CloudLinux announced today that its KernelCare service now supports the Raspberry Pi platform providing live patching for the running kernel with zero downtime -- improving security for IoT deployments.
KernelCare for Raspberry Pi is a free service ensuring that IoT devices and assemblies are automatically updated and always available. This provides IoT projects with improved protection against newly discovered vulnerabilities as they are fixed, rather than being easy targets for hackers.
Microsoft has once again released a series of Windows 10 Updates that appear to be causing problems for some users.
Working under my own banner felt great, and I could only blame myself when things went wrong. I could follow my curiosity and use my common sense to avoid some pitfalls while still being young enough to walk straight into others. I loved every minute of it, and when I landed my first few contracts as a Lotus Notes developer, I managed to find a lot of limitations in the application, which kept me both challenged and motivated.
I tried expanding my business and hired some staff. At the peak, I had six employees. However, I was too young and inexperienced at managing staff. They looked to me for guidance, but I had my head buried in development and the early days system administration. With my company on the brink of disaster, I realized I was not ready to be a manager and had to let everyone go. This was a very humbling experience, and I felt like dirt, but we all got through it with several lessons learned.
The one-man-band company was back in the game, but I had run into issues because my applications were not performing as expected, and workflows were interrupted. I realized that my code was good, but the servers were poorly administered. Curiosity had me caught once again, so I started to learn server administration.
Ubuntu Giving Wayland Another Shot https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/trying-wayland-by-default-again/20575 Networking and Touchpads Work in Linux on M1 Macs [...] Greg Kroah-Hartman Needs Commercial Buy In For Longer Kernel Support https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/ef30af4d-2081-305d-cd63-cb74da819a6d@broadcom.com/ Sudo Buffer Overflow Vulnerability Allows Unauthorized Root Access https://blog.qualys.com/vulnerabilities-research/2021/01/26/cve-2021-3156-heap-based-buffer-overflow-in-sudo-baron-samedit Libgcrypt 1.9.0 Released with Vulnerability https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2021/01/31/gnupg-crypto-library-can-be-pwned-during-decryption-patch-now/ System 76 Posts Guide to Gaming https://blog.system76.com/post/641571610853326848/the-system76-guide-to-gaming-on-popos Linux Mint Ported 20.1 Features to LMDE 4 https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4024 Tails 4.15.1 Out https://tails.boum.org/news/version_4.15.1/index.en.html Nitrux 1.3.7 Out https://nxos.org/changelog/changelog-nitrux-1-3-7/
Clonezilla Live 2.7.1-22 Out https://sourceforge.net/p/clonezilla/news/2021/01/stable-clonezilla-live-271-22-released/
Gparted Live 1.2.0-1 Out https://gparted.org/news.php?item=237
Gnome 3.38.3 Out https://ftp-chi.osuosl.org/pub/gnome/core/3.38/3.38.3/NEWS
Firefox 85 Out https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/85.0/releasenotes/
Nvidia Linux Driver 460.39 Out https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/170134/en-us
A lot of work has been put recently into making the various Linux desktop environments more able on mobile form factors. Let's see how these efforts are panning out, starting with PHOSH, the GNOME mobile shell, and its applications.
Whether Debian should be easier for new users, Twitter pretends to care about decentralisation, a protip about portable monitors, how we should run an online FOSS Talk Live, and your feedback.
In October 2010, Steven Rostedt announced on the LKML that he was working on a script called ktest.pl to automate certain aspects of Linux kernel testing. The script is aimed at individual kernel programmers testing their patch series, and provides an alternative to the Autotest framework, which is powerful but quite involved for one person to set up.
This post will cover ktest's capabilities and requirements, and give concrete examples of how to use it in one specific environment, a single physical machine with a qemu VM run under virsh.
Last month was the delightful news that Ubuntu 21.04 is aiming to use Wayland by default for non-NVIDIA systems on the GNOME desktop rather than the X.Org session. While there is two months to go until the Ubuntu 21.04 release, there still is more work ahead in making that shift a reality.
The Ubuntu developers working on the Wayland-by-default transition have made their Trello workboard now public and it offers a glimpse at some of their planning and challenges around this significant shift in moving to Wayland by default. Their motivation in doing so now is to ensure that by Ubuntu 22.04 LTS next year the Wayland support will be shining and in excellent shape given that it is a long-term support release.
I try to use Wayland wherever possible, since the performance gains and battery life improvements are just too good to ignore. There’s still two major blockers, though – first, NVIDIA support is problematic, at best, so my main computer will remain on X until NVIDIA gets its act together.
While so far only the NVIDIA proprietary driver on Linux supports the Vulkan ray-tracing extensions, eventually we will see support for these new Vulkan extensions with the AMD Vulkan drivers for the Radeon RX 6000 series and newer. There has also been work by Intel in preparing for Vulkan ray-tracing with Xe HPG. For when the time comes to test those implementations, there is finally one good, open-source, automated Vulkan RT benchmark so far.
There are a new round of kernel patches posted today by NVIDIA for the open-source, traditionally reverse-engineered "Nouveau" graphics driver: implementing support for SVM atomic memory operations.
NVIDIA has in the past posted Nouveau patches pertaining to Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) and Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM). Their proprietary driver has been implementing bits of HMM and other new Linux kernel interfaces while with NVIDIA providing relevant pieces to Nouveau allows for demonstrating an open-source "client" / user of new code for satisfying upstream requirements. But Red Hat has also been actively working on improving the OpenCL/compute support for Nouveau too for some interesting reasons. So long story short, in the area of GPU compute is where NVIDIA has -- and continued -- volleying open-source patches.
RADV is a Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs that is part of the Mesa project and installed on most Linux distros out of the box. Our goal is to deliver a stable and performant driver to Linux gamers, and recently we've made our own shader compiler called ACO. To create the best possible experience, we'd like to take it a step further and ask our users for some testing and feedback.
Prior to benchmarking, I perform all necessary installations and updates to run the latest versions of both OSes. I also capture some basic details of the device for each OS.
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At first glance, the i3-10110U based Beelink SEi mini PC looks to be similar to the ‘NUC 10 Performance’ but without the Thunderbolt port and having lower USB specs (5Gbps rather than 10 Gbps). But by including a Windows Pro license and offering fully loaded configurations with RAM and storage the SEi is trying to be a price-conscious alternative.
Compared to the previous generation of Gemini Lake mini PCs this is a more powerful device with both improved CPU and GPU performance. This does come at a slight cost as the fan is quite noisy when the processor is under load. It is unfortunate that ‘Power Limit’ throttling can occur seemingly randomly and it is not ideal having to check and reboot if affected. However, the inclusion of WiFi 6 and configurable storage options add to the improvements presented by the SEi.
Are you looking for the best email encryption tools for Linux? Because it’s essential to protect the contents of your emails from being viewed by others. The best way to do this is to encrypt them, which will stop others from accessing them. Anytime you send or receive sensitive information through an email service provider, you should always use some protection. Besides, many of these email security programs and software are available for Linux.
Browser wars never seem to end. Now it's the turn for Google Chrome. In case you are not aware, Google recently informed that they are shutting down private API support in all Chromium-based web browser on March 2021. We take a look at the situation and trying to figure out a way forward for our readers.
If you take the word GIF and add the letter T in front of it as an extension, it sounds like a GIFT that keeps on giving. It is only a gift if you know how to create and implement one in various user-based circumstances. If you master the simple technicalities behind its creation and application, you immediately become the go-to guru for anything related to GIFs within your active community forums or social media platforms.
You do not need a formal definition of the word GIF to relate to it. Your activeness and continuous interaction in many social platforms and community forums must have triggered an idea about it. The popularity of GIFs on the world wide web (www) is so broad that completely removing it will make the Internet’s definition incomplete.
Unfortunately there’re open-source apps that participate in mass surveillance and do not respect your privacy. Use our list for the best open-source apps for discretion…
Flowblade, a multi-track non-linear video editor Linux, released new major 2.8 version today with focused on making the app more configurable.
For 1680 x 1050 and higher screen resolution, now you can change the panels layout by moving panels to different positions using View->Panel Placement submenu.
chromecast_mpris is a daemon that allows you to control Chromecast devices from your Linux desktop using MPRIS widgets. The tool can also be used to open media and play YouTube videos on your Chromecast from the command line.
MPRIS (Media Player Remote Interfacing Specification) support is available by default in the Plasma Desktop and Linux Mint, GNOME has a simple MPRIS widget in its Date / Time menu (and there are third-party extensions for this as well, like this MPRIS Indicator Button), playerctrl (a command line utility and library for controlling media players that implement the MPRIS D-Bus Interface Specification), etc.
We use Beaker to allocate and loan computer hardware. If you want to talk to it via the comand line, you can use the bkr executable. Some of the information comes back as json, but beaker tends to speak xml. To look up a host name from a job, you need to be able to parse the xml. To do that, I used the xq execuable from the python yq package. Yes, x and y.
Welcome back to WordPress 101 series. The series is dedicated to teaching WordPress CMS to WordPress beginners. If you have any questions, let me know in the comment section below.
In this article, we are going to learn to structure menu(s) in a WordPress site. Menu(s) is an important part of any website. It is where website admin can put important links such as important categories, pricing page, FAQs, contact us, and so on.
What if you could block connections to your network in real-time from countries around the world such as Russia, China and Brazil where the majority of cyberattacks originate? What if you could redirect connections to a single network based on their origin? As you can imagine, being able to control these things would reduce the number of attack vectors on your network, improving its security. You may be surprised that this is not only possible, but straightforward and easy, by implementing GeoIP filtering on your nftables firewall with GeoIP for nftables.
Linux Kernel is the core component of a GNU/Linux operating system. It is a free, opensource, monolithic, modular, multitasking, Unix-like operating system kernel. It is created by Linus Torvalds for his i386 PC in 1991. We can install more than one Kernel in our system. Ever wondered how many Linux Kernels you have installed in your Linux box? No? Well, this brief tutorial will teach you how to view or check all installed Linux Kernels along with their versions from commandline in different Linux operating systems.
In this week’s blog, we present you with a set of short videos on managing storage in Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager. These videos introduce you to storage concepts and demonstrate how to create, attach, and maintain various storage types.
In these videos, you will learn about storage domains that hold resources used by virtual machines. These resources include disk images, ISO files, templates, and snapshots. Supported storage types can be file-based storage like Network File System (NFS) or other POSIX compliant file systems. Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager also supports block-based storage types like Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) and Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) storage. You can also use locally attached storage for storage domains.
Signal Messenger is a great way to securely talk to friends and family. The messaging service offers users an end-to-end encryption protocol to make sure only the folks involved can have access.
Today we are looking at how to upgrade Friday Night Funkin to the latest version on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Since SUSE acquired Rancher Labs, it’s time to explain how to run Rancher on MicroOS and how to import a Kubic cluster.
I used Rancher 2.5.5 for this, newer versions my have different requirements.
Linux powers modern technologies, from the internet and cloud to supercomputers and mobile phones. That’s why the 2020 Open Source Jobs Report found that 74% of hiring managers are looking for Linux talent, more than any other skill. If you want to work on today’s hottest technologies, you need to have a solid understanding of Linux.
You would use the ipvlan networking if you want to expose containers to the local network (LAN, or the Internet if you are using an Internet server, and have allocated several public IPs).
Any containers with ipvlan will appear on the network to have the MAC address of the host. Therefore, this will work even when you use it on your laptop that is connected to the network over WiFi (or any router with port security). That is, you can use ipvlan when macvlan and bridged cannot work.
These instructions are a slightly modified version from the GT.M Acculturation Workshop.
Moodle is a free and open-source learning management system (LMS). It is written in PHP programming language. Moodle is used by many schools, universities, and organizations for a better learning experience.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gitlab on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Gitlab is a graphical implementation of git, it is open-source repository management and version control system. GitLab is developed on Ruby on Rails. Using GitLab you can host your source code on your own server. This ensures the security of the code and gives you total freedom on the number of users as well as the number of repositories and the number of files. GitLab provides you with a platform to collaborate on projects and to keep track of changes in code. GitLab has widely used for software development and version control related tasks. In many ways, it is similar to GitHub, except you can install it on your own server.
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 Gitlab on a Debian 10 (Buster).
By default, Ubuntu comes with a set of keyboard shortcuts that you can use straight away. However, you may not like the default mappings of some of these keyboard shortcuts. They might be assigned to shortcuts you’re used to using for something else, disrupting your productivity. For example, if you have a keyboard with a media button, that button is automatically mapped to Rhythmbox. If your favorite media player is VLC, you may want to change the keyboard shortcut to your favorite application.
There are several ways to manage your keyboard shortcuts in Linux. You can do it via Xmodmap (and Xkeycaps) or through your desktop environment’s keyboard/shortcut settings. This article will focus mainly on how to change the shortcuts or assign new ones on two of the most popular desktop environments, Gnome and KDE.
Sudo allows a user to run commands or programs with security privileges of another user ( by default superuser). Superuser in Linux is called 'root'.
It is one of the best security practice is to use non-root user to perform server administration.
In this quick article, we are going to create a user and add to a sudo group in Arch Linux.
One of the sectors where Linux has been at the forefront is the Web server industry. Linux distributions act as servers for a high majority of the websites on the Internet. Apart from websites, they are also used nowadays for Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a Service, etc. platforms, all thanks to its ecosystem centered around security.
Linux Server Load refers to the average work being done by a web server in a given amount of time. It is generally specified in averages of the last 5 minutes, 10 minutes, and 15 minutes.
Many high-end laptops come with fingerprint readers these days. Windows and macOS have been supporting fingerprint login for some time. In desktop Linux, the support for fingerprint login was more of geeky tweaks but GNOME and KDE have started supporting it through system settings.
This means that on newer Linux distribution versions, you can easily use fingerprint reading. I am going to enable fingerprint login in Ubuntu here but you may use the steps on other distributions running GNOME 3.38.
Firefox and Chrome are two of the most popular browsers on the market. There are other browsers like Opera and Edge that own smaller portions of the browser market.
Every browser that tries to gain users must also provide them with an easy way to move away from their old browser and quickly adjust to the new one. A browser stores all sorts of information and it needs to be imported into the new browser if the transition is going to be smooth.
LXD/LXC is great for setting up test / development environments as it allows us to quickly create Linux based containers that behave like full virtual machines.
I recently had the requirement to develop an Ansible Playbook to configure a bunch of machines as a web farm. I decided to use LXD/LXC to create an environment where I could test the playbook quickly and easily. This meant I wouldn’t have to worry about needing to build any VMs, or anything external to the system I was working on.
In the following sections I will show the commands I ran to create the environment, explaining what each part does, before showing the completed script at the end of the page, so please read through to the end! Before continuing, you will need to have installed LXC. Checkout this article on how to install LXC/LXD if you haven’t already.
Finding files in any operating is a very common task as you have multiple files residing on your system at a time. The GUI based methods of doing so are readily available for every operating system, however, in Linux, I mostly prefer the CLI based methods. That is why today we will learn the two most simple methods of finding files in CentOS 8.
What is a dockerfile? When working with Docker you can download (pull) a pre-built Docker image from a registry such as Docker Hub, or you can build your own images by building from Dockerfiles. This article will look at what Dockerfiles are and how to write them so that you can build your own Docker images.
When it comes to operating systems, you will get majorly three or four choices. If you are here, you already know Ubuntu — a popular Linux distro. To learn and enjoy what Ubuntu offers, you need to install it. A fresh install on your hard drive will provide you the best way to use it in most cases.
Kops is used to bringing up the Kubernetes cluster in the easiest possible way. It is a command-line tool used to create Kubernetes Clusters. Kops officially supports AWS where GCP, DigitalOcean, and OpenStack are in Beta. Kops can also generate Terraform files for the required cluster configuration. One can not only easily create a cluster using Kops, but also modify, delete and upgrade the Kubernetes version in the cluster.
In this article, we will see the steps to create a Kubernetes cluster with 1 master and 1 worker node on AWS. Before we proceed, it is assumed that you are already familiar with Kubernetes
The head of a company that makes the popular Windows game Terraria has cancelled plans for a port to Google's Stadia platform after his company's Google account was disabled with no warning.
Valve and their partners at CodeWeavers have put out a release candidate for Proton 5.13-6 as the latest version of their Wine-based software for running Windows games on Linux via Steam Play.
Craving a Zelda-like game? Something from the 2D, pixelated era, like The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past for the SNES, or The Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening for the Gameboy? Look no further than Ocean’s Heart, available on Steam since January 2021, and perfectly playable on Proton.
Developed by Max Mraz and published by Nordcurrent, the game practically screams Zelda, from the same blue clothing the female protagonist, Tilia, wears that Link wears in Breath of the Wild, the short blonde hair, the sword, the boots, the top-down camera setting, the bows and arrows, the boomerangs, the bombs, the hearts, the magic, the rolling on the ground. Yet, it differs enough to still be a decent game, with different weapons, different characters, a different story, and different artwork. Whether you’re a seasoned Zelda fan or completely unfamiliar with the games in the series, I think Ocean’s Heart will appeal to both audiences. If you dislike the Zelda series though? Well, you probably won’t like this either.
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Unfortunately for us, there’s no Linux version of the game, which I would imagine be a simple thing to do, since Solarus has cross-platform support, but the good news is it runs just fine on Proton. Occasionally on my end the game crashed when ALT + Tabbing out of the game or when my Series X controller disconnected, so be sure to save the game frequently.
Finnix 122 comes six months after Finnix 121 with a bunch of improvements for the live ISO images, including faster boot times, better compatibility with systems using older BIOSes when booting the distro from a USB flash drive, smaller ISO size, and a redesigned boot splash screen with a prelonged default timeout of 30s.
This release is fully synced with the Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” (Testing) repositories as of February 6th, 2021, and it’s powered by the latest and greatest Linux 5.10 LTS kernel, which automatically translates to better hardware support.
Finnix 122 includes a number of fixes, new packages and new features:
Improved USB flash drive boot compatibility on older BIOSes Improved boot speed Lowered ISO size Added "finnix" getting started command Added "wifi-connect" helper script
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This weekend, our development team is pleased to announce the release of Linspire 10.0, a major version update brings its codebase to the latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Once again, PC/OS engineers have worked diligently to develop the best, most meticulously designed and engineered FOSS desktop on the market today, intuitive, efficient, ready for your workflow. There have been many changes incorporating features and functionality that elevate Linspire to the forefront of consumer operating systems / mainstream Linux distributions.
The following 600 words are all about a promising new FreeBSD distro and why it has me rather excited.
So, for the duration of this ramble I’d appreciate you pretending it’s 2008 and this site is still called ‘FYIDYK’ — the forerunner to omg! with a worse acronym and a ‘cover everything’ attitude!
In this post I look at what this distro is, what it isn’t, and what it hopes to become. Plus, I share a link to download installer images (warning: experimental) so you can try it out for yourself.
While it was a sad blow when PC-BSD/TrueOS stopped pursuing its desktop ambitions as what was arguably the leading BSD desktop operating system out there with a nice end-user experience, since then we have seen efforts like MidnightBSD, GhostBSD, and others fill the avoid with continuing to enhance the out-of-the-box BSD desktop system. A new entrant that is quite interesting is helloSystem that aims to be a "macOS of BSDs" for a polished desktop experience.
This weekend during the virtual FOSDEM 2021 conference, which I believe was the first time I've heard of helloSystem. The helloSystem project shares similar design goals to that of macOS in being something that "just works", doesn't need much configuration, and works well out-of-the-box on the desktop. The helloSystem OS is powered by a FreeBSD base. Even the helloSystem desktop has been configured to look like an early MacOS X desktop.
In this video, we are looking at Solus 4.2 MATE.
Today we are looking at Solus 4.2, the MATE edition. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.10, MATE 1.24, and uses about 900MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
The CentOS board conducted a public Q&A just ahead of last week's FOSDEM 2021 open source conference – and there was an awkward silence when someone asked whether changing the end-of-life (EOL) date for a released project is something that might happen again.
This killer query came about half an hour into the session, which can be viewed here. "A question has come in about the change of the EOL for a community deliverable during a release being very unusual. Is this [a] thing that could theoretically happen in the future?" said moderator Brian Exelbierd from Red Hat (and also a board member).
A lengthy silence ensued before Pat Riehecky from Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a CentOS board member since April 2020, offered: "It's hard to predict the future."
Indeed, but this question was not really about the future, nor was it about CentOS Stream, though the board members (eventually) chose to answer as if it were.
Cloud technology is so prevalent today that a recent IBM Institute for Business Value study found that a typical enterprise uses nearly eight clouds from multiple vendors. The study also notes a surge in the adoption of hybrid clouds — the combination of public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises IT — noting that in the next three years, hybrid cloud adoption is expected to grow by 47%, and the average organization will be using nearly six hybrid clouds.
IBM and Palantir Technologies have entered into a new partnership consisting of IBM’s hybrid cloud data platform designed to deliver AI for business, with Palantir’s next-gen operations platform for building applications.
The product is expected to simplify how businesses build and deploy AI-infused applications with IBM Watson and help users access, analyze, and take action on the vast amounts of data that is scattered across hybrid cloud environments – without the need for deep technical skills.
The new product, Palantir for IBM Cloud Pak for Data, is planned for general availability in March of 2021.
Additionally, Palantir is adopting Red Hat OpenShift, allowing it to run anywhere in the hybrid cloud.
As an IoT developer, before you build an actual product, you need to have a practical proof of concept, which can be assessed as commercially viable. For this, there are plenty of DIY development boards to choose from, and open-source hardware, such as Raspberry Pi and Arduino, have been extremely popular.
But these boards come with their own challenges: the supported memory is extremely limited, the boards cannot compete on x86 operating systems, and they lack the ruggedness needed for industrial-scale applications. This is why we had earlier listed several alternative IoT hardware, such as ODROID-XYU4, Banana Pi and ASUS Tinkerboard, which bring far superior specs to the table.
Neousys Technology, a Taiwan-based provider of rugged embedded systems, has introduced the NRU-110V Edge AI inference platform powered by an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier SoM. It comes with eight FAKRA Z connectors to support up to eight GMSL automotive cameras, as well as one 10GbE (10 Gigabit Ethernet) port for real-time video data transfer.
The system specifically supports GMSL cameras with 3-exposure HDR, LED flicker mitigation, good light-sensitivity, and IP67 waterproof characteristics, and also comes with a synchronize mechanism to simultaneously capture high-quality images from 8 GMSL cameras while accepting GPS PPS signal to align image data with other sensors. That makes it suitable for various applications ranging from autonomous driving, mobile robots, precision agriculture, intelligent V2X, to teleoperation.
for this low price (below 10 Bucks) it performs well as an “overall” webcam with fish eye optics.
Camera module was purchased on Amazon, in search for something that could be used in Medical scenario to take LED illuminated close up pictures (like really close up… from skin etc.) on GNU Linux, but unfortunately this cam module does not seem to be suitable for this scenario (can not focus closer than 3cm, image blurry, also the LED failed to turn on (maybe missing a switch somewhere?)
Arduino recently announced an update to the Arduino_OV767x camera library that makes it possible to run machine vision using TensorFlow Lite Micro on your Arduino Nano 33 BLE board.
If you just want to try this and run machine learning on Arduino, you can skip to the project tutorial.
The rest of this article is going to look at some of the lower level optimization work that made this all possible. There are higher performance industrial-targeted options like the Arduino Portenta available for machine vision, but the Arduino Nano 33 BLE has sufficient performance with TensorFlow Lite Micro support ready in the Arduino IDE. Combined with an OV767x module makes a low-cost machine vision solution for lower frame-rate applications like the person detection example in TensorFlow Lite Micro.
Guy Dupont got a bunch of 2004, fourth-generation iPod Classic MP3 players from his mother-in-law, and instead of playing MP3 files on the media players, he decided to repurpose one with a Raspberry Pi Zero W to be able to stream music from Spotify over WiFi. The resulting project is called sPot (ess-pot), and looks just like an original iPod, but it’s a Linux device that can stream/search via Spotify with a UI written in Python and based on the original iPod experience.
BeagleVâ⢠will be available for early access in March with larger availability in September. The early access version encompasses StarFive Jinghong 7100 SoC with powerful AI performance (3.5T NVDLA, 1T NNE), built-in ISP, 1 Gigabit ethernet, and a dual core 64-bit SiFive U74 RISC-V CPU with 8GB of LPDDR4 memory. It also has a dedicated hardware encoder/decoder supporting H.264 and H.265 4k@60fps, making it a perfect edge computing device with powerful AI capability. Supported by mainline Linux and a Debian-based BeagleBoard.org€® open–source software image, BeagleVâ⢠is ready for development out-of-the-box and prepared for the future.
Seeed Studio pegs the cost of the board at $149 for the 8 GB RAM version, although currently you must apply and be selected to purchase a board in this early stage. It’s unclear if the price will remain unchanged after this first run; the product page notes a coupon code is necessary and the Seeed Studios article indicates this is an introductory price. However, the same article also lists the 4 GB RAM variant at $119. The BeagleBoard page shows a timeline of April 2021 for a “pilot run for community”.
XMPP (also known as Jabber) is an open and free alternative to commercial messaging and chat providers. It is a secure battle-tested protocol developed by an independent standards organization.
XMPP was designed for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, media negotiation, whiteboarding, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, EDI, RPC and more.
The “X” in XMPP stands for “Extensible”, which means the core protocol is updated and extended with more features through a transparent process at the non-profit XMPP Standards Foundation every now and then. This results in some clients not implementing every feature of XMPP; for example, a typical instant messaging client won’t implement Internet-of-Things functionality.
In 2021, there are more reasons why people love Linux than ever before. In this series, I'll share 21 different reasons to use Linux. This article discusses Linux's influence on the security of open source software.
An often-praised virtue of open source software is that its code can be reviewed (or "audited," as security professionals like to say) by anyone and everyone. However, if you actually ask many open source users when the last time they reviewed code was, you might get answers ranging from a blank stare to an embarrassed murmur. And besides, there are some really big open source applications out there, so it can be difficult to review every single line of code effectively.
I've worked from home for years, and with the COVID-19 crisis, millions more have joined me. Teachers, accountants, librarians, stockbrokers… you name it, these workers now operate full or part time from their homes. Even after the coronavirus crisis ends, many will continue working at home, at least part time. But what happens when the home worker's computer fails? Whether the device is a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop—and whether the problem is hardware or software—the result might be missed workdays and lots of frustration.
This article explores how to ensure high-availability home computing. Open source software is key. It offers device independence so that home workers can easily move between primary and backup devices. Most importantly, it gives users control of their environment, which is the surest route to high availability. This simple high-availability strategy, based on open source, is easy to modify for your needs.
That's a bad thing and not just for women leaders. Studies show that employee productivity is significantly higher for companies with three or more women on their boards. That means both higher profits and dividend payouts. As the Bloomberg editorial board recently pointed out, if companies really cared about doing what's best for shareholders they'd have more women leaders.
Firefox has had a number of major redesigns in the past, including the Australis UI update in 2014, and the the Photon uplift in 2017. A third is now on the way, dubbed Proton.
Mozilla will roll our its latest ‘visual refresh’ later this year (possibly in Firefox 89). More than a mere tickle around the sides, the Proton redesign affects several parts of the core browser experience, including the new tab page, hamburger menu, and the tab strip.
Confirmed Proton redesigns coming...
This software is still in development, so it’s not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with it.
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been awarded a four-star and 100% rating, the highest possible, from Charity Navigator, the largest independent evaluator of US-based nonprofit charities. The FSF was also selected for Charity Navigator's "Top Ten List" as one of "10 Charities Worth Watching." These designations exemplify the FSF's strong financial health and commitment to accountability and transparency.
Using objective analysis, Charity Navigator awards only the most fiscally responsible organizations a four-star rating, with metrics including governance, ethical practices, operations in accordance with industry best practices, and openness with donors and stakeholders. This is the eighth year in a row the FSF has received a four-star rating, a record attained by only six percent of the 160,000 charities evaluated by Charity Navigator. The FSF also earned perfect scores on "Financial Health" and "Accountability & Transparency," resulting in the organization's first-ever 100% rating, an accomplishment less than one percent of all charities evaluated by Charity Navigator are able to achieve. This is the second time the FSF has placed in the list of "10 Charities Worth Watching."
I recently had the occasion to try and find a definition of “proprietary” in terms of software that is not on Wikipedia. Most of the discussion on the issue I found was focused on what free and open source software is, and that anything that isn’t FOSS is proprietary. I don’t think the debate is as simple as this, especially if you want to get into conversations about nuance around things like Open Core.
[...]
I’ll start by proposing the following definition:
Proprietary software is software that comes with restrictions on what users can do with the software and the source code that constitutes said software.
We have reworked our mission statement. First of all, our positions have not changed but the activities that we focus on going forward will continue to extend beyond license approval. We remain stewards of the Open Source Definition (aka OSD) but we will also be looking for other ways to support, grow and maintain the open source ecosystem.
Our old mission statement was pretty wordy and didn't succinctly encompass all the work that we do anymore. The OSI finds itself in a very different place than we were when we started. Open source software is everywhere now and the tech landscape has changed quite a bit. The needs of the open source community are more varied and little more complicated than they were in 1998. We aim to meet the needs of a larger, more global community and that means declaring our intent to embrace change and update our tactics.
Ilya Podolyako, the founder of Blackbird.io, released the underlying source code to the public under a GNU General Public License 3.0 license at bbio.fogbugz.com.
We have recently gotten the question of how to build and test Qt WebEngine 5.15.3 a lot, so I would like to provide the details and potential problem of a mixed version build here.
This is also relevant for anyone building WebEngine 5.15.x against Qt 5.12.x, another mixed version combination we provide some support for.
First ensure you have all the build dependencies, the dependencies for Linux are listed on Building Qt 5 from Git. For macOS and Windows, it mainly means ensuring a Python2 (yes 2, Chromium still hasn't fully migrated to Python3) and new for Qt 5.15.3, a node.js binary which is now used by Chromium to package certain web interfaces, and which can be downloaded from nodejs.org or using Homebrew on macOS. Bison and flex is also needed, but should be fairly standard on Mac and Linux and in qt5/gnuwin32 for Windows.
SYCL as the single-source C++-based programming model for heterogeneous parallel programming is now revised to the SYCL 2020 specification released today by The Khronos Group.
SYCL 2020 as the successor to the SYCL 1.2.x standard adds unified shared memory (USM) support, parallel reductions, work group and subgroup algorithm support, expanded interoperability, and SYCL atomic operations that more closely behave like C++ atomics. There are more than 40 new features of SYCL 2020 in full to enhance the programming experience from desktop and mobile through HPC deployments with this programming model based on C++.
In general, this pattern is used to have system experts do the low level, tricksy stuff (parsers, VMs, threads, optimisers) and domain experts can then employ a high level abstraction and for each to be able to focus on their specific domain(s) of interest.
These patterns are often accompanied by the use of a powerful, low level language in the server, and a quick and flexible language in the client. You know the scene: Javascript and HTML accessing Java Object Oriented business logic and a SQL database with ACID transactions. And this asymmetric architecture has often made good sense, allowing the server to be fine tuned and type checked while still facilitating rapid application development and delivery via a variety of web / application presentations. Rust in general and the recently announced Rust rewrite of Apache come into this category
But, when these specialisations turn into silos, then barriers may arise that can hamper adaptability, speed of delivery and front-to-back consistency. That’s one reason why bridges have arisen between server and client – Javascript and Node.js being one typical response from the market.
Enter raku; like it predecessor perl, raku is a language that can ‘telescope’. From pithy one liners on the command line to deep class model introspection and mutation. Depending on the needs of the situation and the knowledge of the developer. So, raku combines an approachable on-ramp for less experienced coders and it offers power developers the keys they need to open up and adapt underlying structures to fit specialised requirements. Raku can even inline low level code (C, C++) where the limits of the language are reached. A reboot of the original perl philosophy of “making the easy things easy and the hard things possible”.
Geolocating is the process of retrieving location-related information about a given IP address. And yes! It can be done using Python! So, let’s get right to it.
The Python steering council has, after some discussion, accepted the controversial proposal to add a pattern-matching primitive to the language. "We acknowledge that Pattern Matching is an extensive change to Python and that reaching consensus across the entire community is close to impossible. Different people have reservations or concerns around different aspects of the semantics and the syntax (as does the Steering Council). In spite of this, after much deliberation, reviewing all conversations around these PEPs, as well as competing proposals and existing poll results, and after several in-person discussions with the PEP authors, we are confident that Pattern Matching as specified in PEP 634, et al, will be a great addition to the Python language."
In this post, we will go over "What are Word Embeddings" and how to generate Word embeddings for stock tweets using Python package Spacy.
The Rust Foundation is a new non-profit organization to steward the Rust programming language and ecosystem, according to an announcement from the Rust Core Team.
curl is an internet transfer engine. A rather modular one too. Parts of curl’s functionality is provided by selectable alternative implementations that we call backends. You select what backends to enable at build-time and in many cases the backends are enabled and powered by different 3rd party libraries.
The 1.50.0 pre-release is ready for testing. The release is scheduled for this Thursday, February 11th. Release notes can be found here.
The original application https://www.javatpoint.com/crud-in-jsp is using bean without any explicitly declared constructor . To be able invoke different constructors first one for "Update","Insert", "Delete" and another one for "Select" which is supposed to be invoked explicitly we've done following updates to bean User.java. The more intensively we start to use JSP when developing applications, the more imperceptible we come to JSF technology .
The novel is a survivor. In the centuries since Cervantes turned the endeavor inside out, so many writers have set out to make the form, well, novel. From Proust’s long game to postmodern tricksters like Julio Cortázar to the contemporary faction of autofiction writers devoted to blurring the space between fiction and fact, the novel adapts even as it endures.
But beyond my gratitude for someone noticing my writing, I was intrigued by the questions. And when I suggested we might publish the interview, I was even more intrigued by the student’s request to stay anonymous. She wrote that she was “extremely unsure of having my name on anything online. I know I am very strange (probably the strangest person I’ve ever met), but I’m not on Facebook or social media. I actually like the fact that googling my name gets no results about me. I don’t know if I’m ready yet to give up my blissful online non-existence. Is that crazy?”
It didn’t seem crazy to me, but I asked if she might want to describe herself for readers. Here is her self-description:
Although Anne died too young, she lived a long life.€ She lived many lives during those 69 years, really, and she cheated death at least a couple times during her last decade on Earth.
As I set out to write some words about my old and very dear friend, colleague, and fellow worker (that’s Wobbly for comrade), I feel compelled to note first that this is only going to be one of many remembrances of Anne Feeney that will be written, by many different people.€ Anne personally knew many thousands of people around the world.€ Many of them she spent a lot of time with over many decades, and knew very well.€ A much larger number of people have listened to her music over the course of those decades, and thus had her in their lives in all sorts of other important ways.
With the rollout of safe and effective vaccines against COVID-19 finally starting to result in tens of millions of people receiving the Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, with newer vaccines likely to be introduced in the coming months, the predictions that I (and many others) made months ago are coming to pass. I’m referring, of course, to antivaxxers resurrecting old antivaccine tropes, dusting them off, and updating them for the age of COVID. Examples abound, including antivaxxers claiming that COVID-19 vaccines cause female infertility, “reprogram your DNA“, are unnecessary because COVID-19 is not deadly, and even kill, particularly the elderly. Similarly, as expected, antivaxxers point to anecdotes of bad things happening to people after receiving the vaccine that are almost certainly coincidences and not related to the vaccine and are weaponizing them to spread fear. Certainly, it doesn’t help that there is at least one person who proclaims himself so very, very, very pro-vaccine is out there pointing to anecdotes and attacking critics to support his pet hypothesis that it’s dangerous to vaccinate people who have pre-existing COVID-19 antibodies. So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that antivaxxers are now weaponizing the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) database to try to blame all manner of adverse events on vaccines, whether there is evidence of causation or not.
A company called Expanscape has created the most Inspector Gadget-like device that I’ve ever seen. It’s a laptop prototype called the Aurora 7 (a working title), and attached to its humongous black box of a chassis are six extra displays that extend out in every direction away from the main screen, each showing its own windows and applications.
If you’re like me, the first thought that comes to mind is “that poor hinge!” Yeah, poor hinge, indeed. Many laptop hinges don’t gracefully handle having one screen attached, let alone seven. Piggybacking on the main 17.3-inch 4K display are three other screens of the same size and resolution. Above the left and right displays is a single seven-inch 1200p monitor. You’ll also find one more seven-inch 1200p touchscreen display mounted into the wrist rest. This prototype weighs about 26 pounds and is 4.3 inches thick. It has an imposing, intimidating presence, and I haven’t even seen it in person.
The World Health Organization estimates there have been 51,312 confirmed cases and 522 deaths from COVID-19 in Gaza since reporting began in July 2020, and the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees warns the Gaza Strip’s health system could collapse if the number of cases continues to rise. We get an update from Raji Sourani, human rights lawyer and director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, on how Gaza has been impacted by COVID-19 as an ongoing blockade has destroyed its health infrastructure. “Our equipment is unable to deal with the emerging situation,” Sourani says.
On 30 December 2020, the South African government put the country back on Level 3 restrictions to try and curb the surge in Covid-19 cases over the Christmas holidays. This included a ban on alcohol sales, and the use of any body of water open to the public – lakes, dams, rivers, and the oceans, including beaches.
We had just spent two weeks in the interior, up in the Kalahari bordering Botswana and Namibia. It was hot, dusty and damn far from the beach – almost 500 kilometres from the Northern Cape’s Atlantic coastline, which had not banned beach access, partly due to being so sparsely populated, as well the water being very cold – and 1,500 km from the coastline of KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), where we live.
Tonia Bazel didn’t want to strike during a pandemic, taking time away from the patients on the infectious disease floor where she works. Nevertheless, she and the other nurses at Albany Medical Center in New York took to the picket line on December 1. They had been bargaining for two years following their vote to join the New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA) in 2018, and although wages and benefits had been the source of their initial concerns, conditions during the Covid-19 crisis had become the focus of their action. As a second wave of the virus began to wash over the state, they went on strike to demand better protective equipment and safer staffing levels.1
The New York Times’s running report on the world’s vaccine programs shows 67 vaccines having advanced to human trials; 20 of them are in the final phase of trials or have completed them. The United States, China, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, South Korea, and India have each produced many vaccines; most vaccine-manufacturing countries are offering one or two vaccines.
Cuba is the only vaccine manufacturer in Latin America; there are none in Africa. The only state-owned entities producing the leading vaccines are those of Cuba and Russia.
A report from HIPAA Journal Dec. 29 said Leon Medical had been struck with Conti ransomware and that those behind the attack demanded a ransom payment in return for a decryption key and a promise not to publish stolen records. Those behind the attack claim to have stolen personal health information relating to more than 1 million patients, although Leon Medical Centers denied the figure, calling it grossly overstated.
Conti ransomware was in the news at around the same time Leon Medical Centers is said to have hit. Industrial computer manufacturer Advantech Co. Ltd. was reported to have been struck by Conti ransomware Nov. 19, while Canadian voice over IP hardware and software maker Sangoma Technologies Corp. disclosed a Conti ransomware attack late December.
How the data was stolen from Nocona General Hospital, however, appears to be a mystery. In stark contrast to Leon Medical Centers, Nocona has not published a breach disclosure on its website. Texomas reported that an attorney for the hospital chain told NBC Nocona that the company was not a victim of ransomware.
The model's conclusion: On any given day, the actual number of active cases — people who are newly infected or still infectious — is likely 10 times that day's official number of reported cases.
The model has not been published or peer-reviewed yet, but lead researcher, Jeffrey Shaman, an infectious disease specialist at Columbia University, shared the data exclusively with NPR. Here are more of the startling takeaways.
A malicious attacker was able to gain access to the water treatment plant in Oldsmar, a city in Pinellas County, Florida, and increased the concentration of sodium hydroxide to what the county sheriff Bob Gualtieri described as a "dangerous level".
Cyber cops in Ukraine carried out an arrest and several raids last week in connection with the author of a U-Admin, a software package used to administer what’s being called “one of the world’s largest phishing services.” The operation was carried out in coordination with the FBI and authorities in Australia, which was particularly hard hit by phishing scams perpetrated by U-Admin customers.
Pinellas County, Fla., Sheriff Bob Gualtieri announced at a press conference Monday that the [attacker] had gained control of the operating system at the city’s water treatment facility and had attempted to increase the amount of sodium hydroxide in the water from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (flatpak), Debian (connman, golang-1.11, and openjpeg2), Fedora (pngcheck), Mageia (php, phppgadmin, and wpa_supplicant), openSUSE (privoxy), Oracle (flatpak and kernel), Red Hat (qemu-kvm-rhev), SUSE (kernel, python-urllib3, and python3), and Ubuntu (firefox).
On Guix System, setuid programs were, until now, installed as setuid-root and setgid-root (in the /run/setuid-programs directory). However, most of these programs are meant to run as setuid-root, but not setgid-root. Thus, this setting posed a risk of local privilege escalation (users of Guix on a “foreign distro” are unaffected).
Linux v5.8 was released in August, 2020. Here’s my summary of various security things that caught my attention...
Kees Cook catches up with the security-related changes in the 5.8 kernel release.
Never forget the IoT device you invite into your home may become the state's witness. That's one of the unfortunate conclusions that can be drawn from Amazon's latest transparency report.
First there was the Securus and LocationSmart scandal, which showcased how cellular carriers and data brokers buy and sell your daily movement data with only a fleeting effort to ensure all of the subsequent buyers and sellers of that data adhere to basic privacy and security standards. Then there was the blockbuster report by Motherboard showing how this data routinely ends up in the hands of everyone from bail bondsman to stalkers, again, with only a fleeting effort made to ensure the data itself is used ethically and responsibly.
This year, we’re continuing a new tradition of reviewing media and news stories that mentioned Tor and the Tor Project. Our goal is to highlight what is changing (or not) in the conversation about privacy and censorship, as well as identifying the ways the media discusses Tor in the context of these challenges.
Last year started off on a “normal” note--we were preparing to dive into our roadmap for 2020, and news outlets were publishing articles explaining Tor, demonstrating how to use Tor Browser to protect your privacy online, and highlighting how privacy is a human right Tor fights to make available for everyone online. And then COVID-19 changed everything.
We’re only aware of the search warrant because an individual who had their information given to the police by Google, Said Abdullahi, received an email from Google letting him know that the information had been handed over. Abdullahi then turned this information over to TechCrunch, who were able to get their hands on the geofence warrant. This is part of Google’s transparency push which alerts users when governments have accessed account information via a warrant or if an account has been the victim of suspected state actor hacking.
The Trump administration made a point of imposing sanctions on court staff, specifically targeting chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda, whose entry visa to the US was revoked.€ The moves were instigated in response to investigative efforts by the prosecutor into the alleged commission of war crimes by US, Taliban and Afghan forces in Afghanistan.
Israel has also kept a witheringly hostile eye towards the activities of the ICC.€ The acceptance by Palestinian authorities in 2015 of the court’s jurisdiction heralded the next troubling step in scrutinising Israeli actions in the occupied territories.
In a landmark decision, judges at the International Criminal Court say the body has jurisdiction over war crimes committed in the Palestinian territories, opening the door to possible criminal charges against Israel and militant groups like Hamas. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the international tribunal’s decision “pure anti-Semitism” and rejected its claim of jurisdiction, as did the United States, while Palestinian officials and human rights groups welcome the news. Human rights lawyer Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights in Gaza, says the decision restores “the independence and the credibility of the ICC.” We also speak with Katherine Gallagher, senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights and a legal representative for Palestinian victims in front of the ICC. She says the court’s ruling is “a landmark decision” that provides “some measure of accountability” when war crimes are committed in Palestinian territories. “There are just an array of violations that have been going on for years,” Gallagher says.
Extremist groups “very aggressively recruit” military service members to leave the ranks, the Defense Department’s top spokesman said Monday.
Despite Abu Yasser’s death, Sarbast Lazgin, deputy minister of Iraqi Kurdish peshmerga forces, says the terror group has increased its activities while Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) have yet to come to an effective joint mechanism on how to govern so-called disputed areas. Kirkuk is also considered part of the disputed territories between Baghdad and the KRG.
BENI, Democratic Republic of Congo (Reuters) - Suspected Islamists killed 10 people in a raid on a village in eastern Democractic Republic of Congo and kidnapped several others, local authorities and a witness said.
The attack, in which assailants used machetes, occurred on Friday night in the village of Mabule, around 25 km (16 miles) south east of Beni, the sources said.
Dorsey, an expert on the region, highlights two contrasting examples. While the United Arab Emirates has lifted the bans on alcohol consumption and unmarried couples living together, Saudi Arabia has labeled having atheist thoughts as a form of terrorism.
As an example, Dorsey references Saudi dissident and activist Raif Badawi, who was convicted of apostasy, or insulting Islam. Badawi was sentenced to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for questioning why Saudis are obliged to adhere to Islam — and asserting that religion did not have the answers to all of life's questions.
You’ve read The New Humanitarian’s annual lists of crises and policy trends to watch.
That was our take. What’s yours? We asked that question of the audience during a recent conversation (video online here) to discuss with humanitarian practitioners and analysts the issues they expect will shape 2021.
About 140 people from the 1,000+ online audience offered up a variety of themes – from food security to sanitation – and pointed to emergencies in countries and regions ranging from Palestine, Lebanon, the Sahel, and Yemen to more surprising locations, like Europe.
Here’s what they said, compiled in this first-ever “people’s edition” of our annual humanitarian crises and trends to watch list.
Calls for police accountability have included demands to examine the public money spent on law enforcement and the ways officers are disciplined. The Asbury Park Press and ProPublica examined the collective bargaining agreements that govern the relationship between unionized police forces in New Jersey and the towns where they operate.
There are 565 municipalities in the state, and some that contract with police unions are as small as 1 square mile. Police unions consolidate their legal and collective bargaining expertise across the state.
One town’s police contract guaranteed a retiring lieutenant $121,000 for unused sick time. Another’s promises officers six months pay with no work required as a parting retirement benefit. In another contract, cops get paid $109 an hour for side gigs like monitoring traffic at construction sites.
Despite attempts to rein in police union contracts in New Jersey, costly provisions remain common, an unprecedented analysis by the Asbury Park Press and ProPublica found. The news outlets identified contract clauses throughout the state that protect officer payouts that cost the public hundreds of millions of dollars.
"These events will occur more frequently and will become overall more destructive if measures are not taken to mitigate these risks," said one researcher.€
If the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers "continues to ignore its duty to properly account for the harm Nationwide Permit activities pose to species, then litigation may be necessary," the groups said.
This case has beaten a path through the undergrowth for victims of corporate crimes. Now we need strong laws to make this avenue easier to access.
Then last year, the ATC announced that it was taking up to $19.5 million from Mountain Valley Pipeline.
Predictably, the ATC’s active opposition to the pipeline ceased.
"We are going to do everything in our power to make it loud and clear to bank executives: They must walk away from Line 3ââ¬â¢or there will be consequences."
EXCLUSIVE: A leading UN agency, UNESCO, is harming action on the climate crisis by partnering with natural gas exporters, critics say.
On January 29,€ Defend Ballona Wetlands€ and two individuals, Molly Basler and Robert van de Hoek, filed€ a lawsuit€ in Los Angeles Superior Court€ challenging the California Department of Fish & Wildlife’s (CDFW) approval of an environmental impact report (EIR) that they claim€ would€ allow for the “complete destruction” of the fragile Ballona Wetlands Ecological Reserve in Los Angeles County.
The explosion of inequality over the past four decades is appropriately a major focus of the political agenda for progressives. Unfortunately, policy prescriptions usually turn to various taxes directed at the wealthy and very wealthy. While making our tax structure more progressive is important, most of the increase in inequality comes from greater inequality in before-tax income, not from reductions in taxes paid by the rich. And, if we’re serious about reversing that trend, it is easier, as a practical matter, to keep people from getting ridiculously rich in the first place than to tax the money after they have it.
People who have money can buy stocks, wait for awhile, and ultimately get richer by doing nothing. But low-income Americans have to depend on wages for their fair share of national economic growth—and€ wages have€ barely budged€ in over 50 years.
"I look forward to working with my colleagues in the House and the Senate to end the crisis of starvation wages in America and raise the minimum wage to a living wage of at least $15 an hour."
"She fearlessly confronted the powerful."
One heartening fact about Joe Biden is that he’s the first Democratic president in nearly 40 years who is not employing the services of Larry Summers, one of the most influential neoliberal economists of the last few decades. Summers has been a perennial power player ever since he served on the Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan from 1982–83. His Reaganite roots didn’t stop him from being repeatedly elevated to commanding positions of authority under the administrations of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. He was secretary of the treasury from 1999–2001 and director of the National Economic Council from 2009–10.
As Democrats in Congress push forward on passing President Joe Biden’s sweeping $1.9 trillion stimulus package, many experts say measures to combat the economic fallout from COVID-19 must address the pandemic’s disproportionate impact on women — especially women of color. Women in the U.S. lost 5.5 million jobs in the first 10 months of the pandemic, nearly 1 million more job losses than men, and, combined with increased responsibilities for caregiving at home, are experiencing a “shecession,” according to researcher C. Nicole Mason. “Women have been disproportionately impacted by job and income losses during the pandemic and during this economic downturn,” says Mason, who is president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a leading voice on pay equity, economic policies and research impacting women. “The reason for this is because women are overrepresented in the hardest-hit sectors: service, leisure/hospitality, education and healthcare services.”
On Covid-19 survival checks and our national deficit of the soul.
We need to have a conversation about the National Football League’s use of “woke marketing” or “woke capitalism” or whatever you want to call it, before the weight of its contradictions causes us all to collectively crack. What the NFL did on Sunday was dare the viewing public to sweep away the Buffalo wings from their tables and proclaim the entire endeavor to be a snarling pack of lies.
The unemployment rate fell by 0.4 percentage points in January to 6.3 percent. Much of this decline was due to people leaving the labor market as the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) only rose by 0.1 percentage point. The EPOP now stands at 57.5 percent, 3.6 percentage points below its year-ago level.
The establishment survey showed an increase of just 49,000 jobs, with the private sector only accounting for 6,000 of these jobs. There were sharp downward revisions to job growth for both November and December, so the level of private sector jobs reported for January was 198,000 below the November level.
The “Tax Cuts and Jobs Act” of 2017—the signature legislation of the Trump administration and Republican-dominated Senate—disproportionately hurt poor and working-class Americans and lined the pockets of the ultra-wealthy. It depleted the Treasury, laying the groundwork to justify cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the law is projected to fuel a $1.9 trillion hole in the Treasury over 10 years. The law was also written to include numerous “Easter eggs” containing newer tax breaks on the wealthy, scheduled to hatch years after it was enacted. Now, as one of those buried tax breaks that will benefit millionaires is set to take effect, more than 100 Democrats signed on to a letter demanding it be repealed. That too is a step in the right direction.
But much, much more is needed.
For over two months now, hundreds of thousands of farmers have been waging an unprecedented struggle at five locations around the National Capital Region of Delhi € against three farm laws, which essentially seek to hand over control of India’s agricultural sector to large corporate houses. These farm laws were rushed through parliament without either consulting farmers unions or listening to any objections raised by the opposition in parliament. After eleven rounds of talks with representatives of the Central Government ended in failure, the farmers unions decided to intensify the struggle by holding a tractor parade on India’s Republic Day, i.e., January 26, 2021.€
Permission was granted by the Delhi Police to hold the tractor parade on designated routes at three locations 20 to 30 kilometers away from the city centre. During the parade, agent provocateurs mislead a section of the agitated farmers to move away from the designated routes with their tractors and move to the city centre, where the historic Red Fort is situated. Red Fort is the 17th€ century monument where India’s National Flag is hoisted on Independence Day, i.e. on 15 August every year. After the breakaway sections arrived at the Red Fort, unwarranted violence broke out (and at another location enroute). Farmers’ unions believe that the violence was engineered to malign the farmers’ movement and to divert media attention away from the main tractor parade, which was an unprecedented success. Using the outbreak of violence as the excuse, the Indian Government is trying to do all it can to suppress the farmers’ movement. This article is an attempt to describe what actually transpired on January 26. 2021.
"If we are committed to ending systemic racism in the workplace, passing a living wage bill for tipped and non-tipped low-wage workers is essential to reducing inequality," says racial justice champion Tanya Wallace-Gobern.
One of the main tasks any company needs to do is allocate resources. Regardless of the product or the industry they're in, they have to decide how to employ the assets they have to make money. No one has really "solved" this problem, and that's why there are swarms of resource planning systems, project management tools, and cultish trend-following.
After a C-suite shuffle at James B's employer, one of the newly installed C-level execs had some big ideas. They were strongly influenced by one of the two life-changing books, and not the one involving orcs. A company needs to allocate resources. The economy, as a whole, needs to allocate resources. If, on the economic level, we use markets to allocate resources because they're more efficient than planning, then we should use markets internally as well.
For the most part, and for most groups in the company, this was just a book-keeping change. Everyone kept doing the same thing, but now instead of each department getting email accounts for every employee, each department got a pile of money, and used that to pay for email accounts for each employee. Instead of just getting a computer as part of the hiring process, departments "rented" a computer from IT. It created a surprising amount of paperwork for the supposedly "efficient" market, but at least at first, it wasn't a problem.
Before long, though, the C-suite started to notice that a lot of money flowed in to the IT department, but very little flowed back out. The obvious solution, then, was to cut the IT budget entirely. It would fund itself using the internal market, selling its services to other departments in the company.
The head of IT reacted in a vaguely reasonable way: they jacked the internal billing rates as high as they could. Since they technically owned the PCs, they installed them with physical locks on the cases. If you wanted a hard drive replacement, you needed to go through IT. The problem is that IT had exclusive contracts with vendors, and those vendor SLAs were pretty generous- to the vendors. One HDD failure could take a PC down for weeks while you waited for a replacement.
Will continued political volatility be America's downfall?
I come to you having witnessed six executions and engaged in 35 years of dialogue about the death penalty. I’m on fire to abolish government killing because I’ve seen it far too close-up, and I have a pretty good idea by now how it works—or doesn’t. I wasn’t at all surprised to see Donald Trump order 13 federal executions carried out before he left office: He had the discretionary power, and he used it. He was operating within the hopelessly flawed guidelines for government killing that the Supreme Court set forth in 1976 in Gregg v. Georgia, when it reinstituted the death penalty. After a national hiatus on executions from 1972 to 1976, Gregg renewed our capricious, racist, broken death penalty system, which has caused and is perpetuating unspeakable suffering.
If what's impeachable is only what members of Congress say it is, constituents should insist that egregiously narrow definitions must no longer prevail.
Someone who has disgraced the office of the president so maliciously should not reap its amenities for the rest of his life.
Yes, yes, yes. These words cut to the soul. Can we create a grown-up America? This is how it begins.
The quote is from a€ letter to President Biden, put forward in early February by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Center for Victims of Torture and signed by 111 organizations, demanding that the new president shut down, at long last, the prison hellhole at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
“There’s a reason that the people’s branch is in Article One. Of course, we have the power to impeach a lawless president. He does not have the power to impeach us,” Representative Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat who will serve as the lead impeachment manager for the Senate trial of Donald Trump, tells The Nation. “Now is the moment for us to stand up and to strongly reassert Congress as the dominant branch of the US government.”
House Republicans have decided to keep Liz Cheney on as the third-highest-ranking leader in their caucus of deplorables. No surprise there. Cheney is a corporation-coddling and warmongering neoconservative, a hate-amplifying liar whose only sin in the eyes of her colleagues is that she got one thing wrong.
On January 31, eighteen-year-old Darya Kuznetsova, a junior at a technical college in Perm, joined a local protest to demand freedom for the jailed opposition politician Alexey Navalny. After the rally, supervisors at her school summoned her for a conversation “about her further education.” A recording of the discussion made its way to the Perm-based online journal “Zvezda.” Meduza provides the full text of the conversation here with Zvezda’s permission.
With former President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial set to begin in the Senate this week, we feature the speech Democratic Congressmember Cori Bush of Missouri made Thursday on the floor of the House of Representatives to demand accountability for the attack on the U.S. Capitol. “On January 3, we stood together to swear our oath to office, to the Constitution. We swore to defend it against all enemies foreign and domestic,” Bush said. “It was attacked by a domestic enemy called white supremacy, and we must stand together now, today, to uphold that oath and hold every single person who helped incite it accountable.”
The sight of an unruly violent crowd storming the U.S. Capitol trying to overturn the results of a democratic election shows the evils of intervention whether domestic or foreign-inspired. This action evokes what the French did in Indochina, the Chinese in Tibet, the Belgians in the Congo, the British in China, the Russians in Crimea, the Italians and the Dutch in Africa, the Japanese in China and the U.S. in the Middle East and Latin America, among many others.
In 1961, João Belchior Marques Goulart assumed as president of Brazil after the resignation of the president. He was a proponent of economic and land reforms and democratic rights. However, the U.S. government pressured him to impose a program of economic austerity. When Goulart refused to follow the U.S. dictates, the U.S. developed a plan called Operation Brother Sam (no sense of irony here) for the destabilization of Brazil’s government. Brazilian military officers took power and General Humberto Castelo Branco was installed as president in 1964. He immediately declared a state of siege and arrested more than 50,000 political opponents within the first month of being in power. The U.S. government approved the coup and reinstituted economic aid to the country.
Under these inauspicious conditions, if you are brave enough to face down the cold and COVID to protest openly against the government of Vladimir Putin, your reward may well be a trip to jail. If you’re very good at your job of protesting, you might win the grand prize of an attempt on your life.
Yet, for the last two weeks, Russians have poured into the streets in the tens of thousands. Even in the Russian Far East, protesters turned out in Yakutsk (45 below zero) and Krasnoyarsk (22 below).
"It says so much about how utterly rigged the system is that it takes a team of lawyers to figure out some hail-mary-pass way to raise the minimum wage."
"My solution starts at the top: firing the whole board who presided over Trump and DeJoy's wrecking of USPS," said Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr.
Sunday, February 7, is the end of Haitian president Jovenel Moïse’s term according to the constitution. He refuses to step down. Last week, the opposition called for a two-day general strike, uniting around a transition with the head of Haiti’s Supreme Court stepping in.
Most reporting failed to note the international role, and particularly the U.S., in creating this “crisis.” And nearly all focused only on one segment of the opposition: leaders of Haiti’s political parties.
"If the United States and its partners return to the deal," said the nation's top diplomat, "Iran will reverse its actions. All the actions we are taking are reversible."
By dying, the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson did Benjamin Netanyahu one last favor. Adelson had been scheduled to testify as a prosecution witness in the Israeli prime minister’s corruption trial. Netanyahu allegedly used Adelson to secure more friendly coverage from a major Israeli newspaper. The complications of the case are too arcane to explain in this limited space, but take it from me: Wherever Adelson went, corruption—be it moral, legal, political, or cultural—was never far behind.
With both Twitter and Facebook banning Donald Trump's account last month, after he inspired a mob of goons to ransack the Capitol, there has been something of an eerie quiet in the world. Having spent years making sure that every one of his often disconnected-from-reality tweets makes headlines or ruins many peoples' days, the sudden quiet has been kind of odd.
Scotland must be a fully functioning independent nation in two to three years. We need to start now to understand and plan for the physical infrastructure of governance a modern state needs. Just one of the vast gaps at present is the ability for an independent state to interact with other states; that is, after all, what defines the very being of a state. Scotland will need its own foreign ministry. In short time.
No cushy benefits. No national security briefings. No perks for the worst president in history.
"Democrats with a slim majority in the Congress can't pass this bill without progressives and must resist suggestions that will ultimately tank this relief bill."
"Given that the Constitution permits the Senate to impose the penalty of permanent disqualification only on former officeholders, it defies logic to suggest that the Senate is prohibited from trying and convicting former officeholders."
Terms of the funding, led by Vy Capital, push the company’s valuation to $6 billion, a spokeswoman said. Reddit intends to spend the cash to develop its advertising business, expand internationally and add video tools, the company said in a statement. The deal was reported earlier by the Wall Street Journal.
Following the Super Bowl LV halftime show on Sunday, a five-second ad popped on air. Impossible to read the entire message unless paused, it was easy to make out that the spot was from the social media site Reddit, which has been in the headlines of late due to the GameStop and AMC stock drama.
The parent company of a West Virginia newspaper chain has filed an antitrust lawsuit against Facebook and Google parent company Alphabet, alleging the platforms are siphoning away much-needed digital ad revenue. It appears to be the first such lawsuit by a news organization against the digital giants and makes the argument that the platforms represent a digital monopoly that should be broken up, like Standard Oil or AT&T were back in the day.
At the end of last week, both the Russian Foreign Ministry and the Emergency Situations Ministry joined the popular video-sharing app TikTok. So far, Russia’s diplomats have uploaded two videos, both of which take aim at imprisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny and his previous claims about the “Sputnik V” coronavirus vaccine. Meanwhile the Emergencies Ministry has promised viewers€ entertainment in the form of “tricks and challenges.”
Section 230 protects any owner or user of an “interactive computer service” — typically an app or website — from liability for content that someone else posted. Over the past few years, it’s drawn the ire of conservative politicians who want to punish “Big Tech” for banning users, but also lawmakers and activists who say it lets web services knowingly allow harassment, nonconsensual sexual imagery, and other illegal material. Congress has introduced several major reform proposals, and at least one will likely advance in the near future.
The debate over Section 230, though, is a lot more complicated than one law or a few giant social networks. In the coming weeks, we’ll be hosting a live event with some of the people that Congress’ fight over Big Tech has left out — trying to reset the conversation to be less about Facebook and YouTube and more about the internet at large. But for now, on the 25th anniversary of Section 230 becoming law, I want to look at a few of the big questions that any proposal will have to grapple with.
The three politicians proposed a bill they're calling the SAFE TECH Act [PDF], which narrows the liability protection afforded to organizations by Section 230 of the US Communications Decency Act. Its full title gives a sense of the wrongs it aims to right: The Safeguarding Against Fraud, Exploitation, Threats, Extremism, and Consumer Harms Act.
Section 230 of the CDA is the legal foundation of the modern internet because it provides a way for orgs to host user-generated content while, more or less, avoiding legal liability for that content. And it allows companies to maintain that qualified immunity even when they moderate user-generated content.
Yet the content moderation decisions made by internet companies, particularly social media platforms, have displeased both Republicans and Democrats in the US, not to mention others abroad. The now departed Trump administration fumed about Section 230 repeatedly but, distracted by its election rejection insurrection, failed to push through acceptable reforms. Now it's the Democrats' turn.
The Moscow City Court has reduced the jail sentence handed down to Mediazona editor-in-chief Sergey Smirnov to 15 days, following an appeals hearing on Monday, February 8.
"Now more than ever, it is crucial that we protect a robust and adversarial press," the letter states.€
A successful prosecution of the Wikileaks' founder and publisher would have far-reaching implications both for national security journalists and for the news organizations that publish their work. This isn't an accident.
The letter was organized by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and signed by leading rights groups including Amnesty International, the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, and PEN America.
The majority of the charges against Assange relate to the Espionage Act, a federal law passed in 1917 designed to punish espionage. The law’s broad language criminalized those who obtain and/or transmit materials related to the national defense (read the text of the law). While the authors of the law may have intended to keep the scope broad in order to encapsulate a wide range of espionage activities, today that law is being turned against publishers of information that seeks to hold government officials to account for unethical behavior.
As we argue in our letter, prosecuting Assange under the Espionage Act raises the specter of prosecuting other journalistic institutions for routine investigative and publishing practices. As we state in our letter, “a precedent created by prosecuting Assange could be leveraged—perhaps by a future administration—against publishers and journalists of all stripes.” Both the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act raise serious constitutional concerns, and the selective enforcement of these laws is used to threaten journalists, whistleblowers, and publishers who seek to cast light on government malfeasance.
The United States’ extradition request for Julian Assange was recently dismissed by a British judge, but Julian Assange is still in prison and the charges are likely to be appealed. Read EFF’s deeper dive into why the prosecution of Assange threatens press freedom and how the use of the CFAA against Assange fits into a larger pattern of selective enforcement of computer€ crime laws.
Members of Canada's House of Commons on Wednesday unanimously voted to grant citizenship to Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, who has been imprisoned in his home country since 2012 and whose wife and three children live in Canada.
The motion asks Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino to use his "discretionary power" to grant Canadian citizenship to Badawi, "in order to remedy a particular situation and unusual distress."
He was convicted in 2014 to 10 years in prison and 1,000 lashes for "insulting Islam." He received 50 of those beatings in January 2015, but the rest of the sessions -- which were to be carried out weekly -- were suspended after a global outcry.
For some reason, we, the people, keep having to shell out cash to employ a lot of unreasonable law enforcement officers.
The EU Court of Justice is to decide how extensively the Commission must inform about a research project sensitive to fundamental rights. The decision is of great significance, because the successor to iBorderCtrl, which has long been terminated, is also problematic.
On Monday, February 8, Alexey Navalny’s associates released a video outlining the future work of the Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) and other projects linked to the imprisoned opposition politician.
Twenty-six percent of Russians have watched Alexey Navalny’s “Putin’s Palace” investigation, but a third of them think it’s fake, according to a new survey from the independent Levada Center. The poll’s results showed that young people were not only more likely to have watched the video but were also more inclined to believe it. That said, 77 percent of respondents who had watched or heard of the investigation said it didn’t change their attitude toward Vladimir Putin.
The Russian human rights center “Memorial” has declared nine of Alexey Navalny’s supporters prisoners of conscience. This comes after they were placed under house arrest as suspects in a criminal case launched over alleged violations of sanitary and epidemiological rules during a pro-Navalny demonstration on January 23.€
“SB 331 will prevent workers from being forced to sign non-disclosure and non-disparagement agreements that would limit their ability to speak out about harassment and discrimination in the workplace,” Leyva said in a statement. “It is unacceptable for any employer to try to silence a worker because he or she was a victim of any type of harassment or discrimination—whether due to race, sexual orientation, religion, age or any other characteristic.”
Leyva introduced the bill, the Silenced No More Act, or SB 331, on Monday. She told Protocol that she anticipates that the colleagues who voted for her last NDA bill will vote for this one. She admitted that COVID-related issues will take precedence in the California legislature during the new year, "but there are issues that are just as important – like discrimination and harassment, especially based on age and race. If we don't pass legislation, that's another year that goes by that people are mistreated in the workplace. We don't want people to be silenced."
Jess Stender, a senior counsel with Equal Rights Advocates, said Ozoma's experiences "really shows why we need to prohibit these gag orders for all forms of discrimination."
For the next seven weeks, employees at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama will vote on whether to become the first of the company’s US employees to unionize. The only other US Amazon employees to make it as far as a union election was a smaller group of maintenance workers at a Delaware warehouse in 2014. That effort failed after an aggressive anti-union campaign from a company that has long been hostile to worker organizing.
The vote in Alabama, at a warehouse outside Birmingham called BHM1, comes at a pivotal time for the company and its workers. Amazon is emerging from the pandemic in a stronger position than ever: posting record earnings, opening new warehouses at a rapid clip, and hiring hundreds of new workers a day. Those workers, however, have become increasingly vocal about the fact that they haven’t shared in the company’s success. Last year’s wave of protests and walkouts over COVID-19 safety measures and other issues won some partial victories, but the Bessemer union, if it succeeds, would give workers the power to negotiate a contract that could lock in durable changes to wages and working conditions. It could also inspire other Amazon warehouses to organize.
Workers at BHM1 say that one of the primary issues driving the union push is Amazon’s grueling and automatically enforced productivity metrics, a complaint that has prompted demonstrations at other Amazon facilities as well.
The terrorist horrors of the extremist group Boko Haram have killed more than 30,000 people and forced about 2 million to flee their homes since 2009. The group attained global attention in 2014 with the abduction of more than 270 schoolgirls in the north-eastern town of Chibok.
“I felt it was important that we put some backstories and some personalities behind all these casualty statistics,” said Ovbiagele.
In the words of Magnus Ranstorp, one of Sweden's leading terrorism experts, radical Islamists have "put a lot of gunpowder" on school activities in particular in a bid to influence young people and isolate them from secular society.
Among other things, the new arrivals will be informed that polygamy, female genital mutilation, child marriage, and domestic violence are forbidden, as is racism (inluding anti-Semitism, Afrophobia, and Islamophobia) and other forms of hostility.
[...]
Sweden, a relatively homogeneous nation until half a century ago, has in the past few decades embraced mass immigration, to the point where over a quarter of the population have a foreign background (up from 15 percent in 2000). Using a counting method now considered outdated, where having at least one foreign-born parent constitutes a foreign background, their proportion rises 33 percent, or about a third. Among young children, the proportion of non-Swedes is even higher.
The UN’s top humanitarian official is stepping down, opening up speculation about the nationality of his successor and prompting assessments of the Briton’s achievements and shortcomings over the past four years. In an email to the 2,100 staff of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on 7 February, Mark Lowcock announced he would step down in the coming months to spend more time with his family in the UK.
Appointed in May 2017, Lowcock inherited a string of internal budget, administrative, and management challenges, while also being confronted with demands for broad reforms of humanitarian aid stemming from the World Humanitarian Summit. During his tenure, relief operations faced shrinking room for manoeuvre, with direct attacks, blockades, and manipulation – notably in Syria and Yemen – complicating many of the situations the international community was responding to.
[...]
He mobilised support for the UN’s largest ever single appeal – $10 billion to support 63 countries in the humanitarian response to COVID-19. Today, the plan is roughly 40 percent-funded, the bulk of it going directly to UN agencies, disappointing many who hoped this would be an opportunity to support frontline responders, especially national NGOs. OCHA’s management of donor-supported pooled funds and CERF did allow Lowcock to channel some funding to NGOs working on the pandemic.
While Lowcock's organisational abilities have met with some praise, his people skills are commonly cited as a weakness. Some of those contacted for this article said even his farewell email to staff seemed curt and lacking warmth. One senior aid official noted its praise of Lowcock’s boss, UN Secretary-General António Guterres, rather than colleagues and partners, reacting: “No thank you to staff... or even a reminder of the important work and mission of OCHA and their accomplishments?”
I know that Section 230 is very much under attack these days, and I've seen so many people cheer when we point out that dumping 230 could take away (or at least, drastically alter) the sites we love and appreciate every day. I think this is because of a natural tendency of many people to focus on the negative side of things in existence, and to ignore all of the good that has resulted from them. In some ways, I think it's a variation on the famous Douglas Adams quote:
As we've been noting in posts throughout the day, today is the day that, 25 years ago, then President Bill Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996. That large telco bill included, among many other things, the Communications Decency Act, a dangerous censorial bill written by Senator James Exon. However, buried in the CDA was a separate bill, written by now Senator Ron Wyden and then Representative Chris Cox, the Internet Freedom and Family Empowerment Act, which today is generally known as Section 230 of the CDA. A legal challenge later tossed out all of Exon's bill as blatantly unconstitutional.
The Justice Department dropped its 2018 lawsuit challenging California’s state net neutrality rules on Monday, removing one of the law’s major roadblocks preventing it from going into effect.
In 2017, the Trump Federal Communications Commission voted to repeal the Obama-era internet regulations banning internet service providers, like AT&T and Verizon, from throttling or blocking traffic and implementing paid fast lanes. The following year, California passed its own law instituting net neutrality rules at the state level. That law was quickly challenged by the Trump-led Justice Department, which argued that California’s law was preempted by the FCC’s 2017 repeal.
Under then-President Donald Trump, the Justice Department in 2018 argued that federal law preempted the state statute prohibiting internet service providers from blocking or throttling traffic, or offering paid fast lanes.
California’s legislature voted to adopt its own statute after the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2017 repealed net neutrality rules put in place by the administration of former President Barack Obama.
Acting FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel praised the Justice Department’s decision.
Better and more harmonised enforcement efforts and region-wide collaboration will be key to battling counterfeits, say sources on the ground
This is the second time in recent years that Gowling’s Munich office has suffered a major loss. The office, which traditionally focuses on IP, saw its first upheaval in 2017 when IP partners Alexander Bayer and Michael Schneider moved to Pinsent Masons. They were joined by two associates. Here, Gowling lost a large part of its patent litigation expertise in one go.
Gowling then hired partners Carsten Schulte and Thomas Mayer to fill this gap. However, the team was unable to replicate the achievements of Gowling’s London IP practice, or benefit from the UK team’s close contact to notable clients such as Interdigital. Now Gowling lacks a clear overall strategy in Germany, where the firm only has a small soft IP team in Munich, and an M&A/corporate practice in Stuttgart.
[...]
Manuela Finger, an IP partner focusing on trademarks and unfair competition, along with two associates, remains at Gowling’s Munich office.
Speaking to JUVE Patent, London IP partner and practice head Gordon Harris said of the plans in Germany, “We are very much still planning to be major players in the patent market in Germany. We are taking a moment to review and plan, though we have options already under consideration.”
“Gowling will be looking to establish a significant team from the off, avoiding the difficulties of incremental step-by-step growth. We are also not constrained by geography and are looking widely in Germany, not just in Munich.”
One of the most notable projects in European IP law is the establishment of the Unified Patent Court. This is part of a package of regulations on patent law, the core of which is the introduction of a European ‘community patent’ with unitary effect at the level of the European Union.
Unfortunately, the project has met a few challenges; the UK has made final preparations to withdraw from the Unified Patent Court project and, in March 2020, the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany declared that parliamentary approval of the Agreement on the Unified Patent Court is void on grounds of not achieving the necessary parliamentary majority.[
Post-Brexit, patent protection is unaffected.
Patents covering the UK will continue to be granted by both the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO), neither of which are EU institutions. The UK will continue to be one of the 38 contracting states to the European Patent Convention, which is the international treaty that established the EPO. UK patent attorneys can also continue to represent their domestic and overseas clients before the EPO in obtaining European patents covering the UK and other European countries of interest.
The UK has confirmed that it will not seek to be involved in the EU’s proposed Unitary Patent system. The future of the Unitary Patent was already uncertain before Brexit in any event. If, however, the system does come into being, there will be no change to the territorial scope of patents that can be obtained via the EPO, but simply that the patents granted for some EU countries (not including the UK) will be part of a Unitary Patent rather than individual patents for those countries. Further, Unitary Patents will be available to applicants regardless of nationality or residence and so UK companies would still be able to benefit from the system
The interesting part is not the continued bickering over the schedule. Granted, Samsung's lawyers did a very good job making a boring secondary matter almost entertaining to read--I would truly regard that as an accomplishment. But there's one aspect of this filing that ignited my interest: Samsung's reply to Ericsson's suggestion that Samsung should simply have accepted Ericsson's proposal to resolve their FRAND royalty dispute through arbitration.
I'm a longstanding critic of the notion that arbitration is the answer to SEP disputes. It's not hard to see why policy makers, competition enforcers, and at times even judges would rather refer parties to arbitration, just so they wouldn't have to deal with the intricacies of SEP licensing. Unlike the other popular alternative dispute resolution method, mediation, arbitration is sure to yield a result. But as Apple explained in a court filing almost a decade ago, arbitration gravitates toward the middle between both parties' demands while courts are more likely to enter "sharp" rulings. The way I always explain this to people is that if you're an implementer of a standard and you're dealing with a SEP holder asking for $5 per unit when $0.50 might be more accurate, you can't counterbalance that demand in arbitration: even if you proposed $0.01, the middle would still be $2.50, and negative royalties are obviously a non-starter. And that's not the only issue.
That is not to say arbitration could never be fair. It depends on the parameters.
[...]
The transparency of U.S. litigation often proves helpful. Those two exhibits to Samsung's filing (Ericsson's proposal and Samsung's response) are now publicly accessible, and those dealing professionally with the question of SEP disputes can see what "willingness to arbitrate" means in many cases: it means that SEP holders want to tilt the playing field in their favor. That's why it's key not to allow SEP holders to enforce injunctions only because an implementer declined to arbitrate. Arbitration can work, but only if both parties define some specific questions that arbitration should answer, and the parameters under which the arbitration proceeds.
News has reached IPKat that a Board of Appeal has referred to the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) the question of whether mandatory appeal hearings via video conference are legal. The news has been reported by a patent firm attendant at the Board of Appeal proceedings at which the question was referred, reported here.
In order to avoid a growing back-log of cases during the COVID-19 pandemic, the EPO has been forced to transition to holding oral proceedings almost exclusively by video-conference (ViCo). The EPO also appears to be preparing for oral proceedings to be the new norm even once the pandemic is over. Particularly, at the beginning of this year, a new rule of procedure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA) (Article 15a) was introduced. Article 15a permits a Board of Appeal to hold oral proceedings by ViCo whenever "the Board considers it appropriate to do so" (IPKat: The inexorable rise of EPO oral proceedings by video conference).
[...]
In G2/19 the EBA found that Haar was indeed in Munich. A similar [Merpel: and some would say commonsensical?] approach from the EBA in the present case would be to either reject the referral or find no legal issues with Article 15a. Either way, parties eager for their appeal to be heard before the Boards of Appeal can only hope for a swift resolution to the referral.
On February 7, 2021, Unified filed an invalidity challenge in China against CN103299632, owned by Velos Media. The CN’632 patent is directed to video decoding techniques and was originally assigned to Ericsson before being transferred to Velos. The CN’632 patent is related to EP 2 664 149, which Unified filed an opposition on December 29, 2020. It is also related to U.S. Patent 9,414,066, which Unified has also challenged in the U.S. with IPR2020-00352, instituted on June 30, 2020.
On February 4, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 10 of U.S. Patent 8,209,411. The ‘411 patent is owned by WSOU Investments, 2020's most prolific NPE. WSOU Investments, LLC is run by Craig Etchegoyen, formerly of Uniloc. The '411 patent generally relates to systems and methods of providing content to a terminal and, more particularly, relates to systems and methods of providing content to a terminal having a limited display area for presenting such content. It is currently being asserted against Salesforce, in the Western District of Texas.
The government will obviously not support the amendment. Indeed, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage has already started down the questionable path of conducting a hearing “about” the bill rather than a hearing on the bill itself as would normally occur once a bill receives second reading approval. I appeared before the committee on Friday – see this week’s Law Bytes podcast – but the rush to judgment outside conventional Parliamentary processes is disturbing. The latest motion to withdraw the bill entirely provides an important reminder that there are significant flaws in the proposed legislative reforms that demand careful study and consultation, not the fast track process the government is trying to pursue.
People who downloaded and/or used pirated software owned by Siemens are about to become part of a copyright infringement lawsuit in the United States. According to the company, 142 yet-to-identified Comcast users were observed using unlicensed software. As a result, the developer wants Comcast to hand over their personal details so they can be pursued for damages that could reach $150,000.
Team-Xecuter is widely known for creating 'hacks' that bypass digital restrictions on Nintendo consoles. Last year the U.S. Government indicted three alleged members. The official site remained online until a few days ago, when it became inaccessible due to database errors. While this could be related to the legal trouble, Team-Xecuter.com has not been seized.
