This week’s blog looks at video recording on the AK41. When it comes to software, Linux offers a fantastic array of free and open source programs. In the vast majority of areas there’s a wide range of programs to choose from. Sometimes the amount of high quality open source software is bamboozling. But there’s still a few areas which are dominated by a single program. In the case of video recording and streaming, the stand out open source program is OBS Studio.
Modern graphic cards perform a variety of tasks. They aren’t just designed for gaming. Many cards help offload video encoding and decoding from the CPU. This helps to lower power consumption and free up resources for the rest of the system. In the case of OBS Studio, this program relies heavily on the GPU. But the AWOW AK41 doesn’t have a dedicated graphics card. This Mini PC uses the Intel UHD Graphics 605, an integrated processor graphics unit from the Gemini Lake generation. Performance of the graphics unit is widely reported as in the low-end segment.
Ultrabooks powered by AMD’s Renoir-H APUs do not seem to be on the short list of priorities for most big brand OEMs, at least now that the supply chains are a bit overwhelmed. The only true ultrabooks we have seen thus far are coming from Honor, but these will have limited availability within the SEA region for now. Luckily, there are smaller OEMs like Tuxedo that try to offer slim and light notebooks with the Renoir-H APUs like the newly announced Pulse 14 model that comes preinstalled with a Linux distro.
Bill is still on Manjaro! The Ubuntu MATE Guide is now available online. We answer questions about MeWe, dual booting, fresh install, replacing a sheet feed scanner, System76, Crossover, and LibreOffice spell check.
We would like to welcome Owen Peery to the team. He’s our new editor!
1:40 Wanderings 46:32 News 1:05:05 Security 1:22:05 Outro
First up, in our Wanderings, I’ve been testing out a new keyboard, Tony Hughes tries to remove a finger (again), Joe has been soldering and reading, Moss has been adding more distros,
Then, in our news, Pinta, Lutris and Mozilla
In security, we talk security recommendations and the NSA
It's a new day for Jupiter Broadcasting and the show, we share our big news.
Plus our plan to help make a difference in free software, and we reunite with some old friends.
We reboot the show to capture Mike's love of coupons and update you on what we have been up to recently since the show's fake demise.
What the rise of Arm means for Linux users, security vs convenience, having too much choice, and Dan’s favourite candle.
A random live stream to see if I can live stream since I recently distrohopped. I might talk a little about GNU/Linux and GNU/Life. So hangout and ask questions. If they aren't completely asinine, I might attempt to answer them.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.8.4 kernel.
All users of the 5.8 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.8.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.8.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
However, I don't think Torvalds had any idea that his project would wind up being the darling of businesses across the globe. Or did he? Truth be told, even us early adopters (I started using Linux back in 1997) had an inkling that Linux was something special.
Like most new Linux users, I'd been working with the Windows operating system (back then it was Windows 95) and had grown tired of the crashes and the inability to get the operating system to do what I wanted it to do. Sure, most people were happy with what Microsoft had to offer, but to those who were of a more curious nature, those inclined to dive down rabbit holes to find out how the sausage is made, Windows was too restrictive and problematic. So when we discovered Linux, it was like a whole new world opened up before our eyes.
Sporting AGP, fabbed on a 350nm process, making use of a 64-bit memory interface, and clocking to nearly 100MHz, the Matrox G200 desktop graphics cards are set to see mainline open-source support come Linux 5.10.
Yes, the 20+ year old Matrox G200 series desktop parts are finally seeing working Direct Rendering Manager driver support to support kernel mode-setting on Linux.
A single patch coming in at nearly three thousand lines was merged on Monday for the Linux 5.9 kernel that make the use of the "fallthrough" macro more widespread throughout the kernel.
The single patch at large went through and added nearly twenty-five hundred "fallthrough;" lines of code to the kernel to replace existing areas just using a "fall through" code comment or the like. Previously there were just 1,167 references in the kernel using this macro while now it's at more than thirty-six hundred for Linux 5.9.
In 2017, Mohamed Al Samman was working on the Linux kernel, doing analysis, debugging and compiling. He had also built an open source Linux firewall, and a kernel module to monitor power supply electrical current status (AC/DC) by using the Linux kernel notifier. He hoped to become a full time kernel developer, and expand the kernel community in Egypt, which led him to apply for, and be awarded, a Linux Foundation Training (LiFT) Scholarship in the Linux Kernel Guru category.
One of the many interesting discussions for this week's virtual Linux Plumbers Conference is on planning code obsolescence moving forward. While this is about kernel features too, it's also about the steps and when to phase out old hardware support.
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This long time kernel developer is seeking to have upstream work on better documentation that tracks kernel features considered potentially "obsolete". The documentation would include detailing the Kconfig switches / knobs for toggling the functionality, how long upstream plans to maintain the existing support, any justifications for keeping the code around, points of contact for said code, and the benefits of removing the "obsolete" code.
In 2019 there were kernel developers talking at conferences that the remaining "PREEMPT_RT" patches for a real-time kernel should be mainlined in early 2020. That didn't happen for the long ongoing work around the "RT" patches while at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC 2020) is that the work should finally be close to merging to mainline.
The X.Org project has announced the release of xorg-server version 1.20.9. Among other improvements are numerous fixes to XWayland, including a bug that could cause an infinite loop at startup as well as other potential crash fixes. The release also addresses several security issues that can "lead to local privileges elevation on systems where the X server is running privileged." Users of xorg-server are encouraged to upgrade.
With no one stepping up to manage the X.Org Server 1.21 release, the two year old X.Org Server 1.20 series continues seeing new point releases, particularly with 1.21 being out of the scope already for having the chance to appear in the major H2'2020 Linux distribution releases. X.Org Server 1.20.9 is the newest point release out today in shipping fixes.
Not even one month passed since the previous libX11 security vulnerabilities were made public while today a new security advisory was issued along with releasing version 1.6.12 of this key X11 library.
The X.Org code-base is known for being riddled with security issues in its aging and massive code-base. Security researchers have found many bugs in recent years while fortunately today's disclosure isn't too bad.
CVE-2020-14363 is an integer overflow leading to a double free vulnerability in the way that libX11 is handling locales that was discovered by Jayden Rivers.
Popsicle is a free and open-source USB file flasher for parallelly flashing multiple USB devices. It has a simple, themeable user interface with a straightforward workflow that makes it convenient to use. Popsicle also supports USB 2 and USB 3 devices to which it can write ISO and IMG image types. It has the ability to verify ISO images with MD5 checksum or SHA256.
We’ve covered several flashing tools for creating bootable USB sticks such as WoeUSB, ISO Image Writer, Gnome Multi-Writer, Unetbootin, and Etcher, Popsicle takes the award for ease of use – and that is even when compared to Multisystem, a command-line tool for flashing multiple drives at once. Added to its feature list is the fact that it is the only official USB flashing tool available on Pop!_OS.
Glimpse 0.2.0 is based on GIMP 2.10.18 (this is not the very latest version) and aims to broaden the image editor’s appeal through careful rebranding, restyling, and where needed reconfiguring also.
For instance, Glimpse 0.2.0 contains all of the tools, updates, and performance tweaks offered in the regular version of GIMP 2.10.8 plus a fair bit more...
I have written a drop-in replacement script that uses a feature of OpenSim to make these items much more gentle on the servers. It is free, based on an old script given out under the GNU General Public License. The more people who upgrade to this, the better everyone’s experience will be at crowded events.
[...]
Unfortunately people get used to the tools they have, so many people continue to use the old fashioned wearable AOs that bog down the servers.
In 2009, the developers of OpenSimulator added an improvement that should have solved the lag problem of scripted AOs. They added a new event, Changed_Animation, that is sent to scripts whenever the server changes the avatar’s animation. This only works on OpenSim and not in Second Life. Now a new AO can be written that doesn’t need to poll.
But unfortunately, people continue to use 13-year-old scripts from Second Life. In a survey of a dozen or so AOs available for free around the metaverse, all the ones I found used the same free open source Zhao script from 2007 — that even includes many for sale in the Kitely Market. This script is actually very well written, it just suffers from the limitations that Second Life never fixed and OpenSim fixed after Zhao was written.
RSS Guard is a simple (yet powerful) feed reader. It is able to fetch the most known feed formats, including RSS/RDF and ATOM. It's free, it's open-source. RSS Guard currently supports Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian. RSS Guard will never depend on other services - this includes online news aggregators like Feedly, The Old Reader and others.
In the past month, the excess donations accumulated so we are finally able to offer enough financial security to do an extra hire. Beginning November, Gilles Roudière (Groud) will be working full-time for the project, dedicated to 2D and general editor usability!
Have a Steering Wheel that you need to tweak on Linux for your favourite racing games? Oversteer can help with that a lot and a new release is up.
What can Oversteer do? Depending on what's supported by each device it can help you to change the emulation mode, change the wheel rotation range, combine accelerator/brakes pedals for games that use just one axis, force feedback gain, profiles for different games you can setup and more. It's almost essential if you like a good UI to work with your hardware on Linux.
Club Manager 2022 / Anstoss 2022 has now completed its Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, and thanks to that the Linux PC version is confirmed after hitting a stretch goal during it.
"Club Manager 2022 is all about modern football, while retaining the popular gameplay of the management classic. It offers depth of play and realism, while focusing on the truly essential tasks of a manager. Your team - your club and your success."
3,888 backers pledged €246,496, with the goal for full Linux support being at €180,000 so they got far more than they needed to ensure good Linux support there. The extra exciting news is that while they didn't hit the 250K goal for online multiplayer, considering how close it was they've also confirmed they will be doing it to ensure it's as big as possible.
Taking inspiration from Left 4 Dead and Escape From Tarkov, blending together elements for casual and hardcore gaming crowds, 314 Arts have announced Projekt Z.
Developed in Unity, they've already confirmed their plan to fully support Linux with Projekt Z and even quite early on, it's looking pretty impressive from their first announcement dev-blog style video on it. Their aim, from what they tried to explain about it is to have a mix of story and tactical shooting along with hub building and people recruitment. While a small team, they're using some of the more advanced rendering bits in Unity to make it look rather modern and slick.
GB Studio is a free and open source retro adventure game creator that allows you to visually make games that can work cross-platform on Linux, macOS, Windows…and the Game Boy.
Yep, the classic hand-held from Nintendo still has a huge homebrew community and with tools like GB Studio many more people can make games for it. GB Studio just recently had a massive 2.0 Beta release, which pulls in major new features for the project. The way it's going, it might end up as the ultimate retro game creation tool.
Ah yes, the Atari VCS, the Linux-powered console/PC hybrid thing that's coming out supposedly by the end of this year has a new announcement and…nope it's not more games.
You would think as the release of the hardware is approaching, after numerous delays, they would be loudly talking about all those wonderful games that will support it but no. Instead, you get another streaming application. On top of Antstream for retro games, AirConsole for cheaply made multiplayer browser games and Game Jolt which is apparently helping to bring over some indies they've announced Plex.
With a detailed hand-crafted world, Shadow of Aya is a pixel-art adventure that looks and sounds pretty epic.
"Master the elements of poison, fire, ice, and meteorite in Shadow of Aya, a top-down action adventure ode to the 8-bit classics. But beware—as your powers grow, so do the forces that conspire against you. The journey downward is choked with shadow, and the creatures who slumber among them."
Spooky Doorway's upcoming second helping of paranormal investigations and all sorts of weirdness with The Darkside Detective: Season 2 can now be tested out with the demo.
Not only has it gained a demo, it's gained a publisher too. Akupara Games announced earlier this month, that they've taken over publishing for the original season and for this upcoming addition. Speaking about it in a press message, they said: "Akupara Games is shifting towards a catalog of spooky and narrative-focused adventure and horror games which align with titles such as Whispering Willows and Mutazione. When we saw The Darkside Detective series we knew it was an absolutely perfect fit for our ever-growing spoopy family." - David Logan, CEO
[...]
Check out the trailer below, nice Linux logo included too just to be sure...
Back in June, the awesome emulator 3dSen PC was released, which gave us a whole new way to play classic NES titles into fully 3D environments. Now, you can make profiles for your favourites.
Honestly, it's a bit like magic. It works, very well too and genuinely looks really cool. One of those things that comes along and just blows your mind technically. Not only 3D, it also has modern gamepad support, saves states and things you would expect from a modern emulator. Need a reminder on how it looks?
Developer Draw Distance has confirmed that Vampire: The Masquerade - Shadows of New York will be release on September 10, and it will come with full Linux PC support.
This is a standalone companion game to the previous title, Coteries of New York. So you don't need to have played it, although there is a small amount of crossover. Good to see Draw Distance continue Linux support after getting their tech ready with Coteries. Continuing the same gameplay found in Coteries, Shadows of New York is very much a visual novel, a fantastic look one too with some great artwork.
heard about free software many years ago, soon after we got our first computer, a Coleco ADAM. I didn't know much about how to use the computer so I did the only logical thing: started a user group! We all learned together; my husband and I along with our children and the group members. That was years of fun but it turned out that 240kb was not enough memory! By that time we had an early Windows computer and I got a Mac to do some design work. Eventually my oldest son told me that Linux was ready for the desktop, and put Mandrake on my first laptop. I loved it, and although it was a dual-boot, I never bothered to login to Windows after that. After Mandrake went away, I ended up on Kubuntu where I've been ever since. The LinuxChix helped me a lot in the change from Windows to Linux.
have done my fair share (or more) of video editing in my life, primarily using Adobe Premiere Pro as I was taught in college. However, I try not to use Windows unless I have to, and so I’ve been always on the hunt for better options for my GNU/Linux systems – and I think I’ve found my personal favourite video editor; Kdenlive.
Kdenlive is a free video editor that up until this point, has yet to let me down for my personal needs, and has also been easily the simplest and fastest for encoding and exporting videos.
Qt Creator supports setting multiple shortcuts for the same action now. Do you ever mix up shortcuts because your second-favorite editor uses different ones than Qt Creator? Just open Preferences > Environment > Keyboard, find the action and press Add (as long as you do not introduce a conflict with another shortcut). Personally I added some Emacsey shortcuts for splitting and some other actions to my configuration. (Since I am on a Mac, Ctrl+X is free to use for me.)
If you wonder where some items from the Window menu went: We moved them to a new View menu, which seems to be common to have.
Gcolor3 is a color selector and picker written in GTK+ 3. It is much alike Gcolor2, but uses the newer GTK+ version to get better integrate into modern desktop.
Gcolor3 is now “Color Picker”! With the rename comes a new maintiner, a new icon, lots of new improvements, and many translation updates.
Hi,
GNOME 3.37.91 is now available! This is the second beta release of GNOME 3.37. Please note: we are now in string freeze, so be kind to translators and stop changing strings! :)
The corresponding flatpak runtimes have been published to Flathub. If you'd like to target the GNOME 3.38 platform, you can test your application against the 3.38beta branch of the Flathub Beta repository.
If you want to compile GNOME 3.37.91 yourself, you can use the official BuildStream project snapshot:
https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/3.37.91/gnome-3.37.91.tar.xz
The list of updated modules and changes is available here:
https://download.gnome.org/core/3.37/3.37.91/NEWS
The source packages are available here:
https://download.gnome.org/core/3.37/3.37.91/sources/
WARNING! -------- This release is a snapshot of development code. Although it is buildable and usable, it is primarily intended for testing and hacking purposes. GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development status.
For more information about 3.38, the full schedule, the official module lists and the proposed module lists, please see our 3.37 wiki page:
https://www.gnome.org/start/unstable
Happy Wednesday,
Michael
Ahead of the official GNOME 3.38 launch in September, the second GNOME 3.38 beta (v3.35.91) is now available for testing,
Among the new changes to find with the GNOME 3.38 Beta 2 release include:
- A fix to the Epiphany web browser that was crashing the browser when visiting long pages, such as Planet GNOME.
GNOME is a fairly simple and streamlined Linux graphical user interface (GUI), and a lot of users appreciate its minimalist look. Although it's pretty basic out of the box, you can customize GNOME to match your preferences. Thanks to GNOME Tweaks and the user themes extension, you can change the look and feel of the top bar, window title bars, icons, cursors, and many other UI options.
After I made Firmware and RetroFirmware in my previous post, what I needed to do was quite simple initially. Add a new “name” field to each [Firmware] group entry in every .libretro core descriptor file that has a [Firmware] group and write a parser for it in retro-gtk. But only writing the parser is not enough (like I did when I first pushed the code :p). The whole point of adding a new field is to have a translatable name, which means the parser needs to get the name string in the user’s region’s language. Which can then later be used by gnome-games in the UI.
Writing the parser was not that hard since there were examples in the retro-gtk. The only thing different from the other parser would be that this new one would get string from the key file depending on which locale the user is.
So, what’s needed is an interface, let’s call it Firmware, with all the abstract definitions of the functions needed, and a subclass of this interface with the implementations.
But, practically speaking only libretro-cores use firmware, so making a class by the name RetroFirmware that inherits the interface Firmware, then using RetroFirmware in places where the refactored code calls and handles firmware should do the trick, right?
Well, not so fast. There are some other minor inconveniences that need to be solved as well. Such as, the name that’s being used by firmware is more of an ID/internal-name rather than a translatable string. Hence, these strings can not be used to display firmware name in UI.
Another issue is that some firmware have only MD5 checksum, some have only SHA512 checksum, while others have both. This makes the code quite inconsistent when it comes to future support of firmware that is not currently being supported by games, or support for different versions of the same firmware simultaneously i.e, firmware with same internal-name but different checksums. Making it slightly harder for gnome-games to identify that both firmware are different.
Arne Exton, the founder of Ubuntu-based ExTiX Linux distribution, has released a new version ExTiX 20.09. It’s a major release that comes with KDE plasma desktop and support for running Android apps using Anbox (“Android in a box”).
Starting with a major update, ExTiX has now included a free and open-source compatibility layer, Anbox, that lets you run Android applications and games on GNU/Linux distributions.
Coming three weeks after ExTiX 20.8, which was one of the first live distros to let you try the new Linux 5.8 kernel series, ExTiX 20.9 is now available with another major change, namely the ability to run Android apps.
Yes, you’re reading that right, you can now run Android apps that you can install directly from the Google Play Store on ExTiX. How? Simple, thanks to the amazing Anbox (Android in a Box) free and open-source compatibility layer that lets Android apps run on GNU/Linux distributions.
It’s been three months since the last Parted Magic update and the new version (2020_08_23) is here with some major changes. First and foremost, this is the first release of the disk partitioning distribution that no longer offers support for 32-bit computers.
The 32-bit kernel has been removed due to an initramfs size limitation in syslinux. Moreover, both 32 and 64 entries were removed from the boot menu as only 64-bit is now supported.
Tor Browser is fully installed (9.5.4) System upgrade from Debian Buster repos as of August 25, 2020 Update Linux Kernel to 5.7.10 Update Thunderbird to 68.11.0-1 Update VLC to 3.0.11 Update ffmpeg to 4.1.6.1 Update Youtube-dl to 2020.07.28
The talk of joining an umbrella organization and disbanding the Gentoo Foundation (GF) has been recurring over the last years. To the best of my knowledge, even some unofficial talks have been had earlier. However, so far our major obstacle for joining one was the bad standing of the Gentoo Foundation with the IRS. Now that that is hopefully out of the way, we can start actively working towards it.
But why would we want to join an umbrella in the first place? Isn’t having our own dedicated Foundation better? I believe that an umbrella is better for three reasons:
1. Long-term sustainability. A dedicated professional entity that supports multiple projects has better chances than a small body run by volunteers from the developer community. 2. Cost efficiency. Less money spent on organizational support, more money for what really matters to Gentoo. 3. Added value. Umbrellas can offer us services and status that we currently haven’t been able to achieve.
I’ll expand on all three points.
This quick guide explains the steps on how to install and switch desktop environments in the Fedora Linux operating system between multiple desktops.
A new coalition is building a low-cost solution to save lives in earthquake-threatened regions, rather than garnishing a profit from a new early-warning system. OpenEEW is an open-source IoT project with the goal to save lives by reducing the cost of earthquake early-warning (EEW) systems and accelerating their deployments globally.
The Linux Foundation earlier this month announced that it will host the project’s developer — Grillo — in collaboration with IBM. The project includes the core components of the Grillo EEW system, comprised of integrated capabilities to sense, detect, and analyze earthquakes and alert communities.
Nearly one-third of the world’s population live in seismically-active regions. At risk is the safety and survival of approximately three billion people living in earthquake-prone areas without early-detection systems that could cost upwards of US$1 billion to put in place.
In 2016, there was an enormous amount of noise about Jacob Appelbaum from the Tor Project and winner of the Henri Nannen Prize for journalism.
An anonymous web site had been set up with allegations of harassment, abuse and rape. Unlike the #MeToo movement, which came later, nobody identified themselves and nobody filed a police complaint. It appears that the site was run by people who live in another country and have no daily contact with Appelbaum. Therefore, many people feel this wasn't about justice or immediate threats to their safety.
Long discussions took place in the private mailing lists of many free software communities, including Debian. Personally, as a I focus on my employer, clients and family and as there are so many long email discussions in Debian, I don't follow most of these things. I've come to regret that as it is now clear that at least some claims may have been falsified, a serious injustice has transpired and this could have been easily detected.
I don't wish to discount the experiences of anybody who has been a victim of a crime. However, in the correspondence that was circulated within Debian, the only person who has technically been harassed is Jacob Appelbaum himself. If Appelbaum does have a case to answer then organizations muddying the waters, inventing additional victims, may undermine the stories of real victims.
The explosive emails reveal that Zini was secretly sending out messages to the media lobbying them to change their reporting to reflect the position preferred by accusers.
Special editions of Sparky 2020.08 GameOver, Multimedia & Rescue released. It is based on the Debian testing “Bullseye”.
Changes: ● packages updated from Debian testing repos as of August 24, 2020 ● Linux kernel 5.7.10 (5.8.3 & 5.9-rc2 in Sparky unstable repos) ● added Memory Test and Hardware Detection to the live config ● installed qt5ct + added qt5ct config to Openbox & Xfce desktops ● GCC 9 removed; the default compiler is GCC 10 now ● Xfce 4.14 ● Firefox 79.0 ● LibreOffice 7.0.1~rc1 ● VLC 3.0.11 ● Calamares 3.2.24 ● removed packages from GameOver iso: balder2d, crrcsim, flare, frozen-bubble ● added new packages to GameOver iso: gamemode ● small improvements
We've recently read that Debian Developer Russell Coker spread the vendetta against Jacob Appelbaum from Debian to Linux Australia. It is a vendetta that has spread through the entire free software community in a manner not unlike coronavirus.
Shortly after that, on 22 June 2016, Linux Australia publicly stated they would wait for the matter to become clearer before deciding if any response was necessary.
Eight days later, on 1 July 2016, Linux Australia published a long email publicly denouncing Jacob Appelbaum. They reached the decision to do that in just eight days, but four years later, the situation hasn't actually changed: not one person ever filed a police complaint against Appelbaum.
blackmail What forces influenced Linux Australia to set their principles aside?
Fellowship has a lot of experience of these things and we want to put them in the open.
[...]
Many large free software organizations have been infiltrated by companies like Google. This means there are Google employees who are members and sometimes board members in non-profit organizations like Linux Australia. If one of these companies decided that Jacob Appelbaum is bad for business, their employees would have been ordered to make the kill.
Corporate infiltrators rarely reveal when they are acting on company orders like this. Remember the Google motto: don't get caught doing evil.
In the course of our work in the Open Source Program Office, we get to have discussions once in a while with Red Hat partners about the nature of open source and the best practices to start using open source for a project or two within the partner's organization.
These conversations are a little hard to describe. On the one hand, there's the standard list of open source things to do beyond just tossing out a bunch of code onto an open source repository and declaring to the world "we are open!" If you've done this, you've fallen victim to one of the classic open source blunders, never just throw your code over the wall.
Foreman is a robust management and automation product that provides administrators of Linux environments with enterprise-level solutions for four key scenarios: provisioning management, configuration management, patch management, and content management. A major component of the content management functionality in Foreman is provided by the Pulp project. While Pulp is an integral part of this product, it is also a standalone, free, and open source project that is making huge progress on its own.
Let's take a look at the Pulp project, especially the features of the latest release, Pulp 3.
GitLab Commit starts tomorrow, Wednesday August 26! In addition to a session about how some of us at GNOME use GitLab, we’ll be present at the exhibit hall at a virtual booth.
If you’d like to visit us during GitLab Commit, a number of staff and community volunteers will be present over the course of the day. You will find us on the following schedule. Times are in UTC. Other staff members or volunteers may also stop by to say hi.
Coming a month after Thunderbird 78.1, the Thunderbird 78.2 release is here to further improve the recent OpenPGP implementation, which lets users send encrypted emails with ease.
In Mozilla Thunderbird 78.2, saved drafts are now encrypted by default when OpenPGP is enabled, encrypted email is now send even if the email address contains uppercase characters, and automatic signing for encrypted messages now works in more scenarios.
Following the recent layoffs at Mozilla and some projects seemingly at risk moving forward, one that we have been worried about is GFX-RS as the interesting Rust-based library implementing the Vulkan Portability Initiative using GFX-HAL.
At least for now, GFX-RS is moving along for this cross-platform Vulkan portability project and great graphics example for Rust. GFX-RS 0.8 was released today as the project's newest milestone.
Tor Browser 9.5.4 is now available from the Tor Browser download page and also from our distribution directory.
This version is expected to be the final version of the Tor Browser 9.5 series. Watch for Tor Browser 10.0 near the end of September.
When working with lists in Python, you may sometimes need to reverse the elements of a list. Reversing a list means that the first element of the list becomes the last, the second become second-to-last, the last element becomes the first, and so on.
In Python, there are several different ways to reverse a list, depending on what you’re trying to do.
I’ve been teaching Java for quite a while now. So I often share advice on how to learn programming faster and better. In talking to my students I can see that one thing distracts them very much: coding anxiety. It is a real trouble. Some people find it hard to focus their attention for more than one hour. Some are excessively stressed out by the job search.
So today I’m gonna share on how to eliminate this kind of stress, use the best ways to learn programming, and enjoy coding happily ever after.
In this article we will solve a python question on codewars by using the Python dictionary. Our strategy here is to use the python dictionary to keep those words that have already appeared before so we will not increase the number when we see the same word again.
Below is the entire problem we need to solve.
In cryptanalysis, words patterns can be a useful tool in cracking simple ciphers.
A word pattern is a description of the patterns of letters occurring in a word, where each letter is given an integer code in order of appearance. So the first letter is given the code 0, and second is then assigned 1 if it is different to the first letter or 0 otherwise, and so on.
As an example, the word “hello” would become “0.1.2.2.3”. For this task case-sensitivity is ignored, so “hello”, “helLo” and “heLlo” will all return the same word pattern.
We grew up hearing that every individual is different, but surprisingly, I have seen hundreds of students repeating the same mistakes when they start coding. And I have learned that such blunders need to be corrected as soon as possible. Indeed, you have to work hard to learn programming. But hard work without knowing what mistakes to avoid is like trying to beat the wind.
Yes! Trying to learn by evading blunders made by other programmers is a great way to be a successful coder. The real question is: “How do I detect the mistakes before they kill my motivation and overcome them?” Well, I have created a list of some of the most common mistakes people make while they are learning to program, along with their solutions. Let’s unearth them one by one.
The interpreters are based on much the same codebase, thus the multiple release. This is a micro release, no APIs have changed since the 7.3.0 release in December, but read on to find out what is new.
Conda Forge now supports PyPy as a Python interpreter. The support right now is being built out. After this release, many more c-extension-based packages can be successfully built and uploaded. This is the result of a lot of hard work and good will on the part of the Conda Forge team. A big shout out to them for taking this on.
We have worked with the Python packaging group to support tooling around building third party packages for Python, so this release updates the pip and setuptools installed when executing pypy -mensurepip to pip>=20. This completes the work done to update the PEP 425 python tag from pp373 to mean “PyPy 7.3 running python3” to pp36 meaning “PyPy running Python 3.6” (the format is recommended in the PEP). The tag itself was changed in 7.3.0, but older pip versions build their own tag without querying PyPy. This means that wheels built for the previous tag format will not be discovered by pip from this version, so library authors should update their PyPy-specific wheels on PyPI.
In the first case above, you can’t actually measure peak memory usage because your process is running out memory. And in the remaining cases, you might be running with differents inputs at different times, resulting in different memory requirements.
What you really need then is model of how much memory your program will need for different input sizes. Let’s see how you can do that.
The Ten Years Reproducibility Challenge aims “to find out which of the ten-year-old techniques for writing and publishing code are good enough to make it work a decade later”, Hinsen says. It was timed to coincide with the 1 January 2020 ‘sunset’ date for Python 2, a popular language in the scientific community, after 20 years of support. (Development continues in Python 3, launched in 2008, but the two versions are sufficiently different that code written in one might not work in the other.)
“Ten years is a very, very, very, very long time in the software world,” says Victoria Stodden, who studies computational reproducibility at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In establishing that benchmark, she says, the challenge effectively encourages researchers to probe the limitations of code reproducibility over a period that “is roughly equivalent in the software world to infinity”.
Recently, 269 gigabytes of internal law enforcement documents were liberated by hacker collective Anonymous -- and released by transparency activists Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets). The trove contained plenty of sensitive law enforcement data, but also a lot of stuff law enforcement considers "sensitive" just because it doesn't want to let the public know what it's been spending their tax dollars on.
Focusing on individual students deflects blame from the context, policy, and institutional priorities that allow student gatherings to occur.€
"Judge Dodson saw Florida's unconstitutional executive order for what it was—a cynical edict that put fealty to President Trump over the wellbeing of children and educators."
If/When Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca put out a viable Covid-19 solution in October, it won’t come as a surprise to DARPA.
As the world seeks to mitigate economic fallout from the COVID-19 global pandemic and its unprecedented disruptions, the United States has, to date, prioritized its domestic challenges, largely abandoning its traditional role as a provider of humanitarian assistance during times of international crisis.
Get your First & Fourth Emojiment gear in the€ Techdirt€ store€ on€ Threadless€ €»
Much of the commentary emanating from speakers on night one of the Republican National Convention (RNC) either ignored the coronavirus pandemic completely or exaggerated President Donald Trump’s handling of it, several observers noted.
On Monday night, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Stephen Hahn corrected comments he had made the day before, responding to critics who suggested he had overstated the benefits of a possible treatment for coronavirus.
The Trump administration’s latest effort to use COVID-19 rapid tests — touted by one senior official as a “turning point” in arresting the coronavirus’s spread within nursing homes — is running into roadblocks likely to limit how widely they’ll be used.
The pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the most severe since the 1918 influenza pandemic (colloquially known as the Spanish Flu; see, J. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, Penguin Books; Revised ed. edition (October 4, 2005)). The geographic origins of the virus in Wuhan, China is well-established for the pandemic, but the biological origin is less well understood (although bats are the most likely culprit).
Coronaviruses have arisen in bats, pigs, and cattle and one species, HCov-OC43 from cattle or swine, was responsible for a human pandemic in the late 19th Century. These viruses appear to be promiscuous, being transmitted from bats, cattle, or swine to humans and from humans to tigers and pigs. One possible reason is that coronaviruses including SARS-CoV-2 infect human cells through binding of the viral Spike protein to angiotensin I converting enzyme 2 (ACE2), a protein highly conserved in mammals related to its endogenous functions regulating vasodilation and vasoconstriction as part of the renin–angiotensin system. Adaptation of the virus to different hosts, accompanied by changes in Spike protein structure, have been seen in the masked palm civet, believed to be an intermediate host between bats and humans; in this instance, the virus mutated at two Spike protein sites to amino acids having higher affinity binding to human ACE2. However, the role of the civet has not been definitively established, with the Malayan pangolin being another possible intermediate. Comparisons between SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein binding sequence and ACE2 in vertebrate species shows conservation that may be related to susceptibility, suggests animal reservoirs and intermediates between bats (the native species) and humans, and illustrates the possibilities and likelihoods that SARS-CoV-2 may infect various species including endangered species.
During the covid-19 pandemic, wearing face coverings is being rapidly introduced as a public health intervention in countries with no cultural tradition of doing so. For successful uptake, such interventions need to be grounded in the social and cultural practices and realities of affected communities, and campaigns should not only inform, but also work to shape new sociocultural norms (table 1).
Speaking during a media briefing on the certification of Africa Polio free, the Director-General of the World Health Organisation, WHO, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: “The substantial investments we have all made in defeating polio have delivered a rich reward. Although wild polio has been driven out of Africa, those investments will continue to bear fruit for many other health needs.”
“The Global Polio Eradication Initiative has helped to deliver vitamin A, bed nets and deworming tablets, and support for outbreaks including Ebola.”
The Africa Regional Certification Commission on Tuesday declared Africa free of wild polio after four years without a case.
World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanmo Ghebreyesus praised the WHO African region, which contains 47 countries, for being free of polio.
The two policies are popular with the American public, but the Democratic Party refused to embrace them in its 2020 platform.
Researchers in Hong Kong say 33-year-old-man is asymptomatic; immunologists call case 'no cause for alarm.'€
After the president accused the FDA of deliberately holding up approval of convalescent plasma, the agency authorized expanded use of the treatment despite a lack of randomized, controlled studies.€
The most deleterious of the effects of the industrialization of farming in the United States is the drastic decline of the small white family farmers and the near disappearance of the black family farmers.
As of the first week of August, there have been at least 160,000 deaths in the United States from Covid-19. There is data indicating race and ethnicity for approximately 90 percent of these deaths; in age-adjusted numbers analyzed by the American Public Media Research Lab, the widest disparities afflicted Black, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, and Latinx populations. Black mortality rates range from more than twice to almost four times as high as for white people. Among Indigenous people, the rates are as much as three and a half times as high and are two times as high for Latinx people. The death rate for predominantly Black counties is six times that of predominantly white ones.
We hear it throughout the English-language press, both mainstream and progressive: “The Covid-19 crisis led Spain to nationalize its private clinics!” It would be great if it were true. Moreover, since governments like to say that we are “at war” with the coronavirus, shouldn’t a war involve more than just confining people in their houses, while asking them to wear face masks and wash their hands? After all, wars usually involve taking control of the economy – the private sector included – to attain victory over enemies, presumably even viral ones.
A new report suggests President Donald Trump may push for an unproven vaccine for coronavirus from the United Kingdom to be made available in the United States just one month before voters are set to decide if he deserves another term in office.
This week’s FDA news has been dominated by the tumultuous emergency authorization of convalescent plasma on Sunday, but let’s not forget last week’s news: On August 16, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) surprised public health experts by publishing a one-paragraph notice on its website rescinding FDA guidance related to laboratory developed tests (LDTs). The notice states that the FDA will not require premarket review of LDTs absent notice-and-comment rulemaking, including for COVID-19 tests. LDTs are tests “designed, manufactured and used within a single laboratory,” such as tests run by large academic medical centers, hospitals like the Mayo Clinic, and testing giants LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics. Former HHS national coordinator for health information technology Farzad Mostashari described this change as “bizarre” and like “[c]losing the barn door 6 months after the horse left the barn, and 3 months after she moved to a different barn!” What’s going on, and how will this change affect COVID-19 testing?
[...]
For COVID-19, after HHS declared that the public health emergency justified the use of emergency use authorizations (EUAs) on February 4, the FDA initially said that diagnostic LDTs needed an EUA. This created a Catch-22, as former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb put it; rapid development of COVID-19 tests was needed in the emergency, but the emergency-based EUA requirement slowed them down. Shortages ensued. On February 29, the FDA changed its policy again (in this guidance, which has since been updated), allowing the use of RT-PCR LDTs to determine COVID-19 infection while developers awaited an EUA. Nevertheless, the agency retained the ability to revoke EUAs if a particular LDT turned out to be problematic. For antibody tests to identify past infection, the FDA took the opposite approach. Initially, it allowed anyone to offer tests without going through the agency, but on May 4 it began requiring EUAs—some of which have since been revoked. As the FDA’s website stated, there were important reasons for requiring LDTs to obtain EUAs during this crisis, as these tests have “serious implications … for analyses of disease progression and public health decision-making.”
[...]
But second (and opposingly), the notice may make it easier for some labs to bring tests to market that otherwise would not have, or may make it easier to scale existing authorized tests (such as Yale’s new saliva test) to labs that have not themselves gone through the FDA’s process. At least some scientists have praised it along these lines. Professor Fyodor Urnov, at UC Berkeley, said the announcement had “simplifie[d] things moving forward and resolve[d] a substantial source of uncertainty that has lingered in the field for some time.” Some experts also note that the rescission notice relies on CLIA as a backstop, which may ensure a certain level of quality from the resulting tests.
Unfortunately, because the effect of the notice is to make it much more difficult for the FDA to observe these tests at all, it will be almost impossible to determine whether the balance of impacts is a good one. Further, the unexpected and unexplained way this change was implemented is particularly worrisome. In the middle of a pandemic, upsetting the expectations of firms that are attempting to address the crisis is not the basis of sound policymaking.
In Latin America, the still-raging coronavirus pandemic is leading to a reassessment of the use of traditional medicine and highlighting the urgent need for humanitarian aid and health workers to better integrate Indigenous knowledge into their responses.
As COVID-19 continues to spread throughout the region, amongst the hardest hit communities have been the Indigenous peoples, long neglected by the state and with the lowest access to quality healthcare.
Worldwide, health officials have stated that there is not yet a vaccine to prevent COVID-19, and no cure: Treatment generally consists of alleviating symptoms with anti-inflammatory, anticoagulant, and antiviral medications, and oxygen when respiratory symptoms are severe.
But with drugs and oxygen in short supply and often prohibitively expensive, many people in remote rural communities and on the periphery of cities turn to alternatives. In Peru and other countries, accounts of alleged “miracle cures” – ranging from the unproven to the potentially toxic – circulate by meme and word of mouth.
Experts at the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) have warned against self-medication and sought to dispel rumours about supposed cures or inappropriate medications that could cause harm.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, ghostscript, php7.0, and proftpd-dfsg), Fedora (mod_http2 and thunderbird), Red Hat (chromium-browser and firefox), and SUSE (apache2, grub2, samba, and xorg-x11-server).
Back in November, I had to drop off my bus at one of the county garages for a minor repair.€ On the way, I radioed dispatch and said I’d need a ride back to the lot where my car was parked.€ I dallied outside the garage office, on the clock, until my ride ambled along and scooped me up.
Is a police camera aimed at a publicly-viewable area Constitutional? That's a question courts have had to answer periodically. In most cases, the answer appears to be "no." Long-term surveillance -- even of a publicly-viewable area -- is a government intrusion into private citizens' lives. This sort of intrusion requires a warrant and sufficient probable cause.
Californians should not be forced to present their smartphones to enter public places. But that’s exactly what A.B. 2004 would do, by directing the state to set up a blockchain-based system for “immunity passports”: a verified health credential that shows the results of someone’s last COVID-19 test, and uses those to grant access to public places.
By claiming that blockchain technology is part of a unique solution to the public health crisis we’re in, AB 2004 is opportunism at its worst. We are proud to stand with Mozilla and the American Civil Liberties Union’s California Center for Advocacy and Policy in opposing this bill. We encourage you to tell your senator to oppose it, too.
If you aren’t an enthusiast, chances are you haven’t used a Virtual Reality (VR) or Augmented Reality (AR) headset. The hype around this technology, however, is nearly inescapable. We’re not just talking about dancing with lightsabers; there’s been a lot of talk about how VR/AR will revolutionize entertainment, education, and even activism. EFF has long been interested in the potential of this technology, and has even developed our own VR experience, Spot the Surveillance, which places users on a street corner amidst police spying technologies.€
It’s easy to be swept up in the excitement of a new technology, but utopian visions must not veil the emerging ethical and legal concerns in VR/AR. The devices are new, but the tech giants behind them aren’t. Any VR/AR headset you use today is likely made by a handful of corporate giants—Sony, Microsoft, HTC, and Facebook. As such, this budding industry has inherited a lot of issues from their creators. VR and AR hardware aren’t household devices quite yet, but if they succeed, there’s a chance they will creep into all of our personal and professional lives guided by the precedents set today.€ €
The company lost $580 million in 2019, the filing shows, and in the first half of 2020 it has lost $175 million. The S-1 shows the company had 125 customers in the first half of this year, “including some of the largest and most significant institutions in the world,” the filing states, and its software “is used by customers across 36 industries and in more than 150 countries.” This confirms information leaked to TechCrunch last week.
Facebook is planning to expand its dedicated news section and says it is “considering” the UK, Germany, France, India, and Brazil as possible recipients, it announced Tuesday. The company’s timeline is vague: “within the next six months to a year,” so it’s curious why Facebook would announce something not yet imminent. But given Facebook’s volatile history with the news industry, and the trend toward requiring platforms to pay news outlets for their content, it’s possible the company is simply testing the waters for its next move.
As we've noted, much of the hysteria surrounding TikTok isn't based on anything close to consistent outrage. As in, many of the folks freaking out about a teen dancing app were nowhere to be found when U.S. wireless carriers were found to be selling access to your location data to any random idiot. Most of the folks pearl clutching about TikTok have opposed election security funding or even the most basic of privacy rules. The SS7 flaw that makes most wireless networks vulnerable to eavesdropping ? The lack of any security or privacy safeguards in the internet of things (IOT) space?
Another federal law enforcement agency has figured out a way to dodge warrant requirements for historical cell site location data. The Supreme Court's Carpenter decision said these records were covered by the Fourth Amendment. But rather than comply with the ruling, agencies like the CBP and ICE are buying location data in bulk from private companies that collect this data, rather than approach service providers with warrants.
Will They Make Better Decisions Than Humans—Or Worse?
Mainstream outlets are largely ignoring the IDF's near-daily attacks, which began in early August.€
The war for Palestinian survival rages on.
Marches and demonstrations have been held nationwide demanding justice for the 29-year-old father of six, who is Black.
"The video that came out of Kenosha is absolutely horrific. I don't understand how people can watch it and not be here."
On Sunday night, video was released showing the attempted murder of Jacob Blake on a street in Kenosha, Wis. The video shows Blake, a Black man, walking towards his parked vehicle followed by two police officers who have their guns drawn on him. As Blake reaches his car door, one of the officers grabs Blake’s tank top and holds him in place as he, or the other officer, fires multiple shots into Blake at point-blank range. In the video, seven shots can be heard.
Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black man from Kenosha, Wisconsin, was shot seven times in the back by police officers on Sunday evening as he attempted to enter his own car.
The Green New Deal is mentioned only once in the 263-page report—in the footnotes.€
"It would be a moral disgrace if we left to future generations a planet and that was unhealthy, unsafe, and uninhabitable."
Once the domain of ships and researchers at sea, new technologies are offering us ways to explore more of our ocean and coasts more often at lower cost. The U.S. Integrated Ocean Observing System's (IOOS€®) Ocean Technology Transition project, an ongoing multi-year cooperative grant program, is one effort working to meet the need for new technology and novel approaches to address ocean observing needs.
OTT looks for developing ocean, coastal, and Great Lakes observing, product development, and data management technologies for which there is a known need and steps in to accelerate its transition to operations. These technologies include hardware and software platforms, sensors, and data management aimed at improving available ocean information to support decision making for the coastal ocean, and Great Lakes’ environments. For 2020, IOOS, in conjunction with the National Oceanographic Partnership Program (NOPP), sought projects focused on regional coastal ocean observing systems and advancing data management and cyber infrastructure for observations. Here are the grants awarded in 2020.
Their insistence on making a bonfire of the environment means their convention has to compete with disaster scenarios in California and the Gulf of Mexico.
As a historic set of wildfires sweeps across California, sparked by lightning and stoked by record heat and drought resulting from climate change (Mercury News, 8/19/20; Scientific American, 4/3/20), many news outlets have drawn readers’ attention to an additional problem the state faces in fighting the fires: shortages of the prison labor that it normally relies on for firefighting crews.
As climate-fueled wildfires engulf California, tens of thousands of firefighters have been deployed across the state to combat the blazes amid a record heat wave and deadly pandemic. We look at how more than 1,300 incarcerated firefighters — who are annually deployed to the frontlines in California for just $1 an hour — are fighting back the blazes as coronavirus outbreaks in state prisons limit how many are available to fight the fires, and lay bare the state’s reliance on prison labor to control its ever-growing wildfire season with an exploitative system many have called slave labor. “What they’re not saying is we lack the incarcerated firefighters … [who] make up the backbone of the firefighting department,” says Rasheed Lockheart, who was a firefighter at San Quentin State Prison until his release in January.
As climate-fueled wildfires engulf California, tens of thousands of firefighters have been deployed across the state to combat the blazes amid a record heat wave and deadly pandemic. We look at how more than 1,300 incarcerated firefighters — who are annually deployed to the frontlines in California for just $1 an hour — are fighting back the blazes as coronavirus outbreaks in state prisons limit how many are available to fight the fires, and lay bare the state’s reliance on prison labor to control its ever-growing wildfire season with an exploitative system many have called slave labor. “What they’re not saying is we lack the incarcerated firefighters … [who] make up the backbone of the firefighting department,” says Rasheed Lockheart, who was a firefighter at San Quentin State Prison until his release in January.
Californian hopes of cooler future rise as the world’s biggest battery storage system comes on stream.
Although the project, known as the Jordan Cove LNG terminal,€ has struggled to obtain state€ permits and faces vocal opposition from tribes and others, this consistent Trump administration refrain has not changed.€ The Obama administration made similar claims€ about natural gas production and€ energy security, jobs, and the environment, when it oversaw a rapid expansion of the LNG export industry.€
"Big Oil has fallen. Our job is to make sure they don't take us down with them."
"As our ancestors before us, we will stand and fight for our future generations, for the Porcupine caribou herd, and the Gwich'in way of life."
The recent article “Low Flows On Deschutes” highlights why irrigation is a significant threat to our river’s ecological integrity.
The tech industry buzzword “gig” has distracted society from important questions about the gig economy that are surprisingly traditional: whether a business has employees or contractors, and how it can avoid payroll taxes and legal liability. Countless Silicon Valley business models have been built under the guise of gigs, Uber and Lyft two of the best known cases, which is ironic considering that for all of their high-tech pretensions, at the core both are taxi and food delivery services. But with state governments like California facing increasing revenue shortfalls and an estimated 57 million gig workers in the United States noting a lack of employer protections and fair wages, the matter has shifted to the courts.
Meena did not sleep that night. The rain water had entered her home. The flimsy tarpaulin couldn’t hold the downpour and crashed in minutes. Meena and her family ran to take shelter in front of a closed shop.
"Many of them still need more financial assistance just to keep their doors open and staff on payroll," the National Federation of Independent Businesses said.
"It is morally obscene that the American people have to rely on GoFundMe to pay for rent and food," said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).€
"The American people need real relief that fights the pandemic and puts money in workers' pockets—posturing and gimmicks will not solve the enormous problems they face."
The United States is in the midst of a long-overdue racial reckoning, and the fight is not only happening in the streets.
The coronavirus pandemic has both changed everything and accelerated trends that were already occurring across the world in business, politics, and how people shop and interact. The same is true with American higher education. As colleges and universities across America are restarting, Covid-19€ has laid bare the nakedness of the corporate university, revealing how education and learning have long been displaced as the primary purpose of colleges and universities.
Christiansburg, Va., resembles many other towns in the United States. There’s a small city center surrounded by strip malls, and the vast sprawl is where most economic activity occurs. Given that these corporate landscapes now dominate the country, maybe it’s appropriate that this is where a radical labor movement is taking shape.
The exemplary domestic and international response of socialist Cuba to the global SARS-CoV2 pandemic has been recognised worldwide. By late July, authorities had the virus under control; 87 people had died, none of them children or healthcare workers, and Cuba was entering phase three of post-Covid-19 recovery.
“If I don’t buy masks or medicine, I may die or survive, but if I don’t buy bread for the family, we will all die of starvation,” says a retired 68-year-old teacher in Damascus, explaining why he does not have masks, sterilisers or medicines. “We need two bundles of loaves every day which costs us at least 600 Syrian pounds (24 US cents), but if we buy masks, they will cost us about 1000 SP (40 cents). The choice is between bread and masks.”
Woke capitalists are not socialists in disguise, they represent a very real and dangerous side of contemporary capitalism.€
"Trump's disastrous plan to defund Social Security would eliminate retirement and disability benefits by 2023," said Sen. Bernie Sanders. "That may make sense to the billionaires at Trump's country club, but it makes zero sense to me."
The Social Security Administration’s chief actuary estimated late Monday that eliminating the payroll tax would fully deplete Social Security’s disability and old-age trust funds by 2023, confirming the disastrous consequences progressive advocacy groups and lawmakers have been warning of since President Donald Trump threatened earlier this month to “terminate” the levy if reelected in November.
ANNAPOLIS, Md. — In August 2018, Chermire Gladden sat on the dark wooden benches in Maryland District Court, waiting her turn as a judge churned through more than 90 cases filed against public housing residents.
Gladden had informed the Housing Authority of the City of Annapolis two months earlier that she wouldn’t be able to afford the $604 monthly payment for her two-bedroom apartment at Harbour House, a sprawling collection of three-story buildings where she lives with her 10-year-old daughter, Jazzlyn, just blocks from $1 million waterfront homes.
In the aftermath of the 2008 housing market collapse, I spent many months reporting on the “collateral damage” caused by a systemic failure. I remember going into campgrounds in California’s Central Valley, where homeless people crowded in the communal bathrooms, prepping for work. I remember huge homeless encampments alongside railway tracks and dotting the sides of freeway embankments.
On the eve of the 2020 Republican National Convention, a progressive advocacy group representing 15,000 unemployed workers on Sunday projected onto a Charlotte, North Carolina hotel the photos and stories of jobless workers struggling to meet basic needs after the GOP allowed the $600-per-week unemployment benefit boost to expire last month, slashing the incomes of some 30 million Americans.
How much do America’s big-time corporate CEOs make? Such a simple question, right? Not quite. Economist Larry Mishel has been working to get the answer right — for decades. And now Mishel, a former president and currently a distinguished fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, has just released his latest take on the corporate pay universe, a set of newly revised stats that track the past half-century of executive compensation.
Will we enable billionaires to further concentrate wealth and power during a pandemic, or will we tax their gains to improve the health and welfare of our country?
We have returned to Franklin Roosevelt’s one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.€
With over 100,000 people displaced by wildfires raging across California, Baupost Group collected more than $3 billion in July after betting on insurance claims against embattled utility company PG&E.€
You would be forgiven for thinking that the red thread of twentieth century politics, brought into fruition with 1917 and ended in ’89, a blood red.
They need to argue the case for the bold agenda that this country desperately needs, and challenge Donald Trump for his policy failures.
During the height of the Cold War when it was viewed as disloyal and compromising to show a sympathetic interest in Marxism or sympathies with Soviet ideology, someone at the U.S. military base at Frankfurt distributed to the soldiers stationed there, a handwritten version of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments of the U.S. Constitution, in the form of petition. Very few of the soldiers approached were willing to affix their signatures, most alleging that this seemed a subversive document circulated by enemies of the United States, and was Soviet propaganda. Somehow the Western propaganda message that the Cold War was about the defense of ‘the free world’ against a totalitarian enemy had made no impact, or alternatively, that the free world had nothing to do with the substantive elements of freedom as social practice.
Democrats are simply not going to win votes if they see a crisis of this scale and respond with laughably small, do-nothing policy ideas.€
On August 26, 2020, Alice in Wonderland will get some company. She will be joined in New York City’s Central Park by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth, the first statues there of women who, unlike Alice, actually existed. The monument is a gift to the park from Monumental Women, a nonprofit organization formed in 2014. The group has raised the $1.5 million necessary to commission, install, and maintain the new “Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument” and so achieve its goal of “breaking the bronze ceiling” in Central Park.
For five years, the Irkutsk region was a “red” region — in other words, it had a governor from the Russian Communist Party (KPRF). Sergey Levchenko had won a competitive race against a candidate from the national ruling party, United Russia, but last year, he resigned from his post. Levchenko had been planning to compete for a second term, but he faced pressure to quit from the federal government. Acting Governor Igor Kobzev, who was appointed to replace him, was imported to Irkutsk by federal officials from a city more than 3,000 miles away. Local mayors and even United Russia officials aren’t excited about what he’s brought to the table, and he’s up for election on September 13. Meduza correspondent Andrey Pertsev traveled to Irkutsk to see how this independent-minded area of Siberia is taking on a Kremlin-backed leader and why the opposition might actually win.
Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tikhanovskaya (Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya) gave a remote address to the European Parliament on Tuesday, August 25. The entire speech was live streamed by RBK.€
No citizen, though Oakland-born, Hints Donald and his claque— Just like Obama, culpable Of being born while black.
For at least four decades, going back to the devastating rise of Ronald Reagan, progressives have heard the same refrain every presidential campaign year: This is the most important election of our lives. In 2020, though, it’s true. Really.
It was hard to stomach. The usual suspects, the usual scripts tatty from overuse. The 2020 Democratic National Convention was a prolonged display of avoidance, evasion and theatrical amnesia. There were moments of formality masquerading as promise: Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez nominating Senator Bernie Sanders for presidential candidate. But it was not to be. The decision had long been made in advance: the Democrats wanted Joe Biden, and so did Ocasio-Cortez. “If you were confused no worries!” she tweeted. “Convention rules require roll call & nominations for every candidate that passes the delegate threshold.” She had been asked to second the nomination for Sanders.
It is quite normal for newspapers to run columns in their editorial pages written by people who don’t share the same editorial perspective of the publication’s editors. It’s why they call them “op-ed pages”—for “opposite the editorial page.”
If we get another four years of Trump, genuine leftism on a federal level is dead in the water until 2024.€
Media have to redirect the discussion back to the genuine calamities facing the nation.
Alaska Attorney General Kevin Clarkson resigned Tuesday following the publication of an Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica investigation showing he sent hundreds of text messages to a younger state employee that Clarkson acknowledged had made her uncomfortable.
Records obtained by the newsrooms found Clarkson sent at least 558 text messages between March 5 and March 31 to a woman whose job required she sometimes interact with the attorney general. In at least 18 messages he invited the woman to come to his home.
Late last year, Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy wrote President Donald Trump asking for a favor on behalf of his appointed attorney general, Kevin Clarkson.
In a Dec. 2 letter, the governor asked Trump to help Clarkson’s wife and stepson overcome immigration obstacles in order to leave Colombia and join him in Alaska.
The Los Angeles Times wins the prize for best description of the thing that happened on my TV last night: “Welcome to a parallel universe.”
Kimberly Guilfoyle's remarks on the opening night of the GOP event brought "the convention's fascist timbre to the next level," wrote one observer.
"You can't stop the Revolution! I said what I said," Bush responded.
As party loyalists gather for the Republican National Convention, a group of veteran Republican operatives who want to defeat President Trump have launched a $4 million advertising blitz targeting voters in swing states. The anti-Trump ads are funded by The Lincoln Project, a super PAC that can raise and spend an unlimited amount of money. We speak with longtime Republican political consultant Stuart Stevens, a senior adviser to The Lincoln Project who worked as a strategist on five Republican presidential campaigns, about Trump’s takeover of the party and efforts by so-called “Never Trump” Republicans to prevent his reelection, and why he says “race is the original sin of the modern Republican Party.”
The Republican National Convention opened in Charlotte, North Carolina, with dire warnings that a Joe Biden presidency could destroy the country. We feature excerpts from President Trump’s surprise speech after he was formally nominated for a second term, claiming without evidence that Democrats are planning to steal the election, and other speakers throughout the evening who repeatedly praised Trump’s handling of the pandemic even as the U.S. coronavirus death toll passes 177,000.
The greatest cover-up in modern Scottish history is underway. I am not permitted to say more at present. I will however venture to say that this is massively bigger than just the attempt to imprison me, that most of these documents are also being withheld from the Holyrood Inquiry.
My good friend Manni Singh has been jailed for 72 days – an incredibly draconian sentence – for organising an entirely peaceful political demonstration at which I was a speaker, on which there were zero incidents of violence or damage.
Political conventions normally have a twofold goal: reenergizing the base of the party and making a pitch to wavering voters whose support might be won. In this year’s, we’ve seen a stark contrast between the two parties in which aim they have prioritized. Last week’s DNC was overwhelmingly focused on winning over centrists and disenchanted Republicans, with the ideological message put on the back burner in order to emphasize appeals to patriotism, civility, and decency. In pursuit of this goal, prime-time space was given to Republicans and former Republicans: John Kasich, Michael Bloomberg, Cindy McCain, and Colin Powell.
Donald Trump is a persistent liar. But some of his lies are bigger than others, and the biggest of them all is the one he repeated at the opening of this week’s Republican National Convention. Over disembodied mumbles of “four more years,” the president served up a heaping helping of xenophobia and economic nonsense as he claimed that he was presiding over a “historic” economic recovery before the coronavirus pandemic messed everything up.
The protests in Belarus have entered a new stage, and it looks a lot like a stalemate. As demonstrated last Sunday, the scale of the opposition protests hasn’t decreased significantly. Alexander Lukashenko’s regime, which initially responded to the unrest with violence, has changed tactics and is now relying on a mixture of ignoring the size of the protests, persecuting the organizers (if they can find them), and putting on theatrical performances featuring Lukashenko in an effort to mobilize his supporters. Meanwhile, the regime’s power base — the security apparatus — isn’t showing any outward signs of breaking down. In this context, where compromise isn’t an option and neither side has a clear advantage, it seems impossible to predict the outcome of the standoff. However, according to researchers studying protests, who have analyzed hundreds of movements around the world over the past few decades, even in such difficult cases it’s possible to assess the likelihood of different possible outcomes, if not the exact results of the protests. Meduza applies this theory to the ongoing events in Belarus.
Every night of this week’s virtual Republican convention is featuring President Trump as he labors to convince Americans to reelect him despite presiding over the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, contributing to the deaths of at least 173,000 Americans from the pandemic, and facing huge demonstrations over the racial tensions that he loves to fan. Even more challenging, he must once more beguile the victims of his greatest con: the working men and women who voted for him, believing his promise that he’d take on the establishment that failed them.
As the Republican National Convention (RNC) takes place this week, a number of Republicans are announcing that they cannot in good conscience support another four years in the White House for the party’s candidate, President Donald Trump.
The CISA 5G Strategy outlines five “strategic initiatives” to secure the buildout of 5G systems, which include supporting 5G policy and standards development that stops malicious actors from influencing the design of new systems, expanding awareness of supply chain threats to 5G systems to minimize vulnerabilities, and working to strengthen and secure existing infrastructure.
CISA Director Christopher Krebs wrote in the report that he saw 5G development as the “single biggest critical infrastructure build the world has seen in 25 years,” highlighting the need to build security into a system that will support essential services.
Half a decade ago, the billionaire founder of Epic Games Inc. sparred with Microsoft Corp. over the way the software giant treated small application developers. Now he’s launched a legal broadside against the biggest app stores in the world with a lawsuit alleging that Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google are a harmful duopoly.
It’s a battle meant to help his company, which makes the gaming phenomenon Fortnite and operates the video-chatting service Houseparty, but also one that probably fits with his view of himself.
Google hasn’t had a general counsel since 2018, when Kent Walker was promoted to senior vice president of global affairs, a position responsible for responding to the swell of regulatory and privacy-related issues the company has faced in recent years. DeLaine Prado will report to Walker.
President Donald Trump headlines his Republican Party’s national convention against a backdrop of a nation in crisis and an older sister who branded him a liar and someone without principles.
The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee filed lawsuits recently against New Jersey and Nevada to prevent expansive vote-by-mail efforts in those states.
Did Democrats just inadvertently throw Trump a lifeline for reelection? More worrisome, did their convention presage a Biden administration without a mandate to address the stark challenges of this time?
A national political nominating convention, as the Democrats have just completed, is, to be sure, a mutual admiration event. A steady stream of speakers led to the finale with the acceptance speech by the presidential candidate, Joe Biden. But the Convention has another declared purpose: to show the country what the Democratic Party stands for and the future it wishes to shape for the American people.
The Republican National Convention (RNC) begins tonight, and I honestly don’t know how to complete this sentence. Many will watch, many more will not, and I’ll be fixated on this four-day failapalooza for one reason only: to see if the Audience of One phenomenon rears its orange head and burns the whole project to the ground. I very strongly suspect it will.
Critics accused the secretary of state of "using Judaism as a political prop" and suggested his speech may violate the Hatch Act.
President Trump was formally nominated Monday afternoon as the Republican Party’s candidate for this year’s presidential race. Yet as he is set to accept the party’s nomination this week, a number of Republicans won’t be voting for him, preferring instead to support his main rival, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.
The U.S. now has over 5.7 million confirmed Covid-19 infections and nearly 177,000 people have died nationwide.
The stakes could not be higher.
The capacity of the United States Postal Service (USPS) to provide mail services that generations of Americans have relied on has been severely weakened by the Trump administration. The assault on the Postal Service has only grown stronger and more brazen in recent weeks. We know by Trump’s own admission that his targeting of the agency is by design and is intended to interfere with the federal election that is less than three months away. Due to the ongoing health risks associated with COVID-19, a record number of Americans are expected to vote absentee this November rather than in-person. Knowing this, Trump has weaponized the pandemic to obstruct mail services and suppress the people’s vote, particularly in battleground states. By making it more difficult for Americans to exercise their right to vote, he is disenfranchising tens of millions of voters. The other part of Trump’s calculation is that by stripping the Post Office of much-needed resources to receive and process absentee ballots, he can exploit any hint of trouble with vote tallying this November to try and cast doubt on, and perhaps even dismiss, the election results should he lose. It has all the makings of an authoritarian power grab.
"During this critical time, Americans deserve better than a mail slow-down rooted in political gamesmanship."
Protesters carried signs that declared "U.S. Mail Is Not For Sale," "PM DeJoy, Stop Delaying De-Mail," and "Senators: Do the Right Thing."
Democratic lawmakers ramped up their demands for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to step aside or be removed after the Trump megadonor on Monday demonstrated flippant ignorance of basic U.S. Postal Service operations, refused to cooperate with lawmakers’ requests for documents, and declined to commit to reversing policy changes that have impeded the timely delivery of mail, including life-saving prescription medications.
"The only thing you should be delivering is your resignation," Rep. Ayanna Pressley told DeJoy.
The Massachusetts Democrat said the board's continued support for Postmaster General Louis DeJoy as his policies harm mail service "raises questions about the role of the board and the motivations of its members."
The battle over the future of the United States Postal Service is intensifying, with a record number of mail-in ballots expected to be cast in the 2020 presidential election, and Democrats and Republicans locked in a fight over the future of the agency. Historian Philip Rubio, who teaches at North Carolina A&T State University and worked as a mail carrier for two decades before that, says decades of political interference have caused a “manufactured crisis” at the U.S. Postal Service. “The damage has been done,” Rubio says of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s changes. “I think he’s discouraged a lot of voters who were hoping to vote by mail to vote safely and securely because of the pandemic.”
After the arrest of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon last week for allegedly defrauding hundreds of thousands of donors to a private organization with the stated purpose of building a wall along the southern border, We Build the Wall, administration officials have sought to distance themselves from the project. But Customs and Border Protection (CBP) leadership met with representatives of We Build the Wall to consider their offer of donating the privately constructed wall to the US government. CBP described it as “an overall positive meet and greet” and even provided the group with guidance on how to gift its wall to CBP, according to an internal CBP memo obtained exclusively by The Nation.
"It's unbearable that the Republican Party and the Trump administration are celebrating and campaigning while millions of families are suffering because they refuse to extend the $600 benefit that was keeping us afloat."
It is one of the virtues of an extraordinarily vicious presidency that it has led some to openly confess their preference for elite rule. Even those who vigorously promoted elements of aristocracy—or oligarchy—once used to feign devotion to a democratic creed. Now, alongside the regular suggestion that Donald Trump threatens democracy, some are willing to say he proves its bankruptcy. “Voters know in the abstract what they ought to know,” conceded Jason Brennan, the author of Against Democracy, after the last presidential election. “They just don’t actually know the things they think they should.” When the people chose Trump, Brennan concluded, it proved the need for “epistocracy,” a kind of update to the ancient Greek philosopher Plato’s contention that the wise should rule.
"McConnell's choice is clear: do the bidding of Trump or listen to the clarion call of Americans—of all political parties and persuasions—to defend the Postal Service from sabotage from within."
Cocaine and Donald Trump Jr. started trending at the same time on Twitter on Monday night. This was a direct result of liberals’ freely and without facts theorizing about the president’s eldest son. These speculations are not just baseless but also unfair. There are far more human reasons for Trump Jr.’s odd performance during the speech he gave at the RNC.
The postmaster general's testimony comes on the heels of new documents showing his policies have damaged mail service more significantly than he has publicly acknowledged.
For months, the Trump Organization has "stalled, withheld documents, and instructed witnesses, including Eric Trump, to refuse to answer questions under oath" about its financial records.
Trump is leveraging the pandemic to destroy any semblance of democracy left in presidential elections.
While China-bashing is all the rage right now (much of it deserved given the country's abhorrent human rights practices), it's sort of amazing what a difference a year makes. While the current focus of ire towards the Chinese government seems focused on the COVID-19 pandemic and a few mobile dance apps, never mind the fully embedded nature of Chinese-manufactured technology in use every day in the West, late 2019 was all about China's translucent skin. Much of that had to do with China's inching towards a slow takeover of Hong Kong and how several corporate interests in the West reacted to it. Does anyone else remember when our discussion about China was dominated by stories dealing with Blizzard banning Hearthstone players for supporting Hong Kong and American professional sports leagues looking like cowards in the face of a huge economic market?
Bhushan was initially given the opportunity to apologize for his tweets, but he refused to do so. The Supreme Court has adjourned Bhushan’s hearing until Sep. 10. Regardless of the outcome of his sentencing hearing, which is ongoing, Bhushan’s case is emblematic of precisely the issues he has been highlighting: that the Supreme Court is perceived to be siding with the government.
But India is not unique in this regard. All around the world, proponents of liberal democracy and free speech have found themselves on the defensive—often for posting critical material on social media. Foreign Policy collected four other prominent cases from the past few years in which activists were targeted, arrested, and in some cases imprisoned for posts their governments considered seditious.
It should go without saying that communication technologies don’t conjure up unfathomable evils all by themselves. They are a convenience-enhancer, a conduit, and a magnifying lens amplifying something that’s already there: our deeply flawed humanity. Try as we might to tame it (and boy have we tried), human nature will always rear its ugly head. Debates about governing these technologies should start by making the inherent tradeoffs more explicit.
The Russian tech giant Yandex has reportedly started evacuating its office in Minsk, since armed men raided the premises on August 13, two sources familiar with the situation told The Bell. The company’s press office says the Minsk bureau currently employs roughly 300 people, all of whom are now working remotely. “Some of these staff have left the city,” spokespeople clarified.
A misuse plagues our republic: the misuse of democracy; instead of building a democratic, and just, society, we simply use democracy to validate and renew the personnel of our oligarchic republic. These days, because the republic is fractured and oligarchic, democracy is being misused to maintain the same republic as the promise of a new republic without such inequalities.
Every report I’ve seen on the injustice suffered by Masai Ujiri in Oakland last June has talked about the tip and ignored the iceberg. That this could be so at this BLM moment is deeply worrying and shows that our problems go well beyond even systemic racism.
Under the spindlework arch of the wraparoundporch, no one ever thinks they’ll expose the original hardwood for its kindling.
The reenergized movement against anti-Black violence ignited by the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor, among others, has inspired the reading public to turn to texts that can explain exactly how we got here. Reading lists abound with everything from histories of slavery to self-help guides on white privilege and allyship. Yet few engage with the histories of urban inequality and policing that shed light on how reporting someone using a possibly counterfeit $20 bill at an urban corner store set in motion the public execution of a Black man or how a series of alleged suburban break-ins emboldened neighborhood vigilantes to murder a jogger or why a deadly police raid authorized by a controversial no-knock warrant is entwined with a city’s rapacious gentrification plans.
On August 15 at 4 pm, about 200 protesters, mostly students and local youth, met at Chicago’s Cloud Gate, known as “The Bean,” in Millennium Park. Their demands were simple: Remove police from Chicago public schools, cancel the Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Citizens academy that encourages Chicagoans to report illegal immigrants, reallocate funds away from police and toward the community, and cut ties between ICE and local universities.
Police officers are not "worried" about "excited delirium." This supposed mental health condition -- which isn't recognized by the American Psychiatric Association, American Medical Association, or the World Health association -- exists mainly to exonerate police officers who have subdued an arrestee to death. A majority of people who die from "excited delirium" do so in police custody.
At first glance, it would seem that the Russian authorities have acquiesced to demands from world leaders and activists across the country that state officials investigate the apparent assassination attempt against opposition politician Alexey Navalny.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov announced on Tuesday, August 25, that the Putin administration is aware of no grounds for launching a criminal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the poisoning of opposition politician Alexey Navalny.
In early May, police arrested Vladimir Vorontsov, the author of the popular online community Police Ombudsman, which reports abuses within Russian law enforcement. He was arrested on charges of soliciting 300,000 rubles (about $4,000) in bribes from an ex-cop. In his defense, Vorontsov asked Russia’s National Guard to testify to his character. That testimony is now in, reports the news agency TASS, which obtained a copy. According to TASS, public relations representatives for the agency expressed “appreciation for the constructive cooperation” Vorontsov offered in the past.
The last three years have been a marked and unending period of decline for the organized “alt-right.” Ostensibly led into a somewhat cohesive social movement by Richard Spencer, the collection of publications, podcasts, high-profile white nationalists and organizations that made up the alt-right saw their peak in the two days they laid siege on Charlottesville, Virginia. Yet they were shut down afterward as anti-fascist activists confronted them, kicking them off platforms and legally challenging them. There have been attempts to regroup since, with Spencer returning to his work of “building meta-politics” and others forming white nationalist organizations like the Patriot Front or going even more extreme with “accelerationist” terror organizations like Atomwaffen Division or The Base.
How to Remember a Feminist Movement That Hasn’t Ended
Nature and wild spaces are appreciated by many, but they can sometimes be rendered inaccessible or dangerous to people of color, as a recent incident in Washington State shows. But it doesn’t have to be that way. As the founder of the national organization Outdoor Afro, Rue Mapp has devoted her life to encouraging Black Americans to connect more closely with the natural world. In this interview, Mapp discusses how she approaches this work given a context in which forests are often not seen by Black people in the U.S. as healing spaces due to the terrors of the Jim Crow era. Meanwhile, she also takes on the importance of balancing accessibility to nature with rent control policies to prevent gentrification of green cities from shutting out people of color.
President Donald Trump thinks of himself as a champion against human trafficking. He addressed a White House Summit on the issue in January claiming there was a “humanitarian crisis” at the border fomented by criminal organizations and that “traffickers victimize countless women and children.” He signed an executive order and diverted $400 million in funding to combat the issue, boasting in his usual manner that “we have signed more legislation on human trafficking than any other administration has ever even thought about.” But in recent months, the administration has been found to be flouting the United States’ own anti-trafficking laws by deporting thousands of children and families seeking asylum, practically delivering them into the hands of traffickers across the border in Mexico.
The disembarkation of rescued refugees in Libya is punishable under German law, including for merchant ships. This is documented by a Bundestag assessment. However, the Foreign Office and the public prosecutors are not interested in pursuing captains and shipowners
Just your periodic reminder that the First Amendment protects some pretty hideous speech. And it does so even when uttered by public servants. Caveats apply, but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals [PDF] has overturned a lower court dismissal of a Cleveland EMS captain, who made the following comment several months after Cleveland police officers killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice as he played with a toy gun in a local park.
In the Mankon language, spoken in northwest Cameroon, mughu€ is a word for hell. Northwest Cameroon was home to more than a dozen of the 48 African asylum seekers now confined in Louisiana at Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, where COVID has taken a firm grip. Along with men from Uganda, Ghana, Kenya, Senegal, and Burkino Faso, the Cameroonians find themselves in a mughu of indefinite detention where their applications for parole are denied — unreasonably, their advocates say — or simply go unanswered.
Civil rights attorney Ben Crump said 29-year-old Jacob Blake's children were in the car he was attempting to enter as police fired seven shots at his back.
Last month we noted how the Boys and Girls Club was one of several organizations cable giant Charter (Spectrum) was using to lobby the FCC in a bid to kill off merger conditions affixed to its 2015 merger with Time Warner Cable. Many of those conditions actively protect consumers from monopoly price gouging (a 7 year temporary moratorium on arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps, for example). Other conditions worked to expand broadband into less affluent areas. Despite the conditions actually helping, you know, boys and girls... the club's letter opposed them.
Two weeks after one of the worst storms the Midwest has ever experienced swept across Iowa, the state is still reeling. The storm—known as a derecho, characterized by hurricane-force winds—killed at least three people, flattened millions of acres of farmland, and left about 550,000 households without electricity at its peak. About 100,000 of those households were still without power a week after the storm. Today marks two weeks since the storm, and nearly 1,000 people are still without power.
The Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) is a federal business lending program established by the 2020 CARES Act, intended to help small businesses retain jobs during the pandemic. In order to receive funds, companies applied and explained how many jobs they would save with the money they received. All of that data is publicly available.
Cross-referencing PPP loan data with lawsuits filed between March 13, 2020 (when the COVID emergency was officially declared) and July 29, 2020 shows that, in that period of time alone, NPEs sued 36 companies who received PPP loans. With only a few exceptions, all of the targeted recipients are small and medium-sized enterprises, ranging from a medical robotics manufacturer to an engineering CAD company to a company that makes test devices for electrical utilities.
But what they all have in common is that they were sued by non-practicing entities.
[...]
Beyond the negative impacts on PPP recipients that have been sued by NPEs, there’s one more thing that the PPP data reveals: PPP funding was used to help keep NPEs in business. Cross-referencing well-known NPE entities to the PPP loan data shows that 5 patent assertion entities received PPP loans—Dominion Harbor Enterprises, Implicit LLC, Parus Holdings, Infogation Corp., and Omnitek Partners.
It’s extremely unclear why these companies needed PPP loans to retain jobs in the first place—after all, patent litigation filings have actually increased during the COVID crisis. And there’s no reason to think that their businesses have been negatively impacted by COVID. A patent license or an infringement judgment doesn’t exactly require face-to-face contact. Nonetheless, taxpayers may wind up funding somewhere between $1.15 million and $3 million dollars worth of patent assertion activity.
Perhaps the most exceptional of these requests is from Implicit LLC, which appears to have been approved for a loan of $150,000-$350,000 to save a single job for 2.5 months. Making the most conservative assumptions possible using the PPP data, that means taxpayers may have funded Implicit to protect a single job with compensation of at least $432,000 per year.
Apparently patent assertion continues to pay off for its practitioners.
Another chapter in the pemetrexed saga: Barcelona Commercial Court No. 4 has ruled on infringement in the very first case worldwide concerning pemetrexed diarginine, a salt form of pemetrexed chosen by Sandoz in the wake of the outcome of the landmark Actavis case of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (Judgment dated 12 July 2017). In preliminary injunction proceedings, the Spanish Court held that pemetrexed diarginine was also an infringing equivalent to pemetrexed disodium and, in doing so, makes some interesting findings.
This morning, the UK Supreme Court (UKSC) issued its long-awaited opinion in the Unwired Planet/Huawei case [decision here, docket here, neutral citation: [2020] UKSC 37]. A Katpost setting out the procedural history of the case, outlining the issues and referencing previous commentary on this blog can be found here.
This is a landmark decision on the law of Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) and Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminary (FRAND) licensing practices. Below is a brief summary of each issue addressed by the UKSC.
[...]
There is a lot to unpack in this decision and this Kat is sure that patent professionals all over the world will take interest in today's decision and comment on it in the weeks, months, years and – who knows – decades to come. For today, however, it is sufficient to note that Birss J's groundbreaking assumption of international FRAND-jurisdiction is here to stay and is now likely to be followed also by other European courts.
David McCutchen is the inventor of U.S. Patent No. 7,082,640 – a shop-vac that can reverse the air flow (back-flush) in order to clear the filter. The video below shows how this is implemented. McCutchen passed-away in 2019, but assigned his patent to his company – Christy, Inc. – which is apparently named after his daughter (Christy).
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Oil States Energy Services, LLC v. Greene’s Energy Group, LLC, 138 S. Ct. 1365, 1379 (2018). In its decision in Christy, the CFC sided with the Gov’t and found that IPR cancellation is not a compensable taking. This result comports with the Court’s prior decisions in Celgene Corp. v. Peter, 931 F.3d 1342, 1360 (Fed. Cir. 2019), cert. denied, 19-1074, 2020 WL 3405867 (U.S. June 22, 2020) and Golden v. United States, 955 F.3d 981 (Fed. Cir. 2020). I’ll note that the not-a-taking holding is based upon the Federal Circuit’s legal conclusion that “IPRs do not differ sufficiently” from inter partes and ex parte reexaminations available pre-AIA.
The illegal exaction theory is interesting — Christy asks for a refund of its issuance and maintenance fees. Since this is a class-action, that amount could add-up if we look at all of the patent claims cancelled via IPR.
On August 25, 2020, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,548,645, owned by Engle Grange, LLC, an NPE. The ‘645 patent is generally directed towards a two-step key fob authentication system for an automobile. The patent is currently being asserted in litigation against Ford.
Let's start this one by noting that "COVID parties" are an incredibly dumb and insanely dangerous idea. A few people have suggested them as a way to expose a bunch of people to COVID-19 in the belief that if it's mostly young and healthy people, they can become immune by first suffering through having the disease, with a lower likelihood of dying. Of course, this leaves out the very real possibility of other permanent damage that getting COVID-19 might have and (much worse) the wider impact on other people -- including those who might catch COVID-19 from someone who got it at one of these "parties." It's also not at all clear how widespread the idea of COVID parties are. There have been reports of them, but most of them have been shown to be urban legends and hoaxes.
Many trade mark cases get decided based on how the "relevant public" understands a given sign in a given context. What public is "relevant" depends, of course, on the goods or services at issue. A recent decision from the German Federal Court of Justice looks into the question whether and when courts need to obtain expert evidence on the relevant public's understanding.
The case relates to a trade mark infringement case started by German movie production company Rat Pack Filmproduktion GmbH against US-based RatPac Entertainment LLC. Both companies are active in the movie production business but are otherwise unrelated.
[...]
Who gets to decide how a sign is understood by the "relevant public"? In this case, the Bundesgerichtshof found fault with the lower court, which decided, in its own, how professionals in the movie industry would understand the use of a particular sign in a particular context. In other words, the lower court judges had replaced fact-finding with their own personal views. This was found a violation of the appellant's constitutional right to be heard.
The lower court decision, as overturned by the Bundesgerichtshof, is certainly not the first trade mark case that has been decided on the basis of the personal views of the judges, when it should be adjudicated based on evidence (such as surveys and expert evidence). This Kat considers the Bundesgerichtshof's decision as a welcome nudge to judges tasked with fact-finding to do just that: find facts.
Nonetheless, the case still raises several questions that the (very short) decision of the Bundesgerichtshof fails to address. Firstly, the published decision does not explain what evidence, if any, was already on file about the understanding of the relevant public, in particular whether either party has introduced witnesses or conducted a survey.
In any event, it seems to this Kat that the question before the Bundesgerichtshof would be better addressed by survey evidence than by the report of a lone expert (who may simply substitute his or her personal view for those of the judges' view). Whether either party filed a survey, or asked the court to have a court expert conduct a survey, is not known.
Finally, German procedural law aficionados may be interested in knowing that this decision is a rare occurrence of the Bundesgerichtshof allowing an appeal against a denial of leave to appeal (Nichtzulassungsbeschwerde) in a trade mark case.
The European Commission reports that the number of ads placed on pirate sites is trending down. Following the introduction of a voluntary anti-piracy agreement, advertisements for major EU brands have decreased. The next step is to study how the efforts affect pirate site revenues over time.
Streaming service USTVNow has caused confusion among some users by recommending the use of a third-party Kodi add-on for years and then suddenly changing direction. In fact, the TVAddons repo recently received an aggressive cease-and-desist notice from USTVNow, alleging trademark infringement and piracy, simply for promoting an add-on that's still available on the official Kodi repo.
