the default branch has an unusual name compared to what I’m used to.
Last year at the Mozilla All-Hands in Whistler, Canada I went for a walk with my colleague Mark Reid who manages our Data Platform team. We caught up on personal stuff and discussed ongoing projects as well as shared objectives for the next half-year. These in-person conversations with colleagues are my favorite activity at our semi-annual gatherings and are helpful in ensuring that my team is working on the most impactful projects and that our tests create value for the teams we support.
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For Mozilla, getting reliable data from our products is critical to inform our decision making. Glean is a new product analytics and telemetry solution that provides a consistent experience and behavior across all of our products. Mark and I agreed that it would be fantastic if we had automated end-to-end tests to complement existing test suites and alert us of potential issues with the system as quickly as possible.
As we know, Glean SDK has provided language bindings for different programming language requirements that include Kotlin, Swift, and Python. However, when we are talking about supporting applications that use Unity as their development toolkit, there are no existing bindings available to help us achieve it. Unity allows users using a Python interpreter to embed Python scripts in a Unity project; however, due to Unity’s technology being based on the Mono framework, that is not the same as our familiar Python runtime for running Python scripts. So, the alternative way we need to find out is how to run Python on .Net Framework or exactly on Mono framework. If we are discussing possible approaches to run Python script in the main process, using IronPython is the only solution. However, it is only available for Python 2.7, and the Glean SDK Python language binding needs Python 3.6. Hence, we start our plans to develop a new Glean binding for C#.
LibreOffice is the best open-source alternative to Microsoft Office. It is available for all major platforms and the document foundation releases frequent updates.
With the new major update LibreOffice 7, it has got some nice features and performance improvements.
LibreOffice is an office suite developed by the document foundation. The look and features of every LibreOffice are identical to MS Office or even better. The Calc Spreadsheet that is the alternative to MS spreadsheet opens faster and, with the new update, it has got more performance improvements.
LibreOffice is one of the most well-known open source office suites out there. It starts as a continuation of OpenOffice, which is no longer under active development after Oracle bought its parent company, Sun, in 2010.
Version 7.0 of LibreOffice was released yesterday, with tons of improvements everywhere both in performance and in the overall user interface. But can LibreOffice 7.0 be the long-awaited Microsoft Office alternative? And to what level can companies, organizations and governments depend on it to use it instead of Microsoft Office?
To answer that, we’ve put our hands on the new version to see what’s new in it and how well it can deal with Microsoft Office documents and presentation files.
Canonical, Nextcloud and Collabora Productivity announced today a joint collaboration to integrate the Collabora Online open-source, LibreOffice-based office suite into the Nextcloud Ubuntu Appliance.
About two months ago, Canonical launched the Ubuntu Appliance initiative. Available for Raspberry Pi, Intel NUC and PC devices, the Ubuntu Appliance project aims to offer users all-in-one bundles with their favorite software that can easily install, configure and maintain.
Among the initial appliances available in Canonical’s Ubuntu Appliance portfolio, there’s the AdGuard Home Ubuntu Appliance, OpenHUB Ubuntu Appliance, Mosquitto Ubuntu Appliance, Plex Ubuntu Appliance, and last but not least the Nextcloud Ubuntu Appliance.
The Nextcloud Ubuntu Appliance lets you easily set up your own private cloud server with all the collaboration tools the powerful Nextcloud software has to offer, including file storage and sharing, groupware, as well as chat and video calls.
Keeping full control over your personal data and documents, is more and more important. Sharing by email or via the services of big tech companies is losing its shine, for obvious reasons. To help our users we introduce a new fresh Nextcloud Ubuntu Appliance for the Intel NUC, that comes with Collabora Online.
Simply take an Intel NUC server, install the Ubuntu Appliance and take back control over storing and sharing your personal data and files with Nextcloud. Next, of course, you want to read and edit your documents, now stored on your own server, wherever you are. Naturally you will be able to allow others to review and comment on text, presentations, charts and more, perhaps during a video call or chat. All this under your own control!
The new Ubuntu Appliance with Collabora Online and Nextcloud offers you just that – and more too. Do read these articles about the Ubuntu Appliance and the Nextcloud features. Now, let’s have a look at Collabora Online and some of the great features that you will benefit from.
Alongside five popular software projects, we recently launched a new initiative called Ubuntu Appliances. A portfolio of software that allows users to turn a Raspberry Pi or an Intel NUC into a secure, self-hosted device. The initial launch included the Nextcloud Ubuntu Appliance. An application that enables you to host your own cloud, on your own hardware. In this blog, we discuss the benefits of the Nextcloud Appliance, and the addition of Collabora Online for use on the Intel NUC. To get set up, follow our extended tutorial, or, to install Nextcloud on Raspberry Pi or in a virtual machine, head to our website for instructions.
Today WordPress.com publicly launched an all-new version of its remote work collaboration tool P2 — the "secret sauce" behind Automattic's 15-year success as a fully distributed company, with over 1,200 employees working from 77 countries. It's the first time ever that P2 has been released as a standalone product for small and large teams to collaborate.
Almost a year after Richard Stallman, the founding president of Free Software Foundation, was forced to resign, FSF board has finally elected a new president, Geoffrey Knauth.
Following Richard Stallman’s resignation last September from the Foundation, FSF has now elected Geoffrey Knauth as its new president. Knauth has served on the FSF’s board for more than 30 years.
“The FSF board chose me at this moment as a servant leader to help the community focus on our shared dedication to protect and grow software that respects our freedoms,” said Knauth said. “It is also important to protect and grow the diverse membership of the community. It is through our diversity of backgrounds and opinions that we have creativity, perspective, intellectual strength and rigor.”
GNU C Library 2.32 (glibc 2.32) is now available as this important library for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
With Glibc 2.32 some of the enhancements include...
The GNU C Library version 2.32 is now available.
The GNU C Library is used as *the* C library in the GNU system and in GNU/Linux systems, as well as many other systems that use Linux as the kernel.
The GNU C Library is primarily designed to be a portable and high performance C library. It follows all relevant standards including ISO C11 and POSIX.1-2017. It is also internationalized and has one of the most complete internationalization interfaces known.
This is tutorial to edit photos with text using computer program GIMP. This explains the basics of writing and editing text you can apply over all your photos you they can accompany your text documents you are working on. This is the eighth aka the final part of GIMP for Authors the series. I am happy to publish this one. Enjoy editing!
Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX) is an open standard for communicating software bill of materials (SBOM) information that supports accurate identification of software components, explicit mapping of relationships between components, and the association of security and licensing information with each component. The SPDX format has recently been submitted by the Linux Foundation and the Joint Development Foundation to the JTC1 committee of the ISO for international standards approval.
A group of eight healthcare industry organizations, composed of five medical device manufacturers and three healthcare delivery organizations (hospital systems), recently participated in the first-ever proof of concept (POC) of the SPDX standard for healthcare use.
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The original POC was able to validate the conclusions of the NTIA Working Group that proprietary SBOM formats specific to healthcare industry verticals are not needed. This 2020 POC showed that the SPDX standard could be used as an open format for SBOMs for use by healthcare industry providers. Additionally, the ability to import the SPDX format into SIEM solutions will help HDOs adequately understand the operational and cyber risks of medical device software components from their originating supply chain.
There is work ahead to improve automation of SPDX-based SBOMs, including the automated identification of software components and determining which component vulnerabilities are exploitable in a given system. Participating HDOs intend to perform compensating control exercises to identify and implement risk reduction techniques building on this information. HDOs are also evaluating how SPDX can support other improvements to vulnerability management. In summary, this POC showed that SPDX could be an essential part of addressing today’s operational and cyber risks.
Modern software testing requires solutions that are faster and smarter. A test automation framework is a set of best practices, assumptions, common tools, and libraries that help quality-assurance testers assess the functionality, security, usability, and accessibility of multiple web and mobile applications. This type of framework help makes your test automation code reusable, maintainable, and stable. At their heart, they let you carry out tests automatically and produce test results without human intervention. Apply automation to tasks that are repetitive.
Modern software development relies heavily on automation, from analyzing source code looking for errors to testing to the build, packaging and deploy process. That’s the scenario where a test automation tool becomes useful.
It’s very important to select the best set of test automation tools for your specific needs and requirements. There’s lots of tools available which makes selection somewhat problematic.
You don’t need to spend money on test automation software as there’s a great range of free and open source tools, libraries, and testing frameworks available.
Here’s our recommendations to start your automation journey. All of the programs are free and open source goodness with the exception of Katalon Studio, which is freeware.
So, I needed a container of Debian Slink (2.1), released back in 1999. I expected this was going to be a long and involved process.
In my previous article, I introduced natural language processing (NLP) and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), the NLP toolkit created at the University of Pennsylvania. I demonstrated how to parse text and define stopwords in Python and introduced the concept of a corpus, a dataset of text that aids in text processing with out-of-the-box data. In this article, I'll continue utilizing datasets to compare and analyze natural language.
Not owning a smartphone at the moment, I am not able to delete or upload any post in my Instagram account as the Web version does not support such features at the moment. Being a heavy computer nerd, I decided to hack through the Instagram requests myself and figure out a way to fully purge my account directly from my computer.
Open source is notorious for lack of design presence, enough so that my search to prove this fact has turned up nearly nothing. There’s many ways that such a gap in community might manifest, but one that I never anticipated was working with developers that had never interacted with a designer before.
A quick note for context: I’m writing this as a UX/UI designer working with open source projects for a little over a year. Because there are so many ways design processes can happen (enough to warrant its own blog post), this post is not intended to discuss design process deeply. My goal here is to pass on some of what I’ve learned that helps me design in this unusual space in hopes that it can help someone else. This post might seem most relevant for designers, but I think this experience could be helpful for developers as well.
After a few years at more conventional design jobs where the workflow never allowed me to communicate with our team’s developers, I started working with Project Jupyter on JupyterLab. This was my first experience working collaboratively with developers. I was feeling lost enough trying to comprehend the scope of the software I was helping design, and the enigma of the near-silent developer I began working with was not helping my nerves.
Your server is running just fine, handling requests and sending responses. But then, ever so slowly, memory usage creeps up, and up, and up–until eventually your process runs out of memory and crashes. And then it restarts, and the leaking starts all over again.
In order to fix memory leaks, you need to figure out where that memory is being allocated. And that can be tricky, unless you use the right tools.
Let’s see how you can identify the exact lines of code that are leaking by using the Fil memory profiler.
Django is one of the most popular Python Web Frameworks. However, optimizing django performance can often be difficult. Most performance problems boil down to one thing: the database. According to our guest speaker, Andrew Brookins, the only way to master Django performance is to master database performance.
In this Webinar, Andrew is going to take us on a journey through an app that he created to demonstrate all the bottlenecks that arise when trying to optimize your Django app.
In Python, you can use sort or sorted to sort a list.
But what is the difference between the two? This is what I will discuss in this article.
As engineers, we know that we should avoid reinventing the wheel. When we can, we want to use libraries written by other people to do some heavy-lifting for us. In this post, I'm going to share with you some things I learned on how to leverage existing libraries from DLLs (or any other files with COM type information like TLB or OCX files). Specifically, I'll share some things I learned on my journey to figure out how to use Python to send a fax. So we'll eventually show how you could use a Windows DLL that is behind the functionality in the Windows Fax and Scan utility.
There are several situations when we want to work with the operating system using Python. We may want to see the user details or wish to do some tasks with the files and directories. If you are a system administrator, you will find it useful to work with Operating System as one can easily automate some repeating tasks of the Operating System using Python.
Although the same tasks can be performed using basic shell scripting, it has limited capabilities and will not give you so much power as in Python. Additionally, the same python script can be used anywhere and also integrate the codes to other python projects. There are a vast number of modules to work with the Operating System in Python. Some of the modules which are included in Python’s standard library and work well with Operating Systems are os/path, pwd, glob, shutil, and subprocess.
Before getting started with this tutorial, you need to have Python installed. If you don’t have it installed already, refer our step by step guide to install Python on Linux.
Converting a list of strings into a string is a very common operation.
We're back with another GeekOut episode. Richard Campbell, a developer and podcaster who also dives deep into science and tech topics, is back for our second GeekOut episode. Last time we geeked out about the real science and progress around a moon base. This time it's why is there life on Earth, where could it be or have been in the solar system, and beyond.
In case you didn't catch the first GeekOut, episode 253, this one is more of a general science and tech episode. I love digging into the deep internals of all the tools of the Python space, but given all that is going on in the world, I thought it'd be fun to take a step back and just enjoy some fun geekery and give you all something to just sit back and let your mind dream.
In this episode, we did some Django model development. I created a new model to track break days in a school year. This model will be critical to fill in vacations and holidays so that the scheduling functionality works properly. I added the model, the tests, the admin page, and the create view to create break days in the app. We started by picking a model name and discussing naming in programming.
So, just as I mentioned, I was able to complete the documentation part in one week. The documentation includes documentation for both python and c++, the languages supported by panda3d for game development. The appropriate code snippets have been included along with the screenshots of the corresponding output.
From my last work there were few minor things that need to be changed in my triage PR. I'll be working on adding a new format that is PDF. I need some time to figure out what is the best case to add this feature that is either using a different output format or providing a new template so the users can directly print from the HTML.
Last week I completed the ScrapyH2ProxyAgent implementation and added the required tests. I was going through the codebase for hyper-h2 library to get insight on how they implemented CONNECT method for HTTP/2.
Hi everyone a little late on this blog as I have to go back to college to get my stuff back. I passed the second evaluation, yay,. Till now I have been able to get the module metadata except the licenses. The licenses can be collected in 2 ways one is through making bash scripts to find and collect licenses from the module directory. Since licenses files dont have a set structure or a convention that's why its getting difficult and a foolproof guarantee cant be given. Another way is through making an in house copyright to License parser. For debian licenses we have debut used in tern I have to come up with similar kind of parser. I also have one idea of training a model from data collected by using github's api but thats just overkill.
The PHP team is pleased to announce the fourth testing release of PHP 8.0.0, Beta 1. This continues the PHP 8.0 release cycle, the rough outline of which is specified in the PHP Wiki.
For source downloads of PHP 8.0.0 Beta 1 please visit the download page.
Please carefully test this version and report any issues found in the bug reporting system.
The release of PHP 8.0 is now one step closer to reality with the first beta being issued today and this also marking the feature freeze for this version due out later in the year.
PHP 8.0 is a big step forward for this widely used programming language with PHP JIT and other performance optimizations, JSON at long last brought into PHP core, improvements to the PHP GD imaging library, cryptographic message syntax support within PHP OpenSSL, PHP Zip improvements, and a variety of other enhancements. PHP JIT and the never-ending speed optimizations are what I am most excited about with PHP 8.0 and the performance has indeed been great in my testing and I'll have some results of PHP 8.0 Beta 1 out soon.
RPMs of PHP version 7.4.9 are available in remi repository for Fedora 32 and remi-php74 repository for Fedora 30-31 and Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 7 (RHEL, CentOS).
RPMs of PHP version 7.3.21 are available in remi repository for Fedora 30-31 and remi-php73 repository for Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).
RPMs of PHP version 7.2.33 are available in remi-php72 repository for Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).
I'm writing this post in what Google is euphemistically referring to as an improvement. I don't understand this. I managed to ignore New Blogger for a few weeks but Google's ability to fark stuff up has the same air of inevitability as rotting corpses. Perhaps on mobile devices it's better, and even that is a matter of preference, but it's space-inefficient on desktop due to larger buttons and fonts, it's noticeably slower, it's buggy, and very soon it's going to be your only choice.
My biggest objection, however, is what they've done to the HTML editor. I'm probably the last person on earth to do so, but I write my posts in raw HTML. This was fine in the old Blogger interface which was basically a big freeform textbox you typed tags into manually. There was some means to intercept tags you didn't close, which was handy, and when you added elements from the toolbar you saw the HTML as it went in. Otherwise, WYTIWYG (what you typed is what you got). Since I personally use fairly limited markup and rely on the stylesheet for most everything, this worked well.
On the cover of her new album, KiCk i, the Venezuelan experimental artist and producer Arca is wrapped in gauzy white underwear, the soft fabric across her skin in stark juxtaposition to the blade-like bionic prosthetics she’s wearing on her arms and legs. She’s bare but also armed, vulnerable yet gladiatorial.
The View From Saturn€
After Kyiv skateboarder Svetlana Yurchenko did her first kickflip, she let out a joyful scream. The video of her celebrations went viral, quickly making its way across skateboarding-themed accounts on Instagram. It was even shared by legendary American skateboarder Tony Hawk.€
The prosecutors issued the subpoena last year, seeking financial records that the Republican president and his company had provided to the bank, the Times said, citing four unnamed people.
The office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance declined to confirm or deny the report. Deutsche Bank and the White House did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment.
The Times said Deutsche Bank complied with the subpoena and provided prosecutors with "detailed records, including financial statements and other materials" that Trump had provided to the bank as he sought loans.
A massive blast on 4 August has caused widespread damage in the port area of the city of Beirut in Lebanon, with 100 people reported dead and 4000 injured. Here’s what we know so far.
"Really heartbreaking to watch what happened in Beirut. Thoughts and prayers are with those affected by this devastating explosion."
The explosion in the port of Beirut, which killed at least 100 people and injured about 4,000 others, is the latest blow to Lebanon, which already faces an economic, political and public health crisis amid the coronavirus pandemic. The blast is believed to have been triggered by 2,700 tons of highly explosive ammonium nitrate inexplicably left unattended in a warehouse for six years. Journalist Rami Khouri says it’s further proof of “the cumulative incompetence, corruption, lassitude, amateurism and uncaring attitude by successive Lebanese governments” that have failed the country. “It’s the ruling political elite that is responsible for this,” he says.
As Beirut reels from a massive explosion that killed at least 100 people and injured thousands, we get an on-the-ground update from pediatrician and writer Dr. Seema Jilani, who treated her own daughter for injuries after the blast. “It was extremely packed because we’re just coming out of a four-day lockdown,” says Jilani. “Everybody was out.” Lebanon’s Prime Minister Hassan Diab called the explosion a “national catastrophe.”
What if Trump's remarks were taken seriously and some hothead fired retaliatory missiles at Israel?
As Beirut reels from a massive explosion that killed at least 100 people and injured thousands, we get an on-the-ground update from pediatrician and writer Dr. Seema Jilani, who treated her own daughter for injuries after the blast. “It was extremely packed because we’re just coming out of a four-day lockdown,” says Jilani. “Everybody was out.” Lebanon’s Prime Minister Hassan Diab called the explosion a “national catastrophe.”
We all have to negotiate in our lives. Whether it’s about future salary, where do you go for lunch with your colleagues, or if the honeymoon is going to be just lying down on a beach in a resort. So we all negotiate one way or the other. But are we doing it right?
Does it work for us and - maybe more importantly - does it work for both sides of the table?
I finished reading my first book on negotiations. One of the pieces of advice found in the book is even in the title: Never Split the Difference. But why? And what else can we find inside?
In the first-to-publish race on COVID-19, researchers and publishers have also embraced a social media mentality and pushed scientific standards aside. The race to understand the underpinnings of COVID-19 and to win competitive applications for COVID-19 research funding have led to an explosion of COVID-19 publications, sometimes as pre-prints without peerââ¬âreview. The premature publication of early findings with little to no peer oversight has fueled an unfortunate politicization of the results. Opportunistic politicians and pundits have selectively publicized preliminary findings that fit their political agendas, rather than focusing on the accuracy of the analyses and their value to the public.
That is because Arm is not a normal company. The firm’s core products are a set of fundamental designs for computer chips called instruction-set architectures (ISAs). Arm sells access to ISAs to the likes of Apple, Qualcomm and Huawei, giving those firms freedom to design and manufacture Arm chips however they want. The powerful chips in Apple’s iPhones are the product of this process, as are those in just about every smartphone in the world. Arm also creates its own chip designs, which it calls “cores”, and licenses them to companies that need a cookie-cutter starting-point for chips to put in their devices, as well as cars, connected fridges or anything else hooked up to the internet. As a result, Arm is everywhere.
I wrote a furious article about the €£250 million PPE contract inexplicably awarded to the “family office” Ayanda Capital, an investment house for private wealth tax avoidance. We now learn €£150 million of face masks delivered are unusable as they do not meet the required standards.
However, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the federal agency in charge of workplace safety, has said it has received nearly 8,000 complaints about unsafe work situations related to COVID-19, according to the agency’s database. Over 6,500 of them have been closed.
“OSHA is supposed to protect workers. All they’ve done is issue suggestions and voluntary guidance,” to employers,” said Sharon Block, former Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA and current executive director of the Labor and Worklife Program at Harvard Law School.
OSHA has “turned everything over to employers to inspect themselves,” Block said. “If workers can’t rely on the federal government to stand up for them, they have to stand up for themselves.” Some workers have been fired for speaking up about conditions, she said.
OSHA didn’t respond to an NBC News request for comment.
"What is becoming clearer€ each day is€ President Trump's intent to€ use this chaos€ to create a crisis for our democracy."
"In February, Trump said the virus would 'miraculously' go away in April, once it got warmer...€ But, sure, let's trust him with the lives of our children and teachers."
As the moral philosopher Peter Singer asserts, we are just as obligated to save a child half a world away than we are to save a child that is drowning right in front of our eyes. While in the past, even the most powerful individuals could not affect what is happening in distant places, we live in a world that is unprecedentedly interconnected through virtual communication, trade and air travel, and in which material wealth – however unequally distributed – is overall exponentially growing. Lack of resources and distance cannot serve as excuses for inaction, and a moral life cannot be lived while ignoring deadly poverty.
Six months ago, on January 30, the director-general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, announced a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC). Ten days before this, the Chinese government had said—to great alarm—that the coronavirus could be transmitted from human to human. The contagiousness of this virus led the WHO to make the declaration, which came a month after the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention told their counterparts in the United States about the virus. On the day that the WHO declared the PHEIC, Trump gave a press conference, where he bewilderingly said, “We think we have it very well under control.” From January 30 onward, the Trump administration’s response to the virus was incoherent and outrageously incompetent.
Madison, Wisc.—Wisconsin is the most politically divided state in the country. It has one Democratic Senator and one Republican. It has a Democratic governor and a Republican legislature. It gave Donald Trump 47.22 percent of the vote in 2016 to 46.45 for Hillary Clinton.
Hardwick, Vt.—Like a lot of people my age—pushing 68—I don’t usually feel old. Now it turns out I am. Among the ways my body is aging is its decreased production of “fresh naïve T cells” (or, probably, fresh naive anything). This makes me more susceptible to contracting Covid-19, and if I do, to dying.
But pesky facts have never stopped Trump. Having lied for five months about the coronavirus, he’s now filling social media and the airwaves with untruths about the economy so he can dupe his way to election day.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues, nobody really knows what's going to happen — especially if kids start going back to school. Statistical models of the possibilities abound, but this week we're joined by some people who are taking a different approach: John Cordier and Don Burke are the founders of Epistemix, which is using a new agent-based modeling approach to figure out what the future of the pandemic might look like.
Most of the world’s crops depend on honeybees and wild bees for pollination, so declines in both managed and wild bee populations raise concerns about food security, notes the study in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.
“We found that many crops are pollination-limited, meaning crop production would be higher if crop flowers received more pollination. We also found that honey bees and wild bees provided similar amounts of pollination overall,” said senior author Rachael Winfree, a professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Natural Resources in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University–New Brunswick. “Managing habitat for native bee species and/or stocking more honey bees would boost pollination levels and could increase crop production.”
At first the shot will be given to boys in grades 5-9, and in future it will be part of the national vaccination programme and given in the fifth grade. The vaccination comes in two doses.
In addition to protecting the boys who receive it, the vaccine will also cut down HPV transmission in the community, giving additional protection to girls as well, according to Elonsalo.
His Johns Hopkins colleague Dr. Robert Stevens, a critical care neurologist, predicted “a sort of secondary pandemic of people” who might experience problems further down the road.
Trump posted the same video to his account on Facebook, which removed the clip shortly before Twitter froze the campaign’s account. Both social-media companies have policies that forbid sharing misleading information about the coronavirus that could cause people harm.
In a statement first reported by NBC News, a Facebook spokesperson said, “This video includes false claims that a group of people is immune from Covid-19 which is a violation of our policies around harmful Covid misinformation.”
Facebook has previously removed Trump campaign advertisements, though Wednesday's action is the first time the company has removed a post from the president's page concerning COVID-19.
It is untrue that children are “almost immune” or “virtually immune” to COVD-19, according to medical experts. Kids have tended to become less sick when infected with coronavirus, but even if they show no symptoms they may still transmit the virus to others.
The action, the first time Facebook has removed a Trump post for COVID-19 misinformation, marks a rare instance in which it has been willing to censor the president. In June, Facebook removed ads that the Trump campaign posted that featured a symbol Nazis used to classify political prisoners during World War II.
This is the first time that Facebook has removed a post from Trump entirely, rather than labeling it, as it has done in the past.
Several studies suggest, but don’t prove, that children are less likely to become infected than adults and more likely to have only mild symptoms. But this is not the same as being “virtually immune” to the virus.
There have been two sides to the coronavirus pandemic in rural America. In many rural places, like the Vermont town of 2,500 people where I live, the sense of crisis is palpable in every empty grocery story, in every conversation held with a neighbor from across an otherwise empty country road. Yet the disease itself remains relatively scarce. With eight confirmed COVID-19 cases in the entire county by the middle of May, I would likely have to cover several hundred square miles to encounter as many cases as have been contracted on the single block in Upper Manhattan where I grew up. Nationwide, the virus’s fatality rate in rural areas is roughly one-tenth of what it is in urban areas. Unsurprisingly, many of the earliest and loudest protests against state-mandated public health restrictions and business closures have emanated from these kinds of non-urban locales, where case and death rates have so far been minimal: Upstate New York, central Michigan, throughout the Upper South and the Plains.
[...]
In rural America, like elsewhere, speaking of the virus as a great leveler distorts reality. It is more apt to call it a great amplifier. That is the only way to make sense of why the experience of the pandemic thus far has been so much worse in hubs of certain kinds of dangerous and lightly regulated industry than in places that are not oriented around such types of work; so much worse in resort communities and prison towns than in rural areas that are sustained by more balanced and equitable forms of economic activity; so much worse, above all, in rural places where people of color live with the ongoing legacies of violent displacement, enforced segregation, political disenfranchisement, and social marginalization. These are places where rural America’s collective immune system was already fatally compromised; where rural America was already deep into a decades-old crisis when the latest one hit. If the first symptoms of rural discontent in the pandemic era have been right-wing, anti-state convulsions, let us hope they will not be the only kinds of protest we see. Perhaps the coronavirus pandemic will amplify these multiple and overlapping structural crises confronting rural America in another way as well; perhaps it will make them louder, harder to ignore. For those of us who want to build a majoritarian working-class coalition capable of securing national political power, making real headway in rural America is a must (as demonstrated most recently when Bernie Sanders’s campaign ran aground once again in the Black Belt and the rural Midwest). For those who balk at that notion for fear that it will entail conciliatory overtures to petit-bourgeois ethno-nationalists, the geography of the coronavirus pandemic should serve as a reminder: campaigns for economic, racial, and social justice can find eager adherents in vast swathes of rural America.
Saidi Mburi’s shop sales are a good barometer of the economic health of Kibera, Nairobi’s largest informal settlement, and they have been terrible.
After months of COVID-19 curfews, transport restrictions, and social distancing measures, “people just don’t have money,” he told The New Humanitarian.
His cramped one-man store has always offered credit to regular customers, but now “people can’t pay, and it’s affecting me as well.” There are gaps on the shelves because he’s stocking just the basics: bread, sugar, milk, and maize meal – anything else is a “luxury” people can no longer afford.
More than 90 percent of Kenyans have seen their incomes fall as a result of COVID-19, and nearly three quarters of families have had to dip into savings – typically money set aside for school fees – according to Financial Sector Deepening Kenya (FSD Kenya), a trust that promotes financial inclusion.
Everyone is hurting in Gatwekera, one of the 13 hardscrabble neighbourhoods that make up Kibera. But there is a distinction in the suffering between those employed in Kenya’s formal and informal economy – and that could have significance for the country’s path to recovery.
Few blogs have more judges among their readers than this one, so I wish to clarify something upfront: not only do I acknowledge but I fervently support the concept of judicial independence. About 14 years ago I raised concerns over the independence of the judges of a future unified European patent judiciary (now known as the UPC, back then labeled EPLA) would enjoy. Later I criticized the way the European Patent Office treats the members of its Boards of Appeal (BoA). And I've suggested on a variety of occasions that the judges of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) should be appointed for life (with a reasonable retirement age), not for short terms.
That said, courtrooms must not become lawless zones--especially not when public health concerns are at stake.
Nobody in his right mind would advocate unfettered judicial independence to the extent that a judge or a panel of judges could allow court staff, counsel, party representatives, or spectators to strangulate each other. Accordingly, I just can't see why it should be acceptable for hearings and trials to become coronavirus superspreader events. Actually, strangulation at least wouldn't be infectious.
Depending on the legal framework of a given jurisdiction, executive governments may indeed lack the authority to impose certain coronavirus prevention rules on courts. Wherever that may be the case, lawmakers need to step in.
O-6-methylguanosnine DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) is the cellular enzyme responsible for repairing alkylated bases in DNA and reduced expression of this gene (e.g., by hypermethylation of the MGMT promoter) is a biomarker for TMZ sensitivity in gliomas and glioblastomas. Recently, a multinational team of researchers* reported genetic rearrangements associated with TMZ resistance, in a paper entitled "MGMT genomic rearrangements contribute to chemotherapy resistance in gliomas" published in Nature Communications. This paper shows a subset of gliomas with rearrangements in the MGMT gene that produce overexpression of the gene and resistance as a result. These authors screened 252 TMZ-treated recurrent gliomas by RNA sequencing and found eight different MGMT genetic fusions (designated BTRC-MGMT, CAPZB-MGMT, GLRX3-MGMT, NFYC-MGMT, RPH3A-MGMT, and SAR1A-MGMT in high-grade gliomas, HGG, and CTBP2-MGMT and FAM175B-MGMT in low-grade gliomas, LGG, in the paper) in seven patients (6 females) with recurrent disease, created by chromosomal rearrangement (see Figure 1c from paper; shown below). These individuals' tumors showed "significantly higher" expression of the rearranged MGMT gene product.
[...]
The effect of these rearrangements on MGMT expression was elucidated using CRIPSR-Cas9 to produce the BTRC-MGMT, NFYC-MGMT, SAR1A-MGMT, and CTBP2-MGMT rearrangements in cells of two glioblastoma cell lines, U251 and U87. When these cells and their untreated counterparts were challenged by growth in vitro with TMZ, only cells bearing the rearrangements (as confirmed by PCR analysis) were shown to be TMZ resistant. Unlike genetic rearrangements in other cancers that produce fusion proteins (such as the abl-bcr gene produced in chronic myelogenous leukemia bearing the diagnostic Philadelphia chromosome), because most of the rearrangements found involving the MGMT gene were located upstream of the initiation codon of the MGMT gene these authors reasoned that these rearrangements produce increased expression of MGMT leading to TMZ resistance because the cells were better able to repair the methylation injury and replicate functionally. This hypothesis was supported by real-time quantitative PCR analysis of MGMT transcripts in cells bearing the rearrangements, that showed a "striking" increase in expression of MGMT-encoding transcripts (an observation also found in tumors from patients whose gliomas or glioblastomas showed these rearrangements), and Western blot analysis confirmed higher expression levels of the MGMT protein. In two of the rearrangements (BTRC-MGMT and NFYC-MGMT), higher molecular weight fusion proteins were detected as predicted from the genetic data. These results were also replicated in patient tumor-derived stem cells for the BTRC-MGMT and SAR1A-MGMT rearrangements.
These results, and the researchers' conclusion that these rearrangements caused TMZ resistance by overexpression of MGMT, were confirmed by re-establishing TMZ sensitivity in these cells in the presence of O6-benzylguanine (O6-BG), an MGMT inhibitor. These results were further confirmed by detection of double-strand breaks in DNA in these cells in the presence of TMZ and O6-BG.
The new Microsoft Edge browser was released to the public earlier this year. In a phased rollout strategy, Microsoft is installing the browser on Windows 10 devices in several stages, with an option available for users to install the new browser manually. When you install the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge browser, it replaces the previous (legacy) version of the browser on the device.
Apple earlier today elaborated on its controversial position to not allow services like Microsoft’s upcoming xCloud and the competing Google Stadia platform to exist on the App Store because the company cannot review individual games available on cloud platforms. A number of other App Store guidelines also bar cloud services from existing on iOS unless they are designed more like remote desktop software.
The bond hearing took place over Zoom.
During the hearing, the judge and attorneys were interrupted several times with people shouting racial slurs, playing music and showing pornographic images.
The Linux Foundation has launched a new collaborative open source project called Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), which brings together community efforts from the Core Infrastructure Initiative, GitHub’s Open Source Security Coalition and industry leaders including IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, Google, and VMware, among others.
The OpenSSF aims to improve the security of open source software by building a broader community, identifying best practices, and hosting open source technical initiatives on GitHub.
“It will start with a focus on metrics, tooling, best practices, developer identity validation and vulnerability disclosures best practices. In the future, there is a plan to focus resources on the most mission-critical software identified by Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science” the website states.
With the growth of open source software such as Linux and cloud computing becoming more wide spread, a host of tech giants have joined a new group focusing on improving security.
Red Hat – the global leader in Linux open source software and solutions – is part of the Open Source Security Foundation as well as IBM, Red Hat’s owner.
Also signing on are GitHub, Google, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, NCC Group, OWASP Foundation, ElevenPaths, GitLab, HackerOne, Intel, Okta, Purdue, SAFECode, StackHawk, Trail of Bits, Uber and VMware.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the availability of a new training course, LFD272 - Hyperledger Fabric for Developers.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (clamav and json-c), Fedora (python2, python36, and python37), Red Hat (thunderbird), Scientific Linux (thunderbird), SUSE (java-11-openjdk, kernel, rubygem-actionview-4_2, wireshark, xen, and xrdp), and Ubuntu (openjdk-8 and ppp).
Security researchers from Graz University of Technology and CISPA Helmholtz are out with their latest findings on CPU speculative execution vulnerabilities, namely taking another look at L1TF/Foreshadow. Their findings are bad news not only for Intel but potentially other CPU vendors as well.
[...]
The new vulnerability outlined in the paper is "Dereference Trap" for leaking registers from an SGX enclave in the presence of only a speculative register dereference.
The discovery of speculative dereferencing of a user-space register in the kernel as opposed to the prefetcher not only means that some mitigations may be inadequate, but they can improve the performance of the original attack and reportedly produce similar behavior on non-Intel CPUs.
PE Tree allows malware analysts to view Portable Executable (PE) files in a tree-view using pefile – a multi-platform Python module that parses and works with PE files – and PyQt5, a module that can be used to create graphical user interfaces.
“PE Tree is developed in Python and supports the Windows, Linux and Mac operating systems. It can be installed and run as either a standalone application or an IDAPython plugin,” Tom Bonner, a threat researcher at BlackBerry, explained.
In the last couple of months, we, the IPFire development team, have launched a small side project: A new location database for the Internet. In this article, I would like to give you a brief background story on why and how it come to this...
[...]
Other applications would be threat prevention like we use it in IPFire. Connection attempts from certain countries can simply be blocked, or port forwardings can be limited to certain countries only.
That is, however, not an exact science. The Internet changes constantly. IP address ranges are re-assigned from one party to another one, and often it can take some time until those location databases are all updated. Up to that point, you will see wrong information like the Google front page being shown in a wrong language. This might only be a bit of an inconvenience, but for a firewall, we need more recent and reliable data.
Late last month, security researchers discovered a major vulnerability in the software that controls how PCs boot their operating systems. This is one of those issues that sounds scarier than it is. Fixing it will be a major process, especially for Linux system administrators and corporate IT organizations with a mixture of different PC vintages and manufacturers. The problem has been named BootHole, and it could affect up to a billion computers.
An ill-conceived California bill endorses a blockchain-based system that would turn COVID-19 test results into permanent records that could be used to grant access to public places.
EFF and ACLU oppose California A.B. 2004. The newest version of this bill would create a pilot program for using “verifiable health credentials” to report COVID-19 and other medical test results. The bill defines such a credential as “a portable electronic patient record,” for which authenticity “can be independently verified cryptographically.” The bill’s fact sheet explains that these credentials “use blockchain technology” to create “a provable health record” for purpose of “travel, returning to employment, immunization status, and so on.” Three rounds of official bill analysis provide the same explanation.
Facebook’s move to extend WFH through mid-2021 follows a similar announcement by Google last month. Previously, Facebook had told employees to expect to work from home, if their job functions permit, through the end of 2020. Facebook’s extension of its work from home policy was first reported by Business Insider.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has seen his personal wealth rise to $100bn (€£76bn) after the launch of a new short-form video feature.
On Wednesday, Facebook announced the US rollout of Instagram Reels, its rival to controversial Chinese app TikTok.
China’s largest gaming and social media company shed more than $45 billion of market value after sliding by the most since October 2011 on an intraday basis. The vaguely worded executive order could potentially hammer not just the use of WeChat and WeChat Pay in the U.S. but extend to business relationships with some of America’s largest corporations.
Cleaving just the U.S. operations off a global app would be particularly challenging. The Financial Times said one reason Microsoft is considering buying the whole operation instead has to do with the difficulty of separating back-office functions and ensuring that people would still be able to use the app when traveling between countries.
Despite widespread complaints about its effects on human rights, the Brazilian Senate has fast-tracked the approval of “PLS 2630/2020”, the so-called “Fake News” bill. The bill lacked the necessarily broad and intense social participation that characterized the development of the 2014 Brazilian Civil Rights Framework for the Internet and is now in the Chamber of Deputies. The Chamber has been holding a series of public hearings that should be considered before releasing a new draft text.€
The traceability debate has mostly focused on malicious coordinated action on WhatsApp, which is the most popular encrypted messaging tool in Brazil. There has been minimal discussion of the impact on other tools and services such as Telegram, Signal, or iMessage. WhatsApp uses a specific privacy-by-design implementation that protects users by making forwarding indistinguishable for the private messaging app from other kinds of communications. So when a WhatsApp user forwards a message using the arrow, it serves to mark the forward information at the client-side (and count if it's more than 5 times or not), but the fact that the message has been forwarded is not visible to the WhatsApp server. In such a scenario, the traceability mandate would take this information, which was previously invisible to the server, and make it visible, affecting the privacy-by-design secure implementation and undermine users' expectations of privacy and security. €
Google is returning to having humans analyze and rate anonymized audio snippets from its users. However, it’s also taken the major step of automatically opting every single user out of the setting that allows Google to store their audio. That’s why you might be getting an email today: Google would like you to opt back in to the program, and it’s trying to provide clearer information detailing what it’s all about.
Those are very big moves that affect a huge number of people — though Google says the precise number of users getting the email is confidential. It should land in the inbox of anybody who has interacted with a product that uses Google’s voice AI, including apps like Google Maps and services like Google Assistant.
Surveillance. Governments around the world are demanding extraordinary new surveillance powers that many hope will contain the virus' spread. But many of these powers would invade our privacy, inhibit our free speech, and disparately burden vulnerable groups of people. Mindful of the stakes, we ask three questions when analyzing proposals that would provide greater surveillance powers to the government: Would the proposal work? Would it excessively intrude on our freedoms? Are there sufficient safeguards? Different proposals raise different issues.
San Francisco -- The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), in partnership with the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, today launched the largest-ever collection of searchable data on police use of surveillance technologies, created as a tool for the public to learn about facial recognition, drones, license plate readers, and other devices law enforcement agencies are acquiring to spy on our communities.
The Atlas of Surveillance database, containing several thousand data points on over 3,000 city and local police departments and sheriffs' offices nationwide, allows citizens, journalists, and academics to review details about the technologies police are deploying, and provides a resource to check what devices and systems have been purchased locally.
Users can search for information by clicking on regions, towns, and cities, such as Minneapolis, Tampa, or Tucson, on a U.S. map. They can also easily perform text searches by typing the names of cities, counties, or states on a search page that displays text results. The Atlas also allows people to search by specific technologies, which can show how surveillance tools are spreading across the country.
Built using crowdsourcing and data journalism over the last 18 months, the Atlas of Surveillance documents the alarming increase in the use of unchecked high-tech tools that collect biometric records, photos, and videos of people in their communities, locate and track them via their cell phones, and purport to predict where crimes will be committed.
But I also realised that it is not an accident that it is Beethoven himself (quite literally the soundtrack for Enlightenment humanism) that is being weaponised here, rather than some fourth-rate composer of military marches or one with a problematic past. That is to say, not only is the poem arguing that something universally recognised as an unalloyed good can be subverted for propagandistic ends, but that is precisely the point being made by the regime. An inverted Clockwork Orange, if you like.
Yet when I listen to it again I can't help but laugh. I think of the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope, who first used the word bathos to refer to those abrupt and often absurd transitions from the elevated to the ordinary, contrasting it with the concept of pathos, the sincere feeling of sadness and tragedy. I can't think of two better words.
In the Bolivian elections last October 20, incumbent President Evo Morales of the Movement Toward Socialism party (MAS in Spanish) won a 10-point victory over his nearest challenger, as pre-election polls predicted. The next day,€ the Organization of American States issued a statement challenging the legitimacy of the elections, asserting a “hard-to-explain change in the trend of the preliminary results.” Immediately, right wingers violently took to the streets to protest the president. The OAS issued a followup statement confirming their analysis on November 10. The same day, the military forced Morales to step down.
On Thursday, August 6, Moscow’s Lublinsky Court handed down sentences to the defendants in the controversial “Novoe Velichie” (New Greatness) extremism case. According to state investigators, the seven young suspects were planning to seize power in Russia and abolish the constitution. All of the defendants pleaded not guilty — and insisted that they were the victims of a provocation carried out by the organization’s real leader, who was a witness in the case. Nevertheless, the court found them all guilty of organizing an illegal extremist organization and gave them sentences ranging from four years probation to seven years in prison. Meduza special correspondent Kristina Safonova reports from the courthouse during the sentencing hearing.
“The company will explore [for] oil in three locations in northeast Syria, including Rumeilan, Tel Hamees and Tel Brak,” the official added.
Delta Crescent Energy LLC is reportedly involved in the deal. VOA could not reach the company for comment.
A U.S.-backed deal to develop oil fields in northern Syria is helping the State and Defense departments push for a continued American troop presence in the area to counter the Islamic State, current and former U.S. officials told Foreign Policy.
The deal, in which the Delaware-based Delta Crescent Energy is to revamp Syrian oil fields in conjunction with Kurdish authorities, was first revealed during a Senate hearing exchange between South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week.
Russia’s Investigative Committee has initiated an investigation into the allegations about the alleged gang rape of a woman at the apartment of MBK Media chief editor, Sergey Prostakov, as well as the supposed involvement of MBK Media photographer, Andrey Zolotov, a source in law enforcement told RIA Novosti.€
The Satrap Chronicles of the US imperium will have, near the top of their various ingratiating themes, such Australian politicians as Senators Linda Reynolds and Marise Payne. They resemble Siamese consuls, hard to tell apart (robust build, similar of voice and manner). For another, their views form the putty of derivative policy that has characterised a power more interested in being an annex to heft rather than modestly credible as an individual broker.
On America's unholy crusade against Beijing
Tensions between the United States and China are rising as the U.S. election nears, with tit-for-tat consulate closures, new U.S. sanctions and no less than three U.S. aircraft carrier strike groups prowling the seas around China. But it is the United States that has initiated each new escalation in U.S.-China relations. China’s responses have been careful and proportionate, with Chinese officials such as Foreign Minister Wang Yi publicly asking the U.S. to step back from its brinkmanship to find common ground for diplomacy.
Seventy-five years after the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan, we remain perched on the precipice of unparalleled catastrophe.
Like other dark chapters in U.S. history, the official narrative of the decision to unleash the most destructive weapon humanity has ever known upon an utterly defeated people is deeply flawed.
"Hell is probably like what we went through. It must never be allowed to happen again."
My family comes from Hiroshima, and I was born there myself. On August 6, 1945, my father was thirteen and just far enough away from home in the center of Hiroshima, across a few hills assigned to digging potatoes. The rest of his immediate family was scattered far enough from Ground Zero to survive. Branches of his family and branches of my mother’s family came to an end that day, however.
The West is on a collision course with its own brutal history. And this time, one of Australia’s neighbours, and largest trading partners is the target. John Pilger weighs in.
The social media company defined state-affiliated media as those where the state exercises editorial control through financial resources or political pressure, or control over production and distribution.
Twitter said that state-financed media outlets with editorial independence, such as National Public Radio in the United States, or the BBC in the United Kingdom, would not be labeled. A spokesman also confirmed there were no U.S. media outlets on the list.
NPR receives minimal government funding.
Once again, researchers confirm that coastal dwellers can expect worse floods, more often and more expensively.
This story is being co-published by The Guardian, The Nation, and Columbia Journalism Review as part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 400 news outlets committed to transforming news coverage of the defining story of our time.
A week after testifying to the House Select Committee on Climate Change and subsequently complaining that he was “smeared” by several Democratic committee members, Shellenberger appeared, again as a GOP witness, before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, August 5 in a hearing titled “The Devastating Health Impacts of Climate€ Change.”
New sanctions on the project that were included in both the House and Senate versions of the defense spending omnibus bill would expand existing sanctions to include companies that support pipe-laying activities, as well as insurance and underwriting services. The Senate version of the bill goes one step further and would slap sanctions on support vessels and companies involved in certifying the pipeline once it’s complete. The two versions still need to be reconciled, and the scope of the final bill will play a decisive role in whether the project is completed.
Fossil fuel firms have long argued that addressing climate change will kill jobs — but the main entities killing oil and gas jobs lately have been fossil fuel firms.
Although solar panels are a source of renewable energy, making them has an environmental impact. Fengqi You at Cornell University in New York and his colleagues have analysed the overall environmental impact of two types of new solar panels, comparing these against panels made with crystalline silicon wafers – the current industry standard.
The team found that a new type of solar panel made from two layers of a mineral called perovskite requires a smaller total energy input and results in fewer carbon emissions. The panel, called a perovskite-perovskite tandem, contains two layers of the material on top of each other, each optimised to absorb a section of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Perovskite solar cells have only been around for the past decade, and perovskite-perovskite tandem cells are only a couple of years old and not yet widely commercially available, says You.
Covid-19 emerged from the wilderness. That alone is reason to protect the forests, control trade in wildlife – and avoid pandemics.
Flathead Forest Plan favors resource extraction over grizzly bears, Canada lynx, wolverine, and bull trout
This past week US economy collapsed in the 2nd quarter by 32.9% at annual rate and nearly 10% just for the April-June period. Never before in modern US history—not even in the worse quarters of the 1930s great depression—has the US economy contracted so quickly and so deeply!
Congress’s inability to actually represent the real-live human beings of America, combined with an economic system that rewards lack of empathy and an excess of greed, has brought us to a dark time when an oncoming tsunami of financial ruin, destitution and evictions towers over our heads, blocking out the sunlight.
Every year, high school students in Russia take the Unified State Exam — a standardized test used in college admissions. According to a new joint investigation published by the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, there’s one group of students whose scores are irrelevant to getting into top universities. These select individuals are guaranteed acceptance thanks to something called “targeted recruitment,” which means that various branches of the Russian state have agreed to sponsor their higher education. The system is meant to improve social mobility and promote government service, but more and more high-ranking state officials are abusing the program to subsidize their own children’s educations, as well as the educations of relatives’ children who fail to qualify for top schools on merit alone. Meduza summarizes the key findings of this report.
American military personnel are getting sick in significant numbers in the midst of the ongoing pandemic. As The New York Times reported in a piece buried in the back pages of its July 21 edition, “The infection rate in the services has tripled over the past six weeks as the United States military has emerged as a potential source of transmission both domestically and abroad.”
Just before she called me one day in late July, Dawn Miller’s phone lit up with calls from one particular number: the management office for her apartment building in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she’s lived since 2009. She hasn’t paid rent in five months. She can’t. Before the pandemic, she worked at a food kiosk at Brooklyn College selling coffee and sandwiches. But then the campus shut down, throwing her out of work. She had to borrow money just to afford food. She didn’t start receiving unemployment benefits until June, and even then the money had to go to paying back what she had borrowed to travel to her home country of Jamaica when her sister recently died. Rent had to wait.
President Donald Trump confirmed Tuesday that he is considering circumventing Congress to unilaterally suspend collection of the payroll tax, a move advocacy groups and lawmakers said would be an “unconstitutional” abuse of power and a destructive attack on Social Security funding.
"Donald Trump is so desperate to defund Social Security, he may rip the Constitution to shreds to make it happen."
The pandemic is driving American families to the edge, with tens of millions at risk of losing their homes and over 1 in 10 U.S. adults reporting their households didn’t have enough to eat in the previous week.
As presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s search for a running mate drags on, press coverage hasn’t failed to disappoint.
Underlying this is a third reason for scrutinising America’s middle: its example for similar regions elsewhere. It grew rich from heavy industry and transport, then declined in the past half-century. A more recent bounce-back of some better-run cities offers lessons for others. Former industrial regions in Europe and Asia can learn from the Midwest.
New York Attorney General Letitia James filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking to dissolve the National Rifle Association (NRA). The suit accuses CEO Wayne LaPierre and other current and former NRA executives of diverting funds from the charitable mission of the organization into their own pockets.
James seeks to dissolve the pro-gun organization, remove LaPierre from his leadership position and recover millions of dollars in lost assets. In addition to the NRA and LaPierre, the lawsuit also names the organization's general counsel John Frazer, former treasurer Woody Phillips and former chief of staff Joshua Powell.
None of the men have been criminally charged as part of James' lawsuit, which was filed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan after an 18-month investigation that included subpoenas and testimony. The complaint seeks to have a judge dissolve the NRA, recoup the lost assets and prohibit the defendants from serving on the boards of any nonprofit charitable organizations in New York.
In a dark season of pestilence, COVID has reduced to tatters the illusion of American exceptionalism. At the height of the crisis, with more than 2,000 dying each day, Americans found themselves members of a failed state, ruled by a dysfunctional and incompetent government largely responsible for death rates that added a tragic coda to America’s claim to supremacy in the world.
For the first time, the international community felt compelled to send disaster relief to Washington. For more than two centuries, reported the Irish Times, “the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger. But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the U.S. until now: pity.” As American doctors and nurses eagerly awaited emergency airlifts of basic supplies from China, the hinge of history opened to the Asian century.
"As progressives and leftists, we are not going to minimize our disagreements with Joe Biden. But we're also clear-eyed about where things stand. We have a moral responsibility to defeat Trump."
During the week of August 17, thousands of Democrats elected to serve as delegates to their party’s national convention will log on to their computers to view the proceedings. They will cast electronic votes on the party platform and for their party’s nominee to challenge Donald Trump for the presidency.
Israel is roiling with angry street protests that local observers have warned could erupt into open civil strife – a development Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to be encouraging.
Time and again, Trump and the Republicans have shown that they only care about two things: their wealthy donors and corporate backers.
Malaysia’s former prime minister Najib Razak was found guilty in the first of 5 trials he faces for his multibillion-dollar looting of Malaysia’s 1MBD development fund. This particular trial concerned US$14m of funds deposited in Najib’s personal accounts from a unit of 1MDB.
The new executive order means there is now no U.S. state categorically banning people with former convictions from voting.
Sen. Bernie Sanders maintains progressive candidates won because they campaigned "not only against Trump, but for an agenda that works for the working families of this country."
One of Donald Trump’s singular achievements is to drive political commentator George F. Will out of the Republican Party. The very personification of bow-tied Toryism, Will voted for every Republican presidential candidate from Barry Goldwater in 1964 to Mitt Romney in 2012. But Trump’s vulgarity and overt racism were too much for Will.
It seems as if President Donald Trump is trying to sabotage the November election by publicly proposing postponing it and denigrating the untouchable democratic mainstay by repeatedly and forcefully arguing that it will be rigged.
The erasure of Islam, its decimation in Kashmir, India’s only Muslim majority state, has accelerated since last August 5 when Prime Minister Modi drew down Kashmir’s limited autonomy, claiming that it was a hurdle towards Kashmir’s development.
While President Trump tries to selectively discredit vote-by-mail, his re-election campaign and the Republican National Committee have registered a combined 100,000 new voters ahead of the 2020 election, closing gaps between Republican and Democratic voters in a number of critical swing states.
With the arrest of Khabarovsk Governor Sergey Furgal and the appointment of Mikhail Degtyarev in his place, the two politicians’ political party — LDPR — suddenly finds itself at the center of Russian politics. Over the course of these events, the party’s long-time leader (the only leader it’s ever had), Vladimir Zhirinovsky, has reversed his initial hardline opposition to Furgal’s ouster. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev spoke to Zhirinovsky about the erstwhile governor’s arrest, whether Furgal really planned to resign beforehand, about Mikhail Degtyarev’s real estate outside Moscow, and why LDPR opposed an initiative by Russia’s ruling political party to spread voting over multiple days before later endorsing the idea.
President Donald Trump, who has for the past several months repeatedly made unverified and dubious claims about fraud associated with mail-in voting, authored a tweet on Tuesday urging voters in his home state of Florida to vote by mail if that’s what they wanted to do.
"Schiff has been trying to sneak ratification of such surveillance through Congress."
In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration made a series of blunders that have created havoc in U.S. governance.€ The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the worst of these decisions, but not far behind was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).€ The DHS has turned out to be the perfect authoritarian tool in the hands of a corrupt administration, and there is ample evidence of the department’s role in degrading public life in America in the past several weeks.€ The department has become Trump’s tool for targeting “anti-fascists,” the label that he has broadly applied to all protestors.
New Age Racists
During a telephone conversation with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko (Alyaksandr Lukashenka), Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky discussed the 33 suspected Russian mercenaries arrested in Belarus.€
Former Vice President Joe Biden announced on Wednesday that he would not be going to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, later this month to deliver his acceptance speech for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. Before the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States earlier this year, it was assumed that the Democratic nominee would accept the nomination in person as was customary.
Voting by mail has become a political issue in this election year, thanks in part to many errant and unverifiable statements by President Donald Trump. But a new poll demonstrates most Americans still trust the practice of voting by mail.
"From the Bronx to St. Louis, the Squad is here to stay, and it's still growing."
On Tuesday, a progressive candidate for Congress ousted an incumbent Democratic lawmaker from Missouri who has been in office since 2001 — and whose father had held that seat for three decades prior.
Called 'victory for health care,' ballot initiative succeeds where legislative efforts were long thwarted by Republican Party.
"We are done with establishment politics that put corporations first."
Americans have maintained the illusion of prosperity by accruing massive debt, Wolff told Salon, comparing the nation's situation to that of "a patient who has had a really bad cancer or a heart attack, and is now kept alive with tubes and chemicals and all the rest of it. He is not dead, but is in deep trouble. That problem is compounded, Wolff said, "by the fact that this is a society cannot, to this day, face what I just said."
Specifically, the State Department is offering the reward for “information leading to the identification or location of any person who works with or for a foreign government for the purpose of interfering with U.S. elections through certain illegal cyber activities.”
The legal basis for TikTok’s divestment comes from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which this week ruled that the Musical.ly deal was against America’s national-security interests. Having flirted with banning TikTok altogether, Mr Trump now seems willing to accept a fire-sale. Microsoft, an American [sic] software [sic] giant, is in talks to buy TikTok’s American operations, as well as those in New Zealand, Australia and Canada.
President Donald Trump has made it clear he would like to ban the video-making app TikTok. Despite being mostly used by younger users to make music or comedic videos, the White House says it is worried about the platform, as the New York Times (8/1/20) explained, “because of the app’s Chinese ownership”: TikTok is owned by the Beijing-based firm ByteDance. The administration has often vilified China as a rival that intends to undermine the United States through underhanded means.
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Christopher Krebs described a statement put out by a top official at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) last month – which warned that Russia, China, and Iran were interfering the 2020 elections – as the “beginning” of communications with the public.
Promising to create hundreds of jobs, improve “the safeguarding and protection of TikTok user data” and shorten loading times for users in Europe, the new data center is expected to be operational by early 2022. Once it goes online, European user data will be stored at that location, TikTok said. The outfit established its EMEA Trust and Safety Hub in Dublin earlier in the year and said the new investment “signals our long-term commitment to Ireland.”
Beahm, 38, who had the 12th most-watched channel on Twitch in March by hours watched, according to tracker SullyGnome. In May, he was No. 20, with 4 million hours watched. He has 1.7 million followers on Twitter.
In a July interview with PC Gamer, Beahm reiterated that Twitch never told him why he was banned, and said he won’t be returning to the platform. Beahm had previously been banned temporarily by Twitch in 2019 for streaming from a men’s bathroom.
It’s not hard to say what all this means. Beahm is itching to get back to streaming and to return to his public. What’s less clear is the event that necessitated this return in the first place. Twitch doesn’t comment on bans as a matter of policy, but whatever happened was bad enough to invalidate an incredibly lucrative contract between one of the most famous streamers in the world and his platform of choice. Beahm’s found himself in a scene of Damoclesian peril.
Increasingly, Beijing’s economic clout has allowed it to insist that others comply with its censorship strictures—or has led others to voluntarily internalize these strictures, even without being asked—as a prerequisite to doing business with or in the country. While individual compromises may seem minor or worthwhile in exchange for the opportunity to engage with China’s population, the collective global implications of playing by Beijing’s rules need to be recognized and understood before acquiescence to Chinese censorship becomes a new normal in countries that have prided themselves for their staunch free speech protections.
Hollywood is an important bellwether. The Chinese government, under Xi Jinping especially, has heavily emphasized its desire to ensure that Hollywood filmmakers—to use their preferred phrase—“tell China’s story well.”8 Within the pages of this report, we detail how Hollywood decision-makers and other filmmaking professionals are increasingly making decisions about their films—the content, casting, plot, dialogue, and settings—based on an effort to avoid antagonizing Chinese officials who control whether their films gain access to the booming Chinese market.w
Every minute, more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, 350,000 tweets are sent, and 510,000 comments are posted on Facebook.
Summary: Though social media networks take a wide variety of evolving approaches to their content policies, most have long maintained relatively broad bans on nudity and sexual content, and have heavily employed automated takedown systems to enforce these bans. Many controversies have arisen from this, leading some networks to adopt exceptions in recent years: Facebook now allows images of breastfeeding, child-birth, post-mastectomy scars, and post-gender-reassignment surgery photos, while Facebook-owned Instagram is still developing its exception for nudity in artistic works. However, even with exceptions in place, the heavy reliance on imperfect automated filters can obstruct political and social conversations, and block the sharing of relevant news reports.
Calling on institutions to bar those with odious views on race and gender empowers them to also exclude those championing equality and progressive change.
In the early days of the internet, there was no shortage of predictions insisting the emerging technology would be a bold new frontier of transformative change, ushering forth a golden era of connectivity free from the pesky befuddlement of incompetent government leaders, bad actors, and malicious overlords. This new frontier, we were told, would culminate in a fairer and more humane planet, unshackled from the petty hassles of the brick and mortar world, extracting us from our worst impulses as we marched, collectively, toward a better and more ethical future.
Which brings us back to Rushdie.
He has experienced state censorship and death threats. He risked his life for his artistic freedom. Loading
Yet he still thinks the social media-enabled phenomenon of public shamings and cancellations is pernicious and suffocating to artists like himself.
And that its consequences will result in risk aversion among artists, which equals the death of any real creative questing.
Journalists, writers and artists may not fear for their lives, but they might fear for their livelihoods and reputations. They may fear their work will be labelled “problematic” before its artistic worth is even considered.
The group, which also includes American activist Naom Chomsky and Indian historian Meera Nanda, warns that the spread of "censoriousness" is leading to "an intolerance of opposing views" and "a vogue for public shaming and ostracism".
Perhaps the Pythons’ comic brilliance reached its apex in the 1979 film, Life of Brian. Of course, this is now best remembered for controversy over its supposed blasphemy, as well as the jaunty closing musical number (“Always Look on the Bright Side of Life”). But it was doing something incredibly important.
This is a film about the madness of crowds. Brian (Chapman), accidentally hailed as the Messiah, urges the mob around him to think for themselves but all they can do is parrot his words back at him. Thoughts are forged with a demented logic, as illustrated in a scene in which Stan (Idle) wants to have a baby but is told quite reasonably by Reg (Cleese) that he can’t: “What’s the point of fighting for his right to have babies, when he can’t have babies?” Michael Palin’s Francis says that it is “symbolic of our struggle against oppression”. Reg soberly remarks that it is a symbol of his struggle against reality.
Turkey's president, Recep "Gollum" Erdogan, continues to use legislation to silence everyone that might possibly criticize or mock him. This has been an ongoing process, one that keeps getting worse with every iteration. A failed coup didn't help calm things down in Turkey, which is apparently hoping to pass China and take the top spot on the "journalists jailed" chart.
Last month we wrote about France’s “hate speech” law, and noted that it followed in the footsteps of the earlier German law known as NetzDG (short for “Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz”, or network enforcement law). NetzDG was bad news not just for German freedom of speech, but for human rights around the world, because of its knock-on effects. Once Germany had set a precedent for censoring the Internet, it was much easier for other countries to do the same. When people complained, governments could say that if it was acceptable for a liberal democracy like Germany, it was good enough for them. A report from Justitia, a think tank in Denmark, shows just how pernicious the influence of the NetzDG has been:
Domestically, Turkey under Erdogan is placed 154th among 180 nations in terms of press freedom. Complaints against Erdogan or his regime might get you arrested and/or bring about a loss of employment. The courts, media, the political opposition, universities, and even the international public opinion have been stifled by Erdogan. Hence, there are no more forces in Turkey that can stop his irredentist and belligerent ambitions. There are no more checks and balances, or separation of powers in Erdogan’s Turkey. The political opposition feels criminalized and intimidated. Erdogan is now in command of a repressive apparatus. Soner Cagaptay, writing for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy asserted that, “Since 2002, Erdogan has won more than a dozen nationwide elections primarily on a platform of strong economic growth. Yet once a recession hit in 2018, his popularity began to slip, and his hand-picked candidates lost mayoral elections for Istanbul and other key cities in 2019. The economy is now suffering another recession due to the coronavirus pandemic, and polls show his popularity slipping further. Thus, even if the Hagia Sophia conversion increases his approval rating by a few percentage points, the boost is unlikely to last, and nothing short of strong economic growth will bring back the wider popularity he once enjoyed.”
It’s actually worse than that in terms of the ACLU. When I was a school counselor in a public high school, the ACLU screwed me royally, even though I had helped them with the case of a student. A€ federal district court found for the student in a freedom of speech case, and I was a member of the school staff who was embarrassed publicly. But readers, let’s forget that specific case for a moment and get back to the complete lack of support from the ACLU, even though I was a member for some time, and a member of the ACLU’s anti-death penalty committee in a New England state.
State prosecutors in the Russian city of Kazan have ordered a local department store to remove its newly created parking spaces “for female customers.” The Kazan Prosecutor’s Office is maintaining that the creation of parking spaces exclusively for women is illegal and indicative of “signs of discrimination against drivers on the basis of gender.”€
Yet just as this uprising against police brutality was met with stunning police violence, it appears that our punitive criminal justice system is doling out a characteristically punitive response. Across the country, a number of demonstrators — many of whom are teenagers and young adults — are facing serious prison time for destroying property during the protests.
It’s an unprecedented use of anti-harassment laws, coming amid a nationwide law enforcement backlash against anti-police brutality activism. If successful, the charges would add significant new risks to political activity on social media, a key element in the ongoing protest movements.
The Nutley Police Department filed its complaints in late July over a tweet posted during a June 26th protest. The now-deleted message included a photo of a masked on-duty police officer with a request that “If anyone knows who this bitch is throw his info under this tweet.” Because of the mask, the officer is not readily identifiable from the photograph, and there do not appear to be any replies revealing his identity.
The original poster and the retweeters are charged with cyber harassment, a fourth-degree felony punishable by up to 18 months in jail. Activist Georgana Sziszak, one of the retweeters, revealed the complaint in a GoFundMe campaign last week. The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey confirmed its existence to The Verge, as did Sziszak’s attorney Alan Peyrouton. The Verge has also reviewed a copy of Sziszak’s summons.
If you’re familiar with EFF, you know that we do our best to defend and promote digital civil liberties through a powerful blend of impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, technological development, and more.
But you may not know that EFF also provides a legal intake and referral service. As EFF’s Intake Coordinator, I field thousands of requests for assistance every year, which can range from someone looking for legal representation after being sued for publishing negative online reviews, to someone outside of the U.S. reporting Internet shutdowns in their country, to an elected official who is worried about the risks of law enforcement using their city’s security cameras to target undocumented community members.
Something seems to be in the air these days — besides coronavirus. A hopefulness. A boldness. A conviction that we now have a real opportunity for blunting the corporate power that’s done so much to make the United States the world’s most unequal wealthy nation.
On August 2, the Twitter account @network_rus published a photo of a young woman riding the Moscow subway with a “Delivery Club” bag on her back and two small children in her arms (the tweet has since been deleted, but you can still see it in the cache).€
"Rather than work to stop child slavery, Nestle and Cargill want legal immunity to continue profiting from child slavery."
Questions are being raised over the sudden departure amid lingering concerns of alleged impropriety by Secretary of State Pompeo.
St. Petersburg activist and Red Cross employee Daria Apakhonchich was fined 10,000 rubles ($137) for participating in a performance action in support of persecuted LGBTQ artist and activist Yulia Tsvetkova, reports lawyer Varvara Mikhaylova from the rights organization “Apologia Protesta.”
Brian Hastings, a top Border Patrol official, stared grimly at the television cameras.
It was July 1, 2019, and Hastings was facing down a scandal: News reports had revealed that Border Patrol agents were posting wildly offensive comments and memes in a secret Facebook group.
Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro continues to get himself in legal hot water. Back in 2017, New Orleans journalistic outlet The Lens uncovered his office's use of fake subpoenas to coerce witnesses and crime victims into showing up to provide testimony and make statements.
First came the new names—Breonna Taylor,€ George Floyd,€ Rayshard Brooks, and€ others—all added one by one to the long list of tragic, unjustifiable police killings of Black Americans. Then came the€ batons, the pepper spray, the tear gas, the flash-grenades, the helicopters, the armored vehicles, and the rubber bullets wielded against€ nonviolent Black Lives Matter protesters across the United States, from Minneapolis to New York City to Portland. And then came the chorus of privileged beneficiaries of our country’s discriminatory status quo, denying and defending the reality of brutal, racist, militarized, and unaccountable over-policing.
The Jordan Valley lies on the eastern part of the West Bank, occupied by Israel in 1967, and shares a border with Jordan. The Israeli government, with the blessing of Donald Trump, is hoping to annex the Jordan Valley. This plan has drawn international condemnation, from Germany and France as well as from Israel’s Arab neighbors — Egypt and Jordan — with whom it shares borders and a peace treaty. The Israeli nongovernmental organization B’Tselem states that the Valley, which constitutes roughly 30 percent of the West Bank, is home to 10,000 Israeli settlers and about 65,000 Palestinians. Thousands of Palestinians have been protesting against the annexation plan.
This is the second part of Beyond Prisons’ two-part conversation with Dr. Dylan Rodríguez. If you haven’t already, listen to part one.
In this episode, Dylan shares a few thoughts about high profile reformers like Van Jones and the dangers of the non-profit industrial complex (NPIC). We also talk about “The Problems with Community Control of the Police and Proposals for Alternatives,” a document that Dylan co-authored with Beth Richie, Mariame Kaba, Rachel Herzing, and others.
The task force, co-headed by Craig Carpenito, the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey and composed of prosecutors and FBI agents, is charged with developing “detailed information about violent antigovernment extremist individuals, networks and movements.”
A second location, in Las Vegas, Nevada, was also raided today in connection with the investigation. TMZ says the home is owned by Arman Izadi, a friend of Paul who was also connected to the incident at the mall.
Police in Scottsdale, Arizona previously called the incident in the mall a “riot.” The FBI appears to have taken over the investigation into the events at the Scottsdale Fashion Square mall. Scottsdale police filed misdemeanor charges against Jake Paul in June for his alleged involvement. Arman Izadi — as well as a third person, Andrew Leon — received misdemeanor charges as well.
“It has been decided that in the cases charging Jake Paul, Arman Izadi and Andrew Leon it is in the best interest of the community to dismiss misdemeanor charges without prejudice so that a federal criminal investigation can be completed,” the police said in statement via ABC 7, which referenced Paul and the two others who were charged.
A judge has sealed the search-warrant affidavit and Eimiller said she could not reveal the nature of the investigation or the person it was served on.
The allegations from Scottsdale police stemming from the May incident included criminal trespassing and unlawful assembly, and the department said it reserved the option to refile the charges after the conclusion of the federal investigation.
The search warrants served on Wednesday were sealed, and the FBI said that it could not comment further.
Stores in the Old Town Scottsdale area — including Neiman Marcus, Anthropologie, Sprinkles Cupcakes, and a Mercedes Benz dealership — were damaged May 30 into May 31 during the protests, police said.
Paul was captured on video inside the Fashion Square Mall documenting the unrest. Police alleged in a statement that he "unlawfully entered" the mall and stayed after police had declared an unlawful assembly that night.
Since June of 2020, activists have been subjected to an increasingly aggressive crackdown on protests by federal law enforcement. The federal response to the movement for Black Lives has included federal criminal charges for activists, door knocks by federal law enforcement agents, and increased use of federal troops to violently police protests.
The NLG National Office is releasing this resource page for activists who are resisting federal repression. It includes a link to our emergency hotline numbers, as well as our library of Know-Your-Rights materials, our recent federal repression webinar, and a list of some of our recommended resources for activists. We will continue to update this page.
Please visit the NLG Mass Defense Program page for general protest-related legal support hotlines run by NLG chapters.
It's not yet a given that AT&T will no longer be able to practice "zero rating," referring to how a telecom data provider can incentivize sign-ups by exempting the consumption of its owned content against an individual subscriber's data plan. That could depend on the outcome of a pair of cases examining SB-822, California's tough net neutrality law. Yesterday, after nearly two years of no action in either case, the U.S. Department of Justice along with much of the telecom industry renewed a call for a preliminary injunction.
In Oct. 2018, California agreed to hold off on enforcing its net neutrality rules until there was some clarity on the FCC's attempt to rollback federal rules. The following October, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals blessed the FCC's repeal with the foreshadowing caveat that the agency's attempt to preempt states was problematic. "[T]he Commission lacked the legal authority to categorically abolish all fifty States’ statutorily conferred authority to regulate intrastate communications," stated the D.C. Circuit opinion.
We've noted repeatedly that not only did the Trump FCC and DOJ rubber stamp the controversial T-Mobile and Sprint merger, they willfully ignored data showing the deal would result in high prices, lower overall sector pay, fewer jobs, and less overall competition. As most objective antitrust and telecom experts predicted, the ink was barely dry on the deal before the pink slips started to arrive. The higher rates will still likely take a few more years to materialize as the remaining three industry players (T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon) perfect their ability to pretend to compete on price without actually doing so.
In 2010, US Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Thomas Carper (D-DE) introduced their Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act. Better known as the “Internet Kill Switch” proposal for the emergency powers it would have conferred on the president, the bill died without receiving a vote in either house of Congress.
Two bills before the California legislature in its final month of session, S.B. 1130 and A.B. 570, chart very different courses for the state’s broadband infrastructure program. In considering them, the state faces a€ fundamental question about how to invest its money: in modern, high-capacity fiber networks, or slow wireless and DSL copper networks.€
EFF has researched—and devoted substantial legal and technical expertise to—this very question. The choice is clear. If we are not spending resources into building, brick-by-brick, and as soon as possible,€ 21st-century access by extending fiber deeper into communities, we stall efforts to end the digital divide. Spending money on slow speeds and legacy networks will end up costing taxpayers a substantial amount more.€ Why? Because they will fail to provide useful access to modern applications and services, let alone next generation Internet products. Worst yet, they do not offer a meaningful way to transition toward the gigabit era. In other words, the “cheaper” option now means that California will still have to replace these networks with fiber eventually, to keep pace with demand and stay competitive with other parts of the United States and the world.
On Thursday, the state of California urged a state judge to issue a preliminary injunction that would require Uber and Lyft to classify their drivers as employees, which they have failed to do despite California legislators passing a law last year that would require them to do so in order to improve the livelihoods of gig workers.
But as officials and lawyers argued in court over the new law, which would make drivers' lives better yet reduce ridesharing corporations' revenues, drivers in support of the injunction gathered in Los Angeles in Oakland for their own hearing, which they dubbed a "people's hearing."
"It ought to be the people's vaccine, not a new taxpayer burden."
There are many ways to respond to a cease and desist notice over trademark rights. The most common response is probably fear-based capitulation. After all, trademark bullying works for a reason, and that reason is that large companies have access to large legal war chests while smaller companies usually just run away from their own rights. Another response is the aggressive defenses against the bullying. And, finally, every once in a while you get a response so snarky in tone that it probably registers on the richter scale, somehow.
"This is not the time for any company to extract large corporate profits from uninsured and underinsured Americans."
Calls are growing to break up the Big Tech giants, with a handful of companies controlling more and more of the technology industry, crowding out or acquiring would-be competitors and exercising vast power over the U.S. economy. Lawmakers grilled the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook during a hearing last week on whether their companies are guilty of stifling competition, in a scene reminiscent of the 1994 hearing of tobacco executives who claimed cigarettes were not addictive. This came just days after Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos reportedly made $13 billion in a single day, even as the coronavirus pandemic has left millions of Americans struggling to make ends meet. We speak with Scott Galloway, professor of Marketing at NYU Stern, who says we may be seeing “the beginning of the end” of the tech monopolies.
The deal will ultimately expand Uber’s reach in the U.K. to as many as about 170 locations from 40, and allow the taxi and private car-hire companies that use Autocab’s software to expand and “offer more earnings opportunities to local drivers,” such as deliveries, the companies said in a statement on Thursday.
Customers in markets such as Oxford or Exeter will be able to use their Uber app to get a ride from a local car-hire company, though the integration won’t be rolled out in markets where Uber is already in use, such as London, the companies said. Autocab says it operates in 30 countries, and Uber may eventually expand the program. Uber said it will also help the Manchester, England-based firm expand further.
In the morning, you check email. At noon, you browse social media and message friends. In the evening, you listen to music while shopping online. Around bedtime, you curl up with an e-book. For all of those activities, you probably used a product made or sold by Google, Amazon, Apple or Facebook. There’s no simple way to avoid those Big Four. Even if you subscribed to Spotify, you would probably still be using a Google Android phone, an Amazon speaker or an Apple iPhone to stream the music. Even if you deleted Facebook, you might still be using the Facebook-owned Instagram or WhatsApp.
Being beholden to a small set of companies that touch every corner of our digital lives is precisely why lawmakers have summoned the chief executives of Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple to testify in an antitrust hearing on Wednesday. Expect the tech titans to be grilled over whether their companies have become so powerful and far-reaching that they harm rivals and all of us, too. So what can we do if we want to break out of the stranglehold of Big Tech?
At first glance, there may not seem like much we can do to escape. “It’s not like you can start shopping at local bookstores and put Amazon out of business,” said Jason Fried, the founder of Basecamp, a Chicago-based company that offers productivity apps.
The EPO has decided to postpone until further notice all oral proceedings in opposition scheduled until December 31, 2020 (previously until September 14, 2020). Applicants can delay payment of renewal fees due from June 1 through August 31 without incurring any late fees.
Newsletter No. 4 July 2020In a recent decision (4A_613/2019, 11 May 2020), the Swiss Federal Supreme Court (Supreme Court) followed the practice of the Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office (EPO) as it held that the singling out of single features from two separate lists of features and therefore the combination of these two specific features constitutes an extension of the subject-matter of the patent application leading to its nullity.
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The Supreme Court’s decision, which is intended for publication, is legally-binding and cannot be appealed before any other court. On a European level, co-proceedings are still pending at the EPO. The Opposition Division of the EPO revoked the entire European divisional patent EP 2 425 821 applying the mentioned “gold standard” test. The decision was appealed before the Board of Appeal (Case No. T3035/19-3.3.07). Public oral proceedings will be held on 23/24 September 2021.
Europe has fallen far behind other regions in AI patent filings. This appears in large part due to the perceived and actual hostility towards software and AI patent applications from the European Patent Office (EPO). Shockingly, only one of the top 20 worldwide AI patent filers is an EU-headquartered entity. Further, this gap in patent filings seems to be growing across most areas of AI and AI applications, except in self-driving vehicles where several European companies, mostly German companies, have become technology leaders.
Litigators and researchers all use PACER to access Federal Court documents. These documents are typically stored as electronic PDF documents and PACER charges 10€¢ per page. That amount is relatively small, but adds up very quickly once you see how many pages are found in a single docket. The cost is particularly prohibitive for public access — those of us who are monitoring court activity but don’t have a financial interest in the case itself. In addition, it is prohibitive to the public-interest plaintiffs in this case, including the National Veterans Legal Services Program (NVLSP) and the National Consumer Law Center.
I downloaded this opinion from PACER for a $3 charge. Obviously, it did not cost the courts that amount to send the download to me. The marginal cost was likely well under 1€¢ for the whole document. The Judiciary has argued that the high charge is intended to pay for buying new computers, upgrading computer systems, and all forms of electronic information dissemination.
Texas-based model Deniece Waidhofer, known for selling access to sexy photos of herself online, is taking action against Thothub, a site that publishes leaked copies of her work. The site, its members, and services it works with, including Cloudflare, are accused of copyright infringement and being part of a RICO conspiracy, the suit alleges.
When friends of Kevin Smith, aka Silent Bob, threw a 50th birthday party for the actor/director at a drive-in cinema in the US, the plan was to watch the Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. Unfortunately, the cinema's systems broke down, threatening to ruin the event. Fortunately, a filmmaker was there to download the movie from a torrent site and the show went ahead as planned.
The .CA domain registry and CIPPIC have filed their intervention in the Canadian pirate site blocking appeal. The groups argue that the blocking injunction sidelines the telecoms regulator and disrupts the balance struck by the Copyright Act. In addition, they believe that user rights, including freedom of expression, should be carefully considered.
In 2013, Movie2K was one of the largest 'pirate' streaming sites on the Internet generating more traffic in Germany than Twitter. After making arrrests last year, local authorities assisted by the FBI now say they have secured cryptocurrency worth almost $30m. Overall, however, the site's programmer is said to have made 22,000 bitcoins from his work.
