Fedora Project’s leader Matthew Miller announced today on Twitter that the first (of many to come) laptop from Lenovo with Fedora Linux pre-installed is now available for sale, the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8.
About four months ago, Lenovo shocked the Linux community by announcing that they FINALLY plan to offer Linux laptops, choosing the Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Linux as default operating system.
The first Lenovo laptops to ship with Linux are supposed to be the ThinkPad P1 Gen2, ThinkPad P53, and ThinkPad X1 Gen8.
As a follow up from the news earlier this summer of Lenovo planning to certify their ThinkPad and ThinkStation lines for Linux from Ubuntu and Red Hat while also offering distribution choices like Fedora, that work is proceeding with Lenovo now offering up their first system from their web store that comes pre-loaded with Fedora.
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8 is available with Fedora preloaded while still offering up options from Core i5 through Core i7 10th Gen CPUs, 8GB / 16GB of RAM, a variety of display options (including 14-inch 4K), etc.
Lenovo began teasing its new Linux initiative several months ago (refresh your memory here and here). Just in time to meet its “Summer 2020” promise, the first wave of Fedora-powered ThinkPads are now up for sale on Lenovo’s webshop. But it’s not merely this expected launch that has me excited; it’s how refreshingly visible they’re making the Linux option.
After being announced by the Fedora Linux team back in April, the rollout of Fedora across Lenovo laptops appears to have begun along with a sale.
The first model appearing with Fedora as an option is the ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 8. Not only has it rolled out with Fedora, it's right there on the store and you can't miss it as it shows up first, as it's also the cheapest option for this model available right now.
Hello again! The third and final phase of GSoC is coming to an end and I’m glad that I made it this far. In this blog post, I’d like to outline the work done in the last two weeks.
This report was written by Nisarg S. Joshi as part of Google Summer of Code 2020.
The objective of this project is to fuzz the various protocols and layers of the network stack of NetBSD using rumpkernel. This project is being carried out as a part of GSoC 2020. This blog post is regarding the project, the concepts and tools involved, the objectives and the current progress and next steps.
OverviewThe idea was about The UI testing framework in LibreOffice. The UITesting Framework is based on introspection code in c++ interacting with a testing framework in python through a simple UNO interface. To identify objects we use the ids that we introduced for loading dialogs from UI files. We were having unsupported items list in LibreOffice UITesting Framework. So The project mainly goals is to Extend the ability of the existing UI testing framework to support the unsupported items that exist now. So the work done on this list to decrease number of items in it.
And just like that, the third evaluations for Google Summer of Code are upon us. It seems just like yesterday when I began my work on this project and now the final phase is about to be over. Sort of unbelievable.
My GSoC 2020 internship project was improving the usability of Pitivi’s Render dialog. Below is a detailed summary of the work done during the last three months.
After originally publishing the Incremental FS patches back in May of 2019, Google's Android kernel team is still working to upstream this virtual file-system into the mainline Linux kernel and at this week's Linux Plumbers Conference was working to drum up support for it.
The Incremental File-System back when it was first proposed was advertised as a special-purpose virtual file-system to allow the execution of a program while its binary and resource files are still being lazily downloaded from the Internet or other medium.
If you’ve been exploring Linux apps on Chrome OS with us, it’s high time we covered how to save your current setup so you can restore it in a pinch. Full Linux distros have various tools available to run backups and store them locally or off site depending on your personal preference. Chrome OS, however, has a built in tool for this task and you can keep you backup right on you Chromebook or better yet, put it on Google Drive so it’s safe. This is very handy if you run into a situation where you need to power wash your device or heaven forbid have a system crash that requires a full recovery.
A proposed Google web specification threatens to turn websites into inscrutable digital blobs that resist content blocking and code scrutiny, according to Peter Snyder, senior privacy researcher at Brave Software.
On Tuesday, Snyder published a memo warning that Web Bundles threaten user agency and web code observability. He raised this issue back in February, noting that Web Bundles would prevent ad blockers from blocking unwanted subresources. He said at the time he was trying to work with the spec's authors to address concerns but evidently not much progress has been made.
His company makes the Brave web browser, which is based on Google's open-source Chromium project though implements privacy protections, by addition or omission, not available in Google's commercial incarnation of Chromium, known as Chrome.
The Kubernetes project has decided the time has come to stop existing in a state of permanent beta.
The decision, included in the Changelog for version 1.19 of the container-wrangling code and explained in a blog post, reflects the fact that Kubernetes offers plenty of REST APIs and they can evolve … or not.
The project’s new rules mean that when a new feature's API reaches beta, a nine-month countdown commences. Within that timeframe, the beta must either reach general availability (which deprecates the beta) or start anew (which deprecates the previous beta).
“The motivation here seems pretty clear: get features stable,” wrote Kubernetes contributor Tim Bannister of The Scale Factory. “Guaranteeing that beta features will be deprecated adds a pretty big incentive so that people who want the feature continue their effort until the code, documentation and tests are ready for this feature to graduate to stable, backed by several Kubernetes' releases of evidence in real-world use.”
File comparison compares the contents of computer files, finding their common contents and their differences. The result of the comparison is often known as a diff.
diff is also the name of a famous console based file comparison utility that outputs the differences between two files. The diff utility was developed in the early 1970s on the Unix operating system.
Typically, diff is used to show the changes between two versions of the same file. Modern implementations also support binary files.
As you know I love messing with terminal apps and I use discord very frequently so what not try to find a 3rd party discord client that manages to be a competent replacement, I've tried out Cordless which is also pretty good but it's got a bit of a funky interface, 6cord however does basically everything I could want it to do.
We've just released htop-3.0.0 with over two years worth of bug fixes and features. Enjoy!
Etherpad is a free open-source web-based real-time collaborative document editor. It's a combination of a text editor with a real-time interactive editing option.
Some may say, it's an open-source alternative for Google Docs, Zoho Docs, or Microsoft Office (Web). However, it's not. It adds a real-time video and voice chat as well as a live comment section.
It's also self-hosted which means it can be installed for servers to work as a collaborative editing platform for teams.
Etherpad also supports importing and exporting to many popular document formats: ODF (Open Document Format), Microsoft Word ".doc" format, text file, PDF and HTML. It also provides its own format "Etherpad".
Yesterday, we’ve covered three methods you can use to install Linux packages from the terminal on your Chromebook. Today, we’re going to look at how to install and use one of the most popular package management tools for Debian/Ubuntu based operating systems. Synaptic Package Manager is a GUI (graphical user interface) for the in-built APT package management system we covered yesterday. Not only does Synaptic provide a visual interface for the installation, upgrading and removal of packages, but it also gives users the ability to add repositories to access additional packages.
Released just before the weekend began, the Wine team have put out the 5.16 development release as they continue chasing Windows compatibility.
Need to know what Wine is? It's the constantly improving compatibility layer that allows the running of Windows-only applications and games on Linux and other operating systems. It's one of the driving forces behind Steam Play Proton. Helping you to get whatever you need done on Linux, or perhaps so you don't have to give up that favourite game.
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If you want help managing different installs of Wine, you can try Lutris.
Building off Friday's release of Wine 5.16 as the newest snapshot for running Windows games/applications on Linux and other platforms, Wine-Staging 5.16 is now available as the latest release for this more bleeding-edge version of Wine.
Wine-Staging 5.16 comes with just over 650 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base of various features still being vetted and further testing before upstreaming. With Wine-Staging 5.16 come a few new patches, including some DLLs needed by Microsoft's 2020 release of Flight Simulator. Though at this point the new Microsoft Flight Simulator isn't all rounded out for Wine / Steam Play (Proton) but at least movement is happening and soon this new flight simulator release will hopefully be flying on Linux.
Spacebase Startopia is getting closer and during Gamescom 2020, some new footage surfaced giving us a better look at what to expect from it.
The what - Spacebase Startopia is a fresh take on the classic and much loved Startopia from Mucky Foot Productions, which originally released in 2001. They say it will offer up a mixture of a building sim with city-building and base-management mixed in with some RTS-styled skirmishes. It's due for release on October 23 from Realmforge Studios (Dungeons 3) and Kalypso Media.
Space Crew takes the idea of the popular Bomber Crew from developer Runner Duck and sends everyone into space. During Gamescom 2020, it gained not only a new trailer but a release date too.
Acting as a sequel to Bomber Crew, it will be your responsibility to help stop all of humankind being wiped off the intergalactic stage by the mysterious extraterrestrial threat known as the Phasmids. If you missed it, we at GOL spoke to the developer earlier this month who confirmed Linux support.
GONNER2, the sequel to IGF winning game GoNNER will bring some messy, colourful and weird platformer action to Linux PC later this year. If you missed it, we already have it confirmed for Linux support back in June.
An action-platformer with roguelike elements that will keep you on your toes, with the sequel bringing in a lot more of everything it possibly can. A game they say is "for the curious, the brave and the tad bit whimsical" as you will "awaken your inner kid as you get into a sweet flow, flying through levels, shooting everything that moves and pulling off ludicrous, acrobatic destruction".
Meteors! Meteors are coming! Thankfully, you have the powers of a god in Techium Eclipse, so you can just grab the planet and swing it around to ensure they don't hit any cities.
It's a surprising bit of fun, as it becomes quite challenging when you get through a couple waves. Having to keep an eye on multiple meteors coming down, as you're trying desperately to spin this little planet and protect everyone. Lovely simple controls too, allowing you to either spin the planet or move the camera around with mouse or gamepad. Games need not be complicated. The idea is to eventually build a space port for people to leave this planet that's under siege.
Coming to Linux PC sometime in 2022, Hyper Team Recon from Nathan Burton and Top Hat Studios is a seriously charming upcoming 3D platformer that follows a bunch of shapeshifting aliens.
"Three energetic aliens, Ember, Penny and Lite, are tasked by their commander to travel to Earth in order to learn more about the lifeforms inhabiting the planet, using their species unique morphing abilities to disguise themselves as girls in order to keep a low profile, but after the trio get split up and stranded on Earth after their ship crashes, they will each have to traverse through a variety of levels and locations full of platforming, puzzles and combat!"
Why play old, stale and normal Chess when you can fry your brain good with some 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel.
Originally released July 22, 2020, it joins a very long list of Linux ports done by Ethan Lee, who also created FNA. I thought I was bad at chess, 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel showed me that pretty clearly. A very impressive idea though, one where you can checkmate someone as bad as me in multiple timelines.
Time to brew a cup of your favourite and chat in the comments, let's see what GOL readers have been enjoying on their Linux boxes recently.
This week we saw Children of Morta gain official Linux support and wow—what absolutely stunning artwork it has. I'm constantly finding myself just appreciating the detail that went into it. Children of Morta could quite easily be my biggest surprise of this year. Not only that, the introduction with the narration is simply incredible.
Valve released today a new major update to their Steam Client for Linux, Mac, and Windows platforms, adding a whole bunch of new features and improvements for a better gaming experience.
It’s been about two months since the last stable Steam Client release, which didn’t brought any major changes for Linux users. The new version, however, is packed with improvements for Linux gamers.
For starters, Valve has fixed a regression that caused invalid rendering on NVIDIA configurations with on-screen keyboard and the transparent visual selection for SteamOS overlays and reduced the Vulkan shader processing memory usage with the open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV).
After announcing earlier this month that updates to Dota Underlords had slowed due to the COVID19 pandemic, as well as their team helping other Valve projects, they have returned to Underlords now.
This update brings in a new 'Classic Mode' available for casual online battles and private, which does away with the Underlords and brings back all the Creep waves. What they say is for nostalgia, on the earlier versions of Underlords. Quite a nice addition actually, hopefully they will add Ranked play for it too.
The Asus ROG Phone 3 is already one of the best-reviewed phones of the year here at Android Authority. Not only is it a great gaming phone, but it’s just a great phone in general. However, one thing we haven’t touched on yet is how it does with emulating console games, so here we’ll be covering some Asus ROG Phone 3 emulation tests.
The ROG Phone 3 is a specs beast and the first smartphone on the market with the Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Plus. As such, there’s no point in testing out Super Nintendo or even PlayStation emulation. The ROG Phone 3 can handle anything from a fifth-generation console or earlier without breaking a sweat.
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The developer of DamonPS2 refuses to release their version of the code, which violates the GNU General Public License. You might not care about this behind-the-scenes drama, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it for this article.
Gaming laptops come in many forms and in many variations when it comes to the power they pack. You can get one for $2000 or as low as $500, and of course the quality of the graphics and how well games will run will be largely dictated by that price.
First off, what is Super Tux Kart? According to the project’s webpage, it is an “3D open-source arcade racer with a variety characters, tracks, and modes to play.” In the early 2000s, a project called TuxKart floated around for Linux (if you want to see this lovely Word-webpage, you can do so here). Once the project tapered off around 2004, it was picked up again in 2006 by Joerg Henrichs, now with the moniker of “Super Tux Kart.” Over time, updates continued to be added as the team for Super Tux Kart grew. New maps, stories, and a whole game engine got added to this once small project. The game now features a whole host of open-source project mascots, such as the mascots for Linux, Blender, and GIMP. In 2019, online multiplayer was added, which brings us up to speed for Super Tux Kart's latest update.
The development looks promising as KDE Plasma 5.20 adds more super cool features such as warning about your hard disk or SSD failure, etc as the team prepares for the upcoming KDE Plasma 5.20 release.
KDE's Plasma 5.20 desktop picked up a number of new features this week.
Most exciting to some is that Plasma 5.20 will begin monitoring S.M.A.R.T. data in an attempt to detect if your HDD/SSD is failing. This feature stems from a decade old feature request for propagating the SMART information through KDE. Finally with Plasma 5.20 that is happening with the new Plasma Disks code.
Also landing this week for KDE to end out August includes:
- Improved appearance of GTK applications with the Breeze GTK theme.
After the translation debacle in my previous post, I started working on the back-end that will be used by later UI (I’ll be talking about one place where this back-end is used in this post) in a manner such that, when translations start functioning, they can easily be implemented by addition of a few lines of code. This back-end work involves methods that will be used to add or remove firmware, checking whether the firmware being added is acceptable/supported etc.
Hello again ! This is my GSoC final project report blog, so this is going to be a very simple and straightforward post without pictures(..but just one !) and jokes ! It will give you all the information about what work we did during GSoC and point you towards code and documentation produced during the project.
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The work I did was performed on the work branch which is obtained from my fork of GNOME/nautilus : master. A pull request was opened from my work branch to the GSoC-Staging-Branch maintained by GNOME/nautilus. After code-review and testing by my mentor Antonio, the code was merged into the staging branch. Later on when the main project goal was achieved the staging branch was rebased appropriatly and merged into GNOME/nautilus : master.The GSoC-Staging-Branch was updated weekly, with Merge Requests which represented the goals for the particular week.
During this last month, I've been working to improve the code I've already written and to cover the last details for this feature in order to work like previewed in the mockups.
This post is a summary of the work that has been completed during the GSoC 2020 period for my project, Object Tracking. The project consisted of implementing an Object Tracking UI in Pitivi and the associated tracking functionality in GStreamer.
Based on Slackware64-current. Plus interace tweaks, installer auto-partition fixes.
“Whether you’re leading a digital start-up or working to revamp a traditional enterprise, it’s essential to understand the revolutionary impact AI has on operations, strategy, and competition,” wrote Harvard professors Marco Iansiti and Karim Lakhani in “Competing in the Age of AI”, a recently published article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR). Earlier this year, they also published a book of the same title, which expands on the ideas in the article and illustrates them with a number of concrete use cases.
The age of AI is being ushered by the emergence of a new kind of digital firm. Rather than just relying on traditional business processes operated by its workers, these firms are leveraging software and data-driven algorithms to eliminate traditional constraints and transform the rules of competition. Managers and engineers are responsible for the design of the new AI-based operational systems, but the system then runs the operations pretty much on its own.
“At the core of the new firm is a decision factory - what we call the AI factory,” note the authors. “[T]he AI factory treats decision-making as a science. Analytics systematically convert internal and external data into predictions, insights, and choices, which in turn guide and automate operational workflows… As digital networks and algorithms are woven into the fabric of firms, industries begin to function differently and the lines between them blur.”
On Saturday 29 August 2020, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close.
DebConf20 has been held online for the first time, due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) disease pandemic.
All of the sessions have been streamed, with a variety of ways of participating: via IRC messaging, online collaborative text documents, and video conferencing meeting rooms.
With more than 850 attendees from 80 different countries and a total of over 100 event talks, discussion sessions, Birds of a Feather (BoF) gatherings and other activities, DebConf20 was a large success.
When it became clear that DebConf20 was going to be an online-only event, the DebConf video team spent much time over the next months to adapt, improve, and in some cases write from scratch, technology that would be required to make an online DebConf possible. After lessons learned from the MiniDebConfOnline in late May, some adjustments were made, and then eventually we came up with a setup involving Jitsi, OBS, Voctomix, SReview, nginx, Etherpad, and a newly written web-based frontend for voctomix as the various elements of the stack.
All components of the video infrastructure are free software, and the whole setup is configured through their public ansible repository.
One more talk from Jon "maddog" Hall and then the closing wrap up. This has been a blast: I've enjoyed it a lot and it's made me more enthusiastic than I have been for a long time.
Steve Langasek announced that the Ubuntu 20.10 release has entered Feature Freeze this week, more specifically as of August 27th, 2020. This is actually the most important milestone so far in the development cycle of Ubuntu 20.10 and it means that no new features will be implemented until the final release.
Dubbed “Groovy Gorilla,” Ubuntu 20.10 has been in development since April 2020, shortly after the release of the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system. The Feature Freeze stage will be followed by an optional Ubuntu Testing Week that kicks off next week on September 3rd for those who want to help with the testing.
Winmate, a company specializing in rugged computing technology headquartered in Taiwan, has recently launched Winmate IQ30 SBC powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 octa-core coupled with up to 4GB LPDDR4, and 32GB flash storage.
The single board computer also comes with a Fast Ethernet port with optional PoE, WiFI 5, and optional cellular connectivity thanks to an an M.2 card socket and SIM card slot, as two video interfaces for Android-powered touch screen displays.
Two-Factor Authentication or Multiple Factor Authentication, is the process of using two or more ways of proving identity to online services rather than just using the password alone (password = 1 factor, password + mobile code = 2 factors… And so on). It is a security measure designed to prevent attackers from gaining access to online accounts even if the accounts’ passwords fall to their hands.
Most mainstream online services do support two-factor authentication today, though not all of them. Such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and basically all banking and critical services online support it too.
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FreeOTP is a %100 free and open source mobile authentication application published under the Apache 2.0 license. Developed by the famous enterprise open source software maker Red Hat; Making it a far way more trusted than any solution coming from companies like Google.
The program, just like any other authenticator app, allows you to scan a QR code when you activate two-factor authentication on websites, and then it starts to automatically generate security codes each 30 seconds. When you want to login to your 2FA-secured account, you just have to enter the code currently shown on the app.
When a novel coronavirus made headlines earlier this year, the world wasn't ready. In a short period of time, we all witnessed the consequences of having a global, interconnected economy unprepared for effective global collaboration. Indeed, this pandemic shed light on the under-preparedness of a truly global economy in a hyper-connected world. We didn't pay attention to the fact that a health issue in China could have an impact on both the real estate market in North Carolina and a shoe factory in Italy. Facing a pandemic, especially one that forced such extreme social distancing, required drastic shifts—both technological and social.
It took a few releases, but the free, open-source and cross-platform Thunderbird email client, news and chat client is now shipping with OpenPGP support enabled by default in the latest release.
Just a few days after releasing the Thunderbird 78.2.0 update, which brought lots of improvements to the OpenPGP implementation that lets users send encrypted emails, here’s come another small, yet important update.
Thunderbird 78.2.1 has been released today and it finally enables the OpenPGP feature by default. That’s amazing news for privacy and security fans enthusiasts using the open-source email client as they won’t have to go to all the trouble of enabling OpenPGP in the latest Thunderbird 78 series.
Like most conferences this year, the annual LLVM Developers' Meeting has become an online-only affair.
The annual LLVM conference normally hosted in Silicon Valley is now taking place entirely online. This virtual event is taking place from 6 to 8 October.
This is another test-only release of my module for manipulating PGP signatures in Perl. I'm trying to get the CPAN testing failures down to a dull roar. This iteration fixes some testing issues with systems that have only GnuPG v1 and tries to handle systems whose gpg is GnuPG v2 but is older than 2.1.12 and therefore doesn't have the --pinentry-mode flag that GnuPG uses to suppress password prompting.
I handled the latter by skipping the tests if the gpg on the user's PATH was too old. I'm not certain this is the best approach, although it makes the CPAN automated testing more useful for me, since the module will not work without special configuration on those systems. On the other hand, if someone is installing it to point to some other GnuPG binary on the system at runtime, failing the installation because their system gpg is too old seems wrong, and the test failure doesn't indicate a bug in the module.
Essentially, I'm missing richer test metadata in the Perl ecosystem. I want to be able to declare a dependency on a non-Perl system binary, but of course Perl has no mechanism to do that.
Python is quick and easy to learn. And yet, there is a massive gap between knowing the common aspects of the language (loops, variables, functions, and so on) and how to write a well-factored application using modern tools and libraries. That's where learning Python is a never-ending journey.
Sebastian Witowski is here to give us his take on a modern Python developer's toolkit. There are a bunch of great tips in store for us.
In this short Pandas tutorial, you will learn how to make column index in a dataframe. Standarly, when creating a dataframe, whether from a dictionary, or by reading a file (e.g., reading a CSV file, opening an Excel file) an index column is created. For this reason, we need to either set the specific column we want to be index when creating the file or, simply, making one of the columns index later (e.g., after we’ve read a CSV file). Namely, if we want a specific column to be the index in our dataframe.
All libraries related wheezy.web and wheezy.template have been recently migrated from bitbucket to github.
PyPy is now a member of Open Collective, a fiscal host. We have been thinking about switching to this organization for a couple of years; we like it for various reasons, like the budget transparency and the lightweight touch. We can now officially announce our membership!
With this, we are now again free to use PyPy for all financial issues, like receiving funds professionally, paying parts of sprint budgets as we like, and so on. We will shortly be reintroducing buttons that link to Open Collective from the PyPy web site.
Although the old donation buttons were removed last year, we believe that there are still a few people that send regularly money to the SFC, the not-for-profit charity we were affiliated with. If you do, please stop doing it now (and, if you like to do so, please set up an equivalent donation to PyPy on Open Collective).
At school in my 11th grade, I worked on speaker dependent single word speech recognition as my scientific project. This “just” used non-linear time adaption, aka. dynamic programming, to match speech patterns to previously recorded patterns.
23 years later, both the science and the computing power have advanced by leaps and bounds – these days, the go-to solution for such problems are artificial neural networks (called “NN” henceforth), and the “hello world” of that is to recognize handwritten digits. Doing that was my goal.
All the code and notes are in a git repository, and the commits correspond to the various steps that I did.
Admittedly I didn’t manage all of it just on Friday, but it stretched over much of the (fortunately rainy) weekend as well – but it was really worth it!
You have probably seen Traitlets in applications, you likely even use it. The package has nearly 5 million downloads on conda-forge alone.
Last week I was working on finishing up the HTTPNegotiateDownloadHandler. Presently the download handler uses ALPN or NPN (whichever is available) to negotiate a protocol (presently one of HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2) from the remote server and issues the requests on the respective download handler. Presently, all requests made via proxy are directly issued using the HTTP11DownloadHandler.
“I’m a toy, a defective toy — there wasn’t enough fabric left when they made me,” 27-year-old Dilya Abdulaeva said to herself. At five feet and three inches (160 cm) tall, she was about to fly into a circus ring on a lyra, or aerial hoop, and hold her own weight of 310 pounds (140 kg) more than 13 feet (4 m) above the ground. Then, she would ride the lyra up to the top of the arena, floating 36 feet (11 m) high. Only a few days earlier, the circus producer had decided that Dilya, whose usual job was to care for the troupe’s trained cats and other performing animals, was going to appear in the ring as “something big” that would “shock” the audience. The crew didn’t even have time to sew a costume for her, so Dilya stepped out of the wings in black sweatpants, a yellow sweater, a mask, and a red wig.
The events described here happened during my lifetime, but to many, they’re “history.” Fred’s life, and the principles he lived by, still have much to teach us today.
For decades, trust and safety professionals in content moderation, fraud and risk, and safety — have faced enormous challenges, often under intense scrutiny. In recent years, it’s become even more clear that the role of trust and safety professionals are both critically important and difficult. In 2020 alone, we’ve seen an increasing need for this growing class of professionals to combat a myriad of online abuse related to systemic racism, police violence, and COVID-19 — such as hate speech, misinformation, price gouging, and phishing — while keeping a safe space for connecting people with vital, authoritative information, and with each other.
More than 100,000 U.S. workplaces required to submit injury and illness records flouted a new federal requirement to electronically submit their logs, keeping dangerous employers cloaked in secrecy.
"What I worry about the most is an October surprise—of FDA being forced to do something it doesn't want to or science doesn't support," wrote epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding.€
More than 3,000 police officers were on the streets of central Berlin and said a water cannon would be used if necessary, as they braced for violence as demonstrators left from the Brandenburg Gate.
"These are people who are opposed to corona (measures), so we assume they have in recent months exercised absolutely no caution," Berlin police president Barbara Slowik said ahead of the protest.
"This is the most important election in history. And you are the most dangerous president in the history of our country. That's why you're going to lose," said Sen. Bernie Sanders during Trump's remarks.
"This is Covid denial on another level entirely."
In a primary fight largely ignored by national media, an infectious disease specialist is challenging Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) in what could be the next progressive upset.
"The takeover of€ the€ FDA by politics and Trump political hacks is something that threatens your€ life€ and the lives of everyone you care about."
Recently Miguel de Icaza wrote a blog post arguing that closed computing platforms where a major US corporation decides what software users are allowed to install are a good thing. This has, naturally, caused people to become either confused, disappointed or angry. Presumably many people are writing responses and angry comments. I almost started one writing one pointing out all the issues I found in the post.
Doing that would probably create a fairly popular blog post with followups. It might even get to the reddits and hackernewses and generate tons of comments where people would duke it out on issues on user choice vs the safety provided by a curated walled garden. There would be hundreds, if not thousands, of snarky tweets that make their poster feel superior for a while but are ultimately not productive.
We went looking for details. Was he expelled, was it political? Was it based on falsified evidence, the way Debian Account Manager Enrico Zini falsified harassment claims against Jacob Appelbaum?
In fact, Steve Greenland died of cancer in July 2009. He was still on the Debian keyring up to 2020 because the Debian Account Managers (DAMs) were too busy playing politics. They were making up false evidence to remove political opponents but it never occurred to them that Greenland's computers, with his PGP keys, would have been acquired by relatives or even sold on eBay.
Mastercard on Friday said it's joining the effort to create more of these kinds of cashierless stores, unveiling a platform it calls Shop Anywhere. It teamed up with retail tech company Accel Robotics to create a handful of new test concepts that let customers check into a store, grab what they want and walk out.
The third big question is: what to do at the moment when, if Biden wins, Trump claims victory and refuses to begin the transition? What would a mass, peaceful protest movement against the theft of an election look like? What would its grassroots tactics be? What would be its demands?
The labour and progressive movements of the US should be asking these questions now, and urgently. Asking them on the morning of 4 November will be too late.
But Cabo Delgado is no longer forgettable. A smouldering Islamist insurgency has set the province ablaze. There were almost as many attacks by the jihadists in the first half of 2020 as in all of 2019, which was bloodier than 2018, the first full year of the conflict. More than 1,500 people have been killed. At least 210,000 have had to leave their homes.
On August 5th the insurgents launched their latest assault on Mocímboa da Praia, a strategic port (and site of their first attack, in October 2017). They killed more than 50 soldiers in a single ambush and sank a small naval ship with a rocket-propelled grenade. On August 11th they took the port. The sophistication of the attack has raised concerns in Maputo and other capitals that the insurgency will spread to other parts of the country and perhaps beyond.
The two books I tell people to read to understand not just the United States’ war in Vietnam, but also its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the current world war the US has created and sustained that stretches from western Africa to Pakistan, are David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest and Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie. Both men were New York Times reporters, with extensive experience in Vietnam, and both men reported not only critically on the war, but adversarially, something that any observer of major American media of the last twenty years will note is often missing in US media coverage of the current wars in the Muslim world.* What few examples we have in corporate media these last two decades of critical and adversarial reporting on the wars is fickle and frail when compared to the strength, integrity and depth of reporting and writing produced by Halberstam and Sheehan. Read these two books about the lies, the self-deceptions, the careerism, the group-think, the chauvinism, and the greed of the American Empire and its officers, and you will understand not just the American war in Vietnam, but the wars of this century, wars that continue to devastate and destroy so many.**
One of the most shocking things I learned talking with a Los Angeles Police Officer I became friends with while working as a reporter on my first job in L.A. was that LAPD cops were trained to “empty your revolver” whenever you fired at a person.
The U.S.-brokered pact makes no pretense of peace for Palestinians. Instead, it sharpens a regional coalition against Iran.
A little-known federal program dumps military equipment on local police forces. We need to end it.
In Kenosha, Wisconsin, police shot Jacob Blake up to seven times in the back in front of his children. When demonstrators protested the shooting, they were greeted by officers in riot gear€ and, according to one report, at least one military vehicle.
It goes without saying, but the police have certainly claimed the nation’s attention as of late. The national protests have quelled in some cities, but rage in others. Protests against police brutality have only brought more police brutality—instances of “excessive force,” like utilizing pepper spray and batons at a protestors’ violin vigil, shooting an unarmed civilian eight times while she was sleeping, or assaulting the eldery. The feds have even deployed the national guard and implemented harsh curfews. Where did this all come from? Recent escalations and increased militarization of policing are a direct consequence of our investment in military spending overseas.
Donald Trump speeches. Celebrity tweets. Corporate news repetition. Chaos. Vapidity. Manufactured dissent. Graphic fighting sports.
"This administration's insidious attack on one of our most important environmental laws is an attack on the democratic process itself."
A coalition of 27 U.S. states, commonwealths, territories, counties, and cities filed a federal lawsuit on Friday challenging the Trump administration’s “unlawful, unjustified, and sweeping revisions” to a 50-year-old law that the president claimed would “streamline” infrastructure projects by limiting environmental reviews.
"More oil wells mean more greenhouse gases, more air pollution, and more destroyed habitat."
Years ago, I moved to Livingston, Montana. Livingston strategically lies at the northwest corner of the Custer Gallatin National Forest’s Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness (known as AB Wilderness). One of the factors that attracted me to Livingston was the AB Wilderness. I could—in theory—put on a backpack and walk 7 miles to Livingston Peak within the AB Wilderness Boundary, then hike south for 250 miles and only cross three roads. There are few places in the lower 48 states where such an experience is possible.
Given estimates that humans are responsible for around 75% of fires, "this means solutions are in our grasp too."
Ecosocialists view animal rights as the third rail of climate politics. The opposite is true.
President Donald Trump claimed he would eliminate the payroll tax if he is reelected — but an analysis by the Social Security Administration found that such a move would cause the Social Security Trust Fund to run out of money by 2023.
One of the advantages of owning your own independent magazine is you get to publish whatever you want.
With a pandemic ravaging the country, a historically unpopular president and no platform to run on, the Republican Party has set its sights on attacking socialism. It doesn’t seem to be working.
In a business driven by profit, vaccines have a problem. They’re not very profitable — at least not without government subsidies. Pharma companies favor expensive medicines that must be taken repeatedly and generate revenue for years or decades. Vaccines are often given only once or twice. In many parts of the world, established vaccines cost a few dollars per dose or less.
"Like Donald Trump's other economic executive orders, this will not provide actual relief to workers."
Protesters rally outside Bezos' D.C. to demand $30/hr minimum wage for Amazon workers after world's richest man sets new wealth record.€
The nonprofit and for-profit sectors operate in tandem in the furtherance of the brutal concentration of wealth in the hands of the few, at the expense of the many.€
"Joe Biden has laid out an economic plan that will help working families move forward—not with broken promises—but concrete plans to help people in every community do better for themselves and their children."
"Elite journalists are no doubt clearing their shelves for the awards they expect to win for the fearless and high-minded excoriations of the Trump presidency they will write…when it's over."
President Donald Trump and Postmaster General Louis DeJoy have undermined the USPS by removing mailboxes and mail sorting machines the months before an election in which many Americans will vote by mail.
"The Democrats are not matching Trump’s own or his party's propaganda."
Last week, as Donald Trump ginned up for the Republican National Convention, he went on Fox News to talk with Sean Hannity about “voter fraud,” be it fraud committed at polling sites or fraud committed by mail. To preempt this, he assured his audience, he would send sheriffs, miscellaneous other law enforcement and U.S. attorneys into polling places around the country to monitor for irregularities.
Vote the liar-in-chief and his enablers out in November, and share this video with anyone you think watched this dangerous misinformation parade.
On today’s episode, Nicholas Baham II (Dr. Dreadlocks), Janice Domingo, and Nolan Higdon analyze the DNC and RNC conventions and platforms.
I came across this excellent heat map representation of a large opinion poll on support for the monarchy, sampling 22,000 people all across the UK, taken in 2018 by focaldata.
You could say that this tweet is President Trump’s prediction or prophecy with some rational basis to it but the refrain “which has not been seen before” is one that the President repeats often, always falsely, and so is a clear marker that it’s delusion at work here. The man imagines something and takes that to be real.
We should not assume that the radical right will collapse under the weight of its many internal conflicts and contradictions.
Here we are again, in the post-Convention frenzy of a presidential election year in the USA. All sense, reason and proportion go out the window as both sides hurl their invective and sling their spin. Passions rise and all composure is sidelined. Each team makes dire predictions—but selectively, so as not to draw attention to the real issues, which neither one wants to acknowledge.
The November election is a little over two months away. Will states be able to bear the burden?
A common complaint among Republicans is that their opponents are mainly in the business of manufacturing victims and turning those victims into Democratic voters.
This year is the 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two. One of the biggest frauds of the final stage of that war was the meeting at Yalta of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and President Franklin Roosevelt. Yalta has become a synonym for the abandonment of oppressed people and helped inspire the 1952 Republican campaign theme, “20 years of treason.”
In 2008, when Barack Obama chose veteran centrist Joe Biden as his vice-presidential running mate, it seemed a prudent choice: Democrats had already expressed their desire for change by choosing a progressive African American who opposed the Iraq war to succeed George W Bush. In November, it’s Biden’s turn to run for the top job. Since he does not quicken any pulses, good political casting called for a running mate who would symbolise something more exciting than himself — not political radicalism, but inclusion. So he picked Kamala Harris, who has a Jamaican father, Indian mother and Jewish husband.
Two Moscow-based Associated Press journalists who were covering the recent protests in Belarus were deported to Russia on Saturday. In addition, the AP's Belarusian journalists were told by the government that their press credentials had been revoked.
Police in Belarus have arbitrarily arrested journalists, bloggers, and political activists ahead of the August 9, 2020 presidential election and pressed charges against two potential candidates, Human Rights Watch said today.
The arrests raise concerns about interference with and violations of rights to freedom of expression, particularly media freedom and political speech, and freedom of assembly. Many of the arrests seemed timed to keep those detained locked away until at least after the elections.
Belarus has revoked the press credentials of numerous foreign journalists ahead of expected protests over the results of the country's presidential election held earlier this month.
The journalists were from a variety of international news outlets, including The Associated Press, Reuters, French wire service Agence France-Presse (AFP), the BBC and Radio Liberty.
A Reuters spokesperson said in a statement that Reuters journalists had been stripped of their accreditation, adding “We are not aware of any acts by our Belarus journalists that might warrant loss of accreditation.”
“We hope the authorities will reinstate their credentials to ensure our journalists can continue to deliver independent, unbiased news in the public interest,” the spokesperson said.
High school students have been in the streets all summer, and they’re not backing down. Black Lives Matter protests have gone on for weeks. They’ve popped up in hundreds of small towns. More and more kids don’t need to be taught that policing is racist, nor that police anchor a historic system of racial domination. They see it everywhere.
"Protective gear found in the bus is just that—protection for working in large crowds, masks for COVID protection," Riot Kitchen said in a statement. "We reject all claims that our crew was there to incite violence."
Scheurle said the fuel was to be used for generators for cooking, camping and food production. She said the minivan driver was not trying to flee but was exiting the gas station as police arrived. She also doubted that any illegal substances were found and suggested "residual" marijuana could have been present because the drug is legal in Washington.
Sentenced to life behind bars for a rape he did not commit, Long's attorneys learned in 2015 that investigators withheld exculpatory evidence proving his innocence.€
"By supporting this movement, we can build a country that fulfills the promise of freedom, unity, and safety for all of us, no exceptions."
When traveling from out of state with an AR-15 is not treated as a crime, but "filling up gas cans for your food truck" leads to immediate arrest.
"We've been here before, but this time we know that it is necessary to redefine public safety in order to save black lives."
The facts of this case are pretty ugly so let's just dive right into them. As Lenore Skenazy reported for Reason last year, two government employees decided a single incident of a mother leaving her kids in the car was all the reason they needed to swing by the house and strip-search every one of her six children. The oldest was five years old. The youngest were a pair of 10-month-old twins.
Like many other adolescents of my generation, I attended many protests against the US war in Vietnam. Like many antiwar protesters, I was inspired by many different writers, philosophies and other protesters. Among those inspirations—amidst the youthful rebels in SDS and the Yippies, the writings of Karl Marx and Jean Paul Sartre, and the militant pacifism of Martin Luther King,, Jr. and David Dellinger—were the actions, essays and prayers of male and female religious antiwarriors like those involved in the burning of draft files and indicted for a non-existent plot to kidnap Henry Kissinger and hold him hostage until the US withdrew from Southeast Asia.
In the town hall with employees, Zuckerberg said the team that enforces Facebook’s policy against dangerous organizations “is trained to look for symbolism and innuendo” and that the “contractors and reviewers who the initial complaints [about the Kenosha Guard] were funneled to didn’t pick this up. On second review, doing it more sensitively, the team responsible for dangerous organizations recognized that this violated the policies and we took it down.”
Facebook is now taking down posts that praise the shooting or shooter, Zuckerberg said. Yet a report Thursday by The Guardian newspaper found examples of support and even fundraising messages still being shared on Facebook and its photo-sharing service, Instagram.
The U.S. telecom industry's monopolization problem shows no sign of slowing down.
Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 295. This is my appearance on Jimmy Song's podcast Bitcoin Fixes This (ep. 7). Bitcoin Fixes This #7: Intellectual Property Stephan Kinsella is a patent attorney, Austrian economist and author of Against Intellectual Property. We talk about IP law’s monarchist origins and how it’s a tool for monopoly. Stephan also tells us about how information is not the same thing as physical property and how IP and Bitcoin both suffer from labor theories of value.
Following on from the updates to the FAQs earlier this week, the Patent Examination Board (PEB) have now released a final version of the FAQs. Candidates have 1 day left to change their elected exam location (deadline 31 August 2020). This is also the deadline for specifying your Designated Contact if taking the exam at work. The latest information can be read here.
In a welcome improvement to communications, exam updates are now being distributed via the CIPA mailing list.
Declarations from generic drug makers alleged only possible future injury from implementation of the 2019 law that created a presumption that so-called “pay for delay” settlement agreements are anticompetitive.
A trade association for the generic pharmaceutical industry failed to demonstrate standing to challenge a California law that created a presumption that “reverse payment” settlement agreements regarding patent infringement claims between brand-name and generic pharmaceutical companies were anticompetitive and unlawful. None of the declarations submitted by trade association members alleged an intention to engage in such a settlement. Nor did they establish that they incurred economic injury due to complying with the law, such as by foregoing pay for delay settlements or litigating patent-infringement suits to judgment. Rather, the members alleged that they “likely would expect to be forced to litigate every pending patent-infringement lawsuit to judgment,” or that they “likely will stay [their] hand on many products and simply stay off the market until the relevant patents all expire.” These declarations alleged only “possible future injury” and failed to establish a substantial risk of harm (Association for Accessible Medicines v. Becerra, July 24, 2020, per curiam).
"Trump and his posse of sycophants and enablers think that everything belongs to them."
Under pressure from rightsholders, Google makes pirate sites harder to find in search results. As a result, pirates are increasingly advising each other to use DuckDuckGo instead. Surprisingly, in response to a very popular 'pirate' search term, Google appears to agree its rival is the best option.
Last week, 1337x.to decided to ban YTS releases when it became apparent that information from the site's database was being used in lawsuits against file-sharers. Over the past few days, more torrent sites followed this example which, strangely enough, has made them a target as well.
