The first time I heard about Linux was in 2017, when I was getting started with my college degree. I proceeded with my Computer Science major and stumbled upon Linux as a subject. I’d often hear my senior friends terming Linux as a “hard to learn subject” and all I was taught by the lecturers is learn the syllabus and spill it out on the examination sheet.
As the saying goes by, “Not everything you hear is always true,” I had some enthusiasm for the subject, and I’m glad I dug in and explored this amazing gem of software.
When I test software on Linux (a regular part of my job), I need to use multiple servers with various architectures running Linux. I provision the machines, install the required software packages, run my tests, gather the results, and return the machine to the pool so that others can use it for their tests.
Since I do this so often (even multiple times a day), my first 10 minutes on a Linux server have become a daily ritual. When I first log into a Linux server, I look for certain things using commands to gather the information I need. I'll go through my process in this article, but please note that, in most cases, I'll just give the command name, so you will need to identify the specific flags for those commands to get the information that you need. Reading man pages for the commands is a good starting point.
This week Red Hat made some waves with the news regarding CentOS. We’re going to dive deep into this topic as we’re joined by Mike McGrath, Red Hat’s Vice President of Engineering to discuss the news and Mike will take us through the details on CentOS Stream and what it will mean for the commuinity. This week we we will also be bringing back the famous Jill’s Treasure Hunt segment where we get to take a look at some cool stuff from Jill’s collection. Plus we have our community feedback, gaming, tips tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux.
I’m part of a Linux gaming group on Facebook... Yesterday I groaned in exasperation when I saw yet another Linux beginner gleefully announce “OK I’m installing SteamOS!” But WHY are so many new Linux users doing this? I'll tell you!
Doom Eternal running through Steam Play on Linux.
Josh and Kurt talk about supplier compliance
The previous Linux 5.9 release brought us support for zstd compression for the kernel and initramfs, initial support for AMD Radeon RX 6000 graphics cards and the CPU in Rocket Lake processor, initial support for Intel Emmitsburg architecture, and more.
While a "core/entry" pull request may not seem that exciting, this time around for the Linux 5.11 kernel there are two prominent additions.
The two big additions with the core/entry pull request submitted on Monday for Linux 5.11 are:
- TIF_NOTIFY_SIGNAL that replaces the existing and inefficient signal delivery mode of task work. What makes this notable is delivering a huge performance boost to IO_uring, the modern I/O interface for the Linux kernel that has been seeing much praise and adoption. The speed-up with IO_uring on Linux 5.11 is quite commendable along with the other improvements led by Jens Axboe.
HWMON maintainer Guenter Roeck has sent in all of the hardware monitoring changes destined for the Linux 5.11 kernel.
There are several prominent additions to the hardware monitoring subsystem for Linux 5.11 including:
- The AMD SB-TSI sensor driver has been mainlined as a sideband temperature sensor interface for AMD EPYC server platforms. AMD SB-TSI should ultimately prove useful for cases like OpenBMC deployments.
AMD has released the newest open-source snapshot of their official AMD Vulkan "AMDVLK" driver for Linux systems.
AMDVLK 2020.Q4.6 is the new release out today. This open-source Vulkan driver rebuilds against the Vulkan 1.2.162 API, offers performance tuning for Shadow of the Tomb Raider on Navi 21, and has two new extensions. The new extensions are VK_EXT_shader_terminate_invocation and VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate.
The latest Vulkan extension now supported by Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" is support for the new VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate.
VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate is an interesting extension and sure to be of interest for game developers. The extension allows changing the rate dynamically at which fragments are shaded. The fragment shading rate can be tuned on a per-draw, per-primitive, or per-region basis. This extension can help in allowing games to provide higher levels of detail in a scene compared to other less important areas of the screen.
Today along with upgrading Quake II RTX to support cross-vendor Ray Tracing, NVIDIA had another surprise with the release of the new 460.27.04 Beta driver with quite a number of changes. On top of that, there's also a big new release of the LunarG Vulkan SDK for Ray Tracing.
The NVIDIA 460.27.04 Linux beta driver out this morning has full support for the Khronos-ratified ray-tracing extensions, support for the NVIDIA RTX A6000 series GPUs, support for Reverse PRIME Bypass as a new optimization for multi-GPU systems, other new Vulkan extensions, the OpenGL/Vulkan shader disk cache default size has been increased, initial support for S0ix-based suspend-to-idle, other optimizations, and a number of different fixes.
Vulkan 1.2.162 was released at the end of November with the ratified Vulkan ray-tracing extension for multi-vendor use. The Khronos Group today is announcing the updated Vulkan SDK, tooling, code samples, and developer guide today with ray-tracing coverage included.
The Vulkan SDK has now been updated against Vulkan 1.2.162 with the ray-tracing extension supported and likewise the Vulkan Guide and other assets updated as well to cover the new VK_KHR_acceleration_structure, VK_KHR_ray_tracing_pipeline, VK_KHR_ray_query, VK_KHR_pipeline_library, and VK_KHR_deferred_host_operations extensions.
OBS Studio is software designed for capturing, compositing, encoding, recording, and streaming video content, efficiently. It is the re-write of the widely used Open Broadcaster Software, to allow even more features and multi-platform support. OBS Studio supports multiple sources, including media files, games, web pages, application windows, webcams, your desktop, microphone and more.
PeaZip is an open source file and archive manager. It's freeware and free of charge for any use. PeaZip can extract most of archive formats both from Windows and Unix worlds, ranging from mainstream 7Z, RAR, TAR and ZIP to experimental ones like PAQ/LPAQ family, currently the most powerful compressor available.
Open and extract 180+ archive formats: 001, 7Z, ACE(*), ARC, ARJ, BZ2, CAB, DMG, GZ, ISO, LHA, PAQ, PEA, RAR, TAR, UDF, WIM, XZ, ZIP ZIPX - view full list of supported archive file formats for archiving and for extraction.
PeaZip provides fast, high compression ratio multi-format archiving - view file compression and decompression benchmarks for more information.
Are you interested in moving files between devices? It doesn’t matter which platforms are involved. Ubuntu, Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android – among the several benefits of using Linux is the array of options that exist for different computer operations including wireless file transfer.
In today’s article, we highlight more than a handful of the best ways for wirelessly transferring files between platforms. The mentioned apps don’t all share the same transfer protocols, user interface, permissions, or features so make sure that you review them yourself before choosing.
What if you could have a tiny text editor with different modes to emulate your choice of Emacs, Vi, Pico, NEdit, and even WordStar? Amazingly, such an editor already exists, and it’s called e3. It has no library dependencies, and its binary is less than 20KB.
Ksnip, a feature-packed cross-platform screenshot tool, has been updated to version 1.8.0, receiving new image annotation / manipulation tools, the ability to pin screenshots in a frameless window, and more.
Ksnip is a free and open source Qt5 screenshot tool that runs on Linux (X11, Plasma Wayland, GNOME Wayland and with this release, xdg-desktop-portal Wayland), Windows and macOS.
The tool allows taking a rectangular area, full-screen, current screen and active window screenshots, with support for annotations. It comes with tools such as line, rectangle, elipse, arrow, pen, marker (rectangle, ellipse, pen), text, text with arrow, auto numbers, and stickers, as well as the ability to scale or crop the screenshot after it has been taken. Optionally, the screenshots can then be uploaded to Imgur or a different image upload website with the help of the Ksnip built-in script uploader support.
Even though snaps show was created in VENV, everything works the same way on bare metal.
After you created the new partition of desired size installer brings you to screen which allows to redefine functionality of partition and assign name to folder supposed to be mounted on this partition . In case name of folder is not on the list you can create new folder's name manually , for instance "/boot/efi" is not on the list and might be created by hands and accepted by installer as desired name of folder to mount 512 MB EFI partition , this type of partition is on the list of features for partitions.
From Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning to Web Development, Python is used almost everywhere and is currently one of the world’s most popular programming languages.
Now that everyone wants to learn how to code, most people start their coding journey learning Python because of its less overwhelming syntax than other programming languages. Soon Python will clinch the spot of Java to become number one in the most popular programming languages list. Let’s install Python on Linux in this article.
If you’re a Python developer/learner who stumbled upon Linux, wondering how to install Python, here’s how you can do it effortlessly. Most of the Linux distributions ship with Python preinstalled and check the version of Python and if it’s installed, type the following command in the terminal.
For the past couple of years, JavaScript runtime Node.js has become one of the best things to learn if one aims to become a full-stack developer. For starters, Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome’s V8 engine, which is written in C++.
Perf is a simple but powerful performance monitoring tool for Linux based operating systems. It is used to trace or count both hardware and software events. It provides a number of subcommands and capable of statistical profiling of the entire system. It helps you to identified and solve performance related issues.
Spotify client is the streaming player that fetches and plays various songs from the cloud servers of Spotify. It needs an internet connection to run and also offers a web player that works on the browser to play songs. However, if you want to install its client application on Manajro Linux then here is the tutorial.
When it comes to installing applications and programs on Linux there are several ways to do it. More advanced users can choose to download the source code
from the developer’s website and compile it directly on their computer. Something very slow and impractical actually.
More inexperienced users tend to take the easy way: find and download the binary (e.g. deb) and install it, from the package manager, by double clicking, much like in Windows. Intermediate users who are looking for convenience and ease, make use of the Linux repositories to download, install and update their programs.
Containerization has radically changed the IT landscape because of the significant value and wide array of benefits it brings to business. Nearly any recent business innovation has containerization as a contributing factor, if not the central element.
In modern application architectures, the ability to deliver changes quickly to the production environment gives you an edge over your competitors. Containers deliver speed by using a microservices architecture that helps development teams create functionality, fail small, and recover faster. Containerization also enables applications to start faster and automatically scale cloud resources on demand. Furthermore, DevOps maximizes containerization's benefits by enabling the flexibility, portability, and efficiency required to go to market early.
While speed, agility, and flexibility are the main promises of containerization using DevOps, security is a critical factor. This led to the rise of DevSecOps, which incorporates security into application development from the start and throughout the lifecycle of a containerized application. By default, containerization massively improves security because it isolates the application from the host and other containerized applications.
A list of some of my favorite basic Linux commands that make day-to-day sysadmin tasks easier and more efficient.
One of the first questions new sysadmins ask is, "What should I back up?" Here's the answer.
A step by step methodology that can be very helpful in your day to day DevOps activities without sacrificing invaluable uptime.
If you are gamer then for sure you know the what is discord for those who don’t know it is a popular messaging platform where user get advance feature which is not available on another platform.
There are a couple of ways to install Discord on your Linux System are as follows
Install Discord using snap or flatpak.
Installing Discord using deb package.
Installing Discord from the tar.gz file.
Now we will show you all the way to install discord on Ubuntu 20.10 and Debian-based.
If you are a person who takes an interest in computer science topics then you might be aware of the importance of this four-character word. Every time you see this word at the beginning of the URL of any kind of website but have you ever tried to know how it works and how it has evolved throughout the years…? Have you ever tried to get more knowledge about HTTP?
Today in this blog we will discuss a few concepts about HTTP and how it plays an important role between the client and the server in the world of the web.
Sometimes you might encounter the error "W: Some index files failed to download." on Ubuntu when updating the system.
It was superfun playing this game on a non-gaming computer. No graphical card just the onboard Intel HD Graphics 630 and still got to a 140 fps. That was more then adequate.
Containers are a good choice to bundle and run our own applications. When the number of containers increases rapidly and need to manage them in a convenient way. That’s the reason why Kubernetes comes. Kubernetes (K8s) is an open-source system for automating deployment, scaling, managing containerized applications and services.
Kubernetes cluster contains master and worker nodes. The master node control and manages a group of worker nodes. You can have multiple master nodes for high availability clusters.
Hadoop has two core components which are HDFS and YARN. HDFS is for storing the Data, YARN is for processing the Data. HDFS is Hadoop Distributed File System, it has Namenode as Master Service and Datanode as Slave Service.
Namenode is the critical component of Hadoop which is storing the metadata of data stored in HDFS. If the Namenode goes down, the entire cluster will not be accessible, it is the single point of failure (SPOF). So, the production environment will be having Namenode High Availability to avoid the production outage if one Namenode goes down because of various reasons like machine crash, planned maintenance activity, etc.
Suppose you are running a service in a container and there is a new version of the service available through their docker image. In such a case you would like to update the Docker container.
Updating a docker container is not an issue but updating docker container without downtime is challenging.
Confused? Let me show you both ways one by one.
have a NextCloud instance running at home and I need to make sure that the SSL certificate on it is always valid. Since I am using Lets Encrypt for the SSL certificate generation, I have had to run a few extra steps because the LE SSL generation requires the site to be reachable on port 80 and 443.
The challenge I have is that since my NextCloud instance is on a home system and I have a bunch of VMs running providing different services, I cannot use the VirtualHost option of Apache to make this happen on one IP.
I am fortunate that I have my own domain and have full control of the system that it is running on including DNS, I have to do the LE SSL certificate generation be run in a two step process.
If you are a developer considering modernizing your Java applications by containerizing or migrating them to a more modern application server, then you are likely aware of Red Hat’s migration toolkit for applications.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Android Studio on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Android Studio is the official Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for Android app development, based on IntelliJ IDEA. On top of IntelliJ’s powerful code editor and developer tools, Android Studio offers even more features that enhance your productivity when building Android apps.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of Android Studio on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
Security always comes first. It is recommended to keep your files secure on your systems. No one liked that anyone misused their hard work due to silly mistakes. Many of fresher set file permissions to 777 on production servers to avoid any permission issue. But they are doing big mistakes by setting world writable permissions. Use previous tutorial to search files with 777 permission on Linux system.
It is always advised to keep the file and directory permissions to minimal. May of the web application framework suggest to keep permissions for all directories to 755, and all files to 644. So this tutorial will help you to do this.
This tutorial shows 3 ways to install the Telegram messaging app on Debian 11. Telegram is a free, open-source messaging app with a focus on privacy, security and speed. It’s available on Linux, Mac, Window, Android, iOS and Windows Phone.
Previously, we looked at some of the available distribution independent package formats used to install apps on Linux systems. They include Snap, FlatPak, and AppImage. Our post on ‘Snap vs. Flatpak vs. AppImage: Know The Differences, Which is Better’ will give you a detailed guide and the difference between the three. In this post, we will look at how you can install the Snap package format on Kali Linux.
Kali Linux is a Debian-based Linux distribution developed for performing Penetration Testing and Digital Forensics. If you are a beginner getting into the field of Cybersecurity, you can also check our post on ‘The 10 Best Programming Languages for Hacking.’ The Snap (also called Snappy) packaging and deployment system are not available on Kali Linux by default. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t install it.
As one of my absolute favourite games from 2019, Baba is You really is an exceptional puzzle game that really makes you think outside the box and break some rules.
The thing about Baba is that you're pushing around and combining logic blocks, to change the rules of each level to be able to actually solve it. The idea is just brilliant, it works well and it's quite challenging too. Have you never seen it?
Almost My Floor: Prologue is the short demo of a much bigger upcoming point and click adventure, with a horror theme along with a sprinkle of comedy it does look good. Released back in October, the developer Potata Company released a Linux build just recently on December 2.
It has some pretty great artwork, and from what I played the touch of comedy was nice. Not particularly long at around 40 or so minutes but a fun glimpse of what's to come from the full game. Almost My Floor is a story about trying to get home, in an apartment complex that seems to have blurred the lines between reality and fantasy with a maze of floors and stairways along with horrible creatures that want you for lunch.
Great news for AMD fans as Quake II RTX has been updated again, and it now features support for the newly released official cross-vendor Ray Tracing support with the Vulkan API.
With Vulkan, originally only NVIDIA supported Ray Tracing with their own extensions. That's no longer needed, as The Khronos Group formally announced the final and finished Ray Tracing specification for the Vulkan API back in late November.
Quake II RTX was one of the earliest titles to have Ray Tracing, and acted as something of a quick playground just to test out the features available. It was built on top of existing work from Q2VKPT from Christoph Schied with NVIDIA adding in new path-traced visual effects, improved textures and so on.
With Cyberpunk 2077 being the hot new thing in gaming, Valve and CodeWeavers are trying to ensure it can run nicely through the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer since it doesn't support Linux directly.
Valve recently set up a new branch of Proton named "Proton Experimental" along with the release of Proton 5.13-4. It appears to be the version of Proton where Valve will be adding in fixes quicker, and more newer features. Yesterday, December 14, Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned the newest updates to Proton Experimental implements the Spatial Audio sound API which should fix Cyberpunk 2077 world sounds. Additionally there's more CPU performance improvements, which should help Path of Exile too.
Customization is a big part of the Linux system which gives an unique user-experience to all of use who use Linux as their daily driver. We always want to make it look amazing.
In this quest, we often ignore the cursor customizations even while we use it in our every movement on the system. This is why I am writing this article, listing the best 5 cursor icon themes that you can set up in your favorite Linux distribution.
I’ve been busy the past few months writing a new GDK backend for macOS when not maintaining my other projects. Historically our macOS performance wasn’t something to rave about. But it’s getting better in GTK 4.
The new backend can do both software rendering with Cairo and hardware-based OpenGL rendering using the same OpenGL renderer as we use on GNU/Linux.
[...]
Thanks again to my employer, Red Hat, for funding this work so we can all benefit from having our applications reach more users.
For newer Linux users or people looking to switch, it can be a minefield to try and find accurate and up to date info on what Linux distro to game with. Here to help. What is the best Linux distribution for gaming? It's actually not a tough question.
With how far Linux has come in only the last 2 years, you can play a seriously large amount of games now. Sadly, there's some (quite a lot actually) places out there that seem to slap a new date on old crusty articles and give really bad Linux gaming advice. Most of the people writing these types of articles elsewhere clearly don't use Linux - I do, and I have done for around 15 years now.
Let's start off with what not to do shall we? First off, don't bother with SteamOS from Valve. Currently, it's out of date and has been for some time now. It hasn't been properly updated since 2019! Valve are not working on it but they might return one day. Anyone suggesting it likely has no idea what they're talking about and any website listing it is junk.
Next: Ubuntu GamePack or any "specialized" Linux gaming distribution. You can throw almost all of those types in the trash. They really don't do anything normal Linux distributions don't do already and they can often introduce their own special bugs. I consider them like the old discs you would find in the bargain bin in a local PC store. You really don't need them, don't waste your precious time.
After NuTyX 12-rc1, its founder Tnut has finally announced the major release of a new stable version, NuTyX 20.12.0, with package manager cards 2.4.123.
As Tnut quoted while testing version release, the latest version 12 is a completely new 64-bit project, and hence no 32-bit version will be available for NuTyX 20.12.0.
For those unaware, NuTyX is a French Linux distribution (with multi-language support) built from “Linux From Scratch” and “Beyond Linux From Scratch” projects featuring its own custom package manager called “cards.”
To be honest, I was originally planning to give you a simple update concerning the next release and nothing more. But being so close towards the end of the year and at the time of writing this post, December 15th, being my slightly boring birthday, I simply was in the mood to reach out to you.
A year of growth and expansion
Without getting into the doom and gloom in our lives, 2020 has been, in every aspect, a very turbulent year for EndeavourOS also. This year was the year, we’ve established to land our base firmly on solid ground and found that right and comfortable corner for us in the Linux community. During our journey reaching that corner, we had the privilege to meet and welcome a lot of new faces in our community this year. Since EndeavourOS is community-focused, this growth brought us also a lot more knowledge and helping hands on our forum and Telegram group.
A reader by the name of Mitchell asked me to discuss FreeBSD jails, given how often I’ve mentioned the feature here over the years. I was ready to refer him to an earlier post before realising I never introduced them here before. Whoops!
Jails are a lightweight, fast form of virtualisation and process isolation invented by the imitable Poul-Henning Kamp that, once you first use them, you miss them everywhere else. Each jail operates with its own chroot file system environment and network configuration, similar to a Solaris Zone.
In previous posts of this series about Linux on the Raspberry Pi 4, I have written about Ubuntu, Manjaro and of course the Raspberry Pi OS. This time I'm going to look at openSUSE, which has two variants – the more stable LEAP, and the more leading-edge Tumbleweed. I will be giving them both a try.
Fair warning: openSUSE is one of my favorite Linux distributions, and it is the one that boots by default on my desktop system and all of my laptops, so I might be a bit biased. On the other hand, I have tried openSUSE before, on older models of the Raspberry Pi, with very limited success.
When Red Hat, CentOS's Linux parent company, announced it was "shifting focus from CentOS Linux, the rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to CentOS Stream, which tracks just ahead of a current RHEL release," it lost a lot of friends. CentOS co-founder, Gregory Kurtzer, immediately announced he'd create his own RHEL clone and CentOS replacement: Rocky Linux. He wasn't the only one. CloudLinux also proclaimed it would create a new CentOS clone Lenix. And, CloudLinux will be putting over a million dollars a year behind it.
Why? Igor Seletskiy, CloudLinux CEO and founder, explained, "Red Hat's announcement has left users looking for an alternative with all that CentOS provides and without the disruption of having to move to alternative distributions. We promise to dedicate the resources required to Project Lenix that will ensure impartiality and a not-for-profit community initiative. CloudLinux already has the assets, infrastructure, and experience to carry out the mission, and we promise to be open about the process of developing Project Lenix."
CloudLinux, which has been making Linux secure and stable since 2010, announced today it will invest $1 million annually in development and establish a community initiative around its RHEL fork intended as a safe haven for CentOS users left stranded with Red Hat’s announcement last week. CloudLinux will give current users a trusted, battle-tested alternative supported by a governing board from members of the community.
CloudLinux is sponsoring Project Lenix, which will create a free, open-source, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 (and future releases). It will provide an uninterrupted way to convert existing CentOS servers with absolutely zero downtime. Entire server fleets will be able to be converted with a single command with no reinstallation and no reboots required.
A major server OS vendor has announced to sponsor the development of a community-driven fork of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The decision comes less than a week after IBM/Red Hat decided to kill CentOS, the most popular RHEL fork, as we know it.
CloudLinux, which makes a popular CentOS-based OS for servers, has decided to pump a million dollars a year into a 100% binary compatible clone named Project Lenix.
This week’s blog presents a set of short videos on how to use Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization on Oracle Linux 8. The KVM code was first announced in 2006 and was merged into the mainline Linux kernel as part of version 2.6.20, in February 2007. Therefore, KVM is part of Linux.
KVM is an open-source type-1 (bare-metal) hypervisor that permits a system running Oracle Linux 8 to host multiple virtual machines (VMs) or guests. These VMs use the system's physical computing resources to virtualize an operating system as a regular Linux user-space process. In these videos, we cover installation, management, creation, and other aspects related to using KVM virtualization on Oracle Linux 8.
The Community Outreach Revamp initiative held an Ask Me Anything on December 10th, 2020. Cco-leads Sumantro Mukherjee & Mariana Balla answered questions, with moderation by me (the FCAIC). We had some great questions and we are always open to more! Find us on #fedora-mindshare every other week at 15:00UTC.
According to Red Hat, CentOS is being ditched for CentOS Stream because it "was not actually providing that much usefulness to Red Hat."
In a comment on my most recent entry on CentOS Stream, Ben Cotton said:
I honestly believe that CentOS Stream will be suitable for the majority of CentOS Linux users, and a huge improvement for some. [...]
At one level, I agree with Ben Cotton on this. There's every indication that CentOS Stream won't be worse than plain CentOS 7 as far as bugs and security issues go; while it will now be getting (some) package versions before RHEL does instead of afterward, Red Hat has also apparently drastically increased its pre-release testing of packages. The move from CentOS 8 to CentOS Stream does cost you an extra five years of package updates, but I also feel that you shouldn't run ancient Linux distribution versions so you probably shouldn't be running most CentOS installs for longer than five years anyway.
This release fixes many security vulnerabilities.
Tails 4.14 appears to be a great release compared with the last couple of releases, and that’s because it finally switches to the Linux 5.9 kernel series. This, of course, means that you’ll get better hardware support for various graphics, Wi-Fi, and other components.
In addition to bumping the kernel to Linux 5.9, this release is based on the Debian GNU/Linux 10.7 “Buster” operating system, which means that Tails now inherits all of the security patches and miscellaneous bug fixes from the upstream software repositories to offer users better stability and reliability.
After an unexpectedly short discussion on debian-project, we’re moving forward with this new initiative. The Debian security team submitted a project proposal requesting some improvements to tracker.debian.org, and since nobody of the security team wants to be paid to implement the project, we have opened a request for bids to find someone to implement this on a contractor basis.
If you can code in Python following test-driven development and know the Django framework, feel free to submit a bid! Ideally you have some experience with the security tracker too but that’s not a strong requirement.
We’re almost there, 2021 is just around the corner. Like many others, we at Canonical have a deep appreciation for all things Raspberry Pi. We see the good they do and the joy they bring and can’t help but be impressed. This year marks the beginning of a stronger collaboration between the folks at Raspberry Pi and us at Canonical. We are by no means done and still have a long way to go. But we have made strides in the right direction. This is a roundup of all things Ubuntu on Raspberry Pi 2020.
This was the big one. On the 22nd of October, we announced the Ubuntu 20.10 release with FULL support for the Raspberry Pi 4 (4GB+). People have been trying to use Raspberry Pis as a day to day Desktop PC for years. And while Raspberry Pi OS is great at what it does, it’s fair to say there are more mature distributions. When the Raspberry Pi 4 came to have 4GBs, enough RAM to run a full Desktop, we got to work. Numerous teams at Canonical including Desktop, Kernel, Foundations and the Certification team engaged with the folks over at Raspberry Pi to collaborate on making sure Ubuntu is a first-class experience.
Cloud systems offer low cost access to huge computational, storage, and network resources. These systems offer per-user and per-application isolation and customization via a service interface that is often implemented using high-level language technologies, well-defined Application Programming Interfaces, and web services.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is a category of cloud computing services which offers a way to support the complete lifecycle of delivering web applications and services via the cloud. Along with Software as a Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), PaaS is a service model of cloud computing.
PaaS solution stacks offers a number of advantages. They provide significant benefits for the business with extensive savings in upfront cost of installing a development platform, improved productivity & profits, zero maintenance, decreased operational costs, global access to information using internet and many others. In essence, PaaS technologies enable creative developers to spend less time managing hardware and software.
Do you have a problem managing your enormous bookmarks and browser history? Then this project is for you.
Memex is a promising browser extension that offers full-text search for your browser history and browser bookmarks.
It saves the user much time retracing his footsteps through websites. Take a YouTube as an example, If you disable your YouTube history, It'll be hard to find previously played videos. With Memex you can do that in a few seconds.
For an active dynamic internet user who enjoy searching and finding new stuff and taking notes as well, I find Memex is useful in organizing my findings, especially with its tagging and bookmarking functionalities.
Adding highlights and personal notes to certain text are another awesome features for this lightweight extension. They are useful to assist writers, bloggers and research organize their thoughts and formulate writing plans.
The extension is built as offline-first which can work primarily subscription and does not require internet to search and access the stored data.
Memex is a useful tool for students, doctors, developers, bloggers and writers. It helps them utilize their web browser into an efficient assistant tool.
The latest stable update version of the popular open source web browser enables WebRender by default on Linux systems using Xorg, and is the final release to support Adobe’s once-ubiquitous ‘Flash Player’ plugin.
Firefox 84 is also the first version of the browser to offer native support for Apple Silicon, namely the M1 processor in new versions of the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini.
WebRender is enabled by default in Firefox 84 when run on GNOME-based X11 Linux desktops. The feature, many years in the making, delivers appreciable performance gains for most users on Linux. The tech is already in use on most macOS and Windows systems.
We have shown you how to enable WebRender manually to benefit from speedier web browsing. If you follows those steps you don’t need to do anything to “undo” anything to enjoy WebRender as it’ll keep working as intended.
For those making use of the Firefox web browser, Mozilla has an early Christmas present with today's release of Firefox 84. Most significant with Firefox 84 is for Linux users that WebRender is finally getting flipped on by default for select system configurations.
While WebRender has been slowly appearing by default on other platforms, with Firefox 84 there is Mozilla finally flipping it on for some Linux systems. WebRender by default is initially appearing on if running Firefox from the GNOME desktop and doing so off an X11 session rather than Wayland. More widespread enabling of WebRender on Linux by default will likely appear once they have further tested additional configurations. Those interested can continue to force enable WebRender elsewhere via the MOZ_WEBRENDER=1 environment variable.
Mozilla Firefox web browser 84.0 now is available to download.
Firefox 84 is a big release. It comes with WebRender enabled by default in Linux Gnome on X for faster page rendering. For Wayland session, you can manually enable the feature in about:config page, search and enable gfx.webrender.all.
The new browser release also includes native support for Apple Silicon hardware, the M1 processor in new versions of the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac mini.
This year began like any other year, with our best intentions and resolutions to carry out. Then by March, the world changed and everyone’s lives — personally and professionally — turned upside down. Despite that, we kept to our schedule to release a new Firefox every month and we were determined to keep Firefox working for you during challenging times.
We shifted our focus to work on features aimed at helping people adjust to the new way of life, and we made Firefox faster so that you could get more things done. It’s all part of fulfilling our promise to build a better internet for people. So, as we eagerly look to the end of 2020, we look back at this unprecedented year and present you with our list of top features that made 2020 a little easier.
A little over two years ago, Mozilla started an ambitious project: deciding where we should focus our efforts to grow the movement of people committed to building a healthier digital world. We landed on the idea of trustworthy AI.
When Mozilla started in 1998, the growth of the web was defining where computing was going. So Mozilla focused on web standards and building a browser. Today, the computing — and the digital society that we all live in — is defined by vast troves of data, sophisticated algorithms and omnipresent sensors and devices. This is the era of AI. Asking questions today such as ‘Does the way this technology works promote human agency?’ or ‘Am I in control of what happens with my data?’ is like asking ‘How do we keep the web open and free?’ 20 years ago.
This current era of computing — and the way it shapes the consumer internet technology that more than 4 billion of us use everyday — has high stakes. AI increasingly powers smartphones, social networks, online stores, cars, home assistants and almost every other type of electronic device. Given the power and pervasiveness of these technologies, the question of whether AI helps and empowers or exploits and excludes will have a huge impact on the direction that our societies head over the coming decades.
It would be very easy for us to head in the wrong direction. As we have rushed to build data collection and automation into nearly everything, we have already seen the potential of AI to reinforce long-standing biases or to point us toward dangerous content. And there’s little transparency or accountability when an AI system spreads misinformation or misidentifies a face. Also, as people, we rarely have agency over what happens with our data or the automated decisions that it drives. If these trends continue, we’re likely to end up in a dystopian AI-driven world that deepens the gap between those with vast power and those without.
Learn WordPress is a learning resource providing workshops, quizzes, courses, lesson plans, and discussion groups so that anyone, from beginners to advanced users, can learn to do more with WordPress. Learning how to use, build for, and contribute to WordPress is essential for anyone wanting to dive deeper into the software and its community.
In 2017, the FSFE launched its REUSE campaign and it not only has received many important updates since then but also an overwhelming international attention. Since the release of version 3.0 last year, we have been focusing on supporting Free Software projects in adopting the underlying best practices. And 2020 marks another successful year of this initiative.
On one hand this is thanks to the FSFE's role as a consortium member of the Next Generation Internet Zero (NGI0). In this position, the FSFE's legal team assists all participating software projects with any Free Software copyright and licensing issues that they may run into. And we are encouraging and assisting the projects in becoming REUSE compliant. More than 150 projects that we are reviewing in the scope of our NGI0 involvement are in process of adopting the REUSE specifications and many of them are already REUSE compliant.
An early preview release Git v2.30.0-rc0 is now available for testing at the usual places. It is comprised of 413 non-merge commits since v2.29.0, contributed by 60 people, 25 of which are new faces.
The tarballs are found at:
https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/testing/
The following public repositories all have a copy of the 'v2.30.0-rc0' tag and the 'master' branch that the tag points at:
url = https://kernel.googlesource.com/pub/scm/git/git url = git://repo.or.cz/alt-git.git url = https://github.com/gitster/git
New contributors whose contributions weren't in v2.29.0 are as follows. Welcome to the Git development community!
Alexey, Amanda Shafack, Bradley M. Kuhn, Caleb Tillman, Charvi Mendiratta, Daniel Duvall, Daniel Gurney, Dennis Ameling, Javier Spagnoletti, Jinoh Kang, Joey Salazar, Konrad Borowski, Marlon Rac Cambasis, Michaà â KÃâ¢pieà â, Nate Avers, Nipunn Koorapati, Rafael Silva, Robert Karszniewicz, Samuel ÃÅavoj, Sean Barag, Sibo Dong, Simão Afonso, Sohom Datta, Thomas Koutcher, and Victor Engmark.
Returning contributors who helped this release are as follows. Thanks for your continued support.
Adam Spiers, Ãâ var Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Alex Vandiver, Arnout Engelen, brian m. carlson, Christian Couder, Chris. Webster, Denton Liu, Derrick Stolee, Drew DeVault, Elijah Newren, Emily Shaffer, Felipe Contreras, Han-Wen Nienhuys, Jeff King, Jiang Xin, Johannes Schindelin, Jonathan Tan, Josh Steadmon, Junio C Hamano, Kyle Meyer, Martin Ãâ¦gren, Matheus Tavares, Nicolas Morey-Chaisemartin, Patrick Steinhardt, Peter Kaestle, Philippe Blain, Phillip Wood, Pranit Bauva, René Scharfe, Sergey Organov, Srinidhi Kaushik, à  tÃâºpán NÃâºmec, SZEDER Gábor, and Taylor Blau.
The initial test release of Git 2.30 is now available for evaluation of this distributed revision control system.
Earlier this year Git 2.28 brought the support for a configurable/default branch name to replace the "master" usage that has been the default behavior up to this point. That configurable option has been working out well for those wanting to change the default Git branch from the likes of "master" to "main" or "default". Git itself has been working towards such a transition to the "main" name and with Git 2.30 are some updates around their internal tests to accommodate the eventual change.
Most of the open-source projects that we talk about are usually hosted at GitHub or other GitHub alternatives like GitLab. Even though you get many benefits and features from such platforms (not to mention the potential exposure), there are also downsides of using it.
For instance, youtube-dl project was taken down by Microsoft to comply with a DMCA request.
With a centralized approach, you do not have a lot of control and privacy. Of course, this may not be a big deal for many folks but if you are someone who does not want centralized servers, want to have peer-to-peer code collaboration feature, and something that works offline, Radicle will be a good tool for them.
I ran across Kev Quick’s announcement for The 512KB Club last month, and noticed that this blog, using the Academic theme for Hugo, was… a bit on the bloated side, clocking in at a whopping 748KB (including 246KB font, 206KB JS, and 190K CSS).
This became an added incentive for switching theme - something that’s already on the todo list after a previous theme update necessitates some painful configuration refactor.
So, Rudolph has been worried about getting Santa and the other reindeer back home to the North Pole after an exhausting flight to visit all the (well-behaved) Children on the Globe.
He has heard a rumour that the North Pole keeps moving due to the precession of molten iron at the Earth’s core and that every year it creeps around a bit with relation to Santa’s workshop, which lies at the True North Pole.
Luckily he has been on a navigation skills course and has learned about how to specify a position on the globe using a combination of Latitude and Longitude. However, these seem all of a muddle as they are alike and yet different. What Rudi needs is a way to structure his navigation to ensure that he does not mix them up. Even better, he is good friends with Larry and knows that he can trust the Raku type system to get him home. In fact, Raku has a lot of ways to make the life of a reindeer|developer better, find out more at https://www.raku.org.
This bizarre need to feel busy, or to feel that time is structured, even when one is sprawled on the couch on a weekend afternoon—where does it come from? Is it inscribed in our DNA, or is it as much an invention of industrialized culture as paper clips and microchips? To answer that question, we would have to understand the texture of human life for most of our history, before civilization and workweeks edged their way into the picture. We would need a participant-observer from our era to live among hunter-gatherers and experience their relationship to work, time, and joy.
The anthropologist James Suzman has done a version of that, devoting almost 30 years to studying the Ju/’hoansi “Bushmen,” a tribe whose members lived an isolated existence in Namibia and Botswana until the late 20th century, when incursions by local governments destroyed their way of life. In his new book, Work: A Deep History, From the Stone Age to the Age of Robots,* Suzman describes the Ju/’hoansi of yore as healthy and cheerful, perfectly content to work as little as possible and—not coincidentally—ingenious at designing customs that discourage competition and status-seeking. Combining careful anthropological research with excursions into sociology and psychology, he asks how we’ve come to find ourselves more harried—and seemingly more unhappy—than the small-scale communities from which civilization emerged. If there is some better way of handling modernity’s promises and pressures, perhaps the Ju/’hoansi can light the way.
Finally, the paper reports efforts to determine whether OSK expression could improve age-related (as opposed to injury- or pathology-related) vision problems. In these experiments, 3-and 11-month-old mice were treated by intravitreal injection of DOX-inducible OSK encoding constructs and OSK expression induced for 4 weeks. Twelve-month-old mice showed age-related visual acuity and RGS electrical activity diminution which was reversed by DOX-induced OSK expression. However, these phenotypic changes were not observed to be associated with an increased number of RGCs or axon density, which prompted these researchers to hypothesize that the effect were dependent on changes in gene expression ("transcriptomic changes" as these were termed in the paper). RGCs from treated or untreated 12-month-old mice were isolated and compared with RGCs from 5-month-old mice and expression of 464 genes were found to be altered: expression of almost all (90%) of these genes were found to be restored to youthful levels in OSK-expressing RGCs. The participation of DNA methylation changes in aged RGCs in producing a youthful pattern of gene expression was further assessed and validated using artificial intelligence/machine learning approaches.
The “herd immunity” policy pursued by the Swedish government in response to the COVID-19 pandemic has produced a catastrophe. With Sweden’s hospitals overflowing and the bodies piling up in morgues, its neighbors Norway and Denmark have offered to step in with emergency aid.
The WSWS is publishing statements of support for data scientist and COVID-19 whistleblower Rebekah Jones, whose Florida home was raided last week in response to her efforts to expose the spread of the pandemic in Florida and in K-12 schools across the United States. We urge our readers to send statements of support for Jones today.
OnlyFans has exploded in popularity during the pandemic. A content-subscription platform that allows influencers and content creators to monetize their content, OnlyFans is primarily used by sex workers, who post racy content on their feeds in exchange for a monthly subscriber fee. The platform has grown exponentially over the past nine months, at one point seeing a 75-percent increase in signups, and many users have turned to the platform as a way to make ends meet. One of those people was Lauren Kwei, 23, a New York-based paramedic who had turned to posting semi-racy content on the platform to supplement her income. She also reportedly worked as a hostess at a Korean restaurant, meaning that, like many Americans, she juggled multiple jobs in order to eke out a living.
The problem with relying so much on one company for much of our online lives is that once it goes out, we’re all in trouble. This happens to people who rely on Apple’s ecosystem and rely on Google’s large range of services. On Monday, December 14, 2020, most of Google services, including Gmail, YouTube, and Google Drive, experienced an outage for about an hour.
Google said the problem hit its authentication system, which is used for logging in and similar functions, and lasted about 45 minutes.
From Gmail and Google Calendar to YouTube and even Google’s two-factor authentication, the outage temporarily ground online work to a halt for many, including publications that would have otherwise been reporting on the outage.
Moreover, it underscored the hidden costs of the easy-to-use systems that permeate the web, and just how taxing or debilitating they can be when the head of the many-tentacled beast that is Google nods off, even for just an hour.
“If an [Internet] giant like Google can suffer such a major attack – denying millions of users access to basic [Internet] services – it just goes to show that under the surface of the shiny web interfaces we see, [Internet] infrastructure actually hangs in a delicate and vulnerable balance,” said Jaro à  atkeviÃÂ, head of product at Mysterium Network, an open-source Web 3.0 project focused on decentralizing the [Internet].
Users across the world were unable to access the gamut of Google’s productivity and collaboration tools, which also include Google Calendar, Sheets, Meet and Chat. Customers in Europe appeared to be the hardest hit, according to the Down Detector website, with the outage occurring around lunchtime for those in the UK; users on the U.S. east coast also faced disruption just as the work day was getting started.
The outage was acknowledged by Google at 6:55 a.m. ET; the company said it affected “the majority of users.” The outage was subsequently downgraded to a “service disruption” at 7:31 a.m. ET, with some users still affected.
Google announced that the problem had largely been resolved at 7:52 a.m. ET.
The acquisition builds on Reddit’s foray into video content. The forum-based platform launched native video in 2017, and Reddit said it has seen sharp growth in users using its video content since, including doubling the amount of videos posted on Reddit in 2020.
Hundreds of workers entered Wistron Corp.’s facility in the southern city of Kolar over the weekend, damaging the property and looting thousands of iPhones and laptops, according to local media. More than 150 people were arrested, the Times of India reported.
As we wrap up 2020, I wanted to take a moment to look at where the industry is headed and what we’ve learned this year.
The Linux kernel this year has seen new safeguards and efforts aiming to have user-space reduce their arbitrary poking of CPU machine specific registers (MSRs) in the name of security and other handling concerns. That effort has continued on with the Linux 5.11 cycle.
Linux user-space software with administrative privileges can write to arbitrary CPU MSRs and that can cause problems for a host of reasons. Recent kernels have added the support for adding notifications when an unrecognized MSR write from user-space occurs along with an option to allow filtering of MSR writes.
How this happened was a complete mystery to me. The account was restored fairly swiftly but I learned nothing from that.
Then someone at Twitter contacted me. After they investigated what had happened and how, I had a chat with a responsible person there and he explained for me exactly how this went down.
Had Twitter been hacked? Is there a way to default 2FA? Were my local computer or phone compromised? No, no and no.
Apparently, an agent at Twitter who were going through the backlog of issues, where my previous hijack issue was still present, accidentally changed the email on my account by mistake, probably confusing it with another account in another browser tab.
The software supply chain has long been a prime target for cyberattacks, putting servers, IoT devices, personal computers, and connected equipment from surgically embedded devices to avionics at risk of sabotage. These risks will increase dramatically with the global rollout of such new technologies as 5G telecommunications, and new tools will be required to affirm the security and authenticity of software projects. Against this backdrop, in-toto, an open-source tool developed by researchers at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering that provides an unprecedented level of assurance against such attacks, announces it has hit a significant milestone with the release of its first major version.
In-toto, a free, easy-to-use framework that cryptographically ensures the integrity of the software supply chain, was developed in 2016 by Justin Cappos, a professor of computer science and engineering, and Santiago Torres-Arias, a former Ph.D. student at NYU Tandon, now a professor at Purdue University. Since its advent, in-toto has been adopted or integrated into several major open source software projects, including those hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, a part of the Linux Foundation. With the release of version 1.0, in-toto has reached a level of maturity where its developers can ensure its quality, and guarantee its security to potential adopters.
A new wormable botnet that spreads via GitHub and Pastebin to install cryptocurrency miners and backdoors on target systems has returned with expanded capabilities to compromise web applications, IP cameras, and routers.
To protect Massachusetts residents from government use of this dangerous technology, legislators must restore these protections to the bill.
Take Action
Massachusetts: End Government Face Surveillance
In a press release published Monday, the FTC announced that it is ordering nine social media and video streaming companies — including Amazon, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snap, Twitter, WhatsApp, and YouTube — to provide data on how they collect and use personal information provided by their users. The companies have 45 days to respond.
Each of the nine companies was contacted for comment. A Twitter spokesperson told The Verge, “We’re working, as we always do, to ensure the FTC has the information it needs to understand how Twitter operates its services..”
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Monday voted to issue orders to nine major [Internet] platforms requiring information about how they handle data for a new study.
The orders, which do not implicate any legal wrongdoing, were sent to Amazon, ByteDance (the parent company of TikTok), Discord, Facebook, Reddit, Snapchat, Twitter, WhatsApp and YouTube.
The agency is requesting information about how the platforms collect, use, track or estimate personal and demographic information.
The Federal Trade Commission is asking some of the world's biggest social media and streaming video giants to hand over information regarding their privacy and data practices.
The FTC has issued orders to Amazon, Facebook, TikTok owner ByteDance, YouTube, Twitter, Snap, Discord and WhatsApp asking for a variety of information, including how they collect personal data; how they determine what ads are shown to consumers; whether algorithms or other analytics are applied to personal information; how they measure user engagement; and how their practices impact children and teenagers.
The orders were filed pursuant to Section 6(b) of the FTC Act, which gives the FTC the authority "to conduct wide-ranging studies that do not have a specific law enforcement purpose."
Sources told WSJ that Facebook’s internal team has concluded that the right-wing organisation Bajrang Dal should be qualified as a ‘dangerous organisation’ and be banned from its platform on the basis of incidents in the country. But the social media company is concerned about the safety of its staff in India.
Many of Bajrang Dal's videos have lakhs of views on Facebook. In June this year, Bajrang Dal extremists got into a church in New Delhi and installed a Hindu idol, claiming that the church was constructed on temple grounds. The group posted a video about it on Facebook, which has been viewed over 2.5 lakh times.
Routing domain is a concept on OpenBSD, which makes it possible to segregate applications and their routes from one another into separate kernel routing tables. This feature became a crucial component for my project, since VPN providers often use the same address space in their configurations. Without routing domains, the overlap would make it impossible to run multiple clients side-by-side. Routing tables are numbered lookup tables for egress routing domains. By default, OpenBSD has four tun interfaces numbered tun0 to tun3. I used rdomains 10 to 13 to make the numbering symmetric, since rdomains start with 1 and run up to 255.
A pair of laws - the Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts - will be announced later on Tuesday.
They are expected to be the biggest revision in 20 years, focusing on competition and making platforms responsible for hosted content.
There are also likely to create heavy fines for violations of the rules.
The rules are being spearheaded by commissioners Margrethe Vestager and Thierry Breton, both of whom have a history of strong rhetoric against the biggest tech giants - as commissioners for competition and the internal market respectively.
Afghanistan is just one of the places where Donald Trump has set records for the numbers of bombs dropped, in yet another country sadistically and ceaselessly attacked by the U.S. This goes for the unconstitutional, illegal, genocidal wars in Yemen and Somalia as well. Of course, none of these countries, nor their long-suffering populations pose any threat whatsoever to the American people.
In a previous column, this author covered the appointment of the antiwar, retired Col. Douglas Macgregor as senior adviser to Christopher Miller, the new acting Secretary of Defense. Many were cautiously optimistic that the recent Pentagon personnel shake up, that included the appointment of both aforementioned men, could herald an era of genuine last minute ‘America First’ foreign policy decisions. Namely, full U.S. exits from not only Afghanistan, but potentially Iraq and Somalia too.
Saturday's rally was ostensibly about protesting Trump's loss and claiming that he was the victim of a "rigged" election. But with inhibitions loosened by booze, anger and literal (as well as metaphorical) darkness, the truth was illuminated: The rage about Donald Trump's electoral fate is about racism. It's a part of the growing fury taking hold of conservatives as their control over American culture slips further and further out of their grasp. Trump is just the latest vehicle for this anger, but this story is about a lot more than him. It's bigger even than electoral politics. This is about a more fundamental issue: over Who gets to define America, and the widespread reactionary outrage over being outnumbered by more liberal, more diverse and more cosmopolitan Americans, and feeling unable to stop the tide of progress.
House Speaker Lee Chatfield, R-Levering, denounced threats made against Electoral College members in announcing the decision to pull Eisen from his committee assignments.
All three instances constitute flagrant violations of international law, which outlaws the acquisition of territory by force. Such annexations were declared illegal under the Geneva Conventions enacted in the wake of the Second World War to prevent the repetition of actions like those carried out by Germany’s Nazi regime. Trump has thumbed his nose at the entire post-World War II international order and the international rule of law, and signaled that militarism, territorial expansion, and colonialism are the order of the day.
In 1975, Morocco forcibly annexed the vast but sparsely populated territory of Western Sahara in contravention of an International Court of Justice ruling and without consulting the local Sahrawi people. This followed secret talks between Madrid, the occupying power, Rabat and Washington in which Spain agreed to cede control to Morocco. The Polisario Front, the military wing of the self-proclaimed national-bourgeois Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), declared independence for Western Sahara and fought a 16-year war with support from Libya and Algeria against Morocco and Mauritania.
Zulkarnaen, whose real name was Aris Sumarsono, 57, is an Afghan-trained militant who was believed to lead the elite squad involved in the suicide bombing at Jakarta's JW Marriott Hotel that killed 12 people in 2003.
He also allegedly made the bombs that killed 202 people in Bali in 2002. He had been on the run since the Jakarta bombing.
Police said he acted as the commander of the JI regional terror network, and set up a squad of fighters known as Laskar Khos, or Special Force, involved in the Bali bombing.
Indonesian police said they have arrested one of the most senior members of the al Qaeda-linked militant group Jemaah Islamiah suspected to be behind the 2002 bombings on the resort island of Bali that killed more than 200 people.
Jemaah Islamiah's stated aim is to build an Islamic caliphate in Southeast Asia.
Zulkarnaen, one of the commanders of the Bali attack, was arrested on Thursday by anti-terrorism police, spokesman Ahmad Ramadhan said in a statement on Saturday.
With their biggest ally, President Donald Trump, leaving the White House, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are doubling down on internal crackdowns, intensifying arrests of rights activists and political dissidents. It’s a signal to the Biden administration that it faces hard bargaining and a collision course with Arab allies who have grown accustomed to unconditional support.
Seven non-government organizations have orchestrated with human traffickers to smuggle illegal immigrants into Greece, according to Migration Minister Notis Mitarachis.
Notis Mitarachi, the Greek minister for migration, told The Times that the charities formed part of a network stretching from Somalia to Britain in which smugglers moved refugees illegally. Greek officials suspect the charities of funding trafficking rings to help illegal migrants to reach the continent.
The Greek islands in the Aegean are on the front line of the operation. Greece is already home to 90,000 illegal migrants living in squalid refugee centres awaiting asylum in Europe. Of those, at least 17,000 are on the islands.
A short but bloody conflict flared up this year in Nagorno-Karabakh, an Armenian-populated enclave in Azerbaijan. The events echoed the horrific but forgotten Armenian Genocide of a century earlier, which is officially recognised by only 31 countries today.
The talks are intended to eliminate subsidies that contribute to “illegal, unreported and unregulated” (IUU) fishing, estimated to account for a remarkable 20-50% of the global catch, as well as those that sustain legal overfishing and the building of overcapacity. Many fish stocks are collapsing. It is estimated that the proportion of the total stock of fish in the oceans that are overfished—ie, exploited at such a pace that the fish population cannot replenish itself—has risen from 10% in 1974 to 34% now. This is endangering coastal communities that rely on fishing. Roughly 39m people depend on capture fisheries for their livelihood. And fish provide 20% of animal-protein needs on average for 3.3bn people.
The first powerful storm of the South Pacific’s cyclone season could reach Fiji by Thursday, sparking warnings of damaging winds and severe flooding.
Cyclone Yasa is projected to intensify and strike parts of Fiji with wind speeds that may reach 230 kilometres per hour – potentially a Category 5 storm. Such powerful winds can cause “widespread destruction” and “total damage to crops and vegetation”, the country’s meteorological office says, on top of damage from floods, landslides, and storm surge.
“We should all prepare now,” Fiji’s prime minister, Frank Bainimarama, warned on Tuesday.
A weaker Category 1 storm, Cyclone Zazu, is already hitting parts of Tonga to the east with high winds.
Today, WildEarth Guardians, and a coalition of wildlife advocates,€ filed a lawsuit€ challenging the Trump administration’s€ decision€ to deny protections to imperiled wolverines under the Endangered Species Act. This is the second time the Fish and Wildlife Service has prioritized politics over science for wolverines, which number only about 300 in the contiguous U.S.
The groups in today’s filing€ defeated the Service in court in 2016, after the Service abruptly withdrew its proposed rule to list the lower 48 population of wolverine as “threatened” under the ESA. The court ordered the agency back to the drawing board with a directive to apply the best science in evaluating the protection needs of the wolverine. Four years later, the Service returned with the same decision to deny wolverine protective status, despite no new scientific support for such a determination.
While Sanders is ill-positioned and uninclined to push back very hard against the evident trajectory of Biden's decisions, many progressives are starting to throw down gauntlets against the corporate and militaristic aspects of the incoming presidency.
This isn’t a debate over whether Pornhub is predatory. This is a question about what level of censorship power we want to give to payment processors.€
Sexual exploitation is a scourge on society that needs resources, education, victim support, and, when necessary, prosecution by responsible authorities to address. Visa and Mastercard are the wrong entities for addressing these problems. Visa and Mastercard do not have the skills, expertise, or position to determine complex issues of digital speech. Nuanced challenges to what content should exist online, and whether moderation policies will inadvertently punish otherwise marginalized voices, are issues that legal experts, human rights experts, lawmakers, and courts in the United States and abroad have been deeply considering for years. The truth is, navigating speech policies in a way that won’t shut down huge swaths of legitimate and worthy speech is hard. And it’s wrong that Visa and Mastercard have the power to—however clumsily—police speech online.
More importantly, as a society, we haven’t given Visa and Mastercard the authority to decide online speech cases. Those companies haven’t been elected or chosen by any electorate in any country. They are here enforcing speech rules that we haven’t adopted in the United States—and, frankly, which would likely violate the U.S. Constitution if they were adopted. And sadly this is not the first time these companies’ decisions have jeopardized speech online.
A new Online Safety Bill will attempt to impose accountability for illegal or potentially harmful content such as material promoting terrorism or spreading disinformation about Covid-19. Companies could be fined as much as 10% of annual global revenue if they breach regulations, details of which are to be announced Tuesday, Digital Secretary Oliver Dowden and Home Secretary Priti Patel said in an emailed statement.
It’s as if we’re all playing a game of darts, and we laugh and laugh at the lawmakers whose distorted and embarrassingly bad Section 230 and First Amendment takes wildly miss the dart board. What we don’t realize is they aren’t playing darts. They aren’t trying to hit the dart board. While we correct their takes and scoff at their ignorance, they are playing a different game. Their goal is not to get Section 230 or the First Amendment right. It’s to exert pressure on Big Tech firms to create benefits for them.
These lawmakers don’t want to win using traditional democratic structures — they know they can’t. They know that forcing social media firms to leave certain content up and take other content down will never succeed in the courts. They know that removing Section 230 would not even fix this problem in the first place.
The Center for Democracy & Technology doesn't have standing to sue President Donald Trump over his executive order that targets social media sites for the alleged censorship of conservative voices, a D.C. federal judge has ruled.
The CDT in June sued the Trump administration over his May 28 executive order on online censorship. Trump's order, which he issued shortly after Twitter started flagging his tweets for misinformation, says social media is the modern day equivalent of a public square and it's "fundamentally un-American and anti-democratic" to let powerful social media companies "censor" opinions.
Additionally, CDT's allegations fail to show Article III standing because the injury it claims is not "actual or imminent" but "conjectural or hypothetical." While "[a]n allegation of future injury may suffice if the threatened injury is certainly impending, or there is a substantial risk that the harm will occur," "allegations of possible future injury are not sufficient."
Hong Kong democracy activist and media tycoon Jimmy Lai has been charged under the city's national security law on suspicion of colluding with foreign forces and endangering national security, local media reported on Friday (Dec 11), citing a police source.
Lai, an ardent critic of Beijing, is the most high-profile person charged under the sweeping new law imposed on the Chinese-ruled city in June.
He was due to appear in court on Saturday, according to Apple Daily, a popular tabloid known for its feisty and critical coverage of China and Hong Kong.
The prosecution against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has invoked my case, making it a haunting reminder of the travesty of justice that befell me.
I worked for the Central Intelligence Agency. In 2015, the United States government wrongfully tried, convicted, and sent me to prison for allegedly violating the U.S. Espionage Act. I am one of the few who has ever gone to trial to defend their selves against this ancient and misused law.
The response was even more draconian than usual.€ Exercise was halted; showers prohibited.€ Meals were to be provided directly to the prisoner’s cell.€ Prison officials described the approach as a safety precaution.€ “We’ve introduced further safety measures following a number of positive cases,” stated a Prison Service spokesperson.
Assange’s time at Belmarsh is emblematic of a broadly grotesque approach which has been legitimised by the national security establishment.€ The pandemic has presented another opportunity to knock him off, if only by less obvious means.€ The refusal of Judge Baraitser to grant him bail, enabling him to prepare his case in conditions of guarded, if relative safety, typifies this approach.€ “Every day that passes is a serious risk to Julian,” explains his partner, Stella Moris.€ “Belmarsh is an extremely dangerous environment where murders and suicides are commonplace.”
Unidentified gunmen shot and killed a journalist in the northwestern Pakistani city of Dera Ismail Khan, police said Tuesday.
Police officer Aslam Khan said gunmen riding on a motorcycle opened fire on Qais Javed near his home after midnight and fled from the scene. Khan said Javed was shot multiple times and was rushed to the city’s main hospital but died on the way. Javed, 37, previously worked as a cameraman at a top local television station and had recently started his own web channel.
The school I find him in is one of 23 Islamic educational institutions in Sudan, known as khalwas, that I filmed in undercover over a two-year period, starting in early 2018.
I witnessed and filmed many children, some just five years old, being severely beaten, routinely shackled, and imprisoned without food and water by the sheikhs, or religious men, in charge of the schools. Some of the children who did not appear in our documentary told me they had been raped or experienced other forms of sexual abuse.
Recent Boko Haram massacre in Borno State exemplifies years of repression and abuse of older people by the armed group. Older people are frequently killed in military raids and die disproportionately in unlawful military detention. Humanitarian response treats older people as ‘an afterthought’
With more than 80 percent of its girls married before their 18th birthday, Katsina has one of the highest prevalence of child marriage. In fact, girls often get married against their will at the age of 10 or even younger.
12-year-old boy who ran away from a madrassa alleging torture was rescued by members of child helpline in Pilibhit. The child alleged that he was beaten and chained when he tried to escape from the religious school in Jahanabad area, the members said.
Yet by last week, the city council’s once sweeping ambitions had given way, once again, to incremental change. In a 2021 budget vote on December 9th, the council voted to cut just $8 million from the $179 million MPD budget. In the face of a veto threat from Mayor Jacob Frey, the council even voted against a measure that would have reduced the size of the city’s authorized police force from 888 to 750 officers.
This vaccine victory is bittersweet. We have lost so many Americans to the virus, who didn’t have to die. Many of them died because of stubbornly pro-capitalist public policy.€
The administrative judge last year ordered Uber to answer questions regarding a safety report it released in 2019, which contained details of sexual assault cases that had occurred in the United States during 2017, 2018 and 2019 on trips taken using its ride-hailing platform.
As I already noted earlier this month, the Oberlandesgericht München (Munich Higher Regional Court) fundamentally disagrees with the Munich I Regional Court's approach to setting the amounts of collateral to be posted in the form of a bond or a security deposit when patent injunctions are enforced while an appeal is pending.
Meanwhile I've obtained a copy of an order by the appeals court in Conversant v. Daimler, raising the security amount from 5.5 million euros to 146 million euros. That's an increase by more than a factor of 26--and a complete (partial) victory for Daimler at this stage. It also means that Nokia-fed Conversant won't ever enforce a German injunction against Daimler over the patent-in-suit, as the troll probably can't afford this amount anytime soon and the patent is going to expire in about a month's time.
What the lower court had done in that case--and not only that one, as the appeals court will make a similar decision in a Nokia v. Daimler case on Thursday--was not just an error. It was an utter disgrace. It was what happens when judges prioritize "forum-selling" over their own professional honor. And the way in which they explained the "reasons" for their approach was so bad that even the term "nonsensical" would represent a euphemism.
[...]
No similar arrangement exists with respect to Nokia's SEPs--and the patent-in-suit in that case isn't about to expire. In the Nokia case, Daimler cars that come with a telematics control unit (TCU) from Samsung subsidiary Harman Becker are excluded from the scope of the injunction, but the effect of that carve-out doesn't come close to the 86% coverage Daimler enjoys in the Conversant context because of Huawei's license. All things considered, a security amount in the billions of euros will likely be set on Thursday. The lower court had set it at only 18 million euros. The numbers don't tell the whole story, but they'll make it clear that the appeals court doesn't merely reverse the lower court in this context. It effectively rebukes it. And rightly so.
The practice of anti-suit injunctions (“ASIs”) originated in the fifteenth century in the English courts to prohibit parallel proceedings before the common law courts and the Court of Chancery, a parallel jurisdiction based on principles of equity, that makes up for the inadequacies and rigidities of the common law.
Today, the ASI is a remedy a judge may grant to strengthen jurisdiction and arbitration clauses. A party may thus be obliged to abandon proceedings brought before a court that is not the one designated by the clause. In other words, it is a matter of enjoining the litigant from initiating or continuing parallel litigation in another jurisdiction.
The Western part of the world is in the situation in which it is these days--with renewed, hard lockdowns--because covidiots come in all shapes, forms, sizes, and colors. One of them will pay the price for his mendacity and irresponsibility in this context next month when he'll have to move out of a white building regardless of his achivements in several other areas, while some others wear black robes and regrettably can't be voted out no matter how much they'd deserve it.
The next few months--the coldest of the year--are the worst time ever to conduct in-person trials. Now, I fully understand that the judiciary can't just freeze everything for an extended period of time. There are matters, particularly criminals trials, habeas corpus etc., that can't wait. All that one can do in those cases is to impose a requirement to wear masks, to enforce a certain minimum distance, and to ensure sufficient ventilation.
I obviously wouldn't deny that there are civil lawsuits with an objective sense of urgency. There may be time-sensitive issues related to employment or tenancy relationships, for instance.
But patent cases that require swift adjudication are few and far between. Very few and very far, that is.
Practically, the standard for holding any in-person patent trial in the coming months should no less--and ideally even more--exacting than the one for a preliminary injunction: irreparable harm, inadequacy of monetary relief, balance of hardships, and public interest considerations.
Nine Entertainment pressures the government to get the tech giants to pay for local news content. Meanwhile, for three years Nine has been playing Goliath in a fight with Australian freelance photojournalists, whose photos Nine sold even though it didn’t own the copyright. Callum Foote reports.
House of Commons Debate, November 18, 2020CPAC, Heritage Minister Discusses Bill to Update Broadcasting Act
Police say they are preparing to send warning notices to more than 7,000 UK residents who are believed to have purchased pirate IPTV subscriptions. The warnings follow the arrest of a then 28-year-old man in the North-West of England during the summer and the seizure of luxury cars, expensive jewelry, and a pirate IPTV customer database.
Germany's Federal Court of Justice has ruled that YouTube does not have to hand over the email or IP addresses of users who uploaded pirated movies to the platform. The decision is part of a long-running case that saw three YouTube users upload Scary Movie 5 and Parker to the site resulting in thousands of views in breach of copyright.
The liability created by Section 1201 can attach even to those who aren’t infringing copyright, because their access is in service of research, education, criticism, remix, or other fair and noninfringing uses. The law allows rightsholders to enforce their business models in ways that have nothing to do with the rights actually granted to copyright holders. A willful and commercial act of circumvention can even result in criminal charges and jail time, and the Department of Justice takes the position that there doesn’t need to be any connection to actual copyright infringement for them to prosecute.
EFF is representing Matthew Green and bunnie Huang in a First Amendment challenge to Section 1201, based on its failure to respect copyright's traditional boundaries, including safeguards like fair use.€ At the same time, we're participating in the rulemaking process in hopes of winning some exemptions that will mitigate the law's harms.€ In the past, we’ve won exemptions for remix videos, jailbreaking personal computing devices, repairing and modifying car software, security research, and more.
This year, EFF is asking the Librarian of Congress to expand on the 2018 device repair exemption with a€ broader version that would apply to all software-enabled devices and include non-repair modifications.€ In past rulemakings, the government has insisted on drawing arbitrarily narrow classes of devices to exempt; our submissions aim to illustrate the wrongheadedness of this approach. In keeping with that theme, we're also asking the Librarian to clarify that the existing exemption for jailbreaking smart TVs includes video streaming devices like the Roku, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire Stick.
