AWS Creates Its Own Docker Images https://www.zdnet.com/article/aws-preps-its-own-library-of-public-docker-container-images/ Dell Adds Privacy Drivers to the Kernel https://www.debugpoint.com/2020/11/dell-privacy-driver-linux/ Elementary OS Is Making Progress with Dark Mode in Odin https://blog.elementary.io/dark-style-progress/ Raspberry Pi 400’s New Form Factor https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-400-the-70-desktop-pc/ KDE Announces Updates and Updates https://kde.org/announcements/releases/2020-11-apps-update/ Nitrux 1.3.4 Out https://nxos.org/changelog/changelog-nitrux-1-3-4/ Emmabuntus Debian Edition 1.03 Outinstallation features https://emmabuntus.org/on-november-2020-emmade3-1-03-focuses-on-the-reuse-for-all/
Sparky Linux 5.13 Out https://sparkylinux.org/sparky-5-13/
LXQT 0.16 Out https://github.com/lxqt/lxqt/releases/tag/0.16.0
Collabora Office 6.4 Out https://www .collaboraoffice.com/press-releases/collabora-online-6-4-0-released/
Second Gen Librem Mini from Purism Out https://9to5linux.com/purism-launches-2nd-gen-librem-mini-linux-pc-with-a-10th-gen-intel-core-cpu
If you are fond of using tools to quickly edit and manipulate images and screenshots, you may have heard about Paint.NET, which is available only for Windows systems.
It is a popular nifty tool to get a lot of basic editing tasks done along with a bunch of options available. You might be aware of several image editing tools but Paint.NET is a pretty popular option just because it is easy to use without any bloated feature for an average user.
LazPaint comes to the rescue as an impressive open source replacement to Paint.NET for Linux, Windows, and macOS. It offers most of the essential features one would need to manipulate images while being easy to use.
In the world of Operating Systems, the Linux operating system is everyone’s favorite gladiator and for obvious reasons. Firstly, it is open-source, meaning the only thing you need to worry about is your internet provider’s stability and subscription rates. There is no exchange of cash needed for you to get the best experience in the Linux world. Secondly, the Linux OS is powerful.
If you are thirsty for a tech-savvy experience, you will never run out of things to do on the Linux operating system environment. Lastly, the reason we gathered this article. It is only fair to state that if an operating system is categorized as open-source, then the software and applications that define it should also be in the same domain.
If we are to count the number of open-source software and applications Linux offers, we will have to enter a black hole. Each day, the Linux community produces new and improved software and applications related to the Linux distros.
In the modern era, the world has seen major progression in the technological sector. New and advanced technologies have made the lives of people easier. Not long ago, people used landlines to communicate with one another, but now, devices such as smartphones have arrived. Such advances have truly revolutionized the lives of humans in ways that go beyond the concept of communication. Such has been the impact of technology on our lives that every aspect of modern life has been merged with it. Whether it involves our finances or our social profiles, all rely heavily on technology.
However, this reliance of ours has made us much more vulnerable to data breaches. The real-life cases of Adobe and eBay clearly indicate what a serious issue cybersecurity is. Cyberattacks have also been on the rise and, to top it off, even more advanced and new kinds of attacks are being developed every day. Although Linux is much more secure than Windows and other operating systems, it is still vulnerable to viruses.
Diff tools helps for file comparison which helps for debug and save times. Here some picked hand picked best file comparison tools for Linux.
Updating your environment to Terraform 0.12 is not for the faint of heart, but this how-to will make it less painful.
You may print simple outputs with echo command but that's not enough for complicated formatted outputs. It's time you realize the power of the printf command.
KDE dates from 1996, when it was announced by Matthias Ettrich, a Linux fan who sought an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows 3.1, of which he said back in 2003: “There was really nothing good one could say about it, but it was popular.”
The name originally stood for Kool Desktop Environment and was also a pun on CDE (Common Desktop Environment), a proprietary Unix desktop. Ettrich choose the Qt framework from Trolltech (now the Qt Company) to build it, later becoming an employee.
Qt 6 is nearly upon us. While this has not been addressed by other publications, Qt 3D is also introducing a number of changes with this major release. This includes changes in the public API that will bring a number of new features and many internal changes to improve performance and leverage new, low-level graphics features introduced in QtBase. I will focus on API changes now, while my colleague, Paul Lemire, will cover other changes in a follow up post.
It was on my list to write a short review about Linux Lite OS in a bit of detail for some time. So, here's a review of one of the best alternative OS for older hardware - Linux Lite 5.2.
A few days ago, the PrimTux team launched the sixth version of its educational free and open source operating system, called PrimTux6.
With PrimTux6, it is now available in two versions: one based on Ubuntu 18.04.5 or 20.04.1 for recent computers (64-bit) and the other on Debian 10 “Buster” for older computers (32-bit). However, both versions are designed to be extremely lightweight.
For those who don’t know, PrimTux is a French-oriented Debian and Ubuntu-based Linux distribution for educational environments and to run on all types of PC, including old ones.
Besides basic Linux applications, it offers a very rich educational software for children from kindergarten to the first years of college.
A first step for the CI service would be to create a database of diffs sent to ports. This would allow people to track what has been sent and not yet committed and what the state of the contribution is (build/don’t built, apply/don’t apply). I would proceed following this logic: [...]
In this article I will share my opinion about things I like in OpenBSD, this may including a short rant about recent open source practices not helping non-linux support.
In this release, Tails finally upgrades the Mozilla Thunderbird open-source email, chat and news client to the latest 78 branch, which brings numerous new features and improvements like OpenPGP encryption. Tails 4.13 ships with Mozilla Thunderbird 78.4.2 by default.
It’s also important to know that the Mozilla Thunderbird 78 series no longer supports the Enigmail add-on for OpenPGP functionality since it is now built into the applications. Therefore, Tails users who use Enigmail are recommended to read the official migration instructions before upgrading to version 4.13.
Well, first of all, hello – and I'm glad to be back. I've spent the past two and a half years teaching at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (AUAS). I initially thought that I would be able to keep up this blog while doing that, but it didn't take long for me to realize how impractical that was. Now that I am done at the AUAS, I am very pleased to be writing here again.
What better way to resume than with a brand new Raspberry Pi system? To me, this one confirms that the people at Raspberry Pi Towers really are a bunch of hard-core geeks who came of age with computers at about the same time that I did.
In the 1980s, the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair ZX were the stuff of geeky dreams, and are still a source of nostalgia for those of us who remember them. So a Raspberry Pi in a keyboard brings huge smiles to a lot of old faces.
I’ll be mostly focusing on hardware in this month’s update, I’ve been out of the software development loop for much of the month due to personal reasons. This, however, gives me an opportunity to talk to you at more length about the PineCube, Pinecil and SOEdge as well as some community-centric things.
The Raspberry Pi is a $35 computer that can do a lot of things, but few projects are as popular as turning it into a retro-gaming console; imagine something the size of an NES or SNES Classic mini console with a few hundred games on it instead of a few dozen. With about half an hour of free time and some lightweight technical know-how, you can convert this card-deck–sized computer into a console capable of emulating nearly every classic video game system from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s.
It was not until later on in my career, when I could relate to good Open Source evangelists but specially good sales professionals. I learned a bit about how different groups within the same organization are incentivized differently and you need to understand those incentives to tune your message in a a way that they can relate to it.
Most of my arguments and those from my colleagues back then were focused on cost reductions and collaboration, on preventing silos, on shorten innovation cycles, on sustainability, prevention of vendor lock-in, etc. Those arguments resonate very well among those responsible for strategic decisions or those managers directly related with innovation. But they did not work well with execution managers, specially senior ones.
When I have been a manager myself in the software industry, frequently my incentives had little to do with those arguments. In some cases, either my manager’s incentives had little to do with such arguments despite being an Open Organization. Open Source was part of the company culture but management objectives had little to do with collaboration. Variables like productivity, efficiency, time-to-market, customer satisfaction, defects management, release cycles, yearly costs, etc., were the core incentives that drove my actions and those around me.
If that was the case for those organizations I was involved in back then, imagine traditional corporations. Later on I got engage with such companies which confirmed this intuition.
I found myself more than once arguing with my managers about priorities and incentives, goals and KPIs because, as Open Source guy, I was for some time unable to clearly articulate the positive correlation between collaboration and efficiency, productivity, cost reduction etc. In some cases, this inability was a factor in generating a collision that end up with my bones out of the organization.
Mozilla plans to remove support for so-called NPAPI plugins in Firefox 85 according to a post by Jim Mathies, Senior Engineering Manager, to the Mozilla Dev Platform group.
Mozilla dropped support for all NPAPI plugins except for Adobe Flash when it released Firefox 52 in March 2017. NPAPI allowed the browser to integrate plugins to add support for content such as Silverlight or Java to the Firefox web browser.
When Adobe announced that it would stop supporting Adobe Flash at the end of 2020, it was clear that Mozilla would not only disable support for Adobe Flash in Firefox but remove the entire NPAPI codebase from the browser.
Firefox 83.0 is now shipping as a notable update to the Mozilla web browser and this time around are some exciting changes.
Most notable with Firefox 83 is the SpiderMonkey "Warp" upgrade aiming to deliver better website responsiveness and other real-world JavaScript performance improvements. Mozilla describes the Warp benefits as "improved page load performance by up to 15%, page responsiveness by up to 12%, and reduced memory usage by up to 8%. We have replaced part of the JavaScript engine that helps to compile and display websites for you, improving security and maintainability of the engine at the same time."
I've been using Rust for a little over six months now. I'm far from an expert, but I have stumbled across many, many gotchas and learned many, many things along the way; things that I hope will be of use to those who are learning what is easily my favourite programming language.
We lost one of the greatest intellectuals not only in the Americas, but also the world. The fact that JGQ was born a Mexican in el sur (Parral, Chihuahua, Mexico) and died a proud Mexican/Chicano in el norte (Los Angeles, California) in a time when the Mexican continues to be otherized, marginalized and pejoratized serves as a grim reminder of this great loss for la raza.
For over 50 years, JGQ dedicated his life to uplift the people of the sun through his superior scholarship, dedicated mentorship, political actions and eloquent words. While his contributions are many, for the sake of space, here go a few: wrote classic books and articles on Chicana/o history, labor, politics and culture; helped establish the theoretical foundations of Chicana and Chicano studies, along with the living legend, Rodolfo “Rudy” Acuña, whom JGQ fondly admired; taught and mentored thousands of students who became leaders in their own right; supported and participated in countless political actions for social, economic and racial justice; lead co-author of El Plan de Santa Bárbara: A Chicano Plan for Higher Education; co-founded UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC); co-founded CSRC’s Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies; NACCS (National Association of Chicana and Chicano Studies) Scholar Recipient, 1990; wrote poetry and eloquent prose; etc.
Then Mickey welcomes philosophy professor and author John K. Roth, who has dedicated most of his scholarly career to studying the Holocaust. He explains the conditions that gave rise to fascism and the genocide of Jews, and suggests what lessons modern societies should remember to avoid taking similar paths.
Broadcasters and media outlets often prepare obituary material in order to be able to publish it promptly when a death is announced.
The problem occurred when RFI was moving its website to a different content management system, according to its statement.
It said "around a hundred" draft stories were published in error - not just to its own site but to partner sites including Google and Yahoo.
Big tech companies were among the first in the country to allow their white-collar employees to work from home indefinitely when the pandemic hit. And, following backlash about the impact that would have on blue-collar workers, some firms also pledged to continue to pay them as well, according to the newspaper.
However, several Bay Area firms, including Electronic Arts, LinkedIn, Salesforce and Nvidia, have terminated contracts with transportation providers in recent months, while Yahoo cut more than 120 cafeteria jobs at its Sunnyvale, Calif., facility.
In a report released Thursday, the labor advocacy group Silicon Valley Rising projected up to 12,000 workers could find themselves without health coverage if the trends continue on their current trajectory.
A week ago this Saturday, after four days of ballot counting, tabulation, speculation, commiseration, and angst on all sides, it became clear that Joe Biden had won Pennsylvania, and with it the necessary Electoral College votes to put him over the top for the Presidency. True, there have been (and probably will still be) be recounts and legal challenges, but most agree that President Trump doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on legally, and thus far his legal challenges have been shot down like Japanese Zeroes during the Battle of the Philippine Sea. (Look it up if you’re not big on WWII history. It’s even a bit of a Thanksgiving reference.) It is also unlikely that recounts will change the results in enough states to flip the election back to President Trump. What this means is that, barring a truly unexpected development, on January 20, Joe Biden will take the oath of office and become the 46th President of the United States.
"Actual public health professionals do not incite violence in response to guidelines or policy that they disagree with. The purpose of public health is to help people, not endanger them."
Well, first we need a bit of perspective. Yes, we place an enormous value on our health and our lives, so getting effective treatments and vaccines quickly are extremely important. But we do also care about what we pay to get there.
To take my favorite analogy, the firefighter who goes into a burning building to rescue a couple of children can be said to deserve many millions of dollars. After all, we put a huge value on human life. While firefighters are reasonably well-paid, most of their paychecks don’t cross $100,000. Should we pay all of our firefighters $1 million a year? Perhaps in some sense that would be fair, but the reality is that we can get people to do the work for far less.
Today, policymakers and the public alike are increasingly adopting approaches that treat substance use as a public health issue rather than a criminal justice one.
Since the COVID-19 crisis began, many universities have looked to novel technologies to assist their efforts to retain in-person operations. Most prominent are untested contact tracing and notification applications or devices. While universities must commit to public health, too often these programs invade privacy and lack transparency. To make matters worse, some universities mandate these technologies for students, faculty, staff, and even visitors.€ As we’ve stated before, forcing people to install COVID-related technology on their personal devices is the wrong call. € € € € € € €
This is why the EFF is launching our new campaign: End University App Mandates.€ Please help us call on university officials to publicly commit to the University App Mandate Pledge (UAMP). It contains seven transparency and privacy-enhancing policies that university officials must adopt to protect the privacy, security, and transparency of their community members. Whether you are a student, a worker, a community member, or an alum, we need your support in defending privacy on campus.
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called on universities that have launched or plan to launch COVID-19 tracking technologies—which sometimes collect sensitive data from users’ devices and lack adequate transparency or privacy protections—to make them entirely voluntary for students and disclose details about data collection practices.Monitoring public...
"These are not markups for luxury condos,€ they are for the most basic necessity of your life: your health."
The promise of antigen tests emerged like a miracle this summer. With repeated use, the theory went, these rapid and cheap coronavirus tests would identify highly infectious people while giving healthy Americans a green light to return to offices, schools and restaurants. The idea of on-the-spot tests with near-instant results was an appealing alternative to the slow, lab-based testing that couldn’t meet public demand.
By September, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had purchased more than 150 million tests for nursing homes and schools, spending more than $760 million. But it soon became clear that antigen testing — named for the viral proteins, or antigens, that the test detects — posed a new set of problems. Unlike lab-based, molecular PCR tests, which detect snippets of the virus’s genetic material, antigen tests are less sensitive because they can only detect samples with a higher viral load. The tests were prone to more false negatives and false positives. As problems emerged, officials were slow to acknowledge the evidence.
What she's done to her state, Trump and the Republican Party are doing to the entire country. The winter surge that all the scientists predicted is upon us and it's very bad. The president and his administration are obsessively trying to convince their voters that the election was stolen from them (which is a lie) so they aren't even pretending to be interested in the rapidly spreading pandemic. Republican officials are missing in action on everything, with senators even refusing to appear on the Sunday morning shows in case they might be asked to explain why their president and their party are tilting at electoral windmills while refrigerator trucks are being commandeered in some states because the morgues are all full.
In the normal course of its work connecting prisoners across Wisconsin via email correspondence and newsletters, the Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee of Milwaukee receives reports of the deaths of incarcerated people from their fellow prisoners.€
One recent report involved Kristopher Carlisle, who was incarcerated at the Columbia Correctional Institution.
First problem - only LibreOffice 7.0 and newer works on macOS 11 Big Sur. Nobody knows why. So if you use older version you should update your LibreOffice to 7.0.3
The macOS Big Sur update has been causing some older MacBook Pros to get stuck on black screens during installation, with no way that users can find to fix it. The issue seems to be most common on late-2013 and mid-2014 models of the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Owners of other Macs have reported Big Sur installation issues, too — and some say they’ve been able to fix those issues — but those two models of MacBook Pro seem to be having the most severe problems for now.
GitHub has reinstated the youtube-dl repository after it concluded that the code doesn't violate the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions. The company believes that developers should have the freedom to tinker, whether the RIAA likes it or not, and has placed $1 million into a takedown defense fund.
The Microsoft-owned source code repository GitHub has reinstated the repository for youtube-dl, a popular command-line script that can be used to download videos from YouTube and many other videos from the Internet.
Besides lying about the end-to-end encryption offered by their service, Zoom is also being called out for lying about the encryption status of recorded video calls stored in Zoom’s cloud service. The announcement added that Zoom:
An Australian firm that was hit by the Windows REvil ransomware earlier this month has said that it has dealt with the incident fully and upgraded its defences to prevent any repeat.
Five years have passed since InternetLab published “Quem Defende Seus Dados?" (“Who defends your data?"), a report that holds ISPs accountable for their privacy and data protection policies in Brazil. Since then, major Brazilian telecom companies have provided more transparency about their data protection and privacy policies, a shift primarily fueled by Brazil’s new data protection law.€
InternetLab’s fifth annual report launches today, identifies steps companies should take to protect Brazil’s telecom privacy and data protection. This edition, featuring eight telecom providers for mobile and broadband services, shows Brazil telecom provider TIM leading the way, followed by Vivo and Oi right behind. TIM scored high marks for defending privacy in public policy debates and the judiciary, publishing transparency reports, and transparent data protection policies. In contrast, Nextel scored in the last place as it did in 2019, very far away from the rest of its competitors. Nextel did take a step forward in defending privacy in the judiciary, in contrast to 2019, when it received no stars in any category.
Hiperderecho, Peru’s leading digital rights organization, has launched today its third €¿Quién Defiende Tus Datos? (Who Defends you Data)--a report that seeks to hold telecom companies accountable for their users’ privacy. The new Peruvian edition shows improvements compared to 2019’s evaluation. Movistar and Claro commit to require...
"The military industrial complex and the surveillance state have always had a cozy relationship with tech. Buying bulk data in order to profile Muslims is par for the course for them," says Rep. Ilhan Omar.
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called on universities that have launched or plan to launch COVID-19 tracking technologies—which sometimes collect sensitive data from users’ devices and lack adequate transparency or privacy protections—to make them entirely voluntary for students and disclose details about data collection practices.Monitoring public health during the pandemic is important to keep communities safe and reduce the risk of transmission. But requiring students, faculty, and staff returning to campus to commit to using unspecified tracking apps that record their every movement, and failing to inform them about what personal data is being collected, how it’s being used, and with whom it’s being shared, is the wrong way to go about it.EFF is urging university officials to commit to its University App Mandate Pledge, a set of seven transparency-and privacy-enhancing policies that will help ensure a higher standard of protection for the health and personal information of students, faculty, and staff.In committing to EFF’s pledge, university officials are agreeing to make COVID-19 apps opt-in, disclose app vendor contracts, disclose data collection and security practices, reveal the entities inside and outside the school that have access to the data, tell users if the university or app vendors are giving law enforcement access to data, and stay on top of any vulnerabilities found in the technologies.“The success of public health efforts depends on community participation, and if students are being forced to download COVID-19 apps they don’t trust to their phones, and are being kept in the dark about who’s collecting their personal information and whether it’s being shared with law enforcement, they’re not going to want to participate,” said EFF Grassroots Advocacy Organizer Rory Mir. “University leaders should support the app mandate pledge and show that they are committed to respecting the privacy, security, and consent of everyone that is returning to campus.”Universities have rushed to adopt apps and devices to monitor public health, with some mandating that students download apps that track their locations in real time or face suspension. Location data using GPS, for example, can reveal highly personal information about people, such as when they attend a protest or go to a bar, where their friends live, and what groups they associate with. It should be up to users to decide whether to download and use a COVID-19-related app, and up to universities and public health authorities to communicate the technology’s benefits, protections, and risks.For the pledge:https://www.eff.org/app-mandate/pledgeFor more about COVID-19 and digital rights:https://www.eff.org/issues/covid-19
Since this COVID-19 crisis began people have looked to technology to assist in contact tracing and notification. Technology will never be a silver bullet to solve a deeply human crisis, even if it might assist. No app will work absent widespread testing with human follow up. Smartphones are not...
San Francisco—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), in partnership with the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, today launched the largest-ever collection of searchable data on police use of surveillance technologies, created as a tool for the public to learn about facial recognition, drones, license plate readers,...
As uprisings over police brutality and institutionalized racism have swept over the country, many people are facing the full might of law enforcement weaponry and surveillance for the first time. Whenever protesters, cell phones, and police are in the same place, protesters should worry about cell phone surveillance. Often, security...
EFF has published a new report, "Surveillance Compounded: Real-Time Crime Centers in the United States," which profiles seven surveillance hubs operated by local law enforcement, plus data on dozens of others scattered across the country.€
Researched and written in collaboration with students at the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno, the report focuses on the growth of real-time crime centers (RTCCs). These police facilities serve as central nodes and control rooms for a variety of surveillance technologies, including automated license plate readers, gunshots detection, and predictive policing. Perhaps the most defining characteristic of a RTCC is that a network of video cameras installed in the community that analysts watch on a wall of monitors, often in combination with sophisticated, automated analytical software.€
EFF opposes police Body Worn Cameras (BWCs), unless they come with strict safeguards to ensure they actually promote officer accountability without surveilling the public. Police already have too many surveillance technologies, and deploy them all too frequently against people of color and protesters. We have taken this...
Since the election, Parler has found renewed life among Trump supporters who feel that... [checks notes] being fact-checked, or limited for sharing debunked and dangerous conspiracy theories, is somehow an attack on... something (reality: it's an attack on their delusions). And as Parler has gotten a new round of attention, some questions were raised about the funding behind it. After all, there was no big VC or known investor behind the company, so it wasn't entirely clear how it was surviving. There was a crazy and incorrect conspiracy theory making the rounds that it was owned by Trumpists' favorite bogeyman, George Soros. That's not true, though it would have been completely hilarious if it had been.
The government of Finland said Thursday it was preparing legislation that would allow citizens to change their personal identity codes in cases of gross data breaches that carry a high risk of identity theft.
The government’s fast-tracked proposal was designed primarily to assist thousands of people whose personal information was stolen during a [cracking] of patient records at a private Finnish psychotherapy center.
The company on Monday named Peiter Zatko, widely known by his hacker handle Mudge, to the new position of head of security, giving him a broad mandate to recommend changes in structure and practices. Zatko answers to CEO Jack Dorsey and is expected to take over management of key security functions after a 45- to 60-day review.
In an exclusive interview, Zatko said he will examine “information security, site integrity, physical security, platform integrity -- which starts to touch on abuse and manipulation of the platform -- and engineering.”
Zatko is a high-profile hacker known as “Mudge” and was a member of L0pht, a hacking group that testified to Congress in 1998 about cyber vulnerabilities in government. He is also one of the leaders of the Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacking group that released tools to hack Windows in a bid to force Microsoft to step up security.
Zatko has also worked for both the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency at the Defense Department and for Google as part of its Advanced Technology and Projects division.
Facebook Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter Inc.’s Jack Dorsey will face accusations from Republican senators that the companies censor conservative content, after several of President Donald Trump’s social-media posts claiming voter fraud were labeled as false or misleading in the wake of the election.
The chief executive officers of the social networks are scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday in their second congressional appearance in a month to defend themselves against charges of silencing conservatives.
The session is likely to focus on Twitter and Facebook’s handling of Trump’s statements about the election process and outcome, many of which have been labeled as false or misleading, as well as their treatment of an October story in the New York Post that was seen as potentially damaging to Democrat Joe Biden.
"To be clear," said Martha Hennessy, granddaughter of Dorothy Day and one of the sentenced, "these weapons are not private property, they belong to the people of the United States; they belong to me, to you, to us."
A nearly three-decade-old ceasefire has ended in occupied Western Sahara — what many consider to be Africa’s last colony. Fighting has broken out in several areas between the Moroccan military and the Polisario Front, the Sahrawi liberation movement seeking independence, after the Moroccan military broke into a no-go buffer zone in southern Western Sahara. For the past three weeks, Sahrawi civilian protesters had blocked a Morocco-built road in the area that Sahrawis consider to be illegal. The peaceful blockade backed up traffic for miles and cut off trade between Morocco and Mauritania to the south. The Polisario Front says it is now mobilizing thousands of volunteers to join for the fight for independence. “We have not seen fighting like this in Western Sahara since 1991,” says Jacob Mundy, associate professor of peace and conflict studies and Middle Eastern and Islamic studies at Colgate University. “We’ve seen tensions on the rise, but to have open warfare like this is very significant.”
The friendly interplay last week between Moon Jae-in, the president of South Korea, and Joe Biden, the incoming president of the United States, signaled subtle but important differences about how to make peace with a nuclear-armed North Korea.
Planting trees and creating urban parks brings more green spaces and cleaner air, cutting heart deaths and saving lives.
"Support for a global treaty on plastic pollution is a critical action that the Biden administration can take to correct the wrongs of the Trump era."
Scores of environmental and progressive groups warn that Moniz, "an unrepentant founding father of the fracking industry," would "extend our reliance on fossil fuels and the very companies with which he is linked."
"While government leaders cling to the economic models of yesterday, faith leaders are looking ahead to the energy future we share."
The logging industry is probably a prime example of the losing side. For that industry, the awkward question is, if acreage taken out of production by law is objectionable, why could acreage taken out of production by a changing climate not be equally objectionable?
The basics of climate-driven risk to commercial forestry have been known for years, and the evidence has just kept getting better and better. For example, back in December 11, 2007, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published a review of 75 studies of rising risk for this industry. The review of these studies revealed that “Even without fires or insect damage, the change in frequency of extreme events, such as strong winds, winter storms, droughts, etc. can bring massive loss to commercial forestry.”
The pristine reserve is home to the Gwich'in people, who call it "Iizhik Gwats'an Gwandaii Goodlit," or, "the sacred place where life begins."
Our goal is to ensure that the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem remains functional in the future.€ We support designated wilderness under the 1964 Wilderness Act, the Gold Standard for land protection to preserve the Custer Gallatin National Forest’s critical wildlife habitat and significant wildlands (CGNF).€ We also identify more than 50 stream and river segments that should be designated as Wild and Scenic Rivers.
There are more than 700,000 roadless acres that qualify as wilderness on the CGNF. Among the largest roadless parcels are found in the Gallatin Range, which is the largest unprotected wildlands in the northern portion of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.
Lifting these financial burdens would help individual debt holders meet daily needs, reduce the racial wealth gap, and give a boost to the national economy.
"It's time for companies to live up to their human rights responsibilities and ensure the widest possible access to their innovations."
Bernie Sanders’s greatest strength has always been his determination to push the boundaries of our politics. The fact that he is currently considering the idea of joining President-elect Joe Biden’s administration as secretary of labor is the latest example of his readiness to think outside the box.
Biden "has a progressive mandate and must use all the power at his disposal to materially improve people's lives and boost public morale."
First, consistent with my own and others’ understanding of the current White House as proto-fascist, Trump and his inner circle continue to absurdly claim that the 2020 election vote was fraudulent and have yet to give up conducting a coup. Key Trump operatives speak seriously of a “transition” to “a second Trump administration.”
It would be foolish to laugh off such reckless talk. The Trump campaign and White House are scheming to get the Republican-controlled state legislatures of Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania to declare invalid the mail-in ballots required by the pandemic Trump fueled and fanned across the nation. This would be the pretext for some or all those legislatures trying to install (over the protests of Democratic governors in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan) un-elected slates of Trump electors to the Electoral College, claiming that Trump won the “legal” popular vote in their states. The murky legal and constitutional tangle that could result from such an action could involve Congress and the far-right Trump-appointed Supreme Court (6-3 Republican, including three justices who served on George W. Bush’s side in Bush v. Gore) installing Trump for a second term.
When people I know, and some to whom I’m related, admit voting for Reagan, I become silent. When my hero, Muhammad Ali, supported Reagan over issues of religion in school, I recoiled. When I remember Reagan’s dog-whistle appeal to racists at his opening campaign appearance in Philadelphia, Mississippi, near the site of the historic murders of three civil rights workers in 1964, I literally get sick to my stomach. When I catalogue Trump’s abrogation of nuclear weapons treaties, I think of Reagan’s nuclear insanity initiating the Star Wars’ program of space weapons. When I think of today’s endless wars, I know that it was Reagan who began the so-called low-intensity war march toward the acceptance of war in Central America that culminated in George H. W. Bush’s eradication of the Vietnam Syndrome that gave us the massive military-industrial-financial pissing away of trillions of dollars that could have gone to programs of social uplift. When I reach down into my pockets, I can witness the diminution of the change there through the destruction of my retirement cost-of-living adjustment whose underpinning was Reagan’s destruction of unions with his frontal attack on the air traffic controllers’ union. When I see a sea of kids in the uniforms of charter schools in New York City, I recall “A Nation At Risk” and the march toward the privatization of public schooling in the US.
Here’s the man, Reagan, who provided money to fascist murderers in Central America in exchange for weapons for Iran: the Iran-Contra Affair. Here’s the man that began the real tax cuts for the very wealthy that robbed the Treasury of tax dollars that could have helped ordinary people on the streets and in the homes of the US.
The wife of Tomsk Mayor Ivan Klyayn — the general director of the company “Tomskoe Pivo” (Tomsk Beer), Galina Klyayn — reportedly threw a pillowcase full of her family’s banking records out of a window moments before investigators searched their home on Friday, November 13. This was first reported by the news outlet Mash on the day of the search. Sources later confirmed these reports to the newspaper Kommersant.
I doubt it; I€ think Trump is enough of a realist to realize that he has lost in a fair and free election.€ It surely grates on him; as all commentators agree, he can’t stand losing.€ But his narcissism does not explain all of his behavior.
There is also calculation: He is looking for a path back to power in 2024.
President Moïse has ruled by decree, which is not formally allowed by the Haitian constitution, since January 2020, when the terms of most of parliament expired. He has extended executive powers, reforming the penal code, naming a new electoral council with a mandate to reform the constitution, and now weakening one of the last remaining institutions exercising government oversight. The latest decree follows years of conflict between the CSCCA and the Haitian presidency.
In 2018, anticorruption protesters began advocating for an investigation into Moïse and his predecessors’ handling of billions in Petrocaribe-related spending. Moïse, under increasing pressure from the streets, pledged to support such an investigation. The CSCCA has since released three audit reports on Petrocaribe, finding widespread irregularities and fraudulent practices in the management of the Venezuelan-led aid program, and directly implicating the president, and the company he led before his election. Last year, members of the court had to temporarily leave the country due to threats. As of yet, there has been no real judicial progress in holding anyone accountable for the misuse of public funds. The president has denied all the CSCCA’s allegations.
On Sunday, November 15, Moldova held a second round of voting in its 2020 presidential elections. Opposition candidate Maia Sandu won, becoming the first woman president in the country’s history. Sandu defeated the incumbent head of state, Igor Dodon, who is often referred to as one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s main supporters in the post-Soviet space. Sandu, on the other hand, is considered a pro-EU, anti-corruption candidate. Here’s what you need to know about the results of the elections in Moldova.
The authors behind two separate packages of amendments to Russia’s Family Code have withdrawn their initiatives from the State Duma following backlash over proposed changes that would impact child protective services and the rights of transgender people.
The Australian Government has cheerfully forked out $1.2 billion of those green notes to settle a lawsuit in the robodebt case. I think it's a good moment to stop and consider whether some ministers should be told, in strict terms, to avoid taking any initiatives that involve technology.
Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny has filed a defamation lawsuit against Presidential Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov. The claim has been sent to Moscow’s Presnensky District Court, which has yet to set a trial date.€
Politeness will not solve the problems facing the country. Democrats must put forth and fight for bold solutions that will materially improve the lives of working people.
The rushed confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett has, for the first time in decades, made Democrats think seriously about progressive reforms to the Supreme Court. Today, conservatives hold a 6-3 majority on the court, illegitimately engineered by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell. This stark reality has radicalized the base. It has even made some Democratic senators consider using their power to achieve deep structural change, as opposed to cosmetic bipartisan redecorating.
Allentown—On the morning of Election Day, Ashleigh Strange was ready for trouble. As the regional organizer for Lehigh Valley Stands Up, she and her team had spent months doing deep canvassing here. Working in close coordination with the immigrant rights group Make the Road and the young climate justice campaigners of the Sunrise Movement, they’d been talking—and more important, listening—to voters. These long, frequently sprawling conversations might start with anxieties about rent or child care or worries about immigrants taking away jobs, but they ended, surprisingly often, with people who’d long ago given up on voting deciding to take a chance on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
We must see this for what it is: A final attempt of a desperate, bitter man to cling to power.
When Rep. Rashida Tlaib talks about "pushing the Democratic Party to represent the communities that elected them," she actually means what she says.
"It is a sad failed pathetic coup attempt," wrote one critic, "but it is still [nevertheless an] attempt to overthrow democracy."
For four hours in 2016, state Senator Ernie Chambers spoke on the floor of the Nebraska Capitol in order to kill a bill championed by the Republican Party. Dressed in blue jeans and a short-sleeved sweatshirt, Chambers—an expert in Nebraska’s legislative rules and one of the state’s few Black lawmakers—ran down the clock. He talked about mountain lion hunting, the deterioration of his own memory, and whether or not the famed Nebraska author Willa Cather was a lesbian. “I’m having so much fun, it has to be a sin,” Chambers recalled after he successfully thwarted the bill.
Rather than plans dictated from the top—which have proven not only to be unfair and destructive, but not even reach the necessary emissions cuts—we will build a plan of our own, from below.
There's no returning to normal after Trump.
Donald Trump’s pitiful attempts to cling to power have made a farce out of one of the key rituals of democracy, the peaceful transfer of power. Trump refuses to concede, is flooding the courts with frivolous lawsuits designed to stop certification of the vote, keeps urging state legislators to intervene in the picking of electors, and is egging on street conflicts between his supporters and his opponents. All of this is dismaying and destructive to democracy, but unlikely to result in the coup Trump so clearly wants. The key institutions that Trump needs for a coup—the courts, the military, and Republican state legislators in swing states—are all resisting Trump’s cajoling.
The never-ending amount of election related litigation keeps on coming. The Trump campaign is still heavily invested in lawsuits -- a practice it started before the election and it hasn't scaled back now that its boy has been handed an L.
If any governor wants to take away your vote, they don’t even have to tell you, they just kick you off the voting rolls, because right now voting is not a right in America, it’s merely a privilege.
Legitimizing this myth only serves the interests of those opposed to the critical analysis of current events in the United States.
Trump is now being told that the courts don’t agree with his desperate lawsuits brought by firms€ such as Jones Day, whose lawyers can’t resist the lucrative billings that client Trump generates.€ Trump is also seeing that Republican Senators are starting to distance themselves from their€ roles as dittohead minions. Even puppet Mike Pence is not parroting Trump’s wild, flailing fictions.
All this bluster is, however, more than the fluster of a failed gambling czar going off the rails.€ There are lootings to be done. By refusing to concede, Trump is raising millions of dollars from€ his supporters. € Trump’s defiance also distracts the media from the Executive Branch that is on a€ rampage of wreckage and revenge garnished by profiteering that will fill the defeated President’s€ days until January 20, 2021.
That’s how I feel about Donald Trump, minus the cap gun.
He’s not finished. He may be around for a long time, out there bellowing more lies. With more than 72 million voters behind him, he will be a Republican power to be reckoned with. He may do it from the confines of a TV studio, emerging to conduct rallies to assuage his need for adoration. He reportedly has ruminated privately that he may run for a second term in 2024, if he’s not in prison.
Next time you hear someone blame Section 230 for a problem with social media platforms, ask yourself two questions: first, was this problem actually caused by Section 230? Second, would weakening Section 230 solve the problem? Politicians and commentators on both sides of the aisle frequently blame Section 230 for big tech companies’ failures, but their reform proposals wouldn’t actually address the problems they attribute to Big Tech. If lawmakers are concerned about large social media platforms’ outsized influence on the world of online speech, they ought to confront the lack of meaningful competition among those platforms and the ways in which those platforms fail to let users control or even see how they’re using our data. Undermining Section 230 won’t fix Twitter and Facebook; in fact, it risks making matters worse by further insulating big players from competition and disruption.
While large tech companies might clamor for regulations that would hamstring their competitors, they’re notably silent on reforms that would curb the practices that allow them to dominate the Internet today.
Today EFF is launching How to Fix the Internet, a new podcast mini-series to examine potential solutions to six ills facing the modern digital landscape. Over the course of 6 episodes, we’ll consider how current tech policy isn’t working well for users and invite experts to join us in imagining...
Turkey's recent history is rife with human rights-stifling legislation and practices. The Internet Law, its amendments, and the recent decision of Turkey’s regulator (BTK) further cemented that trend. The Internet Law and amendments require large platforms to appoint a local representative, localize their data, and speed...
The upcoming U.S. elections have invited broad attention to many of the questions with which civil society has struggled for years: what should companies do about misinformation and hate speech? And what, specifically, should be done when that speech is coming from the world’s most powerful leaders?Silicon Valley companies and...
Back in March you may remember that we wrote about yet another ridiculous SLAPP suit filed by the Donald Trump campaign (using lawyer Charles Harder, who, you may also remember, was the lawyer in the lawsuit against us as well). Harder's track record in these performative cases continues to be... rather lacking. Last week, you may have missed that amidst all the other legal disputes Trump's campaign was losing, this particular case was also dismissed -- though, not quite as easily as I had expected. And it does leave it open for an amended complaint to be filed, though I still can't see how it passes muster.
In all of these cases, the killings were provoked as well as indefensible. The cartoons in question are all too easy to interpret as gratuitous insults against Islam and therefore against the€ almost 9% of the French population€ that are Muslim. Nonetheless, murder is incompatible with stable society. The latter being prima facie true, the next question is, What alternatives were available to those who were/are disgusted by the€ Charlie Hebdo€ caricatures?€ Lawsuits for defamation€ have been repeatedly filed. Some are still ongoing. However, to date, none have stopped the magazine’s demeaning ways. Well-organized public protests combined with steady political pressure might work in the long run. It was perhaps because such an effort was not forthcoming, at least not consistently, that action defaulted to emotionally driven individual fanatics.
By the way,€ Charlie Hebdo, with its own brand of fanaticism, is what you might call an equal opportunity defamer. Topics ranging from the Catholic Church to Italians killed in earthquakes have been depicted in distasteful, sometimes semi-pornographic fashion. As it stands, the right to publish gratuitously insulting cartoons is not only legal in France but, because of all the related violence, also now defended as an important expression of French national culture. To make this point clear, French€ officials have announced the publication€ of a booklet to include the€ Charlie Hebdo€ images. This will be “handed out to high school students as a commitment to defend the values of the Republic.”
Even 4,300 kilometers away, people close to the Iranian government still try to intimidate her.
Messages threatening harm to loved ones are just one of the tactics that Iran and other authoritarian regimes use to try to harass journalists who report from afar.
Iran’s jailing earlier this year of VOA Persian TV host Masih Alinejad’s brother brought the risks to reporters’ families close to home.
We, on the left,€ also need a program that combines economic, racial,€ gender and environmental justice with real organizing and popular education that is truly national and includes small towns and rural areas and is ongoing. This is necessary and cannot start a year or less before the election. € The millions€ who didn’t vote, one-third of the voting age population,€ are even more important to talk € with and reach out to than those who voted for Trump. Your thoughts?
From the exit polls, the majority of white women voted for Trump as did a slight increase in the proportion of Latinx, from 30% in 2016 to 33%-34 % in 2020. This small increase for Trump is sometimes exaggerated. Moreover, there was€ a 2/3 increase in Latinx turnout which is a major€ cause of Biden winning Arizona and Nevada and probably also,€ Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The Native American vote was also central to Biden and Harris€ winning in€ Arizona.
“It’s a blessing within itself for me to even be sitting here right now,” says Ronnie Long, free after 44 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. Long, who is African American, was convicted in 1976 of raping a white woman by an all-white jury and sentenced to 80 years in prison. In 2015, his lawyers learned that investigators had withheld exculpatory evidence proving his innocence — including semen samples and fingerprints taken from the crime scene that did not match his own — and witnesses for the state committed perjury at his trial. It would take several more years and a ruling by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for Long to win his freedom. Long walked out of the Albemarle Correctional Institute in North Carolina a free man on August 27. He is asking North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper for a pardon, which would fully clear his name and make him eligible for financial compensation. “You’ve got people that have been victimized by the system, like myself, and then you turn around and you put me back into a society and expect for me to live a productive life,” he says. “I need that pardon in order to try to get on with my life.”
The Baltimore PD can still use its flying spies, says the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. The aerial surveillance program -- first "introduced" on accident in 2016 -- allows the PD to track the movement of people across the entire city, thanks to high-powered cameras mounted on airplanes. The surveillance system (created by Persistent Surveillance Systems) can capture 32-square miles. People and vehicles are reduced to pixels despite the power of the 192-million-megapixel cameras, but combining this footage with street-level surveillance allows the PD to deanonymize moving pixels observed near crime scenes.
Among the more unpleasant mythemes that one group of humans has devised about another is the blood libel: the claim that Jews murder Christian children, often around Easter, and use their blood in Passover rituals. Bits and pieces of this myth date back to ancient times. The Greek world produced some sinister stories about Jews annually fattening a Greek in their temples for sacrifice. And the New Testament (Acts 7:51–53) and the Quran (2:87) have cast Jews as persecutors and murderers of prophets. But the specific ingredients of the blood libel—innocent children murdered by conspiratorial Jews for blood rituals—were not baked into narrative until a child’s corpse was discovered in 12th century England and an enterprising monk accused the local Jewish community of murder. That first accusation sputtered out, but others soon followed in France and Germany that sometimes resulted in the execution of entire communities. With the invention of the printing press, the myth spread even more widely, throughout Eastern Europe and, with colonialism, into the Middle East and beyond. In the 20th century, there was even a genre of postcards depicting Jews draining the blood from young Christian boys.
The Nizhny Novgorod Region’s branch of the Investigative Committee has refused to launch a criminal case on incitement or inducement to suicide over the death of local journalist Irina Slavina, who self-immolated on October 2.
Russia’s Supreme Court has dissolved the political party “People Against Corruption” just months after President Vladimir Putin’s cousin, Roman Putin, became its chairman.
I saw them for only a few seconds. One glimpse and they were gone. The young woman wore a brown headwrap, a yellow short-sleeved shirt, and a long pink, red, and blue floral-patterned skirt. She held the reins of the donkey pulling her rust-pink cart. Across her lap lay an infant. Perched beside her at the edge of the metal wagon was a young girl who couldn’t have been more than eight. Some firewood, rugs, woven mats, rolled-up clothing or sheets, a dark green plastic tub, and an oversized plastic jerry can were lashed to the bed of the cart. Three goats tied to the rear of it ambled along behind.
But the progress was largely illusory. Take the alleged gang rape, which was reportedly recorded by the attackers. It took weeks of campaigning by activists before the Public Prosecution Office moved, allowing some of the suspects to flee the country. Five men have since been arrested; at least two suspects are still at large. Three of the men arrested have been charged with rape, which they deny. Absurdly, the authorities also charged four people who came forward as witnesses (and two of their acquaintances) with violating laws on “morality” and “debauchery”. The media have characterised the incident as a “group sex party”, smearing all involved, including the alleged victim. This has had a chilling effect: once-vocal women have gone into hiding.
After Ms Khamees was turned away by the police, she broadcast her accusations on TikTok, an app for sharing short videos, where she had more than 100,000 followers. Days after the video went viral, the police picked up the entire group who had been partying with her that night. The authorities seemed as concerned with their use of hash and the mixing of unmarried men and women, as with Ms Khamees’s claim that a man had held a razor to her face and raped her. Her attackers (she accused a group of people of facilitating the rape) were charged with rape and other offences. But Ms Khamees was also charged—with prostitution, drug use and “violating family values”. Only after she completed a programme to “correct her concepts” were the charges against her dropped.
We've long mentioned how incumbent ISPs like AT&T and Comcast have spent millions of dollars quite literally buying shitty, protectionist laws in around twenty states that either ban or heavily hamstring towns and cities from building their own broadband networks. In some cases these laws ban municipalities from even engaging in public/private partnerships. It's a scenario where ISPs get to have their cake and eat it too; they often refuse to upgrade their networks in under-served areas (particularly true among telcos offering DSL), but also get to write shitty laws preventing these under-served towns from doing anything about it.
When streaming live TV bundles first became prevalent, they promised to offer the channels that people wanted to watch without a restrictive or expensive cable subscription. But these services have had to consistently raise their prices as they have added more channels to their bundles.
The price increase means that Hulu + Live TV will soon cost the same as YouTube TV, which implemented its own price hike earlier this year. There are cheaper options still available. Sling TV, for instance, offers bundles starting at $30 per month, but the lineup of channels is smaller than those found in the Hulu or YouTube plans.
Global News, Letting Tech Giants Like Facebook Regulate Themselves ‘Simply not Working’ Says Minister
The anti-trust suit filed by the US against Google in October is unlikely to make any progress, judging by the kind of people whom US president-elect Joe Biden is taking onboard as part of his transition team and also in technology roles.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has now clarified its reasoning behind the decision to find against the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the latest round of a major patent dispute concerning rights to commercialise the revolutionary gene editing technology CRISPR.
In January 2020, the European Patent Office's Board of Appeal (BoA) ruled that a European patent owned by the Broad Institute be revoked after it dismissed the institution's claims over its patent's priority date.
The EPO has now issued its long-awaited written reasoning behind this decision.
Usually, a patent’s filing date is the date at which its validity is assessed. Sometimes, however, the patent may claim an earlier date, the priority date, from a previous patent application disclosing the invention.
Facing up to the challenges that social distancing and travel restriction bring the European Patent Office (EPO), like many organisations and businesses in 2020, has introduced video conferencing (ViCo) as an important means to facilitate communication.
On 10 November 2020, a Decision of the President of the EPO was issued indicating that from 04 January 2021, opposition oral proceedings will be held by ViCo unless serious reasons prevent the use of ViCo. Where there are such “serious reasons”, oral proceedings will be postponed until after 15 September 2021. Consent from all parties is no longer required.
According to a corresponding EPO Notice on 10 November 2020, the “serious reasons” may include reasons relating to a participant to the oral proceedings as an individual, for example, a proven visual impairment that prevents a representative from following oral proceedings on screen, and reasons related to the nature and subject-matter of the proceedings, for example, where a demonstration or inspection of an object where the haptic features are essential, to the extent that this is possible in the current climate. Notably the EPO has indicated that “Sweeping objections against the reliability of videoconferencing technology or the non-availability of videoconferencing equipment will, as a rule, not qualify as serious reasons”. Where a request for an in-person hearing is refused, the parties will be informed of the reasons but such a refusal is not separately appealable.
The EPO has explained that this change in practice is “with a view to guaranteeing effective access to justice and to avoid a continuous increase in the number of unresolved oppositions”.
Bringing together 250 participants from 38 countries on four continents— from museum professionals to fashion design students all the way to big fashion brands—the event was an opportunity to have important conversations about the benefits of open access and the challenges of bringing equity, diversity and inclusion into the policies and practices of fashion heritage institutions and the fashion universe more generally. The symposium’s program spanned two days and comprised presentations, roundtables, and a hands-on workshop.€
In August 2012, YouTube briefly took down a video that had been uploaded by NASA. The video, which depicted a landing on Mars, was caught by YouTube’s Content ID system as a potential copyright infringement case but, like everything else NASA creates, it was in the public domain. Then, in 2016, YouTube’s automated algorithms removed another video, this time a lecture by a Harvard Law professor, which included snippets of various songs ranging from 15 to roughly 40 seconds. Of course, use of copyright for educational purposes is perfectly legal. Examples of unwarranted content takedowns are not limited to only these two. Automated algorithms have been responsible for taking down perfectly legitimate content that relates to marginalized groups, political speech or the mere existence of information that relates to war crimes.€
In 2020, Sweden has maintained its position as a priority target for companies aiming to extract cash settlements from alleged BitTorrent pirates. Data released by ISP Bahnhof reveals that thus far this year, copyright holders have demanded the personal details of Internet users behind 42,869 IP addresses. Once again, Telia is responsible for the majority of data handed over.
What a few weeks for Twitch. You will recall that the platform went about pissing a ton of its talent and viewers off by nuking a metric ton of video content on the site in response to a flood of DMCA takedown notices, most of them from the RIAA. And this truly was the nuclear option, far different from the notice/counternotice system most platforms use. In fact, it was so extraordinary that it arguably lost Twitch its DMCA safe harbor. Regardless, when the company then followed up with a message to all Twitch creators that they should go educate themselves on matters of copyright and proactively delete any recordings or clips that might run afoul of copyright law, it created a cluster-fuck with virtually nobody having any idea how or what they should be doing. In response to the turmoil, Twitch brilliantly rolled out an announcement for a new emoji.
