While the year of the Linux Desktop remains a dream, awareness and adoption of this open source operating system has perhaps never been better. That’s partly thanks to companies like Canonical that push Linux not only to businesses but also to consumers. The latter, however, would probably prefer not to have to install Linux themselves on their new laptops or desktops. With the latest fruit of the collaboration between the Ubuntu maker and Lenovo, they won’t have to, presuming they’re buying a new ThinkPad or ThinkStation.
I often get asked by viewers, "If you made an OS, what would it look like?" I will never make my own OS or my own Linux spin, because I'm not interested in being a support channel for people, nor do I have the time.
This is the 21st hot-pocket-sized podcast that won’t scorch roof of your mouth.
I have a small collection of vintage or near vintage gaming consoles. I lean mostly in the Nintendo party as I think they have a great grasp on what is fun. I don’t always agree with many of their business practices but the entertainment they have provided is multi-generationally successful. In order to lower the wasted time of hooking these systems up to enjoy and better organize their presentation, I built a Gaming Rack that was inspired by watching a YouTube channel called Retro Recipes. Seeing how nicely laid out and easily enjoyed they were set up, I made the decision that I must adapt this idea to my little world.
Python Bytes podcast delivers headlines directly to your earbuds.
In our second of two parts on editing and managing photos on Linux we describe a few additional applications for you to try. We share what they do but the trying is up to you! We also reveal what we are doing for our 400th episode.
It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.
Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys chat about our favourite hacks from the past week. We start off with a bit of news of the Bennu asteroid and the new Raspberry Pi Compute Module. We drive ourselves crazy trying to understand how bobbin holders on sewing machines work, all while drooling over the mechanical brilliance of a bobbin-winding build. SCARA is the belt and pulley champion of robot arms and this week’s example cleverly uses redundant bearings for better precision. And we wrap up the show looking in on longform articles about the peppering of microcontrollers found on the Bluepill and wondering what breakthroughs are left to be found for internal combustion.
The kernel team is working on final integration for kernel 5.9. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. As a result, the Fedora kernel and QA teams have organized a test week from Monday, October 26, 2020 through Monday, November 02, 2020. Refer to the wiki page for links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.
Since 2012 there has been a quirk in the Linux kernel to disable/override using ACPI _PSD data on all AMD processors as a workaround in turn for Windows-specific behavior that clashes with the semantics of the Linux ACPI CPUFreq driver for CPU frequency scaling. With AMD Zen 3 this quirk is no longer needed to behave correctly and thus Linux 5.10 is going to drop this eight year old quirk on Zen 3 and newer.
The change since 2012 in the Linux kernel for AMD CPUs has overrode the ACPI _PSD table supplied by the BIOS. But now for Family 19h / Zen 3, the table accurately reports the P-state dependency of CPU cores. That correct table is needed for proper CPU frequency control with the new processors and thus the new kernel will stop overriding it so it can be used by ACPI CPUfreq for its frequency handling on the shiny new CPUs.
The EXT4 file-system updates have landed in Linux 5.10 with some notable additions for this mature file-system.
[...]
Another big change is the new EXT4 "fast commits" mode by Harshad Shirwadkar of Google. This fast commit mode is relevant for EXT4 users operated in ordered mode (the mount option data=ordered) and maintains a minimal delta for recreating the affected metadata in the fast commit space shared with the JBD2 journal. That can yield up to a ~103% write performance improvement in the ordered mode with fast commits enabled.
The EXT4 changes also include other fixes and low-level code improvements.
Complementing the ARM(64) architecture changes for Linux 5.10 are now the SoC and board updates that are quite interesting this round.
The ARM platform/SoC support with Linux 5.10 ranges from initial bring-up of the NVIDIA Tegra Orin SoC to finally mainlining the DeviceTree support for the Purism Librem 5 smartphone revisions thus far to Raspberry Pi 4 display setup.
A rare Saturday post because I spent so much time this week intending to blog and then somehow not getting around to it. Let’s get to the status updates, and then I’m going to dive into the more interesting of the things I worked on over the past few days.
Zink has just hit another big milestone that I’ve just invented: as of now, my branch is passing 97% of piglit tests up through GL 4.6 and ES 3.2, and it’s a huge improvement from earlier in the week when I was only at around 92%. That’s just over 1000 failure cases remaining out of ~41,000 tests. For perspective, a table.
The Linux specialists over at Phoronix have noticed that the AMD Linux driver has been tweaked to add support for a new graphics card dubbed the "navi10 blockchain SKU". It comments that the only visible difference in support for this card vs existing Navi 1X support, from the driver perspective, is that the patches disable the Display Core Next (DCN) and Video Core Next (VCN) support - basically creating a 'headless' Navi 1X graphics card.
Cryprocurrency is showing signs of a resurgence in popularity and values, and some are worried that the latest and greatest GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD will be plucked from retailers even faster if they are viable mining platforms. It has been reported that AMD is trying to make sure retailers follow certain distribution practices with its upcoming Radeon RX 6000 series products, to make sure they are distributed to gamers and enthusiasts rather than scalpers and such like. An initiative like creating appealing crypto-specific Navi 1X products might help everyday consumers get their hands on a new Navi 2X graphics card too.
For the Intel Tiger Lake Linux benchmarking thus far with the Core i7 1165G7 on the Dell XPS 13 9310 it's primarily been compared against the Ryzen 5 4500U and Ryzen 7 4700U on the AMD side since those are the only Renoir units within my possession. But a Phoronix reader recently provided me with remote access to his Lenovo ThinkPad X13 with Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U (8 cores / 16 threads) for seeing how the Tiger Lake performance compares against that higher-end SKU.
Phoronix reader Tomas kindly provided SSH access to his ThinkPad X13 with Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U and 16GB of RAM. The Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U is quite close to the Ryzen 7 4800U with 8 cores / 16 threads but graphics capabilities in line with the 4700U. He's been quite happy with the ThinkPad X13 as a replacement to the Dell XPS 13 for business usage and has been running it with Ubuntu 18.04 LTS on the Linux 5.8 kernel.
Since the desktop icons are handled by an extension instead of Nautilus file browser, drag’n’drop action between desktop and file browser does no longer work.
Fortunately, a fork of the original Desktop Icons extension now is available with several enhancements, including Drag’n’Drop.
Are you wondering about trying the XFCE desktop on a Ubuntu PC? Here's a tutorial on how to install XFCE on Ubuntu. You will get multiple options at the login.
In this tutorial we will show you how to install InfluxDB on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, as well as some extra required package by InfluxDB
In this tutorial we will show you how to install Squid Proxy on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, as well as some extra required package by Squid
Due to version LIBVIRT&&QEMU you are forced to deploy Ubuntu 20.10 on Btrfs file system . In particular case, Virtual Environment is a fair enough . See also Install KVM&Libvirt on SparkyLinux2020.08
AppImages, Snaps and Flatpaks are the 3 biggest universal package management systems available on Linux and whilst sharing some similarities they all have very noticiable and very important differences that you should take into consideration before deciding which one you want to use.
Tilt sensor are small and cheap electronic able to detect inclination. While being not as accurate like accelerometers, they are small, inexpensive and easy to use. For this reason tilt ball switches are popular for toys and gadgets.
Tilt ball switch are usually made of an internal cavity with a free conductive mass inside. When this switch is in vertical position, conductive mass goes down and connects terminals. When it is in horizontal position, conductive mass moves from terminals, so resulting in current not passing:
In this tutorial I’ll show you how to use a simple Tilt Ball Switch with your Raspberry PI with a LED detecting sensor position. I’ll use a Raspberry PI Zero W, but this guide applies also to newer Raspberry PI boards. Small resistors (330 Ohm) will be also used to protect from power outage that can damage your Raspberry PI board.
Easily download files from your server to your desktop computer using SSH by following this easy guide. We'll show you how, step-by-step.
Slack is a collaborative software that is used for the communication between various team members of a company. It has various workspaces where the teams are connected and can take decisions in a common shared environment. It allows users to organize conversations by using various channels. A channel is used for group discussions, and team members can share files, images, and videos. In slack, teammates can also communicate through video and audio calls to each other. If the user wants to join a community or team, then using a specific team workspace, users can request to join a team.
This article is about the installation of slack, this guide will provide the step by step installation of slack on your CentOS 8.0. Please note: The commands in this tutorial get updated for newer Slack versions, this means that the commands might show a newer software version number than the screenshots. Just execute the commands as shown in the guide to install Slack.
NotepadQQ is an exciting application that attempts to bring Linux users what Notepad++ does on Windows: an impressive, Microsoft Notepad-like text editor that supports various programming languages and other useful features. Here’s how to get it installed on your Linux system.
Squid is a full-featured caching proxy supporting popular network protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, and more. It can be used to improve the web server’s performance by caching repeated requests, filter web traffic, and access geo-restricted content.
This tutorial explains how to set up a Squid Proxy on Ubuntu 20.04 and configure Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers to use it.
The Jellyfin developers offer up a myriad of ways to install the media server on the Linux platform. From Docker to downloadable DEBs and custom packages in the Arch Linux AUR.
In this guide, we’ll focus on downloadable packages. However, if you are an advanced Linux user and know how to use Docker, click here to get your hands on it.
To start installing Jellyfin on your Linux server, open up a terminal window via SSH or by physically sitting in front of it. After that, follow the command-line installation instructions outlined below.
The libtraceevent package prior to version 5.9-1 was missing a soname link. This has been fixed in 5.9-1, so the upgrade will need to overwrite the untracked files created by ldconfig.
This video tutorial shows how to install and configure FreeNAS 11.3 U5 Storage on VMware Workstation step by step.
sshd stands for Secure SHell Daemon. It is a hidden process that silently listens to all the authentication and login attempts of the Linux operating system. It is especially helpful if you are trying to figure out any unauthorized login attempts to your system. In this article, how to check the sshd Logs on Linux is explained.
At any single instance, multiple ports can be open in your system, so it can be useful to determine which ports are open. This article shows you four possible methods to use to check whether a port is in use in Linux.
Books are important learning resources for both beginners and experts, but with all the books available on the market, it may be difficult to choose just one. Here, we review five books on Linux to help you choose.
Chrome has support for multiple profiles. What differentiates one profile from the other is the Google account that is (or isn’t) connected to a profile.
Users can create a new Chrome profile and sync it with their Google account, or they can skip adding an account and keep everything local. What a user cannot do is create a profile that has no name.
This tutorial explains Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla computer installation. You will prepare at least two disk partitions, finishing it all in about twenty minutes, and enjoy! Let's start right now.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu 20.10.
In this tutorial we will show you how to install Webmin on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, as well as some extra required packages by Webmin control panel
This is only going to work if you have access to the OpenStack code. If you are not an OpenStack customer, you are going to need an evaluation entitlement. That is beyond the scope of this article.
The sheer number of projects and problem domains covered by OpenStack was overwhelming. I never learned several of the other projects under the big tent. One project that is getting relevant to my day job is Ironic, the bare metal provisioning service. Here are my notes from spelunking the code.
TheJulia was kind enough to update the docs for Ironic to show me how to include IPMI information when creating nodes.
Many computers use the Network Time Protocol (NTP) to synchronize their system clocks over the internet. NTP is one of the few unsecured internet protocols still in common use. An attacker that can observe network traffic between a client and server can feed the client with bogus data and, depending on the client’s implementation and configuration, force it to set its system clock to any time and date. Some programs and services might not work if the client’s system clock is not accurate. For example, a web browser will not work correctly if the web servers’ certificates appear to be expired according to the client’s system clock. Use Network Time Security (NTS) to secure NTP.
Fedora 331 is the first Fedora release to support NTS. NTS is a new authentication mechanism for NTP. It enables clients to verify that the packets they receive from the server have not been modified while in transit. The only thing an attacker can do when NTS is enabled is drop or delay packets. See RFC8915 for further details about NTS.
NTP can be secured well with symmetric keys. Unfortunately, the server has to have a different key for each client and the keys have to be securely distributed. That might be practical with a private server on a local network, but it does not scale to a public server with millions of clients.
NTS includes a Key Establishment (NTS-KE) protocol that automatically creates the encryption keys used between the server and its clients. It uses Transport Layer Security (TLS) on TCP port 4460. It is designed to scale to very large numbers of clients with a minimal impact on accuracy. The server does not need to keep any client-specific state. It provides clients with cookies, which are encrypted and contain the keys needed to authenticate the NTP packets. Privacy is one of the goals of NTS. The client gets a new cookie with each server response, so it doesn’t have to reuse cookies. This prevents passive observers from tracking clients migrating between networks.
Have you ever felt like Vim was too useful and thought hey let's change that, well that's what this dev thought and now we have a plugin called comfortable motion that's adds physics based scrolling into vim, what's physics based scrolling you ask. Well it's scrolling that occurs based on how long you hold down the scroll key.
This is not a tutorial. These are my running notes from getting Cassandra to run on Fedora 32. The debugging steps are interesting in their own right. I’ll provide a summary at the end for any sane enough not to read through the rest.
One of my fiorends wrote a bunch of music back in high school. The only remainig recordings are on a casette tape that he produced. Time has not been kind to the recordings, but they are audible…barely. He has a device that produces MP3s from the tape. My job has been to try and get them so that we can understand them well enough to recover the original songs.
I have the combined recording on a single MP3. I’ve gone through and noted the times where each song starts and stops. I am going to go through the steps I’ve been using to go from that single long MP3 to an individual recording.
Open source allows anyone to dip their toes in the code, read up on the documentation, and learn everything on their own. That’s how most of us did it, but that’s just the first step. Those who want to have successful careers in building, maintaining, and managing IT infrastructures of companies need more structured hands-on learning with real-life experience. That’s where Linux Foundation’s Training and Certification unit enters the picture. It helps not only greenhorn developers but also members of the ecosystem who seek highly trained and certified engineers to manage their infrastructure. Swapnil Bhartiya sat down with Clyde Seepersad, SVP and GM of Training and Certification at the Linux Foundation, to learn more about the Foundation’s efforts to create a generation of qualified professionals.
This is part of a series of posts on compiling a custom version of Qt5 in order to develop for both amd64 and a Raspberry Pi.
Building Qt5 takes a long time. The build server I was using had CPUs and RAM, but was very slow on I/O. I was very frustrated by that, and I started evaluating alternatives. I ended up setting up scripts to automatically provision a throwaway cloud server at Hetzner.
The Wine development release 5.20 is now available.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - More work on the DSS cryptographic provider. - A number of fixes for windowless RichEdit. - Support for FLS callbacks. - Window resizing in the new console host. - Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/5.x/wine-5.20.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/5.x/wine-5.20.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
Wine 5.20 isn't the most notable update in recent time but has a number of low-level improvements. Among the work in v5.20is continuing the implementation of the DSS crypto provider, fixes for windowless RichEdit handling, support for FLS callbacks, window resizing support in the new console host, and bug fixes. The FLS callbacks are notable for fixing .NET CoreRT crashes and other potential uses.
The latest development release of the Wine Is Not An Emulator Windows API re-implementation has game specifix fixes for Alice Madness Return, Backpacker 3: Americana, Capella no yakusoku, Metro Exodus, Red Evil and Stellaris. There's also several general fixes that make a long list of games run better in Wine 5.20.
The latest Wine release was, as usual, dominated by developers employed by the Codeweavers corporation. Hans Leidekker contributed nearly thirty improvements to the the DSS cryptographic provider, Esme Povirk contributed code improving Wine's handling of PNG files in windowscodecs, there's 50 small fixes to windowless RichEdit by Huw D. M. Davies and Nikolay Sivov contributed a whole 57 different improvement to Wine 5.20, most of which are related to Wine's audio mixer and audio handling.
Michael Stefaniuc, who is not part of the Codeweavers brotherhood, changed code all over the code-base so it now uses wide-char string literals. Tjat puts him in third place in terms of commits to this release with a score of 40 commits in total.
Building off the Friday release of Wine 5.20, a new Wine-Staging release is now available that is carrying more than 750 patches atop the upstream code-base that are currently undergoing testing.
The only new patches to Wine-Staging 5.20 are WIDL additions for supporting WinRT IDLs due to Wine curently being unable to parse various WinRT-specific keywords in order to generate their interface headers. Proof of concept patches were posted with the original bug report and now integrated into Wine-Staging for evaluation.
Breaking down barriers towards closer Windows compatibility, the Wine compatibility layer team have released the Wine 5.20 development release along with new features and fixes.
Need to know what Wine is? Here's our quick primer: it's a constantly improving compatibility layer that allows the running of Windows-only applications and games on Linux and other operating systems. It's one of the driving forces behind Steam Play Proton. Helping you to get whatever you need done on Linux, or perhaps so you don't have to give up that favourite game.
Hive Time from developer 'Cheeseness' released nearly a year ago, and so the developer has written up a lengthy blog post on the development and the finances. A good read if you like behind the scenes dev info, here I will sum up a few interesting bits from it but the full article is definitely worth reading.
It's a thoroughly interesting read because Hive Time is in quite a unique position. Not only because it's made with open source tools like Godot Engine, Blender, the GNU Image Manipulation Program, Inkscape, and Audacity it also released where you could download it for nothing. Technically, it's a $10 game but they made it pay what you want for people who can't afford to pay. The pay what you want model was made pretty popular years ago thanks to the likes of Humble Indie Bundle and others, but for selling a single game how does it turn out? That's what Cheese talks about and it seems to have been a tough sell overall.
Way back in 2013, we discussed an interesting study conducted by Google looking at the effect of let's play and video game reviews has on the gaming industry. That study's conclusion was that viewers watched let's plays at a far higher clip than, say, video game trailers. Two-thirds of those views appeared to be watchers focusing on the video itself, whereas the other third were watching on secondary devices/screens in order to find tips and tricks for completing the game in question. Both were conducive to promoting the gaming industry, being a method for finding out if a game is worth buying and because gamers know they have a resource to help complete a game.
For years, Retroarch has been the indomitable platform of choice for discerning emulation connoisseurs on PC. The all-in-one package designed to load up all your favorite consoles and games from one place is available for Android, too, though the intricacies of setting it up are much less talked about.
If you’ve downloaded Retroarch and don’t know your core from your content or just want to know which cores are best for running your favorite console games, read this Retroarch for Android guide for the instructions.
I managed to install and did hands-on with the upcoming Xfce 4.16 pre-release (pre1)using the development build. It's super exciting with new features and updates. Have a look.
Though Plasma 5.20 was overall a very smooth release, we spent a lot of time fixing some of the bugs we missed, as well as some older ones in Frameworks and apps too. It may not be very sexy, but bugs are what drive users crazy, and we want them fixed! So, fix them we did.
KDE developers remain very busy this autumn working on fixes for the recently released Plasma 5.20 and related software.
KDE developer Nate Graham known for his weekly development summaries called this week's KDE changes as having "so many bugfixes."
Patent assertion entities: do not pick a fight with open source. It won't end well for you. This is the message from GNOME Foundation executive director Neil McGovern, who will speak on the subject at the Open Source Summit Europe next week.
McGovern talked to The Register ahead of the event on patents, Microsoft, and more.
The open-source outfit develops the default desktop environment on major Linux distributions including Ubuntu and Red Hat. In late August 2019, Rothschild Patent Imaging filed a lawsuit against the GNOME foundation claiming that GNOME Shotwell, a photo manager, infringed one of its patents.
“We didn't receive a letter before the court documents were filed or any sort of warning, it was just filed and then within a week there was a settlement request for $75,000,” McGovern told us.
Linux Kodachi operating system is based on Xubuntu 18.04.5 it will provide you with a secure, anti-forensic, and anonymous operating system considering all features that a person who is concerned about privacy would need to have in order to be secure.
Kodachi is very easy to use all you have to do is boot it up on your PC via USB drive then you should have a fully running operating system with established VPN connection + Connection established + service running. No setup or knowledge is required from your side its all been automated for you. The entire OS is functional from your temporary memory RAM so once you shut it down no trace is left behind all your activities are wiped out.
The belief that efficiency is fundamental to competitive advantage has turned management into a science, whose objective is the elimination of waste, - whether of time, materials, or capital, - wrote Roger Martin in “The High Price of Efficiency,” a January 2019 article in the Harvard Business Review. Martin is professor and former dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, as well as a prolific writer.
“Why would we not want managers to strive for an ever-more-efficient use of resources?,” asked Martin. Of course we do. But, an excessive focus on efficiency can produce startlingly negative effects. To counterbalance such potential negative effects, companies should pay just as much attention to a less appreciated source of competitive advantage: resilience, - “the ability to recover from difficulties - to spring back into shape after a shock,” he presciently added a year before the advent of Covid-19.
In his recently published book, When More Is Not Better: Overcoming America's Obsession with Economic Efficiency, Martin expanded on his HBR article, arguing that an excessive focus on efficiency is not only detrimental to business but constitutes a serious threat to America’s democratic capitalism. “Throughout the first nearly two and a half centuries of America’s existence as a sovereign state, most citizens experienced an advance in their economic status in the overwhelming majority of those years. Based on that trend, Americans have, unsurprisingly, used their votes throughout the years to support and perpetuate capitalism as America’s economic system. But that consistent economic advance has stalled, and has been for a longer period than ever before in American history.”
The book is based on a six-year project on the future of America’s democratic capitalism by the Martin Prosperity Institute. The project conducted in-depth interviews with a wide variety of Americans to understand what they thought about the directions of the country. It excluded people in the top 10% of the income distributions, focusing instead on the vast majority of the populations, which includes people with household incomes ranging from $25,000 to $110,000 with a median of $75,000.
The power of Call for Code€® is in the global community that we have built around this major #TechforGood initiative. Whether it is the deployments that are underway across pivotal projects, developers leveraging the starter kits in the cloud, or ecosystem partners joining the fight, everyone has a story to tell. Call for Code Daily highlights all the amazing #TechforGood stories taking place around the world. Every day, you can count on us to share these stories with you. Check out the stories from the week of October 19th:
The Oracle Linux and Virtualization Alliance team welcomes IRI, The CoSort Company, and its Voracity data management platform to our ISV ecosystem. Voracity enables customers to marshal data without the cost or complexity of multiple tools.
IRI has certified and supports Voracity on Oracle Linux 7 and 8. This can provide a rich set of performance and security features for Oracle DBAs, big data architects, and data privacy teams.
We are happy to announce version 23 of osbuild. This release makes it possible to build Fedora on RHEL systems.
Below you can find the official changelog from the osbuild-23 sources. All users are recommended to upgrade!
And this week PeerTube's official Twitter feed announced that "Thanks to Debian's €10,000 donation we've just reached the 4th step of our PeerTube fundraising" — livestreaming. "Many thanks to all those who donated. And it's not too late to contribute."
"We hope this unconventional gesture from the Debian project will help us make this year somewhat less terrible," added the Debian blog, "and give us, and thus humanity, better Free Software tooling to approach the future." It describes their donation as "a strong sign of recognition from an international project — one of the pillars of the Free Software world — towards a small French association which offers tools to liberate users from the clutches of the web's giant monopolies."
And secondly, "it's a substantial amount of help in these difficult times, supporting the development of a tool which equally belongs to and is useful to everyone. The strength of Debian's gesture proves, once again, that solidarity, mutual aid and collaboration are values which allow our communities to create tools to help us strive towards Utopia."
For my work on Debian, i want to use my debian.org email address, while for my personal projects i want to use my gmail.com address.
One way to change the user.email git config value is to git config --local in every repo, but that's tedious, error-prone and doesn't scale very well with many repositories (and the chances to forget to set the right one on a new repo are ~100%).
The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor.
The Janitor knows how to talk to different hosting platforms. For each hosting platform, it needs to support the platform- specific API for creating and managing merge proposals. For each hoster it also needs to have credentials.
At the moment, it supports the GitHub API, Launchpad API and GitLab API. Both GitHub and Launchpad have only a single instance; the GitLab instances it supports are gitlab.com and salsa.debian.org.
This provides coverage for the vast majority of Debian packages that can be accessed using Git. More than 75% of all packages are available on salsa - although in some cases, the Vcs-Git header has not yet been updated.
Of the other 25%, the majority either does not declare where it is hosted using a Vcs-* header (10.5%), or have not yet migrated from alioth to another hosting platform (9.7%). A further 2.3% are hosted somewhere on GitHub (2%), Launchpad (0.18%) or GitLab.com (0.15%), in many cases in the same repository as the upstream code.
Canonical released Ubuntu 20.10 with optimized Raspberry Pi images for all major Pi SBCs and modules, including a full Desktop version that runs on higher-end models. There is also improved micro cloud support, including the Pi-ready MicroK8s 1.19.
With last October’s launch of Ubuntu 19.10, Canonical improved on the Linux distribution’s Raspberry Pi support by supporting the Raspberry Pi 4. The release included Pi support for a new version of MicroK8s — Canonical’s single-node Kubernetes environment — that provides “strict confinement” to enable easier deployment of k8s containers on edge gateways. This June, Canonical launched Ubuntu Appliance for container-like apps based on Ubuntu Core snap packages that run on the Raspberry Pi. Now, with Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu extends its support for the Pi with several optimized images.
Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla was officially released! Here’s how to upgrade from Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Ubuntu 20.10 will be supported for 9 months until July 2021. It features Linux Kernel 5.8, desktop images for Raspberry Pi 4, and GNOME 3.38 on Ubuntu Desktop.
The release also includes a new version of Gnome, additional support for Ubuntu certified devices, and support for micro-cloud infrastructure.
System76 has announced a new Pop!_OS 20.10 Linux operating system. Latest version of Pop OS is based on Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla which was released few days ago.
Days after the release of Ubuntu 20.10 “Groovy Gorilla,” along with its seven official flavors, System76 has announced a new Pop!_OS 20.10 Linux distro based on the upstream Ubuntu 20.10.
Just yesterday, we told you Ubuntu 20.10 was finally available for download. This was exciting, as it is the most well-known Linux-based desktop operating system on the planet (other than Chrome OS, maybe).
Of course, having the most recognizable name does not make Ubuntu the best Linux distro. In fact, I can confidently say it is definitely not the best. And that is because Pop!_OS exists.
If you aren't familiar, Pop!_OS is computer-maker System76's own desktop operating system that is based on Ubuntu. What the company does with Pop!_OS, essentially, is improve upon Ubuntu with tweaks and changes to make it even more user friendly. Ultimately, Pop!_OS has become much better than the operating system on which it is based. Is System76 standing on the shoulders of giants? Yes, but so what?
The seven official flavors of Ubuntu 20.10 are now available with the latest builds and .iso images and ready for you - Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, and Ubuntu Studio - 20.10.
Ubuntu 20.10 is out, with Canonical highlighting its Raspberry Pi support, including not only desktop support but also micro clouds based on MicroK8s, the company's lightweight Kubernetes distribution.
Codenamed "Groovy Gorilla," Ubuntu 20.10 is only supported for nine months, unlike its predecessor 20.04 which is a long-term support release. It is based on the 5.8 Linux kernel, which is a substantial upgrade from 5.4 as used in 20.10, with Btrfs RAID 1 support, USB 4 (based on Thunderbolt 3), updates to support features of recent CPUs Intel Ice Lake and Tiger Lake graphics, AMD Zen 3, and more. Also included by default is GNOME desktop 3.38, the latest version.
[...]
The company will be hoping to attract enterprises with IoT deployments or use cases for edge computing.
OpenStack users will find the latest Victoria release now available in Ubuntu 20.10, though the release notes observe that "upgrading an OpenStack deployment is a non-trivial process," probably an understatement.
Pi aside, this is not the biggest of Ubuntu releases but keeps the momentum going for Canonical's distribution, hugely popular for server use on public cloud and becoming more polished for desktop users too.
This week I noticed that the Snap Store app on my Ubuntu 20.10 laptop uses a tonne of memory, even when it’s not running — we’re talking more memory than the main GNOME Shell process uses, and that is always running!
Naturally I assumed something in my config was to blame. I do make heavy use of Snap apps — don’t worry I use plenty of Flatpak and PPAs too. I’m pretty polyamorous when it comes to packaging formats and I did install using an Ubuntu 20.10 daily build.
Therein lay bugs. I know the caveats. All good. Don’t mind. Whatever.
Over the year, The maker community has designed several platforms to monitor vital signs with boards like Healthy Pi v4 or HeartyPatch both of which are powered by an ESP32 WiFi & Bluetooth wireless SoC. WallySci has designed another all-in-one wireless bio-sensing platform, called E3K, that also happens to be powered by Espressif Systems ESP32 chip, and can be connected to an electromyography (EMG) sensor to capture muscle movements, an electrocardiography (ECG) sensor to measure heart activity, and/or an electroencephalography (EEG) sensor to capture brain activity. The board also has an extra connector to connect a 9-axis IMU to capture motion.
MiTac’s fanless, rugged “MX1-10FEP” embedded computer has an 8th or 9th Gen Coffee Lake Core or Xeon CPU plus 3x SATA bays, 4x USB 3.1 Gen 2, 2x M.2, 2x mini-PCIe, and optional PCIe x16 and x1.
MiTac recently introduced a Coffee Lake based MX1-10FEP computer that is also being distributed by ICP Germany. This month, ICP announced that the MX1-10FEP-D model with PCIe x16 and PCIe x1 slots has been tested and classified by Nvidia as “NGC Ready” for Nvidia GPU Cloud graphics boards such as the Nvidia T4 and Tesla P4.
[...]
The MX1-10FEP has an Intel C246 chipset and defaults to Windows 10 with Linux on request.
Taking inspiration from Colin Furze’s 600cc bumper car constructed a few years ago, Henry Forsyth decided to build his own RC miniature version. His device features a 3D-printed and nicely-painted body, along with a laser-cut chassis that holds the electrical components.
The vehicle is driven by a single gearmotor and a pair of 3D-printed wheels, with another caster-style wheel that’s turned left and right by a servo steering. An Arduino Uno and Bluetooth shield are used for overall control with a motor driver.
The Bluetooth functionality allows for user interface via a PS4 controller, or even (after a bit of programming) a Wii Balance Board. In the end, the PS4 remote seems to be the better control option, but who knows where else this type of balance technique could be employed?
Hisilicon Hi3861 may be the first RISC-V WIFI SoC we’ve reported on, but due to political uncertainties and security concerns, supplies may not be available outside of China.
So alternatives are welcomed, and Nanjing-based Bouffalo Lab (not a typo, åšæµÂæâ¢ÂºÃ¨Æ½ç§âæŠ⬠in Chinese) has recently introduced BL602 and BL604 32-bit RISC-V WiFi and Bluetooth LE SoC for low-power IoT applications that are supposed to compete against ESP8266 in terms of price but with higher performance and additional features. The BL602 will also be integrated into an upcoming Sipeed Longan-series board, and potentially a new IoT board from Pine64.
When the PinePhone postmarketOS Community Edition smartphone began shipping to customers in September it came with a version of the operating system with one important feature missing: HDMI output.
So when my phone arrived a few weeks ago I was able to spend some time familiarizing myself with the operating system and I could plug in the included Convergence Dock to use USB accessories including a keyboard, mouse, and storage. But I wasn’t able to connect an external display.
Now I can.
In the mid-1990s, Be Inc. had the audacity to create a brand-new personal computer operating system from scratch. It gained critical acclaim for its ahead-of-its-time features, but failed to capture significant market share. It’s still a cult favorite 25 years later, and here’s why.
BeOS is a now-defunct multimedia operating system that was first introduced in October 1995 for Be Inc.’s BeBox computer. The driving forces behind Be were Jean-Louis Gassée, Apple’s former vice president of product development, and Steve Sakoman, creator of the Apple Newton. With these tech credentials, Be had the industry’s ear right from the start.
The main physical server (we call it giant) we’ve been using at Haxx for a very long time to host sites and services for 20+ domains and even more mailing lists. The machine – a physical one – has been colocated in an ISP server room for over a decade and has served us very well. It has started to show its age.
Some of the more known sites and services it hosts are perhaps curl, c-ares, libssh2 and this blog (my entire daniel.haxx.se site). Some of these services are however primarily accessed via fronting CDN servers.
giant is a physical Dell PowerEdge 1850 server from 2005, which has undergone upgrades of CPU, disks and memory through the years.
giant featured an Intel X3440 Xeon CPU at 2.53GHz with 8GB of ram when decommissioned.
One reaction to this problem has been to urge people to keep using, or switch to Mozilla Firefox. The reasoning is that only Firefox continues developing and maintaining an independent, functioning browser engine, with an independent code base. This should ensure that no single entity can turn into a monopoly, and dictate what web standards should be.
Until recently, I have also held this line. I used Firefox, not only for my own sake, but for the sake of the web. But this stance has been becoming more and more burdensome. I ask myself, are they actually representing and defending who I want to imagine that they are?
The more I think of it, the more the way Mozilla related to its users reminds me of emotional abuse.
GDB 10.1 is now shipping as a big update to the GNU Debugger.
GDB 10.1 adds support for (e)BPF debugging as the new target supported by this release. The GDB server also now supports RISC-V GNU/Linux and ARC GNU/Linux.
Making GDB 10.1 exciting is that there is experimental multi-target debugging support as well as support for debuginfod. Debuginfod is the HTTP server for distributing ELF/DWARF debugging information from a centralized server.
GDB 10.1 released!
Release 10.1 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available. GDB is
a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Fortran, Go, Rust, and many
other languages. GDB can target (i.e., debug programs running on)
more than a dozen different processor architectures, and GDB itself
can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows variants.
GDB is free (libre) software.
You can download GDB from the GNU FTP server in the directory:
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdb
The vital stats:
Size md5sum Name
21MiB 1822a7dd45e7813f4408407eec1a6af1 gdb-10.1.tar.xz
39MiB 67b01c95c88ab8e05a08680904bd6c92 gdb-10.1.tar.gz
There is a web page for GDB at:
http://www.gnu.org/software/gdb/
That page includes information about GDB mailing lists (an announcement
mailing list, developers discussion lists, etc.), details on how to
access GDB's source repository, locations for development snapshots,
preformatted documentation, and links to related information around
the net. We will put errata notes and host-specific tips for this release
on-line as any problems come up. All mailing lists archives are also
browsable via the web.
GDB 10.1 includes the following changes and enhancements:
* Support for debugging new targets:
- BPF (bpf-unknown-none)
* GDBserver support for the following targets:
- ARC GNU/Linux
- RISC-V GNU/Linux
* Multi-target debugging support (experimental)
* Support for debuginfod, an HTTP server for distributing ELF/DWARF
debugging information as well as source code.
* Support for debugging a 32-bit Windows program using a 64-bit Windows GDB.
* Support for building GDB with GNU Guile 3.0 and 2.2 (in addition to 2.0)
* Improved performance during startup through the use of threading
during symbol table loading (an optional feature in GDB 9, now
enabled by default in GDB 10).
* Various enhancements to the Python and Guile APIs
* Various TUI Mode fixes and enhancements.
* Other miscellaneous enhancements:
- Detection when attaching to a process of a mismatch between
this process and the executable previously loaded into GDB.
- Support for default arguments for "alias" commands.
* GDBserver support for the following host triplets has been removed:
i[34567]86-*-lynxos*
powerpc-*-lynxos*
i[34567]86-*-nto*
bfin-*-*linux*
crisv32-*-linux*
cris-*-linux*
m32r*-*-linux*
tilegx-*-linux*
arm*-*-mingw32ce*
i[34567]86-*-mingw32ce*
For a complete list and more details on each item, please see the gdb/NEWS
file, available at:
https://sourceware.org/git/gitweb.cgi?p=binutils-gdb.git;...
--
Joel Brobecker
This is an Open Access Week guest post by Jordan Bunker, prototype engineer and open access advocate.
After the world went into lockdown for COVID-19, Makers were suddenly confined to their workshops. Rather than idly wait it out, many of them decided to put their tools and skills to use, developing low-cost, rapid production methods for much-needed PPE and DIY ventilators in an effort to address the worldwide shortage.
EFF is proud to celebrate€ Open Access Week.
A good month after the initial two releases, we are thrilled to announce relase 0.0.3 of RcppSpdlog. This brings us release 1.8.1 of spdlog as well as a few local changes (more below).
RcppSpdlog bundles spdlog, a wonderful header-only C++ logging library with all the bells and whistles you would want that was written by Gabi Melman, and also includes fmt by Victor Zverovic.
This version of RcppSpdlog brings a new top-level function setLogLevel to control what events get logged, updates the main example to show this and to also make the R-aware logger the default logger, and adds both an extended vignette showing several key features and a new (external) package documentation site.
Saamiyah pinged me a few days ago about the Hacktoberfest event that she was organising and asked whether I would be free to present a topic. Sure, why not?
As many tech meetups at the moment, the Hacktoberfest event also was virtual. It was hosted on the Jitsi instance of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community. The event was scheduled to start at 19h30 on Friday, i.e last evening. I was late to join but "luckily" so was everybody.
It turned out to be harder than he’d thought. Initially, he created an API that attempted to add a McSundae from every McDonald’s location to its cart once every minute. The app figured out what he was up to and blocked him — “It was like, you can’t do this, you look like a bot,” he recalled.
After a night of trial and error, Zahid figured out the magic time frame. Now, his bot attempts to add a McSundae every 30 minutes. If the bot successfully adds the item, it lets McBroken know that the location’s machine is working. If it can’t, the location gets a red dot. (A Twitter user claiming to be a McDonald’s employee has confirmed that the method works.)
These are some answers to the Week 83 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.
A web content management system (WCMS) is software designed to simplify the publication of Web content. In particular, it enables content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files. A CMS is most commonly used in creating an intranet or in establishing a presence on the Web.
This type of software that keeps track of every piece of content on a Web site. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of. A major advantage of using a CMS is that it requires almost no technical skill or knowledge to manage.
Not only do content management systems help website users with content editing, they also take care of a lot of “behind the scenes” work such as automatically generating navigation elements, making content searchable and indexable, keeping track of users, their permissions and security setting, and much more.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of the best Python-based WCMS. They are all free and open source software. Here’s our recommendations.
Python is a high-level, general-purpose, structured, powerful, open source programming language that is used for a wide variety of programming tasks. It features a fully dynamic type system and automatic memory management, similar to that of Scheme, Ruby, Perl, and Tcl, avoiding many of the complexities and overheads of compiled languages. The language was created by Guido van Rossum in 1991, and continues to grow in popularity.
Python is a very useful and popular computer language. One of the benefits of using an interpreted language such as Python is exploratory programming with its interactive shell. You can try out code without having to write a script. But there are limitations with the Python shell.
Fortunately, there are some excellent alternative Python shells that extend on the basic shell. They each offer a good interactive Python experience.
NumFOCUS recently earned a Silver Seal of Transparency from GuideStar in recognition of our accountability and transparency efforts.
Suppose you need to translate web page while scraping data from the website in R and Python. In google chrome, there is an option (or functionality) to translate any foreign language. If you are an english speaker and don't know any other foreign language and you want to extract data from the website which does not have option to convert language to English, this article would help you how to perform translation of a webpage.
This post elaborates on these points. I've condensed the rationale into four critical features for the OSH language.
I give examples of each feature, link to docs (in progress), and comment on the future of the project.
Support for the QUIC protocol, a new AbortController class, a updated N-API with new methods for managing ArrayBuffers, V8 updated to version 8.6 and NPM updated to version 7.0 are among the highlights in the latest Node.js framework for creating JavaScript-based network services like web servers, chat servers and all kinds of real-time applications.
[...]
Node.js 15.0 is a "regular" support release with support throughout June 2021. Node.js uses even numbers for LTS releases. The Node.js 14.x branch is the corrent "Long Term Support" branch with support throughout April 2023 and the older Node.js 12.x will be supported until April 2022. The 10.x branch will go EOL in April 2021.
When it comes to creating computer applications that can also be run in a network among distributed servers and clients, Java is still the most powerful programming language available. You can also build a small scale application module commonly known as an applet with Java.
Version 0.23 of the Eclipse OpenJ9 Java Virtual Machine was released this week in continuing to focus on being a high performance, open-source JVM.
Scoundrels and Spitballers is a treasure trove of anecdotes, author profiles, and hilarious, gossipy asides worthy of Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon. Garnier’s book was partly culled from interviews with older Tinseltown wordsmiths the cinephile did for French TV in the 1980s. He also spent long hours digging through studio archives, tracing the development of screen stories through letters, memos, script revisions, and other original source material.
Near the beginning of Scoundrels and Spitballers, Garnier explains, “I wanted to stress the vibrancy and free-for-all giddiness of a period when the film industry was young, and its workers even younger.” He succeeded, and also effectively shows how, in his words, “Hollywood broke a few writers’ souls, but it also helped many—and definitely inspired a few.”
I was simply tucking in my shirt! You are the pervert for thinking it was somehow wrong for me, a young man (why televisions were out a full 17 years prior to my birth) to ask a lovely, possibly 15 year old for her number? To free up my gangrenous goods in my hand next to her in a hotel room at The Mark (can’t make this stuff up, right?)? Well, then I guess we have no freedom in America any longer. The men who perpetrated 9-11 truly won. To think I simply wanted her number so I could call her periodically through the day to say “9-11”and then later in the middle of the night to say “9-11” and then maybe a little bit later “9-11”. This is something I do for all newly menstruating girls as a rite of passage for them. It’s an honor and a privilege that I do not take lightly in this, our God blessed United States (cough, cough, cough).€ Oh, yeah….9-11
In other rat bastard pervert news:
The company announced in a blog post that they would be taking action against accounts who use their platform to actively spread QAnon’s beliefs. The post detailed how “QAnon-dedicated creators that are identified by our Policy and Trust & Safety teams will have their accounts removed from Patreon.”
From now on, QAnon-dedicated creators that are identified by our Policy and Trust & Safety teams will have their accounts removed from Patreon. Creators who have propagated some QAnon content, but are not dedicated to spreading QAnon disinformation, will have the opportunity to bring their campaigns into compliance with our updated guidelines. Creators whose campaigns seek to analyze the QAnon conspiracy theory will not be impacted by this policy change. To date, the majority of creator accounts discussing QAnon fall into this last category.
Though he saw these races as all part of one human species and believed they could develop separately and eventually die out, this easy-to-memorize listing has had lasting afterlife with unfortunate consequences. Mostly ignoring modern discoveries and changes in methodologies, the same paradigm became the common go-to justification for legal, social and political racism. Roughly two-hundred years later, in 1997, the US government classified people originating from Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa as white and had them sitting at the top of an assumed hierarchy of ethnic intelligence.
These arbitrary “populations” were framed as the “natural winners”, writes Angela Saini in her book Superior: The Return of Race Science that gives the myth of racial science and racisms a serious dressing down. Race science and racism are never far apart. In 2007, French president Sarkozy infamously said, “Africa has not fully entered into history” – well, apart from the fact the history of modern anatomical humanity probably started in Africa. Sarkozy’s present-day American counterpart talked of “shithole countries”.
It goes without saying that the current pandemic has altered our national broadband conversation. What it has not changed, as those of us who have been working in this space are painfully aware, is the reality which existed long before COVID-19. Nor has the virus undone any of the decisions made over the last few decades which have lead us here — a moment epitomized by a viral image of two girls attending classes from a Taco Bell parking lot.
77,640 new Covid-19 cases were reported on Thursday.
Phoenix—With less than two weeks to Election Day and early voting already underway, Joe Biden’s campaign is finally resuming in-person canvassing in battleground states. It’s about time. The Biden team’s decision earlier this year to impose a moratorium on door-knocking—a party line that local candidates, too, felt pressure to follow—and opt instead for an “invisible campaign” of ads, calls, and texts was a costly blunder. In-person canvassing is one of the most effective tools a campaign has at its disposal: It motivates volunteers, persuades undecided voters and increases turnout up and down the ballot. Which may be why the Trump campaign—and state GOP organizations—never stopped knocking. So it’s welcome news that, after months of condemning canvassing as both dangerous and ineffective, top Democratic operatives have suddenly changed their tone.
Then, there is also fear of post election trouble if Our Beloved Leader refuses to agree with the final tally that is not in his favor. This could result in trouble, tension, turmoil extending over a longer period.
Food
The first presidential debate of 2020 was a disaster for Donald Trump. His constant hectoring of both Joe Biden and moderator Chris Wallace was childish and obnoxious. It made visible all the temperamental problems that are a major reason he is so unpopular. The polling gap between him and Biden widened after the debate, as Biden’s lead in aggregate polling rose from 7–8 to 10–11 points.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s latest book, “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons From the COVID-19 Pandemic,” went on sale this month. Its publisher has hailed the governor’s courageous honesty.
“Real leadership, he shows, requires clear communication, compassion for others, and a commitment to truth-telling — no matter how frightening the facts may be,” one bit of advertising for the book reads.
We talked about the future of the print magazine, how to cover the elections, making significant upgrades to the look and functionality of the website. We discussed book projects and the need to attract more women writers and more people writing about Palestine from Palestine. We drank wine and made a few of Cockburn’s favorite dishes. We walked the desert at night, under a giant moon and the plaintive songs of coyotes. I recall an ineffable sense of urgency that week, as if we were in the path of some convulsive force. We knew Covid was looming, but none of us really knew what Covid was and the kind of changes it would exact on lives, on our work, on our psyches, on our relationships with each other and our writers and readers, several of whom have died over the intervening months.
I had been in southern California € for a couple of months before our Joshua Tree retreat, bouncing from LA to the Owens Valley. I’d been into the bowels of LAX twice and witnessed both times slurs being hurled at Asian travelers, who at that point were the only people smart enough to be wearing masks. Those masks protected them in a virus rich environment, but also made them targets. I spent a day outside Delano with farmworkers, nearly all of them already wearing bandanas on their faces, more terrified of ICE raids than the coming pandemic, but prepared for both. € I spent another day touring the small tribal reservations in the Owens Valley with my friend Paul Sampson, a Paiute, who explained how successive waves of European diseases, mainly influenzas, wiped out more than 90 percent of the Owens Valley Paiute, making it that much easier for ranchers, miners and the City of Los Angeles to steal their land and water. “Capitalism spreads and feeds off of disease,” € he told me. That succinct phrase, uttered as we walked the haunted corridors of Manzanar, continues to resonate.
This novel approach to herd immunity is a pipe dream currently entertained by fanatics in the white house – regarding which, William Haseltine of ACCESS Health International recently said, “herd immunity is another word for mass murder.” If covid spreads widely, which this type of herd immunity advocates, “we’re looking at two to six million American dead not just this year, but every year,” Haseltine added. This is the policy of the Trump regime: millions of dead Americans.
Dr. Scott Atlas is Trump’s herd immunity guy. He’s not an epidemiologist, he’s a neuroradiologist and so knows little about infectious disease. He’s also an ideologue from the radical right-wing Hoover Institution. Apparently, he has had a most malign effect on Trump’s thinking. Trump may have decided not to protect himself from covid because he agrees with Atlas that everyone will get covid, so why fight it? Trump calls exposing himself to the plague leadership, but other forms of leadership are on display in places like China, Vietnam, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan. There the leaders focused on one thing: killing the virus. And they have, by and large, succeeded, saving hundreds of thousands of their citizens’ lives. Meanwhile Americans die from covid by the thousands, over 221,000 so far.
"The policy of the Japanese government to dump nuclear waste into the Pacific Ocean is not based on scientific or environmental protection principles and has no justification."
Epidemiologists agree that early intervention is crucial for curbing the worst effects of pandemics. America’s decentralized, state-level, bureaucratic response systems needed a President willing and able to take charge. Trump did the opposite. In order to keep market confidence as high as possible, Trump kept telling the public that all was well, leaving underfunded and privatized bureaucracies to navigate through the chaos.
JANUARY: “IT WILL ALL WORK OUT WELL”
Facebook moderators working as independent contractors in Dublin say they’re required to work in the office, despite a new nationwide lockdown across Ireland, The Guardian reports. The moderators, employed by contractor CPL, say they were told they’re considered essential workers and therefore not bound by Ireland’s Level 5 restrictions, which require people to work at home unless they’re “providing an essential purpose for which your physical presence is required.”
On 3rd Oct. 2020 GitLab blocked Iranians’ access (based on IP) without any prior notice! and five days later (8th Oct.) my friend’s account blocked and still he doesn’t have any access to his projects! even after creating a ticket and asks for a temporary access to only export his projects! GitLab refused to unblock him! (screenshot in appendix). My friend is not the only one who blocked by GitLab, with a simple search on the web you can find a growing list of blocked accounts. So I decided to move from GtiLab and EVERY Free Software based/hosted/managed on/in USA.
When it comes to USA policies, Free Software is a Joke :)
GitLab is not the only actor in this discrimination against Persian/Iranian people, we also blocked by GitHub, Docker, NPM, Google Developer, Android, AWS, Go, Kubernetes and etc.
This takedown notice does not necessarily spell the permanent end of youtube-dl. GitHub always immediately takes down any source code project that receives a DMCA notice like this, but the project’s creators will have an opportunity to file a counterclaim in the hopes of restoring youtube-dl’s status on GitHub. We’ll be keeping an eye on the situation as it develops.
YouTube-DL is pretty simple to use: you give the command-line program the URL of any YouTube video, and it will fetch the material and save it to your computer for future playback.
Microsoft GitHub has removed all traces of the very useful youtube-dl utility for downloading videos from YouTube and other websites, including this one, following a questionable DMCA request from the Recording Industry Association of America.
youtube-dl is a simple command-line utility that lets you easily download audio adn videos from just about any website with a file file embedded in it. It works on sites like this one. A lot of software, including the popular video player mpv, can use it to download video fragments on the fly so videos embedded in web pages can be opened and played as if they were local files.
The Recording Industry Association of America submitted a DMCA request to Microsoft GitHub demanding that youtube-dl gets removed from the Internet on October 23rd, 2020. The complaint contains this rather misleading claim: [...]
Security updates have been issued by Gentoo (freetype), openSUSE (mailman), Red Hat (firefox, java-11-openjdk, OpenShift Container Platform 3.11.306 jenkins, and rh-maven35-jackson-databind), SUSE (kernel, mercurial, openldap2, python-pip, and xen), and Ubuntu (firefox, netty-3.9, and python-pip).
In July I finished my Bachelor’s Degree in IT Security at the University of Applied Sciences in St. Poelten. During the studies I did some elective courses, one of which was about Data Analysis using Python, Pandas and Jupyter Notebooks. I found it very interesting to do calculations on different data sets and to visualize them. Towards the end of the Bachelor I had to find a topic for my Bachelor Thesis and as a long time user of OpenPGP I thought it would be interesting to do an analysis of the collection of OpenPGP keys that are available on the keyservers of the SKS keyserver network.
So in June 2019 I fetched a copy of one of the key dumps of the one of the keyservers (some keyserver publish these copies of their key database so people who want to join the SKS keyserver network can do an initial import). At that time the copy of the key database contained 5,499,675 keys and was around 12GB. Using the hockeypuck keyserver software I imported the keys into an PostgreSQL database. Hockeypuck uses a table called keys to store the keys and in there the column doc stores the OpenPGP keys in JSON format (always with a data field containing the original unparsed data).
For the thesis I split the analysis in three parts, first looking at the Public Key packets, then analysing the User ID packets and finally studying the Signature Packets. To analyse the respective packets I used SQL to export the data to CSV files and then used the pandas read_csv method to create a dataframe of the values. In a couple of cases I did some parsing before converting to a DataFrame to make the analysis step faster. The parsing was done using the pgpdump python library.
Together with my advisor I decided to submit the thesis for a journal, so we revised and compressed the whole paper and the outcome was now
In a recent post, Brian Krebs discussed a technique for disrupting 8chan, a controversial message board. Ron Guilmette, a security researcher, spotted that N.T. Technology, the hosting company owned by 8chan’s current operator, no longer has the right to transact business as it is in the “administrative hold” state. ARIN, the Internet registry N.T. Technology obtained its IP address allocation from, would be within its rights to reclaim the IP address space.
Ron Guilmette is an expert in this type of analysis - last year he discovered the theft of $50 million worth of IP addresses in AFRINIC’s service region.
However, taking down 8chan is unlikely to be as simple as requesting that ARIN deallocates its IP adddress space. After deallocation, the IP addresses may continue to be advertised as fullbogons - netblocks that are used on the Internet despite not being assigned to an end user. While some Internet service providers do block fullbogons, this is by no means universal.
According to a statistical report published by Statista in July 2020, Google Chrome accounted for 69% of the global desktop web-browser market share by June 2020, with 11% increase from the last year.
Google Chrome is mostly based on Chromium which is an open-source web-browser released and maintained by Google. Chromium itself is the base for a dozen other browsers that are compatible with Google Chrome Web store.
In this article we will guide you through the best privacy and security browser extensions for Google Chrome and Chromium-based web browsers that support Google Chrome Web store.
A San Francisco judge refused to pause her September order blocking President Donald Trump’s ban on Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s WeChat as legal fights continue over the administration’s moves against Chinese-owned apps.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler on Friday rejected the administration’s request to let its restrictions on WeChat proceed while the Justice Department appeals the Sept. 19 order she issued at the behest of users of the messaging app.
Microsoft Corp. is both a Databricks investor and a partner, integrating a version of the startup’s software into its cloud product, Microsoft Azure.
Databricks, founded in 2013, has more than 5,000 customers including Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Conde Nast International Inc. and Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc., according to its website.
Today the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that the UK, French and Belgian bulk data collection or retention regimes (often referred to as ‘mass surveillance’) must be brought within EU law.
By scanning the faces of everyone who enters a shop and comparing them to the faces of those blacklisted, Facewatch is able to identify if a person who enters is on the blacklist or not. If they are, the shop owner receives an alert to inform them a subject of interest (SOI) has entered the premise, along with a picture of the person.
But Facewatch does not stop there. The company centralises the list of SOIs that their subscribers upload, and they may share them with surrounding subscribing businesses. So, for example, if you run the Facewatch software in your grocery store and the pub across the street also uses Facewatch and identifies John Smith as a SOI, John Smith will also be added to your “blacklist” and you will be alerted when he enters your grocery store, even if you have had no prior interaction with John Smith.
Facewatch has also allowed their users in the UK to file police reports automatically upon witnessing a crime. Facewatch users could send the police footage of a crime being allegedly committed. According to articles dating back to 2011, users were “given a crime reference number straight away” so that they could “follow the details of their case online.” At the time, Simon Gordon had said that “it helps if a business's local police force is supporting the scheme, because the process is more streamlined.”
It is unclear what the specific nature of the agreement was between the police and Facewatch before 2019 – in 2015 Gordon had told the BBC that 13 police forces had joined the scheme.
A judge in California has rejected a request from the Department of Justice to reverse a previous decision allowing WeChat to remain active in US app stores. US Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler said new evidence the government presented did not change her opinion about the messaging app, owned by Chinese company Tencent app. WeChat will remain active in US app stores for the time being.
Two and a half years after Mark Zuckerberg floated the idea on a podcast, and several months after organizers said it would be ready to hear cases, Facebook’s independent Oversight Board is now up and running. In a call with reporters today, the board’s co-chairs said that they are now prepared to hear appeals from the billions of people who use Facebook and Instagram each day. The ability to appeal to the board will roll out gradually around the world over the next several weeks. And when it’s complete, one of the bolder experiments in platform governance will have finally begun.
“Scraping tools, no matter how well-intentioned, are not a permissible means of collecting information from us,” wrote Facebook privacy policy official Allison Hendrix. "We understand the intent behind your tool. However, the browser plugin scrapes information in violation of our terms, which are designed to protect people's privacy."
If the university doesn’t end the project and delete the data it has collected by Nov. 30, she wrote, it may "be subject to additional enforcement action.” Facebook is also asking that any marketing surrounding the tool also be removed.
The Ad Observatory, a project of NYU’s engineering school with more than 6,000 volunteers, uses its AdObserver browser extension to scrape data from political ads shown on Facebook. But Facebook says the program is violates its terms of service, which bar scraping.
A Facebook official sent a letter to the Ad Observatory researchers October 16th, saying that “scraping tools, no matter how well-intentioned, are not a permissible means of collecting information from us.” The letter also threatened further enforcement action if the project did not shut down and delete the data it has collected, according to the WSJ. The company could change its own code to block the NYU team from collecting further data, a Facebook spokesperson told the WSJ.
Jeff Halper’s War against the People: Israel, the Palestinians and Global Pacification [1] is a thorough study of Israel’s advanced military weapons. It’s been over ten years since Halper recommended reframing Israel as a major military power, not an endangered state that is a light onto nations. Israel is integral to a buying spree of its military technologies and strategies by similar authoritarian, amoral, neoliberal states and institutions. Internationally renowned legal expert Richard Falk describes the emergent global constellation as “gangster geopolitics.”
SIPRI data between 2015 and 2019 shows that Israel was the 8th largest arms exporter and that its global sales increased by 77% (U.S. +23%, Russia -18%, Canada -33%). Halper writes that Israel “gets away with it” because of its specialized indispensability in global arms, strategy, and surveillance. Also, profits are internationalized through private and public investments (such as pension funds) and because manufacturing weapon system components is dispersed to many countries. In 2019 Israel opened a new government relations office in Washington D.C. to secure more U.S. contracts; it already had partnerships with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Honeywell, Gulfstream and General Dynamics. Halper describes “net-centric warfare” and the range of electronic systems and devices. The Israel Export Institute lists 14 companies specializing in avionics – the design and manufacture of the electronic systems used on aircraft, satellites and spacecraft. Forward-looking infrared sensor (FLIR) weapons are laser-guided munitions with automatic target trackers to provide fully automatic tracking at altitudes, airspeeds and slant ranges consistent with tactical weapon delivery.
In the seven months and six days from March 31, 1968 to November 5, 1968, a Vietnamese army clad in black pajamas, fighting for a population one fifth that of the United States, had unseated one U.S. president, defeated a sitting U.S. vice president running for president, and elected a clinically paranoid con man and two-time loser to the presidency of the biggest empire in the history of the world. Not bad.
Candidate Richard Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the war and that was enough to beat a slavish Hubert Humphrey, who crisscrossed the country hobbling up to the microphone with the colossal Vietnam debacle of his boss, President Johnson, shackled to his ankle.
U.S. foreign policy never recovered from the war on terror.
There are essays examining the geopolitics and economics of the war, but the pieces that stand out the most are those that focus on the conflict’s victims. Indeed, the essay by Fred Branfman that opens the book enumerates the number of dead and wounded during the years of war; the numbers are in the millions. He writes, “The nation (USA) has no greater moral failing than [its] ongoing refusal to take responsibility for the countless Indochinese peasants…” its forces killed. Instead, Washington has pretended it has no responsibility for those deaths and gone on to add many thousands more such deaths to its ledger, albeit in other nations around the globe. The second piece is also by Branfman. It is an excerpt from his 1970 publication titled Voice from the Plain of Jars. I remember reading this book in 1971 at the Post Exchange bookstore in Frankfurt am Main. Although I was quite surprised to find it on the shelves in a store funded by the US Department of Defense and for its troops, I was also happy it was there. It is a testament to whoever managed that store and to the broader range of ideas published by mainstream publishers then that this text was but one of several antiwar books I purchased there. Anyhow, those voices from Laos’ Plain of Jars were telling stories about the “secret” US bombing of that country. It was a bombing campaign that forced families to live in caves and underground, destroyed their fields and poisoned the water. It was also a military campaign whose primary intent was to intimidate the civilian population.
The bombing of Laos was not the only such campaign. In fact, one could argue that much of US policy was designed to intimidate civilians. This included intentionally targeting civilian villages and hamlets, bombing them and conducting on-the-ground search and destroy missions. In southern Vietnam, the purpose of these missions was often to drive the Vietnamese into detention camps run under the aegis of the CIA’s Operation Phoenix. pavli Other times, the purpose seemed to be mass murder. The most infamous of the latter type of operation is probably the massacre at My Lai in 1968. Another, broader and less specific operation was the use of defoliants like Agent Orange across Southeast Asia by US forces. This chemical was known to cause birth defects and cancers, but was used so universally and indiscriminately many US troops were also permanently affected after being exposed to it. As a sort of proof of Washington’s refusal to accept responsibility for its crimes in Southeast Asia, it took years and years of protests, court battles and Congressional hearings before the Veteran’s Administration acknowledged the terminal damage to its troops was often caused by the Pentagon’s use of Agent Orange.
The security services put an extraordinary amount of media priming effort into explaining why the alleged novichok attack on the Skripals had a delayed effect of several hours, and then failed to kill them. Excuses included that it was a cold day which slowed their metabolisms, that the chemical took a long time to penetrate their skins, that the gel containing the novichok inhibited its operation, that it was a deliberately non-fatal dose, that rain had diluted the novichok on the doorknob, that the Skripals were protected by gloves and possibly only came into contact in taking the gloves off, or that nerve agents are not very deadly and easily treated.
He let the cancer take him before he became a too old punk rocker, his music too loud and his joy too diabolical.
When I got to college in California in 1985, I came with a thick mustache and white trousers, a failed start at college in Delhi and Marxism buzzing through my head. I was a casualty – I admit – of politics and of hallucinations, unable to focus in a Delhi which was marked for me by the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 when over 3,000 Sikhs were massacred. Southern California was not so far from Delhi; Los Angeles sprawled into Claremont, where I had arrived by bus from the outer reaches of San Francisco, and this sprawl was filled with the harsh edges of class struggle in a way that defined the sprawl of Delhi. It did not take long to sense the deep fissures of race and class that etched themselves on the landscape, deepened by the 1984 Olympics around which came the brutalities of evictions and police violence. It was all terribly familiar, the sound of Steel Pulse’s Ku Klux Klan (1978) in the air, things can’t remain the same yah.
As at it turns out, as compelling as this carefully constructed network TV narrative was, there were more than a few things wrong with it that haven’t been brought to the cable news watching public’s attention. The primary one being that it was largely bullshit. Madame Whitmer’s command performance as a humble public servant addressing a nation under fire was as badly scripted as the daytime soaps she interrupted. The governor was never in any real danger and she had been kept abreast of the details of the investigation for weeks if not months, being secretly shuttled about by the feds from secure location to secure location accordingly.
The men allegedly hunting her had been the subjects of a carefully arranged sting operation. No fewer than four FBI agents and/or informants had taken part in the dastardly plot from its earliest stage as chatroom heavy breathing on social media. It had all the markings of a classic FBI entrapment scheme. A dozen good old boys were picked out, infiltrated, and egged on by agent provocateurs to take their macho locker room talk to the next level. The Feds had been coaxing these bitter gun nuts for months, since the beginning of the year. God only knows how much of the plot was constructed by the feds themselves but I’m fairly confident that it probably never would have made it past the bullshitting stage if it wasn’t for the hard work of our heroes in the FBI, the one gang in blue that the liberals agree matters.
With around a quarter of the votes counted, exit polls showed them ahead of rightest opponents with€ 52-53%€ of the vote. No runoff election will be necessary.
Opponents Carlos Mesa (a former president) and Luis Fernandez Camacho received around 30% and 14% of the voters. Both are right-wingers who aggravated a military-threatened coup last November. Mesa, and the self-appointed coup president Jeanine Añez, have admitted defeat.
In practice, however, despite the seeming rift between Washington and Brussels, the outcome is, essentially, the same. The US and Europe are Israel’s largest trade partners, weapon suppliers and political advocates.
One of the reasons that the illusion of an even-handed Europe has been maintained for so long lies partly in the Palestinian leadership itself. Politically and financially abandoned by Washington, the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas has turned to the European Union as its only possible saviour.
Formal ratification of the new law — TPNW for short — is a nation’s binding promise “never under any circumstances … develop, test, produce, manufacture, otherwise acquire, possess or stockpile nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.” The United Nations opened the TPNW for consideration by a vote of 122 to 2 in July 2017.
A mere 90 days after the 50th nation state ratification, the TPNW will enter into force as international law, binding on countries that have seen it ratified.
Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party won a decisive victory in the country’s presidential elections on Sunday, with its candidate Luis Arce apparently winning by a large enough margin to avoid a runoff, likely achieving an absolute majority. The leading opposing candidate, neoliberal Carlos Mesa, and the right-wing unelected President Jeanine ÃÂñez congratulated Arce on his victory.
Critics say the U.S.-brokered agreement normalizes not only relations between the former foes, but also Israel's crimes against the Palestinian people.
But there’s one big problem, say companies that build the specialized semiconductors used by the U.S. Defense Department in, for example, radiation-hardened chips on space satellites, anti-jam GPS receivers, and the F-35 fighter. The bill’s current language focuses too much on state-of-the-art commercial chips and not enough on the application-specific, small-order chips that the Pentagon needs to build directed energy weapons, they argue.
Without the addition, their collective employees’ livelihoods—about 50,000 jobs across the country—are at stake.More than a dozen companies—concerned less with what could power your laptop and more on what might steer that cruise missile—are lobbying Congress to change the defense bill’s language to include “mission-critical and integration-level semiconductors” before the compromise language is finalized. This addition would put a spotlight on Pentagon-qualified semiconductor manufacturing and integration and help secure an increasingly fragile global supply chain. Without it, their collective employees’ livelihoods—about 50,000 jobs across the country—are at stake, those companies said.
When we think of existential risks, events like nuclear war or asteroid impacts often come to mind. Yet there’s one future threat that is less well known – and while it doesn’t involve the extinction of our species, it could be just as bad.
It’s called the “world in chains” scenario, where, like the preceding thought experiment, a global totalitarian government uses a novel technology to lock a majority of the world into perpetual suffering. If it sounds grim, you’d be right. But is it likely? Researchers and philosophers are beginning to ponder how it might come about – and, more importantly, what we can do to avoid it.
The islamist terrorists operating in the northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado have carried their war across the border into Tanzania, where they murdered and beheaded 20 people on Wednesday night, according to a report in Monday's issue of the independent newssheet "Carta de Mocambique", citing Tanzanian sources.
The police initially noticed that there were unusually few people in Tensta in the evenings in late August. Later, they received tips that gangsters had threatened people with weapons and violence to force them indoors.
The Lebanese signed a document confirming loyalty to the constitution and renouncing any kind of extremism, he received the maximum score in the test for applicants for citizenship, but when handing over the completed papers he refused to shake hands with the woman responsible for processing documents.
Secondly, Islamist extremist terrorism, which by volume remains our largest threat. It is still the case that tens of thousands of individuals are committed to this ideology – and we must continually scan for the smaller numbers within that large group who at any given moment might be mobilising towards attacks. Having someone “on our radar” is not the same as having them under detailed real-time scrutiny. Difficult judgements of prioritisation and risk must be made. That task has become sharper in recent years, as more terrorists have gone for basic attack methods requiring little preparation, meaning there are fewer clues for us to detect in advance – and less time to find those clues.
And now Right Wing Terrorism. In April of this year MI5 and our police colleagues completed the phased transition we had begun in 2017; against this sadly rising threat, MI5 now holds lead intelligence responsibility. We operate entirely the same system as on Islamist extremist terrorism, with cases pursued by the same counter-terrorist professionals within the same part of the MI5/police machine, operating to the same thresholds, prioritised on the basis of threat and risk rather than ideology. This threat is not, today, on the same scale as Islamist extremist terrorism. But it is growing: of the 27 late-stage terrorist attack plots in Great Britain disrupted by MI5 and CT Policing since 2017, 8 have been right wing extremist.
Ken McCallum said terrorism remains the biggest threat - with Northern Irish and Islamist extremism also a concern.
It raises serious questions about whether Times editors and reporters, rather than actually trying to determine how voters feel, are setting out to find people to mouth the words they need for predetermined story lines that, not coincidentally, echo the Trump campaign's propaganda.
A huge amount of illicit fishing happens on licensed boats, too. They might catch more than their quota, or falsely declare their catch as abundant albacore tuna instead of the more valuable bigeye. In port fisheries inspectors are always overstretched. If an operator is caught, for instance, fishing with too fine a net, the fine and confiscation are seen as a cost of doing business. Many pay up and head straight back out to sea.
The damage from illicit fishing goes well beyond fish stocks. Operators committing one kind of crime are likely to be committing others, too—cutting the fins off sharks, or even running guns or drugs (see article). Many are also abusing their crews. Tens of thousands of migrant workers, mainly from South-East Asia, man the world’s fleets. Many toil at sea in vile conditions with violent masters, sometimes for years at a time. A lot of them are in debt bondage; and a fishing boat is a lot harder to escape from than a factory.
A chain of calamities caused the planet’s biggest extinction, the greatest mass dying ever. Greenhouse gases explain how.
This month another set of photographs highlighted the global crime and catastophe of ecocide. It was by Sri Lankan photographer Tilaxan Tharmapalan, and it won the UK’s Royal Society of Biology photography competition. Tharmapalan captured images of a wild herd of elephants scavenging for food in a rancid landfill near a wildlife sanctuary. Many of the elephants have become ill or died as a result of feeding on plastic and other toxic waste. But it is the ubiquitous nature of plastic, the myth of recycling, and the normalization of its presence in our lives that I wanted to discuss in this essay.
Images like this make the greenwashing efforts by the plastic industry and Big Oil fall flat. In fact, they have been a lie from the start. It was the plastic industry that started the idea of “recycling.” But this was not intended to reduce the production of plastic. On the contrary, it was intended to give a veneer of “corporate responsibility,” while they ramped up plastic manufacturing. Over the decades recycling became the mantra of many “environmental” organizations. But the myth of recycling remains largely obscured. In every recycled plastic product there is an equal measure of new plastic, so there is no real reduction. It is the exact opposite.
"I am so deeply proud and grateful for each and every one of my House and Senate colleagues who stand for our future and champion the Green New Deal," the progressive standout declared.€
“I will repeat, and the American people know, that Joe Biden will not ban fracking. That is a fact,” Harris said.
Whenever there are discussions about banning fracking, media coverage seems to prioritize potential “risks” to Democrats’ electoral prospects, or potential economic downturns. Unfortunately, a lot of this coverage is quite sloppy.
It is high time to break the spell the industry seems to have cast over Democratic politicians. This was a promising start.
The Crash of Flight 3804€ is a triumph on two fronts. First, it’s a comprehensive history of U.S. involvement in the Middle East that manages the uncommon feat of placing this history into its proper context: America’s need for Middle Eastern oil. It also serves as an exciting, moving account of author Charlotte Dennett’s decades-long journey to expose the truth behind her father’s death. Her father, Daniel Dennett, was a U.S. counterintelligence agent stationed in Beirut, Lebanon, during and after World War II, and his job was to protect oil and other American interests from fierce competition from America’s wartime allies. In his daughter’s view, this likely led him to become one of America’s first victims of “the Great Game for Oil,” as she calls€ it.
President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden met in Nashville, Tennessee, on Thursday in the second and final debate of the 2020 campaign. It was a more subdued debate than their first clash, when Trump refused to abide by the rules and interrupted Biden at least 128 times. Thursday’s debate was moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker, who began by asking the candidates about COVID-19. Biden criticized Trump for repeatedly downplaying the severity of the pandemic, while the president boasted about his handling of the crisis, falsely claiming a vaccine was “ready” to be deployed within weeks. Epidemiologist Dr. Ali Khan, dean of the College of Public Health at the University of Nebraska Medical Center and former director of the CDC’s Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response, says the political divide on how to deal with COVID-19 would be “unimaginable” for any other disease. He also says the Trump administration’s aims of reaching “herd immunity” by letting the virus run rampant in the U.S. is cruel and scientifically unsound. “That is the most unethical, disastrous approach possible,” he says.
This week on CounterSpin: Earlier this year, the New York Times ran a column helpfully headlined “The Simple Reason the Left Won’t Stop Losing,” in which David Leonhardt claimed that “left-wing movements…have often prioritized purity over victory,” and encouraged progressives to “break with orthodoxy.” One way to do that? By “announcing that fracking and nuclear energy are crucial to fighting climate change.” That fits with corporate media’s approach to fracking—which, as Joshua Cho noted for FAIR.org, prioritizes the supposed “risks” to the electoral prospects of Democrats who call for banning it over the prospects for human civilization’s survival. We’ll talk about why fracking is still bad with Mitch Jones, policy director at Food & Water Action and Food & Water Watch.
EPA director of science and information Keith Baldry said a survey by the company had detected a potential leak at Adelaide Energy's Katnook Gas Processing Facility, south of Penola.
"There's no major contaminants in the water, but it is important to protect the groundwater … so it needs to be fixed," Mr Baldry said.
Crown executive chairman John Alexander had little time for those who had been muddying the good name of Australia’s foremost gambling brand. “There have been a number of sensationalist and unproven claims made, with many focused on allegations from over five years ago. Let me be clear – Crown does not tolerate any illegal activity by its employees or its patrons.”
At the same gathering, former government minister and current Crown Resorts chairman Helen Coonan also took issue with those “unsubstantiated and unproven allegations that have been made against Crown,” all of which had “been deeply distressing to all of us.”
We spent $2 trillion to keep Americans afloat in the pandemic. Putting a similar amount toward the climate crisis could be even more pragmatic.
A wealth tax as modest as some Democrats are proposing would affect precious few Americans, but still generate trillions of dollars of revenue from people who have largely been increasing their fortunes throughout the pandemic.
Subliminally, the image evokes efficiency. A stool is a chair for people and a table for small things, but at a much smaller size and with 25 percent fewer legs.
Our current economic order idealizes efficiency, but leaves the human factor out of its equations. It economizes on the insignificant at the expense of the invaluable.
His opponent, Hillary Clinton, was backed by more than 100 former high-ranking officers. Trump was endorsed by only a few. Nevertheless,€ on election day four years ago,€ most military veterans ended up voting for a wealthy recipient of five draft deferments.€ Among former military personnel, Trump beat Clinton by a 26-point margin, a bigger percentage of the “vet vote” than McCain’s own share when he ran against Barack Obama in 2008.
A Pew Poll conducted last Fall showed that Trump remained popular among€ veterans, even as his ratings began to sink among other constituencies. U.S. military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan — which Trump criticized as a candidate in 2016 and, again at West Point this year—is now viewed unfavorably by a majority of the vets surveyed. In blue collar communities in€ Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin which suffered some of the highest post 9/11 combat-casualty rates, veterans and their neighbors helped Trump carry those decisive swing states four years ago.
Not to mention that the sclerotic U.S. political system has yet again thrown up two dismal choices, sadly reiterating that the two major parties offer a choice of extreme right (Republican) and center-right (Democrats). And although a common lament is that a third party is needed, one that might actually represent the interests of the majority of United Statesians, very few seriously considering pulling the lever for an alternative party, and the number of those who actually do are likely to be less than usual, given the understandably fervent desire to push Donald Trump out of the White House.
Millions will hold their noses while voting for Joe Biden. The lesser evil is still evil, especially given former Vice President Biden’s dismal record of war mongering, acting as an errand boy for big banks and turbo-charging the prison-industrial complex. So why does the U.S. not only offer such abysmal choices, but seemingly worse ones every four years?
Californians must require that companies follow the law and properly classify their workers. No company should be able to buy its way out of treating workers fairly.
"No company should be able to buy its way out of treating workers fairly," said one progressive think tank about the state's ballot initiative that will have national implications.€
In many major metropolitan areas across the United States, there are far more vacant homes than people experiencing homelessness.
For many, that means tapping the Obama-era alumni and other well-connected Democrats whom they’ve strategically hired to see who’s ready to take a trip through the revolving door. This is why prominent House progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Katie Porter have called on Biden to ban corporate appointeesfrom his administration.
The bellwether for corporate infiltration of a Democratic administration is BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager in charge of $7.32 trillion across the global economy. Hillary Clinton’s campaign actively courted BlackRock CEO Larry Fink in 2016, and he quietly built out a full Treasury Department-in-waiting of well-established Democrats ready to keep oversight of mischievous financiers light. In the years since, BlackRock has only gotten larger, which means it only has more to lose from a muscular Biden administration. So what does BlackRock care about from the next administration, and whom might they seed in a Biden administration to get it?
There was a darkening of advertising copy when Obama was elected so there’s no striking change here. But there is in the imagery that dramatizes the proximity of whites and blacks, an effort apparently to insinuate the value of integration.
Many public-service snips stress that dominant institutions must include more blacks, that “separate but equal” is no longer tenable in this time of striking inequality. While this separation, as felt and experienced now, doesn’t have the same status as the concept introduced in the Plessy Supreme Court case of 1896, and nominally reversed in the 1954 Brown case, there’s no question that segregation indices are starkly evident again a half century after MLK’s assassination, as the New York Times editorial board documented on this anniversary in 2018 (“The Unmet Promise of Equality,” by Fred Harris and Alan Curtis, 3/1/2018).
Last year, the leadership of The New School (TNS) celebrated its storied progressive history by organizing a centennial festival. The event, featuring artistic events, panels, and exhibitions, was intended to highlight its reputation as a quirky, heterodox university committed to social justice. “We ask the questions that lead to new questions, challenging the status quo,” said the announcement. The festival was also a hugely expensive event, promoted as a fundraiser, albeit one seemingly quite ineffective at its goal of raising money. Months down the line, the university is struggling with a projected budget shortfall of $130 million. But contrary to the celebratory spirit of its carefully crafted public image, the leadership is attempting to transform the university—without the input and against the wishes of faculty, staff, and students—into a corporate paragon of anti-labor austerity.
Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies has seen revenue of 671.3 billion yuan (A$140.6 billion) in the first nine months of 2020, the company says, adding that this was an increase of 9.9% over the corresponding period in 2019.
"The Election Code does not... require county election boards to reject absentee or mail-in ballots during the canvassing process based on an analysis of a voter's signature," the court unanimously ruled.
"Parts of the presidential battleground states of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Ohio fell short of delivery goals by wide margins."
Repairing the breach left by centrism and fueled by rage will require radical love, the kind of love that condemns a broken system and not its broken people.
The order sets up Trump's "cronies to burrow into permanent jobs in€ the U.S. government," said one critic.€
The more Trump has abused his power and position in this world and the more he’s escaped any retribution for his crimes, the more obsessed I’ve become with visualizing ways for him to pay in some version of the afterlife.
As I mulled over the treatment he deserved for the havoc he continues to wreak on the lives of countless others here in the United States and across the globe, I turned almost automatically to the work of Dante Alighieri, the Italian poet whose Divina Commedia minutely recreated in a verse called terza rima what awaited the readers of his time once they died. Dante (1265-1321) laid out his otherworldly landscape in three volumes — Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso — that have rightly been considered among the towering and influential literary achievements of humanity.
We’re now in our mid-to-late 70s. We were a little pre-boomer, but many of us joined or led the rights revolutions of the 1960s, struggled against the Vietnam War, and hoped to make the world more just, generous, and joyous.
That was then.
It’s hard to argue with them. Donald Trump needs to go. Sure, we’ll need to challenge Joe Biden to do the right thing if he wins. The signers are all too aware that Biden’s campaign platform and troubling record as senator promise another Democratic administration dedicated to war and Wall Street.
That brings us to the two necessary components missing from “Vote Biden, Fight Him Later.” The first is a call to enact Ranked Choice Voting (RCV).
"The only anarchy in this country is coming from the White House," quipped New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
Donald Trump, desperately behind in the polls, appears to be laying the groundwork for illegally attempting to remain in office if he loses the election. This commentary focuses in on the role of workers—union and nonunion—in resisting a Trump Coup.
Fourteen states, including the battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania, won’t begin to authenticate, much less count, mail-in ballots until that day, and definitive election results may not be available for some time. Even if preliminary returns point to a Biden electoral victory, Trump has already refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power.
As president, Trump has immense powers to sow confusion and chaos as the nation enters a period of deepening uncertainty. He can call for investigations into voting and tabulating processes and encourage state legislatures to submit alternative slates of electors.
The Senate Judiciary Committee’s principled and relentless attacks on so-called “originalism” and “textualism” in constitutional jurisprudence during the Bork hearings in 1987 set that hot mess of racist and patriarchal legal apologetics back 20 years, requiring Scalia’s noxious reclamation project that produced Amy Coney Barrett’s starry-eyed zealotry.
The committee’s hearings on Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991 – presided over by your current presidential candidate – allowed an unqualified, biased and apparently traumatized GOP hack to assume his lifetime position, while Biden sat on his hands and allowed the GOP to smear Anita Hill, although her testimony shouldn’t have been necessary if (like Barrett, except much more so) the nominee’s thin experience for such a high post had been effectively exposed.
Notes from the ghost town that only exists in Trump’s impoverished imagination.
I have heard this idea being applied to U.S. politics for some time (since Reagan). I think it reflects the fear of many people, which arises as their previously taken-for-granted assumptions of the general benevolence of U.S. institutions and the U.S. political elite as a whole, drop away in the face of scandals and public disclosures of the obviously cruel and predatory nature of U.S. foreign and even domestic policy goals.
The first major incident of this sort since WWII was the Vietnam War: the Tonkin Bay Incident deception, the Pentagon Papers, My Lai, the Secret Invasion of Cambodia, Agent Orange; and then the many negative incidents of domestic fallout from all this: the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., urban riots, Watergate, the exposure of the CIA assassination plots (the Senate’s Church Committee), COINTELPRO (domestic spying), and the FBI/Police assassination of Black Panther Party people.
The corporate media will happily elect Donald Trump and once again they will blame the “working class” for his “populism”. Wolf Blitzer never was interested in anything but the “bigness” of Trump’s phony bill. Details involved journalism and CNN wants Trump the cash cow, not the facts, science or democracy. We knew this would happen. As soon as Trump got COVID and went down in the polls the media would start to humanize a fascist again. Blitzer accuses Nancy Pelosi of politicizing the stimulus package but the question is why doesn’t the same standard apply to Donald Trump?
The leftish Ro Khanna is only a figure to be admired for the corporatist Wolf Blitzer when he needs to use him to promote Trumpism. On all other occasions Khanna would be an extreme leftist undermining the party line. Why Khanna and other leftists want to compromise with Trump now is puzzling. It’s just more of what passes for the left: disagree with Pelosi and it’s left-wing. But the left was right to challenge Pelosi when she compromises with Trump and wrong to flip when Pelosi stands up to him.
For some time now, I’ve wanted to send Donald Trump to Hell. I mean this literally, not as a figure of speech. I want him to inhabit the palpable, sensory Hell that religions have long conjured up with scenes of sulfur, damnation, and screams of perpetual pain from those who once caused grievous harm to their fellow humans.
In the run-up to the debate’s opening bell I snapped a photo of a remote control that friends had given my wife and me when our kids were small. For a laugh, I sent the picture to the family group chat. My three siblings and I are uniformly scornful of both candidates and their parties, whereas the nieces and nephews, many voting for the first time in this election, are generally more optimistic or—they might say—pragmatic. One dauntless brother-in-law bangs the drum for Joe Biden and dismisses our recalcitrance as a supercilious luxury.
During last night’s proceedings Trump did get silenced a few times as he tried to penetrate the Plexiglass Iron Curtain of two-minutes allotted to minor topics like Climate Change (a neutral term that should be changed to something like Ecological Armageddon).
The question is posed not because Republicans object in principle to the idea of increasing the size of the United States Supreme Court in order to create a majority aligned with their views, but because of the success they have enjoyed packing the entire federal court system without resorting to such an obvious tactic. There is€ strength in numbers and that has enabled Mitch and his cohorts to effectively pack the United States Supreme Court, and many Federal Courts of Appeal and Federal District Courts with conservative judges.€ Their success ensures that the political alignment of those courts will comport with the politics of the packers far into the future.
The first method of packing that was demonstrated by the Republicans took place in 2016 after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death. Following years of precedent, when Scalia’s death created a vacancy on the Court, President Obama did what all presidents before him had done on such occasions.€ He sent to the Senate the name of a replacement. Mitch did what had never before been done by a Majority Leader of the Senate-he refused to meet with the person who had been nominated by the president or to hold hearings or permit a vote on the nomination. Even though the 2016 election was 10 months away, Mitch said that a € successor should not be selected until after the election and the people had spoken. The vacancy remained until after the 2016 election when the vacancy was given to the trump to fill, a much-valued gift that was the first example of Mitch and his colleagues packing the Supreme Court without expanding its size. If the Scalia vacancy had been a suitcase, upon arrival at its destination the traveler would have discovered the suitcase was well stocked with the traveler’s needs.
Instead, we’d like to ask€ sincere Trump voters whether they’d have a€ neighbor over for a family dinner who did any or all of the following?
* He has admitted on tape to routinely abusing women as several dozen have€ publicly accused him of sexual assaults. And he paid substantial hush money€ to buy the silence of at least two mistresses.
The Republican National Convention this year made fighting “cancel culture” a priority for the party. Former Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch wrote in the Wall Street Journal (7/27/20) that cancel culture was at the heart of the crisis facing academic freedom in the nation. Other right-wing activists noted the same in the Washington Times (8/10/20), and Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson (Real Clear Politics, 7/3/20) talk about the issue constantly.
In March, President Donald Trump phoned into the show “Fox & Friends” on Fox News to talk about his negotiations over a coronavirus aid bill. Democrats in Congress had been pushing to include billions to assist states in expanding mail-in voting, ensuring voters wouldn’t have to risk exposure to the virus on Election Day.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly discussed firing FBI Director Christopher Wray after the election — and officials are concerned he may also oust Attorney General Bill Barr, according to The Washington Post.
All hail the goddamn “mute” button — although, as far as I could tell, it wasn’t actually used last night. NBC News debate moderator Kristen Welker, who stepped firmly to the plate last night and parked it deep over the center field fence, may not have needed it. According to the debate rules, the button was only there so the candidates (Donald Trump) wouldn’t run roughshod over each other during their allotted two-minute answer segments.
Let us pray: That was the last presidential debate in which we ever have to watch Donald Trump for the rest of our lives.
President Trump and Joe Biden sparred on their records over race and criminal justice in Thursday’s presidential debate. Trump simultaneously promoted his criminal justice reform efforts while continuing to lean on “tough on crime” rhetoric. Trump also criticized Biden for authoring the 1994 crime bill and supporting other laws that intensified mass incarceration in the U.S., which Biden acknowledged was “a mistake.” Rashad Robinson, spokesperson for Color of Change PAC, says Biden’s admission highlights the importance of continued pressure on politicians on racial justice issues. “The Democrats can’t just make this about hating Trump. They also have to continue to fight and build and put out the policies that are going to change lives and remove barriers and systems that have stood in people’s way,” Robinson says.
Trump didn’t act as openly tyrannical during last night’s debate as he did during the first one, but for those willing to see the authoritarian nature of Trump’s presidency, the cruelty and bombast were never far from the surface. You could see it when he was asked about the 545 incarcerated migrant children who were torn from their parents and whose parents now cannot be located. Trump blamed the families: “These children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels.” In Trump’s authoritarian imagination, if immigrant children went without food and toothbrushes, and if they cried themselves to sleep amid the traumatic stress of family separation and incarceration at night, their suffering was all their own fault.
A federal judge has ordered the United States Postal Service (USPS) to restore previously decommissioned high-speed mail sorting machines at offices that can’t process election mail fast enough ahead of the upcoming presidential election. The order is the result of a lawsuit filed by New York state in late August.
President Trump and Joe Biden sparred on their records over race and criminal justice in Thursday’s presidential debate. Trump simultaneously promoted his criminal justice reform efforts while continuing to lean on “tough on crime” rhetoric. Trump also criticized Biden for authoring the 1994 crime bill and supporting other laws that intensified mass incarceration in the U.S., which Biden acknowledged was “a mistake.” Rashad Robinson, spokesperson for Color of Change PAC, says Biden’s admission highlights the importance of continued pressure on politicians on racial justice issues. “The Democrats can’t just make this about hating Trump. They also have to continue to fight and build and put out the policies that are going to change lives and remove barriers and systems that have stood in people’s way,” Robinson says.
With its depiction of American “greatness” as a collage of heavily advertised commodities, the ad would have seemed crass and stupid when it first appeared, but hardly remarkable. Now, of course, that cluster of words and pictures glitters with irony and implication. The caption of this homage to consumerism suggests a link between the slick hucksterism of the ad business and the fanatical nationalism of the MAGA cult. Is the connection real? If so, how does the Trump phenomenon – that cheesy mash-up of reality TV and Triumph of the Will – relate to the marketing and PR that saturate American culture and consciousness? Is Trump’s ugly but compelling political spectacle, which hogs the media foreground, an outgrowth of the inescapable, desensitizing background noise that is advertising?
It was these questions that led me to plunge into Kilbourne’s 21-year-old but still powerfully relevant book, and also to engage the author in conversation about the three intertwined topics – advertising, addiction and patriarchy – that she has spent much of her life observing and describing in her books, documentary films (including Killing Us Softly, released in 1979 and updated three times since) and provocative slide shows, presented to myriad universities and other groups over the past forty-some years. Following these thematic threads, she has produced a sharp and deep critique of advertising and its effect on our inner and outer worlds.
Before sunrise one overcast morning in 2018, a woman sat in the parking lot of a Juneau, Alaska, urgent care clinic, her head ringing from a ruptured eardrum. The man who hit her was an Alaska state representative, Zach Fansler, who soon resigned from office because of the drunken encounter.
Democrats in the region chose one of Fansler’s aides to become district party chairman and help select a replacement. That former legislative staffer and district party leader, 27-year-old Benjamin Anderson-Agimuk, is now charged with raping an 11-year-old girl.
There’s an important pitfall to look out for this election season: misinformation. This kind of stuff shows up in the form of Facebook pages impersonating candidates, sketchy digital campaign ads and fabricated news content designed to deceive. Each and every piece of misinformation can have major consequences. Perhaps you’ll recall, a year and a half after President Donald Trump was elected, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee released thousands of Facebook and Instagram ads placed by Russian operatives to interfere in the 2016 election.
Sign up to learn how to become a more informed, more engaged citizen.
Gerry Cohen had already voted, dropping off his state-issued ballot at his local post office, by the time the unsolicited mail ballot applications started showing up at his house in early September. The first one or two didn’t bother him. Cohen knows elections: He teaches election law at Duke University and is a Democratic member of the Board of Elections in Wake County, North Carolina. Sending applications directly to voters is “a good public service,” he said.
But Cohen has received at least seven unsolicited mail ballot applications since he voted — not from the state or county, but from the same get-out-the-vote group. “It’s extremely disruptive and reaches the level of a disinformation campaign,” Cohen said. “I think seven is malicious.”
Pennsylvania’s New Vote-by-Mail Law Expands Access for Everyone Except the Poor
In America’s poorest big city, language barriers, unstable housing and lack of internet access make voting by mail difficult. So low-income Philadelphia residents will be voting in person, if at all. Read the story from ProPublica and The Philadelphia Inquirer.
The South American nation sets an example of how to undo an attempted coup.
On Sunday, October 20, Bolivians went to the polls and overwhelmingly elected Luis Arce of the MAS party president. Private quick counts released the night of the vote showed Arce receiving more than 50 percent of the vote and holding a more than 20 percentage point lead over second place candidate Carlos Mesa. As of Wednesday morning, just over 88 percent of votes had been tallied in the official results system — and Arce’s lead is even greater. The MAS candidate’s vote share is, at the time of writing, 54.5 compared to 29.3 for Mesa. As the final votes are counted, Arce’s vote share will likely increase further.
At this point, there can be no questioning Arce’s victory. The election came nearly exactly a year after the October 2019 elections which were followed by violent protests and the ouster of then president Evo Morales, who resigned under pressure from the military. Official results in that vote showed Morales and the MAS party winning with a 10.56 percentage point advantage over Mesa, just over the 10 point margin of victory needed for Morales to win the election outright, without having to stand in a run-off election. However, the Organization of American States (OAS) alleged widespread manipulation of the results, feeding a narrative of electoral fraud that served as a pretext for€ the November 10, 2019 coup.
Right now, even though the polling does not account for the€ millions€ of voters who have been unceremoniously booted from the voter rolls, many people believe Biden is going to become the next drunken pilot of the American Empire — a position which has less power than most people imagine as the Military Industrial Complex and Wall Street roll on undeterred due to their unimaginable inertial force like boulders in an avalanche.
But there are countless reasons Biden could still lose, and even though I generally think the two corporate parties consist of sham snake-oil salesmen dancing with their asses out, I just want to preemptively make it clear who Democrats should blame€ IF€ Joe Biden snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.
Underlying his theory of fascism is the notion that capitalism is in a very advanced stage of decay—has long outlived its revolutionary role–and is incapable of further democratic development, only retrenchment:
Trotsky writes,
California state Senator Kevin de León challenged Senator Dianne Feinstein’s 2018 reelection run as a “proud progressive” who promised to stand “on the front lines and not on the sidelines” of the fight against Republicans who were transforming the federal bench into a platform for right-wing judicial activism.
On today’s episode, Nicholas Baham II (Dr. Dreadlocks), Janice Domingo, and Nolan Higdon discuss California’s Prop 22 which seeks to reclassify the employees of Uber, Lyft, and similar companies to independent contractors. Then they discuss conflict management with contemplative conflict coach Dr. Gail Young.
I have no idea if Obama really did “take the gloves off” on Wednesday. I have my doubts. But whatever he did, he may have answered the bell too late. Earlier in her broadcast, however, Jackson noted in passing that the Senate Judiciary Committee had just recommended Sente confirmation of the far-right Christian cultist Amy Coney-Barrett for the U.S. Supreme Court. The Handmaid jurist will be voted on to the appointed-for-life high court by the majority Republican Senate tomorrow.
Donald Trump and his allies have jammed Coney-Barrett through in near-record speed so that she can cast a deciding vote when the court rules on Trump’s final challenge to Biden’s likely Electoral College victory early next year. Five of the nine voters will vote for Donald Trump in the 2020-21 presidential election: Clarence Thomas, Sam Alito, Neal Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney-Barrett.
Here are the 4 biggest takeaways.1. Trump tried to run the same campaign he did in 2016 – but it doesn’t work as an incumbent.Trump accused Joe Biden of being a “typical politician.” He promised, again, that he would release his tax returns “as soon as possible.” He claimed that he would replace Obamacare with something “much better.” And he rehashed some of his favorite racist tropes, like calling some immigrants “low IQ.”€
The Judiciary Committee first voted by a 12-0 margin Thursday to subpoena both Zuckerberg and Dorsey. Democrats on the committee had boycotted the hearing over the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
Both executives, along with Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, will also testify before the Senate Commerce Committee on Wednesday for a hearing on content moderation, data privacy and media consolidation.
The CEOs are appearing voluntarily, though the committee approved subpoenas yesterday that would have forced the two men to testify. Zuckerberg and Dorsey will also be appearing before the Senate Commerce Committee on October 28th, where they’ll be joined by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. That hearing is focused on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
In practical terms, what this means is that the legal contracts which granted these companies temporary control over large swaths of Internet address space are now null and void, and American Internet regulators would be well within their rights to cancel those contracts and reclaim the space.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat” sequel opens with a blackface content warning from its distributor, Amazon Studios. The mockumentary’s content warning points out the film’s depictions of “sexuality, drug use, foul language, nudity, blackface” — basically about what you’d expect from a “Borat” film.
Earlier this week, a compromising clip of Giuliani from the “Borat” sequel went viral on social media after he appeared to reach his hands into his pants in a hotel room with 24-year-old actor Maria Bakalova, who plays Borat’s daughter. Bakalova had posed as a conservative TV journalist who interviews Giuliani and invites him to her hotel room, where there were several hidden cameras from the “Borat” film crew. After Giuliani lays back in the bed and fiddles with his pants, Borat bursts into the room, saying “She’s 15. She’s too old for you.”
In the new video, Borat added a cheeky warning to anyone who may misinterpret Giuliani’s intentions in the scene.
“I warn you, anyone else tries this and Rudolph will not hesitate to reach into his legal briefs and whip out his subpoenas,” he said.
Even by the standards of Egypt, where votes are routinely bought and opposition candidates imprisoned, this contest seems especially undemocratic. Using arrests, intimidation and bureaucratic hurdles, the regime has cleared the field of most of its critics. Candidates compete to sound the most pro-Sisi, while rich businessmen throw money at parties backed by the state. The results are not expected until December, but the outcome is not in doubt. Parliament will again be full of politicians who fawn over the president.
In Denver, Colorado at 6:00 am MDT, Hawkins will participate in a special campaign segment on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, presenting his Green New Deal to create a manufacturing revival and full employment across the nation. The Green New Deal will rebuild all the sectors of the economy for zero greenhouse gas emissions and 100% clean energy by 2030. It will also enact an Economic Bill of Rights with federal guarantees of living-wage jobs, incomes above poverty, affordable housing, universal health care, lifelong tuition-free public education, and secure retirements.
Hawkins will arrive in Cheyenne, Wyoming in the afternoon, and will be available for interviews.
Hawkins will participate in the Free & Equal Election Foundation’s Open Presidential Debate from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm MDT. He will be available for media interviews before and after the debate.
Summary: Following the shooting of Black man Jacob Blake by Kenosha police officers, protests erupted in the Wisconsin town.
The dramatic show of national unity - after the decapitation of teacher Samuel Paty outside Paris - hid growing dissent in some parts of the country over the nation's view of secularism and freedom of speech.
"Last year, a student told me that it was completely legitimate to kill someone who failed to show respect to the Prophet [Muhammad]," Fathia Agad-Boudjhalat, a history teacher, told French radio. "It comes from what they hear in their families."
The girl’s father then called upon fellow Muslims to take action against the teacher and urged them to file complaints to the school to have Paty fired. While the original post did not contain Paty’s name, it had enough information to have the teacher easily identified.
Soon, social media reposts began to include Paty’s personal data, screenshots circulating online suggest.
Imadaev’s comments come in the wake of a recent attack where an 18-year-old Chechen refugee beheaded a high school history teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine on Friday. The suspect was shot dead by police shortly thereafter.
French anti-terrorism prosecutor Jean-François Ricard said a text claiming responsibility and a photograph of the victim were found on the suspect’s phone. He also confirmed that a Twitter account under the name Abdoulakh A, which belonged to the suspect, had posted a photo of the decapitated head minutes after the attack, along with the caption, “I have executed one of the dogs from hell who dared to put Muhammad down.”
The called it "a critical piece in prescribing how our country's leaders can work to depoliticize the Supreme Court and its confirmation process."
His attorney said the whistleblower still "calls his ultimate goal to return to the United States, but only if he is guaranteed a fair trial."
"Our government cannot be allowed to commit human rights atrocities or escape investigation, oversight, or criticism based on its powerful geopolitical position, as it so often has."
The GOP sees unions and their supporters as enemies to be politically and economically destroyed.
Are we approaching the end of our . . . uh, democracy?
A real democracy, of course, has always been a terrible inconvenience to those in power, which is why, in the nearly two hundred and fifty years of the nation’s existence, voting — as well as acknowledgment of certain people’s humanity — has been endlessly gamed, suppressed and denied; and a fragile, racist status quo has managed to maintain itself, wrapped in the lie of “liberty and justice for all.” Perhaps it’s this status quo that’s really up for grabs.
While progressives were mostly excited by the possibility of Sanders taking over the Labor Department, some voiced concerns about the consequences of losing a powerful left voice in the Senate.
It is true that we have a demagogue as a leader, Donald J. Trump, but he’s Stateless and ideology free, and so a very typical mega-narcissist personality that America produces. It probably does so because when a society is riven so drastically between Well-being and Anxious Dysphoria everything real needs to be transported to the hyperreal. For the privileges granted a Few by the neoliberal order, the Many need to be distracted from the realities of their own diminishing condition. In realm of the hyperreal, celebrity life shines, one’s own ego takes the stage, vicariously identifying with media luminaries, and collapsed, immiserated lives spin in a state of yearning to be on that stage. It probably had its start with Hollywood, Disney, “Mad Men” on Madison Avenue, and then by means of our cyber-techno infrastructure, cyberspace “Influencers.” Donald J. Trump on a 15 seasons’ run became a TV “Influencer,” destined with that many “followers” to become president of the hyperreal.
In short, the inflation of egos and vicarious transport become a cultural defense against working class revolt. Everything in the hyperreal is personalized, and everything personalized seeks the greatest expansion of the personal. The personal is preferred to social solidarities and so, unfortunately, severed lives meet fatal ends, like honeybees who lose track of the hive. Regardless to what extent Americans confer on themselves superpowers of personal autonomy, the byproduct of all that just leaves them easily seduced, exploited, distracted, just as State power has no power against multi-national corporate power.
Here are seven counterinsurgency features of policing and the inequities in the criminal justice system.
1. Counterinsurgency Tactics Are Everywhere.
Trump has made no secret of the fact he adores law enforcement. One of the first edicts he issued from his office told America in no uncertain terms that cops were to be respected, if not worshipped, for deigning to stand between millions of US peons and the forces of evil.
"The Trump immigration agenda is defined by cruelty: it's responsible for six children dying in cages, forced women into unnecessary surgeries including sterilizations, continued deportation flights in the middle of a pandemic."
Pressed during Thursday night’s final 2020 presidential debate to account for his administration’s record of separating immigrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, President Donald Trump repeatedly attempted to evade responsibility by lying about the origins of the inhumane practice, smearing those harmed by it, and attempting to shift blame onto Democratic opponent Joe Biden.
A new report by non profit in Washington D.C. has used FOIA requests to highlight that police departments across the country have tools to break into phones and download all data. The report is called “Mass Extraction: The Widespread Power of U.S. Law Enforcement to Search Mobile Phones.” Over 2,000 FOIA requests, Upturn discovered that police departments in all 50 states and also Washington D.C. have purchased mobile device forensic tools (MDFTs). According to Upturn, these MDFTs are:
I let the matter drop, since as much as I loved Laura, she was far too Bohemian to take me seriously. At the time, she was an Evergreen Books editor and sinking roots in New York’s cultural avant-garde. After she married my friend Frank Cavestani, they became regulars at Max’s Kansas City and part of Andy Warhol’s periphery. Since Frank was an anti-war Vietnam veteran, they decided to use the new and inexpensive 8mm camera to make “Operation Last Patrol,” a documentary about Ron Kovic and other veterans protesting at the Republican Party convention in 1972. When he made “Born on the Fourth of July,” Oliver Stone cast Frank as Ron’s care-giver. You can see him pushing Tom Cruise around in a wheelchair in crowd scenes inspired by “Operation Last Patrol.”
Through most of the seventies, Frank and Laura lived in the Chelsea Hotel, where they became good friends with Viva, one of Andy Warhol’s leading ladies. They were good friends with Viva, who I met once. They were also pals with Abbie Hoffman, who was living in the Chelsea. When there, they made a documentary about how Abbie made gefilte fish for Benjamin Spock. The film shows off his puckish humor.
The Netflix film, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin, stars Sacha Baron Cohen (Abbie Hoffman), Jeremy Strong (Jerry Rubin), Alex Sharp (Rennie Davis), Eddie Redmayne (Tom Hayden), John Carroll Lynch (David Dellinger), Danny Flaherty (John Froines), Noah Robbins (Lee Weiner), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II (Bobby Seale), Frank Langella (Judge Julius Hoffman), and Michael Keaton (Ramsay Clark).
Chicago 7 begins with a series of historical segues and cast flashes designed to introduce the national preoccupation with violence leading up to the intended peaceful protests at the DNC, Chicago, 1968. LBJ announces a doubling of the Vietnam draft for men aged 18-24; MLK quavers, “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read, ‘Vietnam’”; MLK’s assassinated; RFK’s assassinated; a sober, coat-and-tie clad SDS group listens to Renee Davis and Tom Hayden plan out the Chicago DNC protest; Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin rouse distressed-clothed hippies with the carnivalesque levity and the promise of easy sex ahead; MOBE leader David Dellinger stresses “nonviolence’; and Bobby Seale sneers, “Fry the pigs!” (but don’t take that out of context). These are followed by quick-cut plans — Chicago’s authorities, youthful protesters — in back-and-forth segues, ending with Walter Cronkite glumly telling the nation: “The Democratic Convention is about to begin in a police state. There just doesn’t seem to be any other way to say it.”
During the second and final presidential debate in Nashville, Tennessee, moderator Kristen Welker asked Trump and Biden about immigration and family separation. Trump deflected questions during the debate, repeatedly stating that the Obama-Biden administration “built the cages” and falsely claiming that kids seeking asylum in the U.S. are “well taken care of.” However, the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy “took children away from their families at the border,” says Erika Andiola, advocacy chief at RAICES Action, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. “He’s not owning up to that.”
A worker in central Florida was allegedly fired for revealing a letter from his boss to company employees warning of layoffs if Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden wins the election.
The worker, Stan Smith, said last week he planned to quit after receiving the letter, but was fired this week by Daniels Manufacturing Corporation (DMC), WESH, an Orlando-area ABC affiliate, reported.
Smith told WESH last week the letter was provided to DMC employees by company President George Daniels along with recent paystubs.
The anti-police brutality protests in Nigeria created a powerful movement that appeared to shake those in power, but after a turbulent fortnight, BBC Hausa editor Aliyu Tanko considers where it goes from here.
So if you think the dice are loaded, you’re right. They are. But most middle-aged white American men aren’t named Bezos, Zuckerberg, or Musk. On average, like all North American workers, regardless of race, that vast majority hasn’t seen a real wage increase in almost fifty years. The middle class, once the dominant majority in American society and the steady flywheel of its economy, is now beleaguered, shrinking, and downwardly mobile. Like everyone else, they’re expressing their fear and insecurity in a political language that is often unhealthy, and sometimes hateful. None of this excuses acts of racism. But the problem isn’t going to be solved with hashtags. As the gilded one percent takes up more economic space, the competition for what remains becomes more bitter. In a way, the message I bring is one of racial harmony: You’re all getting screwed together.
The source said that while Iranian authorities allowed Kord Afshari to be hospitalized for serious ailments three times in recent months, they prevented her from getting the treatment that she needed before she was returned to Evin.
China is pushing growing numbers of Tibetan rural laborers off the land and into recently built military-style training centers where they are turned into factory workers, mirroring a program in the western Xinjiang region that rights groups have branded coercive labor.
While the flight attendant claims the airline provided an accommodation by having another crewmember serve alcoholic drinks to passengers united a “bigoted co-worker” complained, the airline says they can’t actually make another flight attendant take on extra duties under their collective bargaining agreement. A complaint they received put a stop to the accommodation, because it infringed on the rights of the flight attendant’s colleagues under the CBA.
Two trending events bring to light the serial violation of human rights in Nigeria by agents of the state. In Kebbi State, the religious police, Hisbah, released “guidelines” that blatantly violate basic rights in its mission to enforce criminal aspects of Sharia law on residents of the North-West state. A few days earlier, video clips and photographs shared nationally and around the world depicted Kano State Hisbah operatives shaving the hair of young men arrested for donning stylish hairstyles they felt did not meet their religious inclination. Such impunity has no place in a multi-religious, democratic society guided by the rule of law and the constitution.
When impudence goes unchallenged, its perpetrators become emboldened to trample at will on the rights of their victims. Kebbi State follows this template. Having been tolerated when, like 11 other northern states, it passed controversial religious ordinances in defiance of the constitution, the state’s Hisbah has gone further. News media reported that it has now banned stylish haircuts, sagging of trousers and playing of music at social events. It also banned commercial tricycles and motorcycles from carrying two women as passengers. This is ridiculous, but not new to Nigerians.
Zafar Bhatti a victim of Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy law was sentenced life imprisonment in 2012 after falsely being accused of sending blasphemous messages, from a mobile SIM that was not even his.
It was the technology that was supposed to change the world. According to carriers, not only was fifth-generation wireless (5G) supposed to bring about the "fourth industrial revolution," it was supposed to revolutionize everything from smart cities to cancer treatment. According to conspiracy theorists and internet imbeciles, 5G is responsible for everything from COVID-19 to your migraines.
The EU is now starting to work in earnest on what is likely to be its most important new law for the online world, the Digital Services Act (DSA). Techdirt wrote about this last year, when the European Commission started sketching out (bad) ideas for the new law. The basic impetus for the DSA is to replace the EU's e-Commerce Directive, which was passed 20 years ago, and is clearly in need of an update. As the European Commission's page on the DSA explains, there are two core elements:
While there is plenty of breaking news to go around, tech junkies will not have missed the Department of Justice’s long-awaited announcement of their antitrust lawsuit against Google. This is just the latest in a number of government moves aimed at applying more pressure to big tech. Congress is also reviewing potential reforms to antitrust law in order to make it easier to target online platforms. During recent hearings, the House Judiciary Committee examined how these companies compete and highlighted individual competitors that struggle to compete or work with dominant firms.
At the end of September, multiple press outlets published leaked set of antimonopoly enforcement proposals proposed for the a new EU Digital Market Act , which EU officials say they will finalize this year.
The proposals confront the stark fact that the Internet has been thoroughly dominated by a handful of giant, U.S.-based firms, which compete on a global stage with a few giant Chinese counterparts and a handful of companies from Russia and elsewhere. The early promise of a vibrant, dynamic Internet, where giants were routinely toppled by upstarts helmed by outsiders seems to have died, strangled by a monopolistic moment in which the Internet has decayed into "a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four."
In September 2019 a conference on adopting the Protocol on the Protection of Industrial Designs in Eurasia was held in in Nur-Sultan (formerly Astana), the capital of Kazakhstan. The member states of the Eurasian Patent Convention (EAPC) – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan – discussed the possibility of introducing a unitary Eurasian industrial design regime. As a result of the meeting, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia signed the protocol.
After 12 years of Francis Gurry, WIPO has a new man at the top – and he seems ready to stamp his authority on the organisation. Speaking at the AIPPI World Congress Online last week, Daren Tang said the time is right to take WIPO in a broader direction. No longer should we view intellectual property as a mere “technical vertical”, he argued, but legal IP rights should connect to economic growth, investment attraction, job creation and social vibrancy.
You only have to look at Tang’s previous work to see this comes as no surprise. As head of the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, which he led for five years, Tang was instrumental in shifting the office from being an IP registry to an “innovation agency”. One of his major successes was the IP Hub Masterplan, a 10-year project to develop Singapore as a global IP hub in Asia. Among its many measures, the plan targets IP financing and monetisation – hardly typical goals of IP offices.
Before I talk about Epic Games' latest filing in the antitrust dispute with Apple in the Northern District of California, here's a follow-up to what I posted one month ago when I wrote that the political clout of the newly-founded Coalition for App Fairness (Epic Games, Spotify, the Tinder company, and others) would depend on its ability to attract more members. This week, the CAF announced the addition of 20 members, and claimed that more than 400 other app developers have applied for membership. The names of the would-be members awaiting approval of their request to join aren't known, so I can't tell how credible and significant they are.
There are at least a couple of shady ones among those who have been allowed to join. It appears that Prepear's real issue with Apple is a trademark dispute, and I think Apple made a reasonable and responsible decision when it disallowed Eristica's "challenge" system as such challenges can indeed be quite dangerous.
[...]
The "property" question is even more central to Apple's "conversion" claim (the civil law equivalent of theft). Epic argues that it's not theft to take money from Fortnite users on iOS, as opposed to "stealing cash from a vault in Apple Park, or raiding Apple's bank account."
My feeling is that the part about defrauding the app review process is not ripe for decision at this point; some of what Epic says may be valid, but not sufficient to defeat the counterclaims at this early stage. Conversion, which requires a possessory interest, may be ripe for judgment.
As for the question of whether Epic's offering an alternative payment mechanism (which Epic did in order "to illustrate that competition could exist on iOS, and that consumers would welcome and benefit from it") constitutes interference with Apple's customer relationships, Epic points to a passage in Apple's agreement with end users (Apple Media Services Terms and Conditions) that says "Apple acts as an agent for App Providers in providing the App Store and is not a party to the sales contract or user agreement between you and the App Provider." On that basis, Epic describes itself as the "principal" in the relationship with end users, and Apple as an "agent" at best and "an outright non-party" at worst. However, iOS users have a relationship with Apple that goes beyond Fortnite.
For a long time, Qualcomm had kept a surprisingly low profile in the automotive patent wars. But it was always active behind the scenes. The San Diego-based chipmaker is a member of some of the same lobbying groups as Nokia and Ericsson. And more recently, Qualcomm has been lobbying the European Commission and the German government directly in order to garner support for an automotive standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing proposal that must be rejected all the way.
The exact political dynamics aren't clear, but it is disconcerting that Germany's Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy will host a closed-door workshop on November 17 to discuss Qualcomm's proposed memorandum of understanding (MOU). There is a possibility that the German government is simply doing a favor to the epitome of incompetence in the SEP policy context--EU internal market commissioner Thierry Breton, who wasn't his country's first choice for the job and recently made himself totally ridiculous by repeating himself like a broken record that European companies' leadership in 5G "is a fact" (when even the only report that ever said so has been corrected in that regard). It might also have helped Qualcomm that the ministry is advised by a (non-cellular) SEP troll--Fraunhofer--in the patent policy context. In any event, Germany's automotive industry is no match for Qualcomm when it comes to IP-related lobbying.
[...]
My advice to the German automotive industry would be to decline to participate in the November 17 event as Qualcomm's proposed MOU is simply not a constructive contribution to the debate. Qualcomm has opposed component-level licensing for a long time because it's "humongously more lucrative" (as Qualcomm once told the IRS) to license only end-product makers.
User representatives were informed that more than 1 200 oral proceedings have been held by VICO so far this year, and that many users have by now had the opportunity to test and discover the advantages of oral proceedings by VICO – such as reduced costs, air travel and risk of infection, as well as the level playing field VICOs create for practitioners irrespective of their location. Suggestions relating to virtual “break-out rooms” and a shared base for document exchange during oral proceedings were discussed, as well as issues relating to recordings. SACEPO members were also invited to provide feedback on a proposal to amend EPC rules to address certain specific aspects of the taking of evidence by VICO.
Chinese patent applicants will be able to designate EPO as ISA, giving them an additional option for their international search
A twoââ¬âyear pilot between the European Patent Office (EPO) and the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) will enable nationals and residents of the People's Republic of China to select the EPO as their International Searching Authority (ISA) for applications filed in English under the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).
[...]
PCT applicants who are nationals or residents of the People's Republic of China and whose international search was performed by the EPO as ISA will also be able to file a request for international preliminary examination with the EPO. They should pay the corresponding fee directly to the EPO, pursuant to PCT Chapter II.
The EPO establishes international search reports (ISRs) and written opinions (WO/ISAs) which provide an applicant with a clear evaluation of their invention's patentability and so with a solid basis for taking timely and informed decisions as to whether or not to enter the various national/regional phases under the PCT, in particular the European phase. In addition, with an ISR and a WO/ISA from the EPO, Chinese applicants wishing to accelerate the prosecution of their application can enter the European phase earlier, request early processing and have their file examined without a supplementary European search.
ISA for there PCT applications. The pilot, which starts on December, 1, 2020, will be limited to a total of 2,500 applications in the first 12 months and 3,000 applications in the second 12 months.
[...]
It is not clear what the uptake of this program will be among Chinese applicants. In addition to the language requirement, the EPO international search fee is currently 1,775 Euros (~$2,100 USD) versus only 2,100 RMB (~$315) for the CNIPA international search fee. Further, these fees must be paid directly to the EPO in Euros, which can be hard for Chinese applicants due to restrictions on currency transfers overseas. Also, as Chinese applicants often rely on Chinese government support for PCT applications, which is capped, Chinese applicants may not be able to afford to select the EPO as ISA. For example, Shanghai provides an extra 10,000 RMB (~$1,500 USD) subsidy for each granted PCT national phase entry patent application (versus filing via Paris Convention).
The China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) and the European Patent Office (EPO) will launch a two-year pilot program that enables Chinese patent applicants to designate the EPO as an additional option for international searches, sources with the CNIPA said.
The program, which will start on December 1, will be open to applicants filing with either the CNIPA or the World Intellectual Property Organization's International Bureau as the receiving office. Chinese nationals and residents can select the EPO as their international searching authority for their applications filed in English under the Patent Cooperation Treaty.
[...]
During a transitional phase, applicants filing their international applications with the CNIPA as the receiving office and choosing the EPO for the international search will be required to pay the international search fee directly to the EPO in euros, read the communique.
The pilot program is one of the outcomes of the comprehensive strategic partnership between the two intellectual property (IP) offices and will help Chinese applicants to acquire IP protection in Europe, said Shen Changyu, head of the CNIPA.
In an exclusive interview, the USPTO director sets out his hopes for the office, particularly in diversity and inclusion, and his proudest accomplishments
Onxeo S.A. (Euronext Paris, NASDAQ Copenhagen: ONXEO), hereafter “Onxeo” or “the Company”, a clinical-stage biotechnology company specializing in the development of innovative drugs targeting tumor DNA Damage response (DDR), in particular against rare or resistant cancers, today announced that it has received from the European Patent Office (EPO) a notice of intent to grant a patent which strengthens the protection in Europe of AsiDNAââ¢, its first-in-class inhibitor of tumor DNA repair in combination with PARP inhibitors (PARPi). This patent protects in particular the method of use of AsiDNAâ⢠in combination with PARP inhibitors in the treatment of certain cancers for which the DNA repair pathway via homologous recombination (HR) is not impaired or deficient, these HR-proficient cancers being mostly insensitive to treatment with PARP inhibitors.
Turkish courts and judges are not bound by decisions of foreign courts. Nevertheless, since Turkey is a party to the EPC, the decisions of the EPO may influence the Turkish courts to some extent, especially if the disputed patent is a European patent validation. Having said that, it is at the discretion of the IP court to suspend the infringement action in cases where there is a post-grant opposition proceeding before the EPO.
As artificial intelligence (AI) evolves, it becomes imperative to examine whether the current intellectual property (IP) legal frameworks, in the US and abroad, are adequate to address issues specific to AI. The United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO), European Patent Office (EPO) and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) have all recently had the opportunity to weigh in on the issue of whether an AI machine can be named as the inventor on a patent application. In late 2018 and in 2019, Dr. Stephen Thaler filed two patent applications in each of the UKIPO, EPO and USPTO, naming DABUS,1 a patented AI machine, as the inventor of the subject inventions.2 All three offices came to the same conclusion for similar reasons: Current law suggests that an inventor must be a human.3 In January 2019, the USPTO held an AI IP policy conference, which included panel discussions featuring IP specialists to discuss AI and IP policy considerations.4 Following the conference and Thaler's patent applications, the USPTO sought further insight into public opinion on how IP laws and policy should develop as AI technology advances and issued two requests for comment (each an "RFC"), one on August 27, 20195 and a second one on October 30, 2019.6
Earlier this month, the USPTO published the resulting report, entitled "Public Views on Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property Policy,"7 which summarizes nearly 200 comments from various stakeholders in response to the RFCs (the "Report"). The Report was divided into two parts, the first covering responses to the August 27, 2019 RFC with respect to patenting AI inventions and the second covering responses to the October 30, 2019 RFC with respect to the impact of AI on IP policy areas other than patent law (including copyright, trademark, database protection and trade secret law). Below is a brief summary of some of the key findings and considerations of the Report.
PCT applicants who are nationals or residents of the People's Republic of China and whose international search was performed by the EPO as ISA will also be able to file a request for international preliminary examination with the EPO. They should pay the corresponding fee directly to the EPO, pursuant to PCT Chapter II.
The EPO establishes international search reports (ISRs) and written opinions (WO/ISAs) which provide an applicant with a clear evaluation of their invention's patentability and so with a solid basis for taking timely and informed decisions as to whether or not to enter the various national/regional phases under the PCT, in particular the European phase. In addition, with an ISR and a WO/ISA from the EPO, Chinese applicants wishing to accelerate the prosecution of their application can enter the European phase earlier, request early processing and have their file examined without a supplementary European search.
Nokia announced on Tuesday, October 20, that it would pay a collateral of €3.25 million ($3.84 million) to enforce its injunction against Chinese company Lenovo in Germany for infringing its video-compression technology patents.
The Finnish telecoms company won the injunction from the Munich Regional Court on September 30 after it ruled that the defendant, a Chinese computer firm, was an unwilling licensee because its engagement in licence negotiations was insufficient.
The injunction will stop the sales of Lenovo PCs, laptops and tablets that use Nokia’s standardised H264 decoding or encoding functionalities in Germany, but will not affect already-purchased products.
“Legal action is never our preferred option, but Lenovo have been unwilling to enter into discussions, despite a clear judgment confirming their unauthorised use of Nokia’s patented technology,” said a Nokia spokesperson.
“Lenovo can easily resolve this matter by accepting their responsibilities and agreeing a licence on fair terms. Our door is open for Lenovo to resolve the matter through good-faith negotiation.”
Nokia has active cases against Lenovo in the US, Brazil and India. The company has been on a winning streak this year, having won the lawsuit it filed against Daimler in Mannheim, and the case brought against it and Avanci in the Northern District of Texas.
A former reseller of pirate IPTV service SET TV sued by DISH in a Florida court has reached a rapid albeit expensive settlement with the broadcaster. For each of the 40,000 subscriptions sold to the public, the reseller agreed to pay $750 in damages to DISH - a cool $30 million. But there could be a sting in the tail for subscribers too.
Danishbits, one of the largest private torrent trackers on the Internet and particularly popular in Denmark, has shut down. Several insiders report that the site's owner was arrested recently. Other staff members can't take over because they don't have full access to the servers. Meanwhile, rival trackers are opening their doors to welcome new users.
Back in 2014 we had a post about Tom Lehrer and copyright. As you hopefully know, Lehrer, the unassuming retired math teacher, had a brief and massively successful music career, in part because all of his work is amazing. Years back, Buzzfeed had a fantastic article about Lehrer that is worth reading. That's what spurred my post about Lehrer and copyright, because in the Buzzfeed piece it became clear that Lehrer did not care one bit about retaining his copyrights.
When combined with Guilbeault’s other plans for the Internet, which include granting the CRTC additional powers to regulate Internet streaming services, the vision is to establish a heavily regulated Internet space in order to get money from Internet companies. There is surely a need for regulatory reforms when it comes to the Internet and I wrote recently about digital taxation and the effective application of competition laws. But the NMC reforms are not about tax or marketplace fairness. Rather, they are the product of intense domestic lobbying by Canadian sectors long accustomed to regulatory protection. Should the government agree, the outcome is likely to be increased costs for consumers alongside less access to news as social media sites respond by blocking the sharing of news articles, thereby harming both media organizations and the broader public.