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Links 12/11/2020: Next Debian Theme, Proxmox Backup Server 1.0



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Linux on Tiger Lake: System76 Lemur Pro and Galago Pro laptops updated with Tiger Lake CPUs

        System76 is one of the few companies that sells laptops sporting the latest hardware with Linux installed out of the box. The retailer just refreshed its popular Lemur Pro and Galago Pro thin-and-lights with Intel’s new 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPUs.

        The new Tiger Lake-equipped laptops come about 8 months after their last refresh, which introduced Comet Lake chips. Tiger Lake has shown itself to be a good upgrade from Comet Lake, primarily in the graphics department.

        The new Galago Pro can be equipped with either an Intel Core 5-1135G7 or Core i7-1165G7, up to 64 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM (2x32 GB), and up to a 2 TB PCIe Gen4 SSD. Users can also opt for an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 for an extra US$150, though that configuration won’t ship until early December. Otherwise, the laptop will use Intel’s Iris Xe Graphics.

        The Lemur Pro has the same CPU and PCIe Gen 4 SSD options but is limited to 40 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM as 8 GB is soldered to the motherboard. This also means the only dual-channel RAM option is 16 GB (2x8 GB). The Lemur Pro also lacks a discrete GPU option. However, it has an extra PCIe Gen 3 slot for another SSD up to 2 TB.

      • System76 Lemur Pro thin and light Linux laptop gets Tiger Lake refresh

        Linux PC company System76 is updating its Lemur Pro thin and light laptop with a new version that supports up to an Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor.

        The new model comes about half a year after the company released a version powered by a less powerful Intel Comet Lake processor… and the upgrade from 10th-gen to 11th-gen Intel Core chips does come with a price.

        The new System76 Lemur Pro sells for $1199 and up, which is $100 higher than the starting price of the old version.

      • PAPPL 1.0 Beta Released For Ultimately Replacing CUPS Printer Driver

        The open-source CUPS printing system is stagnate since Michael Sweet left Apple but the CUPS founder hasn't left the printing scene. He's been spending most of the year working on the PAPPL framework. This is a C-based framework for developing CUPS Printer Applications and aims to be a replacement for printer drivers. PAPPL is designed for uses such as with the LPrint and Gutenprint projects. LPrint is a label printer application also by Michael Sweet while Gutenprint are drivers for use with CUPS and GIMP.

    • Server

      • Terraform vs Ansible: What's the Difference?

        The way DevOps as a culture is gaining momentum, tools like Ansible and Terraform witnessing a huge demand and popularity.

        Both tools are considered as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions which helps in deploying code and infrastructure. While Ansible acts as a configuration management solution commonly abbreviated as “CM”, Terraform is a service orchestration or provisioning tool.

        Note that there are overlaps and these terms are not necessarily mutually exclusive. This is what confuses people and this is why I am going to compare Ansible and Terraform.

        I'll explain what are these tools used for, what are their pros and cons. This will help you decide whether you should use Ansible or Terraform in your projects.

      • An Introduction to the Kubernetes Operator Pattern (YouTube)

        Earlier this year I did a short talk for Halihax, a local technology community, providing an introduction to the Kubernetes operator pattern. This was my first attempt at giving any kind of a talk (outside of demos at work), but hopefully it will prove useful to someone out there.

      • Sysadmin tales: Take a look back at an old school IT prank | Enable Sysadmin

        Set your Wayback Machine to the early ’80s. Disco was dead and gone, pop rock was making waves, and consumer computers were available enough that some schools started figuring out that teaching computers was something they should do.

        My school was one of those—the lovely Manheim Township High School in Neffsville, PA. A classroom was repurposed as a computer lab, as the prior computer area was barely larger than a closet and only had four terminals connected to some type of "miniframe" computer, with one Apple II computer on a rolling cart.

        [...]

        Now, the cable to connect the computer to the monitor was pre-VGA; it was just a simple RCA connector, as everything was monochrome. No screws to help hold the connector on tight. My friend and I (I don’t recall who had the idea, but I’d like to think it was me) decided to cross-wire all the monitors, so the monitor for one seat was connected to the computer at another seat. We did it side-by-side where we had to, but the ones on the island were really fun as we could connect them so the computer on one side of the table would drive the monitor on the other side of the table.

      • Create your first Knative app | Opensource.com

        Knative is an open source community project that adds components to Kubernetes for deploying, running, and managing serverless, cloud-native applications. It enables more productive development with less interaction with Kubernetes' infrastructure.

        There is a large amount of information out there about Knative, networking, and serverless deployments, and this introductory tutorial covers just a bite-size amount of it. In this walkthrough, I'll use Knative with Minikube to create a Knative app—a simple container that prints messages in response to a curl command or in a web browser at a link provided by the deployment.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • Linux Is Linux, Just Pick A Distro Already - YouTube

        Today I wanted to talk about why linux distro reviews honestly just make for really boring content, and even when they are well put together they don't the amount of energy required to put them together doesn't really justify them.

      • Destination Linux 199: Linux Hardware Galore with Raspberry Pi, Nvidia & Dell - Destination Linux

        On this week’s episode of Destination Linux, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released a new exciting Pi and an Nvidia entering the arena as well with their own Pi-like competitor. We’ve got some great news this week from Dell as they are pushing to improve privacy on their laptops for use with Linux. In our gaming section we give Noah that first person shooter, 360 no scope throwback that he’s been asking for and of course we have our popular tips/tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux.

      • FLOSS Weekly 604: Learning from the Apache Way

        Hadrian Zbarcea is a champion for open source for the last 15 years. He is a member and VP at the Apache Software Foundation. He is the founder of Apifocal and has involvement in designing massive scale messaging and integration platforms for many organizations. Hadrian is passionate about leveraging open source technologies to build services that streamline access to essential and relevant data. Hosts Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennett discuss with Hadrian the open-source culture and "The Apache Way." They also discuss the value of asynchronous email and decentralization and why we should strive to have more asynchronous and decentralized open-source options.

      • The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 880

        3d printing stuff, star wars, youtube issues, arm macs

      • Unfettered Freedom, Ep. 11 - High Priority FSF, Linux Ransomware, Best Distros 2020, Gimp, NCoC - YouTube

        Unfettered Freedom is a video podcast that focuses on news and topics about GNU/Linux, free software and open source software.

      • ARMed & Dangerous | Coder Radio 387

        Our first reactions to Apple's ARM event, how these new systems will impact developers, and if we're buying one.

    • Kernel Space

      • Intel Begins Sending Out Linux Support Patches For CXL 2.0 - Phoronix

        Just a day after the CXL 2.0 specification was published, the initial Linux kernel support for this updated Compute Express Link revision was sent out for review.

        Longtime open-source Intel Linux developer Ben Widawsky sent out the initial kernel patches for CXL 2.0. The initial focus is on the type-3 memory devices defined by the CXL 2.0 specification that serves as a memory expander for RAM or persistent memory. These initial CXL 2.0 patches are still a work-in-progress but seem to be making good progress given the punctual review process beginning.

        Those nine kernel patches so far around the CXL 2.0 memory support amount to just over thirteen hundred lines of new code.

        Widawsky also sent out a set of 25 patches to the QEMU developers in working on the CXL 2.0 emulation support. They are leveraging QEMU to move forward on the CXL 2.0 bring-up while awaiting capable hardware and also being an ideal environment for regression testing.

      • ASUS Offers First Motherboard Firmware Update Via LVFS+Fwupd For Linux Users - Phoronix

        ASUS has been evaluating the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for distributing firmware updates to their Linux customers for flashing in turn via Fwupd. Their first motherboard firmware update has now been volleyed onto this open-source platform for easing firmware updates on Linux.

      • Relief for insomniac tracepoints

        The kernel's tracing infrastructure is designed to be fast and to interfere as little as possible with the normal operation of the system. One consequence of this requirement is that the code that runs when a tracepoint is hit cannot sleep; otherwise execution of the tracepoint could add an arbitrary delay to the execution of the real work the kernel should be doing. There are times, though, that the ability to sleep within a tracepoint would be handy, delays notwithstanding. The sleepable tracepoints patch set from Michael Jeanson sets the stage to make it possible for (some) tracepoint handlers to take a nap while performing their tasks — but stops short of completing the job for now. Within the kernel, the tracing machinery has no need to sleep; its task is normally to package up the data associated with a given tracepoint and place the result into a ring buffer for transport to user space. This work can be accomplished without the need to wait for any outside events. The use cases driving the push for sleepable tracepoints thus must come from elsewhere — from BPF programs attached to tracepoints by user space, in particular. These programs are currently limited to accessing data in kernel space, which can always be done without the need to sleep. There would be value, though, in the ability to look at user-space data in a tracepoint handler as well. This data is not guaranteed to be resident in RAM when the handler tries to access it; should it not be present, a page fault will result. Handling page faults can take an arbitrary amount of time, during which the faulting process must be put to sleep.

        In current kernels, this possibility prevents access to user-space data from tracepoint handlers. Specifically, it means that tracers cannot dereference pointers passed from user space. Thus, for example, a tracepoint running on entry to the openat2() system call can see the pointer to the open_how structure passed by user space, but is unable to examine the contents of the structure itself.

        There is nothing about tracepoints that inherently makes sleeping impossible — at least, for those tracepoints that are executed when the kernel is not running in atomic context. But the BPF subsystem has long had its own rule that BPF programs could not sleep. That will change in the 5.10 kernel, though, thanks to the addition of sleepable BPF programs, which no longer have this constraint. Only certain types of BPF programs are allowed to block; in 5.10, tracing programs are on that list. There will be no users of this ability in the 5.10 release, though.

      • Kernel support for processor undervolting

        Current processors can run with any of a number of combinations of frequency and voltage, which can change dynamically in a process called dynamic frequency scaling. Different combinations of frequency and voltage will naturally vary in terms of both the number of instructions executed per second and power consumption. It is possible to place a CPU into a configuration outside of its specified operational envelope; when this is done, the processor may malfunction in a number of ways, from occasional false results from some instructions to a complete crash.

        For some users, lowering the operating voltage is a necessity. Their chips, especially recent Intel laptop models, can overheat while running under high load, for example when compiling a kernel. One solution is to undervolt the processors, making them run at the lower voltage to decrease power consumption (and thus heat generation). As the frequency does not change, the performance of the system stays about the same. Fortunately for those users, tools like intel-undervolt exist to help them in this task. However, they face two difficulties: the values to use are undocumented and vary from one processor to the next, and the kernel prints a worrisome warning every time the tool changes the configuration.

        In the case of Intel chips, the voltage settings are controlled by Model Specific Registers (MSRs), which do not just serve to change the voltage, as MSRs are an interface to many processor settings. On Linux, access to the MSRs from user space is possible using /dev/cpu/CPUID/msr special files. Write access can be disabled, however, via the msr.allow_writes boot-time option or if the kernel is running in lockdown mode. Within the kernel, MSR access requires specific processor instructions and is handled by the msr platform-specific driver. This driver emits a warning when an attempt is made to write to a MSR that is not explicitly listed as being safe to change; it still allows the write to happen, however, if writes are enabled in general.

        Donenfeld's patch silences that warning by adding an entry to the list of safe MSRs. That entry, named MSR_IA32_OC_MAILBOX by the patch, allows changing the processor voltage; it is the register used by intel-undervolt and other similar tools. Interested readers can refer to a background paper on how those registers are configured. Apparently, this work is based on partial documentation and a significant amount of reverse engineering with trial and error.

      • Graphics Stack

        • Linux graphics, why sharing code with Windows isn't always a win.

          A recent article on phoronix has some commentary about sharing code between Windows and Linux, and how this seems to be a metric that Intel likes.

          I'd like to explore this idea a bit and explain why I believe it's bad for Linux based distros and our open source development models in the graphics area.

          tl;dr there is a big difference between open source released and open source developed projects in terms of sustainability and community.

          The Linux graphics stack from a distro vendor point of view is made up of two main projects, the Linux kernel and Mesa userspace. These two projects are developed in the open with completely open source vendor agnostic practices. There is no vendor controlling either project and both projects have a goal of try to maximise shared code and shared processes/coding standards across drivers from all vendors.

          This cross-vendor synergy is very important to the functioning ecosystem that is the Linux graphics stack. The stack also relies in some places on the LLVM project, but again LLVM upstream is vendor agnostic and open source developed.

          The value to distros is they have central places to pick up driver stacks with good release cycles and a minimal number of places they have to deal with to interact with those communities. Now usually hardware vendors don't see the value in the external communities as much as Linux distros do. From a hardware vendor internal point of view they see more benefit in creating a single stack shared between their Windows and Linux to maximise their return on investment, or make their orgchart prettier or produce less powerpoints about why their orgchart isn't optimal.

          A shared Windows/Linux stack as such is a thing the vendors want more for their own reasons than for the benefit of the Linux community.

          Why is it a bad idea?

          I'll start by saying it's not always a bad idea. In theory it might be possible to produce such a stack with the benefits of open source development model, however most vendors seem to fail at this. They see open source as a release model, they develop internally and shovel the results over the fence into a github repo every X weeks after a bunch of cycles. They build products containing these open source pieces, but they never expend the time building projects or communities around them.

          [...]

          A warning then to anyone wishing for more vendor code sharing between OSes it generally doesn't end with Linux being better off, it ends up with Linux being more fragmented, harder to support and in the long run unsustainable.

        • Intel's Graphics Driver Now Sharing ~60% Codebase Between Windows/Linux, 90~100% The Performance

          Intel today is announcing their Server GPU for the data center based on their Xe-LP microarchitecture with an initial focus on high-density, low-latency Android cloud gaming and media streaming. For as exciting as the Intel Server GPU is, some exciting Intel Linux graphics driver details were also disclosed.

          [...]

          Before getting to the exciting Linux bits, Intel also is announcing today that oneAPI Gold will be out in December and they are bringing the Intel Implicit SPMD Program Compiler (ISPC) to run on top of oneAPI Level Zero.

        • Airlie: "Why Sharing Code With Windows Isn't Always A Win"

          Following the news today of Intel sharing ~60% of their GPU driver code-base between Windows and Linux and working to bring the Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) to Mesa in 2021, not everyone is enthusiastic about those prospects.

          David Airlie at Red Hat serves as the DRM co-maintainer for the Linux kernel, contributes significantly to Mesa particularly for Lavapipe/LLVMpipe/Clover, and also is the co-founder of the open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver as well as being involved in the early days of the open-source AMD driver work, among other open-source/Linux accomplishments over the years. Airlie penned a blog post today in response to Intel's news of the increased Windows/Linux code sharing and IGC likely coming to Mesa.

    • Benchmarks

      • AMD Ryzen 7 5800X Linux Performance

        Over the past week we have looked at the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X/5950X Linux performance as well as that of the lower-end -- but still very powerful -- Ryzen 5 5600X. Today we are striking in the middle in looking at the last Zen 3 CPU model for the moment: the Ryzen 7 5800X. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X is a $449 USD processor that is packing eight cores / sixteen threads, a 3.8GHz base clock. 4.7GHz boost clock, 32MB L3 cache, and has a 105 Watt TDP.

        The Ryzen 7 5800X was tested on the same test bed as the other AMD Zen CPUs as shown in recent days with the ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VII HERO WiFi, Corsair 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600, 2TB Corsair Force MP600 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics, and running Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS with the Linux 5.9 kernel. The Linux experience for the AMD Zen 3 testing going on for weeks now has been great. The only real caveats around the Zen 3 Linux support remain: temperature monitoring isn't in place on a stable kernel until next month's Linux 5.10, the AMD_Energy hwmon driver doesn't support these desktop CPUs for energy consumption monitoring, and AMD's compiler engineers have yet to drop the Clang/GCC compiler patches for "znver3" in order to offer the optimized compiler support. Hopefully the Znver3 support will be out soon and last I heard was the early-to-mid November timeframe.

    • Applications

      • 8 Best Free and Open Source Distraction-Free Tools for Writers

        Fans of the typewriter remain a vehement group. They view the typewriter as something really special, a tool which makes the connection between languages.

        One of the attractions of a typewriter is that it offers a distraction-free alternative of modern day methods for producing a document. They challenge the writer to concentrate on what really matters – the content. They force the writer to think.

        In many countries, the typewriter has been firmly consigned to history by the computer. Yet, the computer is jam-packed with distractions. The desktop with its cluttered interface, the chatter of social media, the almost limitless content of the internet, the chirping email notifications, the list of distractions is endless. When writing, concentration is vital.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Linux for beginners: 10 more commands for manipulating files | Enable Sysadmin

        Check out these ten additional commands from a sysadmin to help you learn Linux at the command line.

      • Dog - Command Line DNS Client for DNS Lookup

        Dog is a nice-looking command-line DNS Client for DNS lookup which works like dig. It has colorful output, understands normal command-line argument syntax, supports the DNS-over-TLS and DNS-over-HTTPS protocols, and can emit JSON.

      • How to Install and Configure Cloudera Manager on CentOS/RHEL 7 - Part 3

        In this article, we will explain how to install and configure Cloudera Manager in CentOS 7 server.

      • How to Setup Highly Available NGINX with KeepAlived in Linux

        As we know NGINX is a highly rated web server which can also be used as reverse proxy, load balancer and HTTP cache. In this article, we will demonstrate how to setup highly available (HA) NGINX web server with keepalived in Linux. Keepalived works on VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol) which allows one static IP to be fail-over between two Linux systems.

      • How To Install Trisquel 9.0 Etiona

        This tutorial explains step by step to have your computer with Trisquel 9.0. Don’t worry this is intended for beginners so everyone can try. You will prepare at least two disk partitions and going through about twenty minutes to finish it. For your information, different to Ubuntu, Trisquel supports 32 bit as well as 64 bit computers and I encourage fellow Lenovo ThinkPad owners to try it happily. You can practice this guide either normally, in dualboot mode, bios legacy and uefi, or into external storage device. Last but not least, you can also do this inside a virtual machine like AQEMU. Now let’s go!

      • How to set up Tutanota mail on Linux

        Tutanota is a privacy-based email client and service for Linux and other platforms. It is designed to deliver you an excellent email experience while protecting your email from prying eyes. In this guide, we’ll show you how to install and set it up.

      • How To Install Webmin on Linux Mint 20 - idroot

        In this tutorial we will show you how to install Webmin Linux Mint 20 Ulyana, as well as some extra required package by Webmin

      • Linux File Timestamps Explained With Examples - OSTechNix

        This tutorial explains the types of Linux file timestamps and how to view and change a file's timestamps using touch command with examples.

      • How to install Cemu Emulator on a Chromebook

        Today we are looking at how to install Cemu Emulator on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

      • How to Install Nvidia Drivers on Ubuntu 20.04 | Linuxize

        This article describes how to install the NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu 20.04.

        If your Ubuntu machine has an NVIDIA GPU, you can choose between the open-source driver Nouveau and NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers. By default, Ubuntu uses Nouveau drivers that are generally much slower than the proprietary drivers and lacks support for the latest hardware and software technology.

        Installing NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu is an easy task that can be done in less than a minute. Ubuntu includes a tool that can detect the graphics card model and install the appropriate NVIDIA drivers. Alternatively, you can download and install the drivers from the NVIDIA site.

      • Enforcing Strong Password Criteria Using PWQUALITY

        Cyber-attacks are becoming increasingly ubiquitous and difficult to deal with and Hackers relentlessly try to exploit common weak passwords. As a result, organizations have to safeguard themselves by using strong password criteria to secure their systems. In this article, we’ll take a look at the mechanics of enforcing strong password criteria on a Linux system.

      • Autokey: Make Your Own Keyboard Shortcuts in Linux - Make Tech Easier

        Autokey is a text expansion application for Linux. Learn how you can use Autokey to create shortcuts, hotkeys or automate stuff.

        [...]

        As you get more familiar with Autokey, you’ll find that you can do much more with it. You can automate desktop applications to perform the same tedious tasks without your input or even create your own mini-apps. Let’s see how you can use Autokey to automate your daily life with your computer.

      • Advanced tips and tricks for using sudo - The Linux Juggernaut

        Now that we’ve looked at the basics of setting up a good sudo configuration in this article, we’re confronted with a bit of a paradox. That is, even though sudo is a security tool, certain things that you can do with it can make your system even more insecure than it was. Let’s see how to avoid that.

    • Games

      • 11 of the Best Linux Games in 2020

        There have been many false dawns for Linux gaming, but in recent years things have been improving unabated. The launch of the Proton compatibility layer meant that thousands of DirectX-only games can now be translated to Vulkan and therefore work on Linux, while new Linux-compatible games continue to be released as well. If you want to play Windows-only games on Linux, see our guide on how to set up Proton and Steam Play. If, however, you just want to check out all the best Linux games in 2020 you can play, then read on below.

      • Testing the New Xbox Series X Controller on Linux

        After his recent tribulations with the new Dual Sense Controller (for the Playstation 5) on Linux, cow_killer takes on the latest controller from Microsoft made for the new Xbox Series X. The unboxing and the first few results can be found in the following video:

      • Beamdog need testers for major updates to Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition | GamingOnLinux

        Canadian studio Beamdog who made the Enhanced Editions of Baldur's Gate I & II, Icewind Dale and others are currently testing a huge upgrade for Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition.

        While still using the classic Infinity Engine, Beamdog went through it and upgraded a great many parts for the original release of the Enhanced Editions and it's clearly a labour of love as they continue to fix and tweak them many years after release. They recently announced a huge 2.6 game engine upgrade which will affect all three named titles, and now they're looking for more people to jump in and test.

        To be clear, they confirmed that currently only Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition is ready for testing but since the update notes fixes for all of them it's likely the other two mentioned above will follow along after.

      • Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead releases November 19 with Linux support | GamingOnLinux

        Along with getting a new trailer, it's now confirmed that Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead will be releasing on November 19 with official Linux support. Previously announced during Gamescom 2020, this is the second official Bridge Constructor tie in with an established brand like with Bridge Constructor Portal from 2017 which was genuinely a lot of fun.

        Tweaking the idea once again, to fit in with the theme from AMC’s The Walking Dead you're still building bridges and dealing with physics but this time you will be creating traps, setting bait and all sorts to turn bridges into hilarious walker meat-grinders. Not only that, there's the survivor aspect to it too which once again adjusts the classic Bridge Constructor with a new spin with some fan-favourite characters appearing from The Walking Dead.

      • Zniw Adventure is a sweet new family-friendly cartoon-like point & click out now | GamingOnLinux

        Developed by two people since way back in 2014, Zniw Adventure is a thoroughly charming looking cartoon-styled point and click adventure with a family friendly theme.

        ZA is the story of a young female dinosaur, who's on a quest to find the perfect gift for her mother's hatchday. During Zniw's misadventures, the player will visit several places and encounter various Cretaceous creatures along the way. What looks like a classic straight out of the 90s complete with 4:3 aspect ratio cartoon visuals, hand-drawn backgrounds and frame-by-frame animation it really does look inviting if you love old school adventures.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • LXQt 0.16.0 Review – Lightweight Qt Desktop Environment

        LXQt 0.16.0 released with more improvements and bug fixes. Here we review the changes and take you through the new features of this lightweight Qt desktop environment.

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • Test GNOME apps on this Linux reference platform

          I'm very excited about GNOME 3.38. The new version of the Linux desktop environment includes lots of new features and a noticeable performance boost. But in the background, mostly unnoticed, is another neat new thing about GNOME: the development of GNOME OS.

          As you might guess from its name, GNOME OS is a Linux distribution that uses GNOME as its desktop. But unlike Pop!_OS, Fedora, or Ubuntu, GNOME OS isn't meant as a complete Linux distribution. Instead, it is a reference platform for GNOME.

          The idea is to have a standard operating system image running GNOME to give developers a consistent platform to test on. As GNOME makes new releases, the GNOME development team can share that image with testers, so they can experience the new version.

    • Distributions

      • New Releases

        • Debian-based MX Linux 19.3 now available for download
          There have been many great Linux distro updates lately, such as Ubuntu and Fedora. Today, yet another great operating system gets updated to a new version, this time it is MX Linux 19.3. The Deian-based distribution offers a choice between Xfce 4.14 and KDE Plasma 5.15 for the desktop environment and comes with MESA 18.3.6.

          MX Linux 19.3 comes loaded with some great software, such as GIMP 2.10.12, Firefox 82, VLC 3.0.11, Clementine 1.3.1, and Thunderbird 68.12.0. The reliable LibreOffice 6.1.5 is installed by default, but you can easily update to version 7.x from a repository.

        • MX Linux 19.3 Released: A Midweight Debian and antiX OS Spinoff
          After more than five months of development, the MX Linux team has released a new third point version, 19.3, of its current MX Linux 19 “Patito Feo” series.

          This MX-19.3, a mix of Debian and antiX Linux distros, contains several bug fixes and application updates for all editions featuring either Xfce or KDE Plasma.

        • MX Linux 19.3 is released. What's New and Upgrade Steps

          The finest and stable Linux distribution MX Linux 19.3 was released. We take a look at what's new. Also, this post explains how to download and upgrade MX Linux to its latest build - MX Linux 19.3.

        • Debian 11 Picks Its Default Theme
          For those wondering the outcome of last month's Debian 11 "Bullseye" artwork voting, a new default theme for this 2021 GNU/Linux distribution release has been decided.

          Debian today announced that the winning theme that will be the default Debian 11 desktop artwork is "Homeworld".

        • Meet Proxmox Backup Server, a Debian-Based Open Source Enterprise Backup Solution

          Meet Proxmox Backup Server, an open-source enterprise backup solution that’s easy to manage and comes with great features like support for incremental backups, Zstandard (Zstd) compression, deduplication, as well as authenticated encryption (AE).

          While incremental backups will ensure that the distribution will only read and backup the changes, thus reducing bandwidth and storage space, deduplication and Zstandard compression will avoid redundancy and minimize used storage space.

        • Proxmox Backup Server 1.0

          we are really excited to announce the first stable release of our new Proxmox Backup Server. The open-source enterprise backup solution is another great tool to ease the work in your datacenter and safely back up your most valuable data. We hope you'll like it!

      • Screenshots/Screencasts

      • IBM/Red Hat/Oracle

        • Red Hat Shares ― Automation

          With another successful AnsibleFest behind us (watch the recordings on demand at no cost), we thought automation would be a fitting topic for this issue.

        • Enhancing internet and cloud security with Red Hat's contribution the Guide to IPsec VPNs

          Virtual private network (VPN) technology has changed immensely since the publication of the original Guide to IPsec VPNs (SP 800-77) in 2005. The guide was recently reworked and modernized, and Red Hat engineers lent a hand to updating this important document. The updated document takes into consideration the evolution of cryptography, software and hardware capabilities, as well as virtualization and containerization in today's complex and cloud-based network infrastructure, and presents solid guidance for a modern environment.

          Red Hatters are a longtime contributors and developers of IPsec standards and open source IPsec software. Through this collaboration with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), we go beyond delivering products that are open, interoperable, and compliant to modern security standards, but also help to improve the security of the internet for everyone.

          [...]

          The update guide’s intended audience is network administrators and architects. Those who are fairly familiar with the IPsec (and IKE) protocol can find a quick overview of the changed FIPS requirements and operational recommendations in the Executive Summary. The guide can also be used as extensive documentation of the IKE and IPsec subsystem when RHEL is placed into FIPS mode via the system-wide crypto policies setting.

          An in-depth tutorial describes the IPsec packet format (eg ESP), the Internet Key Exchange version 2 (IKEv2) protocol that is used to configure IPsec and explains in detail how the two protocols interact to create VPN solutions.

          Hands-on examples with typical IPsec deployments are shown via case studies. The examples show different IPsec implementations and their configurations, such as Cisco, Linux using libreswan (RHEL’s IPsec application), OpenBSD using iked, and FreeBSD using strongSwan. These examples can be used to help the conversation when connecting RHEL to third party VPN implementations.

        • Announcing the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6 Update 1 for Oracle Linux

          The Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) for Oracle Linux provides the latest open source innovations, key optimizations, and security to cloud and on-premises workloads. It is the Linux kernel that powers Oracle Cloud and Oracle Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Linux on 64-bit Intel and AMD or 64-bit Arm platforms.

          UEK Release 6 maintains compatibility with the Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK) and does not disable any features that are enabled in RHCK. Additional features are enabled to provide support for key functional requirements and patches are applied to improve performance and optimize the kernel.

        • QEMU Live Update

          The ability to update software with critical bug fixes and security mitigations while minimizing downtime is extremely important to customers and cloud service providers. In this blog post, we present QEMU Live Update, a new method for updating a running QEMU instance to a new version while minimizing the impact to the VM guest. The guest pauses briefly, for less than 100 milliseconds in our prototype, without loss of internal state or external connections.

          Live Update uses resources more efficiently than Live Migration. The latter ties up the source and target hosts, and consumes more memory and network bandwidth, and does so for an indeterminate period of time that depends on when the copy phase converges. Live migration is prohibitively expensive if large local storage must be copied across the network to the target.

        • Oracle Linux 8: Package Management made easy with free videos

          Welcome back to Training Tuesdays. In this week’s edition, we are talking about performing software package management on Oracle Linux 8. Software package management is an essential skill needed to keep your Oracle Linux 8 system up to date with the latest software enhancements, bug fixes, and security patches.

          Oracle Linux 8 includes DNF utilities to perform package management. DNF replaces YUM, which was used in previous versions of Oracle Linux. In this 3-part video series, we cover how to use DNF, how to install the latest version of the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) for Oracle Linux, and how to install the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) software repository.

        • Simplify production deployment to improve run time efficiency and deliver on service level agreements – IBM Developer

          The Elastic Deep Learning capabilities of IBM Watson€® Machine Learning Accelerator are designed for large-scale distributed deep learning workloads. It transforms static monolithic training into a dynamic process that is resilient to failures and automatically scales GPU allocation while training.

          Data scientists, deep learning developers, and administrators can use Elastic Deep Learning capabilities to simplify production deployment, improve run time efficiency, and deliver on service level agreements (SLAs).

        • Open Answers: What is Podman?
        • Open Answers: What are containers?
      • Debian Family

        • Packaging Kubernetes for Debian [LWN.net]

          Linux distributors are in the business of integrating software from multiple sources, packaging the result, and making it available to their users. It has long been true that some projects are easier to package than others. The Debian technical committee (TC) is currently being asked to make a decision in a dispute over how an especially hard-to-package project — Kubernetes — should be handled. Regardless of the eventual outcome, this disagreement clearly shows how the packaging model used by Linux distributors is increasingly mismatched to how software is often developed in the 2020s; what should replace that model is rather less clear, though. A longstanding rule followed by most distributors is that there should be only one copy of any given library (or other dependency) in the system, and that said copy should usually be in its own package. To do otherwise would bloat the system and complicate the task of keeping things secure. As an extreme example, consider what would happen if every program carried its own copy of the C library in its package. Those thousands of copies would consume vast amounts of both storage space and memory. If a security vulnerability were found in that library, thousands of packages would have to be updated to fix it everywhere. A single library package shared by all users, instead, is more efficient and far easier to maintain.

          This rule is thus contrary to the practice of stuffing dependent libraries into the package of a program that needs them — a practice often called "vendoring". Living up to this rule can be challenging, though, with many modern projects, which also often engage in a fair amount of vendoring. Projects written in certain languages appear to be especially prone to this sort of behavior; the Go language, for example, seems to encourage vendoring.

          Kubernetes is written in Go, and it carries a long list of dependencies with it. It was maintained in Debian for a while by Dmitry Smirnov, but he orphaned Kubernetes in 2018, stating that packaging it is "a full time job, probably for more than one person". The Kubernetes package was eventually picked up by Janos Lenart, who has been supplying updated versions to the Debian Testing repository.

        • Reproducible Builds in October 2020 — reproducible-builds.org

          In our monthly reports, we outline the major things that we have been up to over the past month. As a brief reminder, the motivation behind the Reproducible Builds effort is to ensure flaws have not been introduced in the binaries we install on our systems. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our main website.

          [...]

          During the Reproducible Builds summit in Marrakesh in 2019, developers from the GNU Guix, NixOS and Debian distributions were able to produce a bit-for-bit identical GNU Mes binary despite using three different versions of GCC. Since this summit, additional work resulted in a bit-for-bit identical Mes binary using tcc, and last month a fuller update was posted to this effect by the individuals involved. This month, however, David Wheeler updated his extensive page on Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling, remarking that...

          [...]

          Build node maintenance was performed by both Holger Levsen […][…] and Vagrant Cascadian […][…][…], Vagrant Cascadian also updated the page listing the variations made when testing to reflect changes for in build paths […] and Hans-Christoph Steiner made a number of changes for F-Droid, the free software app repository for Android devices, including...

        • My Debian Activities in October 2020 – blog.alteholz.eu

          This month I accepted 208 packages and rejected 29. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 563, so yeah, I was not alone this month :-).

          Anyway, this month marked another milestone in my NEW package handling. My overall number of ACCEPTed package exceeded the magic number of 20000 packages. This is almost 30% of all packages accepted in Debian. I am a bit proud of this achievement.

        • "Homeworld" will be the default theme for Debian 11

          The theme "Homeworld" by Juliette Taka has been selected as default theme for Debian 11 'bullseye'. Juliette says that this theme has been inspired by the Bauhaus movement, an art style born in Germany in the 20th century.

          After the Debian Desktop Team made the call for proposing themes, a total of eighteen choices have been submitted. The desktop artwork poll was open to the public, and we received 5,613 responses ranking the different choices, of which Homeworld has been ranked as the winner among them.

          This is the third time that a submission by Juliette has won. Juliette is also the author of the lines theme that was used in Debian 8 and the softWaves theme that was used in Debian 9.

        • This Is the Default Theme of Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye”

          The winner is Juliette Taka and her artwork “Homeworld” will be used as the default theme for Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye,” the next major version of the popular Linux-based operating system. The artwork will be used as default wallpaper, login screen, installer, etc.

          Juliette Taka works at Logilab and she’s using Debian GNU/Linux for more than seven years. She is known for making illustrations and drawing comics books, and she also made the Lines theme used in Debian GNU/Linux 8 “Jessie” and the softWaves theme used in Debian GNU/Linux 9 “Stretch.”

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

        • Canonical Reverts Intel Microcode Update in Ubuntu Due to Boot Failures in Tiger Lake Systems

          New security vulnerabilities are affecting all Linux systems running certain Intel processors. On November 10th, Intel released a new Intel Microcode firmware for Linux systems, and new Linux kernel versions were made available as well to address these new flaws.

          As I reported the other day, Canonical was quick to patch the Intel Microcode packages in all of its supported Ubuntu releases. Unfortunately, the Intel Microcode update caused a regression on certain processors in the Intel Tiger Lake family CPUs, causing the system to not boot.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Improve open source community sustainability by tracking these two metrics

        In early 2020, I wrote an article on three metrics for tracking and measuring offline, in-person community-building activities. Little did I (or the world) know then that offline, in-person activities of any kind would soon become unfeasible for the foreseeable future.

        So, I started thinking: With open source projects being online by default, and with everything else moving online and virtual, what should creators of open source technologies measure as we continue in this COVID and (hopefully soon) post-COVID world?

      • A Matrix overview

        At this year's (virtual) Open Source Summit Europe, Oleg Fiksel gave an overview talk on the Matrix decentralized, secure communication network project. Matrix has been seeing increasing adoption recently, he said, including by governments (beyond France, which we already reported on in an article on a FOSDEM 2019 talk) and other organizations. It also aims to bridge all of the different chat mechanisms that people are using in order to provide a unified interface for all of them.

        Fiksel is a former security consultant and a longtime member of the Matrix project. His opening slide (slides [PDF]) was an altered version of the xkcd "Why SMS refuses to die" Venn diagram, with "Matrix!" placed at the intersection of the three sets and "How we view the future :)" as the caption. It ably captured one of the main thrusts of his talk and can be seen in the screen shot below.

      • FFmpeg Lands Support For NVIDIA AV1 Video Decoding With RTX 30 + NVDEC

        Adding to the growing list of changes for the next FFmpeg release is now AV1 video decoding with NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 30 series graphics cards.

        With NVIDIA's recently released RTX 30 series there is initial support for hardware-accelerated AV1 decoding. Merged today is now support in FFmpeg for making use of this hardware AV1 decode with RTX 30 via NVIDIA's "NVDEC" decode interface that is part of their Video Codec SDK.

      • Calendula is with no doubt, the best medication management Android app for patients and mothers

        There is no shortage for medication apps for mobile phones, either for iOS and Android devices. However, they always come with a cost, If the app is not paid, it is not actually free, it often comes with annoying advertisements and limited feature with in-app purchase to become more usable.

        Fortunately, Calendula is not one of these apps, It's completely free android application which helps patients manage their medication, a privacy aware and without any ads or in-app purchase.

        Even more, Calendula is a complete open-source community-powered project that is packed by dozen of developers who keep it updated and maintained.

        [...]

        Calendula source code is released as a complete open-source project under GPL-3.0 Licenses.

      • Web Browsers

        • Mozilla

          • Digital security tools for human rights defenders

            At the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, there wasn't much known about how people living in rural areas, forests, and near rivers would face this new situation. For people living in the world's cities, digital technologies were part of every decision made when considering how to address the pandemic. Still, communities that depend on forests for their livelihood and environmentalists who fight to protect forests from exploitation live with digital technology in different ways from residents of cities. As a result, the changes to daily life that these communities experienced were different.

            It didn't take long for organizations worldwide to warn: loggers, land grabbers, and miners do not quarantine. In fact, according to The National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), logging in the Brazilian Amazon increased 63% in April, a month after the global pandemic had its start in the country. Along with the pandemic, Brazilian Amazonian communities face all kinds of challenges: from access to communications to the struggle for survival - and during the pandemic, a challenge was strengthened: the issues of fake news and secure communication between communities and third-party organizations.

          • Karl Dubost: Career Opportunities mean a lot of things

            At Mozilla too, (after moving back to Montreal for a couple of years), I moved from Montreal to Japan again. There are career opportunities because they allow you to work in a different setting with different people and communities, and this in itself makes the life a lot richer.

          • Firefox UX: How to Write Microcopy That Improves the User Experience

            The small bits of copy you see sprinkled throughout apps and websites are called microcopy. As content designers, we think deeply about what each word communicates.

            Microcopy is the tidiest of UI copy types. But do not let its crisp, contained presentation fool you: the process to get to those final, perfect words can be messy. Very messy. Multiple drafts messy, mired with business and technical constraints.

            Here’s a secret about good writing that no one ever tells you: When you encounter clear UX content, it’s a result of editing and revision. The person who wrote those words likely had a dozen or more versions you’ll never see. They also probably had some business or technical constraints to consider, too.

      • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

      • CMS

        • Kiwi TCMS - Kiwi TCMS 8.8

          We're happy to announce Kiwi TCMS version 8.8!

          IMPORTANT: this release includes many improvements, API changes, bug fixes, translation updates, new tests and internal refactoring. It is the sixth release to include contributions via our open source bounty program. You can explore everything at https://public.tenant.kiwitcms.org!

      • FSF

        • Teachers: Help Your Students Resist Zoom

          In the wake of the global COVID-19 emergency, the urgency of ensuring the continuity of classes left little to no space for a healthy debate on how to favor software that empowers students to learn. As a consequence, freedom-denying and privacy-violating software has seen widespread adoption in education.

          Zoom, a proprietary online conferencing program that is becoming more and more dangerously popular, is an example of such harmful technology. No educational institution should ever use it.

          Please don't force students to install Zoom on their computers, or to use its web version. To all those teaching remote classes with Zoom

          It is unfortunate that you are using Zoom, a nonfree program that spies on users and takes away your students' computer freedom, along with your own. By using Zoom, students are dependent on a software they cannot inspect, study or change. Their freedom to learn about technology and how it works is destroyed.

          If you use Zoom, some students might decide to continue using it beyond your classes, effectively surrendering their privacy over communication, and would hence miss on the opportunity to learn how to keep control of their data and computing.

          There are better programs you can use for teaching remote classes, free/libre programs like Jitsi or BigBlueButton. By choosing these and other free programs for education, you are enabling motivated students to learn about the software they use everyday, and some of them one day will be able to adapt it to their needs, serving a larger community. Those who will not pursue such curiosity, will still benefit from using a software that respects their freedoms and doesn't spy on them.

        • GNU Chinese Translators Team - News: LibrePlanet 2021: join us online on March 20 & 21 with keynote Julia Reda [Savannah]

          Mark your calendars: LibrePlanet 2021: Empowering Users will be held on March 20 and 21, 2021. For those of you who haven't been to the LibrePlanet conference before: expect a friendly, social, community-focused event with two days of inspiring talks and workshops from some of the most active and inspiring people in the free software community.

          [...]

          If you want to know more about how the event is organized, and how we stream and record the event, fully free and online, you can read more in our blog post about the 2020 edition's technical challenges. You can also browse through the video archive of past LibrePlanet conference sessions on our MediaGoblin instance to get inspired.

      • Programming/Development

        • An introduction to Pluto

          Pluto is a new computational notebook for the Julia programming language. Computational notebooks are a way to program inside of a web browser, storing code, annotations, and output, including graphics, in a single place. They became popular with the advent of the Jupyter notebook, which originally targeted Julia, Python, and R—the names got mashed together to make the word "Jupyter".

          Pluto is similar in many ways to Jupyter, which I wrote about earlier. It uses the same basic mode of interaction that is based on input and output cells; both notebook formats are well-suited to exploration, sharing calculations, and education. In an earlier article, I reviewed progress in Julia since v. 1.0 was released two years ago. It also went into some detail about its special attractions of Julia in the area of scientific computing. Readers who are unfamiliar with Julia may want to review some of the earlier articles; here, I concentrate entirely on Pluto.

          Like Julia, Pluto has an MIT license. It was created by Fons van der Plas and Mikołaj Bochenski, and has been developed on GitHub since March 2020. Despite its recent vintage, it's already mature enough for serious use; in fact, it's being used in an ongoing open MIT course. But users should keep in mind that the version number, as of this writing, is only 0.12.4; the program's behavior is certainly not set in stone. Pluto advises the user, upon startup, if a fresher version is available in the repository.

          Readers who would like to try out Pluto right away and don't have Julia installed can use the Binder service to run a notebook with nothing but a web browser. When a user visits this page, it spins up a Julia instance on a server and opens a notebook interface to it that is ready for experimentation. Whether opened through Binder or running locally, the notebook offers the user an initial page with the choices to open a sample, existing, or new notebook. The series of sample notebooks offers an excellent hands-on introduction to the use of Pluto.

        • Mike Hommey: Announcing git-cinnabar 0.5.6

          Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.

        • How I learned JavaScript | Codementor

          While starting out, I wanted to learn JavaScript all because i wanted to be able to manipulate the DOM, but on starting, i got to know i could do better than just that.

          [...]

          JavaScript is a great tool every web developer needs. I now know React and use it as my major framework tool. Next, i want to learn Angular and Vue when i become very comfortable with React, then learn Python too.

        • YANUB: yet another (nearly) useless blog: Solution for QSoas quiz #1: averaging spectra

          This post describes the solution to the Quiz #1, based on the files found there. The point is to produce both the average and the standard deviation of a series of spectra.

          [...]

          QSoas is a powerful open source data analysis program that focuses on flexibility and powerful fitting capacities...

        • An Agile Primer

          With Kanban, items are represented visually on a whiteboard, allowing team members to see the state of every piece of work in realtime. Kanban is both the board and the approach to managing work in a visual way, which helps limit work-in-progress and maximize a team’s efficiency.

          TL;DR: Kanban is a visual way to manage work that’s organized via Agile/Scrum.

        • ISS Mimic: A Raspberry Pi-powered International Space Station model that syncs with the real thing
        • Perl/Raku

          • Is it possible to return to development with traditional P5P mailing lists? | Yuki Kimoto Perl Blog

            Is it possible to return to development with traditional P5P mailing lists?

            I still think the traditional method is suitable for advancing Perl development.

            why?

            We're used to it, and Perl development has been done that way.

            We tend to think of it as a poor method, but it's actually a good one.

            The first is that it will be developed with backward compatibility in mind.

          • Bang Bang

            Interpreters read and execute scripts (whereas shells are more like a kitchen pass-through and can either execute or hand over to another interpreter). When we specify interpreter on the command line, it is the one that will be used. For instance Rscript script.R will execute script.R using the Rscript interpreter.

            When we execute a file without explicitly giving an interpreter (for instance, like ./myscript.pl), it is the job of the “shebang” to tell to the shell/OS which interpreter to use.

        • Python

          • How to Deploy a Django Application to Heroku with Git CLI

            Heroku is a cloud platform that provides hosting services. It supports several programming languages including PHP, Node.js, and Python. It is Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which allows you to manage website applications while it takes care of your servers, networks, storage and other cloud components.

            [...]

            In this article, we deployed a Django application on Heroku with a custom domain name, using Git.

            Besides various cloud services, Heroku also offers one of the best server up times and 24/7 operation and security team support.

          • Everything is an€ X

            “Everything is an X” is a very high level pattern that you see applied in the design of lots of systems, including programming languages and user interfaces. It has a lot of advantages, and some disadvantages. I’ll discuss some of these, then look at some examples, which will be necessary to understand what I’m really talking about.

            When we say “everything” here, we’re talking very loosely — many things in the system are not, in fact, instances of “X”, but are something lower level, or just completely different. “Everything is an X” really means “a surprising number of things in this system are an X”.

          • PyPy: Faster Python With Minimal Effort – Real Python

            Python is one of the most popular programming languages among developers, but it has certain limitations. For example, depending on the application, it can be up to 100 times as slow as some lower-level languages. That’s why many companies rewrite their applications in another language once Python’s speed becomes a bottleneck for users. But what if there was a way to keep Python’s awesome features and improve its speed? Enter PyPy.

            PyPy is a very compliant Python interpreter that is a worthy alternative to CPython 2.7, 3.6, and soon 3.7. By installing and running your application with it, you can gain noticeable speed improvements. How much of an improvement you’ll see depends on the application you’re running.

        • Rust

          • This Week in Rust 364
          • Exploring PGO for the Rust compiler

            For the last few months Mozilla has been using Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) to build their own optimized version of Clang, leading to an up to 9% reduction of Firefox compile times on their build infrastructure. Would the same be possible for the Rust compiler, that is, could we apply profile-guided optimization to rustc itself in order to make it faster? This post explores exactly this question, detailing first the steps needed for generating a PGOed versions of rustc (in two flavors), and then taking a look at the resulting performance implications. But before that let's have a little reminder what PGO even is and how it works in general.

            [...]

            As mentioned above Firefox build times have improved by up to 9% with a PGOed compiler. Clang's own documentation even reports an up to 20% improvement. The best way we have for assessing the Rust compiler's performance is the rustc-perf benchmark suite. Since compiling with PGO does not quite fit with how the Rust project's CI works, we cannot use the perf.rust-lang.org version of the benchmark suite. Fortunately, thanks to good documentation, running the benchmarks locally is straightforward enough.

            [...]

            The basic principle stays the same: create an instrumented compiler, use it to collect profile data, use that data when compiling the final version of the compiler. The only difference is that this time we instrument a different part of the compiler's code, namely the part generated by rustc itself. The compiler has had support for doing that for a while now and, as can be seen in the respective chapter of the rustc book, the command-line interface has been modeled after Clang's set of flags. Unfortunately, the compiler's build system does not support using PGO out of the box, so we have to directly modify src/bootstrap/compile.rs in order to set the desired flags.

        • Java

          • Leading the future of Java with the Red Hat build of Quarkus 1.7 - Red Hat Developer

            The latest supported version of the Red Hat build of Quarkus continues to drive the future of Java development for Kubernetes-native and serverless applications. This article introduces the technologies making it easier than ever to create fast, lightweight Java applications for container-based and serverless environments using the Red Hat build of Quarkus 1.7.

            [...]

            In addition to the optimizations and integrations with OpenShift, the Red Hat build of Quarkus is also tightly integrated with Red Hat Data Grid 8 and Red Hat’s single sign-on technology.

            Red Hat Data Grid 8 is an in-memory, distributed, NoSQL datastore solution based on Infinispan. Using the Quarkus Infinispan extension, developers can connect to a Data Grid server running outside of application processes and create native executables. See Securely connect Quarkus and Red Hat Data Grid on Red Hat OpenShift for more about this technology.

            Red Hat’s single sign-on technology provides support with securing web applications. The Keycloak extension provides the architecture, authentication and authorization mechanisms, and other tools for creating production-quality security for your applications. See the DevNation Tech Talk, Easily secure your cloud-native microservices with Keycloak to learn more about securing Quarkus microservices with single sign-on technology from Red Hat.

  • Leftovers

    • Steve Herman, Warrior for Sagebrush and Beauty

      Students

      For 35 years, Steve taught classes in ornithology, mammalogy, evolutionary ecology, biostatistics and plant ecology at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, with more than 2200 students. His legendary field course “Summer Ornithology: Birds in the Hand” took students into the wilds of the northern Great Basin banding birds and adventuring. It continued until 2018, long after he retired. Prerequisites were “enthusiasm for studies in natural history and a fascination with wildness in the American West”. The course infused students with a love of birds, and an obsession with nature. “Young people energize me I learn from them as much as they learn from me … My life’s work has been to produce scientists who will seek to protect wildness … But I also just really enjoy teaching people about birds. I’ve been lucky to get to do that for a very long time”. Many retain a deep devotion to a man who truly was a force in their lives. Some became addicted to this landscape. He kept in touch with an amazing number, recalled minute details of past outings, wrote countless letters of recommendation, encouraged their biological quests, officiated at weddings, and was generous in many ways. He reconnected with generations of students and friends at an annual spring MABO (Malheur Bird Observatory) camp out by Malheur Refuge, amid singing Sage Thrashers and Rattlesnakes.

    • Afterword to Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program

      Dixi et salvavi animam meam. With these Latin words Karl Marx concludes his Critique of the Gotha Program (1875) – “I have spoken and saved my soul.” One is unaccustomed to religious expression from the great communist, unless it be sarcastic, yet here he uses it to conclude a devastating analysis of the program of German workers party. What is Marx’s soul? How did he save it? And what about ours?[1]

      These Latin words from two and a half millennia previous were distilled from a ‘brazen and stubborn’ prophet, Ezekiel, who with bizarre, way-out visions of animals, jewels, and wheels within wheels heard these words whispered from the heavenly vault.[2]

    • From AIPAC to the Dogs of Istanbul: the 2020 DOC NYC Film Festival

      Set in a network of lakes and islands not far from Bucharest, Romania, the documentary features a 9-member Roma family headed by Gica Enache who abandoned city life after the fashion of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden”, except without the typically puritanical streak of the New England Yankee.

      [...]

      Their knowledge of nature is so profound that the Bucharest conservationists rely on their knowledge of the grasslands and waters, even to the point of hiring Vali as a guide. However, plans run afoul after the authorities decide that the children are victims of neglect. The shack is filthy and the children have never spent a day in school. Despite his “back to nature” sensibility, the chain-smoking patriarch treats Vali as a hired hand, forcing him to be an unpaid fisherman. On top of the family dysfunctions, the conservationist power elite in Bucharest wants the Enaches out because they are suspected of starting accidental fires that have left large swaths of the grasslands leveled.

      Forced to live in a Bucharest apartment funded by a welfare agency, the clan tries its best to adjust to civilization but eventually has to contend with the reality that it was not cut out for it. “Acasa, My Home” (acasã is Romanian for home) is a brilliant work by first-time filmmaker Radu Ciorniciuc. Highly recommended.

    • Science

      • How Bunny the dog is pushing scientists’ buttons

        Along with Bunny’s demands for scritches, Devine, an artist and self-identified nonexpert in dog science, fields hundreds of questions from humans every day. One question persists among fans and skeptics alike: is this dog really “talking”? Inspired by Bunny’s videos, researchers at the Comparative Cognition Lab at UC San Diego are trying to find out. They haven’t gotten anywhere close to an answer yet, but they’re gathering a lot of data along the way.

    • Education

      • College Costs More Than What’s on the Bill — That’s Why Students Should Strike

        Never before has it been so clear to so many people—notably white people—that police, and prisons, don’t actually make our communities safer. People across the country, many of whom have never heard of the term “abolition” in relation to these institutions are now beginning to understand how the existence of police endangers the lives of millions of racially and economically marginalized individuals as they simply exist—engaging in banal activities such as visiting a local corner store, birdwatching, jogging, even sleeping.

    • Health/Nutrition

      • CoVIDA- Homage to Victims of the Pandemic

        Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

      • 'Going to Get a Lot of People Killed': Covid-19 Soars to New Heights as Trump Sabotages Transition

        "We're in an unbelievably dangerous moment with coronavirus where the full weight of government at all levels needs to be focused on saving lives, and instead Donald Trump is trying a ham-fisted theft of the election."

      • More avoidable pandemics await a heedless world

        There will be more avoidable pandemics, more devastating and lethal, as humans intrude further upon the planet’s forests.

      • Days After Hopeful Pfizer Vaccine News, 82% of Doses Bought by Richest Nations
      • Two Days After Pfizer's Hopeful Vaccine News, 82% of Doses Already Bought by World's Richest Nations

        "You couldn't get a clearer example of how unequal€ the pharmaceutical system is—some make billions of pounds, while many others die because they cannot afford treatments or there are no more left for them to buy."

      • Supreme Court Challenge to ACA Highlights Why We Need Medicare for All
      • The Affordable Care Act May Live to Die Another Day

        Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in California v. Texas, the case that threatens to strike down the Affordable Care Act. Those arguments went surprisingly well for defenders of the ACA—as well as anyone could reasonably have hoped, in the face of a court stacked with six conservative jurists. The future of the ACA is still uncertain, and we won’t know the court’s decision until at least January and most likely June. But based on what I heard, I think the ACA has a chance to survive this latest frivolous and intellectually dishonest attack.

      • Amid SCOTUS Fight over ACA, Advocates Say Medicare for All Remains Best Way to Expand Healthcare

        In oral arguments Tuesday, the Supreme Court appeared to reject arguments to strike down the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the pandemic. The case was filed by a group of 18 Republican-led states, backed by the Trump administration, who argue the ACA’s individual mandate is unconstitutional, and the rest of law should fall with it. “This was a terrible third attempt to have the Supreme Court strike down Obamacare. The first two had failed. This was even more ludicrous than the earlier cases,” says Slate legal correspondent Dahlia Lithwick. We also speak with Dr. Steffie Woolhandler, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, who says Medicare for All remains the best way to expand healthcare in the United States. “We don’t need to raise the total cost of healthcare. We just need to go to an efficient system that excludes private health insurance,” Dr. Woolhandler says.

      • Dutch young adults spend around 7 hours behind screens per day

        Too much time behind the screen can have physical and mental consequences. A sixth of young adults said they experience physical complaints they attribute to screen time. 18 percent said they have trouble falling asleep after using a screen and 31 percent said they have a worse night's sleep due to phone use. 37 percent also indicate that screen use has a negative influence on their concentration.

      • Q&A: Pollution Linked to 15 Percent Increase in COVID-19 Deaths

        The danger of pollution to respiratory health comes from tiny emissions particles that are inhaled. Fine particulate matter is defined as anything smaller than 2.5 micrometers (PM2.5). The smaller the particles, the further down the respiratory system they can get, causing big problems by way of oxidative stress and an exuberant inflammatory response. Some particles can even trigger apoptosis. Short-term exposure to particle-laden air can cause acute irritation, leading to a cough, while long-term exposure is linked to chronic conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD), heart disease, and cancer.

        A study published in Cardiovascular Research on October 26 claims that fine particulate matter has increased the risk of deaths from COVID-19 by 15 percent globally, with certain areas such as East Asia reaching a 27 percent increase. The Scientist talked to Lelieveld to learn more about the relationship between pollution and COVID-19.

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • Waves of attacks on US hospitals show a change in tactics for cybercriminals [iophk: Windows TCO]

          United States hospitals were targeted by two major cybersecurity attacks this fall: the first taking down Universal Health Services, a chain of hundreds of hospitals, and the second by a group called UNC1878 threatening hundreds of individual health care facilities all around the country. Targeting health care institutions directly marks a new approach for cybercriminals.

        • Ransomware Hits Dozens of Hospitals in an Unprecedented Wave [iophk: Windows TCO]

          On Wednesday evening, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Department of Health and Human Services warned that there is a "an increased and imminent cybercrime threat to US hospitals and health care providers," above and beyond the wave of attacks that have already occurred. The alert points to the notorious Trickbot trojan and Ryuk ransomware as the primary hacking tools involved in the attacks. Security analysts at private companies say that the activity is tied to the Russian criminal gang sometimes called UNC 1878 or Wizard Spider.

        • Ransomware Group Turns to Facebook Ads

          It’s not clear whether this was an isolated incident, or whether the fraudsters also ran ads using other [cracked] Facebook accounts. A spokesperson for Facebook said the company is still investigating the incident. A request for comment sent via email to Campari’s media relations team was returned as undeliverable.

        • On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation

          However, as users rightly demand more complicated and fancy apps, the APIs often need to get more fancy and complicated as well. Suddenly you look up and, instead of only using screwdrivers and hammers, you’re using power tools and complicated saws, and everything is much more fiddly than it once was.

          With real tools, you’d expect to receive an owner’s manual, which explains how to use the tool you’ve just purchased. A rough analogy exists for APIs, insofar as most platform vendors will provide documentation. This is basically the "owner’s manual" for that API.

          Apple’s documentation has, for years, been pretty bad. Over the last couple years, it has gone from bad → awful → despicable → embarrassing. All too often, I go to research how to do something new, and use an API I’m not familiar with, only to be stymied by those three dreaded words:

          No overview available.

        • Pseudo-Open Source

          • Privatisation/Privateering

            • Linux Foundation

              • Free Linux webinars on development of open-source projects and more

                If you lost your job or were furloughed because of the COVID-19 crisis or if you'd like to further develop your current skill set, the Linux Foundation has launched free webinars through its LF Live: Mentorship Series. Founded in 2000, the Foundation's goal is for developers and companies worldwide to "build ecosystems that accelerate open technology development and industry adoption."

                [...]

                The first webinar was held Oct 29, "Writing Change Logs that Make Sense," led by Shuah Khan. The slides presented in the webinar are also available separately to allow the viewer an even more comprehensive experience. You can also subscribe when registration goes live for each session.

              • New DevOps Practices and Tools Training and Certificate Program to Make it Easier to Incorporate DevOps into Development Processes

                The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the availability of a new Professional Certificate program, Introduction to DevOps: Practices and Tools.

                Developed in conjunction with the Continuous Delivery Foundation and hosted on the non-profit edX learning platform, the program is addressed to developers and IT operators exploring new approaches for building software, professionals focused on site reliability and quality assurance, and anyone involved in the software delivery process.

        • Security

          • Security updates for Wednesday

            Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (chromium, firefox, gdm, linux-hardened, matrix-synapse, salt, sddm, and wordpress), Debian (firefox-esr, libmaxminddb, and moin), Fedora (cifs-utils, firefox, galera, java-latest-openjdk, mariadb, mariadb-connector-c, and wordpress), Gentoo (blueman, chromium, firefox, mariadb, qemu, salt, tmux, and wireshark), openSUSE (sddm), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (kernel-alt, microcode_ctl, and rh-nodejs12-nodejs), SUSE (kernel, microcode_ctl, openldap2, python-waitress, spice-vdagent, u-boot, and ucode-intel), and Ubuntu (firefox, intel-microcode, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux-raspi, linux, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-gcp-5.4, linux-gke-4.15, linux-gke-5.3, linux-hwe, linux-hwe-5.4, linux-oem, linux-oem-osp1, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.4, and moin).

          • Less than 6 months to 16.04 ESM: 6 things to prepare | Ubuntu

            Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Xenial Xerus will enter the extended security maintenance (ESM) period in April 2021. This article explains the ESM period and provides a guide for six key considerations when planning a migration path from Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

            [...]

            2) Consider the full stack. The OS is a heart of the system, and an OS migration is a significant change that touches multiple aspects of your configuration, from the Linux kernel up to your applications. Remember to evaluate how the migration will impact your existing workloads and APIs as your current configuration might depend on specific versions of the applications and libraries that shipped with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. You will likely find newer versions of applications and libraries if you choose a more recent version of Ubuntu (you can find a few examples below). Those versions might not be fully compatible with your overall configuration anymore after the migration.

          • Ransomware is now all about data leaks, Kaspersky researchers claim

            Ransomware has changed from being just about encrypting a victim's data and become primarily about data exfiltration, the Russian security firm Kaspersky says.

          • Melbourne firm denies data stolen during ransomware attack

            A Melbourne firm which suffered a hit from cyber criminals using the Windows REvil ransomware has denied that any data was exfiltrated from its site, as was reported in these columns.

          • Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation

            • Escalating Privileges In Ubuntu 20.04 From User Account | Hackaday

              Ubuntu 20.04 is an incredibly popular operating system, perhaps the most popular among the Linux distributions due to its ease-of-use. In general, it’s a fairly trustworthy operating system too, especially since its source code is open. However, an update with the 20.04 revision has led to security researcher [Kevin Backhouse] finding a surprisingly easy way to escalate privileges on this OS, which we would like to note is not great.

          • Privacy/Surveillance

            • Mississippi City Trying To Turn Residents' Doorbell Cameras Into Law Enforcement Surveillance Network

              The Ring doorbell/camera has become a fixture of American life, thanks in part to Ring's partnership with law enforcement agencies. In exchange for steering people towards Ring's snitch app, the company has been giving deeply discounted doorbell cameras to police, who then hand them out to homeowners with the implied assumption homeowners will return the favor by handing footage over to cops any time they ask.

            • Gun-Toting Couple Sues Photographer For Privacy Violation Over Photo They Used As Christmas Cards, After He Billed Them

              You've heard of Mark and Patricia McCloskey by now. They are the St. Louis couple who waved guns at various protesters who entered their gated street in the process of marching to the nearby mayor's home, demanding the mayor's resignation. The McCloskeys seem to have quite the reputation as not the greatest of neighbors, and seem to have very strong opinions about their property.

            • TikTok stuck in limbo, with no word from US on asset sale

              Social media app TikTok has found itself in a quandary since it has had no response from the government's Committee on Foreign Investment in the US about its owner ByteDance's plan to address the issues around data security raised earlier this year.

            • The EU in Crypto War

              Once again, the EU member states demand the weakening of encryption, associations and activists protest vehemently

            • Surprise: Latest Draft Of The EU's Next Big Privacy Law Includes Some Improvements

              The EU's new ePrivacy regulation is a strange beast. It's important, designed to complement the EU's GDPR. Where the GDPR is concerned with personal data "at rest" -- how it is stored and processed -- the ePrivacy Regulation can be thought of as dealing with personal data in motion. Despite that importance, it is largely unknown, except to people working in this area. That low profile is particularly strange given the fierce fighting that is taking place over what exactly it should allow or forbid. Businesses naturally want as much freedom as possible to use personal data as they wish, while privacy activists want the new regulation to strengthen the protection already provided by the GDPR.

            • Dell, FedEx, Switch Team Up to Build Nationwide Cloud Service

              The network’s technology hubs will be based in FedEx facilities, feature Dell hardware and connect to existing Switch computing centers, the companies said Thursday in a statement. The service will differ from the Amazon Web Services public cloud, in which information from various clients lives side-by-side in large centralized buildings. Instead, the partners will have locations throughout the country that are closer to clients for greater computing speed. And customers will use the service to host their private clouds, which is more akin to storing applications and data behind a corporate firewall.

              The initiative marks another step toward Dell becoming a hybrid-cloud provider, after missing out on the initial cloud services wave, in competition with International Business Machines Corp. Dell’s offering with Switch and FedEx will let clients pay for the service based on how much they use, a core trait of online computing. Round Rock, Texas-based Dell has undertaken a broad effort to move its products toward a consumption business model, which generates recurring revenue and gives clients more flexibility.

            • Ring recalls 350,000 smart video doorbells for potential fire hazard after 23 devices caused property damage

              The recall is for the Ring Video Doorbell (2nd Generation), which is model number 5UM5E5, according to a recall notice posted Tuesday on the Consumer Product Safety Commission website.

            • Exclusive: TikTok-owner ByteDance to rake in $27 billion in ad revenue by year-end :sources

              The company’s overall revenue goal for 2020 is around $30 billion, Reuters previously reported, which means ByteDance’s ad revenue in China, accounting for the bulk of its total revenue, is in line with the company’s plan.

              While TikTok is what ByteDance is best known for globally, the app contributes little to the Chinese company’s revenue overall. Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, contributes nearly 60% of ad revenues, followed by news aggregator Jinri Toutiao at 20% and long-form video platform Xigua at less than 3%, according to one of the sources.

              ByteDance declined to comment.

            • Twitter explains how its search algorithm works after Trump's US election debacle

              Standing by its commitment alongside other social media services, Twitter vigilantly controlled election-related information last week. Instead what caught the attention of the tech industry is the fact that Donald Trump's official account consistently shows up when people submitted search queries on the platform with specific keywords. To clear up the misunderstanding, the developers have issued a statement to hopefully explain what might have caused it.

            • Tweets have spoken: Twitter search links Trump to 'loser'

              Twitter said the results were automatically generated based on how people on the app were using the terms in their tweets at the time.

            • 'Unfair surveillance'? Online exam software sparks global student revolt

              Facial recognition systems — which some proctoring platforms use to confirm the identity of the test taker — are less accurate with dark-skinned people, noted Shea Swauger, a researcher who tracks the industry at the University of Colorado (CU) Denver.

              And algorithms designed to detect suspicious movement will inevitably flag disabled students and others who do not move in the way the platforms expect, he added.

              Students also are balking at allowing third-party software access to their devices, with some services requiring that students give them permission to read their computer files, monitor their keystrokes and analyse their biometrics.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Is It Mere Spite—or Something More Sinister?

        Mark T. Esper’s tenure as secretary of defense was officially “terminated” by Donald Trump on November 9, but his ouster had been expected for months—ever since he defied the president by refusing to support the use of active-duty troops in crushing public protests following George Floyd’s murder on May 25. As is well known, Trump demands total loyalty and submission from his top appointees, and is quick to punish anyone who disobeys his mandate. Hence, when Esper publicly rejected the president’s stance on the use of American troops in curbing dissent, his days in office were numbered; it was only through heavy pressure from Trump’s top aides and allies in Congress—worried about the campaign implications of turmoil at the Pentagon—that Esper was not fired on the spot. But now, with the election over, Trump felt no hesitation in ousting an unfaithful servant.

      • DeSantis Responds to Racial Justice Protests With Expanded 'Stand Your Ground' Proposal Slammed as 'Legalized Lynching'

        "This is basically just a license for white people to kill protesters," said one critic.

      • Not a Coup but a Cover-Up and a Con Game

        Donald Trump was destined to become even more authoritarian after being soundly defeated for a second time at the ballot box. It’s not his temperament to be a Cincinnatus or a George Washington, a leader happy to be relieved of the burden of power so he can return to domestic tranquility. Trump’s narcissism is ill-equipped to brook rejection. He also has very good legal reasons to fear that once shorn of the special legal impunity granted sitting presidents, he’ll be a ripe target for criminal investigation and prosecution.

      • The War Inside the War in Vietnam

        Marc Levy has assembled letters, essays, poems and anecdotes from members of his own unit and others, including ones from our more recent wars. Some of the contributors are working writers; others are impassioned witnesses who, after many years, could not help but speak. Not least is the fine writing by Levy himself, a medic who served with Delta 1/7 First Cavalry Division, and like many of us is still unpacking a war that remains woefully present after nearly half a century. After accumulating nearly three hundred multi-paged blog entries for Medic, Levy and his friend Blake Campbell compressed the blog into a compelling and necessary book of 559 pages. The scope of the book is Dantean; the reader is led through the many layers of Hell by Levy’s Virgil, and is met by witnesses whose searing testimonies are unforgettable. What they reveal is a war inside the war, a war that only combatants at the sharp edge of the fighting knew. But this is not just any war; it the first the US lost, and one so mindless in its intent and execution that it split the country in half and many of its veterans internally.

        We see in Medic both the viciousness of the fighting and the minutia of everyday life in the field: how to heat coffee with a tiny ball of C-4 plastic explosive, standing watch and staring into the darkness, the screams of maimed and dying enemy outside the wire, the perimeter being probed, overrun and the enemy suddenly close enough to see his chin hairs. We see men improvising in a disaster where the tactics continually fail. We see men killed their first day in the field and a well-liked platoon sergeant killed by his own “automatic ambush” of trip-wired claymores. We see the clouds of mosquitoes and a jungle heat that could rise to one hundred twenty degrees during the day. We see good young men having the decency beaten out of them daily, being pushed to limits beyond anything they were prepared for, and put in morally impossible situations that would haunt them the rest of their lives.

      • Fuck Veteran’s Day: a Vet's Lament

        In 2008 I testified to U.S. Congress about war crimes the U.S. military was committing in Iraq in the name of democracy and freedom: the wanton killing of non-combatants, the torture of prisoners, the mutilation of dead bodies, the cover-ups, lies, and complete disregard for Iraqi life.

        Seventeen years after the invasion of Iraq and Americans remain split in their opinion of the war. Interestingly, Trump ran and won on a quasi-antiwar platform in 2016. Rhetorically, he railed against the military-industrial complex, Bush’s neverending wars, and “interventionist” policies. Republican voters preferred his message to the Neoconservative party line. So much for polls. Trump didn’t out-hawk the hawks in the GOP — he provided a different message. And it resonated. No matter what the left says about Trump’s base, there’s no evidence to suggest they’re champing at the bit for another foreign war.

      • The Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex Is Fascism

        This Veterans Day, if you wish to honor the troops and humanity as a whole, vow to break with or challenge the MIC.

      • Will the Biden Team Be Warmongers or Peacemakers?

        For progressives everywhere, the knowledge that “another world is possible” has sustained us through decades of greed, extreme inequality and war, as U.S.-led neoliberalism has repackaged and force-fed 19th century laissez-faire capitalism to the people of the 21st century.€  The Trump experience has revealed, in stark relief, where these policies can lead.

        Joe Biden has certainly paid his dues to and reaped rewards from the same corrupt political and economic system as Trump, as the latter delightedly trumpeted in every stump speech. But Biden must understand that the young voters who turned out in unprecedented numbers to put him in the White House have lived their whole lives under this neoliberal system, and did not vote for “more of the same.” Nor do they naively think that deeply-rooted problems of American society like racism, militarism and corrupt corporate politics began with Trump.

      • More 'Dictatorship Than a Democracy': Trump Purge at Pentagon Increases Fears of Coup-in-Motion

        "The purge happening at the Department€ of Defense, in the middle of a messy transition, should worry us all."€ 

      • Far Right Militias Are Recruiting Vets. We Must Organize Against This Trend.
      • Trump’s Coup Attempt Will Hurt US Democracy in the Long Run
      • Pompeo Blasted for Pledging “Smooth Transition” to “Second Trump Administration”
      • World Leaders Urged to 'Stand Up for Democracy' and Refuse to Meet With Pompeo After He Denies Election Outcome

        "We cannot normalize Pompeo's threats to democratic legitimacy and the principles of a peaceful transition of power," stressed Serra Sippel of the Center for Health and Gender Equity.

      • Democratic Voters Want More Than the Status Quo

        The revelry in the streets when Donald Trump was finally declared the loser won’t dispel Democratic gloom at the 2020 election results. Even in victory, Democrats once more failed to assemble a governing coalition. Joe Biden, with over 75 million votes and counting, racked up the highest total vote of any presidential candidate in history, but Donald Trump captured the second-greatest total, over 71 million, despite running on a record of 230,000 dead from the pandemic, a collapsed economy, and unparalleled mendacity and incompetence. Democratic grand hopes for taking the Senate were reduced to the outcome of two Georgia runoff elections in early January. Rather than expanding their majority, House Democrats lost seats. And, most damaging, Democrats gained no ground in state legislative bodies, leaving Republicans in charge of designing five times as many congressional districts as Democrats after the new Census. With the exception of Biden’s razor-thin victory, Donald Trump’s Republican Party consolidated its minority power.

      • Everything Will Fundamentally Change

        What should someone who cares about ending war think? How can we get from the euphoria of electing a warmonger to mobilizing people to end war? How should we talk with the people who are celebrating? And how with the people who are outraged?

        With those who are celebrating, I see no reason to oppose their joy and happiness. I happen to love joy and happiness, as long as people can work hard while celebrating. The trick is that working hard implies that a holy and infallible emperor has not been enthroned, that something more is needed. The trouble is that lesser evilists upon selecting a lesser evil candidate often adopt the position that their candidate is actually great and glorious, that in fact it’s part of their duty to learn only good bits of information about their chosen one. One thing we could try is reminding people of the wisdom of their lesser evil election choice in a manner that restores to their consciousness exactly how evil was that lesser evil choice, or — even better — exactly how evil is the society that only allows us such choices.

      • A New Record Is Set for Voter Participation, But We Still Need More Democracy

        It has often been pointed out this year’s election featured a record number of votes cast (about 161 million) and had the highest voter turnout (around 70%) since 1900, when 73% of eligible voters participated in the presidential election.

        However, “eligible” is the key term here. Women, African-Americans, Native Americans, and others were systematically excluded from voting for most of American history. The early presidents in the era of slavery (George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson) each won office with votes from less than 1% of the total US population. By 1900, William McKinley’s 7.2 million votes were less than 10% of the total population. It was only after the women’s suffrage movement and passage of the 19th Amendment a century ago that voting rates passed the 10% mark. It’s taken a century of work in defense of voting rights to finally approach 25% support for a president.

      • Can Trump really stage a coup? Experts weigh in on whether it's possible

        For the first time in history, an incumbent president is refusing to concede after clearly and indisputably losing a presidential election. That's making observers, citizens, and experts nervous that Trump may be preparing to stage a coup of some sort, or perhaps call again on his supporters to commit violence to sustain his rule.

      • Iran's enriched uranium stockpile 12 times limit, says IAEA

        Iran now has more than 12 times the amount of enriched uranium permitted under an international agreement, the global watchdog says.

        The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said Iran's enriched uranium stockpile had reached 2,442.9kg (5,385.6lb).

        Iran insists its nuclear programme is exclusively for peaceful purposes.

        The IAEA also said Iran's explanation for the presence of nuclear material at an undeclared site was not "credible".

      • Several wounded in WWI memorial attack at Jeddah cemetery for non-Muslims

        Several people were wounded on Wednesday in a bomb attack at a World War I commemoration ceremony attended by European diplomats at a non-Muslim cemetery in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, France's foreign ministry said.

      • Poll shows 57% of young Muslims in France believe Sharia law more important than national law

        The study’s most astonishing finding is that the majority of Muslims under the age of 25 (57 percent) believe Islamic law to be more important than French law in France – an increase of 10 percent since 2016. About 38 percent of French Muslims overall felt the same. Meanwhile, only 15 percent of the Catholic population believe that their religious laws should come before French law.

        A number of questions on the poll were indirectly related to the beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty on October 16, who had shown a caricature of the Prophet Mohammed in a class on freedom of expression, inciting rage in one student.

      • ErdoÄŸan's Jihad on "Infidel Europe"

        Middle Eastern politics is always a trap for radical ideologues. In ErdoÄŸan's mindset the "infidel West" is militarily helping Armenia (the evil) and Turkey is militarily helping Azerbaijan (the righteous).

        Although Ankara and Baku categorically deny accusations, press reports and independent human rights observers have confirmed the arrival of hundreds of jihadists in Azerbaijan to fight Armenia.

      • Berlin-Based Syrian YouTuber Fayez Kanfash Leads 'Macron The Dog' On A Leash, Burns Macron Pictures: This Is What Happens To People Who Curse Our Prophet

        In a November 2, 2020 video uploaded to his YouTube channel, Berlin-based Syrian YouTuber Fayez Kanfash dragged by rope "Macron, the dog" – a man wearing a mask of French President Emmanuel Macron through the streets of Berlin. While burning pictures of Macron, Kanfash hit the man and shouted at him that he is a lowlife and a dog. Kanfash told onlookers that this is how people who curse Islam and the Prophet Muhammad will be treated, and he led people in chants of "Allah Akbar!" The video concludes with Kanfash being interrogated by several police officers. Kanfash's YouTube channel has close to one million subscribers.

      • French moderate imam requests extra police protection amid death threats over support for Macron

        One of France’s highest profile imams has appealed to President Emmanuel Macron for increased police protection after receiving “thousands” of death threats over his condemnation of terrorist attacks.

        Hassen Chalghoumi, imam of the Paris suburb of Drancy and a leading Muslim moderate, said he had received a torrent of new threats since he spoke out against the beheading of a French teacher last month.

      • Police: Children's doctor identified, charged in racially motivated attack on SU student

        Police continue to investigate reports of an attack on a Southern University student-athlete, which the university believes was racially motivated.

        Local children's physician, 54-year-old Shane McKinney, was identified and booked into the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison Wednesday on a charge of simple battery.

        McKinney studied medicine in Alabama and specializes in pediatric emergency medicine. According to his LinkedIn, McKinney has worked as a doctor in Baton Rouge since 2018.

      • The New Humanitarian | Families of Colombia’s ‘false positives’ seek justice

        Four years after an historic agreement brought a nominal end to a decades-long armed conflict in Colombia, the process to restore peace has stalled and a continuing rise in violence has served as proof of its failure to end hostilities.

        Among the many human rights abuses committed before the accord was signed in Havana, Cuba in 2016 were thousands of extrajudicial killings by state forces known as falsos positivos, or false positives, whereby innocent civilians were killed and falsely made out to be combatants.

        In an interview with The New Humanitarian, Jacqueline Castillo, president of the Mothers of False Positives, or MAFAPO, a group looking for justice for the victims’ families, says the investigation of those abuses through a transitional justice body has been agonisingly slow.

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • Misinformation by a thousand cuts: Varied rigged election claims circulate

        Posts like these, discussing a dizzying array of false claims and conspiracy theories, have dominated social and ultraconservative media since the early morning after Election Day, when President Donald Trump prematurely and incorrectly declared himself the winner. As the votes continue to be counted and Joe Biden's lead has increased (Biden was up by more than 5 million votes Wednesday), so has Trump's insistence that the election was stolen from him.

        And while no evidence of significant, widespread or even small-time voter fraud has been found, the years of groundwork laid by Trump and his supporters have blossomed into a flood of misleading — and importantly, fractured — claims of a rigged election.

      • A Twitter for conservatives? Parler surges amid election misinformation crackdown

        And so, many of them joined Parler, a Twitter-like social media platform that has for two years been a minor destination for conservative politicians and media figures. Like other social media apps, Parler has a feed of posts to scroll through. Posts can be up to 1,000 characters, and they can include links and photos. Users can follow one another, as well as explore a "discovery news" tab, which was dominated Tuesday by allegations of election fraud. Its community guidelines fit onto a few pages and address the most basic content problems: criminal activity and spam.

        Now, Parler is surging. It sits atop the charts of app stores, boosted in large part by supporters who agree with Trump's decision to continue fighting the results of the election — in the courts and on the internet. Twitter declined to comment on the growth at Parler.

      • Debunking the ‘Hammer and Scorecard’ election fraud conspiracy theory

        Before we dive in, let’s be clear that independent election security researchers see no evidence that Hammer and Scorecard exist, and the head of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a government body created by President Donald Trump in 2018, has said this theory of election interference is "nonsense."

      • Infamous ‘Hoax’ Artist Behind Trumpworld’s New Voter Fraud Claim

        He tricked the Bush administration into thinking he could detect terrorist signals in al Jazeera broadcasts. Now Dennis Montgomery has a new set of believers.

      • The Times Called Officials in Every State: No Evidence of Voter Fraud

        The New York Times contacted the offices of the top election officials in every state on Monday and Tuesday to ask whether they suspected or had evidence of illegal voting. Officials in 45 states responded directly to The Times. For four of the remaining states, The Times spoke to other statewide officials or found public comments from secretaries of state; none reported any major voting issues.

    • Environment

      • The 2020 Election Shows Climate Can Be a Winning Issue for Democrats

        In the aftermath of a challenging election that saw Democrats win the presidency but lose seats in Congress, party centrists have been excoriating progressives for giving the GOP ammunition for attack ads. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a former CIA agent who serves from Virginia and narrowly avoided defeat, lashed out at leftist colleagues on a conference call for embracing terms like “defund the police” and “socialism,” insisting, “We lost good members because of that.” South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, an influential member of House leadership, added the term “socialized medicine” to the list. He warned that if Medicare for All defines the Senate runoff contests in Georgia, which will determine control of that chamber, “we’re not going to win.”

        But one slogan was pointedly absent from this recrimination-fest: The Green New Deal. This marks a quick transformation of the Green New Deal from left-wing fantasy to the mainstream of Democratic policy. The 2020 election saw the party’s bold embrace of multi-trillion-dollar proposals to arrest greenhouse gas emissions and create millions of clean-energy jobs. Far from holding back the candidates who pushed for this necessary ambition on the climate, the issue may even have helped them win — from the House to the White House.

      • Biden Can Leverage Larger Trends to Make Climate Progress
      • Demanding White House Climate Office and 'Fierce' Cabinet Picks, Groups Urge Biden to Claim His 'FDR Moment'

        "Democrats have a once-in-a-generation moment to deliver policies at the scale of the crises our generation is facing."

      • The Fall of Trump Propels the Climate Story into a Decisive New Era

        The world is about to see whether the US government will help humanity grasp a final opportunity to turn down the heat.

      • The Fall of Trump Propels the Climate Story Into a Decisive New Era

        Donald Trump’s defeat in the US presidential election is the biggest development in the climate story in years, if only because it means that the story might not have a hellish ending after all. News columns and Zoom meetings are already abuzz with to-do lists and speculation about what the administration of President-elect Joe Biden will or will not be able to accomplish on climate change. But that is another story for another day.

      • Energy

        • Massachusetts Locals Accuse Town Mayor Of ‘Colluding’ With Enbridge Over Controversial Natural Gas Project

          Protesters during a demonstration outside the town hall on November 6 accused the mayor of “colluding” with Enbridge by signing a $10 million settlement agreement dropping the town's official opposition and legal fights against a newly constructed natural gas compressor station in town. Compressor stations, which pump large volumes of fracked gas at high pressure and are critical parts of gas pipeline infrastructure, are prone to hazards due to the extreme pressure by which the gas is€ processed.

        • Damning Report Shows G20 Countries Still Pour Trillions of Dollars Into Fossil Fuels

          While state support to oil, gas and coal has dipped slightly since the landmark 2015 accord, a joint analysis by three climate think tanks found that many nations' post-pandemic stimulus plans will see billions more given to polluting fuels.

          In a grading of G20 countries' performance of phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, the analysis found that at least US$170 billion of public money had been pledged to fossil fuel-intensive sectors since the start of the pandemic.

        • How the Navajo Nation helped push Democrats ahead in Arizona

          “If it hadn’t been for the tribal nations, Biden truly wouldn’t be in office,” said Tara Benally, field director for the Rural Utah Project, a nonprofit organization that advocates and performs outreach to underrepresented voters. “Just seeing the turnout, that’s something Biden should be aware of and needs to truly understand that he has to work with these Indigenous nations — because if Biden doesn’t come through for these Indigenous nations, what does that mean for him? Where does Trump come into play again?”

          2020, in particular, has been a challenging year for tribal communities. Indigenous people were hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic, which compounded the underlying health and environmental injustices they already face. By May, the Navajo Nation quickly recorded the highest number of Covid-19 cases per capita in the country, exceeding numbers in New York and New Jersey. Yet despite the devastating health emergency, Republican state officials did little to keep the virus from spreading. Not only did the Trump administration slash funding for Indigenous communities, but policies for mask mandates, business lockdowns, and translations for Covid-19 resources were lacking. And when the federal stimulus package rolled out nationwide, finances were slow to arrive in tribal nations.

    • Finance

      • ‘Proposition 22 Is a Backlash to Victories Workers Have Had’
      • Trump's Anti-Labor Department

        Donald Trump has been waging a savage war behind the administrative curtain to make employees wholly subservient to the profiteering whims of CEOs and rich investors.

      • Disinvested: How Government and Private Industry Let the Main Street of a Black Neighborhood Crumble

        Growing up in Chicago’s East Garfield Park neighborhood in the 1960s, Annette Britton spent a lot of time on Madison Street. She picked up produce for her mother at N&S Certified Food Mart, skated at the Albany roller rink and went to movies at the Imperial Theatre. A neighborhood pharmacy, Sacramento Drugs, not only filled prescriptions but served customers ice cream at a diner in back. Durham’s, an appliance store, sold washing machines and refrigerators.

        Back then, stores, often with apartments above them, lined Madison Street from downtown west to the city limits. The east-west axis of Chicago’s grid system, the street once thrived as a commercial beltway known as the “Equator of Chicago” and the “Heart of the West Side.”

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • To 'Rebuild and Repair' After Trump Cruelty, Rights Group Gives Biden Blueprint for Racial Justice and Immigration Reform

        "Progress on each of these fronts is desperately needed to make all families and communities safe."

      • The Left and the Rule of Law

        Our work in the present situation then, is to protect the rule of law against threats to take hold of the power concentrated in our government and use it in arbitrary ways.

      • Where Will the Deplorables Go Now?

        Many of the deplorables are white evangelicals. Sociologist Robert Jones, head of the Public Religion Research Institute, says they are the most prejudiced group in the United States.

        In his latest book, White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity, Jones asserts that white churches have always been at the heart of racism, helping lock it into the culture. He says born-again whites display bigotry in many different ways.

      • The 8.1 Million Vote Landslide

        Much of this is naturally guesswork, but hopefully not too nutty. I applied some simple rules. As we have seen, the vast majority of mail-in ballots are for Biden, even in pro-Trump areas. This means that I assumed in most states that the remaining vote was more pro-Biden than the vote already recorded.

        In the pro-Trump states, I assumed there was no margin for the outstanding votes. This would not have made a huge difference since in most of these states 98 percent of the vote was already in, but it seems plausible that Biden would have come close in the votes outstanding in these states. (I used the NYT data from 11:00 A.M. on Saturday, November 7th.) For other states, I assumed more of a pro-Biden tilt. As we saw, in Pennsylvania the mail-in votes went to Biden by a margin of around 50 percentage points. I assumed margins of 40 pp in a number of states (a 70-30 margin) and somewhat smaller margins in other states. In CA I assumed the remaining votes would follow the same pattern as the votes reported to date.

      • Police Terror Won’t End With the Trump Administration

        In the month leading up to last week’s general election, the New York City Police Department made preparations for mass upheaval. Top brass told uniformed officers to prepare to contain unrest following “one of the most highly contested presidential elections in the modern era.” A tactical squad staged amped-up training exercises in preparation for pervasive property destruction. The department, according to an NYPD spokesperson, even got ready to “freeze areas of Manhattan” to car and foot traffic “should wide spread looting occur.”

      • Who Will Be the Marcus Rashford of the USA?

        The election is over, so what is the activist athlete to do? So much of the energy of the last year was poured into the political season, with players projecting that one-word message to “vote” on league-produced T-shirts, gear, and face masks. Yet, before it gets thrown down into a swoosh-adorned memory hole, we should remember that these athletes were not inspired to let their political flag fly because of the candidacy of Joe Biden. It was the movements in the streets, namely the fight for police accountability in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, that pushed players to act. That their protests and even their strikes were channeled and diverted into the 2020 elections should not erase the initial thirst for justice. There is much more work to do around this front in the aftermath of the election, so hopefully athletes will continue to amplify that cause.

      • Memo to Democrats: 2020 Elections Show Progressive Vision, Not Centrist Restraint, Is Winning Message for the Future

        "Scapegoating progressives and Black activists for their demands and messaging is not the lesson to be learned here. It was their organizing efforts, energy, and calls for change needed in their communities that drove up voter turnout."

      • Government DO SOMETHING
      • Good Riddance to Trump: A Political Obituary I Have Waited 5 Years to Write

        Nearly five years ago, my editors at The Nation put me on the Trump beat. My first assignment was to analyze the real estate mogul cum reality-TV star cum politician’s language—his use of tweets to score political points, his coarse threats and insults, his unparalleled narcissism, and his MAGA racism.

      • When Centrists Lose, Corporate Media Blame the Left

        Clearly the 2020 election contains many lessons, but it's unlikely the right conclusions will be drawn from the fact-free centrist narrative that has already emerged.

      • Things May Get Worse Before They Get Better for the U.S.

        For many, Trump’s ouster is a relief. But his steadfast support among white voters puts his party on a crash course with democracy.

      • “The Envy of the World”: Still No Functioning Democracy Here

        I walked up to Chicago’s Trump Tower down the middle of Michigan Avenue last Saturday night. Within four blocks of the hated structure, both sides of the street were jammed with cars full of young LatinX, Black, and white folks honking their horns, hanging out car windows, waving, roaring their engines, playing YG’s chart-topping hit “(FTD) Fuck Donald Trump,” and aiming bird flips at the Trump building. Young people of all races and ethnicities danced on all four corners of Michigan and Wacker.

        It was one Hell of a celebration. As well it should have been. Donald Trump is a vicious, pandemic-spreading white-supremacist, eco-exterminist, uber-narcissist, and instinctual fascist who richly deserves Noam Chomsky’s description of him as “the most dangerous criminal in human history.” A second Trump term would be a tragedy from which the nation and world might never recover.

      • The 2020 Election as a Triumph for Democracy? Hold the Hosannas

        In our political horse races, winners do have another responsibility. We expect them to go on and govern, to make and execute policy decisions. Horse races don’t give us democracy. We have democracy when those we the people elect make choices that reflect what we need and feel.

        Our pundits, unfortunately, regularly overlook that distinction, as they did once again on Election Day 2020. They beheld the spectacle of a national voter turnout up by tens of millions and hailed the resiliency of our democracy, as imperfect as that democracy may be.

      • The UK Equalities Commission's€ Labour Antisemitism Report€ is the Real 'Political Interference’

        First, the commission’s headline verdict – though you would never know it from reading the media’s coverage – was that no case was found that Labour suffered from “institutional antisemitism”.

        That, however, was precisely the claim that had been made by groups like the Jewish Labour Movement, the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the Board of Deputies and prominent rabbis such as€ Ephraim Mirvis. Their claims were amplified by Jewish media outlets such as the Jewish Chronicle and individual journalists such as Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian. All are now shown to have been wrong, to have maligned the Labour party and to have irresponsibly inflamed the concerns of Britain’s wider Jewish community.

      • No Evidence to Support Trump's Election Fraud Claims, New York Times Finds

        "I don't know of a single case where someone argued that a vote counted when it shouldn't have or didn't count when it should," said one official. "There was no fraud."

      • Georgia GOP Senators Heading for Run-offs Demand GOP Election Chief Resign
      • Trump’s Frivolous Lawsuits Are the Tip of the Iceberg in His Refusal to Concede
      • Dahlia Lithwick: Trump’s Ridiculous Coup Attempt Will Fail, But It Will Hurt Democracy in Long Run

        As President Trump continues to launch baseless accusations of widespread voter fraud in the presidential election, Democratic and Republican election officials across the United States have told The New York Times they uncovered no evidence to support Trump’s claims. Despite his electoral defeat, Trump has not conceded, and his administration is proceeding as though it will continue into a second term, blocking President-elect Joe Biden from accessing government funding and other resources for a smooth transition. “The entire country is trying to figure out: Is this just going to go away?” says Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor at Slate magazine. “Or are we really in this slow-rolling denialist attempt to give this man a second term?”

      • “A Tremendous Jump for Progressive Forces”: Puerto Rico Election Signals End of Two-Party Dominance

        We look at election results in Puerto Rico, where progressives have made historic inroads against the two traditional parties, the Popular Democratic Party and the New Progressive Party. “There is no question that the old monopoly of the two political parties that have dominated Puerto Rican politics for decades is coming to an end, and that’s a very good thing,” says historian Rafael Bernabe, who was just elected to the Puerto Rico Senate as part of the Citizens’ Victory Movement.

      • Michael Russell, Neo-Liberal

        Mike Russell is claiming I have in some way misinterpreted or mis-attributed his detailed advocacy of privatisation of the NHS. I therefore bring you the following published critiques, every one of which has evidently “misunderstood” Mike Russell too. First from Iain MacWhirter in the Scottish Review of Books:

      • Juan González: Mainstream Media Has Missed the Real Story About Latinx Voter Turnout

        About 160 million voters cast ballots in this election, setting a new record, and President-elect Joe Biden’s lead in the popular vote has jumped to over 5 million. Much of the increased turnout was powered by people of color, while the total number of votes cast by white Americans barely increased from the last presidential election. “The main story is that in an election which saw historic turnout, people of color — and especially Latinos — had an unprecedented increase in voting,” says Democracy Now! co-host Juan González. “After decades of political experts talking about the growing Latino vote, this year it actually happened.”

      • Senate GOP Blasted for Proposing OSHA Cuts as Covid-19 Crisis 'Makes Many Jobs Much More Dangerous'

        The proposed cut to the Susan Harwood Training Grant Program was announced on the same day as senators floated nearly $700 billion in new military spending.€ 

      • Thousands Urge Commutation of Abuse Victim Lisa Montgomery's Death Row Sentence as Trump Continues Federal Executions

        "Is the public really okay with a lame-duck Trump administration continuing to execute people on death row?"

      • Maine Governor Won’t Fund Reforms for Public Defense Agency Without Accountability

        Maine Gov. Janet Mills said Tuesday she was reluctant to provide further funding for the state agency charged with defending poor people charged with crimes, despite a scathing report this week that found it was failing to provide high-quality legal representation.

        Staff at the Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services, or MCILS, provided ineffective oversight of the private attorneys paid to defend the state’s poor — the result of flawed leadership, too few employees and an overreliance on ad hoc accounting practices, according to the report by the Office of Program Evaluation and Government Accountability, or OPEGA, the state’s financial watchdog.

      • Facebook, Google to extend political advertising bans

        Facebook and Google are set to extend their bans on political advertising longer than expected as President Trump and his allies continue to delegitimize his loss.

        Facebook notified advertisers Tuesday that they should expect the pause “to last another month, though there may be an opportunity to resume these ads sooner.”

      • Facebook and Google Extend Bans on Political Ads

        The tech companies initially indicated the bans would last a week after Election Day but could be extended.

        The Associated Press and other major media outlets on Saturday declared that Joe Biden won the presidential election. President Donald Trump has yet to concede and has alleged voter fraud but his campaign hasn’t provided evidence of widespread irregularities.

      • How a Fiercely Christian Nation Became Fanatically Islamic

        One of the benefits of Adel Guindy's new book, A Sword Over the Nile: A Brief History of the Copts Under Islamic Rule, is that it implicitly answers an important question: how and why did non-Muslim nations become Islamic? In this case, how did Egypt go from being overwhelmingly Christian in the seventh century, to being overwhelmingly Muslim in the twenty-first century?

        To understand the significance of this question—and because pre-Islamic Egypt's profoundly Christian nature is often forgotten—a brief primer is in order: [...]

      • Trump Attempting a Coup With Republican Support Doesn't Have to Work to be Dangerous

        A combination of factors is cause for alarm as Trump makes desperate grasps at a second term. How good a hold he gets on it, how hard he holds on, and how serious he is about it are questions worth pondering right now. Staying on guard against all-out alarmism, let’s take a look at the pieces on the board.

      • Facebook Extends Ban on US Political Ads for Another Month

        The ban, one of Facebook's measures to combat misinformation and other abuses on its site, was supposed to last about a week but could be extended. Alphabet Inc.'s Google also appeared to be sticking with its post-election political ad ban.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

      • Pham Doan Trang Goes to Prison

        Trang has been arrested in Vietnam's most brazen attack on journalists since relations with the United States€ were normalized in 1995.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Defying Fear in Traumatic Times

        Even in the midst of this splendid dawn, even as we awake with relief from the dark fever of a seemingly endless night and celebrate, along with multiple dancing citizens, that the republic is not beyond redemption, we must remember that other nightmares await us.

        If it were only a matter of the damage Trump will likely inflict before he surrenders the Presidency. Or his legacy of a worsening pandemic, a degraded environment, a wounded democracy, a land racked by violence, racial injustice and hatred of immigrants.

      • Protest Song Of The Week: ‘Don’t (Just) Vote’ By Cass McCombs

        “We have to excise a malignant cancer from the body politic. But that’s just the beginning. Real politics is what you do before and after you push the lever. You have to keep your shoulder to the wheel: engagement, activism, organizing – that’s what will make the difference.” This statement by the political scholar Noam Chomsky was included at the conclusion of “Don’t (Just) Vote,” the latest single by singer-songwriter Cass McCombs.The song is an update of the tune “Don’t Vote” off McCombs’ 2009 album “Catacombs.”McCombs described why he updated the tune. “I was compelled to write something for the election and I thought of no better way than to troll myself, laying waste to a much-misunderstood song of mine from over a decade ago, ‘Don’t Vote.’ Most people never made it much further than the title, anyway.”For this new song, ‘Don’t (Just) Vote,’ the message is clear: Vote, yes, but when you do, imagine the world you would like to see, beyond what appears on your ballot. Harness your imagination and justice becomes inevitable.”The elections are over (save for a couple of Senate runoffs in Georgia), and Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was declared the winner. Yet, as McCombs pointed out, the result will not has no bearing on the work that must still be done.Biden is a status quo politician, who doesn’t support the expansion of Medicare to cover all Americans. He is unlikely to do much to address issues such as income inequality, mass incarceration, police brutality, systemic racism, and climate change. Institutional injustices do not miraculously go away with the results of an election. Real change is going to come from people making their voices heard and mobilizing to hold elected officials accountable.

      • Actress Rahama Sadau charged with blasphemy

        Kannywood embattled actress, Rahama Sadau will be appearing in a sharia court in Kaduna over allegations of blasphemy levelled against her after sharing racy photos on social media.

        Rahama Sadau is allegedly under police investigation after the racy photos she shared triggered blasphemous comments.

        It was gathered that the investigation is linked to the blasphemous comment on the Holy Prophet Mohammed the racy photos incited.

      • The New Humanitarian | Visions for the future of humanitarian aid

        Rethinking Humanitarianism can feel like an abstract and even overwhelming undertaking. To help break it down, The New Humanitarian reached out to leaders across and beyond the aid sector – from policy-makers to people with lived experience – to crystallise some visions for the future. Their ideas coalesced around five broad themes: preventing conflict, mutual and activist aid, decolonising aid, shrinking the scope of the aid sector, and anticipating crises. Taken together, these ideas paint a picture of areas central to the humanitarian action of the future. Each week, until early December, we’ll be adding new submissions, so stay tuned for more visions of tomorrow’s aid landscape.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Physicists have developed an efficient modem for the future quantum internet

        The first quantum revolution brought about semiconductor electronics, the laser and finally the internet. The coming, second quantum revolution promises spy-proof communication, extremely precise quantum sensors and quantum computers for previously unsolvable computing tasks. But this revolution is still in its infancy. A central research object is the interface between local quantum devices and light quanta that enable the remote transmission of highly sensitive quantum information. The Otto-Hahn group "Quantum Networks" at the Max-Planck-Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching is researching such a "quantum modem". The team has now achieved a first breakthrough in a relatively simple but highly efficient technology that can be integrated into existing fibre optic networks. The work is published this week in "Physical Review X".

        [...]

        The "quantum modem" is designed to efficiently establish a connection between flying and stationary qubits. For this purpose, the team around doctoral student Benjamin Merkel has developed a new technology and has just demonstrated its basic functionality. Its crucial advantage is that it could be integrated into the existing telecommunications fibre-optic network. This would be the fastest way to advance a functioning long-distance networking of quantum technologies.

        For this system to work, the photons sent or received by the modem as quantum information carriers must be matched precisely to the infrared wavelength of the laser light used for telecommunications. This means that the modem must have qubits at rest that can react precisely to these infrared photons with a quantum leap. Only in this way the sensitive quantum information can be transmitted directly between the qubits at rest and the flying qubits.

        Extensive research by the Garching-based group showed that the element erbium is best suited for this purpose. Its Electrons can perform a perfectly matching quantum leap. Unfortunately, the erbium atoms are very reluctant to make this quantum leap. Therefore, they must be fixated in anenvironment that forces them to react more quickly. To solve this problem, the erbium atoms and the infrared photons are locked up in a suitable space for as long as possible. "You can think of it as a party, which should stimulate the best possible communication between, let’s say, ten guests," Reiserer explains. The size of the space is crucial here. "In a football stadium the guests would get lost, a telephone box in turn would be too small," the physicist continues, "but a living room would do just fine.”

        The party, however, would quickly be over because the photons travel at the speed of light and are therefore highly volatile and always tempted to leave. This is why the Garching quantum modem uses a tiny mirror cabinet as a "living room" Thereto,the team packed the atoms into a transparent crystal made of an yttrium silicate compound, which is five times thinner than a human hair. This crystal, in turn, is placed like a sandwich spread between two almost perfect mirrors. To eliminate the heat wobbling of the atoms, which is destructive to quantum information, the entire ensemble is cooled to minus 271 €°C.

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • Oxurion NV Announced the Confirmation of New Patents for THR-687

          Oxurion NV, a Belgium-based biopharmaceutical company focusing on developing an advanced treatment to preserve the vision of patients suffering from diabetic macular edema (DME), announced that it is strengthening its intellectual property (IP) portfolio leading THR-687, an integrin antagonist which is developed for DME treatment.

          The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO) have issued new composition-of-matter patents that cover THR-687. Patents US10703752 and EP3613739 were issued in July 2020 and November 2020 respectively and expire in 2039, with possible extension till 2044.

          THR-687 is generated to treat DME having a possibility to become the degree of care for patients suffering from DME and is known as a possible top-notch small molecule pan-RGD integrin antagonist

        • Cyxone files patent application to extend exclusivity of Rabeximod

          Cyxone (publ.) announced today that the company has filed for an extended patent protection of Rabeximod with the European Patent Office (EPO), that will be extended to other territories in due course. An approval of the application will strengthen the company's intellectual property portfolio and generate a longer market exclusivity for Rabeximod.

          Cyxone develops Rabeximod, a potentially disease modifying drug candidate for chronic diseases of the immune system as well as for critical conditions such as virally induced acute respiratory disorders. The candidate drug is subject to two planned Phase 2 clinical trials investigating its safety and efficacy as treatment in moderate Covid-19 and for the management of rheumatoid arthritis.

        • Patent Office Updates You Need to Know

          The European Patent Office (EPO) has requested that all visitors abstain from visiting the EPO if they have recently visited a high risk area, on November 2, 2020. Visitors who have been to a high risk area must confirm they have had a negative COVID-19 test taken at least five days after they left the high risk area. Visitors will also be asked to sign a declaration of the areas they have visited in the two weeks prior to their visit to the office.

          The German Patent Office (DPMA) has announced that it held a virtual meeting of its User Advisory Council and discussed the Office operations in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, on November 2, 2020. The User Advisory Council addressed, among other topics, current developments concerning patent and utility model procedures during the coronavirus crisis and patent information trends.

        • Fina Biosolutions Announces European Patent for Conjugate Vaccine Development

          ...Patent entitled “ Expression and Purification of CRM Proteins and Related Proteins, and Protein Domains” from the European Patent Office (EPO).

        • Software Patents

          • Necessity of stopping a suspicious vehicle: non-technical

            This European patent application underlying the present decision relates to a control method for road toll collection using a control system. Every vehicle on every road section that is monitored by the system is to be checked by collecting usable vehicle information. Based on these information, it is decided whether suspicious vehicles are stopped and checked manually by inspection staff (cf. WO 02/061690 A1, pages 1-3).

            [...]

            During appeal stage, the applicant further argued that assigning the vehicles to be checked into different case groups as specified by claim 1 would be technical (cf. point 1.5 of the appeal decision). In more detail, it would be technical to change the number of vehicles that need to be checked by assigning them to different groups which are then used to decide whether a vehicle is manually checked or not.

            However, the board in charge did not follow these arguments and argued that assigning vehicles to different groups is a business-related method to control the number of vehicles to be checked, as for example outlined in the description in the sentence bridging pages 30 and 31. Hence, also the feature of claim 1 referring to the case groups is considered non-technical and thus not relevant for assessing inventive step.

          • Patent Eligibility of Claims Directed to Printed Matter

            The invention in this case was prompted by a 2005 FDA labelling requirement for IV ports capable of handling fluids “power injected” directly into a patient’s veins. (Most IV ports are designed for low-pressure gravity flow). Bard’s IV ports were apparently already designed for use in power-injection, but not fully labelled.

            [...]

            What is the impact of a claim term being “not entitled to patentable weight.” Here, the court narrowly defined the printed matter as “the information that the claimed access ports are suitable for [power] injection.” The court still gave weight to the requirement of a “radiographic marker.” Thus, if you scroll up to the two claim-terms that I copied, it appears that the first term (“providing … a radiographic feature”) is given patentable weight while the second term (acting on information provided by the feature) is not. The district court gave neither patentable weight. On appeal the court also vacated on anticipation.

      • Copyrights

        • Grand rights' of great importance: copyright on the big stage

          There is no statutory definition of 'grand rights', but it is generally understood in the music industry that public performance rights are categorized as either 'grand rights' or 'small rights''. Grand rights cover dramatico-musical works, such as musicals, ballets, operas, operettas, pantomimes and revues, while small rights cover the usual non-dramatic works.

          This distinction is rooted in consideration for the author without any specific legal basis. The reasoning is that there is a greater need for protection of 'droit moral' associated with dramatic stage performance. Grand rights are recognised as being 'in a league of their own' and are usually personally managed by the author.

          [...]

          The decisions reflect that both courts attach a great deal of importance to what was generally known and common in the music industry at the time of conclusion of the agreements, both in Denmark and internationally. Even though it was shown that neither party had focused on, or even considered, grand rights at the time of entering into the agreements, the courts applied an objective interpretation rather than relying on the parties' intentions. The subjective interpretation was rejected in favour of an objective "state of awareness" within the music industry at the time.

          This objective state of awareness, combined with the broad wording of the provisions on transfer of rights, appears to have been decisive to the outcome.

          The speciality principle under Danish copyright law derives from concern for protecting the author. As the principle stipulates restrictive interpretation of implied or ambiguous assignments, the courts' decisions suggest that the assignment between MLTR and EMI was so clear in wording that the principle did not apply, even though grand rights/dramatico-musical works were never explicitly mentioned.

          One may be tempted to wonder whether a non-exhaustive listing of rights could now act as a contractual safety valve of sorts when dealing with copyright assignments – or whether the distinction between grand and small rights is simply an illusion in this regard? Whatever the answer, these decisions have certainly challenged the previous general opinion on assignment of grand rights.

        • Illegal Free Streams of Alexander Povetkin vs Dillian Whyte Will Be Blocked

          The High Court of England and Wales has handed down a new dynamic ISP blocking order aimed at preventing boxing fans from obtaining free illegal streams of boxing matches. The major upcoming target is the Alexander Povetkin vs Dillian Whyte rematch scheduled for November 21, which will be blocked by the country's major ISPs.

        • Happy 20th Birthday To 'No One Lives Forever', The Classic PC Game That Can't Be Sold Today Thanks To IP

          There are a great many interesting arguments we tend to have over both the purpose of copyright law and how effectively its current application aligns with that purpose. Still, we are on fairly solid legal footing when we state that the main thrust of copyright was supposed to be to drive more and better content to the public. Much of the disagreement we tend to have with naysayers revolves around whether ever expanding rights coupled with protectionist attitudes truly results in more and better content for the public. We, to a large extent, say the current copyright bargain is horribly one-sided against the public interest. Detractors say, essentially, "nuh-uh!".

        • 5,500 Pirate IPTV Servers Shut Down By 700 Police Officers Around Europe

          A massive law enforcement operation across Europe has reportedly shut down 5,500 servers used to stream pirated TV broadcasts, live sports, and movies to the public. According to the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, 700 police officers were deployed in 11 countries, leading to the arrest of the alleged boss of an IPTV operation with profits estimated at €10.7 million.

        • Twitter Takes Down Trump's 'YMCA Dance' But Leaves Original Online

          Twitter has once again removed a tweet from President Donald Trump. The social media platform took action following a complaint from Village People's publishers, targeting the widely shared YMCA dance. While the rightsholders have a case, the takedown appears to be yet another example of selective copyright enforcement that's mostly political in nature.



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