Almost a month ago, German Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers launched Pulse 15, a 15-inch Ultrabook powered by high-end AMD Ryzen 4000 series processor.
Now, it has brought the brand new TUXEDO Pulse 14, a 14-inch ultra-light Linux laptop featuring AMD’s latest high-end mobile processor to deliver similar power and performance.
System76 is not one to rest on reputation. Instead of being content with an already impressive lineup, they’re always looking to up their game. With the release of the Bonobo WS, the Denver, Colorado company has done just that.
The new Bonobo WS is centered around Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake CPU and is matched with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Super Desktop GPU. You can spec the Bonobo WS with up to 128GB of RAM and up to 24TB of NVMe storage. As far as display, the Bonobo WS offers a 17" matte display with either 1080p or 4k.
After establishing a base in the Thelio System, System76’s trusty robot crew prepares to journey deeper into the cosmos. Rumor has it that the inhabitants of an unnamed star system have defied the laws of space, allowing them to transport powerful technologies with incredible ease. We hope to learn from their accomplishments and implement these techniques into future computers. However, in order to reach this star system, System76 and crew must acquire a warp drive located on a neighboring planet. This is where our mission begins.
Leading the retrieval expedition is the fearless Zoe, whose advanced features will be a big help for avoiding trouble. Alongside her is the recently upgraded 5iMON. He likes to help however he can. We’re also sending oliVIa and irVIng, a pair of prototype robots—notoriously nicknamed RogueBots—who we’re hoping will learn a thing or two from their well-functioning counterparts. Let’s check in on them in the hangar.
FreeBSD USB Audio, Kyua: An introduction for NetBSD users, Keeping backup ZFS on Linux kernel modules around, CLI Tools 235x Faster than Hadoop, FreeBSD Laptop Battery Life Status Command, and more.
game, roms, arduino, high score
Mike and Wes join us to discuss the recent Docker news, freeing your Robovac from the cloud, and why Alex really loves Terraform.
This week we’ve using new wireless headphones and test driving a Tesla. We discuss Mark Shuttleworth responding to feedback about Snapcraft, Jupiter Broadcasting regaining independence, Ayatana Indicators becoming cross-distro, Yaru Colors and we round up our picks from the tech news.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.8.5 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...
Linux kernel 5.7 has reached the end of life. It was announced at the end of May 2020. It’s now marked as EOL (End-of-Life) on the kernel.org website.
If you are using Linux distros with Linux Kernel 5.7 series then you need to update to Linux 5.8 or you can also update to Linux kernel 5.7.19 now and upgrade to the latest Linux 5.8 kernel series.
Linux kernel 5.7 was announced at the end of May 2020 and it shipped with some interesting features, including a new and improved exFAT file system, ARM Kernel Pointer Authentication for the ARM64 (AArch64) architecture, as well as several new features to optimize certain x86 CPUs, such as frequency invariant scheduler accounting and split lock detection.
It also brought vDPA device support, improved perf cgroup profiling, a thermal-aware scheduler for increased performance, a new Linux Security Module for BPF (Berkeley Packet Filter) programs, support for the userfaultfd(2) system call, support for user xattrs in cgroupfs, as well as various power management improvements.
While the Linux 5.9 kernel cycle is still young and not seeing its formal release until early October or so, Intel's open-source team has already submitted to DRM-Next their first batch of feature changes desired for Linux 5.10.
This is just the first of several pull requests expected of graphics/display updates for Intel hardware expected for Linux 5.10.
The newest Linux networking feature to get excited about that's in development is PTQ, or Per Thread Queues.
Per Thread Queues is about allowing application threads to be assigned dedicated network queues for transmit/receive. By having dedicated network queues and also employing busy polling, PTQ aims to offer higher performance networking and better traffic isolation. PTQ should be able to provide some nice uplift on high-end networking hardware in the data center as well as offering finer-grained network packet steering.
While more and more software vendors are employing link-time optimizations (LTO) and profile-guided optimizations (PGO) for leveraging the compiler to squeeze out performance, it may surprise many that Microsoft engineers are exploring LTO+PGO for the Linux kernel in their own quest of achieving greater Linux performance.
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While LTO'ing the Linux kernel isn't a new concept, we haven't heard as much about PGO'ing the kenrel. With profile-guided optimizations relying upon, well, profiles for feeding back into the compiler for assisting its optimization heuristics, it's vital that the profiles be accurate for real-world usage. Given the very diverse workloads seen on Linux and on the wide range of hardwares and drivers, it'd be a huge task generating profiles useful enough for PGO that can be used at large and would help the vast majority of users. Thus for PGO'ing the kernel it's likely on more of a niche basis to individual users/organizations that can employ PGO and cater it to their precise use-cases.
The 2020 Linux Kernel Report details the growth of the Linux kernel, which has become one of largest and most successful software collaborations in history.
According to the report from the Linux Foundation, as of August 2020, the kernel has seen more than a million recorded commits, with the recent record-breaking 5.8 release showing an average of 10.7 commits per hour.
Through the years, the size of the Linux kernel has also increased. When the first kernel was released in 1991, the report states, it consisted of 88 files and 10,239 lines of code and ran only on i386 architecture. Now, the 5.8 release consists of 69,325 files and 28,442,673 lines of code and runs on more than 30 major hardware architectures.
With NVIDIA next week expected to launch their next-generation GeForce RTX 3000 "Ampere" graphics cards, here is a fresh look at the current GeForce RTX 2000 series performance up against the latest AMD Radeon competition when using the very latest Linux graphics drivers for both vendors. This is the very latest performance showdown right now for the AMD/NVIDIA GPU performance under various Linux and Steam Play games on Ubuntu.
One of the key responsibilities of a system administrator is to ensure the safety of an organization’s computer data. This is a critical task for any organization, given that the loss of important data could have profound implications on its future prosperity.
There are a number of different strategies that a system administrator will need to use to ensure that data is preserved. For example, the person will need to maintain the computer system and/or network, by applying operating system updates and patches, by performing regular backups, and ensuring that the system is kept secure at all times. Disk cloning is a highly popular method of performing comprehensive backups of the operating system, installed software, and an organization’s data with the minimum of effort.
Looking for a graphical interface for the command line youtube-dl video downloader? Tartube is a GTK+ 3 front-end written in Python 3.
Tartube is partly based on youtube-dl-gui and runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS, and BSD. It’s a free and open-source software that can download individual videos, and even whole channels and playlists, from YouTube and all youtube-dl supported websites.
Do you distro-hop on Linux often? Ventoy might be the tool you're looking for and it's quite possibly my new best friend.
What is it? Ventoy is a free and open source application that you can stick on a USB drive, which allows you to create a reusable system for booting ISO/WIM/IMG/EFI files. Instead of wiping your USB drives over and over with new distributions, Ventoy lets you just dump the files onto the drive, reboot and get an easy list of distributions to boot.
How to access a command line on your laptop without installing Linux.
Linux is great, and I recommend trying it out, whether on real hardware or in a virtual machine, to anyone interested in Computer Science.
However, the process can be quite involved, and sometimes you don’t want to change your whole operating system or sort out installing virtual machines.
Fortunately, these days you can try out one of Linux’s greatest features, the command line, without going through all that hassle.
Application Systems Heidelberg have confirmed they have multiple games coming to Linux, and with Gamescom in full swing you can try out some of their demos. Here's a nice round-up of what's coming for you.
If you've not heard of them before; Application Systems Heidelberg are something of an industry veteran that's been around since 1985, also sometimes referred to as ASHGames. They are the publishers of multiple previous Linux titles like THE LONGING, LUNA The Shadow Dust, Lamplight City, Unforeseen Incidents and more. They don't just publish, they also get their hands dirty with development and often help on various ports too. Here's a quick look over just a few of the titles they have coming.
Prodeus from the duo at Bounding Box Software is looking intense and it's coming soon! Today it's been confirmed for an initial release into Early Access on November 10.
As a reminder Prodeus is supposed to be a retro-themed shooter but re-imagined using modern rendering, while still retaining that classic look and feel. They're going for a "AAA experience" while adhering to some technical limits to give it that authentic feel. Expect to see flying blood and pixels, colourful lighting, and plenty of user-made content with the included level editor.
Here's your chance to get stocked up on games for a while, as the Humble Store is running a massive end of Summer sale with tons discounted.
If there's something on your wishlist, given how many developers and publishers have opted into this sale it's highly likely you're going to find it going cheap. This includes some of the bigger publishers like SEGA, 2K, and Humble's own published games too.
Parkitect, the really sweet theme park building game from Texel Raptor is set two expand with two parts: a small paid DLC and a free upgrade for everyone.
The small paid ($7.99/€6.59) DLC is named Booms & Blooms, which will bring a rather fancy Effects Controller, allowing you to create your own firework shows and synchronise special effects with your custom rides. You can even place down speakers to play your own music or trigger sound effects. Also included are new rides: two new thrill rides, one new water ride, and three new coasters and it brings with it a new switch segment to allow certain rides to go backwards.
Merged together socialising with NPCs spread across a dynamic town with a platforming brawler, Sonzai sounds like it's going to be quite the treat.
"Sonzai is an innovative hand-drawn action-RPG about life, magic, and relationships. The town of Kumotoshi holds secrets; a new life and new people. What threads bind these people together? What is the true nature of magic? Thrown into a new town, form relationships with people around you. Sonzai is the debut game by trailblazing video game duo 2 Odd Diodes, hailing from Kolkata, India, and published by New York-based Top Hat Studios, Inc."
Need to make some nice models for games? Asset Forge is a nice way to do it, allowing you to kit-bash your way to create some really nice assets.
The idea is that you're given a bunch of pre-made blocks, that you can stick together to create entirely new models. Position them, rotate them around, resize them, export them into common 3D formats, render them as a 2D sprite and much more. It opens up asset creation to a new audience and it's a wonderful idea.
Asset Forge 2.1 just recently went up adding in overhauled texture tiling which should fix all currently reported issues and new options to place selection on floor or in centre. There's also various bug fixes and 50 new pre-made blocks for you to use (some are only in the Deluxe version).
Relic Hunters Legend, an upcoming free to play online co-op shoot and loot game from Rogue Snail was due to go into Early Access this year but they've given a pretty big update on what's happening.
To set the scene here a little, Rogue Snail previously developed Relic Hunters Zero and Star Vikings Forever. In 2017, they ran a Kickstarter campaign for Relic Hunters Legend which was successful at around $55,185. Since then, they've been taking on extra pre-orders with a Founders program who get early access from $19.99 to $59.99.
X4: Foundations is set to get much bigger with the upcoming 4.0 free upgrade and the massive sounding X4: Cradle of Humanity expansion due late this year.
This new expansion takes the X series back to Earth, which will significantly increase the size of the in-game universe with new sectors and it will bring in two Terran factions along with their economy, ships, weapons, stations and so on. Things are about to get political too, as they will come with their own issues and alternate perspective on the story so far.
When it comes to dating sims we've seen birds, monster high schools, various anime styled colourful casts and all sorts in between. How about creating your own villain though? That's what you'll be doing in Lovingly Evil.
Developed by Lizard Hazard Games, the same team behind Your Royal Gayness and LoveBug, they've continued their Linux support with their latest title. Lovingly Evil sees you create your very own villain with different facial features, body types, clothes, accessories, pets and more. Once ready, you will attend The Villain Conference, an event devoted to evil doers the world over who want to just have a nice time talking about having horrible times to attempt to find the one, a partner in crime to help you with your nefarious plans and perhaps a little love.
Releasing early next year, Across the Obelisk has been announced by Dreamsite Games (Empire TV Tycoon) and it looks like another good deck-builder.
"Adventure into the land of Senenthia, an old peaceful land that's been corrupted by a mysterious power. Help villagers, fight evil bosses, claim treasures and travel through an evolving world that will change with every little step that you take!"
Sounds like it's going to be overflowing with content too. Not only will it have singleplayer and multiplayer, it will also have more than 500 cards than can be upgraded, 200 different items and customizable heroes with different builds possible with tons of combinations.
The radio silence is over it appears. After Valve came back swinging with Half-Life: Alyx, it appears they're looking to spruce up an older title with Left 4 Dead 2.
Coming up on 11 years since the original release, and about 7 since the Linux version released it's set to get a major upgrade. Interestingly, it's not directly Valve doing it. This update is a collaboration with the community.
Back during the Ubuntu 20.04 cycle there was an attempt to switch the iptables back-end to Nftables by default. That plan was ultimately foiled by LXD at the time running into issues and other fallout. But now t hat those issues should be addressed and Debian Buster has switched to Nftables, the move is being re-attempted next week for Ubuntu 20.10.
Distributions like Fedora already switched to Nftables in the past, Debian is now on it, and Ubuntu 20.10 should be ready for it. Nftables as a packet filtering/classification framework for filtering network traffic is very stable at this point and addresses issues with IPTables. Nftables is generally regarded as being faster than IPTables, provide better rule-set handling, API benefits, more extensible, and other advantages.
Here you find summary all our works on Ubuntu 20.04 from Download Links to Installation Guide from Reviews to Apps Recommendations plus Beginner's Guide in one place. For us facing pandemic right now, there is even Corona Kit to help remote works with only Free Software. This summary also covers six Official Flavors from Kubuntu to Ubuntu Budgie. For everyone who wants to know Focal Fossa this summary is really for you. Enjoy!
As we noted earlier this month the first color eReaders are coming to market, but the $299 price tag of Onyx Boox Poke2 Color eReader may have some people thinking twice before purchasing this type of device. The good news is there’s now a cheap alternative with PocketBook Color available on Newegg for $229 with the exact same E-ink Kaleido 4096-color display.
This is a guest post by Promwad, a software and hardware product development company with DTV & STB development expertise and know-how. Recently, they received a package from Realtek, their partner in Taiwan. There was a Realtek RTD1395 development board inside – Hercules 32-bit OTT – with 2 GB RAM and pre-installed Android 9 OS. Promwad team tested what it’s capable of and how it can be used by hardware and software engineers who design new TV set-top boxes and develop embedded software.
Hercules OTT board is an Android IPTV box that plays videos of any formats with a maximum resolution of 4K. Streaming services such as Youtube, Netflix, etc. are supported via Dash and HLS. Also, the board supports other Android apps, including audio/video calls and conferencing.
PureOS, the operating system that powers Librem’s range of Purism products – is built upon a powerful Debian-based foundation that is stable, reliable and secure–perfect for today’s digital content creators.
One use-case scenario, is using the Librem Mini, Librem 15, or the upcoming Librem 14 as the centerpiece of your music studio. There are several programs available for free in the PureOS Store that will turn your computer into a multi-track recording studio, like the powerful and professional-grade DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) Ardour.
Avalue’s “ECS-APCL” mini-PC runs Linux or Win 10 on an Apollo Lake Celeron J3455 with 2x GbE, 4x USB, 2x M.2, and 4K dual displays via DP++ and HDMI.
Avalue announced an Intel Apollo Lake based, 120.6 x 95.2 x 49.8mm ECS-APCL mini-PC that uses the company’s EPX-APLP Pico-ITX SBC as its mainboard. The system is designed for embedded applications including digital signage and self-ordering and public information systems.
High-end robotic systems are still out of price range of most individuals, and even many research labs. Smartphones, however, with an astonishing array of computing power, sensors, and networking capabilities, are commonplace and becoming more powerful every day. To leverage these abilities, Intel researchers Matthias Müller and Vladlen Koltun have come up with OpenBot, which uses an Android smartphone as the brains, and otherwise costs about $50 to construct.
After introducing Renesas ZMOD4410 Indoor Air Quality HAT for Raspberry Pi earlier this month, Avnet is back with another Raspberry Pi HAT namely Monarch Go Pi HAT that adds LTE Cat M1 connectivity to Raspberry Pi boards and other compatible SBC’s with a 40-pin GPIO header.
The expansion board gets its name from Sequans Monarch Go LTE-M modem itself based on the Sequans Monarch GM01Q LTE IoT module that supposed to support both LTE Cat M1 (eMTC) and NB-IoT. The solution is certified by various operators in North America, Europe, and Asia, and ships with a Verizon ThingsSpace IoT SIM.
The challenge of matching precipitant (patients) for cancer trials is not easy nor simple. The current methods for patient recruitment for clinical trials result in failure [5]. Our topic of the day MatchMiner is designed to help researchers overcome this challenge.
MatchMiner is an open-source computational platform with a specific focus on patient genomic profiles to precision cancer medicine clinical trials. It is intended for researchers with software development skills.
The project is developed by researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) which is known as a comprehensive cancer treatment and research institution in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It's also an affiliate of Harvard Medical School.
[...]
MatchMiner is released as an open-source project under Apache License 2.0.
Rancher’s K3S, a slimmed-down Kubernetes distribution for resource-constrained environments such as edge deployments, joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) today at the sandbox level. Launched in February 2019, K3S has already been downloaded more than a million times and currently enjoys more than 20,000 installs per week. Shannon Williams, Rancher Labs co-founder and president, explained in an interview that its ease of use and simple packaging really led to its immediate popularity.
“When we first built K3S, we built this idea that you could build a fully compliant, fully certified Kubernetes distribution that was lightweight and small enough to run on single node type deployments – edge devices and people’s laptops. Kubernetes is quite powerful, but also quite complex to build at scale. You build something that can run 5,000 nodes, it’s going to be a little more complex than what you want to run on a single machine, and so we really built it with a lot of very sane defaults and easy deployments. When people found it, it was like, ‘Finally, this makes Kubernetes really easy, Kubernetes can be run by anyone and with very little overhead and cost.’ K3S just took off from there,” Williams said.
This is my third post related to my project, Adding UFS2 file system in Haiku
Several leading service providers, OEMs and technology vendors contribute to prplMesh including ADTRAN, ASSIA, Calix, CommScope, Deutsche Telekom, GlobalLogic, Intel, KAON, Lifemote, MaxLinear, Minim, Verizon, and Vodafone.
There are three classes of these algorithms commonly used for asymmetric encryption: RSA, DSA, and elliptic curve based algorithms. To properly evaluate the strength and integrity of each algorithm, it is necessary to understand the mathematics that constitutes the core of each algorithm.
Tor Browser 10.0a6 is now available from the Tor Browser Alpha download page and also from our distribution directory.
Note: This is an alpha release, an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommend downloading the latest stable release instead.
This week we're officially wrapping up the campaign #MoreOnionsPorFavor. Non-profits, companies, media outlets, whistleblower platforms, service providers, hackerspaces, security conferences, bloggers, and web developers joined the campaign to make the web more secure. We will email swag winners in the next few days.
Firefox 80 is available, and we're glad it's here considering Mozilla's recent layoffs. I've observed in this blog before that Firefox is particularly critical to free computing, not just because of Google's general hostility to non-mainstream platforms but also the general problem of Google moving the Web more towards Google. I had no issues building Firefox 79 because I was still on rustc 1.44, but rustc 1.45 asserted while compiling Firefox, as reported by Dan Horák. This was fixed with an llvm update, and with Fedora 32 up to date as of Sunday and using the most current toolchain available, Firefox 80 built out of the box with the usual .mozconfigs.
I'll admit it: I used to have triskaidekaphobia, otherwise known as a "fear or avoidance of the number 13." After all, I grew up in an area with many tall buildings where the elevators have no 13th floor, so it seems like I could rationalize this irrationality. I've been able to push aside this phobia, but I can completely empathize with those who don't like dealing with 13.
Which comes to our topic today: the upcoming PostgreSQL 13 release.
The fear of the number 13 was enough to prompt discussions on the upcoming version number, which given a lot of factors (including the relatively recent number scheme change) the community opted to stick to the status quo.
But the aim of this post is not dive into the psychology behind the number thirteen, but rather go into why Postgres 13 is a special, if not lucky, release.
Similar to what I wrote last year, PostgreSQL 13 is not a "This is the FEATURE release" that we've had in previous years (Partitioning! Logical Replication! Parallelism! Upsert! JSON! etc.), but rather improves upon many existing features based on real-world PostgreSQL experiences. In fact, I'd call PostgreSQL 13 the "something for everyone" release: there is very likely a feature that you will immediate benefit from by upgrading to PostgreSQL 13.
PyCharm 2020.2.1 is out with fixes for small issues, including usability problems introduced by version 2020.2. Update from within PyCharm (Help | Check for Updates), using the JetBrains Toolbox, or by downloading the new version from our website.
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If you’re on Ubuntu 16.04 or later, or any other Linux distribution that supports snap, you should not need to upgrade manually, you’ll automatically receive the new version.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now helping businesses of all shapes and sizes to make the most of their operational resources. Whether it is the HR department or the Marketing team, AI solutions are enabling organizations to extract valuable insights from every data point they can.
AI engineers all over the world are experimenting with technology to develop ways that can simplify business processes and deliver maximum customer value.
There are countless examples of AI in business where it delivers excellent value. Netflix uses AI for recommendations, Amazon uses it for product suggestions, Tesla uses it in self-driving cars, are a few among countless other examples.
In this episode, we worked on two issues. The first issue was fixing incorrect projected completion dates of tasks. We used test driven development to reveal the bug and work on the fix. The second issue add some extra data to display on a page. We picked a couple of tasks at random to fix for this stream session. The first issue related to the course view when paired with what the student’s actions.
Welcome to Early Access PyCharm, a brand-new podcast that goes behind the scenes of how the PyCharm IDE is made and all the thinking that goes into it. In the upcoming episodes, you will hear from the people who work daily to make you more productive and your code even better.
If you want to find the first number that matches some criteria, what do you do? The easiest way is to write a loop that checks numbers one by one and returns when it finds the correct one.
Let’s say we want to get the first number divided by 42 and 43 (that’s 1806). If we don’t have a predefined set of elements (in this case, we want to check all the numbers starting from 1), we might use a “while loop”.
The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.46.0. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
Close to 9,000 new cases of coronavirus in children have been identified in Florida in the past 15 days, after schools reopened for in-person instruction earlier this month.
A small detour from the usual programming to talk about my recent adventures into amateur radio. I recently obtained my Amateur Extra class license (callsign: AD2BA), the highest license level for US amateur radio operators, and I think it's worthwhile to explore my thinking. This should not be read as "why you should get your amateur radio license in 2020." I am not you. You may not be interested in amateur radio and you might not be interested in my reasons. But if you think you might be interested in amateur radio, hopefully my thinking could help provide you clarity. I also want to talk about my experience with the process of obtaining my license and upgrades.
Now is the time to support and expand the public production of pharmaceuticals and ensure that medicines are available to all who need them.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) quietly altered its guidelines on who should get tested for coronavirus, giving very little reasoning for the sudden change.
The outbreak of COVID-19 initially looked like a gift to autocrats around the world—until they botched it.
Seoul—Masks have always been common in Korea. People wear loose ones to avoid tanning their faces or to cover makeup-less mugs. Instead of calling in sick with a cold, they are expected to work with a mask to protect their coworkers. Terrible air pollution prompts about half the people to wear masks, and since antiquity, masks have come out every spring, when the Gobi Desert blankets east Asia with fine sand during Yellow Dust Season. Since the onset of the pandemic, masks have been mandated on all public transportation, including taxis, in Seoul and its suburbs. Nearly everyone complies, with drivers and other riders reminding maskless passengers of the requirement. No one takes violent offense; people are always in your business in Korea. Until late August, following a right-wing rally that caused a spike in infections, masks weren’t mandated here in most other settings. It was largely unnecessary, since almost everyone already wears them, although some establishments had posted signs requiring them.
Germany is generally known as a high-tech country producing machinery and cars. But a few decades ago, Germany passed the 50% mark, entering the service industry. The 50% mark indicated that more than half of Germany’s wealth now comes from the service industry and no longer from making machines like Porsches and Volkswagens. By 2020, the Coronavirus hit the workers of Germany’s service industry. While the car industry stopped production, office workers in Germany’s service industry went home. Workers moved from the corporate office into the home office.
Humanity is obviously in the middle of a grave crisis that “socialist” Bernie Sanders understands. In a column recently published in the Guardian with the title “The Pandemic is helping the rich get even richer. It’s time to tax their obscene wealth,” he characterizes the current conditions as,
I have retained Trump’s linguistic infelicities in this compendium of his remarks on the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is a study both troublesome and perplexing. To what end can a state trample on human rights ostensibly to preserve such objects a public health? The coronavirus lockdowns have become a feature of global politics and relentless mandatory intrusion, the health department made sovereign, assisted by vigorous policing. States have used, and continue to use all manner of measures to confine individuals to homes, mask them, restrict movement, while, in some cases, shutting them up as dissenters and hurrying them into obscurity. The end sought: viral suppression, flattening the curve, elimination. But what might be saved in terms of health will be lost in terms of liberties.
It’s unfathomable that this needs to be said, but here it is: The Covid-19 pandemic is very much not over. Nearly 1,200 people died from the virus in the past day, according to the Covid Tracking Project. Nearly 295,000 Americans were infected by the virus in the past seven days, according to the Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention. In all, there have been more than 5.7 million cases in this U.S. and nearly 179,000 deaths.
The city of Portland recently sent the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) information they requested about the chemicals contained in the crowd control agents that have been sprayed on Black Lives Matter protesters by law enforcement since May — and their documents reveal that the tear gas contains chemicals that are apt to pose a health risk to those exposed, particularly given the high quantities sprayed. The documents provide insight into the potential health and environmental hazards posed by the tear gas that has blanketed protesters in the streets of downtown Portland nearly every night for months.
The documents also confirm that the city of Portland sources its tear gas from Safariland, LLC, a "security products" manufacturer that has faced scrutiny for its role in supplying tear gas used by law enforcement to suppress protests over the death of George Floyd.
As of August 13th, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), there are 29 candidate vaccines undergoing clinical evaluation, and another 138 candidates in preclinical studies. Those in Phase 3 studies include two based on inactivated viruses, from the People's Republic of China (Sinovac and Sinopharm, the latter being developed by the Wuhan Institute of Biological Products and the Beijing Institute of Biological Products). There are two RNA-based candidate vaccines: the Moderna/NIAID vaccine and the BioNTech/Fosun Pharma/Pfizer vaccine, both of which are lipid nanoparticle encapsulated RNAs. The candidate furthest along (by accounts in the press) is the University of Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, based on a non-replicating viral vector.
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The remaining 11 vaccines in Phase 1 include a vaccine based on a measles-based replicating viral vector (Institute Pasteur/Themis/Univ. of Pittsburg CVR/Merck Sharp & Dohme), a plant-derived virus-like particle (VLP)-based vaccine (Medicago Inc.) and non-replicating viral vectors (from Gamaleya Research Institute and ReiThera/LEUKOCARE/Univercells). Clover Biopharmaceuticals Inc./GSK/Dynavax is developing a "native-like trimeric subunit Spike protein vaccine," and Medigen Vaccine Biologics Corporation/NIAID/Dynavax has a protein subunit vaccine in Phase 1 clinical trials, while Vaxine Pty Ltd/Medytox is developing a vaccine based on a recombinant Spike protein formulated with Admaxâ⢠adjuvant. Curevac and the Imperial College of London have RNA-based vaccines in clinical trials.
Administration of these vaccines is almost universally intramuscular, typically requiring more than one dose where the doses are separated by 14-28 days (some with as long as 56 days between doses); the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is effective with a single dose.
Of the 138 candidate vaccines in preclinical trials, 12 are DNA-based; 9 are inactivated virus; 3 comprise live, attenuated virus; 19 are non-replicating viral vectors, typically Adenovirus 5 or another adenovirus type; 50 comprise protein subunits, often the viral Spike protein; 17 are replicating viral vectors, using vesicular stomatitis virus, influenza virus, or other viruses; 16 are RNA vaccines, usually mRNA-based; and 12 comprise virus-like particles.
The South African government is investigating reports of large-scale “looting” of its $26 billion coronavirus rescue package, launched to cushion the economic impact of the pandemic on struggling households.
Amid rising public anger, the ruling ANC party has called a meeting of its National Executive Committee to begin on Friday to probe corruption within its ranks – from the theft of food parcels meant for the poor through to tenders for personal protective equipment.
President Cyril Ramaphosa took the unprecedented step this week of publishing the names of all companies that had won coronavirus-related contracts – a response to a tide of reports of tenders being farmed out to the families and friends of the well connected.
In a letter sent last week to all members and branches of the ANC, Ramaphosa said, “our movement has been and remains deeply implicated in South Africa’s corruption problem”, and described COVID-19-related graft as “an unforgivable betrayal to millions of South Africans”.
Position, velocity and time (PVT) information can be a ‘nice to have’, but in other circumstances knowing place and time has legal or military importance as well. Heavy vehicles for example are typically outfitted with tachographs that track driver speed and/or location. This has importance for rest regulations, but also to check if loads are actually from where they say they are.
Our Global Navigation Satellite Systems so far are broadcasting unauthenticated data, at least to civilian users. Or in other words, a satellite sends us information, but we have no way to determine if the messages are really coming from GPS, GLONASS, Galileo or BeiDou.
The two main OSNMA data structures (HKROOT, which carries the DSM, and MACK blocks) are both transmitted in the OSNMA field of Galileo pages. 15 pages make up one subframe.
DSM data is transmitted over multiple subframes, but MACK blocks are strictly localized to a subframe. Each subframe can carry 1, 2 or 3 MACK blocks. Even though a MACK block carries a signature and a key, this signature and key are unlikely to refer to the subframe that contains that MACK block.
Up to 200,000 patient records from Office 365 and Google G Suite exposed by hardcoded credentials and other improper access controls.
You can view the record of our legal dispute in our August 13, August 17, and August 23 filings.
UPDATE (August 26):
Apple is blocking Fortnite updates and new installs on the App Store, and has said they will terminate our ability to develop Fortnite for Apple devices. As a result, Fortnite’s newly released Chapter 2 - Season 4 update (v14.00), will not release on iOS and macOS on August 27.
Developed in 1998 alongside the first-person shooter Unreal, the Unreal Engine has become a cornerstone of Epic’s business and the gaming industry at large. It’s currently used by dozens of game makers, Hollywood production and special effects studios, and other firms in the 3D rendering and computer graphics businesses.
Essentially, the legal fight with Apple will, in short order, split Fortnite into two. On PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, and Android, Fortnite players will have access to all of the new content that’s set to arrive with the potentially Marvel-themed new season. Most new Fortnite seasons pack in significant changes, including updates to the map, new cosmetics, and new in-game rewards as part of the game’s battle pass subscription. If you’re a Marvel fan, it could be a particularly interesting one.
On Apple devices, though, players will miss out on all of that new content. The game will basically be in stasis.
In just a few clicks, save WordPerfect documents in the popular EPUB eBook format for easy publishing to popular devices. Improved file format compatibility enables users to save WordPerfect files in OpenDocument Text (ODT) format, while updates to PDF functionality give control over the resolution of linked and embedded content. When it comes time to print, take advantage of improved support for labels, table headers, and more.
Though some users across the U.S. and parts of Europe took to social media to express relief at missing on-camera meetings, key workers and front-line users such as teachers — who remain heavily reliant on videoconferencing to get work done — found themselves unable to perform their jobs.
Zoom did not explain what caused the outage, saying on its status page only that it had found the issue and resolved it. (Downdector.com, which tracks various tech outages, showed the spike in problems on Monday that arose when the platform problems began.)
For three weeks, a 290-bed medical facility in upstate New York has been grappling with a cybersecurity incident that prevented doctors from accessing patients’ electronic medical records (EMRs).
Popular podcast host and cultural commentator Joe Budden said he will leave Spotify after a two-year exclusive run of his “The Joe Budden Podcast with Rory and Mal” on the service, claiming the audio provider is “pillaging” his audience.
In his most recent podcast episode on Wednesday, Aug. 26, Budden spent the better part of three-plus hours deconstructing his deal with the streaming platform, suggesting that he will no longer be on Spotify when the exclusive contract expires in a month — representing about seven more episodes.
Every so often, we hear an update about Google's open-source Fuchsia operating system, just never anything on when (or if) it will actually release. That has not changed. However, Google's Fuchsia OS did reach an important milestone of sorts—it has been certified and listed with the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG).
[...]
The listing specifically highlights the "Google Sapphire 1.0 Bluetooth Core Host Solution." There are not any telling details associated with the listing, just that it went live today. However, Sapphire is the codename for Fuchsia's Bluetooth stack. In addition, the listing also mentions Fuchsia in the description field, so we know for sure it's related to Google's upcoming OS.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr and nginx), Fedora (firefox, firejail, and lua), Gentoo (chromium, docker, firefox and thunderbird, net-snmp, postgresql, and wireshark), openSUSE (chromium, claws-mail, dovecot23, libreoffice, and python3), Oracle (kernel), Scientific Linux (firefox), SUSE (apache2, graphviz, and libxslt), and Ubuntu (firefox, libmysofa, and squid3).
A recently patched truncation bug in the Node.js implementation of bcrypt resulted in inadequate encryption strength in certain use cases, according to a security advisory that was issued last week.
Node.js bcrypt is a popular hashing library with thousands of dependent packages and more than 500,000 weekly downloads.
The truncation bug caused very long inputs to be shortened to a few bytes, making the hashes extremely insecure. First reported in January, the vulnerability was patched in version 5.0.0 of the library.
As we've been noting, Trump's executive order attempting to ban TikTok is not only legally unsound, it's not coherent policy. Chinese state hackers, with their unlimited budgets, can simply obtain this (and far greater) data from any of the thousands of companies in the existing, unaccountable international adtech sector, our poorly secured communications networks, or the millions of Chinese-made IOT devices or "smart" products Americans attach to home and business networks with reckless abandon. The U.S. has no privacy law and is a mess on the privacy and security fronts. We're an easy mark and TikTok is the very least of our problems.
Roughly half of all Russians (45 percent) who have heard of the technology of implanting computer chips in people say they fear being “implanted” without their knowledge, according to a new survey by the state-run pollster VTsIOM. At the same time, however, just 41 percent of respondents said they believe secret chip implantation is even possible.
The government in Denmark has fired 3 top officials from the country’s foreign intelligence agency, the Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste (FE), following revelations from a whistleblower. The officials, including the head of the agency, Lars Finden, have been “relieved of duty for the time being” following the release of a trove of documents. The documents detailed that the FE has been illegally spying on Danish citizens in the last six years and were released by an unnamed whistleblower to the independent regulator of Danish security services which is known as Tilsynet med Efterretningstjenesterne (TET).
Two years ago, Privacy News Online warned that the growing number of large-scale DNA databases were likely to become a serious threat to people’s privacy. Sadly, things have not improved since then. The increasing police use of DNA sites to find suspects for serious crimes, as described in that post, led one of the leaders in this sector, GEDmatch, to give its users the right to opt out from having their DNA compared to crime scene material. Except that it turned out to be little more than “smoke and mirrors“, as the The Legal Genealogist site put it. The same year, researchers discovered that information about a person’s DNA could be extracted from the GEDmatch site by anyone, using a variety of simple tricks.
Mayer joined TikTok in May, leaving his position as head of direct-to-consumer content at Disney where he oversaw the launch of Disney Plus. Mayer was also crucial to some of Disney’s key acquisitions, including Marvel Entertainment in 2009, Lucasfilm in 2012, and the $71.3 billion acquisition of 21st Century Fox last year. Mayer left not long after Disney named Bob Chapek the company’s new CEO following Bob Iger’s move to executive chairman. Mayer was long considered a longtime frontrunner for the CEO position.
Mayer joined TikTok as CEO in May, leaving one of the top jobs at The Walt Disney Co. For more than a decade, he helped the world’s largest entertainment company strategize and expand its offerings. He provided the rationale for acquiring Pixar Animation Studios, Marvel Entertainment, Lucasfilm, and the entertainment assets of Twenty-First Century Fox Inc. for $71 billion in March. Mayer’s appointment by ByteDance had been expected to smooth relations between the social media giant and Washington, and enforce the notion that TikTok operates as a separate entity from its Beijing-based parent.
In a letter to employees obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, Mayer said that the political environment had caused him to reconsider the job. "In recent weeks, as the political environment has sharply changed, I have done significant reflection on what the corporate structural changes will require, and what it means for the global role I signed up for," he wrote. "Against this backdrop, and as we expect to reach a resolution very soon, it is with a heavy heart that I wanted to let you all know that I have decided to leave the company."
Vanessa Pappas, the general manager of TikTok in North America, Australia and New Zealand, will serve as the company's interim CEO.
Before joining TikTok in May, Mayer was The Walt Disney Company’s chairman of the direct-to-consumer & international division. He previously served as senior executive vice president and chief strategy officer of Disney.
Editor’s Note: Surveillance capitalism is everywhere. But it’s not the result of some wrong turn or a rogue abuse of corporate power — it’s the system working as intended. This is the subject of Cory Doctorow’s new book, which we’re thrilled to publish in whole here on OneZero. This is how to destroy surveillance capitalism.
With major web browsers now including privacy protections against cookie-based tracking, there’s been a rise in the use of fingerprinting – and researchers now say they’ve developed a way to spot and prevent these stealthy tracking techniques.
FP-Inspector, created by a team from the University of Iowa, Mozilla, and the University of California, uses a syntactic-semantic approach to detect fingerprinting (FP) scripts, using machine learning models based on static and dynamic JavaScript analysis.
Unlike techniques such as API changes and network request blocking, which require manual analysis, the open source tool automates the process of detection by extracting features such as syntax and execution from scripts and training a classifier to detect fingerprinting.
The Kindle sends device information, usage metadata, and details about every interaction with the device (or app) while it's being used. All of this is linked directly to the reader account.
Opening the app, reading a book, flipping through a few pages, then closing the book sends over 100 requests to Amazon servers.
The Arizona investigation was kicked off by a 2018 Associated Press article showing that Google services will store location data from your Android device or iPhone — even if you “pause” a setting called “Location History.” Even with that setting switched off, some Google apps automatically store location, along with a timestamp, anyway.
“I agree with the article,” a Google employee wrote in the documents released today. “Location off should mean location off; not except for this case or that case.”
Tomorrow at 17:00UTC, Tor Project is hosting the next session of PrivChat, titled "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Censorship Circumvention". You can watch it live on Youtube.
A new book on Stephen Miller, the architect of the Trump administration’s unprecedented attack on immigrant communities and the immigration system, describes the White House adviser as a dangerous man bringing white nationalist ideology to the highest levels of government. “This is what shapes the immigration policy,” says Jean Guerrero, author of “Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda.” Miller, descended from Jewish immigrants, has been obsessed with fighting multiculturalism since his teenage years and has steadily climbed the right-wing political ladder to become one of Donald Trump’s most trusted associates. He is credited with many of Trump’s most vicious anti-immigrant policies, including separating immigrant children from their parents. “Stephen Miller primarily has been targeting families,” says Guerrero. “It becomes clear that for Stephen Miller, this is not about national security, this is not about keeping out criminals. This is about reengineering the ethnic flows into this country to keep Brown and Black families out.”
For as long as Israeli leaders continue to see a war on Gaza as a political opportunity and a platform for their own electoral games, the siege will carry on, relentlessly.€
Goodbye peace plan and any prospect of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations over a two-state solution.
A Facebook representative said they could not comment at this time, citing an ongoing investigation. However, the platform confirmed to The Verge that the Kenosha Guard page had been removed for violating the platform’s Dangerous Individuals and Organizations policy, which was expanded to include militia groups earlier this month. Facebook also confirmed that the August 25th event listing was in violation of platform policies.
Constant attacks by some US elites on China will, according to some observers, diminish and disappear once the US presidential election is over in November 2020. This is unlikely to happen for at least two reasons. One, the issues that underscore the targeting of China are fundamental in nature and go beyond elections and personalities. Two, at the root of some of these issues are questions of power— of dominance and control— whose resolution will span decades if not centuries.
Climate heating must have already begun to result in changing oceans. The next step is to confirm and monitor this change.
Massive southern shelves split by climate-induced hydofracturing can collapse in hours—or even minutes—fueling dangerous sea level rise and coastal flooding.€
"The Green New Deal is not radical," said Sen. Bernie Sanders. "Having a president in office who calls climate change a hoax—that's radical."
"Little time remains to protect life and property," said the National Hurricane Center.
The two-seater prototype plane made the test flight in good weather and to promote renewable energy. Parachutist Raphael Domjan reached a speed of 150 kilometres per hour during his jump, landing near the project base in Payerne.
Environmental advocates say Pennsylvania’s participation in RGGI would be a “game-changer,” but climate science deniers and other fossil fuel allies€ claim it would be too costly and kill jobs in a state where the coal and fracked gas industries have long dominated the energy€ landscape.
Shortly after a devastating wildfire destroyed the small town of Paradise in Northern California in November 2018, Pacific Gas & Electric hired an obscure waste disposal company to help it rebuild from the fire.
PG&E owed the firm millions of dollars when it abruptly terminated its business relationship this year. The utility giant announced that two of its employees lost their jobs over allegations they had taken bribes from the company, known as Bay Area Concrete Recycling.
The disastrous August 4 explosion of an ammonium nitrate shipment in Beirut brought Lebanon’s political and economic turmoil to the fore in US media, with reports that it’s likely “the blast will make the spiraling economic situation worse” (Vox, 8/5/20). That Lebanon is enduring a major financial crisis was made clear; that US sanctions regimes have contributed to the problem was obscured in the coverage. However, America’s economic strangulation of Iran and Syria is harming Lebanon, as are similar policies directed against the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
"For billionaires, this is a heads we win, tails you lose economy, boosted by Trump policies to funnel wealth to the top."
"Lowe's and Home Depot can continue to contribute to the poisoning of people and environment, or they can help their customers take on the existential crises of pesticide-induced diseases."
"Delinking health insurance with jobs should be a top policy priority."
"It sickened me to my core to watch that spectacle given every directive this administration has taken from day one to demonize immigrant communities, including naturalized ones."
The GOP convention reminds us that this freakshow of mayhem can exhaust and distract from the mission at hand.
With less than eighty days until Election Day and a pandemic surging across the country, disinformation continues to spread across social media platforms, posing dangers to public health, voting rights, and our democracy. Time is short and social media platforms need to ramp up their efforts to combat election disinformation and online voter suppression — just as they have with COVID-19 disinformation.
The above photograph, taken by Vasily Fedosenko for Reuters, has become one of the most famous snapshots from the start of the protests Belarus. It was taken during the night of August 9–10, near the Hero City Obelisk in downtown Minsk, where most of the mass arrests took place. The photo shows an officer from the security forces in a black balaclava, gesturing towards a half-naked protester, who is lying on the ground.
Svetlana Alexievich, the Belarusian oral historian who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, says President Alexander Lukashenko needs to talk not just to the Kremlin but also to his constituents. “For this to happen, we need the help of the world and maybe Russia and Putin, if we can get it,” Alexievich told journalists in Minsk before reporting for questioning by state investigators in connection with her membership in the opposition’s Coordination Council.€
The climate crisis is to blame for these fires, which are growing in number and intensity every year. It’s also to blame for the increasing number and virulence of hurricanes now hitting the Gulf and Southeast, flash floods along the Eastern seaboard, and fierce winds across middle America.
An arbitration court in Moscow has ordered anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny (now in a coma in Berlin after an apparent poisoning) to pay more than 3.3 million rubles ($47,725) to the “Druzhba Narodov” meat-processing plant in a defamation lawsuit.€
Ever since Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny was hospitalized in Omsk after becoming suddenly ill aboard a flight to Moscow, his family and aides have sparred in tweets and news headlines against local medical officials. For nearly two days, the hospital treating Navalny in intensive care refused to issue the paperwork needed to release him for transfer to a clinic in Berlin. The oppositionists’ supporters believe doctors delayed the medical evacuation to ensure that any traces of poison in Navalny’s system would be undetectable by the time he was turned over to independent experts. In the media and online, physicians in Omsk are now waging a PR counteroffensive, pressing German doctors for their supposed proof that Navalny was poisoned and condemning Navalny’s allies for sullying their reputations.
Vladimir Putin has expressed interest in a “thorough and objective investigation of all the circumstances” surrounding Alexey Navalny’s sudden illness, the Russian president said in a phone call on August 26 with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, according to a Kremlin readout of the conversation.
It’s been six days since Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny fell violently ill and went into a coma, and during today’s conversation with Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, journalists asked about little else.€
Should opposition politician Alexey Navalny survive his battle with a still-unknown poison, he’ll find a no-less combative Evgeny Prigozhin waiting for him in Russia. The catering magnate with alleged interests in mercenary work and troll factories has just personally acquired the rights to the 88-million-ruble ($1.2-million) debt awarded to the “Moskovsky Shkolnik” food production facility in a civil suit last October against Navalny, Lyubov Sobol, and the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK).
Shortly after 9 pm on December 30, 2007, Mwai Kibaki held a Bible in his right hand and was sworn in for a third term as Kenya’s president. It was a hurried, late-night provocation that even the most authoritarian administrations had never before attempted. Just a few hours earlier, the Electoral Commission of Kenya (ECK) had declared Kibaki the winner of the election held on December 27. The ECK did this knowing the opposition had accused the government of rigging the vote. In hindsight, the swearing-in was the culmination of events that constitute an inflection point for Kenya—one with lessons for any fragile democracy, but especially for the United States under President Donald Trump.
I missed night one of the Republican National Convention. Deliberately. We’re all practicing some forms of self-care during the pandemic—that was mine. When I woke up, early, I saw “cocaine,” “Adderall” and “Cecily Strong” trending on Twitter, at least here in New York. In a way, that was all I needed to know.
At the second night of the Republican National Convention in Charlotte, speakers largely ignored the devastating public health and economic crisis facing the country as the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus nears 180,000 and tens of millions of Americans are out of work and struggling to pay for food and housing. We feature excerpts from the night, which included praise for President Trump’s actions in the Middle East and more dire warnings about a Joe Biden presidency, as well as several speeches that appear to violate the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from using their office for partisan political activity.
"The Trump administration and Secretary Pompeo have shown a gross disregard not only of basic ethics, but also a blatant willingness to violate federal law for political gain."
“Do yourself a favor and read this thread,” tweeted scheduled RNC speaker Mary Ann Mendoza—which included the claim that ”‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ is not a fabrication. And it certainly is not anti-Semetic [sic] to point out this fact” (CNN, 8/25/20).The Republican National Convention had to pull a scheduled speaker from its Tuesday night lineup when it was discovered that anti-immigrant advocate Mary Ann Mendoza had peddled antisemitic conspiracy theories on Twitter that very same day, including a link to the hoary Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This is par for the right-wing course; antisemitic incidents in the United States hit their highest peak in the last four decades in 2019, according to the Associated Press (5/12/20), and a great deal of it has been tied to the racial extremism coming from the Trump administration and its defenders. But a few media outlets want to pin this as much or more on “the left,” based on a lot of distortion and dishonest engagement.
If you watched this week’s Republican National Convention in complete ignorance of US politics, you’d think the GOP had achieved a remarkable degree of racial parity. A plethora of people of color spoke on behalf of Donald Trump’s reelection—conspicuously so. Just on the first night, the RNC gave pride of place to Maryland congressional candidate Kim Klacik, Georgia Democratic state Representative Vernon Jones, NFL star Herschel Walker, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, and former UN ambassador Nikki Haley. As David Dayen of The American Prospect quipped, “Looking just at the race and ethnicity of current elected officials who spoke on the first two nights of the Republican National Convention, the GOP is 41.7% nonwhite.” But of course this impression is a false one. The Republican Party is overwhelmingly white, both in its voting base and its elected officials.
I’ve been a postal driver for over 20 years. I’ve never seen an attack on the service like this one.
The second night of the Republican National Convention was bursting with disappointments for those of us who live to suffer, none more stinging than the sudden disappearance from the speaker’s list of Mary Ann Mendoza. Mendoza is a so-called “angel mom” and a member of the Trump campaign’s advisory board who enjoys more than 40,000 followers on Twitter.
The opening night of this week’s Republican National Convention (RNC) prominently featured a speech by Patricia and Mark McCloskey, the wealthy white couple who illegally brandished firearms at Black Lives Matter protesters in St. Louis, Missouri.
"Sending federal law enforcement to Kenosha will only make matters worse. We don't need more police, we need to end police violence."
Protests continue in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where police shot an unarmed Black man in the back seven times as he was getting into his car, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Jacob Blake was reportedly breaking up a fight before police shot him, and the shooting was witnessed by his three young children. On Tuesday, the situation escalated further when at least one white gunman opened fire on a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters. Two people were killed, and a third was injured, as police continued a violent crackdown on protesters demanding justice for Blake. We speak with Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes, who says the police response to Blake was completely unjustified. “There’s no way that any officer could look at that video and say that that’s the way policing should happen,” he says. “We need police departments, sheriff’s departments to acknowledge that there is a real problem in the culture of policing.”
At least two separate Facebook users reported the account for inciting violence prior to the shooting, The Verge has learned. In each case, the group and its counter-protest event were examined by Facebook moderators and found not to be in violation of the platform’s policies.
One user, who asked not to be identified by name, said she had reported the Kenosha Guards event in advance of the protest. Facebook moderators responded that the event itself was not in violation of platform policy, but specific comments could be reported for inciting violence. She reported a specific comment threatening to put nails in the tires of protestors’ cars, but it too was found to be within the bounds of Facebook policy.
Special Agent in Charge Renn Cannon said he is pulling agents from fraud and organized crime teams to focus on "acts of violence and federal crimes" committed during nearly three months of unrest. The FBI respects the rights of peaceful protesters to assemble and demonstrate, but near nightly acts of violence and vandalism associated with the protests have created a dangerous and volatile situation, he said.
The cause was an injudicious trip to Ireland, during which the government claims he breached covid-19 public-health guidelines. For a start, he failed to go into quarantine for 14 days upon his arrival. Then he attended a golf-society dinner along with other public figures, which created a furore in Ireland and led to the resignation of a minister who also attended the event. In his resignation letter Mr Hogan said that the controversy “was becoming a distraction” from his work.
A Tibet advocacy group has launched a campaign this week to raise awareness of China’s human rights abuses in Tibet, with billboards set up in New York and London in places where millions of people are expected to see them, the group said on Wednesday.
The billboards, which will remain place for the next two weeks, have been designed to provide “some very basic facts about Tibet,” John Jones—campaign and advocacy director for the London-based Free Tibet—told RFA’s Tibetan Service.
Summary: Content moderation questions are not just about the rules that internet platforms create for themselves to enforce: they sometimes involve users themselves enforcing some form of the site’s rules, or their own rules, within spaces created on those platforms. One interesting case study involves the US Army’s esports team and how it has dealt with hecklers.
Demonstrators have demanded the resignation of the prime minister, the dissolution of parliament, a redrafting of the constitution and an amendment to a lese-majesty law that controls commentary and criticism of the royal family.
A Finnish conductor blamed for the row over the Last Night of the Proms has hit back as those close to her insist that BBC bosses were behind the decision to replace Rule, Britannia!
Dalia Stasevska is said to be “heartbroken” by personal attacks on her as her friends insist she did not demand that Rule, Britannia! and Land Of Hope And Glory were pulled from the Last Night of the Proms because of associations with colonialism and slavery.
A major three-week hearing in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition case is scheduled in London on September 7. However, the impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic will likely prevent dozens of journalists from around the world from reporting on proceedings if the Westminster Magistrates Court does not take action.
Judge Vanessa Baraitser, who is presiding over Assange’s case, previously stated, “In principle, there is no objection to the use of the cloud video platform, but there are limited licenses to use that platform and it is not generally something the court is involved in.” She added, “Applications must be made to the Old Bailey.”
We finally have police camera video from the incident at the end of last season’s NBA finals when Toronto Raptors President Masai Ujiri engaged in a “confrontation” with Alameda Country police. The police version of events was always doubtful: They immediately put out the idea that after the Raptors won the title, Ujiri attempted to rush the court without credentials, and on the way physically assaulted an officer, striking him in the face. They recommended prosecution to the district attorney last summer, who took one look at the facts of the case and threw it in the trash.
Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal revealed that ICE and CBP were buying location data from third-party data brokers -- something that seemed like a calculated move to dodge the requirements of the Supreme Court's Carpenter decision. There's a warrant requirement for historical cell site location data, but the two agencies appear to believe gathering tons of "pseudonymized" data to "help identify and locate" undocumented immigrants isn't a Fourth Amendment problem.
This is without precedent in the history of sports: The Milwaukee Bucks, arguably the best team in the NBA, have gone on strike, refusing to leave the locker room for game five of their playoff series against the Orlando Magic. Their decision stopped the sports world on a dime, and shortly after the news, the Milwaukee Brewers announced that the team would also skip tonight’s MLB game. The Brewers and Bucks are refusing to play in solidarity with the demand for justice for Jacob Blake, who was shot in the back seven times over the weekend by police in nearby Kenosha.
"We've already blocked this policy in two federal courts—and we plan to do so again," said the ACLU.
Police officials in Russia’s Kabardino-Balkarian Republic have called for an internal investigation into the circumstances surrounding the suicide of 85-year-old Nikolai Zakharchenko. Local police in the town of Nartkala had previously launched a criminal case against the elderly man for illegally manufacturing narcotics. Mediazona, citing the lawyer representing the deceased man’s widow, reports that the police officers involved are now facing an inquiry under the article 110 of the Russian Criminal Code: incitement to suicide.
The following was originally posted at Ongoing History Of Protest Songs.
Acclaimed singer-songwriter Justin Townes Earle tragically died on August 20, 2020, at the age of 38 years old.
“Today’s decision means we will never know for sure whether anti-Native American bias influenced the jury’s decision to sentence Lezmond Mitchell to death. Yet we do know that Mr. Mitchell’s death sentence represents an unprecedented infringement on the sovereignty of the Navajo Nation, which has steadfastly opposed his execution," attorneys Jonathan Aminoff and Celeste Bacchi said in a statement released Wednesday morning.
Ota Benga was kidnapped from what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1904 and taken to the US to be exhibited. Journalist Pamela Newkirk, who has written extensively about the subject, looks at the attempts over the decades to cover up what happened to him.
More than a century after it drew international headlines for exhibiting a young African man in the monkey house, the Bronx Zoo in New York has finally expressed regret.
Police fired tear gas for a third night Tuesday to disperse protesters who had gathered outside Kenosha’s courthouse, where some shook a protective fence and threw water bottles and fireworks at officers lined up behind it. Police then used armored vehicles and officers with shields pushed back the crowd when protesters ignored warnings to leave a nearby park.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers had called for calm Tuesday, while also declaring a state of emergency under which he doubled the National Guard deployment in Kenosha from 125 to 250. The night before crowds destroyed dozens of buildings and set more than 30 fires in the city’s downtown.
“To Protect and Server” is a reconfiguration of Google’s popular “ReCaptcha” software that helps protect websites from spam and abuse. A “CAPTCHA” is a turing test to tell humans and bots apart. “It is easy for humans to solve, but hard for “bots” and other malicious software to figure out. By adding reCAPTCHA to a site, you can block automated software while helping your welcome users to enter with ease.” Google’s system uses images that a human must identify and decode in order to pass a digital barrier of entry.
The practice is meant to turn girls into women - and thus into marriage material. For their fathers, the calculus is simple: The earlier their daughters get married, the sooner they get the "bride price.” But the earlier the girls become dependent on their husbands, the faster they also become mothers, closing the cycle as the next generation of girls is born into this system.
Four principles – humanity, impartiality, neutrality, and independence – are considered the foundations of humanitarian action. Without them, it is said, aid workers can neither be legitimate, nor effective.
For too long, it has also been suggested that international organisations should dominate humanitarian action because only they can be truly neutral third parties in war.
It’s time to question these assumptions, especially when racial justice campaigners are rightly demanding that power be relinquished to national humanitarians in whose countries wars are being fought out – and when the COVID-19 pandemic has placed local aid workers even more at the forefront.
At such a moment, it is important to dispel two persistent myths. You don’t have to be neutral to be a good humanitarian; and you don’t have to be an international aid worker to be neutral.
The neutral humanitarian model that has become so dominant as an international norm today comes largely from the influence of Swiss political ideology. This modern Swiss commitment to neutrality was driven by two men from the same great Genevan family. In 1815, Charles Pictet de Rochemont, a Swiss politician, negotiated international recognition of Switzerland’s political neutrality, so creating the signature value of modern Swiss internationalism. In 1965, Jean Pictet, the senior lawyer at the International Committee of the Red Cross, affirmed humanitarian neutrality as the third of his famous “fundamental principles” for the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement.
To get a Chromebook that you know will get longer term support, you should first look at our list on the second page of this article and determine just how “fresh” you want it. If, for example, $300 for a Chromebook with three years of updates left is fine with you, you can pick out one like the Asus Chromebook Flip C101PA and buy that specific Chromebook with the confidence that you have August 2023 before the OS gets visited by Valkyries. We wouldn’t advise buying a Chromebook with less than three years of updates left on the clock if you can help it.
The government bestows temporary monopolies in the form of patents to promote future innovation and economic growth. Antitrust law empowers the government to break up monopolies when their power is so great and their conduct is so corrosive of competition that they can dictate market outcomes without worrying about their rivals. In theory, patent and antitrust law serve the same goals—promoting economic and technological development—but in practice, they often butt heads.
The relationship between antitrust and patent law is especially thorny when it comes to “standards-essential patents” or “SEPs.” These are patents that cover technologies considered “essential” for implementing standards—agreed-upon rules and protocols that allow different manufacturers’ devices to communicate with each other using shared network infrastructure. Some technology standards become standards by achieving widespread adoption through market forces (the QWERTY keyboard layout is on example). But many are the result of extensive deliberation and cooperation among industry players (including competitors), like the MP3 audio compression and 3G wireless communication standards.
That inclination, which may very well--but won't necessarily--become the actual decision (the judge said a written order would come down shortly), is exactly what Epic's lawyers were pursuing as a Plan B when they focused on Unreal Engine in their reply brief.
Judge Gonzalez Rogers reminded attendees of the fact that a TRO needs to be replaced by a preliminary injunction (PI) after 14 days--unless extended by consent--or it simply goes out of effect. Therefore, even if Epic obtained a TRO now, Apple could still try to prevail with respect to Unreal Engine a couple of weeks later--and this goes both ways, so whatever Epic doesn't win immediately, it could still pursue in the next round. The PI hearing has been scheduled for September 28, so the TRO decision will be in effect for about a month. Whatever the court decides on Epic's TRO motion won't be appealable, but a PI decision will be.
Even though this emergency motion had to be briefed over what was basically just a long weekend, the judge was undoubtedly aware of everything that was in the parties' pleadings and the attached declarations and documents. She's familiar with some of the fundamental issues raised by Epic because she's been presiding over two other App Store antitrust cases (Pepper and Cameron) for some time.
The European Patent Office (EPO) issued two patents in the largest European markets. Patent number 2,563,429 expires in 2031 and covers a device for the suprachoroidal administration of any therapeutic agent. Patent number 2,916,827 expires in 2033 and covers the use of XIPEREâ⢠(triamcinolone acetonide suprachoroidal injectable suspension) and the treatment of uveitis and other posterior ocular diseases with triamcinolone acetonide.
In its Judgment of 26 August 2020, [2020] UKSC 37, the UK Supreme Court affirms the lower court decisions ([2017] EWHC 711 (Pat) and [2019] EWCA Civ 38) in the related cases Unwired Planet v. Huawei and ZTE v. Conversant [I discuss the High Court’s 2017 decision here]. The judgment largely favors the patent holders, and holds that a UK court may enjoin the sale of infringing products that incorporate an industry standard if the parties do not enter into a global license for patents covering that standard. The court covers a lot of important ground, including the parties’ compliance with EU competition law under Huawei v. ZTE (CJEU, C-170/13, 2015) (€¶€¶ 128-158) and the appropriateness of injunctive remedies under UK law (€¶€¶ 159-169). But in this post, I will focus on what I consider to be the most significant aspect of the court’s judgment – its interpretation of the patent policy of the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), an interpretation that largely determines the outcome of the case and could have far-reaching ramifications for the technology sector.
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While I applaud the UK Supreme Court’s shift from a focus on competition law to the language and intent of the ETSI patent policy, I am concerned about its conclusions regarding the authority of one country’s courts to determine global FRAND rates, the availability of injunctive relief against standards implementers and the demotion of non-discrimination as an independent prong of the FRAND analysis.
One silver lining in this cloud, perhaps, is that the Court’s judgment, which relies so heavily on the particulars of the ETSI policy, is thus limited to the ETSI policy. It is unclear how much weight its findings would have for a court, whether in the UK or elsewhere, assessing participants’ obligations under FRAND policies adopted by different SSOs such as TIA and ATIS (as in FTC v. Qualcomm), not to mention SSOs such as IEEE that have adopted language expressly contravening some of the interpretations that the Court makes with respect to ETSI.
Incoming WIPO head pledges closer cooperation with Ibero-American offices – The Mexican IP Office (IMPI) has posted details of a recent meeting with heads of the various Ibero-American IP offices, as well as the president of the European Patent Office (EPO), António Campinos, and the incoming director general of the World IP Organisation (WIPO), Daren Tang. In the meeting, the director general of the IMPI, underlined that close cooperation is especially important to share good practice during the covid-19 crisis. Tang, who was attending his first meeting with the region’s IP office collective, stated that when he begins his role from 1 October 2020, he will “work to further strengthen ties between countries and serve as a bridge between regions”. Expanding on that, Tang highlighted his commitment to bring “technological and digitisation tools” to the various offices and that, in this time of a pandemic, “creativity has accelerated innovation and this anticipates a promising future”. The heads of the Ibero-American IP offices included those from the registries of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Spain, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Portugal, Uruguay and Venezuela. (TJL)
Unwired Planet and Conversant win landmark decision giving courts in England and Wales jurisdiction to determine global FRAND rates
The latest in a string of judgments in different--particularly, but not only, European--jurisdictions favoring standard-essential patent (SEP) holders just came down in London, where the Supreme Court of the UK announced its decision in the related Huawei v. Unwired Planet, Huawei v. Conversant, and ZTE v. Conversant cases. Note that the order in which I just stated the parties is Appellant v. Appellee, but in each of the three cases the appellant is actually the defendant, and the appellee is the patent-asserting plaintiff. It's also worth noting that Apple intervened in the case, though Apple didn't get to deliver oral argument.
This blog reported and commented on the late October hearing. I had hoped that the top UK court would reverse the prior decisions by the lower courts, the England and Wales High Court in the first instance and the UK Appeals Court. The lower courts held that a UK court should have the authority to enter a conditional injunction: a SEP injunction that would be immediately enforceable unless the implementer takes a global portfolio license on the terms set by the UK court, regardless of what percentage of the defendant's revenues from the accused products is actually generated in the UK.
This year, we’re pleased to work with an amazing group of volunteers who make up our 2020 CC Global Summit Program Committee. This committee is the backbone of the CC Summit; curating the program, identifying speakers, fielding questions, and exemplifying the open culture. The theme of this year’s CC Summit is “Designing the Commons of the Future: Reflecting on the values that shape the Commons.” This event will be the perfect space for the open community to begin an exercise of internal reflection on how to build a more equitable, inclusive, and accessible world.
The top-tier piracy world known as The Scene is in turmoil after the unsealing of US indictments targeting key members of release group SPARKS and several linked affiliate groups including GECKOS, DRONES, ROVERS and SPLINTERS. Sources inform TF that there were several raids across Europe yesterday, mainly focused on Norway and Sweden.
Internet provider Bright House Networks has countersued several major record labels, alleging that they sent false and deceptive piracy notices to its subscribers. This week, the company asked the court for permission to add the RIAA and its anti-piracy partner MarkMonitor to the suit, as they are central to the wrongful conduct.
So some of you out there are paying hundreds of dollars to have someone do a cover for you without a contract and without having the art license in a file, and thus you don’t even own your own cover.
The Syrian civil war has led to great human suffering, with hundreds of thousands killed, and millions displaced. Another victim has been the region's rich archaeological heritage. Many of the most important sites have been seriously and intentionally damaged by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). For example, the Temple of Bel, regarded as among the best preserved at the ancient city of Palmyra, was almost completely razed to the ground. In the past, more than 150,000 tourists visited the site each year. Like most tourists, many of them took photos of the Temple of Bel. The UC San Diego Library's Digital Media Lab had the idea of taking some of those photos, with their many different viewpoints, and to combine them using AI techniques into a detailed 3D reconstruction of the temple:
As one of the most beloved science fiction series in history, it's no surprise that the Star Trek franchise has seen its share of intellectual property flare ups. With Viacom manning the IP enforcement guns, it only makes sense that the series has been the subject of the company's failed attempt to pretend Fair Use doesn't exist, the company's failed attempts at copyright enforcement taking down an authorized Star Trek panel, and the company's failed attempt to actually be good humans to the series' adoring fans.
This Kat's favorite sort of IP case is one that involves the intersection of different IP rights. Last month, the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled in a case regarding the international dimensions of copyright and trademark, as well as a general property right issue - trespass!
The D.C. Circuit affirmed the dismissal of all three counts, ruling that Imapizza's claims fell outside the limits of extraterritorial application of US copyright and trademark law. Let's explore the ruling of the court concerning these punctuation pizza parlors in Imapizza LLC v. At Pizza Limited.
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Imapizza argued that owners of @pizza had copied photos from the &pizza website by downloading photos that were hosted on a sever in the US; the downloading took place within the UK. The Court rejected this argument, noting that no unauthorized uploading or downloading had taken place in the US. The copying occurs not at the place of the host server, but where the new copy is fixed in a tangible form. Because the copying occurs where the download takes place (UK in this case) rather than where the content is hosted (US), there was no domestic infringing act.
Although the owners of @pizza photographed the inside of an &pizza location, there is no copyright infringement in such photography. Under Section 120(a) of the Copyright Act, the copyright in an architectural work does not extend to an exclusive right to photograph the work if "located in or ordinarily visible from a public place." The Court rejected this argument as well.
Because the Court found no infringing act in the United States, the Court rejected Imapizza's assertion that @pizza's conduct falls within the predicate act test for extraterritorial copyright infringement. The predicate act test allows for extraterritorial application of the Copyright Act if the foreign infringement stems from a predicate act of domestic infringement. Imapizzza uploaded their own photos in the US, and @pizza's owners did not violate copyright protections by photographing the &pizza restaurant; therefore, @pizza did not commit any domestic infringing acts and the Court affirmed the dismissal of the copyright claim.
