This is the first in a series spotlighting large institutions in the USA and how they are embracing Linux and open source.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an independent agency of the U.S. federal government responsible for the civilian space program, as well as aeronautics and space research. NASA’s budget in 2020 is over $22 billion. To put that figure into context, that’s equivalent to the annual GDP of Zambia, Papua New Guinea, or Laos.
How is NASA embracing Linux and open source?
NASA runs a set of supercomputers with the names Pleiades, Electra, Aitken, Merope, and Endeavour at the Ames Research Center. Pleides is one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, currently ranked the 39th most powerful in the world, sporting an eye-watering 241,108 cores and 211,968 GB of memory. Pleiades and the other supercomputers run on a custom version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.
More improvements are coming to Mesa 21.0 following last week's merging of the Direct3D 12 Gallium3D driver that is being used by Microsoft for supporting OpenGL/OpenCL-on-Direct3D 12.
For those trying to setup their Linux systems to be "Big Navi"-ready if purchasing one of the new graphics cards today, some more last minute fixes have landed within Mesa.
In addition to AV1 video decoding having been merged yesterday to Mesa 21.0 with the OpenMAX interface initially, today a batch of fixes were merged that affect these new GPUs and the Radeon RX 6800 series shipping today.
Although for Linux, we're still waiting on The Khronos Group to formalise the cross-vendor Ray Tracing Vulkan extensions for that.
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For running them on Linux, the driver situation isn't the best. AMD have put out the Radeon Software for Linux version 20.45, which adds support for the Radeon RX 6800 Series but that driver only officially supports Ubuntu 20.04, RHEL/CentOS 7.9 and RHEL/CentOS 8.2. For Mesa drivers, you're going to need Linux Kernel 5.9, Mesa 20.2 (or newer) and also LLVM 11.0 which means most normal distributions will be missing out with manual upgrades. So, unless you really know what you're doing with everything, you will likely want to hold off.
Today is the big day: Big Navi is shipping! This also means we can talk at length finally about the Linux support and performance for the Radeon RX 6800 series and how well they perform for Linux gaming. Here is a look at the Linux driver state for these initial RDNA 2 graphics cards and their performance capabilities with the multiple different open-source driver stacks available.
Long story short, this is the best at-launch Linux driver support we have seen from AMD at the premiere of a brand new generation of graphics processors. But even though it's the best at-launch support we have seen out of a new generation of Radeon GPUs, there still is room for improvement -- especially for those Linux users not comfortable compiling their own drivers, etc. There is support available already in the mainline Linux kernel and Mesa repositories that have materialized this year under the Sienna Cichlid codename. Yes, both the RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT shipping today fall under the Sienna Cichlid codename.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Nvidia Drivers on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, The performance of graphics processing units (GPUs) mainly depends on drivers. Ubuntu by default use open source video driver Nouveau which has limited support and features when compared with proprietary Nvidia drivers. 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.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of Nvidia Drivers on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
Calibre is a free and open-source e-book manager. It ships as a cross-platform desktop application along with a server component and can be used to manage your e-book library.
Setting up calibre as a server allows you to access your books from anywhere in the world and allows you to share them with friends and family. You can also transfer them to your mobile devices for reading later. Calibre server also allows you to read e-books directly on the web.
In this tutorial, you will learn about how to install and use a calibre ebook server on an Ubuntu 20.04 based server.
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a virtualization solution built for Linux. When installed, it allows you to create a guest or virtual machines
Today we will learn how to install KVM on your system and how to configure virtual machines using ‘Virtual Machine Manager’ in just a few simple steps. Note that the following tutorial is tested on Kali Linux.
This article explains how to delay startup applications, with 2 ways of achieving this.
Learn to capture and interpret network information with Wireshark.
In this article, we will walk you through the process of installing the Fedora 33 Server with screenshots.
Often I find instructions from different vendors that are too generic and doesn’t really work the way you want it to. For example, I use https://www.noip.com for my Dynamic DNS updates and I found that the instructions for installing noip2 Dynamic Update Client is lacking clarity and no fit for purpose in latest Ubuntu servers. Ideally noip2 Dynamic DNS Update Client should continually checks for IP address changes in the background and automatically updates the DNS at No-IP whenever it changes. But the instructions are lacking as if you reboot your server, it doesn’t work anymore because it doesn’t run on startup. This post attempts to fix that problem by installing required packages to run the make command, install noip2 binary, fix file permissions if missing, create an init.d script for service command, create a systemd file so that we can control it via systemd and finally enable it via systemctl. I know, I know I overdid it but it doesn’t hurt and now you will have multiple ways to control it. If you’re familiar with it then you can skip parts to get to the right sections to either use init.d or systemd, so feel free. Now let’s get to it...
You have started your Ubuntu system and suddenly a black screen like the snapshot below appeared ? Ubuntu initramfs It starts with BusyBox and (initramfs)
Bitwarden open-source password manager is available in the SNAP repository to install on various operating systems such as Ubuntu, CentOS, Linux Mint, RedHat, Kali Linux, and more…
This free and open-source password manager is although available to users without any cost, however, the developers also provide some extra features at a very low cost. The premium version will include Bitwarden Authenticator (TOTP), 1 GB encrypted file storage; a Two-step login with YubiKey, U2F, Duo; Vault health reports, Unlimited Collections and shared Items; Priority Customer Support, and more.
Have you ever deleted a file and instantly regretted it? You need it back, and fast! But what if the file is so new, it hasn’t yet been backed up? Fortunately, there’s something you can do about it.
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a true classic for many reasons, and it continues living on with the OpenMW free and open source game engine. It's been a while since the 0.46 release of OpenMW back in June 2020 but plenty of work has been going on since.
In a new blog post they did a round-up of work done during September-October and it all sounds pretty awesome.
After recently announcing new features for Stadia like messaging and profiles (and possibly new country support coming), Google seem to be firming it up elsewhere with it being even easier to try out without buying anything.
Stadia has been freely available to everyone for a while now as store to buy games from for streaming, along with the optional Stadia Pro subscription to get access to regular free games. However, what if you just wanted to test it? Well now you're getting that chance.
On November 19 at 9 AM PT / 5 PM UTC, Destiny 2 will become properly free to play on Stadia so anyone with a Stadia account will be able to play it (without Stadia Pro). Along with this, Destiny 2: The Collection will be removed as a Stadia Pro title since it's going free to play on Stadia. This is pretty big, since having a game as big as this free for everyone could be quite a draw for Stadia for people unable to play directly on their system.
Fold Stories from OtterWays recently caught my attention, as a brand new adventure puzzle-platformer with a really quite wonderful style and setting.
Set in what they're saying is a dreamlike origami world where you start as a simple sheet of paper. From there, you learn how to fold into different shapes to progress through the levels. During your journey you come across various other creatures, and collect pieces of the story scattered throughout.
War Thunder, the huge free to play online battle game across land, sea and air just had a huge game engine upgrade with the latest release.
Something that has been in progress for a long time, is that the Linux version got Vulkan support as the default now too. This is a feature our contributor BTRE interviewed the CEO of Gaijin Entertainment, Anton Yudintsev, for back in 2018 so we've been waiting some time on it. With their Dagor Engine 6.0, it brings with it tons of visual upgrades and enhancements to existing graphics.
Valve contractor Joshua Ashton, who originally created the Direct3D9 to Vulkan layer D9VK which was eventually merged with DXVK, is now working to help VKD3D-Proton for Direct3D 12 to Vulkan.
If you didn't understand much of that: DXVK and VKD3D-Proton translate Windows games Direct3D calls into Vulkan so that they can work on Linux with the Wine compatibility layer which is all part of Steam Play Proton.
Ashton wrote up a blog post detailing all the work they've been doing, which has recently involved getting the APITrace tool hooked up and working with Direct3D 12. Ashton mentions that the work "may be useful for people who are developing games or working on implementing a D3D12 driver or translation layer for debugging purposes" and that the primary use here is to aid the VKD3D-Proton translation layer.
On one hand, Kubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla is a solid distro. It has some really cool features - it's stylish, consistent, fast, stable, and sort of fun to use. Definitely ahead of the game when it comes to your typical Tux offering. But then, this release is a missed opportunity, because it could have nailed it with Plasma 5.20, which really is so much better than what you get by default. Honest.
And then, of course, there's the "pick your regression of the day" game. Any which issue with networking, sharing or media playback, all these are problems we've seen before, some have been addressed, some have gone back, and some have returned, and there's really no point for me to talk about this again. As long as the Linux desktop development remains focused on the concepts of amateur/project/fun instead of product, and as long as there isn't the tightest of integrations of all components, it doesn't seem feasible we will ever see a steady-state desktop that can maintain core functionality without erratic changes over consecutive releases.
Now that said, Kubuntu 20.10 is a bright ray of goodness and almost pro level of attention to detail and finesse in the Tux arena, and if you're on a hunt for a desktop, this seems like the most reasonable choice of late. There you go. Good but it could have easily been so much better.
The 3rd wave of Coronavirus is here, and hence many countries around the world are starting to impose new lockdowns in order to limit the spread of the virus.
So what to do in this long time of quarantine? A Linux user answer to that question would be simply trying a bunch of interesting Linux distributions in order to enjoy the time passing by.
After it’s been installed as a preview in Kali Linux 2020.3, ZSH (Z Shell) is now the new default shell in Kali Linux 2020.4. ZHS brings a number of improvements over Bash and it looks better. But, if you’re installing Kali Linux and you want to use Bash by default, you can simply run the chsh -s /bin/bash command.
On the other hand, existing Kali Linux 2020.3 users who upgrade to Kali Linux 2020.4 will have to enable ZSH manually if they want to use it as the default shell. To do that, you must run the following commands in a terminal emulator.
Germany open source provider SUSE will go in for an initial public offering next year, the American news service Bloomberg reports, adding that its owner, Swedish private equity firm EQT, is already consulting advisers about the listing.
Applications hide in containers, systems hide in other systems, new configurations appear and disappear with a single mouse click, and every file is a potential threat. It is no wonder that CIOs and IT managers are looking for new tools and a new approach that will bring harmony, safety and economy to precious IT assets in changing times. Welcome to the new world of IT infrastructure management.
Nutanix provides a fully software-defined stack that integrates compute, virtualization, storage, networking, and security to power any application at any scale. Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor is their enterprise-ready hypervisor, offering integrated virtualization, app mobility, management, operational insights, and security.
We are very excited that SUSE Manager is now certified on Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor. As part of the Nutanix Ready Program SUSE Manager is now a recommended and trusted application. With this certification SUSE Manager can run confidently on Nutanix infrastructure.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) approved the recent proposal to provide a Fedora 34 KDE Plasma Spin for 64-bit ARM (AArch64) architecture.
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the recent proposal for introducing a new spin that features the KDE Plasma desktop for 64-bit ARM (AArch64).
The Fedora KDE Special Interest Group recently proposed a Fedora KDE Plasma spin for AArch64, complementing their existing x86_64 version. There are already Fedora AArch64 images built for GNOME Shell as the default Fedora Workstation desktop as well as a lightweight Fedora Xfce desktop version too.
When things aren't working correctly in your Linux environment, the easiest thing to do is disable Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). Things suddenly begin to work, and you forget about it—but this is a common pitfall that means you've lost a very powerful security tool.
Threats are rising alongside the rise of containers, microservices, and distributed architecture. This is due to an old, well-known issue: velocity. The advantage of containers is that they enable you to move fast, do more, and change quickly. This means container adoption has gone off the roof, but the speed it affords also means you will encounter more issues and vulnerabilities. This happens naturally when you're doing more things faster and quicker.
How to fix the Linux EFI secure-boot shim bootloop issue seen on some systems.
Quite a few Bay- and Cherry-Trail based systems have bad firmware which completely ignores any efibootmgr set boot options. They basically completely reset the boot order doing some sort of auto-detection at boot. Some of these even will given an error about their eMMC not being bootable unless the ESP has a EFI/Microsoft/Boot/bootmgfw.efi file!
Many of these end up booting EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi unconditionally every boot. This will cause a boot loop since when Linux is installed EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi is now shim. When shim is started with a path of EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi, shim will add a new efibootmgr entry pointing to EFI/fedora/shimx64.efi and then reset. The goal of this is so that the firmware's F12 bootmenu can be used to easily switch between Windows and Linux (without chainloading which breaks bitlocker). But since these bad EFI implementations ignore efibootmgr stuff, EFI/Boot/bootx64.efi shim will run again after the reset and we have a loop.
In hybrid cloud environments, where workloads are deployed in physical hosts, virtual machines and containers across on-premise and cloud environments, security becomes more and more complex. As a part of the AnsibleFest Virtual Experience, Lucy Kerner, a Red Hat security strategist and evangelist, and Justin Lacey, a Red Hat solution architect, led the breakout session "Implementing a secure hybrid cloud using security and compliance automation." The session highlighted a combination of Red Hat technologies that can help simplify and improve security and compliance in a hybrid cloud environment at scale using automation. Missed out on this session? We’re recapping some key points here.
Ansible empowered me to utilize my own technical strengths and passion to improve processes and enjoy my time.
KubeVirt is a cloud-native virtual machine management framework based on Kubernetes. KubeVirt orchestrates workloads running on virtual machines in the same way that Kubernetes does for containers. KubeVirt has many features for managing the network, storage, images, and the virtual machine itself. This article focuses on two mechanisms for configuring network and storage requirements: Multus-CNI and CDI DataVolumes. You will learn how to configure these KubeVirt features for use cases that require high performance, security, and scalability.
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As a cloud-native virtual machine management framework, KubeVirt adopts cloud-native technologies alongside its own inventions. As a result, KubeVirt APIs and controllers support flexible and scalable virtual machine configurations and management that can integrate well with many technologies in the cloud-native ecosystem. This article focused on KubeVirt’s network and storage mechanisms. We look forward to sharing more exciting features in the future, including KubeVirt’s mechanisms for handling CPU, memory, and direct device access.
Meet Ubuntu Web Remix, an unofficial Ubuntu flavor created by Rudra Saraswat, the maker of Ubuntu Unity, based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) and designed as a free and open-source alternative to Google's Chrome OS operating system for Chromebook devices, as well as the open source Chromium OS project.
Being an alternative to Chrome OS/Chromium OS, Ubuntu Web Remix uses Mozilla's Firefox web browser rather than Google Chrome or Chromium. It offers support for Web apps, but you can also install regular Linux applications from Ubuntu's software repositories.
Purism is now shipping the mass production version of the Librem 5 phone to customers worldwide after finally managing to finish up their extensive quality control steps and fulfillment procedures.
The first customers to receive the mass production Librem 5 phone are the early backers, followed by all USA pre-orders, general backers, as well as orders placed after shipping begins, and shipping parity, which is expected to be achieved by the middle of Q1 2021.
When we first announced that the Librem 5 would default to the BM818 modem, we listed US and EU variants of the modem that support different frequencies that are in use in those regions. While there are frequency overlaps throughout the world (this is why you can take a phone between the US and Europe and have it work for the most part), having a modem that supports all of your local frequencies ensures the best performance.
Ever since it was discovered that there was a T1 variant to the BM818 modem for the Librem 5, we have gotten questions from our friends in the Asia Pacific region about whether we would offer it. We didn’t want to announce anything until we had modems and could test them in the Librem 5 to ensure they work but I’m happy to announce we just completed that testing and it works!
The kits share a very similar set of hardware and are in the same price range; moreover, they both offer a free one-year subscription to the Arduino Create MKR Plan, Arduino premium coding platform.
That is where the similarities end though! The Oplà IoT Kit is designed for individuals to use to add connectivity to the devices around the home or in the office, while the Explore IoT Kit is an educational kit developed for students to learn how to control objects remotely using digital dashboards and learn the fundamentals of the Internet of Things. Furthermore, they offer different online platforms and different projects — in other words, a completely different experience.
Intel’s virtual FPGA Technology Day 2020 is taking place today, and the company made two announcements before the event. First, the company introduced the new Intel eASIC N5X structured eASIC family with an Intel FPGA compatible hard processor system to design to quickly create applications across 5G, artificial intelligence, cloud, and edge workloads.
First released in 1987 by Acorn Computer Ltd, RISC OS was the first operating system designed to run on ARM processors, and specifically on the company’s Archimedes personal computer.
I don’t think I had ever heard about the operating systems until it was ported to the Raspberry Pi SBC by RISC OS Open Ltd (aka ROOL) who manage the publication of RISC OS source code. But there’s also a separate project called RISC OS Cloverleaf which aims to further develop the open-source operating systems, and just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund software development, and they also offer two mini PCs running RISC OS Cloverleaf with namely Cloverleaf Puma powered by a Rock Pi 4B SBC, and Cloverleaf Kitten featuring a Raspberry Pi 4 board.
Tor is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. The Tor software protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world: it prevents somebody from watching your Internet connection and learning what sites you visit, it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location, and it lets you access sites which are blocked.
The Tor Browser Bundle lets you use Tor on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux without needing to install any software. It can run off a USB flash drive, comes with a pre-configured web browser to protect your anonymity, and is self-contained.
Today, we are releasing our baseline Greenhouse Gas emissions (GHG) assessment for 2019, which forms the basis upon which we will build to reduce and mitigate Mozilla’s organisational impact.
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Their impact is significant, and it is an approximation. We can’t yet really measure the energy required to run and use our products specifically. Instead, we are estimating how much power is required to use the devices needed to access our products for the time that we know people spent on our products. In other words, we estimate the impact of desktop computers, laptops, tablets, or phones while being online overall.
For now, this helps us get a sense of the impact the internet is having on the environment. Going forward, we need to figure out how to reduce that share while continuing to grow and make the web open and accessible to all.
The emissions related to our business services and operations cover all other categories from the GHG protocol that are applicable to Mozilla.
For 2019, this includes 10 offices and 6 co-locations, purchased goods and services, events that we either host or run, all of our commercial travel including air, rail, ground transportation, and hotels, as well as estimates of the impact of our remote workforce and the commute of our office employees, which we gathered through an internal survey.
Experimentation is the foundation of the scientific method, which is a systematic means of exploring the world around us. But experimentation is not only reserved for the field of scientific research. It has a central place in the world of business too.
Most of us are by now familiar with the business methodology called Minimum Viable Product (MVP). This Minimum Viable Product is basically just an experiment. By building and launching MVPs, business operations are engaging in a systematic means of exploring the markets.
If we look at market leaders today, we learn that they’re not doing projects anymore; the only thing they’re doing is experiments. Customer discovery and lean strategies are only used to test assumptions about the markets. Such an approach is equivalent to Test-Driven Development (TDD), which is the process we are intimately familiar with. In TDD, we write the hypothesis (the test) first. We then use that test to guide our implementation. Ultimately, product or service development is no different than TDD—we first write a hypothesis, then that hypothesis guides our implementation, which serves as measurable validation of the hypothesis.
Qt Design Studio is a UI design and development tool that enables designers and developers to rapidly prototype and develop complex UIs. Both designers and developers use Qt Design Studio and this makes collaboration between the two a lot simpler and more streamlined. To get an impression, you should watch this video.
The Qt Company has released their public beta of the forthcoming Qt Design Studio 2.0, their software for quickly and easily designing user interfaces with an emphasis on UI design for non-programmers.
Qt Design Studio 2.0 is focused on improving the user experience for developing these Qt-based UIs. The 2.0 Beta release has improvements around thumbnail generation, rotating items, navigator improvements, and other enhancements.
The ugliest function in my data-auditing toolkit is "chkday". I wrote it for data tables containing both a date in ISO 8601 format and the corresponding day number for the given year.
Almost every man I know talks too goddamn much. All my favorite poets are women & gods. What I really miss is the pavement at midnight, my elongated shadow. There are mornings when the hunger pulses through me, when I just want to see a man die like an ox in a flooded field, where every witness is swallowed at once by a minute of silence, then continues the work of living. It’s not that I’m thirsty for blood. I just want to be alone & with you at the same time. G told me long ago she thinks I’m cold & I responded for years by writing on shreds of paper, my mind is on fire. She slipped them into her mouth & waited for the wet grass of a man she could love. On my sternum there is a thumbprint from where you pressed a seed into earth. G told me, to be us is to die, before we kissed on the hood of my car. I charged up & doubled down against my own death. Years ago, I stole the necessary tools to bleed my idols & I haven’t stopped drinking since that first cut. They’re buried in my garden now, whispering into each other’s ears, fingers wet with blood & water, combing through your hair. Two suns live behind my eyes & while one rises, the other sets.
What used to be a rope descending my vertebrae to the basement of my spine grows thin.
In solidarity with my chemotherapy, our cat leaves her whiskers on the hardwood floor, and I gather them, each purewhite parenthesis and plant them in the throat of the earth.
From the 1940s to the ’60s, the Onitsha Market in southeastern Nigeria was the center of a burgeoning movement in self-help literature. Known as Onitsha Market literature, these cheap, locally published booklets were at once moralistic and titillating. With titles like Why Harlots Hate Married Men and Love Bachelors, How to Avoid Corner Love and Win Good Love From Girls, Money Hard to Get but Easy to Spend, and Drunkards Believe Bar as Heaven, they were sold at market stalls and were intended to appeal to a class of newly literate Nigerians interested in advancing themselves professionally and culturally.
Illinois schools reported putting students into seclusion at least 10,776 times in the 2017-18 school year — up more than 50% from the last time districts sent seclusion data to the federal government, two years earlier.
The number of school districts that reported using seclusion, the practice of forcibly isolating a student in a small room or other space, also increased to 138 from 133, underscoring how entrenched the practice has been in the state.
"I do not expect Joe Biden to use this power on Inauguration Day to instantly turn the United States into a single-payer country. But there's nothing in the law that would appear to prevent him from doing it."
The Novaya Borovaya neighborhood in north-east Minsk, home to about 15,000 people, has been without running water for three days straight. The authorities say they are working on restoring the water supply, but many local residents believe that the utilities services are sabotaging the repairs as punishment for the strong support for the Belarusian opposition among residents in the neighborhood — 90 percent of whom voted for Alexander Lukashenko’s rival Svetlana Tikhanovskaya during the 2020 presidential elections.
From “climate change isn’t real” to “climate change is real and we’re serious about it” to “we are the solution” — there are established waymarkers along corporations’ paths to enlightenment on one of society’s greatest€ challenges.
“Like a pandemic, climate change is an inevitable threat that we must address before it is too late,” reads a June 2020 statement. “As the economy and agriculture begin to build back with the gradual easing of the COVID-19 restrictions, we need to support a recovery for farmers that puts the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss at its€ core.”
"Trying to protect nursing home residents without controlling community spread is a losing battle."
A rather interesting First Amendment opinion has been handed down by a federal court in Arizona. (h/t Volokh Conspiracy)
As the COVID-19 pandemic enters its ninth month, a new report by National Nurses United, the largest nurses’ union in the United States, finds hospitals are still failing to provide adequate PPE and are unprepared as the surge is expected to get worse during the flu season. Nurses also report mental health struggles related to the pandemic. The union estimates at least 2,000 frontline healthcare workers have died due to COVID-19, with nurses of color accounting for half of those deaths, even though they’re less than a quarter of the workforce. Jean Ross, president of National Nurses United, says the lack of preparedness is having a devastating toll on healthcare workers. “Hospitals still don’t have a plan in place for a surge — and we’re currently in a surge,” Ross says. “It’s the lack of response, the improper response, that has nurses and other healthcare workers really down.”
"More people may die if we don't coordinate," President-elect Joe Biden said this week.
On August 11, Russia announced the registration of the world’s first coronavirus vaccine, dubbed “Sputnik V.” That said, studies of its effectiveness are not yet complete: there are more than 40,000 volunteers taking part in the ongoing Phase III clinical trials, 75 percent of whom received the vaccine while the rest were given a placebo. Official data on the study has yet to be released, but some of the volunteers are already sharing their experiences and test results in a Telegram chat group created specially for this purpose. This information is serving as the basis for “amateur studies” of the vaccine; determining its side effects, monitoring antibody levels, and figuring out who got the placebo and who was given the actual shot. To find out more, Meduza talks to the chat group’s creator, Vladimir Rusetsky — a programmer from Omsk who volunteered for Russia’s coronavirus vaccine trial together with his wife.
"Eat, drink, and be merry, because tomorrow my policies may kill you."
We must "shift from an economy that is extractive and exploitative to one that regenerates and repairs," the new report says.
As the U.S. COVID-19 death toll nears 250,000, drugmakers Pfizer and Moderna have both announced promising vaccine trial results showing over 90% effectiveness in preventing illness. But officials and health experts warn widespread distribution of a vaccine for the coronavirus — which has killed 1.2 million people across the globe — will be tremendously difficult to store and distribute. Vaccine researcher Dr. Saad Omer calls the recent news “reassuring” but says drugmakers need to be much more transparent about their data and issue more than just press releases. “There should be a little bit more detail, and it should be in the form of some scientific report,” says Dr. Omer, director of the Yale Institute for Global Health and professor of infectious diseases at Yale School of Medicine.
GitHub recently reinstated the repository for youtube-dl, a popular free software tool for downloading videos from YouTube and other user-uploaded video platforms. GitHub had taken down the repository last month after the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) abused the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice-and-takedown procedure to pressure GitHub to remove it.
By shoehorning DMCA 1201 into the notice-and-takedown process, RIAA potentially sets a very dangerous precedent.
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...
The good folk who man the security agencies in Australia have cleverly pounced on admissions by Google and Facebook during a parliamentary inquiry, that they do not honour 20% of the requests for data disclosure, to push that well-worn barrow: end-to-end encryption will lead to Armageddon.
Microsoft has announced a new chip designed in collaboration with Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm that it says will add security to future Windows PCs.
The COVIDian dystopia continues. After a brief respite, infections and deaths have surged, strongly suggesting the "we're not doing anything about it" plan adopted by many states is fattening the curve. With infections spreading once again, the ushering of children back to school seems to have been short-sighted.
Jumana Musa joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they discuss how the third-party doctrine is undermining our Fourth Amendment right to privacy when we use digital services, and how recent court victories are a hopeful sign that we may reclaim these privacy rights in the future.
One week has passed since Yerevan and Baku announced the ceasefire that ended six-weeks of deadly conflict in the unrecognized Nagorno-Karabakh Republic. Since then, Russian peacekeepers have entered the region and Azerbaijan is preparing to take control of nearly half of its territory on December 1. Meanwhile, in Armenia, protests are continuing over the truce, which is widely perceived as a capitulation, and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan is facing increasing pressure to resign. Meduza breaks down the latest developments since the signing of the Nagorno-Karabakh truce on November 10.
No serious person believes that the war is winnable in any meaningful sense.
Mirroring Obama's choice to "look forward" not back, one critic said this a "preview of an epic failure" by the President-elect
The war began with what Harry Truman claimed was a surprise invasion on June 25, 1950, by the North Korean army across the dividing line with South Korea that was devised after World War Two. But the U.S. government had ample warnings of the pending invasion. According to the late Justin Raimondo, founder of antiwar.com, the conflict actually started with a series of attacks by South Korean forces, aided by the U.S. military: “From 1945-1948, American forces aided [South Korean President Syngman] Rhee in a killing spree that claimed tens of thousands of victims: the counterinsurgency campaign took a high toll in Kwangju, and on the island of Cheju-do — where as many as 60,000 people were murdered by Rhee’s US-backed forces.”
The North Korean army quickly routed both South Korean and U.S. forces. A complete debacle was averted after Gen. Douglas MacArthur masterminded a landing of U.S. troops at Inchon. After he routed the North Korean forces, MacArthur was determined to continue pushing northward regardless of the danger of provoking a much broader war.
Patrick O’Neill gripped the hammer tightly in his hands. The police would soon surround him.
O’Neill and six other Catholic peace activists had infiltrated the Kings Bay Naval Base in St. Mary’s, Georgia, with the goal of symbolically disarming the base’s six Trident submarines armed with first-strike missiles capable of holding 200 nuclear warheads.
"This is a grave humanitarian issue that demands your immediate attention and our collective condemnation," the lawmakers told the outgoing secretary of state, who is visiting the region this week.
Esper publicly rebuffed President Trump’s invocation of€ the Insurrection Act€ in June. Trump wanted to use that act to justify Esper sending active-duty military troops into€ cities€ experiencing violence associated with protests. Esper’s statement, “I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act,”€ was counter to the president’s wish. Trump told Fox News,”Look, it’s called insurrection. We just send them in, and we do it very easy.”
At that time, Trump was referring to the massive urban unrest that was occurring over the police killings of several Black citizens, many of whom were unarmed. Those protests and the ancillary lootings have largely disappeared. So why would Esper be fired now?
Treason means to betray one’s country. For many Americans,€ it has been shocking to learn of turn-coats within the intelligence agencies who sell national security secrets to hostile powers, especially when that information would lead to the execution of U.S. agents abroad. In 2000 many were shocked to see the Supreme Court intervene to throw the election to the Republican candidate. For the past four years, it has been shocking to see President Donald Trump bow to the bosses of Russia, China, North Korea, Turkey, and other countries whose policies harm U.S. interests. It was shocking to see the Senate ignore evidence that the president’s policies toward Ukraine placed his personal election priorities over laws passed by Congress. These and other recent events have bordered on or constituted betrayal of national security and democratic principles.
These disheartening events are eclipsed by all that is happening in the wake of the November 2020 elections. Trump’s request to Xi Jinping to buy soybeans to help him with the farm vote and his pledge to Turkish president Erdogan to scrub an investigation took place behind closed doors but were later revealed by John Bolton. Now the betrayal of America’s basic laws and norms is taking place in the open.
Any US military action against Iran’s civilian nuclear facilities would be a massive war crime.
"Trump's request for military options to strike Iran's nuclear program in his waning days in office encapsulates the bankruptcy of the pressure-only approach toward Iran favored by so many in Washington."
Those challenges? “For one, Iranian officials see no room for renegotiation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA),” notes O’Connor (JCPOA is the formal name of the “Iran nuclear deal”).
For another, Biden has conditioned his promise on Iran first returning to its own duties under the deal, commitments it abandoned after the US president Donald Trump abrogated the agreement and pressured US allies to start ignoring their obligations too.
It is worth pointing out that it was President Donald Trump who proved so itchy to renege on the nuclear deal to begin with.€ In May 2018, his administration formally withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the long negotiated harvest of the Obama administration in July 2015.€ Over the course of 120 days, it re-imposed all previously lifted economic sanctions, including “secondary sanctions” on non-US entities conducting financial or commercial transactions with Iran. A unilateral shredding of Washington’s own undertakings was made while still expecting the mullahs to continue in sweet compliance.
The less than compliant response from Tehran has not made this one of Trump’s finer moments: an abandonment of nuclear limits marked out by the agreement; a resumption of the nuclear program; an increasingly emboldened stance in the Middle East.€ According to UN inspectors, Iran’s enriched stockpile currently lies at 2,440 kilograms.€ Under the deal, it would have been under 300 kilograms.€ All of this took place despite the precipitous fall in oil exports, a decline in currency value and a steep rise in inflation.
Dozens of women in military uniforms, some gripping rifles, sing cadence as they march in formation in the mountainous borderlands of Myanmar’s northern Kachin State. These women are training to join the ranks of the Arakan Army, one of several armed groups fighting for autonomy and greater rights for ethnic minority communities in Myanmar. Female soldiers aren’t a rarity among Myanmar’s armed organisations. But their numbers are rising in the Arakan Army, which draws support from the ethnic Rakhine population, also known as Arakanese, in western Myanmar. The Arakan Army insurgency is Myanmar’s latest and its most intense, displacing some 230,000 people since late 2018. Civil society organisations say escalating violence, military abuses, and a lack of jobs in impoverished Rakhine are pushing more women to join. “Women and children suffer most because of the fighting, with tens of thousands living in inadequate displacement camps without physical and psychological safety,” said Ma Nyo Aye of the Rakhine Women’s Network, which works with victims of violence. “Unsurprisingly, lack of employment and extreme poverty also drive young women to join the insurgent group.”
In his latest book, The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson presents a vision of the coming decades that straddles dystopia and utopia, horror and hope—revealing a near-future Earth of increasingly severe climate effects and humanity’s radical responses to them. Robinson constructs this ambitious bricolage novel from fictionalized eyewitness accounts, including those of climate refugees, interweaving them with essayistic ruminations on finance, power, and the environment. It’s an appropriately sprawling form, anchored around reports by members of a UN organization called the Ministry for the Future, a technocratic body created to safeguard future generations. Mary Murphy, its head and the book’s central protagonist, carries the weight of the novel as an idealistic presence confronting a fast-approaching catastrophe.
Hurricane Iota made landfall in Nicaragua Monday as a Category 4 storm, just two weeks after Hurricane Eta devastated communities across Central America and caused widespread destruction. Iota is the strongest November hurricane to ever hit Nicaragua. “It’s caused a lot of damages to the most vulnerable peoples, which tends to be Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants and Black communities all across Central America,” says Giovanni Batz, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis, who has been in touch with people reeling from Hurricane Eta.
Big corporate media outlets are great at policing progressive Democrats who "go too far." They're not so watchful over Democratic presidents who cling to a go-slow, corporate-friendly "middle ground."€
"She has aligned herself with corporate agribusiness at the expense of family farmers, supports fossil fuel interests, and holds views that are out of step with the Democratic Party and the majority of Americans."
In the U.S., the transportation sector is the largest contributor to planet-warming emissions. Climate and energy policy experts say electrifying vehicles is necessary to mitigate these€ emissions.
"Despite risks to the climate, Indigenous rights, and their own bottom line, Bank of America is the only big U.S. bank that hasn't ruled out funding for drilling in the Arctic Refuge," noted the Sierra Club.
"President-elect Biden assured our movement he understands the urgency of this crisis; now, it's time for him to act like it."
Conservation groups have filed a€ legal protest€ challenging a massive logging project that would clearcut thousands of acres, including old-growth trees, and threaten an imperiled population of grizzly bears and protected lynx habitat on the Montana-Canada border under the guise of restoration.
The protest from the Center for Biological Diversity and WildEarth Guardians said the U.S. Forest Service’s Black Ram project on the Kootenai National Forest would violate the National Environmental Policy Act and the Endangered Species Act.
But all of these are just halfway measures that ignore a full accounting of the multiple ways that livestock production harms our ecosystems, wildlife, and our planet. They do not address the real issue-does it make sense to use water-loving, slow-moving, domesticated animals to produce protein? There are alternative sources of protein, and certainly better places to do this than the arid lands of the Western U.S.
There have been some excellent reviews of livestock impacts.
During the recent nail-biting, sleep-depriving weeks when the fate of American democracy was in hanging-chad-like balance, no one had the luxury of time to think about policy.
Both Millay and Esper had balked in June at Trump’s threat to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act to quell Black Lives Matter and all other protests across the country. “Not at this time,” they repeatedly insisted, in contrast to the moron Trump’s threats and insistence that this was the time. While few among the ruling rich discounted Trump’s incessant threats, no section believed that a military solution to the mass anti-racist protests, that mobilized an unprecedented 16-26 million in the streets in 2000-plus cities and towns following the police murder of George Floyd, was necessary. They had other means in mind to corral the mass hatred of society’s systemic racism into safe channels. The Democratic Party, the “historic graveyard of social movements,” was and remains their first choice.
Trump had warned on June 1 in a White House Rose Garden speech, as federal law enforcement officers fired rubber bullets and noxious chemical gases at peaceful White House area protestors, that if the nation’s governors don’t call up National Guard troops to “dominate the streets, I will deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem for them.” To make his point, de minimus, the bragging demagogue sent a relative handful of plainclothes federal officials to Portland and Minneapolis to momentarily arrest and disappear small groups peaceful protestors only to be repudiated by local and state officials. Shortly after, both Millay and Esper, publicly repudiated having escorted Trump, bible in hand, from the White House to nearby St. Peter’s Church for a one-minute photo op aimed at displaying his military might. Trump literally posed himself as under the command of his military establishment, with a momentarily intimidated Millay – dressed up in combat fatigues – playing along as if Trump had actually invoked the 1807 Act.
If Biden now selects only corporate-friendly, status-quo-defending advisors and Cabinet members, and if he touts watered-down bipartisan "solutions" as stunning successes, it will further cement a betrayal.
Despite his frequent denials of being a Marxist, Joe Biden was constantly called one. Biden is a career dud on a national scale. Biden only became a winner once he started to get compared to Karl Marx. Any person should deny a comparison to Marx, but only out of humility. Biden denied Marxism because he hated it. Still that didn’t stop the association being extremely positive for him, including an offbeat assertion from Bernie Sanders that Biden would be the next FDR.
By the way how about an election analysis that actually makes sense? Ralph Nader said that this election was a big loss for the left because Sanders and Warren types were boxed out completely of Biden’s election. Why? Because these people bowed to the Democratic Party. Most on the left did actually. It might be worth it to rid ourselves of Trump. But I don’t think so. Biden is damn lucky a man named Karl Marx lived a life worth remembering many years ago. Biden and Trump may be old demented men but they just got beat by a dead man.
Techdirt has been writing about trade agreements for many years. The reason is simple: as digital technology permeates ever more aspects of modern life, so international trade deals reflect this by including sections that have an important impact on the online world. A new trade agreement between Japan and the UK (pdf) is a good example. It is essentially a copy of the earlier trade deal between the EU and Japan (pdf) -- because of Brexit, UK negotiators have not had the time or resources to draw up their own independent text, which typically requires years of drafting and negotiation. But significantly, the Japan-UK agreement adds several major sections purely about digital matters. All are terrible for the general public, as a briefing document from the UK-based Open Rights Group explains.
We need coverage of people as active citizens, not just as consumers.
By repeatedly conferring legitimacy on a fundamentally antidemocratic president and his actions, media paved the way for the€ dangerous place€ we find ourselves in today, and hobbled their ability to protect our democracy.
Let’s teach 16-year-olds to be election-savvy and help them register to vote.
The ongoing struggle for racial justice. The future for immigrant families. The health and well-being of all Americans. The very fate of our fragile planet. The United States faces a crossroads in 2020. Seeking out the stories flying under the national radar, The Nation and Magnum Foundation are partnering on What’s At Stake, a series of photo essays from across the country through the lenses of independent imagemakers. Follow the whole series here. This installment was produced with support from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Support independent cartooning: Join Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!
Senator Andrey Klishas and State Duma lawmakers from United Russia Pavel Krasheninnikov and Olga Savastyanova have introduced a draft law to the Russian parliament on allowing President Vladimir Putin to run for the presidency in two more elections.
The Pskov Regional Court has upheld a city court ruling on refusing to recover 500,000 rubles (about $6,550) from journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva in a defamation lawsuit, reports RFE/RL’s Sever.Realii.€
The new politics of the poor in Joe Biden’s (and Mitch McConnell’s) USA.
The Federation Council’s Commission on Protecting State Sovereignty has proposed submitting a draft law to the State Duma on the possibility of recognizing candidates in elections as “foreign agents.”
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has joined more than three dozen cybersecurity experts and professional security organizations in calling for the White House to keep politics out of securing this month’s election. Election security officials and computer security experts must be able to tell the truth about the security of Americans’ votes without fear of retribution.
The experts and organizations were moved to action after reports that the White House is pressuring the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and its director Chris Krebs, to change CISA’s reports on election security. CISA has pushed back against baseless allegations of voter fraud and security problems—including many promoted by President Trump— through its “Rumor Control” website, and recently published a statement renouncing “unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections.”
An Open Letter on Election Security
Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy. And since computers are deeply involved in all segments of voting at this point, computer security is vital to the protection of this fundamental right.€ Everyone needs to be able to trust that the critical infrastructure systems we rely upon to safeguard our votes are defended, that problems are transparently identified, assessed and addressed, and that misinformation about election security is quickly and effectively refuted.€ €
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has joined more than three dozen cybersecurity experts and professional security organizations in calling for the White House to keep politics out of securing this month’s election. Election security officials and computer security experts must be able to tell the truth...
It is true that since 1960 the teaching of civics in American schools has been largely obliterated by funding cuts and “core exam” strategies. By 2011, all federal support for the teaching of social studies and civics in schools had ended. Survey after survey has discovered just how ignorant Americans have become about their nation. For example, two-thirds of them can’t even name the three different branches of the US government. Or, presumably, spot the difference between the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech and Trump’s repeated claim that the news media are “enemies of the People.”
So is the solution to the Trumpian abomination to be found in a great renaissance of social studies education? Perhaps but my own American educational experience tells me to be very careful here.
If the United States were a democracy, this election wouldn’t have been close. The fate of the world wouldn’t depend on a handful of suburban precincts. The winner would have been known immediately. With a comfortable lead well into the millions, the president-elect and his party could have moved on to crafting and passing the program that gained them an undeniable mandate.
Women of color should be the ones remaking U.S. foreign policy.
"Under the guise of rooting out election fraud, it looks like Graham is suggesting committing it."
The last time a Democratic presidential nominee won Georgia was in 1992, when only 10 websites existed, Ross Perot was splitting the vote, and Donald Trump was cameoing in Home Alone 2. This year, President-elect Joe Biden won the state, Carolyn Bourdeaux flipped Georgia’s Seventh Congressional District, and two Democratic Senate candidates have forced critical runoffs. There was no one author of Democrats’ success; it was a victory by the many. And Georgia isn’t the only state where that was true.
Georgia Senator David Perdue, the scandal-plagued millionaire€ who bought himself a Senate seat six years ago, has a strategy for keeping that seat in a critical January 5 runoff election that will help determine which party is going to control the chamber: He plans to hide.
But the opposition refused to accept those results, saying that there had been electoral fraud. The Carter Center and other international observers said they didn’t see any, and when they tried to investigate stories circulating, nothing factual turned up.
In 2005 Venezuela was still trying to recover from the employer lock-out and corporate strike that crippled the economy after the anti-Chávez coup of 2002 was thwarted by a massive popular uprising. There were signs of poverty everywhere—people sleeping in doorways, begging, sitting at tables on the street hoping to sell a few trinkets to be able to eat.
UK Parliament Member Damian Collins has been pushing dangerous nonsense about social media content moderation for a while now. A couple years ago he held a theatrical hearing on fake news that was marred by the fact that Collins himself was spreading fake news. Last year, he announced incredibly dangerous ideas about "stopping fake news" on websites.
Shadowproof is thrilled to announce the launch of the Marvel Cooke Fellowship, which will fund reporting from writers of color on the movement to abolish the prison industrial complex.
Over the summer, a historic wave of protests against death-by-policing elevated demands to defund police departments. Unprecedented public curiosity in abolition followed, prompting many media organizations to produce introductory articles on the subject.€
Police officers play a prominent role in modern Russian music across genres, from Soviet chansons to present-day avant-garde pop. But who are they? Just regular guys? Reluctant cogs in a corrupt machine? Or real enemies? Artem Rondarev, a professor at the Higher School of Economics, discusses how the police have been depicted in Russian music over the years.
In stacking not just his DHS team but all of his transition teams with neoliberals and hawks, Biden has sent the world a clear signal that despite the cage-free fantasies of liberal Democrats, his immigration policy will be more of the same.
State Duma deputies have approved a bill on expanding immunity for former Russian presidents in its first reading. The draft legislation is intended to bring Federal law in line with the country’s newly amended constitution.
As school districts are facing the new school year under conditions drastically changed by COVID-19, the digital divide is deepening education inequality in the US.
Back in March, the Trump FCC put on a big show about a new "Keep America Connected Pledge" to help broadband users during COVID. In it, the FCC proudly proclaimed that it had gotten hundreds of ISPs to suspend usage caps and late fees, and agree to not disconnect users who couldn't pay for essential broadband service during a pandemic. The problem: the 60 day pledge was entirely voluntary, temporary, and because the FCC just got done obliterating its authority over ISPs at lobbyist behest (as part of its net neutrality repeal), was impossible to actually enforce. It was regulatory theater.
The global pandemic and widespread lockdown measures resulted in a 30% to 50% spike in network traffic in just a few weeks earlier this year, according to Nokia Deepfield’s latest Network Intelligence Report. Many network operators in Europe and North America experienced a year’s worth of traffic growth in a matter of weeks.
Following that spike, traffic volumes stabilized at rates of 20% to 30% greater than pre-pandemic levels in May and have remained there since. However, Nokia notes that network traffic typically grows during the last four months of the year and that may happen again, especially as COVID-19 infections surge and public health restrictions are being re-instituted in many regions.
[...]
The threat surface and potential for malicious activity has also grown significantly during the last decade and the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the vendor noted in the report. There was a “steady increase in the overall volume of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) traffic” during the first weeks of the lockdown phase of the pandemic, the analysts wrote.
“Aggregated data from five large service providers showed that by April, DDoS traffic exceeded pre-pandemic levels by 40%,” Nokia Deepfield wrote. That increase, it added, is attributed to a jump in online gaming and growing abuse of DDoS amplifiers in Europe and North America.
Nokia also last month, in its 2020 Threat Intelligence Report, reported that malware infections on IoT devices surged 100% in a year and said those connected devices comprise about 33% of infected devices compared to about 16% in 2019.
The global rise in internet traffic was fueled by a rapidly growing use of specific applications that occurred within the first weeks of widespread lockdowns. Traffic from video conferencing apps jumped at least 350% and up to 700% on some networks and online gaming grew at least 100% in the weeks that immediately followed the World Health Organization’s decision to designate COVID-19 as a global pandemic.
The Beijing IP Court (the Court), founded on 6 November 2014, has been playing an active role in the promotion of IP protection through various means, e.g. by holding press conferences addressing specific topics (see a previous IPKat post: Beijing IP Court: let’s talk about short video copyrights) and publishing model cases (see a previous IPKat post: Beijing IP Court: Moutai is excellent, but not exclusively so; and Can the god of wealth be registered as a trade mark, and why?). The Court was designated as the first IP case guidance research base in China, with the approval of the Supreme People’s Court.
On 3 November 2020, the Court held a press briefing dedicated to the adverse effect clause of China’s Trade Mark Law, with specific examples given (the original news release is here, to which the main content of this post is referred. This Kat’s supplementary comments are inserted in blue coloured font).
[...]
The connotation and extension of the ‘adverse effect’ concerns subjective values and is not cut and dry. Its interpretations might be subject to cultural background, personal experience and the values they hold. The afore-cited examples are not all unsurprising, at least from this Kat’s point of view.
A somewhat broad discretion can be observed in the adoption of the adverse effect as a ground for trade mark refusals. A practical tip then would be to keep an eye on the recent relevant rulings and official briefings, and bear in mind that it might be necessary to consider a security buffer zone, which is mainly in preparation for the differences in opinion with the examiners. As pointed out by Judge Zhang Jian, the briefing is to remind the applicants ‘to be more cautious when applying for trade marks, and actively avoid the words that are low in style or are prone to adverse effects, in consideration of avoiding the minefield that is adverse effects clause’.
The CC Open GLAM Platform is a space to help coordinate efforts to aggregate, advertise, connect, and support open access to cultural heritage initiatives and projects. This year, CC launched an Activities Fund to support Open GLAM related activities by Platform members. In my role as Facilitator of the Platform, I presented a budget plan that received input and feedback from the community. We had three main allocations for the money:€
