Merely going by statistics, it is most likely that you are a Windows user. After all, around 87.70% of all PCs around the world run on Windows with Linux, only accounting for 2.32%.
These numbers are understandable when you consider that Linux has always been positioned as the “serious” Operating System. Throughout the decades, it has been mostly used in servers, and by programmers for technical workflow.
It was never able to appeal to regular PC users (which makes up the majority of the market) because it demands considerably more technical know-how compared to Windows.
However, Linux is slowly evolving and making itself more user-friendly. The OS installation process is now as simple, if not simpler, than installing Windows. Furthermore, the most popular Linux distros are coming with excellent desktop environments with a sleek and intuitive GUI, so users don’t have to rely on the command-line for all the basic tasks.
Linux is a free and open-source kernel developed by Linus Torvalds, a Unix-like operating system clone. XKCD comic has a long tradition for including humorous geeky cartoons. In this post, I pick my favorite XKCD comics for Linux and Unix fans.
XKCD comic often deals with tech humor, programming, maths, science, Linux/Unix, human relationships in humorous ways. Hence I find them useful especially XKCD comics related to Linux.
Linux laptop maker Tuxedo Computers has introduced a new 4.2 pound gaming laptop with a 15.6 inch display, NVIDIA graphics, and a choice of AMD Ryzen or Intel Comet Lake processors.
The Tuxedo Polaris 15 is available for 1,125 Euros ($1330) and up, although it’s worth noting that the price includes value added tax.
TUXEDO Computers is one of the best places to get a Linux laptop. They’re also a great option if you’re looking for one of the best Linux based mini PCs.
And, recently, they just unveiled two monstrous Linux laptops perfectly tailored for games. Here, let’s take a look at what they offer.
[...]
The Polaris 15 comes in with a Matt black aluminum chassis and a thin bezel for the display. It looks pretty cool (I love Matt color finishes!).
The Polaris 17 comes in with a soft-touch finish and a little on the heavier side weighing 2.5 kg. The 17.3-inch screens should be an attractive variant for users comfortable with a desktop-like experience on their laptop.
With all the clever decisions for its design and build, it offers the choice of both Ryzen 4000 series of processors (Ryzen 5 4600H and Ryzen 7 4800H) and Intel 10th gen processor (i7-10750H).
That’s great for buyers looking for powerful Linux notebooks with the choice of Intel/Ryzen configuration.
In addition to the choice of chipsets, both laptops comes baked in with 62 Wh battery for a good battery life, a 144Hz display, supports up to 64 GB 3200 MHz RAM, M.2 SSD, and a slot for PCIe NVMe SSD (up to 1 TB).
All of this is powered up by either GTX 1650ti or the RTX 2060 — which is great for a Linux laptop enthusiast.
The HP ZBook Fury G7 15 & ZBook Fury G7 17 powerful laptops are certified for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. This combination of advanced HP hardware and Ubuntu creates an ideal platform for AI developers and data scientists to use these devices. In fact, this configuration means that the hardware works out of the box without any manual configuration needed. The HP ZBook Fury G7 laptop is available in two sizes: 15 and 17 inches. Both sport similar features including thin bezels and better screen-to-body ratios than preceding generations. They also come with 10th-Generation Intel Core or Xeon W processors, making them great for professionals. Finally, the laptops feature up to 4K resolution as well as up to 600 nits brightness. This results in vibrant color accuracy along with excellent contrast.
If you’re in the market for a new Ubuntu laptop be sure to check out HP’s refreshed ZBook series, which were formally unveiled today.
I’ll warn you up front that these portable powerhouses aren’t cheap — prices start from $1,989 — but these machines are now available to buy full certified for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS across a mesmerisingly mammoth range of configurations.
While I’m not familiar with HP workstations their marketing reliably informs me that the Z-series Fury line is built to shoulder workloads from data scientists, engineers, and creative professionals.
I.e. these notebooks are designed to do more than ðŸËâ°help you just couch-stalk old crushes on Facebook .
Today, HP announced the launch of its Z series of laptops and workstations certified with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, the latest additions to their popular professional workstation line. Made to drive AI and machine learning and with hardware that is also suited to 3D and virtual reality development, the Z series is an ideal enterprise workstation for developers.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is certified on several of HP’s new portfolio, including the ZBook Fury G7 15 and 17. The 17ââ¬Â³ model is the world’s smallest mobile workstation with an NVIDIA RTX 5000 for unthrottled performance but the benefit of a large canvas. Compared to the previous generation, the ZBook Fury 15 G7 provides 1.7x faster rendering and visualisation. Users can now multitask power-demanding tasks side by side with the latest Intel CPUs and NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs. Also available with Ubuntu are the HP Z4, Z6 and Z8 G4 models, the Z Central 4R and the HP Studio and Create G7.
In this buying guide, you will get to know about the best 5 Linux-based laptops that are available in the market right now.
Linux is growing day=by-day and many users are shifting towards it. This has led to the popularity of many companies that specifically sell Linux-based laptops.
Apart from that many big companies like Dell, Lenovo, HP, Huawei, etc are providing Linux alternatives to their customers. Here is my list of the top Linux-based laptops that you can buy right now.
In March this year, Amazon Web Services (AWS) teased the first public release of its brand new Linux-based OS, Bottlerocket. Following the same, AWS Product Manager Samartha Chandrashekar has now unveiled the general availability of Bottlerocket.
This means you can use this open-source Linux distribution to host and run containers on virtual machines or bare metal hosts. For those who don’t know, a container is just like a normal application that bundles all the codes and its dependencies together.
Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) new Linux distribution, Bottlerocket, has left the developer review phase and entered generally availability, according to an Amazon blog post.
The second Linux distro developed by AWS, Bottlerocket is designed to run containers alongside a container orchestrator, such as Kubernetes.
“As our customers increasingly adopt containers to run their workloads, we saw a need for a Linux distribution designed from the ground up to run containers with a focus on security, operations, and manageability at scale,” the company said.
“Customers needed an operating system that would give them the ability to manage thousands of hosts running containers with automation.”
Last week we brought you The Next Database Platform live event and now we are providing most sessions from the full recording below. Use the timestamps at the bottom of the article to jump to sessions/interviews of particular interest and to skip around breaks and bumper material. We’ll be providing more in-depth analysis from select sessions over the next couple of weeks as well. Thanks again for all who attended last week; great conversations all around. Thanks as well to our sponsors (see below) for making this event free, open, and possible.
Docker has become the de facto standard for many IT administrators and does have the lion's share of developer interest today. Yet, Podman offers admins some security advantages over basic Docker due to its ability to run as a nonprivileged user and without a daemon.
Docker and Podman both offer many of the same features, such as their support for Open Container Initiative's (OCI) runtime and image specifications, as well as their ability to map commands to create and manage containers. Yet, there are several differences between Docker and Podman, including security concerns and reliance on daemon programs.
Considering Podman does not use a daemon to develop, manage and run OCI containers, it must run on top of a Linux OS. Containers can either be run as root or in rootless mode. Docker utilizes a daemon, which is a persistent background process that handles all container management duties on the host. Docker relies on both a client and server architecture where the daemon fulfills the role of a server while clients communicate via the command-line interface (CLI).
Netezza€® has always been synonymous with speed and simplicity. Netezza Performance Server for IBM Cloud Pak€® for Data is the next-generation advanced data warehouse and analytics platform available both on-premises and on cloud.
To understand why Netezza Performance Server for IBM Cloud Pak for Data is important for application developers, it is first important to understand the journey to AI and how to get there. Many developers want to infuse AI into the companies they work for, but don’t really know how. IBM Cloud Pak for Data is a complete Data and AI platform that modernizes how businesses collect, organize, and analyze data to infuse AI throughout their organizations. If you look under the hood of IBM Cloud Pak for Data, you will see that it is built with the streamlined hybrid cloud foundation of Red Hat€® OpenShift€®. This solution supports multicloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, and private cloud deployments.
The Netezza Performance Server part of IBM Cloud Pak for Data is responsible for the “collect” piece of the data lifecycle. Netezza Performance Server can take data from many sources and store current and historical data in an enterprise data warehouse so it can be used for reporting, analysis, and better decision-making. What makes the Netezza Performance Server so powerful is the fact that it can process huge amounts of data and run large jobs that can return results in seconds, rather than hours or days. Netezza has always been known for speed and simplicity, so the fact that the new generation of Netezza Performance Server is built onto the same engine means that you don’t need to waste all your time on migration to the new platform, especially if you are coming form an older Netezza form factor. It is a simple nz_migrate command, then just point your applications to the new server. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
Unfettered Freedom is a video podcast that focuses on news and topics about GNU/Linux, free software and open source software. On this freedom-packed episode: 0:00 - Intro 2:00 - Blender 2.90 is an impressive release.
chrome books and linux, opensuse, 3d printing, uefi
PIP is the package installer for Python. You can use pip to install packages from the Python Package Index and other indexes. It is the most downloaded package on the Python Package Index. Doc Searls and Aaron Newcomb talk with the project manager of PIP, Sumana Harihareswara who is also a comedian and owner of Changest Consulting. Changest Consulting is a short-term project management services for free and open source software projects. They also talk with software developer, and release manager of pip, Pradyun Gedam. They discuss the new changes that are coming to pip in the future and why those changes are important. Including changes to the pip dependency resolver.
On this week’s episode of Destination Linux, the #1 video-centric Linux podcast on the planet. We’re going to talk about the subject of the best Unix Shell is it time to switch away from BASH? We have a new Kali Linux out with some surprising changes. A new games just dropped for Linux and it has a very dark premise. Later in the show we’ll give you our popular tips/tricks and software picks. Plus so much more, coming up right now on Destination Linux.
Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which I buy your product but I still have virus, there are apparently cellphone pedestrian lanes all over the world...
OpenZFS with ZSTD lands in FreeBSD 13, LibreSSL doc status update, FreeBSD on SPARC64 (is dead), Bringing zpool checkpoints to a FreeBSD bootloader, and more
I'm announcing the release of the 5.8.6 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...
When Linux was born on Aug. 25, 1991, it was little more than a hobby for then 21-year old Linus Torvalds. Today the Linux community is estimated to be more than 86 million users strong.
Awareness of Linux in the enterprise was nonexistent 29 years ago. Since then Linux has become the backbone of many large and small enterprises. It's installed in government systems and embedded in devices worldwide; and is a viable alternative to the expensive hardware wrapped around macOS and the trouble-laden Windows OS.
Software developers have ported Linux to more hardware platforms than any other operating system. That results in no small part from the popularity of the Linux-based Android operating system.
Following the debut of the big Blender 2.90 release and subsequently updating it for the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org, here is a deep dive into the Blender 2.90 performance... A number of areas are being looked at with the initial Blender 2.90 benchmarks from how the performance is on various CPUs and GPUs to the performance of the Blender 2.82 vs. 2.90 to looking at the Windows vs. Linux performance for Blender 2.90 with various means of acceleration.
Over the past several days it's been busy benchmarking in evaluating the performance of Blender 2.90 on many different systems and configurations. Among the areas being looked at in this article are...
Hi all,
I'd like to announce Mesa 20.1.7, the seventh bugfix release for the 20.1 branch.
The next bugfix release is planned for 2 weeks from now, on 2020-09-16.
Cheers, Eric
While Mesa 20.2 will hopefully be out next week, Mesa 20.1.7 is out today as the newest stable release for this collection of open-source Linux graphics drivers.
With Mesa 20.1.7 there still are a fair number of changes even with being quite late in the cycle for this Q2'2020 driver series. Among the highlights with Mesa 20.1.7 are:
- A new option for clamping division by zero and through the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver exposing it as the "clamp_div_by_zero" option. This clamp_div_by_zero option in turn is being enabled by default for RadeonSI when running SPECViewPerf 13 and Road Redemption for corrected rendering.
SHADERed has been available for a while now as a cross-platform, open-source shader editor and for debugging and writing of graphics shaders. SHADERed not only runs on Linux and Windows now but through any modern web browser as of the new v1.4 release.
SHADERed 1.4 released today and comes with a web browser port for those wanting to work on shaders within the confines of your web browser.
SHADERed supports working on vertex/pixel shaders as well as the likes of compute and geometry shaders. The support is quite comprehensive not only for OpenGL/GLES GLSL but also HLSL. There is also integration support around the likes of the Godot Engine.
A big day for the FNA project, as they've released a massive new release which pulls in FNA3D, the new modern and much more advanced 3D graphics library for FNA.
Intel unveiled its 11th Gen, 10nm fabricated Tiger Lake U- and Y-series processors with greatly improved Intel Iris Xe graphics and Thunderbolt 4 and PCIe 4.0 support, split into 12-28W UP3 and 7-15W UP4 models.
Intel Tiger Lake will soon begin appearing in laptops with an upgraded CPU architecture, the all new Iris Xe (Gen12) graphics, new AI capabilities, Thunderbolt 4, PCI Express 4.0, WiFi 6, and other new functionality.
Intel has officially launched Tiger Lake processors for thin-and-light Laptops. The new 11th generation processors come with either Intel Iris Xe graphics or the older Intel UHD graphics, and nine processors are currently available divided into two families: UP3 with 12W to 28W configurable TDP, and UP4 with 7W to 15W configurable TDP.
Intel has now revealed properly and launched 'Tiger Lake', their 11th Gen Intel Core processors with 'Willow Cove' cores backed up by their new Xe graphics architecture. As posted about previously if you missed it, we went over Intel's dedicated GPU info here.
The Heaptrack fast heap memory profiler allows you to track all heap memory allocations at run-time. Afterwards, you can use the accompanying GUI tool to find optimization opportunities in your code by analyzing the recorded profiling data.
If you’d like to read a bit more about Heaptrack, you can do so here.
The heaptrack version 1.2.0 release is a maintenance release and brings a couple of important bug fixes and improvements. As a result of these bugfixes and improvements, heaptrack is more stable and error resistant while recording data.
Additionally, due to some minor tweaks to the graphical analysis tool, it is more efficient to use. You’ll find that the performance of the analysis step is slightly improved too.
FrostWire (formerly known as Gnutella) is a free and open-source BitTorrent client and a fork of LimeWire. It was originally very similar to LimeWire in appearance and performance, but later developers added more rich features such as including BitTorrent protocol, Magnet Link, Wi-Fi sharing, Internet Radio, iTunes, Video/Audio Player support. It is written in Java language so it is compatible with all operating systems like Linux, Windows and Mac.
The FrostWire client is used to search, download and share large files and folders such as, Songs, Movies, Games, eBooks, Softwares, etc. across millions of people right from your computer from a peer-to-peer network.
Vem is a free and open-source command-line text editor with an alternative command layout designed to provide full keyboard support over the Vim text editor and to make it as intuitive as possible.
At its root, it is a set of configuration files that changes how Vim acts by reducing/simplifying the set of commands that are bonded to single keypresses and maps them across the keyboard to optimize their position according to their frequency.
We are pleased to announce a new release of our Hotspot Linux perf performance analysis GUI, Hotspot version 1.3.0!
Hotspot is a replacement for perf reportthat takes a perf.data file, parses and evaluates its contents, and then displays the result in a graphical form.
Open-source consulting firm KDAB has released Hotspot 1.3 as their GUI utility for visualizing Linux perf reports.
Hotspot is a utility for consuming data generated by Linux's perf subsystem and serves as a replacement to the command-line perf report functionality.
Hotspot 1.3 brings improvements for dealing with large and complex perf.data files, it is much faster than previous releases, and also properly supports perf analysis data that has been compressed using Zstd. On the user-interface side the Qt application has improved timeline handling, support for demangling rustc symbols, and a variety of smaller improvements.
System cleaning software BleachBit 4.1.0 was released a few days ago with support for cleaning Pale Moon and Zoom.
Internet radio (also known as web radio, net radio, streaming radio, and online radio) is a digital audio service transmitted via the Internet.
Why do we like internet radio? There’s no sign-up or subscription charges. There’s a huge range of stations available from around the world. If you like classical music, pop music, folk music, news, talk radio, and much more, internet radio has something for everyone wherever you live (providing you have a net connection). Internet radio offers every format that is available on traditional broadcast radio stations.
There’s a wide range of free and open source software that lets you listen to internet radio. With so many different possibilities available it’s easy to get lost trying to find the right one for you.
Here’s our verdict on internet radio software. Features that are highly desirable include, but are not limited to, access to the community radio browser API or similar, recording streams, the ability to import/export a list of radio stations, good search functionality, station logos, reordering stations, as well as an attractive and easy-to-use interface. Other factors that help to determine our rating include things like the program’s stability, speed, memory usage, and more.
Only open source software is eligible for inclusion.
Tritrie Games and Assemble Entertainment have released Jessika, a full-motion video (FMV) thriller mystery with Linux PC support and it looks very interesting.
Dealing with mature themes like suicide, it puts you in the position of a special investigator hired by the family of Jessika looking through the digital footprints of the deceased to find out what happened. What at first seems to be a job like any other quickly develops into a dark drama with twists and turns. You need to dig through video files, audio clips, notes, and more to piece the real story together.
Taking place during October 26 - 29, the 2020 Open Source Summit has gone virtual and it looks like there's going to be a session you won't want to miss.
With Linux gaming going to new and different places with the likes of Valve, Collabora, CodeWeavers and more putting resources into making it easier to run Windows-only games the interest has definitely increased in Linux gaming. So much so, that more people are speaking up about it at important Linux and open source events.
Thunder Lotus have been doing well with Spiritfarer, with it going on to receiving very warm reviews and it's now available on even more stores for additional choice but it's not without issues.
Spiritfarer is an absolutely gorgeous game, that truly hits the right mark in many ways from how it tells the stories of the dead and how you deal with death to the amazing art and audio. However, Thunder Lotus seemed to completely miss the mark in one of the stories it told. It involves a character with a wheelchair, with the character mentioning how in death they would be "free from my dreaded wheelchair" which it has been said is ableist writing.
Enjoy your coffee break games? Oneons: Prisoners looks like it could keep you busy, with an experimental take on tactical rogue-lite combat.
"Oneons is a short, experimental sci-fi broughlike (coffee-break roguelike/roguelite) with 12 floors of tactical combat, dangerous enemies, and useful items. Strategize your limited health and energy as you descend through the increasingly difficult floors. Survive. Die. Fight again."
Seenapsis Studio and Goblinz Studio recently released A Long Way Down, a game following the trend of deck-building and card battling. A Long Way Down is quite unique though, thanks to the maze building world.
A Long Way Down is set in Limbo, you're dead. Well something like that anyway. You're trying to get to the other side, wherever that may be. However, you're stuck in a maze with an evil dungeon master trying to block you and take you out with all sorts of nasty otherworldly creatures. You have to use floor tiles you're given wisely, to force your own path through the maze, while also building up a good deck of ability cards to use during battles.
After finally releasing the Linux version of Children of Morta in late August, you can now also find it on GOG too.
Children of Morta is a story-driven action RPG game about an extraordinary family of heroes. Lead the Bergsons, with all their flaws and virtues, against the forthcoming Corruption. Will you be able to sacrifice everything to save the ones you care for?
After only recently adding in a large amount of new and free content to Poly Bridge 2, the developer Dry Cactus has now giving you another reason to keep building.
A new Weekly Challenge mode is live, with a new challenging bridge-building map going up every Monday at midnight UTC. Seems like they will stick around too but only scores submitted during the initial week will be added to the leaderboard. So Poly Bridge 2 is going to get a new challenge every week and build up a backlog of them to play through—nice!
Jumpala: Tryouts Edition, the free edition of the upcoming competitive platform-hopping game is out now and allows you to get a proper taste of what to expect from it.
Acting as a sort-of demo / prologue for the full game, Jumpala: Tryouts Edition is still quite generous in that it lets you play against AI, local multiplayer and online play too although the content overall is obviously limited in this edition. The core mechanic is that you hop between platforms, changing them to your colour and when they fall off the screen whatever colour they are that matches a player gets the points noted on it.
After a small dip in July, how did the Steam on Linux gaming marketshare end out for August prior to many gamers returning to school and others still being isolated at home? A small uptick but still under the 1% threshold.
Valve just updated their Steam Survey with the August 2020 numbers. From July's 0.86% marketshare, Valve's survey is reporting a 0.03% increase for Linux gaming putting the overall percentage now at 0.89%.
Up for trying out a new immersive narrative choice-based novel? Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Heart of the Forest has a demo available right now.
Mixing in the style and mechanics Different Tales created with their previous Wanderlust series, Werewolf: The Apocalypse — Heart of the Forest throws you deep into a primeval wilderness in the centre of modern Europe. It's where the protectors of nature wage their ancient, never-ending war against the forces of destruction. It's designed much like a visual novel, so if you love a good book this could be for you. Beautiful, distinctive collage art that combines hand-illustrated characters with pictures of real places to inspire your imagination.
Ready for a new kind of rally experience? Unlike the harshness of the likes in DiRT Rally, Funselektor Labs seem to have crafted a more accessible game with art of rally.
With a top-down viewing so you know what's coming and easy controls, you get to dive right in and just have fun right away. art of rally is a stylized experience inspired by the golden era of rally from the creator of Absolute Drift and going by the demo, there's a lot to look forward to.
Currently in development by Kenney, Frick, Inc. looks pretty hilarious making you drive little trucks across various courses but this comes with a big twist on the controls.
Instead of using a gamepad or a wheel, you're using in-game on-screen controls. Kenney mentioned that "each truck has a different control method and it's all made to be Frick, Inc. frustrating until you master it."—Frick, Inc. frustrating, hah, at least it's an honest description.
Can a game as completely charming as Parkitect get any sweeter? Well they've sure tried with the 1.6 update and Booms & Blooms DLC now available.
Playing a business simulation game doesn't need to be all business, sometimes it needs a little pizzazz. You're building a theme park after all, it needs plenty to show off to customers so they can empty their wallets in your direction. That's what the update and DLC are all about. For everyone it gives an automatic day/night cycle (an option), mowed grass terrain type, new decorative objects, German guest names are in, alternative font styles for 3D signs, leaf movement animation to trees, an Italian translations, a depth visualization to the blueprint builder and a bunch of juicy sounding performance improvements.
The KDE Project announced today KDE Applications 20.08.1, which is dubbed as the September 2020 Apps Update for the Plasma desktop environment.
Coming three weeks after the release of KDE Application 20.08 as the latest and most advanced version of the popular open-source and free software suite for the KDE Plasma desktop environment and GNU/Linux distributions, KDE Applications 20.08.1 is now available as the first of three point releases.
This update introduces a total of 85 changes by my count across numerous of the included apps and core components. The star of this release is a new accessibility app called Kontrast, which lets you check the color contrast of your projects. The app shows color combinations that are accessible for people with color vision deficiencies.
SparkyLinux 2020.09 has been released today as the September snapshot of the semi-rolling SparkyLinux 2020 series based on the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system.
Coming about two weeks after the SparkyLinux 2020.08 update and only one week after the release of the Special Editions (GamvOver, Multimedia, and Rescue), SparkyLinux 2020.09 is here as an up-to-date media synced with the Debian Testing repositories as of August 31st, 2020.
But don’t expect any major updates or changes. Compared to August’s snapshot, the September release includes updates the Linux kernel to version 5.7.17 from 5.7.10, but keep in mind that the Linux 5.7 kernel series has now reached end of life and it will no longer receive security updates.
Yesterday I have updated my builds of Plasma for Debian to Plasma 5.19.5, which are now available from the usual sources, nothing has changed.
On a different front, there are good news concerning updates in Debian proper: Together with Scarlett Moore and Patrick Franz we are in the process of updating the official Debian packages. The first bunch of packages has been uploaded to experimental, and after NEW processing the next group will go there, too. This is still 5.19.4, but a great step forward. I expect that all of Plasma 5.19.4 will be available in experimental in the next weeks, and soon after also in Debian/unstable.
Here’s my (eleventh) monthly update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
Canonical has released important Ubuntu kernel updates for all supported releases to address several security vulnerabilities discovered lately by various security researchers.
Available for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS systems, these major kernel updates fix a total of 17 security issues. As such, I recommend that you patch your installations as soon as possible by running the sudo apt update && sudo apt full-upgrade commands in the Terminal app.
Among the most important security issues fixed in this update, there’s CVE-2020-10766, CVE-2020-10767 and CVE-2020-10768, flaws that made the Linux kernel to not correctly apply the mitigations for the SSBD (Speculative Store Bypass Disable) and IBPB (Indirect Branch Predictor Barrier) vulnerabilities affecting certain Intel processors, as well as to incorrectly enable Indirect Branch Speculation after it’s been disabled for a process via a prctl() call.
These flaws could allow a local attacker to expose sensitive information.
The web team here at Canonical run two week iterations. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
[...]
We experimented some more with solid pictograms but came to the conclusion that the line versions were cleaner and easier to consume, so this will be the chosen route we begin to roll out.
[...]
Gradients have been an integral part of our desktop work and website, so we have begun to look at expanding the system so that we can potentially include them in our product set too, creating a more cohesive experience from website to product.
E-con’s 2MP, HD “STURDeCAM20” camera offers a MIPI-CSI-2 to GMSL2 interface and IP67 protection and is available in a $699 kit for the Jetson AGX Xavier with 15-meter coaxial cable and FAKRA connectors.
In 2018, E-con Systems launched a 3.4-megapixel NileCAM30 camera and Nvidia Jetson TX2 kit claimed to be the world’s fastest camera to use the Gigabit Multimedia Serial Link (GMSL) standard. Now, it has introduced a STURDeCAM20 camera and STURDeCAM20_CUXVR kit for Nvidia’s high-end Jetson AGX Xavier Developers Kit that uses the next-gen GMSL2 interface. Like E-Con’s SurveilsQUAD camera system for the AGX Xavier, th STURDeCAM20 has 2-megapixel, HD resolution and a MIPI-CSI-2 link.
Why do open source projects fail?
Lack of funding is a major factor, of course, but it's far from the only reason that open source projects fail to achieve sustainability. Sometimes there's a lack of understanding of how to create a product for a broad market, or some fundamental misstep with intellectual property rights (IPR)—such as failing to properly license your code.
It's hard for any open source project to sustain if it doesn't get these types of basics right. Collaboration across boundaries and the ability to iterate and expand are hindered, and innovation is stifled. I see these fatal flaws especially in a lot of humanitarian projects—passion projects—and it is heartbreaking.
I have served as our Membership Committee Chair since the May 2019 board meeting, tasked with devising and supervising strategy to increase membership and deliver value to members.
As part of my election campaign last year, I signed up over 50 new individual members. Since May 2019, we've seen strong 33% growth of individual members, to reach a new all-time high over 600 (638 when I last checked).
I see the OSI as a relatively neutral organization that occupies a unique position to build bridges among organizations within the FOSS ecosystem. In order to facilitate this, we need a representative membership, and we need to engage those members and provide forums for cross-pollination. As Membership Committee Chair, I have been running quarterly video calls on Jitsi for our affiliate members, where we can share updates between many global organizations and discuss challenges we all face.
Open source runs the world. That's for supercomputers, where Linux powers all of the top 500 machines in the world, for smartphones, where Android has a global market share of around 75%, and for everything in between, as Wired points out:
LibreOffice 7.0.1, the first minor release of the LibreOffice 7.0 family, targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users, is now available for download from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. LibreOffice 7.0.1 includes around 80 bug fixes and improvements to document compatibility.
The most significant new features of the LibreOffice 7.0 family are: support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.3; Skia graphics engine and Vulkan GPU-based acceleration for better performance; and carefully improved compatibility with DOCX, XLSX and PPTX files.
The Document Foundation released today LibreOffice 7.0.1 as the first point release in the latest LibreOffice 7.0 series of this very popular, free, open source and multi-platform office suite.
LibreOffice 7.0.1 is here to address a total of 79 bugs across various core components, improving document compatibility, as well as the overall stability and reliability of the LibreOffice 7.0 office suite series.
You can download LibreOffice 7.0.1 right now from the official website. But, for now, The Document Foundation doesn’t recommend LibreOffice 7.0 for enterprise deployments. This release is currently targeted at technology enthusiasts and power users who want to experiment with the new features and changes.
On Saturday August 22, in the Ibero-American afternoon/evening, the Hispanic Community met for the fourth consecutive month with panelists who covered several topics related to the office suite par-excellence in the FLOSS world.
The event was broadcast live on YouTube and Facebook. The activity began at 16:00 UTC, extended for almost 4 hours and presented speakers of 6 nationalities recognized for their participation and collaboration in the project. All the talks are available on the LibreOffice Hispano channel.
Who makes LibreOffice? How can you – as a user – get involved in the community? And what can you contribute to the project? Well, we’ll answer all of these questions, and more, in an upcoming online “hackfest” during the LibreOffice conference (date to be announced). This is a virtual event where the world’s foremost LibreOffice experts will be at hand, to answer your questions about contributing to the project. You can see how they work and “how the sausage is made”, as they say!
We are pleased to announce the availability of a new GnuPG release: version 2.2.23. This version fixes a *critical security bug* in versions 2.2.21 and 2.2.22.
Of all the Linux commands out there (and there are many), the three most quintessential seem to be sed, awk, and grep. Maybe it's the arcane sound of their names, or the breadth of their potential use, or just their age, but when someone's giving an example of a "Linuxy" command, it's usually one of those three. And while sed and grep have several simple one-line standards, the less prestigious awk remains persistently prominent for being particularly puzzling.
You're likely to use sed for a quick string replacement or grep to filter for a pattern on a daily basis. You're far less likely to compose an awk command. I often wonder why this is, and I attribute it to a few things.
RPMs of PHP version 7.4.10 are available in remi repository for Fedora 32-33 and remi-php74 repository for Fedora 31 and Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 7 (RHEL, CentOS).
RPMs of PHP version 7.3.22 are available in remi repository for Fedora 31 and remi-php73 repository for Enterprise Linux ââ°Â¥ 6 (RHEL, CentOS).
Around this time, I think I said something about how that's basically the job. That is, my job, their job, anyone's job... is to check for things that could go wrong and deal with it when it does. It's never been optional, and certainly not because of some kind of "avoid messiness" mandate (where the heck did that come from, anyway).
IAR Systems, a supplier of software tools and services for embedded development, has announced a significant update of its build tools supporting implementation in Linux-based frameworks for automated application build and test processes.
[...]
With the addition of the static analysis tool C-STAT, developers will be able ensure code quality throughout the development and testing process, according to IAR. C-STAT proves code alignment with industry standards like MISRA C:2012, MISRA C++:2008 and MISRA C:2004, and also detects defects, bugs, and security vulnerabilities as defined by CERT C and the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE).
“This latest version of our build tools for Linux enable our customers to make their testing and building processes more efficient as well as achieve code quality all the way,” said Anders Holmberg, General Manager Embedded Development Tools, IAR Systems. “IAR Embedded Workbench and IAR Build Tools improves performance and ease of use for more efficient workflows. Our broad offering enables companies to standardize on our tools and gain flexible workflows, and through this enhance productivity and collaboration between different teams in the organiSation.”
The build tools for Linux includes the highly optimising IAR C/C++ Compiler, IAR Assembler, Linker and library tools, IARBuild and runtime libraries. The tools also support the integrated static code analysis tool C-STAT.
Qt Automotive Suite 5.15.0 has been released. It is now available for Qt Automotive Suite licenses holders via the Qt Online Installer / Qt Maintenance tool.
Qt Automotive Suite is a spiced up version of Qt for Device Creation, with additional automotive supportive features. Qt Automotive Suite 5.15 is a special release as it is the last feature release of the Qt 5 series. Next up in the pipeline is Qt 6.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to reset the background color of your application to the default color.
We’re excited to announce that plans are underway for our end-of-the-year 2020 fundraising campaign launching on November 23rd and ending on December 31st!
In the past, we’ve worked successfully with organizations such as JetBrains who donated 100% of the profits from the sale of PyCharm to the PSF. The theme this year is geared toward education. We'll be actively supporting Python educators by collaborating with authors, trainers, and education companies that offer their services all over the world. The goal for the campaign is $30,000 and the funds raised will help benefit the PSF, our community, and those who educate Pythonistas worldwide.
PyTorch vs TensorFlow: What’s the difference? Both are open source Python libraries that use graphs to perform numerical computation on data. Both are used extensively in academic research and commercial code. Both are extended by a variety of APIs, cloud computing platforms, and model repositories.
If they’re so similar, then which one is best for your project?
If you have functions that do a lot of mathematical operations, use NumPy or rely heavily on loops, then there is a way to speed them up significantly with one line of code. Ok, two lines if you count the import.
reno is a release notes manager designed with high throughput in mind, supporting fast distributed development teams without introducing additional development processes. The goal is to encourage detailed and accurate release notes for every release.
The internet is an absolutely massive source of data. Unfortunately, the vast majority if it isn’t available in conveniently organized CSV files for download and analysis. If you want to capture data from many websites, you’ll need to try web scraping.
Don’t worry if you’re still a total beginner — in this tutorial we’re going to cover how to do web scraping with Python from scratch, starting with some answers to frequently-asked questions about web scraping.
If you’re already familiar with the concept, feel free to scroll past these and jump right into the tutorial!
Former presidential adviser Vladislav Surkov — at one point considered to be the “gray cardinal” responsible for managing Russia’s domestic politics — has authored a poem published in the September issue of Russian Pioneer. The poem is about freedom without cocaine. For a rough (non-rhyming) English translation:
It’s not a matter of if a privately built border fence along the shores of the Rio Grande will fail, it’s a matter of when, according to a new engineering report on the troubled project.
The report is one of two new studies set to be filed in federal court this week that found numerous deficiencies in the 3-mile border fence, built this year by North Dakota-based Fisher Sand and Gravel. The reports confirm earlier reporting from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which found that segments of the structure were in danger of overturning due to extensive erosion if not fixed and properly maintained. Fisher dismissed the concerns as normal post-construction issues.
If you were a university president, watching his university slowly sink back into the earth from the weight of administrative overhead, compounded by a mismanaged national health crisis, wouldn’t you welcome any light?€ Wouldn’t you treasure a faculty member who was not only a valued mentor and teacher, but a renowned atmospheric scientist who had published over 200 peer reviewed papers, and had served on many national and international scientific panels, including the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC)?
A friend and I were sitting at a picnic table behind a pizza joint in Berkeley, CA. The year was 1980 and it was evening. We were each eating a slice of pepperoni, talking and joking. After we finished, my buddy lit up the rest of a joint (pot was illegal in California then). While we were smoking it, four cops snuck up on us, surrounding us with their guns drawn and pointed at us. The closest gun barrel was about four feet from my head. I swallowed what remained of the joint and waited. Two cops grabbed us and threw us up against a wall, searching us and telling us not to move. The other two cops remained where they were, their guns still pointing at us and their fingers on the triggers. I was wondering what the hell was going on. I had run-ins with the police before, but never had they kept their guns on me for this long. A couple cop cars showed up. We were cuffed and thrown in the back of the cruisers. They took us to the police substation on the University of California campus. In the station, they fingerprinted us and threw us each in a holding cell. My friend kept asking what we were being arrested for and the cops kept telling him to shut up. Eventually, we were told we were being held on suspicion of armed robbery.
Hidden behind the tragedy of the deadly explosion earlier this month in the port of Beirut is a dark and pervasive travesty that began in 2013 and explains how the 2,750 tons of explosive ammonium nitrate ended up in a portside warehouse.
Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr., leader of a megachurch in Lynchburg, Va. since the 1960s, founded Liberty University in 1971. In 1979 he founded the Moral Majority as a political movement opposed to abortion, homosexuality, feminism, and liberal, socialist thought; it was dissolved within a decade due to competition, infighting and mounting irrelevance. But the university became maybe the world’s largest Christian academic institution, with tens of thousands of resident and online students.
The highest qualification for high-school students in England, Wales, and the north of Ireland, is the A-level. Scotland has a different system called the Highers.
New York unions representing teachers and principals have reached a deal with the city over how to reopen the largest public school system in the United States, averting a planned strike by educators. “We feel betrayed, and we feel as if it’s an inadequate plan,” says Aixa Rodriguez, a Bronx-based high school teacher. We also speak with education writer Eric Blanc, who says New York has failed to learn the lessons of other school districts that reopened too quickly without adequate safety measures in place against COVID-19. “When educators in New York are saying it’s not safe to go back, that’s not just born out of paranoia; that’s born out of looking at what happens when you open schools,” says Blanc.
School is back in session for kids in Russia, but the coronavirus pandemic is still a concern. These days, school children begin their mornings waiting in long lines at entrances to schools, to have their temperatures checked before heading to class. And judging by the photos and videos popping up on social media, Russia’s students — and parents, and teachers — could use a lesson in social distancing.
"This bill meets the political moment, and it also happens to be an incredibly bipartisan opportunity."
"Trump and his minions have been trying to yank food from hungry children and families and he is now putting notes in pandemic food boxes to claim credit."
Sarah Johnson spent her entire life taking care of people — the six children she raised, mostly alone, and the hospital patients she served in her 25 years as a nurse. But at 86, she was the one who needed care. She was thin and frail and had COVID-19.
Her son Rodney Lavalais anguished over the fact that she was all by herself; he’d moved in with her four years ago after he saw her struggling to open a jar. But when the ambulance took her to Ochsner West Bank, a hospital in the New Orleans suburbs, he couldn’t come with her.
The director of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has welled-up because of it. In March, he feared that the world’s elderly citizens risked being marginalised in any pandemic policy. “If anything is going to hurt the world, it is moral decay. And not taking the death of the elderly or the senior citizens as a serious issue is moral decay.”
Sullivan County, N.Y.—It’s a myth that people in small-town America know one another. I’ve had a cabin in this place for 30 years and never knew that a foie gras factory sits high above Ferndale, a hamlet I’ve driven through hundreds of times. I found out one sunny Sunday this spring, when 40 flag-festooned cars filed up to La Belle Farm past blooming forsythia and a white-picket-fenced farmhouse, part of an appreciation drive for farm and factory workers.
Donald Trump’s re-election campaign has been touting that he is tough on the drug companies, unlike the wimpy Joe Biden. Perhaps in Trumpland this is true, but not in the real world. Spending on prescription drugs has actually increased somewhat more rapidly under Trump than Obama-Biden, rising at a 6.3 percent annual rate under Trump compared to a 5.5 percent rate under Obama-Biden.
As a coup de grâce to the Bernie Sanders campaign Joe Biden declared that he would veto Medicare-for-All. This could drive a dedicated health care advocate to relentlessly pursue Med-4-All as a final goal. However, it is not the final goal. It should be the first step in a complete transformation of medicine which includes combining community medicine with natural medicine and health-care-for-the-world.
As we enter the Labor Day weekend, Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, has some dire words regarding the spread of coronavirus: new daily infection numbers are still much too high.
Just two weeks ago, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Stephen Hahn got up in front of a podium with Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar and President Donald Trump to announce an Emergency Use Authorization for convalescent plasma to treat Covid-19. Each crowed in succession about how this pooled blood product could reduce deaths by a third. Within seconds of the announcement, scientists and clinicians were pointing out that this was a rookie statistical error. The study in question actually showed a far more modest 35 percent relative risk reduction in hospitalized patients less than 80 years old not on ventilators and who received plasma with high levels of antibodies within three days of diagnosis, compared with those who received plasma with low levels of antibodies.
The Department of Defense has initiated a probe on the patents after patient advocacy group Knowledge Ecology International said in a post Friday it has found that Moderna has not reported government funding in its 126 patents and 154 patent applications.
KEI said in the post that it made a request to the DoD and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to remedy this.
Moderna has secured $25 million in grants from the DARPA to develop the technology for its coronavirus vaccine.
"We continue to work with our external data security providers and, if any personally identifiable information has been accessed, we will notify those who may have been impacted as well as the appropriate authorities as required, including the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
Zoom projected a total revenue of $2.4 billion dollars ( for its fiscal year ending in January. This is up from the 1.8 billion dollars (1.5 billion euros) it forecast back in June, and takes into account the users that will not renew the monthly subscriptions they signed up for in the first quarter.
Justin Elze, a principal security consultant at security company TrustedSec, pointed out that in order for the vulnerability to be exploited, a protocol known as IGMP needs to be enabled. That protocol is less common in enterprise networks and tends to be used by cable TV networks to do video streaming, he said.
Last year, the beloved children's series announced a move to HBO Max for its 51st season, a deal that includes five new seasons of the show.
For nearly half a year now, especially when this damned pandemic really took off, we've been bringing you the occasional story of how Nintendo's Animal Crossing keeps popping up with folks finding innovative ways to use the game as a platform. Protesters advocating for freedom in Hong Kong gathered in the game. Sidelined reality show stars took to the game to ply their trade. Very real people enduring very real layoffs used the game's currency as a method for making very real money. As someone who has never played the game, the picture I'm left with is of a game that is both inherently malleable to what you want to do within it and immensely social in nature.
The Linux Foundation (LF) announced Tuesday a new initiative to provide investors, banks, insurers, companies, governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academia with an AI-enhanced open source analytics and open data platform. The plan is to boost financing for climate-related initiatives, address climate risks, and assess climate-related opportunities, the organization said.
Yesterday a zero-day vulnerability was discovered in a popular WordPress plugin, File Manager. The vulnerability allows arbitrary file upload and remote code execution.
File Manager plugin is a useful plugin that allows users to browse site files in an easy way. The plugin has over 700,000 active installations that make it a desired target for attackers.
Yesterday the vulnerability was discovered by Seravo as part of their WordPress upkeep service. They noticed unusual activity on several of their customers’ websites and further investigation revealed the severe vulnerability in the File Manager plugin.
Linux v5.6 was released back in March. Here’s my quick summary of various features that caught my attention:
In early 2019, law enforcement in Florida wrapped up a supposed "human trafficking" sting centering on Florida spas and massage parlors. By the time prosecutors and cops were done congratulating themselves for helping purge Florida of human trafficking, they appeared to have little more than about 150 bog-standard solicitation and prostitution arrests.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has just ruled that the “NSA’s bulk collection of Americans’ phone records was illegal.” For years, the NSA has conducted a domestic mass surveillance program on Americans’ phone records with little to no resistance from other arms of the government but lots of resistance from civil liberties and privacy advocates within the States. In the same tweet announcing the breaking news, the ACLU commented:
The Fourth Amendment has been interpreted to mean that law enforcement can’t serve a warrant on tech companies like Google to try and find out what devices were near the scene of a crime. Federal courts have started to rule that police can’t ask for information on every device near the scene of a crime, otherwise known as a geofencing warrant or reverse location request. These reverse location requests have increased in use around the country over the last few years and have resulted in some high profile cases of wrongful accusations. After Arizona police served a reverse location request on Google following a murder back in 2018, they ended up wrongfully accusing Jorge Molina. Molina is now suing Google for $1.5 million dollars.
One of the reasons why protecting privacy is so hard is that our data is vulnerable in so many ways as it flows across the Internet. Threats can come from the companies that run online services, ISPs, telecom companies and governments. That’s bad enough for everyday situations, but in extreme ones, those weaknesses can have serious consequences.
In its detailed report of the takedown, Stanford found that the network engaged in mass reporting: the coordinated reporting of accounts ostensibly for violating a platform’s terms of service.
The network, it said, encouraged users to mass-report accounts that were critical of Islam and the Pakistani government, and in some cases accounts that were part of the Ahmadi religious community.
The new policy mirrors a requirement imposed in May — if drivers are reported for not wearing a face mask, they must verify that their face is covered before making their next pick up.
The company referred to a "a two-way street" of accountability. They also reported that since implementing the rule regarding drivers, 3.5 million drivers had completed over 100 million verifications.
Uber's photo recognition system would automatically detect whether the customer was wearing a mask, according to the company. However, the system "does not process biometric information," they said.
It was bad enough when, beginning in March, US President Donald J. Trump repeatedly referred to Covid-19 as “the Chinese virus” in speeches, insulting Asian-Americans, and stirring up xenophobic remembrances of Yellow Perils Past, backpedaling and vacillating over his semiotic intentions, but then he left less doubt when he began to infer that China had let the spread of the virus happen “for whatever reason,” and began locating the epicenter of the outbreak, not with pangolins at the Wuhan wet market, which the MSM was initially feeding news consumers, but the up the road at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), site of pandemic studies, where research was being conducted on Coronavirus-laden bats. Problem is, as with Trump’s many assertions of “fake news” reports, there’s some truth; there’s some plausibility regarding the laboratory origins of the virus.
It is time for the United States to debate the downsizing, if not the dissolution, of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).€ U.S. national security would be strengthened by the demise of NATO because Washington would no longer have to guarantee the security of 14 Central and East European nations, including the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.€ European defense coordination and integration would be more manageable without the participation of authoritarian governments in Poland and Hungary.€ Key West European nations presumably would favor getting out from under the use of U.S. military power in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Southwest Asia, which has made them feel as if they were “tins of shoe polish for American boots.”
Roughly 200 “trained extremists” are responsible for provoking “radical actions” at opposition protests in Minsk and other Belarusian cities, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claimed at a press conference on Wednesday in Moscow, where he discussed the results of negotiations with his Belarusian counterpart, Vladimir Makei.
AFRICOM acknowledges 46 bombings of claimed militant targets this year, while critics warn that harm to innocent civilians continues to fuel the very terrorism such strikes are purportedly meant to destroy.€
Recently, New York Attorney General Letitia James€ sued€ four current or former NRA executives for “illegal financial conduct,” according to NBC. Among the charges were that Wayne LaPierre, CEO and executive vice president of the NRA, received “hundreds of thousands of dollars” of complimentary safaris in Africa.
The Trump administration is taking aim at yet another international agency.€
Seven shots in the back. Seven shots in the back. THAT’LL TEACH THE S.O.B. TO TURN HIS F***’N BACK ON ME Seven shots in the back.
Brenton Tarrant was sentenced last week.€ The Australian national who butchered, with relish, 51 individuals in Christchurch at Al Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre, found himself facing something unique in New Zealand: jail for life without parole.€ He pleaded guilty to 51 charges of murder, 40 counts of attempted murder and one of terrorism.€ He also faced a tsunami of victim impact statements – over 200 in all.
Authorities in Kentucky have still not arrested the police officers who murdered Breonna Taylor on March 13. Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who is now in charge of the case, had time to speak at the Republican National Convention last week, but he has not found the time to bring to justice the three cops who shot Taylor in her own apartment.
German officials have confirmed that Russian opposition figure and anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny was poisoned with a substance from the “Novichok” group of nerve agents — the same poison reportedly used in the attack against ex-spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in England in March 2018. Traces of the poison were found during tests conducted by a German military toxicology lab at the request of doctors from the Charité Hospital in Berlin, where Navalny is currently being treated. “Alexey Navalny was the victim of a chemical attack in Russia,” the German government underscored in its statement.€
Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny addresses demonstrators during a rally to support opposition and independent candidates after authorities refused to register them for September elections to the Moscow City Duma on July 20, 2019. (Maxim Zmeyev / AFP via Getty Images)
As the life of Kremlin critic Alexey Navalny hangs in the balance, so does the fate of the movement he leads. For many years, the anti-corruption crusader has offered the only serious challenge to President Vladimir Putin’s 20-year rule. According to the German government, Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, the same deadly nerve agent used in the UK against Russian double agent Sergey Skripal in 2018. With doctors predicting a long and difficult recovery, will the temporary loss of its lodestar cripple Russia’s already embattled opposition or set it free from the shadow of a brilliant but flawed leader?
Once Navalny was in Berlin it was only a matter of time before it was declared that he was poisoned with Novichok. The Russophobes are delighted. This of course eliminates all vestiges of doubt about what happened to the Skripals, and proves that Russia must be isolated and sanctioned to death and we must spend untold billions on weapons and security services. We must also increase domestic surveillance, crack down on dissenting online opinion. It also proves that Donald Trump is a Russian puppet and Brexit is a Russian plot.
In an announcement on Wednesday, September 2, the German government cited “unequivocal evidence” that Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny was poisoned with a substance from the ‘Novichok’ group of nerve agents — the same poison reportedly used in the attack against ex-spy Sergey Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in England in March 2018.
Russia’s most prominent opposition figure, Alexey Navalny, has been in a coma for more than two weeks. On August 20, his flight home to Moscow was forced to make an emergency landing in Omsk after he became violently ill. Russian doctors treated Navalny for roughly two days before he was transferred abroad in an air ambulance to the Charité Clinic in Berlin, where specialists found evidence that he’d been poisoned with cholinesterase inhibitors. Physicians have been unable to identify the exact substance responsible for Navalny’s condition, but German officials announced on September 2 that experts have collected “unequivocal evidence” that he was poisoned with a substance similar in composition to the nerve agent Novichok. To understand more about Navalny’s poisoning, Meduza science editor Alexander Ershov spoke to Marc-Michael Blum, a biochemist who studies decontamination, countermeasures, and mitigation of chemical warfare agents. In 2018, following the Novichok poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skirpal in England, Dr. Blum led the team sent by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to Salisbury and Amesbury.
Putin’s preparations to deploy the Russian security services are only part of the Kremlin’s ongoing intervention in neighboring Belarus. As protests expanded in the days following the August 9 presidential vote, Moscow reportedly sent planeloads of Russian TV workers to replace striking staff at Belarus state TV and lead the Lukashenka regime’s propaganda efforts. The impact of this apparent takeover is now all too evident in government messaging, with Belarusian officials including Lukashenka echoing Kremlin language and referring to pro-democracy protesters as paid foreign agents, social misfits, and Nazis.
The confrontation was caught on film. As three armed policemen try to pull Wanjira Wanjiru away, she clings to the wing-mirror of a parked car and refuses to move. “Don’t touch me!” she yells. “Why are you arresting me?” “Why are you protesting?” one of the steel-helmeted policemen asks. “I’m protesting because you’re killing us,” replies the 25-year-old anti-police brutality campaigner. “Who is killing you?” “You police! You’re killing us in our communities!” Then, as the policemen back off, Wanjira, fist in the air, defiantly chants what has now become an iconic line: “When we lose our fear, they lose their power!” Her resistance during the “Saba Saba” protests that day, held annually on 7 July to commemorate Kenya’s pro-democracy movement that emerged in the 1990s, resonated as a symbolic moment in Kenyans’ fight against police violence – an issue now in the global spotlight after a string of police shootings of Black Americans in the United States.
An internal Census Bureau document sent to members of Congress and obtained by NBC News warned that the new truncated deadline set by the agency's director last month has the potential to undermine the integrity of the count and lead to "serious errors."
The document was sent to the House Oversight Committee, which has been investigating the Census Bureau for several years since its failed attempt to add a citizenship question to the decennial count.
The Swedish city of Malmo witnessed raging violence on August 28 after a copy of the Quran was burned by members of a far-right Danish party. A day after, reports of clashes in Norway breaking out during an anti-Islam rally also surfaced.
Amid this, an image purportedly showing Muslim refugees in Switzerland burning the Swiss flag went viral on social media. According to the claim, Muslim men burnt the Swiss flag in 2019, demanding the removal of the Cross from the flag.
[...]
On further search, we found that the image is part of a 2006 outrage that hit several Muslim countries following the publication of cartoons featuring prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper.
The only problem: The story was almost entirely false.
Four years after Russia’s infamous [astroturfer] factory unleashed a disinformation campaign in the United States, the incident underscores how vulnerable many Americans still are to fake news, especially with much of the populace primed for a repeat of Russia’s use of hacks, online ads, and outright lies to sway U.S. voters to advance its own agenda.
The 'crater' - these holes are called hydrolaccoliths or bulgunnyakhs by scientists - is given the number 17, and is seen as the most impressive of the large holes to suddenly appear in recent years as the permafrost thaws.
Arctic heating is happening far faster than anybody had anticipated. And the ice record suggests this has happened before.
Across the South, many workers rely on industries whose pollution causes devastating storms. Let’s rebuild with sustainable jobs.
This article is adapted from “The Climate Beat,” the weekly newsletter of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative strengthening coverage of the climate story. The author is Covering Climate Now’s deputy director.
The climate crisis is not some far-away threat. It’s here now, and it demands a swift and comprehensive political response, no matter your political allegiances.€
Bolstered by an energized climate movement, small-dollar donors, and support from prominent progressive lawmakers like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Green New Deal champion Sen. Ed Markey on Tuesday fended off a Democratic primary challenge from Rep. Joe Kennedy III, whose name recognition and late endorsement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were ultimately insufficient to topple the popular Massachusetts incumbent.
"With climate costs surging everywhere and local budgets depleted, more and more communities are turning to the courts as their only recourse to make polluters pay."
Make no mistake, it really is yet another significant milestone in the demise of Big Oil.
"The failure to act on this issue will have a catastrophic impact on the future of us and the generations to come."
Penny Aucoin, her husband Carl Dee George, their son Gideon and their daughter Skyler have had their lives devastated by the fracking industry.
As the coronavirus pandemic contributes to a glut of fossil fuels, groups like Greenpeace are calling on Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to ban fossil fuel interests from his campaign and administration, if he wins, even as he recently declared at a campaign stop that he “will not ban fracking.” We discuss the politics of fossil fuels with reporter Antonia Juhasz, who says the end of oil could be near, and look at how the industry has profited from the COVID bailout. “The pandemic has taken essentially every weakness that already existed in the oil industry and then made each of them much, much worse, leaving the oil industry in a situation where I would argue it is at its weakest since its inception,” she says.
The lawsuit seeks to recover costs associated with climate impacts like extreme flooding and sea level rise. Like other climate liability lawsuits targeting fossil fuel companies, Hoboken's suit alleges that the oil and gas companies and their lobbying group€ not only knew early on about the climate harms resulting from their products, but actively engaged in campaigns of deception to undermine climate science and avoid policy€ responses.
Plutonium used to be called the world’s most valuable substance. It’s now recognised as a highly dangerous liability.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown this week requested an audit of the Oregon Forest Resources Institute after an investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive, OPB and ProPublica revealed that the tax-funded agency worked to discredit academic research and acted as a lobbying and public relations arm for the timber industry.
In a letter dated Aug. 31, Brown’s office asked Secretary of State Bev Clarno to conduct a thorough audit of the agency, pointing to a need for an investigation in light of “facts recently disclosed” in public records and media reports that “allege a variety of statutory and ethical concerns.”
"The world of philanthropy must step up and do more, faster. Congress must insist on it."
"While an eviction moratorium is essential, it is a half-measure that extends a financial cliff for renters to fall off when the moratorium expires and back rent is owed."€
“It’s 350 rupees. Don’t reduce the price, we are already not earning anything due to corona,” said Prakash Kokre, while a buyer tried to bargain. He picked up a white male lamb and put it on a weighing scale placed on the ground. “Teen kilo [three kilos],” he announced to the two customers who insisted on Rs. 200 per kilogram. “That’s too low, but I need the money,” said Prakash, as he gave the animal to its new owners.
The Covid-19 pandemic will cause the number of homeless people and homeless families to skyrocket. This is not so much a prediction as a certainty. With government subsidies to people to help pay rent and mortgages at an end, and with unemployment benefits reduced, the number of adults and children on the streets will grow exponentially. Why is this?
In the midst of a global pandemic, unprecedented economic collapse, mass unemployment, hunger and desperation, the stock market is booming and the richest of the rich are richer than ever before.
“If you think about it one way, we’re in the midst of the biggest rent strike in national history,” Tara Raghuveer, director of the KC Tenants union, told me over Zoom: “There’s massive noncompliance from inability to pay the rent, and hundreds of thousands of people are politicizing that inability, as they should.” In Jackson County, where Kansas City is located, the eviction moratorium expired at the end of May. The following months have mirrored the rest of the country: nonstop organizing, mutual aid efforts, and crushed hopes of state intervention.
The nationwide eviction moratorium announced Tuesday by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will provide immediate and welcome relief through the end of the year for certain renters, but housing rights advocates say the move is woefully inadequate because it fails to provide any payment assistance to renters.
EFF has become increasingly concerned that payment processors are being asked to turn over information on their customers, without any mechanism for the public to know who is making those requests, or how often. That’s why we are calling on Coinbase—one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the country—to start releasing regular transparency reports that provide insight into how many government requests for information it receives, and how it deals with them. These are difficult decisions with serious consequences, and they should not be made in the dark.
Cryptocurrency exchanges should especially understand the importance of the privacy of this information
The looter, like most American figures, exists in a state of mythical distortion. When looters emerge from social movements, the press depicts them as opportunists and outsiders; when looters destroy property in response to police violence or the silent horrors of capitalism, they are deemed lawless aggressors. Talking heads and commentators cast looters as mindless and apolitical, as if looting were not a risky, calculated act. Vicky Osterweil’s In Defense of Looting corrects those misconceptions, reclaiming looters as conscious actors and heirs of a radical tradition stretching back to chattel slavery.
The authorities in Russia’s Ulyanovsk Region are sponsoring a controversial new movement called “Protiv Vsekh” (Against Everyone), which has nominated several candidates to run in the upcoming city council elections in Ulyanovsk. The movement’s leader, Anna Karvaleiru, is trying to win over local voters using performance art and provocative campaign ads — appearing on billboards in blackface under the slogan “We’re all ‘negroes’! Vote against everyone!” This “anti” campaign is directing its efforts against everyone from governing officials to the ruling United Russia party, but it targets the nominally opposition Communist Party (KPRF) in particular. As it turns out, the KPRF would have been posed to take power in the city’s parliament, but half of its candidates were banned from competing in the elections. In protest, the KPRF has set up a tent city on one of Ulyanovsk’s main squares. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev travelled to Ulyanovsk to meet the people behind this absurd campaign and uncover what’s actually at stake in the elections.
When is the last time you had a guest inside your home, you gave them a cup of tea and a biscuit, perhaps watched some TV together, and then when they left you thought “Oh, they were nice. I wonder who that was?”.
Attorney General Bill Barr’s decision to abruptly replace a career official who led a Justice Department office that oversees the legality of national security policy with a political appointee sparked concerns among national security officials, according to ABC News.
I have today received a bill from my legal team for €£60,563.40 in fees to date in defending the contempt of court charge against me for my reporting of the Alex Salmond trial.
Unlike former years, the election of 2020 is not just about Republican versus Democrat, the economy versus public health or fiscal conservative versus liberal and progressive. It’s not about policy differences where reasonable minds may differ.€ € Rather, this year’s election is a contest of values.€ € It pits American citizens against an administration that daily practices human disregard and cruelty.
Although Donald Trump has repeatedly claimed that American workers are “thriving” during his presidency, this contention rings hollow. The mishandled coronavirus pandemic, of course, has created levels of unemployment, hunger, and misery in the United States not seen since the Great Depression. But even in the years before the pandemic, when Trump claimed he had created “the greatest economy in history,” American workers were left far behind.
The time for analysis has passed, and in the next few months what is needed is relentless action, and careful preparation for the crisis to come.
The MSNBC host, who asked guests whether the president is "radicalizing" his followers like "leaders in the Muslim world," says her remarks have been taken out of context.€
"Donald Trump is not running a re-election campaign. He's running a power grab."
Human rights advocates blasted the move as "another brazen attack against international justice" that "is designed to do what this administration does best—bully and intimidate."
Larry Penner vouches that “the Democrats could run Mad magazine’s ‘What, Me Worry?’ Alfred E. Neuman for president and still carry the Empire State by a wide margin” (“True blue New York,” Queens Chronicle, August 27). That’s a harsh assessment … of Neuman. Unlike Democratic politicians in solidly blue states, or Republicans in their red-state counterparts, he had real rivals to contend with.
It doesn’t matter who you vote for or what political party you do or don’t belong to, when it comes to funding government it’s taxpayers of all stripes who pick up the tab. Now, at both the national and state level, the new, nefarious, and open weaponization of government resources for partisan political purposes has emerged in full force. If we want to end democracy in the U.S.€ — this will do it.
"If the USPS is surprised we are issuing a subpoena," said the New York Democrat, "it's because they weren't listening."
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) called the findings "more powerful proof that resources and reform are vital right away to prevent serious election mail delays and voting suppression."
Less than two months after Trump ally and GOP megadonor Louis DeJoy took the helm of the U.S. Postal Service, the House of Representatives met in an emergency session to address widespread fears about potential sabotage of this vital public agency at a time when it is needed more than ever to deliver medicine and other essentials and to facilitate mail-in voting.
In November, 2019, as part of its support for the Haitian National Police (HNP), the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL) awarded a $73,000 contract for the provision of “riot gear kit[s]” for the police’s crowd control unit, CIMO, according to information contained in the US government’s contracting database.
“A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” published by Harper’s Magazine (7/7/20), lauds the recent climate of protest for spurring calls for police reform as well as greater inclusion and equality, but laments what came with it: a new set of “moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our social norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”
President Trump openly admires authoritarians. It appears he believes he was being elected dictator rather than president, and has been openly bitter about his perceived lack of power ever since. The world leaders he enjoys talking to most -- Vladimir Putin, Mohammad bin Salman, Recep Erdogan -- are all notorious thugs who punish critics, dissidents, and anyone else who steps a little out of line.
Fear not, white people. Black people won’t eat you.
After four nights, the reality show” Shouting with the Tsars,” a.k.a. the Republican National Convention, is finally over. Convened to con America and nominate Donald John Trump as its incumbent president, the RNC engaged in nightly rounds of racial poker – I’ll see your black former president, first lady and former secretary of state and raise you my black senator, football player, self-avowed Democratic Party “mental plantation”-escapee, and former prison felon – all the while bluffing that the party is a colorblind meritocracy with nary a white supremacist in sight, a utopian model of and for an America that never was and under them never will be.
I don’t know why criticisms of electoral politics are so often interpreted to mean that elections don’t have consequences. Of course they do, not least in the ways that elections – even as they legitimize the vast areas of agreement between the parties – shape our culture. On that note, here are some predictions for what we will see should Trump win reelection this fall:
Donald Trump has a few things in common with Joseph Stalin. In some ways, the comparison is an injustice to both men: Stalin was not a moron, grifter, or alleged rapist; Trump is not (as of this writing) a world-historical mass murderer. But both men were addicted to lies. They also smeared anyone who told the truth—or might one day tell the truth—as enemies of the people. A third, related similarity is that they listen to sycophants who praise their bravery and genius, even when the sudden, unpredictable shifts in their beliefs make it nearly impossible for these toadies to remain in good standing. Pity, therefore, the million-dollar babies at Fox News whose careers depend on this complicated skill.
Donald Trump’s penchant for conspiracy theories has become a familiar part of his political persona. Fulminations against the “deep state” that once were shocking are now routine. But in becoming inured to Trump, we risk losing sight of how dangerous it is that the most powerful man in the world regularly voices lurid tales of intrigue that have no mooring in reality.
It’s difficult to do anything when big money controls our politics and dictates what policies are and aren’t enacted.
"Before tonight, a Kennedy had never lost an election in Massachusetts. But even a 100-year dynasty cannot overcome the Green New Deal," said the youth-led Sunrise Movement.
No Kennedy had ever lost a Democratic primary, or a general election, in Massachusetts. From June 18, 1946, when a young World War II vet named John Fitzgerald Kennedy won the Democratic nomination to fill a congressional seat representing Cambridge and parts of Boston and Somerville, Kennedys had won every race they entered in the state.
"We're not done yet," said Morse, who slammed Neal for raking in money from corporations that are "exploiting the working class people of this community and of this country."
Millions of Americans who are struggling to put food on the table may discover a new item in government-funded relief packages of fresh fruits and vegetables, dairy and meat: a letter signed by President Donald Trump.
Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth’s Steven Rosenfeld about how to vote, for the August 21, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
"Voter fraud is nearly nonexistent. And the only one encouraging it is Donald Trump, in a desperate attempt to create chaos and sow doubt."
Ramzan Kadyrov, the head of Chechnya, has issued an executive order making his own 21-year-old daughter, Aishat Kadyrova, the republic’s first deputy culture minister. On his Telegram channel, Kadyrov described his decision as “firmly prudent,” despite his daughter’s youth. “She has extensive experience in managing highly complex and large-scale projects, including in the field of culture,” the Chechen leader explained.
Summary: In July 2014, Amazon announced its "Netflix, but for ebooks" service, Kindle Unlimited. Kindle Unlimited allowed readers access to hundreds of thousands of ebooks for a flat rate of $9.99/month.
To say content moderation has become a hot topic over the past few years would be an understatement. The conversation has quickly shifted from how to best deal with pesky trolls and spammers ââ¬Å —ââ¬Å straight into the world of intensely serious topics like genocide and destabilization of democracies.
A few weeks back we wrote about how FTC chair Joe Simons -- while bizarrely complaining about Section 230 blocking his investigations, despite it never actually doing that -- was actually willing to say that Trump's executive order on social media was nonsense (though not in those words). While the FCC caved and moved forward with its nonsense exploration of Section 230, the FTC has done nothing, because there's nothing for it to actually do.
Banks on Monday demanded the FBI investigate "antifa" as a "domestic terrorist organization" responsible for violent protest acts across the country. But federal arrest records do not indicate any cohesive group tied together among those apprehended for violent acts at protests.
A group of 40 Iranian lawmakers has submitted a controversial draft bill to the parliament that could result in harsher online censorship by giving control of the country's Internet gateways to the armed forces, including the notorious Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC).
The bill also calls for the creation of a board that will oversee social-media platforms and deal with any violations. The board will include representatives from the judiciary and the government, as well as from the IRGC's feared Intelligence Unit, which has, in recent years, arrested scores of activists, journalists, environmentalists, dual nationals, and others -- including a Facebook engineer who recently spoke about his arrest and the pressure he faced from guards.
However, hard evidence points to a different reality. This year, the Heterodox Academy conducted an internal member survey of 445 academics. “Imagine expressing your views about a controversial issue while at work, at a time when faculty, staff, and/or other colleagues were present. To what extent would you worry about the following consequences?” To the hypothetical “My reputation would be tarnished,” 32.68 percent answered “very concerned” and 27.27 percent answered “extremely concerned.” To the hypothetical “My career would be hurt,” 24.75 percent answered “very concerned” and 28.68 percent answered “extremely concerned.” In other words, more than half the respondents consider expressing views beyond a certain consensus in an academic setting quite dangerous to their career trajectory.
So no one should feign surprise or disbelief that academics write to me with great frequency to share their anxieties. In a three-week period early this summer, I counted some 150 of these messages. And what they reveal is a very rational culture of fear among those who dissent, even slightly, with the tenets of the woke left.
On€ September 7, 2020, Julian Assange will leave his cell in Belmarsh Prison in London and attend a hearing that will determine his fate. After a long period of isolation, he was finally able to meet his partner—Stella Moris—and see their two sons—Gabriel (age three) and Max (age one)—on August 25. After the visit, Moris€ said€ that he looked to be in “a lot of pain.”
The mainstream media’s role in perpetuating racism has come under increased scrutiny during the nationwide uprisings against injustice, leading to resignations and firings at news outlets across the country and calls for more diverse newsrooms. Daniel Thompson, the former digital editor at Kenosha News, says that’s what led him to quit his job after his news outlet ran a misleading headline and article about a peaceful Jacob Blake protest that focused almost exclusively on one speaker’s threat of violence. “Now more than ever for the media, it’s important to try to give a full, accurate picture.” says Thompson. “I don’t think the situation happened out of any malicious intent. I think it was simply ignorance and a lack of diversity or diverse voices that were part of the decision.”
The mainstream media’s role in perpetuating racism has come under increased scrutiny during the nationwide uprisings against injustice, leading to resignations and firings at news outlets across the country and calls for more diverse newsrooms. Daniel Thompson, the former digital editor at Kenosha News, says that’s what led him to quit his job after his news outlet ran a misleading headline and article about a peaceful Jacob Blake protest that focused almost exclusively on one speaker’s threat of violence. “Now more than ever for the media, it’s important to try to give a full, accurate picture.” says Thompson. “I don’t think the situation happened out of any malicious intent. I think it was simply ignorance and a lack of diversity or diverse voices that were part of the decision.”
A prominent anti-corruption journalist is to appear in court in Zimbabwe despite showing coronavirus symptoms.
Hopewell Chin'ono, who has worked with ITV News in the past, was arrested in July after exposing government corruption.
His lawyers ware waiting for the results of a Covid-19 test after his health worsened in the past few days.
Mr Chin'ono arrived at the court building on Tuesday, despite not knowing the results of his test.
He arrived in chains.
Active since at least 2011, the adversary is also tracked as Ajax Security Team, APT35, ITG18, NewsBeef, Newscaster, and Phosphorus, and was previously observed targeting a U.S. presidential candidate, media organizations, government officials, and prominent expatriate Iranians, using an updated spear phishing technique.
In July, only a couple of months after Google revealed that the Iranian hackers targeted the WHO, the threat actor accidentally leaked 40Gb of data. In early 2020, the hackers were observed posing as journalists in a phishing campaign that targeted at least five individuals around the world.
Now, security firm Clearsky reveals that the adversary continues phishing attacks in which they impersonate journalists, this time from ‘DeutscheWelle’ and the ‘Jewish Journal’, and it employed both email and WhatsApp to approach the target and trick them into clicking on a malicious link. Fake LinkedIn profiles were used to gain victims’ trust.
State investigators in Bashkiria have announced the arrest of two men suspected of murdering a 100-year-old World War II veteran named Ivan Nesmeyanov.
(World-systems sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein was born in 1930 and died on August 31 last year. As part of the Hong Kong-based Global University for Sustainability’s tribute, several South Africans remembered his role here.)
The first World Peace Flame in North America was installed in the lobby of the Civil Rights Museum, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee in 2002.
The president's re-election depends on fence-sitting Americans in swing states excusing fascist-inspired violence in order to feel safe. That's a strategy straight out of the fascist playbook.
Observers at€ VICE€ said the ads show the retail tech giant sees "labor organizing as one of the biggest threats to its existence."
An independent investigation looking into the removal of citizen names from voter registration rolls in Georgia last year found that the vast majority of those names were wrongfully purged.
A business in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which had fire damage after uprisings in the city following the police-perpetrated shooting of Jacob Blake in August, was featured by President Trump to the media as he toured damage in the city on Tuesday.
Donald Trump and his partisan wrecking crew jetted into Kenosha Tuesday on a political mission. That was no secret. The president spelled everything out in his acceptance speech at last week’s Republican National Convention, when he refused to mention the name of Jacob Blake—the 29-year-old Black man who was shot seven times in the back by a Kenosha police officer—but instead made the Wisconsin city a touchstone for a “law-and-order” rant about “mayhem in Democrat-run cities” and his fall campaign theme that “No one will be safe in Biden’s America.”
“We’re gonna help you rebuild,” President Trumpââ¬Â¯saidââ¬Â¯to the former owners of Rode’s Camera Store. The 109-year-old shop was burned down in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during protests against the police shooting of Jacob Blake. The current owner, Tom Gram, declined to appear with Trump, andââ¬Â¯told local station TMJ4, “I think everything he does turns into a circus, and I just didn’t want to be involved in it.”ââ¬Â¯
I can’t say it’s not a satisfying sight. Roger Goodell and the National Football League are tap-dancing as fast as they can, desperate to avoid a players’ strike against racism one week out from the start of the season. The league has seen every major sports federation—the NBA, the WNBA, MLB, MLS, even the NHL—cancel games because of player outrage after yet another police shooting, this time of Jacob Blake in Kenosha. Goodell and his fraternity of NFL owners are working overtime to show that they understand players’ concerns and want the league to be a force for racial justice.
The greatest athletes in America are standing up for justice at a critical time.
Across the United States, cities are experiencing turbulence and a rise in gun violence following the protests of abusive policing sparked by the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. More than 110 people were shot in that city in the month following Floyd’s death, eight fatally. In Atlanta, 106 people were shot over a 28-day period ending July 11, up from 40 over the same period last year.
This isn’t the first time in recent years that America has seen such protests followed by a spike in violence. In the spring of 2015, the death of Freddie Gray, 25, from injuries sustained in police custody brought demonstrators into the streets of Baltimore. The protests flared into rioting and looting. Soon afterward, the city’s chief prosecutor announced criminal charges against the officers involved in the arrest. The officers’ colleagues responded by pulling back on the job, doing only the bare minimum in the following weeks. In the resulting void, crews seized new drug corners and settled old scores. Homicides surged to record levels and case-closure rates plunged. “The police stopped doing their jobs, and let people fuck up other people,” Carl Stokes, a former Democratic city councilor in Baltimore, told me last year. “Period. End of story.”
In the midst of the pandemic, mail-in voting is expected to play a bigger role in this presidential election than ever before. As part of our Electionland project, we work with U.S. journalists to cover the voting process, so we’re offering some tips for local reporters to tackle coverage of voting by mail.
This article is part of Electionland, ProPublica’s collaborative reporting project covering problems that prevent eligible voters from casting their ballots during the 2020 elections. Learn more
The owner of eSalon, Erica Kious, told Fox News that she has independent stylists working for her who rent chairs in her salon and claimed that she "can't control" what they do if they rent the chairs from her.
Lessie Beningfield Randle, 105, is the lead plaintiff and one of two known survivors still alive; she joins the great-granddaughter of JB Straford—the owner of the Stradford Hotel in Greenwood, the largest Black-owned hotel in the United States at the time—along with the grandchildren of many of those killed in the massacre.
The lawsuit alleges that the massacre, one of the worst acts of racial violence in U.S. history, still overshadows the Greenwood neighborhood and that Tulsa's racial inequality today can be traced back to the events of almost 100 years ago.
Spotify announced the arrival of Rogan’s podcast in a tweet Tuesday, calling him a “stand-up comic,” “mixed martial arts fanatic” and “psychedelic adventurer,” avoiding one of the big elements of his brand — political provocateur.
Also not available on Spotify are Rogan’s podcast episodes with comedians Chris D’Elia (recently accused of sexual misconduct involving, in some cases, teenage girls), as well as Joey Diaz and Tommy Chong.
Reps for Spotify and Rogan didn’t respond to requests for comment.
President Daniel Ortega is making life increasingly hard for aid and human rights groups in Nicaragua even as poverty, malnutrition, and emigration due to political strife are on the rise, and as he is criticised for a dismissive and reckless response to the coronavirus outbreak.
“In Nicaragua, simply existing as a person carries a risk,” Ana Quirós, director of the Center for Information and Advisory Services in Health, or CISAS, told The New Humanitarian. “You do not need a particular reason to become a victim of violence, of repression, kidnapping or assassination. It is a general risk.”
Quirós was deported and stripped of citizenship in November 2018 after the government accused CISAS, which had been working on health education and HIV prevention in Nicaragua with the support of several international aid groups and actors – including Medico International, Medicus Mundi, and the EU – of “participating in destabilising activities”.
Today is the due date for the first round of submissions to the FCC's comment period on the NTIA's laughable petition, which asks the agency to reinterpret Section 230 in response to the President's temper tantrum about Twitter fact checking him. This is clearly outside of its regulatory authority, but it has caved and pandered to the President by calling for comments anyway.
Researchers at University College London claim they’ve obtained a new top internet speed of 178Tbps – a fifth quicker than the prior record and fast enough to download the entire Netflix catalog in under a second, they say.
[...]
The amplifiers that they’ve been working with are called hybrid discrete Raman & rare-earth doped fiber amplifiers, and they used the S-, C—and L-bands simultaneously, according to an abstract of a paper published in IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.
“We are working with new technologies that utilize, more efficiently, the existing infrastructure, making better use of optical fiber bandwidth,” said Dr Lidia Galdino, a lecturer at UCL and lead author of the paper.
The researchers say their findings could be put into practice by upgrading the amplifiers in existing optical networks that are typically placed at 40-100km intervals along fiber runs. Upgrading by replacing the fiber infrastructure can cost up to 28 times more than the amplifier upgrades, they say.
The UCL research was carried out over a 40km span.
Netflix will completely localize its streaming service in Russia before the end of the year, the company’s press service told the newspaper Vedomosti on Wednesday. According to the new deal, the National Media Group — one of Russia’s biggest media holding companies — will manage Netflix streaming in Russia.
Encrypted Media Extensions (a.k.a. EME) is the W3C standard for encrypted media in the web. This way, media providers such as Hulu, Netflix, HBO, Disney+, Prime Video, etc. can provide their contents with a reasonable amount of confidence that it will make it very complicated for people to “save” their assets without their permission. Why do I use the word “serious” in the title? In WebKit there is already support for Clear Key, which is the W3C EME reference implementation but EME supports more encryption systems, even privative ones (I have my opinion about this, you can ask me privately). No service provider (that I know) supports Clear Key, they usually rely on Widevine, PlayReady or some other.
Three years ago, my colleague Žan Doberšek finished the implementation of what was going to be the shell of WebKit’s modern EME implementation, following latest W3C proposal. We implemented that downstream (at Web Platform for Embedded) as well using Thunder, which includes as a plugin a fork of what was Open Content Decryption Module (a.k.a. OpenCDM). The OpenCDM API changed quite a lot during this journey. It works well and there are millions of set-top-boxes using it currently.
The delta between downstream and the upstream GStreamer based WebKit ports was quite big, testing was difficult and syncing was not always easy, so we decided reverse the situation.
Existing law is crystal clear that the government can step in to lower drug prices in order to serve the public interest.€
A recent Wall Street Journal (WSJ) article, “Facebook’s Hate-Speech Rules Collide With Indian Politics,” has blown the lid off Facebook’s unholy alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the right-wing ruling party in India.
The blistering race and competition to find a COVID-19 vaccine is ongoing at a very fast pace. Pharmaceutical companies are scurrying to secure a legal monopoly for the treatment, to control the largest market share, and to ensure a considerable return on their investment, since the demand thereon would be immediate, global, and possibly extending for years and decades to come.
Whether it is Gilead’s Remdesivir or any other treatment or vaccine that is ultimately found to have a proven curative or preventive outcome, researchers are ramping up their efforts, all while anticipating that a second wave of coronavirus is expected to swipe the globe again, as the Spanish flu did a century ago.
A federal jury in East Texas Tuesday ordered Apple to pay over $506 million for infringing on 4G LTE patents controlled by intellectual property owner PanOptis in the country’s first patent jury trial since the Covid-19 shutdown in March.
The jury concluded five of Plano-based PanOptis’ patents were infringed by Apple’s wireless products and ordered $506.2 million in damages as a royalty for past sales. U.S. District Judge Rodney Gilstrap held the trial in person with social distancing and face mask use being enforced in the courtroom. He now has the option to increase damages by up to triple since the jury concluded the infringement was willful.
PanOptis sued in February 2019, claiming Apple refused to pay licensing fees for the use of the technology in its iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch products. Apple argued at trial that the patents were invalid but the jury concluded the company failed to prove “by clear and convincing evidence” that any of PanOptis’ claims were invalid.
Attorneys for Apple and PanOptis did not immediately respond to requests for comment Tuesday evening. Apple is expected to appeal.
The U.S. International Trade Commission said it has launched a Section 337 investigation into whether certain Apple Inc mobile devices and laptop computers infringed patents held by Japan’s Maxell Holdings.
In seeking the probe, Maxell has alleged Apple devices violate patents covering technology including an unlocking feature and video transmission processes. Maxell has asked the commission to prohibit the importation and sale of the devices into the United States.
This week, four iconic Silicon Valley technology companies—Apple, Cisco, Google, and Intel—sued the USPTO under the Administrative Procedure Act.
[...]
The policy was first articulated in NHK Spring Co. v. Intri-Plex Techs., No. IPR2018-00752, Paper 8 (Sept. 12, 2018). There, a panel of the PTAB declined to institute NHK Spring’s petition against an Intri-Plex patent where a parallel infringement suit was already pending between the same parties in the Northern District of California.
In denying institution, the panel cited its discretion under 35 U.S.C. €§ 325(d) as well as under €§ 314(a). First came €§ 325(d), which empowers the Director to “determine the manner in which the post-grant review or other proceeding or matter may proceed, including providing for the stay, transfer, consolidation, or termination of any such matter or proceeding.” Here, the panel applied the nonexclusive factors of the PTAB’s prior informative opinion in Becton, Dickinson and concluded that the art and arguments now asserted in the PTAB were already considered (and overcome) during examination.
Though it found this analysis sufficient on its own, the panel then also went on to exercise its discretion under €§ 314(a), which makes a “reasonable likelihood” of invalidating at least 1 of the challenged claims a necessary—but not sufficient—condition for instituting review. Where review is permissible, the Director may still decide in his discretion to deny review, and the NHK panel found it compelling that the parallel proceeding in U.S. district court was “nearing its final stages”—with a five-day jury trial already set for six months before the PTAB’s own proceeding would conclude.
The principle of NHK—that the “the advanced state of the district court proceeding is an additional factor that weighs in favor of denying the Petition under €§ 314(a)”—forms the first part of the policy now being challenged.
[...]
The APA challenge to the NHK-Fintiv rule, like much of the USPTO’s own recent policymaking, balances a range of important considerations and reaches a position that is coherent and reasonable. The weakness—if it can be called that—of the challenge is that it represents merely one reasonable position among several, especially given the Supreme Court’s views on agency discretion in general and USPTO discretion in particular. If the challenge eventually fails to dislodge the disputed policy, then the reason will likely be that, like most agencies, the USPTO enjoys wide latitude that is difficult to paint as unreasonable.
While the EPO remains the worldwide favorite, its relative popularity has been decreasing.
On September 2, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,500 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claims 31 and 36 of U.S. Patent 8,990,073. This patent is owned by VoiceAge EVS, LLC, which is associated with Fortress Investment Group LLC, an NPE. The '073 patent relates to concealment of frame erasure caused by frames of an encoded sound signal erased during transmission from an encoder to a decoder.
[...]
Traindex, a machine learning enabled search service, has provided an ordered list of most semantically similar patent documents where results are filtered to include only results with the publication date preceding that of the patent being challenged.
On September 2, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) granted Lighthouse Consulting Group’s request for adverse judgment and cancellation of all instituted claims in IPR2020-00194 filed by Unified. This request comes after the PTAB’s decision to institute trial for U.S. Patent 8,590,940, directed to image-based check depositing technology. Lighthouse asserted this patent over 30 times. The defendants in these cases were primarily banks and financial services companies such as Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Charles Schwab, AMEX, Bank of America, Capital One, Morgan Stanley, Ally Financial, JP Morgan, and BB&T. Wells Fargo also filed an IPR petition challenging claims of this patent in April 2020.
As previously reported on IPKat, two European patent applications naming an AI algorithm as an inventor are currently making their way through the EPO appeal process. The applications (EP 18275163 and EP 18275174) were unsurprisingly rejected by the EPO because the applicant refused to designate a human inventor (IPKat). The appeal includes extensive arguments on the legality and ethics of human-only inventorship. Surprisingly, in their preliminary arguments, the applicant claims that the EPO has conceded that the AI algorithm was the actual divisor of the inventions. However, the patent applications themselves do not disclose the processes by which the AI invented. To this Kat, the very fact of "AI invention" is still very much open to question.
The algorithm allegedly behind the inventions in the patent application was devised by Dr Thaler. Dr Thaler is a curious character, who also claims that his algorithms (or "creativity machines") are capable of dreaming, near-death experiences and sentience. However, we will leave aside Dr Thaler and his self-termed "AI child" for now. The broader argument has been made here on IPKat that more well-known AI algorithms, such as DeepMind's AlphaGo, demonstrate that AI is now capable of invention. But is this the case?
[...]
In a similar way, the AlphaGo algorithm identifies the single moves in a game of Go which score highest in the searches it has run. A human observer may be able to extrapolate from a series of these results a broader inventive strategy for winning games of Go. However, this would necessitate inventive activity on behalf of the human observer to recognise and communicate any broader principles of Go strategy evident in the games played by AlphaGo. Once again, AlphaGo comes short of being an inventor itself.
The argument about AI inventorship looks set to run and run. In the latest news, Dr Thaler is now suing the USPTO for not permitting an AI inventor to be designated on Dr Thaler's US patent applications. However, whilst the thought experiment of AI inventorship is of potential academic interest, the discussion currently lacks practical relevance. Even the most advanced AI algorithms available today are more a testament to improvements in computing power than evidence of silicon-based inventive activity.
The system proposed by the USPS stores voter data on a blockchain. Each user receives a computer-readable code that is tied to their identity. Though voters receive their code by mail, they enter that code on a mobile or web application to cast their votes.
This approach has several benefits: reliance on an immutable blockchain would ensure that nobody tampers with cast votes, while the code-based system would ensure that voters only cast votes in their own name. The fact that user identities are separated from cast ballots would also provide some degree of privacy.
The patent mentions Ethereum as a possible blockchain on which the voting system might be built. However, this only applies to some "embodiments" of the plan, meaning that a real-word application of the patent could use a different blockchain.
Does the disclosure in court proceedings of a work protected by copyright or related rights amount to a ‘communication to the public’ and/or a ‘distribution to the public’ within the meaning of the InfoSoc Directive? Is the notion of ‘public’ in the right of communication/making available to the public in Article 3 therein to be intended in the same way as the notion of ‘public’ in the right of distribution in Article 4? How can copyright protection be reconciled with transparency obligations?
These, in a nutshell, are the issues that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) will have to address when it decides BY, C-637/19, a referral made by the Svea Court of Appeal, Patent and Market Court of Appeal, Stockholm, Sweden.
This morning, Advocate General (AG) Hogan issued his Opinion, in which he advised the Court to rule that the electronic transmission by a litigant or a party to proceedings of protected materials as evidence to a court does neither constitute a communication nor a distribution to the public. In any case, the mere fact that a document qualifies as a public document does not entail that the underlying material is also in the public domain.
Let’s see more in detail how the AG reasoned.
At the time, we released a t-shirt with Fairey’s remix as part of a fundraising campaign and later put it on a CC tote bag (there are still a few available).
The new Premier League season will begin without crowds due to the coronavirus yet 160 games will not be televised in the UK, a gap that pirate IPTV providers will fill using broadcasts from abroad. The Premier League has recently obtained a new ISP blocking injunction but the Football Supporters' Association is begging for the obvious: Don't give fans no other option than to turn to illegal services.
Anti-piracy lawyer Kerry Culpepper has filed an application to register the RARBG trademark. RARBG is one of the most popular torrent sites and, if the application is granted, the trademark can be used for enforcement purposes. The same happened with the Popcorn Time and YTS trademarks earlier this year.
Yet another President Trump tweet has been removed following a complaint. This one, however, is now part of a copyright lawsuit filed by British singer-songwriter Eddy Grant over the unlicensed use of his 1982 song 'Electric Avenue'. According to the complaint, which demands up to $150,000 in damages, the video containing the track remained live on Twitter, despite demands it was taken down.
