You may be familiar with Clockwork company, which earlier launched an open-source Linux-powered portable game console called GameShell for gamers.
Now, they’re back with another new portable and modular device called DevTerm for developers, which you can easily carry along wherever you go.
The application runs in the background, transforming the multi-touch gestures you make on your touchpad into various desktop actions. For example, you can minimize a window by swiping down using 3 fingers, pinch in using 2 fingers to zoom in, etc.
This is a demo video recorded by the Touchegg developer (image above credits also go to the dev).
We have the coolest new retro tool of the year, that will turn you into a Linux powered spy.
Plus the changes coming to Fedora, and what GNOME is focusing on next year.
In our Innards section, we continue our talk on Raspberry Pi Projects.
Yes, Torvalds said he'd love to have one of the new M1-powered Apple laptops, but it won't run Linux and, in an exclusive interview he explains why getting Linux to run well on it isn't worth the trouble.
Sysmon is a Linux activity monitoring tool similar to Windows task manager, was written in Python and released under GPL-3.0 License. This is a Graphical visualization tool that visualizes the following data.
By default distribution like Ubuntu comes with a system monitor tool, but the drawback with the default monitor tool is it does not display HDD, SSD, and GPU loads.
Sysmon adds all the features to a single place similar to the Windows Task Manager.
My favorite pastime is to see an eclectic range of bands, solo artists, and orchestras live. It’s such a life-changing and exhilarating experience to be present. It’s one thing to be sitting at home listening to a CD or watching music videos on TV or on YouTube, but being with an audience, packed out in a stadium or music hall, takes it to another level. But it’s an expensive pastime, and still on hold given the coronavirus pandemic. I’m therefore listening to music from my CD collection which I’ve encoded to FLAC, a lossless audio format, and stored locally.
Linux offers a huge array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks, but I’m endeavoring to explore every free music player in case there’s an undiscovered gem.
MPD is a powerful server-side application for playing music. In a home environment, you can connect an MPD server to a Hi-Fi system, and control the server using a notebook or smartphone. You can, of course, play audio files on remote clients. MPD can be started system-wide or on a per-user basis.
myMPD is a standalone and lightweight web-based MPD client. Its developer claims myMPD is designed for minimal resource usage and requires only very few dependencies.
Shading is an act of adding shade to a drawn object to give it a look and a perception of depth. Nobody likes white bland 3D objects. In 3D modeling, it is very significant to give objects some color material or texture. The process of adding shades to color materials and textures is called shading. Shading is so essential in 3D modeling that Blender has a dedicated workspace for shading.
Shading workspace will automatically bring us in the “Look Dev” mode. Look Dev mode approximates lights and gives a general idea of the output of the object or scene. The shader editor will show the shader nodes of the selected object. Every object in Blender can be assigned a default material with white shading. And these shaders can be manipulated in the Shading workspace. You can add material to any object by going into the material tab.
The viewport is the main view of Blender that a user sees after getting it installed. At first look, it may appear intimidating, but it has become a lot comprehensible after the launch of the 2.80 version. The interface is less complicated and simple to learn.
The viewport is a window that allows you to look around the scene or object you created. Viewport and camera view can be confusing, but both are not similar. A camera is an object in the scene, whereas the viewport is a part of the interface.
Basics of navigating viewport include rotating, zooming, and panning the perspective of the view. There are various ways to navigate in the viewport.
How does it feel when you create a beautiful scene in Blender with high definition textures, shaders, particles, and volumetric effects and when you click on rendering, it just says that you need 2 hours to render just one frame? Yes, it feels discouraging. It is not easy to render a high-quality image or animation using an ordinary workstation.
It is not a piece of cake to render in Blender, especially when working in Cycles (rendering engine). 3D rendering requires a lot of computing power. If you are rendering an animation, then it will take much more power and time. It would be best if you had a powerful PC with high-end specifications to get decent results. The trouble is the affordability of a robust workstation; they are costly. But this issue is fixable; just use cloud rendering.
MySQL is an RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) that is famous for its speed and easy-to-use interface. In this article, you will learn about the different methods to delete or drop a database in MySQL. In this article, we assume that you already have a working knowledge of the creation and listing of databases in MySQL. So, feel free to read on if you have already installed MySQL on your system and have some dummy databases in MySQL that you want to delete.
Among the most frequent system administration practices is the process of restarting the network. To connect your machine with the Internet, a sound networking service is always required. At times, due to undesirable issues, the networking service in a particular operating system may start malfunctioning. If the issue is temporary, then it can be resolved simply by restarting your networking service.
There are multiple methods that you can use in any operating system to restart the system’s networking service. Today, we walk you through the two primary methods of restarting the network service in CentOS 8, one of the most popular distributions of the Linux operating system.
If you are using a system based on CentOS 8 and are not able to establish a secure connection with your network, you would be shocked by how many issues a quick restart can solve. You can restart the Linux networking service using various commands, but you must execute the commands to restart the network using sudo or su commands as a root user.
Sublime Text is a well-known text editor used to write source code for web development. This tutorial will assist you in installing Sublime Text on an Ubuntu 20.04 machine.
Wireshark is an open-source and free network traffic inspection tool. It captures and displays packets in real-time for offline analysis in a human-readable format with microscopic details. It requires some sound knowledge of basic networking and is considered an essential tool for system administrators and network security experts. Wireshark is the de-facto go-to tool for several network problems that vary from network troubleshooting, security issue examination, inspecting network traffic of a suspicious application, debugging protocol implementations, along with network protocol learning purposes, etc.
The Wireshark project was initiated in 1998. Thanks to the global networking expert’s voluntary contribution, it continues to make updates for new technologies and encryption standards. Hence, it’s by far one of the best packet analyzer tools and is utilized as a standard commercial tool by various government agencies, educational institutes, and non-profit organizations.
Google Drive is a cloud storage and synchronization service that allows users to keep, synchronize, and share files across many devices. It offers 15GB of free storage space for each Google account to store files.
Working with remote repositories gets confusing when the names of the remote repositories in your local Git repo are inconsistent.
Here learn how to download and install IntelliJ on Ubuntu. Intellij Idea can be installed simply from GUI and also from CLI.
Htop is more like an immersive Centos 8 system process viewer and device monitor. It shows resource-usage measures in color and helps you to conveniently keep track of the performance of your system as an enhancement. With both an additional array of choices and a clear picture on the board, it is the same as the standard main command. It shows details about the usage of Processor & RAM, tasks being done, average load, and uptime. Besides, Htop shows a list of all operating processes and can even show it in a tree-like structure. If you are interested to interactively control your device, then one of your best choices ought to be the Htop command. It runs on all distributions of Linux, and in most situations, is enabled by default.
In this tutorial, you will learn to install Htop on Centos 8 using the command-line.
When installing things on NixOS, you need to have a package in the right format on the nixos.org web page. Steam is available, but some quirks may trip you up when you try to install it. You will hear more about this here.
In particular, it is a non-free software package, so you must enable this option. You will also need to handle the ‘glXChooseVisual failed’ problem. The process will work one way in NixOS and another way on other distributions. It is more complex with just the Nix package manager.
Modern and dynamic websites require many features, menus, and widgets to make the website user-friendly and reach the perfect marketplace. No matter which tool you use to create your website, javascript is always required to draw the finishing line
If you’d like a fast way of converting between audio and video files in Linux and would like something that doesn’t chew on resources and does the task properly, then you may give FFmpeg a try. FFmpeg is vital for keeping some level of familiarity between files uploaded by multiple users, as well as help maintain your storage space under control. When using FFmpeg, you can translate, adjust sample rates, record audio/video streams, and resize files between different video and audio formats. It provides a collection of audio and video libraries that are shared, including libavcodec, libavformat, and libavutil. Whenever it refers to converting files, FFmpeg has several command-line choices, and it is also recommended to use it from the CLI. Follow me on, and I’ll lead you to install FFmpeg in Centos 8. FFmpeg is not offered in the default repositories of Centos 8. You may opt to build FFmpeg utilities from the source or install them from the Negativo17 directory via DNF. In this article, we’ll move ahead with the second choice. It is also the fastest way to implement FFmpeg on the Centos 8 OS.
Linux, of course, has to keep track of all the applications and daemons running on your computer. One of the ways it does this is by maintaining the process table. This is a list of structures in kernel memory. Each process has an entry in this list that contains some information about it.
There isn’t a great deal in each of the process table structures. They hold the process ID, a few other data items, and a pointer to the process control block (PCB) for that process.
It’s the PCB that holds the many details Linux needs to look up or set for each process. The PCB is also updated as a process is created, given processing time, and finally destroyed.
Nowadays, a Firewall is an essential utility and property of any system for security; by default Debian Operating system having a firewall configuration tool named UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall). UFW is a user-friendly front-end tool to manage iptables firewall rules. It provides you more straightforward methods to manage iptables as the name of this tool start from Uncomplicated.
To a network administrator, the ARP protocol may sound familiar. ARP is a protocol that Layer 2 devices implement for discovering and communicating with each other. The arping tool works using this protocol. Now, why would you need arping? Imagine you are working with a small office network. Using the classic ping command to ping hosts to verify their availability is very tempting, right? Well, if you are using the ICMP protocol, then you are actually performing ARP requests for probing devices in the network.
This is where the arping tool comes in. Like ping, arping pings network hosts using network layer ARP packets. This method is useful for hosts that do not respond to Layer 3 and Layer 4 ping requests.
This article shows you how to use arping command in Linux.
YAML is a friendly data serialization standard that works with all programming languages. While configuration files are often defined in YAML, it can even be used as a programming language, like the workflow language at Google, or Apache Camel K.
It has the advantage of not having any braces, making it lightweight visually. One of the drawbacks is that editing YAML files may not always be easy. For instance, writing a tag at the wrong indentation level can be hard to detect. To help with editing, it is possible to provide a YAML schema that can be leveraged by a large set of integrated development environments (IDEs). Unfortunately, this practice is not widespread. Consequently, users waste time searching for a missing or extra space and browsing documentation.
In this article, you will discover the benefits of providing a YAML schema and how to make it consumable for all your users, making it easier to edit YAML files.
I got an interesting request (not from singles in my area). One of my readers asked me, how does one go about connecting two Linux boxes - I presume for sharing purposes. This is a topic I've touched upon frequently, but often indirectly. As Commandant Lasard from Police Academy would say, there are many, many, many, many different ways to do this.
So perhaps it's time for a proper tutorial. I will show you several common, robust ways to have two Linux systems communicate over network. We'll do it on the command line, then move up to file managers, and finally, also perform a remote data backup using a friendly GUI tool. Let's start.
If you’re a Linux admin, you probably take care of any number of servers, all of which contain numerous users. Those users log in via various means or protocols, such as SSH, FTP, HTTP. In order to successfully log in, those users have to have—passwords.
A good patch management plan always includes a good patch backout plan.
This article will list various command line games available for Linux. These games do not require you to commit a lot of time and can be played in short bursts. If you are using a lightweight Linux distribution with minimal UI elements or using a headless OS based on Linux, this list should be useful for you.
Okay, now this is quite impressive. Tristam Island is a text adventure designed like old Infocom works and it's playable across more platforms than you might expect.
Developed by Hugo Labrande using modern, open source tools on Linux naturally it has first-class Linux support. However, it's also available on over 30 other platforms too. From Linux to Windows, Amiga to Spectrum and even some calculators can run it. The technical details of it are just as impressive as the adventure you go on. The developer also supplies the plain ".z3" file to run in your favourite interactive fiction interpreter. It could run pretty much anywhere.
"After crashing your plane at sea, you end up drifting to a small island, with not much to survive. You explore, and find out the island was inhabited, years ago. But why did the people leave? And why is there a fence around the white house at the top of the hill?"
Need an up to date Linux distribution for your living room big screen experience? GamerOS can fill that gap for you while Valve sit on SteamOS.
GamerOS is one of the easiest ways to get a full-screen Steam experience on a big screen, with no-fuss updates and a whole bunch of special tweaks to make it run as nicely as possible. Not only that, it has a bunch of extras to support other stores and platforms too.
With the release of GamerOS 21 the standard components included have been upgraded like the Linux Kernel 5.9.9, Mesa 20.2.2, NVIDIA 455.38, RetroArch 1.9 and updates to their Steam Tweaks and Steam Buddy apps too. Their Steam Buddy is web-based tool you use to manage non-Steam stuff, with these release it expanded to support the Atari Jaguar and PlayStation Portable through emulators. It also now has audio controls, it will generate banner images based on game titles when one isn't available, fixes gamepads not working with the Epic Games Store and more fixes.
Here’s a quick test run of some of these game streaming services, and I’ll explain what they do. In particular, we’ll see how well each service fares on the desktop Linux side.
Remember the unique mix of point and click adventuring with an idle game in The Longing? It's supposed to have taken people 400 days to finish and it released back in March 2020 - to which I was impressed with it.
This is because when you start, a big timer at the top of your screen will count down from 400 real-time days. It's a painfully slow game, and one that's very much the anti-AAA shot some readers might be needing. It's all about loneliness, and the longing to know more and have more. It's such a thoroughly strange experience.
The Longing sits between a point and click adventure with an idle game. You can walk around, interact with things and explore for a while. However, certain parts of it force you to wait. You might need something to grow or get broken before you can pass, or even just opening a big door might take an hour or two. You can just quit and come back, and time will continue on so you don't need to have it open.
Google continues to boost their game selection with many fan favourites continuing to arrive on their Stadia game streaming service. They also have big plans.
As of right now, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is available to buy on Stadia and it's 60% off at $23.99 / €27.99 / €£23.99. The sale on that will end on December 3. They're also offering a free Stadia Premiere Edition (Controller + Chromecast Ultra) with pre-orders of Cyberpunk 2077 and I do have to admit I love the feel of my own Stadia Controller.
Black Mesa: Definitive Edition is the final big update to the re-imagined fan-made Half-Life game, and it's looking pretty awesome. Easily the best way to experience the first part of Half-Life.
Don't get me wrong, the original from Valve still has plenty of true charm but for modern audiences it's not the ideal way to try and get into it. Black Mesa (especially now with the Definitive Edition) makes it easier for a new generation to get invested into the crazy world that is Half-Life and experience the adventure of Dr. Gordon Freeman.
For a while now you've been able to stream games using NVIDIA GeForce NOW in your browser, however it looks like NVIDIA will be making that a bit more official for Linux.
Currently on certain platforms like Windows and macOS, NVIDIA have a dedicated downloadable application for their GeForce NOW streaming service. They expanded support into the browser for ChromeOS / Chromebooks in the Summer, which initially needed other platforms to spoof their browser string to ChromeOS but that hasn't been needed for a while.
While the new Radeon RX 6800 series is suited for 4K gaming, a number of premium readers inquired about seeing 1440p gaming benchmarks for the cards. Now that all the initial launch coverage is out of the way, here is a look at the Radeon RX 6800 / RX 6800 XT with 15 graphics cards in total for this round of Linux gaming benchmarks focused at 1440p.
Up for this comparison based on the cards I had available were the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060, RTX 2060 SUPER, RTX 2070 , RTX 2070 SUPER, RTX 2080, RTX 2080 SUPER, TITAN RTX, RTX 2080 Ti, and the RTX 3080 (unfortunately, the RTX 3080 remains my lone Ampere card at the moment with NVIDIA not yet sending out the RTX 3090/3070 for Linux testing). On the Radeon side is the RX 5600 XT, RX 5700, RX 5700 XT, Radeon VII, RX 6800, and RX 6800 XT.
The very latest open-source Radeon Linux graphics drivers were used for this testing, which does incorporate the recent driver optimizations. Via the Phoronix Test Suite a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan test cases were conducted. The GPU power consumption and GPU core temperatures were also monitored on a per-test basis.
Here's my review on Kubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa. Two years ago I call it friendly computing, now in 2020, I call it familiar operating system for everyone. We have so many good news with Kubuntu today and let's go, I hope you enjoy my review.
Kubuntu 20.04 has a lot of benefits and a little of issues. I believe it is a familiar operating system most computer users can afford, by purchasing real Kubuntu laptops or by installing manually, you can push your computing for daily purposes, teaching and graphic designing quickly and comfortably. To complete everything, let's not forget it is a Long Term Support edition which will receive Ubuntu-based updates for five years until 2025 and desktop-based updates until 2023. Win-win solution, nice to everybody, that's Kubuntu Focal for you. That's my review.
Buoyed by the recent Snyk security report that found security vulnerabilities in several container images except Ubuntu’s, the company behind it, Canonical, has published a whole portfolio of hardened images.
Unsurprisingly, Canonical has partnered with Docker to streamline the delivery of the secure portfolio of images through Docker Hub.
“Canonical and Docker will partner together to ensure that hardened free and commercial Ubuntu images will be available to all developer software supply chains for multi-cloud app development,” Docker's Matt Carter wrote in a blog post announcing the collaboration.
MiTac’s fanless “ME1-108T” embedded computer runs Linux on an up to quad-core i.MX8M with up to 4GB LPDDR4, up to 32GB eMMC, 2x GbE, 3x USB, and HDMI, DP, serial, mini-PCIe, and 40-pin RPi GPIO.
ICP Germany announced the launch of MiTac’s compact ME1-108T embedded system. Although we have reported on dozens of compute modules and SBCs that run Linux on NXP’s dual- or quad-core, Cortex-A53 i.MX8M, the ME1-108T appears to be only the second embedded system using the SoC after Axiomtek’s Agent336.
The plan is to support Ubuntu, NVIDIA L4T, and Windows (future release).
Just a couple of weeks ago, we reported on the status of Raspberry Pi 4 Vulkan driver & future plans based on a presentation made by Igalia at the Open Source Summit 2020 at the end of October.
At the time, the V3DV Vulkan Mesa driver for Raspberry Pi 4 was merged into Mesa, passed over 100,000 tests in the Kronos Conformance Test Suite (CTS), and was said to implement the full Vulkan 1.0 API. So it should come as no surprise that Khronos has now declared the Raspberry Pi drivers to be conformant with Vulkan 1.0 specifications.
After about six months of development, the upcoming LibreOffice 7.1 office suite is now ready for public beta testing. The first beta release has arrived and anyone willing to help the development team discover and fix bugs can download it right now from the official website for Linux, macOS, and Windows platforms.
LibreOffice 7.1 promises a plethora of improvements and some new features, starting with a new outline folding mode for Writer. This adds a button with arrow next to a selected heading in a word document, allowing users to fold all text from the current heading to the next one when clicked and with all its subheadings when right clicked.
The upcoming LibreOffice 7.1 is under development. LibreOffice 7.1 Beta 1 is released just a while back. Here we take a look at the LibreOffice 7.1 top new features and release dates.
As any programmer knows, there are many reasons it's vital to keep track of code changes. Sometimes you just want a history of how your project started and evolved, as a matter of curiosity or education. Other times, you want to enable other coders to contribute to your project, and you need a reliable way to merge disparate parts. And more critically, sometimes an adjustment you make to fix one problem breaks something else that was working.
Most PCs tend to boot from a primary media storage, be it a hard disk drive, or a solid-state drive, perhaps from a network, or – if all else fails – the USB stick or the boot DVD comes to the rescue… Fun, eh? Boring! Why don’t we try to boot from a record player for a change?
Python comes up with many built-in data structures like lists, dictionaries, and tuples to store and manage the data efficiently. The namedtuple is the dictionary-like container available in the “collections” module. Similar to the dictionaries, the namedtuple also contains the keys that are mapped to values. However, the namedtuple allows accessing the values through keys and as well as through indexes. As compared to the Python dictionaries, accessing the values through indexes is the additional functionality in namedtuple. This article explains the Python namedtuple in detail with examples.
Data structures are the essential components of any programming language that store and manage the data efficiently. Python provides many built-in data structures, i.e., lists, tuples, and dictionaries, that help the programmers to create efficient applications. The Python dictionaries store the data in key-value pairs. The OrderedDict is the subclass of the dict class and maintains the order of the keys in which were inserted in. This is the one and the only difference between the dict and OrderDict. The dict does not maintain the key’s order.
The OrderedDict keeps the order of keys insertion, and when we iterate through the OrderedDict, then it returns the keys in the same order. On the other hand, when the iteration is performed on dict, the keys are returned in random order. However, the dictionaries are now ordered in Python 3.6 and above versions and return the values in the same order as they are inserted. The OrderedDict class exists in the collections module. Therefore, to use the OrderedDict class, first, import the collections module. This article explains the Python OrderedDict in detail with examples.
Yield is a Python built-in keyword that returns the value(s) from a function. The execution of the function is not terminated. Rather, it returns the value to the caller and maintains the execution state of the function. The execution of the function is resumed from the last yield statement. The yield allows us to produce a sequence of values rather than one value. It is used inside a function body. The function that contains a yield statement is known as the generator function.
There are several advantages to yield keyword. For instance, it controls the memory allocation and saves the local variable state. However, it increases the complexity of the code.
Python offers many built-in data structures, such as lists, tuples, and dictionaries, to save and manage data efficiently. Dictionaries provide an easy way to save data as key-value pairs. A key acts as an index and is used to retrieve data. Keys should be unique and immutable throughout the dictionary. Keys are mostly strings and integers, though the value of a key could be of any type, such as an integer, string, floating-point number, or complex number. Meanwhile, a dictionary can contain a collection, such as a list, tuple, or some other type of dictionary. A dictionary in Python is created using a pair of curly brackets, in which each key-value pair is separated by a comma.
What if you try to access or modify a specific key in a dictionary that does not exist? Well, in this case, the Python interpreter will raise the “KeyError” error and terminate the execution of the program.
If you have developed a Python script or application meant to be primarily run in terminal emulators or even GUI apps, adding command line arguments can improve its useability, code readability, application structure and overall user friendliness of the application for the end users. These command line arguments are also called “options” or “switches” and work similarly to arguments you usually see in bash scripts and other C / C++ based programs.
To add arguments to Python scripts, you will have to use a built-in module named “argparse”. As the name suggests, it parses command line arguments used while launching a Python script or application. These parsed arguments are also checked by the “argparse” module to ensure that they are of proper “type”. Errors are raised if there are invalid values in arguments.
Usage of the argparse module can be best understood through examples. Below are some code samples that will get you started with the argparse module.
Vue.js is a progressive JavaScript framework, which is used to build UIs (User Interfaces) and SPAs (Single-page Applications). This framework is famous for its fast-paced learning curve. It is such an easy to learn and approachable library that with the knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, we can start building web applications in Vue.js. The fast learning curve is kind of a signature of this framework. It is a versatile framework for our need as a library or a full-fledged framework for building huge web apps.
Evan You have created this framework. The idea of Evan You behind this framework is to build the best framework by combining the best features from already existing Angular and react Frameworks. Before building Vue.js, Evan You was working at Google. Inc and worked on Angular based projects. So, he came up with the idea of building his own framework. He picked the best parts of Angular, like template syntax, easy to use, and picked the best parts of React as well, like two-way data binding, the concept of props, component-based approach, and combined them to make a new framework Vue.js better than both of them.
No one knows exactly how many sex workers there are in Russia, but the number is said to be in the millions. Most of these people are young women trying to pull themselves and their families out of poverty. Faced with the illegality of their labor, the dangers of the job, and the powerful social stigma that haunts prostitution, Russia’s sex workers walk a tightrope at home, where many feel compelled to conceal or justify the work that puts food on the table and keeps a roof overhead. Meduza special correspondent Irina Kravtsova traveled to Volgograd, Samara, and Ufa, where she met with three such women and spoke to their children to learn how Russia’s sex workers navigate these enormous challenges.
But that’s a strange teaching.
There’s teachings that say all soldiers are automatically heroes, and as a result, war is holy.
Oksana Karas’s new film, “Doctor Liza,” is currently in theaters. The picture follows a day in the life of Dr. Elizaveta Glinka, a story whose protagonist manages to comfort, hug, warm, and save hundreds. Chulpan Khamatova stars in the film, which features many other prominent Russian actors, including Evgeny Pisarev, Andrzej Chyra, Konstantin Khabensky, Andrey Burkovskiy, Yulia Aug, Tatyana Dogileva, Timofey Tribuntsev, Alexey Agranovich, Elena Koreneva, and Yana Gladkikh. Karas told Meduza about what effect she hopes to achieve in Russia with a film about charity.
"50.8 million children who attend real public schools need a secretary of education who will be their advocate, not an advocate for privatization."
At the moment, one of the biggest debates in education is whether or not campuses should reopen during the pandemic. The Trump administration has demanded that schools fully reopen irrespective of COVID-19 rates, budget constraints, and before there could be a proper assessment of the risk of community transmission, and DeVos has stated publicly that she does not see tracking the virus’s impact in schools as the Education Department’s responsibility. Meanwhile, the Biden campaign has promised emergency federal relief funding and assistance for schools to address the effects of the pandemic, a move that is in line with many student activists’ demands.
Russia’s “Sputnik V” coronavirus vaccine has shown more than 95 percent effectiveness 42 days after the first dose, the researchers developing the vaccine reported on Tuesday, November 24.
The family of a former meatpacker who died from COVID-19 alleges in a lawsuit that managers at a Tyson Foods plant in Iowa knew working conditions would result in illness, and even placed bets on how many workers would be infected. The family of Isidro Fernandez, who died in April, says the plant manager set up a winner-take-all betting pool for supervisors and managers to wager on coronavirus infections. Since the start of the pandemic, at least six workers have died and more than 1,000 tested positive for COVID-19 at the Iowa facility. Tyson Foods has suspended the managers involved in the alleged betting scheme, but worker rights advocates say it is further evidence of abuse and exploitation in the meat industry. “These companies are treating them like animals. They’re treating them as disposable,” says Magaly Licolli, executive director of Venceremos, an advocacy group for poultry plant workers.
In recent days, there have been articles in several major news outlets about how China vaccinated close to 1 million people, under an Emergency Use Authorization, for vaccines that are currently in Phase 3 clinical testing (here, here, here, and here). While large-scale distribution of vaccines, that have not completed testing for safety and effectiveness, is probably not a good public health practice, none of these pieces raised any questions about whether the United States, and other countries, might have benefited from access to the Chinese vaccines.
It would not be reasonable to distribute Chinese vaccines here based on safety and effectiveness data that had not been thoroughly vetted by the Food and Drug Administration. But, if we had chosen to go a collaborative route in developing vaccines, we could have done our own tests, in addition to using data available from tests done by the Chinese manufacturers.
Guests: Kate Kheel, Phoebe Sorgen, Amber Yang, and Kenn Burrows.
The global race for a Covid-19 vaccine appears to be in its final leg. The research was publicly funded. But Big Pharma stands to make enormous profits, at the expense of people the world over.
YouTube has temporarily suspended and demonetized the channel for pro-Trump outlet One America News Network. OANN will be barred from publishing videos and livestreams for one week, and will need to reapply to the YouTube Partner Program to regain its monetization status.
The suspension is the first "strike" for OANN under YouTube's terms of service. YouTube uses a three strike system, with repeat offenders ultimately being removed from the video platform.
YouTube has suspended the pro-Trump One America News Network from posting new videos for a week, and the outlet has had its old content demonetized after uploading a video containing misinformation about the coronavirus, YouTube spokesperson Ivy Choi confirmed to The Hill on Tuesday.
The weeklong suspension is the result of a “strike” issued for saying that there is a guaranteed cure for COVID-19, a claim that runs afoul of YouTube’s coronavirus-specific policy.
YouTube is temporarily banning One America News Network for breaking rules about Covid-19 claims, shuttering the right-wing cable outlet on the world’s largest video site for a week.
“After careful review, we removed a video from OANN and issued a strike on the channel for violating our COVID-19 misinformation policy, which prohibits content claiming there’s a guaranteed cure,” Ivy Choi, a YouTube spokeswoman, said in a statement. After a channel receives three strikes, YouTube terminates it altogether.
YouTube, part of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, is also suspending advertisements from the network for violating other unspecified policies.
Sweden's top infectious disease expert said Tuesday that the country has not seen evidence of herd immunity slowing the spread of the coronavirus in the country.
In the coming weeks and months, a group of experts will decide if Yemen, a country the UN has deemed the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis”, is in the midst of, or at risk of, a famine.
Despite a recent stream of statements from aid officials – including last week’s warning from UN Secretary-General António Guterres that “Yemen is now in imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen for decades” – such a declaration is not a foregone conclusion.
That’s because, although it’s an emotionally weighted and frequently used word, famine actually has a highly complex technical definition that is hard to meet and requires a level of quality data that doesn’t always exist in Yemen, which has been at war since early 2015. For example, the threshold was not met in late 2018, and that was despite similar cries of alarm, despite the fact that some children were clearly starving to death, and despite the finding that nearly 16 million people were expected to be above “crisis” levels of food insecurity.
Two years later, and after more than five and a half years of war – Houthi rebels in the north are fighting an internationally recognised (but mostly exiled) government and its allies in the south, backed by a Saudi Arabia-led coalition – it seems to many Yemenis that almost everything that could possibly go wrong in one country has done so.
The only problem, a judge said yesterday, is that Allen may not have written the email. In fact, Mr Justice Trower said, evidence pointed to the email having been fabricated “for the purpose of misleading the court”.
Lennert Wouters, a security researcher at Belgian university KU Leuven, today revealed a collection of security vulnerabilities he found in both Tesla Model X cars and their keyless entry fobs. He discovered that those combined vulnerabilities could be exploited by any car thief who manages to read a car's vehicle identification number—usually visible on a car's dashboard through the windshield—and also come within roughly 15 feet of the victim's key fob. The hardware kit necessary to pull off the heist cost Wouters around $300, fits inside a backpack, and is controlled from the thief's phone. In just 90 seconds, the hardware can extract a radio code that unlocks the owner's Model X. Once the car thief is inside, a second, distinct vulnerability Wouters found would allow the thief to pair their own key fob with the victim's vehicle after a minute's work and drive the car away.
Ransomware gangs have shown themselves to be an innovative lot, incorporating more and more tactics as they look to extort money from their victims and this trend will continue into the new year, a veteran researcher of this brand of malware says.
Security researchers who reported observing Internet communications between the Russian financial firm Alfa Bank and the Trump Organization in 2016 can remain anonymous, an Indiana trial court ruled last week.
The ruling protects the First Amendment anonymous speech rights of the researchers, whose analysis prompted significant media attention and debate in 2016 about the meaning of digital records that reportedly showed computer servers linked to the Moscow-based bank and the Trump Organization in communication.
Imagine walking down the street, looking for a good cup of coffee. In the distance, a storefront glows in green through your smart glasses, indicating a well-reviewed cafe with a sterling public health score. You follow the holographic arrows to the crosswalk, as your wearables silently signal the self-driving cars...
Despite widespread complaints about its effects on human rights, the Brazilian Senate has fast-tracked the approval of “PLS 2630/2020”, the so-called “Fake News” bill. The bill lacked the necessarily broad and intense social participation that characterized the development of the 2014 Brazilian Civil Rights...
Despite their importance, Unix/Linux local and privileged accounts often don’t get sufficient oversight in a centralized PAM strategy.
True, the Unix/Linux userbase is typically more technically savvy and has a greater understanding of security than your typical user. In some ways, Unix/Linux actually led the move toward PAM decades ago. The problem is, not much has changed in decades. They still heavily rely on their own methods for privileged management, such as Sudo controls, and are still using Sudo with few differences from when it was first introduced.
No matter how savvy the user, Unix/Linux privileged accounts are time-consuming and tedious to manage, so they often don’t get sufficient oversight. In addition, when it comes time for an audit, it’s extremely difficult to piece together all of the privileged account activities and security controls. You might have one report for Windows and Mac and a separate one or many for Unix/Linux. You can’t get a consolidated view of risk to use for decision-making or show progress to your auditors.
It looks like some members of the Seattle Police Department have taken an interest in Clearview. Clearview scrapes photos and data from the open web and sells access to its untested facial recognition AI to government agencies, private companies, and the odd billionaire. According to Clearview, it has 4 billion scraped records in its database. What it doesn't have is a proven law enforcement track record for solving crimes, despite making extremely forward overtures to hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the globe.
It looks like the FBI believes it should be able to pull pretty much anything from someone's phone for pretty much any reason. A recent warrant affidavit [PDF] submitted by Special Agent Brian De Jesus requests access to nearly everything contained on a cellphone abandoned in a car, supposedly by the suspect now being charged for being a felon in possession of a handgun.
Moscow’s Information Technology Department has is soliciting bids to develop a system that will build detailed “digital profiles” for all users of municipal services, as well as constantly monitor the activities of Muscovites throughout the city and at municipal facilities. The website Open Media first reported the 280-million-ruble ($3.7-million) contract’s appearance. Although the system is reportedly designed to collect information anonymously, experts warn that it could include surveillance mechanisms and that abuse of the system could result in people’s personal information ending up on the black market.
An alliance of British businesses, that is campaigning to stop Google from allegedly controlling the open Web, has asked the UK's Competition and Markets Authority to delay the release of technology by the search firm that is claimed to be able to cement its alleged dominance of online business.
Six Australian intelligence organisations have "incidentally" collected data from the COVIDSafe app, according to a report from the watchdog, the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, issued on Monday.
Alerts in the Schengen Information System are increasing significantly every year, entries in Europol databases are also continuing to grow. The German government now wants to use video messages and giveaways to promote the acceptance of the largest European police database.
The Chicago Police Department has firmly established itself as one of the worst police forces in America. From running an off-the-books, Constitution-evading "black site" to interrogate detainees without bringing in their lawyers or rights to loading up its gang database with thousands of non-gang members, the department is a horrific mess.
The complaint detailed:
An investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) found that the Ring doorbell app for Android was “packed with third-party trackers sending out a plethora of customers’ personally identifiable information”. The EFF’s research discovered that four main analytics and marketing companies were receiving information from the app that included things such as the names, private IP addresses, mobile network carriers, persistent identifiers, and sensor data on the devices of paying customers. Also potentially concerning is the fact that Amazon keeps records of every motion detected by its Ring doorbells, as well as the exact time they are logged down to the millisecond. Conscious of the growing concerns about privacy, Amazon has improved account security and privacy control, although not significantly.
If no changes to this proposal are made, the accounts that would be eligible for verification would include government accounts, companies, brands, nonprofits, news media accounts, entertainment, sports, activists, organizers, and what Twitter refers to as “other influential individuals.” Each type of account must meet specific requirements, like being profiled in a media outlet, in order to receive verification. The entirety of Twitter’s draft policy can be viewed here. After receiving feedback, Twitter plans to release the final policy on December 17th.
If you’re not the handy type or perhaps just don’t want to put the effort into putting in a wired security doorbell, such as a Ring, you may opt for a wireless doorbell, saving yourself the hassle. However, you could end up with more hassles than you ever dreamed, as 11 popular wireless doorbells failed basic cybersecurity tests, according to researchers. Cybersecurity Research These 11 wireless doorbells that failed the cybersecurity tests were all available on common online shopping sites, such as Amazon and eBay...
Actually ending the war in Afghanistan.
This past summer, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo began a series of appeals to the UN Security Council, saying that the United States was still a member of the deal, based on the council’s 2015 favorable vote by former U.S. ambassador to the UN Samantha Power. Therefore, Washington had the right to initiate the “snapback”—a procedure that allows participants of the deal to reverse any easing or lifting of sanctions instituted by the pact.
This led to several UN Security Council meetings, where most members rejected Pompeo’s arguments. But Pompeo called for the snapback in late September, despite “objections from most other countries.”
While a ‘total reset’ is, perhaps, possible in some aspects of US policies – for example, a reversal of the Donald Trump Administration’s decision to abandon the Paris Agreement on climate change – it is highly unlikely that the US can simply reclaim its position in many other geopolitical battles around the globe.
President Trump was often accused of leading an ‘isolationist’ foreign policy, a misleading term that, according to Stephen Wertheim’s “Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy”, was deliberately coined to silence those who dared challenge the advocates of military adventurism and interventionism in the first half of the twentieth century.
I have known several veterans who had serious health issues connected to their military experience and had to fight for support from the Veterans Administration. The plight of those suffering the ill effects of exposure to the defoliant Agent Orange used to make forested areas of Vietnam visible for attacks by the US, are among a group that had to fight strenuously for deserved benefits. A friend from the post-World War II era fought until the end of his life to get the benefits he deserved after serving as a military photographer in the Pacific whose work involved taking photographs of nuclear tests.
Following the Vietnam War, Jimmy Carter issued an amnesty program that offered the chance for amnesty to hundreds of thousands of draft and military resisters. There were 432,530 veterans who qualified to have their discharges upgraded, who were discharged with either undesirable or general discharges. The Carter amnesty program (“Carter Authorizes Military To Review Viet Discharges,”€ Washington Post, March 29, 1977) had several pitfalls, with a narrow window of opportunity of only several months for veterans to apply to the program and a lengthy process that typically required the veteran to appear before a special discharge board made up of military officers and plead his case. The earlier Ford program of amnesty was so punitive that amnesty organizations boycotted it. Those veterans who qualified for that program were given a second discharge that further penalized them and marked them negatively. Most had to complete a punitive form of alternative service.
In restoring the Iran deal, Biden can successfully correct the conflict-laden course he is inheriting from Trump, repair U.S. credibility, and prove once again that the administration he served as vice president was right to choose diplomacy.
Though India and Pakistan agreed on an informal ceasefire in 2003, it fell apart a decade later. Since 2018 the number of ceasefire violations recorded by the Indian Army has almost doubled, while Pakistan has documented a 10% jump (the figures differ because violations are defined loosely, including everything from a stray bullet to an artillery barrage). Things have been getting steadily worse: in 2019 the Indian army recorded 3,479 violations; the figure for this year so far is over 3,800.
She attempted to choke one and stabbed another in the neck with a knife before being stopped by shoppers, police say.
Refugees from Ethiopia are currently fleeing across the border into Sudan. If this crisis plays out like many do, big aid agencies will soon begin setting up shop, organising camps, handing out food and water, and leading an organised response to those refugees. But what if things were done differently? In this fourth episode of the Rethinking Humanitarianism podcast series, hosts Heba Aly and Jeremy Konyndyk talk to three disruptors about their visions for alternative humanitarian action. They delve into mergers of international NGOs with Simon O’Connell, the incoming CEO of SNV, an international development organisation based in The Netherlands. They unpack networked humanitarianism with Paul Currion, the founder of a blockchain company for the aid industry. And they hear a vision of local solidarity from Muthoni Wanyeki, regional director for Africa at the Open Society Foundations.
“The Way the End of Days Should Be,” a story from Diane Cook’s 2014 collection Man V. Nature, takes place in a flooded world. The story’s unnamed narrator defends their home from desperate strangers with the help of a man named Gary. The narrator’s neighbor, meanwhile, houses every newcomer who washes up on his porch—he welcomes so many people, in fact, that his house begins to deteriorate. No matter how bad things get for the neighbor and the refugees living in his house, the narrator refuses to change their isolationist ways. Eventually, Gary abandons the narrator to help the neighbor, and the narrator reacts by suspecting Gary and the neighbor of conspiring against him. We leave the narrator lingering near their front door, a knife in each hand, waiting to defend his home from a siege that may never come.
Richmond has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in fossil fuel campaign contributions during his career. Despite this history, some fenceline communities in Louisiana are looking forward to the potential of what Joe Biden’s ascension to the White House with Richmond by his side could mean for their majority-Black neighborhoods which are impacted daily by air pollution from an expanding petrochemical industry.€ €
From a climate perspective, a clean water perspective and a Covid perspective, Line 3 is nuts.
GIS TEK, an expensive software that compiles information about Russia’s entire fuel and energy sector, was created to help fight illegal business dealings and tax evasion. Its main result so far, however, has been an embezzlement case implicating the heads of one of Russia’s largest technology companies, LANIT, along with Deputy Energy Minister Anatoly Tikhonov. Meduza technology editor Maria Kolomichenko reports on the story, which involved secretly-recorded phone conversations and reports of bribes being transferred through a trashcan in a women’s restroom.
Over the past several years, utility giant Georgia Power has embarked on an unusual buying spree, paying top dollar for people’s property in places where cheap land was easy to find.
In 2016, it bought a veterinarian’s 5-acre lot in the rolling hills of northwest Georgia for roughly double the appraised value. The following year, it acquired 28 acres of flood-prone land in southwest Georgia’s pecan belt for nearly four times what the local tax assessor said it was worth. By the year after that, it had paid millions of dollars above the appraised value for hundreds of acres near a winding gravel road in a central Georgia town with no water lines and spotty cellphone service.
After calling around, they soon found out that a company wanted to build a liquefied natural gas (LNG) import terminal in Coos Bay on the Oregon coast, and run a natural gas pipeline to California — and Evans’ land was in the way. If the company’s plans worked out, the pipeline would travel right through their€ property.
As Smith wrote, many European nations, including the UK, Netherlands, and Denmark, have adopted biomass electricity, with the unintended consequences of € “speeding up carbon emissions, pollution and forest destruction.” The shift has led many to see forests as fuel, encouraging the cutting of timber for the production of wood pellets.
Plans by corporate power and government investors risk corporate good intentions and national vows for forest survival.
As the president refused to concede defeat, Pennsylvania and Nevada certified President-elect Joe Biden's victories and dealt a major blow to the Trump campaign's legal ploy.
As the U.S. enters the holiday season, millions of people across the country are struggling to find enough to eat, with the hunger relief group Feeding America warning that some 54 million U.S. residents currently face food insecurity amid a massive public health and economic crisis. Food insecurity in the U.S. has intensified after the expiration of federal assistance programs in the CARES Act, and the United Nations World Food Programme predicts acute hunger could affect 270 million people worldwide by the end of 2020 — an 82% increase since the start of the coronavirus pandemic. We speak with author and filmmaker Raj Patel, host of the food politics podcast “The Secret Ingredient,” who says hunger was already at alarming levels in the U.S. before the pandemic, and it’s only gotten worse. “The long story here is the continuing war on the American working class,” Patel says.
"A transformative agenda... is urgent and is in the interests of all humanity."
Like a totalized 21st century social system, like a smoother corporate bureaucratic James Bond. Racial capitalism: naming systemic inequalities exposed by post-George Floyd BLM resistance, and revealed by the Covid pandemic’s disparate racial impacts. Racial capitalism now is settler-colonialist neoliberalism, with the genocide accelerated more up front and center in your face, toxic combo-Rush Limbaugh and Jabba the Hutt.
Racial capitalism is bankrupting Detroit. Racial capitalism is the slavery and land grabbing foundations of US political economy. Racial capitalism is bipartisan. Racial capitalism is slave patrol-modeled authorities licensed to kill in Flint, Kenosha, Ferguson, Louisville, all oppressed communities north as well as the old south, via police and viral and human rights violations, dispossessions, structural and deadly violence. Racial capitalism is constitutive of “America”.
"America's essential workers are facing a holiday season of unparalleled danger."
"The Senate's failure to provide crucial relief and recovery aid has left families without a lifeline and will severely damage prospects for recovery."
"If Amazon workers in Alabama–a strong anti-union state–vote to form a union, it will be a shot heard around the world."
This essential workforce is hustling to help holiday shoppers while also organizing for hazard pay and other Covid-19 protections.
The character of the corporation is rarely up for discussion. It’s completely absent in the entire economics profession. In political science, it is generally ignored.
That’s the take of Evan Jones of the University of Sydney Department of Political Economy.
On the first of September, the Centers for Disease Control issued a moratorium on evictions to curb the spread of Covid-19. But the moratorium, which applies only to qualifying tenants through the end of the year, is riddled with loopholes and has been ineffectively enforced. Thousands of tenants have been evicted despite the ban.€
Private financial technology business Stripe Inc. is in talks to raise a new funding round valuing it higher than its last private valuation of $36 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
The valuation being discussed could be more than $70 billion or significantly higher, at as much as $100 billion, said one of the people, who asked not be identified because the matter is private. That would make it currently the most valuable venture-backed startup in the U.S., according to CB Insights.
While the Trump campaign is encouraged to submit written testimony, Michigan lawmakers say the hearing the campaign announced is not happening.
So many questions. So many unknowns. To take the pulse of the country, I took the pulse of a small group of intellectuals. What was Trump going to do, I wanted to know. I heard a wide range of views, though almost everyone I asked said, “Your guess is as good as mine.” Nobody I talked to— all of them white, relatively well off and male— saw what we used to call “the light at the end of the tunnel.”€ Or, if there was a light it wasn’t all that bright.
One professor, an expert on the American war machine, suggested that Trump might well launch a military attack on Iran. “Yuk, it’s a scary time,” he emailed.”I worry that Trump will refuse to leave office and provoke a civil war.” An East Coast historian who has written a lot about the American Civil War, has, for months, urged friends to calm down and de escalate their rhetoric. That historian wrote, “I think a lot of what Trump is doing is bluster. I can’t really see what he can actually do to stay in office.”
Even in defeat, President Trump’s villainies command the spotlight. Speculation is rife over whether the Biden administration or the various state and local criminal investigations in New York will lead to prosecutions of Trump himself on everything from campaign finance violations (the alleged bribes to his mistresses to keep silent about Trump’s dalliances with them in 2016) to tax fraud to obstruction of justice. President-elect Joe Biden has stated that “”this is the time to heal,” suggesting that he’ll leave the pursuit of Trump to others. But for the country to heal, one critical remedy is to rebuild trust in government and pride in public service. And that will require putting the spotlight on how the Trump administration systematically traduced our government.
The post-World War I claim in Germany was as big a lie as the American "Biden stole the election" claim, but it came to be believed by a sizable proportion of the German population and helped lead to the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
"ICE and others at Irwin thought they could silence these women... But the women have organized and had the audacity to speak out."
Other Republicans, in fear of the wrath of Trump’s supporters, will obstruct Joe Biden at ever.
President Jimmy Carter
My interest in other presidents became more serious, starting with Jimmy Carter when I joined the US EPA in 1979. Carter reviewed agriculture and, probably, he might have favored a sustainable version of family farming. He was amenable to change, like preparing the country to face global warming.
The question is particularly pertinent as speculation abounds about Donald Trump’s future, assuming that he will no longer be in office after January 20, 2021. Apparently, he is already collecting money to be used for a second presidential run in 2024. There are also rumors that he will be trying to start a media platform to compete with his former sycophants at Fox News. One can only hope that the New York State Attorney General and Manhattan District Attorney will take up some of Trump’s future time by dragging him into court for various financial sleights of hand. And, we shouldn’t forget, he does have hundreds of millions of dollars in outstanding personal debts that have to be paid off before 2024.
There has been no mention for the moment of a Trump presidential library. Perhaps at Mar-a-Lago next to the 18th green? Also, surprisingly, there seems little publisher interest in his memoirs, perhaps because a compendium of his tweets would not be marketable or all potential collaborators are afraid of sullying their careers. But, after all, The Art of the Deal€ did sell 650,000 copies. The New York Times refers to several publishing executives who warn that “publishing Mr. Trump could be perilous…and that the possibilities of boycotts, libel lawsuits and social media campaigns outweighed the obvious financial benefits.” Also, as one top publisher commented; “We’d want to know that he would be willing to be edited and submit to a rigorous fact-checking process.”
The questions that arise now are simple enough: what caused Trump to lose the election, and to what extent did Americans vote for Biden, as opposed to voting against Trump? Answers to these questions emerge from a careful examination of pre-election polling and Edison’s national exit polling, the latter of which surveyed both in-person and mail-in/absentee voters to collect information on voters’ demographic backgrounds and their political and economic motivations. What we find is that mass anger at racial injustice, the disaster of Covid-19, and the depressed economy that accompanied it, were all chief difference makers in the election outcome.
Continuity with Previous Elections
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!
Federal Judge Matthew Brann dismissed Donald Trump’s over-the-top challenge to Pennsylvania’s election results with a withering rebuke to arguments made by the leader of defeated president’s legal team: “This claim, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has been haphazardly stitched together.” Then the judge, a former Republican Party operative whose biography identifies him as a member of the conservative Federalist Society, let rip.
In 2008, as the economy was in free fall, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama worked together with their secretaries of the Treasury, the chair of the Federal Reserve, and the president of the New York Federal Reserve and created one of the largest financing schemes in the history of the United States to prevent total economic meltdown. Part of this was the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the $700 billion package that Congress passed in response to the financial crisis. But the overwhelmingly greater part of this plan used the Fed to lend out somewhere between $7 trillion and $29 trillion in near-zero-interest loans directly to banks to keep them afloat. While this worked to save our banking system and avoid the worst possible disaster, the plan neglected to invest in rebuilding the real economy. As a result, Americans saw a grueling, decade-long recovery—if they saw any recovery at all.
As a young man, I joined a guerrilla insurgency and went to war, but I didn’t really know why I did so. Just six years after the Vietnam War ended, my family and all other Salvadorans started facing the profound consequences of the Reagan administration’s decision to begin spending billions of dollars to bolster the universally condemned Salvadoran government and military in their war against the leftist guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. The FMLN was the Salvadoran embodiment of what Reagan referred to as the “evil empire” of communism. By the end of the war, some 80,000 people had been killed in a country of just over 5 million that’s the size of Massachusetts. Most of the innocents were slaughtered by their own government, according to the United Nations and international human rights groups.1This article is excerpted from Roberto Lovato’s Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas (Harper).
Washington, November 24: Mephistopheles, the prince of darkness, announced today through his press spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, that he would meet on Thursday “with his old friend” President Trump and return to him his soul. The transfer is expected to take place at noon at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street in the shadow of Trump Tower. The event will be observed by a small audience, selected by the Devil from among Trump’s most fervid supporters. Mephistopheles is expected to wear red, Trump orange.
The Devil has been in possession of Trump’s soul since 1973, when he met the young real estate heir through their mutual friend, attorney€ Roy Cohn, described by one colleague as “pure evil.” It’s not known what Trump was paid at the time and there is no record of the transaction in the president’s tax returns, recently published by€ The New York Times. But it’s likely that profits from the sale – dispersed over many years — were offset for tax purposes by losses from Trump’s Atlantic City casinos, Doral Country Club and multiple golf courses in the U.S. and Scotland.
The U.S. will never be at peace so long as Trump is free to create mischief and mayhem. He needs to prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
The disciplinary commission at People’s Friendship University of Russia (RUDN) has decided to expel activist Pavel Krisevich from its Economics Faculty over a performance protest he staged outside of the€ Federal Security Service (FSB) headquarters in Moscow’s Lubyanka Square.
"The thing about covering up the murder of Laquan McDonald is that it disqualifies you from holding any type of public office. Forever," said Rep.-elect Cori Bush.
"It should not have taken the ire of Congress and the American public to convince Administrator Murphy to do the right thing."
In one tweet thanking the actor, the president says he's "working hard to clean up the stench of the 2020 Election Hoax!"
"Feinstein lost all credibility when she showed she was more willing to treat with contempt 11-year-old climate activists demanding a livable future in her office, than the Supreme Court nominee who refused to say whether she would uphold the laws that would give that future a fighting chance."
That didn’t stop the Trump campaign from declaring victory and saying the quiet part out loud: It had dropped the lawsuit because it had succeeded in its goal of delaying certification of the election results. Rudolph Giuliani, who appears to be leading this coup d’imbécile, spoke for the campaign even though he did not personally represent it in the Michigan case. He said the goal of Trump’s lawsuit had been “to prevent the Wayne County election from being certified prematurely before residents can be sure that all legal votes were counted and all illegal votes were not counted.”
This statement is effectively an acknowledgment of a violation of legal ethics that is sanctionable under Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. It is an admission that the team’s legal arguments in court were not designed to achieve victory but only to delay the completion of the process entrusted to the Board of Canvassers. Having achieved that mere delay, by a matter of hours (and not an actual injunction), the legal team withdrew its lawsuit and claimed “victory.” It shows that the lawsuit was a ploy and not a valid legal argument.
Lawyers are not supposed to bring lawsuits that are merely designed to cause a delay in the normal operation of law. They’re not supposed to bring lawsuits that are frivolous and have no legal rationale. The Federal Rules anticipate the possibility of an attorney doing exactly what Giuliani has admitted the Trump campaign is doing and authorize judges to punish attorneys who do it.
It's been absolutely fascinating -- though not at all surprising -- to watch a ton of Trumpists mentally struggling with the process of understanding the nature, importance, and necessity of content moderation online over the last few months via Parler. As you may recall, after whining about being moderated on sites like Twitter and Facebook, a bunch of Trump fans started using Parler, a site that was only recently revealed to have been cofounded by Rebekah Mercer (Parler fans like to claim that their users are migrating from Twitter to Parler, but most of them are still using Twitter, because Parler is mostly them preaching to the converted).
Dayee, who was 33, was born and raised in Helmand and spent his working life covering the ebb and flow of violence between the military and the Taliban. In the months leading up to his death, the violence had been flowing. Even as peace talks got under way thousands of miles away in Qatar, with the aim of ending the war, Afghanistan was experiencing a surge in assassinations of people in public life.
Australian news businesses that are arguing for a news media code to ensure that digital platforms pay for their content are trying to turn back time and make the Internet much less open and its business models less diverse, the Internet pioneer Vint Cerf, a Google vice-president and Internet Evangelist, claims.
Another horror story involving the government and a drug-testing lab is finally coming to a close. And the owner of the drug lab is going to jail.
We speak with Democracy Now! co-host Juan González about the deaths of two leading figures he reported on: New York City Mayor David Dinkins and beloved Puerto Rican social leader Carlos “Taso” Zenón. “Most people forget [Dinkins] was a Democratic Socialist before democratic socialism was in vogue,” notes González. He also recalls how Dinkins backed the movement against apartheid in South Africa, ordering the city to divest its pension fund from companies doing business there, and brought Nelson Mandela to the city right after he was freed. González also recalls how Zenón was a longtime activist who for decades led the fight against the U.S. Navy’s occupation of the island of Vieques, his hometown, where the U.S. government tested weapons and held military training exercises.
"To think that we will solve a social problem with police batons is totally delusional," said the mayor's advisor on housing and refugee protection.
At least 37 transgender and gender nonconforming people were violently killed in 2020, making it the deadliest year for trans and gender nonconforming people on record, according to a new Human Rights Campaign report. Of those killed, 22 were Black, and seven were Latinx. More than 200 trans and gender nonconforming people have lost their lives to violence since 2013, when HRC began recording and reporting violence toward trans people. The media often perpetuates systemic discrimination by covering trans and gender nonconforming people “when we’re celebrities or when we’re dead,” says Tori Cooper, director of community engagement for the Transgender Justice Initiative at the Human Rights Campaign, noting that the true number of deaths is likely much higher. “It is important that the media counteract some of the negative imagery around us by telling stories that uplift our community, that provide a more holistic view of who we are.”
The former director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was a key architect of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and also expanded fee waivers for naturalization and immigration applications.€
In a press release, the ACLU of Montana said that Ana Suda and Martha “Mimi” Hernandez had reached an undisclosed settlement with the agency while adding that local backlash surrounding the case had forced the two to move from Havre, Montana, where the incident occurred in May 2018.
On Tuesday, November 24, the Russian Investigative Committee announced that it is carrying out searches targeting Jehovah’s Witnesses in Moscow, as well as in more than 20 other regions across the country.
Contrary to what some try to claim, broadband usage caps have always been bullshit. They serve absolutely no technical function, do not help manage congestion, and exist exclusively to nickel-and-dime captive customers in monopolized U.S. markets. Worse, they can be used by incumbent ISPs anticompetitively to hamstring competitors in the streaming video and other markets.
Let’s tell the Copyright Office that it’s not a crime to modify or repair your own devices.
Every three years, the Copyright Office holds a rulemaking process where it grants the public permission to bypass digital locks for lawful purposes. In 2018, the Office expanded existing protections for jailbreaking and modifying your own devices to include voice-activated home assistants like Amazon Echo and Google Home, but fell far short of the broad allowance for all computerized devices that we’d asked for. So we’re asking for a similar exemption, but we need your input to make the best case possible: if you use a device with onboard software and DRM keeps you from repairing that device or modifying the software to suit your purposes, see below for information about how to tell us your story.
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...
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...
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...
Cory Doctorow joins EFF hosts Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien as they discuss how large, established tech companies like Apple, Google, and Facebook can block interoperability in order to squelch competition and control their users, and how we can fix this by taking away big companies' legal right to block new tools that connect to their platforms – tools that would let users control their digital lives.
To be honest, Animal Crossing was always going to be a hit. It's just the perfect distillation of the Nintendo experience: a cutesy social experience couched in harmless video game fun. Still, one unanticipated side effect of the global COVID-19 pandemic was how plenty of people and groups turned to the game for new and innovative ways of connecting with others. Examples abound, including players building a real-world economy around the game's resources, TV stars plying a version of their trade in the game, protests and social movements springing up in the game's world, and even the use of the game as part of the presidential election campaign. Mostly absent was any pushback from the gaming community. Instead, these few instances of crossover from real world to gaming world appeared to simply show the power of what Nintendo had created: an open and innovative gaming experience based on community and unbridled social interaction.
Today the European Commission formally adopted and announced its Action Plan on Intellectual Property ("IP Action Plan").
A near-final draft of the document already leaked last week and generated some media attention. I elected to wait for the final document (also because I'm very busy with the impending launch of my iOS and Android game). Given that some significant changes have been made, I'm glad I did hold off.
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The fact that the Commission deemphasizes the automotive industry's SEP issues may be attributable to the immense lobbying firepower and persistent, highly professional efforts by major SEP holders such as Nokia and Ericsson, which is not a conspiracy theory but based in fact (and would serve to explain the repeated postponement of the publication of this document). The automotive industry's lobbying departments are basically one-trick ponies that only know about emissions standards and similar topics. Those organizations may need another decade or two before they figure out IP policy.
I actually doubt that the automotive industry would have had to expect anything positive to come out from the Commission's DG GROW (formerly called DG MARKT) "brokering" an agreement between the automotive sector and major SEP holders. That's because the commissioner in charge of DG GROW, Thierry Breton, is totally in the tank for Nokia and Ericsson, even up to the point where he describes fake news as "a fact! A fact! It is a fact!".
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The IP Action Plan is per se underwhelming and unspecific, but that doesn't mean that the initiatives it outlines as potential measures couldn't be impactful in the end--possibly even with respect to SEPs. We'll have to stay tuned.
1. In his 1913 essay Totem und Taboo, Freud defined taboo as a prohibition related to what is considered sacred or impure. The famous psychoanalyst insists on the irrationality of the phenomenon. Thus, compulsory licensing, which is often seen as an impure danger, seems to be a kind of taboo for intellectual property specialists. But the numerous research studies related to COVID-19 and the need to be ready for eventual health crisis of this type in the future invite us to try to (re)examine the question rationally: what is the real nature of the compulsory license?
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6. Finally, the ex officio license seems to be able to serve as an economic lever for States, more particularly by helping them to encourage patented producers to relocate manufacturing to their territories and to lower prices. Thus, patent law could be a key to addressing the crisis as research for treatments and vaccines is in full swing. More generally, this crisis could lead to a strengthening of the geopolitical and economic roles of intellectual property, provided there is no misunderstanding about its purpose: it is definitely a tool to foster innovation and growth, but also a tool directed towards the society and not only towards the interest of its holder[21]. And, if they refuse to understand this, the rights holders, instead of seeing their prerogatives simply limited, risk expropriations, as has already and notably been proposed by some in France and decided upon in Germany.
The Federal Circuit has taken the occasion, in appeals from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board as well as district courts, to remand judgments whenever the Court believes that the record below is devoid of sufficient detail to properly assess the correctness of the decisions made below (see "Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Wyeth LLC (Fed. Cir. 2019)" and "NeuroGrafix v. Brainlab, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 2019)"). Recently, the Court took advantage of another opportunity to remind a district court of the need to provide ample factual bases for its decisions and avoid a "rush to judgment," in Ferring B.V. v. Allergan, Inc.
The case involved the claims to patent ownership of a former consultant, Seymour Fein, for Ferring Pharmaceuticals. Mr. Fein was a consultant for Ferring Pharmaceuticals for a little less than four years, until Ferring terminated his consulting agreement in November 2002. During his contract, employment Mr. Fein was involved in a project involving desmopressin, a synthetic analog of naturally occurring arginine vasopressin that is a hormone related to water retention in humans. In particular, desmopressin was used to treat sleep disruption caused by nocturia. The compound had low bioavailability and a large range of absorption, and it was thought that increasing desmopressin doses (to reduce these aspects of use of the drug) could pose a safety issue. A study performed by Ferring scientists starting in October 2000 supported the use of low doses and plasma concentrations of desmopressin as a clinically effective nocturia treatment. However, the drug was also accompanied by hyponatremia (low blood sodium ion concentration), which can be life-threatening, and Mr. Fein was asked to consult on this problem as part of his consulting duties. According to the opinion Mr. Fein suggested using low doses of desmopressin formulated "in a waterless orodispersible form (a 'melt') [and administered] sublingually through the mucosal membranes of the mouth" as a solution to the problem. When tested, such a formulation showed double the bioavailability of previously marketed forms of the drug. Clinical trials and a patent application filing by Ferring followed (but this application named no inventors). Thereafter, Mr. Fein was not further involved with development of these formulations of the drug. Instead, he was tasked with overseeing (until Ferring cancelled his consulting agreement) an intravenous desmopressin administration study, where he suggested improvements that permitted a greater weight range of participants. When Ferring filed a PCT application claiming priority to the initial application, Mr. Fein was named as an inventor but his contract with Ferring was terminated shortly thereafter.
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Finally, the Federal Circuit addressed the issue of unclean hands. Being an equitable remedy, defendants' assertion of equitable estoppel requires their own conduct to be without reproach. In this case, Ferring contended that "the district court erred by ignoring evidence that Fein intentionally and deliberately copied Ferring's . . . clinical study protocol for use in his own clinical studies." Ferring asserted several bases for its unclean hands allegations that the panel did not specifically address. However, the opinion notes that for some of these arguments and evidence supporting them there was no discussion in the record and thus "[we have] no basis to infer that the district court considered Ferring's evidence" in this regard, which the Court found was another abuse of discretion. The Court accordingly left correction of these errors to the District Court on remand.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s precedential opinions on discretionary denial are the subject of significant attention—a withdrawn attempt by the Trump Administration to codify discretionary denial as a rule, a request for comments on rulemaking by the Office, and a challenge to the practice of discretionary denial as illegal under the Administrative Procedure Act.
The attention is deserved. Fundamentally, discretionary denial has harmed the patent ecosystem, reversing the positive changes observed in patent litigation frequency and cost. The changes even appear to have increased the cost of IPR itself. Using cost data from AIPLA’s Report of the Economic Survey, decision analysis from Unified Patents, and statistical data from the PTO itself, the following charts show a clear correlation of the implementation of discretionary denial and these negative impacts on the patent system.
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In other words, after the PTO made the discretionary denial opinions precedential, innovators were more likely to face patent lawsuits, less likely to be able to use the IPR process as a meaningful defense, and the total cost of defending themselves—both in court and at the PTAB—increased significantly.
It’s also increased the costs for patent owners, who face a more expensive set of proceedings at the Patent Office and more expensive litigation overall. While a discretionary denial might save them money at the Patent Office, it doesn’t provide a petitioner with any reason to back away from their invalidity theory—in fact, in cases like the recent Philip Morris IPRs, the petitioner might even be more likely to fight invalidity in court given the panel’s statement that their merits case was particularly strong. And without a reason to back away, petitioners are more likely to fight in court, increasing overall costs for patent owners.
Cui Bono?
So who actually wins here? Innovators—plaintiffs and defendants alike—are forced to spend more on less consistent proceedings, taking money away from their R&D efforts.The chief winners are patent lawyers and law firms, like Irell & Manella, Director Iancu’s former firm, which will have more trials to litigate, leading to more billable hours, and the patent trolls, like prolific filer Fortress Investment Group—represented by Irell & Manella in manycases—who receive higher value settlements when litigation costs increase.
The Audiovisual Anti-Piracy Alliance, which counts major TV broadcasters, sports rightsholders, and content security companies among its members, is seeking enhanced anti-piracy tools from the European Union. These include real-time stream takedown tools, toughened repeat-infringer policies, plus 'take down means stay down' measures.
US Senator Thom Tillis is incredibly disappointed that Twitter declined his invite to testify at a subcommittee hearing to discuss how online piracy can be tackled through voluntary agreements. In a letter sent to CEO Jack Dorsey, the senator criticizes the company's track record, suggesting that "Twitter simply does not take copyright piracy seriously."
The potential scope of news sites regulation is vast, covering everything from the Rebel (which sells video subscriptions) to podcast networks like Canadaland. The law also applies to foreign sites, raising the possibility that sites with considerable audio and video and significant Canadian subscribers such as New York Times could be captured as well. As with economic thresholds, it will be open to the CRTC to decide what obligations online undertakings should face with regard to news or to potentially exempt some of these services. However, as it stands now, Guilbeault is incorrect when he claims that Bill C-10 excludes news since the bill opens the door to regulation and creates uncertainty by leaving it to the CRTC to determine precisely what regulatory obligations or exemptions might apply.
Projekt Melody swears her body belongs to her — the purple hair, the cat-eared bow, and all the barely there clothing that strategically covers her up. She commissioned it from an artist for $5,000 and even kept the receipts as proof. And for her thousands of fans on Twitch, this is what they see when she streams herself playing Minecraft, watching movies, or just sitting around chatting in her room.
It wasn’t until this month that she ran into a problem: the artist, alleging that Melody owed him money, filed a copyright complaint claiming that she didn’t actually own her body — he did. Melody was banned from Twitch.
TikTok remains a somewhat fascinating service to me, as different people experiment with using it to express all sorts of things in ways that are unexpected and often delightful. A couple months ago I discovered that there appears to be an entire genre of TikTokers creating videos about... mixing paint colors. I know... I know. At first that sounds insane. Who could possibly want to watch that? But some of them are truly amazing, as first noted by reporter Rebecca Jennings who tweeted about her discovery of Christian Hull, an Australian TikToker whose videos of him watching paint mixing videos and trying to guess what color the eventual mix will be is just so insanely joyful and addicting.
