There are thousands of Linux distributions out there, and it can be confusing just to read how one is different from the others. To get started, you may want to try Ubuntu, not because it is the easiest to use, but because it is the most popular. Thanks to its millions of users, you can easily find help if you run into issues (which you are bound to do).
System76 has released their new AMD-based mobile workstation, the Serval WS. It features a 15.6" display, Nvidia graphics, and AMD Ryzen CPUs.
System76 is relentless in their pursuit to provide Open Source firmware to all of their Linux laptop line-up, and the new Bonobo WS is the latest to get the Coreboot-based System76 Open Firmware and the System76 Embedded Controller Firmware after the Darter Pro, Lemur Pro, and Oryx Pro.
These Open Source technologies not only offer users full control over their hardware, such as battery, fans and keyboard, when they buy a Linux laptop from System76, but they also greatly speed up the boot time and overall performance of the device.
Linux PC maker System76 has released its most powerful laptop to date: the new System76 Bonobo WS is a mobile workstation with support for desktop-class chips including a 125-watt Intel Core i9-10900K processor and NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER graphics. At 8.4 pounds, it’s not the sort of laptop we’d normally cover on Liliputing, but hey, it’s more portable than a desktop with those components.
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System76 Bonobo WS is a 17.3 inch Linux laptop/mobile workstation PC with desktop components (up to a Core i9-10900K deca-core CPU, NVIDIA RTX 2080 SUPER graphics, 128GB RAM, Thunderbolt 3, and 1080p 144Hz or 4K/60Hz display options. It’s HEAVY though (8.4 pounds).
Linux PC Vendor System76 has finally launched its new Bonobo WS portable Linux laptop with high-end specifications, powerful and open source components.
With a 17.3-inch 1080p or 4K Matte display to play 4K videos and higher resolution gaming smoothly, Bonobo WS boasts a 10th generation Intel Core Desktop processor underneath.
The Bonobo WS is a powerhouse of performance—as well as an actual house for tiny elves. There’s a lot to love about this new laptop, some of which we recite in song from our respective locations.
Some of you may not know this but I only started using Linux even casually when I started this channel, I know it might now seem like it now but that's what happens when you engross yourself in something for a whole year. So after seeing Distrotube's video on his history I thought it be fun to look back at my own history Linux and computing and talking about where it might take me in the future.
This week we’ve been trying to fix ice-makers and creating a new Discord server. We discuss appealing to communities, bring you another command line love and go over all your wonderful feedback.
Computing's Mr. Grumpy, Linus Torvalds, wished "a painful death" on Intel's AVX-512 instruction set, and Intel's Mr. Charisma, Raja Koduri, has now offered a defence of it in the face of questions from PCWorld's Mr. Lovely, Gordon Mah Ung. It's okay, I'm going to stop that now, lest the estate of Roger Hargreaves comes after me.
Back in July Torvalds was hanging out in a forum thread speculating on the potential absence of AVX-512 in the upcoming Intel Alder Lake platform, when he chose to call out the feature and called on Intel to start "fixing real problems instead of trying to create magic instructions to then create benchmarks that they can look good on."
At the Intel Architecture Day this month PCWorld quizzed Koduri on Torvalds' comments, to which he responded saying: "AVX-512 is a great feature. Our HPC community, AI community, love it. Our customers on the data center side really, really, really love it."
"We understand Linus’ concerns," continues Koduri, "we understand some of the issues with first generation AVX-512 that had impact on the frequencies etc, etc. and we are making it much much better with every generation."
As of this writing, just over 3,900 non-merge changesets have been pulled into the mainline repository for the 5.9 kernel development cycle. While this merge window has just begun, there is already a significant set of new features to point out.
The Linux kernel has never lacked for synchronization primitives and locking mechanisms, so one might justifiably wonder why there might be a need to add another one. The addition of local locks to 5.8 provides an answer to that question. These locks, which have their origin in the realtime (PREEMPT_RT) tree, were created to solve some realtime-specific problems, but they also bring some much-needed structure to a common locking pattern used in non-realtime kernels as well.
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A kernel function attempting to acquire a spinning lock that is owned by another thread will spin (loop actively) until the other thread, which must be running on a different CPU, releases the lock. This type of lock is fast, but it may waste CPU cycles if the wait lasts for a long time. Spinning locks are thus used around short sections of code. Longer code sections protected by spinning locks will increase the overall system latency; code that needs to respond to an event quickly may be blocked on a lock. The category of spinning locks contains spinlocks and read-write locks.
The situation is different with sleeping locks; a thread taking such a lock will, as the name suggests, relinquish the CPU if it cannot obtain the lock. This type of lock works for longer sections of critical code, but takes a longer time to obtain. Also, sleeping locks cannot be taken when a thread is running in atomic context; that happens, for example, when interrupts are disabled, the code holds a spinlock, or it holds an atomic kmap (atomic kernel mapping). In non-PREEMPT_RT kernels, sleeping locks include all types of mutexes and semaphores. In practice, even sleeping locks do spinning in some cases if there is a possibility to obtain the lock rapidly. For example, mutexes may spin if the mutex owner is running (and thus should release the mutex shortly). This is called "opportunistic spinning"; interested readers can look into the details in the kernel documentation.
A reminder about how to attend our virtual edition of the Linux Plumbers Conference.
If you are registered, you can participate by joining the Meeting Rooms on our Big Blue Button instance, starting Monday August 24th. You will find a front end showing the schedule for the current day with all the active sessions you can join. If you are having issues, please consult the LPC 2020 Participant Guide.
The Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) today announced the formation of a Software Implementation Working Group (SIWG) to bring AV1 video support to more platforms by leveraging Intel's open-source SVT-AV1 implementation.
This AOMedia working group is working to bring AV1 encoder support to more platforms and the group is being chaired by representatives from Facebook, Tencent, and Intel.
RTP is the dominant protocol for low latency audio and video transport. It sits at the core of many systems used in a wide array of industries, from WebRTC, to SIP (IP telephony), and from RTSP (security cameras) to RIST and SMPTE ST 2022 (broadcast TV backend).
Being a flexible, Open Source framework, GStreamer is used in a variety of applications. Its RTP stack has been battle tested in multiple use-cases across all of the aforementioned industries, giving it the distinct advantage of being able to apply optimisations from one use case to another. Without a doubt, GStreamer has one of the most mature and complete RTP stacks available.
NVIDIA is preparing to remove support for multi-GPU modes of AA (anti-aliasing), AFR (alternate frame rendering), and SFR (split frame rendering) from the Linux driver in the near future.
NVIDIA has updated their deprecation schedule today to reflect that the current NVIDIA 450.xx driver series is the last branch supporting SLI AA/AFR/SFR modes. NVIDIA 450 is the current stable Linux driver series this summer while soon should be succeeded by a new series in ushering in the upcoming GeForce 3000 series support.
I had some requirements for writing a vulkan software rasterizer within the Mesa project. I took some time to look at the options and realised that just writing a vulkan layer on top of gallium's llvmpipe would be a good answer for this problem. However in doing so I knew people would ask why this wouldn't work for a hardware driver.
Merged into Mesa 20.3 earlier this week was VALLIUM as a Vulkan front-end to Gallium3D with an explicit focus to serve as a CPU/software-based Vulkan implementation and relying upon the Gallium/LLVMpipe infrastructure. But with VALLIUM being a Gallium3D front-end, some have wondered whether this could allow Vulkan to magically work with existing Gallium3D hardware drivers or even to run Vulkan on GPUs not natively supported by Vulkan.
AMD's software team has released version 3.7 of ROCm, the Radeon Open Compute stack as their alternative to NVIDIA's closed-source CUDA compute environment.
The ROCm 3.7 release comes just hours after they released AOMP 11.8 as AMD's downstream of LLVM/Clang focused on providing Radeon OpenMP offloading support until the work is all upstreamed in LLVM/Clang. With AOMP 11.8 they are using the branched LLVM 11.0 code that is nearing its stable release, OPMD updates for the FLANG Fortran compiler, OpenMP debugging improvements, and other changes.
Two years ago to the date, Valve Software made an announcement that would change Linux gaming on Steam: that announcement was the new version of Steam Play with the Proton compatibility layer.
Proton is the Valve-funded fork of Wine, a compatibility layer designed to run Windows software on other systems. With Proton, Valve are focusing of course on games and Steam integration with the help of CodeWeavers. Two years on, there's a huge amount more AAA games (thousands) playable on Linux with a few clicks of a button (guide). Thanks to Proton, users moving over from Windows likely don't need to give up a lot of their games, since many should work well and the importance of that cannot be understated as a back catalogue is vital.
Developer Matthew Brown has crafted a set of brilliant puzzle games with the Hexcells series and it seems they're not entirely finished with them years after release.
The series has gone onto receive wide acclaim from other critics and users on Steam, with each game in the series having thousands of user reviews and a positive rating. So clearly Brown has done well here. If you've not played them: they're a series of ambient and relaxed logic puzzles. You could say it's a puzzle game in its purest form, with no bells and whistles and that's part of why it's so good.
Do you enjoy build up a good deck of powerful cards? How about competitive online matches? Keep an eye on the upcoming Mythicard, a free to play auto-battler.
The idea here is that you have competitive matches against 5 other people, as you compete to be the last one standing. In order to win, you have to build up an army of cards and improve on things each round. The battlefield is a row of eight maximum cards in play per player, with each round letting players purchase cards, sell card, level up and rearrange their card's attack order. With cross-platform online multiplayer across Linux, macOS, Windows and Android. Once a round begins, you engage in automatic 1v1 battles until there's no cards remaining for one player.
With a name that's clearly a parody of SpaceX, the indie game EarthX has you build up and manage a private space company and with a recent update you can go to Mars.
You get to develop rockets, fight for contracts with competitors and perhaps live out your dream of becoming a nutty ridiculously rich entrepreneur. This isn't another Kerbal though, it's much more of a management game as you build up your little base of operations and get designing some rockets. With a recent expansion released in July the game has opened up a lot as you can now head to Mars, you can even build on it and perhaps try your hand a little Terraforming.
Crumble, a 3D platformer I've been excitedly following for quite some time actually has a release date now and they plan to launch it on December 4, 2020.
It looks pretty fantastic and from the time we've played of the early builds, it feels awesome too. It's a rolling-ball 3D physics platformer, where your character is just a silly face with a very long and sticky tongue. It's actually a bit hilarious with the unstable platforms and destruction that goes on during some levels. There's even a level where you control an aeroplane by rolling across it to change direction.
Red Hook Studios have released an update to the free Darkest Dungeon: The Butcher's Circus DLC, which now includes Linux PC support too.
This is the brand new free DLC that adds in PvP battles to Darkest Dungeon, which are entirely separate to the main campaign. It brings the tough turn-based combat to an entirely new audience. Red Hook Studios are still tinkering with their idea and this is the start of a second Season of content for The Butcher's Circus. In addition to adding Linux and macOS support to the new mode they've also added an Offline Mode to practice against bots, Steam Rich Presence support, improvements to the Direct Challenge feature and more polishing.
Xfce 4.16 continues to move along on new and improved features with hopes of shipping this calendar year. A batch of xfce4-panel improvements were merged today.
A lot of improvements hit xfce4-panel today, namely around the merging of the status notifier plug-in with the system tray plug-in in this panel code. All the patches that hit the Git repository today can be seen here.
this is the fifth post about the progress in my GSoC project and I want to present a new major feature that help to structure the content of the worksheet as well as another minor feature improving the handling and the usability of the insertion of images in the markdown worksheet entries.
When working with worksheets holding a lot of information it is sometimes required to be able to structure the content. This structuring is possible now with the help of a new entry type - Hierarchy Entry. With this entry a hierarchical representation of the content can be achieved which allows structures like "Chapter -> Section -> Sub-Section", etc.
It has been a long time since my last post. I am facing a personal problem, regarding the health of my dad. It has been difficult to find time to work and take care of him. When I have time, it is really difficult concentrate properly. This is the very reason why I am very happy to say that I finally got a working version of a graph layout algorithm specifically designed for directed acyclic graphs. See an example layout in the image below!
KDE Neon is the official distribution from the KDE team itself. It is an ideal choice for hardcore KDE fans who want to enjoy the latest and greatest of KDE with the simplicity of Ubuntu.
The GSoC is coming to an end and so the work planned for this event for all students. And I’m one of those students.
In previous stages of the development in this event I went full-on to refactor the whole app-backend separation and interaction to decrease the level of indirections when making requests to the server and so have a nicer time adding multi-account support. You can see what I made here and here.
As I announced in the last progress update, where I got to rework the error system internally, I started working towards the goal of integrating matrix-rust-sdk into Fractal instead of implementing multi-account support, since the latter came to be a lot more unwieldy than initially thought, having to touch too many moving (and undocumented) parts across the code. But this brought the need to unexpectedly learn another library and get to gripes with its assumptions about its usage.
After a quick glance over the documentation I thought I was ready to tackle the task. First barrier: the library is still early alpha and there was a version conflict with another crate. With some try and failure I got Cargo to accept the setup and I could make the matrix-sdk Client login. But initially I had to have two clients working at the same time while I incrementally moved everything to matrix-sdk. Fortunately, there was a method to set the login parameters in the client without making the request to the server. That meant I could share the access token. Neat.
So This week I was working on change tracking in Music.
In this video, we are looking at Parrot OS 4.10 MATE Home Edition.
The latest snapshot, 20200818, brought KDE Applications 20.08.0. The latest applications release offers a plethora of awesomeness. Dolphin adds thumbnails for 3D Manufacturing Format (3MF) files to the list and previews of files and folders on encrypted file systems such as Plasma Vaults can be seen. This is done securely by storing the cached thumbnails on the file system itself, or falling back to generating them but not storing cached versions anywhere if necessary. Konsole also comes with a new feature that displays a subtle highlight for new lines coming into view when the terminal output is rapidly scrolling by and shows a thumbnail preview for image files when hovering the cursor over by default. The announcement about the new features is worth reading. Command line utility dar 2.6.10 updated the configure script to handle some undocumented enables and fixed less thana handful of bugs. Users of the Mate Desktop Environment had a fix with the engrampa 1.24.1 package to avoid a memory leak in Java utilities and the mate-calc 1.24.1 fixed incorrect parenthesis handling; both packages update translations. Those who use the TV and webcam recorder xawtv will noticed the update to version 3.107 after ta build issue was resolved with GNU Compiler Collection 10.1. Other packages to update in the snapshot were the new major version of perl-Image-ExifTool 12.04, rubygem-i18n 1.8.5 and rubygem-rubocop-ast 0.1.0. The snapshot is trending moderately stable at a rating of 73, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer.
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, the latest addition to Red Hat’s portfolio of IT management technologies designed for the hybrid cloud. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes is designed to help organizations further extend and scale Red Hat OpenShift with enterprise-grade management capabilities across hybrid and multicloud environments, allowing them to manage multiple Kubernetes clusters and enable multi-cluster application deployments across hybrid clouds while ensuring policy and governance.
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift 4.5, the latest version of the industry’s most comprehensive Kubernetes platform. Red Hat OpenShift 4.5, which includes the general availability of OpenShift Virtualization, is designed to help organizations break down application barriers between traditional and cloud-native infrastructure and extend control over distributed resources.
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced updates to its portfolio of developer tools, bringing new capabilities that further equip customers to build, deploy and manage applications in Kubernetes-based environments. With tools optimized for Red Hat OpenShift, the industry's most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, developers can tap into the benefits of Kubernetes—including speed, consistency, portability and scale—without extending development time or complexity.
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform has been named a Leader by Forrester Research in The Forrester Waveââ¢: Infrastructure Automation Platforms, Q3 2020.
With Open Liberty 20.0.0.8, you can now customize HTTP access log fields in JSON logs. This feature allows you to include fields from the accessLogging logFormat attribute in your JSON logs. You also can write a JSON log file directly to system.out, without wrapping it in a liberty_message event.
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In Open Liberty, you have the option to format your server logs in either basic or JSON format. When logs are in JSON format, you must specify the sources (message, trace, accessLog, ffdc, or audit) that you want to send to messages.log or console.log and standard-out.
In Open Liberty 20.0.0.8, we’ve added the option to include fields from the accessLogging logFormat attribute in your JSON logs. Previously, only selected fields were printed in these logs. Now, you can include other NCSA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) access log fields in your JSON logs. This new feature lets you receive more informative logs that suit your needs.
The latest version of the Red Hat OpenShift Kubernetes platform is now generally available. Red Hat OpenShift 4.5, which includes the general availability of OpenShift Virtualization, helps organizations break down application barriers between traditional and cloud-native infrastructure and extend control over distributed resources.
Red Hat OpenShift now includes OpenShift Virtualization, a new platform feature that enables IT organizations to bring standard VM-based workloads to Kubernetes.
First introduced at Red Hat Summit 2020 as a technology preview feature, OpenShift Virtualization is now generally available and included with Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform at no additional cost.
The impact: There is a great deal to gain from Kubernetes continued adoption. Developers pay more attention to code and less to infrastructure; operators get more scalable ways of managing infrastructure and ensuring compliance, business owners get quicker feedback on business strategy.
Generative AI refers to programs that can use existing content like text, audio files, or images to create new plausible content. The MIT Technology review described generative AI as one of the most promising advances in the world of AI in the past decade. Generative AI enables computers to learn the underlying pattern related to the input, and then use that to generate similar content. There are various techniques to do that such as generative adversarial networks (GANS), transformers, and variational autoencoders.
Let’s talk about GANs before discussing the use cases of generative AI and how daunting it can be for some use cases.
We are currently working on a second draft of the Declaration of Digital Autonomy. We’re also working on some next steps, which I hadn’t really thought about existing before. Videos from GUADEC and HOPE are now online. We’ll be speaking at DebConf on August 29th.
We are very pleased to announce that Lenovo, Infomaniak, Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS), have committed to supporting DebConf20 as Platinum sponsors.
If you check the “meta file” Ubuntu LTS releases use to ‘find’ new versions you’ll spot that it doesn’t (yet) include Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (though the recent 16.04.7 LTS and Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS releases are both present).
Is this omission a bug?
No, it turns out; it’s intentional.
Ubuntu’s Alan Pope has said “…it’s common for us to hold back upgrades for a bit until we’re super confident people will get a good experience”.
Sometimes, you may wonder, what’s on the other side of the curtain? If you’re a developer contemplating snaps, you surely want to know the range of tools and options available in the developer account dashboard in the Snap Store. But some of the features may not necessarily be immediately visible or relevant until you’ve uploaded a snap. To that end, we wanted to give you an overview of the Snap Store, and show you the different capabilities you will have as a snap developer.
The web team here at Canonical run two-week iterations. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
This morning I received a message from DHL informing me of an incoming package from Hong Kong and sent by a company (i.e. an agent) I had never heard of. My first reaction was “Ah” shortly followed by “Why?!”.
But in any case, I’ve just received the package, and after tearing the plastic out, I found a FriendlyELEC branded package. So I thought to myself it must be a NanoPi board for review. Wrong! I actually got two NanoPi “boards” namely NanoPi NEO3 with 2GB RAM, and NanoPi R2S both of which are Rockchip RK3328 powered SBC’s designed for Linux headless applications.
What can you do if you have a nice piece of hardware that kinda works out of the box, but doesn’t have support for your operating system to get the full functionality out of it? [Harry Gill] found himself in such a situation with a new all-in-one (AIO) water cooling system. It didn’t technically require any operating system interaction to perform its main task, but things like settings adjustments or reading back statistics were only possible with Windows. He thought it would be nice to have those features in Linux as well, and as the communication is done via USB, figured the obvious solution is to reverse engineer the protocol and simply replicate it.
His first step was to set up a dual boot system (his attempts at running the software in a VM didn’t go very well) which allowed him to capture the USB traffic with Wireshark and USBPcap. Then it would simply be a matter of analyzing the captures and writing some Linux software to make sense of the data. The go-to library for USB tasks would be libusb, which has bindings for plenty of languages, but as an avid Rust user, that choice was never really an issue anyway.
Last year with covered Dragino RS485-LN RS485 to LoRaWAN converter that extends the range of RS485 wirelessly up to 15+km thanks to LoRaWAN connectivity. Rakwireless has now launched a similar product with RAK7431 Modbus RS485 to LoRaWAN bridge.
While there are plenty of smartwatches out there, most of them are about fitness first. And, frankly, that's not my first priority. I wanted a watch with great health-monitoring sensors and health apps. That's exactly what Samsung's latest smartwatch gives me.
Thanks to its photoplethysmography (PPG) sensor with 8 pulse-reading optical photodiodes, the Galaxy Watch can monitor your pulse and much more. It works as a single-lead electrocardiogram (EKG or ECG); as an oximeter to measure your oxygen level; and as a sphygmomanometer to track your blood pressure.
That's the good news. The bad news is that, although the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved its EKG functionality for Class II use, which is as a non-critical medical device, it hasn't released the application in the US yet. It is already available in South Korea. The EKG app is expected to be available in the States later this year.
IoT-Leveraged Living Spaces From preventive maintenance for appliances to voice-controlled lighting, the subsystems that comprise a modern Smart Home continue to evolve. Providing the building blocks for these implementations, IC vendors are keeping pace with specialized MCUs, sensors platforms and embedded software to meet diverse requirements. The evolution of Smart Homes is about more than pure convenience. Smart Home technologies are leveraging IoT concepts to improve energy efficiency and security, thanks to intelligent, connected devices. The topic encompasses things like power-saving motor control systems, predictive maintenance, cloud-based voice assistance, remote monitoring and more. Clearly the market is an attractive one. According to the latest Smart Home Device Database from market research firm IHS Markit, the global Smart Home market is forecast to grow by nearly a factor of five to reach more than $192 billion in 2023, up from $41 billion in 2018 (Figure 1). The report says that the fastest-growing device types in the market include lighting, smart speakers and connected major home appliances. FIGURE 1 - According to research from IHS Markit, the global Smart Home market is forecast to grow by nearly a factor of five to reach more than $192 billion in 2023, up from $41 billion in 2018.
Advantech’s AIMB-233 is a thin Mini-ITX SBC that runs Linux on 8th Gen Whiskey Lake CPUs. The board serves up 32GB DDR4 DRAM, triple HDMI displays support, 2x GbE, 8x USB, 3x SATA III and -20 to 70€°C operation temp.
Advantech has released its AIMB-233, a low-profile industrial-grade thin Mini-ITX SBC. The AIMB-233 is powered by a Whiskey Lake 8th Gen. Intel Core processor. The board supports Linux and Windows, as well as Advantech’s own SUSIAccess remote management software. It also supports Advantech’s WISE-PasS/RMM and Embedded Software APIs. The fanless board features a thin 25mm profile and a wide operating temperature of -20 to 70 €°C.
Android may have started with the mantra that developers are allowed to do anything as long as they can code it, but things have changed over the years as security and privacy became higher priorities. Every major update over the last decade has shuttered features or added restrictions in the name of protecting users, but some sacrifices may not have been entirely necessary. Another Android 11 trade-off has emerged, this time taking away the ability for users to select third-party camera apps to take pictures or videos on behalf of other apps, forcing users to rely only on the built-in camera app.
Deb Nicholson has been serving as our Director of Community Operations for just over two years and is now leaving to Conservancy to take on the role of Interim General Manager at the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Although Deb will no longer be on our staff, she'll remain part of the Conservancy community, most formally as a volunteer on our Evaluation Committee that reviews applications from potential new member projects.
In the two years since she became the Director of Community Operations, Deb has helped Conservancy welcome six new member projects, put on two Copyleft Confs, run two fundraising seasons and contributed over 50 posts to our blog.
The Open Source Initiative is bringing in Deb Nicholson as its new Interim General Manager. Nicholson will be supporting the organization through a period of growth and introspection over the upcoming year as stakeholders continue building on the non-profit's past successes. She will be overseeing day-to-day operations, including marketing, staffing and infrastructure, as well as supporting board and volunteer activities.
OSI's President, Josh Simmons elaborates, "We're thrilled to welcome Deb as an Interim General Manager at OSI. Her credentials are top notch, and she's well respected within the free and open source software communities... I couldn't ask for a better partner as OSI works through its second major transformation! Deb's roots in the software freedom community and at Conservancy bode well for our movements as we strive to present a more unified front to advance our shared goals."
We would also like to take this moment to thank Patrick Masson for seven years of service as OSI's General Manager and Director. He leaves behind a powerful legacy as OSI's first full-time employee. Masson will be continuing his work as an outside consultant to support this transition as well as supporting FLOSS Desktops For Kids. We wish him all the best, both inside and outside, the open source community.
I am an open source lawyer for Red Hat. One important part of my job is to provide information to other companies, including their in-house counsel, about how Red Hat builds enterprise-class products with a completely open source development model and answering their questions about open source licensing in general. After hearing about Red Hat's success, these conversations often turn to discussions about how their organization can evolve to be more open source-aware and -capable, and lawyers at these meetings regularly ask how they can modify their practices to be more skilled in providing open source counsel to their employees.
In this article and the next, I'll convey what I normally tell in-house counsel about these topics. If you are not in-house counsel and instead work for a law firm supporting clients in the software space, you may also find this information useful. (If you are considering going to law school and becoming an open source lawyer, you should read Luis Villa's excellent article What to know before jumping into a career as an open source lawyer.)
Submissions are being accepted through Wednesday, October 28 at 12:00 Eastern Daylight Time (16:00 UTC). General registration, award nominations, exhibitor registration and sponsoring packages will open soon.
We invite activists, hackers, law professionals, artists, students, developers, young people, policymakers, tinkerers, newcomers to free software, and anyone looking for technology that aligns with their ideals, to submit a proposal for a session at LibrePlanet. Session proposals can focus on software development, copyleft, community, or other related issues.
McKeown began by noting that he has used free operating systems throughout his 30-year career in networking, first BSD, then Linux. Those operating systems have shaped networking in various ways; they have also shaped how networking is taught to undergraduates at Stanford University, where he is a professor. The Linux infrastructure is "an amazing example of networking at its best that we show to our students and try to get them experience getting their hands dirty using it", he said.
He is a "huge believer in the open-source community for networking". In his group at Stanford, all of the code is released as open source. The "real revolution in networking" over the last ten years or more has been the rise of open source as a "trustworthy infrastructure for how we learn about and operate networks". Ten or 12 years ago, everyone was using closed-source, proprietary networking equipment, but today's largest data centers are all running on mostly open-source software, mainly on Linux-based equipment.
This change is pleasing to him—not simply for the sake of openness—but because it has allowed the owners and operators of this equipment to be able to program it. Those players can then introduce changes into their networks to improve their service in various ways. That kind of innovation can only be helpful to the networking world in the future.
A combination of express data path (XDP) and BPF provides the ability to do fast packet forwarding in the Linux kernel. In parallel, new forwarding pipelines, hardware accelerators, switches, and smart network-interface cards (NICs) are emerging, many of which are programmable using the P4 language. How can those two things be brought together so that the benefits can be gained end-to-end? Those two "camps" could be determined to be in opposition to each other, but he hopes that does not end up being the case. If the two do not end up working together, he said, it "will only confuse developers and users".
As part of the upcoming oneAPI 1.0 "Gold" release, oneAPI Level Zero 1.0 was released this morning.
Intel's oneAPI Level Zero API is their direct-to-metal interface for offload accelerators. To date it's largely been about Intel GPUs but there is also work on supporting FPGAs, other GPUs, and other offload accelerators in general. With the oneAPI Level Zero 1.0 release, their low-level API is signaled that its ready for adoption and production use.
Getting to grips with Emacs is not easy. In fact, it can be one of the steepest learning curves for newcomers. Learning the concepts and being productive with this editor to produce your own dotfiles from afresh takes time and a fair chunk of effort.
But there’s a much easier way to start being productive. There are numerous projects that produce their own package of configuration. These configuration frameworks take the vanilla Emacs and add their own configuration files, pre-defined internal commands, and configurations for various plug-ins (known as packages). In essence these configuration framework replace your .emacs.d directory, offering an easy to use Emacs configuration for Emacs newcomers and lots of additional power for Emacs power users. The configuration frameworks are sometimes labelled Emacs distributions.
Pretend that a ping pong ball represents a single curl installation somewhere in the world. Here’s a picture of one to help you get an image in your head.
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If you manage to do this construction work non-stop at the rate of one ball per second (which seems like it maybe would be hard after a while but let’s not make that ruin the fun), it will keep you occupied for no less than a little bit over 317 years. (That also assumes the number of curl installations doesn’t grow significantly in the mean time.)
That’s a lot of ping pong balls. Ten billion of them, give or take.
Assuming you have friends to help you build this tower you can probably build it faster. If you can instead sustain a rate of 1000 balls per second, you’d be done in less than four months.
One official ping pong ball weighs 2.7 grams. It makes a total of 27,000 tonnes of balls. That’s quite some pressure on such a small surface. You better make sure to build the tower on something solid. The heaviest statue in the world is the Statue of Liberty in New York, clocking in at 24,500 tonnes.
Moving away from Google Chrome was probably the easiest migration in my de-Googling efforts. I’m not a huge user of bookmarks, history, or extensions, so those weren’t tying me down. On the desktop, I just switched to a combination of Ephemeral (as my defaut) with Epiphany/GNOME Web as my main “real browser.”
Ephemeral is a lightweight privacy browser that I develop for elementary OS, so of course I dogfood it and have it set as the default. A key feature is that you can pop sites open in your “real” browser with one click, so I usually have that set to Epiphany—the native GTK browser that comes with elementary OS, so it’s an obvious choice.
However, some sites don’t perform well in Ephemeral or Epiphany (usually due to unnecessary user agent sniffing), so I do keep Firefox around for that. And Firefox on the desktop has gotten really good. Since Epiphany supports Firefox Sync, it’s actually pretty easy to jump between the two as needed. I also occasionally install Chromium for testing web development in a Chrome-based engine, but I don’t use it for any real browsing.
During the past few days, I’ve been chatting with Firefox users, trying to separate fact from rumor regarding the consequences of the August 2020 Mozilla layoffs. One of the topics that came back a few times was the removal of XUL-based add-ons during the move to Firefox Quantum. I was very surprised to see that, years after it happened, some community members still felt hurt by this choice.
As discussed in part III, public key authentication is great in principle but in practice has been hard to integrate into the Web environment. However, we’re now seeing deployment of a new technology called WebAuthn (short for Web Authentication) that hopefully changes that.1
Previous approaches to public key authentication required the browser to provide the user interface. For a variety of reasons (the interfaces were bad, the sites wanted to control the experience) this didn’t work well for sites, and public key authentication didn’t get much adoption. WebAuthn takes a different approach, which is to provide a JavaScript API that the site can use to do public key authentication via the browser.
The key difference here is that previous systems tended to operate at a lower layer (typically HTTP or TLS), which made it hard for the site to control how and when authentication happened.2 By contrast, a JS API puts the site in control so it can ask for authentication when it wants to (e.g., after showing the home page and prompting for the username).
At Mozilla, we put privacy first. We do this in our own products with features like tracking protection. We also promote privacy in our public advocacy. A key feature of our privacy work is a commitment to reducing the amount of user data that is collected in the first place. Focusing on the data you really need lowers risk and promotes trust. Our Lean Data Practices page describes this framework and includes tools and tips for staying lean. For years, our legal and policy teams have held workshops around the world, advising businesses on how they can use lean data practices to reduce their data footprint and improve the privacy of their products and services.
Mozilla is not the only advocate for lean data. Many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many others use the term “lean data” to refer to the principle of minimizing data collection. Given this, we were very surprised to receive a demand letter from lawyers representing LeanData, Inc. claiming that Mozilla’s Lean Data Practices page infringes the company’s supposed trademark rights. We have responded to this letter to stand up for everyone’s right to use the words “lean data” in digital advocacy.
We’ve made some great early progress with Firefox VoiceOver support on macOS and we’d love it if web developers could give it a test run and provide feedback on any issues you run into while evaluating web page accessibility.
Tor Browser 10.0a5 is now available from the Tor Browser Alpha download page and also from our distribution directory.
Note: This is an alpha release, an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommend downloading the latest stable release instead.
Pre-built binaries will be added as they become ready.
Please file bug reports for any issues you find as blockers of https://llvm.org/pr46725
Release testers: please start your engines, run the script, share your results, and upload binaries.
We're a bit behind schedule, but I also don't think we have any super bad bugs open, so hopefully we can still wrap up fairly soon.
Thanks, Hans
LLVM 11.0 after being under development for a half-year is preparing to ship with build speed improvements around pre-compiled headers, AMD Radeon "Navi 2" support, C++20 improvements, usage of C17 by default if no other C standard is specified, parsing but no handling yet for the GNU "asm inline" C extension, Radeon GCN offload capabilities for OpenMP, load hardening mitigation work and SESES as the latest on the compiler-based mitigation front, support for new Arm CPUs, and much more as previously covered in our LLVM 11.0 feature overview.
Flutter is a cross-platform open-source user-interface (UI) toolkit that is based on the Dart programming language. In early July, Canonical and Google worked together to bring Flutter to the Linux desktop. On August 5, Flutter version 1.20 was released, improving Flutter's performance, expanding its widget library, and more.
In a two-part series, we will be implementing a simple RSS reader for LWN. In part one, we will introduce the BSD-licensed Flutter and cover some Dart concepts that will be used by the application. Readers may also want to consult our introduction to Dart for more information on the language. Part two will build on the basic application to further flesh out the UI features.
According to its project page, Flutter's use-case is "for building beautiful, natively compiled applications for mobile, web, and desktop from a single codebase." Its GitHub repository indicates it has over 660 contributors who make a little less than 100 commits per week. Google claims that the project has had two-million developers use the framework on a variety of platforms.
PHP 8.0 is on the horizon, and the project has imposed a feature freeze for the release. There's one exception to the feature freeze, though: the new attributes syntax. An attribute is syntactical metadata for PHP code, identical to what is called an "annotation" in other languages. Even though attributes have been voted on multiple times by the community, major contributor and creator of XDebug Derick Rethans threw a wrench into the works days before the feature freeze by challenging the current syntax. The ensuing discussion lead to the fourth attributes proposal for the year, with a special feature freeze exception being made by release manager Sara Golemon. This exception gives Rethans one more opportunity to convince the community to change how attributes work up to the Beta 3 release, scheduled for September 3.
In this episode, we polished some parts of the application. Now that my first customer is using the app regularly, the feedback is coming in rapidly. We worked to fix some of the issues that she found.
The first issue that I tackled dealt with ambiguity about a course’s relationship to a school year on the course’s detail page. I fixed this issue by displaying the grade level on the course page to provide all the details. This change makes it clear what grade level the course is connected to. This is useful because courses in the school year could have the same name (e.g., “Math”).
Loops are essential for any scripting language. Learn for, while and until loops with examples in this chapter of Bash Beginner Series.
Last time I went on vacation without access to news, I was in Greece, on Ithaca, and Chernobyl happened. I found out about it a week later when I got to Athens to catch my flight back to Hamburg. There was an English language newspaper there – Daily American perhaps, or that was the paper in Rome, I can’t accurately recall now – and there was a bold headline about a nuclear accident, so I picked up the paper and read. It explained the maps I had seen on Greek TV when I had dinner in an island restaurant. The arrows, the red zone on the map. I hadn’t understood a word that the reporters were saying so it all meant nothing to me at the time.
If you can do any of these—and avoid their opposites—you’ll significantly raise your chances of getting a response from your potential mentor. And if you can do all six you’ve maximized those chances.
Happy hunting!
That’s not how the internet should work.
If anyone knows a solution to this, or someone at Google who can help fix it. Please let me know.
We could use some comic relief in these troubled times, and the times are always troubled. My grandfather used to say, “If you’re not a little wacky today, there’s something wrong with you.” Some people look to mindfulness for relief. Me, I follow Harold Lloyd’s example and gesture at myself in a circus mirror. Don’t take yourself too seriously and you won’t have an excuse to take anyone else that way.
The four have been charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit money-laundering. According to Audrey Strauss, the acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, whose office investigated the alleged scam, the four men “defrauded hundreds of thousands of donors, capitalizing on their interest in funding a border wall to raise millions of dollars, under the false pretence that all of the money would be spent on construction.” Mr Bannon appeared in court after his arrest, entering a not-guilty plea. At the time of writing, the accused had not commented further on the charges.
Steve Bannon, who served as President Trump’s chief White House strategist up until August 2017, was arrested Thursday on charges relating to misusing funds raised for constructing a private wall on the U.S.-Mexico border.
The "We Build the Wall" campaign, led by Iraq War veteran Brian Kolfage, raised over $25 million.
When we asked Brian Kolfage last month to explain how his group We Build the Wall had spent the $25 million it had raised, plus address concerns of corruption when the private sector takes over the building of border walls, he scoffed.
“How is there corruption?” Kolfage, a decorated Iraq War veteran, told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. “It’s privatized. It’s not federal money.”
My friend Clint Gibler of TL;DR Sec fame graciously created one of his brilliant summaries of the talk, which you can find here.
Unfortunately, the force of that temptation has been growing stronger recently, and not just within the progressive subcultures of English-speaking countries. On June 22nd, Parisian vandals threw red paint on a statue of no less a French intellectual icon than Voltaire, whose 1763 Treatise on Tolerance, ironically, traced the history and importance of ideological and religious pluralism.
Seventeen years ago, against the advice of my parents, I decided to become a public school teacher. Once I did, both my mother and father, educators themselves, warned me that choosing to teach was to invite attacks from those who viewed the profession with derision and contempt. They advised me to stay strong and push through when budgets were cut, my intellect questioned, or my dedication to my students exploited. Nobody, however, warned me that someday I might have to defend myself against those who asked me to step back into my classroom and risk my own life, the lives of my students and their families, of my friends, my husband, and my child in the middle of a global pandemic. And nobody told me that I’d be worrying about whether or not our nation’s public schools, already under siege, would survive the chaos of Covid-19.
Chicago, Ill.—Jamila had never officially been my student.
The coronavirus pandemic of my experience has been a slow eruption of omnipresent neighborhood and planetary grieving, in a year that was already characterized for me by grief above all else: my mother died of cancer in London in November 2019. Before the virus’s death toll began accruing, I’d been doing research, belatedly, on collective death doulas, good deaths, death cafés, and the death positivity movement. As luck would have it, I was recruited into a neighborhood “grief circle,” directly after Mum’s death, by a flyer posted outside my house. I have been attending ever since. It is convened by the cofounder of Philly Death Doula Collective, Kai Wonder MacDonald. It’s in that space that I have grieved the fact that Mum didn’t have a particularly good death, nor even, for complex reasons, a real funeral. Grief circles are confidential, loosely anonymous gatherings that are free or priced on a sliding scale. They exist for the sole purpose of bearing witness to the grief of others, and being witnessed in one’s own. The core premise is that witnessing grief reciprocally is an ancient form of mutual aid. There is no toxic positivity and no advice-giving. Ours currently takes place weekly and draws between six and fifteen attendees, about three of whom have remained constant throughout. Our grief circle stepped into overdrive this spring, for obvious reasons. Kai now schedules specific circles for so-called “essential workers.” COVID-19 deaths, especially for the racialized populations that are bearing the brunt of the virus, are rarely good deaths. Kai’s “trauma-informed” practice holds that lonely, fearful, disenfranchised deaths, in turn, breed trauma among the living.
There's an excellent piece over at RealClearPolitics arguing that COVID-19 killed the techlash. It makes a fairly compelling argument, coming at it from multiple angles. First, there's the question of how real the "techlash" ever was. It's long appeared to be more of a media- and politician-driven narrative than a real anger coming from people who make use of technology every day:
At the end of June, with hundreds of his workers already infected with COVID-19 and several dead, Kenneth Sullivan, the CEO of Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork producer, sent a pointed letter to two U.S. senators who had launched an investigation into outbreaks in meatpacking plants and industry warnings of an impending food shortage.
In blunt, unapologetic terms, Sullivan chastised critics for suggesting Smithfield had acted too slowly to prevent the disease from spreading among its workers and surrounding communities. These “revisionist historians,” he wrote, refused to be “bound to reality” by saying meatpackers could have spaced workers out, slowed processing lines or stockpiled face masks.
Russia is planning to launch a mass immunization campaign against COVID-19 in October 2020, using the “Sputnik V” vaccine developed by scientists at the Gamaleya Research Institute in Moscow, announced Kirill Dmitriev, the head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), which sponsors the vaccine’s research and development.
Former UN official calls out failing African Green Revolution.
It’s as if they want America's schools to fail.
On the second day of the new school year, a high school sophomore named Hannah Watters snapped a photo of the hallway at her school in the suburbs of Atlanta. Kids in backpacks were standing shoulder to shoulder. Few were wearing masks. “This is not ok,” she tweeted. Within four days, six students and three staff members reported new cases of Covid-19, and classes were moved online for the following Monday and Tuesday. Brian Otott, the superintendent of the county school district, maintained that it wasn’t possible to require mask wearing. Watters, meanwhile, received a five-day suspension—since rescinded—for sharing her photo online.
This pattern is playing out in other school environments across the country. Students anxious about what they say are unsafe conditions on campus told Teen Vogue that administrators seem more concerned about controlling the press or doing damage control than protecting the health of students, staff, and teachers. They say they’re also stressed that they could become the target of harassment from their fellow students or from the public if they’re revealed as the source of any incriminating photos.
By taking the vaccine industry into full public ownership, we can provide an internationalized response to this and future pandemics that properly recognizes vaccines as a global public good.
A new poll published this week demonstrates that Americans are increasingly pessimistic about how the U.S. has generally responded to the coronavirus pandemic, with a majority believing “the worst is yet to come” for the first time since the start of May.
"Everyone living in America should get the healthcare they need, regardless of their employment status or ability to pay."
Microsoft Defender (which used to be known as Windows Defender), is the built-in antivirus tool in Windows 10, and Microsoft has just made it more difficult to disable.
While the current version of Microsoft Defender does a good job of protecting PCs against viruses, malware and other internet threats, there are plenty of reasons why you’d want to disable it.
It’s always been a bit tricky to turn off Microsoft Defender in Windows 10, and while you could pause its real-time protection, it would automatically turn itself back on later.
Adobe representative Rikk Flohr acknowledged and apologized for the snafu in a forum post yesterday. Per Flohr, the company has released another update “to prevent this issue from impacting additional customers.” However, the photos can’t be recovered, according to Flohr. The update won’t help anyone who’s already been impacted.
Many users noted receiving an error message that read either "Oops something went wrong" or "Message could not be sent. Check your network and try again," when attempting to send an email.
Newsweek has contacted Google for comment.
Police said these kinds of scams come to their attention on a nearly daily basis. In June, for example, police reported two similar incidents in which two victims had each been conned out of as much as 30,000 euros.
In my experience, when wealthy people talk about “freedom,” it doesn’t usually mean freedom for the rest of us, just freedom for them. This whole affair can easily be characterized as being little more than a company of millionaires fighting a company of billionaires over the right to take a cut from software sales.
Apple takes 30% of the revenue from most subscriptions in its App Store, then 15% after the first year. But in late July, a congressional antitrust panel disclosed internal emails showing a more-favorable deal struck between Apple services chief Eddy Cue and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. They agreed to a 15% revenue share for Amazon Prime Video customers who signed up through the iPhone app and no revenue share for users who already subscribed via Amazon or elsewhere, the emails showed.
The Linux Foundation is today announcing the formation of the FinOps Foundation to promote the discipline of cloud financial management through best practices, education, and standards
With support from founding members Apptio, Cloudeasier, Cloudsoft, CloudWize, Contino, Kubecost, Neos, Opsani, ProsperOps, Timspirit and VMware, the foundation is set to increase awareness and offer education for professionals in the emerging discipline of FinOps.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the formation of the FinOps Foundation to advance the discipline of cloud financial management through best practices, education and standards. The Linux Foundation announced an intent to form the FinOps Foundation at Open Source Summit North America in late June. Today it’s announcing formation and support from founding members Apptio, Cloudeasier, Cloudsoft, CloudWize, Contino, Kubecost, Neos, Opsani, ProsperOps, Timspirit and VMware.
Back in 2014 when Facebook bought Oculus, there were the usual pre-merger promises that nothing would really change, or that Facebook wouldn't erode everything folks liked about the independent kickstarted product. Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, who has since moved on to selling border surveillance tech to the Trump administration, made oodles of promises to that effect before taking his money and running toward the sunset. Among those promises was the promise users would never be forced to use a Facebook login account just to use your VR headset and its games, and that the company wouldn't track your behavior for advertising.
As anti-police brutality protests have spread across the country in the wake of the yet another killing of an unarmed Black man by a white police officer, so has surveillance. Another set of documents found in the "Blue Leaks" stash shows a California-based "fusion center" spreading information about First Amendment-protected activities to hundreds of local law enforcement agencies. Pulling in information from all over -- including apparent keyword searches of social media accounts -- the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC) distributed info on protests and protesters to officers across the state.
We can't let cash-strapped police departments shift from racist human policing to racist technology-driven policing.
The South Wales Police has been deploying a pretty awful facial recognition program for a few years now. Back in 2018, documents obtained by Wired showed its test deployment at multiple events attended by thousands was mostly a mistake. The system did ring up 173 hits, but it also delivered nearly 2,300 false positives. In other words, it was wrong about 92% of the time.
Researchers from Comparitech have discovered yet another unsecured database which has leaked 235 million records to the world. The records include hundreds of millions from Instagram, forty some million from TikTok, and four million from YouTube. These public records were scraped from these social media platforms by Deep Social, a now defunct company that seems to have sold the data to Social Data. Scraping of public records is something that is forbidden by all three affected sites. In fact, Deep Social was banned from Facebook and Instagram for breaking that policy back in 2018.
With COVID-19 forcing millions of teachers and students to rethink in-person schooling, this moment is ripe for an innovation in learning. Unfortunately, many schools have simply substituted surveillance technology for real transformation. The use of proctoring apps—privacy-invasive software products that “watch” students as they take tests or complete schoolwork, has skyrocketed. These apps make a seductive promise: that schools can still rely on high-stakes tests, where they have complete control of a student's environment, even during remote learning. But that promise comes with a huge catch—these apps violate student privacy, negatively impact some populations, and will likely never fully stop creative students from outsmarting the system.€
No student should be forced to make the choice to either hand over their biometric data and be surveilled continuously or to fail their class.€
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called on California Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers to ensure that all COVID-19 contact tracing programs include enforceable privacy protections that strictly limit how much and what kinds of data can be collected from Californians and prohibits using that data for anything other than reining in the pandemic.More Californians will feel safe participating in efforts to trace transmission of the novel coronavirus if they know their information won’t be used to deport them or build data-rich profiles for data brokers and advertisers, EFF said this week in letters to Newsom and lawmakers.
According to the charges, Sullivan tried to pay the [cr]ackers via a bug bounty program, paying the $100,000 even though the company didn’t know who the [cr]ackers were. Sullivan tried to get the [cr]ackers to sign nondisclosure agreements, which stated that the [cr]ackers didn’t take or store any of the user and driver data.
In the criminal complaint, filed in the Northern District of California, the FBI details some of the steps Sullivan allegedly took once he realized drivers’ license information could have been involved in the [cr]ack. “At approximately 1:00am Pacific time on November 15, 2016, Sullivan reached out to Uber’s then-CEO [Travis Kalanick] via text message,” the complaint states, adding that call records show that Sullivan and Kalanick had a call that lasted about five minutes. “The CEO’s response reflects that the prospect of treating the incident under the bug bounty program was already being discussed,” the complaint states.
Facebook is under several antitrust investigations outside of the FTC’s. Last September, a coalition of state attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, opened an investigation into the social media company. Since last July, the House Judiciary Committee has been investigating big tech companies, including Facebook. Just last month, that House panel held a hearing where Zuckerberg testified, along with the CEOs of Apple, Amazon, and Google.
Facebook is under investigation for whether it’s abusing its outsized share of the online advertising market, in addition to whether its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp and its copying of competing apps’ features violate antitrust laws. At a congressional hearing last month, alongside the CEOs of three other technology giants, Zuckerberg defended those deals and argued that Facebook’s numerous products have a lot of competition.
The accelerating push for profits has prompted the company to consider selling ads on the Alexa service, they said, an idea previously avoided for fear of hurting the user experience. The pullback also coincided with a hiring spree at U.S. warehouses, where Amazon has added more than 175,000 people to help handle a surge in online orders.
Groans and laughter rose from the crowd as they realized what this meant. If China could issue such a lofty inventory of ideals while simultaneously surveilling and suppressing its citizens, then Silicon Valley could as well. The Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence was arguably dedicated to producing just these sorts of grandly empty assurances. If it’s hard to be against ethics, it’s just as hard to be against “human-centered” A.I.; there are no institutes for “inhuman” or “machine-centered” artificial intelligence. Schaake’s speech was a pointed message: talk is cheap.
July’s congressional hearings, in which the top executives of Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple spent hours fielding skeptical questioning from a House antitrust panel, may signal a new era of increased regulation for American tech companies. European lawmakers, however, have long outpaced their American counterparts; having adopted new privacy regulations in 2018, they have now begun drafting a series of new laws aimed at limiting the anticompetitive practices of the major tech companies in Europe. Schaake—with her skepticism of rhetoric, her insistence on the role of government in protecting privacy and challenging monopolies, and her conviction that regulation enables rather than suppresses innovation—epitomizes a pragmatic and quintessentially European approach to tech. For her, the question is not whether the major tech companies will face democratic accountability but when.
Jihadis continue to tell infidels what they wish to hear, and the latter continue to eat it up—to their own, often fatal, detriment.
This is one of the findings of a July 22, 2020 study titled “Prisons and Terrorism” in Western Europe (the second such publication of a decade-long project begun in 2010). Published by Kings College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR), it finds that “‘False compliance’ seems to have become more widespread, especially among jihadist prisoners, though its true extent is unknown. This can be a major issue in relation to risk assessment and release arrangements.”
In the nearly three years since it first popped up on anonymous online message boards, the QAnon conspiracy has transformed from a fringe movement to a major player in far-right politics and culture.
Research from the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America counts 20 candidates for Congress who will appear on the general election ballot in November that have either identified themselves as believers in QAnon or have given credence to its dogma.
The Berlin lawyer Seyran Ates has done some research in the social environment of yesterday’s ” single offender “. [...]
The party itself still stands firmly in the middle of nowhere.
"Peace is not an arms deal to be made between anti-democratic regimes. It must be made between peoples."
Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller says the Albuquerque Police Department (APD) is making progress at police reform, but you can’t ask Albuquerque residents Ken Reiss and Jose Vallejos what they think about Keller’s claims. APD officers killed them last week.
There are no official policing authorities as such when it comes to international relations. Realists imagine a jungle of states, the preyed upon and the predators, a grim state of affairs moderated by alliances, agreements and understandings. But there is one body whose resolutions are recognised as having binding force: the Security Council, that most powerful of creatures in that jumble known as the United Nations.
Malian President Ibrahim Boubacar Keïta was forced to resign on Tuesday after soldiers arrested him at gunpoint in a coup that has plunged the West African country, plagued for years by extremist violence, into a new phase of uncertainty.
The African Union and Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) both condemned the coup – which left four people dead and more than a dozen injured, according to Amnesty International – and suspended Mali from their respective bodies.
The junta leaders, who call themselves the National Committee for the Salvation of the People (CNSP), ordered a nighttime curfew and the closure of land and air borders – a move likely to impact humanitarian organisations working in the country.
Many fear that the group’s actions could further destabilise the country and the wider Sahel region, where al-Qaeda and so-called Islamic-State-linked groups continue to expand their reach, triggering record displacement.
“A period of uncertainty is beginning,” said Bokar Sangaré, a Malian journalist and commentator.
Etienne Sissoko, a Malian economist, told TNH that the prices of goods will likely increase as trade slows and regional sanctions bite. International donors may also pause funding, he said, weakening an already lacklustre economy.
The junta has promised quick elections and a civilian transition, but its intentions remain unclear. Brema Ely Dicko, a sociologist from the University of Bamako, said soldiers can expect stiff opposition should they try to hold on to power.
“If they don’t honor their commitments, they will face further uprisings in a few months,” he said.
Workers building an underwater fiber optic cable left 1,100 feet of pipe, 6,500 gallons of drilling fluid, a drill tip and other materials under the seabed.
Tim Edwards, president of the CalFire firefighters union, said 2020 was beginning to resemble 2017, when the state saw some of its most destructive fires.
“We are in the same situation but with 10 times as many fires,” he said.
"It's outrageous that the Dem establishment is caving to big money donors and moving backwards on fossil fuel subsidies."
The Democratic National Committee has dropped a pledge to eliminate tax breaks and subsidies for the fossil fuel industry from its party platform, after a DNC spokesperson said the amendment was originally included in “error,” despite both Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris supporting it on the campaign trail. Varshini Prakash, co-founder and executive director of the Sunrise Movement, says it is “disappointing to see” Democrats back away from the pledge, but adds that as long as social movements sustain pressure, “it will be a priority for the Biden administration, should they win in November.” Prakash also discusses hopes for a Green New Deal, the importance of Kamala Harris’s place on the ticket and the lack of young voices at the DNC.
"We know the Republicans have no plan," says the advocacy group. "But that doesn't mean the Democrats can take their feet off the gas."
"If this helps, good... But you can't buy back trust in government—or the water coming out of your faucet."
Artificial fibres now go everywhere. The oceans’ plastic tide may reach their whole depth, entering marine life and people.
But one of the main funders of this think tank, called the Center for State Policy Analysis, is a program tied financially to the petrochemical billionaire Koch family. This apparent Koch-linked funding raises questions about just how independent the center’s policy analyses may€ be.
Through the southern reaches of Texas, communities are scattered across a flat landscape of dry brush lands, ranches and agricultural fields. This large rural region near the U.S.-Mexico border is known for its persistent poverty. Over 25 percent€ of the families here live in poverty, and many lack access to basic services like water, sewer and primary health care.
"Throughout the state of California right now, we are stretched thin for crews."
The project, which aims to reduce mosquito-borne diseases, will facilitate the release 750 million genetically engineered mosquitoes in the Sunshine State.
Several pseudo environmental groups joined forces with the timber industry and the Forest Service against the€ Alliance for the Wild Rockies€ after it filed a lawsuit last year against the Mission Restoration Project on Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest in the Methow Valley west of Twisp, Washington.
For the first time in US history, the top twelve U.S. billionaires surpassed a combined wealth of $1 trillion.€ On Thursday August 13th, these 12 had a combined $1.015 trillion.
Some folks have complained about the loss of GDP over the last five months and questioned whether the shutdowns have been worth the price. While people often toss around huge numbers in the trillions of dollars as the cost of the shutdown, these big numbers are often both inaccurate and misleading.
For the Trump administration’s senior officials, it’s been open season on bashing China. If you need an example, think of the president’s blame game about “the invisible Chinese virus” as it spreads wildly across the U.S.
The lead U.S. foreign aid agency has proposed a new policy on gender and women’s empowerment that eliminates any mention of transgender people or contraceptives, running counter to its own long-standing practices in deciding what programs to support.
The draft policy released by the U.S. Agency for International Development on Wednesday was billed as an update and replacement to the original 2012 policy, released under the Obama administration. Though written subtly, the agency’s gender policy is parsed closely by experts and grantees as a clue to the kind of initiatives the agency will prioritize, and it guides USAID’s grant-making and development work worldwide.
Some economists reiterated calls for extending the $600 weekly boost that's opposed by Trump and congressional Republicans.
Former Trump staffers previously revealed the president's desire to buy Greenland from Denmark, a proposal one Danish official called "final proof that he has gone mad."
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the government agency that processes visas, green cards and citizenship applications, claims it’s going broke. USCIS officials are threatening to furlough some 13,400 employees as early as August 30, after initially planning the measure for August 3. The furloughs would add to what was already a huge backlog in application processing, creating a disaster for tens of thousands of immigrant applicants. As many as 126,000 people already approved for citizenship may not be naturalized in time to register for the November elections.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s ZANU-PF government faces mounting opposition as economic and social tensions rise.
Zimbabwe’s currency is in free fall, with inflation running at 800 percent, leading to severe food, fuel, medicine, and currency shortages.
[...]
Zimbabwe has recorded just under 5,000 confirmed cases of the coronavirus, and over 120 deaths. This is believed to be a significant underestimate, with some of the country’s leading figures becoming infected, including several legislators and Mnangagwa’s son.
The healthcare system, already limited and starved of resources, is on its knees, struggling to respond to the pandemic which is disrupting other healthcare services.
Fifteen thousand nurses, at the forefront of the struggle against the pandemic, have been on strike for nearly two months, vowing not to return to work—despite government threats and intimidation—until their demands for personal protective equipment (PPE) and the payment of their wages in US dollars are met. Their lives are being put at risk by the lack of PPE.
[...]
According to Bloomberg , relations between Mnangagwa and Chiwenga are acrimonious, which is why he has now been given the poisoned chalice of the health ministry. Mnangagwa accused Chiwenga during a “heated exchange” in a politburo meeting of attempting to use the July 31 protests to embarrass him. Chiwenga, a former general with strong support in the military, is seen as a possible rival for the presidency.
While Chiwenga played a prominent role in the 2017 coup that ousted longtime ruler Robert Mugabe and brought Mnangagwa to power, Mnangagwa has attempted to undermine his influence by reassigning those seen as being loyal to Chiwenga to other posts or outside the country.
Such is the economic turmoil that last June, in an unprecedented move, the Joint Operations Command (JOC) made up of officials from the military, police and secret service, intervened to order the closure of the stock exchange and to ban large mobile-money transfers in a bid to avert collapse. Military leaders denied they were planning a coup.
The New Jersey Supreme Court has made the Fifth Amendment discussion surrounding compelled production of passwords/passcodes more interesting. And by interesting, I mean frustrating. (h/t Orin Kerr)
"The grand jury is getting its hands on those tax returns."
On May 30, 1979,€ a letter appeared€ in 5 major newspapers in the US assailing the human rights record of Vietnam, a nation where the US killed about 3 million people and where about 58,000 of its own soldiers died. In bordering Cambodia, where the US war has spread besides a vicious air war over Laos, millions more died, including those massacred in the Cambodian holocaust.
The lawmaker said he will self-quarantine and follow advice of medical experts.
He could pave the way for another Donald Trump victory in the “the most crucial election in human history.”
It will take more than inspiring speeches to save democracy.
So many of us, including me, have been focused on the failure of the federal response to Covid-19, watching President Trump’s catastrophe-by-public-policy roll out day after day since late February. I’ve written a lot about it in these pages. In a misplaced triumphalism, some people in states that have managed to have a relatively quiet summer with low rates of Covid-19 cases have chastised those in states with renewed outbreaks as being foolish or unheeding of scientific advice, as governors still slow-walk the response to the disease and ordinary people shun masks and flock to social gatherings. We all like to think of ourselves as different, doing the right thing, doing our part.
"Weaponizing the charge of 'anti-Semitism' to silence criticism of Israel is despicable," said activist Ady Barkan.
Senator Kamala Harris is the first Indian American and first Black woman to be nominated for vice president on a major party ticket, but, as many historians have noted, Harris is not the first Black woman to run for vice president. That distinction belongs to the journalist and political activist Charlotta Bass, who was the editor of The California Eagle for nearly 30 years, one of the country’s oldest Black newspapers, which covered women’s suffrage, police brutality, the Ku Klux Klan, and discriminatory hiring and housing practices. Bass joined the Progressive Party ticket in 1952 on an anti-racist platform that called for fair housing and equal access to healthcare. Bass’s exclusion from the public narrative signals a tendency to “sideline Black radical politics,” says author and historian Keisha Blain.
President Trump crossed a new line Wednesday — one that until recently no one knew existed — when he offered praise from the White House briefing room for the baseless QAnon conspiracy theory, which the FBI has labeled a potential domestic terrorism threat. QAnon followers “like me very much” and “love America,” the president told reporters, before affirming the group’s core belief that he is in fact “saving the world” from the “radical left.”
The third night of the Democratic National Convention was an affirmation of the formidable opposition to a second Trump term. Here was Kamala Harris, a Black and Indian American woman, becoming the vice-presidential nominee with the crack of a gavel. Here was Hillary Clinton, the road not taken made flesh, dressed in suffragette white and warning the country not to blow it again. Here was Elizabeth Warren with a plan. Here were children made electric in their fear of dying in bullet-riddled classrooms. Here was Gabrielle Giffords to underscore their point in blood.
Senator Kamala Harris is the first Indian American and first Black woman to be nominated for vice president on a major party ticket, but, as many historians have noted, Harris is not the first Black woman to run for vice president. That distinction belongs to the journalist and political activist Charlotta Bass, who was the editor of The California Eagle for nearly 30 years, one of the country’s oldest Black newspapers, which covered women’s suffrage, police brutality, the Klu Klux Klan, and discriminatory hiring and housing practices. Bass joined the Progressive Party ticket in 1952 on an antiracist platform that called for fair housing and equal access to healthcare. Bass’s exclusion from the public narrative signals a tendency to “sideline Black radical politics,” says author and historian Keisha Blain.
As Kamala Harris makes history as the first woman of color to run on a major party presidential ticket, many Black progressive women remain ambivalent, says Derecka Purnell, a human rights lawyer, abolitionist and columnist for The Guardian newspaper. “It’s just unfortunate that you have to protect someone because of their identity … while at the same time if you care about the masses of Black people, the masses of poor people, the masses of immigrants in this country, you know that you have to speak truth and be honest about their record,” Purnell says.
Senator Kamala Harris has formally accepted the Democratic vice-presidential nomination, becoming the first woman of color to run on a major party presidential ticket. We feature part of her historic speech.
On the first night of the Democratic National Convention (DNC), four Republicans spoke in support of former Vice President Joe Biden. That’s the same as the number of Latinxs who will be given time to speak during prime time for the entire week of the convention. While the first face to appear on-screen during the first-ever virtual DNC was Eva Longoria, the activist and actor of “Desperate Housewives” fame, only three other Latinxs received prime-time billing: Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada), the first ever Latina to serve in the U.S. senate, was given 120 seconds to speak the first night. Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-New Mexico) was given a short slot to speak on Wednesday. And the most prominent Latina in the Democratic Party, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), only spoke for 97 seconds on Tuesday.
On the third night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, party leaders argued that U.S. democracy is at risk if President Trump is reelected in November, with a lineup of speeches from former Congressmember Gabby Giffords, senator and former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren and former President Barack Obama, who grew emotional describing the stakes of the election and urged people not to “let them take away your democracy.” We air excerpts from the night’s events.
"This deserves a full, independent investigation," said the California Democrat.
Being concerned with working-class Americans, to the€ New York Times€ and corporate Democrats, means portraying yourself as “an average guy,” not offering policies that will actually help the working class.
Too much has happened since last we chatted. The pace at which the crises facing our nation keep unfolding has been exhausting, and the pain of our collective and individual losses is too enormous to put into words. But there is hope. We are, on this last night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, just 75 days from the November 3 general election in which Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, will take on President Donald Trump and—unless something truly wild happens next week—his VP, Mike Pence.
Progressives accused the House speaker of "proving she's not, in fact, against Dems primarying Dems, as long as it's to remove anyone who advances halfway progressive ideas."
Officials at the intensive care unit in Omsk where opposition politician Alexey Navalny is now fighting for his life have refused to admit his wife, Yulia, or his personal physician, Anastasia Vasileva, both of whom rushed to the hospital from Moscow.€
Alexey Navalny’s condition has stabilized, says Anatoly Kalinichenko, the deputy chief doctor at the emergency care hospital in Omsk where the opposition politician has been hospitalized.€
Doctors at the Omsk hospital where Alexey Navalny is currently hospitalized have refused to transport him to another clinic on the grounds that he is in no condition to be moved. The director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, lawyer Ivan Zhdanov, wrote about this on Twitter.
On August 20, a plane carrying Anti-Corruption Foundation founder Alexey Navalny was forced to make an emergency landing in Omsk after Navalny became violently ill during the flight. He was immediately hospitalized. He reportedly lost consciousness and was put in intensive care, where he needed to be connected to a ventilator. Navalny started feeling unwell en route from Tomsk to Moscow. According to his press secretary, Kira Yarmysh (who was traveling with him), Navalny has apparently been poisoned. Before boarding the plane in Tomsk, he drank a cup of tea at the airport. Doctors in Omsk have declined to say anything about Navalny’s diagnosis, citing doctor-patient confidentiality, but they say his condition is now stable. “Physicians are doing everything possible — they’re honestly working to save his life right now,” Anatoly Kalinichenko, the deputy chief doctor at the emergency care hospital in Omsk, told reporters. Meduza spoke to Yaroslav Ashikhmin, the general practitioner and cardiologist who’s monitored Navalny since 2016 and is now arranging Navalny’s medical evacuation to a facility in Europe.
On August 20, Anti-Corruption Foundation founder Alexey Navalny was hospitalized at an intensive care unit in Omsk after his plane from Tomsk to Moscow was forced to make an emergency landing when he became violently ill. The opposition politician’s condition is serious: at the time of this writing, he’s in a coma and connected to a ventilator. Navalny’s aides say he was almost certainly poisoned, though the circumstances of this alleged attack remain unknown and the substance potentially used is still a mystery. At Meduza’s request, Omsk journalist Vasily Epanchintsev, a reporter for Gorod55, visited the hospital where Navalny is being treated to learn more about what has happened.€
Opposition politician and Anti-Corruption Foundation creator Alexey Navalny was hospitalized early on Thursday, August 20, in critical condition. At the time of this writing, he is in a coma and breathing through a ventilator. Doctors have yet to share a diagnosis to explain Navalny’s sudden illness, but signs suggest he was poisoned. Will the Russian authorities open a criminal investigation? If they do and if he was indeed poisoned, will the police find those responsible? Judging by past investigations of similar attacks, the chances are slim.
Alexey Navalny was hospitalized in the Siberian city of Omsk on the morning of August 20 and remains in a coma. Doctors say he’s in stable but serious condition. Navalny’s exact diagnosis remains unknown. The Omsk Health Ministry's press service said that there are “no signs of stroke or heart attack, and no signs of infections, including the coronavirus infection.” Navalny’s personal physician, the head of the Doctors’ Alliance, Dr. Anastasia Vasileva, told Meduza that Navalny underwent good blood tests, but isn’t undergoing detoxification treatment. He also has an enlarged liver and is showing an increase in a particular liver enzyme. Without citing any sources, the Telegram-based news outlet Baza claims that according to preliminary findings, Navalny was exposed to toxins that affect the functioning of the nervous system. The source of this toxic substance remains unknown, Baza says; but it supposedly caused Navalny’s brain to swell. The Omsk Regional Health Ministry stated that the reports about Navalny’s brain swelling haven’t been confirmed. Another Telegram-centered news outlet, Mash, published a doctor’s report following an MRI, which says that there were no “structural changes” to Navalny’s brain.€
Following an apparent poisoning, Alexey Navalny’s headquarters have officially asked the Kremlin to help evacuate him abroad for treatment. Dr. Anastasia Vasileva, Navalny’s personal physician and the chairman of the Doctors’ Alliance, wrote about this on Twitter.€
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists on Thursday that he is monitoring reports about anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny’s hospitalization and wishes him a speedy recovery, “as he would for any Russian citizen.” Vladimir Putin’s press secretary also promised to help transfer Navalny to a hospital abroad, if such a request is made.
On August 20, opposition politician Alexey Navalny was hospitalized at an intensive care unit in Omsk after becoming violently ill aboard a plane returning from Siberia, where he spent several days in Novosibirsk and Tomsk. Navalny’s condition is reportedly very serious and it’s possible he was poisoned. Meduza reviews why Russia’s most famous anti-corruption activist was in Siberia.
Anatoly Kalinichenko, the deputy chief doctor at the emergency care hospital in Omsk where opposition politician Alexey Navalny has been hospitalized, has delivered an update on his condition.€
Joe Biden finally got to accept the Democratic presidential nomination that he began seeking in the 1980s, and he did so with a graceful turn, promising, “We can and will overcome this season of darkness.”
America, indeed the entire world, is in a season of death. Every day, hundreds of Americans die from Covid-19. Given this reality, it’s not surprising that the Democrats have had a death-haunted convention. Indeed, one of the main qualities of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden repeatedly touted in the convention was his ability to comfort the grieving.
If you want to know why Republicans have come to dominate the judicial branch of government, while Democrats are reduced to offering thoughts and prayers to an 87-year-old woman battling cancer, look no further than the third night of the Democratic National Convention. If you want to understand how Mitch McConnell was able to steal a Supreme Court appointment from a Democratic president without sparking half the country into civil unrest, listen to what the Democrats told their own voters last night. If you want to know why a woman’s right to choose is overwhelmingly popular yet teetering on the brink of collapse, why the right to vote is being suppressed, why people will be forced to risk their lives to vote during a pandemic this fall, or why our children will be shot at whenever it’s “safe” enough to open schools again, behold the ongoing failure of the Democratic Party to make the courts matter to their own voters.
Speaking on the third night of the Democratic National Convention from a Massachusetts kindergarten facility that’s been shuttered for months due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday lamented the failure of the wealthiest country on the planet to provide crucial services to families with children and demanded that child care be treated as “part of the basic infrastructure of this nation.”
As the political crisis in Belarus smolders on, one thing is clear: Responsibility for the breakdown rests entirely with President Alexander Lukashenko, who has held on to power since 1994. It was he who presided over the evident falsification of the August 9 election, condemned as fraudulent by the West and which even Russia’s foreign minister called “not ideal.” Lukashenko also ultimately commands the security services that have brutalized thousands of peaceful demonstrators over the past fortnight. But recognition of these facts, and of Lukashenko’s record of authoritarianism and cruelty, should not mask concerns about the potentially disastrous consequences of any poorly managed regime change.
For many Democratic women, Wednesday night’s convention roster heralded a celebration tied up in a well-worn ribbon of grief. As we hailed the historic nomination of Senator Kamala Harris, the first black woman ever chosen as a vice presidential candidate, we also mourned the lost chances of other amazing women who spoke this very same night: Hillary Clinton, the 2016 presidential nominee who won by 3 million votes but lost the Electoral College to Donald Trump, and Senator Elizabeth Warren, whose own inspiring 2020 presidential campaign ran strong, until it didn’t.
Greene County, N.Y.—Maybe Republicans in Greene County should be careful what they wish for.
We might as well stop the presidential election now and declare Joe Biden the winner.€ At least that is the consensus of the presidential prediction machines that political pundits and the media are pouring out.€ € € Much like in 2016 where nearly all the predictions had Hillary Clinton a certain winner over Donald Trump, the same mistakes are possibly being made again this year. But to invoke two Yogi Berra lines, “it ain’t over till it’s over,” and it appears to be “Deja vu all over again.”
French President, Emmanuel Macron, is in no position to pontificate to Lebanon about the need for political and economic reforms. Just as thousands of Lebanese took to the streets of Beirut demanding “revenge” against the ruling classes, the French people have relentlessly been doing the same; both peoples have been met with police violence and arrests.
"Deregulate...Deregulate...Deregulate..."
"Our economic system has been rigged to give bailouts to billionaires and kick dirt in the face of everyone else. But we can build a thriving economy by investing in families and fixing what's broken."
"What JPMorgan Chase wants to do looks like another attempt for big banks and corporations to privatize our public infrastructure so their shareholders gain while working families suffer."
As Democrats coalesce around Joe Biden ahead of the November presidential election, we speak with economist Darrick Hamilton, a former Bernie Sanders supporter who took part in the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force, about where the Democratic Party is headed on economic policy. Hamilton says that while Biden’s policies are not as radical as the moment requires, he can be pushed by social movements. “We will make Biden do it,” Hamilton says, quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt on the need for activists to pressure lawmakers. “But first and foremost, Donald Trump needs to get removed.”
For the Trump administration’s senior officials, it’s been open season on bashing China. If you need an example, think of the president’s blame game about “the invisible Chinese virus” as it spreads wildly across the United States.
As a writer, I consider Thomas Frank something of an idol. Early issues of The Baffler, the magazine he cofounded in 1988, were hugely influential to me as an adolescent, and his books on political culture—like The Wrecking Crew and Listen, Liberal—continued to influence me well into my adult years. My own writing is what I call “store-brand Thomas Frank,” at its best a passable substitute for the real thing.
If the United States of America survives another century, currently an uncertain prospect, then the current living politician whose words are most likely to continue to be studied is Barack Obama. He and Bill Clinton are often rated together as orators, but they are in fact very different in scope. Bill Clinton is a master at giving wonky barn burners, speeches that make easily understandable in an almost folksy vernacular complex matters of social debate. Obama is a more classic speaker in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., one who speaks to the highest issues of politics: national unity and citizenship.
"Trump is going to lose not because of non-existent voter fraud. He's going to lose because the American people are sick and tired of his pathological lies, his rejection of science, his racism, and his sexism."
Joe Biden is the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, after he was formally picked by the party to challenge President Trump in November on the second night of the virtual Democratic National Convention. We feature highlights from the night, which featured speeches from 17 so-called rising stars in the Democratic Party, including voting rights activist Stacey Abrams, who unsuccessfully ran for Georgia governor in 2018, as well as Democratic heavyweights like former Presidents Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. For a second night in a row, the DNC prominently featured the voices of Republicans and former Republicans backing Biden, including John McCain’s widow Cindy McCain, former defense secretary and Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who helped make the case for invading Iraq in 2003 by lying to the United Nations about Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. The night ended with a keynote address by Jill Biden.
The New York Democrat praised the "mass people's movement working to establish 21st-century social, economic, and human rights, including guaranteed healthcare, higher education, living wages, and labor rights for all people in the United States."
We can’t let Trump shift public attention from his failure to attack the virus to his attacks on Americans protesting to create an America where Black lives matter and everyone can thrive.
"Our work's not done until these actions are reversed—not 'suspended'—and the USPS has the funding it needs."
The time for mere alarm has already come and gone. We all need to do something about this crisis.
In the face of a historic public outcry, the postmaster general has promised to stop sabotaging essential services—temporarily.€
Lagging in the polls, Donald Trump has launched a campaign to discredit the upcoming election and disparage the United States Postal Service.
Documents obtained by a watchdog group reveal that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin met with the Postal Service Board of Governors in February "to discuss the search for a new postmaster general."
In spite of promises from Postmaster General Louis DeJoy earlier this week to suspend radical changes to United States Postal Service (USPS) facilities that resulted in slower mail delivery, some post offices in Michigan appear to be continuing to dismantle their mail sorting machines.
Donald Trump’s attack on the United States Postal Service is by design but not merely his design. Republicans and their corporate allies have been after the post office for years, undermining its ability to function and mocking its more than 600,000 workers in hopes of clearing the way for the privatization of an agency that has, since the founding of the nation, provided essential infrastructure for American democracy. It is the role that the Postal Service will play in the 2020 elections that has Trump and his allies agitated now, but their targeting of it is nothing new.
Donald Trump’s war on U.S. governance and democracy has targeted two of the oldest institutions in the country—the Post Office and the Census.€ The Post Office is older than the Constitution, tracing its roots to 1775 during the Second Continental Congress, when Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general.€ The first Census was taken in 1790, just after the election of George Washington; it is taken every ten years in order to allocate seats for the House of Representatives.€ Both institutions are explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution, and no U.S. president—other than Andrew Jackson—has tried to compromise them.
For a political party whose platform calls for “sustainable economic growth, which will create good-paying jobs and raise wages,” the Democratic National Committee has appointed a lot of lobbyists for major corporations that oppose wage growth to its top committees.
The Okrestina Street detention facility in Minsk, where many arrested demonstrators have been processed and held, has become a symbol of police brutality in Belarus. Just outside its walls, volunteers established a camp where they offer medical, legal, and psychological aid to released detainees — hundreds of whom say the police abused them in custody. On August 19, as law enforcement has backed down from mass arrests at protests, the volunteers began€ dismantling€ the camp.€ Some say this was at the authorities’ request, while others maintain that it’s because there are€ hardly any€ political prisoners left inside in the jail.€ Meduza€ shares photos of the encampment while it stood and explains how it worked.
The Ukrainian president’s chief of staff, Andriy Yermak, has dismissed media reports claiming that Kyiv lured suspected Russian mercenaries to Belarus as part of an intelligence operation. In an interview with the Ukrainian outlet LB.ua, he referred to the story as disinformation.
The European Union plans to impose sanctions against representatives of the Belarusian government responsible for the “shocking and unacceptable” violence used to disperse protests, as well as for the falsification of the elections, says European Council President Charles Michel.
The leaders of European Union countries have refused to recognize the results of the presidential elections in Belarus, announced German Chancellor Angela Merkel following an extraordinary EU summit on Wednesday, August 19.
President Donald Trump has made a formal request to the United States Supreme Court to reinstate his legal ability to block users on social media.
On Tuesday, August 11th, in what appears to be a pre-planned attack, a 1000-strong mob of Muslim men, raising the Islamic chants of 'Nara-e-Taqbeer' and 'Allah-hu-Akbar’, descended on the streets near DJ Halli and KG Halli police station. The violent mob was armed with iron rods, sticks, petrol bombs, and other sharp objects.
It was alleged that a Hindu Dalit boy had made a derogatory post about the Prophet Mohammad; the subsequent madness sprang from it. The mad mob had gone berserk and barged into the residence of a local Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA). A separate mob of armed Muslims proceeded to attack the local police headquarters. They locked the gates from outside and pelted stones, damaged the lined-up vehicles, and then set the police station on fire. They didn’t spare the local ATMs, nor the public or private properties either.
Former Professor Cai Xia, who has made strident criticisms of Chinese President Xi Jinping, was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on Monday for statements that “damaged the country’s reputation” and were full of “serious political problems.” Media reports indicate that she is no longer in China.
Authorities in Iraqi Kurdistan closed two bureaus of the regional television network NRT and arrested three of its journalists over claims that its coverage of protests was inciting violence.
Security camera footage published by NRT appears to show uniformed security putting a lock on the front door of the channel’s Erbil office on Thursday.
Andrew Fowler is an Australian award-winning investigative journalist and a former reporter for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent and Four Corners programs. and the author of The Most Dangerous Man in the World: Julian Assange and WikiLeaks’ Fight for Freedom. This is an updated edition of his 2011 account of the rise and political imprisonment of Assange. Much of that account explained how Assange seemingly inevitably moved toward an adversarial positioning against American imperialism abroad. He was a tonic for the indifference expressed by so many ordinary Americans in the traumatic aftermath of 9/11 and the rise of the surveillance state. Boston Legal’s Alan Shore (James Spader) seems to sum it up succinctly.
Assange faces 175 years in prison for “crime of journalism”
Generally speaking, the major media outlets in Russia (whether controlled directly or indirectly by the state) report important domestic and international political events as dictated by the Kremlin. This same code of conduct applies to public remarks by members of Russia’s Parliament. In recent reports by national news agencies, several high-profile Russian politicians have openly criticized Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko and talked about the falsification of his re-election. It’s a mixed bag on television, where the national networks have reached no consensus on how to cover the events in Belarus: some channels call the protesters “bandits,” while others air footage of large crowds and broadcast comments from demonstrators. Sources tell Meduza that the Kremlin has yet to issue its usual instructions to elected officials and the mass media when it comes to talking about the situation in Belarus, and Russia’s leadership appears to be reluctant to support Lukashenko, for now.
Many school districts are deciding that police in classrooms cause more problems than they solve.
In 1980, when she was 29, the South Korean–born artist and poet Theresa Hak Kyung Cha moved from the Bay Area to New York. She hated the city. After two years there, she wrote that achieving success would require her to accept the “dregs of morals, money, parasitic existence.” To her, the thought of making that ethical bargain was “in all honesty, disgusting.”
I admit I took it a bit personally when Planned Parenthood of Greater New York took the name of the organization’s founder, Margaret Sanger, off its flagship clinic in Manhattan in July. It will now be called Manhattan Health Center. What am I supposed to do now with the two Planned Parenthood Maggie Awards I’ve won for articles on reproductive rights? Life comes at you fast. Some news reports made it sound as if the change was related to internal struggles over racism; staffers of color have complained that they were disrespected and passed over for promotion, and around the time that Sanger’s name was removed, Laura McQuade, the CEO of the New York affiliate, was fired amid accusations of racism. These were legitimate concerns. Of the 22 members of the PPGNY board, according to The New York Times, only one is Black. (Two are Asian, and two are Hispanic.) Especially given that Black women make up a large proportion of Planned Parenthood patients, that’s pretty shocking.
The president's comments about the group labeled by the FBI as a domestic terrorism threat came on the same day Facebook restricted thousands of QAnon accounts.
The 2020 presidential election will not be decided by the popularity of candidates or their ideas. It will not be decided by how many people intend to vote for each candidate. The usual dramas of polls, debates and running mates are irrelevant.
In 2008, while I was staying in Prague, a scandal broke out involving the Czech writer Milan Kundera, who has lived in Paris since 1975. Respekt magazine published an article claiming that Kundera had informed on a foreign spy of Czech extraction who was staying that night in the students’ residence of which Kundera was then the president. No definitive, valid proof was ever found to back up this accusation, but the slander stuck: a large part of the Czech public allowed itself to be convinced that Kundera was an informer. The writer was a victim of post-totalitarian vengefulness.
As recent calls to “defund the police” sweep the nation, some students who have police in their schools feel conflicted about their safety.
Shadowproof spoke to students in New York, who felt the presence of police is overwhelming in most cases. However, they see police as their only protection against legitimate security concerns presented by one of their peers bringing a firearm, knife, or other deadly weapons to school.
Following the publication of several excellent articles from our open call in June, Shadowproof continues its coverage of the movement to abolish the prison industrial complex.
We’re seeking another round of contributions from independent journalists on the following topics:
The denial of electricity to two million civilian noncombatants is nothing less than a war crime.
One of the most overt forms of voter suppression is voter purges, where officials simply throw out people’s voter registrations. Studies have shown that Black voters are more likely to be purged from voter rolls. Georgia has purged nearly 300,000 voters in the past year, while Wisconsin is still trying to toss 200,000 legal voter registrations in the garbage can before the November election. Since 2017, Oklahoma officials have deleted more than 10 percent of its voters’ names from the books.
There are many reasons why your registration may have been purged, including inactivity, punctuation, the way you spell your name or even your handwriting. If someone just says that you moved—even if you live in the same precinct—an election official has the right to make your registration disappear.
So go check your voter registration now.
And then check it again immediately before you cast your ballot because that’s how they getcha.*
A new controversy has erupted in the Malaysian state of Kelantan. The state government has declared that after a careful study it will decide how to make Main Puteri, an indigenous Kelantanese dance form, Shariah compliant by “correcting” parts that it considers “un-Islamic.” Only then will it be allowed for public entertainment.
Turkish forces have been giving Syrian armed groups free rein to commit serious human rights abuses against civilians in the Syrian city of Afrin, Amnesty International said today, following an in-depth investigation into life in Afrin under Turkish military occupation.
Amnesty’s research shows that Afrin residents are enduring widespread human rights violations, mostly at the hands of Syrian armed groups equipped and armed by Turkey.
I've mentioned a few times that I don't think the TikTok ban is coherent policy.
In addition to coronavirus, Pope Francis said, "we must also cure a larger virus, that of social injustice, inequality of opportunity, marginalization, and the lack of protection for the weakest."€
While Uber never made an official announcement on Thursday that it would stop operating, the company was expected to make an announcement before midnight after Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi made numerous threats. Uber also sent out a notification on Wednesday evening that rideshare services were on the verge of ending in California temporarily. Both Uber and Lyft have confirmed to Salon in separate statements that the two companies will continue business as usual in California.
ANDA litigation, pursuant to the Hatch-Waxman Act, has become more complicated over the years since enactment of the statute in 1984, with more patents being asserted and more parties participating over the opportunity to market a generic version of a branded, innovator drug. Particularly under circumstances where there are several ANDA litigants, and where most of them are not the sole "first filer" entitled to 180-day market exclusivity should they prevail in invalidating the innovator's patent(s) or (less often) showing that their generic product will not infringe, there is an incentive for the branded drug maker and at least some of the competing generic companies to enter into a settlement agreement. (It should be noted that these settlements are not in the manner of "pay-for-delay" agreements; that is a separate topic). One feature of these settlement agreements is that, absent any first filer garnering exclusivity status, each settling generic company seeks an agreement granting them the right enter the market when any non-settling generic company succeeds in invalidating the branded drug patent(s) or proving non-infringement. The Federal Circuit's decision over such a settlement agreement in Takeda Pharmaceuticals U.S.A., Inc. v. Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc. illustrated the impossibility of crafting an agreement that encompasses all contingencies, the difficulty in foreseeing all contingencies, and the efforts a patentee will expend to enforce provisions of an agreement despite the agreement not being satisfied (as well as the toxic effect even the hint of gamesmanship can produce, even where the fact of a party engaging in gamesmanship may be very much in doubt).
[...]
The Federal Circuit affirmed, in an opinion by Chief Judge Prost joined by Judge Hughes; Judge Newman dissented. The panel majority construed the terms of Section 1.2(d) and held that the Hikma decision triggered the provisions of Section 1.2(d), and as a consequence Takeda would not be able to prevail on the merits under Delaware law (which controlled under an express provision in the Settlement Agreement). The panel rejected Takeda's argument that the term "all" in Section 1.2(d) required adjudication of the five patents the parties dismissed in addition to the three patents that went to trial. The panel majority held that this interpretation was not consistent with the plain language of the agreement, based on use of the phrase "asserted and adjudicated" in this section of the Agreement. One basis for this decision is that Takeda's interpretation would render the word "adjudication" meaningless in the panel majority's view. Perhaps equally persuasive was the panel majority's recognition that Takeda's construction would "lead[] to the absurd result that Takeda could prevent Mylan from ever relying on the clause by simply asserting and then withdrawing a claim from a proceeding," which the opinion characterized as "gamesmanship."
The panel majority also rejected Takeda's contention that the intent of the parties was to permit Mylan's "early" entry into the colchicine market based on a change in the status quo (or the status of the licensed patents) for the entire market, because the Agreement did not have terms reciting this intention. And the panel majority rejected Takeda's further contention that the Agreement did not contemplate Hikma's Mitigare€® product, saying that considering the Hikma litigation as a triggering event was "exactly a circumstance Takeda asserts Section 1.2(d) was intended to cover" (and in a footnote, notes that the Hikma litigation was ongoing when the Settlement Agreement with Mylan was being negotiated).
Great question in the new Supreme Court petition of SRAM, LLC v. FOX Factory, Inc. The Federal Circuit has tightened its belt on Secondary Indicia of nonobviousness — only rarely finding that the claimed indicia are closely enough tied to the claims at issue and creating additional hoops of proof for the patentee. The petition argues that those requirements go beyond the statute and Supreme Court precedent. When I wrote about the original 2019 FedCir decision, I explained that This is “not a good case for patent holders.”
Of all the trademark insanity we cover here, there are still little nuggets of niche gold when it comes to the truly insane trademark disputes. There are plenty of these categories, but one of my personal favorites is when real life brands get their knickers twisted over totally unrelated items in fiction. If you cannot conceptualize what I'm talking about, see the lawsuit brought by a software company that creates something called Clean Slate against Warner Bros. because...The Dark Knight Rises had a piece of software in it that was referred to as "clean slate."
We noted last week that Judge Lewis Kaplan (like so many other judges who have copyright troll Richard Liebowitz in their courts) was fed up with Richard Liebowitz's unwillingness to follow fairly straightforward orders, including that he produce the retainer agreement with his clients, as well as present evidence that the client knew of and approved the specific lawsuits at hand. Judge Kaplan did this in at least two (and possibly more?) cases. In the case we mentioned last week -- the Chosen Figure LLC v. Smiley Miley case -- despite already receiving a benchslap from the judge for not providing the retainer agreement, Liebowitz has filed some random emails between his own staff and... his client's girlfriend? That does include an email from his client saying he doesn't check email much so to have his girlfriend on email chains instead, though it's not clear that this will be enough to satisfy the judge's request for authorization for "this case specifically," but we'll see.
We’ve selected technical writers to work with us from September to December 2020 on three different projects related to the CC Catalog API, CC Vocabulary, and our new WordPress base theme.
An anti-piracy group representing publishers in Russia has filed a complaint against Google with the European Commission. According to the letter, Google fails to remove piracy-enabling apps from Google Play, creating barriers to entry for legal platforms. The complaint, however, is far from straightforward.
1337x.to, one of the world's most-visited torrent sites, has banned uploads from the YTS group. The decision comes after YTS, a popular torrent site in its own right, shared user details with several movie companies. Shortly after the decision, the account of EZTV.io was banned for its apparent association with the YTS group.
