Many manufacturing companies offer pre-installed Ubuntu laptops and workstations. On top of receiving the Ubuntu desktop experience, user receive fine-tuned features and benefits. They performed thousands of rigorous tests to ensure all subsystems Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, USB etc. works fine. Also, their regression testing ensures everything works and will continue to work for years to come.
Windows users have tremendous choices when it comes to laptops. And sure, you can install Linux. If you want to buy a laptop with Linux compatible especially Ubuntu pre-installed and supported by the vendor, here are a few best choices.
Many companies, non-profits, schools and other organisations around the world have switched to LibreOffice to avoid vendor lock-in and get back full control over their data. The Eyüpsultan Municipality reported from their migration to Linux and LibreOffice in recent years, which started in 2015...
Bigstep had the most reliable hosting company site in October 2020. Both Bigstep and Hosting Plus responded to all of Netcraft's requests in October, but a faster average connection time gives Bigstep the edge. Bigstep offers "bare metal" cloud hosting to provide the flexibility of cloud hosting without the associated overhead and performance reductions of virtualization, and has now appeared in the top 10 for four consecutive months.
Second place goes to Hosting Plus. The Chile-based hosting provider offers domain registration and SSL certificates, with VPS and dedicated server options for hosting, and hosting plans designed specifically for WordPress and ecommerce sites. This is the second time that Hosting Plus has appeared in the top 10.
Choopa.com appears in third place, with a single failed request and the fastest average connection time on the table for October. Choopa.com offers cloud hosting, dedicated hosting and colocation in its own primary facility in Piscataway, New Jersey as well as smaller facilities in Los Angeles, Amsterdam, and Tokyo.
This week we have an awesome interview with Neal Gompa, Fedora Contributor, about Fedora 33, BTRFS and his Journey into Linux. We also discuss that status of Accessiblity in Linux. Linux is Everywhere, even in Space as afterall . . . Linux is the Final Frontier. In this episode we discuss just how far Linux has gone including leaving the planet. In the Gaming section we discuss Facebook’s entrance into Cloud Gaming. Later in the show, we’ll give you our popular tips/tricks and software picks. Plus so much more, on this week’s episode of Destination Linux.
Why we think the new Raspberry Pi 400 is just the beginning.
And we chat with the CTO of the Uno Platform, a new way to bring native apps to Linux.
Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla and Flavors Released https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/groovy-gorilla-release-notes/15533 https://kubuntu.org/news/kubuntu-groovy-gorilla-20-10-beta-released/ https://ubuntubudgie.org/2020/09/ubuntu-budgie-20-10-release-notes/ https://ubuntu-mate.org/blog/ubuntu-mate-groovy-gorilla-release-notes/ https://wiki.xubuntu.org/releases/20.10/release-notes https://lubuntu.me/groovy-released/ https://ubuntustudio.org/2020/10/ubuntu-studio-20-10-released/ It’s Fedora Test Week for Kernel 5.9 https://fedoramagazine.org/fedora-kernel-5-9-test-week/ Microsoft Edge Preview Builds Available https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2020/10/20/microsoft-edge-dev-linux/ Mozilla Reacts to the U.S. v. Google Antitrust Lawsuit https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/10/20/mozilla-reaction-to-u-s-v-google/ Pop!_OS 20.10 Released https://blog.system76.com/post/632781631953027072/whats-new-in-popos-2010 Tails 4.12 Out https://tails.boum.org/news/version_4.12/index.en.html
AntiX 19.3 Out https://antixlinux.com/antix-19-isos-available/
Trisquel 9.0 Etonia Out https://trisquel.info/en/trisquel-90-etiona-release-announcement-and-100-plans
Linux Kernel 5.10 rc1 Out https://www.lkml.org/lkml/2020/10/25/267
KDE Plasma 5.20.1 Out https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.20.0-5.20.1-changelog/
Firefox 82 Out https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/82.0/releasenotes/
Virtualbox 6.1.16 Out https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog
Today we're checking out a reimplementation of fzf fuzzy finder that you're probably familiar with and unsurprisingly written in Rust called skim, and it's not just a simple write it in rust to make it faster, actually adds in some really interesting and useful features.
First up, in our Wanderings, I pop a kernel, Bo gets refreshed, Josh keeps his chameleon alive, Tony Hughes becomes a hermit, Moss bites into another distro, Joe gets it HANDled, and Tony Watts does the upgrade dance
Then, in our news, Linux Mint gives us an update, Ubuntu and Fedora both get released, XDA has a phone now, and Microsoft Edges into the Linux browser market
In security, Chromium blocks annoyances and fixes a font rendering flaw, and WordPress fixes some bad ones
Many people know that you can PGP-sign git objects — such as tags or commits themselves — but very few know of another attestation feature that git provides, which is signed git pushes.
Why sign git pushes? And how are they different from signed tags/commits?
Signed commits are great, but one thing they do not indicate is intent. For example, you could write some dangerous proof-of-concept code and push it into refs/heads/dangerous-do-not-use. You could even push it into some other fork hosted on a totally different server, just to make it clear that this is not production-ready code.
However, if your commits are PGP-signed, someone could take them and replay over any other branch in any other fork of your repository. To anyone checking the commit signatures, everything will look totally legitimate, as the actual commits are signed by you — never mind that they contain dangerous vulnerable code and were never intended to be pushed into something like refs/heads/next. At the very least, you will look reckless for pushing bad code, even though you were just messing around in a totally separate environment set up specifically for experimentation.
Kernel.org manager Konstantin Ryabitsev describes the Git signed-push functionality, which is now supported by the kernel.org system.
VPN technology has become a critical part of our digital lives, serving a variety of purposes including securing wireless connections, resolving geographical limitations, reaching prohibited websites and protecting the privacy of sensitive data. However, the unfortunate reality is that many of the VPN protocols on the market today are comlex, slow, unstable and insecure. Luckily, the new, innovative Wireguard protocol has demonstrated significant promise in all of these areas - and has earned a place in the mainline Linux kernel as a result. This article will briefly explore VPN protocols and potential concerns when implementing a VPN, and will dive deeper into the unique benefits that Wireguard offers users.
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With VPN technology becoming an increasingly important part of our online lives, selecting a VPN that uses a simple, efficient and secure tunneling protocol like Wireguard is highly beneficial. Because of its impressive performance and efficiency, Wireguard is run as a Linux kernel module (LKM) and is used by a wide array of VPN providers as a simpler, more secure alternative to OpenVPN and IPsec. We expect to see the use of Wireguard increase over the coming years as the Wireguard project continues to progress toward releasing a stable version of its innovative open-source VPN tunneling protocol.
Beginning in Dell's 2021 laptop models they are providing hardware-based "privacy buttons" to disable microphone and camera support. In preparations for more Dell laptops coming to market with these buttons, a Dell privacy driver is being prepared for the Linux kernel.
These new Dell privacy buttons are basically hardware kill switches for the microphone and web camera video stream. The Dell privacy driver sent out on Tuesday for the Linux kernel is about manipulating the relevant LEDs and tracking the status of the hardware-based controls where as the actual toggling of the audio/video support is handled by the hardware.
During boot, the kernel needs to initialize all its page structures so they can be freed to the buddy allocator and put to good use. This became expensive as memory sizes grew into the terabytes, so in 2015 Linux got a new feature called deferred struct page initialization that brought the time down on NUMA machines. Instead of a single thread doing all the work, that thread only initialized a small subset of the pages early on, and then per-node threads did the rest later.
This helped significantly on systems with many nodes, saving hundreds of seconds on a 24 TB server. However, it left some performance on the table for machines with many cores but not enough nodes to take full advantage of deferred init as it was initially implemented. One of the machines I tested had 2 nodes and 768 GB memory, and its pages took 1.7 seconds to be initialized, by far the largest component of the 4 seconds it took to boot the kernel.
The continuing battle to have open source Linux graphics drivers support everything possible continues, with the Panfrost driver for Mali GPUs hitting more milestones.
Mali GPUs are generally used with ARM devices with the Bifrost architecture including Mali-G31, Mali-G51, Mali-G71, Mali-G52, Mali-G72 and the Mali-G76 across devices from 2016 to 2018 so it's not the latest generation which is Valhall from 2019 and the second gen Valhall this year.
There's still more than one month to go until the Linux 5.11 merge window kicks off but Intel open-source developers have already submitted their initial batch of kernel graphics driver updates to DRM-Next.
For this next kernel cycle that will also mark being the first stable Linux kernel update of 2021, Intel has a lot of exciting open-source graphics updates. There continues to be a lot of enablement work around their discrete graphics efforts (currently, DG1), integer scaling support for helping pixel art games and similar content, and enabling asynchronous page flipping at long last for Intel Gen9 graphics and newer.
In addition to Mesa 20.3 seeing RadeonSI support for EGL protected surfaces backed by the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver with Trusted Memory Zone support, AMD's graphics driver developers have now added support for secure/protected video acceleration playback to their Mesa driver code.
To the Gallium3D video acceleration state tracker is now support for "secure" video playback with AMD's Gallium3D driver (RadeonSI) for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) interface -- the predominant video acceleration interface on Linux by the Intel and Radeon graphics stacks.
How's day 1 Linux support looking for the Radeon RX 6000 series? More importantly, what's the deal with ray tracing? Will Rage Mode work?
In the last post I showed how you can combine nbdfuse with nbdkit's RAM disk to mount a RAM disk as a local file. In a talk I gave at FOSDEM last year I described creating these absurdly large RAM-backed filesystems and you can do the same thing now to create ridiculously big "files".
Our tool nbdfuse lets you mount an NBD block device as a file, using Linux FUSE. For example you could create a directory with a single file in it (called nbd) which contains the contents of the NBD export...
I've started struggling to see my mouse pointer on my desktop. I probably need to take an eye test and possibly buy some new glasses. In the meantime, I've changed my mouse pointer to something larger and more colourful: The Amiga Workbench 1.3 mouse pointer that I grew up with, but scaled up to 128x128 pixels (from 16x16, I think)
When working with Linux, sooner or later you encounter TAR GZ archives. This is a file with the tar.gz extension. A TAR GZ archive packs multiple files, including those in subdirectories, into one large archive file and compresses its contents. Think of TAR GZ archives as the Linux version of ZIP archives, with the latter one being more common on MS Windows. This article teaches you how to create and extract a TAR GZ archive in the Linux terminal. We’ll use the tar program for this.
Anyone who deals with text has reason to learn a bit about regular expressions—which represent the "re" in the name of the popular grep command—in order to search through text. However, it's another whole level of mastery to parse lines with regular expressions, extracting and classifying the relevant parts of a larger text. This article shows you a few tools that help you use regular expressions at this higher level.
We'll explore ways to break a line into separate strings and extract multiple strings that match a single regular expression. We'll loop over these strings and see how to store them in convenient data structures. And at the end, we'll peek at lookahead, which is a way to match without really matching.
Although I’ll explain each regular expression and function I use, you should already have a basic understanding of regular expressions before reading the article. Introductions are easy to find both online and in many published books.
Because Python is extremely popular and has rich, powerful implementations of regular expressions, I'll write examples in version 3.7 of that language. But all modern languages support regular expressions, so the techniques I show here can be used in just about any language you're likely to come across. This article shows how to extract multiple strings that match the criteria you specify through the Python findall function.
tree -L 2 -u -g -p -d sometimes I need list from path with max limit for recursive depth directory listing
A quick guide on how to enable Compiz like magic lamp or genie window effect in the Gnome desktop environment. So this guide is for all the distributions that use Gnome.
Gnome is one of the most popular desktop environment. This why Ubuntu dropped its iconic Unity desktop environment and now it uses Gnome as its default. Gnome has many rich features and one of them allows you to install extensions to enhance functionality. I will be using one such extension to enable the famous lamp or genie window effect in my Linux distribution.
For the demonstration, I am using the latest Ubuntu 20.10 but you are free to use any distribution as long as it is using Gnome DE.
No one needs special software to establish a push-based publishing system as I have here. RSS is well supported, and so is plain text. Using monospace fonts, it is possible to create multi-column layouts and other typesetting features without involving complex software stacks. Many papers in the 1900s were typeset this way, and there's no reason why this is not good enough for most people.
For those who need the extra precision: use it. This is not an argument against tools like Microsoft Word or LaTeX; this is a wake up call, that most of us don't need them.
Python is one of the most popular and easy to code programming language nowadays, because of its simplicity and easy to code. It is now very popular among beginners and experienced computer programmers or developers.
It is use to develop any kinds of software/applications using simple and few lines of code for complex machine learning algorithms also.
The major release version of Python is 3.8 these days. It has included many features like Positional-only parameters, f-strings support, Parallel filesystem cache and many more.
The Python 3.8 version is not included in default Ubuntu repository. So, In this tutorial, we will show you the different ways to install Python on Ubuntu 20.04 Linux system.
In the first process, we will use the deb package from deadsnakes PPA, and in the second process, we will install Python using source.
The simplest way to find the free disk space on Linux is to use df command. The df command stands for disk-free and quite obviously, it shows you the free and available disk space on Linux systems.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Android Studio on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Android Studio is the official Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Android app development, based on IntelliJ IDEA. On top of IntelliJ’s powerful code editor and developer tools, Android Studio offers even more features that enhance your productivity when building Android apps.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of Android Studio on a Debian 10 (Buster).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Linux Dash on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, KDE is a well-known desktop environment for Unix-like systems designed for users who wants to have a nice desktop environment for their machines, It is one of the most used desktop interfaces out there.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of Linux Dash on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
Passwords are the keystone to account security. We’ll show you how to reset passwords, set password expiration periods, and enforce password changes on your Linux network.
This tutorial will be showing you how to set up your own DNS over HTTPS (DoH) resolver on Ubuntu with DNSdist, so your DNS queries can be encrypted and protected from prying eyes.
This simple tutorial shows how to install x-apps, a bunch of GTK3 DE-agnostic applications, in Ubuntu 20.04 via PPA.
X-Apps are a bunch of GTK3 DE-agnostic applications that are not so tightly tied to a particular distribution or DE as their ancestors might be. The project was started in 2016 by Linux Mint.
A step by step guide to create VPC endpoint for Amazon ECS
Explains how to enable rc.local shell script support in /etc/ directory on Linux at boot time when using systemd as init to execute scripts.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Linux Lite 5.2.
Fail2Ban is a log parsing utility that scans log files of various processes and bans IP addresses that make too many password failures. When an attempted login is located, Fail2Ban will add a new rule to iptables to block the IP address of the attacker, either temporarily or permanently. It can also alert you via email for the same.
It is primarily focused on detecting intrusions via SSH but it can be configured to work with any service that uses log files.
Moving personal services into Linux containers requires planning. See what it takes to containerize years of information from WordPress.
Amazon Linux 2 is just one of many Linux distributions and other operating systems running in AWS. As Amazon Linux 2 is a close relative of RHEL 7 / CentOS 7, the user experience is also very close to these operating systems. All you need to learn is an extra command for enabling EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux). Best of all: the very same commands work both on x86 and Graviton2 (Arm/Aarch64) instances.
Vim go to a particular line or word in a file. Learn how to open a source code file at a specific line number or function name using vim / vi
You can often resolve Linux's€ file permissions error, by changing the permissions to "chmod 777." But what exactly does "777" mean?
GOverlay is the super useful user interface for managing overlays like MangoHud and the vulkan post processing layer vkBasalt. Now though, it's been extended to be even more useful.
With the latest release of GOverlay 0.4 the developer, Benjamim Góis, adding in support for ReplaySorcery which is an open source instant-replay solution we wrote about before here. Keeping things simple, it allows you to store your screen in a buffer ready to capture clips of your action during games and more. Having a UI for it now is pretty sweet too.
Related is a dark episodic point and click adventure that originally had a first episode release back in May 2020, with the team looking for funding to make more episodes.
"Related is a game about two sisters locked up in one body. The girls perceived themselves in an absolutely ordinary way, but in growing older, they realized that it is not a common feature for everyone when half of your body is being controlled by somebody else."
Two people sharing a single body sounds pretty weird, and it looks like things get a bit wild as they each control half of this body. They have to deal with the scornful attitude of the orphanage personnel, attacks of other children, immersion in insanity and much more. Linux is a confirmed platform for release of the other episodes, with the first already available and supported.
Warhammer 40,000: Gladius is set for another race expansion, as the Craftworld Aeldari are coming in a fresh DLC a little later this month. Slitherine LTD and Proxy Studios mentioned that this 7th DLC for the turn-based strategy game will bring in 19 new versatile units and some more unique game mechanics.
If you're afraid of everything creepy-crawly you might want to look away, as the ant colony management game Empires of the Undergrowth has a big update out.
It's a real-time strategy game set in the world of ants, with different modes that have you direct different types of ants to grow their colony and study them. Backed up by some real science, as it attempts to depict the real-world struggles of our insect world. Dig out tunnels, deal with intruders some many times the size of your ants and explore for food. Empires of the Undergrowth is genuinely great.
What is possibly one of the most impressive animated ASCII games ever made, Stone Story RPG now has a demo so you can get a glimpse of how seriously cool it is.
Inspired by incrementals, idles, and clickers it's something of a unique adventuring experience. Deceptively simple looking, it's incredibly charming and unlike anything else. You have no direct character control, instead the AI does the exploring, the combat, the looting and more. However, it's not an idle game. You can use potions and special abilities, which will need some good timing especially for the boss fights.
GZDoom, the modder-friendly OpenGL and Vulkan source port based on the DOOM engine has a major new release up as they drop support for 32bit.
A number of major changes were pulled in for GZDoom 4.5.0, which will likely affect most users. For starters, mouse behaviour has changed. They've removed some "magic factors" from the mouse sensitivity and while old configurations will get moved over it might still need you to do some settings tweaks.
Avorion - Black Market is the first full paid expansion to the excellent open-world space exploration and building sim and it looks great. Bringing with it access to the black market, where you will be able to trade in various special goods. There's also new story content, quests and bosses along with a big event to participate in.
Need to get your mind off the world for a bit and perhaps create your own ideal society? Well, Valve are here to help with that with a new Steam sale.
The City Builder Sale is live from now until November 10 at 6PM UTC so you've got a good few days to take a look, and see if there's anything you want to grab from it. It's a genre that's surprisingly varied, with rather a lot of choices depending on what type of building you're after.
LXQt 0.16.0 is here six months after the LXQt 0.15.0 release and introduces three new themes, namely Clearlooks, Kvantum and Leech, improved notifications with a new option that lets users view notifications on the screen with the mouse pointer, and improved support for Bluetooth audio devices.
Several new features were also added to the LXQt Panel, including customizable auto-hiding for the Status Notifier, the ability to move windows to the next screen using task buttons, as well as right-click menus for some main menu items/actions.
If the recent releases of KDE Plasma 5.20 and GNOME 3.38 didn't fulfill your wishes for a dream Linux desktop and are looking for something lightweight, LXQt 0.16 is out today.
LXQt is the lightweight desktop environment that was born out of the merging of the LXDE and Razor-qt projects several years ago. LXQt 0.16 is the new release and coming six months after their prior release.
One of the areas of the Qt 6.0 toolkit with the greatest number of improvements is on the Qt Quick 3D front.
Qt Quick 3D supports a wide range of new features and improvements for this toolkit component that provides a high-level 3D API for user interfaces as well as a growing number of other possible 3D use-cases. Some of the Qt Quick 3D improvements to find in Qt 6.0 include...
About a month worth of updates on KDE/Plasma in Debian has accumulated, so here we go. The highlights are: Plasma 5.19.5 based on Qt 5.15 is in Debian/experimental and hopefully soon in Debian/unstable, and my own builds at OBS have been updated to Plasma 5.20.2, Frameworks 5.75, Apps 20.08.2.
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The packages in Debian/experimental are at the most current state, 5.19.5. We have waited with the upload to unstable until the Qt 5.15 transition is over, but hope to upload to unstable rather soon. After the upload is done, we will work on getting 5.20 into unstable.
My aim is to get the most recent version of Plasma 5.20 into Debian Bullseye, so we need to do that before the freeze early next year. Let us hope for the best.
Time is money! In fact, time is much more valuable than money!! There are so many apps, tools and utilities have been invented for tracking and managing time effectively. One such time tracking app is Solanum. Solanum is a pomodoro timer for GNOME desktops. It uses Pomodoro technique which helps you to eliminate internal or external distractions and stay focused on the task and more productive. Solanum is a free and open source utility released under GPLv3.
The Pomodora technique is a popular time management method developed by Italian author and developer Francesco Cirillo. The Pomodoro technique suggests 25 minutes of working, following five minutes break.
This technique is so simple yet very effective!
The Circle Widgets is a new GNOME Shell extension to show widgets on your desktop that display information like the CPU load, current RAM usage, and a clock in various styles.
The extension supports GNOME Shell 3.38, 3.36 and 3.34, so it should work in e.g. Ubuntu 20.10 and 20.04 / Pop!_OS 20.10 and 20.04, Fedora 33, 32 and 31, and so on.
This is great if you want some minimalistic desktop widgets, but you don't want to use Conky. The Circle Widgets supports a lot (!) less customization than Conky, but it's also a lot easier to setup.
On November 3rd 2020, the Emmabuntüs Collective is happy to announce the release of the Emmabuntüs Debian Edition update 3 1.0 3 (32 and 64 bits) based on the Debian 10.6 Buster distribution featuring both Xfce and LXQt desktop environment s .
This project was originally designed to facilitate the reconditioning of computers given to humanitarian organizations, and i n particular, originally, to the Emmaüs communities (which is where the distribution's name obviously comes from), an d to promote the discovery of GNU / Linux by beginners, as well as to extend the lifespan of computer hardware and, as such, reduce the over-consumption of raw material.
T his new update of our distribution provides an OEM installation mode, in the frame of our r euse campaign for all , that we launched beginning of September together with our Debian-Facile friends, Blabla Linux in Belgium and Tugaleres.com . You can look at the playlist of the videos (French speaking, with English subtitles) concerning the implementation of this method by Blabla Linux.
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Following the release of this version, we are going to deliver our clones in OEM versions, to allow this installation by cloning method in the frame of install-parts. We also encourage all associations that want to work in the field of computer refurbishing to create their own clones, and our friend Blabla Linux made a video on this very subject . This feature will be also integrated in the Emmabuntüs DE 4 Alpha 2 next update, which will be available after the release of Debian 11 Alpha 3.
Emmabuntüs is a Debian Stable-based Linux desktop distribution, developed by an informal group of people (Emmabuntüs collective). It aims to deliver a lightweight OS that can efficiently work on less resource-hungry or old computers.
Yesterday, the Emmabuntüs Collective announced the release of a new version 1.03 of Emmabuntüs Debian Edition 3, in short, EmmaDE3 1.03. The latest Emmabuntüs DE3 1.03 is based on the Debian 10.6 “Buster,” featuring both Xfce and LXQt desktop environments.
Emmabuntüs Linux Debian Edition (DE3) 1.03 is here about five months after update 1.02, which adopted the lightweight LXQt desktop environment by default instead of LXDE, to rebase the entire distribution on the latest and greatest Debian Buster release, namely Debian GNU/Linux 10.6.
This means that with this latest Emmabuntüs Linux Debian Edition release users will get not only a better and more stable experience due to the use of the latest Open Source software release and underlying GNU/Linux technologies from upstream, but also due to patching recent security vulnerabilities.
Remember Fuchsia OS from Google that was rumored as a replacement OS for Android? We haven’t heard from Google about Fuchsia for almost a year now. The development scene also seems to be inactive now.
For starters, Fuchsia is an experimental OS from Google that uses a new Zicron Kernel and is primarily aimed at creating an ecosystem of always-connected devices that not only work smartly but are also powerful. The OS supports Flutter apps and is written in C, C++, Dart, Python, Go, and Rust programming languages.
The web browser from Google. Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.
USBGuard is a software framework that helps protect your systems against rogue USB devices by implementing basic allowlisting and blocklisting capabilities. This allows you to define access control for USB devices based on device attributes. Here is a summary of some of the new features in USBGuard that we delivered in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3.
With the increasing demand in the marketplace for open source technologies, ensuring that the workforce is adequately skilled to meet these demands head-on is a top priority for CIOs. Large organizations are facing a crucial skills gap, which can disrupt delivery capabilities and lead to client dissatisfaction. With the open source services market projected to grow at an annual growth rate of nearly 24% through 2022, there is a critical need to address the skills gap and ensure delivery teams are better equipped to meet evolving business needs.
Red Hat’s work with global systems integrators (GSIs) underscores the correlation between highly skilled delivery teams with well defined training and competency development frameworks and better business outcomes, lower attrition and associate growth within the partner organization.
As a result, our GSI partners are adopting new ways to upskill their associates with on-demand learning, hands-on labs and peer learning. In recognition of this paradigm shift, Red Hat has developed an end-to-end enablement framework for partner associates. Red Hat Ascend is a competency journey built on the proven 70-20-10 development model that acts as a self-learning path and incorporates both formal training as well as hands-on learning, simulated labs and peer learning opportunities.
Once upon a time, the term "product documentation" conjured images of ring-bound tomes several thousand pages long that would get shipped to users alongside the latest offering. In the days before the internet, this wasn’t just the best option available; it was the only option. It was big, it was slow, and it was expensive, but hey, what were you going to do?
When the internet came along, product documentation moved along with it. Installation guides, administration guides, and user guides jumped from CDs, to flash disks, to public websites, and users started turning to search engines for answers instead of the index page. Apart from where you’d find it, however, the format changed little from its previous appearance. These were guides, and guides they would remain.
My, how things have changed.
Gone are the days when users expect to sift through a giant manual and search for the information they need, piecing together the clues in the dark. Today’s users are search savvy and time poor, and they need the answers to their questions in one place, in one go. It’s time to shake off the shackles of tables of contents and navigation and reduce the number of steps between the reader and the answers they seek.
Red Hat Software Collections 3.6 and Red Hat Developer Toolset 10 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are now available as beta releases. An alternative to the default RHEL toolset, Software Collections provides a differentiated and eclectic mix of tools that developers can use on a desktop or in production.
Red Hat Software Collections tools are use case-specific and include the most current, stable version of dynamic languages, open source databases, web servers, and other critical development components. The Red Hat Software Collections 3.6 beta release features four new collections and four that have been updated.
The Fedora 33 CoreOS Test Day focuses on testing FCOS based on Fedora 33. The FCOS next stream is already rebased on Fedora 33 content, which will be coming soon to testing and stable. To prepare for the content being promoted to other streams the Fedora CoreOS and QA teams have organized a test day on Friday, November 06, 2020 (results accepted through Thursday, November 12). Refer to the wiki page for links to the test cases and materials you’ll need to participate. Read below for details.
Virtualizing and disaggregating RAN gives service providers the freedom to work with new suppliers, boosting innovation and allowing new operating models. A more secure horizontal cloud platform spanning RAN, mobile core and other functions creates synergies in engineering, security and operations.
As revealed last week, Ubuntu 21.04 will be codenamed Hirsute Hippo and has a release date set in stone for April 22nd, 2021. Canonical already published an official release schedule so we can mark our calendars for the most important milestones of the six-month-long development cycle.
Development of Ubuntu 21.04 was officially kicked off by Matthias Klose on October 28th, revealing the fact that the goal for Hirsute Hippo is to ship with Python 3.9 as the default and only supported Python 3 version. And, as of today, the daily build ISO images have been uploaded on the main download servers for early adopters.
Ubuntu Touch OTA-14 improves support for Android 9 devices, especially for the forthcoming Volla Phone, which will start shipping to backers this month with a variant powered by Ubuntu Touch.
These improvements include better camera support, flashlight support, proper loading of hardware media codecs, functional external display support using HardwareComposer2, as well as the ability to close apps using swipe gestures.
The next release of Ubuntu Linux is Ubuntu 21.04 code-named Hirsute Hippo development begins. And the daily build .iso images are now available. We tried to find out the expected new features.
The popular Linux Mint distribution has decided to compile and package the open source Chromium browser on its own, instead of relying on upstream versions from Ubuntu or Debian.
The move is the latest in the disagreements between Mint’s lead-developer, Clement "Clem" Lefebvre, and the Ubuntu distribution, on which Linux Mint is based.
Linux Mint is what is known as a downstream distribution, and is affected by any changes to its upstream distribution, Ubuntu. It takes significant engineering efforts for downstream distros to ignore changes in their upstream projects.
OpenStack Charms 20.10 brings OpenStack Victoria on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (via Cloud Archive) and Ubuntu 20.10 with full support from Canonical until April 2020. Victoria is the 22nd release of OpenStack which comes with many interesting features of its own, including solutions for complex networking scenarios.
Neutron now provides its metadata service over IPv6 networks which means that users can access it without a configuration drive in IPv6-only networks. Neutron has also added support for flat networks for Distributed Virtual Routers (DVR), Floating IP port forwarding for the OVN backend, and router availability zones in OVN.
Octavia load balancer pools now support version two of the PROXY protocol. This allows one to pass client information to member servers when using TCP protocols. PROXYv2 improves the performance of establishing new connections using the PROXY protocol to member servers, especially when the listener is using IPv6.
In order to upgrade your Charmed OpenStack environment to OpenStack Victoria, refer to the instructions in the official documentation.
For more information about OpenStack Victoria, refer to the official release notes.
Kubeflow, the ML toolkit on K8s, now fits on your desktop and edge devices!
[...]
Unfortunately, this notable accomplishment also has a downside. Deploying Kubeflow on your laptop or edge device has become impractical.
The very minimum memory necessary to deploy the full Kubeflow bundle is 12Gb of RAM.
On top of that, it is Linux-based. This means that on Windows and macOS you need to allocate 12+ Gb of memory to a Linux VM.
Last time I tried, my 16Gb of RAM MacBook Pro did not like the idea.
Ambarella has begun sampling a 10nm “CV28M” camera SoC for edge AI that runs Linux on dual 1GHz Cortex-A53 cores and offers CVflow CNN processing, a 320MP/s ISP, 4Kp30 encoding, and security features.
Five years have passed since we covered a new Ambarella camera SoC, which is a shame since it’s so much fun saying “Ambarella.” Since the announcement of its HD-ready, Cortex-A9 based S2Lm, we have mentioned the company in passing for its part in a Linux- and Jetson-driven Teal One drone, which uses Ambarella’s [email protected] ready, quad -A53 CV2.
Now Ambarella has launched the CV28M, the latest in its CVflow family of AI-enabled computer vision processors. Like the other Ambarella SoCs, it is available with a Linux SDK and evaluation kit.
Manjaro already partners with a handful of PC makers to sell laptops, mini-desktops, all-in-one PCs, and even smartphones with the popular GNU/Linux distribution pre-installed.
This new addition to the Manjaro PC lineup is a computer that measures about 6.6ââ¬Â³ x 4.7ââ¬Â³ x 1.5ââ¬Â³ and which supports up to 32GB of RAM and up to two SSDs (there’s an m.2 2280 slot that supports NVMe storage, and another that supports SATA III storage.
Raspberry Pi 400 is a brand new product from the Raspberry Pi - and it's a portable computer inside a keyboard.
It’s time! We can’t tell you how excited we are that we will start shipping the Librem 5 mass production version mid-to-late November! Right now we are finishing up our extensive quality control steps and fulfillment procedures so that we can start shipping the revolutionary Librem 5 phone.
This is all very exciting, but the main thing most people want to know is: when will I get mine? In this post we will talk about all of the factors around Librem 5 mass production shipping and how we plan to get through the massive backlog of orders with demand increasing daily.
At the end of last month, there was a lot of buzz about Bouffalo BL602, one of the first RISC-V SoC with built-in wireless connectivity, namely WiFi 4 and Bluetooth 5.0 LE.
We should expect more and more of those types of solutions, and Telink & Andes jointly introduced TLSR9-series of wireless audio chips for hearables, wearables, and other high-performance IoT applications. The chips are powered by an Andes D25F RISC-V 5-stage core that happens to be the first core to integrate RISC-V DSP/SIMD P-extension and offer Bluetooth 5.2, Zigbee 3.0, HomeKit, 6LoWPAN, Thread, and/or 2.4 GHz proprietary protocol.
ICOP’s Linux-ready, 2.4W “VEX2-6415” SBC features DM&P’s x86-based dual-core Vortex86EX2, which enables two OSes to run at once. The SBC offers dual LAN ports, dual mini-PCIe interfaces with SIM, and -40 to 85€°C support.
Taiwan-based ICOP, which primarily manufactures embedded boards and systems based on x86 CPUs from its sister company DM&P Group, has announced an SBC that showcases DM&P’s Vortex86EX2. Designed for IoT, automation, and other space-limited embedded applications, the 100 x 66mm VEX2-6415 follows ICOP’s 3.5-inch VEX2-6427 and PC/104 form-factor VEX2-6454 SBCs, which the company announced in conjunction with DM&P’s Vortex86EX (VEX2) announcement back in Feb. 2019. DM&P also offers an official VEX2–6890 evaluation board for the SoC.
In addition to OpenIndiana Hipster 2020.10 having just been released, OmniOS v11 r151036 as another operating system long ago derived from OpenSolaris is also out with a big new release.
OmniOS Community Edition v11 r151036 is a big update for this Solaris-based operating system focused on servers. Among the many big ticket changes in this release are moving to GCC 10, better ZFS support, various hardware sensors are finally supported under OmniOS CE, and much more. Below is a look at the main highlights.
The trek to OpenZFS 2.0 continues with the fifth release candidate now being outed.
The official release of OpenZFS 2.0 appears to still be on track for release in Q4 given these timely release candidates. OpenZFS 2.0 brings many new features from mainline FreeBSD support to Zstd compression to other performance-minded work.
Open source software is everywhere these days—which is great—but how can you be sure that you should trust the software you've downloaded to do what you want? The area of software supply chain management—of which this discussion forms a part—is fairly newly visible in the industry but is growing in importance. I'm going to consider a particular example.
First, though, this isn't one of those police dramas where a suspect parcel arrives at the precinct and someone realises just in time that it may be a bomb. What I'm talking about here are open source software packages (although the impact on your application may be similar if you're not sufficiently suspicious). There's a huge conversation to be had about what trust means as a starting point (and I have a forthcoming book on Trust in Computing and the Cloud for Wiley).
With Intel Gen12 Xe-LP / Tiger Lake supporting AV1 accelerated decoding, Intel has provided this support via their open-source media stack on Linux that is then exposed via the Video Acceleration API (VA-API). Intel has now landed their patches for supporting VA-API AV1 decode with FFmpeg.
The FFmpeg patch we talked about back in September has now been merged for allowing AV1 decode over the VA-API interface with this widely-used multimedia library.
PeaZip is a rather nice archiving program. It works well - overall - and comes with some neat options and extras. It supports a wide range of formats, which is a bonus if you have to work with odd and arcane files sent by friends and colleagues. You can quickly automate and script tasks, as every job log is available. Conversion is also a nice bonus.
But then, there were niggles - the fact I couldn't archive every single filename, the self-check issue with password-protected 7z archives, the inability to change themes, and the weird default looks. The application does the job, but there's no reason why any of these bugs should be present. They will deter ordinary users and annoy advanced ones. If you're looking for something to zip and rar and tar and whatnot your files, then PeaZip is a good choice. I hope the problems can be ironed out, and ideally, the UI will be refreshed. Not because we need new and modern, because the ergonomics are somewhat off. Anyway, rather recommended if ever so slightly rough. Take care, zip away.
When I created and started hosting the first websites for curl I didn’t care about the URL or domain names used for them, but after a few years I started to think that maybe it would be cool to register a curl domain for its home. By then it was too late to find an available name under a “sensible” top-level domain and since then I’ve been on the lookout for one.
The
In his keynote at JupyterCon 2020, Jeremy Howard gave a point-by-point rebuttal of a presentation given at JupyterCon two years prior. Two attendees filed reports to the CoC committee as they felt that the content was unwelcoming and disrespectful.
Finding
The board of directors voted that the talk of Jeremy Howard adhered to the JupyterCon Code of Conduct. Jeremy’s talk offers the kind of exchange of ideas that makes an intellectual community vibrant and healthy.
"Rewind" is an animated video made for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) about a scientist in a dystopian reality who modifies the code of a program, leading to a groundbreaking discovery. But in our world, which is dominated by proprietary software, would she have the freedom she needs to make a difference?
The FHIR REST server 0.9b3 is out! This new version is Python3 compatible and can interact with the GNU Health HMIS node => 3.6
The FHIR server is a Flask application, that generates HL7 FHIR messages to a number of resources in the GNU Health Hospital Management Information System (HMIS) node.
This Reversion is the continuation of the great work done by Chris Zimmerman for Python2 and older GH instances.
The RSGB have made available the video of the Introduction to GNU Radio talk by Heather Lomond, M0HMO, part of the Society's Tonight @ 8 Webinars
A beginners’ introduction to using GNU radio to create simple amateur radio projects. Starting from the beginning Heather will introduce the GNURadio programming environment, develop a little of the theory needed to understand SDRs and then go on to use some simple GNURadio blocks to build a receiver based on one of the super cheap SDRs. Finally, she will show how to build more complex radio systems and where to go to take things to the next level.
Watch An Introduction to GNU Radio with Heather Lomond, M0HM
With C++20 one of the major features added is that of modules as a modern alternative to that of conventional C++ header files for packages. The C++20 modules code for the GNU Compiler Collection that has been in the works for several years is now under review and could potentially still land for the GCC 11 release next year.
[...]
Some features of C++20 modules are not yet implemented around private module fragments, complete type (in)visibility, and more, but he is hoping to address the most significant shortcomings still in time for stage one (the current GCC 11 feature development). The code so far has been tested in Linux x86_64 / AArch64 / POWER, among other targets.
TreeView is a QML type to display data from any QAbstractItemModel. It extends TableView with expandable and collapsable nodes, which can be used in either a list or table mode. The former lets the user navigate up and down like in the list, but the left and right arrow keys will expand or collapse the nodes. The latter mode lets the user navigate between the columns as well using the left and right arrow keys.
Several convenience methods are available to map the model index with the item index in the view. Custom delegates can be created, but it is possible to customize the view delegate with several style hints. Row background and foreground colors, alternate background colors, text font, and collapsed/expanded icons can be easily changed without writing a new delegate.
We are proud to announce that Qt Installer Framework 4.0 has been released. At the same time, we have released Qt Online Installer and Qt Maintenance tool 4.0, which have been updated to use the new IFW version as well.
How can we motivate more women to get into the technology field?
[...]
I was always curious about how things work. I remember, when I was first introduced to Facebook, I thought, "This thing is amazing, but how does it work? I wonder if I can build something like this?"
This curiosity quickly led me to the world of coding, which was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I started with the C language, and it was really tough for me as it was my first time ever even seeing code. After a year, I got comfortable with things, and I learned all the concepts but hadn’t put them into action. So I moved onto what eventually became my favorite programming language—Python. It has been approximately three years, and I still use Python, though I still have a lot of things to learn about it.
Women are underrepresented in the tech sector —myth or reality? Three years ago, we launched a diversity series aimed at bringing the most inspirational and powerful women in the tech scene to your attention. Today, we’d like you to meet Daniela Valero, Senior Engineer Experience Technology at Publicis Sapient.
Transformers have revolutionized Natural Language Processing by reducing the time required to train the models compared Recurrent Neural Networks. Because they are not sequential, attention-based models can process words in parallel, which is a major speed improvements. This allows the model to scale better, both in term of parameters and dataset size. This is also useful for interpretability, because attention weights allow one to easily understand the part of the input which contributed to the most to the predictions.
You’ve probably seen more headlines about COBOL this year than in the last 20 years. It started at the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak when a U.S. governor went on television asking for COBOL programmers to fix the state’s overwhelmed unemployment insurance systems.
As it turns out, COBOL — the programming language for the back-end mainframe — was not the source of the problem. It was a front-end issue: the inability to scale completion of Java-based website forms in such dramatic numbers. But that didn’t stop self-serving critics from continuing to lambast the government (states and federal) for continuing to run vital systems using an “ancient” programming language.
It is ironic that this volley of false criticism was happening as the mainframe and the COBOL language were achieving one of their greatest feats: handling a huge increase in transactions, previously completed with cash, that were forced to be handled online or with credit cards as the world sheltered or sought touch-free activities. And they accomplished this without a hitch.
So, as we look ahead to the next phase of increased dependence on the mainframe platform, it would be proper and valuable to dispel some common misconceptions about the programming language that fuels it.
This article in Forbes identifies four misconceptions that have harmed Cobol’s reputation but also continues the misconception that Cobol is just a mainframe language when in reality companies such as Micro Focus have made Cobol available on Windows and Unix. The language created by Grace Murray Hopper to make computers easier for normal people to program lives on – as well it should!
Back in September 2013 we carried an article showcasing 11 newfangled programming languages, each of which sought to approach programming in a fresh, modern way. The languages are: Dart, Julia, Clojure, Haxe, Fantom, OpenCL, Elixir, Go, Rust, Ceylon, and Harlan.
We acknowledged that it was unlikely many of the 11 newfangled languages would displace the established languages, but noted that a few could become mainstream.
What happened to these 11 programming languages? Have they become central to the development of open source software, have they stayed on the fringes, or are they only remembered like fingerprints on an abandoned handrail?
Prevent your JavaScript code from getting hung up or returning errors while waiting for external resources or long-running processes.
Caching is an essential optimization technique. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to use Python's @lru_cache decorator to cache the results of your functions using the LRU cache strategy. This is a powerful technique you can use to leverage the power of caching in your implementations.
This tutorial is an introduction to a simple optimization technique called gradient descent, which has seen major application in state-of-the-art machine learning models.
We'll develop a general purpose routine to implement gradient descent and apply it to solve different problems, including classification via supervised learning.
In this process, we'll gain an insight into the working of this algorithm and study the effect of various hyper-parameters on its performance. We'll also go over batch and stochastic gradient descent variants as examples.
Python 3.10 is still in development. This releasee, 3.10.0a2 is the second of six planned alpha releases. Alpha releases are intended to make it easier to test the current state of new features and bug fixes and to test the release process. During the alpha phase, features may be added up until the start of the beta phase (2021-05-03) and, if necessary, may be modified or deleted up until the release candidate phase (2021-10-04). Please keep in mind that this is a preview release and its use is not recommended for production environments.
ABlog v0.10 is released with the main focus being to support the latest version of Sphinx as well as Python 3 only support.
Ablog V0.9.X will no longer be supported as Python 2 comes to an end in a few months and it is time people upgraded.
A half-century later, I remember the exhilaration. My Greek boyfriend and I clutched hands in the front-row balcony of Boston’s gracious Exeter Theater while convulsive music thundered up through our feet like a shock treatment. It was Mikos Theodorakis’s soundtrack to Costa Gavras’s Z, a sexy, high-voltage film that inaugurated a genre: the antifascist thriller. Z offered backstory to the 1967 junta that had just, with tacit US approval, toppled the democratically elected government in Greece and established post–World War II Europe’s most gruesome torture regime until the Republika Srpska’s Omarska camp.
And as usual, early summer seems already to hold, inside it, the split fruit of late fall, those afternoons we’ll soon enough lie down in, their diminished colors, the part no one comes for. I’m a man, now; I’ve seen plenty of summers, I shouldn’t be surprised—why am I?
As if everything hadn’t all along been designed—I include myself— to disappear eventually.
Today voters in Oregon will decide the fate of a historic ballot initiative that would decriminalize possession of smaller amounts of all illegal drugs and funnel tax revenue from legal marijuana sales into addiction treatment, potentially providing an early model for combating deep racial disparities in the criminal legal system and significantly slowing the war on drugs.
As COVID-19 cases have soared in suburban St. Louis County, Missouri, so have the calls from ailing or quarantined voters to the Board of Elections, asking how they can vote. Until this week, workers have taken down their contact information and sent ballots to their homes. But on Monday, the board pivoted. Today, voters with COVID-19 can vote at a newly established drive-thru site.
The Linux Foundation is doubling down on open source collaboration to drive more innovation in technology that uses artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL). The LF AI Foundation and ODPi merged on Oct. 25 to form the LF AI & Data Foundation.
This new organization, under the auspices of the LF, will build and support an open community and a growing ecosystem of open source AI, data, and analytics projects.
The LF AI Foundation built an ecosystem to enable and sustain open source innovation in AI, ML and DL. ODPi was a nonprofit organization accelerating the open ecosystem of big data solutions. The merger is significant as AI and data are inseparable and codependent on each other.
Another malicious npm package appeared on the official repository that created a backdoor on users’ computers. The package impersonated an otherwise legit package to fool users.
Security researchers increasingly give security vulnerabilities they discover a unique and memorable name and logo. Names (and cute logos) generate more exposure for the vulnerability and the researchers who found it. The Computer Emergency Response Team Coordination Center (CERT/CC) believes this naming trend invokes “fear, uncertainty, and doubt for vendors, researchers, and the general public.” To address the situation, it has introduced Vulnonyms: a system for automatically naming vulnerabilities. What could possibly go wrong?
Security vulnerabilities are often entered into the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) database and assigned a CVE ID number. These numbers are in the format CVE-YEAR-NUMBER (e.g. CVE-2020-12345). These identifiers, unlike the names assigned by researchers, aren’t memorable.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium and firefox), Fedora (nss), openSUSE (pacemaker), Red Hat (bind, binutils, bluez, cloud-init, container-tools:rhel8, cryptsetup, cups, curl, cyrus-imapd, cyrus-sasl, dovecot, dpdk, edk2, evolution, expat, file-roller, fontforge, freeradius:3.0, freerdp and vinagre, freetype, frr, gd, glibc, GNOME, gnome-software and fwupd, gnupg2, grafana, httpd:2.4, idm:DL1 and idm:client, kernel, kernel-rt, libarchive, libexif, libgcrypt, libldb, libpcap, librabbitmq, libreoffice, librsvg2, libsolv, libssh, libtiff, libvpx, libX11, libxml2, libxslt, mailman:2.1, mingw-expat, nodejs:12, oddjob, oniguruma, opensc, openssl, openwsman, pcre2, pki-core:10.6 and pki-deps:10.6, poppler, prometheus-jmx-exporter, python-pip, python27:2.7, python3, python38:3.8, qt5-qtbase and qt5-qtwebsockets, resource-agents, SDL, spamassassin, sqlite, squid:4, subversion:1.10, sysstat, systemd, targetcli, tcpdump, thunderbird, varnish:6, vim, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel), SUSE (apache-commons-httpclient, gnome-settings-daemon, gnome-shell, kernel, libvirt, opensc, ovmf, python, rmt-server, and sane-backends), and Ubuntu (accountsservice, gdm3, libytnef, python-cryptography, and spice-vdagent).
This year has been the ultimate test of business resilience, and if anything is now clear, it's this: It's time for security pros...
Sonatype’s 2020 State of the Software Supply Chain Report found that next generation cyber-attacks actively targeting open-source soft- ware projects increased 430% over the past 12 months. Industry and the Open Source communities recognize heightened security risks and are working to solve these.
This is not a drill.€ Red alert: The police surveillance center in Jackson, Mississippi, will be conducting a 45-day pilot program to live stream the Amazon Ring cameras of participating residents.€
Since Ring first made a splash in the private security camera market, we’ve been warning of its potential to undermine the civil liberties of its users and their communities. We’ve been especially concerned with Ring’s 1,000+ partnerships with local police departments, which facilitate bulk footage requests directly from users without oversight or having to acquire a warrant.€
One has often lamented the fact that the Australian Labor Party decided to jettison the only politician in its midst who actually knew something about technology, namely Ed Husic, from its front bench, for solely political reasons.
[...]
Why would Iran bother meddling with anything here – that is, if it did meddle with anything in the US? Why would any Iranian leader want to mess with a poll in which the Democrat candidate, the man more likely to reinstate a nuclear deal that was ended by Donald Trump, is tipped to win?
Additionally, there is compulsory voting in this country, so how exactly does one influence one side or the other? Nothing is done digitally; there is a paper trail all the way. In the US, one can keep people from going to vote, sure, but the main entity that is attempting to do that is a homegrown one: the Republican Party?
Watts claims that Canberra is not doing anything to prevent a similar attack — whatever it was the Iranians are accused of doing — on non-government democratic institutions in Australia.
His whinge is: “While government security agencies provide robust cyber security protections for their parliamentary email systems, these protections stop when MPs use private email systems, social media accounts, CRMs, privately-hosted websites and smartphone apps."
And to grandstand a bit more, "The cyber-resilience of these non-government democratic institutions falls through the cracks of our current arrangements.”
Two zero-day bugs in Google's Chrome browser, both of which were being exploited in the wild, have been fixed, according to the company's Project Zero technical lead Ben Hawkes.
There’s little room for error in Facebook’s push to root out misinformation campaigns that may sprout up before the final results of the election are known.
Keep in mind that Facebook already conceded that it was too slow to recognize a 2016 election meddling effort by Russian entities. Separately, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle already want to more heavily regulate the platform, which just weathered major brands boycotting it this summer.
So, Facebook — thin ice? Yes.
That’s added pressure for the platform to root out misinformation on an Election Day when voters seem particularly vulnerable to confusion.
YouTube, the video arm of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, has said it is surfacing more news channels to viewers. But these fake election-result clips came from YouTube accounts devoted to music and stock trading tips. They likely exploited the preference YouTube’s algorithms have for long, livestreamed footage about current events.
No contract has been finalized with the government and the U.S.-based company, and any deal would represent an extension of work the company already does for the U.K. in battling the virus, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
As we judge how social media handled the 2020 presidential election, though, we need a standard for success as well as failure. What would a good election night look like online? As nebulous as that standard is, there are three key things we want to see.
These points are being made in context of recent terrorist incidents in France, their linkage with Islam and controversy over French President’s comments on Islam. Any individual, leader or authority at any level has his/her right to interpret his/her beliefs and also practice them as per his/her inclinations. But no person has the authority to impose his/her views on others of his/her or other religions. The recent controversy surfacing from incidents in France demands a clear understanding of this point. There is no guarantee that two, three or even hundred or more Christians, Muslims, Jews or persons of any sect interpret and practice their beliefs in a similar manner. Simply speaking, this is impossible given the regional and various ethnic divisions marking each religious group.
Of course, this does not justify violence and/or terrorist activity of any kind in the name of any religion. If and when a person tries and justifies his/her criminal activity in the name of religion, why should his/her claim be accepted as “religious?” After all, as suggested earlier, no person can claim to be representative of all the persons adhering to faith he/she practices. Besides, when a person’s activity is viewed as criminal, accepting his/her claim is equivalent to trusting him/her for his/her comments. This is simply going a little too far. If a lunatic fires in all directions killing dozens of place and claims that “God” has commanded him/her to do so, would it be sensible to accept his/her logic? No.
West Philadelphia—My wife and I heard the helicopters hovering over our neighborhood here early in the morning of October 27 before we found out what put them there. Having chosen to impose another news blackout in our home from Monday afternoon on (it’s been that kind of election season), we went to bed without knowing what had happened, and to whom. And we couldn’t have guessed, or imagined, that it was so close to our own home.
They're not screwing around with police reform in Virginia. Plenty of states and cities are reevaluating the way law enforcement money is spent and how agencies operate following nationwide protests against police brutality, but few of these discussions have resulted in solid changes. There's been more discussion than action. Virginia's governor is all about action, it would appear. As NBC12 reports, a long list of reforms has been signed into law by Governor Ralph Northam.
In truth, the case is not about commission of crime at all.€ It is a cruel, vindictive scam by a shamed empire to punish an honorable and ethical man for having revealed damning truths about its barbaric behavior in brazen, criminal contempt for the laws of peace and war.
Material he published has shown the United States to have been blatantly and contemptibly false to its own people and the world.€ That an individual could be framed and railroaded into a corrupt process contrived to punish him for exposing America’s monstrous crimes is a moral horror that beggars belief, and yet that is the unstated intention of the government of the United States.
Could Bolivia’s election be a harbinger of what the United States may experience around its highly anticipated presidential race? Just as we see in the U.S., officials and observers urged calm in Bolivia ahead of an election where violence was expected. But in the end, the vote went forward in a relatively peaceful manner and the results were clear enough that there is no question of who won.
The October 18 election was a redo of last year’s debacle when Morales resigned after weeks of political turmoil that followed his reelection to a fourth term. The Organization of American States (OAS) questioned Morales’ legitimacy by its now-discredited claims of electoral fraud. Having served for 14 straight years, Morales became Latin America’s longest-serving elected head of state. He denounced the forces pushing for his resignation as “a coup,” and there is plenty of evidence to back that claim. The Washington Post reported last November that right-wing “[p]rotesters ransacked and burned the homes of senior members of Morales’s Movement for Socialism party and, in at least one instance, kidnapped a relative.” They even began burning down election centers, leading Morales to resign as he begged, “stop burning the houses of my brothers and sisters.”
The UK terror threat is to be raised to severe following recent attacks in France and Austria. meaning an attack is 'highly likely'.
It is the fourth highest level set by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre and the Security Service (MI5).
Nehammer said the assailant was armed with an assault rifle and wore a fake suicide vest. He added in later comments to the Austrian news agency APA that the attacker was convicted last year of trying to travel to Syria to join Islamic State.
Police shot the assailant dead, and Nehammer said a search was ongoing Tuesday to see if anyone else was involved in the attack.
The man, described as a 20-year-old Islamist terrorist who had been freed from jail last December, was shot dead by police as he fired on passers-by.
Across the country, from Oakland to Dallas to New York City, organizers with Protect the Results — a joint project of Indivisible and Stand Up America — plan to take to the streets and protest if one of the following scenarios occur,: "If Trump declares victory before all the votes are counted, makes unfounded claims that the election was 'stolen,' tries to stop votes from being counted, or otherwise threatens the integrity of the election or the peaceful transition of power," the organization's toolkit explains. In San Francisco, Protect the Results organizers plan on protesting in front of the Twitter building on Wednesday to put pressure on the tech company to fight disinformation. (Many pundits and politicos predict that Trump will declare victory and/or claim there was widespread voter fraud without evidence, as he did in 2016.)
Many Arakanese in Myanmar’s Rakhine State were optimistic in the lead-up to the country's first openly contested elections in a quarter of a century, in 2015. There’s a stark difference five years on, as 8 November polls are clouded by an escalating civil war and voting cancellations across most of the state. Conflict between the military, known as the Tatmadaw, and the Arakan Army – one of several ethnic armed groups pushing for political autonomy within Myanmar – has displaced roughly 227,000 people since late 2018. Citing insecurity, the government has cancelled voting for approximately 1.2 million, or 73 percent, of the state’s voters. Frustrated by years of marginalisation, many Arakanese? – also known as Rakhine – say they’ve lost faith in a political process that has failed to address long-held grievances, while the conflict has exacerbated animosity towards the government. “The actions and decisions of the government haven't improved anything in my life,” said La Pyae Htun, 28, a rice farmer from Kyauktaw, a northern township hit hard by the conflict. “After the war started, I lost my trust in the government.” There’s a growing belief that the Arakan Army is more likely to deliver change than the electoral system – which many say is stacked in favour of the military and Myanmar’s majority Bamar population.
The news tsunami of the nail-biting American election is, unsurprisingly, drowning out coverage of other crises. But the rest of the world continues to have plenty to worry about. As US election results started to flow in overnight, online media database GDELT – which crawls a huge range of news websites – recorded a peak of more than 4,000 articles mentioning “Trump” or “Biden” over a 15-minute period. The surge – up from around 800-900 articles every 15 minutes in the previous 24 hours – dwarfed coverage of everything else, including news from humanitarian emergencies and crisis hotspots around the globe. One example: News broke from Ethiopia overnight signalling the start of a possible civil war in the country of over 100 million. By 1430 GMT, the number of articles tracked by GDELT worldwide mentioning Ethiopia was peaking at 23 articles.
Welcome to the second episode of Rethinking Humanitarianism, a joint 10-part series with The New Humanitarian and the Center for Global Development. In our first episode, we looked at some of the ethical, financial, and operational challenges the humanitarian sector is increasingly facing. Now, for our second episode, we’re asking how we got to this point. If aid were a superhero, what would its origin story sound like? Which problems was it initially set up to solve, and how are they different from the problems today? The answers to these questions should help us understand why efforts at reform have fallen short in the past. Join hosts Heba Aly, director of The New Humanitarian, and Jeremy Konyndyk, senior policy fellow at the Center for Global Development, as they take you back to the early days of aid.
Yesterday, as most of the nation turned its focus to the presidential election, a coalition of environmental and community organizations wrote to Pennsylvania’s environmental regulators, asking them to either reject those permits or allow more time for public review of the proposed changes, which were disclosed in state filings in early€ October.
A plan to dump a million tonnes of radioactive water from the Fukushima disaster off Japan is alarming local people.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Monday denounced the “audacity” of oil giant Shell after it waded into the global discussion about the climate crisis by asking members of the public what they would do to reduce carbon emissions.
If Biden is able to withstand this fossil fuel industry juggernaut and win the election, it should send a clear signal to him and the Democratic party that they can take on Big Oil and emerge triumphant.
Skeleton's production is located in Germany, but IT, electronics and electrical engineering are located in Tallinn's Ulemiste City. Approximately 90 people work in Germany and more than 50 people in Estonia, and the company plans to grow rapidly in the coming years.
A total of more than €93 million has been invested in the company.
The real Yellowstone region has its own border conflicts and troubles. Here in the real world, we are dealing with:
We don’t need a fictionalized Yellowstone to brew up real trouble.
In those instances where local opposition to a conservation measure is mild or does not exist, it probably means the proposal will be ineffective or worse—even set real conservation backward.
Nevertheless, many environmentalists now believe that due to regional parochialism and lack of historical context, significant compromises are necessary to win approval for new conservation initiatives.
In the days and weeks ahead, I imagine that I will either breathe a sigh of relief or else take deep breaths and prepare for four more years of Donald Trump, the Republican faithful, the Proud Boys and more protests, marches and outrage. November 4th€ will also be like almost any other€ day. I will get up, take my meds, make breakfast, check my messages and get to work.
No matter who wins, nothing big on the horizon will change immediately. The police will go on shooting Black people, drones will kill long distance, gamblers will lose money in Las Vegas and the temperature of the air and the water will keep on rising. It’s too late to buy guns and form militia or stockpile suicide pulls. There’s no place on the planet where one can run to and hide from civil wars, drug wars, cold wars and hot wars. They’re almost everywhere, and borders are more difficult to€ cross then ever before. In 1964 I escaped to England. That option no longer exists.
And here was the odd thing. I felt trapped, too. In some way, I felt lost. As I put it then (and this should have a familiar ring to it, even if, in 1973, I was only referring to the TV version of the news), “That screen haunted my life. Somehow I wanted to shatter it and discover new, more human reference points, a true center of gravity.” I had the urge to break out of that world of mine and do the all-American thing, the Jack Kerouac thing: go “on the road.”
So Peter and I set out on that famed American road, traveling from campgrounds to fast-food restaurants, carnival midways to Old Faithful, only to find ourselves trapped in what I called “the increasing corporate control not just of people on the job, but on their vacations, in their leisure hours.” I found myself interviewing, and him photographing, what I came to think of as a “population of disoriented nomads” — mostly lower-middle-class and working-class Americans, confused and angry, “pushed aside,” as I wrote then, by “forces they feel are beyond their control.” We were, it turned out, on someone else’s road entirely.
Welcome to The Nation‘s running Election Day issue-spotter log. Today, we’ll be keeping an eye on the news and trying to keep you informed about challenges to people exercising their right to vote. If anything breaks, we’ll let you know and give some brief analysis about what is happening.
Well, I have two possible headlines ready for after Tuesday’s election. My hoped-for one says: “White Evangelicals Fail to Re-Elect Trump.” But if the dismal alternative happens, the other says: “Bigotry Prevails.”
I fervently wish that the era of born-again whites tipping elections to Republicans finally is ending. Religion is collapsing rapidly in America. Southern Baptists have lost two million members since 2005. Overall church membership has fallen 20 percent in two decades, according to Gallup. In a forthcoming book, researcher Ronald Inglehart says supernatural faith is dropping faster in America than in any other western democracy. Both Barna and LifeWay surveys find that two-thirds of youths raised in church drop out in their twenties.
The police, said one resident who reported the markings, "wanted to make sure it wasn't a water line or a utilities thing. They said, 'No, this is definitely not.'"
"Trump is trying to steal the election, more blatantly than any previous president, and providing a clear preview of how Republicans would move to further erode democracy if given another four years in power."
"Donald Trump can tweet, and he can pout, and he can make whatever statements he wants to make. But this election will not be over here in Pennsylvania until we can deduce the will of the people."
"It's about voting on behalf of our community, our society, our country, and most importantly, to restore our democracy."
Something’s happening in Texas. Before today’s election, 9.7 million Texans had already voted—108 percent of total ballots cast there in the last presidential election. In just four years, Texas has catapulted from second-to-last in voter turnout to a national leader in early voting. This is no coincidence. Now that this once-red state is emerging as a toss-up, residents are turning out in record numbers, believing that their votes will finally have a meaningful effect on the presidential election. Though this is a tremendous success story, it also underlines one of our Constitution’s greatest failures: Under the Electoral College, some votes matter far more than others.
Support independent cartooning: join€ Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s€ Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!
This election isn't just about choosing the lesser evil; it's about choosing a more advantageous field upon which to wage battle.
Desecration and theft of lawn signs in support of Republicans or Democrats are reported in many American neighborhoods this year, with Democrats being particularly unsettled by what they regard as an existential threat. (Although their experience surrounding this issue is trifling compared to what Black, Jewish, and Muslim minorities historically encountered, and still face.)
I appreciate the panic aroused by gatherings of armed Trump supporters. But perhaps fears manifest around lost lawn signs by these mainly white middle class folks are exaggerated and misplaced.
As the year 2020 descends from bad to awful to terrible, the U.S.A. is going through a Chernobyl of its own. The disaster began in November of 2016, and the toxic spillage has poisoned the land and will continue to do so for what feels like the next thousand years.
I learned that the stumbling, then middling, and finally desperate efforts to contain the Chernobyl disaster were not unlike Trump’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic. “It will go away” was his first response, “We’re doing a great job” was the response as things began to unravel, and finally, “stop thinking about it” became the mantra, now that the USA is the runaway #1 in cases, in lies, and in deaths.
All five votes cast in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, one of the first places in the country to cast, count and report its votes, have been called for Joe Biden this morning. The people of this small township near the Canadian border cast their votes shortly after midnight and announce their results hours before most polls open.
Dirge /derj/ noun: A lament for the dead; music accompanying a funeral rite
This is the first time in decades of voting that I’ve been struck in the pit of my belly with fear because of an election and the potential of a chaotic aftermath. Trump is the cause of the fear – fear for my country – and not only because of his candidacy. It’s his repeated flagrant irresponsible warnings about the election. And what he will do if he loses.
He has said the election is “rigged.” He has said time and again that mail-in voting will lead to fraud even though fraudulent voting in this country is rare. He has told his armed, white buddies, the Proud Boys to “stand back, stand by.” That statement has stirred fear of post-election violence.
While most eyes are trained on the contest between President Trump and Joe Biden, down-ballot races and state ballot measures will also have major consequences for racial justice, immigration, reproductive rights and more. “The issues and policies that affect people day in and day out are often determined on the bottom of the ballot,” says Ronald Newman, the national political director for the American Civil Liberties Union.
In July 2019, the EHRC announced that it was investigating the party “after receiving a number of complaints of allegations of antisemitism within the Party.” It proceeded to look at whether the Party had committed unlawful acts; handled complaints of antisemitism “in a lawful, efficient and effective way”; had adequate complaints handling, investigatory and disciplinary processes that were efficient and effective, “including whether appropriate sanctions have been or could be applied”; and whether steps were taken by the Party “to implement the recommendations made in the Chakrabarti, Royall and Home Affairs Committee Reports.”
The EHRC report released on October 29 identified, in the words of the Interim Chair, Caroline Waters, “specific examples of harassment, discrimination and political interference in our evidence” and “a lack of leadership within the Labour Party on these issues, which is hard to reconcile with its stated commitment to a zero-tolerance approach to antisemitism.” The executive summary pointed to “serious failings in leadership and an adequate process for handling antisemitism complaints” across the Party”, including “multiple failures in the systems it uses to resolve them.” Three breaches of the Equality Act were identified, covering political interference in complaints of antisemitism complaints; the inadequate provision of training to those handling such complaints and cases of harassment.
The question at hand: Should the networks act as gatekeepers and decline to broadcast Trump's claims, unfiltered, to tens of millions of Americans, or is their role to show news as it happens?
The German bank, according to sources who spoke with Reuters, is angling to cut ties with the U.S. president.
Harvard’s Institute of Politics (10/26/20) reported last week that 63% of€ respondents aged 18–29 said they will “definitely be voting,” highlighting the “contrast to 47% during this same time in 2016.” Despite this increase of young people planning to vote, corporate media have largely forgotten about them in the weeks leading up to the election.
Since a number of key states will not reach a final tally of mail-in ballots until the end of the week. Trump may have a majority of the popular vote that’s been counted on election night — something known as the “red mirage.” Most mail-in votes will be added later in the week. Trump will say they are fraudulent and that counting them would be unlawful.
This situation drives Trump to say that the Supreme Court will decide the election. His strategy after Election Day will rely on (1) invalidating as many mail-in ballots as possible; (2) blocking enough states from certifying their electors that the election is thrown into the House of Representatives; and (3) asking the Supreme Court to rule on which slates of electors must be accepted.
"This is exactly the problem," added Rep. Pramila Jayapal. "Republicans who are silent are enabling all this behavior and we will not forget that."
America needs a 28th Amendment that establishes an absolute right to vote for all citizens who’ve achieved the age of majority.
"If one solitary ballot goes undelivered, DeJoy should be ordered to show cause as to why he should not be held in contempt," said one legal analyst.€
A federal judge ordered the United States Postal Service (USPS) on Tuesday to “sweep” its facilities for any remaining ballots to make sure that all ballots are delivered by election deadlines.
The last time US Senator John Cornyn was up for reelection in 2014, he skated to a third term with 62 percent of the vote—outperforming every other statewide GOP candidate on the ballot who had a contested election in Texas.
Early last year, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (which has more than its fair share of inexplicable decisions) released an inexplicable decision. The appeal arose from a lower court's dismissal of an injured cop's lawsuit against multiple parties over injuries he sustained when a protester threw a chunk of concrete at him.
This is the most important Election Day since the Civil War.
Time is running out to act on global heating. Electing Donald Trump the first time cost us dearly; a second term would be catastrophic.
Vehicular rallies near polling stations represent a type of voter intimidation that "we haven't seen in our prior federal elections," said one scholar.€
"Every election is a climate election."
While Republican lawyers work overtime to have counts stopped and legal, filled-out ballots destroyed, the president tries to scare opposing voters away.€ €
During final get-out-the-vote rally before Election Day, the Vermont senator said "we must have the courage to think big, not small."
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell won reelection to his office on Tuesday night, with voters in Kentucky sending him back to Washington for a record-setting seventh term.
Marjorie Taylor Green, a QAnon-supporting Republican candidate competing for a U.S. House district in Georgia, has won her race.
The Kentucky Republican fends off challenge from centrist Democrat Amy McGrath.
"It's how we all thought they would do it. It's what they said they wouldn't do. And it's exactly what they are doing."
Aside from the coronavirus pandemic, this year has also seen unprecedented mass uprisings against the US’s white supremacist police state after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis. However, throughout the ongoing protests this year, corporate media seemed to take every opportunity to vilify the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement by spinning the protesters—rather than the racist and authoritarian US regime they are protesting against—as the primary instigators of violence and theft, in addition to preemptively blaming them for Trump’s reelection.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said on Tuesday morning that residents of Flint, Michigan, are receiving robocalls claiming that the voting lines are too long and instructing them to vote on Wednesday instead (when votes will no longer be counted).
"Don't believe the lies! Have your voice heard!" tweeted Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel after voters in Flint were hit with robocalls claiming they should wait until Wednesday to vote.€
What is so€ threatening in the attachment that would make people say itis absolutely not true? Over the years I have come to believe€ that what most antiwar activists do is expose National Shame.
So, whenever the truth threatens one core belief system, there€ is an urgent need to deny its reality. Patriotism is a powerful€ word in the American psyche. So, whenever someone is very€ critical of our present or historical past, to the point of exposing€ National Shame, the first thing the cultural system does is shun the€ person, group, or organization that would ever utter such a blasphemous€ opinion. We are our core belief system, and we will do anything to protect€ those core emotional values. All you have to do is look at churches across€ America who display the American flag. God and Country is the rock of€ salvation. So, when activists expose the Lie, they are shown the door, with€ or without handcuffs. Antiwar protesters are seen as fanatics and unpatriotic.
Bright copper spray tans and cameras a’rolling. Dissing reporters and Internet trolling. Deducting fake losses – hey, who taxes kings? These are a few of his favorite things.
Greasy cheeseburgers in wax-paper wrappers. Maundering speeches for zombie-eyed clappers. Coulter and Ingraham and bottle-blonde flings These are a few of his favorite things.
More than 800,000 people with phone numbers tied to six presidential swing states have been targeted with automated phone calls on Tuesday suggesting they remain at home on Election Day, a tactic that has alarmed voters and has drawn the attention of the FBI, documents and interviews show.
All told, more than 3 million calls were made to people across the country on Tuesday, instructing them to “stay safe and stay home,” according to data and call recordings provided by the firm TelTech, which owns the RoboKiller smartphone app. One message, only a few seconds long, delivers the message in a monotone, robotic voice.
The 2020 general election is on pace to have the highest turnout rate in over a century, with nearly 100 million ballots cast early — nearly three-quarters of the 2016 vote total. We look at how Latinx voters could play a key role in deciding the presidency and who controls the Senate. Many key battleground states, including Florida, Texas, Arizona and Pennsylvania, have large Latinx communities. Many polls show Biden is not doing as well among Latinx voters as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, and one recent poll in Florida showed a majority of Latinx voters supported Trump over Biden. “The Latino vote will be the single most important factor in this election,” says Chuck Rocha, a former campaign adviser to Bernie Sanders. “More Latinos will vote in this election than anytime in the history of America.” We also speak with Maria Hinojosa, award-winning journalist and founder of Futuro Media, who says young Latinx voters like her daughter are extremely motivated. “They are the ones who are saying, ’I’m absolutely voting. … I’m voting as if my life depended on it.’”
Award-winning journalist Maria Hinojosa joins us to discuss her new book, “Once I Was You: A Memoir of Love and Hate in a Torn America,” which tells the story of U.S. immigration through her own journey to the United States from Mexico as a small child to her groundbreaking work as a reporter. She says it wasn’t until the height of the family separation crisis under the Trump administration that she learned about her own family’s near-separation by U.S. immigration agents. “That was almost you,” Hinojosa says her mother told her through tears. “The babies that have been taken, they almost did that to you.”
This is the day that should mark the beginning of the end of the torturous presidency of Donald John Trump. But replacing Trump with Joe Biden is an entirely insufficient goal for a moment in history so perilous as the one in which the United States’ 59th quadrennial presidential election is being conducted. This is also the day when Mitch McConnell’s vice grip on the United States Senate can be broken.
Over the past four years, we’ve taken to the streets to raise our voices – from protecting the sovereignty of Indigenous land and water, to demanding an end to systemic racism and police brutality, to fighting back against nonstop attacks on reproductive freedom, and so much more. This unprecedented wave of activism has made one thing clear: The American people are fired up.And now we are taking that momentum to the ballot box. We are voting not only for ourselves and our family’s future, but for our community, for those whose votes have been suppressed, and for the survival of American democracy itself.€
Acclaimed poet and activist Nikki Giovanni has a new collection of poems called “Make Me Rain,” a celebration of her Black heritage, as well as an exploration of racism and white nationalism. In the poem “Vote,” Giovanni offers her thoughts on the importance of voting. It was filmed by The Meteor, a feminist collective of activists, journalists and creators, part of a daily Instagram series focusing on voting rights.
The current U.S. and Bulgarian administrations already have some unflattering features in common. Both Trump and Borisov run their countries with systems of favoritism, awarding large government contracts to personal connections with few accountability measures. They have both collapsed the separation of powers.
So we've finally got here. That bit in an Olympic marathon where the runners enter the stadium for the last 400 metres on the track, straining aching muscles and tired bodies to sprint to the finish.
It's been an extraordinary, sometimes unsettling, certainly unimaginable (who had global pandemic on their bingo card?) election campaign and trying to figure out what happens next it is all crystal clear to me.
There are three possible scenarios, and I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised if any of them came to pass (actually there's a fourth scenario, but I'll get to that later).
Having reported on this president's effort to buy Greenland, and when the Danes refused to sell to the former property developer, watched as the president cancelled a state visit in revenge; having learnt that he paid off a porn star just before the last election; having been in Helsinki and listened to him saying he preferred to believe Russian President Vladimir Putin who was standing next to him than he did his intelligence agencies; having seen him investigated, impeached and then cleared; having watched him drive past me outside the Walter Reed Hospital when he was infectious with coronavirus; having been called "another beauty", just for saying I was from the BBC, I really have come to realise that anything can happen, and frequently does.
So let's come to the three possible scenarios.
Our campaign has just begun to organize and fight for real solutions to the life-or-death issues of climate, poverty, racism, and nuclear war for which the two-capitalist-party system of corporate rule has no solutions. We are running out of time on these issues. Real solutions can’t wait.
In the immediate days ahead, our campaign will be in the courts and in the streets if necessary to fight for full and accurate vote counts so the real winners of this year’s elections take office.
Regardless of the relative balance of power after this election between the two corporate parties in the presidency, the Senate, the House, and the state houses, our campaign will mobilize support for our demands and for Green and independent socialist candidates in the next election cycle.
We will not be waiting for future elections to mobilize support for our demands. We will be educating the public, building coalitions, and mobilizing actions to advance our program.
To advance this program, we need more than single-issue organizations and campaigns that compete with each other for attention, time, and money. We need to build a political party that brings issues and constituencies around a common program and mutual support.
Building that party must become a common effort of Green and other independent socialist and progressive parties and groups who want a united mass party of the working people and all who love peace, justice, freedom, and the environment.
Americans are turning out in what is projected to be record-breaking numbers to vote in the US presidential election that some believe will lead to further division to the country facing the worse public health crisis in a century.
Americans braved long queues and strict Covid safety measures to make their choice between incumbent president Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, former vice president, Joe Biden.
The ongoing struggle for racial justice. The future for immigrant families. The health and well-being of all Americans. The very fate of our fragile planet. The United States faces a crossroads in this year’s elections. Seeking out the stories flying under the national radar, The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on What’s At Stake, a series of photo essays from across the country through the lenses of independent imagemakers. Follow the whole series here. This installment was produced with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Soon, Aaron Sorkin thinks, we’ll all laugh about this over brunch. Or at least that’s the perspective from which he retells the history of the Chicago Seven in his new film. There are two scenes, midway through, that encapsulate the mission he is committed to: During the trial, Judge Julius Hoffman orders one of the defendants, Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale, bound and gagged after he tells Hoffman to “strongly fuck” himself. It’s a disturbing scene, made more unsettling by the fact that unlike many of the events in the film, this event did, in fact, occur during the actual trial. Although Sorkin alters its timeline (he ties Seale’s outburst to the murder of Chicago BBP chairman Fred Hampton, which occurred later), downplays its severity (Seale was actually gagged for multiple days), and erases Seale’s protestations during the incident, the moment is clearly meant to serve as a searing indictment of Hoffman’s racism and general bias regarding the defendants. Shortly after, we see Youth International Party cofounder Abbie Hoffman (no relation to the judge), when questioned by US Attorney Robert Schultz as to whether he has “contempt for his government,” respond by saying, “I think the institutions of our democracy are wonderful things that right now are populated by some terrible people.”
When I was a child experimenting with language, I pushed the limits of what was allowed and what wasn’t. I remember sitting with my little friend Eddie in the receptionist’s office of Victory Baptist Day School and saying, “If you see Kay…” Eddie finished the round adding, “Tell her I love her.”
The parents of these kids have not been found. De facto orphans now, their lives are blighted. A question that we really need to ask: Why haven’t those who did this been indicted?
This moment connects us in an unbreakable thread to so many of the generations that came before us and came after us—generations who fought invaders, resisted slavery, challenged colonialism, and fought fascism.
The October 30, 2020, episode of CounterSpin was a compendium of archival interviews about Donald Trump and immigration. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Stephen Miller has a special place in Donald Trump’s heart. A public relations flack who hijacked the Department of Homeland Security in his early 30s, Miller has long exerted outsize influence on his boss because of his particular brand of expertise in the issue that got Trump elected: immigration. In a March 2019 meeting about a rise in border apprehensions, Trump indicated that he was frustrated with everyone else. “Stephen’s in charge,” he said. Miller referred to it in a subsequent conversation with a former senior administration official who worked closely with him on immigration issues as his “coronation.”
While most eyes are trained on the contest between President Trump and Joe Biden, down-ballot races and state ballot measures will also have major consequences for racial justice, immigration, reproductive rights and more. “The issues and policies that affect people day in and day out are often determined on the bottom of the ballot,” says Ronald Newman, the national political director for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Last week a court in Tajikistan ruled that a young woman who spoke publicly about sexual harassment she suffered and the newspaper that covered her harrowing story should pay damages to her alleged abuser. Yes, you read that right: The alleged perpetrator of workplace abuse did not simply avoid being held accountable, a judge granted his demand that the woman who dared complain about his harassment and the journalists who investigated her claims owe him monetary compensation.
b The ruling inflicts a painful blow to both press freedom and women’s rights in Tajikistan. But the woman’s unprecedented act of speaking out about physical and verbal abuse that are all too common for women in Tajikistan — and the public outcry that accompanied the case — could be Tajikistan’s first #MeToo moment and thus offers some hope for gradual change.
Space X has begun sending invites out to folks interested in participating in the company's Starlink low-orbit satellite broadband service. Users took to Reddit to note that Starlink is promising users speeds of 50-100 Mbps downstream for about $100 per month, plus $500 down for a connection terminal and antenna. The company is also promising significantly lower latency (20 to 40ms) than what you'll typically see with satellite broadband (often 200ms or higher). The best part, no monthly usage caps and overage fees (so far):
As we wait for a life-saving COVID vaccine, each new day reminds us of the inequalities that the pandemic has laid bare. 30% of public school children lack internet or a computer at home, making school reopenings an urgent priority. Black and brown people, are dying at a much higher rate from Covid due to a complex set of factors, and are at higher risk of lacking access to prescription drugs because of cost.
Though only one part of the larger innovation ecosystem, the patent system has an important role to play in advancing inclusive innovation. Below we build on the USPTO’s recent leadership and the AIA’s recent inclusionary policies (regional offices, pro se/bono supports, fee discounts) to provide a few ideas: being a beacon for the innovation needs of underrepresented populations, addressing the patent grant gap experienced by small inventors, diversifying inventorship by diversifying the patent bar, and developing and reporting innovation equity metrics. These ideas draw upon the paper by one of us, Inequalities, Innovation, and Patents and earlier work, and the ongoing efforts at the USPTO to “broaden the innovation community.”
[...]
Though only one part of the larger innovation ecosystem, the patent system’s long-standing commitment to a diversity of inventors and equal opportunity position it well to answer the call of the current moment, for greater inclusion in innovation. We encourage readers with concrete ideas about how to advance inclusion in innovation, through the patent or other governmental levers, to submit them to the DayOneProject, which is collecting ideas for action for the next administration. For more, also check out the recent Brookings Report on Broadening Innovation by Michigan State Prof. Lisa Cook, a leading economist (see, e.g. the NPR Planet Money podcast, Patent Racism, about her work).
Bio-Rad’s U.S. Patent No. 8,889,083 is particularly directed to a microfluidic system. The claims require “a non-fluorinated microchannel.” But, it turns out that 10X’s product uses a fluorinated microchannel. This automatically raises the issue of vitiation and thus 10X’s question “Whether a claim term written in binary form is vitiated by an equivalent that is the opposite of that term.”
[...]
Damages 1 vs 3: The jury found infringement of three separate patents. However, on appeal the Federal Circuit reversed claim-construction for two of the patents and thus vacated the infringement judgment. Although the damages verdict was based upon three patents, the appellate panel affirmed “the entirety of the jury’s damages award” even after finding no infringement for two of the patents. The court explained: “The jury verdict and jury instructions show that the damages award is not predicated on infringement of any one patent.”
The European Patent Convention (EPC) does not contain a provision explicitly addressing this issue. At most, Article 139 states that each member state is able to decide whether or not to allow the cumulative protection of the same invention by a national patent and a European patent validated in that country. In France, for example, this is not allowed.
The EPO's approach has been defined by case law. In its landmark decisions G 1/05 and G 1/06, the Enlarged Board of Appeal determined the framework within which the EPO may reject an application on the grounds of double patenting, stating (13.4):
“The Board accepts that the principle of prohibition of double patenting exists on the basis that an applicant has no legitimate interest in proceedings leading to the grant of a second patent for the same subject-matter if he already possesses one granted patent.”
The notion of legitimate interest thus introduced has served as a reference for determining in a number of cases whether a patent could be granted on the basis of claims of a scope similar to a higher or a lesser degree to the scope of claims of an already granted patent.
In particular, the Enlarged Board of Appeal, in its decision G 2/10, considered legitimate that an applicant first seeks protection for a preferred mode of performance and then pursues broader claims in a divisional application.
Concerning the notion of 'same subject matter', which must be assessed on a case-by-case basis, it was decided in T 1391/07 that an objection of double patenting cannot be raised in the cases of partially overlapping protection.
In this week’s Patent News – Indian Designs added to WIPO Global Design Database; EPO invalidates Amgen’s patent claims protecting drug – Praluent, rules in favor of Sanofi and Regeneron; TikTok Inc. files suit for declaratory relief against Triller; Jury verdict directs Apple to pay $500 million to VirnetX by way of damages; UK IPO publishes information on the changes to UK intellectual property law from 1st January 2021; USPTO hosts ID5 6th Annual Meeting, commemorates the 5th anniversary of the ID5 forum; SAIP organizes IP20+ Global Intellectual Property Challenges Forum and other news updates.
There was also room for discussion on the Unified Patent Court, judicial changes, and the hope that things can return to normal soon amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
UKIPO requests opinions on AI’s influence on intellectual property – The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has published a request for opinions on how artificial intelligence (AI) might affect IP policy. The UKIPO originally launched a call for views on 7 September that asked how AI and machine learning techniques will affect patents, copyrights, designs, trademarks and trade secrets. In the trademark section, the UKIPO is particularly interested in how trademarks will be affected if AI becomes a primary form with which products are purchased, removing consumer interaction and how this will affect issues such as likelihood of confusion. Another set of questions concern liability for infringement and whether an AI can be found at fault for infringement. The deadline for responses is 30 November 2020. (JW)
A lot has happened in the four years since the UK voted to leave the EU.
The UK has had three prime ministers, three Brexit secretaries and two general elections. In the EU, new presidents of the European Council and the European Commission have been elected and a new European Parliament formed.
Elsewhere in the world, former reality TV star Donald Trump became president of the US and a global pandemic begun ripping its way through the world.
Despite all this, the Brexit debate somehow trundles on. Threats of ‘no deal’ and ‘walking away’ from negotiations have been as common as they were on the morning of June 24 2016.
Nevertheless, the end is now in sight. Come midnight on December 31, the transition period – under which EU law and frameworks still apply in the UK – ends (whether there is a deal or not).
In voodoo practice, a zombie is a corpse brought back to life by some supernatural power. I am unaware whether, in 1974, when writing about graveyard and phantom marks in relation to revocation based on absence of use, the late Professor Remo Franceschelli knew about zombies and the notion of zombie marks.
What I do know is that revocation due to lack of use, or expiry because of a missed renewal, may not in itself suffice to make the old mark freely available for registration and use by third parties. This, because some of those old marks are real zombie marks.
Experience shows that, following revocation, there are businesses, unrelated to the erstwhile mark and its business, which scavenge the trademark graveyard, looking for marks that still have commercial potential due to an unusual degree of continuing consumer recognition and loyalty. The goal: build a new business based on these zombie marks.
Indeed, although revoked trademarks look prospectively available on a first come, first serve basis, what scavengers of zombie marks build on is the past. Their interest is what consumers remember about the mark, not in connection with its present owner, but rather because of the lingering association with the owner of the original registration.
A US federal district court has ruled SAS cannot copyright the ideas behind its analytics software, rendering a senior judicial row over national sovereignty between the UK and America largely irrelevant.
Judge Rodney Gilstrap ruled on October 26 that SAS could not copyright the functionality, as distinct from code, of its eponymous suite as part of a long-running dispute with UK-based software firm World Programming Ltd (WPL).
What began more than a decade ago as an unremarkable copyright spat rapidly spiraled into multinational legal warfare, and was last in the headlines when irate British appeal judges accused their US counterparts of infringing British sovereignty and ruled against US-headquartered SAS.
As previously reported, WPL obtained a copy of SAS's analytics product, observed how it worked, and created a competing product using the same basic functions but not the same code. SAS sued in 2010 and, after losing in the UK's courts, tried going over the heads of British judges to the EU. European judges also ruled against SAS in 2012, finding that software functionality is not subject to copyright, so SAS decided to re-run the whole case through American courts.
The Motion Picture Association says that circumvention services such as VPNs, DNS masks and Tor networks can pose a direct threat to legitimate streaming services. In comments submitted to the US Trade Representative, the movie industry group highlights various other piracy challenges around the globe.
Yet this market-based approach – premised on the vision that Canadians can create great content that will be funded, distributed, and available to subscribers who want it – is being replaced by a regulated model in which success depends upon intervention from the government and the CRTC. That new approach will cause harm in the short term, increase consumer costs in the long term, and leave behind a market that perpetuates unfortunate perceptions of Canadian content as a weaker product reliant on government mandated support.
A few minutes ago a panel of judges at the Supreme Court of New Zealand announced that Kim Dotcom and his former Megaupload colleagues can indeed be extradited to the United States to face copyright infringement charges. However, in an unexpected twist, the Court has granted the defendants the ability to challenge the decision via a judicial review.
It's been almost a decade since US and New Zealand forces did a silly made-for-Hollywood (and possibly by Hollywood) raid of Kim Dotcom's home in New Zealand for the crime of running a cloud storage service that some people used for infringing works. Since that time, Dotcom has been fighting extradition charges to the US. The case has taken many crazy twists and turns, including the US government seizing his assets by claiming he's a fugitive, even as he's been going through the standard legal process to determine if extradition is proper (and there's a very strong legal argument it is not even remotely proper).
We have discussed at some length the intersection of copyright laws and antiquated video game preservation. Going back at least a decade now, most of that focus has been on whether the use of emulators and the digitization of games that no longer have systems to run them ought to qualify as fair use. You can couple that with the more recent trend of some museums with a focus on the art of video games seeking to get exceptions to the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules in order to preserve both offline and online games that might otherwise be lost to the ether. When viewed properly through the lens that copyright law exists for the purpose of promoting more culture, not less, it should be immediately obvious that preserving culture in this manner is one of the chief aims of fair use and copyright law in general.
For a year now we've been writing about the disastrous impact of California's AB5 law that was designed to "protect" gig workers by basically outlawing nearly all freelance work in California, and requiring much of it to be only done by salaried employees. It has impacted many industries very hard, including freelance journalists. The author of the bill, Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez has been insultingly dismissive of those who have highlighted how much harm her bill has done.
